Newspaper Article

Mundane monsters How a group of `ordinary' men turned themselves into executioners

Reviewed by Michael Dorris, an author whose most recent books are "The Broken Cord" and, as co-author with Louise Erdrich, "The Crown of Columbus."

1992

Overview

Fifty years ago a group of 500 men in Hamburg were recruited by the German government to be reserve military policemen. For the most part, they were not members of the Nazi party or the S.S. but working class citizens who, \"after leaving Volksschule (terminal secondary school) at age fourteen or fifteen,\" had been employed in peacetime at regular jobs. \"Ordinary Men,\" Christopher Browning's documentary study of the wartime and postwar records of Police Battalion 101, is a clear and dispassionate record of the process of dehumanization, a chronicle of progressive emotional emptiness. No fictionalizer of the macabre, no Stephen King or Dean R. Koontz or Thomas Harris can, in his wildest imagination, approach the cold evil that possessed this company of average men transformed into killing machines. Ever efficient, occasionally righteous and pious, sometimes with relish, though rarely, according to their recollections, with rage or hatred, 90 percent of them \"followed orders\"-even when offered the option to decline-and became butchers of other human beings. The 101 was responsible for a relatively minor operation, compared to the assembly-line volume of the large concentration camps. Of the 6,000,000 Jews killed by the Nazis and those who collaborated with them as part of the \"Final Solution,\" the Reserve Police Battalion was physically responsible for the deaths of .006 percent. They merely shot the equivalent of a single small city-equal to the population of a Danville, Ill., a Burlington, Vt. or a Vancouver, Wash. However, this fraction, coupled with the particularity and brutality of the deaths documented, makes \"Ordinary Men\" a staggering book, one that manages without polemic to communicate an intimation of the unthinkable.

• Publisher: Tribune Publishing Company, LLC