Holocaust: The Nazi Persecution and Murder of the Jews

by Peter Longerich

  carried out completely ruthlessly and that would demand ‘sacrifices in blood’. At

  the same time the central role of the Jews in preserving the Bolshevist system and

  their ‘potential enemy’ status were also emphasized. 78

  From the tenor of statements such as these it is clear that the Einsatzgruppe

  leadership was given a line to take in discussions concerning the treatment of Jews

  and Communists, a line that corresponded to the content of the orders and

  instructions that pertained to the Wehrmacht (the jurisdiction decree, the com-

  missar order, guidelines for the conduct of the troops). Furthermore it is clear that

  instructions were given that Heydrich shortly afterwards summarized in writing,

  making explicit reference, moreover, to the meeting on 17 June: in a letter to the

  heads of the Einsatzgruppen dated 29 June he merely referred to ‘attempts at self-

  purification’ that the commandos were to initiate; 79 in a letter to the Higher SS and Police Commanders of 2 July he informed them of the ‘most important instructions given by me to the Einsatzgruppen and Einsatzkommandos of the Security

  Police and the SD’. 80 In this second letter the point headed ‘executions’ contains the following list:

  Those to be executed are all

  Functionaries of the Comintern (and all professional Communist

  politicians of any kind)

  People’s Commissars

  Jews in Party and state posts

  other radical elements (saboteurs, propagandists, snipers, assassins,

  agitators, etc.)

  The revealing ‘etc.’ at the end of that list and the fact that Heydrich wrote in this

  letter of ‘removing all obstacles in the way of attempts at self-purification by anti-

  Communist or anti-Jewish circles in the areas to be occupied’, and of supporting

  such attempts, ‘albeit invisibly’, 81 suggest that the range of those to be executed was by no means clearly delimited. One can assume instead that the formulation

  Laying the Ground for Racial Annihilation

  191

  ‘all Jews in Party and state posts’ is an understated way of giving the order for

  annihilating a vaguely defined upper layer of Jews, mostly men, leaving the

  decision of how exactly to define this layer to the commandos themselves. The

  instructions given on 2 July do not, for example, expressly forbid the murder of

  women and children. The significance of the meetings that Heydrich held with the

  leadership of the Einsatzgruppen before the outbreak of war was therefore to make

  it clear to them that Soviet Jews and Bolshevism represented a closely interlinked

  collection of enemies, leaving it to them to shoot the Jews under one pretext or

  another, whether under the heading of state and Party functionaries, or agitators,

  or propagandists, or merely ‘etc.’.

  chapter 11

  THE MASS MURDER OF JEWISH MEN

  In the very first days of the war against the Soviet Union there is evidence to

  document both the attempts of the Einsatzgruppen to initiate ‘self-purification

  processes’ and the execution of Jewish men.

  Pogroms Organized by the Einsatzgruppen

  During the early days of the war, in Lithuania, Latvia, Western Ukraine (the

  eastern Polish area occupied by the Soviet Union), and to a lesser extent also in

  Belarus, 1 radical nationalist and anti-Semitic forces carried out large-scale pogroms against the local Jewish population. In accordance with the stereotype of

  ‘Jewish Bolshevism’ these forces made the Jewish minority responsible for the

  terror of Soviet occupation and exercised a bloody retribution. This manner of

  going about things was perfectly in accordance with the German formula of

  initiating ‘attempts at self-purification’, ‘invisibly’ where possible. Despite the

  disguise, German influence on these pogroms can be demonstrated in a large

  number of cases, as will be shown in what follows, using the reports made by the

  Einsatzgruppen. 2

  However, even where pogroms were already in progress before German troops

  arrived, there is evidence that they were not the expression of a spontaneous

  popular movement. The fact that all the pogroms proceeded in a similar way

  The Mass Murder of Jewish Men

  193

  suggests instead that they were to a very large extent triggered and steered by

  underground organizations formed under the regime of occupation; there is

  evidence, too, that in the months before the German attack these underground

  organizations were cooperating with German agencies and were planning for a

  radical policy of anti-Semitism after the ‘liberation’ of their homelands. 3

  It has been proved, for example, that during preparations for the war against

  the Soviet Union the Germans, and in particular military intelligence and the

  Reich Security Head Office, were working closely with Lithuanian émigrés who

  had fled to the German Reich and established their own organization, the LAF

  (Lithuanian Activist Front), which was in frequent contact with the Lithuanian

  underground. It is demonstrable, too, that the LAF made use of these channels in

  order to commit their comrades at home to violent attacks on Jews during the

  process of ‘liberating’ their country. It is more than likely that this approach was at

  least supported by the Germans, given the close cooperation between the LAF and

  German agencies. 4

  There were similarly close contacts between German agencies and Estonian and

  Latvian émigré organizations that were also drawn into the preparations for war. 5

  The Germans also harnessed both wings of the OUN (Organization of Ukrainian

  Nationalists) into their plans for attack and will have sustained and strongly

  encouraged the already radically anti-Semitic OUN in that direction. 6 Whether this also included an appeal to initiate pogroms cannot be demonstrated with

  sufficient certainty. 7 However, even where it is likely but not provable that local forces were briefed in the run-up to the war the reports of the Einsatzgruppen

  nonetheless show clearly how strong German influence was on the outbreak of

  pogroms.

