Ordinary Men Chapter 17: Germans, Poles, and Jews
Everyone edits their own story. We remember things in ways that make us look a little better, forget details that make us look worse. Now imagine doing that when the story involves mass murder and you are sitting in front of a prosecutor twenty-five years later.
This is post 19 in my Ordinary Men retelling series. Chapter 17 is not about another massacre. It is about what happened when the men of Battalion 101 finally had to talk about what they did. And Browning picks apart their testimonies like a surgeon, showing us exactly where the lies, the silences, and the blame-shifting hide.
The Problem with These Testimonies
Browning opens the chapter with a warning. The postwar statements from Battalion 101 members are deeply unreliable, and for multiple reasons stacked on top of each other.
First, there is the legal calculation. German law defined murder partly by whether a “base motive” like racial hatred was involved. So admitting you were an anti-Semite was not just embarrassing. It could literally upgrade your charge from manslaughter to murder. Every man in that courtroom knew this.
Second, twenty-five years had passed. Memories fade. Some of that fading was real. Some was very convenient.
Third, and maybe most important, psychological defense mechanisms were running at full power. Repression. Projection. Blame-shifting. The men had spent two decades building mental walls between themselves and what they had done.
Browning tells us that nowhere do all these problems collide more than in one specific area: the triangle of German-Polish-Jewish relations. And he finds a striking pattern. When these men talked about their own relationship with Poles and Jews, everything was rosy. When they talked about how Poles treated Jews, suddenly the details got vivid and damning.
That asymmetry is the heart of this chapter.
The Rosy Picture of German-Polish Relations
Most of the policemen barely mentioned the Poles at all, which itself is revealing. When they did talk about them, they painted a picture of a fairly benign occupation. Captain Hoffmann bragged about his company having friendly relations with local Poles in Pulawy. He even claimed he filed charges against a reckless Gendarmerie lieutenant whose aggressive tactics were making the Polish population angry.
Lieutenant Buchmann noted that Major Trapp consulted with the Polish town mayor before the Talcyn reprisal shootings. They took care to only shoot “strangers and the destitute” rather than well-regarded citizens. As if picking your victims with a little more thought somehow made it civilized.
The men also talked about partisans and bandits, but not in a way that highlighted Polish resistance to German occupation. Instead, they framed banditry as an existing local problem that predated the Germans. Two birds with one stone: it made the Germans look like peacekeepers and it buried the reality of how much time the battalion actually spent hunting and killing Jews.
Only two testimonies broke this cozy picture. Bruno Probst – who keeps emerging in this book as the one man willing to be blunt – recalled the brutal expulsions in Poznan and Lodz in 1940-41, and the summary executions of Poles on the flimsiest pretexts. Mere suspicion of hiding weapons or Jews was enough to get entire Polish families shot on the spot.
The other honest voice was not even a policeman. It was the wife of Lieutenant Brand, who had visited him in Radzyn. She described the blatant “master race” behavior: Poles had to step off the sidewalk when Germans walked by, leave shops when Germans entered. When some Polish women once blocked her path, Major Trapp – good old “Papa Trapp” – declared those women should be shot in the public marketplace.
Then there was the ban on sexual relations between German men and Polish women. One policeman spent a year in a punishment camp for violating it. The mere existence of such a law tells you everything about what “friendly relations” actually looked like.
Growing Callousness Toward Polish Life
Browning asks a pointed question: could the German policemen have done to the Poles what they did to the Jews? On a smaller scale, the answer was trending toward yes.
In September 1942, the battalion was still cautious about reprisal killings of Poles. After shooting seventy-eight “expendable” Poles at Talcyn, Trapp met the rest of his quota by shooting Jews instead. By January 1943, that caution had evaporated.
Probst recalled one incident where Lieutenant Hoppner’s platoon was heading to the movies in Opole when they got word that a German policeman had been shot by Poles. Hoppner took his men to the village of Niezdow for reprisal. Most of the villagers had fled. Only a dozen or so elderly people remained, mostly women. Even when word came mid-action that the German policeman had only been wounded, not killed, Hoppner had every last one of them shot. Then he burned the village down.
Then the platoon went back to the movie theater.
The Silence About Anti-Semitism
The testimonies are almost completely silent about anti-Jewish attitudes among the policemen. Part of this was legal self-preservation. Admitting to anti-Semitism in a German courtroom meant risking a murder conviction. Talking about a comrade’s anti-Semitism meant becoming a witness against him.
But it went deeper than legal strategy. Admitting that Nazi ideology had made sense to them at the time would mean admitting they had no real moral compass of their own. That they just adapted to whatever the current regime told them was acceptable. That is a truth very few people can face about themselves.
Captain Hoffmann, who joined the Nazi student organization at sixteen, the Hitler Youth at eighteen, and both the Party and the SS at nineteen, offered the standard line: his SS membership was just about the SS being a “purely defensive formation.” No ideology involved, he insisted.
