Ostkrieg
Page 16
One Landser in early July expressed well this intersection of the political and personal, noting graphically in a letter to his parents what he and his fellow soldiers had done after discovering the bound and mutilated bodies of German Landsers, as well as some two thousand Ukrainians and ethnic Germans, left behind by the retreating Soviets:
Revenge was quick to follow. Yesterday we and the SS were merciful, for every Jew we found was shot immediately. Today things have changed, for we again found 60 fellow soldiers mutilated. Now the Jews must carry the dead out of the basement, lay them out nicely, and then they are shown the atrocities. After they have seen the victims, they are killed with clubs and spades.
So far, we have sent about 1,000 Jews into the hereafter, but that is far too few for what they have done. The Ukrainians have said that the Jews had all the leadership positions and, together with the Soviets, had a regular public festival while executing the Germans and Ukrainians. I ask you, dear parents, to make this known. . . . If there should be doubts, we will bring photos with us. Then there will be no more doubts.42
The presence of SS personnel was also revealing, confirming as it did the reports of excellent cooperation between the army and the death squads. This cooperation, at a minimum, involved providing the Einsatzgruppen with equipment, supplies, ammunition, transport, and housing. Without the logistic and administrative support provided by the Wehrmacht, murder on such a large scale would hardly have been possible. At times, army units played a more active role, helping set up ghettos, identifying and guarding the victims, and participating in the shootings themselves. An early July diary entry of Robert Neumann, a corporal in the Sixty-second Infantry Division, illustrated well the de facto nature of the cooperation of army units in the killing process: “We arrived in Minsk. Our battalion got the task of guarding six-thousand prisoners and shooting all the Jews in the city. Many prisoners fled in the night and we had to make use of our weapons. We killed five-hundred Jews alone.” A few months later, evidently hardened to such tasks, Neumann reported on a mass execution near Orsha. “Yesterday our lieutenant sought fifteen men with strong nerves,” he noted.
Naturally I volunteered. . . . The lieutenant explained to us what we had to do. There were about a thousand Jews in the village of Krupka and they were all supposed to be shot today . . . Punctually at 7:00 A.M. all the Jews reported to the assembly point—men, women, and children. . . . The whole formation then marched off in the direction of the nearest swamp. The execution squad, to which I belonged, marched in front. . . . The Jews had been told that they were all going to be sent to Germany to work there. But as we went straight over the tracks . . . and further in the direction of the swamp, the light went on for most of them. A panic broke out and the guard detail had their hands full to keep the bunch together. As we reached the swamp . . . fifteen yards ahead was a deep ditch full of water. The first ten had to stand next to this ditch and undress to the waist, then wade into the water, and the firing squad, that is us, stood over them. . . . Ten shots, ten Jews bumped off. It went on like that until we had disposed of all of them. . . . It was a spectacle that one will not quickly forget.
Two days later, Neumann was at it again, this time, since there was no nearby swamp, “depositing” Jews in the sand.43
The assumption of an implicit link between Jews and Communists, as well as the notion that Jews instigated atrocities and acts of resistance, was widespread among officers and in the ranks. The major concern of officers, in fact, seemed to be the often overenthusiastic participation of Wehrmacht soldiers in the shootings as well as the chronic problem of “execution tourism” as soldiers would often flock to scenes of executions and snap photographs. Although some officers urged a different approach, favoring a policy of winning the cooperation of the local population and decrying the large-scale shooting of hostages, the OKH insisted that the security of the German soldier and the rapid pacification of such a vast area required hard and merciless action. Any leniency, it was believed, would be misinterpreted as weakness that would only encourage partisan resistance. By the autumn, in fact, just such an upsurge in the partisan war fed a growing sense of vulnerability among average soldiers as they realized the inadequacy of German security forces in the immensity of Russia. Those assigned to security units, generally older and less trained, often felt beleaguered and isolated in a hostile and alien landscape. Atrocity fed atrocity, as one soldier explained: “We . . . may be ruthless, but the partisans also wage an inhuman war and show no mercy.” War brutalizes, with some dehumanization of the enemy to be expected, but the vicious cycle of atrocities and revenge unleashed by partisan war increased the pressure to participate in or ignore excesses. In this battle for naked existence, as Christian Hartmann has emphasized, many men, seemingly unlikely candidates to commit such crimes because of their age or previous socialization, “began to orient themselves much more strongly around social Darwinistic principles.” Fear of partisans contributed mightily to the Landsers’ readiness to cooperate with the Einsatzgruppen and security forces. By the autumn, both army units and, more frequently, rear security units routinely shot Jews as a “retaliatory measure” aimed at quashing the increasingly effective partisan movement.44
