The summer of 1941 was not only a crucial time in the development of Auschwitz, it was also a decisive moment in both the course of the war against the Soviet Union and the Nazis’ policy towards the Soviet Jews. Superficially, during July the war seemed to be going well with the Wehrmacht making good progress against the Red Army. As early as July 3rd, Franz Halder of the German High Command wrote in his diary, “It is thus probably no overstatement to say that the Russian campaign has been won in the space of two weeks.” Goebbels echoed such thoughts in his own diary on July 8th, writing, “No one doubts any more that we shall be victorious in Russia.” By mid-July, Panzer units were 600 kilometers inside the Soviet Union and by the end of the month a Soviet intelligence officer—on the orders of Beria, Goebbels’ Soviet counterpart—was approaching the Bulgarian ambassador in Moscow to see if he would act as an intermediary with the Germans and sue for peace.59
But on the ground the situation was more complex. The policy of starvation which had been such a central part of the invasion strategy meant that, for example, Vilnius, the capital of Lithuania, had by the start of July food supplies for only two weeks. Goering stated clear Nazi policy when he said that the only people who were entitled to be fed by the invading force were those “performing important tasks for Germany.”60 There was also the unresolved question of the dependants of those Jewish men who had been shot by the Einsatzgruppen. These women and children, having in most cases lost their breadwinners, were liable to starve especially swiftly; they were certainly not “performing important tasks for Germany.”
Meanwhile, a crisis over food supply was predicted, not just on the Eastern Front but back in Poland in the Łódź ghetto. In July 1941, Rolf-Heinz Hoeppner of the SS wrote to Adolf Eichmann, who was in charge of the section dealing with Jewish affairs in the Reich Security Main Office:This winter there is a danger that not all the Jews can be fed any more. One should weigh honestly, if the most humane solution might not be to finish off those of the Jews who are not fit for work by means of some quick-working device. At any rate, that would be more pleasant than to let them starve to death.
It is significant that Hoeppner writes of the potential need to kill those Jews “not fit to work”—not all the Jews. Increasingly, from the spring of 1941, the Nazis were making a distinction between Jews who were useful to the Germans and those who were not—a distinction that would later become crystallized in the infamous “selections” of Auschwitz.
At the end of July Himmler issued orders that were to resolve the question of those Jews who were considered “useless eaters” by the Nazis—at least as far as the Eastern Front was concerned. He reinforced the Einsatzgruppen with units of the SS cavalry and police battalions. Eventually about 40,000 men would be involved in the killing—a ten-fold increase in the initial complement of the Einsatzgruppen. This massive increase in manpower was for a reason—the policy of killing in the East was to be extended to include Jewish women and children. The order for this action reached different Einsatzgruppe commanders at different times over the next few weeks, often given by Himmler personally as he went on a tour of the killing fields. But by mid-August all the commanders of the murder squads knew of the expansion of their task.
This moment marks a turning point in the killing process. Once women and children were to be shot, the Nazi persecution of the Jews entered an entirely different conceptual phase. Almost all the Nazi anti-Jewish policies during the war so far had been potentially genocidal, and Jewish women and children had already died in the ghettos or during the failed Nisko emigration. But this was different. Now the Nazis had decided to gather together women and children, make them strip, line them up next to an open pit, and shoot them. There could be no pretence that a baby was an immediate threat to the German war effort, but a German soldier would now look at that little child and pull the trigger.
Many factors came together at this crucial time to cause the change in policy. One important precondition was, of course, that the Jewish women and children in the Soviet Union now presented a “problem” for the Nazis—one the Nazis had created themselves by a combination of shooting male Jews and instigating a policy of starvation in the East. But that was not the only reason the decision was taken to extend the killing. In July, Hitler had announced that he wanted a German “Garden of Eden” in the East–and, by implication, there would be no place for the Jews in this new Nazi paradise. (And it can surely be no accident that Himmler ordered the extension of the killing to include women and children after attending several secret one-on-one meetings with Hitler in July—this move could not have occurred without the Führer wishing it so.) With killing units already shooting Jewish men, it must have seemed a logical step from the Nazi ideological perspective to send extra men to the murder squads in order to “cleanse” this new “Garden of Eden” completely.
