by Omer Bartov
That same month Eger participated in a mass killing at the Jewish cemetery in Buczacz. Again “the German gendarmerie in Buczacz, along with the Ukrainian militia, escorted the Jews from the prison to the execution site,” where “three or four members of the Gestapo” were already waiting. The gendarmes “guarded the perimeter on the top” of the hill, and “the execution pit was . . . about half way down the slope.” But “whoever wanted . . . could easily go there. Several of us also did so. I personally,” admitted Eger, “was only one time next to the pit.” From up close he could observe how “the naked Jews had to lie on their stomachs in a row, and were then shot.” The next batch “had to lie on top of the Jews who had been shot, and were shot in turn, and so on. Women and men had to lie on top of each other in the pit. Children had to jump into the pit.” Eger identified Thomanek and Brettschneider among the shooters. The latter, “right after he fired, made the sign of the cross with his hand over the execution pit and said: ‘May the Lord bless you!’ ”
A few days later Eger encountered Brettschneider on a Sunday stroll in Czortków “with his wife and two children.” He recalled thinking, “Here he is still playing the family man and just a short time ago he shot innocent children and all manner of people.” But as for himself, Eger was convinced that he had behaved as humanely as the circumstances warranted. He remembered that as he was walking up the hill, “a Jewish woman with a little girl ran behind me.” When they reached the top, “she said to me: ‘Can you please shoot my daughter, I think the Ukrainians shoot badly.’ I said that I could not do this. The woman and the child ran further to the execution site and were shot.” On another occasion, he was walking behind “a long row of Jews” being escorted to an execution, when he noticed “an old Jew who could not walk well. I helped him a bit, whereupon he said to me that I was a good man.” In this inverted moral universe, even helping old men reach their own execution or herding little girls to their death rather than shooting them oneself could be recalled as acts of mercy.
Albert Brettschneider (on the left) and his wife. Source: GLA-K 309 Zug. 2001-42/871-8.
Despite such gruesome events, or perhaps because of them, some of these men found solace in romance, or at least in a sexual liaison. Eger recalled that his colleague, the reserve gendarme Heinrich Knaack, had struck up a relationship with a Polish nurse named Iwana Kardasz, and even tried to take her with him when the Germans left Buczacz. The recently divorced thirty-eight-year-old father of a small child and veteran SA (Sturmabteilung) and Nazi Party member arrived in Buczacz after the deportations had already begun. In his own testimony he never mentioned Kardasz, but she remembered that on the retreat from Buczacz in 1944 he had warned her to run away because Pahl wanted to kill her. She had reason to believe this was no idle threat, since she recalled Knaack telling her that “during one action a beautiful blond Jewish pharmacist was caught with a child on her arm. Pahl told her to throw the child to the ground to save her life. The woman threw the child to the ground and Pahl immediately shot her. I think he also shot the child.”54
Knaack did admit to taking part in three or four actions, noting that “the sequence of events was almost always the same.” About twenty men “would come to Buczacz from Czortków in the early morning hours and organize these actions”; the gendarmes were “divided into teams,” whose task was “to help the SD [Sicherheitsdienst, the SS Security Service] round up a certain number of Jews in the so-called Jewish quarter,” which “was raided indiscriminately; all Jews who could be seized at that moment were rounded up,” and then “mostly escorted right away to a designated site and shot there.” Knaack made no attempt to conceal the horror of these events: “I saw and heard frightful things during these actions and can hardly reproduce them. Even children were not spared. They were shot along with the others.” He described the killings at the Jewish cemetery in summer 1943 in terms very similar to Eger’s. “I was standing about one hundred feet from the pit,” he said, watching how “children and parents climbed down into the pit. The women carried their little children in their arms or hugged them and in this manner went to their death.”
Staff of the Buczacz hospital, date unknown. Iwana Kardasz (née Ptasznyk) is sitting on the right in the front row. The man in the dark coat to her right is hospital secretary Ptasznyk (relation to her unknown); the woman to his right is possibly Sofia Kriegel. Other identified figures, on second row from the left: Dr. Voronka’s widow; surgeon Dr. Witold Ratajski; hospital director Dr. Hamerskyi; internist Dr. Szczipaniak; Jewish pharmacist, perhaps Gisela Kleiner. Dr. Ratajski testified that in 1940–44 he “functioned as director and later as chief physician of the district hospital” in Buczacz, had seen many shootings on the city streets, and helped Jews who came to him with bullet wounds. Source: GLA-K 309 Zug. 2001-42/878-99; BArch B162/20037, November 12, 1970, pp. 958–60.