By late summer, Wehrmacht, SS, and police officials agreed on the inseparable link between Jews and partisans, which both increased the need for interagency cooperation and meant that intensified pacification measures fell most harshly on Jews. Racial and security concerns thus trumped the economic considerations of using Jews as a labor force; that autumn, Himmler repeatedly assured his men in the field of the need to liquidate Jews in order to crush Bolshevism and secure territory for German settlement. In mid-September, Keitel demanded “relentless and energetic measures, above all against the Jews, the main supporters of Bolshevism,” while, a month later, Brauchitsch echoed this with his own call for “ruthless and merciless” action. Jews, the commander of one security division emphasized, were “the sole supporters that the partisans can find” and, thus, should be remorselessly destroyed. Throughout Belorussia and Ukraine in late September and early October, as a result, SS and police units, supported by Wehrmacht security divisions, employed a task-oriented, flexible approach, mimicking the famed Auftragstaktik (mission-oriented tactics) in the military arena, in order to promote an efficient “de-Jewification” of the region.45
The best known of these ubiquitous mass executions by the murder squads, that of over thirty-three thousand men, women, and children at Babi Yar in late September 1941, illustrated well the intersection of security and ideological motives as well as the ample cooperation between army and SS. Beyond the obvious fact that it was German military success that created the conditions for the murder of the Jews of Kiev, relations between Reichenau, the commander of the Sixth Army, whose units seized the city on 19 September, and the head of Sonderkommando 4a of Einsatzgruppe C, SS Colonel Paul Blobel, were excellent. The two had already worked closely on coordinating the murder of Jews during the preceding months, with Blobel in personal contact with Reichenau during this period. The two also shared similar racial and ideological views that made the killing of Jews imperative. Just over a month earlier, in fact, Reichenau had personally intervened to order the Jewish children of Belaya Tserkov, temporarily spared when their parents had been murdered, to be shot as well. The head of Einsatzgruppe C, Otto Rasch, also valued Reichenau’s cooperation highly, while the latter often praised the valuable work of the special murder commandos. From the outset, a harmonious working relationship had been created between the army and the Einsatzgruppe, with the latter repeatedly encouraged to operate as far forward as possible.46
The capture of Kiev took place against a backdrop of continued frantic Soviet resistance and unexpected difficulties in occupying the city. Numerous buildings and facilities had been booby-trapped, putting German soldiers and authorities on edge. Between 24 and 26 September, powerful explosions rocked the city center, destroying a number of buildings in which the W
ehrmacht had set up headquarters, and killing several hundred occupation troops. Obsessed with security, and determined to punish the guilty party, army and SS officials met on 26 September to discuss the situation and settle on appropriate “retaliatory measures.” Not surprisingly, the decision was taken to kill a large number of Jews. Einsatzgruppe representatives were informed, “You have to do the shooting,” even though army leaders had no objections to such a massacre and were, in fact, promoting it. In this instance, security concerns and ideology blended seamlessly; the excuse of retaliatory measures could be used to justify what would have happened in any case. As an SS report to Berlin confirmed, “The Wehrmacht welcomes the measures and requests a radical approach.”47
Implementation of this “security” decision was entrusted to the reliably murderous men of Blobel’s Sonderkommando 4a, composed of members of the Security Police and the SD, as well as Waffen-SS men on special assignment and two detachments of Police Regiment South (along with Ukrainian auxiliary police). As with other such actions in larger cities, the operation began with the posting of orders in Russian, Ukrainian, and German ordering the Jewish population to assemble at a designated location at 8:00 A.M. on 29 September, with failure to comply punishable by death. That morning a far larger number of Jews appeared at the Umschlagplatz (assembly point) than anticipated, with most, amazingly in retrospect, believing the German promise that they were to be resettled. German officials on the spot then ordered the Jews to begin walking toward the area of the city where the Jewish cemetery and a section of the Babi Yar ravine were located. Photographs taken at the time show long columns of well-dressed people moving calmly, despite the presence of occasional bloody corpses. The route itself was guarded by army soldiers, with the killing site manned by men of the murder squad.48
Once at the ravine, the Jews had to strip and hand over their clothes and luggage, then were sent by the Ukrainian helpers in groups through a narrow opening into the ravine. Then, as a participant remembered,
The Jews had to lie face down on the earth by the ravine walls. There were three groups of marksmen down at the bottom of the ravine, each made up of about twelve men. . . . Each successive group of Jews had to lie down on top of the bodies of those that had already been shot. The marksmen stood behind the Jews [i.e., walked on the bodies] and killed them with a shot in the neck. I still recall today the complete terror of the Jews. . . . It’s almost impossible to imagine what nerves of steel it took to carry out that dirty work. . . . I had to spend the whole morning down in the ravine. For some of the time I had to shoot continuously. . . . The shooting that day must have lasted until . . . 5:00 or 6:00 P.M. Afterwards we were taken back to our quarters . . . [and] given alcohol again.
