Ordinary Men

Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland

By: Christopher R. Browning

Narrated by: Kevin Gallagher

Length: 10 hrs

Publisher's summary

“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.  

PLEASE NOTE: When you purchase this title, the accompanying PDF will be available in your Audible Library along with the audio.

©2017 Christopher R. Browning (P)2020 HarperAudio

excellent but difficult

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

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.

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.

Very Enlightening

Great job to the reader. Well done with the German pronunciation and the fluidity of the text in speech.
Amazing research and writing done by the author. It was no small task. It was well told and maintained a good story-telling capacity which kept it from sounding quite so much like a source documentary filled with stats and meaningless information. An area of history that isn't discussed much is any.

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.

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.

educational but rambles on with kill numbers for a while….

story would’ve been 5 starts but looses a start for citing the numbers of killings going on and on and the dates, it’s easily forgettable and takes up almost an hour of the book.

The Power of Regimes

This book reveals that evil can propagate even law enforcement at civilian levels. The level at which people blindly follow others is scary. It clearly shows people getting involved or acting as if everything is fine, while the stench of dead bodies burn in the background. Would our youths of today have the fortitude of the Greatest Generation of the 30’s and 40’s to defend the innocent of impeding doom? Their questioning their own gender, use pronouns as self description. I hardly think so.

Horrifying Documentation of Evil in Humanity

This is a most unpleasant book. It is important for recognizing the potential evil existing in humanity (ourselves - that means YOU and ME). I confess I only read the book because Jordan Peterson recommended it.

It documents how ordinary men, most of whom under normal conditions, would never dream of performing horrific acts of murder of helpless old men and women, children, men, women and even pregnant women! Under conditions of war and receiving orders, they nevertheless performed them!

The first few chapters just plainly describes with historical proof the mass killing of Jews by mostly middle aged policemen recruited to avoid depleting the ranks of more fit younger men to fight in WW2. There was a great aversion to doing this by most, and a few refused, but not out of morality per se, but out of disgust. Others performed them only out of fear of being called a coward or weak or betraying your country. Actually forcing these men to kill was almost never the case, which greatly surprised me. They were directed and ordered to do it, and most did. Those who refused were often shunned by the others, but rarely punished.

Later the book goes into more detail about anti-Semitism in Germany and the NAZI dehumanizing of the Jews. Rationalization by these "ordinary men" was that Jews are the enemy and this is a job someone has to do, and after all they are or would be bombing German civilians if and when they do.

Like reading the Gulag Archipelago, I would not listen to it all at once, but maybe a chapter once a week or a month, so you don't get too depressed! Oh, the reader is very good and unemotionally reads, making it all the more shocking and poignant!

ordinary men review

This gives an inside look at the men that carried out these atrocities. The mass killings of these innocent people is definitely hard to listen to. This book I had to listen to in small bits because of it.