Book review for five paragraph essay
I need this paper plagiarism-free.
Write a five-paragraph essay consisting of a critical review of Christopher Browning’s book Ordinary Men. In your review, you should situate the book in its historical context, summarize the premises behind the book’s historical argument, evaluate the use of historical evidence, and critique the merits of the book’s conclusions.
Paragraph 1: Introduce the Holocaust, Reserve Police Battalion 101, and Brownings book/argument
Paragraph 2: Summarize the social/psychological factors that Browning transformed ordinary men into mass murders
Paragraph 3: Summarize the specific historical factors that Browning argues transformed ordinary men of RPB 101 into mass murders
Paragraph 4: Evaluate Browning’s use of evidence and critique the merits of his conclusions
Paragraph 5: Conclude by explaining how the lessons of this book are relevant to society today
All quotations, statistics, or references to specific arguments need to be cited using a parenthetical citation stating author’s last name and page number. If you read a Kindle edition that does not have page numbers, provide the location number instead.
The focus of your paper should be on Browning’s book and argument, but you may reference Doris Bergen’s book War & Genocide and/or Daniel Goldhagen’s video if you wish. Do not use any other sources for this paper.
After your conclusion, return a couple of extra lines and then insert a bibliography listing all the books and/or videos you used in writing your paper. The bibliography must follow the Chicago Manual of Style formatting guidelines. A sample bibliography is included in this module, and you should copy the formatting displayed.
Papers should be carefully edited for grammar, spelling, punctuation, and style. This is your culminating assignment for this class. It should be polished and show off your knowledge of the historical subject matter and your critical thinking skills.
ORDINAlty
RESERVE P O L ICE BATTALIO N 101
AND THE FINAL SOLUTION IN POLAND
Christopher R. Browning
PENGUIN BO O K S
PENGUIN BOOKS
Published by the Penguin Group
Penguin Books Ltd. 80 Strand, London WC2R ORL. England
Penguin Putnam Inc . 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA
Penguin Books Australia Ltd, 250 Camberwell Road. Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia
Penguin Books Canada Ltd, 10 Alcorn Avenue, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4V 382
Penguin Books India (P) Ltd, 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi – 110017, India
Penguin Books (NZ) Ltd, em Rosedale and Airborne Roads, Albany, Auckland. New Zealand
Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty) Ltd, 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank 2196, South Africa
Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand. London WC2R ORL England
www.penguin.com
First pubbshed In the USA by HruperCollins 1992
First published in Creat Britain in Penguin Books 2001
9
Copyright II) Christopher R. Browning. 1992. 1998
All rights resf’lVed
‘One Day in J6zef6w: I nitiation to Mass Murder’. a paper based on a portion of this work, has appeared in
Peter Hayes. ed . Lessons and Legacies: The Meaning of the Holocaust in a Changing World (Cbicago:
Northwestern University Press. 1991)
The moral right of the author has been asserted
Printed in England by Clays Ltd. St lves pIc
Except in the United States of America. this book is sold subject
to the condition that it shall not. by way of trade or other..vtse. be lent,
re-sold. hin>d out. or otherwise ctrculated without the publisher’s
prior consent in any form of binding or COYer other than that in
which it is published and without a similar condition including this
condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser
for Raul Hilberg
CONTENTS
Illustrations ix
Preface xiii
1. ONE MORNING IN J6ZEF6w 1
2. THE ORDER POLICE 3
3. THE ORDER POLICE AND THE FINAL SOLUTION:
RUSSIA 1941 9
4. THE ORDER POLICE AND THE FINAL SOLUTION:
DEPORTATION 26
5. RESERVE POLICE BATTALION 101 38
6. ARRIVAL IN POLAND 49
7. INITIATION TO MASS MURDER: THE J6ZEF6w
MASSACRE 55
8. REFLECTIONS ON A MASSACRE 71
9. LOMAZY: THE DESCENT OF SECOND COMPANY 78
VII
vi ii I Contents
10. THE AUGUST DEPORTATIONS TO TREBLINKA 88
11. LATE-SEPTEMBER SHOOTINGS 97
12. THE DEPORTATIONS RESUME 104
13. THE STRANGE HEALTH OF CAPTAIN HOFFMANN 114
14. THE “JEW HUNT” 121
15. THE LAST MASSACRES: “HARVEST FESTIVAL” 133
16. AFTERMATH
17. GERMANS, POLES, AND JEWS
143
147
18. ORDINARY MEN 159
Afterword 191
Appendix: Shootings and Deportations by
Reserve Police Battalion 101 225
Notes 227
Index 259
ILLUSTRATIONS
Maps
Poland in 1942-43 x
The Lublin District xi
Photographs follow page 40
ix
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Lomazye Tuczna e
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PREFACE
In mid-March 1942 some 75 to 80 percent of all victims of the
Holocaust were still alive, while 20 to 25 percent had perished.
