Similarities Between Ordinary Men And Neighbors

Dan Wallin
Exam #2 Essay
4/12/16

Ordinary Men by Christopher Browning, and Neighbors by Jan Gross are both nonfiction accounts of Genocide during the Holocaust that share similarities in the fact that they delve into the minds of the killers that both tortured and committed mass murder on the Jews during World War II. Each account, however examines different events and two different groups of people in World War II, Browning examines the “ordinary men” of the German Reserve Police Battalion 101 and their participation in the killings of at least 83,000 Jews. Gross on the other hand, examines the brutal torture and eventual murder of an estimated 1,600 Jews in Jedwabne, a town in Southern Poland, by a group of so called “neighbors” or Polish

hooligans. Each account provides a contrast of the other expressed through the viewpoint that the perpetrators in Neighbors were blood thirsty monsters, while in Ordinary Men the perpetrators were looked at as obedient regular men who were simply following orders out of fear of the consequences had they chosen to disobey.
Browning’s main argument throughout Ordinary Men is that the 500 or so German members of Police Battalion 101 only committed these wartime atrocities because they were simply being obedient and following orders. There was much fear amongst these men because they believed that if they didn’t follow orders from the Nazis at the top of the food chain, they would be referred to as cowards, and most of these men didn’t think that they had any other choice than to conform to the group. Many of the men also feared that, after the war, they would lose their jobs as policemen if they didn’t follow orders during the war, so they had to consider both the well-being of their families through job stability and the future of their careers. From the onset of the battalion, members of the group were told that Jews were the enemies of the world and that they deserved to be killed. They were even told that Jewish women and children deserved to be killed because of the fact that German women and children were being killed from aerial bombings by Germany’s enemies during World War II. The Police Battalion was essentially looking to use the Jews as a sort of scapegoat for their enemy, and to avenge the death of their own wives and children.
Though many of the members of the Battalion had moral boundaries that they couldn’t cross, or at least struggled to do so, there were certain members that not only handled it well mentally but even got off on a sadistic pleasure through the torture and mutilation of Jews both before and after their death. Here we notice a similarity between some of the members of the Battalion in Ordinary Men and the Polish Catholic hooligans of Neighbors. Amongst other members of the battalion, Lieutenant Gnade is a great example of a sadistic killer that showed traits very similar to those of the Polish hooligans. Gnade was known to take pleasure in killing the Jews, he would watch with pleasure as fellow Battalion members tortured the Jews by beating them and making them crawl naked to their graves before being slaughtered. We see similar sadistic traits in the Polish hooligans who participated in the killings at Jedwabne. In the first wave of killings, the hooligan's ordered 75 of the youngest and healthiest Jews to carry a monument of Vladimir Lenin whilst singing Russian songs, and dig a hole for the monument before their eventual slaughter and discarding into that very hole. Jewish children were even hunted down, put on the end of pitchforks and thrown onto smoldering coals. Only intensely sadistic humans would be capable of atrocities like these and thus this sadist trait was prevalent amongst some of the members of Police Battalion 101 and the Polish hooligans of Jedwabne.
In contrast to Browning’s viewpoint of the Reserve Police Battalion 101’s obedience and following orders out of fear, Gross represents the Polish hooligans of Jedwabne as monsters who took it upon themselves to decimate around half of the population of the city of Jedwabne (the composition of Jedwabne was around half Catholic and half Jewish at the time).

Many of the hooligans were even said to have made a game out of the killings. It all started on July 10, 1941, when a group of 8 Gestapo men met with the town Mayor, Marian Karolak, as well as the town council. The group decided that an annihilation of the Jewish population living in Jedwabne was in order, and it was the Poles specifically that embraced this order. When one Gestapo man suggested that they allow one family for each specific career/trade to survive, it was a Pole, Bronisław Szleziãski, who made his case that all Jews of Jedwabne needed to be

