Ordinary Men (18 page)
Authors: Christopher R. Browning
The “Jew hunt” took many forms. Most spectacular were two battalion sweeps through the Parczew forest in the fall of 1942 and the spring of 1943, the latter alongside army units. Not only Jews but partisans and escaped Russian prisoners of war were the targets of these sweeps, though Jews seem to have been the primary victims of the first one, in October 1942. Georg Leffler* of Third Company recalled:
We were told that there were many Jews hiding in the forest. We therefore searched through the woods in a skirmish line but could find nothing, because the Jews were obviously well hidden. We combed the woods a second time. Only then could we discover individual chimney pipes sticking out of the earth. We discovered that Jews had hidden themselves in underground bunkers here. They were hauled out, with resistance in only one bunker. Some of the comrades climbed down into this bunker and hauled the Jews out. The Jews were then shot on the spot…. the Jews had to lie face down on the ground and were killed by a neck shot. Who was in the firing squad I don’t remember. I think it was simply a case where the men standing nearby were ordered to shoot them. Some fifty Jews were shot, including men and women of all ages, because entire families had hidden themselves there…. the shooting took place quite publicly. No cordon was formed at all, for a number of Poles from Parczew were standing directly by the shooting site. They were then ordered, presumably by Hoffmann, to bury the Jews who had been shot in a half-finished bunker.
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Other units of the battalion also remembered discovering bunkers and killing Jews in batches of twenty to fifty.
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One policeman estimated the total body count for the October sweep at 500.
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By spring the situation had altered somewhat. The few Jews still alive had for the most part been able to join bands of partisans and escaped POWs. The spring sweep uncovered a “forest camp’’ of escaped Russians and Jews who offered armed resistance. Some 100 to 120 Jews and Russians were killed. The battalion suffered at least one fatality, for Trapp’s adjutant, Lieutenant Hagen, was accidentally killed by his own men.
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A number of Jews had been sent as workers to various large agricultural estates that the German occupiers had confiscated and now administered. At Gut Jablon, near Parczew, a unit of Steinmetz’s platoon loaded the thirty Jewish workers on trucks, drove them to the forest, and killed them with the now routine neck shot. The German administrator, who had not been
informed of the impending liquidation of his work force, complained in vain.
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The German administrator of Gut Pannwitz, near Puławy, encountered the opposite problem of too many Jewish workers. His estate became a refuge for Jews who had fled the ghettos to the nearby forest and then sought sanctuary and food among his work Jews. Whenever the Jewish worker population swelled noticeably, the estate administration phoned Captain Hoffmann, and a German police commando was sent to shoot the surplus Jews.
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After Hoffmann’s hospitalization, his successor, Lieutenant Messmann, formed a flying squadron that systematically eliminated small batches of Jewish workers in a fifty- to sixty-kilometer radius of Puławy. Messmann’s driver, Alfred Sperlich,* recalled the procedure:
In cases where the farmyard and the Jewish lodgings could be reached quickly, I drove into the farmyard at high speed, and the police sprang out and immediately rushed to the Jewish lodgings. Then all the Jews present at that time were driven out and shot in the farmyard near a haystack, potato pit, or dung heap. The victims were almost always naked and were shot in the neck while lying on the ground.
If the road into the farmyard was too visible, however, the police approached stealthily on foot to prevent their victims’ escape. Routinely in workplaces near the woods the police found many more Jews than expected.
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Some Jews had survived by hiding in town rather than in the woods, but they too were tracked down.
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The most memorable case was in Kock, where a cellar hiding place was reported by a Polish translator working for the Germans. Four Jews were captured. Under “interrogation,” they revealed another cellar hiding place in a large house on the edge of town. A single German policeman and the Polish translator went to the second hiding place, expecting no difficulties. But this was a rare instance in which the Jews had arms, and the approaching policeman was fired upon. Reinforcements were summoned, and
a fire fight broke out. In the end four or five Jews were killed in a breakout attempt, and eight to ten others were found dead or badly wounded in the cellar. Only four or five were captured unwounded; they were likewise “interrogated” and shot that evening.
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The German police then went in search of the owner of the house, a Polish woman who had managed to flee in time. She was tracked to her fathers house in a nearby village. Lieutenant Brand presented the father with a stark choice—his life or his daughter’s. The man surrendered his daughter, who was shot on the spot.
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The most common form of the “Jew hunt” was the small patrol into the forest to liquidate an individual bunker that had been reported. The battalion built up a network of informers and “forest runners,” or trackers, who searched for and revealed Jewish hiding places. Many other Poles volunteered information about Jews in the woods who had stolen food from nearby fields, farms, and villages in their desperate attempt to stay alive. Upon receiving such reports, the local police commanders dispatched small patrols to locate the hiding Jews. Time and again the same scenario was played out, with only minor variations. The policemen followed their Polish guides directly to the bunker hideouts and tossed grenades in the openings. The Jews who survived the initial grenade attack and emerged from the bunkers were forced to lie face down for the neck shot. The bodies were routinely left to be buried by the nearest Polish villagers.
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These patrols were “too frequent” for most policemen to remember how many they had participated in. “It was more or less our daily bread,” said one.
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The expression “daily bread” was applied to the “Jew hunts” by another policeman as well.
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From the behavior of the patrol leaders, the men could quickly tell if they faced potential partisan action or were simply searching for reported Jews, who were assumed to be unarmed.
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According to at least one policeman, the “Jew hunt” patrols predominated. “Such actions were our main task, and in comparison to real partisan actions they were much more numerous.”
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With these small patrols hunting down surviving Jews, the men of Reserve Police Battalion 101 came almost full circle back to the experience at Józefów. During the large deportation operations, virtually all the policemen had to perform at least cordon duty. They herded masses of people onto the trains but could distance themselves from the killing at the other end of the trip. Their sense of detachment from the fate of the Jews they deported was unshakable.
