Leo Sammer’s account of the massacre of Greek Jews presents organized murder as a sequence of administrative choices: a train arrives, local officials debate what to do, and repeated groups are sent from an abandoned tannery to a hollow outside the village. The episode is not told as an impersonal chronicle. Sammer recounts it to Hans Reiter, insisting that he was a fair administrator and that killing the Jews himself was contrary to his nature, even as his story records his decisions to supervise their deaths and finally abandon the survivors. The gap between the bureaucratic language of his account and the violence it describes is central to the event’s meaning.

The order and the first decisions

Sammer says that a sudden order placed five hundred Jews from Greece under his authority. He is uncertain whether they were Greek, Hungarian, Croatian, or Serbian, but settles on calling them Greek. He stresses that he ran a civilian operation, not a military or SS one, and that he had no specialists for the task. These qualifications establish the terms of his defense, but they do not alter what he does: he signs the papers confirming the train’s delivery and takes charge of the people on it.

At the station, Sammer refuses to have the railcars opened at first, claiming concern about disease. He contacts an acquaintance connected to a camp near Chelmno, but receives no immediate solution. When railway personnel insist that the train must leave that night, he agrees to unload it. Once the cars are opened, eight people are already dead. Sammer orders the survivors taken to an abandoned tannery and bread bought for them, while he returns to what he calls urgent business. The small act of providing bread sits beside his decision to confine the group and seek a way to dispose of them.

A secretary suggests putting some of the Jews to work locally. Sammer assigns around fifty of them to sweep the village in brigades of ten, then resumes arranging labor for factories elsewhere. When he calls Chelmno again, he is still trying to find an institution to take the group. The account does not present these arrangements as protection: the tannery, the work brigades, and the calls to other camps are steps in managing people Sammer knows are in danger.

A killing operation assembled locally

Sammer says he understands, after a telephone conversation, that he is expected to eliminate the Greek Jews himself and bear the risk. He asks the mayor, fire chief, police chief, and head of the War Veterans Association to meet at a club. Over coffee and bread, the local officials consider other camps and possible contacts. Sammer lets them discuss alternatives before telling them that the order is unequivocal and asking how to carry it out. The scene places the planned killing among ordinary municipal business and conversation, rather than in a distant command center.

After surveying possible sites, Sammer chooses a remote hollow roughly ten miles from town. He assembles policemen, office staff, his driver, and volunteer farmers, and sends them out before sunrise. The first groups take Jews from the tannery to the hollow; those returning report that the operation went according to plan. Sammer’s questions about whether chaos prevailed reveal that he is monitoring the process, though he chooses not to press for details. The next day the operation is repeated with changes to the personnel, and the killing continues in rotating groups.

By the end of the week, eight brigades of sweepers—eighty people—have disappeared. Sammer describes the strain on those carrying out the work: farmers withdraw, police complain that their nerves are frayed, and office staff refuse or fall ill. He himself says his health is failing. Instead of stopping the killings, he recruits fifteen young soccer players from the village. He offers them wine, bread, sausages, and provisions for their families, then sends them to the hollow with armed police. He also orders that no Jew be allowed to leave the tannery. The operation thus draws in boys through food and drink while Sammer maintains control over the imprisoned group.

Concealment, exhaustion, and interruption

As the mass grave fills, Sammer tells his men to cover anything they find and dig elsewhere: the aim, he says, is not to find things but not to find them. Eventually he directs them to dig a deeper, wider pit. The work continues in snow and bad weather. Some of the boys become too drunk to stand; five fall ill with pneumonia, and two later die. Sammer sends food to their mothers as condolence, while the Jewish prisoners remain subject to the operation. His account sets these gestures of local care beside his continued use of the boys and the police to carry out the killings.

A tally gives Sammer a total of more than one hundred Jews still alive, after accounting for those who died on the journey, in the tannery, or in the hollow. He halts the work temporarily because the police, volunteers, and boys are exhausted. The boys return to playing soccer; the police return to their duties; the farmers go back to their farms. With no outside authority showing interest in the prisoners, Sammer restarts the sweeping brigades and sends a group of no more than twenty to farmwork under the farmers’ responsibility. The pause is therefore a response to the limits of the perpetrators’ endurance, not a decision to release or protect the Jews.

A new order to evacuate Germans from the region changes Sammer’s priorities. He asks what should be done with the Jews, but receives no answer. He organizes the westward departure of local people and remains in the village after the others have left. With artillery audible in the distance, he visits the Jews and tells them to leave; then he collects the two policemen guarding them and abandons them in the tannery. He calls this freedom, a word that exposes the distance between his chosen description and the perilous situation he leaves them in. The account gives no further outcome for the abandoned survivors.

The account’s self-defense and its significance

Sammer tells Reiter that he was a fair administrator, that instinct sometimes led him to do good things, and that the vicissitudes of war drove him to do bad ones. He anticipates that the Polish boys will accuse him of ruining their childhoods, then blames liquor, soccer, and their mothers instead. Finally, he claims that anyone else in his position would have killed all the Jews with his own hands, whereas he did not because it was not in his nature. The claim is contradicted by the story he has just told: he did not personally perform every killing, but he selected the site, assembled the participants, issued orders, kept the Jews confined, and continued the operation until wartime evacuation forced a change of course.

The novel’s framing makes Sammer’s testimony more than a report of events. His recollection supplies concrete detail while repeatedly cushioning responsibility with uncertainty, administrative language, and assertions of personal temperament. The operation depends not only on an order from elsewhere but on local choices, including the use of police, employees, farmers, and village boys. His closing defense tries to distinguish his own actions from direct killing; the account instead shows how mass murder can be organized through delegation, routine, and a narrator’s persistent effort to make complicity sound like reluctant management.