Anatomy of a Genocide

by Omer Bartov

  In December 1939 Köllner was called up for military service, and after a few months of training was posted to the Security Police in Warsaw. In August 1941 he was transferred to Lemberg (Polish: Lwów), arriving in Czortków toward the end of the year. In late July 1942 he was appointed head of the Judenreferat (Jewish section), a position he held until the outpost was dismantled. After the war he spent five years in various East German camps and prisons; he then joined his family in West Germany, where he worked for a local firm until his arrest in 1958 on charges of multiple murders. Köllner’s defense hinged on the argument that he had treated Jews well and had actually suffered as a consequence. Even his transfer from Galicia’s capital to a posting in its backwoods, he argued, was a form of punishment for his protests against the maltreatment of Jewish workers building the infamous Thoroughfare IV from Lemberg to the Black Sea.37 In fact his service in Czortków was anything but unpleasant, since shortly after arriving his wife and son joined him there; his wife even found employment with the outpost.

  One reason for Köllner’s success in implementing local genocide was his knack for getting to know his victims before organizing their murder. Rather than employing dehumanization and detachment, he used trust, familiarity, and false promises, which both made things much smoother and provided greater opportunities for personal enrichment. Shortly before the first mass deportation from Czortków on August 25–26, 1942, Köllner warned the local Judenrat of the impending action and ordered it to be prepared to deliver the necessary quota of Jews. But as a gesture of sympathy he also offered to protect young, fit Jews from deportation by stamping their labor cards. In fact he was acting upon instructions from Lemberg, because Jewish labor was still needed to maintain the region’s economy. But since the Judenrat had no way of knowing that, it compensated Köllner generously for his kindness with money and gold. Having won the Jewish leadership’s trust, Köllner then notified it, just hours before the roundup began, that no imminent action was expected, ensuring that the population would be caught off-guard. As a result, approximately three thousand Jews were deported to Bełżec that day, and another three hundred were shot in their homes or on the street; when no more people could be crammed into the railcars, the remaining Jews were incarcerated in the Czortków prison and deported sometime later.

  The Sipo and Kripo buildings in Czortków. Source: GLA-K 309 Zug. 2001-42/878-57, 58.

  This was the first of numerous deportation roundups and mass shooting actions throughout the region in which Köllner participated. But the court would find him guilty of first-degree murder only if it could be shown that he had personally and willfully carried out individual killings. The cases presented to the court demonstrated the license such men had to wantonly kill whomever they wished and the obvious pleasure they took in demonstrating their omnipotence. During the second roundup in Czortków, in October 1942, for instance, Köllner personally shot three Jews who could not keep up with those being deported, either because of old age, physical handicap, or illness. In March 1943 he had two patients dragged from their hospital beds in Buczacz and shot them in the garden. Two months later he shot the plumber Schorr, his wife, and their toddler at close range in front of their older child, and later shot the teenagers Emil Kitaj and Hania Adler point-blank in the head as they knelt in front of him and begged for their lives; on this occasion he was holding the pistol in one hand and his own five-year-old son’s hand in the other.

  Group photo of Czortków Sipo members: Kurt Köllner is fourth from the right; Albert Brettschneider is third from the left; their wives are directly in front of them. Source: GLA-K 309 Zug. 2001-42/878-60.

  Even after the main roundups were over, Köllner continued killing individuals. During the liquidation of the forced labor camp in the village of Nagórzanka near Jagielnica (Ukrainian: Yahilnytsya) in early August 1943, for instance, he chased the teenager Mojsze Waisman, who tried to flee from the barn where he had been hiding, and shot him dead. He then shot the girls Bina and Gisela Horowitz, who had also hidden in the barn, point-blank in the head, once more as they knelt in front of him, a method of execution that seems to have appealed to Köllner and several of his colleagues.38 While these and other murders combined utter indifference to human life with outlandish cruelty, they were representative of the conduct of the Sipo outpost as a whole; in a relatively short time, the murder of Jews, often in the most gruesome manner, had become normalized as a routine and casual act.

