Ordinary Men Chapter 2: The Order Police

How does a police force built to keep order end up carrying out one of history’s worst crimes? That is the story of Chapter 2.

This is post 3 in my retelling series of Ordinary Men by Christopher R. Browning. If you missed the earlier posts, check out the series intro and Chapter 1: One Morning in Jozefow. In this chapter, Browning pulls back from the horror of Jozefow and gives us the backstory. How did a battalion of middle-aged German cops end up in Poland with orders to murder 1,500 Jewish civilians? To answer that, we need to understand the institution they belonged to: the Order Police.

Born Out of Chaos

The Order Police – or Ordnungspolizei (Orpo) – did not appear out of nowhere. Its roots go back to the mess that followed World War I.

After Germany lost the war, revolution broke out. The army was falling apart. Officers and government officials, terrified of being swept away, quickly threw together paramilitary units called the Freikorps. These were basically counterrevolutionary militias designed to crush any leftist uprising.

By 1919, things calmed down. Many Freikorps members were folded into regular police and organized into large, military-style formations stationed in barracks. But the Allies were watching. In 1920, they forced Germany to dissolve these police units because they looked too much like a secret army, which would have violated the Versailles Treaty’s limit of 100,000 soldiers.

So attempt number one: shut down.

The “Police Army” That Was Not Really a Police Force

When the Nazis came to power in 1933, they tried again. They created a so-called “police army” of 56,000 men. On paper, it was a police force. In reality, these men were living in barracks and getting full military training. This was part of Germany’s covert rearmament – a way to build up military strength while pretending to follow the rules.

In 1935, when Hitler openly tore up the Versailles Treaty and brought back military conscription, these 56,000 “police” were absorbed into the regular army. They became officers and NCOs, providing experienced leadership for the rapidly growing military. By 1942, at least 97 German army generals had come up through this “police army.” That is a staggering number. The police-to-military pipeline was very real.

Himmler Takes Over

The big shift came in 1936, when Heinrich Himmler – already running the SS – was also made chief of all German police. He restructured everything into two branches.

Branch one: the Security Police (Sicherheitspolizei), run by Reinhard Heydrich. This included the Gestapo (the political secret police everyone has heard of) and the Criminal Police (Kripo), which handled regular detective work for non-political crimes.

Branch two: the Order Police, run by Kurt Daluege. This was the everyday policing side – city cops (Schutzpolizei), rural county-style troopers (Gendarmerie), and small-town community police (Gemeindepolizei).

By 1938, Daluege had more than 62,000 men under his command. Nearly 9,000 of those were organized into company-sized units of about 108 men each. In ten German cities, three of these companies were grouped into larger “police training units.” The infrastructure for something much bigger was already in place.

War Approaches and the Ranks Swell

Here is where the numbers really start climbing.

In 1938 and 1939, as war became increasingly likely, the Order Police offered young men an attractive deal: join us and you skip the army draft. The police battalions were organized regionally, a lot like US National Guard units. So new recruits could expect to serve closer to home and in what seemed like a safer role than front-line combat.

By September 1939, when Germany invaded Poland, the Order Police had grown to 131,000 men. But there was a catch. The regular army wanted those soldiers. To keep the Order Police from being fully absorbed, Himmler struck a deal – and it was expensive.

The best Order Police units were formed into a police division of nearly 16,000 men and handed to the army. This division ended up fighting in the Ardennes in 1940 and at the siege of Leningrad in 1941, before Himmler clawed it back in 1942 as the Fourth SS-Polizei Grenadier Division. Two police regiments from Danzig were transferred to the army too. And over 8,000 Order Police were reassigned to serve as the army’s military police. In exchange, the remaining draft-age policemen got to stay exempt from military conscription.

Filling the Gaps With Older Men

The Order Police had just given away a huge chunk of manpower. So they recruited aggressively:

• 26,000 young volunteers (men born between 1909 and 1920)
• 6,000 ethnic Germans (Volksdeutsche) who had lived outside Germany before 1939
• 91,500 older reservists drafted from men born between 1901 and 1909, an age group not yet subject to the military draft

This last group is the crucial one for our story. These were the middle-aged men – guys in their 30s and 40s – who would fill the ranks of units like Reserve Police Battalion 101. They were not young ideologues. They were older draftees. By mid-1940, the Order Police had nearly doubled to 244,500 men.

