The Holocaust Could Not Have Happened Without the Police

The Holocaust was not carried out by Hitler alone or even by the SS in isolation. It required the cooperation of police forces—German and local, civilian and military—across Europe. Genocide on that scale needed not just ideology or command, but manpower with bureaucratic expertise, knowledge of local communities, and the authority to enforce state violence. The core machinery of mass murder was built on the backs of ordinary police.

Start with the Einsatzgruppen. These mobile SS killing squads followed the Wehrmacht into Eastern Europe and were responsible for over one million murders, often through mass shootings in forests and ravines. Many of their members came from the Ordnungspolizei—the Order Police. These were not elite soldiers. They were regular German policemen. They had spent their prewar years issuing citations, breaking up street fights, patrolling neighborhoods. In 1941, they were reorganized into battalion-sized units and sent to the front lines of mass murder.

Police Battalion 101, made up largely of working-class men from Hamburg, was one of dozens of such units. In Józefów, Poland, in July 1942, they were ordered to round up the Jewish population and execute them. Their commander, Major Trapp, gave his men the option to step back. A few did. Most did not. They dragged families from their homes, marched them into the woods, and shot them in the back of the head. They returned to base shaken, drank heavily, and then did it again the next day. And the next.

Over time, they adapted. They learned to kill more efficiently. They shot children directly in their beds to save time. They dragged toddlers into the woods with one hand and held pistols in the other. They used deportations to death camps like Treblinka as another method of execution, shooting the sick and elderly on the spot. Their own reports emphasized “discipline” and “order.” They were police doing a job, enforcing policy, executing the law.

This was not isolated. Across occupied Europe, Nazi forces relied on local police to carry out the Final Solution. French police rounded up Jews in Paris and sent them to Drancy. Dutch police arrested over 100,000 Jews. Romanian gendarmerie carried out massacres. Croatian Ustaše police exterminated Serbs, Jews, and Roma. Hungarian Arrow Cross police shot thousands into the Danube. These were national police forces with decades of institutional experience, now turned toward genocide. They managed logistics. They kept records. They knew the neighborhoods.

This role of police in ethnic cleansing is not unique to the Holocaust. In Rwanda, local police helped organize and carry out the genocide of the Tutsi population. In Bosnia, Serbian police units conducted mass killings and expulsions. In the United States, police enforced Indian Removal and helped suppress Black resistance during slavery, Reconstruction, and Jim Crow. In more recent decades, police have played central roles in the surveillance and repression of Muslim communities, immigrants, and activists under counterterrorism policies.

Police are the connective tissue of state violence. They know the local terrain, understand how to find people, and are trained to enforce submission. When states decide that a population is disposable, police are the ones who carry it out. They are the ones who knock on the door. They are the ones who fill out the paperwork. They are the ones who pull the trigger.

Genocide is not spontaneous. It is not chaos. It is administration. The Holocaust did not happen in spite of the police. It happened because the police did their job.