Ordinary Men Chapter 6: Arrival in Poland
Before the middle-aged policemen of Battalion 101 ever set foot in Poland, the machinery of mass murder was already grinding at full speed. Chapter 6 is not really about the battalion yet. It is about the nightmare they were walking into.
This is post 7 in my Ordinary Men retelling series. If you have been following along, you know who these men are by now. But this chapter pulls the camera way back and shows us the bigger picture: who was running the killing operation, how they built it from almost nothing, and what was happening in Poland in the months before Battalion 101 showed up.
Himmler Gives the Order
Sometime in the summer of 1941, Himmler told a man named Odilo Globocnik about Hitler’s plan to murder every Jew in Europe. Globocnik was the SS and Police Leader in the Lublin district of occupied Poland, and Himmler handed him the single biggest piece of this plan: wiping out the Jews of the General Government. That meant most of Polish Jewry. Around two million people.
There was a problem, though. The mass shootings happening in the Soviet Union were messy. They were public. And they were taking a psychological toll on the men doing the killing. Himmler wanted something different for Europe: a method that was more efficient, more hidden, and easier on the killers.
The answer was the extermination camp.
Building the Death Camps
The idea was grimly simple. Ship the victims to special camps. Gas them using assembly-line procedures that needed very few German personnel. Most of the labor would be done by prisoners themselves. Three locations were set up in the fall of 1941:
- Chelmno near Lodz, where large-scale gassing started in December 1941
- Auschwitz-Birkenau near Katowice, which began gassing in mid-February 1942
- Belzec in Globocnik’s Lublin district, operational from mid-March 1942
Two more camps would follow in the Lublin district: Sobibor and Treblinka. Globocnik was responsible for all three of the Lublin-area camps.
The Manpower Problem
Here is the part that always gets me. Himmler gave Globocnik this enormous task: kill two million people. But he gave him almost nobody to do it with.
For running the actual extermination camps, Globocnik pulled in staff from Germany’s “euthanasia program,” the operation that had been secretly killing disabled people. But that was never more than about a hundred men. Not even enough to staff one camp, let alone three.
And the camps were not even the hard part. The real manpower drain was the ghetto-clearing operations. Somebody had to go into every town, round up every Jewish family, and force them onto trains. In the Lublin district alone there were nearly 300,000 Jews. Across the entire General Government, about two million.
So Globocnik had to improvise. He basically built private armies from whatever he could scrape together.
Globocnik’s Patchwork Forces
To coordinate everything, Globocnik set up a special staff called Operation Reinhard (named after Reinhard Heydrich, the SS leader assassinated in June 1942). His deputy Hermann Hofle ran it, with different people overseeing the camps, the transports, the field operations, and the looting of Jewish property.
For manpower, he pulled from four sources:
The Security Police – Gestapo and criminal police branches scattered across the district, each with a section devoted to “Jewish affairs.”
The Order Police – this included local Schutzpolizei in the towns, Gendarmerie units in the countryside, and three Order Police battalions stationed in the Lublin district. Those three battalions, about 1,500 men total, were his single biggest German manpower pool. Essential but still not enough.
The Sonderdienst – small units of ethnic Germans who had been mobilized after the conquest of Poland and assigned to local administrators.
The Trawnikis – and this is a dark story on its own. Unable to fill his ranks with local resources, Globocnik got Himmler’s permission to recruit auxiliaries from Soviet border regions. A man named Karl Streibel visited prisoner-of-war camps and recruited Ukrainian, Latvian, and Lithuanian “volunteers.” These men were screened for anti-Communist (and therefore almost always anti-Semitic) views, offered an escape from probable starvation, and promised they would not have to fight the Soviet army. They were trained at an SS camp in Trawniki, organized into nationality-based units, and became the second major manpower pool alongside the Order Police battalions.
