Anatomy of a Genocide

by Omer Bartov

  Jakob Ebenstein during the German occupation. Source: GLA-K 309 Zug. 2001-42/878-98.

  Even more reviled than the Judenrat, the Jewish police (OD) attracted young men from the wealthier families in Buczacz since it was believed membership would improve one’s chances of survival. Gelbart said that even before the first mass shooting of Jews in late August 1941, a number of “Jewish youths from the white collar professions, whose names I will not spell out here for obvious reasons (they are no longer alive), took control over their own Jews.” That fall the Judenrat’s procurement office, headed by the butcher Fiszel Szwarc, joined forces with the police, whose “hated commander” Albrecht reportedly “robbed the Jews” of their property. As Wizinger wrote, at the time OD members “were able to lead a very good life and to amass large sums of money.” Those who “tried to hide their belongings were mercilessly beaten.” During the winter of 1942–43, the Jewish police continued “robbing, killing, worse than the Germans.” Albrecht, wrote Wizinger, “walks down the streets in an OD uniform. Like the Germans, he is holding a whip in his hand and woe to whoever stands in his way.” As conditions deteriorated, the butcher Szwarc joined the swelling ranks of the OD; it was a smart move, since he was one of several Jewish policemen who survived the war. Halpern remembered that “the Jewish police acted with particular cruelty in relieving the Jews of all they had left. Assaults and beatings of their brethren became a normal phenomenon.” Additionally, as Eliasz Chalfen observed, in the winter of 1941–42 the OD was “especially active” in rounding up young men and women for forced labor.23

  Most devastating was the involvement of the Jewish police in the roundups, deportations, and mass shootings. Rosental testified that during the first roundup, in October 1942, the Gestapo received “considerable assistance from the Jewish police,” which was “armed with axes.” Rosen reported that in the second roundup, the following month, “the Gestapo men were assisted by the Ukrainian and Jewish police.” And during the third action, in February 1943, “there were horrible scenes when children escorted their parents to the pit. The policeman Anderman—a young boy—had to lead his own mother to the mass grave.” Other “Ukrainian and Jewish policemen were posted as guards on all the roads leading to Buczacz, and arrested Jews who had escaped from the ‘actions’ in their towns and were seeking asylum in Buczacz. They were all killed.”24

  As the killing intensified and struck closer to home, the willingness of some Jewish policemen to collaborate began to waver. Yitzhak Bauer, who joined the Jewish police in the fall of 1941 at age eighteen, eventually became a member of the resistance. “The Ordnungsdienst in Buczacz,” he testified in 1968, “numbered about 30 people”; it was located “in the building of the Judenrat,” to which it was “administratively subordinated.” But during roundups “we were put at the disposition of the . . . Gestapo or the local gendarmerie [regular German police].” In such cases, Jewish policemen operated alongside German perpetrators. “As an OD-man I was personally . . . involved in two roundups,” he stated. In November 1942 “we were ordered to report to the Judenrat at daybreak” and assigned to different squads of Germans “heading toward the Jewish houses.” Bauer’s task was to “participate in the cleansing of the Jewish hospital on Mikołaja Street,” alongside two armed Germans, one of whom was the Gestapo driver Albert Brettschneider. At the hospital, which contained “about one hundred patients . . . horrifying things took place. The patients who could not move were shot on the spot directly in their beds. Others were escorted to the railroad station, from which they, together with the other Jews . . . were loaded into the railroad cars and deported to be exterminated in Bełżec.” Bauer witnessed the killings at very close quarters. “We entered a room with bed-ridden patients, who could not raise themselves out of bed. There were five to six persons.” He was “standing by the door” and could clearly see Brettschneider and his partner “walk up to individual beds and shoot those patients” by “aiming at a spot between the eyes and the nose. They simply rested the weapon at that spot on the face of the victim. After each such shot, the victim showed no more signs of life.” Having murdered at least four people in that room, Brettschneider commented to the other man, “It’s time to get some food” (Es ist schon Zeit zum Essen). It was about 8:30 a.m.25

