The Mind of "Ordinary" Men

Paper Summary:

Using Browning's "Ordinary Men" and Rhode's "Masters of Death", the author explores the origins of the men who were responsible for the Holocaust, the SS-Einsatzgruppen and Reserve Police Battalion 101. The author believes that two different dynamics that drove these men to kill millions. Peer pressure and the situation drove some, but ultimately, an active decision to kill was required of every man.

From the Paper:

"In an unfortunate relationship, the most intriguing events throughout the course of humanity are the most brutal and horrific. The Holocaust at the hands of the Nazis and Hitler's Aryan race was quite certainly the most appalling event in modern history and the question of "how did it happen" still stands today. Two recent works, Masters of Death and Ordinary Men, by Richard Rhodes and Christopher Browning, respectively, attempt to answer this query. Though both authors discuss the physical actualization of the mass murders, the more important topic between both is the work of Hitler's most dastardly henchmen: the unlikely Heinrich Himmler's pet SS-Einsatzgruppen and Reserve Police Battalion 101. However, the question is by no means of a single man Hitler was quite obviously insane but rather of the men who acted directly as the hand of God to cleanse the Reich. The Wehrmacht invaded territory after territory with devastating effect, but the Reichsfhrer's (Himmler's) Einsatzkommandos and the Police Battalions followed with a single mission: stability through purification. The fundamental difference between Rhodes's account and Browning's is whether or not these men made any active decision to embody their orders and become pure executioners. Rhodes believes that the common soldiers the men who actually dispatched the victims of the cleansing at one point or another believed what they were doing was justified in some manner and thereby made a positive decision to take steps against civilians and accept execution as their profession. Browning asserts that the men of the Reserve Police Battalion were simply thrust into their acts of violence and lacked the time to consider their orders as heinous, a position that allowed many of them to continue the atrocities after being propelled into the fray. Essentially the Einsatzgruppen were bred for and accepted the role of slaughterers while the Reserve Police Battalion simply found themselves caught-up in a frenzy of death and continued on."

More papers on The Mind of "Ordinary" Men:

• Book Review # 101599 : "Christopher R. Browning's "Ordinary Men"
• Book Review # 116295 : "Ordinary Men"
• Analytical Essay # 67492 : "Don Quixote, an Extraordinary Man"

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