A mere eleven months later, in mid-February 1943, the percent
ages were exactly the reverse. At the core of the Holocaust was
a short, intense wave of mass murder. The center of gravity of
this mass murder was Poland, where in March 1942, despite two
and a half years of terrible hardship, deprivation, and persecu
tion, every major Jewish community was still intact, and where
eleven months later only the remnants of Polish Jewry survived
in a few rump ghettos and labor camps. In short, the German
attack on the Jews of Poland was not a gradual or incremental
program stretched over a long period of time, but a veritable
blitzkrieg, a massive offensive requiring the mobilization of large
numbers of shock troops. This offensive, moreover, came just
when the German war effort in Russia hung in the balance-a
time period that opened with the renewed German thrust
xiii
xiv I Preface
toward the Crimea and the Caucasus and closed with the
disastrous defeat at Stalingrad.
H the German military offensive of 1942 was ultimately a
failure, the blitzkrieg against the Jews, especially in Poland, was
not. We have long known how the Jews in the major ghettos,
especially Warsaw and L6dz, were murdered. But most Polish
Jews lived in smaller cities and towns whose populations were
often more than 30 percent Jewish, and in some ,cases even 80 or
90 percent. How had the Germans organized and carried out the
destruction of this widespread Jewish population? And where
had they found the manpower during this pivotal year of the war
for such an astounding logistical achievement in mass murder?
The personnel of the death camps was quite minimal. But the
manpower needed to clear the smaller ghettos-to round up and
either deport or shoot the bulk of Polish Jewry-was not. 1
My search for the answers to these questions led me to the
town of Ludwigsburg near Stuttgart. Here is located the Central
Agency for the State Administrations of Justice (Zentrale Stelle
der Landesjustizverwaltungen), the Federal Republic of Ger
many’s office for coordinating the investigation of Nazi crimes. I
was working through their extensive collection of indictments
and judgments for virtually every German trial of Nazi crimes
committed against the Jews of Poland when I first encountered
the indictment concerning Reserve Police Battalion 101, a unit of
the German Order Police.
Though I had been studying archival documents and court
records of the Holocaust for nearly twenty years, the impact this
indictment had upon me was singularly powerful and disturbing.
Never before had I encountered the issue of choice so dramati
cally framed by the course of events and so openly discussed by
at least some of the perpetrators. Never before had I seen the
monstrous deeds of the Holocaust so starkly juxtaposed with the
human faces of the killers.
It was immediately clear from the indictment, which contained
quite extensive verbatim quotations from pretrial interrogations
of battalion members, that the case was based upon an unusually
Preface / xv
rich collection of testimonies. Moreover, many of these testimo
nies had a “feel” of candor and frankness conspicuously absent
from the exculpatory, alibi-laden, and mendacious testimony so
often encountered in such court records. The investigation and
legal prosecution of Reserve Police Battalion 10 1 had been a
decade-long process ( 1962 to 1972) conducted by the Office of
the State Prosecutor (Staatsanwaltschaft) in Hamburg. This
office-surely one of the most diligent and committed prosecu
tors of Nazi crimes in all of the Federal Republic-still had
custody of the court records relating to the case, and I success
fully applied for permission to see them.
