Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland

As “the tide of war turn[s] against Germany, the men of Reserve Police Battalion 101 increasingly [find] themselves in action against armed partisans and enemy soldiers” (143). There is an increase in the number of officers killed or injured but most of the rank and file “[make] their way back to Germany as the Third Reich collapse[s] in defeat” (143). Some return to their previous occupations, while others continue in the police.

Major Trapp, Lieutenant Buchmann, and First Sergeant Kammer are extradited to Poland in 1947 and the following year face a one-day trial “focused solely on the reprisal shooting of seventy-eight Poles in Talcyn, not on any of the battalion’s murderous and far more numerous actions against Polish Jews” (144). Trapp is executed, while Buchmann and Kammer are sentenced to eight years in prison and three years in prison, respectively.

Between 1962 and 1967, 210 men who had served in the battalion are interrogated, “many of them more than once” (145). Fourteen of them, including Captains Hoffmann and Wohlauf, are indicted. The captains are sentenced to eight years imprisonment while others receive lesser sentences or are found guilty but are given no sentence at all. Hoffman’s sentence is reduced to four years on appeal, and the pending cases against some other members are dropped.