Ordinary Horror: How "Normal" People Could Become Nazis

The most famous names in the Third Reich are inextricably linked with the German pogroms against European Jewry; Hitler, Goebbels, Eichmann, and Göring to name a few. But what about Karol Bardo, Bronisław Śleszyński, Paul Salitter, and 'Bruno Probst', who are they? These names are largely unknown in the rogue's gallery of torture, murder and genocide, and perhaps would have remained so without the works of Christopher R. Browning and Jan T. Gross. Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland and Neighbors: the Destruction of the Jewish Community in Jedwabne, Poland, by Browning and Gross respectively, demonstrate that the responsibility for genocide in Europe does not fall exclusively upon the shoulders of the Third Reich through an innovative use of sources and unique teleologies.

Gross began his examination of a tiny Polish village after being inspired by a documentary film. He writes that the brutal internecine engaged in by the residents of the small village of Jedwabne had been virtually unknown by most scholars of Poland's World War Two experience. His writing is pithy and deeply troubling, for within the pages of the build-up, culmination, and aftermath of the massacre of Jedwabne's Jews, the reader is granted an insight into a rural European culture of hatred that only awaited the catalyst of Soviet and German occupation to be released. Gross uses not only evidence recorded at various trials in 1949 and 1953, but depositions, oral history, a 1980 memorial book and footage from the 1998 documentary film that set him on his path of investigation. He fully acknowledges that, taken individually, each source has its weaknesses, but that when used to cross-check each other a disturbingly clear - and reliable - picture of the atrocities comes through.

Similar to Gross in his approach, Christopher Browning's viewpoint comes not from the occupied, but from the occupier. Using the Third Reich's practice of utilizing reservists to secure newly occupied territory as his framework, Browning introduces the reader to a particular, and typical, Reserve Police Battalion. These battalions are composed of middle-aged, professional, and average German men charged with an unthinkable task; the systematic slaughter of Polish Jews. These men, he argues, share the blame for the genocide perpetrated by the Third Reich, as ordered by its leaders. These are men, who by and large escape the high-profile trials at Nuremberg, but were still as responsible for the execution of those orders and thus as culpable in the murder of six million Jews in Europe. Like Gross, Browning also relies upon oral history, post-war court documents, memoirs and interviews with the former reservists - now retirees in Germany. It is again in the analysis of the amalgam of individually faulty sources that a strong and coherent narrative of events takes place.

Both Browning and Gross utilize the actions of so-called 'ordinary men'as an illumination of the banality of evil; they are Mayors of villages, bakers, and police men of towns, they are old and young, and their impact on the world's history is still felt today. These ordinary men were thrust into extraordinary circumstances by the Second World War, and given license to act upon the hate that the Third Reich, and to a lesser degree the Stalinist regime, had fanned the flames of. They may be ordinary, but as Gross points out "in each episode many specific individual decisions were made by different actors present on the scene who decisively influenced outcomes. And, thus, it is at least conceivable that a number of those actors could have made different choices, with the result that many more European Jews could have survived the war." That is what makes these two books so important and devastating; the German leadership during World War Two has received the bulk of the guilt for the Holocaust - and rightly so - but they were but the ultimate expression of deep-seated hatred that was woven into the fabric of everyday European life. This hatred was so naturally part of the culture that when it came time to act in the most bestial and brutal of manners, these 'ordinary men' did not make those 'different choices', one that begs the reader to ask themselves if they too are 'ordinary'.

This is an even more important question to ask in the 21st century. Using the cover of 'patriotism,' the administration of George W. Bush has consistently undermined the Constitution of the United States; through the use of secret, warrantless wire-tapping, the abrogation of the Geneva Convention through the limitless detention of 'enemy combatants,' the avoidance of public scrutiny through invocation of 'executive privelege,' and numerous other breaches of the public trust. Those who did not vote for the war in Iraq, or those who critisized the government's tactics in the "War on Terror" were often shouted down as "unAmerican" or worse, silenced as television talkshow host Bill Maher and Valerie Plame's husband Joe Wilson were. The prevalent idea in American society, indeed in every Western society, is that "It (fascism) can't happen here" and for the larger part of the 20th century, American society was content to believe that illusion. While Joseph McCarthy ruined lives with vague assertions of Communism or Richard Nixon engineered political intimidation and espionage on a massive scale, Americans were conforted by the fact that "The Press" or "The Army" or someone esle would uncover the deep, dark secrets of these villains and the social order would be set to right. Unfortunately, with the acquiescence of the American people, "The Press" has been discredited and derided as "elitists" and other "whistle blowers" were castigated publicly, as in the Justice Department scandal. Political expediency, combined with a surprising amount of secrecy, has kept the Bush administration limping along well after Democratic Senators and Representatives promised to "clean up" Washington DC. Though American society has not fallen into the same pit of depravity that Nazi Germany did, one must ask how far do we have to fall? One element that was missing was the financial destitution that many Germans faced in the 1930's; skyrocketing inflation and crushing foreign debt caused resentment to boil over into the election of Adolph Hitler; a firebrand conservative who promised to rid the country of the "vermin" who were the cause of it all and to fight the menace of Communism which "envied the German" way of life. With the mortgage melt-down, the collapse of Wall Street 'giants,' and rising inflation, the already-volatile mixture of draconian domestic "security" policy could potentially combine with latent racism in American society to foster a new era where evil acts are done by 'ordinary' Americans.

Christopher R. Browning Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland (Harper Collins, 1993)

Jan T. Gross Neighbors: the Destruction of the Jewish Community in Jedwabne, Poland (Penguin, 2002)

Valerie Plame Wilson

Bill Maher

Justice Department - Political Firings of Justice Department Prosecutors.
Latent Racism