by Prit Buttar
Neither of these reactions was particularly surprising, given the events that had occurred in the Baltic States; similar sentiments were evident in Latvia and to a lesser extent – not least due to the very small Jewish population – in Estonia. The reactions showed a fundamental difference between Jewish and non-Jewish communities in their response to the German invasion; but the differences between the two communities ran far deeper, and would be exploited ruthlessly by the Germans. A few weeks before the onset of Barbarossa, a farmer in the Lithuanian town of Plungė was heard to remark: ‘The Germans only have to cross the border, and on the same day we will wade in the blood of Jews in Plungė.’4
The history of anti-Jewish pogroms is a long one, stretching back at least as far as the Alexandrian Empire. Throughout the 19th century, there were repeated attacks on Jews in most of Europe, and given the large concentration of Jews in Poland and the Russian Empire, it was inevitable that these areas would see the greatest number of aggressive incidents. Remarkably, given the large Jewish population of Latvia and Lithuania, there was relatively little anti-Jewish violence in the Baltic States, compared with other parts of the Czar’s empire. In Lithuania, there was certainly widespread hostility at various levels, but this was little different from other Catholic countries, and violence to persons or property was unusual. The hostility towards Jews exemplified by the above quote, therefore, is all the more striking.
As has been discussed, there was a widespread perception in Lithuania and Latvia that the Jews were active supporters of the Soviet occupation. From the point of view of the Jews, there was little apparent choice. Whilst many – perhaps even most, given that Jews were strongly represented amongst the business classes – would have preferred to have been allowed to continue living their lives in Lithuania and Latvia as they had done for much of the century, the division of Europe into spheres of influence by Germany and the Soviet Union left no room for such dreams. If the Baltic States were to be forced into either the Soviet or the German camp, the Jews had to choose the former. Although the Final Solution had not yet been devised or implemented, the treatment of Jews in territories controlled by Germany was well known, and if there were any doubts, the flood of Jewish refugees from Poland into Lithuania in 1939 dispelled them. An additional factor that resulted in many Jews seeking employment with the new communist authorities was that before the Soviet occupation, most Jews worked in private firms. The nationalisation of these firms left many of them unemployed, and given the lack of job opportunities elsewhere, they took whatever employment they could get from the new governments. Nevertheless, in the interests of balance, it must be pointed out that the Jewish populations of Lithuania and Latvia formed a disproportionately large percentage of the membership of communist and pro-communist organisations even prior to the Soviet occupation.
Unfortunately for the Jewish population as a whole, some of those who worked for the Soviet regime during 1939–41 had a very prominent profile. Large parts of the communist administrations were made up of those perceived as foreigners – either Latvian and Lithuanian communists who arrived from the Soviet Union with the occupying forces, or Russians. Of the rest, although Jews formed a minority of the new administrations, they formed a larger proportion than Latvians and Lithuanians recruited from the local population. Consequently, many Lithuanians and Latvians grew to feel that the new regime favoured Jews above other groups. It became commonplace for people to tell each other that ‘Under this regime, only the Jews live well’, and to talk about ‘the Jewish takeover of the regime’.5
Some of the pronouncements of the regime also raised anti-Semitic sentiment. Genrikas Zimanas, head of the Lithuanian Minorities Bureau, declared that the arrival of Soviet troops had dealt a mortal blow to anti-Semitism; the Soviet Union, he maintained, was the only state in the world free of anti-Semitism. Stalin himself had declared that anti-Semitism was a capital offence, and the Communist Party would never contemplate anti-Semitism, as this was equivalent to counterrevolutionary thinking.6 Given the attitude of Stalin to Jews at the time, this seems an extraordinary statement; in any event, many Lithuanians interpreted it as further proof of the ‘privileged status’ of Jews.
It was into this volatile and increasingly polarised environment that the invading Germans brought their dreams of a New Order, requiring the subjugation or elimination of those deemed to be undesirable. The Jews were at the top of that particular list.
