6

POLICE BATTALIONS: AGENTS OF GENOCIDE

THE ORDER POLICE (Ordnungspolizei) was as integral to the commission of the Holocaust as the Einsatzgruppen and the SS were. It was composed of the Uniformed Police (Schutzpolizei), under which police battalions operated, and the Gendarmerie (Rural Police).' Police battalions were the branch of the Order Police most intimately involved in the genocide. Their mobility made them, unlike other parts of the Order Police, a flexible, general instrument for implementing genocidal policies. The character of these units and the deeds that they performed provide an unusually clear window onto some of the central issues of the Holocaust.

An analysis of the role and significance of police battalions' contribution to the slaughter of Jews does not depend upon a thorough comprehension of the institutional development of the Order Police or of police battalions during the Nazi period. It requires only that three features of police battalions be understood:

A large percentage of the Germans who were their members were an inauspicious lot, not selected for them because of military or ideological fitness. In fact, the men were often chosen for service in a haphazard manner and were frequently the least desirable of the manpower pool, even considered unfit for military service. Moreover, no ideological screening to speak of was performed on these men.

Once in police battalions, these unpromising men often received below par training in weapons, logistics, and procedures, and the ideological training or indoctrination to which they were subjected was minimal, at times laugh-ably perfunctory and ineffective.

Police battalions were not "Nazi" institutions. Their men were not particularly Nazified in any significant sense save that they were, loosely speaking, representative of the Nazified German society.

The Order Police grew from a total of 131,000 officers and men on the eve of the war² to 310,000 men and officers by the beginning of 1943, of whom 132,000 (42 percent) were reservists. ³ It was a security organization of considerable dimension and importance. With increased size and the new demands of policing territories populated by "inferior races" came added duties, such as fighting partisans, transferring populations, and, though unmentioned in these organizational reports, killing civilians, especially and overwhelmingly Jews. These developments produced an institution that by 1942 was radically different from its prewar incarnation. Although its institutional structure remained essentially unchanged, it had quadrupled in size (since 1938) and had gone from being a relatively decentralized professional police force whose men were stationed primarily in their hometowns or native regions, to an organization staffed ever more by non-professionals, de- voted to colonial domination, with its men strewn about the European landmass among hostile peoples of different languages, customs, and aspirations. By 1942, the Order Police had become, compared to its character in 1938, unrecognizable in size, composition, activities, and ethos.

Police battalions and reserve police battalions were the organizational home of a large number of Germans.⁴ They were units averaging more than five hundred men, performing a wide range of duties in the occupied areas and in Germany itself. Initially, they were composed of four companies and a battalion staff, led by a captain or a major. (They were subsequently reduced to three companies.) Each company was subdivided into three platoons, which were further subdivided into groups of ten to fifteen men. As they were conceived of in 1939, they policed, garrisoned, regulated traffic flow, guarded installations, and helped to transfer populations in occupied areas such as the Poland of 1940.⁵ Also, owing to an agreement with the German army, they were, in times of need, to fight in traditional military operations (and to combat partisans behind the lines). Police battalions did participate in the 1939 campaign against Poland, the 1940 campaign in the west, and the battles in the Soviet Union during the German onslaught. Except possibly for the fighting, these were the normal wartime duties of policemen in occupied areas. The low priority given to their manpower needs, their light armaments, and especially their often inadequate training reflected these modest expectations of police "normality." There is no indication from any record, utterance, or act that in 1939 any preparation was being made for the men of the police battalions to take part in genocidal slaughter.

Police battalions were raised and trained in a haphazard manner, reflecting the low status of the Order Police within the array of German security and military forces⁶ as well as its continuous manpower problems throughout the war. The Order Police estimated in November 1941 that its manpower shortage was approaching 100,000 men (its strength at the time was less than 300,000) and that it urgently needed an infusion of 43,000. ⁷ Its ability to recruit the most able men having been restricted, the Order Police had to rely to a great extent on the drafting of men less soldierly in profile in order to meet its increasing, and increasingly unmet, manpower needs,⁸ including many who were older than the normal military age and others who had failed to meet the standard of physical qualification for police duty. Such compromises were explained by "the current difficult personnel situation in the Order Police."⁹ The Order Police, in scraping together anyone it could, was depleting the last available reserves. Police Battalion 83, for example, had completely exhausted the manpower of the eastern German city of Gleiwitz, where it was raised, so it had to forgo filling one of its units completely. ¹⁰

Not only was there little attempt on the part of the regime to stock the Order Police and its police battalions with especially able men or with men who had demonstrated fidelity to Nazism beyond that of any randomly selected group of Germans, but also the training given these men indicated the low expectations that the regime had of them.

The Order Police's draftees were not auspicious recruits; most had had no military training, many were marginal physical fodder, and their ages and already established family and professional lives made them less pliable than the youngsters whom military and police organizations typically seek. They desire young men for good reason; the experience of millennia teaches that young people are more malleable, more easily turned into integrated bearers of an institution's ethos and practices. So, even with its low operational expectations, the Order Police faced a formidable training task, which was made still more difficult by the paucity of training time, owing to the pressing need to get the men into the field.

The Order Police's training of its new inductees was nevertheless inattentive, and perfunctory to the point of being negligent. Even when the men of reserve police battalions received it in full (which many did not), the training lasted only about three months, an inadequate period for units of this kind, which before the war had been allotted a year of training." The overall inadequacy of the actual training is borne out by an inspector's conclusion that almost six months after their creation, one-third of the reservists of Police Battalions 65 and 67 were not yet sufficiently trained. ¹² The inattention to training is corroborated by the men of police battalions themselves, many of whom mention its perfunctory nature.

