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

by Saul Friedlander

  45. Ibid., pp. 323ff.

  46. Ibid., p. 337. According to the testimony given at Nuremberg by Otto Ohlendorf, head of Einsatzgruppe D (the only chief of an Einsatzgruppe to be put on trial), an oral order to exterminate all Jews on Soviet territory was transmitted by Heydrich’s emissary, Bruno Streckenbach, to the commanders of the Einsatzgruppen a few days before the beginning of the campaign. At the time of this testimony (1947), Streckenbach was thought to be dead. However when he returned from a Soviet prisoner-of-war camp in the mid-1950s, he declared that no such order was ever given or transmitted before the beginning of the Russian campaign. Other members of the killing units (heads or members of Einsatzkommandos—that is, subunits of the Einsatzgruppen) who were put on trial were more or less equally divided in support of either one of these opposing claims; moreover, any number of other versions that could help their own defense were brought forth. See Philippe Burrin, Hitler and the Jews: The Genesis of the Holocaust (London, 1994), pp. 94ff. In a masterly analysis of all available documents and testimonies, Burrin confirms the view first presented by Alfred Streim: The initial orders targeted Jewish men only; the killings expanded to entire Jewish communities from August on. For Streim’s view, see mainly Alfred Streim, “Zur Eröffnung des allgemeinen Judenvernichtungs befehls gegenüber den Einsatzgruppen,” in Der Mord an den Juden im Zweiten Weltkrieg: Entschlussbildung und Verwirklichung, ed. Eberhard Jäckel and Jürgen Rohwer (Stuttgart, 1985). See also Klein, ed., Die Einsatzgruppen in der besetzten Sowjetunion 1941/42, p. 23.

  47. The three thousand members of the four SS Einsatzgruppen (A, North; B, Center; C, South; D, Extreme South) were reinforced by Waffen SS units and by special SS units such as Kommandostab Reichsführer SS. The Kommandostab was a conglomerate of SS units (numbering approximately 25,000 men divided in three SS brigades) directly under Himmler’s command. The Reichsführer used it for “special tasks”: the killing of some 16,000 Jews in the area of the Pripet marshes and of thousands more in Pinsk and Bobruisk, as well as “minor” operations including only a few hundred victims in each case. Mostly, however, the Kommandostab brigades were under the command of the HSSPF and occasionally under that of the Wehrmacht (the first SS brigade, for example, was “lent” by Himmler to the HSSPF South, Jeckeln; then to Reichenau’s Sixth Army). See Yehoshua Büchler, “Kommandostab Reichsführer SS: Himmler’s Personal Murder Brigades in 1941,” Holocaust and Genocide Studies 1 (1986), pp. 11ff.

  48. Heinrich Himmler, Der Dienstkalender Heinrich Himmlers 1941/42, ed. Peter Witte et al. (Hamburg, 1999), p. 195 n. 14.

  49. Quoted in Tikva Fatal-Knaani, “The Jews of Pinsk, 1939–1943: Through the Prism of New Documentation,” Yad Vashem Studies 29 (2001), p. 162. At the same time—and most probably as a follow-up to Hitler’s July 16 remarks—the SS chief considerably increased the number of SS units and police battalions on Soviet territory; he also ordered the large-scale inclusion of local auxiliaries in the killing process. See Christopher R. Browning, The Path to Genocide: Essays on Launching the Final Solution (Cambridge, 1992), p. 106.

  50. For the most thorough presentations of the food-supply argument see Christian Gerlach, “Deutsche Wirtschaftsinteressen,” in Nationalsozialistische Vernichtungspolitik, 1939–1945: Neue Forschungen und Kontroversen, ed. Ulrich Herbert (Frankfurt am Main, 1998), and Christopher Dieckmann, “Ermordung Litauischer Juden,” in ibid., pp. 263ff. and 292ff.

  51. For the Jewish population statistics, see Raul Hilberg, The Destruction of the European Jews, 3 vols. (New Haven, CT, 2003), vol. 1, pp. 295–97.

