The Holocaust: A New History

by Laurence Rees

  It was also the case, of course, that many non-Jewish Lithuanians had collaborated with the Soviet occupiers. As the German troops marched on to Lithuanian soil it became convenient for these collaborators to focus attention on the Jews. By blaming the Jews they hoped to divert attention from their own complicity with the Soviets. They thus sought to ‘cleanse themselves with Jewish blood’.10 Not for the first – or last – time in this history, the Jews were a convenient scapegoat.

  On 25 June 1941, the day after the Germans had arrived in Kaunas, locals turned on Lithuanian Jews in a series of bloody murders outside a garage in the centre of the city. A group of civilians, wearing armbands and armed with rifles, forced between forty and fifty Jews on to the forecourt of the garage. Wilhelm Gunzilius, a member of a German air force reconnaissance unit, witnessed what happened next. ‘This man pulled someone out of the crowd [of Jews] and used his crowbar, “Whack!” And he went down. The victim received another blow when he was on the tarmac.’11 Each of the Jews was killed in the same way: ‘one man was led up to him at a time and with one or more blows on the nape of the neck he killed each one.’12 Gunzilius photographed the slaughter, and his pictures show the killings taking place in front of a large group of civilians and members of the German armed forces. ‘The conduct of the civilians,’ he says, ‘among whom there were women and children, was unbelievable. After every blow of the iron bar they applauded …’13

  Viera Silkinaitė, a sixteen-year-old Lithuanian, also witnessed the killings, and remembers how some of the crowd shouted, ‘Beat those Jews!’ as the murderer smashed their heads open. One man even lifted up his child so that he could see better. ‘What kind of person would he [that child] be when he grew up?’ asks Viera. ‘If, of course, he could understand what he had seen. And what could you expect of the person who was shouting [encouragement]? It was as if he was going to step into that garage and join the beating.’ Appalled at what she had seen, Viera ran off into a nearby cemetery. ‘I was ashamed,’ she says. ‘When I went to the cemetery, I sat down and I thought: “God Almighty, I heard before that there were [Jewish] windows broken or something like that done, that was still conceivable, but such an atrocity, to beat a helpless man … it was too much.” ’14 Back at the garage, once all the Jews had been killed, the man who had smashed their heads open climbed on top of their bodies and played the Lithuanian national anthem on an accordion.15

  Dr Walter Stahlecker, the commander of Einsatzgruppe A, which operated in the Baltic States, revealed the complicity of the Nazis in actions like these. He wrote in a report that ‘local anti-Semitic elements were induced to engage in pogroms against the Jews … The impression had to be created that the local population itself had taken the first steps of its own accord as a natural reaction to decades of oppression by the Jews and the more recent terror exerted by the Communists … the task of the security police was to set these purges in motion and put them on the right track so as to ensure that the liquidation goals that had been set might be achieved in the shortest possible time.’16 Heydrich’s instruction that ‘Jews in the service of the Party or the State’ should be killed was thus obviously a statement of the minimum number of murders that was acceptable.

  Considerable latitude was given to the local commanders in deciding how best to pursue Heydrich’s instructions, and as a result killing rates varied across the different Einsatzgruppen. It is another example of how fixed and unambiguous orders were not always given in connection with the persecution and murder of the Jews. Instead, once again there was a complex relationship between local initiatives and imprecise instructions from on high. There was, however, one guiding principle that an individual Einsatzgruppe commander could use to determine his actions – the most murderous course was almost always the surest. Not killing enough people, or worse still showing mercy, was seen as a sign that you were not doing your job. Hence when Himmler and Heydrich visited Grodno, 90 miles south of Kaunas, they were unhappy with the numbers killed. Despite the fact that Grodno had a large Jewish population, Einsatzkommando 9 had killed ‘only’ ninety-six Jews.17 Significantly, there isn’t a recorded example of Himmler and Heydrich expressing dissatisfaction that summer because an Einsatzkommando was killing ‘too many’ Jews.

