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

by Christopher R. Browning

Ultimately, the Holocaust took place because at the most basic level individual human beings killed other human beings in large numbers over an extended period of time.

mass murder and routine had become one. Normality itself had become exceedingly abnormal.

This recognition does indeed mean an attempt to empathize. What I do not accept, however, are the old clichés that to explain is to excuse, to understand is to forgive. Explaining is not excusing; understanding is not forgiving. Not trying to understand the perpetrators in human terms would make impossible not only this study but any history of Holocaust perpetrators that sought to go beyond one-dimensional caricature.

The men of Reserve Police Battalion 101 were from the lower orders of German society.

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.

The nature of this “special action” was not specified in the written orders, but the men were led to believe that they would be performing guard duty. There is no indication whatsoever that even the officers suspected the true nature of the duties that awaited them.

“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.”

“Oh, God, why did I have to be given these orders,”

Another man remembered vividly “how Trapp, finally alone in our room, sat on a stool and wept bitterly. The tears really flowed.”

Concerning Józefów, Trapp later confided to his driver, “If this Jewish business is ever avenged on earth, then have mercy on us Germans.”

Sergeant Steinmetz of Third Platoon once again gave his men the opportunity to report if they did not feel up to it. No one took up his offer.45

“After I had carried out the first shooting and at the unloading point was allotted a mother with daughter as victims for the next shooting, I began a conversation with them and learned that they were Germans from Kassel, and I took the decision not to participate further in the executions.

Yet another policeman remembered that the first Jew he shot was a decorated World War I veteran from Bremen who begged in vain for mercy.

Before the policemen climbed into their trucks and left Józefów, a ten-year-old girl appeared, bleeding from the head. She was brought to Trapp, who took her in his arms and said, “You shall remain alive.”

As important as the lack of time for reflection was the pressure for conformity—the

Who would have “dared,” one policeman declared emphatically, to “lose face” before the assembled troops.

Another policeman—more aware of what truly required courage—said quite simply, “I was cowardly.”

Politically and ethically motivated opposition, explicitly identified by the policemen as such, was relatively rare.

The problem that faced Trapp and his superiors in Lublin, therefore, was not the ethically and politically grounded opposition of a few but the broad demoralization shared both by those who shot to the end and those who had not been able to continue.

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.”

One of the policemen chatted with the head of the Jewish council, a German Jew from Munich, until he too was led away at the end.13

By then it was late afternoon, and some of the men found a pleasant farmhouse and played cards.

the men of Reserve Police Battalion 101 unofficially dubbed this phase of the Final Solution the Judenjagd, or “Jew hunt.”

The German police then went in search of the owner of the house, a Polish woman who had managed to flee in time. She was tracked to her father’s house in a nearby village. 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.

Adolf Bittner likewise credited his early and open opposition to the battalion’s Jewish actions with sparing him from further involvement. I must emphasize that from the first days I left no doubt among my comrades that I disapproved of these measures and never volunteered for them. Thus, on one of the first searches for Jews, one of my comrades clubbed a Jewish woman in my presence, and I hit him in the face. A report was made, and in that way my attitude became known to my superiors. I was never officially punished. But anyone who knows how the system works knows that outside official punishment there is the possibility for chicanery that more than makes up for punishment. Thus I was assigned Sunday duties and special watches.31 But Bittner was never assigned to a firing squad.

Their investigations led them to compile a list of the crucial traits (tested for by the so-called F-scale) of the “authoritarian personality”: rigid adherence to conventional values; submissiveness to authority figures; aggressiveness toward outgroups; opposition to introspection, reflection, and creativity; a tendency to superstition and stereotyping; preoccupation with power and “toughness”; destructiveness and cynicism; projectivity (“the disposition to believe that wild and dangerous things go on in the world” and “the projection outward of unconscious emotional impulses”); and an exaggerated concern with sexuality.

But he concludes that Steiner’s “sleeper” is a very common trait and that under particular circumstances most people have a capacity for extreme violence and the destruction of human life.

“Evil that arises out of ordinary thinking and is committed by ordinary people is the norm, not the exception.”

Bauman argues that most people “slip” into the roles society provides them, and he is very critical of any implication that “faulty personalities” are the cause of human cruelty.

For him the exception—the real “sleeper”—is the rare individual who has the capacity to resist authority and assert moral autonomy but who is seldom aware of this hidden strength until put to the test.

Hence “ideological justification is vital in obtaining willing obedience, for it permits the person to see his behavior as serving a desirable end.”

Only the very exceptional remained indifferent to taunts of “weakling” from their comrades and could live with the fact that they were considered to be “no man.”49

Nothing helped the Nazis to wage a race war so much as the war itself.

The Drowned and the Saved,

(Conceiving and organizing the Sonderkommandos was in Levi’s opinion National Socialism’s “most demonic crime”.)

If the men of Reserve Police Battalion 101 could become killers under such circumstances, what group of men cannot?

The Destruction of the European Jews,