  52. Hermann G.’s letters were first published in Ludwig Eiber, “Ein bischen Wahrheit…” 1999: Zeitschrift für Sozialgeschichte des 20. und 21. Jahrhunderts 6, no. 1 (1991), pp. 58ff. This letter is quoted in Bernhard Chiari, Alltag hinter der Front: Besatzung, Kollaboration und Widerstand in Weissrussland 1941–1944 (Düsseldorf, 1998), p. 240ff. On September 12, the employment of Jews by soldiers was forbidden by Keitel: “There will be no collaboration between the armed forces and the Jewish population, whose attitude is openly or secretly anti-German, and no employment of individual Jews to render preferential auxiliary services for the armed forces.” Nuremberg doc. NOKW-3292.

  53. Johannes Hürter, “Auf dem Weg zur Militäropposition: Tresckow, Gersdorff, der Vernichtungskrieg und der Judenmord: Neue Dokumente über das Verhältnis der Heeresgruppe Mitte zur Einsatzgruppe B im Jahr 1941,” Vierteljahrshefte fur Zeitgeschichte 3 (2004), pp. 527ff.

  54. Documents explicitly referring to the widespread murder of Jews were brought to the knowledge of the future military resisters as early as mid-July 1941. See ibid., pp. 552ff. Hürter’s article restarted a controversy that had initially been launched in a series of publications by Christian Gerlach; see, most recently, Christian Gerlach, “Hitlergegner bei der Heeresgruppe Mitte und die ‘verbrecherische Befehle,’” in NS-Verbrechen und der militärische Widerstand gegen Hitler, ed. Gerd R. Uberschär (Darmstadt, 2000), pp. 62ff.

  55. The English translation is quoted in Omer Bartov, Hitler’s Army: Soldiers, Nazis, and War in the Third Reich (New York, 1991), p. 130.

  56. Ibid.

  57. Ibid., pp. 130–31.

  58. Quoted in Jürgen Förster, “The Wehrmacht and the War of Extermination Against the Soviet Union,” Yad Vashem Studies 14 (1981), p. 7.

  59. Quoted in Helmut Krausnick and Hans-Heinrich Wilhelm, Die Truppe des Weltanschauungskrieges: Die Einsatzgruppen des Sicherheitspolizei und des SD, 1938–1942 (Stuttgart, 1981), p. 232.

  60. Ortwin Buchbender, Das tönende Erz: Deutsche Propaganda gegen die Rote Armee in Zweiten Weltkrieg (Stuttgart, 1978), pp. 60ff.

  61. Klara Löffler, Aufgehoben: Soldatenbriefe aus dem Zweiten Weltkrieg (Bamberg, 1992), p. 115.

  62. Walter Manoschek, ed., “Es gibt nur eines für das Judentum—Vernichtung”: Das Judenbild in deutschen Soldatenbriefen 1939–1944 (Hamburg, 1997), p. 28.

  63. Ortwin Buchbender and Reinhold Sterz, eds., Das andere Gesicht des Krieges: Deutsche Feldpostbriefe 1939–1945 (Munich, 1982), p. 73.

  64. Manoschek, ed., “Es gibt nur eines für das Judentum—Vernichtung,” p. 32.

  65. Letters quoted in Stephen G. Fritz, ““We are trying…to change the face of the world”: Ideology and Motivation in the Wehrmacht on the Eastern Front: The View from Below,” Journal of Military History 60, no. 4 (1996), p. 693.

  66. Quoted in Bartov, Hitler’s Army: Soldiers, Nazis, and War in the Third Reich, p. 106.

  67. For the special anti-Jewish indoctrination of the SS units and order police battalions see in particular Jürgen Matthäus, “Ausbildungsziel Judenmord? Zum Stellenwert der “weltanschaulichen Erziehung” von SS und Polizei im Rahmen der ‘Endlösung,’” Zeitschrift für Geschichtswissenschaft 47 (1999), pp. 673ff. See also Jürgen Matthäus et al., Ausbildung Judenmord? “Weltanschauliche Erziehung” von SS, Polizei, und Wassen-SS im Rahmen der “Endlösung” (Frankfurt, 2003).

  68. For a general historical survey see “Ukrainian-Jewish Relations During the Nazi Occupation,” in Philip Friedman, Roads to Extinction: Essays on the Holocaust, ed. Ada June Friedman (New York, 1980), pp. 176ff.

