Ordinary Men Chapter 11: The Late September Shootings

By this point in the book, you start to dread the pattern. A village name you have never heard of. A date. A body count. And the same men doing the killing, over and over again.

This is post 13 in my Ordinary Men retelling series. If you are just finding this, start with the intro for context on who these men were and why this book matters.

Serokomla: A Village That Had Already Seen Murder

The village of Serokomla sits about nine kilometers northwest of the town of Kock. It was a small, unremarkable place. But it had already been through hell once before. Back in May 1940, ethnic German vigilante squads called the Selbstschutz – basically “self-defense” militias organized under Himmler’s people – had carried out a massacre there. By September 1942, the village still had a Jewish population of around 200 to 300 people.

They would not survive the month.

The Setup: September 22, 1942

Lieutenant Brand’s platoon from First Company was stationed in nearby Kock. A few days before the operation, Brand sent Sergeant Keller and ten men into the outlying areas around Serokomla to round up Jews from the surrounding countryside and bring them into the village. Think of it as a net slowly tightening.

On the morning of September 22, Brand’s platoon drove out of Kock and waited at a crossroads. They were joined by other units of First Company under Captain Wohlauf, coming from Radzyń about twenty kilometers northeast, and by Lieutenant Peters’s First Platoon of Third Company, stationed in Czemierniki about fifteen kilometers east. Wohlauf was in overall command.

Just before they reached the village, Wohlauf stopped the convoy and gave orders. Machine guns were placed on two hills overlooking the entire area. Some men were assigned to cordon off the Jewish quarter. The rest of First Company was told to collect the Jewish population.

Here is the creepy part: Wohlauf never actually said the word “shooting.” He told the men to proceed “as usual.” By now, everyone knew what that meant. People trying to hide or escape would be shot. People too weak to walk would be shot. The phrase “as usual” had become shorthand for murder.

The Killing Grounds

Lieutenant Peters’s platoon was sent ahead to an area of gravel pits and mounds of waste material just outside the village. Sergeant Keller, watching from his machine-gun position on the hills, could see exactly what was being set up. It was obvious the Jews were going to be shot, even though Wohlauf was still using the word “resettlement.”

By 11:00 a.m. on what was turning into a warm, sunny day, all 200 to 300 Jews of Serokomla had been rounded up. That is when Wohlauf dropped the pretense. He announced that all of the Jews were to be shot.

This is a detail worth pausing on. Peters’s platoon had been part of the cordon at Jozefow back in July. They had been spared from the firing squads that day. They had also missed the shooting at Lomazy. But at Serokomla, their turn had finally come.

Face to Face Again

Without the Hiwis (the auxiliary volunteers from Trawniki who had done much of the killing at Lomazy), Wohlauf organized this execution the same way Jozefow had been run. Groups of twenty to thirty Jews were marched out of the village in succession to the gravel pits. Each group was met by an equal number of policemen. Once again, each killer was paired with an individual victim.

The Jews were not forced to undress. There was no collection of valuables. No one was selected for forced labor. Everyone – men, women, children, elderly – was to die.

The policemen marched their assigned victims to the crest of one of the waste mounds overlooking a six-foot drop. The Jews were lined up at the edge. The policemen stood a short distance behind them and, on order, fired into the backs of their necks. The bodies tumbled over the ledge.

Then the next group was brought to the same spot. They had to look down at the growing pile of bodies – their neighbors, their families – before they were shot in turn. It was only after several rounds of this that the shooters moved to a different location along the pit.

The Captain Who Ordered It and Then Left

While all this was happening, Sergeant Keller strolled down from his machine-gun position to chat with Sergeant Jurich. Jurich was furious. Wohlauf had ordered this entire operation, Jurich complained, and then “sneaked off” to sit in the Polish police station back in the village. The captain who gave the kill order could not even be bothered to watch.

Wohlauf’s new wife was not with him this time (she had been present at other actions). Without anyone to impress, apparently Wohlauf had no interest in being anywhere near the killing. Later, when questioned about Serokomla, he claimed he did not have “even the faintest memory” of the operation. He was probably already thinking about his upcoming trip back to Germany to drop off his bride.

The shooting lasted until 3:00 p.m. Nobody bothered to bury the dead. The bodies were left in the gravel pits. The policemen drove back to Kock, had an afternoon meal, and returned to their lodgings, where they received special rations of alcohol.

Just another day.

The Ambush at Talcyn

Three days later, on September 25, something happened that triggered a much larger chain of violence.

Sergeant Jobst from First Company left Kock dressed in civilian clothes with a single Polish translator. He was on a mission to catch a member of the Polish resistance hiding between the villages of Serokomla and Talcyn. The trap worked – Jobst captured his man. But on the way back through Talcyn, Jobst was ambushed and killed. The translator escaped and made it back to Kock long after dark with the news.

Around midnight, Sergeant Jurich called battalion headquarters in Radzyń to report. At first, there seemed to be no plan for retaliation. But then Major Trapp called back. Lublin had ordered a reprisal: 200 people were to be shot.

