Ordinary Men Chapter 1: One Morning in Józefów

Imagine getting woken up before dawn, loaded onto a truck, and driven for two hours down a bumpy gravel road with no idea where you are going or what you are about to do. Now imagine being told, once you arrive, that your job today is to murder 1,500 people.

That is how Chapter 1 of Ordinary Men begins.

This is post 2 in my Ordinary Men retelling series. If you have not read the intro, start there for context on who these men were and why this book matters.

Before Dawn in Bilgoraj

It is the very early hours of July 13, 1942. The men of Reserve Police Battalion 101 are shaken awake in a brick school building in the Polish town of Bilgoraj. These are not hardened soldiers. They are middle-aged family men from Hamburg. Working-class and lower-middle-class guys. Truck drivers, dockworkers, salesmen. Men the German army considered too old to fight, so they got drafted into the Order Police instead.

Most of them are raw recruits. They have zero experience in occupied territory. They have been in Poland for less than three weeks.

And they are about to have the worst day of their lives.

The Ride to Józefów

In the dark, the men climb into trucks. Each one has been given extra ammunition. More ammo boxes are stacked on the trucks. Nobody tells them why.

The convoy rumbles east out of Bilgoraj on a terrible gravel road. The pace is painfully slow. It takes almost two hours to cover just thirty kilometers. As the sky starts to lighten, the trucks pull up outside a small village called Józefów.

It is a typical Polish village. Modest white houses with straw roofs. Quiet. Still. Among its roughly 1,800 inhabitants are 1,800 Jews.

The village has no idea what is coming.

Papa Trapp’s Speech

The men jump down from the trucks and form a half-circle around their commander, Major Wilhelm Trapp. He is fifty-three years old, a career policeman. His men call him “Papa Trapp” because he is seen as a fatherly figure. Not exactly the kind of guy you picture leading a massacre.

And here is the thing: Trapp does not want to do this either.

He stands in front of his men, pale and visibly shaking. His voice cracks. There are tears in his eyes. He is fighting to hold himself together as he explains the assignment.

The battalion, he tells them, has been ordered to perform a “frightfully unpleasant task.” He does not sugarcoat it. He says this assignment is not to his liking. He calls it “highly regrettable.” But the orders come from the highest authorities.

Then he tries to give them a reason to stomach it. He reminds them that back home in Germany, Allied bombs are falling on women and children. As if that somehow justifies what they are about to do.

The Order

Trapp lays out the mission. There are Jews in Józefów, and some of them, he claims, are connected to partisans. One policeman later recalled Trapp saying the Jews had “instigated the American boycott” against Germany. These are the rationalizations they are given.

Here is the actual order:

• Round up all the Jews in the village.
• Separate the men of working age. They will be sent to a labor camp.
• Everyone else – women, children, the elderly – will be shot on the spot. By the battalion.

Read that again if you need to. Women. Children. The elderly. Shot by middle-aged policemen from Hamburg who had been in Poland for less than three weeks.

The Extraordinary Offer

Now here is the part that makes this chapter – and this entire book – so haunting.

After laying out this horrific assignment, Trapp does something nobody expects. He makes an offer. If any of the older men do not feel up to the task, they can step out. Right there, right then. No punishment. No consequences. Just step out of the line.

Think about that. In the middle of Nazi-occupied Poland, in a military unit, a commanding officer is giving his men a free pass to opt out of mass murder.

This is the question that drives the entire book: How many stepped out?

Browning will answer that question in detail as the book goes on. But the fact that the offer was made at all tells you something important. This was not a group of fanatical killers who could not wait to pull the trigger. This was a group of ordinary men standing in the early morning light, being told to do something monstrous, by a commander who was crying as he gave the order.

Key Takeaway

Chapter 1 sets up the central tension of the entire book in just a few pages. These are not monsters. They are regular people. And they are about to cross a line that most of them never imagined they would face. The fact that they were given a choice – and what they did with that choice – is what makes this story so disturbing and so important.

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

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Next up: Chapter 2 - The Order Police - How did these men end up in this unit in the first place?