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

“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.”

Despite treating his orders as something over which he personally has no choice, Trapp ensures that the men are given the option to “step out” if they wish. He will go on to protect those who do refuse to shoot from any official punishment, undermining the men’s later arguments that they had no choice but to follow orders. 

“The battalion and company commanders are especially to provide for the spiritual care of the men who participate in this action. The impressions of the day are to be blotted out through the holding of social events in the evenings.

“Furthermore the men are to be instructed continuously about the political necessity of the measures.”

The Nazi leaders were well aware of the psychological difficulties that could arise from taking part in mass executions. They provided specific directions intended to convince the men that the actions are regrettably necessary and to help them block out the traumatizing memories of their involvement. 

“This psychological burden was serious and extended even to Bach-Zelewski himself. Himmler’s SS doctor, reporting to the Reichsführer on Bach-Zewelski’s incapacitating illness in the spring of 1942, noted that the SS leader was suffering ‘especially from vision in connection with the shootings of Jews that he himself had led, and from other difficult experiences in the east.’”

The true psychological impact on the perpetrators of mass murder cannot be underestimated. The fact that even SS Commander Bach-Zelewski was deeply affected and actually incapacitated by psychosomatic illness illustrates this in a particularly stark manner. 

“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 fact to face.”

Much of the analysis of how ordinary men were psychologically able to participate in the Holocaust focuses on men who killed at a distance, performing only small, routine parts of the overall killing process, such as directing trains that transported Jews to death camps. Such analysis is not applicable to the men of Battalion 101, who frequently had to directly confront the realities of murdering Jews at point-blank range. 

“By virtue of their age, of course, all went through their formative period in the pre-Nazi era. These were men who had known political standards and moral norms other than those of the Nazis. Most came from Hamburg, by reputation one of the least nazified cities in Germany, and the majority came from a social class that had been anti-Nazi in its political culture. The men would not seem to have been a very promising group from which to recruit mass murderers on behalf of the Nazi vision of a racial utopia free of Jews.”

Having grown up before the violent ideologies of the Nazi Party were entirely normalized, and in communities that often opposed Nazi policies, the men of Battalion 101 were extremely poorly-suited to the task of murdering tens of thousands of Jews. This makes the questions of why they chose to do so, and how they were psychologically capable of doing so, particularly significant. 

“When the first truckload of thirty-five to forty Jews arrived, an equal number of policemen came forward and, face to face, were paired off with their victims.”

The fact that the policemen were paired off, face to face, with their victims is highly significant. They are not just physically close but psychologically close, able to see their victims’ faces and recognize the humanity of those they were about to murder. 

“It could not be avoided that one or another of my comrades noticed that I was not going to the executions to fire away at victims. They showered me with remarks such as ‘shithead’ and ‘weakling’ to express their disgust. But I suffered no consequences for my actions.”

The men who refused to shoot often received insults and mockery from their comrades. However, they were consistently spared any official punishment for their refusal. This suggests that the pressure to conform to the group was a far more significant motivation than pressure to follow orders or obey authority. 

“What is clear is that the men’s concern for their standing in the eyes of their comrades was not matched by any sense of human ties with their victims. The Jews stood outside their circle of human obligation and responsibility.”

Although pressure to conform is a major motivating factor in the men’s decisions to participate in the shootings, this is heavily reliant on the men’s indoctrination into the Nazi’s anti-Semitic ideologies. While the men may not have entirely adopted such beliefs, they certainly came to view Jews as insignificant and expendable, considering their own social status to be more significant than Jewish lives. 

“It would seem that even if the men of Reserve Police Battalion 101 had not consciously adopted the anti-Semitic doctrines of the regime, they had at least accepted the assimilation of the Jews into the image of the enemy. Major Trapp appealed to this generalized notion of the Jews as part of the enemy in his early-morning speech.”

It could be argued that the men of Battalion 101 did not entirely dehumanize their Jewish victims in the manner suggested by Nazi propaganda. However, supported by wartime attitudes towards “the enemy,” they certainly came to see Jews as some kind of nebulous threat to Germany. Even Trapp, who ostensibly opposed the actions, actually employed these ideas in his speech before the first massacre. 

“While the totally naked Jews crawled, First Lieutenant Gnade screamed at those around, ‘Where are my noncommissioned officers? Don’t you have any clubs yet?’ The noncommissioned officers went to the edge of the forest, fetched themselves clubs, and vigorously beat the Jews with them.”

While most of the men simply conformed to pressures to be involved in the shootings and deportations, first reluctantly and then with a callous resignation, a few became enthusiastic and sadistic in their approach. Gnade is the starkest example of this, frequently committing cruel acts intended to dehumanize his victims and, arguably, dehumanizing himself in the process. 

“Those spared such direct participation seem to have […] little if any sense of participation in the killing. After Józefów, the roundup and guarding of Jews to be killed by someone else seemed relatively innocuous.”

When the men are forced to kill Jews face to face, they cannot avoid the reality of what they are doing. However, as soon as they are moved onto slightly less direct activities, their powers of denial are so great that they readily convince themselves that they are not culpable for the murders they are facilitating. 

“One other factor sharply distinguished Łomazy from Józefów and may well have been yet another kind of psychological ‘relief’ for the men—namely, this time they did not bear the ‘burden of choice’ that Trapp had offered them so starkly on the occasion of the first massacre. No chance to step out was given to those who did not feel up to shooting; no one systematically excused those who were visibly too shaken to continue. Everyone assigned to the firing squads took his turn as ordered. Therefore, those who shot did not have to live with the clear awareness that what they had done had been avoidable.”

