Post by Duane Linn

In my reading of the 2017 revised edition of Christopher Browning’s Ordinary Men, I found a chilling examination of how a World War II German police battalion of average, working-class men from Hamburg was successfully transformed into routine mass killers in Poland. I appreciate how Browning uses judicial records to illustrate the unit's natural stratification into eager killers, obedient conformists, and a few dissenters, effectively drawing parallels to the psychological dynamics of the Stanford Prison Experiment. Ultimately, this review underscores Browning’s powerful argument that systemic forces like peer pressure, bureaucratization, and deference to authority can create conditions capable of turning ordinary citizens into agents of genocide.