Holocaust: The Nazi Persecution and Murder of the Jews

by Peter Longerich

  too, took place in towns where members of the same commando had already

  shot the men shortly before.

  The situation of the sub-unit of Einsatzkommando 3 stationed in the citadel in

  Daugavpils (Dünaburg) was somewhat different. Between the end of July and the

  middle of August it executed large numbers of men unfit for work, women, and

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  Mass Executions in Occupied Soviet Zones, 1941

  children and thus proceeded in the same way that would be typical in the months

  to come for the selection of victims within the ghettos.

  There was a different context again for the shooting of women and children in

  the area covered by Einsatzgruppe D, when members of Einsatzkommando 12

  shot several hundred Jewish refugees from a large group who were being driven

  back over the Dniester into Romanian-controlled territory because they could not

  keep pace with the marching tempo.

  The murderous practice of including women and children in shootings there-

  fore spread amongst the commandos only gradually and not in a uniform manner.

  One of the two sub-units of Einsatzkommando 8 was already shooting women

  and children in August, but the other seems only to have taken this step in

  September. Einsatzkommando 5 also only started to do this in September: by

  his own admission, commando leader Schulz could not make up his mind to

  put into practice the order he had received in August. And Sonderkommandos

  7a and 7b cannot be shown to have carried out large-scale operations in this

  period at all.

  We can reconstruct the manner in which the order to murder women and

  children was passed on from the testimonies of various commando leaders. These

  show that they were orally instructed to include women and children in the

  murders in August and September by their commanding officers (Filbert and

  Bradfisch by Nebe; Schulz by Rasch; Nosske and Drexel by Ohlendorf).

  With the mass shooting of women and children, the decisive step on the way

  towards a policy of racial annihilation had been taken. After the various units had

  crossed this threshold they moved on to ‘major operations’ (again each at a

  different pace) that affected the great mass of the Jewish civilian population.

  These were the comprehensive ‘cleansing operations’ designed to make whole

  swathes of the country ‘free of Jews’, and the mass executions of thousands in the

  ghettos that had been established in the meantime.

  The first such comprehensive ‘cleansing operations’ are documented for early

  August in Lithuania, where a few days after it had begun systematically shooting

  women and children Einsatzkommando 3 dramatically increased its total number

  of victims. The same can be shown to have happened in Latvia from August

  (Einsatzkommandos 2 and 3). Similar ‘cleansing operations’ took place in Belarus,

  the work divided between Police Battalion 11 and the 707th Division of the

  Wehrmacht. Einsatzgruppe D followed a similar strategy from the end of August

  on with Einsatzkommando 12 and Sonderkommando 10b in Transnistria, Ein-

  satzkommando 8 in September in the area around the Belarusian city of Borisov,

  and Einsatzkommando 5 from September in the Ukraine.

  The series of shootings in Daugavpils (Dünaburg) in Latvia at the end of July

  was followed by further massacres in the Baltic ghettos from September onwards,

  which claimed thousands of victims. In the area covered by Einsatzgruppe B, after

  the 1st Cavalry Regiment had already murdered the entire Jewish population of

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  253

  certain places at the beginning of August, early October saw the exhaustive ‘major

  operations’ in which all Jews were indiscriminately murdered. In the area under

  Einsatzgruppe C these ‘major operations’ began as early as the end of August

  (Kamenetsk-Podolsk); Einsatzgruppe D started them in mid- to late September

  (Dubăsari and Nikolayev).

  What can be concluded from this is that the range of executions was not

  extended as a result of a uniform series of orders but within a broad context for

  the issuing of orders that gave individual units considerable leeway over a certain

  period and room for manoeuvre that was used by the commandos according to

  the situations they encountered and based on their own assessments of the

  position. Factors such as the number of Jews present in the relevant district, the

  density with which commandos were deployed, collaboration with local forces,

  the attitude of allies, the degree of ghettoization, labour needs, the occupying

  forces’ need for accommodation, the nutritional situation, and others all played a

  significant role in the development of the commandos’ activities. These factors

  influenced the decision as to how, in what way and at what speed the two

  complementary annihilation strategies of ‘cleansing’ the ‘flat lands’ and ‘major

  operations’ in the ghettos would be implemented. The relatively large leeway that

  the units enjoyed, however, was reduced from the end of summer 1941: individual

  instructions, inspections, and such like by the SS leadership began to impose a

  degree of uniformity on the conduct of commandos to produce a strategy for

  ‘spaces free of Jews’.

