This is a book on Jordan B. Peterson’s recommended reading list, because it provides an excellent case study of a group of people who have committed atrocities during the Second World War and the types of social conditions and personal reasoning involved in perpetuating war crimes. Police Battalion 101 was formed in Hamburg, and was one of many Reserve Police Battalions formed to maintain control over the civilian populations of the occupied territories Germany annexed leading up to The Second World War.
CONTENT WARNING: this is a review of a book discussing the history of a battalion involved in genocide, massacres of innocents, and deportations to concentration camps. I have scrubbed the accounts of some of the more macabre minutia while preserving the overall description of events. My goal above all was to try and capture the psychological dimension of the events, and I’ve included details to the extent that sense of psychological situation is upheld and elucidated.
The Battalion’s Composition
The Battalion was composed of 3 companies of about 140 men in strength.
It was commanded by 53 year old Major Wilhelm Trapp, a veteran of the First World War and recipient of the Iron Cross First Class. After the war he became a career policeman and rose through the ranks. Although he was a Nazi Party member since 1932, he had never been taken into the SS or even given an equivalent SS rank, in spite of attempts by Himmler and Hydrich to meld together the state and Party components of the SS and the Order of Police. Trapp was by all accounts not considered SS material.
He often was in conflict with two captains under his command: both young SS men, who even in their testimony more than twenty years later made no attempt to conceal their contempt for their commander as weak, unmilitary, and unduly interfering in the duties of his officers. The two captains, Wolfgang Hoffmann and Julius Wohlauf, both born around the start of the First World War and were early members of Hitler Youth and joined the SS before graduating from their college preparatory high schools. The reserve lieutenants had ages ranging from 33 to 48 and none belonged to the SS. Of the 32 non-commissioned officers 22 were party members and 7 were in the SS. Their ages ranged from 27 to 40, with an average of 33.5. These were not reservists but rather prewar recruits to the police.
Concerning the rank-and-file police, the vast majority were from Hamburg, and two thirds were of working class background, holding jobs as dock workers, truck drivers, warehouse and construction workers, machine operators, seamen, and waiters. The remainder were lower middle class white collar workers in sales or bureaucracies as clerks. The number of independent artisans and small businessmen was very small. About a quarter were Nazi party members in 1942. The men of the lower middle class held Party membership in an only slightly higher proportion (30%) than those from the working class (25%).
The men were predominantly from the lower orders of German Society. They had experienced neither social nor geographic mobility. Very few were economically independent, and outside apprenticeships or vocational training virtually none had any higher education past age 14.
As Browning states,
Early History of the Battalion
Police battalions (Ordnungspolizei) were battalion formations, trained and outfitted by their main police offices in Germany. These forces served to maintain control of the civilian populations in Germany’s occupied territories. Reserve Police Battalion 101 was shipped out to Poland in 1939 under the supervision of the SS on the heels of the Nazi invasion force. Their initial role involved resettlement operations to expel Poles, Jews, and Gypsies from the annexed territories marked for “germanization” and resettlement by ethnic Germans. Over the five months of resettlement action 37k people were evacuated out of central Poland, with 22k people escaping the evacuations by fleeing. According to one eyewitness the killings began with these actions, particularly with respect to the old, sick, and small children. At this point it was the exception and not the rule, although the resettlement commission (composed of SS, SD, and some civilians) did accuse officers of being inefficient by evacuating these vulnerable groups, saying “nothing could be done with such people” instead of ordering executions outright.
Some accounts of shootings were mentioned, but the majority officers testifying 20 years after the fact did not recollect any shootings at this time, compared to what was to follow after.
The Massacre of Józefów
Józefów was a small village 15 km to the southeast of Warsaw, and on July 11th 1942 was the first occasion in which Battalion 101 committed outright massacres of civilians. For the first time for the Battalion, instead of relocating Jews only the male Jews of working age were to be relocated a work camp in Lubin; the women, children, and elderly were to be shot on the spot.
The men were not officially informed of this until the morning of, after being mobilized and transported from a neighbouring town at 2am. At Józefów Major Trapp explained the battalion’s murderous assignment. Once he finished, he made an offer to the men. Any of the men who did not feel up to the task could step out. The first man stepped out, a policeman under Captain Hoffman, who sharply reprimanded the man for embarrassing his company by being the first to step out. Trapp quieted Hoffman, and once he was under his wing more men stepped out, totalling to 12. They had their weapons removed and were to await further assignment from the major.
As the town was quite small, the sounds of screams and gunfire could be heard everywhere. Police reported that all patients in the Jewish hospital or old people’s home were shot, although no one admitted having actually seen the shooting or taken part. At this point it is rather obvious that the police testimonials are going to lengths to avoid implicating themselves any more than necessary in the war crimes. The witnesses reacted differently to the problem of shooting infants. Some claimed they were treated the same as the women and elderly, whereas others stressed there were no infants or small children in areas they were charged with “clearing,” and that everyone tacitly refrained from shooting the young. Later on this same witness observed that even facing death the Jewish mothers did not separate from their children, and the police tolerated the mothers taking their children to the marketplace. In spite of this Captain Hoffman reproached his unit for “not proceeding energetically enough.”
