Ordinary Men

Before Browning’s 1992 book, most Holocaust scholarship focused either on the experience of the victims or on the Nazi political ideology driving the slaughter. He in stead investigates the men who carried out acts of extreme violence. Who were they? How could they end up committing such unspeakable acts? Focusing on one unexceptional regiment of German reservists, Police Battalion 101, Browning shows that, while their orders to kill appalled them at first, a combination of reluctance to challenge authority and peer pressure enabled them to face their gruesome task. These men were not driven by ideology. Rather than being moral monsters, Browning insists that most were simply “ordinary men.”