Ordinary Men Chapter 5: Meet Reserve Police Battalion 101

These were dock workers, truck drivers, and salesmen. Guys pushing forty with bad knees and families back home. And they were about to be sent to Poland to do things none of them could have imagined a few years earlier.

This is post 6 in my series retelling Ordinary Men by Christopher R. Browning. Chapter 5 finally gives us the full profile of Reserve Police Battalion 101: who they were, where they came from, and what they had already done before the worst was yet to come.

Born in 1939

Police Battalion 101 was based in Hamburg, and when Germany invaded Poland in September 1939, the unit was one of the first police battalions attached to the army. They crossed into Poland from Silesia, passed through Czestochowa, and ended up in the city of Kielce. Their job was not frontline combat. They rounded up Polish soldiers behind the lines and guarded a prisoner of war camp.

By December 1939, the battalion was back in Hamburg. About a hundred of its career policemen were pulled out and transferred to form new units. Their replacements? Middle-aged reservists who had been drafted that fall.

This is an important detail. Right from the start, the battalion was losing its professional core and being filled with civilians in uniform.

The Warthegau Resettlement Campaign

In May 1940, the battalion headed back to Poland, this time to the Warthegau, one of the western Polish regions that the Third Reich had annexed outright. They were stationed first in Poznan, then in Lodz (which the Germans had renamed Litzmannstadt, because of course they did).

Their assignment: forced resettlement. Hitler and Himmler wanted these newly annexed territories “Germanized,” meaning populated with ethnically pure Germans. So all the Poles, Jews, and Roma living there had to be expelled to central Poland to make room for ethnic Germans being “repatriated” from Soviet territory.

The battalion threw itself into the work. Their own summary report bragged about it. They worked day and night, evacuating an average of 350 Polish peasant families per day. At peak intensity, the men could not return to quarters for eight straight days and nights. They slept in trucks. In a single day, using just their own forces and ten translators, they evacuated about 900 families.

The final numbers: 36,972 people expelled out of a targeted 58,628. About 22,000 managed to escape by fleeing before the battalion got to them.

Early Signs of Violence

One reservist named Bruno Probst remembered what these “resettlement actions” actually looked like on the ground. An SS resettlement commission would already be in the village when the battalion arrived. They handed out numbered cards corresponding to houses. The police went door to door.

At first, the men tried to evacuate everyone: old, sick, small children. The SS commission was not happy about that. They did not directly order the police to shoot the elderly and infirm on the spot. They just made it clear that “nothing could be done” with such people. The message was received. Probst recalled two cases where old people were shot at the collection points, both times by noncommissioned officers, not the regular men.

Other battalion members remembered the resettlement campaign, but nobody else admitted to witnessing this kind of violence. One policeman did mention that the battalion provided firing squads for the Security Police, executing 100 to 120 Poles during their stay in Poznan.

After the evacuations, the battalion carried out “pacification actions,” combing through villages and forests to catch 750 Poles who had evaded the earlier roundups. Even the newly arrived ethnic German settlers sometimes hid the displaced Poles, wanting to use them as cheap labor.

Guarding the Lodz Ghetto

In late November 1940, the battalion took up guard duty around the Lodz ghetto. The ghetto had been sealed seven months earlier, trapping 160,000 Jews behind barbed wire, cut off from the rest of the city.

Battalion 101 had a standing order: shoot any Jew who ignored the posted warnings and came too close to the fence. That order was followed.

Browning notes that Battalion 101 did not engage in the kind of recreational killing that happened elsewhere. He contrasts them with the First Company of Police Battalion 61 guarding the Warsaw ghetto, where the company captain openly encouraged shooting at the ghetto wall. The worst shooters there were kept permanently on guard duty as a reward. The company recreation room had racist slogans on the walls, a Star of David above the bar, and a tally mark on the door for every Jew shot. They held “victory celebrations” on high-scoring days.

