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Name: Ordinary Men
Rating: 4.7 (25 reviews)
Author: Christopher R. Browning

Christopher R. Browning

Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland

4.7 (25 ratings)

17 mins

Topics

European History Wars

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Ordinary Men
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What’s in it for me? The harrowing story of how a battalion of “ordinary men” became mass murderers.

Eleven officers, five administrative officials, and 486 noncommissioned officers. The vast majority came from Hamburg, one of the least Nazified cities in Germany.

Most of them had no military experience, meaning they had not previously been hardened by war. And most were older men of around forty years old –⁠ people who’d grown up with norms far removed from those of the Nazis. Sixty-three percent had working-class backgrounds and another thirty-five percent were lower-middle class –⁠ social classes much more associated with Communism and Social Democracy than Nazism.

This was Reserve Police Battalion 101, one of the major perpetrators of the Holocaust between 1942 and 1943.

Given its makeup, this battalion would not seem especially likely to have become a group of mass murderers. But that’s exactly what happened. In this Blink, you’ll find out how –⁠ and what it means for the rest of us “ordinary people.”

A few quick notes before we begin: First, be aware that some of the names used in this Blink are pseudonyms created by the author to comply with German privacy protection law. Second, this Blink contains disturbing descriptions of violence and anti-Semitism. Please take care when listening.

A Frightfully Unpleasant Task

It was a hot July morning in 1942 when the men of Reserve Police Battalion 101 were awoken and summoned into the trucks awaiting them. They would soon be shuttled, atop a bumpy gravel road, to the Polish town of Józefów.

When the men clambered down from the vehicles, they were met with the sight of a typical Polish village: white houses, thatched straw roofs. They also saw their commander, Major Wilhelm Trapp –⁠ or “Papa Trapp,” as the men affectionately called the fifty-three-year-old.

When Trapp began to speak, he didn’t do so with hate and anger in his voice. Instead, his words were choked, and his eyes were full of tears. On this day, he told them, the battalion would have to complete their first major action, and it would be a frightfully unpleasant task. Trapp did not like the assignment at all, yet it had come from the highest authorities.

What was the task? Well, as one policeman recalls Trapp saying, there were Jewish people in the village of Józefów involved with the “partisans” –⁠ members of the anti-German resistance. The battalion now needed to round them up and separate the young males, who would be taken to a work camp. The rest –⁠ including women, children, and the elderly –⁠ were to be shot on the spot.

Suddenly, a battalion of middle-aged, reserve policemen found themselves faced with a murderous task for which they were, by all appearances, unlikely candidates. How did this happen?

The Final Solution

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 Massacre at Józefów

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.

Again and Again

“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.

The Descent of Lieutenant Gnade

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.

The “Jew Hunts”

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.

Ordinary Men?

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?

Final Summary

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.

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What is Ordinary Men about?

Ordinary Men (1992) tells the disturbing tale of how a group of men went from “ordinary” to brutal, hardened killers executing the Nazi mission during the Holocaust. It examines in detail the evolution of these men’s attitudes, from the beginning when most experienced disgust at the gruesome tasks they were asked to carry out, through to the end when almost all had become accustomed to the cruelty and some even came to delight in it. Above all, it is a warning and a reminder of what humanity is capable of in its darkest moments.

Who should read Ordinary Men?

World War II and Holocaust historians
Survivors of the Holocaust and their relatives and ancestors
Anyone who thinks themselves incapable of acts of cruelty

About the Author

Christopher R. Browning is the professor emeritus of history at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. In 2006, he was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He won the National Jewish Book Award three times, including for Ordinary Men in addition to The Origins of the Final Solution and Remembering Survival.

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