Anatomy of a Genocide

by Omer Bartov

  Brettschneider expressed profound contempt for his Jewish victims, whom he blamed for their own murder. Instead of joining the partisans, he exclaimed, “all the Jews stayed in the ghetto. The members of the Judenrat are guilty of this. They not only prevented their own people from fleeing, they even handed them over to the Gestapo in Czortków,” while “the Jewish Ordnungsdienst, which guarded the ghetto exits, did not allow any Jew out.” Similarly in Buczacz “the Jews themselves are to blame” for their annihilation, because “had the Judenrat not driven the Jews out and betrayed their hiding places, we would not have gotten our hands on them so easily.” He still could not understand why “the Jews went to the execution like sheep. . . . I shook my head over that at the time.”

  Albert Brettschneider in 1952. Source: GLA-K 309 Zug. 2001-42/871-6.

  This normalization of murder, the removal of the Jews as part of a day’s work, as entertainment, as background noise to drinking bouts or amorous relationships, along with puzzlement at the Jews’ conduct mixed with anger at them for making it so easy to kill them—these were part and parcel of the German experience of genocide, rarely reflected in postwar representations and ruminations, let alone historiography. Different people responded to this reality, which was largely of their own making, differently. Richard Heinrich, a Gestapo official charged with supply and logistics at the outpost, testified, “Whenever I wanted something delivered in Czortków, for instance boots, I had to go to the Judenreferent,” who “would then communicate with Thomanek” in order to have them made in the “Judenlager” (Jew camp).48 Jewish slave labor was taken for granted: “female Jewish tailors would commonly go to the homes of the Gestapo in Czortków,” where they worked for them “or for their wives.” Many of the German personnel used Jewish dentists; Heinrich himself “had a dental bridge made by a Jewish dentist in the Czortków Ghetto,” free of charge, of course.

  And when the time came, men like Heinrich played a similarly casual role in mass murder. In February 1943, he testified, “all members of the Gestapo outpost in Czortków, including the ethnic German guards,” altogether about thirty men, drove out to Buczacz at about 5:00 a.m. Heinrich positioned himself behind a desk, and all Jews seized in the city were escorted to him and had to “put their valuables on the table”; then the guards searched them “for hidden valuables, such as money sewn into their clothes.” Heinrich ran a tidy operation: “On the spot I immediately registered the valuables taken from the Jews on a list,” while a colleague “put the things in a cardboard box right away.” There were “watches, rings, U.S. dollars, English pounds, Złoty, and so forth. I listed and later brought to Lemberg valuables and money valued at 20,000 to 30,000 Reichsmarks.” Because the desk was merely “100–130 feet from the execution pit,” the Jews “had to undress” shortly after handing over their valuables. “I believe there was just one vast pit, which was empty at the beginning of the execution action.” He personally witnessed that “several hundred Jewish men, women, and children were shot.” Subsequently “the clothes of the Jews, who were shot naked in the action, were bundled up.” Heinrich, who had taken care to prepare sufficient amounts of vodka and cigarettes for the shooters, recalled that on the way back “the men did not speak about the action in Buczacz.” Perhaps they were tired, or drunk. The entire operation took some twelve hours.

  While the men from Czortków would sweep in, do their killing, and return to their base, it was the local uniformed police, usually referred to as gendarmes, who represented the daily face of German order in Buczacz. Established in August 1941, the gendarmerie post eventually numbered well over a dozen regular and reserve policemen.

  Undoubtedly the most notorious gendarme in Buczacz was Sergeant Peter Pahl. Born in 1904 near Hamburg, Pahl joined the police at age twenty and spent his entire working life in uniform.49 Married in 1930, he joined the Nazi Party in 1937, by which time he had fathered two girls. His superiors thought well of him. In August 1942 he was evaluated as a “skillful, industrious, absolutely reliable gendarme with above average intellectual capacities” and “exemplary leadership and service performance.” He was awarded the Iron Cross, II Class, in April 1944 for bravery in antipartisan warfare. Briefly imprisoned at the end of the war, Pahl was back with the police soon thereafter, remaining in service until his retirement in 1964. At his judicial investigation, launched two years later, he maintained, “I am of the opinion that in the course of my life I had given my utmost.” Since he suffered a stroke that left him partially paralyzed, most of Pahl’s investigation was conducted in the hospital. Finally indicted for murder in 1970, Pahl died the following year, putting an end to all further judicial proceedings.

