“The course lasted from March 23, 1942, through April 4, 1942. After the course, I was named chief of police in the town of Smotritch5 in the same district where I had been given the grade of noncommissioned officer.”
Such a rank after twelve days of training! We often forget to what degree those who were called auxiliary police in the occupied Soviet Union were not professional police before the war. They were an improvised militia. What a notable difference compared with what happened in France! The French police who rounded up Jews in the streets of Paris were the official police of the French Republic before the war and often afterward. The polizei were not generally Soviet police prior to the war, and even less so after the occupation. There were few Soviet police, especially in the countryside. Certain members of the polizei had only been in their jobs for a few months on the day the Jews were killed. So the term polizei is misleading in that it suggests assimilation with the actual Eastern European police.
Zaloga says that after his appointment he was briefly made a prisoner of the Germans again, accused of cooperation with the Soviets and proximity to the Jews. Then he was freed from prison to fill an even higher position in the auxiliary police. The sequence prison-liberation-promotion was a common path for some of the most zealous collaborators with the Third Reich. “I received the post of commander … of the Second Company … of Doljok … and I had under me between one hundred and one hundred twenty Schutzmann.”
It is only after having recounted the story of his astounding promotions leading to his appointment as a commander in the auxiliary police that he got down to the heart of the matter: the shooting of the Jews.
“The criminal activity … was the following: in autumn 1942, I participated along with my subordinates, around fifty people, in the shooting of the Jewish population, citizens of the Soviet Union, of the district of Staraïa Ouchista.”6
He goes on to describe his participation in the shootings—but curiously, and this is what got my attention, he expresses himself in terms of method, protocol, and a process marked by precise timing.
At this point, I decided to look not only at his deposition to the Soviet commission but also the other declarations he had made during various interrogations. This is how I was able to trace the stages of what he called “the method.” Zaloga doesn’t give up a general method, but he does explain what he saw put into practice at Staraïa Ouchista.
The Night Before
According to Zaloga, everything starts the night before the crime with a phone call from the chief of police.
“As the commander of the company, the night before the shooting, the chief of police ordered me to send fifty Schutzmann from my company. At the same time, he had been ordered to verify that the chief of the section of Staraïa Ouchista had understood correctly that he had to assemble the Schutzmann from of his section in the village of Grouchka, twelve kilometers [six and a half miles] from Staraïa Ouchitsa.”
He maintains that on the eve of the murders he didn’t know the reason for this gathering. “He couldn’t tell me over the phone what it was about,” he states.
But it is fair to assume that an auxiliary police chief who has to mobilize policeman in the night and send them to sleep in a village forty miles away would ask himself the reason. Especially with this specification: “We had received orders to take ten cartridges per gun, plus a machine-gun box in reserve.”
The Route
So the night before the crime, he will drive with a team of subordinates to sleep in this village. The polizei will also bivouac for the night a short distance from where the murders will take place. Of course, none of the thousands of villagers that we’ve interviewed could have been at these police vigils. All of this took place out of their line of sight, outside the village.
Zaloga will recount in great detail his work assembling the polizei. He receives orders regularly, always by phone. The timing and cadence have a surprising precision.
“At the end of the day at around 5:30, I received another order from Lieutenant Reich…. We would be leaving by truck for the village of Grouchka immediately after dinner (the Germans dined at 6:00), and all the Schutzmann had to be ready at that time. After dinner, three trucks were ready to leave.”
It’s surprising. Six in the evening. It seems that the Germans’ dinner, at its fixed hour, determined the criminal team’s time of departure on the eve of the crime. The killers’ mealtime does not vary. Doubtless, this is a function of German military precision. In any case, it is clear that the times of German meals frame the crime against the Jews in Staraïa Ouchitsa. A mass murder should in no way infringe on the regular eating habits and life rhythms of the German killers.
The Jews of Staraïa Ouchitsa will thus be shot between the Germans’ supper the night before and their lunch the next day.