During their training period, usually a paltry two hours a week were devoted to ideological training. The weeks covered different topics (with more than one topic being treated each week), which were laid out in the educational guidelines. Many of Nazism's staple ideological themes were included (Versailles, "the preservation of the blood," "the leadership of the Reich") but were allotted insufficient time to allow for in-depth treatment. ¹³ This superficial ideological education, which actually did little more than familiarize the new inductees with the laws that codified ideological principles, was unlikely to have had much more of an effect upon them than did listening to a couple of Hitler's speeches, something that these men undoubtedly had already done. During the weeks of intensive and tiring training, the meager sessions devoted to ideological pronouncements were probably more effective as rest periods than as indoctrination sessions. ¹⁴

There was to be continuing ideological training during the war, with planned daily, weekly, and monthly instruction of the men in police battalions. The "daily instruction" (to take place at least every other day) informed the men of political and military developments. The weekly instruction was intended to shape their ideological views and build their character. Once a month, the men were instructed in a designated theme supplied by Himmler's office, the purpose of which was to treat thoroughly a topic of contemporary ideological importance. Although at first glance all of this may seem to add up to considerable ideological inundation, it amounted to little time each week and—even when carried out to the full extent of the orders—likely had little effect on the men. The "daily instruction" was meant only to convey and interpret the news, and therefore probably focused on military fortunes. The weekly instruction was to present material so that "the educational goals of National Socialism are clearly presented." Three types of presentations were suggested as appropriate: (I) a brief lecture about experiences in the war, or about the exploits of men of the Order Police; (2) the reading of passages from an appropriate book, such as Pflichten des deutschen Soldaten ("Duties of the German Soldier"); or (3) discussing material from SS educational pamphlets. The impression of casualness that these instructions convey, and hence the sessions' ineffective-ness in indoctrinating the men, is further reinforced by the directive's declaration that no special preparation is necessary for conducting these sessions. Moreover, all educational meetings were to be conducted by the pedagogically innocent officers of the police battalions themselves and not by trained teachers. The once-a-week "weekly" instructional sessions, the central forum of the continuing ideological education efforts, was to last an anemic thirty to forty-five minutes, and could be omitted if they "disturb[ed] or hamper[ed] concentration and spiritual receptivity."¹⁵

THE ORDER POLICE, as a whole, and particularly the police reserve, which stocked the police battalions, were not elite institutions. The age profile was highly unmilitary; the men were unusually old for military institutions. The training was insufficient. A large proportion of the men that it chose had managed to stave off more "military" military service (whether in the SS or in the army), indicating certainly no great disposition for military discipline and activities, including killing. They were likely to have a large number of fathers among them. They were as far away from eighteen-year-old youths, with no life experience, easily molded to the needs of an army, as an effective military institution is likely to be. They did not share the bravado of youth, and they were used to thinking for themselves. By age, family situation, and disposition, the Order Police, and especially the police reserve, were likely to be composed of men who were more personally independent than whatever the norm was in Germany during its Nazi incarnation.

The Order Police was also not a Nazi institution, in the sense of being molded by the regime in its own image. Its officers were not especially Nazified by German standards of the day, and the rank and file even less so. It made little effort to fill its ranks with people especially beholden to Nazism. Except for mild regard paid to an officer's ideology in promotion, ideological stance was almost an absent criterion for the daily workings of the Order Police.¹⁶ The institution did not screen its enlisted men for their ideological views, and the paltry ideological training it gave them was unlikely to have intensified anyone's existing Nazi views perceptibly, let alone to have converted the unconvinced. Compared to the daily ideological fare of German society itself, the institution's ideological instruction was meager gruel. The Order Police accepted into its ranks whomever it could get. Owing to the selection process and the available pool of applicants, it got men who were less than ideal as policemen and, if anything, were, as a group, less Nazified than average for German society. The Order Police was populated by neither martial spirits nor Nazi supermen.

The men in police battalions could not have been expected to be particularly Nazified, and their institution had not prepared them in any purposive way to become more Nazified, let alone genocidal killers. Yet the regime would soon send them to kill, and would discover, as expected, that the ordinary Germans who composed the Order Police, equipped with little more than the cultural notions current in Germany, would easily become genocidal executioners.

OUR KNOWLEDGE OF police battalion activities during the war is fragmented and partial. No survey—systematic or otherwise—of their contribution to mass murder has appeared. An overview of police battalion activities in the occupied areas can, however, be constructed.¹⁷ Administratively, they were subordinate to the Higher SS and Police Leader (HSSPF) of the region in which they were operating. The HSSPF were responsible for all SS, police, and security forces (aside from army units) within their jurisdictions.¹⁸ Orders for killing operations were transmitted almost always orally (either face to face or over the telephone). Depending on the nature of the operation and on the identity of other institutions that might also have been involved, the officers and men of German police battalions had varying degrees of autonomy in the manner of executing their orders.

A police battalion undertook operations of all sorts, sometimes in battalion strength, sometimes in company strength, sometimes employing just a few men. Since a police battalion's primary task was to police and ensure order in an assigned (often hostile) area, it was typically garrisoned in a city, or its companies were garrisoned separately in various cities or towns in a region, which were used as bases for their forays into the surrounding areas. The men of police battalions operated both alone and frequently in conjunction with forces from other institutions, including the army, the Einsatzkommandos, the SS Security Service (SD), concentration camp personnel, the Gendarmerie, and the German civilian administration—in short, with just about any German governmental or security institution that was to be found in the occupied areas. Police battalions might stay garrisoned in one place for quite a while; however, because a shortage of German police manpower was the rule, their general existence, especially in eastern Europe, was peripatetic; when extra forces were needed in a particular locale, men of a nearby police battalion would often be shifted into the breach.

Police battalion activities ranged widely. The majority of time spent by the men of police battalions was devoted to non-genocidal activities. They undertook ordinary police duties. They guarded installations and buildings. They engaged in anti-partisan warfare. Some even fought beside the army on the front. Yet they also rounded people up. They deported people from their homes for resettlement, to perform slave labor in Germany, or to a camp of some kind, often a death camp. They regularly killed people in cold blood, often en masse.