  At his trial Pahl had fond memories of Buczacz and claimed to have been on good terms with everyone. He warmly recalled the Ukrainian Chorny family that often hosted him: “In the summertime I had my armchair there and often rested in the garden.” He “frequently ate there in the evenings” and “played cards with the Chornys and their Ukrainian doctor acquaintance.” On the weekends they would go together to the cinema, located next to the Ukrainian police station. Especially Mrs. Chorny, whose husband worked for the local German administration, “was a kindhearted friend to me, because she spoke extremely good German.” Pahl denied that she was also his mistress: “I did not have a lover in the proper sense.” It was a good life. At the tobacco factory in nearby Monasterzyska, where Pahl was often posted, “they gave us good liquor and vodka, as much as we wanted”; there were also cigars and “a little snack bar, where one could order garlic sausage and vodka and a kind of seltzer water. I went to this restaurant often in the evenings after work. The owner was Polish, his wife was Ukrainian.”

  Peter Pahl as policeman in Germany, likely in 1935. Source: GLA-K 309 Zug. 2001-42/871-21.

  Pahl was also, by his own account, a friend of the Jews, among whom he was “well known and respected.” Described by one witness as the bloodthirsty terror of Buczacz, Pahl responded that if that were the case, the Judenrat “would not have regularly come to see me,” along with “other Jews, who came to me whenever they were desperate.” For instance, on his birthday in April 1942 Baruch Kramer and another Judenrat member brought him a cake: “We celebrated my birthday together in my room.” Pahl also regularly visited Dr. Seifer’s home, where he was “a welcome guest.” The doctor’s wife “would always offer me Portuguese red wine and sardines in oil, that is, things that at the time could hardly be found.” No wonder he responded with righteous indignation when the former Buczacz Landkommissar (county administrator), Walter Hoffer, stated that Pahl “did not have a good name in Buczacz regarding the handling of the Jewish population,” and one of his own colleagues depicted him as a “Jew-hater.” “That is incorrect,” Pahl insisted. “I had very good acquaintances among the Jews.” Why would a local Jewish shoemaker have made him “a pair of long sheepskin boots . . . as a present” if the man did not consider him a friend? The very notion that “the Jews feared” him was preposterous. After all, he had actually informed the Judenrat chairman about an impending roundup, and “in gratitude for my warning” the man “brought me at midnight a black garment cloth.”

  Pahl did concede that during that roundup of April 1943 he and the other gendarmes escorted the victims up Fedor Hill; they stopped about three hundred feet from the execution site in order to secure the area from “curious onlookers.” This, he argued, proved that he “did not cooperate actively with the execution.” In fact when he saw “the Jewish woman Helene,” the gendarmerie station’s own housemaid, “being led to the execution,” he said, “I thought to myself, ‘How vile.’ ” But despite the pleas of the gendarmerie commander, Lieutenant Johann Horak, the SS would not release her. “Inwardly,” insisted Pahl, “I was very much against this. I believe that no member of the gendarmerie post would have gone along voluntarily.” But although “it was entirely clear to me at the time that everything happening there was unjust,” he reasoned, “had we declined to take part in an ex
ecution action ordered from above, the whole gendarmerie station would have been liquidated.”

  Despite such threats, Pahl declared, he tried to save Jewish lives. During the action of February 1943 he allegedly hid thirteen Jews in his room, and even served them soup prepared by the soon-to-be-murdered Helene. And although “the story leaked” and Squad Commander Willy Kießling “reproached me about it,” Pahl hid yet another group of eleven Jews in his room during the next execution action. As he saw it, he had behaved much better than the Jewish policemen, who guarded the ghetto armed with wooden clubs, “beat the Jews the most,” and “hauled the Jews out of their houses.” Pahl, for his part, never acted violently. “In my entire life I fired only three bullets,” he insisted, and then only to kill animals when food was running low. All allegations that he had participated in mass shootings were contradictions in terms, because “had the witnesses actually been there, they . . . would have been shot with the others.” Witness accusations were lies, he asserted, rooted in the ancient Jewish predilection to hurt gentiles: “The Jewish Bible contains the following literal verse: ‘You should not lie to and cheat any man; [but] if he is a goy, lie to him and cheat him, so that you might harm him.’ ”