killed.
The Mayor agreed with Szleziãski and that was that. Szleziãski even volunteered to give up his barn as a killing ground for the Jews where they were not only tortured, but slaughtered and doused with kerosene before being burned alive. Gross points to the fact that the Germans did not oversee these killings and they were brought about specifically by the Poles. The fact that the Poles embraced both the killing and torturing of the Jews shows that they weren’t simply following orders from a higher power. These were people with whom they had lived with all of their lives as neighbors, and were quick to turn their backs on the people they had grown up with. This is a stark contrast of Browning’s account of the members of Police Battalion 101 in which Browning states that these men only committed mass genocide out of obedience and fear, and not because they were receiving a sadistic pleasure from the killings, as was the case with most of the Polish hooligans of Jedwabne, according to Gross.
The perpetrators of Jedwabne were very anti-semitic in nature. Many of the Catholic Poles of Jedwabne strongly believed in the “judeo commune,” the belief that during the Soviet occupation of Polish Eastern territories from 1939-1941, the majority, if not all of the Jews, collaborated with the Soviet Regime against Poland, essentially committing treason. On top of the Judeo Commune, Catholic Poles were preached to by Catholic Priests the fact that the Jews are betrayers of Jesus Christ and were said to have killed Christian children to use their blood for the purpose of Jewish rituals. The Nazis were then able to push their anti-semitic propaganda which exploited these already present beliefs of the Poles during World War II. One can imagine that during a time of war and devastation, it is much easier for people to believe propaganda of this nature since many would be seeking someone to blame, and others may want vengeance for the grievances that they have been caused by a war as destructive as World War II.
To examine further the role of obedience to a higher authority figure, one can look at both the Stanford Prison experiment, as well as Stanley Milgram’s Obedience experiment. The Stanford Prison experiment gave 24 college students from Stanford the role of either prison guard or prisoner. Unexpectedly, both the prisoners and the prison guards took on their roles even though they knew that it was all just an experiment. In an analysis of the conversations that the prisoners had amongst other prisoners, it was concluded that around 90% of the time, the prisoners were talking about being imprisoned and collaborating on an escape plan (46). These prisoners were so serious about their role as prisoners that they didn’t even take the time to get to know one another.
One prisoner even stated that “It was remarkable how readily we all slipped into our roles… and allowed these assigned roles and the social forces in the situation to guide, shape and eventually to control our freedom of thought and action” (A Pirandellian Prison, 46). Another prisoner who was on the verge of leaving the experiment overheard the other prisoners chanting endlessly what a bad prisoner he was. This alone made the prisoner want to stay in order to show the others that he wasn’t a bad prisoner. He had to be re-convinced that it was all just an experiment before he was willing to leave (50). This just goes to show the power that authoritative figures or establishments can have on the human brain, where even in an experiment, both prisoners and guards felt that they needed to best fulfill their roles. These effects were very prevalent in Police Battalion 101 as the battalion members felt that they needed to fulfill their roles as Jew killers because of the overbearing and authoritative Nazi regime above them. We can also see these effects in Jedwabne as the Catholic Poles lived in an anti-semitic institution in which the Jews were portrayed as god-killers and child murderers as well as traitors for committing treason on Poland.
Stanley Milgram’s Obedience experiment is another example of how obedience of an authority figure can have an effect contrary to our own moral beliefs. In this experiment, there was a teacher and a learner as well as an experimenter. The teacher had to administer increasingly powerful shocks for every time the learner (who was really just an actor) replied with a wrong answer. The experimenter was there as the authority figure who would simply keep telling the teacher to keep going whenever they needed a bit of encouragement. Although many of the teachers in the experiment showed serious moral issues with the experiment, 25 out of 40 teachers continued shocking (or believing that they were shocking) the learner all the way to the highest possible shock setting (The Perils of Obedience, 64). Fred Prozi is one of these teachers who was visibly upset and begging the experimenter to check on the learner to make sure he was ok. The experimenter continually refused and eventually told Prozi that he would bear all responsibility for whatever happened to the learner, therefore it was not Prozi’s responsibility as he was simply following orders, and at that point a visibly upset Prozi was able to finish administering every last shock. This is very similar to the mindset of the members of Police Battalion 101 as they would inflict harm and kill Jews, even though it was against many of their own sets of moral rules. The way that they justified the killings was through telling themselves they were simply following orders from a higher authority and weren’t the ones responsible for their actions.
Stanley Milgram perfectly details the way in which the deferring of responsibility leads to “a fragmentation of the total human act; no one is confronted with the consequences of his decision to carry out the evil act.

The person who assumes responsibility has evaporated. Perhaps this is the most common characteristic of socially organized evil in modern society” (77). It was shown in the Obedience experiment, we see time and again that the dissipation of responsibility can lead any average human being to perform tasks that they themselves consider immoral and unethical. So long as we are told that the responsibility of the harm that we are causing will fall on someone else’s shoulders, humans as a whole are capable of unimaginable damage much like Police Battalion 101 and the hooligans of Jedwabne. The institution of authority imposed during the Stanford Prison experiment is similar to the institution of anti-semitism that was preached and instituted in Polish towns like Jedwabne where the Jews were used as a source of blame. While many members of the Police Battalion preached that they were simply following orders, other members, and the Polish hooligans of Jedwabne were up to something far more sinister, and it is truly startling to see the barbarity that humans can have towards other humans in times of crisis when they are told that the responsibility for those lives doesn’t fall on

them.