The Shoah (1939–1945)
Józefów shooting
12-13 juill. 1942·Józefów
The toll is reproduced exactly as the source states it — never rounded, never added to another. Tolls overlap from one event to the next.
Reserve Police Battalion 101, composed of Hamburg reservists, shoots the community; the commander had offered his men the option to withdraw, a handful did so.
Reserve Police Battalion 101, composed of middle-aged Hamburg reservists without any particular ideological training, is ordered to shoot the Jewish community of Józefów, in Poland. Before the operation, its commander, Major Wilhelm Trapp, offers those of his men who do not feel up to the task the option of stepping aside without consequence. A handful accepts; the others carry out the order, women and children included, at close range in the woods.
The judicial record of this battalion, reconstructed by West German justice, provided one of the best-documented corpuses on the ordinary perpetrators of the Holocaust by bullets, and fueled after the war a major historiographical debate on the reasons for their obedience. That day in July 1942 was their first massacre; it was not their last.
- Period :
- The Shoah (1939–1945)
- Type :
- Shoah
- Region :
- Central and Eastern Europe
- Country :
- Pologne
Dossiers d'instruction de la justice ouest-allemande contre le bataillon de police de réserve ; travaux historiographiques sur les auteurs.