Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Holocaust in Poland

A Customer: Arrived in excellent condition. Hard to find in the UK in the new version format. Will enjoy reading this in my spare time now that the winter is approaching. Fast delivery in time for Christmas.

United States on Dec 04, 2023

Davide domingues: Gutes buch

Germany on Oct 29, 2023

Amazon Customer: A sobering read that highlights the dangers of populist governments and the difficulty in reversing immoral social extremes. Murder of Men, Women and Children with efficiency and determination that is Chilling.

Canada on Oct 27, 2023

Steph Rangel: Glenn Beck recommended this book as a reference to what we are currently experiencing.
My husband started it, and said it reads like a history book.
He hasn't finished it yet, but it is good information.

United States on Oct 22, 2023

Marcus Woodhouse: This is not a book or a subject that you can like, it is, however meticulous research into how "ordinary men" can become legal mass murderers and justify it.

United Kingdom on Oct 05, 2023

Kelley Ridings: Ordinary Men examines the heinous actions of Germany’s Nazi Police Battalion 101 in Poland during WW2. The 500 men in this battalion were responsible for viciously killing 83,000 Jews in just 1-2 years time. That was 166 Jews per policeman. These policeman weren’t necessarily rabid Nazis. They weren’t high up party officials. They weren’t necessarily members of the vicious SS. Instead what distinguished them was that they were ordinary German men from working class backgrounds, mostly in their later 30s or older who found themselves transferred to Poland and were ordered to kill the Jews they rounded up to make Poland Jew Free. While some did refuse to follow these orders, which they were permitted to do without penalty or official reprisal, about 90% did willingly take part to varying degrees. Some did kill for a while and then later stopped. Some wouldn’t participate at first but later did take part. Some would kill adults but not children. Others were full-out killers who took fully indiscriminate part throughout.

The author, Christopher Browning, explores not only the history of their actions, but he attempts to explain the why behind how ordinary German men...

United States on Sep 30, 2023

Jim Dowdell: Everyone has become afraid of our ruling class today. Even worse, they fear what their neighbour is capable of doing to them. This book is a screeching fire alarm for our democracy today. The world view of 1940 is not at all dissimilar from the present mainstream media narrative. The agenda of Marxism is unfolding as planned. Be very afraid that you and your children are being conditioned to re-enact the horrors related here.
Although I wholeheartedly recommend this study of the people in the Third Reich I must point out that this study of human nature completely misses the one great hope for any civilization, namely, the counter balance of the church.
There is not one reference to consideration of the moral religious values internalized in anyone. That the most enthusiastic Nazis were totally immoral is a given. But what influence did Christian faith have on the refusers? The bleak picture of the “Ordinary Men” studied here predicts our present descent into a racist Fourth Reich. But this time the “privileged white male” is the new Jew. I believe that further study that shows the influence of the church can go a long way to revive hope.
Read this book for a...

Canada on Mar 25, 2023

Anthony Bates: I’d dare say that more is here to be learned for the average reader than any other book than I can figure out just now. I mean about human nature, the soul and the mind, the abstract aspects of human life, in contrast to its material aspects that are dealt appropriately enough with science and its body of knowledge. About the soul -which admittedly constitutes half of what we can ascertain as existing out there-, this is the richest source of available evidence open to scrutiny and debate.
Yes, because while moral issues have been discussed and vivisected time and again for centuries, we lack as yet a sound, convincing conceptual framework to model it, to explore, to provide its foundations. So, considering that ethics is today essentially still an open problem, the most useful sources are those that confront us with the most radical, paradoxical, unsurmountable problems. And the problem of evil, as exemplified in the Holocaust is one of them, if not ‘the one’.

In summary, the book provides a meticulously documented account of the works and crimes of a group of German reserve police officers, reccruited around the start of WWII in the area of Hamburg. They were...

United States on Jul 28, 2018

John Winterson Richards: Descriptions of the Holocaust never lose their power to horrify - the cold bureaucratic language of official reports is particularly sickening. However, those who try to comfort themselves with the illusion that the Holocaust was the work of a unique handful of sadists will find this study of a single Reserve Police Battalion doubly disturbing: sadists there certainly were, but mass murder on such a gigantic scale would not have been possible without the participation of a huge number of "ordinary men". One's sympathies are solely with the Jewish and Polish victims, but an honest man must also ask himself some uncomfortable questions, "What would I have done if I had found myself conscripted into a Reserve Police Battalion and ordered to shoot unarmed men, women, and children? Would I have been one of the few with the courage to refuse to shoot? If so, is that enough? Does morality not demand more? Would I have been capable of more active opposition?" Many people might like to fantasise that they would have rescued like Oskar Schindler, protested like Sophie Scholl, or even resisted like Claus von Stauffenberg. Yet fantasy is what it is: the reality is that for every Schindler,...

United Kingdom on Feb 16, 2009