Ordinary Men (14 page)

Indeed, the sudden departure of Reserve Police Battalion 101 for Poland had caught Wohlauf by surprise, upsetting plans for a June 22 wedding. No sooner had he arrived in Biłgoraj in late June than he beseeched Trapp to let him return briefly to Hamburg to marry his girlfriend, because she was already pregnant. At first Trapp refused but then granted him a special leave. Wohlauf was married on June 29, and returned to Poland just in time for Józefów. Once his company was stationed in Radzyń, Wohlauf had his new bride visit him there for their honeymoon.
²⁰

Wohlauf may have brought his bride along to witness the Migdzyrzec deportation because he could not stand to be separated from her in the fresh bloom of their honeymoon, as Buchmann suggested. On the other hand, the pretentious and
self-important captain may have been trying to impress his new bride by showing her he was master over the life and death of Polish Jewry. The men clearly thought the latter, and their reaction was uniformly one of indignation and outrage that a woman was brought to witness the terrible things they were doing.
²¹
The men of First Company, if not their captain, could still feel shame.

When the convoy carrying Wohlauf, his bride, and most of First Company arrived in Międzyrzec, less than thirty kilometers to the north of Radzyń, the action was already underway. The men could hear shooting and screaming, as the Hiwis and Security Police had begun the roundup. The men waited while Wohlauf went off to get instructions. Twenty or thirty minutes later he returned and issued the company assignments. Some men were sent to outer guard duty, but most of them were assigned to the clearing action alongside the Hiwis. The usual orders were given to shoot anyone trying to escape, as well as the sick, old, and frail who could not march to the train station just outside town.
²²

While the men waited for Wohlauf’s return, they encountered a Security Police officer already quite drunk, despite the early hour.
²³
It was soon apparent that the Hiwis were also drunk.
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They shot so often and so wildly that the policemen frequently had to take cover to avoid being hit.
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The policemen “saw the corpses of Jews who had been shot everywhere in the streets and houses.”
²⁶

Driven by the Hiwis and policemen, thousands of Jews streamed into the marketplace. Here they had to sit or squat without moving or getting up. As the hours passed on this very hot August day of the late summer heat wave, many Jews fainted and collapsed. Moreover, beating and shooting continued in the marketplace.
²⁷
Having removed her military coat as the temperature rose, Frau Wohlauf was clearly visible in her dress on the marketplace, watching the events at close range.
²⁸

About 2:00 p. m. the outer guard was called to the marketplace, and one or two hours later the march to the train station began.
The entire force of Hiwis and policemen was employed to drive the thousands of Jews along the route. Once again, shooting was common. The “foot sick” who could go no farther were shot and left lying on the side of the road. Corpses lined the street to the train station.
²⁹

One final horror was reserved to the end, for the train cars now had to be loaded. While the Hiwis and Security Police packed 120 to 140 Jews into each car, the reserve policemen stood guard and observed. As one remembered:

Once all the cars were sealed, the men of Reserve Police Battalion 101 quickly departed without waiting to see the train pull away.

The clearing of the Międzyrzec ghetto was the largest deportation operation the battalion would carry out during its entire participation in the Final Solution. Only 1,000 Jews in Międzyrzec had been given temporary work permits to remain in the ghetto until they could be replaced with Poles.
³¹
Thus some 11,000 were targeted for deportation. The policemen knew that “many hundreds” of Jews were shot in the course of the operation, but of course they did not know exactly how many.
³²
The surviving Jews who collected and buried the bodies did know, however, and their count was 960.
³³

This figure needs to be put into some wider perspective in order to show the ferocity of the Międzyrzec deportation even by the Nazi standards of 1942. About 300,000 Jews were deported from Warsaw between July 22 and September 21, 1942. The
total number of Jews killed by gunfire over this two-month period was recorded as 6,687.
³⁴
In Warsaw, therefore, the ratio between those killed on the spot and those deported was approximately 2 percent. The same ratio for Międzyrzec was nearly 9 percent. The Jews of Międzyrzec did not march “like sheep to the slaughter.” They were driven with an almost unimaginable ferocity and brutality that left a singular imprint even on the memories of the increasingly numbed and callous participants from Reserve Police Battalion 101. This was no case of “out of sight, out of mind.”

