Ordinary Men Chapter 18: Lessons From Ordinary Men (Part 2)

So if authority alone does not fully explain why these men became killers, what does? That is where Part 2 of this final chapter gets uncomfortable. Because the answer is not one big thing. It is a bunch of ordinary human tendencies working together in the worst possible direction.

This is post 21 in my Ordinary Men retelling series, continuing Part 2 of the final interpretive chapter. If you are just joining, start with the intro for the full context on Reserve Police Battalion 101.

Authority Was Complicated at Jozefow

Browning circles back to the strange situation at Jozefow. Major Trapp – the man giving the orders – was weeping openly. He clearly did not want to do this. He even offered his men a way out. That is not exactly what an iron-fisted authority figure looks like.

But Trapp did something else. He invoked a distant authority. The orders came from the highest level, he told them. The battalion was bound by those orders, even if Trapp personally exempted individual men who could not handle it.

So the men faced a layered situation. Their immediate commander was weak and sympathetic. The real authority – the Nazi leadership – was invisible but absolute. And here is the key question Browning raises: when the vast majority chose to stay in line and shoot, were they obeying authority? Were they loyal to Trapp as a beloved officer they did not want to abandon? Or was something else going on entirely?

Conformity Was the Bigger Driver

Milgram himself noticed something interesting. When people explain their own behavior, they almost always point to authority rather than peer pressure. It makes sense. “I was following orders” sounds like a reason. “I did it because everyone else was doing it” sounds pathetic.

But the men of Battalion 101 actually admitted the opposite. Many of them told interrogators that what kept them in line was the fear of how their comrades would see them. How would it look if they stepped out? What would the other guys think?

Milgram believed that when people admitted to conformity, that was just the tip of the iceberg. The real influence of peer pressure was even larger than anyone would confess. If that is true, then conformity – not authority – was the dominant force at Jozefow.

Milgram had tested this in his lab. When collaborators escalated the electric shocks step by step, naive subjects went along and chose shock levels far higher than they would have on their own. The peer influence was measurable and significant. But Milgram never managed to replicate the exact dynamic of Jozefow – a group of men with real bonds, real comradeship, real fear of looking weak in front of each other. That scenario is basically impossible to create in a lab. But the principle held: authority and conformity reinforce each other.

What the Evidence Confirmed

Several of Milgram’s findings mapped directly onto what happened with Battalion 101.

Proximity mattered. The closer the men were to the actual killing – face to face, one on one in the woods – the more likely they were to break down and refuse. When the process was moved to the death camps and the killing happened out of sight, the men felt almost no responsibility at all.

Supervision mattered. When officers were not watching, plenty of men quietly stopped complying. They would skip shootings, intentionally miss, or find excuses to be somewhere else. But they could not refuse openly. Just like Milgram’s subjects who cheated when the experimenter left the room, these men could bend the rules only when no one was looking.

The Indoctrination Question

Here is where Browning digs into something Milgram could not really test in a lab: ideology. Did years of Nazi propaganda turn these men into willing killers? Were they brainwashed?

The short answer is: not exactly.

What the Nazis Tried

Himmler absolutely wanted his police forces to be ideological warriors, not just cops with guns. The Order Police had a full indoctrination program. Basic training included a month of “ideological education” covering topics like “Race as the Basis of Our World View” and “Maintaining the Purity of Blood.” Officers attended workshops. Weekly lectures were mandated. SS pamphlets were distributed regularly.

Officers in Battalion 101 played along. Captains Hoffmann and Wohlauf and Lieutenant Gnade were even awarded books in late 1942 for their efforts in ideological training.

What the Materials Actually Said

But when Browning looks at the actual content of these materials, the picture changes.

Two series of weekly newsletters were produced by the Order Police between 1940 and 1944. About two hundred issues total. The general racist perspective was everywhere, obviously. But direct anti-Semitic content was surprisingly sparse. One issue – “Jewry and Criminality” – was so mind-numbingly dull that Browning suggests it was more likely to put readers to sleep than radicalize them.

Only one other article dealt entirely with the Jewish question. Published in December 1941, it declared that “a Europe free of Jews” was imminent. But this was the same message circulated to the general public. It was not some secret brainwashing material aimed at reserve policemen.

