Ordinary Men is a book examining the background of the Reserve Police Battalion 101. The Reserve Police Battalion 101 was involved in mass killings, focusing on the Jozefow massacre and deportations of Jews during World War II. While reading Browning's work, one wonders how these men could carry out the orders of killing other human beings just because a higher authority told them too. One thought could be that when the commander of the battalion, Major Wilhelm Trapp, told them that if any of the older men among them did not feel up to the task that lay before him, he could step out, that the men would, for the most part, choose to do so. (Browning, 2) However, even with the option of not having to kill, the men still obeyed their orders and killed the Jews. Even though the men decided to kill does not mean all of them did so happily. Some eventually became tolerable to the idea of killing, while others could not deal with it.
The Reserve Police Battalion 101 was formed in May of 1941 when the Police Battalion 101 was practically completely dispersed due to the reassignment of many of the men to other units. To fill up the then empty ranks, men were drafted into the unit, most of which were raw recruits who were drafted reservists. This is why the name was changed to the Reserve Police Battalion 101. Most of the men were from lower orders of German society and very few were economically independent. The average age of the men was 39 and over half were between the ages of 37 and 42. These men were considered to be too old for the German army but not to old for reserve police duty. Virtually none of them had any education besides secondary school, which had ended when they were 14 or 15. The only exception to this was any extra apprenticeship and vocational training they had received. Most of the men had come from Hamburg, which was by reputation one of the least nazified cities in Germany.