Ordinary Men (19 page)

Others were more cautious and refrained from shooting only when no officer was present and they were among trusted comrades who shared their views. As Martin Detmold* recalled, “In small actions it often occurred that Jews whom we had picked up were let go again. That happened when one was sure that no superior could learn anything of it. Over time one learned how to evaluate one’s comrades and if one could risk not shooting captured Jews contrary to standing orders but rather letting them go.”
³⁷
The battalion communications staff also claimed that
they ignored Jews they encountered in the countryside when they were laying lines on their own.
³⁸
When shooting at a distance rather than giving a neck shot, at least one policeman merely fired “into the air.’
³⁹

How many hundreds of Jews—indeed, probably thousands—did Reserve Police Battalion 101 shoot in the course of the “Jew hunt”? No reports of such figures survive for this unit. However, we can get a sense of how important a component the “Jew hunt” was in the Final Solution from surviving reports of three other units operating in Poland.

From May to October 1943, long after the vast bulk of the Jews who had fled from the ghetto roundups and attempted to hide had already been tracked down and shot, the commander of the Order Police for the Lublin district (KdO)—these figures would therefore include the contributions of Reserve Police Battalion 101—reported to his superior in Kraków (BdO) the monthly body count of Jews shot by his men. For this six-month period, long past the killing peak in the Lublin district, the total was 1,695, or an average of nearly 283 per month. Two months were particularly prominent: August, when another large forest sweep was carried out, and October, when the escapees from the Sobibór death camp breakout were tracked down.
⁴⁰

More indicative of the killing rate for the “Jew hunt” during the peak period are the reports of the Gendarmerie platoon of Warsaw. This unit of only 80 men, responsible for patroling the nearby towns and countryside surrounding the city, was led by Lieutenant Liebscher, a notoriously energetic and eager participant in the Final Solution. His daily reports from March 26 to September 21, 1943, reflect a total of 1,094 Jews killed by his unit, for an average of nearly 14 Jews per policeman. The peak months, not unexpectedly, were April and May, when Jews were desperately seeking to escape the final liquidation of the Warsaw ghetto and had to pass through Liebscher’s territory. Liebscher’s reports contained detailed descriptions of a variety of daily incidents. They closed with the heading “Proceeded according to existing guidelines,” followed simply by a date, place, and
number of Jews, male and female. In the end, even the heading was dropped as superfluous, and only the date, place, and number of Jewish men and women were listed, without further explanation.
⁴¹

Perhaps most relevant and most closely parallel to the situation of Reserve Police Battalion 101 was that of a company of Reserve Police Battalion 133 stationed in Rawa Ruska in the neighboring district of Galicia to the east of Lublin. According to six weekly reports for the period November 1 to December 12, 1942, this company executed 481 Jews who had either evaded deportation by hiding or jumped from trains on the way to Bełzec. For this brief six-week period, therefore, the company on average killed nearly three Jews per policeman in an area that had already been cleared by deportation and was being kept
judenfrei
by the “Jew hunt.”
⁴²

Though the “Jew hunt” has received little attention, it was an important and statistically significant phase of the Final Solution. A not inconsiderable percentage of Jewish victims in the General Government lost their lives in this way. Statistics aside, the “Jew hunt” is a psychologically important key to the mentality of the perpetrators. Many of the German occupiers in Poland may have witnessed or participated in ghetto roundups on several occasions—in a lifetime, a few brief moments that could be easily repressed. But the “Jew hunt” was not a brief episode. It was a tenacious, remorseless, ongoing campaign in which the “hunters” tracked down and killed their “prey” in direct and personal confrontation. It was not a passing phase but an existential condition of constant readiness and intention to kill every last Jew who could be found.

O
N OCTOBER 28, 1942, THE HSSPF FOR THE GENERAL GOVERNMENT
, Wilhelm Krüger, decreed that eight Jewish ghettos could remain in the district of Lublin.
¹
Four of the eight sites were within the security zone of Reserve Police Battalion 101: Łuków, Międzyrzec, Parczew, and Końskowola. In fact, only the first two remained as Jewish ghettos after the fall deportations, along with Piaski, Izbica, and Włodawa elsewhere in the Lublin district. Faced with the constant threat of death by starvation and exposure on the one hand, or betrayal and shooting on the other, many Jews who had fled to the forests during the deportations in October and November subsequently returned to the reinstated ghettos of Łuków and Międzyrzec. The winter weather made life in the forests increasingly difficult and precarious; any
movement in the snow left tracks, and on at least one occasion frozen feces gave away a Jewish hiding place carved out within a haystack.
²
Thus, when it appeared that the deportations had come to an end, many Jews calculated that they stood a much better chance of survival within one of the permitted ghettos than as hunted prey in the forests.