Like everyone else, Knaack insisted that “there was no option” to avoid participating in these murder operations. “The order was unequivocal: ‘You go here and there and do this and that!’ As far as I could tell, almost all available members of the Buczacz gendarmerie post participated in these actions.” He also expressed a somewhat peculiar veneration for the victims he helped lead to their death: “I admired the Jews, how calmly most of them climbed down into the pit. Some of them prayed, others sang. There were naturally also scenes that cannot be described. Before their turn came, the Jews had to wait for their end in close proximity to the pit. They could therefore see almost everything that occurred in front of and inside the pit.” Clearly, like other colleagues, Knaack had availed himself of the opportunity to stand “close to the pit,” where he could “see all the details of this tragic event.” Yet he refused to denounce his colleagues and was careful not to incriminate himself: “In this action too I did not see members of the gendarmerie post of Buczacz killing Jewish people. The implementation of the execution was once more exclusively by the hands of the SD.” And while there is no account of this by surviving Jews, he too claimed to have saved some of the condemned, twice escorting “a group of Jews” in the fall of 1943 to “the outskirts of Buczacz” so as “to facilitate their escape.” Whether or not Knaack was telling the truth, he certainly belonged to the majority of security personnel who appear to have never suffered from a guilty conscience, however traumatized they may have been by what they had witnessed.
Members of the Buczacz gendarmerie station. Source: GLA-K 309 Zug. 2001-42/878-155.
German civilian administrators in Buczacz, while not directly involved in the killings, made up an important component of the occupation apparatus; they and their family members also constituted an intermediate link between the pretense of normality and the atrocity of mass murder. They often could, and did, live in denial of their complicity during and long after the event, and they were rarely mentioned either by the perpetrators or by the victims. But their perspective sheds light on how life was experienced and remembered by German civilians in a town that had become a site of genocide.
The first Landkommissar of Buczacz, Richard Lissberg, had all the makings of an ideal Nazi. Born in Essen in 1912, he joined the Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei (NSDAP, National Socialist German Workers’ Party) in 1930, was a member of the SA, and attended elite Nazi Party training schools. In 1940 he was posted as Landkommissar to the district of Warsaw but was demoted to a minor position within the office of the commissar for Jewish affairs overseeing the Warsaw Ghetto in July 1941. A few weeks later Lissberg was appointed Landkommissar of Buczacz, charged with reviving the economic life of the city and county. But in spring 1942 he was dismissed once more and enlisted in the Wehrmacht. By the time the West German police finally questioned him in 1965, Lissberg had long been a respectable businessman in his hometown.55
Lissberg initially denied any participation in or knowledge of crimes committed in Buczacz. By the time he arrived, he claimed, “conditions there had already essentially normalized.” The Jews “still lived in their hous
es,” and while “they were already marked with the Jewish star” and “a Judenrat had been established,” absolutely “no coercive measures against the Jews had yet been undertaken by anyone.” He knew nothing “about the great Jewish execution-action” of August 1941, could remember almost no names of German officials in the region, and was entirely oblivious of the Sipo outpost in Czortków. He did recall a few brief meetings with the Tarnopol Sipo chief Major Müller but knew “nothing about the actions that Müller undertook against the Jews.”
Richard Lissberg (in light-colored overcoat) with a hunting party near Brzeżany, likely in winter 1941–42. Source: GLA-K 309 Zug. 2001-42/878-225.
Under further pressure Lissberg conceded that the Jews of Buczacz had in fact been moved to “a specific part of the city” known as “the Jewish quarter,” but he claimed that this had happened before his arrival and that he had “absolutely no knowledge of who conducted this transfer.” He also had no influence on the recruitment of Jewish workers, which, he maintained, was strictly the business of the labor office. He did now recall that a construction firm owned by Klaus Ackermann had been contracted to rebuild the railroad bridge and tunnel and that the owner’s brother, Josef, was his third-floor neighbor and hunting partner. What Lissberg conveniently left out was that he had accidentally shot and killed Josef Ackermann during a hunting trip, which may well have contributed to his dismissal. No wonder he denied having “any photographs or notes that would be of interest for this investigation.”
By the time he was questioned again three years later, Lissberg’s memory had greatly improved, no doubt thanks to the additional evidence amassed by investigators, including the former Landkommissar’s photo album. It now turned out that Major Müller had been Lissberg’s classmate and neighbor in Essen, which explained their extensive socializing in Buczacz and Tarnopol. Lissberg now also vividly recalled “most members of the gendarmerie station in Buczacz,” not least Pahl, whom he described as “a calm and businesslike man.” The two of them, he said, “occasionally played skat” in the local “Ukrainian casino,” and Pahl also often came to the Landkommissariat, where he again always “appeared very calm.” The reason for this ongoing interaction was that the local police were in fact at Lissberg’s disposal, as he now admitted, “to maintain order or secure the German service posts in Buczacz,” although “generally” they reported to the Gestapo. Far from having no contacts with Jews, it transpired that Lissberg’s own secretary was twenty-eight-year-old Julia Rabinowicz, and that he had been heavily engaged in the so-called fur collection, the mass confiscation of winter clothes from the Jews; now he even remembered that “in early 1942 the furs of the Jews collected for the Wehrmacht were stored in the building of the Landkommissariat,” that is, in his own offices.
