Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland

Distance is a key motif throughout the book, representing not simply the physical distance between killer and victim but also the psychological distance between the men and the brutal reality of their actions. The extermination camps are created specifically to address this understanding, using distance and “assembly-line procedures” (50) to make murder “less burdensome psychologically for the killers” (49). When the men of Battalion 101 are assigned to work on the deportations to these camps, they are able to maintain a psychological distance from their victims by way of physical distance from the actual murders. They are aware that “deportations mean the path of death,” but because they are spared “direct participation in the killing,” they are not “disturbed by this awareness” (90). Indeed, their “sense of detachment from the fate of the Jews they [deport] [is] unshakable” (127) as, for them, “[o]ut of sight [is] truly out of mind” (90).

However, there are points where the extermination camps are not viable options and “mass execution through firing squad [is] the available alternative” (54). In these moments, the men are “not desk murderers who [can] take refuge in distance, routine, and bureaucratic euphemisms that [veil] the reality of mass murder” but instead must see “their victims face to face” (36).