Hans Friedrich61 was a member of one of the SS infantry units that was sent to the East to reinforce the Einsatzgruppen in the summer of 1941. His SS brigade operated primarily in the Ukraine and he says they met no resistance from the Jews they came to murder. “They [the Jews] were extremely shocked, utterly frightened and petrified, and you could do what you wanted with them. They had resigned themselves to their fate.” The SS and its Ukrainian collaborators forced the Jews out of their village and made them stand by adeep, broad ditch. They had to stand in such a way that when they were shot they would fall into the ditch. That then happened again and again. Someone had to go down into the ditch and check conscientiously whether they were still alive or not, because it never happened that they were all mortally wounded at the first shot. And if somebody wasn’t dead and was lying there injured, then he was shot with a pistol.
Friedrich admits that he himself shot Jews in these pit killings.62 He claims that he thought of “nothing” as he saw his victims standing just a few meters in front of him: “I only thought, ‘Aim carefully so that you hit.’ That was my thought. When you’ve got to the point where you’re standing there with a gun ready to shoot ... there’s only one thing, a calm hand so that you hit well. Nothing else.” He says his conscience has never troubled him over the murders he committed; he has never had a bad dream about the subject or woken in the night and questioned what he did.
Documents confirm that Friedrich was a member of the SS 1st Infantry Brigade which entered the Ukraine on July 23rd. Although Friedrich—either because of the distance of time or out of a desire not to incriminate himself further—is not specific about the exact places where he carried out the killings, the records point to his brigade having participated in a number of murders of Jews in several named places.
One such action took place in the western Ukraine on August 4, 1941. More than 10,000 Jews from surrounding villages had been forced from their homes and gathered in the town of Ostrog. “Early in the morning [of 4 August] the cars and lorries came,” says Vasyl Valdeman,63 then a twelveyear-old member of a Jewish family. “They were armed and came with dogs.” Having surrounded the town, the SS forced thousands of Jews out towards a nearby hamlet where there was an area of sandy soil. “Everyone understood that we were going to be shot,” says Vasyl Valdeman,but it was impossible for the SS to shoot those amounts of people. We arrived there at ten o’clock [in the morning] and everyone was ordered to sit down. It was very hot. There was no food or water; people were just pissing on the ground. It was a very hard time. Somebody said they would rather be shot than sit there in the hot weather. Someone fainted and some people just died of fear itself.
Oleksiy Mulevych,64 a local villager, saw what happened next. He climbed on to the roof of a nearby barn and witnessed small groups of fifty or one hundred Jews being led away from the field and ordered to strip naked. “They put the Jews on the edge of a pit,” he says, “and officers told their soldiers to choose a Jews to shoot at ... The Jews were crying and shouting. They felt they saw their death ... Then everyone shot and the Jews fell immediately. The officer then chose strong Jews to throw the bodies into
the pit.”
The shootings continued all day. Several thousand Jews—men, women, and children—were murdered, but there were simply too many Jews for the SS to kill everyone in this single action. So, at nightfall, the remainder, including Vasyl Valdeman and his family, were moved back to Ostrog. In this and subsequent actions Vasyl lost his father, grandmother, grandfather, two brothers, and two uncles, but together with his mother he managed to escape from the ghetto and was hidden by local villagers for the next three years until the Red Army liberated the Ukraine. “I don’t know about other villages,” he says, “but people in our village helped Jews very much.”
A few days later, Oleksiy Mulevych went out to visit the killing fields and saw a gruesome sight: “The sand was moving. I think there were wounded people who were moving under the sand. I felt sorry. I wanted to help, but then I understood that even if I took someone from the pit I could not cure them.”
