Ordinary Men Chapter 14: The Jew Hunt

There is a word the men of Reserve Police Battalion 101 invented for what they did in the final months of 1942 and into 1943. They called it the Judenjagd. The “Jew hunt.” Not an official term. Not something that came down from Berlin. The men themselves coined it. Because that is exactly what it was. They tracked human beings through forests and farmyards and shot them like animals.

This is post 16 in my Ordinary Men retelling series. If you are just joining, start with the intro for context on who these men were.

The Numbers So Far

Before this chapter even begins, Browning drops a staggering summary. By mid-November 1942, Battalion 101 had already participated in the direct execution of at least 6,500 Polish Jews and the deportation of at least 42,000 more to the gas chambers at Treblinka.

But they were not done.

The major ghettos had been cleared. The big roundups were over. What remained were the survivors. Jews who had somehow slipped through the cracks, fled into forests, hidden in cellars, or found shelter among the work crews on confiscated German-run farms. The battalion’s new assignment was simple: find every last one of them and kill them. Make the entire region judenfrei. Free of Jews.

The Legal Foundation for Murder

Browning traces the legal scaffolding behind the hunts. Back in October 1941, Hans Frank, the head of the General Government in Poland, decreed that any Jew caught outside ghetto boundaries would be sentenced to death. The original justification was almost comically bureaucratic. German public health officials were worried about typhus spreading from the ghettos. Their solution was not medicine or better conditions. It was death.

But even Frank’s decree was not efficient enough. Courts took too long. Escorts were scarce. So the remedy was straightforward: skip the courts entirely. Just shoot Jews on sight wherever they were found outside the ghettos. A Warsaw district official noted how “gratefully” they had welcomed this simplified shooting order.

By October 1942, the order was for real. Placards went up announcing that any Jew who did not report to the ghettos would be shot. Company commanders drilled the message into their men before every patrol. The official paperwork called these operations “forest patrols” for “suspects.” The men had a more honest name for it.

Sweeping the Parczew Forest

The hunts took different forms. The most dramatic were battalion-wide sweeps through the Parczew forest. In October 1942, the entire battalion fanned out in a skirmish line and combed the woods looking for Jews in hiding.

At first they found nothing. The Jews were well concealed. On a second pass, they spotted chimney pipes barely poking out of the earth. Entire families had dug underground bunkers in the forest and were living there, trying to survive.

The police hauled them out. Most came without resistance. In one bunker, the men had to climb down and physically drag people out. Then the Jews were forced to lie face down on the ground and were killed with a shot to the back of the neck.

About fifty people were killed in this one spot alone. Men, women, children. Entire families. Polish civilians from the nearby town of Parczew stood right there watching. They were then ordered to bury the bodies in a half-finished bunker.

Other units reported finding and killing groups of twenty to fifty at a time. One policeman estimated the total body count for that single October sweep at around 500 people.

By spring 1943, the situation had shifted. The few Jews still alive had mostly managed to join up with partisan bands and escaped Russian prisoners of war. A spring sweep uncovered a forest camp where Jews and Russians offered armed resistance. About 100 to 120 were killed. The battalion suffered one casualty of its own – Trapp’s adjutant, Lieutenant Hagen, who was accidentally killed by friendly fire.

The Farm Killings

Some Jews had survived by working on large agricultural estates that the Germans had confiscated. These workers had been useful, but usefulness was no protection.

At one estate near Parczew called Gut Jablon, a unit loaded thirty Jewish workers onto trucks, drove them into the forest, and executed them with the standard neck shot. The German administrator of the farm had not even been told his entire labor force was about to be murdered. He complained. Nobody cared.

At another estate, Gut Pannwitz near Pulawy, the opposite problem arose. The farm became a magnet for Jews fleeing the ghettos and forests. They sought food and shelter among the existing work Jews. Whenever the Jewish population on the farm grew noticeably, the estate administration simply picked up the phone and called Captain Hoffmann. A police squad would arrive and shoot the “surplus” Jews.

After Hoffmann was hospitalized, his successor Lieutenant Messmann formed a mobile killing squad that systematically worked through farms in a fifty- to sixty-kilometer radius. His driver described the routine. They would race into a farmyard at high speed. The police would leap out and rush straight to wherever the Jews were housed. Everyone was dragged out, forced to strip naked, lie face down, and shot in the neck. If the road into a farm was too visible, they approached on foot to prevent anyone from escaping.

They consistently found more Jews at these worksites than expected.

Hunted in the Towns

Not all Jews hid in the woods. Some tried to survive by staying hidden in towns. They were hunted down too.

The most notable case happened in the town of Kock. A Polish translator working for the Germans reported a cellar where Jews were hiding. Four were captured. Under interrogation, they revealed a second hiding place in a large house at the edge of town.

A single German policeman and the Polish translator went to investigate, expecting no trouble. But this was one of the rare cases where the Jews were armed. They fired on the approaching policeman. Reinforcements were called in, and a firefight broke out. Four or five Jews were killed trying to escape. Eight to ten more were found dead or badly wounded in the cellar. The handful captured alive were interrogated and shot that evening.