From Policing to Occupation

Nobody had really planned for what the Order Police would do during a war. Prewar planners had not thought much about it. But Germany kept conquering territory, and somebody had to hold it down.

When the war started, 21 police battalions of about 500 men each were created from existing police companies and training units. Thirteen of those went into Poland right behind the invading armies. Their initial jobs were what you might expect: rounding up Polish soldiers left behind the front lines, collecting abandoned weapons, and securing rear areas.

By mid-1940, the number of battalions had exploded to 101. They were spread across occupied Europe:

• 13 battalions in the General Government (German-occupied central Poland)
• 7 battalions in western Polish territories annexed by Germany
• 10 battalions in the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia (occupied Czech lands)
• 6 battalions in Norway
• 4 battalions in the Netherlands

The Order Police had become the backbone of the German occupation machine.

Two Kinds of Battalions

The new battalions were not all the same. There were two types:

Reserve police battalions were built around a small core of career cops and prewar volunteers who had been promoted to NCO ranks and transferred from the original units. The rest of the men filling those ranks were older drafted reservists. These were the “ordinary men” of the book’s title.

Elite battalions (numbered 251-256 and 301-325) were made up of the 26,000 young volunteers who had signed up in 1939. They were younger, more motivated, and became the Order Police’s premier formations.

Reserve Police Battalion 101, obviously, was the first type. Older guys. Drafted. Not exactly the “best and brightest.”

The Occupation Structure in Poland

In the General Government (occupied Poland), the Order Police presence worked on two levels.

At the top level, each of the four districts – Krakow, Lublin, Radom, and Warsaw (Galicia was added in 1941) – had a permanent regimental commander and staff. Each district regiment had three battalions that rotated in and out from Germany on tours of duty.

At the ground level, there was a web of smaller units across Poland. City police stations (Schutzpolizei) supervised the local Polish municipal police. And 30 to 40 small Gendarmerie posts were scattered across the medium-sized towns in each district.

By late 1942, the Order Police in the General Government totaled about 15,186 men, overseeing around 14,297 Polish policemen. It was a relatively thin presence for such a large territory.

Two Chains of Command – And That Mattered

This part is important because it explains how the Order Police got pulled into genocide.

There were two separate command chains:

Chain one was the normal police hierarchy. Orders went from battalion level up through the district commander (KdO), to the overall Order Police commander in Krakow (BdO), and finally to Daluege’s main office in Berlin. This handled routine police business.

Chain two kicked in whenever the Order Police had to work alongside the Security Police and other SS units. Himmler had appointed a Higher SS and Police Leader (HSSPF) named Friedrich-Wilhelm Kruger as his personal representative in the General Government. Kruger coordinated anything involving multiple branches of Himmler’s massive SS and police empire. Each district also had its own SS and Police Leader (SSPF).

In Lublin – where Reserve Police Battalion 101 was stationed in 1942 and 1943 – that district SSPF was Odilo Globocnik. Browning describes him bluntly: brutal, unsavory, and corrupt. He was a crony of Himmler’s who had already been removed from a party leadership position in Austria for corruption. This was the man giving orders in Lublin.

So the battalion could receive orders from two directions: the regular police chain from Berlin, or the SS chain running from Himmler through Kruger and down to Globocnik.

And here is the critical point: since the murder of Polish Jews was an operation involving every branch of the SS and police, it was that second chain of command – the one ending with Globocnik – that would pull the Order Police into the Final Solution.

The Takeaway

Chapter 2 is pure organizational history, and it might seem dry compared to the massacre in Chapter 1. But it answers a fundamental question: how did these men end up where they were? They were drafted into a police force that expanded wildly during wartime, got deployed to occupied Poland, and fell under a dual command structure that placed them at the disposal of SS leaders running the genocide. The system was built in such a way that ordinary policemen could be redirected from mundane occupation duties to mass murder with a simple change in which chain of command was issuing the orders.

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

Previous: Chapter 1 - One Morning in Jozefow – The day that changed everything for Battalion 101.

Next up: Chapter 3 - The Order Police and the Final Solution: Russia 1941 – How the Order Police first got involved in mass killings on the Eastern Front.