After the roundup, the work Jews were taken by train to Lubin, and platoons were taken to assemble firing squads in the woods. At this point it began to sink in more for the other officers what laid ahead, and some requested to be transferred to different assignments; this was assented to or denied based largely on the officer’s temperament. Hoffman, same man who reprimanded the first officer to step out on killing, told one man he could lie down alongside the victims in the forest. Many however were sent back to the marketplace and some even returned early to the barracks.
Some other testimonials from shooters:
This proceeded over 17 hours from sunrise to 9pm. Upon returning to the barracks,
Reflections on a Massacre
At Józefów a mere dozen men out of five hundred had responded instinctively to Major Trapp’s offer to step forward and excuse themselves from the impending mass murder. Why was the number of men who from the beginning declared themselves unwilling to shoot so small? In part, it was a matter of the suddenness. There was no forewarning or time to think, as the men were totally “surprised” by the Józefów action. Unless they were able to react to Trapp’s offer on the spur of the moment, this first opportunity was lost.
As important as the lack of time for reflection was the pressure for conformity—the basic identification of men in uniform with their comrades and the strong urge not to separate themselves from the group by stepping out. The battalion had only recently been brought up to full strength, and many of the men did not yet know each other well; the bonds of military comradeship were not yet fully developed. Nonetheless, the act of stepping out that morning in Józefów meant leaving one’s comrades and admitting that one was “too weak” or “cowardly.” Who would have “dared,” one policeman declared emphatically, to “lose face” before the assembled troops. “If the question is posed to me why I shot with the others in the first place,” said another who subsequently asked to be excused after several rounds of killing, “I must answer that no one wants to be thought a coward.” It was one thing to refuse at the beginning, he added, and quite another to try to shoot but not be able to continue. Another policeman—more aware of what truly required courage—said quite simply, “I was cowardly.”
Most of the interrogated policemen denied that they had any choice. Faced with the testimony of others, many did not contest that Trapp had made the offer but claimed that they had not heard that part of the speech or could not remember it. A few policemen made the attempt to confront the question of choice but failed to find the words. It was a different time and place, as if they had been on another political planet, and the political values and vocabulary of the 1960s were useless in explaining the situation in which they had found themselves in 1942. Quite atypical in describing his state of mind that morning of July 13 was a policeman who admitted to killing as many as twenty Jews before quitting. “I thought that I could master the situation and that without me the Jews were not going to escape their fate anyway. . . . Truthfully I must say that at the time we didn’t reflect about it at all. Only years later did any of us become truly conscious of what had happened then. . . . Only later did it first occur to me that had not been right.”
In addition to the easy rationalization that not taking part in the shooting was not going to alter the fate of the Jews in any case, the policemen developed other justifications for their behaviour. Perhaps the most astonishing rationalization of all was that of a thirty-five-year-old metalworker from Bremerhaven:
“I made the effort, and it was possible for me, to shoot only children. It so happened that the mothers led the children by the hand. My neighbor then shot the mother and I shot the child that belonged to her, because I reasoned with myself that after all without its mother the child could not live any longer. It was supposed to be, so to speak, soothing to my conscience to release children unable to live without their mothers.”
The full weight of this statement, and the significance of the word choice of the former policeman, cannot be fully appreciated unless one knows that the German word for “release” (erlösen) also means to “redeem” or “save” when used in a religious sense. The one who “releases” is the Erlöser—the Savior or Redeemer![/quote]
Speaking to the question of ethical or ideological motivations for declining to shoot, Browning has the following:
Even twenty or twenty-five years later those who did quit shooting along the way overwhelmingly cited sheer physical revulsion against what they were doing as the prime motive but did not express any ethical or political principles behind this revulsion. Given the educational level of these reserve policemen, one should not expect a sophisticated articulation of abstract principles. The absence of such does not mean that their revulsion did not have its origins in the humane instincts that Nazism radically opposed and sought to overcome. But the men themselves did not seem to be conscious of the contradiction between their feelings and the essence of the regime they served. Being too weak to continue shooting, of course, posed problems for the “productivity” and morale of the battalion, but it did not challenge basic police discipline or the authority of the regime in general. Indeed, Heinrich Himmler himself sanctioned the toleration of this kind of weakness in his notorious Posen speech of October 4, 1943, to the SS leadership. While exalting obedience as one of the key virtues of all SS men, he explicitly noted an exception, namely, “one whose nerves are finished, one who is weak. Then one can say: Good, go take your pension.”[/quote]
Careerist motivations were brought up by one officer: “because I was not a career policeman and also did not want to become one, but rather an independent skilled craftsman, and I had my business back home.... thus it was of no consequence that my police career would not prosper.” Numerous company chiefs such as Hoffman were, on the other hand, young careerist men or SS members to boot who were ambitious.
