Children during the Holocaust

by Heberer, Patricia;

  Q: And then the Germans tore it off?

  A: They tore his things off and shot him.

  Q: And he fell into the pit?

  A: I saw it. Then they took Mother. She didn’t want to go, but wanted us to go first. Yet we made her go first. They grabbed her and shot her. There was my father’s mother, who was eighty, with two grandchildren in her arms. My father’s sister was also there. She, too, was shot with children in her arms.

  Q: Then your turn came?

  A: Then my turn came. My younger sister also. She had suffered so much in the ghetto, and yet at the last moment, she wanted to stay alive, and begged the German to let her live. She was standing there naked holding on to her girlfriend. So he looked at her and shot them both. Both of them fell, my sister and her girlfriend. My other sister was next. Then he got ready to shoot me.

  Q: Did he ask for something?

  A: We stood there facing the ditch. I turned my head. He asked, “Whom do I shoot first?” I didn’t answer. He tore the child away from me. I heard her last cry and he shot her. Then he got ready to kill me, grabbed my hair, and turned my head about. I remained standing and heard a shot, but I didn’t move. He turned me around, loaded his pistol, so that I could see what he was doing. Then he again turned me around and shot me. I fell down.

  Q: And then you fell into the pit?

  A: I felt nothing. At that moment I felt that something was weighing me down. I thought that I was dead, but that I could feel something even though I was dead. I couldn’t believe that I was alive. I felt I was suffocating, bodies had fallen on me. I felt I was drowning. But still I could move and felt I was alive and tried to get up. I was choking, I heard shots, and again somebody falling down. I twisted and turned, but I could not. I felt I was going to suffocate. I had no strength left. But then I felt that somehow I was crawling upwards. As I climbed up, people grabbed me, hit me, dragged me downwards, but I pulled myself up with the last bit of strength. When I reached the top I looked around, but I couldn’t recognize the place. Corpses strewn all over, there was no end to the bodies. You could hear people moaning in their death agony. Some children were running around naked and screaming, “Mama, Papa.” I couldn’t get up.

  Presiding Judge: The Germans were still there at that time?

  Witness Yoselewska: No. The Germans were not there. No one was there.

  Attorney General: You were naked and covered with blood.

  Witness Yoselewska: I got out naked, covered with blood from the corpses whose bellies had burst.

  Q: What did you have on your head?

  A: When he shot me I was wounded in the head. I still have a big scar on my head, where I was wounded by the Germans. [The witness shows the scar.] I got to my feet to see that horrible scene. The screaming was unbearable, the children shouting, “Mama, Papa.” I ran over to the children, maybe my daughter was there. I called out, “Markele.”24 I didn’t see her. The children shouted, “Mama,” “Papa.” I didn’t recognize the children either. All of them were covered with blood.

  24. This is the Yiddish diminutive for Marka.

  Q: There were three other women?

  A: Further off I saw two women standing up. I walked over to them. I didn’t know them, and they didn’t know me. We asked each other for our names. Then they said, “You’re alive, too. You also survived?” “What should we do?” [. . .]

  Q: Please let us be brief, Mrs. Yoselewska. It is difficult to recount and difficult to listen to. Tell us, did you hide?

  A: We struggled all night long and all day screaming and shouting. Looking around, we saw Germans again and people with horses and shovels. The Germans ordered the gentiles25 to pile all the corpses together in one place. So they did. A lot were still alive. The children were all running around in the field. As I was walking, I saw them and went over to them. The children were running after me and wouldn’t leave. I sat down in the field and remained there.

  25. Presumably this refers to farmers living in the area of the shooting site.

  Q: The Germans came back and rounded up the children?

  A: Germans came and helped round up the children. They left me alone. I just sat and looked. There was no need for much shooting at the children. They fired some shots and children fell down. [. . .]

