Book & Author: “Ordinary Men”
Thursday, February 11, 6:30 pm Central Time
Ordinary Men is the true story of Reserve Police Battalion 101 of the German Order Police, which was responsible for mass killings and roundups of Jews for deportation to Nazi death camps in Poland.
Join world-renowned Holocaust Historian Christopher Browning as we hear the shocking account of how a unit of average middle-aged Germans became the cold-blooded murderers of tens of thousands of Jews, and how themes in Ordinary Men continue to resonate today.
Browning argues that most of the men of RPB 101 were not fanatical Nazis but, rather, ordinary middle-aged, working-class men. These men committed atrocities out of a mixture of motives, including the group dynamics of conformity, deference to authority, role adaptation, and the altering of moral norms to justify their actions.
While this book discusses a specific Reserve Unit during World War II, Browning’s larger argument is that most people succumb to the pressures of a group setting and take action they would never do of their own volition.
Community Partners: Illinois State University – Department of Criminal Justice Sciences; John Jay College of Criminal Justice; Dominican University’s Department of Sociology and Criminology; The Selfhelp Home