The Retaliation: Talcyn and Kock

On the morning of September 26, the same units that had converged on Serokomla four days earlier met again at the same crossroads outside Kock. This time Wohlauf was gone – already on his way to Germany. Major Trapp himself was in command, with his adjutant Lieutenant Hagen and the battalion staff.

When the men arrived in Talcyn, the first thing they were shown was the body of Sergeant Jobst. It had been left lying in the street on the edge of town. This was deliberate. The men were meant to see it and feel what they were meant to feel.

The village was sealed off. Polish civilians were pulled from their homes and gathered in the local school. Many of the men had already fled. The remaining males were brought to the school gymnasium.

Selecting the “Poorest of the Poor”

What happened next is grim even by the standards of this book. Trapp did not just grab 200 random people. He tried to be strategic about it. Working with his adjutant and the Polish mayor, he carried out a selection. Two categories of Poles were marked: outsiders and temporary residents, and those “without sufficient means of existence.” In other words, people whose deaths would cause the least local outrage.

Seventy-eight Polish men were selected. They were taken outside of town and shot. As one German policeman later remembered, they had killed only “the poorest of the poor.”

Trapp sent at least one policeman to the nearby classrooms where the women were being held, screaming and crying, to try to calm them down.

Making Up the Numbers

But 78 was far short of the 200 Lublin had demanded. And here is where Trapp found what Browning describes as an “ingenious” solution. Rather than shoot more Poles and further damage relations with the local population, Trapp decided to make up the difference by shooting Jews from the Kock ghetto.

One German driver later claimed he stopped at the ghetto on the way out of town to warn them. But warnings meant nothing to a trapped population with nowhere to go.

Search squads entered the Kock ghetto and grabbed anyone they could find. Age and sex did not matter. Older Jews who could not walk were shot where they stood. The rest were taken to a large house with a walled courtyard. In groups of thirty, they were forced to lie face down next to the wall. On Lieutenant Brand’s order, NCOs with submachine guns executed them.

The bodies were left overnight. The next day, Jews from the ghetto were forced to bury the dead.

Trapp reported to Lublin that 3 “bandits,” 78 Polish “accomplices,” and 180 Jews had been killed in retaliation for the ambush. The man who had wept openly at Jozefow – who still tried to avoid indiscriminate killing of Poles – apparently had no problem shooting more than enough Jews to meet his quota.

Lieutenant Buchmann: The Man Who Said No

This chapter also gives us the most detailed look yet at Lieutenant Buchmann, the one officer who consistently refused to participate in the killing of Jews.

After Jozefow, Buchmann told Major Trapp directly: without a personal order, he would not take part in any Jewish actions. He also requested a transfer. Buchmann had an advantage most men did not. Before becoming a reserve lieutenant, he had been Trapp’s driver during the battalion’s first assignment in Poland in 1939. He knew Trapp personally, and he felt that Trapp understood his position and was not angry about it.

Trapp could not get Buchmann an immediate transfer home, but he did protect him. Buchmann was stationed at battalion headquarters in Radzyń, and a quiet system was worked out. Whenever a Jewish action was coming, orders would be sent directly to Buchmann’s deputy, Sergeant Grund. Grund would ask Buchmann if he wanted to come along, and Buchmann would decline. It was a polite fiction that avoided any official “refusal to obey orders.”

This is how Buchmann missed the operations at Miedzrzec and Serokomla. Talcyn did not start as a Jewish operation, so Buchmann was present for the selection of Poles in the school. But Trapp made sure to send him back to Radzyń before the shooting of Jews from the Kock ghetto began.

“I Have a Noseful”

Talcyn was the breaking point. When Buchmann returned to Radzyń that afternoon, his desk clerk tried to report to him. Buchmann walked straight past, went to his room, and locked the door. For days afterward, he would not speak to anyone. When he finally did, he said something along the lines of: “Now I will not do this shit any longer. I have a noseful.”

He wrote directly to Hamburg requesting an urgent transfer. He could no longer carry out the tasks “alien to the police” that his unit was being assigned in Poland.

The Reaction Around Him

Buchmann made no effort to hide how he felt. He openly expressed his outrage at every opportunity. People around him described him as “reserved,” “refined,” a “typical civilian” who never wanted to be a soldier.

His men had mixed reactions. Some understood and respected his position. Others looked down on him. A few enlisted men even followed his example, telling the company first sergeant, Kammer, that they could not and would not participate anymore. Kammer yelled at them, called them “shitheads” who “were good for nothing,” but for the most part, he quietly excused them from further Jewish actions.

This was the same pattern set by Trapp from the very beginning. As long as enough men were willing to do the killing, it was easier to accommodate the objectors than to make a problem out of them.

Key Takeaway

Chapter 11 shows a battalion that has settled into a routine of mass murder. The killing is no longer shocking to most of the men – it is just what they do now. But Browning also shows us the exceptions. Lieutenant Buchmann and the handful of men who followed his lead prove that saying no was possible, even within the system. The fact that so few actually did is the question this book keeps forcing you to sit with.

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

Previous: Chapter 10 - Deportations to Treblinka

Next up: Chapter 12 - The Deportations Resume - The killing machine picks up where it left off.