  69. Friedman, Roads to Extinction, p. 177. The relations between Ukrainians and Jews throughout the centuries remain a strongly contested history, at least as intensely so as some major aspects of the relations between Jews and Poles (or Ukranians and Poles). For what appears (to a nonspecialist like myself) to be a balanced view, see Robert Magocsi, A History of the Ukraine (Seattle, 1996).

  70. Friedman, Roads to Extinction, pp. 179–80. Very soon, however, the Germans, intent on turning the Ukraine into an area of colonization, would oppose Ukrainian nationalist demands and try to suppress their movements. See in particular Wendy Lower, Nazi Empire-Building and the Holocaust in Ukraine (Chapel Hill, NC, 2005), pp. 182ff.

  71. Out of a population of approximately 110,000 Jews, some 4,000 were killed by the Germans and the Ukrainians during the early days of the occupation.

  72. Bernd Boll
, “Zloczow, July 1941: The Wehrmacht and the Beginning of the Holocaust in Galicia: From a Criticism of Photographs to a Revision of the Past,” in Crimes of War: Guilt and Denial in the Twentieth Century, ed. Omer Bartov, Atina Grossman, and Mary Nolan (New York, 2002), pp. 61ff.

  73. Aryeh Klonicki and Malwina Klonicki, The Diary of Adam’s Father: The Diary of Aryeh Klonicki (Klonymus) and His Wife Malwina, With Letters Concerning the Fate of Their Child Adam (Jerusalem, 1973), pp. 22–23.

  74. Manoschek, ed., “Es gibt nur eines für das Judentum—Vernichtung,” p. 33.

  75. For these testimonies by Jews and Poles from Brzezany, see Shimon Redlich, Together and Apart in Brzezany: Poles, Jews, and Ukrainians, 1919–1945 (Bloomington, 2002), pp. 114ff.

  76. Thomas Sandkühler, “Anti-Jewish Policy and the Murder of the Jews in the District of Galicia 1941/1942,” in National Socialist Extermination Policies: Contemporary German Perspectives and Controversies, ed. Ulrich Herbert (New York, 2000), pp. 199ff.

  77. About the operation of Sonderkommando 4a and of its subunits, see among others, Helmut Krausnick, Hitlers Einsatzgruppen: Die Truppe des Weltanschauungskrieges 1938–1942 (Frankfurt, 1993), p. 163.

  78. For the events that followed see mainly Helmuth Groscurth, Tagebücher eines Abwehroffiziers 1938–1940, ed. Helmut Krausnick and Harold C. Deutsch (Stuttgart, 1970), pp. 534ff. The main documents relating to these events are available in English translation in Ernst Klee, Willi Dressen, and Volker Riess, eds., “The Good Old Days”: The Holocaust as Seen by Its Perpetrators and Bystanders (New York, 1991); pp. 137ff. Michael Burleigh, The Third Reich: A New History (New York, 2000), pp. 617–19.

  79. Klee et al., “The Good Old Days,” p. 138.

  80. Ibid.

  81. Ibid.

  82. Ibid., p. 149.

  83. Ibid., p. 154.

  84. Bernd Boll and Hans Safrian, “Auf dem Weg nach Stalingrad: Die 6. Armee 1941/42,” in Vernichtungskrieg: Verbrechen der Wehrmacht 1941 bis 1944, ed. Hannes Heer and Klaus Naumann (Hamburg, 1995), p. 277.

  85. Klee et al., “The Good Old Days,” p. 141.

  86. Ibid., p. 141.

  87. For more about Groscurth’s personality, see the detailed introduction to the Tagebuch. For Groscurth’s reference to Heydrich, see Tagebuch, p. 130.

