Ostkrieg

by Stephen G. Fritz

  Large parts of the Soviet population had, thus, been deliberately condemned to death by starvation. Since feeding much of the Soviet population could come only at the expense of ensuring adequate foodstuffs for German consumers, this was never an option, especially given Hitler’s constant association of hunger with revolutionary domestic unrest during World War I. Backe’s hunger policy intended the murder of millions of people simply by denying food to certain segments of the civilian population, most notably urban dwellers and those in the agriculturally deficient areas. This attitude was clearly genocidal and not coincidentally linked to the murder of Jews, considered, as they were, to be useless eaters. In areas swept over by the Einsatzgruppen, those Jews not killed immediately were to be denied access to food markets or the opportunity to buy directly from farmers, thus condemning them to a slow death by starvation. Jewish inhabitants of many cities, for example, received no more than 420 calories per day. A mid-July memorandum to Eichmann from the head of the SD in Posen specifically made the connection with ethnic cleansing. “There is the danger this winter,” the official noted, “that the Jews can no longer all be fed. It is to be seriously considered whether the most humane solution might not be to finish off those Jews not capable of labor by some sort of fast-working preparation.”61

  This vision of mass death through malign neglect turned out to be extremely naive. With the failure to achieve a quick victory, the Germans lacked the security forces to seal off the targeted areas effectively. As a result, the Soviet urban population managed stubbornly to hang on by returning to the countryside or using the black market. Landsers, it appeared, also showed more humanity than their superiors and, contrary to regulations, fed civilians from their own field kitchens. German soldiers, the quartermaster-general complained to Halder, were often “very considerate” toward the population. From late 1941, as well, some military administrators attempted to ensure at least minimal levels of foodstuffs for Soviet civilians, not for humane reasons but as a matter of practical self-interest. “If the Russian campaign had been a Blitzkrieg, then we would not have had to take the civil population into consideration,” attested one army official. “But an end is not in sight. . . . Under these circumstances it is irrational to follow a course that turns the civilian population 100% against us.” Observed another, in a harsh criticism of the illogic of Nazi policy: “If we shoot the Jews, let the prisoners of war die, deliver a large part of the urban population to death by hunger, in the coming year lose a part of the rural population to hunger, the question remains unanswered: Who then will actually produce anything of economic value?” By the autumn, civilians doing “useful work,” whether as laborers, agricultural workers, or security forces, received 1,200 calories a day, a starvation diet to be sure, but better than the 850 calories accorded those not working for the Germans or the 420 for children under the age of fourteen and Jews.62

  The Wehrmacht nonetheless did its best to feed itself from the land, with the inevitable consequences for the civilian population. Within weeks of the invasion, not insignificant parts of the invading force were redirected to the requisitioning of food. At the same time, given the inadequacies of the supply system, German troops plundered huge quantities of livestock, grain, and dairy produce for their own use. The army, however, failed to seize large quantities of grain reserves as the Soviets succeeded in destroying much of the existing stocks. In reprisal, Hitler ordered mass starvation. “The Führer is for a somewhat more radical course in the occupied areas,” Goebbels noted laconically on 19 August. In Belorussia, where supplies were already inadequate, Army Group Center adopted a ruthless policy of “eating the country bare.” In the Baltic and Ukraine, enough food was seized to feed the army tolerably well and to create a substantial Reich reserve, but, because of transportation difficulties, it proved impossible to send much of it back to Germany. Much of the reserve stockpiled in the east, in fact, spoiled during the winter of 1941–1942. As a result, virtually nothing was left to feed the Soviet population, which, in Goering’s words, faced “the greatest mortality since the Thirty Years War.”63

