Ordinary Men Chapter 16: The Aftermath
Here is the thing nobody wants to think about. The men of Reserve Police Battalion 101 shot thousands of unarmed people, helped deport tens of thousands more to death camps, and then most of them just went home and got on with their lives. No prison. No trial. No consequences. They went back to being cops, tradesmen, and dock workers in Hamburg, like nothing had happened.
This is post 18 in my Ordinary Men retelling series. Chapter 16 is short, but it might be the most unsettling chapter in the whole book. Not because of what it describes, but because of what it does not.
From Killing to Combat
Once Battalion 101 had finished its part in the Final Solution, the war kept going. The men shifted to fighting actual armed opponents: partisans and regular enemy soldiers. For most of the war this had been relatively safe duty, but things changed fast.
In the spring of 1943, First Lieutenant Hagen was killed in a bizarre accident, hit by friendly police gunfire. Then in the final year of the war, the casualties piled up. Lieutenants Gnade, Hoppner, and Peters were all killed in action. Lieutenant Drucker was wounded badly enough to be sent back to Germany.
Major Trapp, the weeping commander who had offered his men the chance to step out at Jozefow, returned to Germany in early 1944. A few battalion members were captured by the advancing Soviet army. But most of them made it home as the Third Reich collapsed around them.
Back to Normal
And then they just resumed their old lives.
This is the part that really lands. Many of the men went straight back to whatever they had been doing before the war. For some, that meant going right back into the police force. The two SS captains, Hoffmann and Wohlauf, continued their police careers. Twelve of the noncommissioned officers in Browning’s sample did the same. Another twelve from the rank-and-file reservists managed to leverage their wartime police service into permanent postwar police jobs.
That is twenty-six men from the study sample alone who went from participating in mass murder to wearing a badge again. And the interrogation records contain almost nothing about how smoothly this transition happened. Nobody asked hard questions. Nobody checked.
Hoffmann, who had been in both the Nazi Party and the SS, mentioned being briefly held by the British because of his SS membership. He was even interrogated by Polish authorities. They let him go. He walked straight back into the Hamburg police.
The Wrong Men Got Punished
Here is where the story gets truly absurd. The first people from Battalion 101 to face real consequences were not the hardcore SS officers. It was Major Trapp and Lieutenant Buchmann.
The chain of events started with a single denunciation. One policeman who had been in the firing squad at Talcyn was reported by his own estranged wife. During his interrogation, he named his battalion commander Trapp, his company commander Buchmann, and his first sergeant Kammer. All four were extradited to Poland in October 1947.
On July 6, 1948, they had a one-day trial in the city of Siedlce. One day. For everything these men had been part of. And the trial did not even address the mass killings of Jews. It focused entirely on the reprisal shooting of seventy-eight Poles at Talcyn.
The policeman and Trapp were sentenced to death and executed in December 1948. Buchmann got eight years. Kammer got three.
Think about that for a second. Trapp, who had wept openly when ordering the Jozefow massacre and offered his men the chance to step out, was executed. Buchmann, who had actually refused to participate in the Jewish shootings and was the single clearest example of moral resistance in the entire battalion, got eight years. Meanwhile, officers like Hoffmann and Wohlauf were back at work in Hamburg.
The Long Wait for Justice
Nobody looked at Battalion 101 again until the 1960s. In 1958, West Germany finally created the Central Agency for the State Administrations of Justice, based in Ludwigsburg near Stuttgart. This office was set up specifically to investigate and coordinate prosecutions of Nazi crimes.
The agency organized its staff into task forces assigned to different “crime complexes.” While investigating crimes in the Lublin district, investigators started running into witnesses from Reserve Police Battalion 101. In 1962, the case was handed to police and judicial authorities in Hamburg, where most of the surviving battalion members still lived.
210 Interrogations, Almost No Punishment
From late 1962 to early 1967, investigators interrogated 210 former members of the battalion. Many were questioned more than once. Out of those 210, fourteen men were indicted. The trial started in October 1967 and the verdict came the following April.
The sentences were shockingly light:
- Hoffmann, Wohlauf, and Drucker – eight years each
- Bentheim – six years
- Bekemeier – five years
- Grafmann and five reserve policemen – declared guilty but given no sentence at all. The judges used their discretion under a provision of the 1940 criminal code (chosen deliberately to avoid accusations of applying laws that did not exist at the time of the crimes)
- Grund, Steinmetz, and Mehler – their cases were separated during trial because of failing health. They never faced a verdict.
Then came the appeals. By 1972, Bentheim’s and Bekemeier’s convictions were upheld, but their sentences were thrown out entirely. Hoffmann’s sentence was cut to four years. Drucker’s was reduced to three and a half. The prosecution dropped its case against all remaining battalion members because it clearly could not get real sentences out of the courts.
And That Was Considered a Success
Browning makes a point that lands like a gut punch. As inadequate as this outcome was, the investigation and trial of Reserve Police Battalion 101 was actually one of the more successful cases brought against the Order Police. Most investigations of police battalions never even made it to indictment. The few that went to trial produced almost no convictions.
Battalion 101’s case was the exception, not the rule.
The Records Remain
The chapter ends on a note that is partly hopeful and partly bitter. The interrogation transcripts of all 210 men remain in the archives of the Office of the State Prosecutor in Hamburg. Those records are the foundation of Browning’s entire book.
His closing line for this chapter says it plainly: the prosecution’s work served history far better than it served justice.
Key Takeaway
The men who participated in mass murder overwhelmingly faced no consequences. The justice system moved slowly, punished lightly, and caught almost nobody. What the investigations did leave behind were detailed records that let historians reconstruct what happened, which turned out to be the most important legacy of the entire legal process.
Book: Ordinary Men by Christopher R. Browning | ISBN: 978-0-06-099968-8
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