  Four days after the murders in Kaunas, the Romanians demonstrated that they were also prepared to murder Jews. Just as in Lithuania, Jews in Romania were often accused of sympathizing with the Soviets, and the pre-June 1941 government of Romania, under the leadership of Marshal Ion Antonescu, had been virulently anti-Semitic.

  The Romanians, allies of the Nazis, enthusiastically took part in the invasion of the Soviet Union. The enormous numbers of Romanian soldiers who entered Soviet territory on 22 June, fighting alongside the Germans, were in part motivated by self-interest. In 1940 the Soviets had occupied Bessarabia and other Romanian territories in the east of the country and now Marshal Antonescu relished the chance to snatch this land back.

  Antonescu was an opportunist who believed the Germans would win against the Soviets. When he met Hitler, on 12 June, just before the invasion was launched, Antonescu said to him, ‘Whereas Napoleon and even the Germans in 1917 had still had to contend with the huge problems raised by space, the motor in the air and on the ground have eliminated space as Russia’s ally.’18

  One of the first signs that Romanian forces would use the invasion as an opportunity to target Jews was the murderous action that took place in Iaşi in the east of Romania in late June. Antonescu wanted the city purged of Jews, and as soon as the invasion was launched, rumours began to flourish that the 45,000 Jews in Iaşi were somehow helping the Soviets.19 Starting on the night of 28–29 June a mix of Romanians – including large numbers of police, members of the anti-Semitic Iron Guard and ordinary citizens – rampaged through the city killing Jews. The Germans were also involved, with Major Hermann von Stransky liaising with the locals. Stransky was married to a Romanian and knew the country well.

  A prominent member of the Jewish population in Iaşi remembered, ‘I saw the crowd flee in total chaos, fired on from rifles and machine guns. I fell on to the pavement after two bullets hit me. I lay there for several hours, seeing people I knew and strangers dying around me … I saw an old Jewish man, disabled after the war of 1916–1918 and wearing the Bărbăţie şi Credinţă [Manhood and Faith] decoration on his chest; he also carried with him papers that officially exempted him from anti-Semitic restrictions. However, bullets had shattered his thorax, and he lived his last moments on a garbage can like a dog.’ Further along the street lay the son of a leather merchant who ‘was dying and sobbing, “Mother, Father, where are you? Give me some water, I’m thirsty” … Soldiers … stabbed [the dying] with their bayonets to finish them off.’20 When Vlad Marievici of the city’s sanitation department arrived at police headquarters on the morning of 30 June, he found ‘a pile of corpses stacked high like logs’ that made it difficult for his truck to enter the courtyard. So many Jews had been murdered the previous night that ‘the floor was awash with blood that reached the gate; the blood came up to the soles of my shoes.’21

  At least 4,000 Jews were killed in the city as a result of the pogrom – some estimates put the figure as high as 8,000.22 Five thousand more Jews were forced on to two trains and deported to the south. Crammed on board sealed freight trucks, the Jews found it hard to breathe, and the Romanian guards refused to let them drink any water. After several days their thirst was all but unbearable. Nathan Goldstein, a Jew from Iaşi, witnessed what happened when his train stopped near a river: ‘an eleven-year-old child jumped out the window to get a drink of water, but the [deputy of the train’s commander] felled him with a shot aimed at his legs. The child screamed, “Water, water!” Then the adjutant took him by his feet, shouting, “You want water? Well, drink all you want!”, lowered him head first into the water of the Bahlui River until the child drowned, and then threw him in.’23

  The killing of Jews from Iaşi was just the beginning. In the afte
rmath of the invasion of the Soviet Union, the Romanians went on to murder more than 100,000 Jews in the former Romanian territory of Bessarabia and North Bukovina. Such was the casual brutality employed by the Romanians that even the Germans complained about their behaviour. General von Schobert, for instance, was unhappy with the Romanians for not burying the bodies of those they killed, and the commander of Einsatzkommando 10a criticized the Romanians for ‘lacking planning’ in their actions against the Jews.24 Revealingly, it was the Jews who lived in the Romanian territory that had just been ‘liberated’ from the Soviets who endured the brunt of the violence. Once again, the perceived link between Jews and ‘Bolshevism’ was a factor in legitimizing the murders as far as the killers were concerned.