  Lest Landsers take pity on Soviet civilians and offer them food from their own resources, the OKH issued a directive on 1 November: “In the fight against Bolshevism we are concerned with the survival or destruction of our people. . . . German soldiers will be tempted to share their provisions with the people. They must, however, say to themselves: ‘Every gram of bread or other food that I may give out of generosity to the population in the occupied territories I am withholding from the German people and thus my own family. . . .’ In the face of starving women and children German soldiers must remain steadfast. If they refuse to do so they are endangering the nutrition of our own people.” Although the Germans failed to implement the hunger policy in its full horror, in many cities famine still raged during the winter of 1941–1942, most notably in Leningrad, Kiev, and Kharkov. In the areas most seriously affected, the starving inhabitants could not be dissuaded by even the most draconian threats from roaming the front lines in search of food. Even horses that had died and been buried were dug up and eaten. If fewer Soviet citizens starved to death in the first year of German occupation than expected or desired, a situation that clearly mystified German officials, it was certainly not for a lack of effort.64

  This reprieve, if such it could be called, did not extend to the Jews. By mid-August, as we have seen, the question had turned from why the Jews in the Soviet Union should be killed to why they should not be killed. As any perceived economic value they might have as laborers was trumped by ideological or security concerns, their status as useless eaters or the “bearers of Bolshevism” marked them for annihilation. Two months of continual killings had created a reliable body of executioners, while the steady drumbeat of Nazi propaganda had convinced many of the necessity of eliminating “this scum that tossed all of Europe into the war.” Both local authorities and officials at the center in Berlin now began to perceive the possibility for a large-scale solution of the Jewish question. If in mid-August the onslaught against Soviet Jews and a final solution of the Jewish question in Europe were still separate entities, time, space, and opportunity intersected in the autumn of 1941 to transform regional murder into European-wide genocide. “The occupied Soviet areas,” Alfred Rosenberg announced in a mid-November speech, “should become the scene of the biological elimination of all European Jews.” Thus, although in mid-August Hitler had rejected proposals for the deportation of German Jews during the war, by December a training journal of the Order Police could proclaim openly,

  The word of the Führer [in his January 1939 speech] that a new war, instigated by Jewry, will not bring about the destruction of . . . Germany but rather the end of Jewry, is now being carried out. The gigantic spaces of the east, which Germany and Europe have now at their disposition for colonization, also facilitate the definitive solution of the Jewish problem in the near future. This means not only removing the race from power, but its elimination. . . . What seemed impossible only two years ago, now step-by-step is becoming a reality: the end of the war will see a Europe free of Jews.65

  Clearly, then, the autumn of 1941 marked a watershed at which the threshold to mass murder, not just of Soviet Jews but of all the Jews of Europe, was crossed. In this complex process of decisionmaking and evolving policy formulation, pressures from the periphery, events at the center, and seemingly decisive military triumphs resulted in key decisions being made in mid-September, when it looked as if the war in the east would soon be over and Germany left as the master of the Continent. Preparations and plans for implementation of mass murder, set in motion before the drive on Moscow lagged in late October, continued apace despite the increasing military difficulties—and, in some cases, such as transportation, deportations took place that even aggravated shortages at the front.

  As with the earlier decision to expand the killing of Jews in the Soviet Union, perceptions of the ongoing war effort proved pivotal. With the slowing of the Ger
mans’ advance in the face of stout Russian resistance and growing doubts about their ability to win the war in 1941, Hitler’s mid-August decision reflected the recognition that it was impractical at that juncture to deport Jews from the Reich into the Soviet Union. Perhaps, too, in the wake of the recent meeting between Churchill and Roosevelt, the old notion of using Jews as hostages to warn America against entering the war played a role in Hitler’s thinking. His decision, however, did not stifle mounting pressures from local and regional officials in Germany and the occupied east for a clearer definition of Jewish policy. As pressure for deportation and other anti-Jewish measures mounted in Germany, in the east ambitious administrators pressed for approval from Berlin of more comprehensively radical measures. Military officials, too, voiced concerns over the partisan war and the deteriorating security situation. At the same time, given the severe food shortages, local administrators stressed the untenable conditions within the Polish ghettos. If the ghettos were to support themselves financially, productive jobs had to be created. That, however, would require significant investment that would likely pay off only in the long term. By the autumn, however, Nazi authorities had begun to see the solution to their labor problem in the exploitation of Soviet prisoners of war and civilians. Murdering the Jews thus appeared to many the most utilitarian solution to a burdensome problem. Amid growing frustration and impatience, then, those at the periphery clamored for some basic policy direction.66