  Jewish witnesses painted a starkly different picture. Wizinger recalled Pahl storming into a synagogue, where he “brutally and sadistically beat up the Jews who were praying there, and cut off all their beards. At the end he tore up the Torah.” In winter 1942 Wizinger was one of “about fifty Jews, men and women,” who were rounded up in “a street-action” led by Pahl, incarcerated in the local prison, “severely tortured,” and “driven out to the prison yard naked,” where they were “ordered to do gymnastics while [they] were being beaten. As a result of this abuse two people subsequently died.” In February 1943, while escorting about thirty Jewish children to the killing site on Fedor Hill, Pahl encountered an elderly man on the street and ordered him to join the group. Wizinger watched as the man begged the gendarme to spare his life. “Pahl asked him: ‘How old are you?’ ‘Fifty-years-old,’ the Jew answered. Pahl laughed and said: ‘Man, fifty years old and you want to go on living. Your life is already over.’ Pahl then drew his pistol and shot the Jew in the back of the head.” In June Wizinger was helping another older man on the street when the sergeant showed up: “Pahl asked me whether this was my father and when I said that he was not, he began joking with the Jew and suddenly drew his pistol and shot him in front of my eyes.”50

  German gendarmes with women and a child in front of the Buczacz gendarmerie building, date unknown. Source: GLA-K 309 Zug. 2001-42/878-44.

  Rosalia Bauer was working in a pharmacy in February 1943 when she witnessed a woman she knew being escorted to the prison with her child on her shoulders: “Pahl came up from behind with a drawn weapon. . . . Suddenly I heard a shot and . . . saw how the girl . . . fell down covered in blood in front of the doors of the pharmacy.” That same day she saw another group of Jews escorted to the prison; one man was carrying a five-year-old child in his arms. “Suddenly I saw . . . Pahl firing his weapon at the child, who . . . fell down and showed no signs of life.” Many non-Jews too were appalled by Pahl’s conduct. Adam Steiger, director of the district court in Buczacz, testified, “Practically everyone feared” Pahl, who “was known as the meanest and most brutal of the gendarmes taking part in the actions against the Jews.” From the courthouse, located on the second floor of the Ukrainian police station, Steiger observed that Pahl “shot a Jew in the prison yard” as hundreds of Jews were escorted to the execution site on Fedor Hill in February 1943. That summer he watched a mass execution at the Jewish cemetery hill across town. From that distance he “could not quite identify the people, but the silhouettes were visible and one could hear the echo of the shots . . . all afternoon.” He subsequently heard that Pahl had “shot Jews with his pistol from different distances as shooting practice.”51

  Pahl was not the only gendarme who denied ever personally killing anyone. Bruno Grocholl, who was forty-three and the father of five children when he arrived in Buczacz, subsequently insisted that he had merely performed “general gendarmerie service.” The only policeman who had anything to do with the Jews, he said, was the deputy post commander, Sergeant Georg Barg, nicknamed “Judenonkel” (Jew uncle) because “he was literally in charge of the Jews of Buczacz.” Whenever Jews were required for work, “Barg would contact the Buczacz Judenrat,” which would then “assemble the requested number of Jewish workers with the help of the Jewish Ordnungspolizei.” Grocholl could “not believe that Barg would have beaten the Jews” and thought that generally they had little to fear from the local German policemen, since “at the time a truly comradely relationship had been established between the gendarmerie post and the Judenrat in Buczacz.”52

  But Wilhelm Eger, a thirty-eight-year-old reservist and father of two, suggested at Grocholl’s investigation that his testimony was a pack of lies: “That swine Barg drank the whole time. He was a gross person. He would force the Jews coming to work to do military gymnastics and then make them stand at attention. He pounced on the Jews and did not desist from boxing their ears,” for which purpose he would also “bring along his dog whip.” When Barg “wanted something” from the Judenrat they “had to bring it to him” at his lodgings. Eger also entirely rejected the idea that Pahl could have hidden any Jews in his room, because “it was very dangerous” to do so. To be sure, Dr. Seifer, whom he considered “a fine Jew,” did “often come to the police station” and would “occasionally ask us what did the Jews have to do with our war.” In fact, Eger admitted, Seifer “got to me, because he said at the time that there would always remain some witnesses of our actions against the Jews.” Perhaps that was why Eger helped Seifer escape one of the roundups, if we are to believe his testimony.53

  Bruno Grocholl (center) and Wilhelm Eger (right). Source: GLA-K 309 Zug. 2001-42/878-121.