Whatever the duties of a given day were, the police battalion men were off duty a good portion of the time. This is an aspect of their lives that— though little is known about it—should not be ignored. Understanding them and their deeds requires that we investigate the fullness of their lives and avoid viewing them wrested from their social relations, a view which tends to caricature them. These men were not isolated individuals or oppressed. While in the field, the Germans who served in police battalions went to church and to movies, had sports competitions, enjoyed furloughs, and wrote letters home. They went to night spots and bars, drank, sang, had sex, and talked. Like all people, they had opinions about the character of their lives and what they were doing. Like all men serving in military and police institutions, they talked—in groups, in intimate circles, privately one on one. They talked among themselves about all the topics of the day, which naturally included the war, as well as their lethal activities, which they knew—whether they won or lost the war—would become the hallmark of this period of history, of their country, of this regime, of their lives. In reality, while they were genocidal executioners, the Germans in police battalions, except perhaps for the small percentage of the time when they were on killing operations, led relatively easy, and often easygoing, lives.

POLICE BATTALION PARTICIPATION in large-scale killing operations, in genocide, began with the German attack on the Soviet Union. The killings that some police battalions had perpetrated earlier in Poland were not systematic and not part of a formal genocidal program. The men of Police Battalion 9 filled out the ranks of three of the four Einsatzgruppen, the German killing squads serving as the main agents of genocide in the Soviet Union. One of the battalion's companies was attached to each of these Einsatzgruppen. The companies were further subdivided among the various Einsatzkommandos and Sonderkommandos, so that the police contingent portion of the 100-to-150-man-strong Kommandos was a platoon of about 30 to 40 men. In December 1941, Police Battalion 9 was transferred from the Einsatzgruppen, and was replaced by Police Battalion 3. The men of each police battalion were operationally subordinate to the Einsatzgruppen, and in their duties and actions were barely distinguishable from them.¹⁹ The Einsatzgruppen killed over one million Jews in territories conquered from the Soviet Union. The police battalion men among them, most of whom were reservists, fully contributed to this toll.

The two police battalions assigned to the Einsatzgruppen were not the only ones who slaughtered Jews in the Soviet Union. Other police battalions contributed to the deaths of tens of thousands, at times killing in conjunction with the units of the Einsatzgruppen, at times on their own. The three battalions of Police Regiment 10 (Police Battalions 45, 303, and 314) and of Police Regiment 11 (Police Battalions 304, 315, and 320), all operating under the aegis of the HSSPF Russia-South, helped to decimate Ukrainian Jewry.²⁰ The three police battalions of Police Regiment Russia-Center (Police Battalions 307, 316, and 322) marched through Belorussia with great destructiveness.²¹

One of the first slaughters of the genocidal campaign unleashed against Soviet Jewry was perpetrated by yet another police battalion, Police Battalion 309. A few days after Operation Barbarossa began, the Germans of Police Battalion 309 ignited a portentous, symbolic fiery inferno in the city of Bialystok.

The officers and the men of at least one company of Police Battalion 309 knew from the moment of their entry into territory taken from the Soviet Union that they were to play a role in the planned destruction of Jewry.²² After entering Bialystok on the twenty-seventh of June, a city which the Germans had captured, like many others, without a fight, the battalion commander, Major Ernst Weis, ordered his men to round up male Jews by combing through Jewish residential areas. Although the purpose of congregating the Jews was to kill them, instructions about the manner in which the Germans would extinguish their lives were not given at that time. The entire battalion participated in the ensuing roundup, which itself proceeded with great brutality and wanton murderousness. These Germans could finally unleash themselves without restraint upon the Jews. One Jew recalls that "the unit had barely driven into the city when the soldiers swarmed out and, without any sensible cause, shot up the entire city, apparently also in order to frighten the people. The incessant shooting was utterly horrible. They shot blindly, in fact, into houses and windows, without regard for whether they hit anyone. The shooting (Schiesserei) lasted the entire day." ²³ The Germans of this battalion broke into people's homes who had not lifted a finger in hostility, dragged them out, kicked them, beat them with their rifle butts, and shot them. The streets were strewn with corpses. ²⁴ These individually, autonomously initiated brutalities and killings were by any standard of utility, unnecessary. Why did they occur? The Germans themselves, in their postwar testimony, are mute on this point. Yet some episodes are suggestive. During the roundup, one nameless Jew opened his door a crack in order to assess the unfolding, perilous scene. A lieutenant in the battalion, having noticed the slit, seized the opportunity and shot him through the small opening.²⁵ In order to fulfill his orders, the German only had to bring the Jew to the assembly point. Yet he chose to shoot him. It is hard to imagine that this German felt moral qualms when the target fell to his splendid shot.

Another scene saw some of the Germans in this battalion compel old Jewish men to dance before them. In addition to the amusement that they evidently derived from their choreography, the Germans were mocking, denigrating, and asserting their mastery over these Jews, particularly since the selected Jews were their elders, people of an age to whom normally regard and respect are due. Apparently, and to their great misfortune, the Jews failed to dance to a sufficiently brisk and pleasing tempo, so the Germans set the Jews' beards on fire.²⁶

Elsewhere, near the Jewish district, two desperate Jews fell to their knees begging a German general for protection. One member of Police Battalion 309, who observed these entreaties, decided to intervene with what he must have thought to be a fitting commentary: He unzipped his pants and urinated upon them. The antisemitic atmosphere and practice among the Germans was such that this man brazenly exposed himself in front of a general in order to perform a rare public act of virtually unsurpassable disdain. Indeed, the man had nothing to fear for his breach of military discipline and decorum. Neither the general nor anyone else sought to stop him. ²⁷

Still other deeds of this battalion's slaughter in Bialystok are revealing. At one point the Germans combed through a hospital in search of Jewish patients to kill. In doing so, they demonstrated zeal and fidelity to their task, seeking to slaughter people who obviously posed no conceivable physical threat. They were not, moreover, out to kill any enemy of Germany, just the figmental Jewish enemy. Indeed, they showed no interest in the Soviet Uzbeki soldiers lying wounded in the hospital. They were thirsting for the blood only of Jews.²⁸

The men of Police Battalion 309 used the marketplace near the Jewish districts to assemble the Jews. During the afternoon, a German army officer appalled by the licentious killing of unarmed civilians appeared and argued heatedly with the captain who commanded First Company. The captain refused to comply with the officer's order to allow the Jews to go free, maintaining that the officer had no command authority over him and his men. The captain had his orders, and he was determined to carry them out.²⁹ Subsequently, the Germans took hundreds of Jews from the marketplace to nearby sites, where they shot them.³⁰ Yet the killing was proceeding too slowly for the Germans' taste. The men were bringing more Jews to the assembly points in the marketplace and the area in front of the city's main synagogue faster than they could kill them. The number of Jews was swelling. So another "solution" was improvised on the spot.

