Some enlightening figures, however, were obtainable from the S.D. records concerning the number of victims of another terror operation in conquered territory which was applied to Russia. This particular exercise was carried out by what was known in Germany as the Einsatzgruppen—Special Action Groups, or what might better be termed, in view of their performance, Extermination Squads. The first round figure of their achievement came out, as if by accident, at Nuremberg.
One day some time before the trial began a young American naval officer, Lieutenant Commander Whitney R. Harris, of the American prosecution staff, was interrogating Otto Ohlendorf on his wartime activities. It was known that this attractive-looking German intellectual of youthful appearance—he was 38—had been head of Amt III of Himmler’s Central Security Office (R.S.H.A.) but during the last years of the war had spent most of his time as a foreign trade expert in the Ministry of Economics. He told his interrogator that apart from one year he had spent the war period on official duty in Berlin. Asked what he had done during the year away, he replied, “I was chief of Einsatzgruppe D.”
Harris, a lawyer by training and by this time something of an intelligence authority on German affairs, knew quite a bit about the Einsatz groups. So he asked promptly:
“During the year you were chief of Einsatzgruppe D, how many men, women and children did your group kill?”
Ohlendorf, Harris later remembered, shrugged his shoulders and with only the slightest hesitation answered:
“Ninety thousand!”44
The Einsatz groups had first been organized by Himmler and Heydrich to follow the German armies into Poland in 1939 and there round up the Jews and place them in ghettos. It was not until the beginning of the Russian campaign nearly two years later that, in agreement with the German Army, they were ordered to follow the combat troops and to carry out one phase of the “final solution.” Four Einsatzgruppen were formed for this purpose, Groups A, B, C, D. It was the last one which Ohlendorf commanded between June 1941 and June 1942, and it was assigned the southernmost sector in the Ukraine and attached to the Eleventh Army. Asked on the stand by Colonel John Harlan Amen what instructions it received, Ohlendorf answered:
“The instructions were that the Jews and the Soviet political commissars were to be liquidated.”
“And when you say ‘liquidated,’ do you mean ‘killed’?” Amen asked.
“Yes, I mean killed,” Ohlendorf answered, explaining that this took in the women and children as well as the men.
“For what reason were the children massacred?” the Russian judge, General I. T. Nikitchenko, broke in to ask.
OHLENDORF: The order was that the Jewish population should be totally exterminated.
THE JUDGE: Including the children?
OHLENDORF: Yes.
THE JUDGE: Were all the Jewish children murdered?
OHLENDORF: Yes.
In response to further questioning by Amen and in his affidavit, Ohlendorf described how a typical killing took place.
The Einsatz unit would enter a village or town and order the prominent Jewish citizens to call together all Jews for the purpose of “resettlement.”* They were requested to hand over their valuables and shortly before execution to surrender their outer clothing. They were transported to the place of executions, usually an antitank ditch, in trucks—always only as many as could be executed immediately. In this way it was attempted to keep the span of time from the moment in which the victims knew what was about to happen to them until the time of their actual execution as short as possible.
Then they were shot, kneeling or standing, by firing squads in a military manner and the corpses thrown into the ditch. I never permitted the shooting by individuals, but ordered that several of the men should shoot at the same time in order to avoid direct-personal responsibility. Other group leaders demanded that the victims lie down flat on the ground to be shot through the nape of the neck. I did not approve of these methods.
“Why?” asked Amen.
“Because,” replied Ohlendorf, “both for the victims and for those who carried out the executions, it was, psychologically, an immense burden to bear.”
In the spring of 1942, Ohlendorf then recounted, an order came from Himmler to change the method of execution of the women and children.* Henceforth they were to be dispatched in “gas vans” specially constructed for the purpose by two Berlin firms. The S.D. officer described to the tribunal how these remarkable vehicles worked.