Prior to the invasion of the Soviet Union, Hitler made very clear to all his subordinates that the new war was to be like no other. On 30 March 1941, he addressed his senior officers on the nature of the coming conflict. Franz Halder, Chief of Staff of the army, recorded in his diary afterwards that the conflict would be a ‘struggle between two ideologies’. Hitler condemned Bolshevism as being a form of ‘antisocial criminality’, and given the danger that communism represented for Germany, the war had to result in the ‘extermination of Bolshevik commissars and of the communist intelligentsia’. When it came to officials of the Soviet Union, Hitler stated that ‘Commissars and GPU [Gosudarstvennoye Politicheskoye Upravlenie or ‘State Political Directorate’, a part of the NKVD] personnel are criminals and must be treated as such. The struggle will differ from that in the west.’7 At the beginning of June 1941, all units were informed that Bolsheviks, agitators, partisans, saboteurs, and Jews must all be treated as potential enemies. It was at this point that Wehrmacht units were told that it was their responsibility to compile lists of all Jews in their areas, and to hand these lists to the Einsatzgruppen that followed the front-line units. Although much of the Wehrmacht tried to behave as if fighting the Red Army was its sole function and attempted to leave implementation of Hitler’s more extreme policies, and those required by Generalplan Ost, to other agencies such as the SS, there can be little doubt that almost every part of the German military machine had a role in the atrocities that followed the invasion.
The speed and scale of the killing of Jews in Lithuania and Latvia made the previous activities of German forces in Poland seem no more than a prelude. There were several components to these killings; some were carried out by the Wehrmacht, others by Lithuanians and Latvians, and many by the Einsatzgruppen. Whilst it is in some respects practical to consider these different agencies in turn, it should be remembered that all these groups were active in overlapping timescales.
Security in the rear areas was the responsibility of special security divisions, which as the war went on often found themselves forced into taking on a front-line role. Three such formations – 207th, 281st, and 285th Security Divisions – followed in the wake of Army Group North, while 403rd Security Division took control of the Vilnius region after Army Group Centre had moved on. These divisions came under the overall command of an officer with the title Befehlshaber des Rückwärtigen Heeresgebietes (‘Commander of the Rear Army Areas’, often abbreviated to Berück), a post held in the Army Group North area by General Franz von Roques. By coincidence, his cousin, Karl von Roques, held the equivalent command behind Army Group Centre. The son of a family that originated in the flight of Huguenot Protestants from France, he was not an enthusiastic advocate of Hitler’s concept of a brutal, racial war. Although he ordered all Jews in his area to wear six-pointed yellow stars on their right breasts, his decrees regarding the creation of ghettos stated that such activity should not be regarded as a priority, and should only proceed when adequate resources had been made available.8
The commanders of the security divisions also displayed some reluctance to show the ruthlessness that Hitler desired. Roques’ orders to the divisions – perhaps deliberately – did not make expressly clear how they were to operate. Generalleutnant Carl von Tidemann, commander of 207th Security Division, and Generalleutnant Friedrich Bayer, commander of 281st Security Division, explicitly ordered their men that ‘shooting sections of the population purely on the grounds that they are members of the Communist Party or of other groups, for example Jews’, was forbidden. Likewise, althoug
h the security divisions were to seize groups of Jews to be held as hostages, in an attempt to ensure the good behaviour of the rest of the population, they were not to hand these groups over to the SS, at least while the groups remained within the area defined as Rear Army Areas.9
The combat divisions in the front line also sometimes showed little appetite for following Hitler’s orders regarding commissars and Jews. In an attempt to change this, General Hermann Hoth, commander of Army Group Centre’s 3rd Panzer Group – which included 7th Panzer Division, the unit that seized Vilnius – issued an order as early as 28 June, less than a week after the beginning of Barbarossa, stating that any members of the Wehrmacht who allowed communist officials to escape would face court martial; the order warned soldiers to remain aware of ‘the well-known Asiatic practices of murder, treachery, and perfidy’.10 However, it seems that in many other cases there was little friction between the Wehrmacht and the SS. In October 1941, Franz Walther Stahlecker, commander of Einsatzgruppe A, recorded that cooperation with the army was ‘generally good, in a few cases, for instance with the 4th Panzer Group under Generaloberst Hoepner, very close, almost cordial’.11 Stahlecker’s report is a detailed description of his Einsatzgruppe in the early months of the war, and illustrates clearly how it functioned. It is therefore worthy of detailed attention.
