Ordinary Men Chapter 9: The Massacre at Łomazy
What happens when a unit that already committed one massacre gets told to do it again – but this time with a drunk commander, a crew of intoxicated auxiliaries, and a system designed to make the killing feel easier?
You get Łomazy. And it is worse than it sounds.
This is post 11 in my Ordinary Men retelling series. If you are just joining, start with the intro for the full picture of who these men were.
The New Assignment
Even before the massacre at Jozefow on July 13, orders had already come down to redeploy the police battalions across the Lublin district. The region was carved into northern, central, and southern security sectors. Reserve Police Battalion 101 drew the northern sector.
Lieutenant Gnade’s Second Company was assigned to the county of Biala Podlaska. Gnade set up his company headquarters in the county seat and scattered his platoons across the surrounding towns. First Platoon split between Piszczac and Tuczna. Second Platoon went to Wisznice. Third Platoon ended up in Parczew, technically in a neighboring county.
The killing in Biala Podlaska had already started before they arrived. On June 10, 1942, three thousand Jews had been deported from Biala to the Sobibor death camp. Hundreds more from smaller communities had been concentrated in the village of Lomazy, a town about halfway between Biala and Wisznice. Then everything paused. The murder campaign just stopped.
Until Second Company showed up.
Quiet Weeks Before the Storm
In early August, a squad of about fifteen to eighteen men from Third Platoon was stationed directly in Lomazy under Sergeant Heinrich Bekemeier. They called themselves Gruppe Bekemeier. For several weeks, life was uneventful. Lomazy was roughly half Polish and half Jewish. The Jewish quarter was not fenced or guarded. The German policemen were housed in the school building right in the Jewish part of town.
For those few weeks, these men lived among the people they would soon help kill.
The Phone Call
On August 16, just one day before the action, Bekemeier got a phone call from Lieutenant Gnade. There would be a Jewish “resettlement” the next morning. Have the men ready at four in the morning.
Bekemeier understood exactly what “resettlement” meant.
That same day, Gnade called Lieutenants Drucker and Scheer to Biala. In front of an SD officer, he explained the plan. The entire Jewish population of Lomazy was to be shot. This would be a joint operation with a unit of Hiwis from Trawniki – auxiliary forces, mostly Soviet POWs recruited to assist in the killing.
The key change from Jozefow: this time, the Trawniki men would do most of the actual shooting. The German policemen would handle the roundup. That was supposed to make things psychologically easier.
Second Platoon got trucks for the short ride to Lomazy. First Platoon had no trucks, so they commandeered horse-drawn farm wagons from Polish villagers and rode all night to get there by dawn.
The Roundup
In Lomazy, Gnade briefed his NCOs. Clear the Jewish quarter. Assemble everyone at the schoolyard. The Hiwis would handle the shooting, so the policemen would be “spared” for the most part.
But there was a familiar exception. Just like at Jozefow, infants and anyone too old, sick, or frail to walk to the assembly point were to be shot on the spot. Despite that order, most of the children were once again brought to the assembly point. The men also encountered German Jews among the crowd – specifically Jews from Hamburg, their own home city.
The schoolyard filled fast, overflowing onto the adjoining sports field. With some shooting during the sweep, the roundup was done in about two hours. Roughly 1,700 Jews were now sitting in the schoolyard, waiting.
Digging the Grave
A group of sixty to seventy young Jewish men was pulled aside, given shovels, loaded onto trucks, and driven to the forest about a kilometer away. Their job was to dig their own mass grave.
Several of the young men jumped from the moving trucks and managed to escape. One attacked a German corporal – who happened to be the battalion’s boxing champion – and was knocked unconscious for his trouble. In the woods, the rest began digging.
Vodka and Buttered Bread
Back in town, the wait stretched into hours. Then the Trawniki men arrived. About fifty of them, led by a German SS officer.
And the very first thing they did was take a break.
One policeman recalled the scene vividly: the Hiwis pulled out food and bottles of vodka from their packs and started drinking immediately. The SS officer and Lieutenant Gnade joined in. Before the killing even started, the two commanders were getting visibly drunk. Other NCOs smelled of alcohol too, though they were not as far gone as the two leaders.
Meanwhile, someone prepared buttered bread for the German policemen.
Think about that for a second. The victims are sitting in the summer heat, waiting to die. The men about to kill them are eating sandwiches and drinking vodka.