Lieutenant Drucker was more honest, though still carefully hedged. He admitted that propaganda had influenced him and that he felt “a certain aversion” toward Jews. But then he immediately softened it: “I cannot say that I especially hated Jews – in any case it is my impression now that that was my attitude at that time.” That last clause is doing a lot of heavy lifting.
The Few They Named
When the policemen did say anything revealing about the most openly anti-Semitic among them, it was usually enlisted men talking about unpopular officers.
Lieutenant Gnade was described as a brutal, sadistic drunk who was a Nazi and anti-Semite “out of conviction.” Sergeant Rudolf Grund, who filled in when Lieutenant Buchmann excused himself from Jewish operations, was nicknamed the “poison dwarf” – short, loud, always screaming at his men, and described as “one hundred and ten percent Nazi.” Sergeant Heinrich Bekemeier was feared by Poles and Jews alike. One witness described how Bekemeier forced Jews near Lomazy to crawl through a mud puddle while singing. When an exhausted old man collapsed and begged for mercy with his hands raised, Bekemeier shot him in the mouth. “A common dog,” the witness called him.
But these denunciations were extremely rare. Pointing fingers at a few bad apples let everyone else off the hook.
How They Talked About Jews
The way the policemen described Jews during their interrogations revealed lingering attitudes they probably did not even realize they were showing.
When asked how they could tell Jews from Poles in the countryside, some gave neutral answers: clothing, hairstyle, appearance. But several still used language straight from 1942 Nazi propaganda – the Jews were “dirty,” “unkempt,” “less clean” than the Poles. Twenty-five years later and those stereotypes were still in their mouths.
Others showed a different sensibility. They described the Jews as dressed in rags and half starved. That at least recognized them as suffering human beings.
There was a similar split in how they described Jewish behavior at the killing sites. Some stressed passivity in ways that almost implied the victims were complicit in their own deaths: they did not resist, did not try to escape, practically lay down to be shot. Others emphasized the dignity of the victims. The composure of the Jews, they said, was “astonishing” and “unbelievable.”
The Jews They Knew by Name
For the most part, Jews remained an anonymous mass in the German accounts. Two exceptions stood out.
The first was German Jews. Whenever the policemen encountered Jews who were from Germany itself, they remembered them vividly. The decorated World War I veteran from Bremen. The mother and daughter from Kassel. The movie theater owner from Hamburg. The Jewish council head from Munich. Meeting a German Jew must have been jarring – a sharp crack in the mental wall that let them treat “eastern Jews” as a faceless foreign enemy.
The second group of Jews who became individuals in the policemen’s eyes were those who worked for them, especially kitchen workers. These relationships produced some of the most disturbing stories in the chapter.
In Lukow, one policeman procured extra food for the Jewish work detail he supervised because “the Jews received practically nothing at all to eat, even though they had to work for us.” He also claimed to have let the wife of the ghetto police chief escape during a ghetto clearing. In Miedzyrzec, a kitchen worker begged a policeman to save her mother and sister during a roundup. He let her bring them to the kitchen. In Kock, a policeman found a weeping Jewish woman during a shooting and sent her to the kitchen.
Small mercies. Almost always temporary.
When Mercy Ran Out
These fragile connections between policemen and their Jewish workers almost never saved anyone in the end. And the moments when they broke are some of the hardest passages in the book.
In Pulawy, Captain Hoffmann summoned a corporal named Nehring to his bedroom, gave him a bottle of good wine, and told him to go shoot the Jewish workers at an agricultural estate he used to guard. Nehring protested – he knew many of them personally. Hoffmann did not care. In the end, Nehring got a Gendarmerie officer to have his men do the shooting so Nehring would not have to be present. The Jews still died.
In Kock, two Jewish kitchen workers named Bluma and Ruth asked the policemen for help escaping. One man told them it was “pointless.” Others helped them get away. Two weeks later, a patrol found Bluma and Ruth hiding in a bunker with a dozen other Jews. One policeman who recognized them tried to leave because he knew what was about to happen. He was ordered to shoot them. He refused and walked away. But all the Jews in the bunker, Bluma and Ruth included, were killed anyway.
In Komarowka, Lieutenant Drucker’s platoon had two Jewish kitchen workers called Jutta and Harry. One day Drucker said they could not keep them any longer. Some policemen took Jutta into the woods, chatted with her, then shot her from behind. Shortly after, Harry was shot in the back of the head while picking berries.
The policemen had taken extra care to make sure these two people – people who had cooked their meals for months, people they knew by name – died without seeing it coming. By the standards of German-Jewish relations in 1942, that counted as compassion.
Blaming the Poles
Now we get to the part of the testimonies where the men suddenly found their voices.
