Ordinary Men: Documentary Shows How The Monsters Of War Are More Like Each Of Us Than We Want To Admit
From the ranks of shopkeepers, farmers, taxi drivers and, yes, the college-educated
Whether we fall into fascism due to active steps by Republicans or enabling sloth and ineptitude by the Democrats, the new Netflix documentary “Ordinary Men: The “Forgotten Holocaust” is essential to watch, absorb and learn from.
As this film demonstrates, we live with potential war criminals all around us. Far from the mindless monster caricatures we like to assume made up the goose-stepping ranks of Nazi murderers, the vast majority were very ordinary men: tradesmen, small business owners, taxi drivers, college graduates, family men. Some were drafted, many more-than-willing volunteers. Few were hardcore Nazis. All had the same order: To shoot unarmed men, women and children at point blank range. Again and again. Daily. For months on end.
From the killing of 800 in a Jewish synagogue set aflame by Nazis to the ammunition saving technique of using one bullet to shoot through the body of an infant held by a mother, to murder them both, the killing was brutal, routine and carried out primarily by ordinary men.
The movie focuses on Police Battalion 101 of the Einsatzgruppen occupying killing corps led by the fatherly Maj. Wilhelm “Papa” Trapp, who led his legion of murderers and rapists with a kind of paternal sociopathy.
Six million died in the German Holocaust. Of those, approximately three million died in the industrialized death camps. One million died of hunger, neglect, in transport to the camps etc. The remaining two million were killed in or near their communities by the occupation troops and police units of ordinary men profiled in this movie. Those victims were killed up close, eye-to-eye and most of their killers were "ordinary men".
Some killed with enthusiasm and perverse joy. Most numbly followed orders or succumbed to peer pressure. None had to follow orders to murder.
Several days after watching this film, I spotted a young man with bushy red beard and shaved head lumbering into a local Walmart. On his bare beefy upper left arm was a large, slightly modified Nazi eagle tattoo. It did not have the Swastika … yet. Other than that, he looked like a very ordinary young American man.
More than a lesson from history “Ordinary Men”, it is a warning to us all that we need to understand we are no different than the Germans of World War II. Truly, the past is never past. It is prologue.
Mark Taylor
DeMOCKracy.ink
Movie Trailer: ORDINARY MEN - The "Forgotten Holocaust":