by Ian Kershaw
21
Fulfilling the ‘Prophecy’
I
It was no accident that the war in the east led to genocide. The ideological objective of eradicating ‘Jewish-Bolshevism’ was central, not peripheral, to what had been deliberately designed as a ‘war of annihilation’. It was inseparably bound up with the military campaign. With the murderous onslaught of the Einsatzgruppen, backed by the Wehrmacht, launched in the first days of the invasion, the genocidal character of the conflict was already established. It would rapidly develop into an all-out genocidal programme, the like of which the world had never seen.
Hitler spoke a good deal during the summer and autumn of 1941 to his close entourage in the most brutal terms imaginable, about his ideological aims in crushing the Soviet Union. During the same months, he also spoke on numerous occasions in his monologues in the Führer Headquarters – though invariably in barbaric generalizations – about the Jews. These were the months in which, out of the contradictions and lack of clarity of anti-Jewish policy, a programme to kill all the Jews in Nazi-occupied Europe began to take concrete shape.
In contrast to military affairs, where his repeated interference reflected his constant preoccupation with tactical minutiae and his distrust of the army professionals, Hitler’s involvement in ideological matters was less frequent and less direct. He had laid down the guidelines in March 1941. He needed to do little more. Self-combustion would see to it that, once lit, the genocidal fires would rage into a mighty conflagration amid the barbarism of the war to destroy ‘Jewish-Bolshevism’. When it came to ideological aims, in contrast to military matters, Hitler had no need to worry that the ‘professionals’ would let him down. He could rest assured that Himmler and Heydrich, above all, would leave no stone unturned in eliminating the ideological enemy once and for all. And he could be equally certain that they would find willing helpers at all levels among the masters of the new Imperium in the east, whether these belonged to the party, the police, or the civilian bureaucracy. Organization, planning, and execution could confidently be left to others. There was no shortage of those keen to ‘carry out practical work for our Führer’, as one lowly police officer put it. It was sufficient that his authorization for the major steps was provided; and that he could take for granted that, with regard to the ‘Jewish Question’, his ‘prophecy’ of 1939 was being fulfilled.
On the eve of ‘Barbarossa’, Hitler had assured Hans Frank that the Jews would be ‘removed’ from the General Government ‘in the foreseeable future’. Frank’s province could therefore be regarded merely as a type of ‘transit camp’. Frank registered the pleasure at being able to ‘get rid’ of the Jews from the General Government, and remarked that Jewry was ‘gradually perishing’ in Poland. ‘The Führer had indeed prophesied that for the Jews,’ commented Goebbels. From early in the year the intention had been, as we noted, to deport the Jews from Frank’s domain to the east, following the victory over the Soviet Union – expected by the autumn. The Jews from Poland, then from the rest of Europe, would be wiped out in the east within a few years by starvation and being worked to death in the icy wastes of an arctic climate. For those incapable of work, the intended fate, if not spelled out, was not difficult to imagine.
The 5–6 million Jews of the USSR were included in the wholesale resettlement scheme for the racial reordering of eastern Europe, the ‘General Plan for the East’ which Himmler, two days after the launch of ‘Barbarossa’, had commissioned his settlement planners to prepare. The Plan envisaged the deportation over the subsequent thirty years of 31 million persons, mainly Slavs, beyond the Urals and into western Siberia. Without doubt, the Jews would have been the first ethnic group to perish in a territorial solution which, for them, was tantamount to their death warrant. What was intended was in itself plainly genocidal. The ‘territorial solution’ could, therefore, be seen as a type of intended ‘final solution’. But shooting or gassing to death all the Jews of Europe – the full-scale industrialized killing programme that evolved over the following months into what would then be a differently defined ‘final solution’ – was at this stage not in mind.
Reinhard Heydrich had already in March received the green light from Hitler to send the Einsatzgruppen into the Soviet Union in the wake of the Wehrmacht to ‘pacify’ the conquered areas by eradicating ‘subversive elements’. According to a letter which Heydrich sent on 2 July to the four newly appointed Higher SS and Police Leaders for the conquered areas of the Soviet Union, the Einsatzgruppen had been instructed to liquidate, alongside Communist functionaries and an array of ‘extremist elements’, ‘all Jews in the service of the party and state’. Heydrich’s verbal briefings must have made clear that the widest interpretation was to be placed on such an instruction.
From the beginning, the killings were far from confined to Jews who were Communist Party or state functionaries. Already on 3 July, for instance, the chief of the Einsatzkommando in Luzk in eastern Poland had some 1,160 Jewish men shot. He said he wanted to put his stamp on the town. In Kowno in Lithuania as many as 2,514 Jews were shot on 6 July. Shootings were carried out by Einsatzkommando 3, based in this area, on twenty days in July. Of the ‘executions’, totalling 4,400 (according to a meticulous listing), the vast majority were Jews. But the briefings had evidently not been unambiguous. They were capable of being interpreted in different ways. Whereas Einsatzgruppe A, in the Baltic, was almost unconstrained in its killing, Einsatzgruppe B in White Russia initially targeted, in the main, the Jewish ‘intelligentsia’, while Einsatzgruppe C spoke of working the Jews to death in reclaiming the Pripet Marshes. While some Einsatzkommandos were slaughtering Jews more or less indiscriminately, one killer squad in Chotin on the Dnjestr confined its murderous action in early July to Communist and Jewish ‘intellectuals’ (apart from doctors).
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.
The killing units were assisted in the early stages by Lithuanian nationalists who were prompted into savage pogroms against the Jews. 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 eye-witness 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. 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.
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 enciphered 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.’
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.’ Three months later, when he visited Vilna, Goebbels spoke again of the ‘horrible�
� ‘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’. He described the Jews as ‘the lice of civilized mankind. They had to be somehow eradicated, otherwise they would always again play their torturing 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.’
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. 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. ‘The relationship to the Wehrmacht is now, as before, wholly untroubled,’ 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.’
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 above all against the Jews, the main carriers of Bolshevism.’ 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. The soldier must therefore have full understanding for the necessity of the severe but just atonement from the Jewish subhumans.’ 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.’
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, 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’.
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 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 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 …’
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. But the ‘partisan struggle’ only began in earnest in the autumn. 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 leading SS spokesmen on the ‘combating of partisans’. The participants took away from their ‘orientation 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.’
Such voices were influential. There were, however, others. 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. 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.
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 horrors of ‘Jewish-Bolshevism’, on the march into Russia they frequently looked to confirm their prejudices. 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. 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.’ 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’.
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. 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 retaliat
ion for the arson in Kiev, all Jews were arrested and on 29 and 30.9 a total of 33,771 Jews were executed.’ 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.
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. 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. 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.
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 sub-machine gun, mowing down their naked victims as they knelt at the edge of a pit.