Bloodlands

by Timothy Snyder

  Yet this psychic nazification would have been much more difficult without the palpable evidence of Soviet atrocities. The pogroms took place where the Soviets had recently arrived and where Soviet power was recently installed, where for the previous months Soviet organs of coercion had organized arrests, executions, and deportations. They were a joint production, a Nazi edition of a Soviet text.21

  The encounter with Soviet violence east of the Molotov-Ribbentrop line served the SS, and its leaders. Himmler and Heydrich had always maintained that life was a clash of ideologies, and that traditional European understandings of the rule of law had to give way to the ruthless violence needed to destroy the racial and ideological enemy in the East. The traditional enforcers of German law, the police, had to become “ideological soldiers.” Thus before the war Himmler and Heydrich had purged the ranks of the police of men deemed unreliable, encouraged policemen to join the SS, and placed the SS and the Security Police (Order Police plus Gestapo) under a single structure of command. Their goal was to create a unified force dedicated to preemptive racial warfare. By the time of the invasion of the Soviet Union, about a third of German policemen with officer rank belonged to the SS, and about two thirds belonged to the National Socialist party.22

  The German surprise attack had caught the NKVD off guard, and made the East appear to be a domain of lawlessness primed for a new German order. The NKVD, usually discreet, had been revealed as the murderer of prisoners. Germans broke through the levels of mystification, secrecy, and dissimulation that had covered the (far greater) Soviet crimes of 1937-1938 and 1930-1933. The Germans (along with their allies) were the only power ever to penetrate the territory of the Soviet Union in this way, and so the only people in a position to present such direct evidence of Stalinist murder. Because it was the Germans who discovered these crimes, the prison murders were politics before they were history. Fact used as propaganda is all but impossible to disentangle from the politics of its original transmission.

  Because of the visible record of Soviet violence, German forces of order could present themselves as undoing Soviet crimes even as they engaged in crimes of their own. In light of their indoctrination, what Germans found in the doubly occupied lands made a certain kind of sense to them. It seemed to be a confirmation of what they had been trained and prepared to see: Soviet criminality, supposedly steered by and for the benefit of Jews. Soviet atrocities would help German SS-men, policemen, and soldiers justify to themselves the policies to which they were soon summoned: the murder of Jewish women and children. Yet the prison shootings, significant as they were to the local people who suffered Soviet criminality, were for Nazi leaders rather catalyst than cause.

  In July 1941, Himmler was eager to show his master Hitler that he was attuned to the darker side of National Socialism, and ready to pursue policies of absolute ruthlessness. His SS and police were in competition for authority in the new eastern colonies with military and civilian occupation authorities. He was also in a personal contest for Hitler’s favor with Göring, whose plans for economic expansion lost credibility as the war preceded. Himmler would demonstrate that shooting was easier than starvation, deportation, and slavery. As Reich Commissar for the Strengthening of Germandom, Himmler’s authority as chief of racial affairs extended only to conquered Poland, not to the conquered Soviet Union. But as German forces moved into the prewar Soviet Union, Himmler behaved as if it did, using his power as head of the police and the SS to begin a policy of racial transformation that depended upon mortal violence.23

  In July 1941, Himmler traveled personally throughout the western Soviet Union to pass on the new line: Jewish women and children should be killed along with Jewish men. The forces on the ground reacted immediately. Einsatzgruppe C, which had followed Army Group South into Ukraine, had been slower than Einsatzgruppe A (the Baltic States) and Einsatzgruppe B (Vilnius and Belarus) to undertake mass shootings of Jews as such. But then, at Himmler’s instigation, Einsatzgruppe C killed some sixty thousand Jews in August and September. These were organized shootings, not pogroms. Indeed, Einsatzkommando 5 of Einsatzgruppe C complained on 21 July that a pogrom by local Ukrainians and German soldiers hindered them from shooting the Jews of Uman. In the next two days, however, Einsatzkommando 5 did shoot about 1,400 Uman Jews (sparing a few Jewish women who were to take gravestones from the Jewish cemetery and use them to build a road). Einsatzkommando 6 of Einsatzgruppe C seems not to have killed women and children until a personal inspection by Himmler.24

