Ordinary Men Chapter 18: Why Ordinary Men Became Killers (Part 1)

Why did most of the men in Reserve Police Battalion 101 become killers, while only 10 to 20 percent refused? That is the question this entire book has been building toward, and Chapter 18 is where Browning finally tries to answer it.

This is post 20 in my Ordinary Men retelling series. This chapter is split into two parts because it is the heart of the book. Everything before this – the massacres, the deportations, the ghetto clearings, the Jew hunts – was evidence. Now comes the analysis. Browning lays out every explanation scholars have offered for why ordinary people commit mass murder, tests each one against the evidence from Battalion 101, and shows why no single explanation is enough.

Was It Just What War Does to People?

The most obvious explanation is wartime brutalization. Wars produce atrocities. That is not controversial. John Dower documented how American soldiers in the Pacific openly bragged about taking no prisoners and collected body parts as souvenirs. From the Eastern Front to Vietnam to the Pacific, armed men sent to kill each other on a massive scale have repeatedly crossed the line into torturing and murdering unarmed civilians.

But Browning makes a crucial distinction. There are two kinds of wartime atrocities, and they come from very different mental states.

The first is “battlefield frenzy.” Soldiers who have been shot at, watched their friends die, and grown numb to violence sometimes snap. They massacre prisoners. They destroy villages. These atrocities are horrific, but they emerge from the chaos and rage of actual combat. They are breakdowns in discipline, not official policy.

The second kind is “atrocity by policy.” The firebombing of cities. The slave labor camps. The reprisal shootings of a hundred civilians for every German soldier killed by partisans. These are not breakdowns. They are calculated, methodical, and ordered from above. The men carrying them out are not in a frenzy. They are doing their jobs.

The men of Battalion 101 clearly fall into the second category. And here is the problem with the brutalization theory: most of these men had never seen combat. Except for a few World War I veterans and some NCOs transferred from the Eastern Front, they had never been shot at, never lost comrades in battle, never experienced the kind of trauma that produces battlefield frenzy. They were middle-aged reserve policemen from Hamburg. They had not been brutalized by war. If anything, the brutalization came after they started killing, not before. The horror of Jozefow became routine over time. Brutalization was the effect of their behavior, not the cause.

That said, Browning does not dismiss war as irrelevant. War creates a world divided into “us” and “the enemy.” It makes it psychologically easier for governments to adopt exterminatory policies and for ordinary people to go along with them. The dehumanization of the enemy – what scholars call “psychological distancing” – was a key factor. But it was distancing, not combat frenzy, that mattered for Battalion 101.

The Bureaucratic Distance Argument

Many Holocaust scholars, especially Raul Hilberg, have emphasized the bureaucratic nature of the killing process. Modern bureaucracies create distance between the person pushing paper and the person dying at the end of the chain. The desk murderer who schedules trains or compiles deportation lists never sees a body. His job is segmented, routinized, and depersonalized. He can do terrible things without ever confronting what he is actually doing.

This is a powerful explanation for a lot of the Holocaust. But it does not explain Battalion 101. These men were not desk murderers. They were literally covered in blood. At Jozefow, they marched individual victims into the forest, pressed rifles against their necks, and pulled the trigger at point-blank range. No one was more directly confronted with the reality of mass murder than these men.

That said, division of labor did help later. After the horror of Jozefow, the battalion shifted toward ghetto clearings and deportations. They still used violence – beating people, shooting those who could not walk – but the actual mass killing was done at Treblinka, out of sight. At Lomazy, Trawniki auxiliaries handled most of the shooting. At the Erntefest massacres, Security Police did the killing. The more the battalion could tell itself “we are not the ones pulling the trigger,” the easier it got. That psychological buffer was real and significant. But it cannot explain what happened at Jozefow, when there was no buffer at all.

Were These Men Specially Selected for Murder?

Maybe the men of Battalion 101 were chosen specifically because someone thought they would make good killers? Browning looks into this and finds the opposite.

The SS leadership did carefully select personnel for some killing operations. Heydrich’s office handpicked officers for the Einsatzgruppen. Himmler was deliberate about choosing the right Higher SS and Police Leaders. Gitta Sereny concluded that the 96 men transferred from the euthanasia program to the death camps must have been carefully screened.

But Battalion 101? By every meaningful criterion – age, class, geography – these men were the least likely candidates for mass murder. They were middle-aged, mostly working class, from Hamburg. They were not young ideologues. They were not hardened soldiers. They were what was left of the manpower pool after the real fighters had been sent to the front. Browning calls them the “dregs” of available personnel. Globocnik did not get Battalion 101 because it was ideal for the task. He got it because it was the only kind of unit available for behind-the-lines duty. He simply assumed any battalion sent his way would do the job. And in the long run, he was right.

