What does it take for someone to kill a fellow human being? Not out of passion, not for worldly gains, not even for perverse enjoyment, but simply because of being told to do so. Moreover, what does it take to do this repeatedly, over consecutive weeks and months and even years?

Christopher Browning’s book Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland follows the activities of a German police battalion in Poland during the Second World War. Reserve Police Battalion 101 was not particularly remarkable. In the period the book is concerned with, it is made up of mostly middle-aged men who were deemed too old for active combat. In fact, Browning says that these were the “dregs” of the fighting forces available to Germany. Due to their age, these men had not been subjected to thorough Nazi indoctrination during their formative years (circa 1930s), although many of them were former Party members. What indoctrination they had to go through was formalized, dull and, according to the author, altogether ineffective. There is not a lot of evidence to support the idea that these men bought into the racist Nazi ideology and were convinced about the righteousness of their actions.

Yet, when they were asked to massacre thousands of Jews, Gypsies, and Poles, most of them obeyed. A minority of them resisted from ever pulling the trigger on innocents, and some would shirk their duty when not under the watchful eye of their commander. But mostly, they did as they were told. Some even found enjoyment in it. Others found rationalizations to justify their actions. It should be pointed out that at least within this battalion, it appears that the cost of disobeying orders was negligible, mainly due to the leniency of its commander, Major Trapp, who had tears in his eyes when he ordered his men to commit the first massacre. However, as time went on, Trapp’s tears dried up. The men of the battalion - those who did not resist orders - continued to kill people and assist in their deportations to death camps. They seem to be sufficiently self-aware, knowing what they were doing was wrong. That is small consolation for us, because they did not stop doing it.

The beginning chapters of the book are a little dry, filled with facts and figures that might interest historians but are not strictly relevant to the layman reader. It was chilling to see records of Jewish death tolls kept as though they were the accounting records of a small business. But in keeping with the theme of the book, even this lost its shock value rather quickly.

The later part of the book brings up the Stanford prison experiment and Milgram experiments. Although the results of those studies have to be taken with a grain of salt, they clearly show that human beings are capable of doing things they normally never would, without being subjected to any coercion or subtle manipulation. Considering these lab experiments together with the real-world history of the Reserve Police Battalion 101 brings us face to face with a disturbing reality: given the right circumstances, perfectly ordinary men will commit perfectly horrible things when being told to do so.