Hitler 1936-1945: Nemesis (Allen Lane History)

by Ian Kershaw

  In the Baltic, the butchery of Einsatzgruppe A was especially ferocious. The first massacre of Jews took place on 24 June, only two days after the beginning of ‘Barbarossa’, in the small Lithuanian township of Gargzdai, lying just behind the border. Men from the Security Police and a police unit from Memel shot dead 201 Jews that afternoon. By 18 July, the killing squads had claimed 3,300 victims; by August the death-toll had reached between 10,000 and 12,000 mainly male Jews together with Communists.15

  The killing units were assisted in the early stages by Lithuanian nationalists who were prompted into savage pogroms against the Jews.16 In Kowno, Jews were clubbed to death one by one by a local enthusiast while crowds of onlookers – women holding their children up to see – clapped and cheered. One eyewitness recalled that around forty-five to fifty Jews were killed in this way within three-quarters of an hour. When the butcher had finished his slaughter, he climbed on to the heap of corpses and played the Lithuanian national anthem on an accordion. German soldiers stood by impassively, some of them taking photographs.17 The Wehrmacht commander in the area, General-Colonel Ernst Busch, took the view, on hearing reports of the atrocities, that it was a matter of internal Lithuanian disputes, and that he had no authority to intervene. It was seen as exclusively a matter for the security police.18

  Hitler was keen to keep abreast of the killing operations in the Soviet Union. On 1 August SS-Brigadeführer Heinrich Müller, head of the Gestapo, had passed an encyphered message to the commanders of the four Einsatzgruppen: ‘Continual reports from here on the work of the Einsatzgruppen in the east are to be presented to the Führer.’19

  Goebbels registered his satisfaction, when he received a detailed report in mid-August, at the information that ‘vengeance was being wreaked on the Jews in the big towns’ of the Baltic, and that they were ‘being slain in their masses on the streets by the self-protection organizations’. He connected the killing directly with Hitler’s ‘prophecy’ of January 1939. ‘What the Führer prophesied is now taking place,’ he wrote, ‘that if Jewry succeeded in provoking another war, it would lose its existence.’20 Three months later, when he visited Vilna, Goebbels spoke again of the ‘horrible (grauenhaft)’ ‘revenge’ of the local population against the Jews, who had been ‘shot down in their thousands’ and were still being ‘executed’ by the hundred. The rest had been impressed into ghettos and worked for the benefit of the local economy. The ghetto inhabitants, he commented, were ‘vile figures (scheußliche Gestalten)’. He described the Jews as ‘the lice of civilized mankind. They had to be somehow eradicated (ausrotten), otherwise they would always again play their torturing (peinigende) and burdensome role. The only way to cope with them is to treat them with the necessary brutality. If you spare them, you’ll later be their victim.’21

  Such were the extreme, pathological expressions of sentiments which, often in scarcely less overtly genocidal form, had a wide currency among the new masters of the eastern territories, and were far from confined to diehard Nazis.

  In contrast to the conflicts between the Wehrmacht and the SS following the invasion of Poland, the close cooperation established between Heydrich and the army leadership in the build-up to ‘Barbarossa’ enabled the barbarity of the Einsatzgruppen in the eastern campaign to proceed without hindrance, and often in close harmony.22 The Wehrmacht leadership aligned itself from the start with the ideological aim of combating ‘Jewish-Bolshevism’. Cooperation with the SD and Security Police was extensive, and willingly given. Without it, the Einsatzgruppen could not have functioned as they did.23 ‘The relationship to the Wehrmacht is now, as before, wholly untroubled (ohne jede Trübung),’ ran an Einsatzgruppe report in mid-August. ‘Above all, a constantly growing interest in and understanding for the tasks and business of the work of the security police can be seen in Wehrmacht circles. This could especially be observed at the executions.’24