The one qualification: about 25 percent of the rank and file were Nazi Party members, which was disproportionately high for working-class men. This suggests the initial conscription of reservists may not have been entirely random. But there is no documentary proof of a deliberate policy to draft Party members into reserve police units.

The “Authoritarian Personality” Theory

Shortly after the war, Theodor Adorno and his colleagues developed the idea that certain personality types – rigid, submissive to authority, aggressive toward outsiders, obsessed with toughness – were naturally attracted to fascism. The logic was circular but appealing: Nazis were cruel because cruel people became Nazis.

Later scholars refined this. John Steiner proposed the idea of the “sleeper” – a latent tendency toward violence in certain individuals that stays dormant in normal life but gets activated under the right conditions. In post-World War I Germany, these violence-prone people were drawn to the Nazi Party and especially the SS, which gave them permission and incentive to act on their worst impulses.

But Ervin Staub pushed back on this. He argued that Steiner’s “sleeper” is not rare at all. Under the right circumstances, most people have the capacity for extreme violence. “Evil that arises out of ordinary thinking and is committed by ordinary people is the norm, not the exception.”

Zygmunt Bauman went even further. He dismissed the whole “authoritarian personality” framework. Cruelty, he argued, is social, not characterological. Most people simply slip into the roles that society and institutions provide for them. The real “sleeper,” in Bauman’s view, is the rare person who can resist authority and assert moral independence – and that person usually does not know they have that capacity until they are tested.

Philip Zimbardo’s Stanford prison experiment backed this up. He screened out everyone who scored high on the authoritarian personality scale, randomly assigned perfectly normal college students to be either guards or prisoners, and within six days the guards were inventing new forms of cruelty and humiliation. The situation alone was enough to produce sadistic behavior in people who were not sadistic.

Here is what makes Zimbardo’s findings directly relevant to Battalion 101. Among his eleven guards, about a third became actively cruel. A middle group was “tough but fair.” And less than 20 percent were “good guards” who refused to mistreat prisoners. That spectrum is almost identical to what happened in the battalion: a core of enthusiastic killers who volunteered for firing squads and Jew hunts, a larger group that killed when assigned but did not seek it out, and a small minority of refusers and evaders.

And consider this: the men of Battalion 101 were not self-selected violence enthusiasts. They were conscripts and reservists. The NCOs had joined the Order Police for career reasons or to avoid the army draft. If Nazi Germany offered plenty of career paths for genuinely violent people, then random conscription from the remaining population – already drained of its most aggressive individuals – would arguably produce fewer authoritarian personalities than average, not more. Self-selection on the basis of personality explains almost nothing here.

What About Careerism?

The men who actually did the shooting almost never mentioned career considerations when explaining their behavior in postwar testimony. But several of the men who refused to shoot specifically pointed out that they could afford to say no because they had civilian careers to go back to.

Lieutenant Buchmann was a successful lumber businessman. Gustav Michaelson had an established civilian career. Neither of them needed the police for their livelihood. They could accept whatever professional consequences came from refusing. The younger career officers did not have that luxury.

Captain Hoffmann is the most extreme case of careerism in the battalion. He was so psychologically wrecked by the killing that he developed crippling stomach cramps – almost certainly psychosomatic. But instead of using his illness to escape, he desperately tried to hide it from his superiors because he did not want to lose his company command. When he was finally relieved of duty, he fought that decision. His body was telling him to stop. His career ambitions told him to keep going.

Given how many Battalion 101 men stayed in the police after the war, career considerations must have quietly influenced many of them.

“I Was Just Following Orders”

This is the classic defense. The authoritarian political culture of Nazi Germany, the threat of punishment for disobedience, the military expectation of following commands – surely these men had no choice?

Browning dismantles this cleanly. In forty-five years of postwar trials across hundreds of cases, not a single defense attorney or defendant has been able to document even one instance where refusing to kill unarmed civilians led to serious punishment. It never happened. The dire consequences everyone assumed would follow from disobedience were imaginary.

And in Battalion 101 specifically, the “just following orders” defense collapses completely. Major Trapp, weeping and shaking, explicitly offered his men the chance to step out. He protected the first man who took him up on it. He shielded Lieutenant Buchmann for months. A set of unwritten rules developed within the battalion: for small actions, volunteers were called for or known willing shooters were selected. For large actions, those who would not kill were not forced. Even when individual officers tried to pressure non-shooters, those men knew the officers could not appeal to Trapp.

Yes, everyone had to participate in cordon duty and roundups. But even during ghetto clearings, individuals made their own choices about shooting. Plenty of men admitted that they did not shoot during the chaos of roundups, or deliberately missed while on patrol when nobody was watching them closely.