  Köllner attempted to defend himself by arguing that the Czortków Judenrat had been complicit in these crimes by willingly revealing to him the locations of hiding places. But even if true, this obviously did not alleviate his guilt. He also claimed that in May 1943 he had been investigated by the SS in Lemberg for favoring Jews, leading to a search of his apartment in Czortków. As it turned out, the search actually revealed that he had been hoarding Jewish bribes rather than dutifully handing them over to his superiors. A last effort by Köllner’s wife to provide him with an alibi also backfired, when she brazenly asserted that she had “known nothing about the murders perpetrated in the Czortków district,” especially after another German woman testified that they had discussed “how one could keep what was happening at the time with the Jews from the children.” Clearly Köllner was not worried at all about that.

  Frau Köllner (on the right) with two other wives of Sipo personnel and a child, out for a walk in Czortków. Source: GLA-K 309 Zug. 2001-42/878-18.

  In 1962 Köllner was found guilty of multiple murders and sentenced to life imprisonment. The court rejected his claim of having had “inner reservations,” finding that “his entire attitude” proved “that he had no humane considerations as regards the treatment of the Jews,” thereby demonstrating his “moral transformation and the hold of National Socialist ideology over him.” The judges also dismissed Köllner’s claim of superior orders, stressing that he “did not shy away from avoiding” such “orders when it suited him,” but did not do so on the numerous occasions in which he participated in mass murder. Paradoxically, the judges also argued that Köllner had “recognized quite early the danger of National Socialism” and had “remained inwardly unmoved” by its “ideas and goals.” Hence he “would have probably continued to lead an ordinary bourgeois existence, had he not increasingly succumbed to the temptations of National Socialist ideology” following Hitler’s seizure of power. “In this sense,” stated the judges, who must have been thinking about their own careers under Nazism, “he became—like many others—a victim in the wider sense of the circumstances of the time.” The court therefore concluded that Köllner’s “guilt consists in the fact that he sacrificed his previous moral and human restraints and that in an effort to promote his own advancement and profit as much as possible, he became a compliant and pliable instrument of the regime of the time, especially in the planned eradication of the Jews, even though, according to his own description, he knew very well ‘that this is murder.’ ”

  In other words, the judges convicted Köllner of murder not because he had internalized Nazi ideology but because he used it for his own purposes, and not for having efficiently organized local genocide but for having personally and needlessly killed individuals who would have otherwise been consigned to collective murder.

  Köllner’s superior, the stern-faced professional policeman Heinrich Peckmann, joined the Nazi Party and the Gestapo in 1937 after a twelve-year career in the regular police force. Posted to Czortków in October 1941, he served as deputy and then as chief of the outpost between late 1942 and October 1943. Resuming his police career after the war, Peckmann was arrested in 1960 but acquitted two years later for insufficient evidence. A second attempt to bring him to justice was dropped in 1966 for similar reasons, despite several testimonies alleging that he had commanded a number of mass executions in the region.39

  But the previously laconic Peckmann was much more expansive about the modus operandi of the outpost when called as a witness at another trial the following
year. Officially, he said, “it was forbidden to shoot Jews privately outside of organized actions” or “to visit the Judenrat.” But “no one bothered with these restrictions. In practice you could . . . do whatever you wanted without being held accountable.” SS-Sergeant Artur Rosenow, for instance, had unleashed his “private” dog against a Jewish man walking down the street in Czortków, which literally “stripped him naked,” in defiance of regulations, and “paid no attention” to Peckmann’s instructions not to bring the dog to roundups. On one occasion Rosenow walked into the “Jewish camp” in Czortków, “shot a Jewish woman” with his pistol, and killed her child by “striking its head against the wall.” Because of such men as Rosenow, stressed Peckmann, “nobody had to be assigned to a Jew-action, because there were sufficient volunteers” more than willing to do the shooting. Indeed Peckmann believed that it was “thanks to the bad example set by the SS-leaders of our outpost” that “people like [the Gestapo driver Albert] Brettschneider and the SS guards” became “Jew-haters [Judengegner]. It made them feel so important, when they drove to the roundups with the SS-leaders and were allowed to shoot Jews.” The second outpost chief, Karl Hildemann, had just such a corrupting influence. Peckmann related one instance in which “Hildemann walked into the canteen and asked, ‘Who wants to come along to shoot some Jews?’ ” But while Peckmann claimed to have been outraged by such conduct, he conceded that other outpost commanders who disapproved of “private Jew-shootings” nevertheless were “on principle in agreement with the extermination of the Jews.”40

  Sipo chief Hans Velde and his deputy Heinrich Peckmann (on right) hunting in the woods near Czortków. Source: GLA-K 309 Zug. 2001-42/878-64.

