Moral Education in the Shadow of the Holocaust

In the early morning hours of July 13, 1942, the men of Germany’s Reserve Police Battalion 101 were roused from their bunks, put on trucks, and driven to the small Polish town of Józefów. These were middle-aged family men of working-class backgrounds. After they had climbed down from the trucks and gathered in a semi-circle around their commander, Major Wilhelm Trapp (a fifty-three-year-old career policeman affectionately known as “Papa Trapp”), they received their orders. They were to go into the town below, in which there were 1,800 Jewish men, women, and children, and separate the able-bodied men for transportation to a work camp. Then they were to take the rest, mostly women, children, and elderly men, in small groups into the forest, lay each one face-down on the ground, place their bayonets between their shoulder blades, and shoot them in the head. After relaying the order, Trapp made an extraordinary offer: anyone who did not feel up to the task could step out. In a battalion of 500 men, only twelve did. Within hours, the entire Jewish population of Józefów—but for those men transported to the work camp—was dead.

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