The Milgram Experiments

If it was not raw obedience out of fear, what about obedience in a deeper sense? Stanley Milgram’s famous experiments showed that ordinary people will inflict what they believe is extreme pain on a stranger simply because an authority figure in a lab coat tells them to. No threats. No punishment. Just a calm instruction from someone perceived as legitimate authority. Two-thirds of his subjects went all the way to the maximum shock level.

Milgram found that several factors changed the results dramatically:

• When subjects could not see or hear the victim’s suffering, obedience was highest.
• When they had to physically touch the victim, obedience dropped to 30 percent.
• When a non-authority figure gave orders, obedience was zero.
• When the subject only assisted someone else who administered the shocks, obedience was nearly total.
• When peers openly refused to continue, 90 percent of subjects joined the refusal.
• When given full discretion over shock levels, almost everyone chose the minimum.
• When not directly watched by the scientist, many subjects “cheated” by giving lower shocks than instructed.

The parallels to Battalion 101 are striking. Direct proximity to the killing increased the number of men who could not continue. When the killing was outsourced to death camps, the men felt almost no responsibility. When unsupervised, many men disobeyed standing orders and did not shoot. The pattern fits.

But Browning raises an important complication. At Jozefow, the authority structure was nothing like Milgram’s clean laboratory setup. Major Trapp was a weak authority figure, not a strong one. He was crying. He was inviting men to leave. If the men were obeying authority, they were not obeying Trapp – they were obeying the distant, invisible chain of command above him. Or maybe they were not responding to authority at all.

The Power of Conformity

This is where Browning lands hardest. Milgram himself noted that people far more often cite “obedience” than “conformity” to explain their behavior, because only obedience seems to excuse them from personal responsibility. But many of the Battalion 101 policemen actually admitted that what held them in line was not orders from above but pressure from the men standing next to them. How would their comrades see them if they stepped out?

And Milgram acknowledged that people underreport the influence of conformity. If the men admitted to it at all, the real effect was probably even greater.

Milgram tested peer pressure as a force for resistance – when confederates refused to continue, 90 percent of subjects followed their lead. He also tested conformity as a force for escalation – when confederates proposed increasing the shocks, naive subjects were significantly influenced, averaging a shock level halfway between minimum and maximum.

But Milgram never tested the scenario that actually played out at Jozefow: a weak, weeping authority figure inviting you to leave while your comrades – men you live with, eat with, depend on in hostile territory – stay and keep killing. That is not something you can replicate in a lab. But the mutual reinforcement of authority and conformity was clearly at work.

Browning’s analysis of conformity at Jozefow is devastating. The battalion had orders to kill. Individual men did not. Yet 80 to 90 percent went through with it, even though almost all of them were initially horrified.

Why? Because stepping out meant leaving the dirty work to your comrades. The battalion had to do the shooting whether you personally participated or not. Refusing was, in effect, an antisocial act – you were dumping your share of a terrible collective burden on everyone else. The men who refused risked isolation, rejection, and ostracism. In a unit stationed in hostile foreign territory with nowhere else to turn for social support, that was a terrifying prospect.

Worse, stepping out could be read as a moral judgment on the men who stayed. By refusing, you were implicitly saying you were “too good” for this. Most non-shooters sensed this instinctively and framed their refusal differently. They did not say they were too good. They said they were too weak. That framing was crucial. It did not challenge anyone else’s self-image. It actually reinforced the idea that “toughness” was the superior quality – that the men who kept shooting were the strong ones.

The difference between “too weak” and “too cowardly” was thin, though. One policeman did not dare step out at Jozefow for fear of being called a coward. He waited until he was actually in a firing squad, tried to shoot, and then dropped out. It was one thing to be too cowardly to even try. It was another to try and discover you were too weak to continue.

The result was perverse. Even the men who refused to kill mostly ended up reinforcing the value system that made the killing possible. They upheld “toughness” as a virtue. They tried not to break the bonds of comradeship. They found tortured compromises: not shooting babies on the spot but carrying them to the assembly point; not shooting on patrol when no hard-liner was watching; bringing Jews to the execution site and firing but deliberately missing.

Only the truly exceptional could endure being called a “weakling” and live with being considered “no man” by their comrades.

Key Takeaway

No single explanation – wartime brutalization, racism, bureaucratic distancing, personality types, careerism, obedience, or conformity – is sufficient on its own to explain why these men became killers. But taken together, with conformity and obedience at the center, they reveal something deeply uncomfortable: the men of Battalion 101 did not need to be monsters. They needed to be human beings in a situation where the social cost of saying no was higher than the moral cost of saying yes.

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

Previous: Chapter 17 - Germans, Poles, and Jews

Next up: Chapter 18 Part 2 - Lessons from Ordinary Men - Indoctrination, the gray zone, and the book’s final unsettling conclusion.