Middle-aged reserve policemen. These are the men who committed one of the most well-known, shocking, blood-chilling atrocities in the world. Christopher R. Browning called them “indifferent and apathetic, complicitous and callous” (Browning 1992, 202). This description is more appropriate to portray bystanders, rather than ruthless murderers. But then the same people became killers in the east. Exactly these ordinary Germans, serving in the Reserve Police Battalion 101, only around 500 of them, carried out a bloody massacre in the east, killing at least 83,000 Jews. These policemen killed them not in a fight or battle, and not with the help of a soulless gas chamber, but by manually executing helpless men, women, and children. How can such…show more content… Middle-aged reservists, drafted in 1939, replaced the initial policemen and were sent to Poland to restore order on occupied territories. In fact, they were “germanizing” the occupied territories, settling Germans there and expelling Poles and Jews to central Poland. Then they were engaged in the protection of the Jewish ghetto, then participated in the Hamburg deportation of Jews and Gypsies to eastern Europe. Despite the fact that there was a war going on, and many of the deported Jews and Gypsies were killed upon arrival, the battalion was mostly guarding, providing escort and not participating in massacres. It was because of their previous simple actions in the war, when Battalion 101 received an order for some “special action” in Poland, they expected that their service would be performed in the form of guarding. As it was stated before, the initial actions of the battalion in the war looked like the actions of average workers who performed their duty as guards and…show more content… The war turned these people into soulless machines, and less than 20% of the reserve policemen were able to resist the brutalization of wartime and not turn into cold-blooded murderers. Middle-aged reserve policemen. The upbringing and the background of the members of Reserve Police Battalion 101 can be described as ordinary. Most of them were average workers not connected to military service or even the Nazi Party. And Christopher Browning's book has every reason to be called Ordinary Men. Indeed, at the beginning of the war these men didn’t even know how to shoot or kill, their biggest task was to provide escorts. But in the end, after everything that had happened, every “hunt”, every murder, voluntary or not, after the influence of military brutalization, conformity, propaganda of racial superiority and anti-Semitism, after these bloody tasks performed by the reserve policemen, they ceased to be
