Ordinary Men by Christopher Browning

brown's book docu custodyts a gathering of " characterless" middle-aged German citizens who took place in the in large quantities murder of Jews and other people that the Nazi regime precious to be rid of. As members of a paramilitary police force squad - Police the great unwashed 101 - these workforce were change in the space of a few months from people who had ordinary lives with ordinary jobs, people who played with children and savored Sunday dinners and puttered in their gardens to men who were haunted by a desire for blood.

None of these men entered into service to their country and the Nazi regime willingly, so their subsequent actions cannot be put down to an obvious and overwhelming elan for the ideals of National Socialism. Each one of them was conscripted into Police Battalion 101, a process that (Browning notes) involved none of the indoctrination that (for example) S.S. officers infrawent. Thus there was among these men neither either obvious predilection to genocidal violence nor among them any attempt at ideological

Browning also emphasizes the effects of poverty, hunger and crowding on the moral fiber of all of those in the battalion (20 share of whom, it should be noted, did not participate in the massacres).

The book in some ways reads like the description of a giant star and terrible Malthusian experiment, for this early researcher on population growth argued that people can be driven to do terrible things when they are hungry - and that the disintegration of civilization under that pressures of such ordinary problems as hunger can be both dramatic and fast.

At the same time that Browning demonstrates to us how easy it would be for any of us to do things that we would before have thought to be beyond anything that we would ever consider, he also concentrates on the particular elements of the structure of Battalion 101 to suggest how it was that these ordinary men were so promptly transformed. The primary mechanism that was used to accomplish this was ethnic action in which historical differences and tensions
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