Ordinary Men summary

Reserve Police Battalion 101 belonged to the institution of the Order Police. Originally, this branch was meant to consolidate city, rural, and community police. As the war proceeded, however, the Order Police dramatically expanded its numbers to hold down Germany’s rapidly-expanding territory in Europe. Thus, the men of Reserve Police Battalion 101 were not enthusiastic Nazis but⁠ mostly older reservists conscripted as a last resort.

In the summer of 1941, leading Nazi Heinrich Himmler began disseminating the concept of the “Final Solution to the Jewish Question in Europe.” Hitler intended to murder the Jewish population of Europe using mass extermination camps. 

The men of Reserve Police Battalion 101 were about to become killers. But not all of them –⁠ not yet.

Lieutenant Heinz Buchmann was the first to refuse. Upon hearing of the impending massacre the night before it occurred, he immediately went to Trapp’s adjutant, First Lieutenant Hagen. He told Hagen he “would in no case participate in such an action, in which defenseless women and children are shot.” He asked for another assignment and was given one.

“I’d go crazy if I had to do that again,” exclaimed one policeman to First Sergeant Kammer of First Company, referring to Józefów. The sentiment was shared among many of the men. Yet after the action, just two men found a way to remove themselves from the battalion and return to Germany. Lieutenant Bachmann –⁠ ever the loudest voice of opposition –⁠ also asked to be transferred back to Hamburg. He would have to wait until November, but in the meantime, he declared that he would not take part in any murderous actions unless Trapp personally gave him an order.

The resistance of these few men did not pose a problem to Trapp and his superiors. The much bigger issue was alleviating the psychological burden on the bulk of the men who continued to kill. This is why, in the actions following Józefów, some key changes were made. 

Lieutenant Hartwig Gnade was, according to a preponderance of testimony, a “Nazi by conviction” and an anti-Semite. An unpredictable man, he was sometimes friendly and approachable and other times cruel and vicious. During the Jewish action that took place in Łomazy, Poland, he became a drunkard and a sadist too.

In the forest outside of the city, a drunk Gnade⁠ sought to entertain himself. Sixty to seventy Jewish people had been tasked with digging a grave for themselves and their fellow villagers. While waiting for them to finish, Gnade picked out about twenty-five elderly men and forced them to crawl on the ground, naked. Then he shouted for his officers to fetch clubs and start beating them. 

Eventually, the stream of Jewish people entering the Lublin district stopped flowing. All the towns and ghettos in the north had been cleared. Next, it was time for Reserve Battalion 101 to track down and eliminate those who had managed to escape and hide. These searches became known as the so-called “Jew hunts.”

An estimated 1,000 persons in total were shot during the hunts. The battalion worked with local Polish people who acted as informers, searching for and revealing Jewish hiding places. 

By the end of 1943, the district of Lublin was, for all intents and purposes, judenfrei –⁠ free of Jewish people. Reserve Police Battalion 101 had participated in the direct shooting deaths of at least 38,000 and placed 45,000 on trains to the Treblinka extermination camp. Their total body count was at least 83,000, all for a battalion of fewer than 500 men.

This leads us to the ultimate question: Why? Why did most men in Reserve Police Battalion 101 become killers, while a minority of 10 to 20 percent did not?

The major actions of Police Battalion 101 against Jewish people in Poland included massacres, deportations, and “hunts” in which those who were hiding or had escaped were systematically tracked and killed. By the end of the war, the battalion had the second-highest death count of any German police battalion. This fact is remarkable because demographically, the members of the battalion were far from being obvious candidates as mass murderers. Instead, these were ordinary men who became desensitized to brutal acts of murder and torture through a combination of repeated exposure, dehumanization of their victims, a military culture of conformity, the bureaucratization of atrocity, and other socio-psychological factors.