For a small number of operations, the men were given no choice about their participation. In some respect, this made it easier for them to rationalize their involvement. Whereas in most cases they truly had a choice and were, therefore, responsible for their decisions to kill, in these cases they could easily pass the buck onto their superior officers and more accurately assert that they had no choice. 

“At Łomazy following orders reinforced the natural tendency to conform to the behavior of one’s comrades. This was much easier to bear than the situation at Józefów, where the policemen were allowed to make personal decisions concerning their participation but the ‘cost’ of not shooting was to separate themselves from their comrades and to expose themselves as ‘weak.’”

When the men are given less of a choice about their participation in murder, it allows them to conform to group dynamics without having to admit that this is what they are doing. With the excuse that they were just following orders, they no longer have to admit that they committed murder primarily because they did not want to be excluded or seen as weak by their comrades. 

“Wohlauf may have brought his bride along to witness the Miȩdzyrzec deportation because he could not stand to be separated from her in the fresh bloom of their honeymoon, as Buchmann suggested. On the other hand, the pretentious and self-important captain may have been trying to impress his new bride by showing her he was master over the life and death of Polish Jewry. The men clearly thought the latter, and their reaction was uniformly one of indignation and outrage that a woman was brought to witness the terrible things they were doing. The men of First Company, if not their captain, could still feel shame.”

Captain Wohlauf was younger than many of the rank-and-file police and so his formative years were spent under Nazi rule, absorbing Nazi ideologies. This is apparent in his decision to bring his new wife to watch him command a deportation operation. Unlike his men—who, having grown up before Nazi ideology was normalized, still feel shame at their actions—he sees it as an opportunity to show off his power.

“Apparently the man who had wept through the massacre at Józefów and still shied away from the indiscriminate slaughter of Poles no longer had any inhibitions about shooting more than enough Jews to meet his quota.”

Most of the men become increasingly callous and jaded as they get used to the task of committing or facilitating mass murder. Trapp’s transformation in this regard is perhaps the most noticeable. Over a relatively short period of time, he goes from weeping over the thought of his actions to easily ordering the deaths of even more Jews than he was ordered to kill. 

“As long as there was no shortage of men willing to do the murderous job at hand, it was much easier to accommodate Buchmann and the men who emulated him than to make trouble over them.”

On some levels, it seems surprising that men like Buchmann were so readily allowed to avoid participating in the mass killings. However, when one realizes that there were so many men prepared to be involved that it was more trouble than it was worth to confront the objectors, this becomes more understandable. More than this, it reveals the fact that those who participated were largely able to do so because others were willing to take their place. 

“They herded masses of people onto the trains but could distance themselves from the killing at the other end of the trip. Their sense of detachment from the fate of the Jews they deported was unshakable.”

The deportations provided the men with the greatest distance from the reality of the mass murder that was taking place. With a fierce determination, they used this distance to deny any responsibility for the massacres in which they served as crucial components. 

“In the month since Józefów many had become numbed, indifferent, and in some cases, eager killers; others limited their participation in the killing process, refraining when they could do so without great cost or inconvenience. Only a minority of nonconformists managed to preserve a beleaguered sphere of moral autonomy that emboldened them to employ patterns of behavior and stratagems of evasion that kept them from becoming killers at all.”

There were very few people who initially refused to participate in the killings and even fewer who managed to maintain such a position. Consistently avoiding such duties took specific techniques that many were not prepared to employ. Most of the men simply continued with the task with a growing indifference and callousness. 

“Above all I must categorically say that for the execution commandos basically enough volunteers responded to the request of the officer in charge . . . I must add further that often there were so many volunteers that some of them had to be turned away.”

At least for the smaller operations, the firing squads were largely made up of volunteers. This gives valuable insight into quite how keen the men were to conform to group attitudes: they were not forced to be involved by taunts and pressure, but rather volunteered in order to appear to be willing and not held back by “weakness.”

“For a battalion of less than 500 men, the ultimate body count was at least 83,000 Jews.”

Between the firing-squad massacres, the deportation operations, the “Jew Hunt,” and the Ernetefest massacre, the battalion was involved in the deaths of nearly 100,000 Jews. The true scale of their involvement reinforces the significance of the overarching question of how such “ordinary men” were capable of such colossal atrocities. 

“According to German law, among the criteria for defining homicide as murder is the presence of a ‘base motive,’ such as racial hatred. Any member of the battalion who openly confessed to anti-Semitism would have seriously compromised his legal position; anyone who talked about the anti-Semitic attitudes of others risked finding himself in the uncomfortable position of witness against his former comrades.”

Anti-Semitism rarely appears in the men’s testimonies. A key reason for this is that the men were extremely cautious of anything that might suggest racism was a motivating factor in their decision to participate in the killings. Such a revelation would undermine their position as reluctant order followers and potentially make it possible for them to be charged with murder. 

“In some ways, therefore, the German policemen’s comments about the Poles reveal as much about the former as the latter.”

Although the men rarely discuss anti-Semitism, it can be found through implication in their discussion of the Poles. Through both projection appearing in their discussion of Polish guilt for the Holocaust and their skewed focus away from actions against Jews and onto actions against supposed partisans, they subtly reveal their own hidden prejudices. 

“A number of explanations have been invoked in the past to explain such behavior: wartime brutalization, racism, segmentation and routinization of the task, special selection of the perpetrators, careerism, obedience to orders, deference to authority, ideological indoctrination, and conformity. These factors are applicable in varying degrees, but none without qualification.”

Understanding how a group of “ordinary men” became capable of mass murder on a vast scale is a complex exercise. There are numerous factors that must be carefully considered. It is especially important to approach each with caution and acknowledge that none can be applied without considering some qualifying and complicating factors.