The actual purpose of these vans could not be seen from the outside. They looked like closed trucks and were so constructed that at the start of the motor the gas [exhaust] was conducted into the van causing death in ten to fifteen minutes.
“How were the victims induced to enter the vans?” Colonel Amen wanted to know.
“They were told they were to be transported to another locality,” Ohlendorf replied.†
The burial of the victims of the gas vans, he went on to complain, was a “great ordeal” for the members of the Einsatzgruppen. This was confirmed by a certain Dr. Becker, whom Ohlendorf identified as the constructor of the vans, in a document produced at Nuremberg. In a letter to headquarters Dr. Becker objected to German S.D. men having to unload the corpses of the gassed women and children, calling attention to
the immense psychological injuries and damage to their health which that work can have for these men. They complained to me about headaches which appeared after each unloading.
Dr. Becker also pointed out to his superiors that
the application of gas usually is not undertaken correctly. In order to come to an end as fast as possible, the driver presses the accelerator to the fullest extent. The persons to be executed suffer death from suffocation and not death by dozing off, as was planned.
Dr. Becker was quite a humanitarian—in his own mind—and ordered a change in technique.
My directions now have proved that by correct adjustment of the levers death comes faster and the prisoners fall asleep peacefully. Distorted faces and excretions, such as could be seen before, are no longer noticed.45
But the gas vans, as Ohlendorf testified, could dispatch only from fifteen to twenty-five persons at a time, and this was entirely inadequate for the massacres on the scale which Hitler and Himmler had ordered. Inadequate, for example, for the job that was done at Kiev, the capital of the Ukraine, in just two days, September 29 and 30, 1941, when according to an official Einsatz report 33, 771 persons, mostly Jews, were “executed.”46 An eyewitness report by a German of how a comparatively minor mass execution was carried out in the Ukraine brought a hush of horror over the Nuremberg courtroom when it was read by the chief British prosecutor, Sir Hartley Shawcross. It was a sworn affidavit by Hermann Graebe, the manager and engineer of a branch office in the Ukraine of a German construction firm. On October 5,1942, he witnessed the Einsatz commandos, supported by Ukrainian militia, in action at the execution pits at Dubno in the Ukraine. It was a matter, he reported, of liquidating the town’s 5,000 Jews.
… My foreman and I went directly to the pits. I heard rifle shots in quick succession from behind one of the earth mounds. The people who had got off the trucks—men, women and children of all ages—had to undress upon the order of an S.S. man, who carried a riding or dog whip. They had to put down their clothes in fixed places, sorted according to shoes, top clothing and underclothing. I saw a heap of shoes of about 800 to 1,000 pairs, great piles of under-linen and clothing.
Without screaming or weeping these people undressed, stood around in family groups, kissed each other, said farewells and waited for a sign from another S.S. man, who stood near the pit, also with a whip in his hand. During the fifteen minutes that I stood near the pit I heard no complaint or plea for mercy …
An old woman with snow-white hair was holding a one-year-old child in her arms and singing to it and tickling it. The child was cooing with delight. The parents were looking on with tears in their eyes. The father was holding the hand of a boy about 10 years old
and speaking to him softly; the boy was fighting his tears. The father pointed to the sky, stroked his head and seemed to explain something to him.
At that moment the S.S. man at the pit shouted something to his comrade. The latter counted off about twenty persons and instructed them to go behind the earth mound … I well remember a girl, slim and with black hair, who, as she passed close to me, pointed to herself and said: “twenty-three years old.”
I walked around the mound and found myself confronted by a tremendous grave. People were closely wedged together and lying on top of each other so that only their heads were visible. Nearly all had blood running over their shoulders from their heads. Some of the people were still moving. Some were lifting their arms and turning their heads to show that they were still alive. The pit was already two-thirds full. I estimated that it contained about a thousand people. I looked for the man who did the shooting. He was an S.S. man, who sat at the edge of the narrow end of the pit, his feet dangling into the pit. He had a tommy gun on his knees and was smoking a cigarette.
