Nazi Germany and the Jews, Volume 2: The Years of Extermination

by Saul Friedlander

  During those same years the Jewish minority in Polish-controlled Vilna also energetically developed its cultural and internal political life. Apart from a vast school system in Yiddish, Hebrew, and Polish, the Vilna community boasted a Yiddish theater, a wealth of newspapers and periodicals, clubs, libraries, and other cultural and social institutions. The city became home to major Yiddish writers and artists, as well as to the YIVO research center in the Jewish humanities and social sciences founded in 1925—a Jewish university in the making.93

  The political scene changed radically with the Soviet annexation of the Baltic countries in July 1940: Jewish religious institutions and political parties such as the Bund or the Zionist-Revisionist Betar soon became targets of the NKVD. As we saw in regard to eastern Poland, any kind of balanced assessment of Jewish involvement in the new political system is rendered quasi impossible by contrary aspects in various domains: Jews were highly represented in officer schools, midrank police appointments, higher education, and various administrative positions. The situation was not different in the two other Baltic countries. Thus, it was not too difficult for extremist Lithuanian right-wing émigrés who had fled to Berlin and who, together with the Germans, were fostering anti-Soviet operations in the home country, to pretend—by exaggerating and twisting numbers that the Jews collaborated with the Bolsheviks. Elimination of the Jews from Lithuania became a goal of the underground “Lithuanian Activists’ Front” (LAF). When, a week before the German invasion, the NKVD deported some 35,000 Lithuanians to the Soviet interior, the Jews were widely accused of being both agents and informers.94

  The Wehrmacht occupied Vilna in the early morning hours of June 24. The systematic killings in the city started on July 4, two days after the arrival of Einsatzkommando 9. Lithuanian gangs (self-styled “partisans”) had started rounding up hundreds of male Jews whom they either slaughtered on the spot or in the woods of Ponar, close to the city. Once the Germans openly stepped in, they extended and organized the anti-Jewish operations, and the Lithuanians became willing auxiliaries in the German murder campaign. According to report no. 21 of July 13 about the activities of Einsatzgruppe A: “In Vilna…the Lithuanian Ordnungspolizei, which was placed under the command of the Einsatzkommando…received instructions to take part in the Jewish extermination actions. Consequently, 150 Lithuanians are engaged in arresting and taking Jews to the concentration camp, where after one day they were given ‘special treatment’ (Sonderbehandlung).”95

  The massacre of some 5,000 Vilna Jewish men in Ponar during July inaugurated a series of mass killings that lasted throughout the summer and the fall. Women and children were included from August onwards; the German aim seems to have been the extermination of Jews unable to work, while workers and their families were left alive. Itzhak Rudashevski, a Vilna schoolboy, not yet fourteen in the summer of 1941, described in the diary he had probably started in June the Yom Kippur round-up (as the Jews were already in the ghetto): “Today the ghetto is full of storm troopers. They thought Jews would not go to work today, so they came to the ghetto to take them. At night things suddenly became turbulent. The people get up. The gate opens. An uproar develops. Lithuanians have arrived. I look at the courtyard and see them leading away people with bundles. I hear boots pounding on the stairs. Soon, however, things calmed down. The Lithuanians were given money and they left. In this way the defenseless Jews attempted to rescue themselves. In the morning the terrible news spread. Several thousand people were uprooted from the ghetto at night. These people never came back again.”96 Rudashevski’s last sentence indicates that his entry was written later, from memory; it shows clearly nonetheless that neither he nor the Jews being taken away had any idea of what was going on and where they were headed. By the end of these successive Aktionen, in December 1941, some 33,000 Jewish inhabitants of Vilna had been murdered.97

  For many Lithuanians the prospect of easy looting became a major incentive. A Pole who lived near Ponar and observed the traffic in Jewish possessions shrewdly noted: “To the Germans, 300 Jews means 300 enemies of humanity. To the Lithuanians it means 300 pairs of pants, 300 pairs of boots.”98 This Polish observer probably did not know at the time that before murdering them the Germans robbed the “enemies of humanity” much more systematically than the Lithuanians did. According to the same Einsatzgruppe report of July 13, “about 500 Jews…are liquidated daily. About 460,000 rubles in cash, as well as many valuables belonging to Jews who were subject to special treatment, were confiscated as property belonging to enemies of the Reich.”99

