BOOKs: ordinary men - CHRIS browning

Ordinary Men is a book I picked up earlier this year which tells the story of how a unit of average, middle-aged German men became the cold-blooded murderers of tens of thousands of jews in Poland.

The Reserve Police Battalion 101 were a normal unit of matured German police who were sent to police Poland after the Nazis had marched through it. With a very humane Commander, he told his men that they would be tasked with much harsher than normal orders but that they could go back to their old jobs if they wanted to, with no questions asked. Most of these men were older, non-indoctrinated men serving as normal German Police Officers— unlike the Nazi Youth types who were indoctrinated by Hitler.

Browning documents how these Ordinary people had the utmost capacity for evil, participating in the most monstrous crime in human history— but he reminds us they were also human just like you and I. It’s not a book to be compartmentalized, but it should serve as a reminder of self-recognition that malevolence has the ability to destroy, and we are all individually responsible for our actions and how we, as a society, end up. Today’s trend of Mob rule terrifies me to my core knowing that the most Brutal Regimes in history were human and we happen to be one of them.

Everybody wants to believe they’d have been a hero in Germany in the 1940s, but the statistical probability is so overwhelming that had you been given the chance, you would have been a perpetrator.

We have the capacity for malevolence, but we also have the ability to do what is right. Always do what is right, & let go of the malevolence.