by Bill Yenne
On June 22, 1941, Operation Barbarossa began. More than three million German troops achieved quick and decisive victories, pushing deep into the Soviet Union across a 1,800-mile front. The German operational objective was a swift conquest of the Soviet Union west of the Ural Mountains.
“When Barbarossa commences, the world will hold its breath,” Hitler confidently predicted. “We have only to kick in the door and the whole rotten structure will come crashing down.”
For a while it looked as though he was right. Within a week, the German spearhead was a third of the way to Moscow. Tens of thousands of Soviet troops had been captured within a matter of days, and around 4,000 Soviet aircraft were destroyed.
Waffen SS units went to battle attached to Wehrmacht army groups. The SS Totenkopf Division and SS Polizei Division were attached to Heeresgruppe Nord (Army Group North) for the offensive against Leningrad by way of the Baltic states of Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia. The SS Das Reich Division joined in the Heeresgruppe Mitte (Army Group Center) attack toward Moscow, while the SS Wiking Division and the Leibstandarte Adolf Hitler joined with Heeresgruppe Sud (Army Group South) in the invasion of the Ukraine. The SS Nord Division participated in joint Operation Polarfuchs (Polar Fox) with the Finnish army in the far north.
By the first week of September 1941, the Germans had pushed more than 400 miles into the Soviet Union across the entire front. The area of the Soviet Union now occupied by Hitler’s legions was more than double the size of Germany. Accompanied by nominal contingents of Hungarian and Romanian troops, and by the Corpo di Spedizione Italiano in Russia (Italian Expeditionary Corps in Russia), the Germans conquered and occupied more territory faster than any army in history.
It was the manifest destiny of Völkisch German peasants to be masters of the land, and in the Soviet Union—in Russia, Byelorussia, and Ukraine—there was almost limitless land. Except for a sizable Völksdeutsche minority in Ukraine, most of this land was occupied by Slavs. However, as Adolf Hitler saw it, the Slavs were “subhuman,” so they were a mere inconvenience. Now that the German armies were in control, it was time to turn these wide-open spaces into Lebensraum.
As Hitler had written, Germany’s policy toward the Slavs and their “Jewish-Bolshevik masters” would be to “either sterilize these racially foreign elements to ensure that its own people’s blood is not continually adulterated or remove them altogether and make over to its own people the land thereby released.”
Hitler now turned to his racial philosopher, Dr. Alfred Rosenberg, the man who had compiled the Third Reich’s official hierarchy of races and who had popularized the term “untermenschen” to describe the “subhumans.” Rosenberg was named to head the new Reichsministerium für die Besetzten Ostgebiete (Reich Ministry for the Occupied Eastern Territories). The policy for the Eastern Territories would be for the steppes to be emptied of Slavs and Jews. The executioner of this policy would be Reichsführer Heinrich Himmler.
The Reichsführer SS had been working for more than a year on a meticulously detailed plan for dealing with the problem of what to do with these people. However, he had been thinking about this moment for most of his life. He had long dreamed of this vast clean slate, larger than Germany itself, that could be remade into a mystical Völkisch utopia, ruled over by the Aryan übermenschen of his SS.
“What a sublime idea!” Himmler told his Estonian-born masseur, Felix Kersten, as reported in Kersten’s biography. “It’s the greatest piece of colonization the world will ever have seen, linked with a most noble and essential task, the protection of the Western world from an irruption from Asia.”
Another look into Himmler’s personal perspective on what we would now call the ethnic cleansing of the East comes from SS Obergruppenführer Erich Julius Eberhard von dem Bach, who cut a deal with Allied authorities after the war to give extensive evidence against his SS superiors. Known as Erich Julius Eberhard von dem Bach-Zelewski until he dropped his embarrassing Polish surname, Bach had been appointed by Himmler in 1937 as the Höher SS und Polizeiführer (HSSPF, or higher SS and police leader) for the eastern German state of Silesia. Having been involved in mass resettlements and confiscation of private property in Poland, he was reassigned by Himmler to serve as an HSSPF during Operation Barbarossa. In January 1941, at the SS Shangri-la at Wewelsburg, Himmler told Bach that the SS master plan for the East called for “eliminating” 30 million Slavs and deporting 14 million members of other races in order to make Lebensraum for German and Völksdeutsche settlers.