“We had dogs at our house,” says Vasyl Valdeman, “but we never were as cruel to them as the fascists were to us ... I was thinking all the time, ‘What makes these people so cruel?’” Hans Friedrich has one answer to Vasyl Valdeman’s question—hatred. “If I’m honest I have no empathy [for the Jews]. For the Jews harmed me and my parents so much that I cannot forget.” As a result, Friedrich is “not sorry” for murdering all the Jews he shot. “My hatred towards the Jews is too great.” When pressed, he admits that he felt—and still feels—justified in killing the Jews out of “revenge.”
An understanding of Friedrich’s past is crucial to any attempt at comprehending both why he felt able to take part in the killing and why he feels able to defend his actions today. He was born in 1921 in a part of Romania dominated by ethnic Germans. As he grew up he learned to hate the Jews he and his family encountered. His father was a farmer and the Jews in the locality acted as traders, buying produce and then selling it at market. Friedrich was told by his parents that the Jews earned too much profit from their business dealings and that he and his family were regularly cheated by them. “I would like to have seen you,” Friedrich adds, “if you had experienced what we experienced—if you were a farmer and wanted to sell, say, pigs and you couldn’t do it. You could only do it via a Jewish trader. Try to put yourself in our position. You were no longer master of your own life.”
As adolescents during the 1930s, Friedrich and his friends painted posters that proclaimed, “Don’t buy from Jews” and “The Jews are our misfortune,” and hung them over the entrance to a Jewish shop. He felt “proud” as he did this because he had “warned against the Jew.” He read the propaganda of the Nazi state—particularly the violently anti-Semitic Der Stürmer—and found that it fitted perfectly with his own developing worldview.
In 1940 he joined the SS “because the German Reich was at war” and he “wanted to be there.” He believes that “there were connections between Jews and Bolshevism—there was sufficient evidence to prove this.” When, as a member of the SS, Friedrich advanced into the Ukraine in the summer of 1941 he believed he wasn’t entering a “civilized” country “like France,” but instead somewhere that was at best “half civilized” and “far behind Europe.” Then, when asked to kill Jews, he did it willingly, all the time thinking he was taking revenge for the Jewish traders who had allegedly cheated his family. That these were different Jews altogether—Jews, indeed, from another country—mattered not at all. As he puts it, “They’re all Jews.”
Far from being sorry for having participated in the extermination of the Jews, Hans Friedrich has no regrets of any kind. Although he never said so in these terms, he gives every impression of being proud of what he and his comrades did. The justification for his actions is, in his mind, clear and absolute: The Jews did him and his family harm, and the world is a better place without them. In an unguarded moment, Adolf Eichmann remarked that the knowledge of having participated in the murder of millions of Jews gave him such satisfaction that he would “jump laughingly into his grave.” It is easy to see how Hans Friedrich might feel exactly the same emotion.
While this expansion in the killing was being implemented on the Eastern Front during the summer of 1941, however, it is less clear that this was the moment at which the whole of the Nazis’ “Final Solution”—encompassing millions more Jews, including those in Germany, Poland, and western Europe—was decided upon. One document does perhaps suggest a connection between the two. On July 31, Heydrich obtained Goering’s signature on a paper which stated:To supplement the task that was assigned to you on 24 January 1939, which dealt with the solution of the Jewish problem by emigration and evacuation in the most suitable way, I hereby charge you to submit a comprehensive blueprint of the organizational, subject-related and material preparatory measures for the execution of the intended Final Solution of the Jewish question.
The timing of this document—on the face of it—is crucial: Goering signs Heydrich’s general authorization for the “Final Solution” of all the Jews under German control at exactly the moment the killing squads are to be used to shoot Jewish women and children in the East.
