It is not possible to say that Galen’s intervention led directly to the cancellation of the T4 operation, given that Hitler was already anxious about civilian morale in the light of the crucifix controversy and other concerns.34 Nonetheless, this episode does demonstrate not just the personal courage of Bishop von Galen but also that open resistance was possible in the Third Reich – risky, of course, but possible. It is significant that something similar was not attempted by Bishop von Galen in particular or the German public in general over the treatment of the Jews. Underlying anti-Semitism amongst much of the population was not the only reason for this lack of action. Protests also did not occur because the Catholic Church in Germany had distanced itself from the persecution of the Jews, fearing the consequences for the church itself of protesting. In addition, most non-Jewish Germans were not personally affected by the way the Jews were treated. By now the Jews were almost completely isolated from the rest of the population. They lived in Jewish houses and their children attended Jewish schools. On the other hand, most German civilians had a relative in the armed forces, and so the adult euthanasia scheme affected them directly. What if their loved ones were murdered by the state after they became severely injured in battle?
Hitler knew that many of his supporters were Christians and that without their support his ambitions would be damaged. Emil Klein was both a committed Catholic and a committed Nazi. It would be foolhardy to force him to choose between these two faiths. Hitler had no such problem when it came to the Jews. A vanishingly small number of his soldiers on the front line, or their relatives back at home in Germany, cared enough about Jews to risk protesting about how they were treated.
At the same time as the crucifix controversy festered within Germany, Hitler’s soldiers appeared to be winning the war against the Soviet Union. Minsk, the capital of Belarus, fell to the Germans at the end of June and nearly 300,000 Red Army soldiers were captured. By now, only a week after the launch of the attack, German panzers were almost a third of the way to Moscow. This was not just the largest invasion in history – it was the swiftest as well. In conversation with his acolytes, Hitler basked in the glory. He said: ‘to those who ask me whether it will be enough to reach the Urals as a frontier, I reply that for the present it is enough for the frontier to be drawn back as far as that. What matters is that Bolshevism must be exterminated.’ His plans for Moscow were simple; the city must ‘disappear from the earth’s surface’.35 Ten days later, on 16 July, Hitler met with leading Nazi figures, including Göring, Bormann and Rosenberg, and announced that he intended to build a ‘Garden of Eden’ in the eastern territories, using ‘all necessary measures’ such as ‘shooting’ and ‘resettlements’. Anyone who ‘even looks sideways at us’, he said, should be killed.36
Shortly after the 16 July meeting, Himmler ordered a large increase in the number of security personnel involved in the mass killing of Jews in the Soviet Union; over 16,000 troops, mostly from SS units, were now ordered to help with the murders. Himmler hadn’t been present when Hitler said he wanted to build a ‘Garden of Eden’ on Soviet territory, using ‘all necessary measures’, but he had nonetheless understood what his boss wanted. That, after all, was how the Reichsführer SS had prospered in the Third Reich. Over the next few weeks he visited the killing squads operating behind the front line – visits that often coincided with an increase not just in the number of people killed, but in the categories of people killed as well. Gradually over the summer and early autumn of 1941, Jewish women and children were murdered alongside men. Now that babies were targeted, there could no longer be any pretence that the Nazis were only killing Jews who posed an immediate threat to their security.