The Germans, without precise orders about the methods by which to achieve their ends, took their own initiative (as they so often were to do during the Holocaust) in devising a new course of action. The main synagogue of Bialystok was a towering symbol of Jewish life. An impressive squarish stone structure crowned with a dome, it was the largest synagogue in Poland. Casting about for a way to dispose of the mass of assembled Jews under the shadow of this looming testament to the life of the Jewish enemy, the Germans adopted a plan to destroy both simultaneously—the Jews as well as their spiritual and symbolic home—which was a natural conclusion for their antisemitically inflamed minds.³¹ The burning of synagogues, especially during Kristallnacht, had already become a motif of German anti-Jewish action, and, once established, it was available to be drawn upon anew as a guide to action. Transubstantiating a house of worship into a charnel house was an ironic beginning to the campaign that these men knew was supposed to end with Jewry's extinction.

The men of Police Battalion 309's First and Third Companies drove their victims into the synagogue, the less compliant Jews receiving from the Germans liberal blows of encouragement. The Germans packed the large synagogue full. The fearful Jews began to chant and pray loudly. After spreading gasoline around the building, the Germans set it ablaze; one of the men tossed an explosive through a window, to ignite the holocaust. The Jews' prayers turned into screams. A battalion member later described the scene that he witnessed: "I saw ... smoke, that came out of the synagogue and heard there how the incarcerated people cried loudly for help. I was about 70 meters' distance from the synagogue. I could see the building and observed that people tried to escape through the windows. One shot at them. Circling the synagogue stood the police members who were apparently supposed to cordon it off, in order to ensure that no one emerged."³² Between 100 and 150 men of the battalion surrounded the burning synagogue. They collectively ensured that none of the appointed Jews escaped the inferno. They watched as over seven hundred people died this hideous and painful death, listening to screams of agony. Most of the victims were men, though some women and children were among them.³³ Not surprisingly, some of the Jews within spared themselves the fiery death by hanging themselves or severing their arteries. At least six Jews came running out of the synagogue, their clothes and bodies aflame. The Germans shot each one down, only to watch these human torches burn themselves out.³⁴

With what emotions did the men of Police Battalion 309 gaze upon this sacrificial pyre to the exterminationist creed? One exclaimed: "Let it burn, it's a nice little fire [schönes Feuerlein], it's great fun." Another exulted: "Splendid, the entire city should burn down." ³⁵

The men of this police battalion, many of whom were not even professional policemen, having opted for service with the police as a means of avoiding army service when they were called up to duty,³⁶ became instantaneous Weltanschauungskrieger, or ideological warriors, killing that day between 2,000 and 2,200 Jewish men, women, and children.³⁷ The manner in which they rounded up Jews, the wanton beatings and killings, the turning of the streets of Bialystok into corpse- and blood-bestrewn pathways, and their own improvised solution of a cleansing conflagration, are indeed acts of Weltanschauungskrieger—more specifically, of antisemitic warriors. They carried out an order, embellished upon it, acted not with disgust and hesitation but with apparent relish and excess. Their major had ordered them to round up Jewish men, yet knowing that Hitler had slated the Jews of the Soviet Union for total extermination, the men themselves expanded the order to include some women and children. These Germans were willful in their killing and brutality, for they did more than their specific orders had required of them; they chose to act according to the spirit of the more general order, according to the spirit of their times. The men of Police Battalion 309 performed what can be seen as the emblematic initial killing operation of the formal genocide. They were "ordinary" Germans who, when faced with Germany's deadly foe, when given a chance to have a free hand with the Jews, acted with license, and sent many of their victims to the unnecessarily gruesome death of being burned alive.

ANOTHER ITINERANT UNIT that saw action in the initial genocidal onslaught was Police Battalion 65, which was raised in Recklinghausen, a medium-sized city in the Ruhr area, the industrial heartland of Germany, and was mainly composed of reservists.³⁸ Initially, it served in the west. On May 26, 1941, when the preparations for Operation Barbarossa were already far advanced, Police Battalion 65 was positioned in Heilsberg, East Prussia, which was its jumping-off point for the campaign. On June 22, it marched over Tilsit with the 28 5th Security Division into the Baltics. Its task was to mop up Soviet stragglers and to secure the rear areas behind the advancing German troops. On June 26, the First and Second Companies of the battalion set up quarters in Kovno, while the Third Company was stationed in Siauliai. Before resuming its advance deeper into Soviet territory, Police Battalion 65 received its baptism in genocidal slaughter.

Kovno was the site of incredible butchery of Jews, open for all, Germans and Lithuanians alike, to see. The initial assault upon the unsuspecting, unarmed, and obviously unthreatening Jewish community occurred immediately after the German army marched into Kovno on the heels of the Soviet retreat. With German encouragement and support, Lithuanians, in a frenzied orgy of bludgeoning, slashing, and shooting, slaughtered 3,800 Jews in the city's streets. Two companies of Police Battalion 65 were among the many Germans witnessing these slaughters. In the first week in July, Lithuanian units operating under German command shot another 3,000 Jews in Kovno. The killings, whether wild or systematic, had a circus-like quality, with bystanders observing at their pleasure the slaying, the cudgeling to death of Jews, watching with approval as crowds once watched the gladiators slaying their beasts.³⁹ A number of the men of Police Battalion 65 have related what they observed during the Kovno massacres, including Lithuanian handiwork on one leisurely Sunday, when "we stood on a hill and in a low-lying area near the citadel, about a hundred people (men and women) were shot by machine-gun and rifle fire." ⁴⁰ While some of the men of First and Second Companies had to wait a while yet before they themselves would have a hand in what they had only watched in Kovno, other members of these companies participated in the killings by cordoning off the area around the citadel where the Lithuanians shot the Jews.⁴¹ The men of Third Company, similarly, had no such gradual initiation into genocidal slaughter.