“The Schutzmann who didn’t already have guns had them provided by the police. We received the order to take ten cartridges per gun plus a machine-gun magazine in reserve. The Germans took an automatic pistol and three machine guns. There were ten to twelve Germans, about fifty Schutzmann from the Krouzabik Company, and some of the Schutzmann from my company. The employees of the SD and the criminal police left separately. Upon arriving in Grouchka, we found Schutzmann from Zelenye Kourilovtsy and Privorottia.”
A whole armada made up of German police, the SD, the German criminal police, and the police stationed in four separate locations will participate in the crime. Yet the Jewish community of Staraïa Ouchitsa was not very big. I think we would be quite surprised if we knew the number of German men and local auxiliaries who participated in the crimes against the Jews in the Soviet Union.
The German authorities travel by car and go directly to the village of Staraïa Ouchitsa in the middle of the night. Doubtless to ensure that everything is ready, most importantly the digging of the ditches and the hermetic sealing of the ghetto.
“Lieutenant Reich, accompanied by three policemen in one car, and the chief of the SD accompanied by four SD employees in another car, left for Staraïa Ouchitsa after having ordered the other Germans and the Schutzmann to go to sleep. When he returned from Staraïa Ouchitsa, Lieutenant Reich left in the direction of Kamaniets-Podilsky.”
The Day, at Dawn
The distance remaining for Zaloga and his men to travel in the early morning was very short.
“The next morning at dawn, after waking up, we all left in cars, in two shifts, for Staraïa Ouchitsa. At about one to one and a half kilometers [a half mile to a mile] from Staraïa Ouchitsa, the cars were stopped, the Schutzmann lined up, and Lieutenant Reich, through the intermediary of Kroubazik, announced the goal of our journey and we received instructions to round up the entire Jewish population of Staraïa Ouchitsa and Stoudenitsa, to bring them to the shooting site, which was located not far from the road. After this, the chief of the district, Belokon, who was already there, reported to Lieutenant Reich that all would be done within the prescribed time and that everything was ready. From where we stood, at one hundred fifty or two hundred meters from the road, we could make out the silhouettes of the people digging in the earth. As I saw later, they were preparing a ditch that the local inhabitants, peasants, had to dig on orders of district chief, Belokon.”
The clock of the crime springs into action. Everything will unfold with precision between four in the morning and noon. I follow along with Zaloga’s tempo. His day could be called “The Day of the Genocide of the Jews of Staraïa Ouchitsa.”
“At four and five in the morning, Belokon was already there with the locals who were digging a ditch one to two hundred meters from the road.”
This requisition must have taken place the day before at the latest. According to our witnesses, a local administration would never go to farms during the night to wake up villagers and ask them to bring their shovels.
According to Zaloga, it’s only now that the polizei are informed of their precise objective in gathering here. The announcement seems to follow a certain paramili
tary ritual: the auxiliary police have to line up before they receive their orders. Once again, no witness we have spoken to has mentioned this type of speech or police lineup. This all happens at sunrise.
The Announcement
“The chief of police, Lieutenant Iakob, and the commander of the Kroubazik Company had the Schutzmann line up and announced to them that they had to round up all the Jews from Staraïa Ouchitsa and Stoudenitsa and bring them to the shooting site.”
This is not exactly the announcement of the crime but of what they need to get done in the first hour of the schedule, between seven and eight: round up the Jews.
Why tell them so late? The German confidence in the auxiliary police is generally very limited. Did they want to avoid communication with the Jews in the ghetto? This is quite possible. Did they also want to be sure the auxiliary police didn’t attack the ghetto to rob the Jews or commit rape on the night before the murders? To my mind, this is also very probable.
“Together with the police and the criminal police, this was done between seven and eight in the morning.”