The March to the Forest
Once the grave was nearly ready and the meal was over, the march began. Some policemen rode ahead on the farm wagons to set up a new perimeter in the forest. Others started walking the Jews in groups of two or three hundred at a time. Anyone who collapsed on the way was shot where they fell.
This was too slow. So they decided to move all the remaining Jews at once. The solution they came up with was grotesque. They collected pieces of rope from Polish villagers, tied them together, and laid the rope on the ground in a ring around the assembled Jews. The Jews were ordered to stand, lift the rope, and march.
It was a disaster. The people at the front moved too fast, pulling the rope taut, which caused the people at the back to bunch together so tightly they could barely move. People started falling. Those who fell got tangled in the rope and were dragged along. People inside the crush were trampled. Those who fell behind were driven forward or shot.
One sergeant, Toni Bentheim, watched this and finally lost patience. He shouted at the Hiwis – who stared at him, confused – to drop the rope. After a second shout, the Jews let the rope fall and were able to walk forward normally as a column. Bentheim then went back to the school and drank a schnapps.
Undressing and Waiting
When the Jews reached the forest, they were separated by sex and sent to one of three collecting areas. They were ordered to undress. Women could keep their shifts. Some men were allowed to keep their underpants; in other areas they were stripped completely naked.
Policemen assigned to each area collected clothing and valuables. They were warned they would be searched afterward to make sure they had not stolen anything. The Jews handed over their bundles, deposited valuables into containers, and were forced to lie face down on the ground.
And then they waited again. Sometimes for hours. Under the brutal August sun. Naked skin burning.
Lieutenant Gnade Unravels
Most of the testimony about Lieutenant Gnade paints him as a committed Nazi and anti-Semite who was also wildly unpredictable. Sometimes friendly. Sometimes vicious. Alcohol always made his worst qualities worse. And by the afternoon in Lomazy, Gnade was drunk out of his mind.
His alcoholism was actually not unusual in the battalion. One policeman who did not drink noted that “most of the other comrades drank so much solely because of the many shootings of Jews, for such a life was quite intolerable sober.”
But what set Gnade apart at Lomazy was not the drinking. It was the sadism. This was the same officer who, the previous fall, had put his men on a night train out of Minsk specifically to avoid having them participate in a killing. At Jozefow, he had behaved no differently from the other officers.
Something changed in the forest outside Lomazy.
While waiting for the grave to be finished, Gnade personally selected about twenty to twenty-five elderly Jewish men – all with full beards. He ordered them to strip naked and crawl on the ground near the grave. Then he turned to his NCOs and screamed: “Where are my noncommissioned officers? Don’t you have any clubs yet?”
The NCOs went to the tree line, found branches, and beat the crawling men with them.
The Shooting
When the grave was ready, Gnade began chasing Jews from the undressing areas to the pit. In small groups, the Jews were forced to run between a thin line of guards across a thirty-to-fifty-meter stretch to the grave.
The grave had high mounds of dirt piled on three sides. The fourth side was a slope. The Jews were driven down the slope into the pit.
The Hiwis, drunk and agitated, started shooting too early. They killed Jews right at the entrance, which blocked the way in. Some Jews were then forced to go into the grave and drag the bodies away from the entrance so more victims could be pushed in. Then large numbers of Jews were driven into the pit, and the Hiwis fired down from the dirt walls above.
As the grave filled, the Jews who came after had to climb over the bodies of those already shot. Toward the end, they were clambering over corpses almost to the rim of the grave.
The Hiwis kept drinking, sometimes shooting with a bottle in one hand. Gnade fired his pistol from the edge of the dirt wall, nearly falling in. The SS officer was so drunk he climbed down into the grave itself because he could no longer stand on the wall. Groundwater mixed with blood began rising in the pit. The Hiwis were soon standing in it past their knees.
One by one, the Hiwis passed out drunk. The number of active shooters kept dropping.
“Your Shit Police Don’t Shoot at All”
As the Hiwis collapsed, the SS officer and Gnade started screaming at each other. Everyone within thirty meters could hear them. The SS officer yelled: “Your shit police don’t shoot at all.” Gnade shot back: “Good, then my men will have to shoot too.”
And so the order came down. Lieutenants Drucker and Scheer told their NCOs to form firing squads and take over.
The NCOs rejected the Hiwis’ method. The grave was half a meter deep in groundwater by then. Corpses were not just lying there – they were floating. Sergeant Hergert recalled it was especially horrifying that many of the Jews had not been fatally hit but were being covered by the next wave of victims without receiving mercy shots.
