Ordinary Men (2 page)

As a methodology, however, “the history of everyday life” is neutral. It becomes an evasion, an attempt to “normalize” the Third Reich, only if it fails to confront the degree to which the criminal policies of the regime inescapably permeated everyday existence under the Nazis. Particularly for the German occupiers stationed in the conquered lands of eastern Europe—literally tens of thousands of men from all walks of life—the mass-murder policies of the regime were not aberrational or exceptional events that scarcely ruffled the surface of everyday life. As the story of Reserve Police Battalion 101 demonstrates, mass murder and routine had become one. Normality itself had become exceedingly abnormal.

Another possible objection to this kind of study concerns the
degree of empathy for the perpetrators that is inherent in trying to understand them. Clearly the writing of such a history requires the rejection of demonization. The policemen in the battalion who carried out the massacres and deportations, like the much smaller number who refused or evaded, were human beings. I must recognize that in the same situation, I could have been either a killer or an evader—both were human—if I want to understand and explain the behavior of both as best I can. 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. Shortly before his death at the hands of the Nazis, the French Jewish historian Marc Bloch wrote, “When all is said and done, a single word, ‘understanding,’ is the beacon light of our studies.”
³
It is in that spirit that I have tried to write this book.

One condition placed upon my access to the judicial interrogations must be made clear. Regulations and laws for the protection of privacy have become increasingly restrictive in Germany, especially in the past decade. The state of Hamburg and its court records are no exception to this trend. Before receiving permission to see the court records of Reserve Police Battalion 101, therefore, I had to promise not to use the men’s real names. The names of the battalion commander, Major Wilhelm Trapp, and the three company commanders, Captain Wolfgang Hoffmann, Captain Julius Wohlauf, and Lieutenant Hartwig Gnade, appear in other documentation in archives outside Germany. I have used their real names, for in their cases there is no confidentiality to breach. However, I have used pseudonyms (designated at first occurrence by an asterisk) for all other battalion members who appear in the text of this book. The notes refer to those giving testimony simply by first name and
last initial. While this promise of confidentiality and use of pseudonyms is, in my opinion, an unfortunate limitation on strict historical accuracy, I do not believe it undermines the integrity or primary usefulness of this study.

A number of people and institutions provided indispensable support during the research and writing of this study. Oberstaatsanwalt (Senior Prosecutor) Alfred Streim made available to me the incomparable collection of German judicial records in Ludwigsburg. Oberstaatsanwältin Helge Grabitz encouraged me to work with the court records in Hamburg, supported my application for access, and generously helped in every way during my stay there. Pacific Lutheran University provided me with financial awards for the two trips to German archives that initiated and concluded my research on this project. The Alexander von Humboldt Foundation likewise aided one research visit in Germany. The bulk of the research and writing was completed during sabbatical leave from Pacific Lutheran University, and with the support of a Fulbright Research Grant to Israel. Daniel Krauskopf, executive secretary of the United States—Israel Educational Foundation, deserves special thanks for facilitating my research in both Israel and Germany.

Peter Hayes of Northwestern University and Saul Friedlander of UCLA offered opportunities to present initial research findings at conferences they organized at their respective institutions. Many friends and colleagues listened patiently, offered suggestions, and provided encouragement along the way. Philip Nordquist, Dennis Martin, Audrey Euyler, Robert Hoyer, Ian Kershaw, Robert Gellately, Yehuda Bauer, Dinah Porat, Michael Marrus, Bettina Birn, George Mosse, Elisabeth Domansky, Gitta Sereny, Carlo Ginzburg, and the late Uwe Adam deserve special mention. To Raul Hilberg I owe a special debt. In 1982 he called attention to the indispensability of the Order Police to the Final Solution, continuing as so often in the past to set the agenda for further Holocaust research.
⁴
He then personally interested himself in the publication of this study. For such
help, both now and on earlier occasions in my career, the dedication of this book is an inadequate expression of my esteem and gratitude. For the continued support and understanding of my family, who have patiently endured the gestation period of another book, I am particularly grateful.

