In fact, as early as the very first day of the war in the East, on June 22, Reich Press Chief Dietrich, in his “theme of the day” (Tagesparole) for the German press, insisted on the Jewish dimension of the Bolshevik enemy: “It has to be pointed out that the Jews pulling the strings behind the Soviet scene have remained the same, and so have their methods and their system…. Plutocracy and Bolshevism have an identical starting point: the Jewish striving for world domination.”29 On July 5 the Reichspressechef conveyed once more the daily message: “The greatest Jewish swindle of all time is now uncovered and exposed: the “workers’ paradise” turns out to be a gigantic fraud and exploitation system, in the face of the entire world.” After describing the horror of existence in the Soviet Union, Dietrich returned to his main theme: “The Jew pushed the peoples of the Soviet Union into this undescribable misery by way of his devilish Bolshevik system.”30
The tone was set. It would be sustained, with innumerable variations, to the very end. Goebbels’s first personal contribution came on July 20, in a massive anti-Jewish attack published in Das Reich under the title “Mimicry.” Under the minister’s pen the Jews became quintessential mimics: “It is difficult to detect their sly and slippery ways…. Moscow’s Jews invent lies and atrocities, the London Jews cite them and blend them into stories suitable for the innocent bourgeois.” The argument was clear: Jews camouflage their presence and move to the background in order to maneuver behind the scenes. The conclusion of Goebbels’s tirade was foreseeable: The nations that had been deceived would see the light. “From every corner of the earth the cry would rise: ‘The Jews are guilty! The Jews are guilty!’ The punishment will be terrible. We need not do anything to bring it about,” the minister prophesied. “It will come of itself, because it has to come. As the fist of awakening Germany smashed this racial filth, so one day the fist of awakening Europe will smash it too.”31 From then on and throughout the summer, the minister returned repeatedly to the same theme, on every available occasion.32
In those same days Goebbels discovered two “sensational” documents: Roosevelt’s picture in Masonic attire and the American president as initiator of the criminal anti-German ideas of the Jew Kaufman. The first document, found in a Norwegian archive, “proves beyond any doubt that the warmonger Roosevelt is under Jewish-Masonic domination,” read the instructions to the press.33 On July 23, the Völkischer Beobachter published a full-page article titled “High-Ranking Mason Roosevelt, the Main Instrument of World Jewry.”34 All major German papers toed the line.
The Jewish-Masonic sensation was a minor matter compared to the unearthing of Theodor N. Kaufman.35 The thirty-one-year-old Kaufman (the middle N. stood for “Newman,” but it became “Nathan” for the Nazis), a native of New Jersey, had a small advertising business in Newark, selling mainly theater tickets. In early 1941 he set up the Argyle Press solely in order to publish a pamphlet he had authored: “Germany Must Perish.” He demanded the sterilization of all German men and the division of the country into five parts to be annexed by the Reich’s neighbors. After printing his pamphlet Kaufman personally wrapped the copies and sent them to the press. The pamphlet found no echo except for a write-up in the March 24, 1941, issue of Time magazine under the ironic heading “A Modest Proposal,” which also included a few details about the author and his one-man enterprise. Thereafter Kaufman faded back into obscurity in the United States—but not in Germany.36
On July 24, 1941, the Völkischer Beobachter ran a front-page story with the bloodcurdling title: “Roosevelt demands the sterilization of the German people” and the shocking subtitle: “A Monstrous Jewish Extermination Plan. Roosevelt’s Guidelines.” Theodor Nathan Kaufman was turned into a close friend of Roosevelt’s main speechwriter—the Jew Samuel Rosenman—and was himself a leading personality of American Jewry. According to the story the president was the real initiator of Kaufman’s ideas; he “had even personally dictated parts of the shameful work. The leading interventionists make no secret of the fact that the devilish plan of the Jew Kaufman represents the political credo of the President of the United States.”37
