What Is The Significance Of The Reserve Police Battalion 101, By Christopher Browning?

Christopher Browning, in his seminal work, questioned how the Germans had managed to carry out the destruction of the widespread Jewish population in Poland, he explains that ‘we have long known how the Jews in the major ghettos, especially Warsaw and Lodz, were murdered’ but that most Jews lived in smaller conurbations widely spread across Poland and this must have been quite a feat in organisation, management and recruitment. Browning was particularly interested in how and where the Germans had ‘found the manpower … for such an astounding logistical achievement in mass murder.’ As he explains, the number of staff in the death camps was actually quite small but the number required ‘to round up and either deport or shoot the bulk of Polish

The male Jews of the town were to be separated from their families and sent on to a labour camp; the women, children and elderly were to be shot immediately. The Jews to be shot were mostly marched into the wood, ordered to lay down in rows and shot at the back of the head, this action was repeated and continued until nightfall, by the end of the day 1500 Jews were murdered. By November 1943 the unit murdered the Jewish communities in a further 12 towns; at Majdanek 16,500 Jews were killed, at Poniatowa, 14,000. The Unit was also responsible for the deportation to Treblinka of a further 45,200 Jews; from Miedzyrzec alone in August 1942 10,000 Jews mounted trucks and trains bound for the death camp, a further 18,000 Jews were sent from this place in the next 11

One explanation proposed is that terrible things happen during war, the Americans at My Lai, the Japanese at Manila both slaughtered innocents. Browning describes a ‘battlefield frenzy’ where men are ‘numbed to the taking of human life, embittered over their own casualties’ but he notes that the type of brutality that these feelings might produce ‘did not represent official government policy.’ Another type of atrocity is the type that is calculated, it is ‘atrocity by policy’ and it is this that applies to Reserve Police Battalion 101. Most had not seen military service, ‘most had not fired a shot in anger or ever been fired on, much less lost comrades fighting at their side.’ Certainly ‘battlefield frenzy’ cannot be applied to that first morning at Józefów; Tom Lawson agrees that the war plays a part in explaining why these men committed these murders ‘but not [on] that first day.’ However, as the men’s jobs of killing Jews became ‘routine’ and hence ‘easier’ they did become more ‘brutalized’; ‘in this sense, brutalization was not the cause but the effect on these men’s behaviour.’ Another explanation is that the men were so ‘immersed in a deluge of racist and anti-Semitic propaganda’ that this affected their responses and behaviour. But while Browning accepts that the men in the unit were under no illusions that Jews were the enemy, anti-Semitism does not appear