Einsatzgruppe A crossed into Lithuania a day after the Wehrmacht invasion. Originally, it was intended that the Einsatzgruppen would function in areas handed over by the army as it advanced, but Stahlecker recorded that this proved unworkable for two reasons. Firstly, the rapid advance of the army led to delays in handing over rear areas; secondly, fighting partisans and suppressing communist activity was best done within the combat zone. This was because local paramilitary formations, which were used extensively by the Germans to carry out many of the killings of Jews and others, were frequently disarmed once the front line had moved on. If they were to be used to augment the work of the Einsatzgruppen, therefore, this would have to be before their weapons were confiscated. There was also a feeling that once a degree of normality had returned, it would be far harder to incite locals to ‘spontaneous’ attacks. In many cases, groups of Lithuanians and Latvians spontaneously organised themselves into paramilitary groups, but in order to help create as many local units as possible, Einsatzgruppe personnel accompanied the leading German units into Kaunas, Riga and Tallinn, and rapidly established ‘volunteer detachments from reliable natives in all three Baltic provinces’. These detachments were an essential part of the plan to deal with the Jews:
… native anti-Semitic forces were induced to start pogroms against Jews during the first hours after capture, though this inducement proved to be very difficult. Following out orders, the Security Police was determined to solve the Jewish question with all possible means and most decisively. But it was desirable that the Security Police should not put in an immediate appearance, at least in the beginning, since the extraordinarily harsh measures were apt to stir even German circles. It had to be shown to the world that the native population itself took the first action by way of natural reaction against the suppression by Jews during several decades and against the terror exercised by the Communists during the preceding period.
… In view of the extension of the area of operations and the great number of duties which had to be performed by the Security Police, it was intended from the very beginning to obtain the co-operation of the reliable population for the fight against vermin – that is mainly the Jews and Communists. Beyond our directing of the first spontaneous actions of self-cleansing, which will be reported elsewhere, care had to be taken that reliable people should be put to the cleansing job and that they were appointed auxiliary members of the Security Police.12
The report then goes on to provide further information about these ‘self-cleansing actions’:
Considering that the population of the Baltic countries had suffered very heavily under the government of Bolshevism and Jewry while they were incorporated in the USSR, it was to be expected that after the liberation from that foreign government, they (i.e. the population themselves) would render harmless most of the enemies left behind after the retreat of the Red Army. It was the duty of the Security Police to set in motion these self-cleansing movements and to direct them into the correct channels in order to accomplish the purpose of the cleansing operations as quickly as possible. It was no less important in view of the future to establish the unshakable and provable fact that the liberated population themselves took the most severe measures against the Bolshevist and Jewish enemy quite on their own, so that the direction by German authorities could not be found out. In Lithuania this was achieved for the first time by partisan activities in Kaunas. To our surprise it was not easy at first to set in motion an extensive pogrom against Jews. Klimatis, the leader of the partisan unit … who was used for this purpose primarily, succeeded in starting a pogrom on the basis of advice given to him by a small advanced detachment acting in Kaunas, and in such a way that no German order or German instigation was noticed from the outside.13
Stahlecker had accompanied the leading units into Kaunas, and made his way to the offices of the Lithuanian State Security Department, which had been seized by members of the Lithuanian Activist Front. Here, he made a speech calling for a pogrom against the Jews, but was disappointed that there was little apparent enthusiasm for such an act. Instead, he turned to Algirdas Klimatis, who had organised a paramilitary group of about 600 individuals, and had taken part in fighting against the retreating Red Army. He had no allegiance either to the Lithuanian Activist Front or to the newly proclaimed provisional government, and proved to be a willing accomplice for the Germans. On 25 June, his men started attacking Jews in the suburb of Vilijampolė, and spread their activity from there to other parts of the city and the surrounding area. The exact number of victims of this pogrom is disputed. Stahlecker claimed that in three days, some 5,000 Jews were killed, but it has been suggested that Stahlecker may deliberately have exaggerated the number of killings.14