Šiauliai was a medium-size Lithuanian city seventy-five miles north of Kovno. The men of Third Company repeatedly perpetrated massacres in Šiauliai and the surrounding area. Beginning already at the end of June 1941, they killed a considerable number of Jews, including, it seems, women, in what was part of the initial phase of the Germans' genocidal campaign against Soviet Jews. The details of their many killings are murky, yet the general outlines are clear.⁴² The men of Third Company, at least some of the time, themselves rounded up the Jews from their houses. ⁴³ They then transported the Jews on the company's trucks to nearby woods where they shot them.

Already in this early stage of genocidal killing, an impulse of the Germans that was to repeat itself again and again—though it did not become an iron rule—found expression: Exterminating Germany's deadly foes, though imperative, would be carried out by those Germans who wanted to do it. One reservist relates: "I can still remember with certainty that our Sergeant S. two or three times (2 times for sure) assembled the execution squads.... I would like to say that this sort of squad was composed only of volunteers [emphasis in original]."⁴⁴ The gruesomeness of mass shootings at close range was such that even some of the volunteers, indisputably willing killers, at first found it physically disgusting. One volunteer executioner, who was a reservist, is remembered to have returned from a killing foray shaken: " 'I've done it once, never again, I won't be able to eat for three days.' "⁴⁵ Whatever the visceral reactions were to the initiation in genocidal slaughter, the killing went on smoothly. A few days after Third Company's arrival, posters appeared in Šiauliai proclaiming: "This City Is Jew-free!!" (Diese Stadt ist judenfrei!!). ⁴⁶ Such celebratory declarations were often given occasion to appear shortly after the Germans arrived in a Soviet city.

Throughout the summer and fall of 1941, all three companies of Police Battalion 65 contributed to the extermination of the Jews of the Baltics, sometimes killing the Jews themselves, sometimes leaving the actual killing to other units, while they contributed by rounding up, guarding, or transporting the victims. The killing squads were not always formed only with men who specifically had volunteered for killing assignments. Yet the evidence does not suggest that the men killed unwillingly, or that coercion was necessary in order to guarantee their compliance with orders.⁴⁷ They killed in Raseiniai, in Pskov, and in many other locales about which detailed accounts no longer exist, as they advanced northeastward into the Soviet Union.⁴⁸ After describing a killing in Šiauliai, one reservist summed up their fall vocation: "Similar shooting operations took place repeatedly during the march to Luga."⁴⁹ The volume of killings blurred the Germans' memories about individual massacres.

Arriving in Luga, a city seventy-five miles south of Leningrad, in September, Police Battalion 65 settled into winter quarters. For four months, its energies were devoted to guarding installations and to fighting partisans, in Luga and its environs. Its men also helped to guard a prisoner-of-war camp that housed captured Soviet troops. True to the character of their new lives, they participated in at least one massacre of Jewish men, women, and children, and the killing of those Soviet prisoners who were identified as Jews.⁵⁰

The Germans employed Soviet prisoners of war for their own use, bringing them to their living quarters, where they performed menial tasks in their workshops and kitchens.⁵¹ They regularly maltreated the Jewish prisoners, and when they discovered that a "houseboy" was Jewish or a Soviet commissar, they shot him. By Luga, the men of Police Battalion 6 5, or at least some of the men, had internalized the need to kill Jews. They accepted that Jews were fundamentally different from other Soviet citizens, that this difference resided not in any demonstrated actions or character traits of the Jews, but in their "race," in the simple fact that a person had Jewish parents, Jewish blood. During their encampment in Luga, they killed Jews whom they easily could have spared. One killer even tells of a time he was sent alone with a Jew to the woods. He was under absolutely no supervision, so it was a perfect opportunity to let a victim flee, had he opposed the existing war of racist purgation. But he shot him.⁵² Similarly, it would have been easy for the Germans not to have "discovered" that their houseboys were Jewish; no pressure existed in the quiet of their quarters to do so. But they did, and with regularity. And their beating of their victims was gratuitous. One particular Jew was not only battered (misshandelt) by the men of Police Battalion 65, but he was also mocked and degraded, having been forced to dance with a stuffed bear which the Germans had found in their lodgings. Only then did the Germans shoot him.⁵³

These Germans were treating the Jews according to their own inwardly held standards, which they could apply as they wished, for they clearly had been granted the autonomy to make life-and-death decisions. It had already become axiomatic to the members of Police Battalion 65 that all Jews (and Soviet commissars) were to disappear from the face of the earth. They needed neither prompting nor permission in order to kill any Jew whom they discovered.⁵⁴ This autonomy is remarkable, since military and police institutions are generally loath to allow enlisted men to make the capital decisions normally reserved for officers. Regarding Jews, the normal rules did not hold. Every German was inquisitor, judge, and executioner.

EVEN MORE so than their contribution to the annihilation of Soviet Jewry, the efforts of police battalions were integral to the success of Aktion Reinhard, the Germans' name for the systematic killing of Jews living in the area of Poland that the Germans called the Generalgouvernement.⁵⁵ In the course of less than two years, from March 1942 to November 1943, the Germans killed around two million Polish Jews. The vast majority of them met their deaths in the gas chambers of Treblinka, Belzec, and Sobibór, camps that the Germans constructed especially to dry up this vast reservoir of Jewry. Many thousands never made it to the camps, because the Germans did not bother to transport them, choosing instead to kill them in or near the cities where they were living. Whether the Germans transported them over the rail system to a death camp or shot them on the outskirts of cities and towns, they required substantial manpower to collect the Jews and to ensure that they reached their designated end, whether a pit in the ground or the crematoria's ovens. Various units of the Order Police, chief among them police battalions, frequently supplied the men.⁵⁶

Focusing on the activities of the Order Police generally and of police battalions in particular in one of the Generalgouvernement's five districts, Lublin, reveals a collective portrait of institutions immersed in genocidal slaughter.