However monstrous these murders seem to us today, the extension of the killing to include Jewish women and children was not a major ideological departure for the Nazis. They were already aware that they were fighting in a war of ‘extermination’. The German Army, as we have seen, had been told to let ‘millions’ starve as soldiers stole the food they needed from the locals. And on 24 June, two days after the invasion began, Himmler ordered Professor Konrad Meyer to work on a ‘General Plan for the East’ – an epic vision for the Nazi-occupied east that necessitated the deaths of tens of millions of Soviet men, women and children. As Himmler had said just before the war in the east began: ‘It is a question of existence, thus it will be a racial struggle of pitiless severity.’37
There was also a practical reason, as the Nazis saw it, why these Jewish women and children had to be murdered in the Soviet Union. For once the Jewish men had been shot, many of the women and children had lost their breadwinners and so would likely suffer a slow death by starvation. In the warped world of the Third Reich, one Nazi even argued that it would be more humane to kill the Jews quickly rather than let them starve. Back in Poland, on 16 July – the same day that Hitler held his meeting about establishing a ‘Garden of Eden’ in the East – SS Sturmbannführer Rolf-Heinz Höppner wrote a memo to Adolf Eichmann about the situation in the Warthegau: ‘There is a danger that, in the coming winter, it will become impossible to feed all the Jews. It must seriously be considered whether the most humane solution is to finish off the Jews unfit for labour through some fast-acting means. This would definitely be more pleasant than letting them starve to death.’38
However, it was one thing to talk about extending the killing in the abstract, quite another for SS men to stand up close and pull the trigger, a few feet away from naked Jewish women and children. Nonetheless, in the summer and autumn of 1941 thousands of SS men became murderers for the first time as they killed in just such an intimate manner. The 1st SS Infantry Brigade, for example, murdered Jews in Ostrog in the west of Ukraine at the start of August 1941. Ostrog was a predominantly Jewish city, with a population of 10,000 Jews, now swelled by several thousand more who had sought refuge in the city from the surrounding area. On 4 August the SS forced Jews out of Ostrog into the countryside. ‘They treated us as cattle,’ says Vasyl Valdeman, then a twelve-year-old Jewish boy. ‘They [the SS] were armed and had dogs with them. They made the strong [Jews] carry the ill people, and those who had beards were beaten, because they thought they were rabbis, and we saw much blood on their faces. They [the Jews] were crying out, I remember their words, “They are beating us, beating us as dogs.” ’
When the Jews reached a large sandy field the SS ordered them to sit down. The SS had told the Jews that they were needed to dig fortifications, but it soon became clear that they were to be murdered. ‘We were looking at our parents,’ says Vasyl, ‘and when we saw our grandmother and mother crying we realized that this was something horrible.’39
The Jews waited hours in the scorching heat until, one group at a time, they were ordered to undress and all their valuables were stolen. Next they were marched forward to an open pit and shot. But the SS didn’t possess the manpower to kill all the Jews in one day, so in the evening the remaining Jews were marched back into Ostrog. The next day the killing began again and continued until the military commander of Ostrog said he needed the remaining Jews to act as forced labour.40 Almost the whole of Vasyl’s family were murdered by the Nazis – including his father, two brothers, two uncles, his grandmother and grandfather. Vasyl and his mother were hidden by non-Jewish neighbours and survived the war. ‘They even ran risks so that we could survive,’ he says. ‘Nobody told the Germans that we were hiding.’
‘There were no problems between Ukrainians and Jews in Ostrog,’ says Oleksiy Mulevych, a non-Jewish Ukrainian, who was sixteen years old when the Germans arrived. ‘What the Germans have done to Jews cannot be forgiven. I felt no difference between the Jews and me. I understood that the next turn would be mine.’ Oleksiy thought he and his family might starve because the Nazis ‘took all our food away. At the time we had two hectares of land and they took the corn and the cows … The Germans were the enemies of all the people. They were like beasts.’41 Oleksiy knew nothing of the details of the German plan to feed their armed forces
at the ‘expense’ of the local population, but he and his family felt its impact as they struggled to survive on whatever scraps they could find.
Although Vasyl Valdeman and his mother were protected by non-Jewish Ukrainians, not everyone in Ukraine was as supportive of the Jews. There were many cases of non-Jewish Ukrainians profiting from the destruction of their Jewish neighbours. In Horokhiv, for example, 50 miles south of Ostrog, locals stood in queues to buy the murdered Jews’ possessions at knock-down prices.42 In Lwów there were horrific scenes on the streets at the end of June 1941 as Ukrainians participated in the murder of around 4,000 Jews.43 This orgy of violence was sparked by the discovery that Soviet security forces had killed several thousand prisoners just before the Germans arrived.
