Ordinary men

Více o knize

In the early hours of July 13, 1942, Reserve Police Battalion 101, a unit of the German Order Police, entered the Polish village of Jozefow. Comprised mainly of recently drafted family men too old for combat, they had arrived in Poland just weeks earlier. By nightfall, they had rounded up 1,800 Jews, selecting several hundred for labor and executing around 1,500 women, children, and the elderly. Most of these men were not committed Nazis but ordinary citizens from Hamburg, yet over the next sixteen months, they participated in the direct shooting deaths of at least 38,000 Jews and the deportation of 45,000 more to Treblinka, totaling 83,000 victims from a unit of fewer than 500. Drawing on postwar interrogations of 210 former members, the author allows them to recount their actions, thoughts, and justifications, revealing chilling rationalizations for their behavior. In a sobering conclusion, it is suggested that these men were driven not by fear or authority but by careerism and peer pressure. This account meticulously reconstructs the battalion's horrific actions and offers powerful evidence of the ordinary human capacity for extraordinary inhumanity.