Other policemen recalled other reasons for asking to be excused. One, a tailor, discovered that the mother and daughter he had been assigned were German Jews from Kassel, apparently deported to Poland some time before; others encountered Jews from their hometown of Hamburg. Several battalion members slipped away and were cursed as weaklings. In all, as many as 20 percent quit shooting at some point; at least 80 percent kept on shooting until all 1,500 assembled Jews were dead.

Twenty years later, during their interrogations, those battalion veterans who claimed to have stopped shooting at Jozefow cited physical revulsion, in the main, as the reason. Very few -- even two decades later, when it might have helped them legally -- claimed to have had ethical qualms. A few observed that they felt they were freer than others to withdraw from the killing process because they had no intention of remaining policemen after the war; their colleagues, though, had to think about their careers. For many, the pressure to conform to the group, and to not seem like cowards, played a role in their continuing to shoot. One metalworker from Bremerhaven contented himself with the rationale that he would shoot only children, since if his partner shot the mother then the child would be unable to survive alone and killing it would be an act of mercy. For nearly all, the Jews were not in the same human family as they. Their commander, Major Trapp, had told them, in his initial speech, that all Jews were enemies who deserved to be killed, even their women and their children, because Germany's enemies were killing German women and children with bombs.

Though Trapp and many of his men found their participation in the murder of Jozefow Jews difficult, that difficulty diminished as the battalion continued its work. First of all, they got help from the Trawnikis -- the Ukrainians, Latvians and Lithuanians -- who were called in to do much of the shooting. In addition, the gas chambers came back on line, and it was less stressful to stuff cattle cars, no matter how brutally this had to be done, than to do "neck shots." And even when they had to shoot, the shootings themselves somehow got easier. In fact, after Jozefow the shootings became, for many, routine -- even, for some, fun. And for a few, the initial horror was replaced by a gory sadism, in which Jews, totally naked, preferably old and with beards, were forced to crawl in front of their intended graves and to sustain beatings with clubs before being shot. One officer even brought his new and pregnant wife from Germany to show off his mastery over the fate of the Jews.

MEANWHILE, the Germans knew that some Jews were escaping the villages and ghettos for the forests. This was unacceptable, and a "Jew hunt" was instituted to solve this problem. The battalion, often on tips from local Poles, would comb the woods for signs of underground hideouts. Sometimes a chimney pipe sticking out of the earth would give away an entire family in hiding. On each occasion the hideout would be cleared and the Jews shot. The callousness became ever more extreme. Jew hunts became a sport, and one policeman recalled a colleague's joke about eating the brains of slaughtered Jews.

The battalion's final and greatest spasm of killing took place in November 1943. By then, practically the only Jews left alive in the Lublin district were those in a few labor camps. Despite German reversals in the war, and despite the need for the Jews' labor, Himmler was determined to finish them off. Besides, Jewish revolts in the ghettos of Warsaw and Bialystok, as well as in the death camps of Treblinka and Sobibor, carried out when the surviving Jews realized that even work would not save them, made Himmler conclude that he could expect further such resistance from the "work Jews" in the remaining camps. He therefore ordered the Erntefest, or "harvest festival," in which SS, police and other German units from all over the General Government, including Battalion 101, were organized to kill, in the space of a few days, the remaining Jews in the region.

At least 16,500 Jews, probably closer to 18,000, were brought to the perimeter of the Majdanek camp, both from the camp itself and from the surrounding area. Against a background of music blaring from loudspeakers, and as Poles watched from nearby rooftops, the Jews were driven, stark naked, into ditches where, according to the testimony of one battalion member, they were "forced to lie down quite precisely on top of those who had been shot before them. The shooter then fired off a burst at these prone victims." Those ditches, now lined with grass, are still visible, and a visitor can, by pushing aside the grass, find in them, as this reviewer has, the scattered bones of some of those Jews. The next day, Battalion 101 participated in a similar massacre of at least 14,000 Jews at the Poniatowa camp. By the end of the "harvest festival," the 500 men of Battalion 101 had taken part, during their stay in Poland, in the shooting of at least 38,000 Jews and the shipment to Treblinka's gas chambers of 45,000 more.

After the war, many members of the battalion returned to their earlier occupations. A large number continued their police careers. Four, including Major Trapp, were extradited to Poland in 1947 because of one incident in which 78 non-Jewish Poles were shot in retaliation for the killing of a German; the Polish trial ignored the 180 Jews who were shot in the same incident, as well as the 83,000 other Jews, the vast majority of them Polish citizens, who had been shot or sent to the gas chambers by Trapp and his men. Trapp and another policeman were executed by the Polish authorities. Between 1962 and 1967, 14 men of Battalion 101 were indicted by West German prosecutors. After appeals, one received a sentence of eight years, one of four and one of three and a half. Of the many thousands of other German policemen involved in the Final Solution, West German prosecutors brought to trial only a few, and still fewer convictions were obtained. On a per capita basis, Battalion 101's three brief sentences represented unusually heavy punishment by West German courts for the Order Police's massive contribution to the Final Solution.