  Bauer also witnessed the roundup of April 1943: “Already on the way to the Judenrat I saw the bodies of people who had been shot lying in the street.” Not only did the local German gendarmes also participate in the killing, but “even Germans from the Baudienst [Labor Service] of the Todt Organization,” Nazi Germany’s vast labor and construction agency, “took part in this action.” He saw Rothmann, the local chief of the Baudienst, shoot the Jewish woman Jancie Hirschhorn on a street near the hospital. Bauer’s own mother was murdered that day. Two days later he and OD member Hersz Gross had to accompany SS Corporal Richard Pal, who was in charge of collecting “the remaining belongings” of “murdered or deported Jews.” In one of the apartments they encountered the mother of OD member Dunajer, who was still packing her clothes. “Without asking a word,” Bauer testified, “Pal drew his pistol and fired two shots [at her] in front of my eyes. I saw—I was standing at a distance of 3 feet—how she toppled over, covered in blood, without any sign of life.” Then they had “to load everything in the apartment onto the cart” waiting in the street.26

  Richard Pal in 1965. A Romanian ethnic German born in 1912, Pal joined the Waffen-SS in 1940, was charged with murder and sentenced to eight years in prison in 1974, but was acquitted in 1979. Source: GLA-K 309 Zug. 2001-42/871-01, 883; Bundesarchiv ZB 7129, pp. 1–26; B162/5175, pp. 4265–300; 5176, pp. 4631–35; 14533, pp. 1–211.

  Interviewed in 2002, Bauer commented that following their mother’s murder (their father had died earlier of typhus), he and his younger brother decided to go to the forest and “joined a group” of resisters. He did not mention that he had previously served as a policeman. We learn from his story that the transition from the Ordnungsdienst to the resistance was far more natural than might appear in hindsight.27

  Others joined the resistance in June, when the Germans set out to liquidate all the remaining Jews in town, including those in the enclosed labor camp and the Jewish police, who were housed separately on the outskirts of town. It was there, as Eliasz Chalfen testified, that the Gestapo and the Ukrainian auxiliaries “met with armed resistance.” This last-ditch fighting by the OD allowed some policemen and a fair number of other Jews to escape into the forest. Many of them were denounced and murdered in the ensuing months. But alongside the solidarity of victimhood, resentment against those perceived to have bought their survival at the price of others lingered on. A Polish underground report issued not long after the first liberation of Buczacz, in March 1944, noted, “About 800 Jews came out of their shelters and right away began settling scores among themselves. The poor accused the rich that they had robbed them and that they hid themselves while turning the poor over to the Gestapo.” Allegations of Jewish passivity or spinelessness also quickly surfaced, and the Soviets reportedly “accused the Jews of being parasites and asked them why did they not go to the forest to fight the Germans, and instead hid themselves in holes like cowards.”28

  The Germans accomplished the rapid destruction of the Jewish population by creating a local apparatus of Ukrainians and Jews who helped them organize and perpetrate mass murder and by swiftly decapitating the community so as to minimize organized resistance. Apart from setting up the Judenrat and Ordnungsdienst, in early August 1941 the local authorities effectively transformed the Ukrainian militia into a uniformed district police force under Kaznovskyi’s command, subordinated to the local German gendarmerie. This reorganization facilitated the first mass shooting of several hundred Jews on Fedor Hill. The victims, including a few women and non-Jews, were first held in the cellar of the police building, then escorted the following morning to the killing site by Ukrainian policemen, who secured the perimeter. What came to be known as the “registration a
ction” was itself a dress rehearsal for all subsequent, much larger mass execution and deportation operations in Buczacz. Kaznovskyi, however, suggested in his postwar investigation that he had nothing to do with the massacre. One afternoon in August 1941, he said, “I was sitting in my office in the building of the Ukrainian police station in Buczacz. From the window I could see policemen escorting a column of Jews” toward the station. “As I learned later, the Gestapo had selected the men on the basis of a registration.” Once the Jews were “assembled in the courtyard” of the station, “the Gestapo locked the gate.” The next day, as he “was walking to the police station, the Gestapo men led the prisoners out of the courtyard,” and, along with “some [Ukrainian] policemen, who had guarded the Jews overnight,” they “escorted the prisoners in the direction of Fedor Hill. There were about 200 prisoners. After the policemen returned, they said that the Gestapo had shot the entire group.”