  In August 1941, the mobile killing units of the Einsatzgruppen had been operating in German-occupied Soviet territory for less than two months. From August 8 to 19, units of the Sonderkommando 4a (SK 4a), under the command of SS-Standartenführer Paul Blobel26 (1894–1951), murdered several hundred Jewish inhabitants in the Ukrainian town of Byelaya Tserkov (today Bela Tserkva). Initially, the Einsatzgruppen, following in the wake of Wehrmacht forces, focused primarily on the killing of Jewish males of military age as well as other racial and political targets. However, by late July, with larger deployments of SS and police auxiliaries in place, Einsatzgruppen practice shifted to the destruction of whole Jewish communities, including women and children. This extension of killing actions to entire populations followed an uneven chronological and regional pattern and evidently led to initial confusion among mobile killing units. Thus, while the Waffen-SS platoon and local Ukrainian auxiliaries attached to SK 4a carried out the murders of hundreds of adult males and females belonging to Byelaya Tserkov’s sizable Jewish community, they neglected to shoot the children.

  26. Paul Blobel’s Sonderkommando 4a was attached to Einsatzgruppe C in the Ukraine. He and his unit organized the killing of Jews and other Soviet citizens in cities such as Lutsk, Zhitomir, and Berdichev, and they were responsible for the murder of over thirty-three thousand Kiev Jews at Babi Yar on September 29 and 30, 1941. In June 1942 he was tasked with Aktion 1005 (Operation 1005), the effort to destroy evidence of Nazi atrocities in eastern Europe. Following the war, Blobel was tried and convicted by an American military tribunal in the Einsatzgruppen Trial in Nuremberg and hanged at Landsberg Prison on June 7, 1951.

  The offspring of the murdered Jews were assembled in an abandoned building at the edge of town. On August 19, perhaps realizing for the first time the infeasibility of maintaining hundreds of unsupervised children without provisions in such a locale, mobile-unit commanders ordered their troops to collect three truckloads of youngsters and shoot them at a nearby rifle range. Ninety young children remained behind. Languishing in deplorable conditions without food or water, the children, and their predicament, soon came to the attention of Wehrmacht troops quartered in the vicinity. Outraged noncommissioned officers appealed to military chaplains Ernst Tewes and Gerhard Wilczik27 to intercede on behalf of the children. Tewes and Wilczik alerted the chaplains attached to the 295th Infantry Division, Dr. Joseph Maria Reuss (1906–1985), later bishop of Mainz after the war, and his Protestant colleague Pastor Kornmann, who visited the children and reported their findings to Lieutenant Colonel Helmuth Groscurth (1898–1943), the division’s first general staff officer.

  27. Ernst Tewes (1908–1998) survived the war and became an auxiliary bishop of Munich and Freising in 1968. Gerhard Wilczek returned to his duties as a parish pastor in 1945.

  The incident put local military leaders at loggerheads with those SS officers responsible for the massacre in Byelaya Tserkov. At the core of the conflict was Groscurth, a former member of military intelligence (Abwehr) and an early active opponent of the Nazi regime.28 Groscurth’s protest to senior officials reflected traditional conceptions of correct military conduct toward civilian populations and echoed the sentiments of many conservative career military officers who had grown increasingly uneasy with Germany’s “racial war” in the East. His attitudes stood in stark contrast to the ideologically driven positions of SK 4a commander Blobel and the unit’s field commander, General Walther von Reichenau,29 who “considered the extermination of Jewish women and children to be pressingly urgent and should be carried out in whatever form it took.”30 Groscurth’s effor
ts to forestall the murders of the Jewish youngsters ultimately ended in failure. Nevertheless, the ensuing conflict among commanders concerning which unit would carry out the shootings suggests that even among those inured to the brutal realities of German racial policy, the taboo against the killing of children still initially remained intact.

  28. In 1938, Helmuth Groscurth joined in the so-called September Conspiracy, an aborted attempt among military and Abwehr officials to overthrow Hitler’s regime. In October 1939, with Hasso von Etzdorf and Erich Kordt, Groscurth penned the memorandum “Das drohende Unheil” (“The Threatening Calamity”), exhorting military officers to resist. In April 1943, Groscurth died in Soviet captivity following the battle of Stalingrad. See Browning, The Origins of the Final Solution, 73ff.