The single article in the entire run that even mentioned the reserve police assumed they were doing nothing important. It was a morale booster for bored older guys, reassuring them that “everyone is important” in total war. By that point, Battalion 101 had already carried out multiple mass shootings and deportations. That article would have seemed absurd to them.

The Pamphlets Were Late and Off-Target

Special pamphlets were also distributed – four to six per year – on topics like “The Blood Community of the German Peoples” and “The Politics of Race.” The most thorough and systematic treatment of racial doctrine did not appear until 1943, by which point Battalion 101’s area was already virtually empty of Jews. Too late to have caused anything.

The 1942 pamphlet was aimed at young SS men and focused on marrying racially pure brides and having lots of children. These were middle-aged reservists who had made those life decisions decades ago. The material was irrelevant to them on every level.

Five Problems With the Brainwashing Theory

Browning lays out his case methodically:

One. The most detailed indoctrination material came out after the battalion had already done most of its killing.

Two. Much of the material was written for young SS men and was wildly inappropriate for older reservists.

Three. These were not young men raised entirely under Nazism. Most of Battalion 101 grew up in the pre-1933 Weimar era. They knew what moral norms looked like before Hitler. They had earlier standards to judge against.

Four. The constant drumbeat of anti-Semitic propaganda across all of German society did shape attitudes in a general way. As Lieutenant Drucker put it with spectacular understatement, “Under the influence of the times, my attitude to the Jews was marked by a certain aversion.” The racism was pervasive. But pervasive racism and targeted preparation for mass murder are two different things.

Five. The indoctrination materials that discussed the Jews called for a “Europe free of Jews” but never explicitly told individual policemen to go out and kill Jewish civilians. Contrast that with the partisan warfare guidelines, which flatly told each man he needed to be tough enough to kill suspects. Nothing equivalent existed for the murder of unarmed Jewish women and children.

The Comparison That Seals It

The Einsatzgruppen – the mobile killing squads sent into the Soviet Union – received two months of dedicated preparation. They got pep talks from SS leaders. Officers met personally with Reinhard Heydrich days before the invasion. Even the police battalions sent to follow them into Russia were briefed on what to expect.

Battalion 101 got none of that. Officers and men alike were surprised and unprepared when they arrived at Jozefow. Whatever turned them into killers, it was not a carefully designed indoctrination program.

The Bottom Line on Indoctrination

Browning’s conclusion is measured. The men were influenced by years of propaganda. They absorbed a sense of German superiority and Jewish otherness. But they were not brainwashed. You would have to believe enormously in the power of indoctrination to think these pamphlets stripped grown men of their ability to think for themselves. The propaganda conditioned them. It did not program them.

Why Conformity Was So Powerful

So if they were not brainwashed and authority was complicated, what kept 80 to 90 percent of these men shooting – even though almost all of them were horrified at first?

Conformity. And Browning explains exactly how it worked.

Stepping Out Meant Dumping Your Share on Your Buddies

The battalion had orders to kill. Individuals did not. But the job still had to get done. If you stepped out, you were not stopping the killing. You were just making your comrades do more of it. Refusing was, in practice, an antisocial act. You were ditching your share of a terrible collective obligation and leaving it for the guys standing next to you.

Refusal Looked Like Moral Judgment

Worse, stepping out could be read as a silent accusation. By refusing, you were implying you were “too good” for this. Most men who did refuse instinctively understood this danger. They did not claim moral superiority. Instead they said they were “too weak.” That framing was critical – it did not challenge anyone else’s self-image. It actually reinforced the idea that being “tough enough” to kill was the admirable position.

But even claiming weakness had limits. There was a thin line between being “too weak” and being a “coward.” One policeman solved this by not stepping out at the start (which would have looked cowardly – like he was too scared to even try) but dropping out later, after making an effort. That way he could say he tried and failed, rather than that he never had the guts to begin with.

The Macho Trap

Here is the truly insidious part. Even the men who refused to kill ended up reinforcing the norms of the killers. By framing their refusal as weakness rather than moral objection, they confirmed that “toughness” was the right value to hold. They left the moral framework of the battalion completely intact.