  The Higher SS and Police Commanders evidently played a decisive role in the

  transition to a comprehensive racial cleansing, not least because the terrible wave

  of mass murders that they initiated in August and which reached hitherto

  unimagined magnitudes effectively meant that they seized the initiative from the

  Einsatzgruppe leadership. The role of the Higher SS and Police Commanders,

  Himmler’s plenipotentiaries, but also Himmler’s own indefatigable inspections

  during this period both point towards the central role that the Reichsführer SS

  fulfilled in the implementation of this process. A starting point can even be

  identified: the moment when the ‘securing of [the Eastern areas] by policing

  measures’ was made Himmler’s responsibility on 17 July. Himmler’s political

  motivation must have been his belief that the radicalization of ethnic ‘cleansing’

  in the East would provide him with his way in to taking on the complete

  ‘reordering’ of Lebensraum in the East. The long-term utopian plans for a ‘new

  order’ in the Eastern areas to be conquered foresaw the need to reduce the

  indigenous population there by 30 million, and it was intended that they should

  be implemented, at least in part, during the war. This anticipation of the future

  was bound to end in the destructive measures that constituted a politics of

  annihilation.

  This all suggests that it is doubtful whether the extension of executions in the

  occupied Eastern areas in summer and autumn 1941 can be adequately understood

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  Mass Executions in Occupied Soviet Zones, 1941

  using the paradigm of ‘coming to a decision, giving an order, carrying the order

  out’ that has its origins in the military. It casts into doubt, too, whether the search

  for a decisive ‘order’ which triggered the radicalization of the persecution of the

  Jews in the occupied areas can constitute an adequate research strategy.

  Hitler’s fundamental
decision of 16–17 July about where responsibility was to lie

  in the occupied Eastern areas, and Himmler’s appearance in Minsk on 14–15 of

  that month merely represent certain situations in a much more complex process

  in which decisions and their implementation were intimately linked. The starting

  point is characterized by a degree of consensus between the decision makers that

  the persecution of the Jews would indeed be intensified and radicalized as the war

  progressed. This consensus situation was the basis for instructions formulated in a

  very general manner and reckoning with the need for subordinates to use their

  initiative, instructions that were then transmitted via a series of different channels,

  and which created not a clear-cut command structure but a ‘climate of command’.

  In the first instance, this gave individual initiative considerable room for man-

  oeuvre; later on the whole process was steered and made more uniform at senior

  leadership level. This is a dialectical process, then, in which the top levels of

  leadership and the organs implementing decisions radicalized each other. How-

  ever, each element in this process is essential for putting the whole process into

  practice, and the process cannot be distilled into a single ‘order from the Führer’

  or one instruction authorized by Hitler.

  The reports made by the Einsatzgruppen allow us to construct at least an

  approximate estimate of the number of people murdered in the occupied Eastern

  areas during the first months of the war. Einsatzgruppe A reported that it had

  killed 118,000 Jews by mid-October and more than 229,000 by the end of January

  1942. 228 Of these 80,000 had been killed in Lithuania alone by mid-October, and by the end of January this figure had reached 145,000; in Latvia the totals were

  30,000 by mid-October and 35,000 by January; in Estonia some 1,000 indigenous

  Jews had been killed by the end of January; in Belarus the figure was 41,000 and in

  the old Soviet areas within the area covered by the Einsatzgruppe some 3,600 had

  been killed. Einsatzgruppe B reported 45,467 shootings by 31 October 1941 and in

  its situation report of 1 March 1942 it noted a total of 91,012 who had received

  ‘special treatment’ since the start of the war. The figures for Einsatzkommandos 8

  and 9—60,811 and 23,509 respectively—are particularly horrific. 229 The total number of Jews murdered by Einsatzgruppe C was 75,000 by 20 October. 230

  Einsatzgruppe D reported on 12 December 1941 that it had shot 54,696 people to

  date, and on 8 April 1942 the total was 91,678 of which at least 90 per cent were Jews. 231

  These monstrous figures indicate the huge extent of the mass murders but they

  do not represent precise statistics for the numbers of victims. It is not out of the

  question that, in order to underline their assiduousness, some commandos

  reported exaggerated totals or reported the same figures twice. On the other

  hand, whilst the Einsatzgruppe reports contain data on the Jewish victims who

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  255

  had been killed by other units, this information is neither reliable nor complete,

  especially when one considers the numbers of civilians murdered by units of the

  Wehrmacht or by the local militias.

  Nevertheless, the total number of Jewish civilians killed by the end of 1941

  during the first two phases of the persecution of the Jews in the occupied Eastern

  areas must be of the order of at least 500,000.

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  PART IV

  GENESIS OF THE FINAL SOLUTION ON A

  EUROPEAN SCALE, 1941

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  chapter 14

  PLANS FOR A EUROPE-WIDE DEPORTATION

  PROGRAMME AFTER THE START

  OF BARBAROSSA

  Decision on the Final Solution in the Summer of 1941?

