Ordinary Men by Christopher Browning

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Book review: ‘Ordinary Men’ by Christopher Browning
In his book Ordinary Men, Christopher Browning is attempting to draw a picture of how obedience to authority can make ordinary men commit atrocities that one in a systematic and efficiently without care for morality or sympathy. He presents a case of the Police Battalion 101 that comprised of randomly selected Germans hand-picked from remote areas of Germany and directed to exterminate the Jews of Poland. Browning argues that he referred to these men as ordinary due to the fact that they were neither followers of Nazi nor S.S regimes and the town, in which they resided known as Hamburg, was sparsely populated to the extent that the Nazi rulers did not consider it as an important administrative location. These men were recruited and given weapons without even being trained to eliminate the Jews. The reason for their choice was that there were no other people who could carry out such an urgent task and to the Nazi leaders’ surprise, the men killed thousands of Jews in a sinister manner that surprised the expectations.
Browning presents evidences of what can make ordinary men to become effective killing machines. One of the factors is the atrocity to policy. In this concept of brutalization, Browning argues that the various leaders in the government sat down and carefully designed a plan on how to exterminate the Jews. Their role was to come up with strategies and the ways on how they would be systematically executed for the success of the mission. This is how the men in the Police Battalion 101 became so tactful in murdering the Jews given the conducive environment the government had created for them in its implementation of the atrocity by policy. In their view, the men in the police battalion 101 thought they were just following simple orders given to them. Thus, they did not give critical thinking due to the fact that their blind obedie...