Ordinary Men Chapter 10: Deportations to Treblinka
The men of Battalion 101 discovered something about themselves in August 1942: it was a lot easier to load people onto trains than to shoot them in the face. And that discovery changed the entire nature of their participation in the Holocaust.
This is post 12 in my Ordinary Men retelling series. If you are just joining, start with the intro for context on who these men were and why this book matters.
From Bullets to Box Cars
Chapter 10 marks a turning point. Up until now, the battalion’s role in the Final Solution had been hands-on massacre. Jozefow. Lomazy. Lining people up and pulling the trigger. But the geography of the Lublin district meant that most of the Jewish population lived in towns near railway lines. Lomazy had been an exception – no rail connection, so the Jews there had to be killed on the spot. But towns like Radzyn, Lukow, Parczew, and Miedzyrzec all sat close to functioning rail stations.
And about 110 kilometers to the north of the battalion’s new headquarters in Radzyn, the Treblinka extermination camp was up and running.
The first deportation train had left Warsaw on July 22, 1942. From that point on, transports rolled into Treblinka daily. By early August, some 30,000 Jews from the Radom and Kielce districts had already been shipped there. The camp’s killing machinery was being pushed to its limit, but Globocnik – the SS commander overseeing the whole operation – was impatient. He wanted deportations from northern Lublin to begin immediately, even while Warsaw transports were still running.
Battalion 101 was about to become the muscle for this new phase of industrialized murder.
The Parczew Deportations: August 19
The first target was Parczew, where more than 5,000 Jews lived in a Jewish quarter that had no wall or wire fence around it. That did not mean life had been easy for them. When Steinmetz’s platoon arrived in the area, the main street was already paved with Jewish gravestones. Let that image sit for a moment.
A few weeks earlier, somewhere between 300 and 500 Jews from Parczew had been loaded onto horse-drawn wagons, driven into the woods, and handed over to SS men. The policemen who escorted them left before hearing any shots. They did not know what happened to those people. Or at least that is what they told investigators later.
By mid-August, rumors of a larger deportation were spreading through the town. Many Jews fled into the surrounding forests. But most were still there on the morning of August 19, just two days after the Lomazy massacre, when First and Second Companies of Battalion 101 showed up with a unit of Hiwis (auxiliaries recruited from Soviet POWs) to clear the town.
Major Trapp gave another one of his speeches. The Jews were to be marched to the train station, two or three kilometers out of town. And once again, he made it understood – indirectly but clearly – that anyone too old or too weak to make the march was to be shot where they stood.
Second Company set up a perimeter. First Company swept through the Jewish quarter. By afternoon, a long column of roughly 3,000 Jews stretched from the marketplace to the train station. A few days later, the operation was repeated for the remaining 2,000. This time, they did not even bother bringing the Hiwis.
Out of Sight, Out of Mind
Here is the thing Browning highlights about Parczew: the policemen barely remembered it. In their later testimony, they described the deportations as relatively smooth. Not much shooting. The Hiwis behaved themselves during the first round. The second round was even calmer.
And yet more people were sent to their deaths in the two Parczew deportations than in the Jozefow and Lomazy massacres combined. The men knew what was happening. As platoon leader Steinmetz admitted, “it was clear and well known to us all that for the Jews affected, these deportations meant the path to death. We suspected that they would be killed in some sort of camp.”
But because they were not pulling the trigger themselves, because the actual killing happened somewhere else, the men could live with it. For some of them, the most vivid memory of the entire Parczew operation was standing guard in a swampy meadow and having wet feet all day.
That is how quickly human beings can normalize participation in mass murder when the blood is not on their own hands.
Miedzyrzec: August 25-26
If Parczew was forgettable, Miedzyrzec was the opposite. This was the largest single deportation operation Battalion 101 would carry out during the entire war, and it left a mark on even the most hardened participants.
Miedzyrzec was the biggest ghetto in the Radzyn county. More than 12,000 Jews lived there, packed into a ghetto that had been transferred from civilian administration to SS control in June 1942. It was designated as a “transit ghetto” – a collection point where Jews from surrounding areas would be gathered before being shipped to Treblinka. To make room for new arrivals, the existing population had to be cleared out.
Five platoons of Order Police, the local Security Police, and a unit of Hiwis were mobilized. Somewhere between 350 and 400 Germans total. For more than 11,000 Jews.
Do the math. That ratio was the root cause of what happened next.
The Captain Brings His Bride
Before we get to the horror, Browning pauses to tell us about Captain Julius Wohlauf, and this is one of those details that sticks with you.
Wohlauf was the commander of First Company. He had bounced around before landing in Battalion 101 – his previous commander in Norway had him recalled for being too full of himself. But Major Trapp liked him. Trapp wrote that Wohlauf was “ready at any time without reservation to go the limit for the National Socialist state.” The men had a different take. They called him “the little Rommel” because he liked to ride standing up in his car like a general.
