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

By mid-November 1942, the ghettos and towns of the district have been cleared of Jewish inhabitants and the battalion is “assigned to track down and systematically eliminate all those who [have] escape[d] the previous roundups and [are] now in hiding” (121). The men name “this phase of Final Solution the Judenjaga, or ‘Jew Hunt’” (123).

Although there are different aspects to this operation, including actions in towns, farms, and agricultural estates, “[t]he most common form of the ‘Jew Hunt’ [is] the small patrol into the forest to liquidate an individual bunker” (126) Jews are hiding in. These actions are so common that some policemen will later refer to them as “our daily bread” (126).

During the deportations, the men have “herded masses of people onto the trains but could distance themselves from the killing at the other end of the trip,” and their “sense of detachment from the fate of the Jews they deported [is] unshakable” (127). However, with the “Jew Hunt” they come “almost full circle back to the experience at Józefów”; once again, “the killing [is] personal,” and the men have to see “their victims face to face” (127). They also once again have “a considerable degree of choice” (127).

The ways in which each man “exercise[s] that choice reveal[s] the extent to which the battalion [has] divided into the ‘tough’ and the ‘weak’” (127). Many have “become numbed, indifferent, and in some cases, eager killers” (127). Their “[g]rowing callousness” is seen in their “post-shooting behavior,” as men who had once “returned to their quarters shaken and embittered, without appetite or desire to talk about what they had just done” now joke about their experiences, even crassly claiming that the men eat “the brains of the slaughtered Jews” (128).

Other soldiers limit “their participation in the killing process, refraining when they [can] do so without great cost or inconvenience” (127). Often, this is achieved by simply not volunteering for Jewish actions. One policeman will later claim that “for the execution commandos basically enough volunteers responded” and “often there were so many volunteers that some of them had to be turned away” (128). Other policemen later suggest that this only applied to smaller actions, and that larger actions required a mix of volunteers and soldiers being assigned to shoot. 

Only a small “minority of nonconformists [manage] to preserve a beleaguered sphere of moral autonomy” (127) that allows them to avoid killing Jews. One way in which they achieve this is by making “no secret of their antipathy to the killing” (129) so that, although they have to face the mockery of their comrades, they are not assigned to the firing squads. One officer later recalls that “[n]o one ever approached [him] concerning these operations. For these actions the officers took ‘men’ with them, and in their eyes [the officer in question] was no ‘man’” (129). At least one police officer refuses to obey orders to shoot Jews, “simply walk[ing] away” from his unit and later “credit[ing] Trapp for his suffering no negative consequences” (130).

In the winter of 1942, confronting “the constant threat of death by starvation and exposure on the one hand, or betrayal and shooting on the other,” many of the Jews who had avoided deportation by hiding in the forests return to “the reinstated ghettos of Łuków and Miȩdzyrec” (133). On May 1, Second Company is ordered to once again clear the ghetto at Miȩdzyrec. It is unclear how many Jews are deported, with estimates ranging from 700 to 5,000. Another 1,000 are deported on May 26 and “the last 170 [are] shot by the Security Police on July 17, 1943” (134).

Many members of the battalion are reassigned, so that “only a portion” of those present at the Józefów massacre are still present when the unit takes part in “the great ‘harvest festival’ (Erntefest) massacre, the single largest German killing operation against Jews in the entire war” which has “a victim total of 42,000 Jews in the Lublin district” (135). Erntefest is “the culmination of Himmler’s crusade to destroy Polish Jewry” (136), including the thousands of Jews previously held in labor camps.

In the camps and ghettos, many Jews had previously “pursued the desperate strategy of ‘salvation through labor’” (137), hoping that working for their captors would keep them alive. However, these Jews have been “gradually […] stripped of their illusions” (137) and are increasingly offering only resistance and revolt. Himmler decides that the Jews imprisoned in the Lublin camps will “have to be killed in a single massive operation that [will] catch them by surprise” (137). Beginning on November 3, Erntefest is this operation.

The men of Battalion 101 are involved in “virtually every phase of the Erntefest massacre in Lublin” (138). They stand guard as “an endless stream of Jews” passes by them, on their way to barracks, where they must strip naked, before moving on to a series of “trenches that [have] been dug behind the camp” (138). Men of the battalion watch as “the Jews [are] driven naked from the barracks by other members of [the] battalion […] [and] driven directly into the graves and forced to lie down quite precisely on top of those who had been shot before them” (139).

The following day, the battalion participates in the massacre at the nearby Poniatowa labor camp, again forming “the human cordon through which the 14,000 work Jews” (140) are forced to march. One policeman, Martin Detmold, will later declare that:

[t]he whole business was the most gruesome I had ever seen in my life, because I was frequently able to see that after a burst had been fired the Jews were only wounded and those still living were more or less buried alive beneath the corpses of those shot later (140).

Other policemen are “long inured to the mass killing of Jews,” although many still get sick at the “bestial stench” of the “half-decomposed corpses” (141) being disinterred and burned afterwards.

This is the last time the battalion participates in the Final Solution. A “conservative estimate” of their participation in massacres, shootings during the “Jew hunts,” and involvement in deportations suggests that this “battalion of less than 500 men” had an “ultimate body count […] [of] at least 83,000 Jews” (142).