The German press and radio carried the Kaufman story in endless variations and presented it as the hidden agenda of the mid-August Churchill-Roosevelt meeting. In September one of Goebbels’s main assistants—the head of the broadcasting division of the ministry, Wolfgang Diewerge—published a pamphlet including translated and commented excerpts from Kaufman’s text; it was launched in millions of copies, precisely when the Jews of the Reich were compelled to wear the star.38 And while the Kaufman story was being relentlessly spread, reports of Bolshevik atrocities were regularly carried by all of Goebbels’s channels; of course they were attributed to Jewish executioners.39
According to an SD report of July 31, 1941, “The situation in the United States was being followed with the greatest attention [by the population]. Increasingly, the view spreads that this war would turn into a real world war…. The excerpts from the book of the Jew Kaufmann [sic] and the comments show that this war is really a life-and-death struggle. The Kaufmann plans have deeply impressed even the most obdurate skeptics.”40
To counter Roosevelt’s course, the subtle Ribbentrop decided to directly influence American, even Jewish American, opinion. On July 19, 1941, he expounded to his chargé d’affaires in Washington, Hans Thomsen, that “of all parts of the population in the United States, the Jews, surely, have the greatest interest in America’s not entering the war…. People will soon recall that the Jews were the principal warmongers and they will be made responsible for the losses that occur. The end of the story will be that one day all the Jews in America will be beaten to death.”41
According to an SD report of July 24, newsreel scenes showing “the jailing of Jews responsible for the murders” [in the East] triggered audience reactions claiming that “they were being dealt with much too fairly.” The scenes showing Jews clearing rubble “elicited great satisfaction” even in the annexed French province Lorraine (particularly in its main city, Metz)…. Images of “lynch justice meted out by the population in Riga against its [Jewish] tormentors were greeted with shouts of encouragement.”42
As had been usual over the years, denunciations of political and other known personalities for being Jewish or influenced by Jews demanded exacting research. On June 18, 1941, Streicher’s Der Stürmer sent an inquiry to the Reichsschrifttumskammer (the Reich’s Writers Chamber) to check on the Jewishness of some German writers and that of fifteen well-known authors including, among others, Upton Sinclair, Lewis Sinclair [sic], Romain Rolland, H. G. Wells, Colette, Charles Dickens, Émil [sic] Zola, Viktor [sic] Hugo, Theodor [sic] Dreiser, and Denis Diderot. On July 3, Meyer of the Reichsschrifttumskammer dutifully answered. Of the German writers (Frank Thiess and Ernst Gläser), one was a member of the Kammer, the other worked for the Propaganda Ministry…. As far as the foreign writers were concerned, none was Jewish, the Kammer confirmed, but the three Americans “wrote in accordance with a typical American mentality.” The others, except for one Wilhelm Speyer, were not known to have Jewish origins.43
III
Several documents signed by Heydrich in June and July 1941 outlined the measures to be taken against the Jews living in the newly occupied areas. In a message sent on June 29 to the Einsatzgruppen commanders, the RSHA chief referred to the meeting held in Berlin on the seventeenth and emphasized the need for secretly encouraging local pogroms (Heydrich called it Selbstbereinigung (self-cleansing). Simultaneously the SS units were to get ready to take over from the local “avengers.”44 Then, in a July 2 message to Himmler’s personal delegates to various countries or major areas, the Higher SS and Police Leaders, Heydrich summed up the instructions previously given to the Einsatzgruppen: All Jewish party and state officials were to be executed and local pogroms had to be encouraged.45 Finally, on July 17, Heydrich ordered the execution of all Jewish prisoners of war.46
And so it was. During the first weeks mostly Jewish men were killed, t
hen all Jews without distinction were murdered by SS Einsatzgruppen and other SS units, by the much more numerous Order Police battalions, all of which were assisted from the outset by local gangs, then by local auxiliary units organized by the Germans, and often by regular Wehrmacht troops.47
Contrary to what had long been assumed, Himmler did not give the order for the general extermination of all Jews in Soviet territory during his August 15 visit to Minsk, when, at his request, he attended a mass execution of Jews on the outskirts of the city.48 The move from selective to mass murder had started earlier, probably as a result of Hitler’s remarks during the July 16 conference regarding the “possibilities” offered by “antipartisan” operations. All Jews may not have been partisans in German eyes, but why not assume that they would offer assistance to partisans if they could?