But the “Jew hunt” was different. Once again they saw their victims face to face, and the killing was personal. More important, each individual policeman once again had a considerable degree of choice. How each exercised that choice revealed the extent to which the battalion had divided into the “tough” and the “weak.” In the months since Józefów many had become numbed, indifferent, and in some cases eager killers; others limited their participation in the killing process, refraining when they could do so without great cost or inconvenience. Only a minority of nonconformists managed to preserve a beleaguered sphere of moral autonomy that emboldened them to employ patterns of behavior and stratagems of evasion that kept them from becoming killers at all.
Concerning the eager killers, the wife of Lieutenant Brand remembered vividly one event during a visit to her husband in Poland.
I was sitting at breakfast one morning with my husband in the garden of our lodgings when an ordinary policeman of my husband’s platoon came up to us, stood stiffly at attention, and declared, “Herr Leutnant, I have not yet had breakfast.” When my husband looked at him quizzically, he declared further, “I have not yet killed any Jews.” It all sounded so cynical that I indignantly reprimanded the man with harsh words and called him—if I remember correctly—a scoundrel. My husband sent the policeman away and then reproached me and told me that I’d get myself in deep trouble talking that way.
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Growing callousness can also be seen in the post-shooting behavior of the policemen. After Józefów and the early shootings, the men had returned to their quarters shaken and embittered, without appetite or desire to talk about what they had just done. With the relentless killing, such sensitivities were dulled. One policeman recalled, “At the lunch table some of the comrades made jokes about the experiences they’d had during an action. From their stories I could gather that they had just finished a shooting action. I remember as especially crass that one of the men said now we eat ‘the brains of slaughtered Jews.’ “
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Only the witness found this “joke” less than hilarious.
In such an atmosphere it was quite easy for the officers and NCOs to form a “Jew hunt” patrol or firing squad simply by asking for volunteers. Most emphatic in this regard was Adolf Bittner.* “Above all I must categorically say that for the execution commandos basically enough volunteers responded to the request of the officer in charge…. I must add further that often there were so many volunteers that some of them had to be turned away.”
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Others were less categorical, noting that in addition to asking for volunteers, sometimes officers or NCOs picked from among those standing nearby, usually men whom they knew to be willing shooters. As Sergeant Bekemeier put it, “In summary one could perhaps say that in small actions, when not so many shooters were needed, there were always enough volunteers available. In larger actions, when a great many shooters were needed, there were also many volunteers, but if this did not suffice, others were also assigned.”
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Like Bekemeier, Walter Zimmermann* also made a distinction between the large and small executions. Concerning the latter, he noted:
In no case can I remember that anyone was forced to continue participating in the executions when he declared that he was no longer able to. As far as group and platoon actions were concerned, here I must honestly admit that with these smaller executions there were always some comrades who found it
easier to shoot Jews than did others, so that the respective commando leaders never had difficulty finding suitable shooters.
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Those who did not want to go on the “Jew hunts” or participate in firing squads followed three lines of action. They made no secret of their antipathy to the killing, they never volunteered, and they kept their distance from the officers and NCOs when “Jew hunt” patrols and firing squads were being formed. Some were never chosen simply because their attitude was well known. Otto-Julius Schimke, the first man to step out at Józefów, was frequently assigned to partisan actions but never to a “Jew hunt.” “It is not to be excluded,” he said, “that because of this incident I was freed from other Jewish actions.”
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Adolf Bittner likewise credited his early and open opposition to the battalion’s Jewish actions with sparing him from further involvement.
I must emphasize that from the first days I left no doubt among my comrades that I disapproved of these measures and never volunteered for them. Thus, on one of the first searches for Jews, one of my comrades clubbed a Jewish woman in my presence, and I hit him in the face. A report was made, and in that way my attitude became known to my superiors. I was never officially punished. But anyone who knows how the system works knows that outside official punishment there is the possibility for chicanery that more than makes up for punishment. Thus I was assigned Sunday duties and special watches.
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But Bittner was never assigned to a firing squad.
Gustav Michaelson,* who had lingered among the trucks at Józefów despite his comrades’ taunts, also gained a certain immunity due to his reputation. About the frequent “Jew hunts,” Michaelson recalled, “No one ever approached me concerning these operations. For these actions the officers took ‘men’ with them, and in their eyes I was no ‘man.’ Other
comrades who displayed my attitude and my behavior were also spared from such actions.”
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The tactic of keeping one’s distance was invoked by Heinrich Feucht* to explain how he avoided shooting on all but one occasion. “One always had a certain freedom of movement of a few meters, and from experience I noticed very quickly that the platoon leader almost always chose the people standing next to him. I thus always attempted to take a position as far as possible from the center of events.”
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Others likewise sought to avoid shooting by staying in the background.
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Sometimes distance and reputation did not suffice, and outright refusal was required to avoid killing. In Second Platoon of Third Company, Lieutenant Hoppner became one of the most zealous practitioners of the “Jew hunt” and eventually tried to impose the policy that everyone had to shoot. Some men who had never shot before then killed their first Jews.
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But Arthur Rohrbaugh* could not shoot defenseless people. “It was also known to Lieutenant Hoppner that I could not do it. He had already told me on earlier occasions that I must become tougher. In this sense he once said that I too would yet learn the neck shot.” On patrol in the woods with Corporal Heiden* and five other policemen, Rohrbaugh encountered three Jewish women and a child. Heiden ordered his men to shoot the Jews, but Rohrbaugh simply walked away. Heiden grabbed his gun and shot the Jews himself. Rohrbaugh credited Trapp for his suffering no negative consequences. “On account of the old man, I think, I had no trouble.”
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