Not only are the polizei fully complicit in the crime, because they drag the Jews from their houses after having seen the ditches dug, but what’s more, all acts of violence against the Jews are permitted them in the interest of not slackening the pace of events. It’s not a rounding up of the Jews but a veritable hunt. Listening to Zaloga, I can’t help but think of the raids committed against the Jews in Paris, or in Bordeaux or Lyon, in the rue Sainte-Catherine. How many Eastern European police and ex-Soviet polizei participated fully, with their slurs and their blows, in the genocide of the Jews? I hardly dare to ask myself this question: in the West as in the East, could it have happened without the police and the polizei?
From Seven to Eight. Rounding Up the Jews.
What a euphemism! This “rounding up” is a violent raid on Jewish households.
“At the same time, a group of Germans and Schutzmann was formed and charged with checking all the Jewish dwellings and removing all those who didn’t want to leave and all those who were hiding.” The respect for schedule becomes paramount, for the Germans as well as for Zaloga.
“Everything had to be done between seven and eight in the morning,” he repeated.
“During the rounding up of the Jewish population, many people who were hiding in the apartments were flushed out. The fugitives had already stocked their basements with food and clothing so they could hide out there. They also hid in attics, chimneys, under fake ceilings, and in the crawl spaces between ceilings and roofs, in barns, stoves, and dunghills…. Some men escaped by the roofs, jumping from the roof of a house that hadn’t been inspected yet to one that had already been inspected.”
For the first time in his testimony, we see Jewish resistance. Apparently, in Staraïa Ouchitsa, many inhabitants had planned to evade the liquidation or fled by the rooftops.
But Zaloga describes the violence that erupts when a Jew threatens to put the crime behind schedule:
“The sick people and the old men and women who couldn’t walk to the square were brought, often carried by relatives. If they didn’t have any, we ordered other Jews to help them. A woman aged sixty to seventy years old who was leaving her bedroom very slowly was bludgeoned by a policeman and a Schutzmann…. Then they threw her outside and ordered the other Jews to carry her, half dead, to the square.”
Respecting the schedule was such an imperative that they could kill people who slowed the pace of the crime.
The Criteria for Killing
All of a sudden, Zaloga interrupted his story to explain at length, and with great precision, the Nazi criteria for establishing Judaism and in particular the criminal criteria for those who were half Jewish:
“It is crucial to note that a person was considered Jewish and was shot if he was related to a Jew up to three generations inclusive, in cases where the husband and wife were of different nationalities. I know of the following example: A Jewish woman who was married to a Ukrainian, their daughter who was also married to a Ukrainian, who herself had a daughter married to a Ukrainian … were all shot as Jews. A man or woman married to a Jew who was of another nationality was not shot.”
Unbelievable. Zaloga knows the Berlin Nazi criteria for the crime. A low-grade member of the auxiliary police, at the end of the war, can recite by heart the Nazi guidelines for recognizing who had to be killed and who did not, particularly in mixed-race families. We so often imagine, when we speak of the Einsatzgruppen, that German chiefs commanded units that did nothing but obey. But Zaloga’s testimony proves that there was in fact an understanding of the rules governing the genocide of the Jews even on the lowest rungs of command.
Zaloga takes up his story again. After the roundup of the Jews, the separation of men and women, and the selection of certain artisans who are not to be killed that day, three new orders are given.
The Roundup, Protection of Goods, Ordering of the Meal
“The chief of the SD, the chief of police, and the district chief all left by car for the execution site, having given the following instructions: (1) to send trucks to the village of Stoudenitsa in order to bring the few Jewish inhabitants there to the execution site; (2) to guarantee the protection of all the Jewish dwellings from pillage by the local population; (3) the district chief received the order to arrange a meal for between fifty and sixty people, the Schutzmann of Kamaniets-Podilsky and the Germans.”
