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Major Wilhelm Trapp
Lieutenant Hartwick Gnade is the commander of Reserve Police Battalion 101’s Second Company. Gnade joined the Nazi party in 1937 and is 48 years old in 1942 when Major Trapp starts giving orders for the men to execute Jews. Gnade is one of the only people in the battalion widely described as a virulent anti-Semite who ardently believes in Adolf Hitler and Heinrich Himmler’s Final Solution, which involved exterminating the entire European Jewry. Unlike Trapp, Gnade doesn’t have a problem with giving orders to execute hundreds of people at once—or with taking part in this violence himself. Gnade leads the Second Company in the exceptionally bloody mass execution at Łomazy, where he demonstrates his capacity for sadism by forcing elderly Jews with full beards to crawl naked in the mud by their graves while Gnade and others beat them with clubs. Gnade also becomes a violent drunk over time, which seems to make him even more brutal. In 1943, Gnade is pulled out to create a special guard company, although he does return to the battalion to help with deportation and ghetto clearing. He is killed in action in 1945.
Lieutenant Hartwick Gnade Quotes in Ordinary Men
The Ordinary Men quotes below are all either spoken by Lieutenant Hartwick Gnade or refer to Lieutenant Hartwick Gnade. For each quote, you can also see the other characters and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
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Chapter 9
Quotes
If Gnade’s drinking was commonplace, the streak of sadism he began to display at Łomazy was not. The previous fall Gnade had put his men on the night train from Minsk to avoid becoming involved in the execution of the Jews he had brought there from Hamburg. At Józefów he had not distinguished himself from his fellow officers with any especially sadistic behavior. All this changed in the forest outside Łomazy as Gnade sought to entertain himself while waiting for the Jews to finish digging the grave.
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One other factor sharply distinguished Łomazy from Józefów and may well have been yet another kind of psychological “relief” for the men—namely, this time they did not bear the “burden of choice” that Trapp had offered them so starkly on the occasion of the first massacre. No chance to step out was given to those who did not feel up to shooting; no one systematically excused those who were visibly too shaken to continue. Everyone assigned to the firing squads took his turn as ordered. Therefore, those who shot did not have to live with the clear awareness that what they had done had been avoidable.
This is not to say that the men had no choice, only that it was not offered to them so openly and explicitly as at Józefów. They had to exert themselves to evade killing.
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Lieutenant Hartwick Gnade Quotes in Ordinary Men
The Ordinary Men quotes below are all either spoken by Lieutenant Hartwick Gnade or refer to Lieutenant Hartwick Gnade. For each quote, you can also see the other characters and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
).
Chapter 9
Quotes
If Gnade’s drinking was commonplace, the streak of sadism he began to display at Łomazy was not. The previous fall Gnade had put his men on the night train from Minsk to avoid becoming involved in the execution of the Jews he had brought there from Hamburg. At Józefów he had not distinguished himself from his fellow officers with any especially sadistic behavior. All this changed in the forest outside Łomazy as Gnade sought to entertain himself while waiting for the Jews to finish digging the grave.
Related Characters:
Related Themes:
Page Number and Citation:
Explanation and Analysis:
One other factor sharply distinguished Łomazy from Józefów and may well have been yet another kind of psychological “relief” for the men—namely, this time they did not bear the “burden of choice” that Trapp had offered them so starkly on the occasion of the first massacre. No chance to step out was given to those who did not feel up to shooting; no one systematically excused those who were visibly too shaken to continue. Everyone assigned to the firing squads took his turn as ordered. Therefore, those who shot did not have to live with the clear awareness that what they had done had been avoidable.
This is not to say that the men had no choice, only that it was not offered to them so openly and explicitly as at Józefów. They had to exert themselves to evade killing.
Related Characters:
Related Themes:
Page Number and Citation:
Explanation and Analysis:
