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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 Character Timeline in Ordinary Men
The timeline below shows where the character Lieutenant Hartwick Gnade appears in Ordinary Men. The colored dots and icons indicate which themes are associated with that appearance.
Chapter 5: Reserve Police Battalion 101
...doesn’t matter where their luggage is. Not wanting to be around for the shooting, Lieutenant Gnade (the commander for the group of guards on the transport) gets his men on a...
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...are trained as officers in recognition of their education and career success as civilians: Hartwig Gnade, Paul Brand, Heinz Buchmann, Oscar Peters, Walter Hoppner, Hans Scheer, and Kurt Drucker. Five of...
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Chapter 9: Łomazy: The Descent of Second Company
When the battalion redeploys to the northern part of the Lublin district, Gnade and the Second Company settle in the area of Biała Podlaska. The Final Solution began...
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...apparently already drunk and determined to get drunker. When the grave is finished, the Jews, Gnade’s men, and the Hiwis slowly make their way to the forest. The Jews are ordered...
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Most of the men’s testimonies indicate that Gnade is a virulent anti-Semite with an unpredictable temper that grows steadily worse when he drinks....
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...a knee-deep puddle of blood and mud. As the Hiwis start passing out from drunkenness, Gnade orders his own men to start shooting. The men are forced to take a different...
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Gnade’s men continue shooting until the Hiwis wake up enough to resume their task. Once the...
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...men steal their victims’ valuables and clothes. This massacre is easier for the men of Gnade’s company to deal with psychologically because the Hiwis do most of the shooting. Even the...
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...between the two massacres is that the men experience a sort of “psychological relief” because Gnade did not explicitly give them the option to opt out of shooting the way Trapp...
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...platoon leaders and they get to set the tone for those events. In this case, Gnade’s sadism seems to have rubbed off on his men, and it helps them take an...
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Chapter 12: The Deportations Resume
...security zone is created, allowing for the transfer of the First and Second Platoons of Gnade’s Second Company into new territory, including Międzyrzec and Komarówka. In the fall, the Międzyrzec ghetto...
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...Second Company shoots 100 Jews who miss the deportation train. During the clearing of Międzyrzec, Gnade’s Second Company and Drucker’s Second Platoon join up with some Hiwis to drive the Jews...
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...violence can make all the Jews fit into the limited number of train cars, so Gnade orders Drucker to shoot the 150 Jews that won’t fit. First Sergeant Ostmann brings the...
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...to 3,000 Jews. The ghetto is once again cleared in late October and early November. Gnade, now completely in charge of these actions, oversees both clearings and introduces a new step...
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Chapter 14: The “Jew Hunt”
...that, Steinmetz continues finding Jews in the area. He imprisons them at first, but then Gnade orders him to kill them and any other Jew he finds. Steinmetz is essentially tasked...
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Chapter 15: The Last Massacres: “Harvest Festival”
...Lieutenant Brand, some of the younger noncommissioned officers are reassigned to the Waffen-SS, and Lieutenant Gnade takes Steinmetz with him to Lublin to form a special guard company. Some reinforcements are...
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...not accustomed to the process of disposing of so many bodies. According to one of Gnade’s men, the stench of burning bodies in Majdanek permeates Lublin for days. The men of...
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Chapter 16: Aftermath
...by police fire during a judenjagd in 1943; in the final year of the war Gnade, Hoppner, and Peters die in action, and Drucker is injured and sent back to Germany....
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Chapter 18: Ordinary Men
...younger officers, Wohlauf and Hoffmann, have less than impressive records. The one surprising officer is Gnade, who is initially disgusted with violence and yet he becomes the most ruthless officer in...
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