After the end of the Babi Yar massacre, a few elderly Jews (witnesses mention that there were nine of them) returned to Kiev and sat by the Old Synagogue. Nobody dared to approach or leave food or water for them, as this could mean immediate execution. One after another the Jews died until only two remained. A passerby went to the German sentry standing at the corner of the street and suggested shooting the two old Jews instead of letting them also starve to death. “The guard thought for a moment and did it.”244
CHAPTER V
September 1941–December 1941
On November 12, 1941, Himmler ordered Friedrich Jeckeln, the HSSPF Ostland, to murder the approximately 30,000 Jews of the Riga ghetto.
On the eve of the operation, on November 29, the able-bodied Jews were separated from the bulk of the ghetto population.1 On November 30, in the early-morning hours, the trek from the ghetto to the nearby Rumbula forest began. Some 1,700 guards were ready, including around 1,000 Latvian auxiliaries. In the meantime several hundred Soviet prisoners had dug six huge pits in the sandy terrain of Rumbula.2
Jews trying to escape the evacuation were killed on the spot—inside houses, on stairways, in the streets. As, group after group, the ghetto inhabitants reached the forest, a tightening gauntlet of guards drove them toward the pits. Shortly before approaching the execution site, the Jews were forced to dispose of their suitcases and bags, take off their coats, and finally remove their clothes. Then the naked victims descended into the pit by means of an earthen ramp, lay facedown on the ground, or over the bodies of the dying and the dead, and were shot in the back of the head with a single bullet from a distance of about two meters.
Jeckeln stood on the edge of the pits surrounded by a throng of SD, police, and civilian guests. Reichskomissar Lohse paid a short visit, and some police commanders were brought from as far away as the Leningrad front.3 Twelve marksmen working in shifts shot the Jews throughout the entire day. The killing stopped sometime between five p.m. and seven p.m.; by then about fifteen thousand Jews had been murdered.4
A week later, on December 7 and 8, the Germans murdered almost the entire remaining half of the ghetto population. The RSHA’s report no. 155 of January 14, 1942, summed up the overall outcome: “The number of Jews who remained in Riga—29,500—was reduced to 2,500 as a result of the Aktion carried out by the Higher SS and Police leader Ostland.”5
The historian Simon Dubnow, who lay ill, had been overlooked during the first massacre. The second time he was caught in the dragnet. The sick and feeble ghetto inhabitants were brought to the execution area in buses; as Dubnow could not board the bus fast enough, one of the Latvian guards shot him in the back of the head. The next day he was buried in a mass grave in the ghetto. According to rumor—fast turning into legend—on his way to the bus, Dubnow repeated: “People, do not forget; speak of this, people; record it all.”6 A few months later, on June 26, 1942, SS Obersturmführer Heinz Ballensiefen, head of the Jewish Section of Amt VII (research) in the RSHA, informed his colleagues that in Riga his men had “secured” (sichergestellt) “about 45 boxes containing the archive and library of the Jewish historian Dubnow.”7
Himmler continued to worry about the heavy stress that these mass killings imposed upon his men. On December 12, 1941, he once again issued secret instructions in this regard: “It is the sacred obligation of the higher SS leaders and commanders to see to it personally that none of our men who have to fulfill this heavy duty, become brutalized…. This will be achieved by keeping the strictest discipline in the performance of the official duties and by comradely evening gatherings after days filled with these difficult obligations. However, these comradely gatherings should never end with abuse of alcohol. During such evenings, as far as conditions allow, one should sit together around the table and eat in the best German domestic tradition; moreover, these evenings should be devoted to music, to lectures and to introducing our men into the beautiful domains of German spiritual and emotional life.”8
On the day of the first massacre of the Riga Jews, in the early-morning hours, a transport of 1,000 Jews from Berlin had arrived at a suburban railway station. Jeckeln did not deem it appropriate to send these new arrivals into a ghetto in full upheaval, from where the trek to Rumbula would be starting at any moment. The solution was at hand: The Berlin Jews were transported straight from the station to the forest and killed on the spot.