In fact the deportations from the county of Radzyń had ended for the moment, but life in the ghettos of Łuków and Międzyrzec was not without continuing danger. In Łuków the SS ghetto administrator, Josef Burger, had 500 to 600 Jews shot in December to reduce the ghetto population.
³
In Międzyrzec 500 Jewish workers in the brush factory who had been spared the fall deportation were deported to the work camp at Trawniki on December 30, 1942.
⁴
The following night, around 11:00 p.m. on New Year’s Eve, Security Police from neighboring Biała Podlaska showed up at the Międzyrzec ghetto in inebriated condition and began shooting the remaining Jews “for sport” until the Radzyń Security Police arrived and chased them away.
⁵

After four months of relative calm, the end came. On the night of May 1, the men of Second Company surrounded the ghetto in Międzyrzec, where they had carried out so many deportations the previous fall. Joined once again by a unit from Trawniki, they closed in on the ghetto in the morning and assembled the Jews in the marketplace. The policemen estimated the number of deportees in this action at 700 to 1,000, though one admitted it was said to have been as high as 3,000.
⁶
One Jewish witness estimated 4,000 to 5,000.
⁷
Once again the Jews were thoroughly searched and dispossessed in Gnade’s undressing barracks and then stuffed into train cars so tightly that the doors would barely close. Some were sent to the Majdanek labor camp in Lublin, but most were deported to the gas chambers of Treblinka to conclude the so-called fifth action in Międzyrzec.
⁸
The “sixth action” occurred on May 26, when another 1,000 Jews were sent to the Majdanek camp.
⁹
At that point only 200 Jews remained. Some escaped, but the last 170 were shot by the Security Police on July 17, 1943, in the “seventh” and final
action, after which Międzyrzec was proclaimed
judenfrei
. On May 2, simultaneously with the renewed deportations from Międzyrzec by Gnade’s Second Company, SS units from Lublin along with Ukrainian auxiliaries from Trawniki liquidated the ghetto in Łuków, deporting an additional 3,000 to 4,000 Jews to Treblinka.
¹⁰

Many of the men who had come to Poland with Reserve Police Battalion 101 in June 1942 were gradually reassigned to new tasks. During the winter of 1942-43, the older men—those born before 1898—were sent back to Germany.
¹¹
At the same time men were culled from each platoon of the battalion and assembled in a special unit under Lieutenant Brand. They were sent back to Zamość in the southern part of the district to take part in the expulsion of Poles from villages as part of Himmler’s and Globocnik’s plan for a pure German settlement area deep in Poland.
¹²
In early 1943 a group of younger noncommissioned officers from the battalion was reassigned to the Waffen-SS and sent to specialized training.
¹³
Somewhat later Lieutenant Gnade was transferred to Lublin to form a special guard company. He took Sergeant Steinmetz as his deputy.
¹⁴
Gnade returned briefly to Międzyrzec to conduct the May deportations, however. Finally, Lieutenant Scheer was also reassigned to Lublin, to take command of one of two special “pursuit platoons” (
Jagdzüge
) especially formed to intensify the hunt for partisan bands. Some reinforcements were received to fill the void, especially a group of Berliners to help fill out depleted Second Company.
¹⁵
But for the most part, Reserve Police Battalion 101 remained under-strength.

Because of the high rate of turnover and reassignment, only a portion of the policemen who had taken part in the first massacre at Józefów were still with the battalion in November 1943, when its participation in the Final Solution culminated in the great “harvest festival” (
Erntefest
) massacre, the single largest German killing operation against Jews in the entire war. With a victim total of 42,000 Jews in the Lublin district,
Erntefest
surpassed even the notorious Babi Yar massacre of more than 33,000 Jews
outside Kiev. It was exceeded only by the Rumanian massacre of more than 50,000 Odessan Jews in October 1941.