Nazi-approved pogroms like the ones in Lwów and Kaunas certainly did take place – one estimate is that there were at least sixty of them in the occupied Soviet Union44 – but the majority of Jews were murdered that summer and autumn in actions like the one in Ostrog where the Jews were shot at close quarters. Hans Friedrich, an ethnic German from Romania, participated personally in these ‘pit’ killings as a member of the 1st SS Infantry Brigade. Friedrich says he had ‘no feelings’ as he shot the Jews. He claims this lack of ‘empathy’ – indeed his overall ‘hatred’ of Jews – was because Jews had previously ‘harmed’ his family by buying animals from their farm too cheaply. The ‘motto’ of this war, he says, was ‘against Communism’, and since ‘there were connections between Jews and Bolshevism’ he thought it understandable that the Jews were considered a target, especially since the Soviet Union was only ‘half civilized’.45
In the Baltic States in particular, many of those who shot the Jews were locals, murdering alongside German security forces. Petras Zelionka, for example, was a member of a Lithuanian unit that took part in the killings. He felt justified in murdering innocent Jewish civilians partly because he believed that Jews had tortured Lithuanians during the Soviet occupation of the country – ‘we were told what they have done, how they used to kill even the women.’46 He also reveals that his comrades relished the chance to steal from the Jews. Straightforward avarice could be just as much a reason to commit murder as anything ideological.
A distinguished Lithuanian historian has identified five motivational factors for those who participated in the killings. Revenge (against those who had allegedly helped the Soviets oppress the population), expiation (for those who wanted to show their loyalty to the Nazis after collaborating with the Soviets), anti-Semitism, opportunism (a desire to adapt swiftly to the new situation in Lithuania) and self-enrichment. Having met Petras Zelionka, I believe he matches four of those criteria. Only ‘expiation’ is doubtful in his case.47
An additional motivational factor, not mentioned in this list, was one almost certainly possessed by both Petras Zelionka and Hans Friedrich – sadism. Even long after the war was over – Zelionka was interviewed in 1996 and Friedrich eight years later – neither expressed any remorse for their actions, and they both talked about the killings as if they had gained some base, sadistic kick out of murdering in this intimate way. Friedrich, for example, says that the Jews ‘were extremely shocked, utterly frightened and petrified, and you could do what you wanted with them’,48 and Zelionka that he felt a sense of ‘curiosity’ as he killed children – ‘you just pull the trigger, the shot is fired and that is it.’49
Zelionka’s unit also committed murders at the Seventh Fort in Kaunas, though he claimed he did not take part personally in this particular action. Here there were reports that the killers were sexual sadists. ‘Night after night the Lithuanian henchmen would proceed to select their victims: the young, the pretty,’ recorded Avraham Tory in his diary. ‘First they would rape them, then torture them, and finally murder them. They called it “going to peel potatoes”.’50
The perverted pleasure that some members of the Einsatzgruppen took in the killing process was obvious to onlookers. ‘There were a number of filthy sadists in the extermination Kommando,’ said Alfred Metzner, a driver and interpreter. ‘For example, pregnant women were shot in the belly for fun and then thrown into the pits … Before the execution the Jews had to undergo a body search, during which … anuses and sex organs were searched for valuables and jewels.’51
In Ukraine, Dina Pronicheva, a Jew who escaped from a killing site, witnessed how some of the German killers were happy to commit what their own ideology considered a ‘race crime’: ‘At the opposite side of the ravine, seven or so Germans brought two young Jewish women. They went down lower to the ravine, chose an even place and began to rape these women by turns. When they became satisfied, they stabbed the women with daggers … And they left the bodies like this, naked, with their legs open.’52
There were similar sadists not just in the SS but in the ordinary German Army. During the partisan war behind the front line on the eastern front, Adolf Buchner, a member of an SS Pionierbataillon, saw both SS and army soldiers take pleasure in mentally and physically torturing Soviet civilians. ‘There were some bastards among them,’ he says. ‘They undressed them [i.e. the villagers] until they were naked and they killed them once they were naked … among our own people there were those who were really hot for it, to be able to let them have it … Was there any need, for example, to shoot the children in front of the women and then shoot the women after that? That happened too. That is sadism. There were officers like that, they liked sadistic things, they liked it when the mothers were screaming or children were screaming – they were really hot for that. In my view those people are not human.’53