In charge of the Order Police's units operating in the Lublin District was the commander of the Order Police in Lublin (KdO Lublin). The units can be grouped into three categories. In the first were the regimental staff and units of police directly attached to it. The second category included seven different battalions of police: the three battalions composing Police Regiment 25—numbered 65, 67, and 101—Police Battalion 41, and Police Battalion 316, as well as two other mobile battalion-strength units, Mounted Police Third Squadron (a police cavalry unit) and Motorized Gendarme Battalion. These latter two performed tasks similar to police battalions, were by membership, composition, and function comparable to police battalions, and contributed to the slaughter of tens of thousands of Jews. They are thus included in the ensuing analysis as if they had been police battalions. Finally, auxiliary mobile police battalions (Schutzmannschaft-Bataillone), composed of volunteers from the occupied countries (in this case, from eastern Europe), also acted at the KdO Lublin's behest. In the third category were the Gendarmerie and the Uniformed Police, which were stationary units of police assigned to particular cities, towns, and installations for garrison and guard duty.⁵⁷

As was characteristic of some German institutions during the Nazi period, there was no single command structure governing the units of the Order Police in Lublin.⁵⁸ The irregular command structure, combined with the orders for killing operations having been transmitted orally and not in writing, frequently makes it difficult to ascertain how and from whom the units of the Order Police received orders for the various killing operations. The Order Police units, particularly its police battalions, received two different kinds of orders for genocidal activities. Assignments to carry out deportations or shooting massacres in a particular city or town on a specific day accounted for most of their victims. "I can say the following about the content of these orders," remembers a former clerk on the staff of the KdO Lublin: "A day was designated on which the Jewish populace of a certain locality was to be deported. A particular battalion was assigned to carry it out.... The orders further stipulated that in case of flight or resistance, one should shoot immediately."⁵⁹ In addition to these large-scale, organized killing operations, a general unspecified enabling order, called the Schiessbefehl ("shoot-to-kill order"), mandated the shooting of all Jews found outside of ghettos and camps—on country roads, in woods, hiding in homes or on farms. The Schiessbefehl made the Jews, including Jewish children, vogelfrei, outlaws facing an automatic death sentence. The order communicated unequivocally to the men of the Order Police that no Jew was to be permitted to be free, that the punishment for a Jew's attempt to gain freedom was death, and that the social landscape was to be purged of even the most infinitesimal Jewish presence. This order, for all its symbolic importance, was not merely symbolic. All units under the KdO's command acted upon it.⁶⁰ Indeed, the men of the Order Police, especially of police battalions, put it into effect so frequently that killing stray Jews became a regular part of their lives.

The KdO received regular reports from its units about their general activities, including the genocidal ones. Weekly and monthly reports could be augmented by immediate reports for special occurrences. The individual unit reports would then be collated and synthesized by the operations officer into a monthly report sent to the KdO's superiors.⁶¹ The reports came in different forms and are themselves revealing. Written reports contained tallies of the people whom the Germans killed: of Jews, under the Schiessbefehl's mandate; and of non-Jews, generally as a consequence of their attempts to stamp out partisan activity and other resistance. As a rule, the reports kept the Germans' slaughter of Jews distinct from their killing of non-Jews. Naturally, the Germans routinely employed their linguistic camouflage, conveying often, for example, that Jews were "dealt with according to orders" (befehlsgemäss behandelt). Mass killings and deportations were generally not included in the written reports, having been communicated to the KdO orally or in such veiled language that it was difficult to discern whether the Germans had shot the Jews on the spot or deported them to a death camp.⁶² No matter: as everyone knew, they were functional equivalents.

The weekly reports from July 25 to December 12 of 1942 of Police Battalion 133's First Company have survived. At the time, First Company was operating in East Galicia around Kolomyia, leaving a swath of corpses in its wake. Its reports, the same kind that were received by the KdO Lublin from its own subordinate units,⁶³ demonstrate a number of points. The number of Jews that Police Battalion 133's First Company killed owing to its men's initiative on search-and-destroy missions, and as a result of their general enabling orders to kill Jews, was impressive. It reported that its men managed to hunt down, uncover, and kill 780 Jews, roughly six Jews per man. Between November 1 and December 12, it reported that its men killed 481 Jews. This averaged out to 80 Jews a week, or 11 a day. They had, moreover, singled out Jews for slaughter. They always reported the number of Jews whom they killed separately from the other categories of victims, which included bandits, accomplices, beggars, thieves, vagabonds, the mentally ill, and asocials. And the "reasons" given for the killing of Jews were shams, having no more to do with why the Germans killed them than had Hitler's protestations of his peaceful desires to do with the German designs for carving up Czechoslovakia. Among the reasons First Company reported for killing Jews were: "work-shirkers," "epidemic threats," "was without armband," "bribery," "leaped from transport," "vagabondage," "unauthorized departure from place of residence," "deportation," and "hidden after deportation." In many cases, no reason whatsoever was proffered, save the word "Jews," which was obviously a sufficient reason in itself.⁶⁴ Since this was so, all of the aforementioned "reasons" were superfluous, because a Jew, whether he or she was a putative "epidemic threat" or not, could and would be killed if encountered by this police company's men. Since Jewishness was a sufficient cause, all the "reasons" given were clearly not necessary, and were window dressing of one kind or another.

The strikingly unpraetorian institution, the Order Police, had become an institution immersed in genocidal activities and the discussion of them. Repeatedly, orders went down the chain of command calling for the slaughter of one community after another, the individual operations coalescing into the annihilation of Jews of entire regions. Regular reports came back up the chain of command telling of the men's accomplishments and successes. The Order Police's relations and cooperation with the other security institutions, the Security Police and the SS and Police Leaders (SSPF), were close. The members of these kindred institutions worked hand in hand towards the fulfillment of this national project. Genocidal slaughter and its attendant activities (of filling out reports, requisitioning ammunition, assigning trucks from the motor pool) had become a constituent part of the Order Police and of the lives of its men.