Battalion 101 was not that. But they were not clean, either. Bruno Probst remembered guards on a road that cut between the two halves of the Lodz ghetto. They would set their watches ahead as a pretext to grab and beat Poles who were supposedly violating curfew. On New Year’s Eve, drunken guards tried to kill a Pole but accidentally shot an ethnic German instead. They covered it up by switching the dead man’s identity card.

Dissolution and Rebuilding

In May 1941, the battalion returned to Hamburg and was essentially dissolved. All remaining prewar recruits below the rank of noncommissioned officer were transferred out. The ranks were refilled entirely with drafted reservists. The battalion had become, as one member put it, a “pure reserve battalion.”

For the next year, May 1941 through June 1942, the reformed battalion trained. Two events from this period stuck in the men’s memories. One was the Allied bombing of Lubeck in March 1942, after which units of the battalion were sent to help. The other was the deportation of Hamburg Jews.

The Hamburg Deportations

Between October 1941 and February 1942, fifty-nine transports carried over 53,000 Jews and 5,000 Roma from Germany “to the east.” The destinations were Lodz, Riga, Kovno, and Minsk. Five transports to Kovno and the first to Riga were massacred on arrival. The rest were initially crammed into ghettos.

Four transports from Hamburg were among the ones that did not face immediate death. Battalion 101 was involved in every phase. Some men guarded the collection point, a confiscated Freemason lodge on the Moorweide, right near a major train station and a university library. This was not some hidden operation. Hamburg citizens could see it happening. Other men guarded the train station where Jews were loaded onto cars. And the battalion provided armed escorts for at least three of the four transports.

One detail that stands out: escort duty on the Jewish transports was described as “highly coveted” because it meant a chance to travel. It was assigned only to a “favored” few.

Bruno Probst accompanied the November 8 transport to Minsk. The Jews had been told they were being sent to a new settlement territory in the east. They rode in normal passenger cars. There were extra cars loaded with tools, shovels, axes, and kitchen equipment, all to keep up the fiction. No guards were even placed inside the Jewish cars. The escort had a comfortable second-class carriage.

After four days, they arrived in Minsk. The Jews were loaded onto waiting trucks by an SS commando. Their luggage was left behind on the train with the promise that it would follow. It would not.

That night, Probst and the other escorts were housed in a Russian barracks alongside a regular German police battalion. A Jewish camp was nearby. In conversation with the stationed policemen, the escorts learned that this unit had already shot Jews in Minsk weeks earlier. The conclusion was obvious: the Hamburg Jews they had just delivered were going to be killed too.

Lieutenant Hartwig Gnade, the escort commander, apparently did not want to stick around for what was coming next. He gathered his men and took a late-night train out of Minsk that same evening.

Who Were These Men?

By June 1942, when Battalion 101 received orders for another tour in Poland, it was a very different unit from the one that had first crossed the border in 1939. Only a few NCOs from the original deployment remained. Less than 20 percent had been part of the Warthegau resettlement. A handful had escorted the Jewish transports. The vast majority had no experience with what the German occupation actually looked like in eastern Europe.

Here is the breakdown.

The Numbers

The battalion had 11 officers, 5 administrative officials handling pay and logistics, and 486 noncommissioned officers and men. To reach full strength, some last-minute additions came from Wilhelmshaven, Rendsburg in Schleswig-Holstein, and even Luxembourg. But the Hamburg element dominated so strongly that even the Wilhelmshaven and Rendsburg guys felt like outsiders.

The Structure

Three companies of about 140 men each. Two commanded by police captains, the third by a senior reserve lieutenant. Each company had three platoons, each platoon had four squads. The men carried carbines, the NCOs had submachine guns, and each company had a heavy machine-gun detachment.

The Commander

Major Wilhelm Trapp, fifty-three years old. A World War I veteran with an Iron Cross First Class. He had been a career policeman his entire adult life and had recently been promoted from captain of Second Company. This was his first time commanding a full battalion.