Himmler went on to effuse that a 100,000-square-mile swath of western Russia, roughly between Bryansk and Leningrad, would be devoid of Slavs by 1971. He added that 80 percent of Poles and two-thirds of the Ukrainians would be deported to Siberia, and that by 1961, there would be 2.4 million newly arrived German and Völksdeutsche people living in this area.
Dr. Alfred Rosenberg (1893–1946), Hitler’s racial philosopher, codified the Third Reich’s official hierarchy of races and popularized the term “untermenschen” to describe the Slavs and Jews in Russia. When Germany occupied huge areas of the Soviet Union, Rosenberg headed the new Reichsministerium für die Besetzten Ostgebiete (Reich Ministry for the Occupied Eastern Territories). U.S. National Archives
As Himmler told Kersten, the scheme was radical, but not without precedent. “Our measures are not really so original,” the Reichsführer admitted to the masseur. He added:
All great nations have used some degree of force or waged war in acquiring their status as a great power, in much the same way as ourselves; the French, the Spanish, the Italians, the Poles, to a great extent, too, the English and the Americans. Centuries ago Charlemagne set us the example of resettling an entire people by his action with the Saxons and the Franks, the English with the Irish, the Spaniards with the Moors; and the American method of dealing with their Indians was to evacuate whole races…. But we are certainly original in one important point. Our measures are the expression of an idea, not the search for any personal advantage or ambition. We desire only the realization on a Germanic basis of a social ideal and the unity of the West. We will clarify the situation at whatever cost. It may take as many as three generations before the West gives its approval to this new Order, for which the Waffen SS was created.
These words were Himmler at his most pretentious, making “sacrifices” for the good of his people and for their destiny to rule the world for a thousand years.
As the Waffen SS was battling the Soviet army, Himmler sent in his “special” troops, his Einsatzgruppen, to begin clearing the land for his “sublime idea.” In this case, of course, clearing the land for Völksdeutsche settlers did not mean removing brush and tree stumps, but removing human beings—or rather, those whom Rosenberg and Himmler considered, in their Lanzian logic, to be less than human.
As they had in Poland and Czechoslovakia, the Einsatzgruppen started with the “saboteurs” and intelligentzia, specifically the “Bolshevik commissars,” the Communist Party leadership. Because Hitler considered “Bolshevism” to be a crime, there was legal justification in the minds of the SS planners for executing these people. From there, it was a easy roll down the slippery slope to liquidating everyone in the “Jewish-Bolshevik” elite, which included any Jew, anywhere, any time.
The Oberkommando Wehrmacht was not aware that there would be large-scale executions, and when the Einsatzgruppen began their work in the rear areas, the army was taken off guard. Objections were made, but the orders came directly from Himmler and were outside the Wehrmacht chain of command. So nothing could be done. However, the Wehrmacht and Himmler did work out an agreement whereby the Einsatzgruppen would not interfere with ongoing operations on the front lines.
Organized and supervised by Reinhard Heydrich, the roughly 3,000 men of the Einsatzgruppen were assigned to each of the Operation Barbarossa fronts. Einsatzgruppe A was assigned to Heeresgruppe Nord (Army Group North), and Einsatzgruppe B went to Heeresgruppe Mitte (Army Group Center). Einsatzgruppe C and Einsatzgrupp
e D followed Heeresgruppe Sud (Army Group South) into Ukraine and the Crimea. Each Einsatzgruppe was nominally under the direction of a regional Höher SS und Polizeiführer. Obergruppenführer Erich Julius Eberhard von dem Bach was the HSSPF for the Heeresgruppe Mitte sector.
A report that later wound up in Allied hands calmly states that through September 6, 1941, one Einsatzgruppe C Sonderkommando unit had “dealt with 11,328 Jews.” Einsatzgruppe D Report Number 153 recounted that 79,276 people had been eliminated, including “122 Communist functionaries and 3,176 Jews.” The balance were apparently mere Slavs.