The battalions of Police Regiment 25 were in the thick of the genocide. The three battalions had varied histories up to their respective transfers to the Generalgouvernement. Two of them are discussed here at some length, first Police Battalion 65 and then, in greater depth, Police Battalion 101.⁶⁵

POLICE BATTALION 65 is one unit which formed a bridge between two of the main loci of the Holocaust, the Soviet Union and the Generalgouvernement. After its murderous 1941 advance through northern Soviet territory, described above, the new year greeted the men of Police Battalion 65 with more hazardous duty than bringing unarmed people to slaughter. In January 1942, most of its men joined group "Scheerer," which was engaged in the bitter battles around Cholm in northern Russia, more than one hundred miles southeast of the battalion's headquarters in Luga. Their engagement in battle lasted over three months, during which they fought alongside army troops in fierce encounters with the Soviet army. For a while, the entire battalion was in peril as Soviet units encircled it completely. The battalion suffered extremely heavy casualties at the front and was rotated back when other German forces fought through the Soviet encirclement to free them at the beginning of May. ⁶⁶ In recognition of its performance in battle, the battalion's official designation was forthwith changed to Police Battalion 65 "Cholm," and the survivors of the battles each received a "Cholm-badge" (Cholm-Schild).

Such intensive combat was not the norm for police battalions engaged in the genocide. At the beginning of June, the depleted battalion moved from Luga to Brunowice, near Cracow. Those who had seen battle received leave to visit their homes, and then, as a group, they went for recuperation and ski instruction courses in Zakopane, on the southern border of Poland. Altogether their rest lasted about eight weeks.⁶⁷ While its seasoned personnel was elsewhere, the battalion's green replacements, who restored the battalion close to its normal strength, were trained in Brunowice.

From June 1942 until May 1943, Police Battalion 65 served its second, and more significant, stint as an institution of genocidal killing, by contributing to the decimation of Polish Jewry, first in the Cracow region, and then around Lublin. During this period, the death camps were burning overtime, consuming the Jewish arrivals from one community after another. Police Battalion 6 5 fed the furnaces of both Auschwitz and Belzec.

Shortly after their arrival in Brunowice, the battalion's commander made an announcement to the battalion. According to one man from First Company, he said: "We have here in Cracow a special task to perform. But the responsibility for it lies with the higher authorities." Although the message was cryptic, the meaning was certainly not lost on this battalion's seasoned killers. The witness to this announcement admitted that he immediately thought that this meant that they would be killing Jews.⁶⁸ The Germans of this police battalion knew that, after a five-month interlude of soldiering and rest, they were to resume their slaughter of Jews.

In the Cracow region, Police Battalion 65 was involved repeatedly in killing operations of various kinds. About many of them there is little or no evidence. Still, enough material exists for the character of their stay in Poland to be clear. The first sort of contribution that they made to the fulfillment of Aktion Reinhard's goal was rounding up ghetto-dwelling Jews, loading them onto freight cars, and depositing them before the gates of a death factory. The battalion did this repeatedly, its three companies taking turns at bringing the Jews of Cracow to the city's freight depot, or the Jews from surrounding cities to their local train stations. They then crammed the Jews into freight cars, in the typical German manner of these years, so that there was not even enough room for people to sit down. A smaller, thirty-strong detachment of its men then accompanied the transport to its destination, to either Auschwitz or Belzec, a journey normally lasting about five hours.⁶⁹ A reservist, then thirty-four years old, sketchily describes one such deportation from Cracow:

It was in November 1942, when all available company members were assigned to a transport of Jews [Judentransport]. We had to report to the ghetto and there we took charge of a column of Jewish people, who were being led out of the ghetto. We had to accompany these people to the waiting freight cars, in which a multitude of people were already to be found. These Jews (men, women, and children) were crammed in the most inhumane manner into the available cars. We then had to ride guard on the train. I cannot remember very well the place of destination. I am sure it was not Auschwitz. The name Belzec has been mentioned. This sounds more likely. At least the name means something to me. We had to leave the train at the final destination, and SS took charge. The train stopped by a fence or a lattice, and with the locomotive, the SS guided the train inside. In the area we noticed a distinct smell of corpses. We could imagine what these people had to look forward to, and above all, that it was an extermination camp. We had previously been told that these people were being resettled.⁷⁰

Many, killers and bystanders, who came to the environs of a death camp have commented on the unmistakable odor of death hanging in the air for miles. The policemen all knew of the Jews' final destination well before they reached the gates of the inferno. The Germans' various euphemisms for killing were known to all engaged in the business. The men of Police Battalion 65 were particularly wise to the nature of Jewish "resettlement," having been among the first Germans in the Soviet Union to perpetrate genocidal massacres of Jews, well over a year before this particular deportation. ⁷¹

After descending from a different transport immediately outside Auschwitz, which they handed over to the camp's personnel, who brought it inside, the men of Police Battalion 65 rested before their return journey. They were in repose before the gates of a death factory, of an institution like no other in human history—built, refined, and continually modernized for the explicit purpose of consuming human lives. This rest time afforded the Germans almost an irresistible opportunity for reflection. They had just unburdened themselves of their human cargo destined for the furnaces inside. In turning their backs on Auschwitz, they were closing another chapter in their nation's unfolding blood-written chronicle. These men had just contributed to a small yet palpable alteration of the world. They had just completed a deed of great moral magnitude. Not one of them, especially the first time he stood before these gates, could fail to have been aware of this. How did they evaluate the morality of what they had just done? With what emotions did they gaze upon the transport disappearing into the death camp? What did they say among themselves as they saw the smoke rise, as the unmistakable smell of burning flesh assaulted their senses?

