The Second World War

by Antony Beevor

  Himmler’s idea of shipping European Jews abroad focused on the French island of Madagascar. (Adolf Eichmann, still a junior functionary, was thinking of Palestine, a British mandate.) Reinhard Heydrich, Himmler’s deputy, also argued that the problem of 3.75 million Jews then on German-occupied territory could not be resolved through emigration, so a ‘territorial solution’ was needed. The problem was that, even if Vichy France agreed, the ‘Madagaskar Projekt’ could not work in the face of British naval superiority. Yet the idea of deporting Jews to a reservation somewhere still remained the preferred option.

  In March 1941, with the ghettos in Poland overflowing, mass sterilization was considered. Then, with Hitler’s plans for Operation Barbarossa, senior Nazis embraced the idea of removing Europe’s Jews, as well as thirty-one million Slavs, to some area deep in the Soviet Union once victory was achieved. This would be when German armies reached the Arkhangelsk–Astrakhan line, and the Luftwaffe could switch to the long-range bombing of any remaining Soviet arms factories and communication centres in the Urals and beyond. For Hans Frank, the regent of the Generalgouvernement, the invasion promised the opportunity to deport all Jews who had been dumped in his territory.

  Others, including Heydrich, concentrated on more immediate concerns, particularly the ‘pacification’ of the conquered territories. Hitler’s notion of ‘pacification’ was quite clear. ‘This will happen best’, he told Alfred Rosenberg, the minister for the eastern territories, ‘by shooting dead anyone who even looks sideways at us.’ Soldiers should not be prosecuted for crimes against civilians, unless the needs of discipline absolutely required it.

  Army commanders, now in Hitler’s thrall after the triumph over France which they had openly doubted, failed to raise any objections. Some of them embraced with enthusiasm the idea of a war of annihilation–Vernichtungskrieg. Any lingering outrage about the murderous actions of the SS in Poland had dissipated. Generalfeldmarschall von Brauchitsch, the commander-in-chief, worked closely with Heydrich on liaison between the army and the SS during Barbarossa. The German army would provision the Einsatzgruppen, and would liaise with them through the senior intelligence officer at each army headquarters. Thus at army command and senior staff level nobody could plead ignorance about their activities.

  The ‘Shoah by bullets’ is usually remembered by the activities of the 3,000 men in the SS Einsatzgruppen. As a result, the massacres carried out by the 11,000 men in twenty-one battalions of Ordnungspolizei, acting as a second wave well to the rear of the advancing armies, have often been overlooked. Himmler also assembled an SS cavalry brigade and two other Waffen-SS brigades to be ready to assist. The commander of the 1st SS Cavalry Regiment was Hermann Fegelein, who in 1944 married Eva Braun’s sister and thus became part of the Führer’s entourage. Himmler ordered his SS cavalry to execute all male Jews and drive their women into the swamps of the Pripet Marshes. By mid-August 1941, the cavalry brigade claimed to have killed 200 Russians in combat and to have shot 13,788 civilians, most of whom were Jews described as ‘plunderers’.

  Each of the three army groups in the invasion was to be closely followed by an Einsatzgruppe. A fourth would be added later down in the south on the Black Sea coast, following the Romanians and the Eleventh Army. The Einsatzgruppen personnel were recruited from all sections of Himmler’s empire, including the Waffen-SS, the Sicherheitsdienst (SD), the Sicherheitspolizei (Sipo), the Kriminalpolizei (Kripo) and the Ordnungspolizei. Each Einsatzgruppe of around 800 men would consist of two Sonderkommandos operating closely behind the troops and two Einsatzkommandos a little further back.

  Heydrich instructed the Einsatzgruppen commanders who came from the intellectual elite of the SS–the majority had doctorates–to encourage local anti-semitic groups to kill Jews and Communists. These activities were described as ‘self-cleansing efforts’. But they were not to indicate official German approval, or allow these groups to believe that their actions might gain them any form of political independence. The Einsatzgruppen themselves were to execute Communist Party officials, commissars, partisans and saboteurs and ‘Jews in party and state positions’. Presumably, Heydrich had also suggested that they could and should go beyond these categories as they saw fit when fulfilling their duties with ‘unprecedented harshness’, such as shooting male Jews of military age. But there seems to have been no official indication at this stage of encouraging the murder of Jewish women and children.