For Walter Fernau, who served on the eastern front with the 14 Panzerjäger-Kompanie, the reason for the atrocities was simple. ‘If you give a person a weapon and power over other people,’ he says, ‘and then allow him to drink alcohol then he becomes a murderer.’ There was also, he says, a ‘coarsening’ and a ‘brutalization’ that occurred within the German Army during the war in the east, particularly once the ‘partisan war’ started up: ‘then one would meet someone who looked like a partisan … [and] he was simply shot.’ The final element in this toxic cocktail of emotions was, according to Walter Fernau, straightforward ‘fear’. ‘You would not believe what sort of feeling it is to be really afraid,’ he says. ‘When I ever actually spoke to young people … about war or anything, I always told them how scared I was.’54
As early as 3 July 1941, Stalin had demanded that ‘Conditions in the occupied regions must be made unbearable for the enemy and all of his accomplices.’55 The Germans took this to mean that all civilians in the Soviet territory they controlled were now potential partisans. Since a recurring theme of Nazi ideology was that the Jews were a security threat, it was easy for German forces to conflate ‘partisan’ and ‘Jew’. That was what General von Manstein, commander of the Eleventh Army, did when he issued this order of the day on 20 November 1941: ‘Jewry constitutes the mediator between the enemy in the rear and the still fighting remnants of the Red Army and the Red leadership.’ Manstein went on to emphasize the racial nature of the war: ‘The Jewish–Bolshevik system must be eradicated once and for all. Never again may it interfere in our European living space. The German soldier is therefore not only charged with the task of destroying the power instrument of this system. He marches forth also as a carrier of a racial conception and as an avenger of all the atrocities which have been committed against him and the German people.’56
Though a number of German Army commanders issued orders insisting that their soldiers have no part in the SS and Einsatzgruppen killings, the involvement of the Wehrmacht in the pacification actions against the partisans in the east was widespread. For instance, Wolfgang Horn, an NCO with a Panzer artillery unit, personally ordered the burning down of an entire village during the fight against partisans, but he thought little of it because the houses were ‘not worth much anyhow … we didn’t take it so seriously to [set on] fire a Russian house … we didn’t respect them as as civilized as we are … their lifesty
le was too primitive for us.’57
Many ordinary soldiers, after years of schooling in Nazi ideology, had little doubt that they were fighting inferior human beings. ‘Everyone, even the last doubter,’ wrote one soldier in July 1941, ‘knows today that the battle against these subhumans, who’ve been whipped into a frenzy by the Jews, was not only necessary but came in the nick of time. Our Führer has saved Europe from certain chaos.’58
While there were killers who liked what they were doing, there were also those who had problems participating in the murders. Himmler discovered this for himself on a visit to Minsk in the summer of 1941. On 15 August he watched as around a hundred people – a mix of ‘partisans and Jews’59 according to his work diary – were shot by Einsatzgruppe B. The victims were forced to lie face downwards in a pit and shot from behind. The next group then had to climb into the pit and lie on the people who had just been shot.
Walter Frentz, an air force cameraman who was stationed at the Führer’s headquarters in East Prussia, had asked to accompany Himmler’s group to Minsk because he wanted ‘to see something else for a change – not always just these four walls at HQ’. Frentz was ‘pretty shocked’ by what he saw, because he ‘didn’t know that things like that happened’.60 Once the killings were finished ‘the commander of the auxiliary police approached me, because I was in the air force. “Lieutenant,” he said, “I can’t take it any more. Can’t you get me out of here?” I said, “Well, I don’t have any influence over the police. I’m in the air force, what am I supposed to do?” “Well,” he said, “I can’t take it any more – it’s terrible!” ’61
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