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Chapter 4
Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Ordinary Men, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Freedom of Choice
Peer Pressure, Conformity, and Acceptance
Normalization of Violence
Nationalism, War, and Ethnic Cleansing
Summary
Analysis
Reserve Police Battalion 101 is among the first units to be sent to Poland after the German invasion in 1939. At this stage, they’re primarily supposed to help round up Polish soldiers and equipment, but later that year the battalion is reshaped, with career policemen transferred to other units and new members taking their place. Several months later, the battalion begins to carry out resettlement actions as part of Himmler and Hitler’s plan to repopulate large areas of Poland with “pure” Germans. The battalion contributes to this by moving Jews, Poles, and Gypsies out of their towns and into central Poland, thus allowing Germans to take over the empty cities. Hitler and Himmler never truly achieve this goal, but hundreds of thousands of people are shuffled around nonetheless.
It’s important to note that most of the men who make up Reserve Police Battalion 101 during these early actions in Poland are later transferred to different units and go to different places. Very few of these original battalion members are still part of the battalion in July 1942 when it is ordered to execute over 1,000 Jews in Józefów. One of the Nazis’ most well-documented beliefs was that Germans constituted a master race, but they had to be pure Germans. Just one drop of Jewish or Gypsy blood was enough to ruin a person’s purity. By moving the Poles, Gypsies, and Jews away, the Nazis were helping to ensure that the “pure” Germans who moved in wouldn’t “dirty” their bloodline by marrying and/or having children with anyone impure. All of this happens before the creation and implementation of the Final Solution, so the actions here are not quite as violent as the ghetto clearings and deportations to death camps that will come later.
Themes
A battalion summary report shows that all the policemen took part in resettlement actions, during which they managed to evacuate 36,972 out of the desired 58,628 people. In his postwar interrogation, Bruno Probst, a drafted reservist in the battalion, recounts that these actions were his first experience with excessive violence. The commission in charge of this resettlement is partially made up of SS officers, who “mak[e] it clear” that “nothing [can] be done” with the sick and elderly, implying that they should be killed. Probst only remembers two people being killed by noncommissioned officers after receiving these instructions. Other men in the battalion remember the resettlement but not the violence. One policeman says he remembers the battalion forming shooting squads for the Security Police to kill Poles in one village.
At this point, even when officers grant permission to kill people, few men choose to actually kill anyone (at least according to Probst and the officers who don’t remember any violence during the resettlement actions). This, however, seems to contradict another policeman’s testimony that the men were formed into firing squads to kill Poles. This is a prime example of the struggle Browning faces in his research: sifting through different stories, trying to determine if someone is lying, repressing a memory, or maybe remembering something that really happened that other people coincidentally forgot.
Themes
After five months of resettlement actions, the battalion’s next set of duties involves providing manpower for “pacification actions” by hunting down Poles who escaped deportation during the resettlement. After this, the battalion is put in charge of guarding 160,000 Jews in the Łódz ghetto. The men have orders to shoot any Jew that tries to get out or gets too close to the fence, which the men obey. In his file, Probst remembers watching guards on the ghetto’s main thoroughfare who would set their watches ahead, using this as a pretext to seize Poles, accuse them of breaking curfew, and summarily beat them.
The men who make up the battalion at this time do seem to have become more violent than they were during resettlement actions. This is seen in their willingness to shoot people and unnecessarily harass Poles for entertainment. These events are still occurring before the implementation of the Final Solution, although Himmler, Hitler, and other top Nazi officials are starting to formulate and plan for it. This means that, at this point, the men aren’t carrying out actions that are designed to make it easier to kill the Jews. The Germans are still only trying to segregate them from the general population, although many of the policemen are clearly becoming indifferent towards the Jews’ and Poles’ lives and have no qualms about using unnecessary violence against them.
Themes
In May 1941, the unit returns to Hamburg to be dissolved and rebuilt with drafted reservists before undergoing extensive retraining. The men remember very little from this time beyond helping deport Jews from Hamburg. Hans Keller states that securing a spot as a guard on these transports was desirable because it meant getting to travel. During one deportation transport, Probst notes that the Jews believe that their belongings are going to follow them to their destination and so they don’t put up a fight about not carrying their own luggage. However, at their destination, Probst learns that the Jews will be killed, and so it doesn’t matter where their luggage is. Not wanting to be around for the shooting, Lieutenant Gnade (the commander for the group of guards on the transport) gets his men on a late-night train out of town.