  The killing of Jewish males began as soon as the German armies crossed the Soviet frontier on 22 June. Many of the early massacres were carried out by Lithuanian and Ukrainian anti-semites, as Heydrich had predicted. In western Ukraine, they killed 24,000 Jews. In Kaunas, 3,800 were slaughtered. Sometimes watched by German soldiers, Jews were rounded up and tormented, with rabbis having their beards pulled or set on fire. Then they were beaten to death to the cheers of the crowd. The Germans fostered the idea that these killings were revenge for the massacres carried out by the NKVD before it retreated. Einsatzgruppen and police battalions also began to round up and shoot Jews in hundreds and even thousands. Their victims had to prepare their own mass graves. Any who did not dig fast enough were shot. They were then forced to undress, partly so that their clothes could be redistributed later, but also in case they had concealed valuable items or money in them. Forced to kneel on the edge of the pit, they were shot in the back of the head so that the body would roll forwards and drop. Other SS and police units considered it tidier to make their first victims lie in a row along the bottom of the great trench, and shoot them in situ with sub-machine guns. Then the next batch would be made to lie down on the bodies, head to toe, and they too would be shot. This was known as the ‘sardine’ method. In a few cases, Jews were driven into a synagogue, which would be set on fire. Any who tried to escape were shot down.

  With Himmler’s constant visits to provide unspecified encouragement to his men, the process became self-escalating. The original target group of ‘Jews in party and state positions’ immediately expanded to include all male Jews of military age, then to all male Jews regardless of age. In late June and early July, it was mainly local anti-semitic groups who killed Jewish women and children. But by the end of July SS Einsatzgruppen, Himmler’s Waffen-SS brigades and the police battalions were regularly killing women and children too. They were assisted, despite Hitler’s instruction against arming Slavs, by some twenty-six battalions of locally recruited police, most of whom were attracted by the chance of robbing their victims.

  Ordinary German soldiers and even Luftwaffe personnel also took part in killings, as interrogators from the NKVD 7th Department later found out from German prisoners. ‘A pilot from the third air squadron said that he participated in the execution of a group of Jews in one of the villages near Berdichev at the beginning of the war. They were executed as a punishment for handing over a German pilot to the Red Army. A Gefreiter from the 765th Pioneer Battalion named Traxler witnessed executions by SS soldiers of Jews near Rovno and Dubno. When one of the soldiers remarked that it was a terrible sight, an Unteroffizier from the same unit, Graff, said “the Jews are swine and eliminating them is to show that you are a civilized person”.’

  One day, a German transport Gefreiter accompanied by his company clerk happened to see ‘men, women and children with their hands bound together with wire being driven along the road by SS people’. They went to see what was happening. Outside the village, they saw a 150-metre trench about three metres deep. Hundreds of Jews had been rounded up. The victims were forced to lie in the trench in rows so that an SS man on each side could walk along shooting them with captured Soviet sub-machine guns. ‘Then people were again driven forward and they had to get in and lie on top of the dead. At that moment a young girl–she must have been about 12 years old–cried out in a clear, piteous shrill voice. “Let me live, I’m still only a child!” The child was grabbed, thrown into the ditch, and shot.”’

  A few managed to slip away from these massacres. Not surprisingly, they we
re completely traumatized by what they had experienced. On the north-eastern edge of Ukraine, Vasily Grossman encountered one of them. ‘A girl–a Jewish beauty who has managed to escape from the Germans–has bright, absolutely insane eyes,’ he wrote in his notebook.

  Younger officers in the Wehrmacht seem to have assented to the killing of Jewish children more than the older generation, mainly because they believed that otherwise those spared would return to take revenge in the future. In September 1944, a conversation between General der Panzertruppe Heinrich Eberbach and his son in the Kriegsmarine was secretly taped while they were in British captivity. ‘In my opinion,’ said General Eberbach, ‘one can even go as far as to say that the killing of those million Jews, or however many it was, was necessary in the interests of our people. But to kill the women and children wasn’t necessary. That is going too far.’ His son replied: ‘Well, if you are going to kill off the Jews, then kill the women and children too, or the children at least. There is no need to do it publicly, but what good does it do me to kill off the old people?’

