Ordinary Men

How was it that a group of middle-aged men from Hamburg, most not even members of the Nazi party, led by a 53-year-old career policeman, carried out some of the worst atrocities of the Holocaust? Ordinary Men by American historian Christopher Browning, first published in 1992, sifts through their testimony to try and find some answers. In doing so, it reveals some unsettling truths for any human being reading its pages, as our interviews with experts make clear:

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“The takeaway from reading this horror-filled book is that depredations on the scale of those that Browning describes can be perpetrated anywhere and by anyone.” Read more...

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Lawrence Kaplan, Journalist

“The reason this is such an important book is that when you study the Holocaust you ask almost immediately: How could people do this? How could men who had their own children, go out and murder other children? Or husbands take women and rip open their wombs and kill their infants and shoot them behind the ear? This book raised that question in a very, very strong and powerful way, based on firsthand testimony.” Read more...

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Steven Katz, Historian

“One of my students cited this book as the reason that he carried on doing history.” Read more...

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Hester Vaizey, Historian

“The essential lesson of Ordinary Men is that genocide is not the exclusive preserve of fanatics, racist thugs and homicidal maniacs. It is part of the human condition, especially of humans living in society.” Read more...

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Norman Naimark, Historian

The book, according to the author

“I emphasized universal attributes of human nature and social-psychological factors shaping group dynamics, such as conformity, deference to authority, and adaptation to roles within an occupation unit stationed in enemy territory during wartime.”

Christopher Browning writing in the New York Review of Books, June 20th, 2013

Commentary

“As the shooting went on, and as the battalion members found themselves covered with blood, brain tissue and bone splinters from the Jews they had shot at point-blank range, a few felt ill.”

Review of Ordinary Men in the New York Times, April 12th, 1992