  Further investigation soon established that prior to the shooting Kaznovskyi had in fact ordered a group of fifteen to eighteen Ukrainian policemen to dig a mass grave on Fedor Hill and “escort the ‘Jewish intellectuals’ to the execution site.” The policemen instead delegated the digging to villagers from Nagórzanka, who were also expected to cover up the bodies but escaped at the site of the killing. For that reason, as Mykhailo Huzar testified, the pit was covered with only a thin layer of soil, and soon thereafter “the bodies began to decompose” and “an unpleasant smell spread over the city,” until Huzar and a colleague were sent “to put further layers of soil over the pit.”29

  The registration action, in which hundreds of the city’s most upstanding citizens were murdered, had the added benefit of demonstrating that Jews could simply be taken aside and killed without even the semblance of an excuse or formality. As Gelbart recalled it, the action began on August 25, when the male Jews of Buczacz were ordered to assemble on the market square at 5:00 p.m. for labor registration. Gelbart, who decided not to go, was watching from his window, as the hundreds of Jews gathered in the square were “surrounded from all sides and led in military style to the Ukrainian police” building. “The victims were then interrogated about their particulars and many craftsmen were released.” Those who remained overnight were described as “predominantly educated people,” “the best youth and working intelligentsia,” and “the crème-de-la-crème of the Jewish population.” Jewish survivors’ estimates of their numbers range between 350 and 800.30

  The selection was supervised by Major (Sturmbannführer) Hermann Müller, chief of the Sipo outpost in Tarnopol. Once that was accomplished, the elderly Jewish witness Józef Kornblüh reported, the Gestapo men “left for a drinking bout at the apartment of the Ukrainian physician Dr. [Alexius] Banach, where they drank until 4 a.m.” Markus Kleiner, who was in the prison, testified that at about 8:00 p.m. police chief Kaznovskyi “and several other Ukrainian policemen came in with batons and began to beat up their victims. Some of the victims had their arms broken. The horror and the cries of the tortured people cannot be described.” Inmates were forced “to drink their own urin[e].” The Gestapo returned at daybreak and led the victims to Fedor Hill, where “big boxes had been prepared for them to deposit all their belongings, and afterward they were shot.” Kleiner, who had managed “to escape from the prison on the night before the massacre,” was hiding nearby. He watched as the victims were “executed completely naked,” and he “could hear very well the cries of the victims and the machine gun fire of the executioners.” The Ukrainian policemen then “brought the booty to town and changed the belongings of the unfortunate victims against [i.e., for] brandy and vodka and celebrated their easy victory with yelling ‘Death for the Jews and Poles, long live independent Ucraina [Ukraine].” In this manner, Gelbart noted, “Buczacz lost its most valuable Jewish element already in the opening phase” of the German occupation.31

  From their house Wizinger and his brother watched the victims walking to Fedor Hill, “surrounded by a tight cordon of Ukrainian policemen. They were led barefoot, some only in their underwear. The car with the Germans and their inseparable machine guns was driving slowly behind.” Soon thereafter they heard shots from the forest, which went on for quite a while, followed by the Ukrainian policemen marching back and chanting, “Death to the Jews.” Wizinger recalled that “many of them were wearing pieces of clothing that had belonged to the murdered Jews.” But many family members refused to believe that their loved ones were gone; when the Germans falsely promised to release them in return for a hefty ransom, the “wives and mothers of those who had been taken practically besieged the office of the Judenrat,” begging it to pay the ransom. People brought in their gold jewelry all day. But that night Wizinger, the Judenrat member Dr. Ludwik Engelberg, and a local Polish doctor located the freshly dug mass grave in the forest; it was filled with bodies. The following morning, when the Judenrat presented Major Müller with the gold, he demanded that they sign a document describing the ransom as a fee for the execution of four hundred communists carried out by the authorities at the request of the Jews. As it later transpired, charging fees for executions was common practice. According to Samuel Rosental, Gestapo official sergeant Kurt Köllner and SS corporal Paul Thomanek “would come to the Judenrat after each action, and were paid 20 Złoty for every bullet fired during the action. The amount paid was registered in the Judenrat’s accounting books and Thomanek would be given a receipt.”32