  In Kovno, Lithuanian murder squads [the “partisans”] ran wild during the early days of the occupation. In a postwar statement a German soldier in the 562nd Bakers’ Company (which moved to Kovno at the time and witnessed the killings) volunteered a remark that expressed much more than it was meant to convey: “From where I was standing I saw Lithuanian civilians beating a number of civilians with different types of weapons until they showed no signs of life. Not knowing why these people were being beaten to death in such a cruel manner, I asked a medical-corps sergeant standing next to me…. He told me that the people being beaten to death were all Jews…. Why these Jews were being beaten to death I did not find out.”100 Other reports describe the enthusiastic attendance of the Lithuanian population (many women with children settling in “front rows” for the day) and of throngs of German soldiers, all of them goading the killers with shouts and applause. Over the following days groups of Jews were shoved off to the forts surrounding the city (Forts VII and IX in particular) and shot.

  While some German soldiers did not grasp what exactly was going on with the Jews, many Jews themselves didn’t understand either. Thus on July 2, a Jewish woman from Kovno, Mira Scher, wrote to the chief of the Security Police to ask why, on June 26, Lithuanian “partisans” had arrested most of her family, including her granddaughters Mala (thirteen), Frida (eight) and her grandson Benjamin (four). As “all the people mentioned are entirely innocent,” Mrs. Scher added, “I ask, with all courtesy, to free them.” On the same day a similar letter was sent to the same authorities by Berkus Friedmann, whose wife, Isa (forty-two), daughter, Ester (sixteen), and son, Eliahu (two and a half), were also arrested by the “partisans.” Friedmann assured the chief of the SIPO [Sicherheitspolizei] that his family had never belonged to any party and that they all were legal citizens.”101

  Whereas in eastern Galicia the OUN squads had started on their own to murder Jews from day one, in the Baltic countries some German prompting may have been necessary at times. In a notorious October 15, 1941, report about the activities of Einsatzgruppe A in the Baltic countries, Stahlecker repeatedly insisted on this point. “Native anti-Semitic forces were induced to start pogroms against Jews during the first hours after capture [occupation],” Stahlecker wrote in the introductory part of the report, “though this inducement proved to be very difficult [emphasis added].” Further on Stahlecker returned to this point in his description of the events in Lithuania: “This [local involvement in the killings] was achieved for the first time by partisan activities in Kovno. To our surprise it was not easy at first to set in motion an extensive pogrom against Jews [emphasis added]. Klimatis, the leader of the partisan unit…who was primarily used for this purpose, succeeded in starting a pogrom on the basis of advice given to him by a small advanced detachment acting in Kovno, and in such a way that no German order or German instigation was noticed from the outside.”

  Stahlecker may of course have emphasized these initial difficulties to underscore his own talents of persuasion; Lithuanian reticence did not last long in any case, as, according to Stahlecker himself, in Kovno the local gangs murdered some fifteen hundred Jews during the first night of the occupation.102

  The extermination frenzy that engulfed the immense majority of the Jews of Lithuania raged throughout the other two Baltic countries as well. By the end of 1941 the quasi totality of the 2,000 Jews of Estonia had been killed. A year later the approximately 66,000 Jews of Latvi
a had been almost entirely exterminated (some 12,000 Jews remained on Latvian territory, 8,000 of whom were deportees from the Reich).103

  The massacres spread throughout the occupied eastern territories. Even the Reich’s downtrodden victims, the Poles, took a hand in the mass killing of Jews. The best-known massacres occurred in the Bialystók district, in Radzilow and in Jedwabne, on July 10. After the Wehrmacht occupied the area, the inhabitants of these small towns exterminated most of their Jewish neighbors by beating them, shooting them, and burning scores of them alive in local barns. These basic facts seem indisputable, but some related issues demand further investigation. Apparently, a high humber of fiercely anti-Semitic priests indoctrinated their flock in the Jedwabne region.104 Was this high pitch of anti-Jewish hatred exacerbated by German incitement or even by direct German intervention, but also by the role of Jewish Communist officials in the Bial/ystok district during the Soviet occupation?105 Most helpful throughout, as far as incitement and killing went, were the ethnic Germans; they greatly facilitated the task of their new masters.106