  29. Walther von Reichenau (1882–1942) commanded the Tenth Army during the invasion of Poland; this army group was renamed the Sixth Army, which Reichenau commanded in Belgium and France in 1940. In the same year, Reichenau was promoted to field marshal, the German army’s highest military rank. In 1941, he led the Sixth Army in the invasion of the Soviet Union, becoming the commander of Army Group South in November 1941. Reichenau is best known for his October 10, 1941, order (Tagesbefehl), which encouraged Wehrmacht troops under his command to cooperate with Einsatzgruppen forces in murdering indigenous Jewish populations; many of the most famous massacres conducted by mobile killing units, including the September 29–30, 1941, murders of thirty-three thousand Jews at Babi Yar, occurred in areas under the jurisdiction of the Sixth Army. In January 1942, Reichenau suffered a massive cerebral hemorrhage and died on January 17, 1942, of a subsequent heart attack when the plane flying him back to Germany for medical care made an emergency landing near Poltava.

  30. Helmut Groscurth, quoted in Ernst Klee, Willi Dressen, and Volker Riess, eds., The Good Old Days: The Holocaust As Seen by Its Perpetrators and Bystanders, trans. Deborah Burnstone (New York: The Free Press, 1988), 148.

  Document 3-9. Report of military chaplain Dr. Joseph Maria Reuss, Catholic divisional chaplain, to Lieutenant Colonel Helmuth Groscurth, First Generalstabsoffizier, 295th Infantry Division, August 20, 1941, in Ernst Klee, Willi Dressen, and Volker Riess, eds., “Schöne Zeiten”: Judenmord aus der Sicht der Täter und Gaffer (Frankfurt: S. Fischer Verlag, 1988), 135–36 (translated from the German).

  I submit the following report to 295th Infantry Division:

  This afternoon around 14:30 hours Military Chaplains Tewes and Wilczek of the reserve military hospital 4/607 came to the Protestant divisional chaplain and myself and reported the following:

  German soldiers had drawn their attention to the fact that Jewish children, aged between a few months and five and six years, whose parents are said to have been executed, are locked up in a house under intolerable conditions and are under guard by Ukrainian militiamen. In the vicinity of this house, the children can be heard whimpering continuously. They went there themselves in order to confirm this fact, but did not see any member of the Wehrmacht or any other authority responsible for keeping order there or carrying out guard duty. Only a few German soldiers were present as spectators, and these men had expressed indignation at this state of affairs. They asked us to report this issue to our headquarters.

  Their description of these incidents made it reasonable to suspect that this was an arbitrary action on the part of the Ukrainian militia. In order to be able to report the matter accurately, I myself, accompanied by the two military chaplains and the Protestant Divisional Chaplain Kornmann, paid a visit to the house, where we discovered the following:

  In the courtyard in front of the house the crying and whimpering of children could be heard very audibly. Outside there were a Ukrainian militiaman keeping guard with a rifle, a number of German soldiers, and several young Ukrainian girls. We immediately entered the house unhindered and found in two rooms some ninety (I counted) children aged from a few months to five, six or seven years old. There was no kind of supervision by the Wehrmacht or other German authorities. [. . .]

  The two rooms where the children were accommodated [. . .] were in a filthy state. The children lay or sat on the floor, which was covered in their excrement. There were flies on the legs and abdomens of most of the children, some of whom were only half dressed. Some of the bigger children (two, three, four years old) were scratching the mortar from the wall and eating it. [. . .] The stench was terrible; the small children, especially those who were only a few months old, cried and whimpered continuously. The visiting soldiers were shaken, as we were, by these unbelievable conditions and expressed their outrage over them. [. . .] German soldiers who were present in the courtyard told me that they had their quarters there (in the house in the immediate proximity) and that since the afternoon of the previous day, they had heard the children, who had been there for such a long time, crying constantly. Sometime on the evening of the previous day, three lorry loads of children had already been taken away. An official from the SD31 had been present. The lorry driver had told them that these were children of Jews and Jewesses who had already been shot, and the children were now going to be taken to be shot. The shooting of the children was to be carried out by Ukrainian militia. The children still in the house were also to be shot. The soldiers expressed extreme indignation over the conditions in which the children were being kept; in addition, one of them pointed out that he too had children back home. [. . .]