Unlike so many of the Nazi killing units, whose membership
can only be partially reconstructed, Reserve Police Battalion
WI’s roster was available to the investigators. As most of the men
came from Hamburg and many still lived there at the time of the
investigation, I was able to study the interrogations of 2 10 men
from a unit consisting of slightly less than 500 when it was sent
at full strength to Poland in June 1942 . This collection of
interrogations provided a representative sample for statistical
answers to questions about age, Party and SS membership, and
social background. Moreover, about 125 of the testimonies were
sufficiently substantive to permit both detailed narrative recon
struction and analysis of the internal dynamics of this killing unit.
Ultimately, the Holocaust took place because at the most basic
level individual human beings killed other human beings in large
numbers over an extended period of time. The grass-roots
perpetrators became “professional killers. ” The historian en
counters numerous difficulties in trying to write about a unit of
such men, among them the problem of sources. In the case of
Reserve Police Battalion 101, in contrast to many of the killing
units operating in the Soviet Union, there are few contemporary
documents and none that deal explicitly with its killing activi
ties.2 The accounts of a handful of Jewish survivors can establish
the dates and magnitude of various actions in some of the towns
where the battalion operated. But unlike survivor testimony
about prominent perpetrators in the ghettos and camps, where
xvi I Preface
prolonged contact was possible, survivor testimony can tell us
little about an itinerant unit like Reserve Police Battalion 101.
Unknown men arrived, carried out their murderous task, and
left. Seldom, in fact, can the survivors even remember the
peculiar green uniforms of the Order Police to identify what kind
of unit was involved.
In writing about Reserve Police Battalion WI, therefore, I
have depended heavily upon the judicial interrogations of some
125 men conducted in the 19605. To read about the same events
experienced by a single unit as filtered through the memories of
125 different men more than twenty years after the fact is
disconcerting to a historian looking for certainties. Each of these
men played a different role. He saw and did different things.
Each subsequently repressed or forgot certain aspects of the
battalion’s experiences, or reshaped his memory of them in a
different way. Thus the interrogations inevitably present a
confusing array of perspectives and memories. Paradoxically, I
would have had the illusion of being more certain about what
happened to the battalion with one detailed recollection instead
of 125.
Beyond the differing perspectives and memories, there is also
the interference caused by the circumstances in which the
testimony was given. Quite simply, some men deliberately lied,
for they feared the judicial consequences of telling the truth as
they remembered it. Not only repression and distortion but
conscious mendacity shaped the accounts of the witnesses.
Furthermore, the interrogators asked questions pertinent to
their task of collecting evidence for specific, indictable crimes
committed by particular people, but did not systematically
investigate the broader, often more impressionistic and subjec
tive facets of the policemen’s experience that are important to
the historian, if not to the lawyer.
As with any use of multiple sources, the many accounts and
perspectives had to be sifted and weighed. The reliability of each
witness had to be assessed. Much of the testimony had to be
Preface I xvi i
partially or totally dismissed in favor of conflicting testimony that
was accepted. Many of these judgments were both straightfor
ward and obvious, but others were quite difficult. And as
self-conscious as I have tried to be, at times I undoubtedly made
purely instinctive judgments without even being aware of it.
Other historians looking at the same materials would retell these
events in somewhat different ways.
In recent decades the historical profession in general has been
increasingly concerned with writing history “from the bottom
up,” with reconstructing the experiences of the bulk of the
population ignored in the history of high politics and high culture
hitherto so dominant. In Germany in particular, this trend has
culminated in the practice of AUtagsgeschichte-“the history of
everyday life”-achieved through a “thick description” of the
common experiences of ordinary people. When such an approach
has been applied to the era of the Third Reich, however, some
have criticized it as an evasion-a way to shift attention from the
unparalleled horrors of the Nazi regime’s genocidal policies to
those mundane aspects of life that continued relatively undis
turbed. Thus, the very attempt to write a case study or
microhistory of a single battalion might seem undesirable to
some.
