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

In September 1939, Germany invades Poland and Police Battalion 101 is among the first battalions sent into the occupied country. In December, the battalion returns to Hamburg and around 100 young career policemen leave for other units, being replaced by older reservists. The battalion returns to Poland the following year, where it carries out “resettlement actions” in which “all Poles and other so-called undesirables—Jews and Gypsies—[are] expelled from the incorporated territories into central Poland” in the name of “racial purification” (39). One reservist, Bruno Probst, recalls this as the time he “experienced the first excesses and killings” (40).

In late 1940, the battalion is ordered to guard the Lódź ghetto and are given “a standing order to shoot ‘without further ado’ any Jew who […] [comes] too close to the fence” (41). Returning to Hamburg again in 1941, “all remaining prewar recruits beneath the rank of noncommissioned officer [are] distributed to other units, and the ranks [are] filled with drafted reservists” (41-42). The battalion is heavily involved in the deportation of Hamburg’s Jewish population. Setting up at a Russian barracks after escorting a deportation train to Minsk, they learn that the Jews they just escorted are to be shot.