Christopher Browning's Ordinary Men

Reasons behind human responses and actions cannot be explained in black and white. After all, many decades of research later, neurologists and psychologist have been attempting to decipher several mechanisms in the human brain, that include the decision making process, and still have yet to find concrete answers. Decision making is essential to human nature because individuals need to make basic decisions to survive, or get through important events in their lives. The decision to comply with traffic lights, for example, ensures that car users don't kill each other at intersections. Christopher Browning’s novel, Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland, uses records from the trials of Nazi crimes in Germany to examine the perpetrators. Browning, just like the scientists, could not come to any solid conclusion to explain how a regular man could commit such horrific crimes. He did nonetheless pose an important question: “If the men of Reserve Police Battalion 101 could become killers under such circumstances, what group of men cannot?” (Browning 189). The controversy in the question of “ordinary men” exists because, whether one acknowledges it or not, the question speaks to human nature. The experiences of Reserve Police Battalion 101 during World War II suggest the terrifying concept that any random individual …show more content…
According to Browning, they were the complete opposite - they were the “‘dregs’ of the manpower pool” (165). Previous to the action the battalion were about to perform, the individual policemen were less than qualified to carry out the systematic genocide of Jews. Like many functional members of society, Canadian or otherwise, most policemen were small business owners, who belonged to the working class. They too had families, and had jobs available to any capable member of modern