Ordinary Men Chapter 15: Harvest Festival - The Last Massacres

Forty-two thousand people shot in a single day. That is the number at the center of this chapter, and it is almost impossible to hold in your head. Operation Harvest Festival was the single largest German shooting massacre of the entire war. Bigger than Babi Yar. And Reserve Police Battalion 101 was right in the middle of it.

This is post 17 in my Ordinary Men retelling series. We are near the end now. Everything the battalion did before this – Jozefow, the ghetto clearings, the deportations, the Jew hunts – all of it was building toward this final horror.

The Ghettos That Were Supposed to Be Safe

After the massive deportations of fall 1942, a handful of ghettos in the Lublin district were officially allowed to keep existing. In Battalion 101’s territory, Lukow and Miedzyrec were among those that survived. Jews who had fled into the forests during the earlier roundups started drifting back. Winter was brutal. Hiding in the woods left tracks in the snow. On one occasion, frozen feces literally gave away a group hiding inside a haystack. Many Jews calculated that a permitted ghetto was safer than life as hunted prey in the forest.

They were wrong, but it was a rational bet given what they knew at the time.

Even in the “permitted” ghettos, life was dangerous. In Lukow, the SS ghetto administrator had 500 to 600 Jews shot in December just to reduce the population. In Miedzyrec, 500 Jewish brush factory workers were shipped to the Trawniki labor camp. And on New Year’s Eve 1942, drunk Security Police from a neighboring town showed up at the Miedzyrec ghetto and started shooting Jews “for sport” until other police arrived and chased them off.

The Final Clearings

After a few months of relative quiet, the end came fast. On May 1, 1943, Second Company surrounded the Miedzyrec ghetto one more time. Joined again by Trawniki auxiliaries, they rounded up somewhere between 700 and 5,000 Jews, depending on whose estimate you trust. The victims were stripped of their possessions in Gnade’s undressing barracks and crammed into train cars so tightly the doors barely closed. Most went to the gas chambers at Treblinka. A smaller group went to the Majdanek labor camp.

A sixth action hit Miedzyrec on May 26, sending another 1,000 Jews to Majdanek. By then only about 200 Jews remained. The last 170 were shot by the Security Police on July 17. Miedzyrec was declared judenfrei. The next day, SS units from Lublin liquidated Lukow, sending 3,000 to 4,000 more Jews to Treblinka.

The Battalion Changes Shape

By this point, Battalion 101 was not the same unit that had arrived in Poland a year earlier. The oldest men, those born before 1898, had been sent home to Germany during the winter. A special unit under Lieutenant Brand was pulled from each platoon and sent to Zamosz to help with the expulsion of Polish civilians from their villages, part of Himmler’s insane plan for a pure German settlement zone deep in occupied Poland.

Younger noncommissioned officers got reassigned to the Waffen-SS. Lieutenant Gnade left to form a special guard company in Lublin. Lieutenant Scheer was pulled out to command a “pursuit platoon” for hunting partisans. Some replacements came in, including a group of Berliners to fill out Second Company. But overall the battalion was understaffed.

Only a fraction of the men who had been at Jozefow in July 1942 were still around for what came next.

Why Harvest Festival Happened

After the last ghettos were liquidated in spring 1943, the only Jews still alive by German consent in the Lublin district were about 45,000 workers in labor camps controlled by the SS. These included survivors from the Lublin ghettos and workers sent from the liquidated ghettos of Warsaw and Bialystok.

Himmler needed them dead if his mission was to be complete. But there was a problem he had not had to deal with before: Jewish resistance.

Over the previous six months, Jewish uprisings had broken out in Warsaw (April), Treblinka (July), Bialystok (August), and Sobibor (October). The pattern was clear. When Jews realized there was no hope of survival, they fought back. For a long time, Jews in the labor camps had clung to what Browning calls the strategy of “salvation through labor.” They believed that even the Nazis would not be so irrational as to kill workers making essential contributions to the war economy. That belief kept them compliant.

But the illusions were shattering. Jews could see what was happening around them. Himmler understood that if he tried to liquidate the Lublin labor camps gradually, one by one, the remaining prisoners would figure out what was coming and resist. He needed to kill all 42,000 in a single surprise operation.

That operation was codenamed Erntefest. Harvest Festival.

Planning the Massacre

This was not improvised. Globocnik’s replacement as SS and Police Leader in Lublin, a man named Jakob Sporrenberg, traveled to Krakow to consult with his superior. He came back with a special folder of instructions.

In late October, Jewish prisoners were put to work digging trenches just outside the camps at Majdanek, Trawniki, and Poniatowa. The trenches were three meters deep and dug in zigzag patterns. The prisoners were told they were air-raid protection trenches. They were mass graves.

On the evening of November 2, Sporrenberg gathered the commanders of every force involved: Waffen-SS units from Krakow and Warsaw, Police Regiment 22 from Krakow, Police Regiment 25 from Lublin (which included Battalion 101), the Lublin Security Police, and the commanders of all three camps. The meeting room was packed. Sporrenberg gave orders from his special folder.

The killing started the next morning.

November 3: Majdanek

Members of Battalion 101 were involved in nearly every phase of the massacre at Majdanek. Early on November 3, they took up their positions. One group helped march Jews from smaller work camps around Lublin to the Majdanek concentration camp on the outskirts of the city.

