Refraining from Pinpointing ‘Why’ but Acknowledging the Reality As Is

I think in detailing the combination of factors that led the policemen in Reserve Battalion 101 to commit the killings and atrocities they did from Józefów to the ‘Jew Hunt’ as part of the Final Solution, Christopher Browning provides a well-rounded analysis that entertains and dismisses certain key causes within the context of others. Of note he mentions that with regard to anti-Semitic propaganda, while there is no denying that the racial ideology and social Darwinist perspective of the Nazi regime was entrenched within society prior to and during WWII, “material specifically designed to harden the policemen for the personal task of killing Jews is conspicuously absent from the surviving documentation” (Browning 184). Moreover, there wasn’t an authoritarian figure imposing tasks on the battalion because in addition to the weak leadership of Major Trapp, both the policemen and Trapp were “bound by the order of this distant authority” (174). Additionally, in the context of war, Browning dismisses other explanations such as those most linked to psychological tendencies. However, he notably supports the idea that conformity, and the obligation to and fear of peers, to a certain extent, were significant components in perpetuating a culture of violence since the thought of “isolation, rejection, and ostracism—a very uncomfortable prospect within the framework of a tight-knit unit stationed abroad among a hostile population” rendered the capacity for morality and righteousness obsolete for these individuals (185).

Having said all of that, I think what’s most telling and perhaps Browning’s strongest point is that we refrain from scripting what caused the middle-aged men in the battalion to become executioners, because any of the aforementioned causal factors can be seen as the effect of something else. For instance, the argument for pressure to conform amongst peers could be refuted as a variable present in any war. More importantly, Browning establishes that human behavior is “complex,” and so tracing the root of the battalion’s actions involves a “certain arrogance” (188). What stands out above all is that just as ordinary as the men are in Battalion 101, and how discomforting their conversion to extreme murders is in retrospect, it’s just as ordinary, that within every society, there exists a framework for which this conversion can take place. It’s this irony that’s really enlightening in the series of questions Browning uses to conclude where modern society “conditions people to respect and defer to authority…[to] seek career advancement” and has a structure wherein “the complexity of life and the resulting bureaucratization and specialization attenuate the sense of personal responsibility” (189). Certainly the holistic claim here isn’t to blame society, but that such a network of factors was present within humanity then, and more so today, whether at present dormant, inconceivable, or in use. I think what’s critical isn’t that we should simply associate the Holocaust as the byproduct of society, or any other genocide as an injustice tied to human nature and a social framework; nor should we become pessimists at the prospects that such engrained seeds rest within modern nations. Instead, it’s that we should develop an awareness for how a multiplicity of factors can entangle and manifest themselves, in a given instance such as WWII, to engender impulsive, inexplicable behavior.