  Eger clearly correlated the occupiers’ material comfort and their sheer lawlessness with impunity, stating that “whenever a new German came to Buczacz, he would be provided with Jewish furniture.” Still, he too sought to distance the local police from direct participation in murder. The gendarmes merely had to “report to the Gestapo how many Jews were incarcerated in the prison,” and “once a certain number was reached, the Gestapo issued instructions to the gendarmerie station by telephone that the Jewish prison inmates should be ‘resettled’ by the Ukrainian police.” Hence, unlike mass executions, in which Jews were shot “by members of the Gestapo outpost in Czortków . . . when there were only a few Jews” in the prison they were killed “by the Ukrainian policemen.” In both instances, he claimed, the local police merely had to “escort the Jews” to the “execution site.” When asked specifically whether the gendarmes joined the Ukrainian police in small-scale executions, Eger responded that in summer 1943 “the Ukrainians had seized several Jews” and “agreed with the German gendarmerie station to execute” them on their own since “it was not worth the effort to bring the Gestapo from Czortków for the execution.” The Germans and Ukrainians then jointly escorted the “ten to twelve Jewish men, women, and children” to the killing site. Eger knew this because he was one of the two German gendarmes at the site. But he maintained that he and his colleague played only “a supervisory role.” Hence he could claim that although as German policemen they were in charge, they did not personally kill anyone.

  After some initial denials, Eger admitted that the gendarmes participated in a series of roundups in Buczacz. He conceded that in one case, while searching “through Jewish houses together with a member of the Gestapo,” they “found a wash basket, in which three small children were sitting. The Gestapo man ordered me to shoot the children. I said that I would not do that. He responded that he too could not do it. He then handed the children over to Jews who were just then being escorted on the street to the prison.” Eger knew that those “delivered to the prison were shot shortly thereafter, if they had not already died from hunger or maltrea
tment by the Ukrainian police.” He had in fact been to the prison during the roundup of February 1943: “What I saw there was simply unbelievable. In a single room of at most 300–400 square feet some 150 Jews were literally pressed together . . . small children and women and men.” He finally admitted that he and his fellow gendarmes escorted these Jews to the execution site and observed as they undressed and were taken in groups of three or four to the pit, where they were killed with short bursts of submachine-gun fire by the Gestapo waiting there. “It went very quickly,” Eger commented, “and one could observe that the Gestapo had experience in such matters.”

  In fact Eger had taken part in no fewer than three mass executions. One occurred near the town of Kopyczyńce (Ukrainian: Kopychyntsi), twenty-five miles east of Buczacz, likely in June 1943. While Eger claimed to have “held myself very much back,” he also stated that “various gendarmes of the Czortków platoon went out of their way and were committed 150 percent” to the killing. He saw hundreds of Jewish “babies, toddlers, children and men and women. The process was very brutal and already while the Jews were being rounded up both the Sipo men and the gendarmes shot Jews.” The victims were “escorted out of the town to the edge of the forest,” where “many pits” had been dug; “gradually the first pit filled up with the corpses of the executed babies, children, and adults. For me,” Eger commented, “the scene was so appalling that I still think about it today. The heads of the little children were in some cases completely blown off by the submachine gun salvos. Everywhere one could see spattered brains.” The killing ended around noon. “We were served lunch,” but Eger “could not swallow anything.” Yet he saw no reason to feel guilty. “I cannot blame myself for anything,” he insisted. “I took part in the action on explicit orders and within the framework of the gendarmerie platoon of Czortków, and during the action I neither mishandled nor killed Jewish people. I also took no initiative. On the contrary, I initially held myself back.”