Wilhelm Trapp (police officer)
Wilhelm Trapp (born September 4, 1889 in Nitzow ; † (executed) December 18, 1948 in Siedlce ) was a German major in the Ordnungspolizei , commander of the Reserve Police Battalion 101 and perpetrator of the Holocaust .
Trapp took part in the First World War and received the Iron Cross, First Class . Then he entered the security police and attained the rank of captain. As the commander of Reserve Police Battalion 101, he was promoted to major. He had already joined the NSDAP in 1932 , but was not accepted into the SS .
Under the responsibility of Trapps, the approximately 500-strong battalion committed a whole series of crimes: in July 1942 the massacre of Józefów , on August 17 the shooting of Jews in Łomazy and deportations to Treblinka , purges in the intermediate ghettos , in September 1942 that Massacres in Serokomla and hostage shootings in Talcyn and the Kock ghetto , including 78 Polish non-Jews, in October / November 1942 the evictions of Radzyń , Łuków and Międzyrzec with at least 6,500 dead. In the autumn, the "Jewish hunt" followed on dispersed survivors. In May 1943 the Międzyrzec ghetto was finally deported. The historian Christopher R. Browning counts at least 83,000 dead. The battalion then fought against partisans and enemy soldiers on the Eastern Front until 1944/45 . Trapp had initially shown himself sorry for the murders, exempted some of them from shooting duties, but had no concerns about exceeding the rate of 200 hostage shootings by 86 dead.
At the beginning of 1944 Trapp was back in Germany. In 1946 he was arrested by the British and extradited to Poland in October 1947 . The trial of four German perpetrators took place on July 6, 1948 in just one day in Siedlce: it was only about the murder of 78 Poles, not the murder of Jews. In December, Trapp and an accomplice were executed.
literature
- Christopher R. Browning : Just normal men. The Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the “Final Solution” in Poland . Rowohlt Taschenbuch Verlag, Reinbek bei Hamburg, 5th edition 2009
- Alexander Gruber; Stefan Kühl (ed.): Sociological analyzes of the Holocaust. Beyond the debate about “completely normal men” and “completely normal Germans”. Springer 2015, ISBN 978-3-65806895-0 .
Web links
- Christopher R. Browning: In terrible details (partial print). In: DER SPIEGEL 31/1993. August 2, 1993. Retrieved July 24, 2016 .
Single receipts
- ↑ Completely normal men ..., p. 189
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Trapp, Wilhelm |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | German police officer of the Ordnungspolizei and perpetrator of the Holocaust |
| DATE OF BIRTH | September 4, 1889 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | Nitzow |
| DATE OF DEATH | December 18, 1948 |
| Place of death | Siedlce |