Although another participant remembered the chaos, shouting, and tumult at the scene, official SS reports regarded the two-day shooting as quite successful: “The operation went smoothly, with no unforeseen incidents. The measures to ‘relocate’ Jews were definitely regarded favorably by the population. Hardly anyone is aware that the Jews were in fact liquidated. . . . The Wehrmacht also expressed its approval of the measures carried out.” The local army commanders had, in fact, done more than merely condone the killings; not only had they helped plan and organize the massacre, but the political unit of the Sixth Army also produced two thousand wall posters in its printing shop directing the Jews to their fate, and after the shootings a pioneer unit concealed the action by blowing up the area.49 In alleged retaliation for the bombings in Kiev, 33,771 Jews were executed on 29–30 September 1941.
Killings had escalated into mass butchery. Security was now to be achieved through the ruthless pursuit and annihilation of partisans and their accomplices, especially the Jews. Reports from the summer and fall of 1941 show the grisly result: a vast discrepancy between the number of partisans killed and casualties suffered by German soldiers and only slight differences between the number of people arrested and those shot. One unit, unusual only in its murderous efficiency and not in the trend, killed over ten thousand people in a single month, with the loss of only two dead and five wounded. To promote this policy of pacification, army officials even inaugurated an exchange of ideas and experiences between army and SS officers. “It’s good when the horror precedes us that we are exterminating Jewry,” Hitler remarked to Himmler and Heydrich in late October 1941, significantly enough, after he had blamed the Jews for the dead of the First World War and reminded them of his 1939 prophecy. As events on the ground demonstrated, criminal orders from above and vengeful impulses from below created a climate of violence that would remove any inhibitions about murder. The four Einsatzgruppen and their helpers killed well over 500,000 Soviet Jews in the first six months of Barbarossa in addition to tens of thousands of partisans and Soviet prisoners of war, none of which would have been possible without the willing and active cooperation of the Wehrmacht.50 Hitler had long considered military operations against the Soviet Union to win Lebensraum and political-police measures aimed at securing the newly won territory and exterminating racial-ideological enemies as simply different facets of the same war. As events in the field demonstrated, those involved in the killing process fully understood this complementarity.