  In an order issued on 12 September 1941, the head of the OKW, Field-Marshal Wilhelm Keitel, declared: ‘The struggle against Bolshevism demands ruthless and energetic, rigorous action (Durchgreifen) above all against the Jews, the main carriers of Bolshevism.’25 Other exhortations from military leaders went still further. A month later, the emphatically pro-Nazi Field-Marshal Walter von Reichenau, Commander-in-Chief of the 6th Army, told his troops: ‘The soldier in the eastern sphere is not only a fighter according to the rules of the art of warfare, but also the bearer of a pitiless racial (völkisch) ideology and the avenger of all the bestialities which have been inflicted on the German and related ethnic nation (Volkstum). The soldier must therefore have full understanding for the necessity of the severe but just atonement from the Jewish subhumans (am jüdischen Untermenschentum).’ He concluded: ‘Only in this way will we fulfil our historic duty of liberating the German people from the Asiatic-Jewish threat once and for all.’26

  The Commander-in-Chief of the 17th Army, Colonel-General Hermann Hoth, went, if anything, even further than Reichenau. He spoke in an order on the ‘Behaviour of German Soldiers in the East’, issued on 17 November, of a struggle of ‘two inwardly unbridgeable philosophies… German feeling of honour and race, centuries-old German soldierly tradition (Soldatentum), against asiatic ways of thinking and primitive instincts whipped up by a small number of mainly Jewish intellectuals.’ His men should act out of ‘belief in a change in the times, in which, on the basis of the superiority of its race and achievements, the leadership of Europe has passed to the German people’. It was a ‘mission to rescue European culture from the advance of asiatic barbarism’. He pointed to the way the Red Army had ‘bestially murdered’ German soldiers. Any sympathy with the native population was wholly misplaced. He stressed the guilt of Jews for circumstances in Germany after the First World War. He saw the extermination of the ‘spiritual support of Bolshevism’ and ‘aid of the partisans’ as ‘a rule of self-preservation’.27

  Towards the end of November, the Commander-in-Chief of the 11th Army, Erich von Manstein, in a secret order to his troops, was equally uncompromising. The German people had stood since 22 June, he stated, in a life-and-death struggle against the Bolshevik system, which was not being fought according to traditional European rules of war. The clear implication was that a Soviet regime dominated by Jews was responsible for this. Manstein referred to the Soviet partisan war behind the front lines. Jewry, with ‘all the key-points of the political leadership and administration, trade, and crafts’ in their hands, formed, he claimed, the ‘intermediary between the enemy in the rear and the remainder still fighting of the Red Army and Red Leadership’. From this, he drew his conclusion. ‘The Jewish-Bolshevik system must be eradicated (ausgerottet) once and for all,’ he wrote. ‘Never again must it enter into our European living space. The German soldier has the task, therefore, not solely of smashing the military means of power of this system. He is also the bearer of a racial (völkisch) idea and avenger of all atrocities perpetrated on him and the German people… The soldier must show sympathy for the necessity of the hard atonement demanded of Jewry, the spiritual bearer of the Bolshevik terror….’28

  Other army commanders increasingly used the spread of partisan warfare as justification for the no-holds-barred treatment of the Jews. Already in the first weeks of ‘Barbarossa’, Jews were being equated with partisans by some commanders or seen as the major source of their support.29 But the ‘partisan struggle’ only began in earnest in the autumn.30 In the rear area of Army Group Centre, a ‘seminar’ was organized in September 1941 to allow an exchange of views and experiences between selected officers and SS spokesmen on the ‘combating of partisans’. The speakers included the Higher SS and Police Leader of Russia-Centre, SS-Gruppenführer Erich von dem Bach-Zelewski, on the ‘Taking of Commissars and Partisans’, and the head of Einsatzgruppe Β (situated in the Minsk region), SS-Gruppenführer Arthur Nebe, on the ‘Cooperation of Army and SD in Combating Partisans’, and the connections between the Jews and the partisan movement. The participants took away from their ‘orient
ation course’ the plain message to serve as the guideline for future ‘pacification’ policy: ‘Where there’s a partisan, there’s a Jew, and where there’s a Jew, there’s a partisan.’31

  Such voices were influential. There were, however, others.32 Some commanders insisted on rigorous separation of the Wehrmacht from the actions of the Security Police. One of these, General Karl von Roques, put out an order at the end of July prohibiting any participation by his men in pogroms on the grounds that it was ‘unsoldierly’ and would seriously damage the standing of the Wehrmacht.33 However, his order was ineffective. Cases continued to occur in which ‘soldiers and also officers had independently undertaken shootings of Jews or participated in them’. In September, he was forced to issue another order, in which he repeated that ‘executive measures’, especially against Jews, were solely the province of the Higher SS and Police Leader, and any unauthorized shootings by individual soldiers, or participation in ‘executive measures’ of the SS and police would be treated as disobedience and subjected to disciplinary action.34

