Ordinary Men Chapter 7: The Józefów Massacre - The Orders (Part 1)

A fifty-three-year-old career policeman stands before five hundred men at dawn, tears running down his face, and tells them their job today is to murder fifteen hundred people. Then he says something no one expects: if you cannot do it, you can step out. No punishment. No consequences. Just walk away.

Almost nobody walks away.

This is post 8 in my Ordinary Men retelling series. Chapter 7 is the longest and most important chapter in the entire book. It is the detailed account of the Józefów massacre on July 13, 1942 – the event that turned these ordinary German men into killers. It is so dense and significant that I have split it into two parts. This first part covers the orders, Trapp’s breakdown, and the roundup itself.

The Night Before

It was probably around July 11, 1942, that someone from Globocnik’s staff contacted Major Trapp with the assignment. Reserve Police Battalion 101 was to round up the roughly 1,800 Jews living in Józefów, a small village about thirty kilometers from their base in Bilgoraj. But this time it was not a relocation. The working-age men would be separated and sent to a labor camp in Lublin. Everyone else – women, children, the elderly – were to be shot right there.

Trapp recalled his scattered units and reassembled the battalion in Bilgoraj on July 12. That evening, he met with his company commanders, Captain Wohlauf and Lieutenant Gnade, and told them what the next day would bring. Word spread through the officer ranks. First Lieutenant Hagen, Trapp’s adjutant, briefed other officers on the details.

The First Man to Say No

One of those officers was Lieutenant Heinz Buchmann. He was thirty-eight, the head of a family lumber business back in Hamburg. He had joined the Nazi Party in 1937 and been drafted into the Order Police in 1939. He was not some bleeding-heart pacifist.

But when Buchmann heard what was planned, he went straight to Hagen and said flatly that he would not participate in an action where defenseless women and children were shot. He asked for a different assignment. Hagen arranged for Buchmann to escort the male “work Jews” to Lublin instead. His company captain, Wohlauf, was told about the reassignment but not the reason behind it.

Buchmann said no before the massacre even started. He is worth remembering because his example shows that refusal was possible. Nobody punished him. Nobody demoted him. He just got a different job for the day.

Hints of What Was Coming

The rank-and-file men were not officially told the details. They only knew they would be woken up early for a major operation involving the whole battalion. But some got hints.

Captain Wohlauf told a group of his men that an “extremely interesting task” was waiting for them. A company adjutant told a soldier who complained about being left behind to guard the barracks: “Be happy that you don’t have to come. You’ll see what happens.” Sergeant Steinmetz warned his platoon that he “didn’t want to see any cowards.” Extra ammunition was handed out. One policeman reported being given whips, though nobody else remembered that detail.

Something terrible was coming. Most of the men could feel it.

2:00 AM: The Convoy Moves

The trucks left Bilgoraj around two in the morning. By the time they reached Józefów, the sky was starting to lighten. Trapp assembled the men in a half-circle and addressed them.

He explained the assignment. He told them what they were going to do. And then he made his extraordinary offer: any of the older men who did not feel up to the task could step out. No repercussions.

There was a pause. Silence. Then one man from Third Company, Otto-Julius Schimke, stepped forward.

The First Man to Step Out

Captain Hoffmann was furious. He had arrived at Józefów separately, had not been part of the officers’ meetings the day before, and was outraged that one of his own men was the first to break ranks. He started berating Schimke in front of everyone.

Trapp cut him off. He took Schimke under his protection. After that, about ten or twelve more men stepped forward. They handed over their rifles and were told to wait for a different assignment.

Think about those numbers. Out of roughly five hundred men, about a dozen stepped out. That is around two percent. The rest stayed in line. Some of them probably did not fully grasp what they were about to do. Some were probably paralyzed by peer pressure. Some might have thought it would not be as bad as it sounded. Whatever the reason, the vast majority stayed.

The Plan Takes Shape

Trapp gave the company commanders their assignments. Two platoons of Third Company were ordered to surround the village. They were told explicitly to shoot anyone who tried to escape. The remaining men were to go house by house through the Jewish section and drive everyone to the marketplace.

The orders were specific. Anyone too sick or frail to walk to the marketplace was to be shot where they lay. Infants too. Anyone hiding or resisting – shot on the spot.

After the roundup, a few men from First Company would escort the selected work Jews out of town. The rest of First Company would go to the forest to form the firing squads. Second Company and part of Third Company would load the remaining Jews onto trucks and shuttle them from the marketplace to the forest.

It was a well-organized system. That is one of the unsettling things about it. This was not chaos. It was logistics.

Trapp Falls Apart

After handing out the assignments, Trapp spent most of the day wandering around town. He set up a headquarters in a schoolroom. He visited the Polish mayor and the local priest. He went to the marketplace and walked partway down the road to the forest. But he never went to the forest itself. He never watched the executions. His absence was obvious to everyone.

