Ordinary Men Chapter 3: The Order Police in Russia 1941

Before the killing fields of Poland, there was Russia. And what happened there in the summer of 1941 set the template for everything that followed.

This is post 4 in my retelling series of Ordinary Men by Christopher R. Browning. If you are just joining, check out the intro post, Chapter 1, and Chapter 2. In this chapter, Browning zooms out from Reserve Police Battalion 101 to show us the bigger picture: how the Order Police as a whole first got their hands dirty in mass murder during the invasion of the Soviet Union.

The Einsatzgruppen: The Tip of the Spear

When Germany launched Operation Barbarossa, the invasion of Russia in June 1941, four mobile killing units called Einsatzgruppen were formed to follow the armies in. These were special SS units, about 3,000 men total, drawn mostly from the Gestapo, criminal police, and the SD (Himmler’s intelligence service).

But here is the thing most people miss: about 500 of those 3,000 men were Order Police. The three companies of Police Battalion 9 were split up and distributed among three of the four Einsatzgruppen. From the very start, the regular police were embedded in the killing apparatus.

And the Einsatzgruppen were just the beginning. They were, as Browning puts it, the “thin cutting edge.” A massive buildup was coming.

Hitler Says the Quiet Part Out Loud

In mid-July 1941, Germany was riding high. The initial invasion had been shockingly successful, and Hitler thought final victory was close. On July 16, he made his intentions crystal clear: Germany would never leave these territories. He wanted to create a “Garden of Eden” in the east. And conveniently, Stalin’s call for partisan warfare gave Hitler exactly the excuse he needed. “It gives us the opportunity to exterminate anyone who is hostile to us,” Hitler declared. Anyone who “even looks askance at us” should be shot.

Himmler heard that message loud and clear. Within a week, he reinforced his SS leaders in Russia with two additional brigades (over 11,000 more men) and distributed at least eleven more police battalions across the occupied territories. That added another 5,500 Order Police to the 500 already there. Between late July and mid-August, Himmler personally toured the eastern front, urging his men face-to-face to carry out mass murder of Russian Jews.

Bialystok: Where It All Began

But the Order Police did not wait for the big buildup. Their killing career actually started before any of that, in the city of Bialystok, which was nearly half Jewish.

The First Massacre: June 27

On the eve of Barbarossa, Major Weis of Police Battalion 309 held a meeting with his company commanders. He passed along two key orders. The first was the “commissar order,” which said all Communist political officials were to be executed rather than taken prisoner. The second was the “Barbarossa decree,” which basically removed German soldiers from any legal accountability for what they did to Russian civilians. It was a blank check for violence.

Then Weis went further. He told his officers this was a war against Jews and Bolsheviks, and his battalion should act ruthlessly against Jews. In his reading of the orders, Jews of any age or sex were to be destroyed.

On June 27, Weis ordered a sweep of the Jewish quarter. What followed started as a traditional pogrom, with beatings, humiliation, and beard-burning, but it escalated fast. Jews were collected at the marketplace and taken to a park, lined up against a wall, and shot. The killing went on until dark.

At the synagogue, where at least 700 Jews had been herded, the police poured gasoline around the entrances and tossed in a grenade. The building caught fire. Anyone who tried to escape was shot. The fire spread to neighboring houses where Jews were hiding, burning them alive. The next day, thirty wagonloads of corpses were hauled to a mass grave. About 2,000 to 2,200 Jews were killed.

One detail captures the atmosphere perfectly: when Jewish leaders went to a German army general and knelt at his feet begging for protection, a policeman from Battalion 309 unzipped his fly and urinated on them while the general turned away.

When the army inquired about the fires, Major Weis was found drunk and claimed to know nothing. He and his officers then submitted a fake report of what happened.

The Second Massacre: Mid-July

If the first Bialystok massacre was one commander acting on his own interpretation of orders, the second one was organized from the very top.

Police Battalion 309 moved on, and Police Battalions 316 and 322 moved in. On July 8, while Battalion 322 was searching the Jewish quarter (officially for “plunder” but in practice just raiding Jewish homes and hauling off twenty wagonloads of loot), they got a surprise visit from none other than Himmler himself, accompanied by the head of all Order Police, Kurt Daluege.

