The subject of dehumanization of the Jews seems to me one of the most important concepts in understanding—or at least attempting to understand—the behavior and justifications of these “Ordinary Men.” Browning says, “distancing, not frenzy and brutalization, is one of the keys to the behaviors of the Reserve Police Battalion 101.” (162).
I think that the key moment, at least for this specific battalion, is in their very first assignment. Those who chose to opt out of the order never faced official punishment other than the humiliation or shame of being “weak,” or a “coward.” A much more preferable option, I’d think, than having to murder a human being.
But many of these men did not see Jews as human beings; a mentality that stems from a routinized and depersonalized process of murder. Aside from the minority of those who stepped out of their role and refused to participate in these acts of murder and brutalization, I would argue that the rest did not see the Jews as human beings. Yes, it is true that we have seen genocides as this in times of war: “battle field frenzies,” as Browning calls it (160). However these ordinary men, as Browning points out, had not seen the atrocities of WWI. They were of a younger generation that probably had never seen anything remotely close to such systematized and massive murders. Alright, so Jews were the “foreign enemy,” in this “(race) war,” but the process of mobilizing and murdering an utterly vulnerable, starving and weak group of human beings is different from the “frenzy” of wartime.
For me it is difficult to comprehend these mens’ situation, but the fact is that there were human beings in front of them, and these men had to make a conscious decision to pull the trigger. Jews were dubbed their “enemy” in spite of the lack of any offensive retaliation or resistance, for the most part. They weren’t the typical enemy force we see in other wars and battles. I don’t think that these men, other than the ultra-Nazis, could come up with tangible reasons to kill a human being given that the Jews’ status as “enemies” was, in the end, just racist ideology. But the process as described throughout the book of strip searches, making the Jews lay facing the ground naked, or making them crawl…these are all important mechanisms that allow these German men to dehumanize their enemy. This is an important reason why they were able to commit such atrocities. The language in the “Jew Hunt” chapter shows this: Jews were “tracked down and shot like animals” in the forest sweeps, a hunting game of “hunters” and “prey” (123, 132). I think some Jews even accepted their own dehumanization—perhaps it was out of fear and lack of energy, but it is interesting that generally, they all complied without resistance. I think the dehumanizing procedures largely allowed for these men to accept this “hunter” role, seeing their Jewish “enemy” not as humans, but as animals.
I agree, that the dehumanizing of the Jews was pivotal to actions taken by these ‘ordinary men’ in the Holocaust, but I still struggle to understand and rationalize all this even after finishing Browning’s book. True, as you point out, these men “had not seen battle or encountered a deadly enemy” (161) and were inexperienced when it came to wartime violence. Maybe during this time and in this situation they were able to commit what they did because the Jews were “easily objectified and removed from the community of human obligation” (162) which goes hand-in-hand with Browning’s concept of distancing themselves instead of confronting the actual mass murder they were assisting in. But as you said, this wasn’t necessarily a war, where the Jews were actively resisting in strong numbers and were rather very submissive, so the mentality had to be different. Racist stereotypes precede many conflicts, but not all end up with systematic mass murder. These men were “least likely to be considered apt material out of which to mold future mass killers” (164), but that’s exactly what happened.
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