  In the summer of 1941, the war against the Soviet Union also had an impact on the concentration camps. Heydrich’s 2 July directive called for the Einsatzgruppen, operating just behind the front line, to kill ‘People’s Commissars’ – Soviet political officers. However, some of these commissars were not identified immediately after they had been captured, but were only discovered once they had been transferred to POW camps, far away from the Einsatzgruppen area of operation. This created a problem for the Nazis. Once these commissars had been singled out from the hundreds of thousands of other Soviet prisoners, how should they be murdered most efficiently? It was to resolve this issue that systematic mass killing began in concentration camps, in a secret action codenamed 14f14.

  In July 1941 several hundred Soviet commissars were sent to Auschwitz. Kazimierz Albin, a Polish inmate of the camp, remembers that ‘they wore uniforms, but the uniforms were not [ordinary] soldiers’ uniforms but officers’ uniforms, very much in tatters. They were unshaven, and extremely emaciated. They impressed me as people who had been in very difficult conditions. And they didn’t look like simple soldiers, they looked like intelligent people.’25 The commissars laboured in a gravel pit near the main gate. Here they were literally worked to death. ‘They were beaten all the time,’ says Kazimierz Smoleń, another Polish prisoner. ‘You could hear those yells all the time. The SS men were yelling, the Kapos were yelling and the people who were being beaten yelled as well.’26 The commissars were forced to work in the gravel pits for hours on end without respite. If they slackened the pace they were severely beaten or even shot. ‘It was just a few days,’ says Kazimierz Smoleń, ‘and then they ceased to exist. It was the torture and murder of hundreds of people. It was a cruel death they died. It’s like in a horror movie, but such a movie will never be shown.’

  The Soviet commissars were also sent to other concentration camps to be murdered, and individual SS units often devised their own method of killing. For instance, at Sachsenhausen, outside Berlin, the SS performed an elaborate charade in order to deceive the commissars about their fate. The commissars were taken into a specially converted barracks and told to undress in preparation for a medical examination. Once they were naked they were led one at a time into a room that purported to be a doctor’s office. An SS man, dressed in a white coat, looked them over. What the commissars did not know was that the SS man was interested only in whether or not they had any gold teeth or fillings that could be removed after their death. Next they were taken into a third room where they were told that they were to be measured. They stood up against a measuring stick and then, through a small flap connecting this room to an adjacent one, they were shot in the back of the neck. Kapos took the body away and hastily cleaned the execution chamber ready for the next victim. Loud music was played in the waiting room to drown out the sound of the gunfire.

  Despite the labour-intensive nature of this killing process, the SS managed to murder a prisoner every few minutes. Over a ten-week period in 1941 they killed several thousand Soviet prisoners of war.27 But they could not keep the murders secret. One inmate wrote a note, placed it in a jar and managed to conceal it from the SS. Dated 19 September 1941, it reads: ‘we’ve just found out that another 400 Red Guards have been brought to the camp. We’re all under the shattering burden of these murders, which have already claimed more than a thousand lives. We aren’t in a position to help them at the moment.’28

  By the time the murder of the Soviet commissars was under way, the adult euthanasia scheme had also spread to the concentration camps. Under action 14f13 concentration camp prisoners who had been selected as unfit to work were transported to euthanasia killing centres. At Auschwitz on the evening of 28 July 1941, around 500 sick prisoners boarded a train to take them to Dresden. The SS had told them that they were leaving the camp so that they could regain their strength elsewhere. ‘They had some hope,’ says Kazimierz Smoleń, who watched them leave. ‘Hope is the last thing that dies.’29 The sick prisoners were taken to Sonnenstein euthanasia centre and murdered by carbon monoxide poisoning. These were the first Auschwitz prisoners to die by gassing. They were chosen not because they were Jews, but because they were sick, and they died not at Auschwitz but in the heart of Germany.