Himmler reviewed the troops. Daluege gave a speech about how the Order Police should be “proud to be participating in the defeat of the world enemy, Bolshevism.” Two days later, Colonel Montua of Police Regiment Center issued a confidential order: all male Jews aged 17-45 “convicted as plunderers” were to be shot. Graves were to be leveled so no memorial sites could form. No photographs. No spectators. And in a grim footnote, commanders were told to “provide for the spiritual care” of the shooters and hold social events in the evenings to help them cope.

Of course, there were no trials or convictions of “plunderers.” Male Jews in the right age range were simply rounded up and brought to the city stadium. Bach-Zelewski, the regional SS commander, visited the site. It was a brutally hot day. The Jews got no water and were not allowed to use a toilet.

Then the trucks started shuttling them to antitank ditches in a forest outside the city. Firing squads from the police battalions shot them until nightfall, tried to continue under truck headlights when it got dark, and finished the job the next day. At least 3,000 Jews were killed.

The Killing Machine Picks Up Speed

After Bialystok, things only accelerated. The war diary of Police Battalion 322 traces the path.

Central Russia: Summer and Fall 1941

On July 23, the battalion was pulled from army command and placed directly under Bach-Zelewski. This meant one thing: more killing assignments. Lieutenant Riebel’s Third Company became especially prolific. A few examples:

• August 2: After sweeps near Bialowieza, the diary noted matter-of-factly, “Before departure 3rd Company must carry out the liquidation of Jews.”
• August 10: Riebel reported the “liquidation” of 77 male Jews at a prisoner camp. “The action was performed without incident. There was not a single case of resistance.”
• August 15: At Narevka-Mala, all males aged 16-65 were shot (232 Jews total), while 259 women and 162 children were relocated to Kobrin. Riebel noted the execution “was performed smoothly and without incident.”

By late August, the battalion reached Minsk. After yet another meeting between Bach-Zelewski and Daluege on August 29, another major mass shooting was planned. On August 31, police companies moved into the Minsk ghetto and seized about 700 Jews, including 74 women. The next day, over 900 Jews were executed.

This was notable because it was the first time large numbers of Jewish women were shot. The war diary felt the need to justify it: the women had been “encountered without the Jewish star” during the roundup. Riebel, ever eager to log his company’s body count, reported: “Shot by 9th Company were 290 men and 40 women. The executions proceeded smoothly. No one resisted.”

By the time of the Mogilev action in early October, nobody bothered justifying the shooting of women anymore. The diary simply recorded: 2,208 Jews “of both sexes” seized and then executed outside the city.

Southern Russia: The Numbers Are Staggering

In the south, SS leader Friedrich Jeckeln commanded five police battalions and was meticulous about recording who killed how many. Even from incomplete records, the numbers are horrifying. A sampling from his daily reports:

• August 19: Battalion 314 shot 25 Jews; Battalion 45 shot 522
• August 25: Police Regiment South shot 1,324 Jews
• August 29: Battalion 320 provided the cordon while the HSSPF staff shot 15,000 Jews at Kamenets-Podolsky over two days, plus another 7,000 the next day
• August 31: Battalion 320 shot 2,200 Jews in Minkovtsy
• September 4: Police Regiment South shot 4,144 Jews
• September 11-12: Police Regiment South shot 1,548 and then 1,255 Jews

Postwar investigations filled in more of the picture. Police Battalion 45 reached the Ukrainian town of Shepetovka on July 24, where its commander, Major Besser, was told by his superior that Himmler had ordered the destruction of all Jews in Russia, and his battalion would take part. Within days, they massacred the remaining Jews of Shepetovka, including women and children. Three-figure massacres in various Ukrainian towns followed through August and September.

The battalion’s involvement peaked at Babi Yar in Kiev on September 29-30, where the policemen provided the cordon, escorts, and shooters for the murder of over 33,000 Jews in a single ravine. Battalion 314 was similarly active, participating in mass shootings at Vinnitsa and killing 7,000 to 8,000 Jews in Dnepropetrovsk in mid-October.