The change had already become noticeable at the very beginning of August, for example in Himmler’s order to eliminate the Jewish population of Pinsk in Belorussia. On August 2 or 3 the Reichsführer sent the appropriate instructions to Franz Magill, commander of the SS second cavalry brigade operating near Pinsk and the Pripet Marshes: “All Jews age 14 or over who are found in the area being combed shall be shot to death; Jewish women and children shall be driven into the marshes [where they would drown]. The Jews are the partisans’ reserve force; they support them…. In the city of Pinsk the killing by shooting shall be carried out by cavalry companies 1 and 4…. The ‘Aktion’ is to begin at once. A report on the implementation shall be submitted.”49 The women and children of Pinsk escaped death for a time as the marshes were too shallow; but the order clearly meant that they were to die. The reference to “partisans” once again indicated the link between the July 16 conference and the expanding massacres. Women and children would not yet be shot as men were (presumably to spare the feelings of the units involved), but they would nonetheless be murdered. Such distinctions would rapidly disappear.
It is likely that some of the killings were directly linked to the planned reduction of food supply to Soviet POWs, Jews, and wider Slav populations in order to feed the Ostheer. This “murder for food supply” strategy may have been applied systematically regarding the POWs, but it did not appear as a decisive factor in the murder of Jews during the summer of 1941. Had it been otherwise, the killing would not have been selective from the outset, and some trace of such plans would have surfaced in Heydrich’s directives or in the reports of the Einsatzgruppen and the police batallions.50
The Soviet annexations in Eastern Europe had added some 2 million Jews to the 3 million already living within the borders of the USSR proper. Approximately 4 million lived in areas that were occupied by the Germans; of these 1.5 million managed to flee; those who remained were a relatively easy prey, also as a result of their urban concentration.51
During this “first sweep” (from June 1941 to the end of the year), part of the Jewish populations survived. The intensity of the massacres differed from area to area according to local circumstances, as did the very uneven ghettoization process, particularly in pre-1939 Soviet territory. The ghettos set up in bigger cities, such as Minsk and Rovno, were liquidated in a few large killing operations over the coming eighteen months or so; the smaller ghettos were often destroyed within weeks, and part of the population was not ghettoized at all but killed on the spot during the first or the second sweep (throughout 1942). We shall return to the exterminations in ex-Soviet territory. Suffice it to mention here that by the end of 1941, about 600,000 Jews had been murdered in the newly conquered eastern regions.
Among the nonghettoized Jewish population, the occupiers could use whomever they chose as household slaves. “We took over an apartment that belonged to Jews,” a member of Order Police Reserve Batallion 105, Hermann G., wrote home on July 7, 1941. “The Jews of this place were woken up very early on Sunday morning by a Vorkommando and had, in their great majority, to leave their houses and apartments, and make them available to us. The first thing was to clean these places thoroughly. All Jewish women and girls were put to work: It was a great Sunday morning cleaning. Every morning at 7 o’clock, the chosen people must be present and do all the work for us…. We don’t need to do anything anymore. H.F. and I have a Jew and, each of us, a Jewess, one of whom is 15 and the other 19; one is called Eide, the other Chawah. They do for us everything we want and are at our service…. They have a permit, so that they should not be grabbed by somebody else when they depart. The Jews are fair game [Die Juden sind Freiwild]. Everybody can snatch any of them on the street and keep them. I wouldn’t want to be in a Jew’s skin. No store, insofar as any are open, sells anything to them. What they live on, I don’t know. We give them some of our bread and also some other things. I cannot be so hard. One can only give well-meant advice to the Jews: Do not bring children into the world; they have no future anymore.”52
The author of the letter does not read like a born murderer or dyed-in-the-wool anti-Semite, but rather like someone who just went along and enjoyed his newly acquired power. This was probably the case of most soldiers of the Ostheer. Yet beyond the involvement of ordinary soldiers, the crimes of the Wehrmacht against local populations and Jews can no longer be denied, although their extent remains the object of intense debate.
