Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland

by Christopher R. Browning

The Order Police resulted from the third attempt in interwar Germany to create large police formations with military training and equipment.

Never a good idea.

No mention, of course, was made of what the incarcerated Jews, without food or water, must have been suffering in the closed cattle cars during the sixty-one-hour journey.

This reminds me of that scene in Schlinder's List where the titular character waters the Jews in the train cars.

Some 5,300 Jews were actually assembled there at the appointed time. With all the manpower of my company, I sealed the Jewish quarter and searched thoroughly, whereby some 600 additional Jews were hunted down.

Like an exterminator hunting down rats. It is hard to imagine people being subjected to this kind of vile and cruel treatment.

“Even in the face of death the Jewish mothers did not separate from their children. Thus we tolerated the mothers taking their small children to the marketplace in Józefów.”24

How very kind. Ugh.

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.

Any excuse to get out of firing duty. Surprised to learn that not all of them were actually enthusiastic about the prospect of killing defenceless men, women and children.

“Through the point-blank shot that was thus required, the bullet struck the head of the victim at such a trajectory that often the entire skull or at least the entire rear skullcap was torn off, and blood, bone splinters, and brains sprayed everywhere and besmirched the shooters.”

What an inconvenience for the shooters. /s

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.7

Yes, that is exactly how you motivate yourself into killing children.

The Jews stood outside their circle of human obligation and responsibility. Such a polarization between “us” and “them,” between one’s comrades and the enemy, is of course standard in war.

I suppose this is how you get to shoot defenceless citizens in the first place. Treat them like they were subhumans.

In the woods the Jews were set to work digging a mass grave.

Making them dig their own graves. Brilliant.

Psychologically, the burden on the killers was much reduced. The Hiwis, not just liquored up after the event to help them forget but drunk from the start, did most of the shooting.

It's almost like they were ashamed of what they were doing and wanted to remember as little as possible.

Having killed once already, the men did not experience such a traumatic shock the second time. Like much else, killing was something one could get used to.

A harrowing thought, if any.

Out of sight was truly out of mind. Indeed, for some men of Steinmetz’s platoon, the most vivid memory was that they were assigned guard duty in a swampy meadow north of Parczew, where they had to stand all day with wet feet.

Again, anything to get out of killing duty. But I wondered if they were any better than the ones that were eager to kill. (Yes, they were but given what they were part of, even unwillingly, it's still a difficult thing to accept)

The men clearly thought the latter, and their reaction was uniformly one of indignation and outrage that a woman was brought to witness the terrible things they were doing.21 The men of First Company, if not their captain, could still feel shame.

Of course they didn't want their women and families to see what kind of monsters that they had become. I don't blame them here but I have zero empathy.

The policemen in the shooting commandos marched their Jews to the crest of one of the mounds of waste material in the area of the gravel pits. The victims were lined up facing a six-foot drop. From a short distance behind, the policemen fired on order into the necks of the Jews. The bodies tumbled over the edge. Following each round, the next group of Jews was brought to the same spot and thus had to look down at the growing pile of corpses of their family and friends before they were shot in turn. Only after a number of rounds did the shooters change sites.

I have no words to describe what I felt reading this.

As usual, though, the few who shirked or evaded participation did not impede those intent upon their task.

Would I have done this, I wonder?

Buchmann not only complained. In late September he also wrote directly to Hamburg, urgently requesting a transfer. He could not carry out those tasks “alien to the police” that his unit was being given in Poland.24

A conscientious objecter?

As the surviving Jews were to be tracked down and shot like animals, however, the men of Reserve Police Battalion 101 unofficially dubbed this phase of the Final Solution the Judenjagd, or “Jew hunt.”

Elmer Fudd, this is not.

If the road into the farmyard was too visible, however, the police approached stealthily on foot to prevent their victims’ escape.

How the hell did they identify these Jews so easily?

A single German policeman and the Polish translator went to the second hiding place, expecting no difficulties. But this was a rare instance in which the Jews had arms, and the approaching policeman was fired upon. Reinforcements were summoned, and a fire fight broke out. In the end four or five Jews were killed in a breakout attempt, and eight to ten others were found dead or badly wounded in the cellar.

Of course they were going to die but it's some consolation that some Jews refused to go down without a fight.

Lieutenant Brand presented the father with a stark choice—his life or his daughter’s. The man surrendered his daughter, who was shot on the spot.

Worst dad ever.

“Herr Leutnant, I have not yet had breakfast.” When my husband looked at him quizzically, he declared further, “I have not yet killed any Jews.”

This is both comical and horrifying in equal measures. The depravity here is just unimaginable.

In Łuków the SS ghetto administrator, Josef Bürger, had 500 to 600 Jews shot in December to reduce the ghetto population.

You know, like rabbits.

Until the spring of 1943, the Jews of Poland had clung to the all too understandable but mistaken assumption that even the Nazis could not be so irrational by utilitarian standards as to kill work Jews making essential contributions to the German war economy. They had therefore pursued the desperate strategy of “salvation through labor” as the only hope that a remnant of Jews would survive.

Is this really a factor as to why there were no substantial armed Jewish uprising?

The SD men took care that the Jews were shot in such a way that there were inclines in the piles of corpses enabling the newcomers to lie down on corpses piled as much as three meters high.

At the time it was quite usual, she said, even for German civilians—to say nothing of uniformed policemen—to behave toward the Poles as a “master race.”

Unbelievable.

According to German law, among the criteria for defining homicide as murder is the presence of a “base motive,” such as racial hatred. Any member of the battalion who openly confessed to anti-Semitism would have seriously compromised his legal position; anyone who talked about the anti-Semitic attitudes of others risked finding himself in the uncomfortable position of witness against his former comrades.

For instance, when asked how they could tell the difference between Poles and Jews in the countryside, some of the men cited clothing, hairstyle, and general appearance. Several, however, chose a vocabulary that still reflected the Nazi stereotype of twenty-five years earlier: the Jews were “dirty,” “unkempt,” and “less clean” in comparison to the Poles.12 The comments of other policemen reflected a different sensibility that recognized the Jews as victimized human beings: they were dressed in rags and half starved.13

That explains my earlier thought. Kind of.

By 1942 standards of German-Jewish relations, a quick death without the agony of anticipation was considered an example of human compassion!

This is devastatingly prosaic.

Soldiers who were inured to violence, numbed to the taking of human life, embittered over their own casualties, and frustrated by the tenacity of an insidious and seemingly inhuman enemy sometimes exploded and at other times grimly resolved to have their revenge at the first opportunity.

The authoritarian political culture of the Nazi dictatorship, savagely intolerant of overt dissent, along with the standard military necessity of obedience to orders and ruthless enforcement of discipline, created a situation in which individuals had no choice.

Insidiously, therefore, most of those who did not shoot only reaffirmed the “macho” values of the majority—according to which it was a positive quality to be “tough” enough to kill unarmed, noncombatant men, women, and children—and tried not to rupture the bonds of comradeship that constituted their social world.