Ordinary Men Chapter 4: When the Deportations Began
Imagine filing a report about transporting a thousand people to a death camp, and your biggest complaint is that the butter went rancid.
That is exactly what happened. And that single detail tells you more about how the Holocaust functioned day to day than almost anything else I have read.
This is post 5 in my series retelling Ordinary Men by Christopher R. Browning. If you have been following along, we have covered the introduction and the first three chapters so far. If you are just joining, welcome to one of the most disturbing books about what regular people are capable of.
The Big Shift: From Bullets to Trains
Chapter 4 marks a turning point in how the Order Police contributed to the Final Solution.
By the fall of 1941, the mass shooting campaigns in the Soviet territories were starting to wind down. The Order Police had already helped murder huge numbers of Jews across Russia, as we covered in the previous chapter. But now there was a new assignment: deportation trains.
In late September 1941, Hitler approved the start of Jewish deportations from the German Reich. Reinhard Heydrich, through Adolf Eichmann and the regional Security Police, would organize the transports. But someone had to guard those trains. That job fell to Daluege’s Order Police.
The deal was straightforward. Heydrich’s Security Police would handle the roundups and logistics. Daluege’s Order Police would supply guards for the trains. The standard setup was one officer and fifteen men per transport.
Simple. Efficient. Bureaucratic. Like everything else in this machine.
The Numbers Are Staggering
Browning lays out the scale of these deportation operations, and it is hard to wrap your head around.
Between fall 1941 and spring 1945, over 260 trains carried German, Austrian, and Czech Jews directly to ghettos and death camps in Poland and Russia, or to the transit ghetto at Theresienstadt and then onward to the east.
But that was just the beginning. Add to that:
- 147 trains from Hungary
- 87 trains from Holland
- 76 trains from France
- 63 trains from Slovakia
- 27 trains from Belgium
- 23 trains from Greece
- 11 trains from Italy
- 7 trains from Bulgaria
- 6 trains from Croatia
That is close to 450 additional trains from western and southern Europe, all of which had German guards at some point during the journey.
And nobody has even tried to count the number of trains that went from Polish cities to the nearby death camps. That number was clearly in the hundreds.
Virtually all of these trains were guarded by Order Police.
The Vienna Transport: A Report About Butter
Browning presents two actual Order Police reports to show what these deportation operations looked like from the guards’ perspective. The contrast between them is jarring.
The first report is from Lieutenant Fischmann of the 152nd Police Precinct in Vienna. On June 14, 1942, his commando of sixteen men guarded a train carrying 1,000 Jews from Vienna to Sobibor.
The report reads like a travel itinerary. It notes departure and arrival times. It mentions that the transport commando had to ride in a third-class car instead of second-class because of a shortage. It carefully documents the route through Lundenburg, Brno, Nysa, Opole, Czestochowa, Kielce, Radom, Lublin, and Chelm.
At Lublin, an SS officer pulled 51 Jews off the train – men between 15 and 50 who could still work. The remaining 949 continued to Sobibor. The luggage, food supplies, and 100,000 zlotys were taken at Lublin too. The baggage cars were offloaded at Trawniki, about 30 kilometers past Lublin.
At Sobibor, the camp commandant – First Lieutenant Stangl, who would later become infamous – took delivery of the 949 Jews. Unloading was completed in one hour.
And then the suggestions section of the report. This is where Fischmann gets detailed. The sausage had already been cut open when it was handed out and had to be eaten by the third day or it would spoil. The butter went rancid from the heat. The marching rations were too small. For the fourth day, the men had to make do with just marmalade.
That is what this officer focused on. Sausage quality and rancid butter.
Not one word about what the incarcerated Jews were going through. One thousand people crammed into sealed cattle cars for a sixty-one-hour journey. No food. No water. Summer heat. Fischmann somehow noticed the heat was ruining his butter but had nothing to say about the human beings suffocating a few cars away.
Browning also points out something the report reveals almost accidentally. Fischmann knew that the Jews selected for labor, the luggage, and the food supplies were all separated from the people going to Sobibor. Everything of value was taken off before the train reached the camp. At Sobibor, the gas chambers were hidden deep in the forest, not visible from the unloading ramp. But Fischmann and his commando apparently entered the camp and watched the unloading. The report says “no incidents occurred.” Under the heading: Incidents.
The Kolomyja Transport: Pure Horror
The second report is from a completely different world than Fischmann’s tidy paperwork.
