wartime. When Browning says that "Jews stood outside [the battalion's] circle of human obligation and responsibility," (Browning 73) he is making the point that antisemitism would have been a factor supporting or legitimating killing Jewish civilians but not the driving force for murder. The Jews as Jews, in this view, would have been an afterthought, or as Browning has it "an anonymous collective" rather than persons who had "personal identity" (Browning 153) or humanity. Indeed, the working-class, relatively less well educated, and relatively older makeup of the demographic composition of the "ordinary men" of Battalion 101 argue that ideology might not have been sufficiently absorbed by the men to have allowed them to connect "Jew hatred" with the killing programs. To support this view of antisemitism, Browning cites postwar interrogations of members of Battalion 101 that he says betrayed wide differences of opinion about their victims. Some members described them according to "Nazi stereotype . . . 'dirty,' 'unkempt,' and 'less clean'" than Poles, while others characterized them as "dressed in rags and half starved." By the same token, Jewish behavior was described variously as passive and offering no resistance, hence "complicit in their own deaths," or alternatively as having "astonishing" dignity when facing certain death (Browning 152, passim).
Undoubtedly the fact that so many ordinary Germans killed so many civilians and that so many of those civilians were Jews argues that at some level the killers were able to discard any notion that the Jews were human beings, hence able to kill them with little if any remorse. Indeed, Browning cites examples (Browning 153-4) of Battalion members' failing to intervene on behalf of Jewish servants who were peremptorily transported by the SS. But fact that ordinary Germans involved in killing Jews could form a range of attitudes about Jews as a group tells Browning that antisemitism was n...