  From letters home from the front, it is plain that many ordinary German soldiers needed little persuasion that the merciless onslaught on the Jews was justified. Subjected for years to incessant indoctrination at school and in the Hitler Youth about the Jews, and inundated since the beginning of ‘Barbarossa’ with propaganda about the horrors of ‘Jewish-Bolshevism’, on the march into Russia they frequently looked to confirm their prejudices.35 One soldier, writing home in July, remarked on his shock at ‘evidence of Jewish, Bolshevik atrocities, the likes of which I have hardly believed possible’, and promised that he and his comrades were taking revenge.36 Another wrote, also in July: ‘Everyone, even the last doubter, 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.’37 Given such a mentality, it was not surprising that many Wehrmacht units were themselves involved in the shooting of Jews and other atrocities from the earliest phase of ‘Barbarossa’.38

  In the early weeks of ‘Barbarossa’, the ‘actions’ undertaken by the Einsatzgruppen and their sub-units mainly targeted male Jews. The killing, though horrifying, was on nothing like the scale that it reached from August onwards. One particularly murderous Einsatzkommando in Lithuania, for example, killed nine times as many Jews in August and fourteen times as many in September as it had done in July.39 What was regarded as a large-scale ‘action’ in the first weeks had usually involved the shooting of hundreds of Jews, in rare instances more than 1,000. But by the beginning of October Einsatzkommando 4a, attached to Einsatzgruppe C in the Ukraine, could report with cold precision: ‘In retaliation for the arson in Kiev, all Jews were arrested and on 29 and 30.9 a total of 33,771 Jews were executed.’40 This was the notorious massacre at Babi-Yar, outside Kiev. The Jews – many of them women, children, and old people – had been rounded up in retaliation for a series of explosions in the city, killing some hundreds of German soldiers, a few days earlier, just before Kiev had fallen to the Wehrmacht. They were marched in small groups to the outskirts of the city, forced to undress, then to stand on a mound above the ravine of Babi-Yar. As the repeated salvoes of the killing-squads rang out, the lifeless bodies of the victims fell on to the growing mound of corpses below them.41

  Women and children – seen as possible ‘avengers’ of the future – were now, following verbal instructions passed down the line by Himmler then by the commanders of the various killer squads during August, generally included in the massacres.42 Thus, Einsatzkommando 3 shot 135 women among 4,239 Jews ‘executed’ during July, but 26,243 women and 15,112 children in the total of 56,459 Jews murdered during September 1941.43 Taking the four Einsatzgruppen and their sub-units together, the Jews killed before mid-August numbered around 50,000 – a massive increase on the scale of the murders in Poland, but only a tenth of the estimated half a million who would perish in the next four months.44

  The huge increase in number of victims demanded different killing techniques. At first, a semblance of martial law and ‘execution’ by firing-squad was preserved. But after a few weeks, the killers took turns with a submachine-gun, mowing down their naked victims as they knelt at the edge of a pit. The killing had rapidly moved ‘from military procedure to mass butchery’.45

  Some Einsatzgruppen leaders claimed after the war that Heydrich had conveyed to them in his briefings the Führer’s order to exterminate the Jews in the Soviet Union.46 But the actual variation in the scale of the killing operations in the first weeks, and the sharp escalation from around August onwards, strongly suggests that, in fact, no general mandate to exterminate Soviet Jewry in its entirety had been issued before ‘Barbarossa’ began.47 The number of men – around 3,00° in all, the core drawn heavily from the Gestapo, criminal police, regular police (Ordnungspolizei), and SD – initially engaged in the Einsatzgruppen actions would, in any case, have been incapable of implementing a full-scale genocidal programme, and could scarcely have been assembled with one in mind.48 The sharp increase in their numbers through supplementary police battalions began in late July. By the end of the year, there were eleven times as many members of the killing units as had been present at the start of ‘Barbarossa’.49

  On 15 August, immediately after witnessing that morning an ‘execution’ of Jews near Minsk which made him feel sick, Himmler had told his men that he and Hitler would answer to history for the necessary extermination of Jews as ‘the carriers of world Bolshevism’.50 It was during his visits to the killing units in the east that month that Himmler, as we have seen, instructed them to widen the slaughter, now to include women and children.51 Had he received explicit new authorization from Hitler? Or did he presume that the Führer’s existing mandate sufficed for the massive extension of the killing operations?