Why the contrast between the relatively uneventful and hence unmemorable deportations from Parczew and the horror of Międzyrzec only one week later? On the German side, the key factor was the ratio between perpetrators and victims. For the more than 5,000 Jews of Parczew, the Germans had two companies of Order Police and a unit of Hiwis, or 300 to 350 men. For Międzyrzec, with twice the number of Jews to be deported, the Germans used five platoons of Order Police, the local Security Police, and a unit of Hiwis, or 350 to 400 men. The greater the pressure on the German ghetto clearers in terms of manpower, the greater their ferocity and brutality to get the job done.

Globocnik’s impatient attempt to commence deportations to Treblinka from northern Lublin simultaneous with those from the districts of Warsaw and Radom proved too much for the capacity of the extermination camp. In late August the number of Jews waiting to be killed and the number of corpses that could not be disposed of quickly enough piled up. The overburdened killing machinery broke down. The deportations throughout the Warsaw, Radom, and Lublin districts were temporarily halted, including a train scheduled for two trips from Łuków to Treblinka beginning August 28.
³⁵
Globocnik and his extermination camp supervisor, Christian Wirth, rushed to Treblinka to reorganize the camp. Franz Stangl was summoned from Sobibór, which was relatively inactive while rail line repairs made it
inaccessible to all but nearby sites, and named commandant. After a week of reorganization, deportations from Warsaw to Treblinka resumed on September 3, followed by deportations from the Radom district in mid-September. Meanwhile, the men of Reserve Police Battalion 101 enjoyed a brief respite, for only in late September did the killing resume in northern Lublin.

S
HORTLY BEFORE THE DEPORTATION PROGRAM RESUMED IN
the northern security zone of the Lublin district, Reserve Police Battalion 101 was involved in several more mass shootings. The first of these occurred in the village of Serokomla, some nine kilometers northwest of Kock. Serokomla had already experienced one massacre in May 1940, at the hands of ethnic Germans organized into vigilante-style units known as the Selbstschutz (“self-defense”). These units had been created in occupied Poland in the fall of 1939 and the spring of 1940 under the leadership of Heinrich Himmler’s crony Ludolph von Alvensleben. After conducting a series of massacres, including one at Serokomla, the Selbstschutz was reorganized into “special service”
units known as the Sonderdienst and placed under the local county heads of the civil administration.
¹

Serokomla was visited again by the Germans in September 1942. Lieutenant Brand’s platoon of First Company was stationed in nearby Kock. Brand ordered Sergeant Hans Keller and ten men of the platoon to round up Jews in the outlying areas around Serokomla and bring them to the village.
²
Then, early on the morning of September 22, Brand’s platoon drove out of Kock and waited at a crossroads northwest of town. They were joined by other units of First Company under Captain Wohlauf, arriving from Radzyń twenty kilometers to the northeast, as well as the First Platoon of Third Company under Lieutenant Peters, which was stationed in Czemierniki fifteen kilometers to the east. Under the command of Captain Wohlauf, the reserve policemen drove to Serokomla.

Shortly before reaching the village, Wohlauf halted the convoy and gave orders. Machine guns were set up on two hills just outside the town, vantage points from which the entire area could be seen. Some men from Brand’s platoon were assigned to cordon off the Jewish quarter of the village, and the rest of First Company was detailed to collect the Jewish population.
³

As yet Wohlauf had said nothing about shooting, except that the men were to proceed as usual—an indirect reference understood to mean that those attempting to hide or escape as well as those unable to walk were to be shot on the spot. However, Lieutenant Peters’s platoon, which had been held in reserve, was sent to an area of gravel pits and mounds of waste material less than a kilometer outside the village. To Sergeant Keller, who could observe the deployment from his machine-gun nests atop the two nearby hills, it was obvious that the Jews of Serokomla were going to be shot, though Wohlauf had only spoken to the men of “resettlement.”

