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

It is important to treat the “pretrial and courtroom testimonies of the men of Reserve Battalion 101 […] with considerable caution” (147). One must consider “judicial calculation, involving both self-incrimination and the incrimination of comrades,” as well as the “effects of twenty-five years of memory loss and distortion” and “[p]sychological defense mechanisms, especially repression and projection” (147).

These complicating factors are most heavily present in “the fateful triangle of German-Polish-Jewish relations” (147) and the “portrayal of German-Polish and German-Jewish relations in these testimonies is extraordinarily exculpatory” (147-48), while “the portrayal of Polish-Jewish relations is extraordinarily damning” (148).

Of the few comments on German-Polish relations, most are “general references to partisans, bandits, and robbers”; they do not mention “the specifically anti-German character of such phenomena,” but instead “depict banditry as an endemic problem that predated the German occupation of Poland” (148). This functions to:

imply that the Germans were protecting Poles from an indigenous problem of lawlessness […] [and] to obscure the frequency and intensity of the battalion’s anti-Jewish activities by alleging that partisans and bandits, not Jews, were the chief preoccupation of the policemen (148).

Only two testimonies contradict this “picture of a rather benign German occupation of Poland” with accounts of “cruel harassments” (148), normalized murder, and a “growing callousness and indifference to Polish life” (149).

There are “similar omissions concerning German attitudes toward Jews” (150) in the testimonies. In part, this is “a stark legal consideration,” as German law requires a “‘base motive,’ such as racial hatred” (150) for homicide to be defined as murder. Accordingly, confessing to anti-Semitism would compromise the police officers’ legal defenses. There is also a broader reluctance to discuss political attitudes of the period.

However, the policemen’s “attitudes towards Jews [are] revealed in less direct and less guarded statements made during the interrogations” (152). For example, when asked “how they could tell the difference between Poles and Jews […] [some policemen choose] a vocabulary that still reflect[s] the Nazi stereotype of twenty-five years earlier: the Jews were ‘dirty,’ ‘unkempt,’ and ‘less clean’” (152). Likewise, while discussing the shootings, some policemen highlight alleged “Jewish passivity, occasionally in a very exculpatory way that seem[s] to imply that the Jews were complicit in their own deaths” (152). There are also some mentions of the abuse of Jewish women, “a question of domination over the powerless—of rape and voyeurism” (152). Mostly, the policemen see the Jews as “an anonymous collective” but they recall encounters with German Jews which were “unexpected and jarring—in sharp contrast to their usual view of the Jews as part of a foreign enemy” (153).

The testimonies “contain very frequent and quite damning comment on Polish attitudes toward Jews” (155). It is important to remember, however, that the police “had considerable contact with Poles who collaborated in the Final Solution and helped them track down Jews,” while “Poles who helped Jews did their very best to remain totally unknown to the Germans” (155), presenting an obvious bias in their experiences. In addition, we can speculate that “a great deal of projection is involved in German comments on Polish anti-Semitism” because, while they may not want to implicate themselves or their comrades, the policemen “must have found considerable psychological relief in sharing blame with the Poles” (155).

These “portrayals of Polish complicity are not false” (157). However, there is little mention of “Polish help to Jews and German punishment for such help” or “of the German role in inciting” (158) Polish complicity. Arguably, “the German policemen’s comments about the Poles reveal as much about the former as the latter” (158). 

Several explanations have been offered for why the men of Reserve Police Battalion 101 were prepared commit mass murder. All of them “are applicable in varying degrees, but none without qualification” (159).

The brutalizing effects of war is one such explanation. However, the men of Battalion 101 were not involved in frontline engagement with an enemy and so acted “[n]ot out of frenzy, bitterness, and frustration but with calculation” (161). They did become brutalized through the act of killing Jews, as “the horrors of the initial encounter eventually became routine” (161). However, this means that “brutalization was not the cause but the effect of these men’s behavior” (161).

