Enjoying retirement
In The Red Rose County
'Ordinary Men' by Christopher Browning I don't normally like Matthew Parris or his views but I try to be open-minded and when he talked about this book in my Saturday Times as a must-read about the nature of Evil I thought it might be interesting. I read it at two sittings and in essence it tells the true story of Reserve Police Battalion 101 of the German Order Police which was responsible for mass shootings as well as roundups of Jews for deportation to the death camps in Poland in 1942. Putting that down in black and white that just seems like another historical event. In reality these people, 'ordinary Germans' (most of them middle-aged working-class men) were responsible for horrendous crimes - slaughtering thousands of men, women, children, and babes in arms in revolting circumstances. The American author did masses of research, and a surprising amount of material was available, and his aim was to try to understand why these people did what they did. He concluded that basically there were three groups who emerged. ...a core of eager killers, a majority who carried out their 'duties' reliable but without initiative, and a small minority who evaded participation in the acts of killing without diminishing the murderous efficiency of the battalion. This book really does help us understand how 'ordinary' men were transformed psychologically from citizens to active participants in the most monstrous crime in human history, and gives us a little insight into our ability to answer the question' would we have done it?' A quite incredible read, should be on every school's syllabus.
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August 2023
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