Ordinary Men (15 page)

Obviously anxious to alienate the local population as little as possible, Trapp and Lieutenant Hagen made the selection in consultation with the Polish mayor. Only two categories of Poles were involved: strangers and temporary residents in Talcyn on the one hand, and those “without sufficient means of existence” on the other.
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Trapp sent at least one policeman to calm the women being held in nearby classrooms, who were crying and screaming in desperation.
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Seventy-eight Polish men were selected by this process. They were taken outside of town and shot. As one German policeman recalled, they shot only “the poorest of the poor.”
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Lieutenant Buchmann took some of the men directly back to Radzyń, but others stopped in Kock for lunch. They were in the middle of their meal when they learned that the killing for the day was not yet over. Still far short of his retaliation quota of 200, Trapp had apparently hit upon an ingenious way to meet it without further aggravating relations with the local population. Instead of shooting more Poles in Talcyn, his policemen would shoot Jews from the Kock ghetto.
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One German policeman, a driver who was on his way to Radzyń, claimed that he stopped at the ghetto on the edge of town to warn of the imminent action.
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Such warnings, of course, were to no avail for a trapped population. Search squads of German police entered the ghetto and proceeded to grab anyone they could find, regardless of age or sex. Older Jews who could not march to the shooting site were gunned down on the spot. One policeman later testified, “Although I was supposed to take part in the search, here too I was able to mill around the streets. I disapproved of the Jewish actions in any form and thus did not deliver a single Jew to be shot.”
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As usual, though, the few who shirked or evaded participation did not impede those intent upon their task. The Jews who had been caught in the dragnet were taken out of the ghetto to a large house that backed onto a walled courtyard. In groups of thirty,
they were led into the courtyard and forced to lie down next to the wall. On the order of Lieutenant Brand, the Jews were shot by noncommissioned officers equipped with submachine guns. The bodies were left lying until the next day, when work Jews from the ghetto were fetched to bury their dead in a mass grave.
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Major Trapp immediately reported to Lublin that 3 “bandits,” 78 Polish “accomplices,” and 180 Jews had been executed in retaliation for the ambush of Jobst in Talcyn.
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Apparently the man who had wept through the massacre at Józefów and still shied from the indiscriminate slaughter of Poles no longer had any inhibitions about shooting more than enough Jews to meet his quota.

If Major Trapp was reconciling himself to his role in the murder of Polish Jewry, Lieutenant Buchmann was not. After Józefów he had informed Trapp that without a direct personal order he would not take part in Jewish actions. He had also asked for a transfer. In making such requests, Buchmann had an important advantage. Before being sent to officer training and becoming a reserve lieutenant, Buchmann had been a driver for Trapp during the battalion’s first stint in Poland in 1939. He thus knew Trapp personally. He felt that Trapp “understood” him and was not “indignant” about the position he took.
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Trapp did not obtain an immediate transfer for Buchmann back to Germany, but he did protect him and accommodate his request not to participate in Jewish actions. Buchmann was stationed in Radzyń in the same building as the battalion staff, so it was not difficult to work out a procedure that avoided any “refusal to obey orders.” Whenever a Jewish action was planned, orders were passed directly from headquarters to Buchmann’s deputy, Sergeant Grund.* When Grund would ask Buchmann if he wished to accompany the platoon on its forthcoming action, Buchmann knew that it was a Jewish action and declined. Thus, he had not gone with First Company to either Miédzyrzec or Serokomla. Talcyn did not begin as a Jewish action, however, and Buchmann was in the school when Trapp carried out the selection of the Poles, though it was no accident that Trapp sent
him directly back to Radzyń before the killing of Jews from the Kock ghetto began.

