Ordinary Men (6 page)
Authors: Christopher R. Browning
This document demonstrates many things: the desperate attempts of the deported Jews to escape the death train; the scanty manpower employed by the Germans (a mere 10 men to guard over 8,000 Jews); the unimaginably terrible conditions—forced marches over many miles, terrible heat, days without food and water, the packing of 200 Jews into each train car, etc.—that led to fully 25 percent of the deported Jews dying on the train from suffocation, heat prostration, and exhaustion (to say nothing of those killed in the shooting, which was so constant that the guards expended their entire ammunition supply as well as replenishment); the casual mention that even before the deportations hundreds of Jews judged too old, frail, or sick to get to the train were routinely shot in each action. Moreover, the document makes clear that this action was only one among many in which members of Reserve Police Battalion 133 participated alongside the Security Police in Galicia during the late summer of 1942.
Such documents, however, do not tell us much that we would like to know about the “grass-roots” perpetrators of the Final Solution. These men were not desk murderers who could take refuge in distance, routine, and bureaucratic euphemisms that veiled the reality of mass murder. These men saw their victims face to face. Their comrades had already shot all the Jews deemed too weak to be deported, and they subsequently worked viciously for hours to prevent their victims from escaping the train and hence the gas chambers awaiting them in Beżec. No one participating in the events described in this report could have had the slightest doubt about what he was involved in, namely a mass murder program to exterminate the Jews of Galicia.
But how did these men first become mass murderers? What happened in the unit when they first killed? What choices, if any, did they have, and how did they respond? What happened to the men as the killing stretched on week after week, month after month? Documents like the one on the Kołomyja transport give us a vivid snapshot of a single incident, but they do not reveal the personal dynamics of how a group of normal middle-aged German men became mass murderers. For that we must return to the story of Reserve Police Battalion 101.
Reserve Police Battalion 101
W
HEN GERMANY INVADED POLAND IN SEPTEMBER 1939, POLICE
Battalion 101, based in Hamburg, was one of the initial battalions attached to a German army group and sent to Poland. Crossing the border from Oppeln in Silesia, the battalion passed through Częstochowa to the Polish city of Kielce. There it was involved in rounding up Polish soldiers and military equipment behind German lines and guarding a prisoner of war camp. On December 17, 1939, the battalion returned to Hamburg, where about a hundred of its career policemen were transferred to form additional units. They were replaced by middle-aged reservists drafted in the fall of 1939.
1
In May 1940, after a period of training, the battalion was
dispatched from Hamburg to the Warthegau, one of the four regions in western Poland annexed to the Third Reich as the incorporated territories. Stationed first in Poznań (Posen) until late June, and then in -Łódź (renamed Litzmannstadt by the victorious Germans), it carried out “resettlement actions” for a period of five months. As part of a demographic scheme of Hitler and Himmlers to “germanize” these newly annexed regions, that is, to populate them with “racially pure” Germans, all Poles and other so-called undesirables—Jews and Gypsies—were to be expelled from the incorporated territories into central Poland. In accordance with provisions of an agreement between Germany and the Soviet Union, ethnic Germans living in Soviet territory were to be repatriated and resettled in the recently evacuated farms and apartments of the expelled Poles. The “racial purification” of the incorporated territories desired by Hitler and Himmler was never achieved, but hundreds of thousands of people were shoved around like so many pieces on a chessboard in pursuit of their vision of a racially reorganized eastern Europe.
The battalion’s summary report boasted of its zealous participation in the “resettlement“:
In actions night and day without pause, 100% of the battalion’s strength was employed in all of the districts of the Warthegau. On the average some 350 Polish peasant families were evacuated daily…. During the peak of the evacuation period they [the men of the battalion] could not return to quarters for eight days and nights. The men had the opportunity to sleep only while traveling at night by truck…. In the biggest action, the battalion evacuated about 900 families … on one day with only its own forces and 10 translators.
In all the battalion evacuated 36,972 people out of a targeted 58,628. About 22,000 people escaped the evacuations by fleeing.
2
One drafted reservist, Bruno Probst,
*
recalled the battalion’s role in these actions.
In the resettlement of the native population, primarily in the small villages, I experienced the first excesses and killings. It was always thus, that with our arrival in the villages, the resettlement commission was already there…. This so-called resettlement commission consisted of members of the black [-uniformed] SS and SD as well as civilians. From them we received cards with numbers. The houses of the village were also designated with the same numbers. The cards handed to us designated the houses that we were to evacuate. During the early period we endeavored to fetch all people out of the houses, without regard for whether they were old, sick, or small children. The commission quickly found fault with our procedures. They objected that we struggled under the burden of the old and sick. To be precise, they did not initially give us the order to shoot them on the spot, rather they contented themselves with making it clear to us that nothing could be done with such people. In two cases I remember that such people were shot at the collection point. In the first case it was an old man and in the second case an old woman…. both persons were shot not by the men but by noncommissioned officers.
3
Others in the battalion also remembered the resettlement actions, but no one else remembered or admitted to such violence.
4
One policeman did recall that the battalion had provided the Security Police with firing squads for the execution of 100 to 120 Poles during its stay in Poznań.
5
Following its five-month resettlement campaign, the battalion carried out “pacification actions.” Combing villages and woods, they caught 750 Poles who had evaded the earlier evacuations.
Luków, probably in the fall of 1942, when the Order Police liquidated the main ghetto there. (
Courtesy of Yad Vashem
)
The Międzyrzec “transit” ghetto, liquidated in a series of seven “actions” between August 1942 and July 1943. Lieutenant Gnade’s Second Company referred to Międzyrzec by the apt German nickname
Menschenschreck
, or “human horror. (
Courtesy of the Jewish Historical Institute of Warsaw
)
Order Police stand guard in the marketplace during the “sixth action,” May 26, 1943, when 1,000 Jews were deported to the labor camp at Majdanek. In earlier Międzyrzec deportations, the Jews were sent directly to the gas chambers of Treblinka. (
Courtesy of Yad Vashem
)
Order Police inarch the Międzyrzec Jews through town, May 26, 1943. The Jews deported to Majdanek that day would perish in the
Erntefest
massacre of November 1943. (
Courtesy of the Jewish Historical Institute of Warsaw
)
Lieutenant Gnade in front of his “undressing barracks” in Międzyrzec. (
Courtesy of Yad Vashem
)
At the “undressing barracks”—a stage in the deportation process first introduced by Lieutenant Gnade in the fall of 1942, when the Miédzyrzec ghetto was subjected to a particularly brutal series of “clearing operations”—Order Police forced the Jews to strip and searched them for valuables. (
Courtesy of Yad Vashem
)
