
Ordinary Men
Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland
Failed to add items
Add to Cart failed.
Add to Wish List failed.
Remove from wishlist failed.
Adding to library failed
Follow podcast failed
Unfollow podcast failed
3 months free
Buy for $24.29
No default payment method selected.
We are sorry. We are not allowed to sell this product with the selected payment method
-
Narrated by:
-
Kevin Gallagher
“A remarkable - and singularly chilling - glimpse of human behavior...This meticulously researched book...represents a major contribution to the literature of the Holocaust." (Newsweek)
Now available in audio for the first time, Christopher R. Browning’s shocking account of how a unit of average middle-aged Germans became the cold-blooded murderers of tens of thousands of Jews - now with a new afterword and additional photographs.
Ordinary Men is the true story of Reserve Police Battalion 101 of the German Order Police, which was responsible for mass shootings as well as round-ups of Jewish people for deportation to Nazi death camps in Poland in 1942. Browning argues that most of the men of RPB 101 were not fanatical Nazis but, rather, ordinary middle-aged, working-class men who committed these atrocities out of a mixture of motives, including the group dynamics of conformity, deference to authority, role adaptation, and the altering of moral norms to justify their actions.
Very quickly three groups emerged within the battalion: a core of eager killers, a plurality who carried out their duties reliably but without initiative, and a small minority who evaded participation in the acts of killing without diminishing the murderous efficiency of the battalion whatsoever. While this book discusses a specific Reserve Unit during WWII, the general argument Browning makes is that most people succumb to the pressures of a group setting and commit actions they would never do of their own volition.
Ordinary Men is a powerful, chilling, and important work with themes and arguments that continue to resonate today.
PLEASE NOTE: When you purchase this title, the accompanying PDF will be available in your Audible Library along with the audio.
©2017 Christopher R. Browning (P)2020 HarperAudioListeners also enjoyed...




















People who viewed this also viewed...


















excellent but difficult
Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
Important Psychology
Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
Difficult to know how to review
Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
Gives you a feel of the social atmosphere.
Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
Amazing research and writing done by the author. It was no small task. It was well told and maintained a good story-telling capacity which kept it from sounding quite so much like a source documentary filled with stats and meaningless information. An area of history that isn't discussed much is any.
Very Enlightening
Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
The narration was very good while he was speaking English. While I can't vouch for the the accuracy of his Polish pronunciation, his pronunciation of German words, phrases and names was positively distracting. As a speaker of German I could barely understand his pronunciations at times. It would have been time well spent to improve that before recording the book.
Well written overview of the descent into darkness
Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
educational but rambles on with kill numbers for a while….
Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
The Power of Regimes
Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
A compassionate yet critical analysis of the holocaust
Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
It documents how ordinary men, most of whom under normal conditions, would never dream of performing horrific acts of murder of helpless old men and women, children, men, women and even pregnant women! Under conditions of war and receiving orders, they nevertheless performed them!
The first few chapters just plainly describes with historical proof the mass killing of Jews by mostly middle aged policemen recruited to avoid depleting the ranks of more fit younger men to fight in WW2. There was a great aversion to doing this by most, and a few refused, but not out of morality per se, but out of disgust. Others performed them only out of fear of being called a coward or weak or betraying your country. Actually forcing these men to kill was almost never the case, which greatly surprised me. They were directed and ordered to do it, and most did. Those who refused were often shunned by the others, but rarely punished.
Later the book goes into more detail about anti-Semitism in Germany and the NAZI dehumanizing of the Jews. Rationalization by these "ordinary men" was that Jews are the enemy and this is a job someone has to do, and after all they are or would be bombing German civilians if and when they do.
Like reading the Gulag Archipelago, I would not listen to it all at once, but maybe a chapter once a week or a month, so you don't get too depressed! Oh, the reader is very good and unemotionally reads, making it all the more shocking and poignant!
Horrifying Documentation of Evil in Humanity
Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.