Ordinary Men Chapter 7: The Józefów Massacre - The Killing (Part 2)
Some of the men came out of the woods covered head to toe in blood and bone fragments. Their uniforms were soaked. Their hands were shaking. And the day was not even close to being over.
This is post 9 in my Ordinary Men retelling series, continuing directly from Part 1 of the Józefów massacre chapter. Part 1 covered the roundup, the first company heading into the forest, and the men who tried to get out early. This part covers what happened next – the full-scale killing, the men who broke down, and the long night that followed.
Second Company Gets Called In
The officers had a problem. The killing was going way too slow.
First Company had been shuttling back and forth between the trucks and the forest all morning, but with 1,500 people to murder, the pace was nowhere near fast enough to finish in a single day. German officers kept making frustrated comments like “It’s not getting anywhere!” and “It’s not going fast enough!”
So Major Trapp made a decision. Third Company, which had been guarding the perimeter of the village, was pulled in to watch the marketplace instead. And Second Company – the men who had been handling the roundup and loading Jews onto trucks – were told they now had to join the shooters in the forest.
When Sergeant Steinmetz gave his men one more chance to step aside, not a single person took him up on it.
The Cry in the Marketplace
There is one detail here that is hard to shake.
When the Jews gathered in the marketplace heard the first volley of gunfire echo from the woods, a terrible cry swept through the crowd. In that moment they understood exactly what was happening. Their families, their neighbors, were being executed just beyond the tree line.
But then something the German witnesses described as “unbelievable” and “astonishing” happened. The Jews fell quiet. A calm composure settled over them. While the victims grew still, the German officers grew more frantic about the timeline.
How the Killing Worked in Second Company
Second Company went into the forest with zero training on how to do this.
Unlike First Company, which had received a demonstration from the battalion doctor on where exactly to place the bayonet and aim the shot, these men were sent in cold. Lieutenant Gnade split his company into two groups and sent them to different sections of the woods. He went to observe First Company’s technique, but his own men were already shooting by then.
Lieutenant Scheer divided his platoon into four small groups of five to eight men each, assigned each group a section of forest, and sent them back to the trucks to collect their victims. But the process was painfully slow. Each group had to walk all the way to the collection point, escort Jews deep into the woods, execute them, walk back, and repeat. After just two or three rounds, it was obvious this was not going to work.
Sergeant Hergert came up with a grim efficiency fix. Instead of entire squads going back and forth, only two men from each group would escort victims from the trucks while the rest of the shooters moved forward to the next execution site. Each new site was a bit closer to the road than the last. It sped things up considerably.
The Gore
There is no gentle way to describe what the men experienced, and Browning does not try to soften it.
Without bayonets fixed as aiming guides, Second Company’s initial shots were wildly inaccurate. Men aimed too high and blew off entire skulls. Brain matter, blood, and bone fragments sprayed everywhere – onto the shooters’ faces, their uniforms, their hands.
Once they started using fixed bayonets pressed against the victim’s neck as a guide, the problem actually got worse. The point-blank trajectory meant the bullet tore off the entire back of the skull. The shooters were, in the words of Sergeant Hergert, “gruesomely besmirched with blood, brains, and bone splinters. It hung on their clothing.”
This was the reality these men lived with for the entire day. Not a clinical, distant act of killing. An up-close, physical horror that literally covered them.
The Men Who Broke
This is the part of the chapter that stays with you the longest, because Browning gives us individual stories from the men of Third Platoon, Second Company. These are the testimonies they gave decades later during postwar investigations.
Hans Dettelmann, a forty-year-old barber, was assigned to a firing squad but could not even pull the trigger on his first victim. He went straight to Lieutenant Drucker, told him he had “a very weak nature,” and was let go.
Walter Niehaus, a former cigarette sales rep, managed to shoot one elderly woman before he fell apart. He told his sergeant his nerves were “totally finished” from that single killing. He did not have to shoot again.
August Zorn was paired with a very old man who kept falling down and could not keep up. Zorn had to physically lift and drag the man to the execution site. By the time they arrived, the others had already finished. When the old man saw the bodies of his fellow Jews, he threw himself on the ground. Zorn shot him in the back of the head but aimed too high. The entire back of the skull tore off and pieces of it hit Sergeant Steinmetz in the face. That was enough for Zorn. He went to the first sergeant and asked to be released.
Georg Kageler, a thirty-seven-year-old tailor, made it through one round. But when he was assigned a mother and daughter for his next victims and learned through conversation that they were German Jews from the city of Kassel, he could not do it. He told his platoon leader he was sick and was sent to guard the marketplace instead. He was not the only one to discover that some of the Jews in Józefów were Germans. Other policemen encountered Jews from Hamburg and Bremen. One man remembered that his first victim was a decorated World War I veteran from Bremen who begged for his life.