The deportees transported from the Reich to Riga were but one group among others who, since October 15, following a sudden decision taken by Hitler, were being sent off from cities in Germany and the Protectorate to ghettos in former Poland or the Ostland. Just a month earlier, Hitler had told Goebbels that the deportation of the Jews of Germany (and, implicitly, of all European Jews) would take place after the victory in Russia and would be directed to the Russian Far North. What could have triggered the Nazi leader’s sudden initiative?
I
The precise date of Hitler’s decision about the deportation of the Jews from Germany remains undetermined. Some historians have argued that Hitler reached his decision on September 17. The following day, in a letter to Greiser, with copies to Heydrich and to Wilhelm Koppe, the HSSPF in the Warthegau, Himmler summed up the “Führer’s wish”: “The Führer wishes the Altreich and the Protectorate to be cleared of and freed from Jews from west to east as soon as possible. Consequently, I shall endeavor, this year if possible and initially as a first stage, to transport the Jews from the Altreich and the Protectorate to those eastern territories that became part of the Reich two years ago and then deport them even farther eastward next spring. My intention is to take approximately 60,000 Jews of the Altreich and the Protectorate to spend the winter in the Litzmannstadt ghetto, which, I have heard, still has available capacity. I ask you not only to understand this step, which will certainly impose difficulties and burdens on your Gau, but to do everything in your power to support it in the interest of the Reich. SS Gruppenführer Heydrich, whose task is to carry out the transfer of the Jews, will contact you in good time, directly or through SS Gruppenführer Koppe.”9
Himmler’s letter to Greiser demonstrates that Hitler’s decision was sudden and that nothing was ready for its implementation. To deport 60,000 to 80,000 Jews to the overcrowded Lodz ghetto was manifestly impossible. The promise that these Jews would be sent farther eastward in the spring was clearly an improvised commitment, devoid of practical significance, meant only to preempt any protests from Greiser or from the Lodz authorities. Thus the immediate context of the Nazi leader’s decision becomes even more puzzling.
Starting the evacuation in the West of the Reich points to one of Hitler’s possible motives: persistent demands from the Gauleiter of western and northwestern Germany for housing, as a result of the damages inflicted by British bombings. A particularly pressing request was addressed directly to Hitler by Hamburg Gauleiter Karl Kaufmann on September 16 after a heavy British raid on the city, on the previous day.10 Such demands were reinforced by Goebbels’s constant insistence upon “cleansing Berlin of its Jews.”
Hitler’s sudden decision has mainly been attributed to information about Stalin’s order to deport the entire population of Volga Germans to Siberia.11 Rosenberg’s adjutant, Otto Bräutigam, who brought the news to Hitler’s headquarters on September 14, was told that the Führer attached the greatest importance to this information.12 After consulting with Ribbentrop on September 16, Hitler—according to this interpretation—made up his mind on the seventeenth. Yet we know that six days beforehand Goebbels had already mentioned Stalin’s order in his diary, and, on the following day, the propaganda chief recorded the worldwide echo stirred by the deportation.13 Thus Hitler could hardly have been impressed on September 14 by information he undoubtedly received nearly a week earlier and to which, until then, he had not reacted. Moreover, he certainly knew that deporting the Jews of Germany to avenge the Volga Germans would hardly impress somebody of Stalin’s ilk. The Volga Germans could, of course, have been a convenient pretext
for a decision taken earlier for an entirely different reason: Roosevelt’s steady efforts to involve the United States in the war.
The Nazi leader had more than enough information concerning the direct assistance Roosevelt was providing Great Britain; the Churchill-Roosevelt meeting in August 1941 underscored the foundations of what had virtually become an alliance. And Berlin was following with no less concern Roosevelt’s determination to keep Stalin willing and capable to fight on. The Germans knew of Roosevelt’s unofficial envoy Harry Hopkins’s mission to Moscow and of Roosevelt’s decision to send planes and tanks directly from American assembly lines to the Soviet forces, even before filling the U.S. Army’s immediate needs.14 All this unquestionably tallied with Hitler’s belief that the Jews were the threatening force behind Roosevelt. How else could one explain the readiness of the leader of world capitalism to rush aid and assistance to the threatened fortress of Bolshevism?