The people, completely naked, went down some steps and clambered over the heads of the people lying there to the place to which the S.S. man directed them. They lay down in front of the dead or wounded people; some caressed those who were still alive and spoke to them in a low voice. Then I heard a series of shots. I looked into the pit and saw that the bodies were twitching or the heads lying already motionless on top of the bodies that lay beneath them. Blood was running from their necks.
The next batch was approaching already. They went down into the pit, lined themselves up against the previous victims and were shot.
And so it went, batch after batch. The next morning the German engineer returned to the site.
I saw about thirty naked people lying near the pit. Some of them were still alive … Later the Jews still alive were ordered to throw the corpses into the pit. Then they themselves had to lie down in this to be shot in the neck … I swear before God that this is the absolute truth.47
How many Jews and Russian Communist party functionaries (the former vastly outnumbered the latter) were massacred by the Einsatzgruppen in Russia before the Red Army drove the Germans out? The exact total could never be computed at Nuremberg but Himmler’s records, uncoordinated as they were, give a rough idea.
Ohlendorf’s Einsatzgruppen D, with its 90,000 victims, did not do as well as some of the other groups. Group A, for instance, in the north reported on January 31, 1942, that it had “executed” 229,052 Jews in the Baltic region and in White Russia. Its commander, Franz Stahlecker, reported to Himmler that he was having difficulty in the latter province because of a late start “after the heavy frost set in, which made mass executions much more difficult. Nevertheless,” he reported, “41,000 Jews [in White Russia] have been shot up to now.” Stahlecker, who was disposed of later in the year by Soviet partisans, enclosed with his report a handsome map showing the number of those done to death—symbolized by coffins—in each area under his command. In Lithuania, alone, the map showed, 136,421 Jews had been slain; some 34,000 had been spared for the time being “as they were needed for labor.” Estonia, which had relatively few Jews, was declared in this report to be “Jew-free.”48
The Einsatzgruppen firing squads, after a letup during the severe winter, banged away all through the summer of 1942. Some 55,000 more Jews were exterminated in White Russia by July 1, and in October the remaining 16,200 inhabitants of the Minsk ghetto were dispatched in one day. By November Himmler could report to Hitler that 363,211 Jews had been killed in Russia from August through October, though the figure was probably somewhat exaggerated to please the bloodthirsty Fuehrer.49*
All in all, according to Karl Eichmann, the head of the Jewish Office of the Gestapo, two million persons, almost all Jews, were liquidated by the Einsatzgruppen in the East. But this is almost certainly an exaggeration; it is strange but true that the S.S. bigwigs were so proud of their exterminations that they often reported swollen figures to please Himmler and Hitler. Himmler’s own statistician, Dr. Richard Korherr, reported to his chief on March 23, 1943, that a total of 633,300 Jews in Russia had been “re-settled”—a euphemism for massacre by the Einsatzgruppen.51 Surprisingly enough this figure tallies fairly well with exhaustive studies later made by a number of experts. Add another hundred thousand slain in the last two years of the war and the figure is probably as accurate as we will ever have.*
High as it is, it is small compared to the number of Jews who were done to death in Himmler’s extermination camps when the “final solution” came to be carried out.
THE “FINAL SOLUTION”
One fine June day of 1946 at Nuremberg three members of the American prosecution staff were interrogating S.S. Obergruppenfuehrer Oswald Pohl, who, among other things, had been in charge of work projects for the inmates of the Nazi concentration camps. Pohl, a naval officer before he joined the S.S., had gone into hiding after the German collapse and had not been apprehended until a year later—in May 1946—when he was discovered working on a farm disguised as a farmhand.†
In answer to one question Pohl used a term with which the Nuremberg prosecution, busy for months in poring over millions of words from the captured documents, had begun to become familiar. A certain colleague by the name of Hoess had, Pohl said, been employed by Himmler “in the final solution of the Jewish question.”