In Radzyń Buchmann had made no effort to hide his feelings. On the contrary, he “was indignant about how the Jews were treated and openly expressed these views at every opportunity.”
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It was obvious to those around him that Buchmann was a very “reserved,” “refined” man, a “typical civilian” who had no desire to be a soldier.
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For Buchmann, Talcyn was the final straw. On the afternoon he returned, the desk clerk tried to report to him, but he “had immediately gone to his room and locked himself in. For days Buchmann would not talk to me, although we knew each other well. He was very angry and complained bitterly, saying something to the effect, ‘Now I won’t do this shit any longer. I have a noseful.’”
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Buchmann not only complained. In late September he also wrote directly to Hamburg, urgently requesting a transfer. He could not carry out those tasks “alien to the police” that his unit was being given in Poland.
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If Buchmann’s behavior was tolerated and protected by Trapp, it received mixed reactions from his men. “Among my subordinates many understood my position, but others made disparaging remarks about me and looked down their noses at me.”
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A few men in the ranks followed his example, however, and told the company first sergeant, Kammer, “that they were neither able nor willing to take part in such actions anymore.” Kammer did not report them. Instead he yelled at them, calling them “shitheads” who “were good for nothing.” But for the most part he freed them from participating in further Jewish actions.
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In so doing, Kammer was following the example Trapp had set from the beginning. As long as there was no shortage of men willing to do the murderous job at hand, it was much easier to accommodate Buchmann and the men who emulated him than to make trouble over them.

B
Y THE END OF SEPTEMBER 1942 RESERVE POLICE BATTALION
101 had participated in the shooting of approximately 4,600 Jews and 78 Poles and had helped deport approximately 15,000 Jews to the extermination camp at Treblinka. These murderous activities had involved eight separate actions stretched over three months. On three occasions—the first deportation from Parczew, the shooting at Łomazy, and the deportation from Międzyrzec—the policemen had worked alongside Hiwi units from Trawniki. On the other five—Józefów, the second Parczew deportation, Serokomla, Talcyn, and Kock—the policemen had worked alone.

The policemen were able to keep these actions distinct in their memories; they could describe each in some detail and date
them fairly precisely. Between the beginning of October and early November, however, the activities of Reserve Police Battalion 101 intensified greatly. One action followed another in unremitting succession as tens of thousands of Jews were deported from the county of Radzyń in repeated ghetto-clearing operations. It is therefore very difficult to reconstruct the events of these deadly six weeks. The policemen’s memories blurred as one action ran into another. They could still recall some particular incidents but could no longer fit them into a chronological sequence of distinct operations. My reconstruction of this rapid sequence of events, to which the confused memories of the policemen must be matched, is based above all upon the immediate postwar research of the Polish-Jewish historian Tatiana Brustin-Berenstein and the Jewish Historical Institute in Warsaw.
¹

In early September the disposition of Order Police in the Lublin district was modified. A fourth security zone was created, which included the three counties Biała Podlaska, Hrubieszów, and Chełm along the district’s eastern border. This permitted the transfer of the First and Second Platoons of Gnade’s Second Company from the county of Biała Podlaska to the towns of Międzyrzec and Komarówka in northern Radzyń county.
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In the last week of September most of the remaining Jews in Biała Podlaska followed Second Company; they were rounded up and transferred to the now nearly empty ghetto in Międzyrzec.
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The Międzyrzec “transit ghetto” was also “restocked” in September and October from towns in the county of Radzyń, directly from Komarówka as well as from Wohyn and Czemierniki via Parczew.
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Of all these transfers, the policemen remembered only the one from Komarówka, where Second Platoon of Second Company was regularly stationed.
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Among the Jews in Komarriwka was a woman from Hamburg who had formerly owned a movie theater—the Millertor-Kino—that one of the policemen had frequented.
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The ghetto at Luków served as a second “transit ghetto,” receiving Jews from other small towns in the county of Radzyń.
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This process of concentration
was, of course, an ominous prelude to the renewed death transports to Treblinka and the systematic campaign to make the northern Lublin district
judenfrei
, or “free of Jews.”