Einsatzgruppe C was in Kiev on September 19, the same day that the city surrendered to the Wehrmacht. A summary report states, “The Jewish population was invited by poster to present themselves for resettlement. Although initially we had only counted on 5,000 to 6,000 Jews reporting, more than 30,000 Jews appeared; by a remarkably efficient piece of organization they were led to believe in the resettlement story until shortly before their execution.”
Another Einsatzgruppe C report from the late summer of 1941 explains that the “Jews of the town were invited to present themselves at a certain spot for registration and subsequent accommodation in a camp. Some 34,000 reported, including women and children. After being stripped of their valuables and clothing all were killed, a task which demanded several days.”
Meanwhile, there are Wehrmacht reports that tell another side of the cold Einsatzgruppen efficiency. A certain Major Rosler, who commanded the 528th Infantry Regiment, later wrote that in late July 1941 while his unit was at Zhytomyr in Ukraine, he heard a fusillade of gunfire across a hill. Climbing out to investigate, he witnessed “a picture of such barbaric horror that the effect upon anyone coming upon it unawares was both shattering and repellent.”
He went on to describe a huge pit containing countless bodies of Jews and that “in this grave lay, among others, an old man with a white beard clutching a cane in his left hand. Since this man, judging by his sporadic breathing, showed signs of life, I ordered one of the [SS Einsatzgruppen] policemen to kill him. He smilingly replied: ‘I have already shot him seven times in the stomach. He can die on his own now.’”
The SS Einsatzgruppen kept meticulous, if grisly, records. From the opening of Operation Barbarossa through the ensuing winter, Einsatzgruppe A eliminated 249,420 untermenschen, Einsatzgruppe B eliminated 45,467, Einsatzgruppe C around 95,000, and Einsatzgruppe D an estimated 92,000 from the utopian homeland that Himmler envisioned for his Völkisch German pioneers.
Of course, not all the Wehrmacht troops had clean hands when it came to the killing of Jews. Wehrmacht documents indicate that Jews suspected of sabotage were to be shot. A December 1941 report from Einsatzgruppe A stated that the regular army troops in Heersegruppe Mitte had killed 19,000 partisans and criminals, many of them Jews.
Initially, the bodies of those murdered by the Einsatzgruppen were buried in mass graves. However, through later 1942 and into 1943, a massive effort known variously as Enterdungsaktion or Sonderaktion 1005 was made to exhume, crush, and burn these hundreds of thousands of human remains.
In February 1942, Bach was hospitalized in the SS rest-and-recuperation facility at Hohenlychen, claiming a nervous breakdown. His doctor reported, “He is suffering particularly from hallucinations connected with the shootings of Jews which he himself carried out and with other grievous experiences in the East.” Reportedly, he “would pass his nights screaming, a prey to hallucinations.”
“Thank God, I’m through with it,” Bach claims to have told the doctor. “Don’t you know what’s happening in Russia? The entire Jewish people … is being exterminated there.”
He claims that Himmler told him personally that the executions were pursuant to “a Führer order. The Jews are the disseminators of Bolshevism…. [I]f you don’t keep your nose out of the Jewish business, you’ll see what’ll happen to you!”
Bach painted himself as a victim of the Reichsführer’s threats, but his record shows that when he got out of the hospital, his own brutality toward the untermenschen was undiminished until the end of World War II.
As the victorious German armies pressed through the once and future Soviet Union, the vast and sprawling lands were opened up for Völksdeutsche settlement. The Byelorussian Soviet Socialist Republic was renamed Weiss Ruthenien (White Ruthenia), formally freed from its “Jewish-Bolshevik” masters, and handed over for resettlement.
The Reich was supposed to last a thousand years, so as autumn of 1941 arrived, Himmler confidently began drafting five-year plans and twenty-year plans for his Völkisch utopia. However, there were snowflakes in the air out there on the Russian steppes. Soon the rapid progress of the Wehrmacht would slow. Rains would come, and tires would slip, slide, spin, and stick in the thick black mud. The mud would freeze. The snow would come, and with it a barely perceptible shift in the fortunes of the invincible Wehrmacht.