  The killing of women and children was a psychological barrier, one that Himmler made sure to break. Even as the Einsatzgruppen were generally killing only Jewish men, Himmler sent units of his Waffen-SS, the combat troops of the SS, to kill entire communities, including the women and children. On 17 July 1941, Hitler instructed Himmler to “pacify” the occupied territories. Two days later Himmler dispatched the SS Cavalry Brigade to the marshy Polesie region between Ukraine and Belarus, with the direct order to shoot Jewish men and to drive the Jewish women into the swamps. Himmler couched his instructions in the language of partisan warfare. But by 1 August the commander of the Cavalry Brigade was clarifying that: “not one male Jew is to be left alive, not one remnant family in the villages.” Quickly the Waffen-SS understood Himmler’s intentions, and helped to spread his message. By 13 August, 13,788 Jewish men, women, and children had been murdered. Himmler also sent the 1st Infantry SS Brigade to aid the Einsatzgruppen and police forces in Ukraine. Over the course of 1941, Waffen-SS formations killed more than fifty thousand Jews east of the Molotov-Ribbentrop line.25

  Himmler made sure that the Einsatzgruppen were sufficiently reinforced to kill all the Jews that they found. From August 1941 forward, twelve battalions of the Order Police would provide most of the German manpower for killing actions. The Order Police were supposed to be deployed throughout the conquered Soviet Union; since the military campaign went more slowly than expected, they were available in larger-than-expected numbers in the occupied rear areas. By August the manpower available for mass murder east of the Molotov-Ribbentrop line had reached about twenty thousand. By this time, Himmler seems to have authorized the practice, already widespread, of recruiting local policemen to assist in the shooting. Lithuanians, Latvians, and Estonians had taken part in the shooting almost from the beginning. By the end of 1941, tens of thousands of Ukrainians, Belarusians, Russians, and Tatars had also been recruited to local police forces. Ethnic Germans in the Soviet Union were most desired, and took a prominent part in the killings of Jews. With the Order Police and the local recruits, there was manpower enough for the extermination of the Jews of the occupied Soviet Union.26

  Himmler took the initiative, directed the murders, and organized the coercive bureaucracy. Enjoying the confidence of Hitler, Himmler was able to arrange the institutions of the police to his liking. He extended the institution of Higher SS and Police Leaders to the occupied Soviet Union. In Germany itself, the Higher SS and Police Leaders had proven to be little more than another layer of administration; in the East, they became what Himmler had always wanted them to be: his personal representatives, a crucial stage in a simplified hierarchy of coercive police power. A Higher SS and Police Leader was assigned to Army Groups North, Center, and South, while a fourth was held ready for an advance into the Caucasus. These men were theoretically subordinate to the civilian occupation authorities (Reichskommissariat Ostland in the north, Reichskommissariat Ukraine in the south) established in September 1941. In fact, the Higher SS and Police Leaders reported to Himmler. They understood that to kill Jews was to fulfill his desires. At Bletchley Park, where the British were decoding German communications, it became clear that the Higher SS and Police Leaders “stand somewhat in competition with each other as to their ‘scores.’”27

  In late August 1941, the coordination of the German forces was on display at the mass shooting of Jews in the southwest Ukrainian city of Kamianets-Podilskyi. Here the war itself had created a problem of Jewish refugees. />
  Hungary, a German ally, had been allowed to annex subcarpathian Ruthenia, the far eastern district of Czechoslovakia. Rather than grant the native Jews of this region Hungarian citizenship, Hungary expelled “stateless” Jews to the east, to German-occupied Ukraine. The influx of Jews into a German-controlled territory strained limited resources. Friedrich Jeckeln, the Higher SS and Police Leader for the area, took the initiative, likely so that he could report a success to Himmler at a meeting on 12 August. He flew in personally to make arrangements. The Germans chose a site outside Kamianets-Podilskyi, and forced Jewish refugees and some local Jews to march there. The Jews were shot in pits by Order Police Battalion 320 and Jeckeln’s personal staff company. Some 23,600 Jews were killed in the course of four days, from 26 to 29 August. Jeckeln reported the number by radio to Himmler. This was by far the largest massacre yet carried out by the Germans, and it set a pattern for those to follow.28