Lissberg’s wife, Henriette, was far less parsimonious in providing information on his activities and on social life in Buczacz more generally. Although they divorced shortly after the war, as late as 1969 she staunchly defended her former husband as “Judenfreundlich” (friendly to Jews), insisting that this was why he lost his job in Warsaw. But her statements also unintentionally contradicted many of her husband’s assertions. In stating that by the time she and their three little boys joined her husband in Buczacz in September 1941 he had already been there for a couple of months, Henriette gave reason for the court to believe that Lissberg had after all witnessed if not directly participated in the “registration action.” She also clearly recalled that their third-floor neighbor Ackermann “was shot by my husband and died in the district hospital in Buczacz,” just weeks before Lissberg’s dismissal, which would appear to link the two events. Yet Henriette was adamant that “the Kreishauptmann [district chief] of Czortków sacked my husband” as Buczacz Landkommissar “because of his attitude toward the Jews.”
Indeed according to Henriette, her husband was intensely involved with Jews. It was through him that she “got to know the Judenrat member Kramer” and the chairman Reich, since the two of them “occasionally came to my apartment to negotiate with my husband.” She testified, “When it was necessary to shovel the snow in the Landkommissariat, my husband would call the Judenrat, which then sent Jews to clear the snow.” Lissberg also stepped in when he perceived any signs of injustice among the Jews. On one occasion, after he had ordered the Jews to repave one of the streets in Buczacz, reported Henriette, he “found out that only the poor Jews . . . were working while the gentlemen of the Judenrat and their sons looked on.” Lissberg was “so incensed” that he ordered the men of the Judenrat to immediately join the other workers. He obviously did not lack compassion; when “a young Jew was injured at work,” Lissberg “personally brought him to Dr. Hamerskyi for treatment at the district hospital.” But like most German administrators and civilians, he saw Jews as a cost-free and entirely dispensable labor force.
On Lissberg’s efforts at urban improvement, the Ukrainian teacher Petrykevych had his own perspective, writing in April 1942, “Along the riverbank several multistoried houses have been destroyed”; these were all “Jewish houses,” save for “one that belonged to the Ukrainian bank,” which would “be given another house that had formerly belonged to the Jews.” Finding that “the city now looks much better,” Petrykevych displayed no concern about the fate of the inhabitants of those destroyed “Jewish houses.” Indeed he recalled that at the beginning of German rule the Landkommissar had not allowed the Ukrainian district administration, of which Petrykevych was a member, “to issue a proclamation to the population that would have underscored the liberation of the people from Jewish exploitation”; now it appeared that Lissberg was finally moving in the right direction. But that was clearly not enough, and people in the city were complaining “that the Jews had again bribed some influential person, and that is why there is no ghetto here, and the Jews are free to go as they please.”56
Henriette adopted the same attitude as her husband. Jewish women came to clean the apartments in her building two or three times a week: “We paid them with groceries. I still remember one Jewish woman named Klara and her sister Emma, who occasionally came to clean for me.” At times “up to ten Jewish women would report to us for housecleaning” in the morning “and wait to be assigned a job. The Jewish women liked coming to us because they could be sure that on that day they would be given food.” To the German civilians it soon appeared not only self-evident that they should be served by eager, half-starved, and terrified Jewish women, but that by exploiting their labor the Germans were actually helping them out. This also meant that German civilians got to know many of the Jews before they were murdered. In early 1942, for instance, the Lissbergs hosted the governor of Galicia, Otto Wächter, for dinner. Henriette remembered that when he “saw a woodcut horse in our son Udo’s room,” he asked the boy “who had made him such a beautiful horse.” The boy whispered in the governor’s ear that it was carved “by our Jew Reinstein, who was a cabinetmaker.” Reinstein was shot shortly thereafter.57
Jewish houses along the Strypa River that were later torn down on Landkommissar Richard Lissberg’s orders because they were “full of rats and vermin.” Source: GLA-K 309 Zug. 2001-42/878-213.
Following Lissberg’s recruitment to the Wehrmacht, Henriette moved to a villa near the Ukrainian police station, on the road leading to Fedor Hill. Klara and Emma also came “to clean [her] new house,” which was renovated for her by “several Jews and Poles,” as well as some Ukrainians. It was not a bad life; when “the Jew Friedländer replaced the Pole Stein as my houseboy,” she said, he also “brought our horses, which my husband had purchased in the market in Buczacz, to the stable of the new house.” Friedländer worked for her at least until the city was declared Judenfrei (free of Jews) in June 1943. “I do not know,” she remarked, “how Friedländer survived the persecution of the Jews.” But she did “warn Friedländer” of imminent danger because “it was always known in advance that a roundup was about to take place”; on such days “Friedländer did not have to come to me,�
�� and he “clearly also warned other Jews of the threat of a roundup. After the roundup was over the Jews would thank me and also bring me presents, such as once, for instance, a cake.” In October 1943, while she was visiting her husband in Lemberg, someone broke into the villa and stole “various coats and so forth.” For safety, Henriette and her children moved to an apartment located over the post office in the center of town. “My maid told me at the time that the break-in was by a Jew,” obviously one of the few survivors still hiding in the area and in need of warm clothing. Henriette remained in the new apartment until March 1944, when Lissberg returned to evacuate his family just before the Red Army marched in.