“And what was that?” Pohl was asked.
“The extermination of Jewry,” he answered.
The expression crept with increasing frequency into the vocabulary and the files of the leading Nazis as the war progressed, its seeming innocence apparently sparing these men the pain of reminding one another what it meant and perhaps too, they may have thought, furnishing a certain cover for their guilt should the incriminating papers ever come to light. Indeed at the Nuremberg trials most of the Nazi chiefs denied that they knew what it signified, and Goering contended he had never used the term, but this pretense was soon exploded. In the case against the fat Reich Marshal a directive was produced which he had sent Heydrich, the chief of the S.D., on July 31, 1941, when the Einsatzgruppen were already falling with gusto to their extermination tasks in Russia.
I here with commission you [Goering instructed Heydrich] to carry out all preparations with regard to … a total solution of the Jewish question in those territories of Europe which are under German influence …
1 furthermore charge you to submit to me as soon as possible a draft showing the … measures already taken for the execution of the intended final solution of the Jewish question.*52
Heydrich knew very well what Goering meant by the term for he had used it himself nearly a year before at a secret meeting after the fall of Poland, in which he had outlined “the first step in the final solution,” which consisted of concentrating all the Jews in the ghettos of the large cities, where it would be easy to dispatch them to their final fate.†
As it worked out, the “final solution” was what Adolf Hitler had long had in mind and what he had publicly proclaimed even before the war started. In his speech to the Reichstag on January 30, 1939, he had said:
If the international Jewish financiers … should again succeed in plunging the nations into a world war the result will be … the annihilation of the Jewish race throughout Europe.
This was a prophecy, he said, and he repeated it five times, verbatim, in subsequent public utterances. It made no difference that not the “international Jewish financiers” but he himself plunged the world into armed conflict. What mattered to Hitler was that there was now a world war and that it afforded him, after he had conquered vast regions in the East where most of Europe’s Jews lived, the opportunity to carry out their “annihilation.” By the time the invasion of Russia began, he had given the necessary orders.
What became known in high Nazi circles as the “Fuehrer Order on the Final Solution” apparently was never committed to paper—at least no copy of it has yet been unearthed in the captured Nazi documents
. All the evidence shows that it was most probably given verbally to Goering, Himmler and Heydrich, who passed it down during the summer and fall of 1941. A number of witnesses testified at Nuremberg that they had “heard” of it but none admitted ever seeing it. Thus Hans Lammers, the bullheaded chief of the Reich Chancellery, when pressed on the witness stand replied:
I knew that a Fuehrer order was transmitted by Goering to Heydrich … This order was called “Final Solution of the Jewish Problem.”53
But Lammers claimed, as did so many others on the stand, that he did not really know what it was all about until Allied counsel revealed it at Nuremberg.*
By the beginning of 1942 the time had come, as Heydrich said, “to clear up the fundamental problems” of the “final solution” so that it could at last be carried out and concluded. For this purpose Heydrich convened a meeting of representatives of the various ministries and agencies of the S.S.-S.D. at the pleasant Berlin suburb of Wannsee on January 20, 1942, the minutes of which played an important part in some of the later Nuremberg trials.54 Despite the current setback of the Wehrmacht in Russia the Nazi officials believed that the war was almost won and that Germany would shortly be ruling all of Europe, including England and Ireland. Therefore, Heydrich told the assembly of some fifteen high officials, “in the course of this Final Solution of the European Jewish problem, approximately eleven million Jews are involved.” He then rattled off the figures for each country. There were only 131, 800 Jews left in the original Reich territory (out of a quarter of a million in 1939), but in the U.S.S.R., he said, there were five million, in the Ukraine three million, in the General Government of Poland two and a quarter million, in France three quarters of a million and in England a third of a million. The clear implication was that all eleven million must be exterminated. He then explained how this considerable task was to be carried out.
The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich: A History of Nazi Germany Page 152