Ostkrieg

by Stephen G. Fritz

Barbarossa, as Adam Tooze has stressed, thus marked a significant departure: it was not only the most massive military campaign in history, but it also unleashed an unprecedented campaign of genocidal violence, of which the Holocaust remains the best-known example. This Judeocide, however, was not an isolated act of murder; rather, it formed part of a deliberate, comprehensive plan of exploitation, a utopian scheme of racial reorganization and demographic engineering of vast proportions. The Nazis had attempted, and failed, in 1939–1940 amid appalling brutality to carry off a smaller resettlement scheme in Poland and had seen the inflated hopes of the Madagascar Plan come to naught because of the intransigence of the British, but, if anything, these failures only intensified their enthusiasm for population transfer and resettlement. Why not? The presumed quick victory in the east would bring millions more Jews under Nazi control, and it conjured visions not only of solving the Jewish question but also of reordering the racial composition of Eastern Europe. At the same time, vast areas would be opened to German colonization. Best of all, it could be accomplished entirely under German control. In the short term, German administrators of the conquered eastern territories would ruthlessly exploit the food resources of the area to ensure, as Hitler emphasized repeatedly, that in this war it would not be Germans who starved. Complementing this would be the long-term project of racial engineering that would open the eastern lands to German colonization and development, as the ethnic boundary of Germany was to be pushed to the Ural Mountains. In the process, tens of millions of Slavic inhabitants (and Jews) would be killed, either through deliberate starvation or as a result of forcible emigration.30

  If in execution the German plans for the occupied east resembled the last act in the bloody history of European colonialism, in inspiration Nazi ideas actually had more in common with American Manifest Destiny. Hitler had little interest in colonies, preferring, along the lines of the American frontier myth, millions of farmers who would settle and develop the area, modernize it, and make it a realm of new beginnings. “Our Mississippi must be the Volga, not the Niger,” Hitler declared in the autumn of 1941, while emphasizing that the bloody conquest of the American West provided both historical precedent and justification. “Here in the east a similar process will repeat itself for the second time as in the conquest of America,” he exulted, whereby an allegedly superior settler population had displaced a supposedly inferior native population, thus opening unlimited economic possibilities. “Europe—and not America—will be the land of unlimited possibilities.” This was a modernizing vision, one closely tied to the Nazi promise of the 1930s that the Germans should finally achieve a quality of life commensurate with their racial value. The abundant resources of the east, combined with German expertise and capital investment, would propel a dramatic increase in the standard of living, made possible at the expense of the eastern peoples.31

  The concrete expression of this program of racial reorganization, the blueprint for the social order to be erected in the east, was Generalplan Ost (General plan for the east), developed by Professor Konrad Meyer of Himmler’s Reich Commissariat for the Strengthening of the German People (RKFDV). Officially charged by Himmler just one day before the launch of Barbarossa with drawing up a blueprint for the colonization and restructuring of the eastern territories, Meyer presented a first draft of the plan just three weeks later, on 15 July, that clearly indicated that he had been working on the matter for some time. A project that envisioned extensive German settlement and exploitation of the east as well as the forced Germanization, displacement, and expulsion of millions of people, it necessitated the creation of slave labor camps whose inmates would be set to work on the enormous construction projects. Meyer himself foresaw the “resettlement” of 65–85 percent of the Baltic, Polish, Ukrainian, and Belorussian populations, with numbers thrown around ranging from 31 to 51 million people. Since the ultimate destination of those displaced remained unclear, “natural wastage” on a vast scale must have been assumed, so genocide was implicit in Generalplan Ost from the beginning. In its assumption of mass death through slave labor and the physical destruction of certain groups (Bolsheviks, Communist bureaucrats, Jews, the urban population of Russia), the plan anticipated and was directly linked to the so-called Final Solution.32

  By the time German forces invaded the Soviet Union, then, a considerable murderous momentum had already been built up. Large numbers of Jews were already dying of “natural causes” in the wretchedly overcrowded ghettos of Poland, while the brutal treatment of the local population in occupied Poland as well as Hitler’s firm intention to fight a war of annihilation in Russia both lowered the threshold of genocidal violence. If the purpose of the war was threefold—to destroy the threat of Jewish-Bolshevism, to find a solution to the Jewish question, and to secure living space for Germany’s elevation to great power status—the ends would determine the means. The SS and Einsatzgruppen would implement the first two goals, while the Ostheer, in feeding itself off the land, would reduce the strain on the German home front while ensuring that malnutrition would claim the lives of millions of Soviet citizens.