  At times, however, local populations refused to participate in the anti-Jewish violence. In Brest Litovsk, for example, both the White Russians and the Poles expressed quite openly their pity for the Jewish victims and their disgust for the “barbaric” methods of the Germans, the “hangmen of the Jews.”107 The same reluctance to initiate pogroms was noticed in the Ukraine, in the Zhytomyr region for example. According to an Einsatzgruppe C report from August and early September 1941, “almost nowhere could the population be induced to take active steps against the Jews.” The Germans and the Ukrainian militia had to take the initiative and to instigate the violence in various ways.108 Similar attitudes were indirectly confirmed in Wehrmacht reports dealing with the impact of anti-Semitic propaganda operations on the Russian population. “After examining the reasons behind the relatively small impact of German propaganda to date,” an Army Group Center report indicated in August 1941, “it appears that German propaganda basically deals with matters of no real interest to the average Russian. This is particularly true of anti-Semitic propaganda. Attempts to spark pogroms against the Jews have come to naught. The reason is that in the eyes of the average Russian, Jews live a proletarian life and thus do not represent a target for attack.”109

  As weeks and months went by a basic fact became obvious to the populations of the occupied eastern territories: No law, no rule, no measure protected a Jew. Even children understood as much. On October 21, 1941, a Polish schoolboy, Georg Marsonas, wrote to the Gebietskommissar (district commissar) in Pinsk: “I am thirteen years old and I want to help my mother because she is having a difficult time making a living. I cannot work because I have to go to school but I can earn some money as a member of the municipal band because it plays in the evenings. Unfortunately, I do not have an accordion, which I know how to play. I know a Jew who has an accordion, so I very much ask your permission to have the instrument given or lent to the municipal band. That way I’ll have a chance to fulfill my wish—to be useful to my family.”110

  VI

  While the Germans and their local auxiliaries actively pursued their killing campaign in the north, center, and south of the Eastern Front, the Romanian army and gendarmerie were outperforming Otto Ohlendorf ’s Einsatzgruppe D.111 Over a one-year period the Romanians were to massacre between 280,000 and 380,000 Jews.112 They could not compete with the Germans in the total number of victims, but like the Latvians, the Lithuanians, the Ukrainians, and the Croats, they were ingenious tormentors and murderers.

  The earliest large-scale massacre of Romanian Jews took place, in Romania proper, before the reoccupation of the “lost provinces” (Bessarabia and northern Bukovina), particularly in Iasi, the capital of Moldavia. On June 26, 1941, in “retaliation” for two Soviet air raids and “to quell a Jewish uprising,” the killings started, organized by Romanian and German army intelligence officers and local police forces. After thousands of Jews had been massacred in the city, several thousand more were packed into the hermetically sealed cars of two freight trains and sent on an aimless journey, lasting several days. In the first train 1,400 Jews suffocated to death or died of thirst; 1,194 bodies were recovered from the second one. The exact number of the victims of the Iasi pogrom remains in dispute, but it may have exceeded 10,000.113

  The decimation of the Jews of Bessarabia and Bukovina, which began as a local initiative (mainly in the countryside), then continued on orders from Bucharest. On July 8 Ion Antonescu harangued his ministers: “I beg you, be implacable. Saccharine and vaporous humanitarianism has no place here. At the risk of being misunderstood by some traditionalists who may still be among you, I am for the forced migration of the entire Jewish element from Bessarabia and Bukovina, which must be thrown over the border.” After ordering similar measures against Ukrainians and other unreliable elements, Antonescu turned to historical precedents and national imperatives as supreme justifications: “The Roman Empire performed a series of barbarous acts against its contemporaries and yet it was the greatest political establishment. There are no other more favorable moments in our history. If need be, shoot with machine guns, and I say that there is no law…. I take full legal responsibility and I tell you, there is no law!”114 And, while the supreme leader invoked history, the head of the government, Mihai Antonescu (not related to Ion Antonescu), turned again, in the Iron Guard’s steps, to the rhetoric of Christian anti-Jewish hatred: “Our Army has been humiliated [by the Soviet occupation]—forced to pass under the Caudine Forks of its barbaric enemies—accompanied solely by the treacherous scorn of the accomplices of Bolshevism, who added to our Christian crucifixion their Judaic offense.” The crusade was now launched against those “who had desecrated the altar in the land of our ancestors, against the Yids and Bolsheviks [who] have emptied the house of the Redeemer, crucifying the faith on their vilainous [sic] cross.”115