In January 1939 Hitler had threatened the Jewish “warmongers” in Paris, London, and mainly Washington with his notorious “prophecy” in order to dissuade the democracies from intervening in the incipient Polish crisis. In January 1941 the Nazi leader took up his prophecy again (albeit in slightly different terms), possibly as a reaction to Roosevelt’s reelection and mainly to his fireside chat about the United States becoming “the great arsenal of democracy.” As speeches and threats did not seem to deflect the American president from his course, the Nazi leader may have thought that direct and highly menacing steps against a closely scrutinized Jewish community, the Jews of Germany (with any number of American correspondents posted in Berlin), would have some effect on Roosevelt’s “Jewish entourage.” The German Jews became, concretely and visibly, hostages on the brink of a dire fate if the United States moved further toward war.
In July 1940 Fritz Rademacher of the Foreign Ministry had expressed the same idea regarding the Madagascar plan: “The Jews [in Madagascar] will remain in German hands as a pledge of the future good conduct of the members of their race in America.”15 In March 1941, the Foreign Ministry once again linked measures against Jews in Germany to American policy; it demanded that a new decree (then in preparation) about the loss of citizenship and expropriation of Jews leaving the Reich be announced on March 26, the day the Lend-Lease Bill was to take effect.16
The need to put pressure on Roosevelt may have seemed increasingly urgent to Hitler during the first days of September 1941. On September 4, a German submarine, U-652, dangerously trailed by the U.S. destroyer Greer—and attacked by British aircraft guided by the Greer—attempted to torpedo the American vessel. Both the Greer and U-652 escaped unharmed, but a week later, on September 11, Roosevelt gave a distorted account of the incident and announced the “shoot-on-sight” policy, a major American step on the path to war with Germany.17 “The time for active defense has come,” the president declared in a radio speech, and two days later American naval forces received the order to shoot on sight at all Axis ships encountered within the American “neutrality zone” (unilaterally defined by the United States and extending to the mid-Atlantic).18
One may assume that, in Hitler’s mind, the counterthreat could work both ways: Either the fate menacing the Jews of Germany would eventually stop Roosevelt in his tracks (due to Jewish pressure) or, if Roosevelt and the Jews were bent on war with the Reich—that is, if total war was in the offing—the most dangerous internal enemy would already have been expelled from German territory.
Hitler’s decision may, in fact, have been taken in the early days of September. On September 2, Himmler was the Nazi leader’s guest for lunch. Other issues were on the agenda, but later that same day, the Reichsführer met his delegate in the General Government, Krüger, and discussed with him the deportation of Jews from the Reich (“Judenfrage-Aussiedlung aus dem Reich”). Two days later, as the Greer incident was unfolding, the Reichsführer again met with Hitler and, later in the evening, had a discussion with Koppe, his man in the Warthegau.19 The main practical obstacles were Frank’s uncompromising opposition to further transports of Poles and Jews into the General Government, and the overcrowding of the Lodz ghetto.20
Hitler hesitated for some three additional weeks, as the attack against Moscow unfolded, probably in order to assess the difficulties that the deportation trains could be adding to the already overburdened supply routes from the Reich to the East. In early October, after the German victories in Vyasma and Briansk, the decision was finalized: The deportations could begin.21 When the president of the Lodz district, Friedrich Uebelhoer, prodded by the city mayor, Werner Ventzki, dared to protest to Himmler against the forthcoming influx of Jews and even accused Eichmann of providing false information about the situation in the ghetto, Himmler sent him a sharp rebuff.22
On October 15, the first transport left Vienna for Lodz; it was followed by transports from Prague and Luxembourg on the sixteenth, and from Berlin, on the eighteenth. By November 5 twenty transports carrying 19,593 Jews completed the first phase.23 In the meantime, on October 23, Eichmann and his men reviewed the reports about the first deportations and added some administrative steps and practical measures to the existing procedures.24 Then, on November 8, the second phase started and lasted until mid-January 1942. This time twenty-two transports with some 22,000 Jews in all were headed further east, to the Ostland, to Riga, Kovno, and Minsk (upon Heydrich’s suggestion, as we shall see further on).25 Of the transports destined for Riga, five were rerouted to Kovno; none of these 5,000 deportees ever set foot in the ghetto: Upon their arrival, they were immediately transferred to fort IX and shot in two batches on November 25 and 29.26 A month beforehand, on October 28, approximately 10,000 inhabitants of the Kovno ghetto had been murdered. In Minsk 13,000 local Jews were exterminated on November 7, and a further group of 7,000 on November 20. Clearly the mass slaughters of October and November 1941 were intended to make space for the new arrivals from the Reich. And, as we saw, at times some of the new arrivals were killed on reaching their destination.
