1The Einsatzgruppen were responsible for these massacres, and some of the leaders of these squads - thanks to the relentless work of prosecutor Benjamin Ferencz (1920-1923), who died in April 2023 at the age of 103 - were also tried at Nuremberg after the war. This was the ninth Nuremberg trial, conducted exclusively against the leaders of Einsatzgruppen A, B, C and D between 15 September 1947 and 10 April 1948. Some of the defendants at this trial clearly stand out in the documentary. Such is the case of Otto Ohlendorf (1907-1951), a 'model' husband, father of five, eloquent and orderly, so good-looking that he could even charm the judge during his trial, but who felt no remorse for the acts he and his subordinates had committed. But Ordinary Men focuses mainly on the members of the Ordnungspolizei and, more specifically, the policemen of Hamburg’s Reserve Battalion 101, a troop that shot just under 40,000 people and put many more on the train to the Bełżec killing centre, making it one of the most successful of the Einsatzgruppen.

2Another documentary about fanatical SS men exterminating innocent civilians? Certainly not. Reserve Battalion 101 was made up entirely of 'ordinary' Hamburgers: workers, bakers, butchers and other middle-class, most of whom were in their thirties and therefore too old to fight at the front and had to advance to the second line by being incorporated into an Orpos battalion. They were also people who, for the most part, had never shown any real sympathy for the Nazi regime, as demonstrated by the American historian Christopher Browning, who is omnipresent in the documentary, which draws directly on his seminal work Ordinary Men: The 101st Reserve Battalion of the German Police and the Final Solution in Poland, published in 1992. Like the book, the documentary poses the confronting problem of how men and women put in a certain position can obey iniquitous orders. The documentary shows the journey of the men of the 101st Battalion in the form of a docu-fiction. After having essentially acted as guards in ghettos - such as Litzmannstadt in the Warthegau - their task became more directly lethal from the beginning of the summer of 1942. At the start of their first mission - the extermination of the Jewish population in the Polish village of Józefów - the members had been given the choice by their superior Wilhelm Trapp (1889-1948) of whether or not to enlist. No “Befehl ist befehl”, in other words: the men were allowed to refuse and would not be punished for doing so. But only 12 of the 500 men accepted the offer, and the rest set off on their first shoot-out, on 13 July 1942, killing some 1,500 men, women and children in the hours that followed.

3Ordinary Men shows the insane brutality of the battalion and the lines between the normal and the unbelievable - one of the policemen even invited his brand-new wife to come and watch him work as a 'honeymoon' - but also describes the conditions under which these ordinary men were able to commit their crimes. Some (a minority) were born killers and became increasingly sadistic, but many had to find excuses to justify themselves. After all, it was their job, they’d been chosen for it, you could hardly abandon your colleagues and let them do it all. And wasn’t it better to kill the children too, who would have no father or mother anyway? Their reasoning, taken from interviews conducted in the 1960s during their trial, makes your blood boil and freeze at the same time, as you realize that perhaps, indeed, everyone is capable of anything being put in the right situation. In this sense, while not being too long a history lesson, the documentary succeeds in sending back to the viewer, if not a questioning, at least some food for thought. In the final moments of the documentary, directors Manfred Oldenburg and Oliver Halmburger make the link between the actions of Reserve Battalion 101 and more recent massacres, such as those perpetrated by American soldiers on 16 March 1968 in the Vietnamese village of My Lai or the genocide against the Tutsis in Rwanda between April and July 1994. In short, the documentary is not a substitute for a reading of Browning’s work, but can serve as a docu-drama illustration of the book. For an ‘uninformed’ audience, it can serve as a springboard for further interest in this highly topical historical issue.