One battalion member, a thirty-four-year-old reservist, who had been drafted in 1940 on the Saturday before Pentecost, recalls the moment:

It stank terribly all around; when we took a rest in a restaurant nearby a drunken SS man (he spoke broken German) came over and told us that the Jews had to undress and they were then told that they would go for a delousing. In reality, one was in fact gassing these people and later burning them. The people who did not go along were continuously driven on with whips. I still remember this discussion very clearly. From this moment on I knew that extermination camps for Jews [Judenvernichtungslager] existed.⁷²

This reservist had already known that the Germans were killing Jews en masse; before the gates of Auschwitz he finally learned of the death factories' workings, down to the ruse used for filling the gas chambers. Through both direct experience and discussion, the perpetrators' knowledge of the scope and methods of Germany's slaughter of Jews increased, and they incrementally expanded their understanding of their own place in this larger, national enterprise. In this restaurant, the killers openly talked about the techniques of their trade. Discussion of genocidal slaughter among its perpetrators was an aspect of the vocation. It was shop talk.

It is not at all surprising that this man and others describe Auschwitz as a "Jewish extermination camp" (Judenvernichtungslager), even though non-Jews perished in Auschwitz as well. The killers understood that the Germans were annihilating all Jews, cleansing the world of the putative Jewish blight, so that the institutions devoted to death were in their mental world devoted to the death of the Jewish people. The deaths of non-Jews were understood to have been incidental to the major enterprise, mere tactical operations. Their image of the camp was fundamentally correct, all the more so because, in a real sense, Auschwitz was a "Jewish extermination camp," not only because the vast majority of its victims was Jewish but also because its continually expanding extermination facilities would not have been erected and improved upon had the Germans not been engaged in a genocidal slaughter of the Jews.

Not all the Jews that Police Battalion 65 wrested from ghettos in the fall of 1942 met their deaths in extermination camps. Its men frequently finished off the job themselves. There is scant information about most of their massacres, though it is likely that they conformed to the general pattern of one of the mass killings about which there is testimony, since typically, at the latest after the initial massacres, units would settle upon standardized procedures for the operations. One dawn that autumn, the men of Police Battalion 65 rounded up the Jews of a ghetto near Cracow, after having surrounded the ghetto in order to prevent escapes. They took the Jews to woods outside the city, where they shot them. The Jewish men, women, and children had to undress themselves by the edge of the pit that would become their mass grave. An execution squad of ten Germans, using rifles, shot the Jews in installments until the job was finished. After each batch of Jews had fallen into the pit, one of the men delivered a final shot to the head of anyone who still appeared to be alive. This day's work consumed the lives of eight hundred people.⁷³

This killing operation seems to have been organized by SS and SD men. Police battalions, this one as well, typically (though not as a rule) performed their jobs according to the planning and sometimes under the supervision of the local SS and SD commanders. This was the case during a series of mass shootings that took place during the fall of 1942, when the men of Police Battalion 65 killed the patients of a Jewish hospital. One of the participants, who was at the time thirty-nine years old, relates that the killings were spread out over five or six occasions. In each instance, a commando of about twenty-five men from First Company drove to woods on the outskirts of Cracow. There the Germans separated into two groups, one to secure the area and the other to kill the Jewish patients, who were brought to the killing site by ten SS and SD men. During every one of these operations, they shot up to 150 Jews, who were aged or sick; some of the latter were children. This killer had been assigned to each of these commandos, though he claims that he was always in the group that did not kill. Nevertheless, at least five different times, this man went with his comrades to massacre hospital patients, people who obviously posed no threat to the Germans, people whose condition would in others arouse instincts of nurturance. But not in these men.⁷⁴

The men of Police Battalion 65 learned of this and other genocidal assignments from notices on a bulletin board in their quarters; killing Jews was so routine, so part of the "natural" world of the perpetrators, who served in this and in other police battalions, that notices of genocidal operations often simply got posted in their quarters. Friends within this battalion undoubtedly walked by the bulletin board in order to apprise themselves of their upcoming activities. What did they say to each other upon reading that another operation in the ongoing destruction of the Jews was in the offing, and upon going down the roster of those who would be carrying it out? Did they mutter curses? Did they bemoan that their fate was to be mass murderers? Did they lament the fate of the Jews? They have given no testimony of such reactions, no testimony that recounts the men's hatred of reading the information posted on that genocidal board. Surely, such thoughts and emotions would have stuck in their memories had they conceived of them as the distribution point for cataclysmic news.⁷⁵

In addition to rounding up Jews in ghettos, sitting ducks to be either transported to death camps or shot immediately, the men of Police Battalion 65 repeatedly went into the countryside on search-and-destroy missions, both in the area around Cracow and during the early months of 1943 around Lublin. Their job was to comb the woods for hidden Jews, and then to kill them.⁷⁶ Since large numbers of Jews had fled the ghettos of the Generalgouvernement, many police battalions and other SS and police units devoted a great deal of time to hunting down Jews—and with great success.⁷⁷ The prodigious killing on these missions perpetrated by Police Battalion 133's First Company has already been mentioned. The Germans discovered so many Jews because of the zeal they brought to their jobs. When people are sent to look for a needle in a haystack that they do not wish to uncover, the easiest thing for them to do is not to find it.

In May 1943, Police Battalion 65 was sent to Copenhagen, where its men engaged in a variety of genocide-abetting undertakings, rounding up Jews, deporting them, and trying to prevent their escape. ⁷⁸ February 1944 saw the battalion transferred to Yugoslavia, where it was occupied for the remainder of the year in warfare against partisans and in shooting hostages. It suffered heavy losses. In spring 1945, the battalion retreated towards Germany, and was captured near the end of the war by British forces in the area around Klagenfurt in Austria. ⁷⁹

Police battalions and other units of the Order Police commenced slaughtering Jews en masse with the beginning of the simultaneous onslaught against the Soviet Union and its Jews, and continued as long as Germans continued to kill Jews systematically. It cannot be said precisely in how many deaths police battalions were complicit. The number is certainly over one million, and could be three times as high.⁸⁰