The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.

Edmund Burke
Burkes quote is often employed in rationalizing what had happened in Nazi Germany, that the
passive Germans were merely complicit in the crimes committed by a core group of fanatical
Nazis for they did nothing to stop them. Yet, in his book, Browning adds a twist to the narrative
behind the Holocaust. He develops the human stories behind the perpetrators. These executioners
were too often ordinary men influenced by their time and place in history to commit heinous
acts. The story of the Reserve Police Battalion 101 highlights the fragility of humanity, how
easily each and every one of us could fall victim to the brutalization, conformance, routinization,
and dehumanization of others and of oneself.
The order police were ordinary men. If anything, they were mostly working classmen deemed
too old for the army, had their formative years before the rise of the Nazi party, with standards of
morality or ethics that were different from the Nazis (Browning, p48). They were almost
antithetical to the idea of the perfect Nazi killer, and yet they were the main force behind the
killing of some 83000 Jews with a strength of less than 500 (Browning, p142). Browning argues
that most of the men were not under direct threat or duress during this period, that many could
make a personal choice with regards to joining the shooting. Yet something more sinister rapidly
overtook their sense of morality and disgust that were so intense after the Jozefow killings.
Brownings references to the Stanford Prison Experiments is enlightening in what he views to be
the central issues that surround the actions of these men (Browning, pp172-176). The strongly
hierarchical nature of a militaristic group, the need to form comraderies with ones peers in
strongly hostile environment, and the implicit social obligations to their immediate community

that manifested themselves in mass murder, all acted partly to blind ones conscience. The most
striking evidence of these effects were the primary testimonies given by the policemen
explanations of being too weak rather than too good to prevent antagonizing their comrades
(Browning, p185). The unpleasant collective obligation was unavoidable without severe
repercussions, but individual laxness in carrying out such duties could be tolerated though not
without repercussions from leaving the dirty work to ones comrades.
Nothing helped the Nazis to wage a race war so much as the war itself. (Browning, p186). The
distancing afforded by war made it easy to view Jews as others, more so than any anti-Semitic
propaganda, and as evidenced by the inhumane treatment of other other groups such as the
Soviet POWs and Poles (Browning, p206). Yet it is the state and individual leaders that
ultimately held the ability to control and direct this irrational component of war unto an intended
target. Browning goes on suggesting that most German were never very anti-Semitic but
xenophobic in general, that as he quotes Allen W.S. people were drawn to anti-Semitism
because they were drawn to Nazism, not the other way around. It is the overarching policy of
the final solution, and the enthusiasm of the core Nazi leadership on the ground, that set the
monstrous side of human nature on the Jews.
Humans are not rational beings, and our actions too often betray that. It takes a great deal of
effort, and a great deal of autonomy for ordinary men to rise up and apply their reason against the
current of their time. If we can learn from this painful lesson from history, it is that we cannot
depend on individuals making individual decisions to overturn the basal instincts of identity and
community we must allow our institutions that control the dynamics of society to stay true to
certain fundamental rights. We are all ordinary men, and it is us who must act to prevent the
triumph of evil.
2