Tacoma, November 1991

I
N THE VERY EARLY HOURS OF JULY 13, 1942, THE MEN OF
Reserve Police Battalion 101 were roused from their bunks in the large brick school building that served as their barracks in the Polish town of Biłgoraj. They were middle-aged family men of working- and lower-middle-class background from the city of Hamburg. Considered too old to be of use to the German army, they had been drafted instead into the Order Police. Most were raw recruits with no previous experience in German occupied territory. They had arrived in Poland less than three weeks earlier.

It was still quite dark as the men climbed into the waiting trucks. Each policeman had been given extra ammunition, and additional boxes had been loaded onto the trucks as well.
¹
They
were headed for their first major action, though the men had not yet been told what to expect.

The convoy of battalion truckss moved out of Biłgoraj in the dark, heading eastward on a jarring washboard gravel road. The pace was slow, and it took an hour and a half to two hours to arrive at the destination—the village of Józefów—a mere thirty kilometers away. Just as the sky was beginning to lighten, the convoy halted outside Józefów. It was a typical Polish village of modest white houses with thatched straw roofs. Among its inhabitants were 1,800 Jews.

The village was totally quiet.
²
The men of Reserve Police Battalion 101 climbed down from their trucks and assembled in a half-circle around their commander, Major Wilhelm Trapp, a fifty-three-year-old career policeman affectionately known by his men as “Papa Trapp.” The time had come for Trapp to address the men and inform them of the assignment the battalion had received.

Pale and nervous, with choking voice and tears in his eyes, Trapp visibly fought to control himself as he spoke. The battalion, he said plaintively, had to perform a frightfully unpleasant task. This assignment was not to his liking, indeed it was highly regrettable, but the orders came from the highest authorities. If it would make their task any easier, the men should remember that in Germany the bombs were falling on women and children.

He then turned to the matter at hand. The Jews had instigated the American boycott that had damaged Germany, one policeman remembered Trapp saying. There were Jews in the village of Józefów who were involved with the partisans, he explained according to two others. The battalion had now been ordered to round up these Jews. The male Jews of working age were to be separated and taken to a work camp. The remaining Jews—the women, children, and elderly—were to be shot on the spot by the battalion. Having explained what awaited his men, Trapp then made an extraordinary offer: if any of the older men among them did not feel up to the task that lay before him, he could step out.
³

H
OW DID A BATTALION OF MIDDLE-AGED RESERVE POLICEMEN
find themselves facing the task of shooting some 1,500 Jews in the Polish village of Józefów in the summer of 1942? Some background is needed, both on the institution of the Order Police (Ordnungspolizei, or Orpo) and on its role in the Nazi policy of murdering the Jews of Europe.

The Order Police resulted from the third attempt in interwar Germany to create large police formations with military training and equipment.
¹
In the wake of the German defeat in World War I, revolution broke out in Germany. As the army dissolved, military officers and government officials fearful of being swept away by revolutionary forces organized counterrevolutionary paramilitary units known as the Freikorps. When the domestic
situation stabilized in 1919, many of the Freikorps men were merged with regular police into large formations stationed in barracks and on hand to combat any further resurgence of the revolutionary threat. The Allies, however, demanded the dissolution of these police formations in 1920 as a potential violation of the clause of the Versailles Treaty limiting Germany’s standing army to 100,000 men.

