Ordinary Men and Extraordinary Evil an Examination of the Psychology of Reserve Police Battalion 101
- This is a preview of the essay.
To view the full text you must login!
The Holocaust represents an appalling chapter of human history wherein Nazi Germany effectively promoted and practiced mass genocide throughout European countries that the Nazi regime occupied. The Jewish population served as the primary target of systematic extermination. Most Jews died behind the lines, in death camps or in mass executions at the hands of men like those that comprised the Reserve Police Battalion 101 men who were, at heart, ordinary men, but who nevertheless played an extraordinary role in carrying out the Final Solution.
Historical records show that the men of Reserve Police Battalion 101 underwent a behavioral shift from recoiling in horror at killing innocents at Jsefw to voluntarily participating in numerous Jew hunts as the war progressed. The purpose of this investigation is twofold: firstly, to examine and analyze this manifest psychological shift; secondly, to determine why most of these men declined their major's offer to forego participation in the killing at Jsefw, despite their abhorrence of the deed, as evidenced by their attempts to withdraw once the executions had started.
Reserve Police Battalion 101 participated in its first mass slaughter at the village of Jsefw. They were told to gather the Jewish residents of the village and separate the working men from the women, children and elderly. They were to convey the latter group into the forest and then shoot them all. The process was slow and painful, and many found the event to be "impossible to bear" (Browning, 68). Afterwards, they were "depressed, angered, embittered and shaken...