  What passed between the two men during the five days, from 15 to 20 July, that Himmler was staying in the Führer Headquarters is not known.52 But while in FHQ, Himmler had received minutes of the important meeting that Hitler had had on the 16th with Göring, Bormann, Lammers, Keitel, and Rosenberg. At the meeting, as we have already noted, Hitler had stated that Germany would never leave the conquered territories. All measures necessary for a final settlement, such as shooting and deportation, ought to be taken. He had made the telling remarks that the partisan war proclaimed by Stalin provided ‘the possibility of exterminating anything opposing us (die Möglichkeit auzurotten, was sich gegen uns stellt)’ and that pacification of the conquered territory could best be achieved by shooting dead anyone ‘who even looked askance (daß man jeden, der nur schief schaut, totschieße)’.53 A day later, Hitler issued a decree giving Himmler responsibility for security in the newly established civilian regions of German rule in the east. Effectively, this placed the ‘Jewish Question’ as part of a wider policing remit directly in Himmler’s hands.54

  Within a week, Himmler had increased the ‘policing’ operations behind the front line in the east by 11,000 men, the start of the far bigger build-up that was to follow.55 Most probably, catching Hitler’s mood at the time, Himmler had pointed out the insufficiency of the forces currently available to him for the ‘pacification’ of the east, then requested, and been granted, the authority to increase the force to an appropriate level. That the Jews, as had been the case from the beginning of the campaign, were viewed as the prime target group to be exterminated – under the pretext of offering the most dangerous opposition to the occupation – would have meant that no specific mandate about their treatment within the general ‘pacification’ remit was necessary. In dealing with the Jews in the east as he saw fit, Himmler could take it for granted that he was ‘working towards the Führer’.

  II

  Hitler’s own comments about the Jews around this time would certainly have assured Himmler of this. In the twilight hours before dawn on 10 July, Hitler had remarked: ‘“I feel like the Robert Koch of politics. He found the bacillus of t
uberculosis and through that showed medical scholarship new ways. I discovered the Jews as the bacillus and ferment of all social decomposition. Their ferment. And I have proved one thing: that a state can live without Jews; that the economy, culture, art, etc. etc. can exist without Jews and indeed better. That is the worst blow I have dealt the Jews.”’56

  He retained his biological terminology when speaking – with remarkable openness – to the Defence Minister of the newly-created brutally racist state of Croatia, Marshal Sladko Kvaternik, on 22 July. He had begun with a revealing illogicality: not he, but Stalin, would this time meet with the fate of Napoleon. It was not the first time he had made a remark which hinted at a deep-lying uncertainty about his decision to invade Russia.57 In the first weeks of the ‘war of annihilation’ that he had unleashed, Hitler’s genocidal mentality was surfacing. As in his discussions with the Japanese Ambassador Oshima a week earlier, Hitler went on to describe the Russian people as ‘bestial’. In advising Kvaternik to intervene at home with an iron fist against ‘criminals and anti-social elements’, Hitler declared that there was only one thing to be done with them: ‘annihilate (vernichten) them!’ It was necessary to ‘do away with (beseitigen) them’ or, if they were not dangerous, to lock them in concentration camps from which they must never be let out.58 Towards the end of the talks, Hitler turned to the Jews. He called them ‘the scourge of mankind’. ‘Jewish commissars’ had wielded brutal power in the Baltic, he stated. And now the Lithuanians, Estonians, and Latvians were taking ‘bloody revenge’ against them. He went on: ‘If the Jews had free rein as in the Soviet paradise, they would put the most insane plans into effect. Thus Russia has become a plague-centre (Pestherd) for mankind… For if only one state tolerates a Jewish family among it, this would provide the core bacillus (Bazillenherd) for a new decomposition. If there were no more Jews in Europe, the unity of the European states would be no longer disturbed. Where the Jews are sent to, whether to Siberia or Madagascar, is immaterial.’59