Erntefest
was the culmination of Himmler’s crusade to destroy Polish Jewry. As the murder campaign gained momentum in 1942, Himmler had been plagued with complaints from industrial and military authorities about the removal of Jewish workers essential to the war effort. In response to such complaints, which he viewed as pure pretense, he agreed to spare some Jewish workers on the condition that they were lodged in camps and ghettos entirely under SS control. This allowed Himmler to parry pragmatic arguments based on the necessities of the war economy while insuring his ultimate control over the fate of all Jews. For in the end, the sanctuary of the labor camps and work ghettos was only temporary. As Himmler said, “There too the Jews shall likewise one day disappear in accordance with the wish of the Führer.”
¹⁶

In the Lublin district, work ghettos in Międzyrzec, Łuków, Piaski, Izbica, and Włodawa had been allowed to continue in existence through the winter of 1942-43. The latter three ghettos were eliminated in March and April 1943; as we have seen, Międzyrzec and Łuków suffered a similar fate in May.
¹⁷
Thereafter the only Jews in the Lublin district left alive by German consent were some 45,000 workers in the labor camp empire of Odilo Globocnik. These included a few survivors of the Lublin ghettos, as well as workers sent from the liquidated ghettos of Warsaw and Białystok.

By the fall of 1943, two things were apparent to Himmler. First, the work Jews in the camps would have to be killed if his mission were to be completed. Second, over the past six months Jewish resistance had arisen in Warsaw (April), Treblinka (July), Biabłystok (August), and Sobibór (October), when the Jews in those places saw no further hope of survival. 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. This strategy and hope were the crucial preconditions for continuing Jewish compliance. But the Jews were gradually being stripped of their illusions. The Germans encountered resistance when they tried to carry out the final liquidation of the Warsaw and Białystok ghettos, and revolts broke out in the death camps of Treblinka and Sobibór when the work Jews there realized that the camps were about to be closed. Himmler could not expect to liquidate the Lublin work camps gradually or one by one without encountering further Jewish resistance born of desperation. The inmates of the Lublin labor camps would therefore have to be killed in a single massive operation that would catch them by surprise. Such was the genesis of
Erntefest
.
¹⁸

Mass killing on such a scale required planning and preparation. Globocnik’s recent successor as SSPF, Jakob Sporrenberg, traveled to Krakow, where he consulted with his superior, Wilhelm Krüger. He returned with a special folder and began issuing instructions.
¹⁹
In late October Jewish prisoners were put to work digging trenches just outside the camps at Majdanek, Trawniki, and Poniatowa. Though the trenches were three meters deep and one and a half to three meters wide, the fact that they were dug in a zigzag pattern gave credence to the claim that they were intended as protection against air raids.
²⁰
Mobilization of SS and police units from all over the General Government then began. On the evening of November 2, Sporrenberg met with the commanders of the various forces, which included Waffen-SS units from the districts of Krakow and Warsaw, Police Regiment 22 from Krakow, Lublin’s own Police Regiment 25 (including Reserve Police Battalion 101), and the Lublin Security Police, as well as the commanders of the camps at Majdanek, Trawniki, and Poniatowa, and Sporrenberg’s SSPF staff. The meeting room was full. Sporrenberg gave instructions from the special folder he had brought back from Kraków.
²¹
The massive killing operation began the next morning.

Members of Reserve Police Battalion 101 participated in virtually every phase of the
Erntefest
massacre in Lublin. They arrived in the district capital on November 2 (so Trapp presumably attended Sporrenberg’s conference) and were lodged overnight. Early on the morning of November 3, they took up their stations. One group from the battalion helped to march Jews from various small work camps around Lublin to the Majdanek concentration camp several kilometers from the city center on the main road leading southeast.
²²
The largest contingent of Reserve Police Battalion 101 took up positions five meters apart on both sides of the angled street that led from the main highway past the commandant’s house to the entrance of the inner camp. Here they watched as an endless stream of Jews from various work sites in Lublin filed past.
²³
Woman guards on bicycles escorted 5,000 to 6,000 women prisoners from the “old airport camp” where they had been employed sorting the warehouses of clothing collected at the death camps. Another 8,000 male Jews were also marched past in the course of the day. Together with the 3,500 to 4,000 Jews already in the camp, they swelled the victim pool to some 16,500 to 18,000.
²⁴
As the Jews passed between the chain of reserve policemen into the camp, music blared from two loudspeaker trucks. Despite the attempt to drown out other noise, the sound of steady gunfire could be heard from the camp.
²⁵