''. Poles led to cattle trains as part of the ethnic cleansing of western Poland, using Battalion 101 A total of 17 Orpo battalions participated in the invasion of Poland in 1939. Battalion 101 was one of three from the city of
Hamburg. In settlements already cleared of their native Polish inhabitants, the new
Volksdeutsche from
Bessarabia, Romania and the
Baltics were put, under the banner of
Lebensraum. Battalion 101 "evacuated" 36,972 Poles in one action, over half of the targeted number of 58,628 in the new German district of
Warthegau (the total was 630,000 by the war's end, with two-thirds of the victims being murdered), but also committed murders among civilians according to postwar testimonies of at least one of its former members. For the next half-year, beginning 28 November 1940, Police Battalion 101 guarded the new ghetto in
Łódź, eventually crammed with 160,000 Jews. The
Łódź Ghetto was the second-largest
Jewish ghetto of World War II after the
Warsaw Ghetto where the policemen from Battalion 61 held victory parties on the days when a large number of desperate prisoners were shot at the ghetto fence. Battalion 101, commanded by career policeman Major
Wilhelm Trapp, returned to Hamburg in May 1941 and again the more experienced servicemen were dispatched to organize more units. New battalions, numbered 102, 103, and 104, were formed by them and prepared for duty. Training of new reservists included escort duty of 3,740 Hamburg and Bremen Jews deported to the East to be murdered. Meanwhile, the murder of Jews from the Łódź Ghetto using
gas vans began at
Chełmno in December 1941.
Return to Poland, June 1942 – November 1943 The Reserve Battalion 101 composed of 500 men in their thirties, who were too old for the regular army, returned to occupied Poland with three heavy machine-gun detachments in June 1942. By that time, the first two
extermination camps of Operation Reinhard in
General GovernmentBełżec and
Sobiborwere already gassing
trainloads of Jews from
all over Europe. The most deadly of them, Treblinka, was about to start operations.
Globocnik gave Battalion 101 the task of deporting Jews from across
Lublin reservation. Between mid-March and mid-April 1942, about 90% of the 40,000 prisoners of the
Lublin Ghetto were loaded by Order Police and
Schupo onto trains destined for
Bełżec extermination camp. Another 11,000–12,000 Jews were deported from ghettos
in Izbica,
Piaski,
in Lubartów,
Zamość and
Kraśnik with the aid one of the Trawniki battalions of
Karl Streibel. , southeast of Biłgoraj, commemorating the Jewish victims of the 1942 massacre committed by the Reserve Police Battalion 101. The first mass murder known to have been committed entirely by Reserve Police Battalion 101 was the most "messy" for lack of training; uniforms dripping wet with brain matter and blood. The murder of 1,500 Jews from
Józefów ghetto, approximately south of Lublin in south-eastern Poland, on 13 July 1942 was performed mostly by the three platoons of the Second Company. Prior to departure from
Biłgoraj, they were given large amounts of extra ammunition. A generous supply of alcohol was procured. An opportunity was provided before the mission to back out but only twelve out of 500 policemen did so. The American historian, Christopher Browning, argues that this was due to pressures for conformity. Most of the men did not want to separate themselves from their comrades and be seen as weak or cowardly. Later in the massacre, many men felt unable to continue shooting at point-blank range of prisoners begging for mercy and asked to wait at the marketplace where the trucks were loaded. Luxembourgish police trainees in RPB 101 escorted young Jewish prisoners from
Józefów to the local railway station in
Zwierzyniec selected for slave work in
KL Lublin. The action was finished in seventeen hours. The bodies of their victims carpeting the forest floor at the Winiarczykowa Góra hill (about from the village, pictured) were left unburied. Watches, jewellery and money were taken. The battalion left for Biłgoraj at 9 pm. Only a dozen Jews are known to have survived the slaughter. Two members of the Mart family from the
German minority residing in Józefów were shot by
Polish underground later for collaboration with the Germans. The next ghetto liquidation action took place less than a month later in
Łomazy lacking a rail line. The infants, the old, and the infirm were shot by Battalion 101 during the early morning round-ups on 17 August 1942. Later that day, the
Hiwi shooters arrived at the main square, and some 1,700 ghetto prisoners were marched on foot to the Hały forest outside the town, where the stronger Jewish men prepared a trench with entrance on one side. The Jews were stripped naked and shot, the killings taking until The Ukrainian Trawnikis got so drunk that the policemen from the first, second and third platoons (Lieutenant Hartwig Gnade) had to continue shooting by themselves in half a metre of groundwater and blood.
More deportations In the following weeks, Police Battalion 101 was active in towns with direct lines to Treblinka and therefore mass shootings were not used. On 19 August 1942only two days after Łomazy3,000 Jews were deported from
Parczew (2,000 more several days later); from
Międzyrzec 11,000 Jews were sent to Treblinka on 25–26 August amid gunfire and screams. From
Radzyń 6,000 prisoners, then from
Łuków (7,000),
Końskowola (2,000 coupled with the massacre at the hospital),
Komarówka,
Tomaszów; all those unable to move or attempting to flee were shot on the spot. In
Izbica, the
makeshift ghetto reached a breaking point packed by Gnade with Jewish inhabitants of
Biała Podlaska,
Komarówka,
Wohyń, and
Czemierniki. The October and November deportations to Bełżec and Sobibór led to a week of mass killings at the cemetery, beginning on 2 November 1942. Several thousand Jews (estimated at 4,500) from the transit ghetto were massacred by the
Sonderdienst battalion of Ukrainian
Trawnikis under police control in an assembly-line manner and dumped in hastily excavated mass graves. All men drank heavily. In
Międzyrzec the "strip-search" of young Jewish women was introduced by Gnade before executions dubbed "mopping up" actions by the Germans. Gnade's first sergeant later said: "I must say that First Lieutenant Gnade gave me the impression that the entire business afforded him a great deal of pleasure." By the spring of 1943 most towns of the Lublin reservation were
Judenfrei therefore the battalion was tasked with "Jew hunts" in the deep local forests, or in the potato fields and around distant farmlands. Thousands of Jews were shot at point-blank range. The participation of Reserve Police Battalion 101 in the
Final Solution culminated in the
Aktion Erntefest massacres of Jews imprisoned at the
Trawniki,
Poniatowa and
Majdanek concentration camps with subcamps in Budzyn,
Kraśnik, Puławy,
Lipowa and other slave-labor projects of the
Ostindustrie (Osti). Approximately 43,000 Jews were killed. It was the largest single-day massacre of the Holocaust under direct German occupation, committed on 3 November 1943 on the orders of
Christian Wirth. Trawniki men provided the necessary manpower. ==Postwar history==