  In general, front-line formations did not participate in the massacres but there were notable exceptions, especially the SS Wiking Division in Ukraine, and some infantry divisions, which took part in killings such as those in Brest-Litovsk. While there can be no doubt of the close cooperation between SS and army group headquarters, at the same time senior army officers tried to distance themselves from what was happening. Orders were issued against members of the Wehrmacht taking part in or witnessing mass killings, yet increasing numbers of off-duty soldiers turned up to watch and photograph the atrocities. Some even volunteered to take over when the executioners wanted a rest.

  As well as in Lithuania, Latvia and Belorussia, the mass killings spread across Ukraine, often assisted by local men recruited as auxiliaries. Antisemitism had greatly increased during the great Ukrainian famine because Soviet agents had started rumours suggesting that Jews were primarily responsible for the starvation, so as to deflect responsibility away from Stalin’s own policies of collectivization and dekulakization. Ukrainian volunteers were also used for guarding Red Army prisoners. ‘They’re willing and comradely,’ a Gefreiter wrote. ‘They represent a considerable relief for us.’

  After the massacres in Lwów and other cities, Ukrainians helped by denouncing and rounding up Einsatzgruppe C’s victims in Berdichev, which had one of the highest concentrations of Jews. When German forces entered the city, ‘the soldiers were shouting “Jude kaputt!” from their trucks and waved their arms’, Vasily Grossman discovered much later in the war. More than 20,000 Jews were killed in batches out by the airstrip. They included Grossman’s mother, and for the rest of his life he was tormented by guilt that he had not brought her back to Moscow the moment the German invasion began.

  A Jewish woman called Ida Belozovskaya described the scene when the Germans entered her town near Kiev on 19 September. ‘People with fawning, happy, servile faces were standing along both sides of the road greeting their “liberators”. On that day I knew already that our life was coming to an end, that our ordeal was beginning. We were all in a mouse-trap. Where could one go? There was nowhere to escape.’ Jews were not just denounced to the German authorities out of anti-semitism, but also out of fear, as Belozovskaya testified. The Germans would kill any family found sheltering Jews, so even those who were sympathetic and prepared to give food did not dare to take them in.

  Although the Hungarian army attached to Rundstedt’s Army Group South did not take part in mass killings, the Romanians attacking Odessa, a city with a large Jewish population, committed appalling atrocities. Already in the summer of 1941 Romanian troops were said to have killed about 10,000 Jews when seizing back the Soviet-occupied areas of Bessarabia and the Bukovina. Even German officers regarded the conduct of their ally as chaotic and unnecessarily sadistic. In Odessa, the Romanians killed 35,000.

  The German Sixth Army, commanded by Generalfeldmarschall von Reichenau, the most convinced Nazi among all senior commanders, had the 1st SS Brigade attached to it. An army security division, the Feldgendarmerie, and other military units were also involved in mass killings along the way. On 27 September, shortly after the capture of Kiev, Reichenau attended a meeting with the town commandant and SS officers from Sonderkommando 4a. It was agreed that the town commandant should put up posters instructing the Jews to muster for ‘evacuation’, bringing with them identity papers, money, valuables and warm clothing.

  The Nazis’ murderous intentions were unexpectedly helped by a curious by-product of the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact. Stalinist censorship had stifled any hint of Hitler’s virulent anti-semitism. As a result, when the Jews in Kiev were ordered to report for ‘resettlement’, no fewer than 33,771 turned up as instructed. The Sixth Army, which was assisting with transport, had expected no more than 7,000 to appear. It took the SS Sonderkommando three days to murder them all in the ravine of Babi Yar outside the city.