  88. Klee et al., “The Good Old Days,” p. 150.

  89. Ibid., p. 149.

  90. Ibid., pp. 150–51.

  91. Christoph Dieckmann, “Der Krieg und die Ermordung der litauischen Juden,” in Nationalsozialistische Vernichtungspolitik, 1939–1945: Neue Forschungen und Kontroversen, ed. Ulrich Herbert (Frankfurt am Main, 1998), p. 244. For a detailed reconstruction of the orders received by “EK-Tilsit” see Konrad Kwiet, “Rehearsing for Murder: The Beginning of the Final Solution in Lithuania in June 1941,” Holocaust and Genocide Studies 12, no. 1 (1998), pp. 4ff. For these early stages, see also Jürgen Matthäus, “Jenseits der Grenze: Die ersten Massenerschiessungen von Juden in Litauen (Juni–August 1941),” Zeitschrift für Geschichtswissenschaft 2 (1996), pp. 101ff. There are several computations of the total number of Jews exterminated in Lithuania during the German occupation. According to the most recent studies, out of the Jewish population of 250,000, approximately 200,000 (80 percent) were exterminated. See Michael MacQueen, “Massenvernichtung im Kontext: Täter und Voraussetzungen des Holocaust in Litauen,” in Judenmord in Litauen, ed. Wolfgang Benz and Marion Neiss, Reihe Dokumente, Texte, Materialien, Bd. 33 (Berlin, 1999), p. 15.

  92. Dieckmann, “Der Krieg und die Ermordung der litauischen Juden,” ibid.

  93. Harshav, introduction to Kruk, The Last Days of the Jerusalem of Lithuania, pp. xxxiii–xxxiv.

  94. On these intricate developments, see among others Dov Levin, “The Jews in the Soviet Lithuanian Establishment, 1940–1941,” Soviet Jewish Affairs 10, n. 2 (May 1980), pp. 21ff; Dov Levin, “The Sovietization of the Baltics and the Jews, 1940–1941,” Soviet Jewish Affairs 21, no. 1 (Summer 1991), pp. 53ff. See also Michael MacQueen, “The Context of Mass Destruction: Agents and Prerequisites of the Holocaust in Lithuania,” Holocaust and Genocide Studies 12 (1998), pp. 32–34.

  95. For the sequence of events and the quote, see Yitzhak Arad, Ghetto in Flames: The Struggle and Destruction of the Jews in Vilna in the Holocaust (Jerusalem, 1980), pp. 66–67. During the second half of July the Ministry for the Occupied Eastern Territories took over the civilian administration of the “Reichskommissariat Ostland.”

  96. Isaac Rudashevski, The Diary of the Vilna Ghetto, June 1941–April 1943, ed. Percy Matenko (Tel Aviv, 1973), pp. 35–36.

  97. For a thorough presentation of the exterminations and an assessment of the number of victims, see Arad, Ghetto in Flames, pp. 101ff. and pp. 216–17.

  98. MacQueen, “The Context of Mass Destruction,” p. 36.

  99. Quoted in Yitzhak Arad, “Plunder of Jewish Property in the Nazi Occupied Areas of the Soviet Union,” Yad Vashem Studies 29 (2001), p. 134.

  100. Ernst Klee, Willi Dressen, and Volker Riess, eds., “The Good Old Days,” p. 32.

  101. Both handwritten letters are reproduced in Wolfgang Benz, Konrad Kwiet, and Jürgen Matthäus, Einsatz im “Reichskommissariat Ostland”: Dokumente zum Völkermord im Baltikum und in Weissrussland, 1941–1944 (Berlin, 1998), pp. 177–78.

  102. For Stahlecker’s report see Nuremberg doc. L-180, U.S. Office of Chief of Counsel for the Prosecution of Axis Criminality and International Military Tribunal, Nazi Conspiracy and Aggression, 8 vols. (Washington, DC, 1946) vol. 7, pp. 978ff.

  103. Andrew Ezergailis, The Holocaust in Latvia, 1941–1944: The Missing Center (Riga and Washington, DC, 1996), pp. 58 and 72.

  104. I am grateful to Omer Bartov for this information based on recent Polish scholarship.

  105. The participation of the Poles has been described in Jan T. Gross, Neighbors: The Destruction of the Jewish Community in Jedwabne, Poland (Princeton, 2001). Gross’s book triggered a fierce controversy whose main aspects are thoroughly documented in Antony Polonsky and Joanna B. Michlic, eds., The Neighbors Respond: The Controversy over the Jedwabne Massacre in Poland. (Princeton, 2004), and also, from a different angle, in Alexander B. Rossino, “Polish ‘Neighbors’ and German Invaders: Anti-Jewish Violence in the Bialystok District during the Opening Weeks of Operation Barbarossa,” Polin: Studies in Polish Jewry 16 (2003), pp. 431ff.

  106. Lower, Nazi Empire-Building and the Holocaust in Ukraine, p. 91.

  107. Christian Gerlach, Kalkulierte Morde: Die deutsche Wirtschafts-und Vernichtungspolitik in Weissrussland 1941 bis 1944 (Hamburg, 1999), p. 536.