On 15 July, Himmler returned to the Führer headquarters at Rastenburg in East Prussia after a quick trip to Berlin. As always, it seemed, when these two huddled in these days, bloody consequences followed. In mid-July, in the euphoria of apparent victory, Hitler now set in motion steps to accelerate the translation of his vision of a National Socialist New Order into horrible reality. With the military situation evidently going even better than expected—“No one doubts anymore our victory in Russia,” Goebbels confided to his diary on 8 July—Hitler in the first half of July was in a self-congratulatory mood, proclaiming himself the Robert Koch of politics, the man who had exposed the “Jewish bacillus” of social decomposition. For the Führer, the connection between the Jews and war was inescapable, a mentality shaped by the personal and national humiliation of defeat in World War I, for which Hitler held the Jews responsible as fomenters of internal unrest and revolution. From his very first public statement, in September 1919, in which he advocated a complete removal of the Jews from Germany, through the notorious passage in Mein Kampf in which he expressed the wish that the imperial government had killed thousands of Jews at the beginning of the war, to his political testament at the very end of a second war, Hitler displayed a recurring obsession with the theme of Jews and war. Indeed, he regarded himself as nothing less than the architect and executor of a historic will: a second war had to be fought to undo the disaster of the first. This meant not only achieving Germany’s historic destiny of great power status but also rewriting history on a racial basis, gaining revenge on those held responsible for the nation’s misfortunes, the Jews. For Germany to win, Jewry had to lose.51
From the late 1930s, as war loomed closer, Hitler and other top Nazi leaders displayed, more than a mere conspiratorial outlook, a vengeful mentality that demanded retribution against the Jews as the cause of wars in general and of Germany’s suffering in particular. The key to the Nazi outlook was not that the Jews were inferior but that the Jewish conspiracy represented nothing less than the supreme existential danger, the ultimate threat to Germany’s existence. The racial community that Hitler sought to build could never be secure until Jewish power, values, and corruption were eliminated forever. Germany’s salvation, as Saul Friedländer has stressed, thus required a “redemptive anti-Semitism” that would remove not just Jewish influence but, one way or another, the Jews themselves.52
In this mood of expectant victory, Hitler met for five hours on 16 July with Goering, Bormann, Rosenberg, Lammers, and Keitel to discuss and establish fundamental guidelines for the administration and exploitation of the occupied areas. After vowing that Germany would never leave these lands, he proclaimed his intention of creating a “Garden of Eden” for the benefit of all Germans, “our India.” The Crimea, the Baltic states, the oil ar
ea around Baku, and former Austrian Galicia would be annexed, with the rest to be treated as a “colonial land” to be ruled and exploited by a handful of administrators. He dismissed the Slavs as by nature a “slave mass crying out for a master.” The goals of German occupation policy would be brutally simple: “First, rule; second, administer; third, exploit.” To accomplish these goals, “all necessary measures—shootings, resettlements, etc.”—would be used. “This vast area must naturally be pacified as quickly as possible,” Hitler emphasized. “This will best be done by shooting anyone who even looks sideways at us.”53
Although Himmler was noticeably absent from this meeting, it was his response that was arguably most critical to the future course of events. In outlining his program, Hitler regarded himself as an architect reconstructing history on a racial basis, but he still needed someone to execute his will. The Führer had sketched a vision of a future utopia for Germans, but realizing this vision would necessitate destruction on a vast scale. That was to be Himmler’s task. Nor could he harbor any doubts about what it would entail. The minutes of the meeting, which he received on 17 July, clearly expressed Hitler’s will—exterminate anyone who opposes us—a task that would require a large-scale increase in available police forces. On both 19 and 22 July, he designated units from his own Kommandostab (command staff), the SS Cavalry Brigade and the First SS Brigade, totaling eleven thousand men, for use in antipartisan sweeps in the central and southern sectors of the front. He also reassigned a number of police battalions, over five thousand men in all, for use in the killing operations, which were now to be expanded, according to an evident Himmler edict on 21 July, to include all Soviet Jews. Searching for new sources of manpower, Himmler on 25 July ordered his police officials to form auxiliary police units from the Baltic, Ukrainian, and Belorussian populations since “the task of the police in the occupied eastern territories cannot be accomplished with the manpower of the police and SS now deployed or yet to be deployed.” Within a few days in late July 1941, then, Himmler, responding to his Führer’s wishes, initiated a swift buildup of precisely those units necessary for a rapid escalation of murder. The number of men involved in the killing activities rose from barely three thousand to over sixteen thousand, a figure that would rise to some thirty-three thousand by the end of the year, an elevenfold increase. Himmler then culminated this whirlwind of activity on 31 July by issuing an explicit order to top police officials: “All Jews must be shot. Drive female Jews into the swamp [i.e., Pripet Marshes].” In issuing orders for a radical escalation of the killing operations, Himmler surely felt confident that, in Ian Kershaw’s phrase, he was “working towards the Führer.”54