Christopher Browning accounts for the actions of Reserve Police Battalion 101 in Poland and the role which individual soldiers played in the mass murder of Jews during the “Final Solution.” As he notes in the beginn

ing of the book, “the Holocaust took place because at the most basic level individual human beings killed other human beings in large numbers over an extended period of time. The grass-roots perpetrators became ‘professional killers.’”(Browning xvii) Browning details the Reserve Police Battalion 101 from their organization in Hamburg through their introduction to mass murder, and finally to their development into the professional killers. The majority of the book tells the story of the middle-aged German soldiers based on their own testimony from legal proceedings well after World War II had ended. The most important chapter to this study is the final one in which Browning attempts to explain the motivation of ordinary citizens to become killers.

Christopher Browning’s book, Ordinary Men, recounts the story of the men of Reserve Police Battalion 101’s descent into genocidal murder. He offers many different explanations of why the men participated, but stresses that they felt the need for inclusion and to obey orders. He cites two famous psychological studies as evidence that this made these men “ordinary.” His argument, however, is not convincing. He fails to consider that the men were affected by their prior experience in Nazi Germany. It is impossible to believe that these men could have lived in Nazi Germany and remain insulated from its ever-present anti-Semitic propaganda. Here the distinction between “ordinary men” and “ordinary Germans” is accurate. The men of Battalion 101 must have been affected, at least slightly by Nazi propaganda, making them more willing than just “ordinary men” to take part in genocide against the Jews.

Browning does address Nazi propaganda in his argument, however he dismisses its potential motivation. While he admits that the indoctrination given to the police during their service, coupled with the anti-Semitic propaganda forced on the German public since the Nazi accession to power, had at least some effect on some of the policemen, he considers them relatively negligible factors in the end. (Browning 166). He does not consider the men significantly affected by the anti-Semitic environment in which th

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