  SS Corporal Paul Thomanek represented precisely the kind of unambiguously brutal face of German genocide alluded to by Peckmann. Raised in interwar Czechoslovakia as the son of an ethnic German coal miner, Thomanek joined the German police after the outbreak of war and transferred to the Waffen-SS in October 1941. Posted initially to the forced labor camps of Kamionki and Hłuboczek Wielki near Tarnopol, in November 1942 he was appointed commandant of the labor camp in Czortków and soon became the master of all other labor camps in the region. He was given a car and a house and for a while hosted his wife, son, and father there. He also brought with him a German (or Austrian) Jew named Wolf as chief of his Ordnungsdienst. Thomanek was finally arrested by the German police in 1957.41

  Sipo member Fritz Kallmeyer and his child with other outpost personnel in Czortków. Source: GLA-K 309 Zug. 2001-42/871-26.

  Called der Erschiesser (the Shooter) even before coming to Czortków, Thomanek quickly made friends with two other SS men, Rux and Rosenow, and the three became collectively known as the Judenschlächter (the slaughterers of Jews).42 His multiple killings in the Czortków-Buczacz region demonstrated the complete impunity such men enjoyed in perpetrating random violence quite apart from organized massacres. Because he was in charge of relatively small camps, Thomanek also often personally knew the people he murdered. In May 1943, for instance, he murdered Sofia Wolf for speaking across the Czortków labor camp fence with her child’s Polish caretaker. She just had time to call out, “Herr camp commandant, spare my life, I have a small child,” before he shot her in the face with his submachine gun. The following month, during the liquidation of the camp, his personal barber “Papusch” asked Thomanek to spare him, only to be cut to pieces with a burst of submachine-gun bullets. He responded in the same fashion when a blond seventeen-year-old girl named Jäger begged him to let her live, and then he joined the shooters at the execution site.

  A German eyewitness described this camp liquidation as “the most frightful and cruelest event I have ever experienced”: “Among the heap of Jews who had been loaded on the truck, all in a crouching position, with their faces down, a blond Jewish girl was sitting upright, like an angel looking into another world. The road winding its way through Czortków was paved with stones and it looked like the vehicle was driving over a stream of blood.” Among the guards escorting the truck “in open cars with fire-ready weapons” he saw “Thomanek, who was unmistakable with his red hair.”43

  Thomanek also kept a room in Buczacz, where he often ordered the Judenrat to supply him with “girls,” booze, and food. In February 1943 he was one of several SS and Gestapo shooters on Fedor Hill, although at his trial he claimed he merely helped SS Corporal Richard Pal collect the victims’ valuables. He added that on the drive back to Czortków he said to Pal, “Look at these beautiful flowers and yet so many people have to die,” to which his colleague reassuringly replied, “We have nothing to say about this, orders are orders.” In fact Thomanek killed on his own initiative in Buczacz too. In April 1943 he took Rux and a young Ukrainian woman in his car to an inn on the outskirts of Buczacz; the woman had apparently informed them that the family of her former employer at the inn, Leo Folkenfok, was still hiding there with several other Jews, including small children and a pregnant woman. The two SS men forced the Jews to hand over their valuables and shot them one by one. A German civilian who arrived at the scene before the killers left testified, “I heard one of them say to the other that in the future he should not use explosive bullets.”44

  Left to right: Leo Folkenfok; Ginsburg, a Jewish cook; Pepi, a Jewish construction site assistant; Mrs. Leo Folkenfok; and unknown, possibly the subsequent Ukrainian denouncer, at the entrance to the Folkenfolks’ former inn and house. Source: GLA-K 309 Zug. 2001-42/878-115.

