Comparative Religious Ethics

Comparative Religious Ethics

Browning’s Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 is definitely an eye opener as to how things were actually executed in WWII Germany and anywhere else throughout the world where there might have been a Nazi presence. It is very important that Browning gives the reader a background of the police structure and also the men who made up the Reserve Police Battalion 101. The information about how the men who made up RPB 101 were mostly poor men who had never engaged in war before really allows readers to see what “wartime” can do to anyone. Browning begins chapter 18 with a question, “Why did most men in Reserve Police Battalion 101 become killers, while a minority of perhaps 10 percent…did not?” (p.159) He continues with a list of possible explanations as to how this transformation might have occurred: “wartime brutalization, racism, segmentation and routinization of the task [at hand]…obedience to orders…ideological indoctrination and conformity” (p.159) Personally, I believe that all of the aforementioned were contributing factors to the brutality that occurred, but none more than fear. The fear of authority and one’s own death is powerful enough to make us do unimaginable things because it pushes at our primal human instincts, which Walter B. Cannon described as “fight or flight.” Browning also mentions the Philip Zimbardo Stanford prison experiment, an experiment conducted in which basically tested how injecting power onto a person would change them over time or if it would have no effect. This study showed how much a person could change and not realize what they were doing. The subjects were separated into two groups and some were given “power “over the other group, but were told that they would only be able to use violence within reason to apprehend their subjects. This worked fine until time passed by and “About one third of guard emerged as “cruel and tough.” They constantly invented new forms of harassment and enjoyed their...