As a methodology, however, “the history of everyday life” is
neutral. It becomes an evasion, an attempt to “normalize” the
Third Reich, only if it fails to confront the degree to which the
criminal policies of the regime inescapably permeated everyday
existence under the Nazis. Particularly for the German occupiers
stationed in the conquered lands of eastern Europe–literally
tens of thousands of men from all walks of life–the mass-murder
policies of the regime were not aberrational or exceptional
events that scarcely ruffied the surface of everyday life. As the
story of Reserve Police Battalion 101 demonstrates, mass murder
and routine had become one. Normality itself had become
exceedingly abnormal.
Another possible objection to this kind of study concerns the
xvi iiI Preface
degree of empathy for the perpetrators that is inherent in trying
to understand them. Clearly the writing of such a history
requires the rejection of demonization. The policemen in the
battalion who carried out the massacres and deportations, like
the much smaller number who refused or evaded, were human
beings. I must recognize that in the same situation, I could have
been either a killer or an evader-both were human-if I want
to understand and explain the behavior of both as best I can . This
recognition does indeed mean an attempt to empathize. What I
do not accept, however, are the old cliches that to explain is to
excuse, to understand is to forgive. Explaining is not excusing;
understanding is not forgiving. Not trying to understand the
perpetrators in human terms would make impossible not only
this study but any history of Holocaust perpetrators that sought
to go beyond one-dimensional caricature. Shortly before his
death at the hands of the Nazis, the French Jewish historian
Marc Bloch wrote, “When all is said and done, a single word,
‘understanding,’ is the beacon light of our studies.”3 It is in that
spirit that I have tried to write this book.
One condition placed upon my access to the judicial interro
gations must be made clear. Regulations and laws for the
protection of privacy have become increasingly restrictive in
Germany, especially in the past decade. The state of Hamburg
and its court records are no exception to this trend. Before
receiving permission to see the court records of Reserve Police
Battalion 10 1, therefore, I had to promise not to use the men’s
real names. The names of the battalion commander, Major
Wilhelm Trapp, and the three company commanders, Captain
Wolfgang Hoffmann, Captain Julius Wohlauf, and Lieutenant
Hartwig Gnade, appear in other documentation in archives
outside Germany. I have used their real names, for in their cases
there is no confidentiality to breach. However, I have used
pseudonyms (designated at first occurrence by an asterisk) for all
other battalion members who appear in the text of this book. The
notes refer to those giving testimony simply by first name and
Preface I xix
last initial. While this promise of confidentiality and use of
pseudonyms is, in my opinion, an unfortunate limitation on strict
historical accuracy, I do not believe it undermines the integrity
or primary usefulness of this study.
A number of people and institutions provided indispensable
support during the research and writing of this study. Oberstaats
anwalt (Senior Prosecutor) Alfred Streim made available to me
the incomparable collection of German judicial records in Lud
wigs burg. Oberstaatsanwaltin Helge Grabitz encouraged me to
work with the court records in Hamburg, supported my appli
cation for access, and generously helped in every way during my
stay there. Pacific Lutheran University provided me with finan
cial awards for the two trips to German archives that initiated
and concluded my research on this project. The Alexander von
Humboldt Foundation likewise aided one research visit in
Germany. The bulk of the research and writing was completed
during sabbatical leave from Pacific Lutheran University, and
with the support of a Fulbright Research Grant to Israel. Daniel
Krauskopf, executive secretary of the United States-Israel Ed
ucational Foundation, deserves special thanks for facilitating my
research in both Israel and Germany.
Peter Hayes of Northwest em University and Saul Friedlander
of UCLA offered opportunities to present initial research findings
at conferences they organized at their respective institutions.
