Ordinary Men

Christopher Browning examines a German Order Police unit, Battalion 101, made up mostly of middle-aged family men, most of them raised in Hamburg, that shot Jews in Poland en masse and rounded up many more for deportation to Treblinka. Drawing on postwar judicial interrogations of 210 former members, he lets the men speak for themselves about their part in the Final Solution, starting with the Jozefow massacre of July 1942. Browning argues that most were not fanatical Nazis but ordinary men moved by conformity, deference to authority, adaptation to their roles and shifting moral norms. In the battalion he finds eager killers, a plurality who did their duty without initiative, and a small minority who avoided killing.

Jordan B. Peterson included it on his published book list.