  The massacre of Jews became an everyday occurrence; tens of thousands were herded into ghettos (the most important being in Kishinev, the main city of Bessarabia) until, in the autumn, they were driven over the river Dniester into “Transnistria,” the area of southern Ukraine that was Romanian-occupied and was to remain under Romanian control.116

  On October 16, 1941, the Romanian army entered Odessa; a few days later, on October 22, its headquarters were destroyed by an explosion set up by the NKVD. The murderous fury of the occupiers of course turned against the Jews of the city. After killing some 19,000 Jews (according to German estimates) in the Odessa harbor area, the Romanians drove a further 25,000 to 30,000 to neighboring Dalnic, where they exterminated them by shooting, explosives, or by burning them alive.117

  On several occasions in October 1941 the president of the Union of Jewish Communities in Romania, Wilhelm Filderman, and Chief Rabbi Alexander Safran interceded with Antonescu to stop the deportations to Transnistria and ease the fate of the Jews of Bessarabia and Bukovina. On October 19, in a violent answer released to the press, Antonescu accused the Jews of Romania of treachery toward their country and of responsibility for the supposed mutilations of Romanian officers captured by Soviet Jews, their “brethren”: “In keeping with tradition,” Antonescu went on, “you wish now to transform yourselves from accused into accusers, acting as if you have forgotten the reasons which caused the situation of which you complain…. From the cellars of Chisinau [Kishinev] our martyrs are removed daily, terribly mutilated cadavers thus rewarded for the friendly hand which, for twenty years, they stretched out to those ungrateful beasts…. Do not pity, if you really have a soul, those who do not merit it.”118

  As public as Antonescu’s letter had been, so was information about the massacres, from the outset. “Lunch at Alice’s with Hillard, a cavalry lieutenant who returned yesterday from the Ukrainian front,” Sebastian recorded on August 21, 1941. “A lot about the massacre of the Jews on both sides of the Dniester. Tens, hundreds, thousands of Jews were shot. He, a simple lieutenant, could have killed or ordered
the killing of any number of Jews. The driver who took them to Iasi had himself shot four.”119

  Over time, ever more details about the killings kept reaching Bucharest: “The roads of Bessarabia and Bukovina are filled with corpses of Jews driven from their homes toward Ukraine.” Sebastian noted on October 20: “It is an anti-Semitic delirium that nothing can stop. There are no breaks, no rhyme or reason…This is sheer uncontrolled bestiality without shame or conscience, without goal or purpose. Anything, absolutely anything, is possible.”120

  Sebastian’s perception of the events was confirmed by the American minister in the Romanian capital who, however, set greater emphasis upon Ion Antonescu’s crucial role: “It is becoming more and more evident,” Gunther wrote on November 4, “that the Romanians, obviously with the moral support of the Germans, are utilizing the present period for handling the Jewish problem in their own way. I have it on good authority that Marshal Antonescu has stated…that ‘this is wartime, and a good time to settle the Jewish problem once and for all.’”121

  After the German victory in the Balkans, Yugoslavia had been divided: The Germans occupied Serbia and the Italians large stretches of the Dalmatian Coast; the Hungarians were given the Backa and Baranya regions, and the Bulgarians received Macedonia. An independent Croatian state was established under the leadership of Ante Pavelíc and his Ustasha movement. While the Dalmatian coast of Croatia remained partly under Italian control, some German troops also stayed on Croatian territory.