  In the summary activity report prepared in mid-October by Einsatzgruppe A in

  the operational area of Army Group A—the so-called Stahlecker Report—there is

  a detailed account of the ‘attempts at self-cleansing’ initiated by the Einsatzgruppe

  itself:8 ‘It was necessarily the responsibility of the Einsatzgruppe to set in train the self-purification attempts and guide them into the correct channels in order to

  achieve the goal of cleansing as quickly as possible. It was no less important to

  create for a later date the firm and demonstrable fact that the liberated population

  was of its own accord resorting to the harshest measures against its Bolshevist and

  Jewish opponents without leaving any trace of instructions from the German side.’

  It was also ‘immediately obvious that only the first days after the occupation

  would offer opportunities for carrying out pogroms’.

  The Stahlecker Report goes on to say that, ‘astonishingly’, initiating the first

  pogrom in Kaunas in Lithuania had not proved ‘straightforward’; it had only got

  going after the Lithuanian partisan leaders, who had been brought in to carry it

  out, had been given ‘tips’ by the ‘small advance commando deployed in Kaunas’,

  again ‘w
ithout any German instructions or stimulus being discernible from the

  outside’. During this pogrom, which took place between 25 and 28 July and cost

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  Mass Executions in Occupied Soviet Zones, 1941

  the lives of some 3,800 people, Jewish men were violently dragged from their

  homes by Lithuanian ‘militia’, collected together in public squares and killed there

  or taken to fortresses and shot. 9 By the beginning of July, however, as an incident report makes clear, Einsatzgruppe A had already come to the conclusion that ‘no

  more mass shootings [were] possible’ in Kaunas; 10 a stop was therefore put to them.

  In Riga the Einsatzgruppe succeeded in initiating a pogrom in which 400 Jews

  were killed, but only after ‘appropriate influence [had been exerted] on the Latvian

  auxiliary police’. Further pogroms in that city were not felt to be ‘sustainable’

  because of the rapid calming of the population in general. 11 At the end of July Einsatzgruppe A reported on pogroms in other Latvian cities: according to these

  reports ‘in Jelgava [Mitau] and the surrounding areas . . . the remaining 1,550 Jews

  were expunged from the population without trace’. 12

  Pogroms that can be proved to have been initiated by the Germans were above

  all carried out by Einsatzgruppe C in the Ukraine. In Lvov (Lemberg), where the

  NKVD (the Soviet People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs) had shot some

  3,500 prisoners at the end of June and bloodily suppressed an attempted uprising

  by the OUN, pogroms were started by the indigenous population on 30 June, the

  day of the city’s occupation by German troops. They were probably initiated by

  the OUN and its militia. It is likely, however, that a special unit of the Wehrmacht

  played a key role in triggering this pogrom when it entered the city as an advance

  guard together with a battalion of Ukrainian nationalists under its command. The

  pogroms cost at least 4,000 lives and were finally ended by the Wehrmacht on 2

  July after it had spent two days observing but not intervening. 13 At that point, however, Einsatzgruppe C took over the organization of murderous activities:

  over the next few days, by way of ‘retribution’ for the murders committed by the

  NKVD, three Einsatzgruppe C commandos that had entered the city murdered

  2,500 to 3,000 Jews. 14 At the end of July, Ukrainian groups took back the initiative and were responsible for a further pogrom for which support from the German

  Special Purposes Commando was probably decisive once again. During the so-

  called ‘Petljura Days’ more than 2,000 Jews were murdered in Lviv. 15

  In Zloczow at the beginning of July, under the very eyes of Sonderkommando

  4b and tolerated by the city commandant, Ukrainian activists had organized a

  massacre of the Jewish population in which members of the SS Viking Division

  took part on a huge scale. The total number of victims is estimated to be at least

  2,000.16 In the district of Tarnopol, too, Ukrainian nationalist murdered Jews under the supervision of Sonderkommando 4b—on 7 July some 70 Jews were

  ‘herded together and finished off with a big salvo’. When it had finished, the

  commando described its deployment in Tarnopol in an incident report of 11 July,

  announcing more than 127 executions that it had conducted and a further 600

  dead ‘as part of the [Ukrainians’] anti-Jewish persecutions inspired by the

  Einsatzkommando’. 17

  The Mass Murder of Jewish Men

  195

  There are more ‘self-purification attempts’ inspired by Einsatzgruppe

  C that can be documented on the basis of its incident reports. ‘In Dobromil

  the synagogue was torched. In Sambor 50 Jews were murdered by the

  outraged crowd.’18 A few days later came the report, ‘in Krzemieniec between 100 and 150 Ukrainians were murdered by the Russians. . . . By way of reprisal

  the Ukrainians beat 150 Jews to death with clubs.’19 In Tarnopol and Choroskow they succeeded in ‘bringing 600 and 110 Jews to their deaths’ in

  pogroms. 20 What is remarkable, but also characteristic of the attitude of the Germans towards these ‘self-purification attempts’ is the ‘encouragement’