  By mid-September, the military situation had changed substantially for the better. German forces had cut off Leningrad early in the month, while the encirclement east of Kiev, completed on the fifteenth, promised a spectacular triumph. That same day, following an aerial bombing, the Gauleiter of Hamburg, Karl Kaufmann, urged Hitler to allow the evacuation of Jews from the city in order that their dwellings be distributed to victims of the raid. This suggestion followed by a day a proposal from Rosenberg that all Jews from Central Europe be deported to the east in retaliation for Stalin’s deportation of the Volga Germans to Siberia. Although noncommittal, the Führer expressed interest in Rosenberg’s “very important and urgent matter.” At the same time, Hitler was pressured by officials in France to evacuate a number of Jews to the east as part of a reprisal policy. All the while, of course, Heydrich and Goebbels had continued to push for the removal of German Jews. On 16 and 17 September, Hitler had a cluster of meetings with top officials in which he discussed the Jewish question, talked of turning the conquered eastern territories into Germany’s India, and stressed the importance of resettling ethnic Germans. He also gave approval to Kaufmann on the seventeenth for the removal of Jews from Hamburg.67

  The next day, clearly searching for a place to put more than a few thousand Hamburg Jews, Himmler informed Arthur Greiser in the Warthegau that he would have to accept sixty thousand Jews into the Lodz ghetto since “the Führer wishes that the Old Reich and Protectorate be emptied and freed of Jews from west to east as quickly as possible.” Hitler had, thus, not only permitted the evacuation of Hamburg’s Jews, but now, in light of new military successes, also sanctioned what he had prohibited just a month before, the removal of all German Jews during the war. “The spell is broken,” Hitler told Goebbels in late September, in meetings also attended by Himmler and Heydrich. “In the next three to four weeks we must once again expect great victories.” The serious fighting, Hitler thought, would last until 15 October, after which Bolshevism would be beaten. Heydrich even delighted in pointing to the irony of his suggestion that the Jews should be “transported into camps that have been erected by the Bolsheviks. These camps were erected by the Jews, so what should be more fitting than that they now also be populated by Jews.” With this seemingly offhand mid-September decision to permit the deportation of German Jews, Hitler set in motion a process that would culminate in genocide.68

  By early October, with Operation Typhoon enjoying great success, Hitler remained optimistic about the deportations, his only reservation being a possible shortage of trains. On the tenth, however, Heydrich held a conference in Prague at which he removed any further obstacles. “Because the Führer wishes that by the end of this year as many Jews as possible be removed from the German sphere,” he stressed, “all pending questions must be solved. . . . Even the transportation question must not present any problems.” Symbolically, the first deportation train left Vienna on 15 October, the date Hitler expected the defeat of Russia to be sealed and the same day panic broke out in Moscow. Although local authorities had prepared the evacuations from Vienna, Prague, and Berlin with remarkable speed, the problem of reception areas in the east remained. Greiser succeeded in getting the figure dispatched to Lodz reduced to twenty thousand, but that simply meant that larger numbers were sent further east to Kaunas, Riga, and Minsk. In those cities, in the absence of clear guidelines for what to do with the deportees, local officials, reflective of a process of cumulative radicalization that rewarded personal initiative, largely acted as they saw fit and took whatever measures they deemed necessary.69