On the eve of Christmas in 1941, a holiday that both Soviet commissars and SS Oberführers forbade their troops to celebrate, the forward march of Barbarossa’s children stopped. Adolf Hitler’s heretofore victorious legions sputtered to a halt in the primeval ice and snow of Mother Russia’s secret weapon—winter. The Aryan warriors, whose lineage was believed by some to have stretched back in time and space to the ice fields of Thule, had reached the end of the road in a snowbank.
It would be a very long walk back.
CHAPTER 15
Bloody Hell
IT STARTED OUT AS A VAGUE IDEA, a gut reaction to a perverted and paranoid intolerance. It turned into the crime of the century. The idea was called Die Endlösund (the Final Solution), a term born within a bureaucracy to describe an apparently benign resolution of an issue that was, in reality, homicide on a heretofore unimaginable scale. It was absolutely a holocaust in the most extreme parameters of this term, and since the 1970s, it has become almost universally referred to as the Holocaust.
The plan was simple: kill every Jew in Europe.
Whereas the Einsatzgruppen operations in the Soviet Union, which began in June 1941, functioned to clear both Slavs and Jews from land so that the conquered land could be occupied by Völksdeutsche or German settlers, the aspects of the Final Solution that would be carried out within the Third Reich itself in subsequent years were aimed at clearing Jews and other “undesirables” from the places where Aryan Germans already lived.
The Final Solution was created within the bowels of the SS as the definitive resolution of what the Nazis had called the “Jewish Problem.” What exactly was this problem? The problem was that Hitler wished to make Germany and the growing Third Reich into a wonderland, a paradise for Aryans. But there were Jews inside the Third Reich. To him and to those around him, the presence of Jews in the Reich was likened to a viral infection in an otherwise healthy body.
To understand how the neo-pagan minds of the Reich worked, it is important understand that there had been a series of proposed official solutions discussed before Heinrich Himmler and Reinhard Heydrich concocted the Final Solution to the Führer’s dilemma.
Angry racial dogmas had bubbled around the fringes of Austro-German society long before List and Lanz codified them into a neo-pagan pseudoreligion, and long before they flooded into the political and legal mainstream with the Nazis. However, nationalist thugs, especially those of the SA, now took the Nazi rise to power as a license to intimidate. Ernst Röhm, who was openly gay and, therefore, a member of another group that would later suffer from official Nazi persecution, organized boycotts of Jewish businesses and turned his goons loose to harass people and vandalize Jewish property.
At first, even Hitler tried to distance himself from the thuggery. Having come to power through the ballot box, he was still cautious about public opinion. He ordered the SA to cool it, and his interior minister, Wilhelm Frick, even suggested penalties for SA men who attacked people. However, Hitler was moving toward a “legal” method to accomplish the same goal.
Hitler’s first “solution” on
the road to the Final Solution was to legally isolate the Jews. This he promulgated with legislation known as the Nürnberger Gesetze (Nuremberg Laws) because the Führer announced them at an NSDAP rally in Nuremberg in 1935. The hand of the diehard Blut-und-Boden crowd, from Ricardo Walther Darré to Alfred Rosenberg, was evident in the fact that the concept of “German blood” was the cornerstone of this legislation. (Neither of these blood zealots had been born with German citizenship. Darré was born in Argentina, and Rosenberg in Estonia, when it was still part of the Russian Empire. Of course, Hitler had been born in Austria.)
Passed by the Reichstag in September 1935, the Nuremberg Laws took effect at the beginning of 1936. The Reich Citizenship Law restricted citizenship to people with German blood. People who had Jewish ancestors could not be included among citizens. The Law for the Protection of German Blood and German Honor outlawed marriages between Jews and people with “German blood.”
The chilling thing about the march from the Nuremberg Laws to the Final Solution was that the frothing hatred of Jews was no longer merely the realm of the neo-pagans and Social Darwinists. German public opinion had swung firmly in favor of the persecution that was taking place. This shift was most frighteningly demonstrated on the night of November 9–10, 1938.