The Slutsk Report: A Window Into the Chaos

The documentation from northern Russia gives us something different: not an overview, but one unforgettable eyewitness account.

Police Battalion 11, stationed in the Kovno region since early July, was sent to the Minsk area in mid-October with two companies plus Lithuanian auxiliaries. Their first task was wiping out all Jews in Smolevichi, east of Minsk, supposedly as a “deterrent” against partisan support. The battalion commander claimed he protested but was told the Germans could handle the cordon while Lithuanians did the shooting. The massacre went ahead as ordered.

Then came Slutsk, and here we have a remarkable document: a written complaint from the head of the local German civil administration, a man named Carl, to his superior in Minsk.

Carl described how on October 27, the police battalion showed up and demanded to liquidate all Jews in the city within two days. Carl protested. He needed the Jewish craftsmen. The economy would collapse without them. He thought he had negotiated a compromise: spare the essential workers and their families, sort people at the ghetto first.

It all fell apart within hours. The battalion ignored every agreement. All Jews were grabbed, from workshops, from streets, from homes. Carl wrote that the city “offered a horrible picture”:

• There was shooting everywhere. Bodies piled up in the streets.
• Both German police and Lithuanian auxiliaries beat Jews and non-Jews alike with clubs.
• Carl personally had to chase armed German and Lithuanian police out of workshops at gunpoint.
• His own local police had to get off the streets to avoid being shot.
• Jewish wagon drivers hauling army ammunition were simply pulled down from their wagons and marched off, with nobody bothering about the abandoned wagons and ammo.

Carl noted that people thrown into the mass graves were sometimes still alive and “worked their way out again.”

The economic damage was immediate: the tannery lost 15 of its 26 specialists in a single day. Almost every craftsmen’s family was torn apart, with a husband, wife, or children missing. The remaining workers walked around “with faces beaten bloody.”

The non-Jewish population, whose trust the Germans had supposedly won, “stood there aghast.” Carl wrote that this day “represented no page of glory for Germany and that it will never be forgotten.”

He ended his report with one request: “In the future spare me without fail from this police battalion.”

The Postwar Lie

After the war, the Order Police leadership tried to sell a convenient story: that Daluege had reached an agreement with Himmler saying Order Police would only provide guard duty and support for the Security Police, never the actual shooting. They were helpers, not executioners.

The evidence demolishes this completely. The mid-July massacre in Bialystok happened right after Daluege and Himmler met there with Bach-Zelewski. The September massacre in Minsk happened immediately after Daluege visited that city. Daluege was not preventing Order Police participation in mass murder. He was actively pushing for it.

In at least one German court case, the defendants from Police Battalion 11 actually managed to sell this alibi and claim they only did two executions before getting recalled. The surviving documents tell a very different story.

The Psychological Weight

By late 1941, the killing started to take a toll even on the organizers. Bach-Zelewski himself, the SS leader who had personally appeared at mass shooting sites to give motivating speeches, became seriously ill. Himmler’s own doctor reported that Bach-Zelewski was suffering “especially from visions in connection with the shootings of Jews that he himself had led.”

This psychological burden drove a shift in strategy. In 1942, the number of native auxiliary troops under Order Police command exploded from 33,000 to 300,000. There was a “constant tendency” to push the actual shooting onto these auxiliaries, shifting the psychological weight from German police to local collaborators.

After the fall of 1941, Order Police involvement in mass shootings in Russia likely decreased. Many battalions got pulled into frontline duty during the 1941-42 winter crisis. Others were busy fighting partisans. The major exception was extensive Order Police participation in shootings in the Pinsk region in fall 1942.

Key Takeaway

Chapter 3 shows us that the Order Police were not bystanders or reluctant helpers in the Holocaust. They were active participants from the very first weeks of the invasion of Russia. And the killing escalated with terrifying speed, from targeted shootings of military-age men to the indiscriminate slaughter of entire Jewish communities, women and children included, all within a few months.

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

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