While they were tight-lipped about German attitudes toward Poles and Jews, the policemen had plenty to say about Polish attitudes toward Jews. The accusations are frequent, specific, and vivid.
But Browning flags two important things before laying out this testimony.
First, the German police naturally had the most contact with Poles who collaborated. People who turned in Jews were trying to impress the occupiers. People who helped Jews stayed as far from the Germans as possible. So the policemen’s firsthand experience of Polish behavior was inherently skewed toward the worst examples.
Second, and this is the psychological gut punch of the chapter, Browning suspects heavy projection was at work. These men could not or would not accuse their comrades. They could not be honest about themselves. But they could talk freely and in great detail about what the Poles did. And the more blame they piled on the Poles, the less was left on their own shoulders.
The Polish Accusations
The list begins at Jozefow, where the whole killing campaign started. One policeman said the Polish mayor brought flasks of schnapps to the Germans on the marketplace. Others said Poles helped drag Jews from their homes, revealed hiding places behind false walls and under garden bunkers, and kept bringing individual Jews to the collection point even after the Germans had finished searching. And as soon as the Jews were taken away, Poles moved in to loot their houses. They looted the corpses after the shootings too.
Captain Hoffmann – who claimed to remember absolutely nothing about the massacre his company carried out at Konskowola – suddenly had crystal-clear recall of drinking vodka with two Polish students at Jozefow. These young nationalists told him they hated how the Germans treated them, but that Hitler had “one redeeming feature” – he was getting rid of the Jews.
During the “Jew hunts” in the forests, almost every account mentioned that Polish informants revealed the hiding places. The policemen used the word “betrayed” over and over. Gustav Michaelson was the most direct: “The Jews had camouflaged themselves very well in the forest, in underground bunkers or in other hiding places, and would never have been found if they had not been betrayed by the Polish civilian population.”
Michaelson belonged to the minority of “weak” policemen who never shot anyone, so his moral criticism carried less hypocrisy than most. But nearly everyone else who used the word “betrayed” conveniently forgot to mention that it was German policy to recruit these informants and reward this behavior.
The Missing Half of the Story
Once again, it was the relentlessly honest Bruno Probst who provided balance. Yes, the Jew hunts were often started by tips from Polish informants, he said. But he added something almost nobody else would admit: “I further remember that at that time we also gradually began, more systematically than before, to shoot Poles who provided lodging to Jews. Almost always we burned down their farms at the same time.”
Out of 210 witnesses, Probst was essentially the only one to acknowledge this German policy of killing Poles who helped Jews. One other group of witnesses mentioned a Polish woman in Kock who was turned in by her own father and shot for hiding Jews in her cellar. That was it. Two hundred and ten men, and only a handful acknowledged the lethal risks Poles faced for helping.
Probst also told a story about Lieutenant Hoppner finding a bunker with ten Jews. A young man stepped forward and said he was a Pole who had hidden there to be with his Jewish bride. Hoppner gave him a choice: leave or be shot with the rest. The man stayed and died. Probst was certain the offer was fake anyway. If the Pole had tried to leave, he would have been shot “trying to escape.”
Other policemen described Poles identifying a Jewish woman disguised as a Polish peasant at Konskowola. Poles capturing Jews and holding them for the Germans, sometimes beating them first. One witness mentioned Polish policemen joining German patrols and participating in shootings on two occasions.
But there was also the story of Toni Bentheim, ordered by Drucker to shoot four Jews that Polish police had captured. When Bentheim’s submachine gun jammed at the cemetery, he asked the Polish policeman who had come along to finish it. The Pole refused. Bentheim used his pistol instead.
What Browning Concludes
Browning does not deny that Polish collaboration happened. It did. The behavior the Germans described is confirmed by other sources and it happened far too often. The Holocaust has far too few heroes and far too many perpetrators and victims.
But the German portrayals are distorted in multiple ways. The policemen were almost completely silent about Poles who helped Jews. They said nothing about the German policy of executing those who did. They did not mention that they actively recruited and rewarded Polish informants. And they never acknowledged that unlike in Ukraine, the Baltics, or other parts of eastern Europe, the Germans could not recruit large-scale auxiliary killing units from the Polish population.
The men of Battalion 101 painted a picture where Poles were eager accomplices and Germans were reluctant executors. The reality was far more complicated. And as Browning puts it, the German policemen’s comments about Poles reveal as much about the Germans themselves as they do about the Poles.
Key Takeaway
When people cannot face what they have done, they do not just stay silent. They redirect. The men of Battalion 101 built a version of history where their own attitudes vanished into fog while Polish complicity was rendered in sharp detail. Browning shows us that reading perpetrator testimony is never just about what they say – it is about what they leave out, what they exaggerate, and who they point at instead of themselves.
Book: Ordinary Men by Christopher R. Browning | ISBN: 978-0-06-099968-8
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