The bureaucratization of murder is often discussed in analysis of the Holocaust, in which “so-called desk murderers” were able to commit genocide because they only performed “tiny steps in the overall killing process […] in a routine manner, never seeing the victims their actions affected” (162). Clearly this does not apply to “the men in the woods at Józefów,” who were “quite literally saturated in the blood of victims shot at point-blank range” (162). However, the fact that other actions were shared with other units who did most of the “dirty work” does help to explain the battalion’s growing detachment and sense that they were not personally responsible for murder, brought about in part by “the desensitizing effects of division of labor” (163).

The idea that the men of the battalion were specially selected for the task is not supported by the available evidence as the men do not appear to be “particularly suited for the task” and were in fact, “the ‘dregs’ of the manpower pool available at that stage of the war” (165). The idea of “self-selection”—in which men with a cruel or sadistic nature volunteer for positions in which they can abuse others—is also not a relevant consideration as experiments like the famous “Stanford prison experiment” (167) suggest that cruelty and sadism are largely the response of social and situational conditions, rather than innate individual predispositions.

Those who committed mass murder often attempt to excuse their actions by saying that they were following orders and were afraid of the consequences if they did not do so. However, the “general problem with this explanation” is that “no defense attorney or defendant […] has been able to document a single case in which refusal to obey an order to kill unarmed civilians resulted in the allegedly inevitable dire punishment” (170). Moreover, as “Major Trapp, with choked voice and tears streaming down his cheeks, offered to excuse those ‘not up to it’” (171), the policemen were aware that they would not be harshly punished for not engaging in the shooting.

The “conscious inculcation of Nazi doctrines” (176) also has limited ability to explain the men’s actions. While it is true that “Himmler set a premium on the ideological indoctrination of members of the SS and the police” (177), the materials used to do this were not targeted at older men like those in the battalion, nor focused on “prepar[ing] policemen to kill unarmed Jewish women and children” (183). Accordingly, while the men, “like the rest of German society, were immersed in a deluge of racist and anti-Semitic propaganda,” the lack of targeted inculcation in surviving documentation makes it hard “to believe that any of this material could have deprived the men of Reserve Police Battalion 101 of the capacity for independent thought” (184). 

Extending from this is the issue of “‘obedience to authority’ in the more general sense […]—deference simply as a product of socialization and evolution” (171). This is a complex issue because of the various levels of authority at play but what is clear from the men’s testimonies is that they were perhaps primarily concerned with “the pressures of conformity—how would they been seen in the eyes of their comrades?—[and] not authority” (175). Indeed, although “almost all of them—at least initially—were horrified and disgusted by what they were doing,” to actually “break ranks and step out, to adopt overtly nonconformist behavior, was simply beyond most of the men” (184).

In effect, any member of the battalion:

who did not shoot risked isolation, rejection, and ostracism—a very uncomfortable prospect within the framework of a tight-knit unit stationed abroad among a hostile population, so that the individual had virtually nowhere else to turn for support and social contact (185).

There was also a risk that refusing would be “seen as a form of moral reproach of one’s comrades” or as suggesting that “the nonshooter […] was ‘too good’ to do such things” (185). Those who refused to shoot mostly aimed to defuse this by “plead[ing] not that they were ‘too good’ but rather that they were ‘too weak’ to kill” (185).

These partial explanations come together to some extent. The effects of war helped to reinforce and amplify the Nazi’s anti-Semitic propaganda: “when it was all too usual to exclude the enemy from the community of human obligation, it was also all too easy to subsume the Jews into the ‘image of the enemy’” (186). Further, the existence of:

[p]ervasive racism and the resulting exclusion of the Jewish victims from any common ground with the perpetrators made it all the easier for the majority of the policemen to conform to the norms of their immediate community (the battalion) and their society at large (Nazi Germany) (186).

While “those who killed cannot be absolved by the notion that anyone would have done what they did” (188), it is nonetheless important to notice that these same forces permeate many or even all modern societies to some extent, begging the question, “[i]f the men of Reserve Police Battalion 101 could become killers under such circumstances, what group of men cannot?” (189).