Brianna Hofman

His 361 Paper 1

Whether They Wanted to or Not

When many people think of the Holocaust, they might think of the harsh brutality

of the SS and Jews being killed by gassing. While both answers may be correct, there is

more to the Holocaust than people think. Violent mass shootings and giant mass graves

dug of groups of people were completed for half of the war. As Doris Bergen points out

in her book War and Genocide, At gunpoint they made the victims undress. Then they

shot them by groups directly into the graves (Bergen, 196). These groups of people were

communists, Poles, disabled, and homosexuals slaughtered, but the main targeted victims

were Jews. Many of these mass shootings were conducted by groups called the Order

Police of Nazi Germany. In Christopher Brownings book Ordinary Men, these police

battalions were made up of mostly drafted, middle age men who were raised in the age

before the ideas of Nazi Germany or of men wanting to pursue careers in the police force

after the war, also known as just ordinary men (Browning, 168). These order police

groups even led the oppositions to be deported on trains to the death camps. They served

as the backbone of Nazi Germany to get rid of their political and Aryan oppositions.

Christopher Browning argues in his book Ordinary Men that these ordinary men

assimilated to Nazi Germanys philosophies of repression to the oppositions, not because

they morally believed in these beliefs, but because the ideas were being engulfed into

their thoughts by upper authority if they were to be a part of the Police Battalion.

There were many ways and reasons why the ordinary men had to cope with the

orders of shooting innocent men, women, and children. One of the reasons why the

ordinary men went along with the orders of the mass shootings is that they did not want
to seem like they were an outcast amongst their fellow comrades. As Browning states

that, following orders reinforced the natural tendency to conform to the behavior of

ones comrades (Browning, 87). The men in the battalion followed authoritys orders

because they wanted to conform or fit in within their other comrades. If one chose to step

out and say they could not shoot would mean that one is leaving his comrades and

admitting that one was too weak or cowardly (Browning, 72). Men did not want to

seem weak or that they were not manly enough to do the jobs of policemen by shooting

the Jews as the mass shootings. These policemen especially did not want to seem weak or

cowardly in front of people who were their authority. As Browning suggests that others

were more cautious and refrained from shooting only when no officer was present and

they were among trusted comrades who shared their views (Browning, 130). This is

because they were more comfortable to present their true beliefs when no one of authority

was around. Conforming as comrades allowed for the men to assimilate to Nazi

Germanys beliefs.

The men of the order police could not just conform with their fellow comrades to

shoot in the mass shootings, they had to find other ways such as drinking large amounts

of alcohol in order to cope with what they were doing. In order for the men of Police

Battalion to get them through the brutalization they were impending on these people, they

found alcohol as an outlet to help subdue their moral beliefs. Browning writes about how

these men depended on alcohol to help them get through the mass shootings from the

beginning of the shoot until afterwards, the men not just liquored up after the event to

help them forget but drunk from the start (Browning, 85). They used liquor and drinking

vodka as a way to wrap their minds around the idea that they are about to shoot or have
shot innocent fathers, mothers, and children. It gave the men a way to have a different

mindset while killing. In one part of her book, Bergen writes about a soldier named

Blaskowitz recalling a scene on how a drunk German policeman beat a polish man to

death and forced a woman who may have been his wife to bury the body while scores of

Germans and Poles looked on (Bergen 144). Being drunk allowed for the mens

brutalization against the Jews to appear and allowed the men to be content with it.

Alcohol and being drunk was one of the ways that these ordinary men coped with killing

thousands of Jews and assimilating to the orders of upper authority Nazi Germany.

The men did not just rely on alcohol to get them through their orders of shooting

their victims, sometimes the men of the Police Battalion would not comply with orders

when not directly supervised (Browning, 176). Throughout Ordinary Men, Browning

writes about how men would not be able to keep shooting or even shoot at all when they

were ordered to do a mass shooting of Jews in a village. He writes about how some of

these men just could not handle the fact that they were about to shoot innocent victims,

while others were disgusted and ashamed of what they had done they could not shoot

anymore and they needed to be assigned elsewhere (Browning, 116). There were even

some people of higher ranks who could not wrap their minds around shooting Jews.

Browning writes many times about Lieutenant Buchmann and how he personally did not

want to take any part that involved with killing of Jews (Browning, 102). This shows that

even men of higher ranks were ordinary men who did not morally believe in the shooting

of innocent victims. These ordinary men who opted out of shooting their victims shows

how they did not morally believe in the shooting of the victims, but the only thing they
could do was get reassigned to a different task because of the orders given were to kill the

Jews.

In Christopher Brownings book, Ordinary Men, he argues that the ordinary men

of Police Battalion 101 did not necessarily morally believe in Nazi Germanys ways of

domination, but these ideas were being immersed into their heads by their authority as a

sense to be a part of something greater. These men had to cope with shooting thousands

of innocent victims for many reasons and through many different tactics. Some of those

main reasons why and how were conforming amongst comrades to feel as if they were a

part of something and not an outcast, turning towards drinking alcohol to get them

through the killings and afterwards, and some even chose to opt out of shooting and get

reassigned a different duty. No soldier was alike in his efforts to kill Jews, many had

become numbed, indifferent, and in some cases eager killers; others limited their

participation in the killing process (Browning, 127). Either way these Police Battalions,

compromised of ordinary men, became killers of innocent people directly or indirectly

whether they wanted to or not.