Soon the Reichsführer was receiving a growing number of complaints about the inclusion of Mischlinge and decorated war veterans in the transports. And, as information about the Kovno massacres spread, Himmler precipitously ordered, on Sunday, November 30, that “no liquidation” of the Jews deported from Berlin to Riga “should take place.”27 The order reached Riga too late, and an irate SS chief threatened Jeckeln with “punishment” for acting on his own.28 During the following months mass executions of Jews deported from Germany stopped. It was but a brief respite.
II
Typhoon, the Wehrmacht’s offensive against Moscow, was launched on October 2; it was Germany’s last chance to win the war in the East before the onset of the winter. For a few days victory again seemed within reach. As in July, Hitler’s euphoric state of mind was shared by the OKW and also by Fedor von Bock, the commander of Army Group Center, the main force advancing on the Soviet capital. On October 4, when the Nazi chief returned to Berlin for a major speech at the Sportpalast, Goebbels noted: “He looks at his best and is in an exuberantly optimistic frame of mind. He literally exudes optimism…. The Führer is convinced that if the weather remains halfway favorable, the Soviet army will be essentially demolished in fourteen days.” And, on October 7: “It goes well on the front. The Führer continues to be extraordinarily optimistic.”29
Hitler’s mood during those days was indeed so exuberant, his declarations about the collapse of the Red Army and of the Soviet Union so peremptory, that on October 13 press chief Dietrich could announce the momentous news: “Militarily, this war has been decided. What still remains to be done is essentially of a political nature, both internally and externally. At some stage, the German armies in the East will stop their advance and a border determined by us will be drawn; it will protect the greater Europe and the European bloc community of interests led by Germany, against the East.”30 Dietrich was in fact merely repeating his Führer’s assessment and, so it seems, that of the army itself.
A
ll over Europe, Jews were following the military news like an anxious choir, in despair at first, with hope somewhat later, then with exaltation at the end of the year. “Hitler is reported to have given a speech in which he said that he has begun a gigantic offensive in the east,” Sierakowiak noted on October 3. “I wonder how it will develop. It looks like this one will be as victorious as all the previous ones.”31 And on October 10: “The Germans have supposedly broken the Russian front with their 3 million-man army and are marching on Moscow. Hitler has personally taken command on the front. So it’s to be another successful offensive. The Germans are really invincible. We’ll rot in this ghetto for sure.”32 A few days later Kaplan became the voice of despair: “The Nazis continue to advance on the Eastern front,” he recorded on October 18, “and have reached the gates of Moscow. The city is still fighting desperately but its fate has been decided—it will surely be captured by the Nazis…. And when Moscow falls, all the capitals of Europe will be under the Nazi rule…. A Nazi victory means complete annihilation, morally and materially, for all the Jews of Europe. The latest news has left even the most hopeful among us dejected. It seems this war will go on for years.”33 On October 25, Klemperer just mentioned laconically: “German advance continues in Russia, even though the winter has begun.”34
Nazi Germany and the Jews, Volume 2: The Years of Extermination Page 35