  The Wehrmacht aided and abetted such shooting operations, and sometimes requested them. By late August 1941, nine weeks into the war, the Wehrmacht had serious concerns about food supplies and the security of the rear. Murdering Jews would free up food and, according to Nazi logic, prevent partisan uprisings. After the mass shooting at Kamianets-Podilskyi, the Wehrmacht systematically cooperated with the Einsatzgruppen and the police forces in the destruction of Jewish communities. When a town or a city was taken, the police (if present) would round up some of the Jewish men and shoot them. The army would register the surviving population, noting the Jews. Then the Wehrmacht and the police would negotiate over how many of the remaining Jews could be killed, and how many should be left alive as a labor force in a ghetto. After this selection, the police would proceed to a second mass shooting, with the army often providing trucks, ammunition, and guards. If the police were not present, the army would register Jews and organize forced labor itself. The police would arrange the killings later. As central directives became clearer and these protocols of cooperation were established, death tolls among Jews in occupied Soviet Ukraine roughly doubled from July to August 1941, and then again from August to September.29

  In Kiev in September 1941, a further confrontation with the remnants of Soviet power provided the pretext for the next escalation: the first attempt to murder all of the native Jews present in a large city.

  On 19 September 1941 the Wehrmacht’s Army Group South took Kiev, several weeks behind schedule, and with the help of Army Group Center. On 24 September, a series of bombs and mines exploded, destroying the buildings in central Kiev where the Germans had established offices of their occupation regime. Some of these explosives were on timers set before Soviet forces withdrew from the city, but some seem to have been detonated by NKVD men who remained in Kiev. As the Germans pulled their dead and wounded from the rubble, the city suddenly seemed unsafe. As a local remembered, the Germans stopped smiling. They had to try to govern the metropolis with a very small number of people, dozens of whom had just been killed, even as they prepared a continued eastward march. The Germans had a clear ideological line to follow: if the NKVD was guilty, the Jews must be blamed. At a meeting on 26 September, military authorities agreed with representatives of the police and SS that the mass murder of Kiev Jews would be the appropriate reprisal for the bombing. Although most of the Jews of Kiev had fled before the Germans took the city, tens of thousands remained. They were all to be killed.30

  Disinformation was the key to the entire operation. A Wehrmacht propaganda crew printed broadsheet notices that ordered the Jews of Kiev to appear, on pain of death, at a street corner in a westerly neighborhood of the city. In what would become the standard lie of such mass shooting actions, the Jews were told that they were being resettled. They should thus bring along their documents, money, and valuables. On 29 September 1941 most of the remaining Jewish community of Kiev did indeed appear at the appointed location. Some Jews told themselves that since Yom Kippur, the highest Jewish holiday, was the following day, they could not possibly be hurt. Many arrived before dawn, in the hopes of getting good seats on the resettlement train—which did not exist. People packed for a long journey, old women wearing strings of onions around their necks for food. Having been assembled, the more than thirty thousand people walked, as instructed, along Melnyk Street in the direction of the Jewish cemetery. Observers from nearby apartments recalled an “endless row” that was “overflowing the entire street and the sidewalks.”31

  The Germans had erected a roadblock near the gates of the Jewish cemetery, where documents were verified and non-Jews told to return home. From this point forward the Jews were escorted by Germans with automatic weapons and dogs. At the checkpoint, if no earlier, many of the Jews must have wondered what their true fate would be. Dina Pronicheva, a woman of thirty, walked ahead of her family to a point where she could hear gunshots. Immediately all was clear to her; but she chose not to tell her parents so as not to worry them. Instead she walked along with her mother and father until she reached the tables where the Germans demanded valuables and clothes. A German had already taken her mother’s wedding ring when Pronicheva realized that her mother, no less than she, understood what was happening. Yet only when her mother whispered sharply to her—“you don’t look like a Jew”—did she try to escape. Such plain communication is rare in such situations, when the human mind labors to deny what is actually happening, and the human spirit strives toward imitation, subordination, and thus extinction. Pronicheva, who had a Russian husband and thus a Russian surname, told a German at a nearby table that she was not Jewish. He told her to wait at one side until the work of the day was complete.32