  Given the set of criminal orders issued to the army and the creation of the SS murder squads, it should be no surprise that killings of civilians began almost immediately after German forces crossed the Soviet frontier and quickly escalated in scope and intensity. Although Heydrich had briefed Einsatzgruppen leaders on their tasks, his early instructions had been relatively restrictive, even if imprecise. The initial killings were to target those groups listed in the Commissar Order: political officers in the army, Communist Party officials and functionaries, the Jewish-Bolshevik intelligentsia, and young male Jews (as the likely source of any partisan resistance). Still, Heydrich granted wide discretionary powers to squad leaders to interpret their instructions in a suitably radical fashion. Not atypically, then, zealous local commanders often interpreted the vague guidelines in more radical fashion in order, for example, to kill all male Jews in a village or rural area. The first killings, in fact, were perpetrated by a local Gestapo official in Tilsit, in East Prussia along the Lithuanian border, who on his own initiative but in accordance with directives issued by the leader of Einsatzgruppe A, Franz Walter Stahlecker, on 24 June ordered the shooting of two hundred male Jews in Garsden. A few days later, a police battalion slaughtered two thousand Jews in Bialystok, including women and children, many of them burned alive in a synagogue that had been set on fire. German police officials also encouraged the local population, especially in Lithuania, to foment pogroms against the Jewish population. Some, such as that in Kaunas, the Lithuanian capital, on the night of 25–26 June involved appalling brutality, with more than fifteen hundred Jews “eliminated” and several synagogues burned in a chaos of horror. In one frightful scene, a young Lithuanian with a club beat fifteen to twenty Jews to death amid a chorus of enthusiastic cheers and laughter from the onlooking crowd, which burst into the national anthem at the end. Invariably, these destructive precedents established on the local level were sanctioned by Himmler or Heydrich, thus setting new levels of acceptable violence.33

  Einsatzgruppen units had also swung into deadly action by early July. On the third, the head of an Einsatzkommando in eastern Poland had 1,160 Jewish men shot. In Kaunas, Lithuania, units of Einsatzgruppe A shot almost 500 Jews on 4 July, while two days later they killed 2,514. In Bialystok, almost 1,000 Jews were murdered in the first half of the month. The other Einsatzgruppen were active as well, with shootings widespread in Belorussia and Ukraine, although the various murder squad leaders in these areas interpreted their orders differently. While Einsatzgruppe A seemed virtually unconstrained in its murderous activities, Einsatzgruppe B in Belorussia initially targeted Jewish intellectuals, while its counterpart in Ukraine, Einsatzgruppe C, indicated its intention of working Jews to death in labor projects. Himmler and Heydrich also fomented the killing process through their frequent visits to the field, appealing to their subordinates’ sense of initiative, and exhorting police and
SS officials to greater efforts in killing Jews. In this initial phase of the killing process, a complex dynamic developed. Instructions issued from the center both encouraged radical action and protected individuals from any legal consequences, but, in the absence of a specific killing order, top Nazi leaders left considerable room for local initiative. As commanders on the ground began to act in an increasingly murderous fashion, encouraged by SS officials to interpret their orders liberally, news of their actions spread to other commanders, who, anxious to be seen as diligent in such an important matter, also stepped up the pace of killings. This furthered the radicalizing process while at the same time encouraging the top leadership to amend policy in a more deadly direction since little resistance to the killing had emerged. As orders and encouragement from the top mingled with murderous initiatives from below, a tornadic spiral of violence resulted, one that quickly accelerated the pace of radicalization.34