Franz Kastenbaum has maybe the most striking story. During his official interrogation years later, he claimed he remembered nothing. Then one day he showed up uninvited at the Hamburg state prosecutor’s office and told the truth. He had been in a firing squad of seven or eight men. He shot three people. On the fourth, he intentionally missed. Then he ran into the woods, vomited, sat against a tree, and called out to make sure no one was nearby because he wanted to be completely alone. He sat there for two or three hours. When he finally came back, he caught an empty truck to the marketplace. Nobody had noticed he was gone because the squads were so disorganized. He told the prosecutor he came forward because he had not had any peace since trying to hide what happened.
Those Who Quietly Slipped Away
Not everyone made a dramatic exit. The chaos of the operation – constant truck arrivals, rotation of squads, wild terrain – created opportunities for men to simply disappear.
Lieutenant Drucker had kept about a third of his men in reserve, rotating shooters in and out with cigarette breaks. But the constant shuffling meant nobody was keeping a headcount. Some men who wanted to get it over with shot far more victims than others who deliberately dragged their feet.
One policeman just “slipped off” after two rounds and hung around the trucks at the edge of the forest for the rest of the day. Another man avoided taking a single turn with the shooters. He stayed at the truck arrival point and looked busy. His comrades noticed and called him names like “shithead” and “weakling.” But nothing actually happened to him. No punishment. No official consequences. And he was not the only one.
This is an important detail. Despite the peer pressure, despite the insults, the men who refused or avoided the killing faced zero formal punishment. The social cost was real – the shame, the name-calling. But there was no military consequence.
The Ones Who Stayed
As the day dragged on, the number of men drifting back to the marketplace kept growing. Sergeant Bentheim watched policemen stumble out of the woods drenched in blood, shaking, broken. He told those who asked for relief to just “slink away” to the marketplace.
But plenty of men kept shooting. Alcohol was brought out at some point during the afternoon for those still in the forest. By evening the operation was becoming more frantic and disorganized. The woods were so full of bodies that it was getting hard to find clear ground where they could make the next group of victims lie down.
Some men had shot ten or twenty people before they finally asked to stop. Others never asked at all.
The End of the Day
Darkness fell around 9:00 p.m. It had been roughly seventeen hours since Battalion 101 first arrived at the outskirts of Józefów that morning.
The last Jews were killed. The men came out of the forest and gathered in the marketplace to load onto trucks for the ride back to Bilgoraj.
There was no burial. The bodies were left where they fell in the woods. No official collection of valuables, though some policemen had helped themselves to watches, jewelry, and money from the dead. The pile of luggage the Jews had been forced to leave in the marketplace was set on fire.
And then, just before the trucks pulled out, a ten-year-old girl appeared. She was bleeding from a head wound. Someone brought her to Major Trapp. He picked her up, held her in his arms, and said, “You shall remain alive.”
One girl. Out of roughly 1,500.
The Night After
Back at the barracks in Bilgoraj, the men were wrecked. Depressed. Angry. Bitter. Shaking. They barely ate. But they drank. The battalion provided generous amounts of alcohol and many of the policemen got very drunk.
Major Trapp went around trying to comfort his men, telling them again that the orders came from higher up and the responsibility was not theirs. He asked them not to talk about what happened.
He did not need to ask. Nobody wanted to talk. The men who had been in the forest had no desire to describe it. The men who had stayed behind did not want to hear about it. By unspoken agreement, the Józefów massacre became a taboo subject within the battalion. It was simply never discussed.
But you cannot just switch something like that off. That first night, one policeman woke up from a nightmare and fired his gun into the ceiling of the barracks.
A Strange Postscript
A few days later the battalion went to a village called Aleksandrow, about twelve kilometers from Józefów. They rounded up a small number of Jews. Both the policemen and the Jews were terrified that another massacre was about to happen.
But then Trapp hesitated. And called it off. He let the Jews go back to their houses. One policeman remembered watching individual Jews fall to their knees in front of Trapp, trying to kiss his hands and feet. Trapp turned away and would not allow it.
No one ever explained to the men why the action was stopped.
A week after Józefów, exactly one month after leaving Hamburg, Reserve Police Battalion 101 was redeployed to the northern part of the Lublin district. The massacre was behind them. But it was only the beginning.
Key Takeaway
Roughly 1,500 Jewish men, women, and children were murdered in a single day by men who were not trained killers, who were visibly horrified by what they were doing, and who in many cases had the option to walk away. Some did walk away. Most did not. That gap – between those who stopped and those who kept going – is the question this entire book is built around.
Book: Ordinary Men by Christopher R. Browning | ISBN: 978-0-06-099968-8
Previous: Chapter 7 Part 1 - The Józefów Massacre: The Roundup