The chief opposition to Major Trapp and his superiors in the SS were not ethical or political in nature, but originated in the broad demoralization of the police force from the horror of the killing process itself. Subsequent actions involving Police Battalion 101, based on the experience in Józefów, relegated the men of Battalion 101 to roundups and deportations of civilians, and later on “Jew Hunts” in the forests of Poland in which refugees and partisans were executed. Because the executions by themselves were so demoralizing, other means of allowing the police to participate in the ethnic cleansing were sought out.
Joint Killings with the Hiwis in Łomazy
Major Trapp himself had apparently made arrangements that the killings and more brutal tasks pertaining to deportation were carried about by the Hiwis, with the Police Battalion forces only serving to round up Jews and participate in shootings as a last resort. “Hiwi” is a German abbreviation for “voluntary assistant”, and were military volunteers indigenous to the occupied territories recruited into the German paramilitary forces to serve as auxiliaries.
The first joint operation of Police Battalion 101 with the Hiwis occurred in Łomazy, where many Jewish communities from smaller villages were concentrated. One day before the impending action the platoon stationed in Łomazy received orders from Lieutenant Gnade in the battalion that there would be a Jewish “resettlement” the next morning, which by that time was a well-understood euphemism. On the fateful morning the lieutenant himself held a meeting with the non-commissioned officers, who received instructions for clearing the Jewish quarter and concentrating them at muster points. The usual instructions were given to shoot the young and elderly, but once again most children ended up being brought to the assembly point. At this point a group of young men were selected out of the crowd to begin digging a mass grave in the forest nearby town.
Over the course of several hours of waiting and digging the Hiwis from Trawiniki came into town, led by an SS officer. Immediately after arriving they and the battalion commanders began to drink heavily. Eventually the Jews began to be transported in groups of 200 or 300 at a time to the grave sites. This time point is also notable as it is when Lieutenant Gnade began to exhibit signs of sadism: chasing some to the grave site and ordering a large elderly group to strip and be beaten with clubs for his amusement.
The killing began and throughout the day the Hiwis became increasingly drunk themselves. As the number of able shooters diminished Lieutenant Gnade ordered Battalion police to replace the lost Hiwis. Eventually the Hiwis who were drunk rose from their stupor and resumed shooting. This continued until 7pm, marking the conclusion of the second four-figure shooting carried out by the men of Reserve Battalion 101.
The execution of Łomazy differed from Józefów in numerous ways. There were many more attempts at escape in Łomazy, as there was no program of extracting the able-bodied men for work camps (the group most capable of escaping or fighting back). In spite of this the killing itself exerted much less psychological stress on the Police Battalion, not being directly involved for the most part in the firing squads of the assembled Jews; reportedly some were “overjoyed” they did not have to participate en masse. Yet even those policemen who did replace the Hiwis in shooting for several hours did not recall the same extent of horror as back in Józefów. The first reason for this was that the shooting occurred in Łomazy at a distance against a group, rather than one-on-one as it had in Józefów. Having killed once already, at least some of the police began to acclimate to being killers. The number of police who had testified they had deliberately tried to miss their targets had decreased. And unlike Major Trapp, the sadistic Lieutenant Gnade gave the men no option of bowing out of participating in the executions; nor were the men systematically excused if they were too shaken to continue as in Józefów.
This division of labour between the police and Hiwi forces made the largest impact in the village of Alekzandrów under Major Trapp’s command, where Jews were again rounded up for execution by a detachment of Hiwis from Trawniki, but because the latter did not show up the Police Battalion simply released the Jews from captivity, allowing them to return home. As this was only a few days past the events of Józefów the memory of the massacre was still fresh in their minds.
The August Deportations to Treblinka
Aside from these pairings of Police Battalion 101 with the Hiwi executioners, the Battalion was involved largely in ghetto clearing and deportations of Jews to the concentration camp at Treblinka, located some 110 km to the north of the battalion headquarters in Radzyn. Parczew was the first town targeted, and although the Hiwis were present there was comparatively little violence. A second deportation in Parczew didn’t even require the Hiwi attendance. Thus the men of Police Battalion 101 were more willingly involved because they were spared from direct participation in the killing. The fact that there were ultimately far more victims from the deportations to Treblinka was not of salient psychological consequence to them.
This contrasted with another deportation in Międzyrzec in August 1942, which was the largest ghetto clearing the battalion participated in for the duration of the Final Solution. Some 11,000 Jews were targeted for deportation, and less than a thousand work Jews were permitted to remain in Międzyrzec until they could be replaced with Poles. The amount of Jews killed on the spot versus those deported was about nine percent. To put this into perspective, the Warsaw ghetto clearing had a ratio of two percent. So even by Nazi standards the Międzyrzec deportation was a bloodier operation than normal, involving whips even to get people to move.