The compromises people found were tortured and contradictory. Some would not shoot infants on the spot but would carry them to the assembly point. Some would skip shootings when no eager volunteer was around to report them. Some would fire but deliberately miss. Only a tiny number of men were truly willing to be called a “weakling” and “no man” by their comrades. Only those few could withstand total social rejection.

War, Racism, and the Enemy Image

Browning ties it all together. The pervasive racism of the era made it easier for these men to exclude Jews from any sense of shared humanity. The constant propaganda reinforced the idea that Jews were fundamentally different, inferior, dangerous. And the war itself made everything worse.

In wartime, excluding the enemy from moral consideration is normal. It is how every society wages war. The Nazis exploited this instinct brilliantly. The racial hierarchy they preached – superior Germans versus inferior Jews – merged seamlessly with the wartime mentality of a nation under siege. Even men who did not understand or care about SS racial theory could absorb the simpler message: these people are the enemy, and we are at war.

As Browning puts it: nothing helped the Nazis wage a race war so much as the war itself.

Primo Levi and the Gray Zone

Near the end of the chapter, Browning turns to Primo Levi – the Auschwitz survivor and writer – and his concept of “the gray zone.”

Levi argued that the Holocaust could not be neatly divided into victims and perpetrators. The system degraded everyone it touched. Among the victims, there was a spectrum from low-level functionaries hoarding tiny advantages, to Kapos who committed atrocities freely, to the Sonderkommandos who kept themselves alive by operating the gas chambers and crematoria. Levi called the creation of the Sonderkommandos National Socialism’s “most demonic crime.”

But Levi went further. He said the gray zone included perpetrators too. Even an SS man at Birkenau – a daily mass murderer known for invented cruelties – hesitated briefly when a sixteen-year-old girl was found alive after the gas chambers were cleared. He ordered her death but left before it was carried out. That one instant of pity did not absolve him. But it placed him within the gray zone – “that zone of ambiguity which radiates out from regimes based on terror.”

Browning applies this directly to Battalion 101. Lieutenant Gnade initially rushed his men away from a killing assignment but later learned to enjoy it. Many men were horrified at Jozefow but became casual volunteers for later massacres. Even Lieutenant Buchmann – the most outspoken critic in the entire battalion – eventually led his men to a killing operation when his protector Trapp was absent and the Security Police gave the orders.

And at the very center of this gray zone stood Trapp himself: the commander who sent his men to slaughter Jews while weeping like a child. And Captain Hoffmann, whose body physically rebelled against the things his mind ordered.

Browning is careful to note that the gray zone is not symmetrical. Perpetrators did not become victims. The range of choices available to each side was completely different. But the spectrum of behavior within each group was real.

Browning’s Final Word

The chapter ends on a note that is honest and deeply unsettling.

Browning admits that trying to explain the behavior of nearly 500 men is an act of intellectual arrogance. Human behavior is complex. Group behavior is even more so. No single theory – authority, conformity, ideology, racism, careerism, war – explains everything.

But certain things are clear. These were ordinary men. They faced choices. Most of them made terrible ones. Yet even among them, some refused to kill and others stopped. Human responsibility remains an individual matter. Nobody gets to hide behind the group.

And then comes the gut punch. Browning zooms out and asks: is there anything truly unique about the conditions that produced these killers?

Racism exists in many societies. War and the threat of war create siege mentalities everywhere. Every society teaches deference to authority. Career ambition is universal. Bureaucracy diffuses personal responsibility in every modern nation. And in every social group on earth, peer pressure shapes behavior and sets moral norms.

If the men of Reserve Police Battalion 101 could become killers under these circumstances, Browning asks, what group of men cannot?

Key Takeaway

No single explanation – obedience, ideology, conformity, racism – is enough on its own. What made ordinary men into killers was all of these forces working together, in a context where the barriers to evil had been systematically removed. And the conditions that produced them are not unique to Nazi Germany. That is the lesson Browning wants you to carry with you.

Book: Ordinary Men by Christopher R. Browning | ISBN: 978-0-06-099968-8

Previous: Chapter 18 - Why Ordinary Men Killed, Part 1

Next up: Afterword - The Goldhagen Debate - Browning responds to his most famous critic and the argument that German culture itself was the cause.