  In practice, this meant that the Jews arriving from the old Reich were treated differently in the various reception areas. In Lodz and Minsk, German Jews were crammed into the ghettos, with the twist that, in the latter city, over eleven thousand Belorussian Jews were shot to make room for the new arrivals. The situation in Kaunas, in Lithuania, was different, however. There, the men of Karl Jäger’s murderously efficient Einsatzkommando 3 were waiting as the deportation trains arrived, shooting nearly five thousand German Jews within a few days in late November. In Riga, Latvia, all the deportees on a train from Berlin were murdered on 30 November, a situation that aroused quite a stir since many of the victims were Mischlinge (part Jews), war veterans, or married to Aryans. Shooting Ostjuden was one thing; executing German Jews, “from our cultural sphere . . . [and not] the native bestial hordes,” as Wilhelm Kube put it, clearly presented a problem. Himmler, in fact, had telephoned that afternoon in an attempt to halt the execution but was too late. After this incident, German Jews arriving in Riga were no longer executed immediately. Instead, they were confined in temporary camps outside the city, where the atrocious conditions meant that many died within a short time. By mid-December, after some twenty-five thousand local Jews were executed, deportees from Germany were allowed into the Riga ghetto, where large numbers died of “natural causes.” Others were shot in small groups in a nearby forest, while the deportees on several trains that arrived in late December, January, and February were liquidated on arrival.70

  These gruesome activities confirmed a pattern of confused local reactions but also a sinister long-term trend. Local objections forced a reduction in the number of deportation trains leaving Germany in the late autumn, but the transports themselves could not be stopped entirely, despite the fact that they contributed to a severe shortage of railcars and bottlenecks in the transportation system crippling the German advance toward Moscow. Bock protested the continuing presence of “Jew trains,” fearing that the “arrival of these trains must result in the loss of an equal number of trains vital to supplying the attack,” but to little avail. Once the Jewish deportations had begun, Himmler and Heydrich refused to halt them. Clearly, no blueprint for systematic mass murder had been devised and no general order issued when the deportations began to execute German Jews on arrival in the east, but chaotic conditions in the ghettos in Poland, the public nature of mass shootings, the drain on German manpower, and the psychological burden on the perpetrators all demanded a more discrete, efficient, and orderly process of killing the Jews. Bolstered by his authorization of 31 July to prepare some sort of final solution for European Jewry for implementation after the Russian campaign, which now seemed to be in its concluding stages, Heydrich began to bring together elements from three existing programs: the concentration camp, the euthanasia program, and the resettlement program. Out of this fluid process of experimentation would come perhaps the most sinister invention of the twentieth century: the extermination camp (Vernichtungslager).7
1

  In July and August, even before the euthanasia killings had spread to the concentration camps, Nazi authorities had been searching for a more humane way—more humane for the killers, not the victims—to dispose of large numbers of people. As Walter Rauff, an official of the Criminal Technical Institute of the RSHA, explained to an aide, a “more humane method of execution” was needed for the Einsatzgruppen since members of the firing squads suffered from frequent nervous breakdowns. Out of this necessity came a number of proposals, some disastrous, such as a test using explosives on mental patients that left body parts strewn about, and others more promising. By mid-September, a number of officials were exploring the possibilities of using poison gas. Hitler had suspended the adult euthanasia program on 24 August, which meant that trained killing experts were available to lend their expertise. Rauff himself charged his technicians with constructing a gas van that would channel engine exhaust into a sealed compartment, thus killing the victims by carbon monoxide poisoning. In September and October, experiments using Zyklon-B, a common agent used in the pest extermination business in Germany, were undertaken at the concentration and prisoner-of-war camp at Auschwitz. Although many of these trials were clearly associated with the expansion of the euthanasia program into the concentration camps, Nazi officials were quick to see the broader implications. That fall, for example, a gassing facility at Chelmno, originally conceived by local officials for the Wartheland, was accelerated to completion since it now fit well with broader goals at the center. By early October, plans had been made for the construction of a second large camp at Birkenau, adjacent to Auschwitz, complete with underground cellar rooms with large forced air ventilation systems attached to crematories. At roughly the same time, near Lublin, under the supervision of Christian Wirth, a leading functionary of the euthanasia program, construction began on a facility at Belzec that would use exhaust gas from engines channeled into sealed rooms to kill Jews. The Nazis also began preliminary work on another camp near Lublin, at Sobibor, that autumn.72