Many friends and colleagues listened patiently, offered sugges
tions, and provided encouragement along the way. Philip Nord
quist, Dennis Martin, Audrey Euyler, Robert Hoyer, Ian
Kershaw, Robert Gellately, Yehuda Bauer, Dinah Porat,
Michael Marrus, Bettina Bim, George Mosse, Elisabeth Doman
sky, Gitta Sereny, Carlo Ginzburg, and the late Uwe Adam
deserve special mention. To Raul Hilberg lowe a special debt.
In 1982 he called attention to the indispensability of the Order
Police to the Final Solution, continuing as so often in.the past to
set the agenda for further Holocaust research. ” He then person
ally interested himself in the publication of this study. For such
xx I Preface
help, both now and on earlier occasions in my career, the
dedication of this book is an inadequate expression of my esteem
and gratitude. For the continued support and understanding of
my family, who have patiently endured the gestation period of
another book, I am particularly grateful.
Tacoma, November 1991
1
One Morning
in J6zej6w
IN THE VERY EARLY HOURS OF JULY 13, 1942, THE MEN OF
Reserve Police Battalion 101 were roused from their bunks in the
large brick school building that served as their barracks in the
Polish town of Bilgoraj. They were middle-aged family men of
working- and lower-middle-class background from the city of
Hamburg. Considered too old to be of use to the German army,
they had been drafted instead into the Order Police. Most were
raw recruits with no previous experience in German occupied
territory. They had arrived in Poland less than three weeks
earlier.
It was still quite dark as the men climbed into the waiting
trucks. Each policeman had been given extra ammunition, and
additional boxes had been loaded onto the trucks as well. 1 They
1
21 ORDINARY MEN
were headed for their first major action, though the men had not
yet been told what to expect.
The convoy of battalion trucks moved out of Bilgoraj in the
dark, heading eastward on a jarring washboard gravel road. The
pace was slow, and it took an hour and a half to two hours to
arrive at the destination-the village of J6zef6w-a mere thirty
kilometers away. Just as the sky was beginning to lighten, the
convoy halted outside J6zef6w. It was a typical Polish village of
modest white houses with thatched straw roofs. Among its
inhabitants were 1,800 Jews.
The village was totally quiet.2 The men of Reserve Police
Battalion 101 climbed down from their trucks and assembled in
a half-circle around their commander, Major Wilhelm Trapp, a
fifty-three-year-old career policeman affectionately known by his
men as “Papa Trapp.” The time had come for Trapp to address
the men and inform them of the assignment the battalion had
received.
Pale and nervous, with choking voice and tears in his eyes,
Trapp visibly fought to control himself as he spoke. The battalion,
he said plaintively, had to perform a frightfully unpleasant task.
This assignment was not to his liking, indeed it was highly
regrettable, but the orders came from the highest authorities. If
it would make their task any easier, the men should remember
that in Germany the bombs were falling on women and children.
He then turned to the matter at hand. The Jews had instigated
the American boycott that had damaged Germany, one p0-
liceman remembered Trapp saying. There were Jews in the
village of J6zef6w who were involved with the partisans, he
explained according to two others. The battalion had now been
ordered to round up these Jews. The male Jews of working age
were to be separated and taken to a work camp. The remaining
Jews-the women, children, and elderly-were to be shot on
the spot by the battalion. Having explained what awaited his
men, Trapp then made an extraordinary offer: if any of the older
men among them did not feel up to the task that lay before him,
he could step out. 3
2
The Order Police
How DID A BATTALION OF MIDDLE-AGED RESERVE POLICEMEN
find themselves facing the task of shooting some 1,500 Jews in
the Polish village of J6zef6w in the summer of 1942? Some
background is needed, both on the institution of the Order
Police (Ordnungspolizei, or Orpo) and on its role in the Nazi
policy of murdering the Jews of Europe.
