Reserve Police Battalion 101

Reserve Police Battalion 101
Inspection of the Reserve Police Battalion 101 at Łódź in occupied Poland, tasked upon arrival with service at the Litzmannstadt Ghetto
Active	Founded 6 May 1940 (1940-05-06)
Country	occupied Poland
Allegiance	Nazi Germany, the SS
Type	Paramilitary police reserve

Reserve Police Battalion 101 was a Nazi German paramilitary formation of Ordnungspolizei (Order Police), serving under the control of the SS by law. Formed in Hamburg, it was deployed in September 1939 along with the Wehrmacht army in the invasion of Poland. Initially, the Police Battalion 101 (German: Polizeibataillon 101) guarded Polish prisoners of war behind German lines, and carried out expulsion of Poles, called "resettlement actions", in the new Warthegau territory around Poznań and Łódź. Following the personnel change and retraining from May 1941 until June 1942, it became a major perpetrator of the Holocaust in occupied Poland.

The Nazi German Order Police had grown to 244,500 men by mid-1940, tasked with controlling civilian populations of the conquered or colonized countries. After the German attack on the Soviet positions in Operation Barbarossa of 1941, the Order Police joined the SS Einsatzgruppen in the massacres of Jews behind the Wehrmacht lines. The first mass killing of 3,000 Jews by the German police occurred in Białystok on July 12, 1941 in the formerly Russian zone of occupied Poland, followed by the Bloody Sunday massacre of 10,000-12,000 Jews by the Reserve Police Battalion 133, perpetrated in Stanisławów on October 12, 1941 with the aid of SiPo and the Ukrainian Auxiliary Police. The shootings in Russia proper culminated in the Battalion 45 massacre of 33,000 Jews at Babi Yar. The Order Police battalions became indispensable in the implementation of the Final Solution after the Wannsee Conference of 1942. They rounded up tens of thousands of Nazi ghetto inmates for deportations to extermination camps during the liquidation of the Jewish ghettos in German-occupied Poland, but also participated themselves in the killing of Polish Jews along with the Holocaust executioners known as Trawnikis. During Operation Reinhard mass murders were committed by Battalion 101 against women, children and the elderly in various locations including forced-labour camps and subcamps, most notably during the Aktion Erntefest of 1943, the single largest German massacre of Jews in the entire war, with 43,000 victims shot in the execution pits over the bodies of others.