Then the police went after the Polish woman who owned the house. She had managed to flee. They tracked her to her father’s house in a nearby village. Lieutenant Brand gave the father a choice: his life or his daughter’s. The man gave up his daughter. She was shot on the spot.

Daily Bread

The most common form of the Jew hunt was the small patrol. A tip would come in, usually from a Polish informer or a paid tracker the battalion called a “forest runner.” Someone had seen Jews stealing food from a field. Someone had noticed a bunker in the woods.

A few policemen would follow the guide to the hiding place. Grenades went into the bunker opening. Whoever survived the blast and came out was forced face down on the ground. Neck shot. The bodies were left for the nearest Polish villagers to bury.

How often did this happen? The patrols were “too frequent” for most policemen to remember how many they had been on. One man described them with a phrase that will stick with you. He called them “our daily bread.”

Another policeman used the same expression independently. These hunts were not occasional events. They were the main job. One man said explicitly that Jew hunt patrols far outnumbered actual partisan operations.

The Division: Eager, Numb, and Reluctant

This chapter is where Browning really drives home how the battalion had fractured into distinct groups by this point. The hunts brought the men back to something personal, face-to-face, like Jozefow all over again. And each man’s response revealed what he had become.

The Eager Ones

Some men actively wanted to kill. The wife of Lieutenant Brand remembered a morning when a policeman walked up to her husband at breakfast, stood at attention, and announced: “Herr Leutnant, I have not yet had breakfast.” When Brand looked confused, the man clarified: “I have not yet killed any Jews.”

Brand’s wife was horrified. She called the man a scoundrel. Her husband sent the policeman away but then warned her that talking like that would get her in serious trouble.

The general atmosphere had coarsened badly since Jozefow. After the early shootings, the men came back to their quarters shaken, unable to eat, unwilling to talk. By this phase, some were cracking jokes about it at the lunch table. One man said they were now eating “the brains of slaughtered Jews.” Only the man telling the story found this less than hilarious.

Forming a patrol or firing squad was easy. Officers just asked for volunteers. One man stated flatly that there were always enough volunteers, and sometimes so many that some had to be turned away.

The Ones Who Stayed Away

On the other end of the spectrum, some men had figured out how to avoid the killing almost entirely. They used three tactics. They made their opposition known. They never volunteered. And they physically stayed far away from officers when patrols were being organized.

Otto-Julius Schimke, the first man to step out of the line at Jozefow back in chapter 1, was frequently assigned to anti-partisan operations but never once sent on a Jew hunt. He believed his early refusal had effectively marked him as someone who would not be used for those jobs.

Adolf Bittner took it even further. During one of the first searches for Jews, a comrade clubbed a Jewish woman in front of him. Bittner punched the man in the face. A report was filed. After that, everyone knew where he stood. He was never assigned to a firing squad. But he paid a price – extra Sunday duties and special watches. Unofficial punishment that everyone understood.

Gustav Michaelson, who had lingered by the trucks at Jozefow while his comrades mocked him, also found that his reputation protected him. “No one ever approached me concerning these operations,” he recalled. “For these actions the officers took ‘men’ with them, and in their eyes I was no ‘man.’”

The Quiet Resisters

Heinrich Feucht noticed that platoon leaders almost always picked the men standing closest to them. So he made a habit of positioning himself as far from the center of events as possible. It worked. He was only forced to shoot once.

Some men went further when they were out of sight. Martin Detmold recalled that on small patrols, Jews who were found were sometimes simply let go. This only happened when no superior was around and you were with comrades you trusted. Over time, you learned who you could take that risk with.

The battalion’s communications staff claimed they routinely ignored Jews they encountered while laying telephone lines on their own. At least one policeman admitted that when ordered to shoot from a distance, he fired into the air.

The Body Count Nobody Recorded

Browning admits that no surviving reports document exactly how many Jews Battalion 101 killed in the Jew hunts. But he pieces together figures from other units to give us a sense of scale.

The Order Police commander for the entire Lublin district reported shooting 1,695 Jews in just six months from May to October 1943. That is long after the peak killing period. Nearly 283 per month, as a kind of grim maintenance operation.

A Gendarmerie platoon of just eighty men near Warsaw killed 1,094 Jews in about six months. That works out to roughly fourteen Jews killed per individual policeman.

A single company of Reserve Police Battalion 133, stationed in a neighboring district, executed 481 Jews in just six weeks. About three Jews per policeman, in an area that had already been “cleared.”

If these smaller units were producing numbers like that, the total for a battalion the size of 101 over many months must have been enormous.

Key Takeaway

The Jew hunt is the phase of the Final Solution that gets the least attention, but Browning argues it might be the most psychologically revealing. The ghetto roundups were brief, chaotic events that the men could push out of their minds. The Jew hunt was not a single event. It was an ongoing state of existence – a constant, relentless campaign of tracking and killing that lasted months. It was personal, face-to-face, and it demanded that each man decide, over and over again, what kind of person he was going to be.

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

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Next up: Chapter 15 - The Harvest Festival - The final, largest massacre of the Holocaust in occupied Poland.