The Order Police resulted from the third attempt in interwar
Germany to create large police formations with military training
and equipment. 1 In the wake of the German defeat in World
War I, revolution broke out in Germany. As the army dissolved,
military officers and government officials fearful of being swept
away by revolutionary forces organized counterrevolutionary
paramilitary units known as the Freikorps. When the domestic
3
4 1 OR D I N ARY M E N
situation stabilized in 1919, many of the Freikorps men were
merged with regular police into large formations stationed in
barracks and on hand to combat any further resurgence of the
revolutionary threat. The Allies, however, demanded the disso
lution of these police formations in 1920 as a potential violation
of the clause of the Versailles Treaty limiting Germany’s standing
army to 100,000 men.
After the Nazi regime was established in 1933, a “police army”
(Armee der Landespolizei) of 56,000 men was created. These
units were stationed in barracks and given full military training
as part of Germany’s covert rearmament. When Hitler openly
defied the disarmament provisions of the Versailles Treaty and
reintroduced military conscription in 1935, the “police army”
was merged into the rapidly enlarging regular army to prOVide
cadres of commissioned and noncommissioned officers. The
“police army” played no small role as a training ground for future
army officers. As of 1942, no fewer than ninety-seven generals in
the German army had previously served in the “police army” of
1933-35.2
The preservation of large military formations within the police
had to await the appointment of Heinrich Himmler, already
head of the SS, as chief of German police in 1936, with
jurisdiction over all police units in the Third Reich. Himmler
divided the various German police into two branches, each
under a main office in Berlin. Under the Security Police
(Sicherheitspolizei) Main Office of Reinhard Heydrich were the
notorious Secret State Police (Geheime Staatspolizei, or Ge
stapo), to combat the regime’s political enemies, and the Crim
inal Police (Kriminalpolizei, or Kripo), which was basically a
detective force for nonpolitical crimes. The second branch of the
police was the Order Police Main Office under Kurt Daluege.
Daluege had charge of the city or municipal police (Schutz
polizei, or Schupo), the rural police, equivalent perhaps to
county troopers (Gendarmerie), and the small-town or commu
nity police (Gemeindepolizei).
By 1938 Daluege had over 62,000 policemen under his
The Order Police / 5
jurisdiction. Nearly 9,000 of them were organized into police
companies called Polizei-HundertschaJten of 108 men each. In
each of ten cities in Germany, three police companies were
brought together into yet larger “police training units” (Polizei
Ausbildungsabteilungen ).
In 1938 and 1939, the Order Police expanded rapidly as the
increasing threat of war gave prospective recruits a further
inducement. If they enlisted in the Order Police, the new young
policemen were exempted from conscription into the army.
Moreover, because the police battalions-like U. S. National
Guard units-were organized regionally, they seemed to offer
the guarantee of completing one’s alternative to regular military
service not only more safely but closer to home.
With the outbreak of war in September 1939, the Order Police
bad reached a strength of 131,000 men. The big threat to its large
military formations was, of course, absorption into the German
army, a move avoided through a compromise for which the
Order Police paid a heavy price. Many of its best units were
furmed into a police division of nearly 16,000 men that was put
at the disposal of the army. (It subsequently fought in the
Ardennes in 1940 and took part in the attack on Leningrad in
1941, befure Himmler got it back in 1942 as the Fourth
SS-Polizei Grenadier Division. ) Two police regiments raised in
newly seized Danzig were also transferred to the army in
October 1939. Finally, the Order Police provided over 8,000
men for the army’s military police, or Feldgendarmerie. In
return the other draft-age men of the Order Police remained
exempt from military conscription.
To replenish its ranks, the Order Police was allowed to recruit
26,000 young German men-9,000 volunteers born between
1918 and 1920, and 17,000 volunteers born between 1909 and
1912-as well as 6,000 so-called “ethnic Germans,” or Volks
deutsche, who had lived outside Germany prior to 1939. In
addition, the Order Police received authorization to conscript
91,500 reservists born between 1901 and 1909-an age group not
as yet subject to the military draft. Order Police conscription was
6 / ORDI N ARY M E N
gradually extended to still older men, and by mid-I940, the size
of the Order Police had grown to 244,500.3
The Order Police had scarcely been taken into account in
prewar mobilization plans, and little thought had been given to
its possible wartime use, but Germany’s military success and
rapid expansion quickly created the need for more occupation
forces behind the lines. With the outbreak of war, twenty-one
police battalions of approximately 500 men each were formed
from the various police companies and training units in Germany;
thirteen of them were attached to the armies invading Poland.