The First Wave of Killing
Starting in mid-March 1942, Globocnik unleashed the first wave against Lublin’s Jews. In just one month:
- About 90 percent of the 40,000 Jews in the Lublin ghetto were murdered, either gassed at Belzec or shot on the spot
- Another 11,000 to 12,000 Jews from nearby towns were sent to Belzec
- Around 36,000 Jews from the neighboring Galicia district were also deported to Belzec
From mid-April to late May, Belzec shut down temporarily so they could demolish the small wooden building with three gas chambers and replace it with a larger stone building containing six bigger chambers.
When Belzec reopened in late May, it mostly processed Jews from the Krakow district. Meanwhile, Sobibor opened in early May and started receiving deportations from several Lublin counties. By June 18, about three months after the first deportations, roughly 100,000 Jews from the Lublin district had been killed, along with 65,000 from Krakow and Galicia. The vast majority were gassed at Belzec and Sobibor.
The Shuffle
At the same time Polish Jews were being shipped to death camps, trainloads of Jews from Germany, Austria, Czechoslovakia, and Slovakia were being dumped into the Lublin district. Some went directly to Sobibor. Others were unloaded into ghettos where they temporarily took the places of the people who had just been killed.
It is a detail that captures the bureaucratic insanity of the whole operation. They were emptying ghettos and refilling them at the same time.
The Pause
On June 19, everything stopped. A shortage of trains halted all Jewish transports in the General Government for twenty days. There simply were not enough railcars. Death trains to Belzec from the Krakow district resumed on July 9. The massive deportations from Warsaw to the newly opened Treblinka began on July 22. But the main rail line to Sobibor was under repair, so that camp was basically shut off until fall.
In the Lublin district itself, deportations to extermination camps did not start up again in early July.
Battalion 101 Arrives
It was during this forced pause in the killing that Reserve Police Battalion 101 showed up.
On June 20, 1942, the battalion received orders for a “special action” in Poland. The written orders did not say what this special action actually was. The men were told they would be doing guard duty. There is no evidence that even the officers knew what was really waiting for them.
They boarded trains at the Sternschanze station in Hamburg, the same station from which some of them had deported Hamburg Jews to the east the previous fall. They arrived in Zamosz on June 25. Five days later, the battalion headquarters moved to Bilgoraj, and the various companies were spread out across nearby towns: Frampol, Tarnograd, Ulanow, Turobin, Wysokie, and the more distant Zakrzow.
Not Quite Idle
Even though the killing machine was paused, Globocnik was not about to let a fresh police battalion sit around doing nothing. If he could not resume the deportations to death camps, he could at least keep consolidating victims.
During their first four weeks in the Lublin district, some of the men of Battalion 101 participated in rounding up Jews from smaller settlements and moving them to larger ghettos and camps. In some cases they seized only “work Jews” and trucked them to labor camps near Lublin. In other cases, they rounded up entire Jewish communities, put them on trucks or marched them on foot, and sometimes resettled Jews from surrounding villages into the emptied towns.
These operations did not involve mass executions. But Jews who were too old, frail, or sick to be transported were shot in at least some instances.
Most of the men later could not remember the specific towns they had cleared or where the Jews were sent. Nobody recalled the names Izbica or Piaski, even though those were the two main “transit” ghettos south of Lublin used for collecting Jews.
For most of them, what happened next erased everything else from memory.
The Experiment
Globocnik grew impatient with just shuffling people around. He decided to try something. Since deportation trains were not available, the alternative was mass execution by firing squad.
Reserve Police Battalion 101 was the unit he chose to test.
That test would come at a place called Jozefow. And it would change everything.
Key Takeaway
The Holocaust was not just a top-down command. In the Lublin district, Globocnik had to build his killing operation from scratch, improvising armies from POW camp recruits, ethnic German militias, and middle-aged reserve policemen. The system worked not because it was perfectly organized, but because enough people at every level went along with it.
Book: Ordinary Men by Christopher R. Browning | ISBN: 978-0-06-099968-8
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