  Although local inhabitants had been encouraged to instigate pogroms, with the exception of a few areas, mostly in Lithuania, this proved much more difficult than anticipated. As a result, the Einsatzgruppen developed a more or less typical routine in which a murder squad would enter a town, assemble the intended victims, march them to a relatively remote area nearby, and shoot them. A killing operation in Lithuania in early July was characteristic of such actions across the breadth of the Soviet Union. According to an onlooker, a soldier with a motorized infantry unit, hundreds of Jews from the local village had been marched to a gravel pit, where they were sent in groups to be shot. “The firing squad,” the eyewitness recalled,

  which was made up of ten men, positioned itself . . . about six to eight meters in front of the group [to be killed]. . . . The group was shot by the firing squad after the order was given. The shots were fired simultaneously so that the men fell into the pit behind them at the same time. The 400 Jews were shot in exactly the same way over a period of about an hour. . . . They were covered with a thin sprinkling of sand. . . . Parts of their bodies protruded out of the sand. . . . The mass shootings in Paneriai were quite horrific.

  Similar scenes took place throughout the newly conquered areas. Often, little direction from above was needed. An SS officer recorded in his diary the scene in Drohobycz, in Galicia, where at the fortress “soldiers stood with fist thick clubs” and struck down the Jews, who lay about “whimpering like pigs.” When asked who led the squad, the reply was, “Nobody. . . . Out of rage and hatred the Jews were being struck down.” Inevitably, the killing process developed a bloody momentum, one that could be seen in the meticulously recorded figures of the reports of the various murder squads. Daily numbers in the scores rapidly escalated to the hundreds, then to the thousands, as local commanders, on their own initiative and in response to encouragement from above, broadened the scope of the killing operations. This first killing sweep, in fact, proved to be crucially important for later developments, for it illustrated that few logistic, political, or moral impediments stood in the way of mass murder. A new threshold had been crossed.35

  In all this, the Wehrmacht leadership took an active role. In prewar briefings, Einsatzgruppen commanders and police leaders had been urged to observe scrupulously the agreement between the SS and the army, which suggests that Heydrich was unsure of the extent of Wehrmacht cooperation. Given the negative reaction of some army commanders in Poland in 1939, he could not be sure that they would tolerate mass executions. Despite these concerns, reports from commanders of the murder squads indicated both surprise and relief that from the beginning the army had raised no problems and that cooperation was proceeding “extremely satisfactorily and without friction.” Despite instances of hesitant implementation of the criminal orders, the army attitude was described as “generally good,” “excellent, almost cordial,” “extraordinary,” and “especially successful.” The Einsatzgruppe B leader, Arthur Nebe, in fact, praised the “excellent” cooperation with Army Group Center that had made possible the successful killing actions in Bialystok and Minsk. Similarly, Stahlecker hailed the spirit of cooperation between Einsatzgruppe A and Army Group North, even though Field Marshal Leeb had expressed initial reservations about their activities. So extensive was the collaboration that in many sectors the Einsatzgruppen, although limited by the prewar agreement only to the rear areas, were allowed to follow immediately behind the advancing troops. Sections of some commandos often advanced with the tank spearheads. Nor was there much doubt about what these special units were doing; one frontline officer noted in early December that the combat officer corps was fully informed about the execution of Jews.36

  Important in these early days was the blurring of the distinction between ideologically inspired murder and the pacification operations of the rear-area security units of the army. The Army High Command consistently encouraged a harsh response to “anti-German” elements as an effective preventive measure, while the OKW had already in mid-May issued guidelines demanding “ruthless and energetic action against Bolshevik agitators, guerrillas, saboteurs, and Jews.” Some commanders had, on their personal initiative, gone even further. Colonel-General Hoepner, the commander of Panzergruppe A, asserted that the war against the Soviet Union touched on the very existence of Germany and, thus, demanded the “complete destruction of the enemy,” especially the “exponents of the present Russian-Bolshevik system.” To many officers, the political commissars, the “exponents of the Jewish-Bolshevik world outlook,” had introduced “Asiatic methods” of barbarity into the war. These “Asiatic methods,” Hitler had stressed in an earlier order, “could not be countered with western European means.” As one staff officer concluded in a mid-July report: “We have all come to know these Asiatic methods, every town, every village in the Ukraine harbors its unfortunate victims. . . . Our duty and our right to free the world from the Red plague are all the greater.”37

