Who were the people who could obey orders to kill civilians, including the elderly and even children? Surprisingly, they were very ordinary people.
What kind of people could possibly follow orders to kill civilians, including the elderly and even children? Many of us have likely asked ourselves a similar question when reading books or watching films about the Holocaust. It’s no surprise. Participating in something so unimaginable is beyond comprehension for most of us. Many of us like to think that we would never act in such a way, that we have moral and ethical principles. Unfortunately, history shows that we might be fooling ourselves or simply cannot fully grasp the pressures of the time and the power of group conformity.
It’s fortunate that we are lucky enough to only consider such dilemmas theoretically. Our relatively peaceful times don’t force us to face such challenges. However, not everyone had this luck.
Do only monsters kill?
Many have asked what kind of people participated in the mass killings during the Holocaust. Most reached a troubling conclusion: the people who committed these acts were not exceptional in any way. They were, in fact, very ordinary. They were essentially no different from the people we encounter on the streets, in offices, or on buses every day.
One researcher who asked this question was historian Christopher Browning. He studied the court testimonies of 210 men who served in the German Reserve Police Battalion 101 and were later charged with war crimes in the 1960s and 1970s.
Browning found no significant psychopathological or sadistic traits we might expect. These were average people from ordinary backgrounds who held normal jobs before the war. It’s highly probable that without the war, the extreme circumstances, and the dominant hateful ideology, they would have lived peaceful lives with their families and friends. Sadly, these men collided with history. Although they were not sadists, they committed horrific acts. Why?
Their crossing of the boundary into inhumanity was influenced by factors other than personality traits. Primarily, mechanisms that dehumanized their perception of enemies, social pressure on soldiers or policemen to conform to authority, and maintain solidarity with their comrades. To sum it up: propaganda that encouraged not seeing others as human combined with the social pressure of the “band” of men serving together.
These men often defended themselves after the war by claiming they had to follow orders, even if they disagreed with them, as refusing could lead to imprisonment in a concentration camp or even a death sentence. However, there is no evidence to support the claim that any German soldier or policeman was severely punished for refusing to participate in the killing of Jews.
The general human tendency to conform to authority is also well-documented in “laboratory” studies by social scientists, but that’s a topic for another time.
Policemen in the service of evil
In the mid-1930s, the Nazis began providing uniformed police officers with military-style training, and after 1939, they sent dozens of police battalions to the East to support the war against “Jewish Bolshevism” led by the German army and the Einsatzgruppen. Reserve Police Battalion 101 was composed of the German equivalent of city policemen and county sheriffs. It was stationed in the Lublin district of Poland.
Ordnungspolizei encompassed practically all law enforcement and emergency response organizations in Nazi Germany, including fire brigades, coast guards, and civil defense. In the pre-war period, Heinrich Himmler, head of the SS, and Kurt Daluege, head of the Ordnungspolizei, worked to transform the police forces of the Weimar Republic into militarized units ready to serve the regime’s goals of expansion and racial extermination.
The Massacre in Józefów
The first German “action” in Józefów occurred on May 1, 1942, when Gestapo officers from Bilgoraj arrived in the town and arrested 20 Jews from a special list. They were accused of being communists and taken to a Gestapo prison in Bilgoraj. It is possible they were sent to the Lublin concentration camp, though this was never confirmed. A few days later, on May 11, 1942, three Gestapo officers from Bilgoraj organized a special “action” in Józefów, during which 130 Jews were murdered on the streets and at a local quarry.
Then came the final attack. Early in the morning of July 13, 1942, the men of Reserve Police Battalion 101 were awakened by a sharp whistle.
These were middle-aged family men from working-class and lower-middle-class backgrounds from the city of Hamburg. They were considered too old to be useful to the German army, so they were conscripted into the Ordnungspolizei. Most of them were fresh recruits with no previous experience in German-occupied territories. They had arrived in Poland less than three weeks earlier.
As the men boarded the waiting vehicles, it was still dark. Each policeman received extra ammunition, and additional boxes were loaded onto the trucks. They were headed for their first major operation, although the men had not yet been told what to expect. It took an hour and a half to two hours to reach their destination: the village of Józefów, just thirty kilometers away. As the sky began to lighten, the convoy stopped outside Józefów. It was a typical Polish village with modest white houses and thatched roofs. Among its residents were 1,800 Jews.
The village was completely quiet. The men of Reserve Police Battalion 101 disembarked from the trucks and gathered in a semicircle around their commander, Major Wilhelm Trapp, a 53-year-old career policeman whom his men called “Papa Trapp.” It was time for Trapp to inform his men of the mission their battalion had been given. Pale and nervous, with a choked voice and tears in his eyes, Trapp visibly struggled to control himself as he spoke. The battalion, he said simply, had been assigned a terribly unpleasant task. He didn’t like it; it was truly regrettable, but the order had come from the highest authorities. To make the task easier, Trapp told his men to remember that bombs were falling on women and children in Germany. After explaining what was ahead, Trapp made an extraordinary offer: any of the older men who did not feel up to the task could step forward. Several men did so—and they were not punished.
The men were given explicit orders to shoot anyone who tried to escape. The rest were to gather the Jews and lead them to the market square. Those who were too sick or weak to walk to the market, as well as infants and anyone who resisted or tried to hide, were to be shot on the spot.
The battalion was then ordered to round up the Jews. The men of working age were to be separated and sent to a labor camp. The remaining Jews—women, children, and the elderly—were to be executed on the spot. Reserve Police Battalion 101 murdered at least 1,500 Jews that day.
Browning also describes the various reactions of the policemen to the killings. After the first massacre in Józefów, most were depressed and coped by consuming alcohol. Many could not bear the killing and requested to be excused or found ways to avoid participating directly. However, the battalion conducted many similar operations in which they rounded up Jews from various locations, either killing them on the spot or deporting them to extermination camps, and over time, this became routine for them.
While the battalion’s commanders were convicted in Poland in 1948 (for executing Poles, not for killing Jews), the other policemen were not investigated and tried until 1962–1968 in Germany. The interrogations of these policemen from the 1960s form the basis of Browning’s book.
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