  Thus Dina Pronicheva saw what became of her parents, her sister, and the Jews of Kiev. Having surrendered their valuables and documents, people were forced to strip naked. Then they were driven by threats or by shots fired overhead, in groups of about ten, to the edge of a ravine known as Babi Yar. Many of them were beaten: Pronicheva remembered that people “were already bloody as they went to be shot.” They had to lie down on their stomachs on the corpses already beneath them, and wait for the shots to come from above and behind. Then would come the next group. Jews came and died for thirty-six hours. People were perhaps alike in dying and in death, but each of them was different until that final moment, each had different preoccupations and presentiments until all was clear and then all was black. Some people died thinking about others rather than themselves, such as the mother of the beautiful fifteen-year-old girl Sara, who begged to be killed at the same time as her daughter. Here there was, even at the end, a thought and a care: that if she saw her daughter shot she would not see her raped. One naked mother spent what she must have known were her last few seconds of life breastfeeding her baby. When the baby was thrown alive into the ravine, she jumped in after it, and in that way found her death. Only there in the ditch were these people reduced to nothing, or to their number, which was 33,761. Since the bodies were later exhumed and burned on pyres, and the bones that did not burn crushed and mixed with sand, the count is what remains.33

  At the end of the day, the Germans decided to kill Dina Pronicheva. Whether or not she was Jewish was moot; she had seen too much. In the darkness she was led to the edge of the ravine along with a few other people. She was not forced to undress. She survived in the only way possible in that situation: just as the shots began, she threw herself into the gorge, and then feigned death. She bore the weight of the German walking across her body, remaining motionless as the boots tread across her breast and her hand, “like a dead person.” She was able to keep open a small air hole as the dirt fell down around her. She heard a small child calling for its mother, and thought of her own children. She began to talk to herself: “Dina, get up, run away, run to your children.” Perhaps words made the difference, as they had earlier when her mother, now dead somewhere below, had whispered to her. She dug her way out, and crept away quietly.34

  Dina Pronicheva joined the perilous world of the few Jewish survivors in Kiev. The law required
that Jews be turned in to the authorities. The Germans offered material incentives: money, and sometimes the keys to the Jew’s apartment. The local population, in Kiev as elsewhere in the Soviet Union, was of course accustomed to denouncing “enemies of the people.” Not so very long before, in 1937 and 1938, the main local enemy, denounced at that time to the NKVD, had been “Polish spies.” Now, as the Gestapo settled in to the former offices of the NKVD, the enemy was the Jew. Those who came to report Jews to the German police passed by a guard wearing a swastika armband—standing before friezes of the hammer and sickle. The office dealing with Jewish affairs was rather small, since the investigation of Jewish “crimes” was simple: a Soviet document with Jewish nationality recorded (or a penis without a foreskin) meant death. Iza Belozovskaia, a Kiev Jew in hiding, had a young son called Igor who was confused by all of this. He asked his mother: “What is a Jew?” In practice the answer was given by German policemen reading Soviet identity documents or by German doctors subjecting boys such as Igor to a “medical examination.”35

  Iza Belozovskaia felt death everywhere. “I felt a strong desire,” she remembered, “to sprinkle my head, my whole self, with ashes, to hear nothing, to be changed into dust.” But she kept going, and she lived. Those who gave up hope sometimes survived thanks to the devotion of their non-Jewish spouses or their families. The midwife Sofia Eizenshtayn, for example, was hidden by her husband in a pit he dug at the back of a courtyard. He led her there dressed as a beggar, and visited her every day as he walked their dog. He talked to her, pretending to talk to the dog. She pleaded with him to poison her. Instead he kept bringing her food and water. Those Jews who were caught by the police were killed. They were placed in cells of the Kiev prison that had held victims of the Great Terror three years before. When the prison was full, the Jews and other prisoners were driven away at dawn in a covered truck. Residents of Kiev learned to fear this truck, as they had feared the NKVD black ravens leaving these same gates. It took the Jews and other prisoners to Babi Yar, where they were forced to disrobe, kneel at the edge of the ravine, and wait for the shot.36