The largest group from the battalion lined up five meters apart on both sides of the angled street leading from the main highway past the commandant’s house to the inner camp entrance. They stood and watched as an endless stream of Jews filed past. Female guards on bicycles escorted 5,000 to 6,000 women prisoners from the “old airport camp” where they had been sorting warehouses of clothing collected from the death camps. Another 8,000 male Jews were marched in over the course of the day. Combined with the 3,500 to 4,000 Jews already in the camp, the total victim count at Majdanek reached somewhere between 16,500 and 18,000.

As the Jews walked between the lines of reserve policemen, music blared from two loudspeaker trucks. It was supposed to cover the noise. It did not work. Everyone could hear the steady sound of gunfire coming from inside the camp.

Inside, the Jews were taken to the last row of barracks, ordered to undress, and told to raise their arms with hands clasped behind their necks. Completely naked, they were led in groups through a hole cut in the camp fence to the freshly dug trenches behind the camp. Battalion 101 men guarded this route too.

One policeman from First Company, stationed just ten meters from the graves, later described what he saw. SD men sat on the edges of the trenches with submachine guns. Other SD men stood behind them, keeping the magazines full and swapping out weapons. The naked Jews were driven directly into the graves and forced to lie down precisely on top of people who had already been shot. Then the shooters fired bursts into the prone victims. This went on all day.

While all this happened at ground level, Sporrenberg circled overhead in a small Fieseler Storch airplane, observing the operation from the air. Polish civilians watched from rooftops.

The Same Day, Elsewhere

On that same November 3, other German units carried out identical massacres at the Trawniki labor camp, about forty kilometers east of Lublin. Estimates of the dead at Trawniki range from 6,000 to 10,000.

But Poniatowa, the big labor camp fifty kilometers west of Lublin, held 14,000 Jews and had not been hit yet. The Germans simply did not have enough manpower to do everything in one day. So they sealed the camp and cut the telephone lines. Nobody inside Poniatowa would learn what had happened at Majdanek and Trawniki until it was too late.

Two smaller camps at Budzyn and Krasnik, holding about 3,000 Jews combined, were spared for now. Budzyn was producing for the Heinkel aircraft company and Krasnik was serving the personal needs of the SS police leader in Lublin. Even at the peak of genocide, some economic calculations still held.

November 4: Poniatowa

The next morning, Battalion 101 traveled the fifty kilometers west to Poniatowa. This time the battalion was not spread out across multiple positions. They were concentrated either between the undressing barracks and the zigzag graves, or right at the shooting site itself. They formed the human corridor through which 14,000 Jews, naked, hands behind their necks, walked to their deaths while loudspeakers blasted music that could not drown out the gunfire.

One group leader named Martin Detmold was stationed right in front of the graves. He later described what he saw: the trenches were about three meters wide and three to four meters deep, dug in zigzag patterns. Jews were forced to undress in the last barracks, surrender everything they owned, and then walk through the cordon of policemen and down sloped openings into the trenches. SD men at the edges drove them to the execution spots where other SD men fired submachine guns from above.

Detmold walked up to the execution site and saw how newly arriving Jews had to lie down on top of the people already shot. The shooters arranged the bodies so there were inclines in the growing piles of corpses, making it possible for the next group to climb up and lie down on stacks that were already three meters high.

He called it the most gruesome thing he had ever seen. Many of the Jews hit by the bursts of gunfire were only wounded. They were buried alive under the bodies of people shot after them, without anyone bothering to finish them off. From deep within the piles of corpses, the wounded cursed their killers.

The Smell

Most of the battalion men were long past being shocked by mass killing. What struck them as new was the aftermath: dealing with that many bodies.

Wilhelm Gebhardt, part of Gnade’s guard company that stayed in Lublin after the massacre, remembered that the city stank for days. The smell of burning bodies hung over everything. Everyone in Lublin could tell that a massive number of people had been burned at Majdanek.

Members of Third Company had an even closer experience. Since Poniatowa was only thirty-five kilometers from their base in Pulawy, some were assigned to guard the work Jews who had the horrifying job of digging up bodies and burning them. Horses pulled the corpses from the trenches to a burning site where they were placed on a grill made of iron rails and set on fire. A “bestial stench” hung over the whole area.

One truckload of policemen stopped at the camp while the burning was still going on. Some of the men got sick from the smell and the sight of half-decomposed bodies and vomited all over the truck. When Third Company’s new commander, Captain Haslach, heard the reports from his men, he found them “unbelievable” and drove out to see for himself. By the time he arrived the work was finished, but an SS officer helpfully showed him the graves and the iron-rail burning grill, about four by eight meters.

The Final Count

After Harvest Festival, the Lublin district was for all practical purposes judenfrei. Battalion 101’s participation in the Final Solution was over.

The numbers are staggering for a unit of fewer than 500 men. Browning lays out the conservative estimates:

• At least 6,500 Jews shot during earlier massacres like Jozefow and Lomazy
• About 1,000 Jews shot during the Jew hunts
• At least 30,500 Jews shot at Majdanek and Poniatowa during Harvest Festival
• At least 45,000 Jews deported to Treblinka on trains

Total: at least 83,000 Jews killed by a single battalion of middle-aged reserve policemen.

Key Takeaway

Harvest Festival was designed around one bitter irony: the Nazis had to kill all 42,000 remaining Jews at once because resistance had proven that people who see death coming will fight back. The operation succeeded because surprise was total. And the men of Battalion 101, by then thoroughly desensitized to mass murder, played their part without hesitation.

Book: Ordinary Men by Christopher R. Browning | ISBN: 978-0-06-099968-8

Previous: Chapter 14 - The Jew Hunt

Next: Chapter 16 - Aftermath