Following my visit to Auschwitz and Birkenau I look for a book (in Massolit Books and Cafe) that might begin to answer some of the questions we ask ourselves about the Holocaust. I come away with Christopher R. Browning’s book Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland.

Returning home following our visit, I make this my next read and find it to be a thoughtful and thought-provoking study of the experiences of 500 members of Reserve Police Battalion 101, based on their testimony in 1962 to 1972 as part of the investigation and legal prosecution of the Battalion by the Office of the State Prosecutor (Staatsanwaltschaft) in Hamburg.

Browning avoids sweeping generalisations to explore the multiple responses of the Battalion’s members over time, from their first and unexpected order to shoot 1,500 Jews in the Polish village of Jozefow in 1942 to the Erntefest (“Harvest Festival”) massacre towards the end of the war. Over time the Battalion’s members diverge into three groups, ranging from those who consistently took action to avoid the task they were allocated to those who learned to enjoy it.

The Battalion is of particular interest both because of the extensive and relatively open and honest testimony of its members and because it comprises the men of the title – ordinary men. These are not men who joined the Battalion fueled with the kind of race hatred that the naive witness might expect. The unfolding account offers a conclusion which, in turn, challenges any view of these men as fundamentally evil or in some way different from the reader. These were our fellow human beings.

In his Afterword, published six year’s after the book’s initial publication, Browning responds to scrutiny and criticism by his fellow author Daniel J. Goldhagen. His response is enough for me to decide not to seek out Goldhagen’s alternative account of Reserve Police Battalion 101.