  Ida Belozovskaya, who was married to a Gentile, described the assembly of Jews in Kiev, including members of her own family. ‘On 28 September, my husband and his Russian sister went to see my unfortunate ones off on their last journey. It seemed to them, and we all wanted to believe this, that the German barbarians would just send them away somewhere, and for several days people kept moving in big groups to their “salvation”. There was no time to receive everyone, people were ordered to come back on the following day (the Germans didn’t overload themselves with work). And the people kept turning up day after day, until their turn to leave this world finally came.’

  Her Russian husband followed one of the transports to Babi Yar to find out what was happening. ‘That’s what he saw through a little crack in the high fence. The people were being separated, men were told to go to one side, and women and children to the other side. They were naked (they had to leave their things in another place), and then they were mowed down by sub-machine guns and machine guns, the sound of firing drowned their screams and howling.’

  It has been estimated that more than one and a half million Soviet Jews escaped the killing squads. But the concentration of most of the Soviet Union’s Jews in the western parts, especially in cities and large towns, made the work of the Einsatzgruppen much easier. The Einsatzgruppen commanders were also pleasantly surprised by how cooperative and often eager to help their army counterparts proved to be. By the end of 1942, the total number of Jews killed by SS Einsatzgruppen, Ordnungspolizei, anti-partisan units and the German army itself is estimated to have exceeded 1.35 million people.

  The ‘Shoah by gas’ also had a haphazard development. As early as 1935, Hitler had indicated that once war came he would introduce a programme of euthanasia. The criminally insane, the ‘feeble-minded’, the incapacitated and children with birth defects, all were included in the Nazi category of ‘life unworthy of life’. The first case of euthanasia was carried out on 25 July 1939 by Hitler’s personal physician, Dr Karl Brandt, whom the Führer had asked to set up an advisory committee. Less than two weeks before the invasion of Poland, the ministry of the interior ordered hospitals to report back on every case of ‘deformed newborns’. The reporting process was extended to adults at about the same time.

  The first mental patients to be killed, however, were in Poland three weeks after the invasion. They were shot in a nearby forest. Massacres of other asylum inmates rapidly followed. Over 20,000 were killed in this way. German patients from Pomerania were then shot. Two of the hospitals thus emptied were turned into barracks for the Waffen-SS. By late November, gas chambers using carbon monoxide were in operation, and Himmler observed one of these killings in December. Early in 1940, experiments had been tried using sealed trucks as mobile gas chambers. This was regarded as a success because it reduced the complications of transporting patients. The organizer was promised ten Reichsmark a head.

  Directed from Berlin, the system was extended within the Reich under the name T4. Parents were persuaded that their handicapped children, some of whom
simply had learning difficulties, could be better cared for at another institution. They were then told that the child had died of pneumonia. Some 70,000 German adults and children were murdered in gas chambers by August 1941. This figure also included German Jews who had been hospitalized for a significant time.

  The vast numbers of victims and the unconvincing death certificates had failed to keep the euthanasia programme secret. Hitler ordered it to be halted that August after churchmen, led by Bishop Clemens August Graf von Galen, had denounced it. But a covert version continued afterwards, killing another 20,000 by the end of the war. Personnel involved in the euthansia programme were recruited for the death camps of eastern Poland in 1942. As several historians have emphasized, the Nazis’ eutha nasia programme provided not just the blueprint for the Final Solution, but also the foundation for their ideal of a racially and genetically pure society.

  Because of Hitler’s avoidance of confiding controversial decisions to paper, historians have interpreted the evasive and often euphemistic language of subsidiary documents in different ways when trying to assess the exact moment at which the decision was made to launch the Final Solution. This has proved an impossible task, especially since the movement towards genocide consisted of unrecorded encouragement from the top, as well as an uncoordinated series of steps and experiments carried out on the spot by the different killing groups. In a curious way, it happened to mirror the Auftragstaktik of the army, whereby a general instruction was translated into action by the commander on the ground.

  Some historians argue plausibly that the basic decision to go for outright genocide took place in July or August 1941, when a quick victory still seemed to be within the Wehrmacht’s grasp. Others think that it did not take place until the autumn, when the German advance in the Soviet Union slowed perceptibly and a ‘territorial solution’ looked increasingly impracticable. Some put it even later, suggesting the second week of December when the German army was halted outside Moscow, and Hitler declared war on the United States.