  Just days later, in August 1941, the T4 euthanasia programme came under threat. In one of the most famous statements of resistance in the history of the Third Reich, Clemens von Galen, Bishop of Münster, mounted a powerful attack on the practice of ‘euthanasia’. In Münster Cathedral, on the first Sunday in August, he said, ‘For several months we have heard reports that people who have been sick for a while and may appear incurable, have been taken away from mental and nursing homes for the mentally ill on orders from Berlin. After a short time, their relatives then receive notification that the patient has died, the body has been burnt, and the ashes can be sent to them. There is widespread suspicion, bordering on certainty, that these numerous cases of the sudden deaths of the mentally ill don’t occur naturally, but are being caused intentionally, and that they follow that doctrine that claims that one is justified in destroying so-called “life unworthy of life” – thus to kill innocent human beings, when one thinks that their life is of no value for the people [Volk] and the state.’30 Galen passionately believed that ‘This is not about machines, not about horses or cows whose only purpose is to serve mankind, to produce goods for the people! One may annihilate them, butcher them, as soon as they don’t fulfil their purpose any more. No, this is about human beings, our fellow human beings, our brothers and sisters! Poor people, sick people, unproductive people if you like! But have they for this reason forfeited their right to live?’ He said that if the same principle was applied widely it could also lead to the killing of ‘invalids’ and, in a warning that had special relevance given the fierce fighting taking place in the east, even of ‘brave soldiers’ who returned home ‘seriously disabled’.

  The timing of Galen’s intervention was particularly inconvenient for Hitler. Earlier in 1941 the Gauleiter of Bavaria, Adolf Wagner, had ordered all crucifixes to be taken down in schools within his area of control. Hitler did not request that this action take place, and it has never been fully established whether Wagner acted entirely on his own initiative. There was certainly support for attacks against the church at high levels within the Nazi party. Martin Bormann, head of the party Chancellery, had written a note to all Gauleiters in June 1941 – some weeks after Wagner’s actions in Bavaria – in which he said that it was important to try and break the power of the church. Both Wagner and Bormann were outspoken critics of Christianity, and it is possible that Bormann in his enthusiasm to act against church authorities misunderstood a passing reference that Hitler might have made as a signal for action.31

  Whatever the origin of the decision to order the removal of crucifixes from schools in Bavaria, it turned out to be a major tactical mistake for the Nazis. Bavarians, many of them staunchly Catholic, rose up in large numbers to protest in a flurry of petitions, demonstrations and public meetings. They wrote to their sons and husbands on the front line, complaining about what was happening back home. ‘Of course we were angry,’ says Emil Klein, a committed Nazi from Bavaria who had taken part in the Beer-Hall Putsch in 1923, and was now fighting on the
eastern front, ‘when we were lying out there in the ditches and we heard that at home they were taking the crucifixes off the walls in Bavaria. We were annoyed about that!’32

  Hitler could not afford to lose the support of men like Emil Klein, and the crucifix order was rescinded. Once again Hitler’s personal reputation was partly protected by the popular notion that he knew nothing about the conduct of some of his underlings. ‘You wear brown shirts on top,’ read one anonymous protest letter attacking local Nazis, ‘but inside you’re Bolsheviks and Jews. Otherwise you wouldn’t be able to carry on behind the Führer’s back.’33

  Coming on top of the crucifix debacle, Bishop von Galen’s sermon condemning the euthanasia killings was especially problematic for Hitler. Though he wanted to see Galen punished, he felt he could not act against him without stirring up discontent among his own supporters who were also Christians. Moreover, the transportation across Germany of disabled patients to be murdered had now become dangerously high profile.

  On 24 August 1941, Hitler decided to cancel the T4 action. This didn’t mean that all euthanasia killings ceased – individual hospitals continued to starve disabled patients to death and to kill them by fatal injections – but the systematic gassing in the special killing centres no longer took place as before. In turn, this meant that a number of individuals from the T4 programme who possessed expertise in mass murder, like Christian Wirth and Irmfried Eberl, were unemployed. They would shortly be asked to use their particular talents elsewhere.