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

Alcohol provides another form of psychological distance for the men. After the first massacre, the men respond to the fact that they are “depressed, angered, embittered, and shaken” by drinking “heavily” (69) to block out the memories of what they have done. This is actually encouraged by commanding officers, who recognize the psychological burden of mass murder. An early set of orders contains the directive that “impressions of the day are to be blotted out through the holding of social events in the evenings” (14), while on several occasions the men are “given special rations of alcohol” (100) to help numb them to the reality of mass murder. As a result, an “increasing dependence on alcohol [is] not unusual in the battalion” (82) as many come to rely on its anesthetizing effects. One policeman who does not drink makes this observation quite explicitly, noting that his “comrades [drink] so much solely because of the many shootings of Jews, for such a life [is] quite intolerable sober” (82). For those who have to do “the worst of the on-the-spot ‘dirty work’” (77), alcohol is even more important and the Hiwis are “not just liquored up after the event to help them forget but drunk from the start” (85), only stopping shooting when they fall “into a drunken stupor” (83).

The idea of sickness is often used to represent the “psychological burden” (25) of mass murder. The first indication of this is a brief, early discussion of SS Commander Bach-Zelewski who suffers from an “incapacitating illness” and “especially from visions in connection with the shootings of Jews that he himself had led” (25). However, the most sustained example of this comes in the discussion of “The Strange Health of Captain Hoffman” (114). Hoffman develops “diarrhea and severe stomach cramps” (117) that prevent him from attending many of his company’s actions. These appear to be “the symptoms of psychologically induced ‘irritable colon’ or ‘adaptive colitis’” (120), suggesting that his illness is actually a manifestation of trauma around the mass murders the battalion carry out. Although Hoffman will himself use this explanation as part of his testimony and defense, finding it “convenient to trace his illness to the psychological stress of the Józefów massacre” (117), he initially blames it on a reaction to a dysentery vaccine. Indeed, he actually makes “every effort to hide it from his superiors” (120). This shows us something significant about the motif: during the time of the shootings, many see it as unacceptable to express negative views of their orders, with even latent negativity manifesting as psychosomatic illness. Instead, such illness has to be hidden or else explained away as unrelated to stress. Indeed, for Hoffman, his sickness is a weakness that he is “deeply ashamed of and [seeks] to overcome to the best of his ability” (120).