Randall B. Smith, PhD, Theology Department, University of St. Thomas
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, having separated out the able-bodied men for transportation to a work camp, 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 bayonet 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 was dead.
At the same time as the “ordinary men” of Reserve Police Battalion 101 were exterminating Jewish women and children in Poland, a group of poor, French mountain villagers in the little town of Le Chambon-sur-Lignon were risking their lives to shelter literally hundreds of Jewish refugees until they could be smuggled across the border into Switzerland. Sometimes this meant “hiding,” nearly in plain sight, literally dozens of Jewish men, women, and children in a house built for three or four. This effort to shield Jews from persecution had begun several years earlier with the creation of a school in town where the children of Jewish refugees could be mixed in with and hidden among non-Jewish children. But as the Nazi transport of Jews out of France progressed, their rescue efforts expanded to include adults. The entire town conspired in the effort, although they never spoke out loud about it, and no one but the Protestant pastor of the town knew the places where the Jews were being hidden. Some estimates put the number of Jews saved by the villagers during the war at over 5000.
Question: Why do some ordinary men and women commit horrible atrocities, while others resist at the risk of their own lives? This is the question we will be examining in this series of discussions.
2/19 -Philip Hallie – Tales of Good and Evil, Help and Harm – “Magda and the Virtues”
2/26 – Christopher Browning – Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland
3/5 – David Blumenthal – The Banality of Good and Evil: Moral Lessons from the Shoah and Jewish Tradition
3/19 -Philip Hallie – Tales of Good and Evil, Help and Harm – “The Hands of Joshua James”