The protests of some senior officers regarding the murders committed by the SS during the Polish campaign did not reappear at the outset of the war against the Soviet Union. Even among the small group of officers, mostly belonging to the Prussian aristocracy, who congregated at Army Group Center around Lt. Col. Henning von Tresckow and who, to varying degrees, were hostile to Nazism, the need to overthrow the Bolshevik regime seems to have been fully accepted, and none of the orders issued in the spring of 1941 was seriously questioned.53 It appears, moreover, that several of these officers were well informed, from the very beginning of the Russian campaign, about the criminal activities of Arthur Nebe’s Einsatzgruppe B, which operated in their own area, without however admitting to that knowledge.54 Only several months later, after the October 20–21 extermination of the Jews of Borisov, did this nucleus of the military opposition to Hitler explicitly recognize the mass murder surrounding them and start drawing conclusions.
Whereas acknowledgment of criminal operations was but slowly admitted by a small military group, the participation of the Wehrmacht in such operations was widespread, as we shall see, and indirectly encouraged by some of the most senior commanders of the Ostheer. Thus, in a notorious order of the day, on October 10, 1941, Field Marshal Walter von Reichenau, an outright Nazi, set the tone for several of the highest-ranking commanders: “The soldier must have complete understanding for the necessity of the harsh but just atonement of Jewish subhumanity. This has the further goal of nipping in the bud rebellions in the rear of the Wehrmacht which, as experience shows, are always plotted by the Jews.”55 Hitler praised Reichenau’s proclamation and demanded its distribution to all frontline units in the East.56 Within a few weeks, the Nazi field marshal was imitated by Generals Erich von Manstein, Stülpnagel, and the commander of the seventeenth Army, Gen. Hermann Hoth.57 As for Field Marshal Wilhelm Ritter von Leeb, the commander of Army Group North, he did not believe that the Jewish question could be solved by mass executions: “It would most reliably be solved by sterilizing all males.”58
Some commanders were more reticent. Thus, on September 24, 1941, Field Marshal Gerd von Rundstedt, commander of Army Group South, made it clear that operations against foes such as communists and Jews were solely the task of the Einsatzgruppen. “Independent participation of Wehrmacht members or participation of Wehrmacht members in the excesses of the Ukrainian population against the Jews” were forbidden. Members of the Wehrmacht were also forbidden “to watch or take pictures during the measures taken by the Sonderkommandos.”59 The order was only very partially followed.
In the meantime Wehrmacht propaganda units were hard at work promoting anti-Jewish rage in the ranks of the Red Army and among the Soviet populations. In early July 1941, the
first major drops of millions of German leaflets over Soviet territory started. The “Jewish criminals,” their murderous deeds, their treacherous plots, and the like were the mainstays in an endless litany of hatred.60 And, more virulently so than during the Polish campaign, soldiers’ letters demonstrate the growing impact of the anti-Jewish slogans.
On the eve of the attack, Pvt. Richard M, stationed somewhere in the General Government, described the Jews he encountered there in a letter to his girlfriend: “This nation of bandits and gypsies (here this expression applies exactly without any exaggeration) hangs about in the streets and alleys and refuses to do any work voluntarily…. They show greater skill at stealing and haggling…. Moreover these creatures are covered with dirty tatters and infected with all kinds of diseases…. They live in wooden huts with thatched roofs. A brief look through the window makes it clear that vice is at home here.”61 On the second day of the campaign, Sgt. A.N. wrote home: “Now Jewry has declared war on us along the whole line, from one extreme to the other, from the London and New York plutocrats to the Bolsheviks.” And he added: “All that is under Jewish domination stands in one common front against us.”62
On July 3 Cpl. F marched through an eastern Galician town (probably Lutsk): “Here, one witnesses Jewish and Bolshevik cruelty of a kind that I hardly thought possible.” After describing the discovery of the massacres that had taken place in local jails before the Soviets departed, he commented: “This kind of thing calls for vengeance, and it is being meted out.”63 In the same area Cpl. WH described the houses in the Jewish quarter as “robber dens” and the Jews he encountered as the most sinister beings. His comrade Helmut expressed their feelings: “How was it possible that this race claimed for itself the right to rule all other nations.”64
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