Instead, the NCOs set up two firing squads on opposite sides of the grave. Jews were forced to lie in rows along each edge, and the policemen on the other side shot them. Men from all three platoons took turns in squads of eight to ten, rotating out after five or six shots each.
After about two hours of this, the Hiwis were roused from their stupor and took over again. The shooting ended around seven in the evening. The Jewish men who had been kept aside to cover the grave did their work. Then they were shot too.
The thin layer of earth over the overfilled grave continued to move.
The Aftermath
First and Second Platoons headed back to their stations that evening. But Gruppe Bekemeier stayed in Lomazy. A few days later, they swept the Jewish quarter again. Searching cellars and bunkers dug under floorboards, they found another twenty to thirty Jews hiding. Bekemeier called Gnade, who ordered them shot. The policemen, along with a few Polish police, took the Jews to the forest edge, forced them to lie down, and shot them in the back of the neck, using bayonets as aiming guides. Each man shot at least once.
The Polish mayor was told to bury the bodies.
Why Łomazy Was Different
The massacre at Lomazy was the battalion’s second four-figure shooting. But it differed from Jozefow in important ways.
It was more efficient. Roughly a third as many men killed even more Jews – 1,700 versus 1,500 at Jozefow – in about half the time. Valuables and clothing were collected. Bodies went into a mass grave instead of being left scattered in the forest.
It was psychologically easier for the German policemen. The Hiwis did most of the shooting. Sergeant Bentheim said his men were “overjoyed” they did not have to shoot this time. Those who only did roundup and guard duty barely felt like they had participated in the killing at all. After Jozefow, just rounding up Jews and handing them over to someone else seemed almost harmless by comparison.
It was less personal. Even the policemen who did have to replace the Hiwis and shoot for several hours did not recall it with the same horror as Jozefow. This time there was no one-on-one pairing of killer and victim. The personal tie was severed. At Jozefow, many men remembered specific individual Jews they had killed. At Lomazy, only one policeman recalled the identity of a particular victim. The rapid rotation meant each man’s time pulling the trigger felt limited and finite, not endless.
There was no opt-out. At Jozefow, Major Trapp had given his men a choice – step out if you cannot do this. At Lomazy, no such offer was made. No one systematically excused men who were visibly shaken. Everyone assigned to the firing squads took their turn. And paradoxically, this may have been a kind of psychological relief. If you had no choice, you did not have to live with the knowledge that you could have refused.
The Few Who Slipped Away
That said, some men did find ways to avoid shooting. Georg Kageler claimed he escorted Jews to the forest twice and then “slipped away” to dodge further assignments. Paul Metzger was assigned to an outer cordon to block fleeing Jews. When one Jew ran straight toward him, Metzger let him pass. Gnade, already drunk, demanded to know which sentry had let a Jew escape. Metzger said nothing. His comrades said nothing. And because Gnade was too wasted to investigate, Metzger was never held accountable.
But these cases were rare. At Jozefow, a meaningful number of men had stepped out. At Lomazy, only two testified to deliberate evasion. For most, following orders lined up perfectly with the desire to conform. It was easier to just do what everyone else was doing than to separate yourself and look weak.
The Tone From the Top
At Jozefow, Major Trapp had set a certain tone. He was visibly distressed. He gave his men a choice. He said: “We have the task to shoot Jews, but not to beat or torture them.”
But most killing operations from this point forward were carried out at company and platoon level, not by the full battalion. That meant company commanders like Gnade were the ones setting the tone – not Trapp.
And Gnade set a very different tone.
When he ran into Sergeant Bentheim in the schoolyard after the massacre, still drunk, he asked: “Well, how many did you shoot, then?” Bentheim said none. Gnade sneered: “One can’t expect otherwise, you’re Catholic after all.”
That was the new leadership standard for Second Company. Sadism at the grave. Contempt for anyone who did not participate eagerly enough. Under Gnade and with the help of the Trawniki men, the men of Second Company took a major step toward becoming hardened killers.
Key Takeaway
Lomazy shows how systems adapt to make killing more efficient and psychologically bearable for the killers. Remove the personal connection, bring in outside shooters, take away the opt-out, add alcohol – and suddenly ordinary men can do it again, faster, with less trauma and fewer objections. The second time is always easier than the first.
Book: Ordinary Men by Christopher R. Browning | ISBN: 978-0-06-099968-8
Previous: Chapter 8 - Reflections on a Massacre