It is worth noting that, when the battalion is dissolved and rebuilt, most of the men are drafted. This means that many of the men didn’t choose to become policemen and thus had little to no interest in taking on a policeman’s duties. This is important because it establishes that most of the men did not willingly join the battalion with the intention of getting to see some wartime action. The battalion’s involvement with the transports and what they have to say about it reveals that they probably only had a limited understanding of what fate awaited the Jews until they arrived at their destination. For the most part, the men see guarding the trains as an opportunity to travel, not a serious task that will result in the deaths of hundreds or thousands or people. Notably, Lieutenant Gnade doesn’t even want to stay the night when he hears that there will be violence. This reveals his genuine distaste for violence before the action at Józefów.
Themes
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In June 1942, the battalion gets word that they will do a tour of duty in Poland. Only a few of the men currently in the battalion were part of it during the early resettlement actions in Poland or have experience with deportations and other potentially violent actions. Aside from a few World War I veterans, only a few men have any military experience. With just over 500 men, the battalion is divided into three companies, two of which are commanded by police captains and one by a reserve lieutenant, and each company is divided into three platoons.
Very few of the men have any experience with war or violence, so they’ve never really been in a position to hurt or kill another person. This makes the rest of their story—how they become so used to violence that some of them eventually genuinely like it—all the more interesting and powerful because they seem so ordinary. They don’t seem to be predisposed to violence and most of the men have little if any experience with violence.
Themes
The battalion commander, Major Trapp, is a WWI veteran and career policeman. Despite being an Alte Kämpfer, Trapp is never taken into the SS because, as Browning says, he isn’t SS material. In fact, his two subordinate captains (both in the SS) resent Trapp for being weak. Both captains are in their 20s. Wolfgang Hoffmann, a long-time Nazi and SS lieutenant, commands Third Company. Julius Wohlauf, also a long time Nazi and SS lieutenant, commands First Company and acts as Trapp’s deputy battalion commander. Little is known of Trapp’s adjutant, First Lieutenant Hagen, other than that he is killed in 1943.
Trapp is one of the few WWI veterans in the battalion, so he presumably has experience both committing violence and having to deal with the psychological burden of it. He understands better than most what it’s like to cope with the fact of having killed another human being. This might have something to do with why he’s not considered SS material by Nazi officials—having been a part of violence, he makes no secret about being less than enthusiastic about ever doing it again. His two captains, however, are young SS men who clearly do have more enthusiasm for war and the possibility of violent action. As Browning explains earlier, only men who are both able-bodied and truly believe in Nazi ideology are allowed into the SS, so both Wohlauf and Hoffmann are presumably anti-Semitic and embrace the idea of getting rid of the Jews (either through deporting them elsewhere or even by killing them) to make more room for German expansion.
Themes
Additionally, there are seven reserve lieutenants who are not career policemen but are trained as officers in recognition of their education and career success as civilians: Hartwig Gnade, Paul Brand, Heinz Buchmann, Oscar Peters, Walter Hoppner, Hans Scheer, and Kurt Drucker. Five of them are Nazis, but none belong to the SS. Out of the 32 noncommissioned officers about whom Browning has information, 22 are Nazis and seven are in the SS; all are prewar recruits. The rest of the men seem to be very ordinary. Most come from the working or lower-middle classes. Very few belong to the middle class. The average age of these men is 39—too old for the military, this age group is still useful as policemen. About 25 percent are Nazis; six of them are Alte Kämpfer.
It is important to remember that simply being in the German army was not the same thing as being a Nazi. The Nazis were a political party and being a member of it typically indicates that a person believes in Nazi ideology. Most of the noncommissioned officers and lieutenants are Nazis, but this is probably because military leaders prefer to put Nazis in positions of power over those who aren’t part of the party. It is also important that the overwhelming majority of the rest of the men are not Nazis, which implies that they don’t have the same ideological beliefs and therefore do not necessarily have a deep-rooted and long-held hatred of the Jews.
Themes
In general, the men in this battalion are not particularly well-educated, wealthy, or financially independent. Most developed their moral norms in pre-Nazi Hamburg, which was never a hotbed of Nazi culture. Most even come from the social class that was least supportive of the Nazis’ rise to power. Because of this, Browning concludes that the men in Reserve Police Battalion 101 are not ideal candidates for committing mass murder in support of the Nazi vision of a Jew-free utopia.
To Browning, it is clear that when this battalion was formed, it likely wasn’t done with the intention of using the men to commit mass murder. If the battalion was originally meant to carry out violent actions, then the men that the officials drafted and selected probably would have come from a different demographic, most likely one more supportive of Nazi ideals.
Themes
