Ordinary Men: A Book Retelling Series You Need to Read
What happens when normal, everyday people are put into extraordinary circumstances? Not soldiers. Not fanatics. Just regular middle-aged guys from Hamburg with families and day jobs.
Ordinary Men
Christopher Browning's disturbing study of how Reserve Police Battalion 101 became Holocaust killers.
Ordinary Men Chapter 1: One Morning in Józefów
Imagine getting woken up before dawn, loaded onto a truck, and driven for two hours down a bumpy gravel road with no idea where you are going or what you are about to do. Now imagine being told, once you arrive, that your job today is to murder 1,500 people.
Ordinary Men Chapter 2: The Order Police
How does a police force built to keep order end up carrying out one of history’s worst crimes? That is the story of Chapter 2.
Ordinary Men Chapter 3: The Order Police in Russia 1941
Before the killing fields of Poland, there was Russia. And what happened there in the summer of 1941 set the template for everything that followed.
Ordinary Men Chapter 4: When the Deportations Began
Imagine filing a report about transporting a thousand people to a death camp, and your biggest complaint is that the butter went rancid.
Ordinary Men Chapter 5: Meet Reserve Police Battalion 101
These were dock workers, truck drivers, and salesmen. Guys pushing forty with bad knees and families back home. And they were about to be sent to Poland to do things none of them could have imagined a few years earlier.
Ordinary Men Chapter 6: Arrival in Poland
Before the middle-aged policemen of Battalion 101 ever set foot in Poland, the machinery of mass murder was already grinding at full speed. Chapter 6 is not really about the battalion yet. It is about the nightmare they were walking into.
Ordinary Men Chapter 7: The Józefów Massacre - The Orders (Part 1)
A fifty-three-year-old career policeman stands before five hundred men at dawn, tears running down his face, and tells them their job today is to murder fifteen hundred people. Then he says something no one expects: if you cannot do it, you can step out. No punishment. No consequences. Just walk away.
Ordinary Men Chapter 7: The Józefów Massacre - The Killing (Part 2)
Some of the men came out of the woods covered head to toe in blood and bone fragments. Their uniforms were soaked. Their hands were shaking. And the day was not even close to being over.
Ordinary Men Chapter 8: Reflections on a Massacre
Why do people follow horrific orders when they have a clear chance to say no? That is the question Chapter 8 of Ordinary Men tries to answer, and the answers are more unsettling than you might expect.