When the battalion deployed to Poland in June 1942, Wohlauf had rushed back to Hamburg for a quick wedding because his girlfriend was already pregnant. He returned just in time for Jozefow. Once the company set up in Radzyn, he brought his new bride out for their honeymoon.
And on August 25, when the convoy of trucks rolled out of Radzyn toward Miedzyrzec, Wohlauf climbed aboard with his four-months-pregnant wife. She was wearing a military coat draped over her shoulders and a peaked military cap on her head. One policeman had to give up his seat to make room for her.
Captain Wohlauf brought his wife to watch a deportation.
Why? Maybe he could not stand to be separated from her. Maybe he wanted to show her he was a big man who held power over life and death. The men believed the latter. And their reaction was not admiration. It was outrage. Not outrage at the deportation itself – outrage that a woman had been brought to witness what they were doing. They could still feel shame, Browning notes, even if they could not feel enough of it to stop.
Chaos and Carnage
When the convoy arrived in Miedzyrzec, the operation was already underway. The men could hear shooting and screaming before they even got their assignments. The Hiwis and Security Police had started the roundup, and they were drunk. A Security Police officer was already visibly intoxicated despite the early hour. The Hiwis were firing so wildly and so often that the German policemen had to take cover to avoid being hit by their own side.
Corpses littered the streets and houses.
Thousands of Jews were driven into the marketplace, where they were forced to sit or squat without moving. It was a brutally hot August day. People fainted. People collapsed from heat and dehydration. The beatings and shootings continued right there in the open marketplace, with Frau Wohlauf watching the whole thing from close range, her military coat now removed in the heat.
Around 2:00 in the afternoon, the outer guards were called in. An hour or two later, the march to the train station began. The entire force – Hiwis and policemen together – drove the thousands of Jews along the route. Anyone who could not keep up was shot and left on the roadside. Bodies lined the entire path from town to station.
Loading the Trains
The worst part came at the end. The train cars had to be loaded, and what happened there stayed with the men who saw it.
The Hiwis and Security Police crammed 120 to 140 people into each car. When the loading did not go fast enough, they used riding whips and guns. The reserve policemen stood guard and watched. One later described it:
The loading was simply frightful. There was an unearthly cry from the people, because ten or twenty cars were being loaded at the same time. The entire freight train was dreadfully long. You could not see the end of it. It might have been fifty or sixty cars, maybe more. After each car was full, the doors were closed and nailed shut.
Once every car was sealed, the men of Battalion 101 left immediately. They did not wait to see the train pull away.
The Numbers Tell the Story
Out of the roughly 12,000 Jews in the Miedzyrzec ghetto, only about 1,000 received temporary work permits to stay behind. The other 11,000 were targeted for deportation. The surviving Jews who collected and buried the dead afterward counted 960 bodies – people killed during the roundup itself, before anyone even reached the trains.
Browning puts that number in perspective. During the two-month deportation of 300,000 Jews from Warsaw, about 6,687 were killed by gunfire – a ratio of roughly 2 percent. In Miedzyrzec, the ratio was nearly 9 percent. Almost one in ten people targeted for deportation were killed before they could even be deported.
The Jews of Miedzyrzec, Browning writes, did not go “like sheep to the slaughter.” They were driven with a ferocity that left a mark even on the increasingly numb participants from Battalion 101.
Why Was Miedzyrzec So Much Worse?
Browning asks the obvious question: why was Parczew relatively calm and Miedzyrzec a bloodbath, when they happened only a week apart?
The answer is simple and chilling. Manpower.
For 5,000 Jews in Parczew, the Germans had 300 to 350 men. For more than twice as many Jews in Miedzyrzec, they had only 350 to 400. The more pressure on the perpetrators in terms of numbers, the more brutal they became to get the job done. Violence was not just cruelty for its own sake. It was a management tool.
The Machine Breaks Down
There is a grim irony at the end of this chapter. Globocnik’s rush to start deportations from northern Lublin while Warsaw and Radom transports were still running overwhelmed Treblinka itself. By late August, the camp could not process the volume. Bodies piled up. The killing machinery literally broke down.
All deportations were temporarily halted. Globocnik and his extermination camp supervisor, Christian Wirth, rushed to Treblinka to reorganize. They brought in Franz Stangl from Sobibor to take over as commandant. After a week of frantic restructuring, Warsaw deportations resumed on September 3.
Meanwhile, Battalion 101 got a brief break. The killing in northern Lublin would not resume until late September.
Key Takeaway
This chapter shows how the shift from direct shooting to deportation logistics made mass murder psychologically easier for the perpetrators. When the killing happened somewhere else, the men could process thousands of victims with barely a second thought. It was only when the violence exploded in front of them – as it did in Miedzyrzec – that they were forced to confront what they were part of. And even then, their outrage focused on trivial things, like a captain’s wife being present, rather than on the 11,000 people being sent to die.
Book: Ordinary Men by Christopher R. Browning | ISBN: 978-0-06-099968-8
Previous: Chapter 9 - Lomazy