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

In 1936, Heinrich Himmler, head of the SS, takes charge of “all police units in the Third Reich” and divides them into two branches. The Security Police includes “the notorious Secret State Police […] or Gestapo” and the Criminal Police, “a detective force for nonpolitical crimes” (4). The Order Police, under Kurt Daluege, is comprised of local or regional police forces.

By the time the Second World War breaks out in September 1939, there are 131,000 men in the Order Police. However, many of these men are “put at the disposal of the army” (5) or otherwise absorbed into the expanding military. In order to “replenish its ranks,” the Order Police are “allowed to recruit 26,000 young German men” and “91,500 reservists born between 1901 and 1909—an age group not as yet subject to the military draft” (5). This conscription “gradually extend[s] to still older men” (6) and, by mid-1940, the Order Police includes 244,500 men.

As “Germany’s military success and rapid expansion quickly create[s] the need for more occupation forces behind the lines” (6), a number of the Order Police are assigned to one of 101 battalions, each of around 500 men. Twenty of these battalions are stationed in “German-occupied central Poland, known as the General Government […] and […] the western Polish territories annexed to the Third Reich” (6).

The battalions have a “normal” chain of command, which leads to “the overall commander of the Order Police in the General Government […] and finally to Daluege’s main office in Berlin” (7). However, they also have a second chain of command “for all policies and operations that [involve] the joint action of the Order Police with the Security Police and other SS units” (7).

The second chain of command leads to a district SS and Police Leader—in the case of Reserve Police Battalion 101, “the brutal and unsavory Odilo Globonik” (8)—and ultimately to Himmler via his personal representative, Higher SS and Police Leader Freidrich-Wilhelm Krüger. It is this chain of command that is involved in Battalion 101’s orders to murder Polish Jews.  

The Order Police first participate in “the Nazi mass murder of European Jewry […] not in Poland but in Russia” (9) in 1941, when Order Police battalions are assigned to assist “special mobile units of the SS known as Einsatzgruppen” (9) serving in Russia behind the advancing German army. The first such massacre was conducted by Police Battalion 309 under Major Weis in “the nearly half-Jewish city of Bialystok” (11).

Like the commanders of all other units, Weis had been given orders to pass on to his men concerning their actions towards Russian soldiers and citizenry: “Communists functionaries in the army” or soldiers considered to be “in any way anti-German […] were to be denied prisoner of war status and executed” (11). A “‘shooting license’ against Russian civilians” was granted, which “explicitly approved collective reprisal against entire villages” (11).

“[C]orrectly intuit[ing] and anticpat[ing] the wishes of his Führer” (12), Weis declares that “the meaning of the Führer’s orders [is] that the Jews, regardless of age or sex, [are] to be destroyed” (11). The actions of the battalion on June 27 “beg[in] as a pogrom: beating, humiliation, beard burning, and shooting at will” (11), but “quickly escalat[e] into more systematic mass murder” and “an estimated 2,000 to 2,200 Jews [are] killed” (12).

The second such massacre involves “clear and systematic instigation from the very highest echelons of the SS—namely Erich von dem Bach-Zelewski, Kurt Daluege, and Heinrich Himmler” (12). Other police battalions are first ordered to search “for plunder seized by Jews before the German arrival” (13), an operation in which they shoot twenty-two people.

Two days later, they are given the order that “all male Jews between the ages of 17 and 45 convicted as plunderers are to be shot” (13) and dumped in unmarked graves. The order includes the directives that “commanders are especially to provide for the spiritual care of the men who participate in this action,” that “impressions of the day are to be blotted out through the holding of social events in the evenings,” and that “the men are to be instructed continuously about the political necessity of the measures” (14).

There is, “of course, no investigation, trial, and conviction of so-called plunderers” (14), but police still massacre at least 3,000 Jewish men. From this point, the “murder campaign against Russian Jewry accelerate[s]” (15), with police battalions taking part in numerous massacres of Jewish people of all ages and genders, including “the murder of over 33,000 Jews in the ravine of Babi Yar” (18) in Kiev, on September 29 and 30.

There is some objection to such indiscriminate murder of Jews. On October 30, the head of the German civil administration in Slutsk writes a letter to his boss, the General Commissioner in Minsk. In it, he complains that he has told the battalion commander that “a liquidation of the Jews could not take place arbitrarily” as “[o]ne simply could not do without the Jewish craftsmen, because they were indispensable for the maintenance of the economy” (20). However, the police killed indiscriminately in a manner that the administrator complains “bordered on sadism” (21) and “plundered in an outrageous way (23). He ends his letter by asking “only that one request be granted me: ‘In the future spare me without fail from this police battalion’” (23).

Those involved in the massacres carry a “psychological burden” that “extend[s] to Bach-Zelewski himself” (25). After he is found to be struggling with an “incapacitating illness in the spring of 1942,” Himmler’s SS doctor reports that Bach-Zelewski suffers “especially from visions in connection with the shootings of Jews that he himself had led” (25).

In “September 1941 Hitler approve[s] the commencement of Jewish deportations from the Third Reich” (26) and “[b]etween the fall of 1941 and the spring of 1945, over 260 deportation trains [take] German, Austrian, and Czech Jews […] to ghettos and death camps […] [in] Poland and Russia” (27). Almost “450 additional trains from western and southern Europe […] [are] taken over by German guards at some point in their journey” (27). It is not known how many deportation trains travel from Polish cities but “it [is] clearly in the many hundreds” (27).

Order Police guard “[v]irtually all of these trains” (27). A report on a deportation train travelling from Vienna to Sobibór notes that the journey passed without incident, the only complaint being that “the transport commando had to make do with a third- instead of second-class car” (28) and with “cold rations” that were “not sufficient” (29). It makes no mention of the suffering of the Jews, who were held without food or water in “closed cattle cars during the sixty-one-hour journey” (30). However, the report’s author did notice, “as he delivered 949 Jews to the alleged work camp in Sobibór, that the Jews selected for work, the luggage, and the food supplies did not accompany them there” (30), suggesting that he was aware that he was transporting them to a death camp.

A second report of a train traveling from Kolomyja in Galicia to Bełżec is more eventful for the guards. Because the Jews in Galicia had already “been subjected to open-air massacres” (31) they are aware of their fate and make numerous successful and unsuccessful attempts at escape. The report’s author casually observes that “some 300 Jews—old and weak, ill, frail, and no longer transportable—were executed” (32), and that the conditions were so cramped and hot that “when unloading the train cars some 2,000 Jews were found dead in the train” (35).

These reports “do not tell us much that we would like to know about the ‘grass-roots’ perpetrators of the Final Solution” (36). After all, the men of the Order Police battalions are “not desk murderers who [can] take refuge in distance, routine, and bureaucratic euphemisms that [veil] the reality of mass murder” (36). Instead, “they [see] their victims face to face” (36). This raises many questions about how they became mass murderers, what choices they made, and how their actions affected them. To answer them, “we must return to the story of Reserve Police Battalion 101” (37).