The author believes the ratios of perpetrators to victims played a role in the level of perceived violence by the latter. In Parczew there were 5000 Jews for ~350 police. The police at Międzyrzec numbered 350-400, and were charged with clearing 10,000, which placed a lot more pressure on the police to use more brutal and ferocious tactics to get the job done.
Late September Shootings
Due to a lag in deportation activities late September 1942 Battalion 101 resumed indiscriminate shootings under orders of the SS, in addition to reprisal shootings against resisting Jews and partisans. A lieutenant under Major Trapp named Buchmann mentioned after the massacre at Józefów he would not take part in Jewish actions. A mass execution similar to that of Józefów in Talcyn was the last straw. Buchmann asked for a transfer and while this was being processed he remained in Radzyn.
Chapter 13 of this book interestingly enough was devoted to the health of Captain Hoffmann. Himself a careerist, he developed a habit of having severe digestive upsets and cramping whenever a murderous operation was to occur. In spite of this he refused to report his illness for a long time. The men under him noticed that his bedridden days coincided with company actions involving the murder of innocents. “It became common for the men to predict, upon hearing the night before impending action, that the company chief would be bedridden by morning.” He was verified to be ill, but such behaviour was adaptive. “If mass murder was giving Hoffmann stomach pains, it was a fact he was deeply ashamed of and sought to overcome to the best of his ability.” So acts of evil did have a toll on his health, although this was something he did his best to mask.
[Continued below]
CONTENT WARNING: this is a review of a book discussing the history of a battalion involved in genocide, massacres of innocents, and deportations to concentration camps. I have scrubbed the accounts of some of the more macabre minutia while preserving the overall description of events. My goal above all was to try and capture the psychological dimension of the events, and I’ve included details to the extent that sense of psychological situation is upheld and elucidated.
The Battalion’s Composition
The Battalion was composed of 3 companies of about 140 men in strength.
It was commanded by 53 year old Major Wilhelm Trapp, a veteran of the First World War and recipient of the Iron Cross First Class. After the war he became a career policeman and rose through the ranks. Although he was a Nazi Party member since 1932, he had never been taken into the SS or even given an equivalent SS rank, in spite of attempts by Himmler and Hydrich to meld together the state and Party components of the SS and the Order of Police. Trapp was by all accounts not considered SS material.
He often was in conflict with two captains under his command: both young SS men, who even in their testimony more than twenty years later made no attempt to conceal their contempt for their commander as weak, unmilitary, and unduly interfering in the duties of his officers. The two captains, Wolfgang Hoffmann and Julius Wohlauf, both born around the start of the First World War and were early members of Hitler Youth and joined the SS before graduating from their college preparatory high schools. The reserve lieutenants had ages ranging from 33 to 48 and none belonged to the SS. Of the 32 non-commissioned officers 22 were party members and 7 were in the SS. Their ages ranged from 27 to 40, with an average of 33.5. These were not reservists but rather prewar recruits to the police.
Concerning the rank-and-file police, the vast majority were from Hamburg, and two thirds were of working class background, holding jobs as dock workers, truck drivers, warehouse and construction workers, machine operators, seamen, and waiters. The remainder were lower middle class white collar workers in sales or bureaucracies as clerks. The number of independent artisans and small businessmen was very small. About a quarter were Nazi party members in 1942. The men of the lower middle class held Party membership in an only slightly higher proportion (30%) than those from the working class (25%).
The men were predominantly from the lower orders of German Society. They had experienced neither social nor geographic mobility. Very few were economically independent, and outside apprenticeships or vocational training virtually none had any higher education past age 14.
As Browning states,
These were men who had known political standards and moral norms other than those of the Nazis. Most came from Hamburg, by reputation one of the least nazified cities in Germany, and the majority came from a social class that had been anti-Nazi in its political culture. These men would not seem to have been a very promising group from which to recruit mass murderers on behalf of the Nazi vision of a racial utopia free of Jews.
Early History of the Battalion
Police battalions (Ordnungspolizei) were battalion formations, trained and outfitted by their main police offices in Germany. These forces served to maintain control of the civilian populations in Germany’s occupied territories. Reserve Police Battalion 101 was shipped out to Poland in 1939 under the supervision of the SS on the heels of the Nazi invasion force. Their initial role involved resettlement operations to expel Poles, Jews, and Gypsies from the annexed territories marked for “germanization” and resettlement by ethnic Germans. Over the five months of resettlement action 37k people were evacuated out of central Poland, with 22k people escaping the evacuations by fleeing. According to one eyewitness the killings began with these actions, particularly with respect to the old, sick, and small children. At this point it was the exception and not the rule, although the resettlement commission (composed of SS, SD, and some civilians) did accuse officers of being inefficient by evacuating these vulnerable groups, saying “nothing could be done with such people” instead of ordering executions outright.