A triad of concerns: not to let any Jew slip through the cracks, to protect the Jews’ goods from pillage, and to organize the killers’ meals. We are in 1943. The killers are marked by their criminal habits. The Germans seem to control and coordinate a flowchart step-by-step, hour by hour, from the crime to meal. Zaloga does not mention any feelings of surprise; the murder, the confiscation of goods, the catering for the murderers, it is all of a piece.
I had often said in lectures that there can be no killers without cooks. I didn’t quite know how right I was.
The killers, the auxiliaries, and the requisitioned population are mobilized by a single order. The murderers who have come from Germany, the police recruited in the region, and the local conscripts all have to work simultaneously. At noon, a hot meal will be served in the canteen, the Jewish houses will be protected from pillage, and the Jews of Staraïa Ouchitsa will be murdered, or perhaps only injured and buried alive, their bodies covered by shovelfuls of dirt from the fillers.
Zaloga mentions no delays on the part of the killers or the cook.
However, despite his methodical testimony, he neglects to answer an obvious question: how did the Jews assemble on time? How did they get dressed on time? How did they lie down in the ditch on time? How did they die on time?
Zaloga describes the execution as though the Jews themselves voluntarily respected the schedule for their own death. His narrative of the mass murder of the Jews leaves us to think that the victims were docile and played their part. In fact, respect for the precise schedule of the murder was maintained because, behind the sanitized terms for the procedure, the Jewish victims were subjected at every moment to violence and horror without limit. At every stage of the murder. Most of the time Zaloga describes the Jews as “docile.” Nevertheless, his depositions betray the violence committed at every turn.
The Column of Jews
Zaloga relates the facts like this: “When the column turned and saw the ditch, a general outcry resounded, from women and men alike. No yelling, no insult, no beating or kicking could stop it. The deep cries of the men and the sharp, strident cries of the women mingled with the tears of children who wanted to be held. The screaming would die down briefly only to start up again even louder. It lasted for one hundred to two hundred meters, until they arrived at the site of the ditch.”
The Circles of Guards
Zaloga himself is not far from the ditch because he’s coordinating the second circle of guards. The term “circle” itself, clean and mathematical, masks or dresses up a mass of blows that rain
down on the Jews in order to force them to advance toward the ditch:
“As the chief guard of the second circle at the site of the shooting, I personally saw how a policeman willingly joined the first circle of guards, not far from the ditch, and personally pressed people to get undressed before the shooting. Then they pushed the naked people toward the ditch where the shooting of the Jews was taking place. Those who didn’t want to go or were walking too slowly were clubbed by the policeman and by the other Germans of the SD and the police. During all this, the people condemned to death wept and let out heartbreaking cries.”
Again, any slowness on the part of the Jewish victims when it was time to walk to the ditch provoked beating. We are far from the image of Jews moving forward like sheep! All blows were permitted at all times. This was a large-scale massacre more than a military execution. A mass murder.
The Counter
Zaloga mentions a person whom very few witnesses recall: the counter. He draws a cross in a notebook for every five Jews killed. The counting of victims that takes places beside the ditch will allow the mobile units to make an accurate report to Berlin. Violence and rationality went hand in hand.
The “Chiefs”
In his description of the methodology, Zaloga doesn’t fail to describe the behavior of the German authorities during the shooting. To the violence and the rationality, these leaders add laughter, satisfaction, and encouragement for the murder and the blows.
“Not far from the ditch stood the chief of police, Lieutenant Reich, and the chief of the SD, whose name I don’t know, the two directors of the shooting, who, under the approving eyes of the regional kommissar, Reindel, gave the orders throughout…. With evil smiles on their lips, smoking cigarettes the whole time, they encouraged their subordinates, who were excited by the smell of blood, and laughed to see the blows connect as they rained down on the heads of the terrified Jews. Or, by contrast, they would watch silently with impassive faces the horrible sight of innocent people being massacred. From time to time, they would turn their backs to the ditch and speak in hushed tones, with their hands in their pockets and an air of satisfaction.
In Broad Daylight Page 23