nt people. Browning concludes that peer pressure can turn "ordinary" people into a highly efficient killing machine, and that the small number of dissenters can be safely ignored, because they have little impact on the overall outcome.

https://www.amazon.com/dp/006230302319:T6ae,

  For Aida, the experience of Buryatia was powerful in another way. Her parents are war supporters. The past three years have tested her bond with them, though when we spoke recently, over Zoom, she was home for a visit. Spending time with the friendly women sewing camouflage netting for Russian snipers made her think more deeply, she said, about the nature of evil. “I very often see people whose views are horrible, whose views make me want to throw up, and I don’t understand how a person can talk that way or think that way. But they turn out to be absolutely ordinary people,” she said. What to do with this observation is something she’s still pondering.

Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland by Christopher R. Browning examines the same phenomenon. He follows the war record of a police battalion made up of middle-aged, working-class men from Hamburg. They murdered men, women and children in occupied Poland. They were not young fanatics who had been raised and brainwashed under Nazism, nor were they forced to take part in the murders. Those who wished to opt out were allowed to do so, and some were even promoted after stepping away. Despite this, only 12 out of ~500 men refused to participate in the mass murders of innocent people. Browning concludes that peer pressure can turn "ordinary" people into a highly efficient killing machine, and that the small number of dissenters can be safely ignored, because they have little impact on the overall outcome.