Ordinary Men

Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland

By: Christopher R. Browning

Narrated by: Kevin Gallagher

“A remarkable—and singularly chilling—glimpse of human behavior. . .This meticulously researched book...represents a major contribution to the literature of the Holocaust."—Newsweek

Now available in audio for the first time, Christopher R. Browning’s shocking account of how a unit of average middle-aged Germans became the cold-blooded murderers of tens of thousands of Jews—now with a new afterword and additional photographs.

Ordinary Men is the true story of Reserve Police Battalion 101 of the German Order Police, which was responsible for mass shootings as well as round-ups of Jewish people for deportation to Nazi death camps in Poland in 1942. Browning argues that most of the men of RPB 101 were not fanatical Nazis but, rather, ordinary middle-aged, working-class men who committed these atrocities out of a mixture of motives, including the group dynamics of conformity, deference to authority, role adaptation, and the altering of moral norms to justify their actions. Very quickly three groups emerged within the battalion: a core of eager killers, a plurality who carried out their duties reliably but without initiative, and a small minority who evaded participation in the acts of killing without diminishing the murderous efficiency of the battalion whatsoever.

While this book discusses a specific Reserve Unit during WWII, the general argument Browning makes is that most people succumb to the pressures of a group setting and commit actions they would never do of their own volition.

Ordinary Men is a powerful, chilling, and important work with themes and arguments that continue to resonate today.

Supplemental enhancement PDF accompanies the audiobook.

excellent but difficult

The book is very informative and the reader is excellent but emotionally challenging to ingest

Important Psychology

Difficult content to listen to, but an important look into the psychology of man. An important thing to understand to avoid a repeat in future history.

Difficult to know how to review

This book is difficult to read/hear, but the contents are a must-read to try to grasp the scope of the horror if the Holocaust. I gave it 5 stars because I think it is an important work, but I cannot say that it was enjoyable in any way. I hope these actions are never, ever repeated again, and that we are never left trying to figure out how it happened.

Well written overview of the descent into darkness

I was curious to learn how a police unit could devolve into becoming mass murderers. the book provides a very thorough factual overview and theoretical framework to understand that process. It is a very good and subtle analysis.

The narration was very good while he was speaking English. While I can't vouch for the the accuracy of his Polish pronunciation, his pronunciation of German words, phrases and names was positively distracting. As a speaker of German I could barely understand his pronunciations at times. It would have been time well spent to improve that before recording the book.

Gives you a feel of the social atmosphere.

This book goes over the atrocities Nazi Germany conducted during the Holocaust but you'll have to wait until the end to hear the author's reasoning for why they did it.