They were subsequently involved in rounding up Polish soldiers
cut off behind the advancing lines, collecting weapons and
military equipment abandoned by the retreating Poles, and
providing other services to secure the rear areas.
The number of police battalions rapidly expanded to 101 by
mid-I940, as the 26,000 new young recruits and many of the
older drafted reservists were formed into battalion units as well.
Thirteen battalions were stationed in German-occupied central
Poland, known as the General Government, and seven were
stationed in the western Polish territories annexed to the Third
Reich, the “incorporated territories.” Ten were stationed in the
occupied Czech lands of Bohemia and Moravia, known as the
Protectorate. In addition, six battalions were stationed in Nor
way, and four in the Netherlands.4 The Order Police were
quickly becoming an essential source of manpower for holding
down German-occupied Europe.
The new battalions were created in two ways. First, to provide
the necessary cadres of noncommissioned officers, career police
men and prewar volunteers from the initial battalions that went
into Poland in 1939 were promoted and distributed to the newly
formed units, whose ranks were filled with older drafted reserv
ists. These battalions were designated “reserve police battal
ions.” Second, particular units (given numbers from 251 to 256
and 301 to 325) were formed from among the 26,000 young
volunteers allocated to the Order Police in the fall of 1939. They
The Orde r Police 1 7
would become, in effect, the new elite fonnations of the Order
Police.s
The presence of the Order Police in the General Government
was felt in two ways. First, in each of the four districts into which
the General Government had been divided-Krak6w, Lublin,
Radom, and Warsaw (a fifth, Galicia, was added in 1941}-a
pennanent regimental commander (Kommandeur der Ordnungs
polizei, or KdO) and staff were established. Each district regi
ment was composed of three battalions that were constantly
changing as they were rotated out from Gennany on tours of
duty. Second, there was a thin network of smaller units of Order
Police throughout the General Government. In each of the
major Polish cities, a Schutzpolizei station was established. Its
primary task was to supervise the Polish municipal police. In
addition, there were thirty to forty small Gendarmerie posts in
the medium-sized towns of each district. Both the Schutzpolizei
and the Gendarmerie units, like the three battalion commanders,
reported to the district commander of the Order Police, the
KdO. By the end of 1942, the total strength of the Order Police
in the General Government had reached 15,186 men. The Polish
police under Order Police supervision numbered 14,297.6
One chain of command led upward from the Order Police
battalions, as well as from the network of smaller units, through
the district KdO to the overall commander of the Order Police in
the General Government (Befehlshaber der Ordnungspolizei, or
BdO) in the capital city of Krak6w, and finally to Daluege’s main
office in Berlin. This was the nonnal chain of command for
matters solely concerning the local Order Police units. However,
there was a second chain of command for all policies and
operations that involved the joint action of the Order Police with
the Security Police and other SS units. In the General Govern
ment, Heinrich Himmler had appointed a Higher SS and Police
Leader (HSSPF), Friedrich-Wilhelm Kruger, as his personal
representative, with special responsibility to coordinate any
actions involving more than one agency of Himmler’s sprawling
8 / ORD I N ARY M E N
SS and police empire. In each district in the General Govern
ment, there was an SS and Police Leader (SSPF) who had the
same responsibilities and powers on the district level that Kruger
exercised for the General Government. For the district of
Lublin, where Reserve Police Battalion 101 was stationed in
1942-43, the SSPF was the brutal and unsavory Odilo Globoc
nik, a crony of Himmler’s, who had been removed from his
position as party chief in Austria for corruption. Thus Order
Police units in the Lublin dis