  108. Lower, Nazi Empire-Building and the Holocaust in Ukraine, p. 91.

  109. Quoted in Daniel Uziel, “Wehrmacht Propaganda Troops and the Jews,” Yad Vashem Studies 29 (2001), p. 54.

  110. Quoted in Fatal-Knaani, “The Jews of Pinsk,” p. 149.

  111. For a thorough study of the operations of Ohlendorf ’s unit, see Andrej Angrick, Besatzungspolitik und Massenmord. Die Einsatzgruppe D in der Südlichen Sowjetunion 1941–1943 (Hamburg, 2003).

  112. International Commission on the Holocaust in Romania, Final Report of the International Commission on the Holocaust in Romania. Presented to Romanian President Ion Iliescu. November 11, 2004, available from http://www.ushmm.org/research/center/presentations/programs/presentations/2 005-03-10/pdf/english/chapter_03.pdf., p. 2.

  113. For the most complete description of the Iasi pogrom and of the Holocaust in Romania more generally, see Radu Ioanid, The Holocaust in Romania: The Destruction of Jews and Gypsies under the Antonescu Regime, 1940–1944 (Chicago, 2000); about the Iasi pogrom, see particularly pp. 62ff. The report of the International Commission on the Holocaust in Romania states that “at least 15,000 Jews from the Regat (Old Romania) were killed in the Iasi pogrom and as a result of other anti-Jewish measures.” International Commission on the Holocaust in Romania, Final Report, p. 3.

  114. Quoted in Jean Ancel, “The Romanian Way of Solving the Jewish Problem in Bessarabia and Bukovina
, June–July 1941,” Yad Vashem Studies 19 (1988), p. 190.

  115. Ancel, “The ‘Christian’ Regimes of Romania and the Jews,” p. 19.

  116. About the ghetto in Kishinev, see Paul A. Shapiro, “The Jews of Chisinäu (Kishinev): Romanian Reoccupation, Ghettoisation, Deportation,” in The Destruction of Romanian and Ukrainian Jews during the Antonescu Era, ed. Randolph L. Braham (Boulder, CO, 1997), pp. 135ff.

  117. Ioanid, The Holocaust in Romania, pp. 177ff.

  118. Quoted in Shapiro, “The Jews of Chisinäu,” p. 167.

  119. Sebastian, Journal, p. 397.

  120. Ibid., pp. 430–31.

  121. Foreign Relations of the United States 1941, vol. 2 (Washington, DC, 1959), p. 871.

  122. For an overview of German policies in Serbia see Walter Manoschek, “Serbien ist judenfrei”: Militärische Besatzungspolitik und Judenvernichtung in Serbien 1941/42 (Munich, 1993); Walter Manoschek, “The Extermination of the Jews in Serbia,” in National Socialist Extermination Policies: Contemporary German Perspectives and Controversies, ed. Ulrich Herbert (New York, 2000), pp 163ff. Christopher R. Browning, “The Wehrmacht in Serbia Revisited,” in Crimes of War: Guilt and Denial in the Twentieth Century, ed. Omer Bartov, Atina Grossmann, and Mary Nolan (New York, 2002), pp. 31ff.

  123. Jonathan Steinberg, All or Nothing: The Axis and the Holocaust, 1941–1943 (London, 1990), p. 30.

  124. Ibid.

  125. Quoted in John Cornwell, Hitler’s Pope: The Secret History of Pius XII (New York, 1999), p. 255.

  126. See Menachem Shelah, “Jasenovac,” in Yisrael Gutman, ed., Encyclopedia of the Holocaust, New York, 1990, vol. 2, pp. 739–40.

  127. Pierre Blet, Le Saint Siège et les Victimes de la Guerre, Janvier 1941–Décembre 1942., vol. 8 (Vatican City, 1974), p. 261. Translated in John F. Morley, Vatican Diplomacy and the Jews during the Holocaust, 1939–1943 (New York, 1980), p. 150

  128. Actes et Documents (ADSS), vol. 8, p. 261. Translated in Menachem Shelach, “The Catholic Church in Croatia, the Vatican and the Murder of the Croatian Jews,” Holocaust and Genocide Studies 4, no. 3 (1989), p. 329.