Some accounts of shootings were mentioned, but the majority officers testifying 20 years after the fact did not recollect any shootings at this time, compared to what was to follow after.
The Massacre of Józefów
Józefów was a small village 15 km to the southeast of Warsaw, and on July 11th 1942 was the first occasion in which Battalion 101 committed outright massacres of civilians. For the first time for the Battalion, instead of relocating Jews only the male Jews of working age were to be relocated a work camp in Lubin; the women, children, and elderly were to be shot on the spot.
The men were not officially informed of this until the morning of, after being mobilized and transported from a neighbouring town at 2am. At Józefów Major Trapp explained the battalion’s murderous assignment. Once he finished, he made an offer to the men. Any of the men who did not feel up to the task could step out. The first man stepped out, a policeman under Captain Hoffman, who sharply reprimanded the man for embarrassing his company by being the first to step out. Trapp quieted Hoffman, and once he was under his wing more men stepped out, totalling to 12. They had their weapons removed and were to await further assignment from the major.
Trapp then summoned the company commanders and gave them their respective assignments. The orders were relayed by the first sergeant, Kammer,* to First Company, and by [Lieutenant] Gnade and [Captain] Hoffmann to Second and Third Companies. Two platoons of Third Company were to surround the village. The men were explicitly ordered to shoot anyone trying to escape. The remaining men were to round up the Jews and take them to the marketplace. Those too sick or frail to walk to the marketplace, as well as infants and anyone offering resistance or attempting to hide, were to be shot on the spot. Thereafter, a few men of First Company were to escort the “work Jews” who had been selected at the marketplace, while the rest of First Company was to proceed to the forest to form the firing squads.
After making the assignments, Trapp spent most of the day in town, either in a schoolroom converted into his headquarters, at the homes of the Polish mayor and the local priest, at the marketplace, or on the road to the forest. But he did not go to the forest itself or witness the executions; his absence there was conspicuous. As one policeman bitterly commented, “Major Trapp was never there. Instead he remained in Józefów because he allegedly could not bear the sight. We men were upset about that and said we couldn’t bear it either.”
Indeed, Trapp’s distress was a secret to no one. At the marketplace one policeman remembered hearing Trapp say, “Oh, God, why did I have to be given these orders,” as he put his hand on his heart.14 Another policeman witnessed him at the schoolhouse. “Today I can still see exactly before my eyes Major Trapp there in the room pacing back and forth with his hands behind his back. He made a downcast impression and spoke to me. He said something like, ‘Man, . . . such jobs don’t suit me. But orders are orders.’”15 Another man remembered vividly “how Trapp, finally alone in our room, sat on a stool and wept bitterly. The tears really flowed.”
As the town was quite small, the sounds of screams and gunfire could be heard everywhere. Police reported that all patients in the Jewish hospital or old people’s home were shot, although no one admitted having actually seen the shooting or taken part. At this point it is rather obvious that the police testimonials are going to lengths to avoid implicating themselves any more than necessary in the war crimes. The witnesses reacted differently to the problem of shooting infants. Some claimed they were treated the same as the women and elderly, whereas others stressed there were no infants or small children in areas they were charged with “clearing,” and that everyone tacitly refrained from shooting the young. Later on this same witness observed that even facing death the Jewish mothers did not separate from their children, and the police tolerated the mothers taking their children to the marketplace. In spite of this Captain Hoffman reproached his unit for “not proceeding energetically enough.”
After the roundup, the work Jews were taken by train to Lubin, and platoons were taken to assemble firing squads in the woods. At this point it began to sink in more for the other officers what laid ahead, and some requested to be transferred to different assignments; this was assented to or denied based largely on the officer’s temperament. Hoffman, same man who reprimanded the first officer to step out on killing, told one man he could lie down alongside the victims in the forest. Many however were sent back to the marketplace and some even returned early to the barracks.
Some policemen who did not request to be released from the firing squads sought other ways to evade. Non-commissioned officers armed with submachine guns had to be assigned to give so-called mercy shots “because both from excitement as well as intentionally [author’s italics]” individual policemen “shot past” their victims. Others had taken evasive action earlier. During the clearing operation some men of First Company hid in the Catholic priest’s garden until they grew afraid that their absence would be noticed. Returning to the marketplace, they jumped aboard a truck that was going to pick up Jews from a nearby village, in order to have an excuse for their absence. Others hung around the marketplace because they did not want to round up Jews during the search. Still others spent as much time as possible searching the houses so as not to be present at the marketplace, where they feared being assigned to a firing squad. A driver assigned to take Jews to the forest made only one trip before he asked to be relieved.