  31. That is, the German Sicherheitsdienst (Security Service).

  Because there is no German watch or supervision over this house and these children and because German soldiers can observe the present circumstances at any time—which has already happened and provoked declarations of indignation and criticism, I am herewith reporting this incident to my immediate superiors.

  Dr. Reuss,

  Military Chaplain32

  32. This document and those that accompany it are available in complete English translation in Klee, Dressen, and Riess, The Good Old Days, 137–54.

  Document 3-10. Lieutenant Colonel Helmuth Groscurth to commander in chief of the Sixth Army, Field Marshall Walther von Reichenau in re report on events in Byelaya Tserkov on August 20, 1941, August 21, 1941, in Ernst Klee, Willi Dressen, and Volker Riess, eds., “Schöne Zeiten”: Judenmord aus der Sicht der Täter und Gaffer (Frankfurt: S. Fischer Verlag, 1988), 140–42 (translated from the German).

  On August 21 at 11:00 a.m., Captain Luley [Abwehr officer AOK 6] appeared together with Standartenführer Blobel and Obersturmführer [August] Häfner33 to a meeting called by the army. This meeting took place at the field commander’s office. [. . .] I conveyed the views of the division and made it very clear that the division had only intervened because of the way in which the action was being carried out. The Standartenführer and the Obersturmführer admitted there had been shortcomings in the way things had been run and stated that a way had to be found to settle the matter quickly on the basis of the prevailing conditions. [Häfner] said he did not now see himself as still in a position to be able to carry out the shooting. [. . .]

  33. August Häfner, born 1912, was an officer with Blobel’s unit, Sonderkommando 4a. In 1968, he was a defendant in the Callsen Trial in Darmstadt for the murder of thirty-three thousand Jews at Babi Yar on September 29–30, 1941, but charges against him were eventually dismissed. In 1973, another Darmstadt court sentenced him to eight years in prison.

  Concluding remarks

  1. The troops have been trained by their officers to have a decent, soldierly attitude and to avoid violence and brutality against a defenseless population. They have complete understanding for the need for the most stringent intervention against [partisans]. In the case in question, however, the measures are undertaken against women and children. These in no way differ from those atrocities being carried out by the enemy, about which the troops are continually being informed. It is unavoidable that these events will be reported back home, whe
re they will be compared to the Lemberg atrocities.34 The troops expect their officers to intervene. This is particularly true for the older, married men. An officer is therefore forced to intervene out of consideration for his troops when such things take place in a public setting. In the interest of maintaining military discipline, all similar measures should be carried out, out of the sight of the troops.

  34. This refers to a report of Soviet atrocities against the civilian population of Lvov (German: Lemberg; today: Lviv), used extensively in German propaganda.

  2. The shootings might have been carried out without any sensation if the field commander and also the local commander had taken the necessary steps to keep the troops away from the scene. [. . .] Following the shooting of the town’s entire Jewish population, it became per force necessary to eliminate the Jewish children, particularly the infants. This should have transpired together with the elimination of the adults in order to prevent this inhuman agony. The field commander and the Obersturmführer declared that it was not possible to provide an alternative accommodation for the children, whereby the field commander declared several times that this brood was to be exterminated.

  Signed,

  Groscurth

  Following the discussion of Groscurth with members of Sonderkommando 4a, SS-Obersturmführer August Häfner was instructed to arrange for the killing of the remaining children. In 1965, he described his actions to German postwar investigators.

  Document 3-11. Testimony of August Häfner, May 31, 1965, in Ernst Klee, Willi Dressen, and Volker Riess, eds., “Schöne Zeiten”: Judenmord aus der Sicht der Täter und Gaffer (Frankfurt: S. Fischer Verlag, 1988), 145 (translated from the German).