In many cases, the attacks on Jews were genuinely spontaneous, with little or no encouragement from the Germans – indeed, it seems that once the pogroms commenced, they spread rapidly to neighbouring areas. Dov Levin described how Lithuanians looted Jewish houses, attacking Jews and raping women. One Lithuanian waved several bloodstained passports at Levin as proof of the Jews he had already killed.15 The Lithuanian partisans wore white armbands, and were widely known as baltaraiščiai (‘white armbands’). Even within the ranks of the partisans, there was a perception that not all of those wearing armbands were actively fighting the Red Army:
Some procured guns and took part in the fight for the Fatherland, while others broke into shops, private homes and abandoned houses, where they took every opportunity to steal and take away things, or bury them in the earth.16
Whilst not all partisans took part in anti-Jewish attacks, it seems that most of those who robbed, beat and killed Jews were wearing white armbands.17 Some partisan leaders, such as Jurgis Bobelis in Kaunas, attempted to prevent such acts by their men; Bobelis threatened to execute any men found to be involved in random attacks. Others simply turned a blind eye to events. Many continued to make little distinction between Jews and communists, and encouraged their men to round up all those who fell into either category.
Stahlecker’s Einsatzgruppe was divided into several Einsatzkommando, each with its area of operations. Einsatzkommando 3 was under the command of Karl Jäger, who was born in the Swiss town of Schaffhausen in 1888. He served as an artilleryman in the First World War, and thereafter was a member of the so-called Black Reichswehr, a paramilitary grouping designed to circumvent the restrictions imposed on the size of German armed forces by the Treaty of Versailles. He was an early adherent of the National Socialist movement, and was enrolled into the ranks of the SS in 1936. He rose rapidly through the ranks, and by summer 1941 held the rank of Standartenführer (the equivalent army rank would be colonel). At th
is stage, he was ordered to form Einsatzkommando 3. When its 120 personnel gathered at their training base in the small town of Pretzch, Jäger learned that in addition to commanding the Einsatzkommando, he would also be the commander of the Security Police and Sicherheitsdienst (‘Security Department’ or SD) in Lithuania. Both at Pretzch and in a meeting in Berlin, Reinhard Heydrich, chief of the RSHA, made clear to Jäger and other similarly ranked SS officers that ‘in the event of a war with Russia, all the Jews in the east will have to be shot’.18
Jäger arrived in Kaunas with his unit after the initial wave of killings of Jews by Klimatis and his men. The first section of Einsatzgruppe A to arrive in Kaunas was Einsatzkommando 1, which now handed over the area to Jäger’s men. Jäger later noted that Jews were still moving about freely in the city – perhaps in keeping with Roques’ instructions that the establishment of ghettos had a low priority – and he swiftly took measures to establish a ghetto and to restrict their movements and activities. The early killings were used as a justification for the establishment of the ghetto – only in this way, Jäger stated, could Jews be protected from further pogroms. This was a well-practised argument, and had been used during the 1930s in Germany itself.
The pretence of protecting Jews in the ghetto lasted barely a day. Two days after his arrival in the city, Jäger recorded that 463 Jews had been killed ‘by Lithuanian partisans’, a number that rose to over 2,500 within the next two days.19 By December 1941, about 22,000 Jews had been executed, leaving about 15,000 Jews in the ghetto; the list of victims is chronicled in a report that Jäger wrote at the end of the year, listing with painstaking detail the locations, dates, and nature of the victims, dividing them into men, women and children.20 The report also lists the killings in Vilnius and Minsk, and if these are added to those killed in Kaunas, the number exceeds 133,000. The report concludes with the words: ‘Today I can confirm that our objective, to solve the Jewish problem for Lithuania, has been achieved by EK 3. In Lithuania there are no more Jews, apart from Jewish workers and their families.’21