Some other testimonials from shooters:
It was in no way the case that those who did not want to or could not carry out the shooting of human beings with their own hands could not keep themselves out of this task. No strict control was being carried out here. I therefore remained by the arriving trucks and kept myself busy at the arrival point. In any case I gave my activity such an appearance. It could not be avoided that one or another of my comrades noticed that I was not going to the executions to fire away at the victims. They showered me with remarks such as “-idiot-” and “weakling” to express their disgust. But I suffered no consequences for my actions. I must mention here that I was not the only one who kept himself out of participating in the executions.
“The shooting of the men was so repugnant to me that I missed the fourth man. It was simply no longer possible for me to aim accurately. I suddenly felt nauseous and ran away from the shooting site. I have expressed myself incorrectly just now. It was not that I could no longer aim accurately, rather that the fourth time I intentionally missed. I then ran into the woods, vomited, and sat down against a tree. To make sure that no one was nearby, I called loudly into the woods, because I wanted to be alone. Today I can say that my nerves were totally finished. I think that I remained alone in the woods for some two to three hours.”
Kastenbaum then returned to the edge of the woods and rode an empty truck back to the marketplace. He suffered no consequences; his absence had gone unnoticed because the firing squads had been all mixed up and randomly assigned.
This proceeded over 17 hours from sunrise to 9pm. Upon returning to the barracks,
[the men] were depressed, angered, embittered, and shaken. They ate little but drank heavily. Generous quantities of alcohol were provided, and many of the policemen got quite drunk. Major Trapp made the rounds, trying to console and reassure them, and again placing the responsibility on higher authorities. But neither the drink nor Trapp’s consolation could wash away the sense of shame and horror that pervaded the barracks. Trapp asked the men not to talk about it, but they needed no encouragement in that direction. Those who had not been in the forest did not want to learn more. Those who had been there likewise had no desire to speak, either then or later. By silent consensus within Reserve Police Battalion 101, the Józefów massacre was simply not discussed. “The entire matter was a taboo.” But repression during waking hours could not stop the nightmares. During the first night back from Józefów, one policeman awoke firing his gun into the ceiling of the barracks.
Reflections on a Massacre
At Józefów a mere dozen men out of five hundred had responded instinctively to Major Trapp’s offer to step forward and excuse themselves from the impending mass murder. Why was the number of men who from the beginning declared themselves unwilling to shoot so small? In part, it was a matter of the suddenness. There was no forewarning or time to think, as the men were totally “surprised” by the Józefów action. Unless they were able to react to Trapp’s offer on the spur of the moment, this first opportunity was lost.
As important as the lack of time for reflection was the pressure for conformity—the basic identification of men in uniform with their comrades and the strong urge not to separate themselves from the group by stepping out. The battalion had only recently been brought up to full strength, and many of the men did not yet know each other well; the bonds of military comradeship were not yet fully developed. Nonetheless, the act of stepping out that morning in Józefów meant leaving one’s comrades and admitting that one was “too weak” or “cowardly.” Who would have “dared,” one policeman declared emphatically, to “lose face” before the assembled troops. “If the question is posed to me why I shot with the others in the first place,” said another who subsequently asked to be excused after several rounds of killing, “I must answer that no one wants to be thought a coward.” It was one thing to refuse at the beginning, he added, and quite another to try to shoot but not be able to continue. Another policeman—more aware of what truly required courage—said quite simply, “I was cowardly.”
Most of the interrogated policemen denied that they had any choice. Faced with the testimony of others, many did not contest that Trapp had made the offer but claimed that they had not heard that part of the speech or could not remember it. A few policemen made the attempt to confront the question of choice but failed to find the words. It was a different time and place, as if they had been on another political planet, and the political values and vocabulary of the 1960s were useless in explaining the situation in which they had found themselves in 1942. Quite atypical in describing his state of mind that morning of July 13 was a policeman who admitted to killing as many as twenty Jews before quitting. “I thought that I could master the situation and that without me the Jews were not going to escape their fate anyway. . . . Truthfully I must say that at the time we didn’t reflect about it at all. Only years later did any of us become truly conscious of what had happened then. . . . Only later did it first occur to me that had not been right.”
In addition to the easy rationalization that not taking part in the shooting was not going to alter the fate of the Jews in any case, the policemen developed other justifications for their behaviour. Perhaps the most astonishing rationalization of all was that of a thirty-five-year-old metalworker from Bremerhaven:
“I made the effort, and it was possible for me, to shoot only children. It so happened that the mothers led the children by the hand. My neighbor then shot the mother and I shot the child that belonged to her, because I reasoned with myself that after all without its mother the child could not live any longer. It was supposed to be, so to speak, soothing to my conscience to release children unable to live without their mothers.”
