In January 1939, Hitler had made a speech threatening the Jews with extinction if they succeeded in fomenting another world war. Since summer 1941, German propaganda had played unceasingly on the theme of a tentacular Jewish plot, uniting the British, the Soviets, and ever more the Americans. On 12 December 1941, a week after the Soviet counterattack at Moscow, four days after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, and one day after the United States reciprocated the German declaration of war, Hitler returned to that speech. He referred to it as a prophecy that would have to be fulfilled. “The world war is here,” he told some fifty trusted comrades on 12 December 1941; “the annihilation of Jewry must be the necessary consequence.” From that point forward his most important subordinates understood their task: to kill all Jews wherever possible. Hans Frank, the head of the General Government, conveyed the policy in Warsaw a few days later: “Gentlemen, I must ask you to rid yourselves of all feeling of pity. We must annihilate the Jews wherever we find them, in order to maintain the structure of the Reich as a whole.”54
Jews were now blamed for the looming disaster that could not be named. Nazis would have instantly grasped the connection between the Jewish enemy and the prospect of downfall. They all believed, if they accepted Hitler’s view, that Germany had not been defeated on the battlefield in the last world war, but instead brought down by a “stab in the back,” a conspiracy of Jews and other internal enemies. Now Jews would also take the blame for the American-British-Soviet alliance. Such a “common front” of capitalism and communism, went Hitler’s reasoning, could only have been consecrated by the Jewish cabals in London, Moscow, and Washington. Jews were the aggressors, Germans the victims. If disaster were to be averted, Jews would have to be eliminated. Hitler’s propaganda chief Joseph Goebbels recorded the moral reversal in his diary: “We are not here to have sympathy with the Jews, but only to have sympathy with our German nation.”55
As the war turned Stalin’s way, Hitler recast its purpose. The plan had been to destroy the Soviet Union and then eliminate the Jews. Now, as the destruction of the Soviet Union was indefinitely delayed, the utter extermination of the Jews became a wartime policy. The menace henceforth was less the Slavic masses and their supposed Jewish overlords, and more the Jews as such. In 1942, propaganda against Slavs would ease, as more of them came to work in the Reich. Hitler’s decision to kill Jews (rather than exploit their labor) was presumably facilitated by his simultaneous decision to exploit the labor of Slavs (rather than kill them). These moves signified an abandonment of most of the initial assumptions about the course of the war, although of course Hitler would never have admitted that. But the mass killing of the Jews at least looked consistent with the initial vision of a frontier empire in the East.56
In fact, the decision to kill the Jews contradicted that vision, since it was an implicit acceptance that the Germans would never control the vast territories that they would have needed for a Final Solution by deportation. In logistical terms, mass murder is simpler than mass deportation. At this point, killing was Hitler’s only option if he wished to fulfill his own prophecy. His was a land empire rather than a sea empire, but he controlled no wastelands into which Jews could disappear. Insofar as there had been progress in the Final Solution, it was in Himmler’s demonstration of the method that did not require deportation: murder. The killing was less a sign of than a substitute for triumph. From late July 1941 Jews had been murdered as the envisaged lightning victory failed to materialize. From December 1941, Jews as such were to be killed as the alliance against Germany grew in strength. Hitler sought and found still deeper emotions and gave voice to more vicious goals, and a German leadership aware of its predicament accepted them.57
By defining the conflict as a “world war,” Hitler drew attention away from the lack of a lightning victory and the unwelcome lessons of history that followed from this military failure. In December 1941, German soldiers were staring straight at the fate of Napoleon, whose Grande Armée had reached the outskirts of Moscow faster in 1812 than had the Wehrmacht in 1941. Yet in the end Napoleon had retreated from winter and Russian reinforcements. As German troops held their positions, they would inevitably confront a repetition of the kinds of battles that had been fought in 1914-1918: long days of sinking into trenches to escape machine guns and artillery, and long years of slow, meaningless movement and countless casualties. The kind of warfare that had supposedly been made obsolete by Hitler’s genius was upon them. The German general staff had anticipated losses of about half a million and victory by September; losses were approaching a million as victory receded in December.58
All of the failed offensives and missed deadlines and depressing prospects would be less shameful if what the Wehrmacht was fighting was not an ill-planned colonial war of aggression but a glorious if tragic world war in defense of civilization. If German soldiers were fighting the powers of the whole world, organized by the Jewish cabals of Moscow and London and Washington, then their cause was great and just. If they had to fight a defensive war, as was indeed now in practice the case, then someone else could be handed the role of the aggressor. The Jews filled that place in the story, at least for Nazi believers and many German civilians waiting for fathers and husbands to return. German soldiers, whether or not they believed in Jewish responsibility for the war, likely needed ideological revisions less than the politicians and the civilians. They were desperate but they were still deadly; and they would fight well, and they would fight on, long enough, at least, for Hitler to fulfill his prophecy. The Wehrmacht was and would remain by far the most effective fighting force in the European theater, even though its chances for a traditional victory were now nil.