However, a recent discovery in the Moscow Special Archive casts doubt on the special significance of the July 31st authorization. This document contains a note from Heydrich dated March 26, 1941, which states: “With respect to the Jewish question I reported briefly to the Reich Marshal [Goering] and submitted to him my new blueprint, which he authorized with one modification concerning Rosenberg’s jurisdiction, and then ordered for resubmission.”65 Heydrich’s “new blueprint” was most likely a response to the change in the Nazis’ anti-Jewish policy caused by the forthcoming invasion of the Soviet Union. The idea of transporting the Jews to Africa had been abandoned and, early in 1941, Hitler had ordered Heydrich to prepare a scheme to deport the Jews somewhere within German control. The war with the Soviet Union was expected to last only a few weeks and be over before the onset of the Russian winter, so it was reasonable, Heydrich and Hitler must have felt, to plan for the Jews to be pushed further east that autumn in an internal solution to their self-created Jewish problem. In the wasteland of eastern Russia the Jews would suffer intensely.
As the July 31 authorization makes clear, Heydrich was first assigned the task of planning the “solution of the Jewish problem by emigration and evacuation” at the start of 1939, and so discussions about his jurisdiction and room for maneuver within the Nazi state on this issue must have been ongoing since then. Alfred Rosenberg (mentioned in the March 26 document), who was formally appointed Minister of the Occupied Eastern Territories by Hitler on July 17, 1941, was a potential threat to Heydrich’s own power in the East, and the July 31 authorization may well have been issued to help Heydrich clarify his own position.
So, on balance, the new evidence does not support the once prevalent view that there was some conclusive decision taken by Hitler in the spring or summer of 1941 to order the destruction of all the Jews of Europe, and the July 31 authorization is an important part. The more likely scenario is that as all the leading Nazis focused their attention on the war against the Soviet Union, the decision to kill the women and children in the East was seen as the practical way of solving an immediate and specific problem.
Nonetheless, this particular “solution” would, in turn, create further problems and, as a result, new killing methods would be devised which would enable Jews and others to be murdered on an even greater scale. A vital moment in that process of transformation occurred on August 15th when Heinrich Himmler visited Minsk and saw at first hand the work of his killing squads. One of those who attended the execution with him was Walter Frentz,66 an officer in the Luftwaffe who was working as a cameraman at Hitler’s headquarters. Not only was Frentz shaken by the killings, it was clear to him that so were some members of the execution squad. Says Frentz,I went along to the site of the execution, and afterwards 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!”
It was not just this particular officer who felt traumatized after the Minsk shootings. SS Obergruppenführer (lieutenant-general) von dem Bach-Zelewski, who witnessed the same killings, said to Himmler, “Reichsführer, those were only a hundred.... Look at the eyes of the men in this Kommando, how deeply shaken they are! These men are finished for the rest of their lives. What kind of followers are we training here? Either neurotics or savages!”67 Subsequently, Bach-Zelewski himself became psychologically ill as a result of the murders, experiencing “visions” of the killings in which he had participated.
As a result of these protests and what he had personally witnessed, Himmler ordered a search for a method of killing that caused fewer psychological problems for his men. Accordingly, a few weeks later Dr. Albert Widmann, an SS Untersturmführer (2nd lieutenant) from the Technical Institute of the Criminal Police, traveled East to meet Artur Nebe, the commander of Einsatzgruppe B, at his headquarters in Minsk. Previously Widmann had been instrumental in devising the gassing technique used to murder mentally ill patients. Now he would bring his expertise east.
Incredibly, one of the first methods Widmann tried in an attempt to “improve” the killing process in the Soviet Union was to blow his victims up. Several mentally ill patients were put in a bunker along with packets of explosives. Wilhelm Jaschke, a captain in Einsatzkommando 8, witnessed what happened next:The sight was atrocious. The explosion hadn’t been powerful enough. Some wounded came out of the dugout crawling and crying. ...68 The bunker had totally collapsed.... Body parts were scattered on the ground and hanging in the trees. On the next day, we collected the body parts and threw them into the bunker. Those parts that were too high in the trees were left there.69
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