  The Interpretation of Some ‘Key Documents’

  In parallel with the preparation and escalation of the racist war of extermination

  against the Soviet Union, from the spring of 1941 onwards a general, gradual

  radicalization of Judenpolitik can be observed within the whole German sphere of

  influence. Historians dispute whether a key decision to murder all European Jews

  lies behind this radicalization, and when the decision occurred. Thus the first

  months1 of 1941, the summer, 2 the autumn, 3 or even December4 of the same year are given as possible dates for a ‘Führerentscheidung’ (decision by the Führer) in

  the ‘Jewish question’; on the other hand there is a tendency to stress more strongly

  the idea that decisions were made as part of an ongoing process, that no concrete

  individual decision by Hitler can be assumed, 5 and that there was a series of individual decisions by the dictator that led to an escalation of the persecution of

  the Jews. 6

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  Final Solution on a European Scale, 1941

  Having already rejected the thesis of a decision to implement the ‘Final Solution’

  early in 1941 or in the spring of that year, 7 we should like now to deal primarily with arguments that may be introduced to support the theory that a decision to

  murder all European Jews was made some time in the summer of 1941. This thesis

  still seemed plausible even into the 1970s and 1980s; until that point there were

  good reasons for holding the view that Hitler had ordered the murder of Jews

  living in the Soviet Union in the spring or summer of 1941. Both decisions—the

  one to murder the Soviet Jews and the other to murder the European Jews—

  seemed inseparably connected or at least closely related in temporal sequence. As

  we have already seen in the previous chapter, however, the thesis of an early order

  from the Führer to murder the Soviet Jews is no longer tenable, but must make

  way for the idea of a gradual and progressive radicalization process that lasted

  from spring until autumn 1941.

  From this sophisticated perspective, Christopher Browning above all has devel-

  oped a theory based on the idea that the fate of the European Jews was only

  decided as part of a lengthier decision-making process: Browning proceeds on the

  assumption that in mid-July 1941, in a state of euphoria about his imminent

  victory, along with the decision to escalate the extermination policy in the Soviet

  Union, Hitler set in motion the decision-making process that led to the extension

  of the ‘Final Solution’ to the Jews in the rest of Europe. Then, in mid-September

  1941, along with the decision in principle to deport the German Jews, but still with

  reservations, he had agreed to the murder of the deportees, and in October, once

  again filled with the euphoria of victory, a start had been made on putting this

  decision into action. Thus, for Browning, the events of the summer and the late

  summer are of the greatest importance. 8

  In my view, however, there is no convincing documentary evidence for the

  thesis of one or indeed of several decisions by the Führer in the spring and/or

  summer of 1941. Thus Heydrich’s ‘authorization’ issued by Goering on 31 July 1941

  is certainly not, as some authors assume, 9 the crucial authorization of the head of the RSHA to carry out an order already issued by Hitler to murder the European

  Jews. In the letter Heydrich was not given the task of implementing the ‘Final

&
nbsp; Solution’; in fact, Heydrich asked Goering, who had had formal responsibility for

  the ‘Jewish question’ since 1938, and had put Heydrich in charge of emigration in

  January 1939, to sign a declaration drafted by him. 10 This authorized him ‘to make all necessary preparations from an organizational, functional, and material point

  of view for a total solution of the Jewish question within the German sphere of

  influence in Europe’ and he received the task of presenting an ‘overall draft’ for the

  corresponding ‘preparatory measures’. 11

  The formulation contained in this authorization, that where ‘the competencies

  of other central authorities are affected by these matters, they are to be involved’,

  must have referred in particular to Rosenberg’s Eastern Ministry. For, once before,

  in late March 1941, it had proved impossible to implement Goering’s authorization

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  261

  because the competencies of Rosenberg, already designated as Eastern Minister,

  had not been clarified. 12 But now a formula had been found that took Rosenberg’s responsibilities into consideration.

  This makes it clear that the preparations for the ‘total solution’ entrusted to

  Heydrich were to take in the occupied Soviet territories, and hence at first the

  planned mass deportation of the European Jews to the East. 13

  In fact Heydrich was not to make use of his authorization until November 1941,

  when he issued invitations to the Wannsee Conference and included a copy of the

  letter signed by Goering in the invitation. Heydrich’s ‘empowerment’ was thus

  primarily a formal ‘legitimation designed for third parties’14 and not the commission to implement the ‘Final Solution’.

  Neither is there any evidence to sustain Richard Breitman’s thesis that in late

  August, a few weeks after Heydrich’s ‘authorization’ by Goering, a fully elaborated

  ‘plan’ by Heydrich to murder the European Jews with gas had been authorized by

  Himmler. The entry for 26 August 1941 in the diary kept by Himmler’s adviser, on

  which Breitman relies, actually refers to the authorization of a ‘travel schedule’ for

  Heydrich. The head of the Security Police intended to fly to Norway. 15 Likewise, Tobias Jersak’s thesis that Hitler had made a decision in mid-August to murder all