  There were two known survivors. Abram Brandes ran off from the marching column and jumped into a well; he then persuaded a Ukrainian policeman, whom he knew, to let him escape. From his hiding place in the bushes he watched hundreds of his townsmen being shot. Brandes was denounced and murdered shortly before the liberation. A young lad called Mandel crawled out of the pit after the shooting was over. According to Rosen, the boy survived and was living in Poland after the war but would “tell no one about his experience” or reveal “his Jewish background,” saying that he had become “a different person from the moment he had climbed out of the mass grave.”33

  Beginning in the fall of 1941, the agency directly charged with the mass murder of the Jews of Buczacz was the Security Police outpost established in nearby Czortków. The twenty-odd German members of the outpost carried out their task with notable efficiency: assisted by three hundred Ukrainian policemen organized in a so-called Schutzmannschaft (Auxiliary Police) battalion, as well as by local German gendarmeries, Ukrainian police, and Jewish Ordnungsdienst forces in the smaller towns, they murdered approximately 60,000 Jews in the Czortków-Buczacz region during the three years of the outpost’s existence; only 1,200 Jews are thought to have survived. In Buczacz most of the victims were killed in just nine months, between October 1942 and June 1943.34

  Map of the General Government, published in Krakauer Zeitung, October 26, 1941. Source: Biblioteka Uniwersytecka we Wrocławiu (Wrocław University Library, hereafter BUW).

  Top: Heinrich Peckmann, fourth chief of the outpost, with his wife and son in front of the Czortków Sipo building; bottom: the German grocery in Czortków. Source: GLA-K 309 Zug. 2001-42/878-110, 871-28.

  The new order established by the Security Police in the Czortków-Buczacz region was almost exclusively dedicated to the exploitation and murder of the Jews. In implementing its genocidal objective, the outpost effectively engaged all other available German agencies and every element in the local population, in most cases by providing tangible incentives in the form of material benefits and status elevation; to the Jewish leadership and police it offered a temporary lease on life. Beyond the extraordinary bloodletting this undertaking entailed, perhaps its most scandalous aspect was the astonishing ease with which it was accomplished and the extent to which the killers, along with their spouses and children, lovers and colleagues, friends and parents, appear to have enjoyed their brief murderous sojourn in the region. For many of them, this was clearly the best time of their lives: they had almost unlimited access to food, liquor, tobacco, and sex, and, most important, th
ey became supreme masters over life and death. And when they were done, they packed up and left, often returning to their previous occupations as if nothing had happened, merely taking along a few objects of sentimental or material value, as well as nostalgic photographs of the good old days, unearthed years later when some of them were finally brought to justice.35

  The man most closely associated with the murder of the Jews in the Czortków-Buczacz region was Kurt Köllner.36 Born in 1908 and raised in the town of Bad Dürrenberg in Saxony, Köllner began working as a mechanic and driver in 1926, later joining the management of an automotive company in his hometown and establishing a car rental business of his own; he was considered a reliable and socially respectable businessman. Although his father was a lifelong member of the Social Democratic Party and his parental home hosted various influential political personalities of diverse ideological affiliations, Köllner himself was politically neutral, preferring sports to politics and clinging to his Evangelical faith throughout the Nazi period. He married in a church ceremony in 1934, and his son was born shortly before the war.

  Decades later the court that tried him for murder learned that, following Hitler’s so-called seizure of power in 1933, Köllner concluded that it had become “necessary for him to take up an unequivocal political position,” which meant joining the SS. Köllner explained this step as an attempt to defend his father from incarceration in a concentration camp. But he quickly became an active member of the SS motor school in Leipzig and strutted around town in his elegant black uniform. To the court he insisted that all along he had resisted the regime’s anti-Semitic ideology and had maintained good social contacts with several Jewish families. He had even helped a Jewish acquaintance to emigrate by buying his property—likely for a quite competitive price—and had expressed disapproval of the Kristallnacht pogrom of November 1938, although no witnesses could verify that. Indeed contemporaries remembered that he was nicknamed Mäuschen, or “Little Mouse,” suggesting something less than physical courage and moral fortitude.