The coordinating center for the October “offensive” against the ghettos of Radzyń county was the branch office of the Security Police under Untersturmführer Fritz Fischer. Administration of the Radzyń, Łuków, and Międzyrzec ghettos had been taken over by Security Police officers in June 1942,
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but local manpower was quite limited. The Radzyń branch office and its outpost in Łuków had perhaps a total of forty German Security Police and ethnic German “helpers” between them. Fischer also had a permanent unit of twenty Hiwis at his disposal. Międzyrzec, Łuków, and Radzyń had a total of forty to fifty Gendarmerie.
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Clearly this limited force of Security Police and Gendarmerie, even with Fischer’s own Hiwi unit, was utterly dependent on outside help for deporting the Jews from these ghettos. Once again, Reserve Police Rattalion 101 provided the bulk of the manpower, without which the ghetto clearing could never have been carried out.

The deportations to Treblinka resumed on October 1, when 2,000 Jews were shipped from the ghetto of Radzyń. On October 5 5,000 Jews and on October 8 a further 2,000 Jews were deported to Treblinka from Łuków. In a parallel action, thousands of Jews were deported from Międzyrzec on October 6 and 9. Presumably the trains from Łuków and Międzyrzec were joined after loading, though no witnesses testified to this effect. Between October 14 and 16, the clearing of the Radzyń ghetto was completed by transferring its 2,000 to 3,000 Jews to Międzyrzec. Their stay was brief, for Jews were deported from Międzyrzec again on October 27 and November 7. On November 6, the 700 remaining Jews in Kock were taken to Łuków. The following day, as the ghetto in Międzyrzec was also being cleared, 3,000 Jews were deported to Treblinka from Łuków.
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Interspersed with the deportations were occasional shootings to liquidate those Jews who had successfully evaded the ghetto clearing by hiding or had been deliberately left behind, either
for lack of space in the trains or to work in cleanup details. When the six-week onslaught was over, the men of Reserve Police Battalion 101 had helped deport more than 27,000 Jews to Treblinka in eight actions and had killed perhaps 1,000 more during the roundups and in at least four “mopping up” shootings.

What the policemen remembered about each of these actions varied tremendously. The opening operation, the deportation of 2,000 Jews from Radzyń on October 1, was carried out jointly by men from First Company and twenty Hiwis under Untersturmführer Fischer. There was apparently little killing on the spot, though the Hiwis fired frequent warning shots to drive the Jews to the train station.
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The following day, October 2, Sergeant Steinmetz’s Third Platoon of Second Company completed the liquidation of the Parczew ghetto by shooting—on Gnade’s orders—more than a hundred Jews who had apparently been brought there too late for the transfer to Międzyrzec.
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Thereafter simultaneous deportations were carried out from the two transit ghettos in Łuków and Międzyrzec by First and Second Companies respectively. Since early September, Lieutenant Gnade had made his new company headquarters in Międzyrzec. To avoid the difficult Polish pronunciation, the men of Second Company referred to it by the apt German nickname
Menschenschreck
, or “human horror.” Gnade’s driver, Alfred Heilmann,* remembered taking the lieutenant one evening to a five-hour meeting in a building on the main square in Międzyrzec that served as the Security Police headquarters and prison. During the meeting, a terrible cry arose from the cellar. Two or three SS officers came out of the building and emptied their submachine guns through the cellar windows. “So now we’ll have quiet,” one remarked as they reentered the building. Heilmann cautiously approached the cellar window, but the stench was terrible and he turned back. The noise from upstairs increased until Gnade emerged at midnight quite drunk and told Heilmann that the ghetto would be cleared the next morning.
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The men of Second Company who were stationed in Międzyrzec were awakened around 5:00 a.m. They were joined
by Drucker’s Second Platoon from Komarówka as well as a sizable contingent of Hiwis. Drucker’s men apparently cordoned off the ghetto while the Hiwis and the rest of the Order Police drove the Jews into the main square. Gnade and others used their whips on the assembled Jews to enforce quiet. Some died from the beatings even before the march to the train station began.
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Heilmann watched while the Jews who had been incarcerated in the cellar prison of Security Police headquarters were hauled out and led away. They were covered with excrement and obviously had not been fed in days. After the required number of Jews had been assembled, they were marched to the train station. Those who could not walk were shot on the spot, and the guards shot ruthlessly into the column of Jews whenever it slowed.
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