The collection of the Jews of Serokomla—some 200 or 300—was completed by 11:00 a.m. on what was turning out to be a warm, sunny day. Then Wohlauf “suddenly” declared that all the Jews were to be shot.
⁴
Additional men from First
Company were sent to the gravel pits under the command of Sergeant Jurich* to join the shooters from Lieutenant Peters’s platoon. At around noon, the remaining men of First Company began marching the Jews out of town in groups of twenty to thirty.

Lieutenant Peters’s platoon had been in the cordon at Józefów and was thus spared duty in the firing squads. They had likewise been absent from Second Company’s shooting at Łomazy. At Serokomla, however, their turn had come.

Without the experienced help of the Hiwis, as at Łomazy, Wohlauf organized the executions along the lines of the Józefów shooting. The groups of twenty to thirty Jews, which had been marched out of town in succession to the gravel pits, were turned over to an equal number of Peters’s and Jurich’s commandos. Thus each policeman once again faced the individual Jew he was going to shoot. The Jews were not forced to undress, nor was there a collection of valuables. There was also no selection for labor. All the Jews, regardless of age and sex, were to be shot.

The policemen in the shooting commandos marched their Jews to the crest of one of the mounds of waste material in the area of the gravel pits. The victims were lined up facing a six-foot drop. From a short distance behind, the policemen fired on order into the necks of the Jews. The bodies tumbled over the edge. Following each round, the next group of Jews was brought to the same spot and thus had to look down at the growing pile of corpses of their family and friends before they were shot in turn. Only after a number of rounds did the shooters change sites.

As the shooting proceeded, Sergeant Keller strolled down from his machine-gun nests to talk with Sergeant Jurich. While they watched the shooting at close range, Jurich complained about Wohlauf. After the captain had ordered this “shit,” he had “sneaked off” to Serokomla and was sitting in the Polish police station.
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Unable to show off to his new bride, who this time did not travel with him, Wohlauf apparently had no desire to be present at the killing. Subsequently, Wohlauf claimed that he
did not have even the faintest memory of the Serokomla action. Perhaps his mind was already on his upcoming trip to Germany to take his bride home.

The shooting lasted until 3:00 p.m. Nothing was done about burial; the bodies of the dead Jews were simply left lying in the gravel pits. The policemen stopped in Kock, where they had an afternoon meal. When they returned to their respective lodgings that evening, they were given special rations of alcohol.
⁶

Three days after the massacre at Serokomla, Sergeant Jobst* of First Company—dressed in civilian clothes and accompanied by a single Polish translator—departed from Kock for a rendezvous that had been arranged to entrap a member of the Polish resistance who was in hiding between the villages of Serokomla and Talcyn. The trap was successfully sprung, and Jobst captured his man. However, as Jobst was returning to Kock through Talcyn, he was ambushed and killed. The Polish interpreter escaped and reached Kock long after dark with news of the sergeant’s death.
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Around midnight Sergeant Jurich telephoned battalion headquarters in Radzyń to report the killing of Jobst.
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When Keller talked with Jurich following the call, he got the impression that there was no inclination in battalion headquarters to punish the village. Major Trapp soon called back from Radzyń, however, and said that Lublin had ordered a retaliation shooting of 200 people.
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The same units that had descended upon Serokomla four days earlier now met at the same crossroads outside Kock early on the morning of September 26. Captain Wohlauf was not in command this time, for he was already on his way to Germany. Instead Major Trapp, accompanied by his adjutant, Lieutenant Hagen, and the battalion staff, was personally in charge.

Upon arrival in Talcyn the entire First Company was shown the body of Sergeant Jobst, which had been left lying in the street on the edge of town.
¹⁰
The town was sealed, and the Polish inhabitants were fetched from their homes and collected in the school. Many of the men had already fled the village,
¹¹
but
the remaining males were brought to the school gymnasium, where Trapp proceeded to carry out a selection.