After the Nazi regime was established in 1933, a “police army” (Armee der Landespolizei) of 56,000 men was created. These units were stationed in barracks and given full military training as part of Germany’s covert rearmament. When Hitler openly defied the disarmament provisions of the Versailles Treaty and reintroduced military conscription in 1935, the “police army” was merged into the rapidly enlarging regular army to provide cadres of commissioned and noncommissioned officers. The “police army” played no small role as a training ground for future army officers. As of 1942, no fewer than ninety-seven generals in the German army had previously served in the “police army” of 1933-35.
²

The preservation of large military formations within the police had to await the appointment of Heinrich Himmler, already head of the SS, as chief of German police in 1936, with jurisdiction over all police units in the Third Reich. Himmler divided the various German police into two branches, each under a main office in Berlin. Under the Security Police (Sicherheitspolizei) Main Office of Reinhard Heydrich were the notorious Secret State Police (Geheime Staatspolizei, or Gestapo), to combat the regime’s political enemies, and the Criminal Police (Kriminalpolizei, or Kripo), which was basically a detective force for nonpolitical crimes. The second branch of the police was the Order Police Main Office under Kurt Daluege. Daluege had charge of the city or municipal police (Schutzpolizei, or Schupo), the rural police, equivalent perhaps to county troopers (Gendarmerie), and the small-town or community police (Gemeindepolizei).

By 1938 Daluege had over 62,000 policemen under his
jurisdiction. Nearly 9,000 of them were organized into police companies called
Polizei-Hundertschaften
of 108 men each. In each of ten cities in Germany, three police companies were brought together into yet larger “police training units” (
Polizei-Ausbildungsabteilungen
).

In 1938 and 1939, the Order Police expanded rapidly as the increasing threat of war gave prospective recruits a further inducement. If they enlisted in the Order Police, the new young policemen were exempted from conscription into the army. Moreover, because the police battalions—like U.S. National Guard units—were organized regionally, they seemed to offer the guarantee of completing one’s alternative to regular military service not only more safely but closer to home.

With the outbreak of war in September 1939, the Order Police had reached a strength of 131,000 men. The big threat to its large military formations was, of course, absorption into the German army, a move avoided through a compromise for which the Order Police paid a heavy price. Many of its best units were formed into a police division of nearly 16,000 men that was put at the disposal of the army. (It subsequently fought in the Ardennes in 1940 and took part in the attack on Leningrad in 1941, before Himmler got it back in 1942 as the Fourth SS-Polizei Grenadier Division.) Two police regiments raised in newly seized Danzig were also transferred to the army in October 1939. Finally, the Order Police provided over 8,000 men for the army’s military police, or Feldgendarmerie. In return the other draft-age men of the Order Police remained exempt from military conscription.

To replenish its ranks, the Order Police was allowed to recruit 26,000 young German men—9,000 volunteers born between 1918 and 1920, and 17,000 volunteers born between 1909 and 1912—as well as 6,000 so-called “ethnic Germans,” or
Volksdeutsche
, who had lived outside Germany prior to 1939. In addition, the Order Police received authorization to conscript 91,500 reservists born between 1901 and 1909—an age group not as yet subject to the military draft. Order Police conscription was
gradually extended to still older men, and by mid-1940, the size of the Order Police had grown to 244,500.
³

The Order Police had scarcely been taken into account in prewar mobilization plans, and little thought had been given to its possible wartime use, but Germany’s military success and rapid expansion quickly created the need for more occupation forces behind the lines. With the outbreak of war, twenty-one police battalions of approximately 500 men each were formed from the various police companies and training units in Germany; thirteen of them were attached to the armies invading Poland. They were subsequently involved in rounding up Polish soldiers cut off behind the advancing lines, collecting weapons and military equipment abandoned by the retreating Poles, and providing other services to secure the rear areas.

The number of police battalions rapidly expanded to 101 by mid-1940, as the 26,000 new young recruits and many of the older drafted reservists were formed into battalion units as well. Thirteen battalions were stationed in German-occupied central Poland, known as the General Government, and seven were stationed in the western Polish territories annexed to the Third Reich, the “incorporated territories.” Ten were stationed in the occupied Czech lands of Bohemia and Moravia, known as the Protectorate. In addition, six battalions were stationed in Norway, and four in the Netherlands.
⁴
The Order Police were quickly becoming an essential source of manpower for holding down German-occupied Europe.