The full weight of this statement, and the significance of the word choice of the former policeman, cannot be fully appreciated unless one knows that the German word for “release” (erlösen) also means to “redeem” or “save” when used in a religious sense. The one who “releases” is the Erlöser—the Savior or Redeemer![/quote]
Speaking to the question of ethical or ideological motivations for declining to shoot, Browning has the following:
Even twenty or twenty-five years later those who did quit shooting along the way overwhelmingly cited sheer physical revulsion against what they were doing as the prime motive but did not express any ethical or political principles behind this revulsion. Given the educational level of these reserve policemen, one should not expect a sophisticated articulation of abstract principles. The absence of such does not mean that their revulsion did not have its origins in the humane instincts that Nazism radically opposed and sought to overcome. But the men themselves did not seem to be conscious of the contradiction between their feelings and the essence of the regime they served. Being too weak to continue shooting, of course, posed problems for the “productivity” and morale of the battalion, but it did not challenge basic police discipline or the authority of the regime in general. Indeed, Heinrich Himmler himself sanctioned the toleration of this kind of weakness in his notorious Posen speech of October 4, 1943, to the SS leadership. While exalting obedience as one of the key virtues of all SS men, he explicitly noted an exception, namely, “one whose nerves are finished, one who is weak. Then one can say: Good, go take your pension.”[/quote]
Careerist motivations were brought up by one officer: “because I was not a career policeman and also did not want to become one, but rather an independent skilled craftsman, and I had my business back home.... thus it was of no consequence that my police career would not prosper.” Numerous company chiefs such as Hoffman were, on the other hand, young careerist men or SS members to boot who were ambitious.
The chief opposition to Major Trapp and his superiors in the SS were not ethical or political in nature, but originated in the broad demoralization of the police force from the horror of the killing process itself. Subsequent actions involving Police Battalion 101, based on the experience in Józefów, relegated the men of Battalion 101 to roundups and deportations of civilians, and later on “Jew Hunts” in the forests of Poland in which refugees and partisans were executed. Because the executions by themselves were so demoralizing, other means of allowing the police to participate in the ethnic cleansing were sought out.
Joint Killings with the Hiwis in Łomazy
Major Trapp himself had apparently made arrangements that the killings and more brutal tasks pertaining to deportation were carried about by the Hiwis, with the Police Battalion forces only serving to round up Jews and participate in shootings as a last resort. “Hiwi” is a German abbreviation for “voluntary assistant”, and were military volunteers indigenous to the occupied territories recruited into the German paramilitary forces to serve as auxiliaries.
The first joint operation of Police Battalion 101 with the Hiwis occurred in Łomazy, where many Jewish communities from smaller villages were concentrated. One day before the impending action the platoon stationed in Łomazy received orders from Lieutenant Gnade in the battalion that there would be a Jewish “resettlement” the next morning, which by that time was a well-understood euphemism. On the fateful morning the lieutenant himself held a meeting with the non-commissioned officers, who received instructions for clearing the Jewish quarter and concentrating them at muster points. The usual instructions were given to shoot the young and elderly, but once again most children ended up being brought to the assembly point. At this point a group of young men were selected out of the crowd to begin digging a mass grave in the forest nearby town.
Over the course of several hours of waiting and digging the Hiwis from Trawiniki came into town, led by an SS officer. Immediately after arriving they and the battalion commanders began to drink heavily. Eventually the Jews began to be transported in groups of 200 or 300 at a time to the grave sites. This time point is also notable as it is when Lieutenant Gnade began to exhibit signs of sadism: chasing some to the grave site and ordering a large elderly group to strip and be beaten with clubs for his amusement.
The killing began and throughout the day the Hiwis became increasingly drunk themselves. As the number of able shooters diminished Lieutenant Gnade ordered Battalion police to replace the lost Hiwis. Eventually the Hiwis who were drunk rose from their stupor and resumed shooting. This continued until 7pm, marking the conclusion of the second four-figure shooting carried out by the men of Reserve Battalion 101.
The execution of Łomazy differed from Józefów in numerous ways. There were many more attempts at escape in Łomazy, as there was no program of extracting the able-bodied men for work camps (the group most capable of escaping or fighting back). In spite of this the killing itself exerted much less psychological stress on the Police Battalion, not being directly involved for the most part in the firing squads of the assembled Jews; reportedly some were “overjoyed” they did not have to participate en masse. Yet even those policemen who did replace the Hiwis in shooting for several hours did not recall the same extent of horror as back in Józefów. The first reason for this was that the shooting occurred in Łomazy at a distance against a group, rather than one-on-one as it had in Józefów. Having killed once already, at least some of the police began to acclimate to being killers. The number of police who had testified they had deliberately tried to miss their targets had decreased. And unlike Major Trapp, the sadistic Lieutenant Gnade gave the men no option of bowing out of participating in the executions; nor were the men systematically excused if they were too shaken to continue as in Józefów.