One policeman said bitterly: “Major Trapp was never there. Instead he remained in Józefów because he allegedly could not bear the sight. We men were upset about that and said we couldn’t bear it either.”

The accounts of Trapp that day are almost hard to believe. At the marketplace, someone heard him say, “Oh, God, why did I have to be given these orders,” while pressing his hand to his heart. At the schoolhouse, a policeman saw him pacing back and forth, hands behind his back, muttering: “Man, such jobs don’t suit me. But orders are orders.”

Another man walked in on Trapp sitting alone on a stool, weeping. Not just misty-eyed. The tears were flowing. Another policeman described Trapp running around frantically, then stopping dead, staring at him, and asking: “Do you agree with this?” The policeman looked him in the eye and said, “No, Herr Major.” Trapp started pacing again and cried like a child.

A doctor’s aide found Trapp weeping on the path between the marketplace and the forest and asked if he could help. Trapp’s only response was that everything was terrible.

Later, Trapp told his driver something that stuck with the man for the rest of his life: “If this Jewish business is ever avenged on earth, then have mercy on us Germans.”

Think about that sentence. Trapp knew exactly what he was doing. He knew it was wrong. He even feared future punishment for it. And he gave the orders anyway.

The Roundup

While Trapp broke down, his men carried out the mission. NCOs split the men into search teams of two, three, or four and sent them into the Jewish neighborhoods. Other men stood guard along the streets leading to the marketplace.

As the Jews were driven from their homes, the village filled with screams and gunfire. It was a small town. Everyone could hear everything. Policemen saw bodies in the streets and doorways – people who had been shot during the search because they could not walk or tried to resist. Most admitted seeing the corpses. Only two admitted doing the shooting themselves. Several heard that all the patients in the Jewish hospital or old people’s home had been shot where they lay, though nobody admitted witnessing it or pulling the trigger.

This is a pattern Browning highlights throughout the book. In their testimonies decades later, most of the men admitted knowing what happened. Very few admitted doing it personally.

The Question of the Children

One of the most disturbing parts of the roundup was the question of what to do with infants. The orders said to shoot them. The men’s actual behavior was mixed.

Some witnesses said infants were among the dead found in houses and streets during the clearing operation. But others were very specific: in this first action, the men could not bring themselves to shoot babies. One policeman was emphatic that no infants or small children were shot in his section. He said that “almost tacitly everyone refrained from shooting infants and small children.” Jewish mothers would not let go of their children, so the men let them carry the babies to the marketplace.

Another policeman confirmed this. He observed that during the entire morning, many women carried infants in their arms and led small children by the hand to the collection point. No officers stopped them.

There was one exception. Captain Hoffmann later scolded the Third Platoon of Third Company for not having “proceeded energetically enough.” In other words, he was angry they had not shot more people during the search.

The Neck Shot Lesson

As the roundup wrapped up, the men of First Company were pulled aside for a tutorial. The battalion doctor, Dr. Schoenfelder, gave them an anatomy lesson. He drew the outline of a human body from the shoulders up and showed them exactly where to place a fixed bayonet against the backbone above the shoulder blades. This was the aiming guide for what they called the “neck shot” – a method designed to kill instantly.

One of the men who listened to this instruction was a policeman who frequently played the violin at social gatherings alongside the doctor, who played accordion. Just days or weeks earlier, they had been making music together. Now one was teaching the other the most efficient way to kill a human being from behind.

Separating the Workers

After First Company left for the forest, Trapp’s adjutant Hagen oversaw the selection at the marketplace. A local sawmill owner had already come to Trapp with a list of twenty-five Jews who worked for him, and Trapp had let them go. Through an interpreter, Hagen called for craftsmen and able-bodied male workers.

About 300 men were separated from their families. There was panic, crying, chaos. And then, before the work Jews had even been marched out of the village, the first gunshots echoed from the forest.

The effect was devastating. Browning describes how a “grave unrest” swept through the selected workers. Some threw themselves to the ground, weeping. They understood instantly what those shots meant. The families they had just been torn from were being murdered.

Lieutenant Buchmann and a group of Luxembourger policemen marched the workers to a rail station a few kilometers away. They loaded them onto train cars and took them to Lublin, where Buchmann delivered them to a labor camp. He later claimed he specifically avoided sending them to the notorious Majdanek concentration camp. They returned to Bilgoraj that same day.

Key Takeaway

Chapter 7 is where the book stops being historical background and becomes something you feel in your gut. The most chilling detail is not the violence itself. It is the gap between knowing something is wrong and doing it anyway. Trapp wept, gave the order, and then hid from the results. His men heard the screams, saw the bodies, and kept going. And the few who stepped out prove that saying no was an option – an option that almost nobody took.

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

Previous: Chapter 6 - Arrival in Poland

Next up: Chapter 7 Part 2 - The Józefów Massacre: The Killing - What happened in the forest, and how the men coped with becoming killers.