A captain from Reserve Police Battalion 133 in Police Regiment 24 described a week of deportation operations in Galicia, centered on the town of Kolomyja. This was mid-September 1942. By this point the Jews in Galicia had already survived open-air massacres in the summer and fall of 1941, plus a first wave of deportations in spring 1942. They knew what “resettlement” meant. And they were desperate.
On September 7, about 5,300 Jews were assembled at a collection point in Kolomyja. They had been told to show up for “registration” at the Labor Office. Then the Order Police sealed off the Jewish quarter and hunted down another 600.
The Security Police released about 1,000 of them. The remaining 4,769 were loaded onto train cars – 100 Jews per car – and the train was nailed shut and sealed. It departed for the Belzec death camp around 9 p.m.
That night, as darkness fell, many Jews squeezed through the air holes after ripping away the barbed wire. The guards shot at them. Many were killed immediately. Others were “eliminated” the next day by railroad guards or other police units along the route. But many escaped.
The next day, September 8, some 300 Jews who had been deemed too old, too sick, or too frail to make the journey were simply executed on the spot. The report notes almost casually that “90% of all those executed were shot with carbines and rifles. Only in exceptional cases were pistols used.” This was about conserving ammunition.
The September 10 Train: When Things Got Worse
On September 8 and 10, the police carried out more roundups in surrounding towns: Kuty, Kosov, Horodenka, Zaplatov, Sniatyn. Some 1,500 Jews were forced to walk 35 to 50 kilometers on foot to reach Kolomyja.
Think about that. Forced marches of 30 to 50 kilometers in September heat. No real food or water. Then held overnight in the courtyard of a Security Police prison.
The train that departed Kolomyja on September 10 carried 8,205 Jews in 50 cars. And despite the report author’s objections, the Security Police had overloaded the cars. Instead of 100 per car, many held 180 to 200 people.
The guard? Ten men. Ten men for a 50-car train carrying over 8,000 people.
What happened next was a nightmare even by the standards of this chapter.
As soon as darkness fell, Jews began breaking through the walls and ceilings of the train cars. They tore off barbed wire from the ventilation windows. They had stripped naked because of the unbearable heat inside the sealed cars.
The train had to stop at Stanislawow so workers could nail the cars back together. It took ninety minutes. The train continued. Within a few more stations, the Jews had broken through again. In one car, the guards found Jews working with a hammer and saw. When asked where the tools came from, they said the Security Police had given them the tools because “they could make good use of them at their next work place.”
At every station stop, workers had to be called to re-seal the cars.
Then in Lemberg, the locomotive was swapped out for an older, slower engine. The train could barely move. And that made everything worse, because Jews could jump from the slow-moving train without serious injury.
Here is maybe the most disturbing detail in the entire chapter. Shortly beyond Lemberg, the guards ran out of ammunition. They had fired so much at escaping Jews that they used up their entire supply, plus an additional 200 rounds they had gotten from passing army soldiers. For the rest of the journey, they threw stones at escaping Jews while the train was moving and used fixed bayonets when it stopped.
When the train finally reached Belzec at 6:45 p.m., about 2,000 Jews were found dead inside the cars. Roughly one-quarter of the 8,205 people loaded onto the train had died of suffocation, heat, and exhaustion during the journey. That does not even count those shot while trying to escape.
What Browning Wants You to See
Browning uses these two reports to make a devastating point.
The Vienna transport was clinical and routine. The Kolomyja transport was chaotic and violent. But in both cases, the Order Police knew exactly what they were doing. There was no ambiguity. No ability to pretend they were just moving people to work camps.
Fischmann watched 949 Jews delivered to Sobibor after their luggage, food, and money had already been stripped away. The men at Kolomyja spent hours in a running battle with desperate people trying to escape sealed cattle cars, then found 2,000 corpses when they arrived.
Nobody involved could have had the “slightest doubt,” Browning writes, about what they were participating in: a program to exterminate people.
But these documents, as vivid as they are, still leave the biggest questions unanswered. They are snapshots of individual incidents. They do not tell us how a group of normal middle-aged men from Hamburg became the kind of people who could do this work, day after day, month after month.
For that story, Browning says, we need to go back to Reserve Police Battalion 101.
Which is exactly where the next chapter takes us.
Key Takeaway
The shift from mass shootings to deportation trains did not make the Order Police less complicit. It just changed the mechanics. Whether you were pulling a trigger or nailing shut a cattle car full of 200 people, you were part of the same machine. And these documents prove that the men involved knew it.
Book: Ordinary Men by Christopher R. Browning | ISBN: 978-0-06-099968-8
Previous: Chapter 3 - The Order Police in Russia