  (noted by Einsatzgruppe C in an incident report from early July) that the

  High Command of the 17th Army gave ‘for using first the anti-Jewish and

  anti-Communist Poles living in the newly conquered areas for these

  self-purification attempts’. 21

  In total, in the areas occupied by the Soviet Union between 1939 and 1941

  pogroms have been documented in more than 60 places; estimates place the

  number of dead at no less than 12,000, possibly as many as 24,000. 22 Despite the large number of victims, however, the Germans were disappointed with the results

  of the ‘self-purification attempts’ that they had initiated amongst the Ukrainian

  population. At the end of July Einsatzgruppe C was forced to admit, ‘recent

  attempts circumspectly to inspire anti-Jewish pogroms have unfortunately not

  had the desired effect’. 23 The deeper the Einsatzgruppe penetrated into the Ukraine, the more it was forced to recognize that the indigenous population

  was not prepared to carry out pogroms. 24

  Whilst these Einsatzgruppe reports create the impression that the initiative for

  the pogroms had always lain with the commandos themselves—as Heydrich had

  ordered—there are indications that in many places the pogroms were already

  under way when the commandos arrived and where the commandos concentrated

  on escalating the murders and bringing them under their own control. However, a

  closer analysis of the course of these pogroms shows how—as has already been

  noted—they were not spontaneous operations by indigenous populations but

  responses to initiatives from radical nationalist and anti-Semitic forces that had

  come together in the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists. Immediately after

  the withdrawal of the Soviet occupying forces, the OUN had seized the initiative in

  many places, set up provisional authorities and militias, and in some places, like

  Lvov, with the imminent end of Soviet domination in sight, had organized

  uprisings. There is something to be said for seeing the pogroms as components

  of an OUN strategy to seize power in this transitional phase, and some likelihood

  that the anti-Semitic components of this strategy were fostered by the German

  side even before war had broken out. 25

  But even if the pogroms can be attributed in large part to German plans to spark

  off ‘attempts at self-cleansing’, it has to be admitted that they would not have been

  possible if there had not already been a significant potential for anti-Semitic

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  Mass Executions in Occupied Soviet Zones, 1941

  violence in the indigenous population and if they had not been susceptible to

  mobilization for such murderous campaigns.

  This is true of the pogrom that a book by the historian Jan Tomasz Gross

  has made virtually emblematic of the indigenous population’s active partici-

  pation in and co-responsibility for the murder of Jews, and which has led to

  a wide-ranging debate on this topic, in Poland especially:26 the murder of several hundred Jews in the town of Jedwabne on 10 July 1941 by—according

  to Gross—their Polish neighbours. 27 Some of the victims were killed immediately, others burned alive in a barn. Even if the murders were carried out

  by local people—o
r more precisely by a group of forty or so men, distinct

  from other members of the indigenous population, mostly not from the town

  itself but from the surrounding area—closer analysis of the crime has now

  demonstrated that the pogrom was engineered by a unit of the German

  Security Police. This was probably a commando from the Gestapo office in

  Zichenau that had been assigned to Einsatzgruppe B as an auxiliary troop

  and which had organized several pogroms in the western part of the Voivo-

  deship of Bialystok (in which Jedwabne was located); it had recruited local

  Poles as auxiliary ‘pogrom police’ for this purpose. 28 This was also in accordance with Heydrich’s order of 1 July in which he had described Poles

  as an ‘element . . . for initiating pogroms’. 29

  Organized Shootings by Einsatzgruppen and Police

  Battalions in the First Weeks of the War

  Einsatzgruppe A

  Three of the four commandos under Einsatzgruppe A can be shown to have taken

  part in mass executions of Jewish men in the first days and weeks after the

  outbreak of war. 30 Einsatzkommando 1a shot 1,150 Jewish men in Daugavpils (Dünaburg) at the beginning of July 1941; the men had first been captured by

  Latvian auxiliaries after ‘they had been supported at the rear by the operations of

  the Einsatzkommando’. 31 After the pogrom in Riga, Einsatzkommando 2 reported the killing of more than 2,000 more Jews by the middle of July, partly ‘by Latvian

  auxiliary police, partly by our own forces’. 32 What this refers to is the infamous commando led by the Latvian Victor Arajas; it played an important role in these

  shootings, which mostly took place in the Bikernieki Forest. 33 At the end of June and in July the same commando, a company of Police Battalion 13, together with

  Latvian auxiliaries and members of the army and navy shot what were believed to

  be several thousand Jews in Liepāja (Libau). 34 In Jelgava (Mitau) a sub-unit of Einsatzkommando 2 shot some 160 Jews, including women and children, apparently in the first half of July. 35

  The Mass Murder of Jewish Men

  197

  Einsatzkommando 3 had been organizing mass shootings of Jewish men

  since early July in the city of Kaunas (Kovno). 36 The leader of this commando, Karl Jäger, reported on 1 December 1941 that the executions that had