The men who make up Reserve Battalion 101 are “middle-aged family men of working- and lower-middle-class background from the city of Hamburg” (1). Too old to serve as regular soldiers, they have “been drafted instead into the Order Police” (1). They are mostly “raw recruits with no previous experience in German occupied territory” (1), and have only been stationed in occupied Poland for three weeks.

They are woken up in “the very early hours of July 13, 1942” (1) and driven to Józefów, a nearby village with a population that includes 1,800 Jews. This will be “the first major action, though the men [have] not yet been told what to expect” (2). They arrive as it is getting light and are addressed by “their commander, Major Wilhelm Trapp, a fifty-three-year-old career policeman affectionately known by his men as ‘Papa Trapp’” (2).

Trapp is “[p]ale and nervous” and has to “visibly [fight] to control himself” as he speaks to the men “with [a] choking voice and tears in his eyes” (2). He tells the men that they must “perform a frightfully unpleasant task,” explaining that the “assignment [is] not to his liking […] but the order came from the highest authorities” (2).