  Tall, fat, and red-haired, Thomanek was easily recognizable and greatly feared throughout the region; the cry “Thomanek is coming!” terrorized all who heard it. His visits to the smaller labor camps in the district were also often accompanied by killings.45 Indeed the murders were so ubiquitous, and Thomanek’s appearance so striking, that despite his vehement denials the court rejected all his pleas. The defendant, it concluded, could not resort to claims of superior orders since orders calling for a criminal undertaking could not be seen as binding. The judges also stressed that Thomanek was never in a situation where “he could only save himself from a threat to his own life and body by acting as he did”; in fact it had not been shown that any “SS-man who did not take part in shooting Jews faced a danger” of this kind. At worst, he might “have had to reckon with dismissal from his post and possibly being sent to the front.” Moreover it was clear to the court that Thomanek had acted in “his own personal interest.” Believing that the Nazi regime and the SS were “at that time in a certain sense ‘masters of the world,’ ” Thomanek thought “he could share that power” as long as “he behaved in the manner required and expected of him by his superiors.” And indeed “things went exceedingly well for him.” Thomanek enjoyed such “privileges” only “because he excelled in the ‘treatment’ of the Jews,” which gave him “a position of enormous power that had absolutely no correspondence to his rank” and preserved him from being “called up to the Wehrmacht and sent to a frontline unit.” This “selfish motivation,” concluded the judges, made him “a willing tool of the National Socialist authorities” and “a person whose name evoked fear and horror in the Jews” as “an arbitrary master over the life and death of these unfortunate people.” But although Thomanek was found guilty and sentenced to life imprisonment, the court could not refrain from making almost the same statement made at the conclusion of Köllner’s trial, namely, that since Thomanek did “not carry any responsibility for” the Nazi regime’s “ideas and plans or for the transformation of the political circumstances and the war,” it could also be said that “to this extent he became—like many others with him—in a wider sense also a victim of that time.”46

  Alone among the few members of the Czortków Sipo outpost who eventually faced justice, the Gestapo driver Albert Brettschneider unwittingly exposed a small portion of that potent mix of prejudice, self-righteousness, and sense of inferiority that motivated and rationalized his brutality. Born in Lithuania to a German father and a Lithuanian mother, and married to an ethnic Ger
man, Brettschneider joined the Security Police in 1941, arriving with his wife in Czortków that fall; they remained there until the outpost was dismantled. Finally subjected to a judicial investigation in 1965, Brettschneider’s case was partly dismissed for lack of evidence in 1971 and terminated altogether following his death two years later.47

  At his investigation, even as he described the killings in graphic detail, Brettschneider also betrayed a degree of nostalgia for the “good old days” in the outpost. Despite his low rank, he had formed close relations with many more-senior Sipo members and local administrators. In these small, isolated German communities, joint complicity in mass murder nourished a grotesquely merry intimacy. He fondly recalled a restaurant in Czortków “which I and almost all other outpost members often patronized, because it served good beer.” He also “very often went to drink beer together” with other members “of the Gestapo outpost” at the train station restaurant. In Buczacz there was yet another inn where Brettschneider “always socialized” with SS and Gestapo personnel. Indeed things were so good that even when an SS captain from Lemberg had an affair with his wife around Christmas 1942, Brettschneider did not request another posting, as some of his friends had advised.

  Personally Brettschneider claimed to be constitutionally incapable of inflicting violence: “I could never in my life kill a woman or even a girl. I have always worshipped women.” He would also never “have thought of beating or killing a child.” Anyone testifying that they had seen him participating in mass shootings had to be lying, since such professed witnesses would have in fact been “the first to be shot. I saw this once myself,” he noted, contradicting his assertion that he had never been present at a mass execution. At the same time, Brettschneider readily admitted that finding shooters was never a problem. “At least 30 men would have been” at the killing site, including the SS guards who “lurked around just to get the chance to participate in the shootings,” while several of his Gestapo colleagues “shot Jews eagerly.” As a matter of fact, “no one needed to be ordered to take part in the execution commando. There were always volunteers,” and whenever one of the shooters “emptied his magazine, another one would be lying in wait for the right moment to step in.” In his own testimony Peckmann pointed out that Brettschneider was in fact one of those eager shooters.