Trapp had not only offered a choice but he had set a tone. “We have the task to shoot Jews, but not to beat or torture them,” he had declared. His own personal distress had been apparent to all at Józefów. Thereafter, however, most “Jewish actions” were carried out in company and platoon strength, not by the full battalion. The company commanders—like Gnade at Łomazy—and not Trapp were thus in a position to set the tone for the behaviour expected and encouraged from the men. Gnade’s gratuitous and horrific sadism at the grave’s edge was only one instance of how he chose to exercise leadership in this regard, but such examples soon multiplied. When Gnade and the SS commander of the Trawnikis, both still drunk, encountered Toni Bentheim in the Łomazy schoolyard after the massacre, Gnade asked, “Well, how many did you shoot, then?” When the sergeant replied none, Gnade responded contemptuously. “One can’t expect otherwise, you’re Catholic after all.” With such leadership and the help of the Trawnikis at Łomazy, the men of Second Company took a major step toward becoming hardened killers.
This division of labour between the police and Hiwi forces made the largest impact in the village of Alekzandrów under Major Trapp’s command, where Jews were again rounded up for execution by a detachment of Hiwis from Trawniki, but because the latter did not show up the Police Battalion simply released the Jews from captivity, allowing them to return home. As this was only a few days past the events of Józefów the memory of the massacre was still fresh in their minds.
The August Deportations to Treblinka
Aside from these pairings of Police Battalion 101 with the Hiwi executioners, the Battalion was involved largely in ghetto clearing and deportations of Jews to the concentration camp at Treblinka, located some 110 km to the north of the battalion headquarters in Radzyn. Parczew was the first town targeted, and although the Hiwis were present there was comparatively little violence. A second deportation in Parczew didn’t even require the Hiwi attendance. Thus the men of Police Battalion 101 were more willingly involved because they were spared from direct participation in the killing. The fact that there were ultimately far more victims from the deportations to Treblinka was not of salient psychological consequence to them.
This contrasted with another deportation in Międzyrzec in August 1942, which was the largest ghetto clearing the battalion participated in for the duration of the Final Solution. Some 11,000 Jews were targeted for deportation, and less than a thousand work Jews were permitted to remain in Międzyrzec until they could be replaced with Poles. The amount of Jews killed on the spot versus those deported was about nine percent. To put this into perspective, the Warsaw ghetto clearing had a ratio of two percent. So even by Nazi standards the Międzyrzec deportation was a bloodier operation than normal, involving whips even to get people to move.
The author believes the ratios of perpetrators to victims played a role in the level of perceived violence by the latter. In Parczew there were 5000 Jews for ~350 police. The police at Międzyrzec numbered 350-400, and were charged with clearing 10,000, which placed a lot more pressure on the police to use more brutal and ferocious tactics to get the job done.
Late September Shootings
Due to a lag in deportation activities late September 1942 Battalion 101 resumed indiscriminate shootings under orders of the SS, in addition to reprisal shootings against resisting Jews and partisans. A lieutenant under Major Trapp named Buchmann mentioned after the massacre at Józefów he would not take part in Jewish actions. A mass execution similar to that of Józefów in Talcyn was the last straw. Buchmann asked for a transfer and while this was being processed he remained in Radzyn.
In Radzyń Buchmann had made no effort to hide his feelings. On the contrary, he “was indignant about how the Jews were treated and openly expressed these views at every opportunity.” It was obvious to those around him that Buchmann was a very “reserved,” “refined” man, a “typical civilian” who had no desire to be a soldier.
....
If Buchmann’s behaviour was tolerated and protected by Trapp, it received mixed reactions from his men. “Among my subordinates many understood my position, but others made disparaging remarks about me and looked down their noses at me.” A few men in the ranks followed his example, however, and told the company first sergeant, Kammer, “that they were neither able nor willing to take part in such actions anymore.” Kammer did not report them. Instead he yelled at them, calling them “shitheads” who “were good for nothing.” But for the most part he freed them from participating in further Jewish actions. In so doing, Kammer was following the example Trapp had set from the beginning. As long as there was no shortage of men willing to do the murderous job at hand, it was much easier to accommodate Buchmann and the men who emulated him than to make trouble over them.
Chapter 13 of this book interestingly enough was devoted to the health of Captain Hoffmann. Himself a careerist, he developed a habit of having severe digestive upsets and cramping whenever a murderous operation was to occur. In spite of this he refused to report his illness for a long time. The men under him noticed that his bedridden days coincided with company actions involving the murder of innocents. “It became common for the men to predict, upon hearing the night before impending action, that the company chief would be bedridden by morning.” He was verified to be ill, but such behaviour was adaptive. “If mass murder was giving Hoffmann stomach pains, it was a fact he was deeply ashamed of and sought to overcome to the best of his ability.” So acts of evil did have a toll on his health, although this was something he did his best to mask.
[Continued below]