eblinka death camp. Second, the real dirty work was to be carried out by SS-trained soldiers. This helped remove them mentally from the deaths, and made their work much more efficient. They went on through a number of towns, clearing out ghettos and loading people on trains. By mid-November 1942, following the massacres at Jzefw, Lomzay, Serokomla, Konskowola, and elsewhere, and the liquidation of the ghettos in Miedzyrzec, Lukw, Parczew, Radzyn, and Kock, the men of Reserve Battalion 101 had participated in the outright execution of at least 6,500 Polish Jews and the deportation of at least 42,000 more to the gas chambers of Treblinka. (Browning, 121) Now that that was done, they had to go back through and make sure the towns and ghettos were truly judenfrei (free of Jews). Hence, the Jew Hunt began, and the soldiers would be faced with mass executions. This was quite significant because the men were face to face with their victims, only this time many were hardened killers and would handle the situation quite differently. Although there are no numbers as to how many Jews were killed by the 101st during this sweep, there are numbers for other similar groups. For a group near Lublin, the total was 1,695, or an average of nearly 283 per month, and in Warsaw, ...reflect a total of 1,094 Jews killed by his unit, for an average of nearly 14 Jews per policeman. (Browning, 131) Browning points out that many of these man had participated in ghetto clearing, but few had, up to this point, been involved in such personal killings. It was a tenacious, remorseless, ongoing campaign in which the hunters tracked down their prey in direct and personal confrontation. It was not a passing phase but an existential condition of constant readines and intention to kill every last Jew who could be found. (Browning, 132) There last final, and most brutal sweep was the Harvest Festival. Here they were to wipe out the remaining Jews in the work camps. The men...