Trapp had joined the Nazi Party in December 1932, just before Hitler came to power, which technically made him an “old Party fighter.” But he was never accepted into the SS or given an equivalent SS rank, despite Himmler’s deliberate effort to merge the police and SS hierarchies. The SS did not want him. He was considered too old, too soft, not the right material. His own captains would later describe him with undisguised contempt: weak, unmilitary, and too meddlesome with his officers’ duties.

The Captains

The two company captains were a completely different breed. Both were young men in their late twenties, both held the equivalent SS rank of Hauptsturmfuhrer, and both were exactly the kind of officer Himmler wanted in his merged police-SS empire.

Wolfgang Hoffmann, born 1914, had joined the Nazi Student Union at sixteen, the Hitler Youth at eighteen, and the SS at nineteen, all before he finished high school. He became a police officer in 1936, completed officer training, and was commissioned as a lieutenant. He joined Battalion 101 in spring 1942 and was promoted to captain at twenty-eight. He commanded Third Company.

Julius Wohlauf, born 1913, joined the Nazi Party and SA in April 1933, right after Hitler took power. He joined the SS in 1936, trained as a police officer, and was commissioned a lieutenant in 1938. Like Hoffmann, he arrived at Battalion 101 in early 1942 and was promoted to captain in June, just before departure to Poland. He commanded First Company and served as Trapp’s deputy.

These two young SS officers and their aging, reluctant commander would soon find themselves in deep conflict. The tension between them becomes a recurring thread in the story.

The Reserve Lieutenants

Seven reserve lieutenants filled out the officer corps. These were not career police like Hoffmann and Wohlauf. They were civilians, selected for officer training after being drafted because of their middle-class backgrounds and civilian accomplishments. They ranged in age from thirty-three to forty-eight. Five were Party members. None were in the SS. Their civilian jobs included lumber business owner, tea importer, forwarding agent, and salesman.

The Rank and File

This is where the picture gets really interesting.

About 63 percent came from working-class backgrounds, but most were not skilled tradesmen. They held typical Hamburg working-class jobs: dock workers, truck drivers, warehouse workers, construction workers, machine operators, seamen, waiters.

About 35 percent were lower-middle-class, almost all white-collar workers. Three-quarters of those were in sales. The rest did office work in government or private companies.

Only about 2 percent were middle-class professionals, and even those were modest ones: druggists and teachers.

The average age was thirty-nine. Over half were between thirty-seven and forty-two, a demographic sweet spot: too old for the regular army but prime targets for reserve police conscription.

Party Membership

About 25 percent of the rank and file were Nazi Party members by 1942. Six had joined before Hitler took power. Another six joined in 1933. Six more who worked on ships were admitted through the overseas Party section during the domestic membership ban from 1933 to 1937. Sixteen joined when the ban was lifted in 1937. The rest joined in 1939 or later.

Lower-middle-class men held Party membership at a slightly higher rate (30 percent) than working-class men (25 percent), but the difference was small.

The Uncomfortable Truth

Browning closes the chapter by driving home the point that makes this whole book so disturbing.

These men came from the lower rungs of German society. They had not traveled much. They were not economically independent. Almost none had education beyond the equivalent of trade school. They grew up in the pre-Nazi era and had known political and moral standards other than those of the Third Reich. Most were from Hamburg, which had a reputation as one of the least pro-Nazi cities in Germany. The majority came from a social class that had been politically anti-Nazi before 1933. Some of them were almost certainly former communists, socialists, or union members.

In other words, these were just about the last guys you would expect to volunteer for mass murder in the name of a racial utopia.

And yet.

Key Takeaway

Chapter 5 is Browning building his case piece by piece. These were not fanatics, not ideologues, not specially selected killers. They were ordinary men from an ordinary city, and that is precisely what makes everything that follows so hard to look away from.

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

Previous: Chapter 4 - The Deportations Begin

Next up: Chapter 6 - Arrival in Poland - The battalion reaches the Lublin district, and everything changes.