  In addition, top German commanders had a visceral hatred of communism based on their traumatic experiences of the revolutionary chaos and political collapse of November 1918, for which they held the Jews primarily responsible, an attitude reinforced by the growing brutality of the war in the east. In early October, Field Marshal von Reichenau, commander of the Sixth Army, stressed to his men that the goal of the campaign was the complete destruction of the Jewish-Bolshevik system, reminding his troops, “The soldier in the east is not just a fighter according to the rules of war, but also the bearer of an implacable national idea, and the avenger of all the bestialities inflicted on the German[s]. . . . For that reason, the soldier must have full understanding of the need for a harsh but just punishment of Jewish subhumanity.” Nor was Reichenau’s attitude unique. Colonel-General Hoth also understood the war as an ideological struggle to the death, urging his troops to recognize, “This struggle can only end with the annihilation of one or the other; there can be no settlement.” Hoth justified this harsh attitude, and the executions being carried out by Einsatzgruppe C, by pointing to the alleged guilt of the Jews for German sufferings after World War I. Manstein, too, picked up on this theme of justified revenge, stressing to his men, “The Jewish-Bolshevik system must be wiped out once and for all. . . . [The German soldier must be] the bearer of a national idea, and avenger of all the atrocities inflicted on him and the German people.” The Jews, as the supporters of the partisans and the intellectual carriers of “Bolshevik terror,” Manstein stressed, had to be harshly punished. Terror had to be legitimized; mass executions were to be seen not as murder but as justifiable reprisals for atrocities against the German people as well as a preventive measure to provide security in the present.38

  Nor were non-Nazi generals unaffected by the poisoned ideological climate. When General Franz von Roques, the commander of Rear Army North, complained to the commander in chief, Field Marshal Ritter von Leeb, about mass executions of Lithuanian Jews in Kaunas, Leeb, a deeply religious man, noted in his diary, “We have no influence over these measures. The only thing to do is keep clear of them. Roques is no doubt correct that the J
ewish question will probably not be solved in this manner. The surest way to solve it would be through sterilization of all Jewish men.” If even Leeb, surely no friend of the Nazis, saw mass sterilization as a humane alternative to mass murder, it could surely be no surprise, then, that army personnel shot large numbers of political commissars, regarded as Jews and easily recognizable by their special uniform insignia, in the first weeks of the war.39

  Although Hitler had intended just such an overlapping of motivations, two other factors also encouraged a radicalization of operations: the shootings and mutilation of German prisoners of war by Soviet troops and Stalin’s call on 3 July for unleashing partisan war against the invaders and killing them everywhere. Hitler positively welcomed the latter measure, remarking in mid-July that the partisan war “gives us the possibility of exterminating anyone who opposes us.” As for the former, within the first two weeks of the war, numerous incidents of shootings of German prisoners had been reported as well as instances of inhuman treatment. Both were played up by Goebbels’s propaganda machine as typical examples of the perfidy of Jewish-Bolshevism, the propaganda minister boasting that Soviet atrocities had demonstrated to the Landsers the justice and necessity of the German attack while assuring that “our soldiers will return from the Soviet Union as radical anti-Bolsheviks.”40

  Nor did German troops, increasingly concerned for their own survival, find it difficult to dehumanize an enemy who chose to resist fanatically. “It’s not people we’re fighting against here, but simply animals,” concluded one Landser in early July after witnessing the mutilated remains of comrades recently taken prisoner by the Russians. Karl Fuchs, a committed Nazi ideologue, remarked of Russian prisoners of war in a letter to his wife, “Hardly ever do you see the face of a person who seems rational and intelligent. . . . The wild, half crazy look in their eyes makes them appear like imbeciles.” The tendency of Soviet troops to respond in kind to German atrocities led one soldier to conclude, “Bestiality breeds bestiality.” Nazi propaganda had demonized and dehumanized the Soviet population even before the campaign, but specific actions, such as the early July massacre and mutilation of 153 German prisoners, found with eyes gouged out and limbs and genitals hacked off, seemed to confirm this judgment while instilling an elemental fear of the enemy in many Landsers.41