Ordinary Men Audiobook by Christopher R. Browning, Claire Bloom - director

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Title: Ordinary Men
Subtitle: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland
Author: Christopher R. Browning, Claire Bloom - director
Narrator: Stefan Rudnicki
Format: Unabridged
Length: 9 hrs and 26 mins
Language: English
Release date: 02-28-17
Publisher: Blackstone Audio, Inc.
Ratings: 4.5 of 5 out of 131 votes
Genres: History, European

Publisher's Summary:
Ordinary Men is the true story of Reserve Police Batallion 101 of the German Order Police, which was responsible for mass shootings as well as roundups of Jewish people for deportation to Nazi death camps in Poland in 1942. Browning argues that most of the men of RPB 101 were not fanatical Nazis but, rather, ordinary middle-aged working-class men who committed these 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. Very quickly three groups emerged within the battalion: a core of eager killers, a plurality who carried out their duties reliably but without initiative, and a small minority who evaded participation in the acts of killing without diminishing the murderous efficiency of the battalion whatsoever.
While this book discusses a specific Reserve Unit during WWII, the general argument Browning makes is that most people succumb to the pressures of a group setting and commit actions they would never do of their own volition. Ordinary Men is a powerful, chilling, and important work with themes and arguments that continue to resonate today.

Members Reviews:
Very detailed, would recommend.
Great book, very descriptive when descibing events/battles/photographs. Maybe could have used a better reader, but overall well worth the buy. Would recommend

Cold, but poignant
Insightful and jarring. A testament to the potential for evil within us all, as well as a warning of the price of Silence and passivity in everyday life.

Bogged down in details.
Get out your pencil and take notes. This book is full of details, obscure Polish town names, people's names that are not even their real names.
Basically a recap of court testimony. Yawn....

Disappointing
I know the Germans did terrible things and don't need to hear more about them.My interest is the perpetrators and how they came to do these things.I would have liked to hear more about the individuals involved ,their history and what became of them afterwards. Ordinary Men offers some insight into how this could happen but not much about the individual soldier of Battalion 101. I would like to add ,no one tried to stop the killing. They knew it was going to happen no matter what they did. The same is true of the Geman Civilians.When they heard rumors ,if they believed them, in that totalitarian state during a war what could an individual do. This is why we must prevent abuse of human rights at its core.

Waste of time
Takes cheap and intellectually dishonest shots at the U.S. whenever he can. Somehow manages to drag up My Lai and other American events as if they compare to the industrialized slaughter by Germany.
Criticizes American reluctance to take Japanese prisoners as racially driven murder. Since most Japanese did not wish to be taken prisoner and often attempted to trick there would be captors at the last second, shooting all Japanese attempting to "surrender" was justified. This is a basic rule of war and recently reconfirmed in Iraq.