Christopher Browning writes a detailed history of the soldiers of the German Reserve Police Battalion 101 and their role in the mass murder of Jews in Poland during the Second World War in his book, Ordinary Men. He argues that many factors contributed to these men participating in mass murder, however he concludes that obedience to authority and inclusion in the group were the two most important causes. While his argument is well written and is partially true, it is not convincing. Browning has been criticized by other historians who believe that his characterization of the men in Reserve Police Battalion 101 should not be "ordinary men," but rather "ordinary Germans." Browning fails to acknowledge that these men were a product of a unique society, ignoring the effect that perpetual anti-Semitic Nazi propaganda had on them. The historians" characterization of the men in Battalion 101 as "ordinary Germans" is key to understanding how these average men could be motivated to commit mass murder.
Christopher Browning accounts for the actions of Reserve Police Battalion 101 in Poland and the role which individual soldiers played in the mass murder of Jews during the "Final Solution." As he notes in the beginning of the book, "the Holocaust took place because at the most basic level individual human beings killed other human beings in large numbers over an extended period of time. The grass-roots perpetrators became "professional killers.""(Browning xvii) Browning details the Reserve Police Battalion 101 from their organization in Hamburg through their introduction to mass murder, and finally to their development into the professional killers. The majority of the book tells the story of the middle-aged German soldiers based on their own testimony from legal proceedings well after World War II had ended. The most important chapter to this study is the final one in which Browning attempts to explain the motivation of ordinary citizens to become killers.