By the magic of racial thinking, killing the Jews itself was a German triumph, at a moment when any other victory receded beyond the horizon of the possible. The United States, Great Britain, and the Soviet Union were enemies of Germany, and the Jews were the enemy of Germany, and thus, went the spurious syllogism, they were under the influence of the Jews. If these were Jewish states, then Jews in Europe were their agents. Killing the Jews of Europe was thus an attack on Germany’s enemies, directly and indirectly, and was justified not only by moral but by military logic. Himmler noted Hitler’s desire that the Jews of Europe, as of December 1941, were to be destroyed “as partisans,” as agents of Germany’s foes behind the lines. By this time, the logic of killing Jews as “retribution” for partisan attacks had already been developed: in the Polesian swamps between Belarus and Ukraine, where Himmler had used it as the reason to kill Jewish men, women, and children beginning in July 1941; in Kiev, where the Germans had murdered more than thirty thousand Jews in retribution for the Soviet bombings in the city; and even further in Serbia, where the German armed forces had encountered serious resistance slightly earlier than in the Soviet Union.59
The Serbian example was, perhaps, especially pertinent. The German war in southeastern Europe had begun slightly earlier than the war in the Soviet Union, and had brought certain applicable lessons. Germany had invaded Yugoslavia and Greece in spring 1941, just before the beginning of Operation Barbarossa, mainly to rescue its bungling Italian ally from defeat in its own Balkan wars. Though Germany had quickly destroyed the Yugoslav army and created a Croatian puppet state, resistance in the Serbian occupation zone it shared with Italy was considerable. Some of it came from communists. The German commanding general in Serbia ordered that only Jews and Roma be killed as revenge for the deaths of Germans who fell in action against partisans—at a ratio of one hundred to one. In this way, almost all of the male Jews of Serbia had been shot by the time Himmler made his note about the destruction of Jews “as partisans.” The logic of Serbia was universalized. Jews as such would be killed as retribution for the US-UK-USSR alliance. Neither Jews nor the Allies could be expected to understand this. It made sense only within the Nazi worldview, which Hitler had just adapted for future use.60
The fifth and final version of the Final Solution was mass death. In Naz
i parlance, the word resettlement now shifted from description to euphemism. For years German leaders had imagined that they could “resolve” Europe’s Jewish “problem” by resettling Jews to one place or another. Jews would be worked to death wherever they landed, and perhaps sterilized so that they could not reproduce, but they would not all be killed as such. Thus resettlement was incomplete though not entirely inaccurate as a description of Jewish policy in 1940 and into 1941. Henceforth resettlement or resettlement to the East would mean mass murder. Perhaps the resettlement euphemism, by suggesting an essential continuity of policy, helped Nazis to overlook the fact that German policy not only changed but had to change because the war was not going as expected. It might thus have allowed the Germans to shield from themselves the reality that military disaster conditioned their Jewish policy.61
The Germans had already shown, by December 1941, that they could do something far worse than deport Jews to Poland, Madagascar, or the Soviet Union. They could kill the Jews under their control, and blame the victims for their fate. The reality of resettlement from which the Germans now distanced themselves can be brought closer by simple quotation of German usage: “Resettlement site: on the resettlement site eight trenches are situated. One squad of ten officers and men are to work at each trench and are to be relieved every two hours.”62
By the time Hitler conveyed his preferences in December 1941, Himmler’s SS and police forces (aided by the Wehrmacht and local policemen) had already killed about a million Jews in the occupied Soviet Union. Retrospect conveys a sense of inevitability, and the new German policy of killing all European Jews may appear to be nothing more than the fulfillment of a goal that was, in some sense, already a given. While it is true that Hitler took for granted that the Jews would have no place in his future Europe, and that Himmler’s escalating murder must have corresponded to Hitler’s wishes, Hitler’s decision to speak of the mass murder of all Jews must be seen as just that: a decision. Other responses to the same events, after all, were possible.63
Germany’s ally Romania showed the possibility of such reversals. Bucharest had also been pursuing national purification. As of December 1941, Romanian Jews had suffered more than German Jews. Romania had joined in the invasion of the Soviet Union—like Germany, under propaganda associating communism with Jews. By invading the Soviet Union along with the Germans, Romania recovered the Bessarabian and Bukovinan territory that the Soviet Union had annexed in 1940. Romania then added a new region called “Transnistria,” seized from the southern part of Soviet Ukraine. In this zone in 1941, Romanian policies toward Jews were every bit as brutal as their German equivalents. After taking Odessa, Romanian troops killed about twenty thousand local Jews in “reprisals” for an explosion that destroyed their headquarters in the city. In the Bohdanivka district the Romanians shot more than forty thousand Jews in a few days in late December 1941. The Romanians also created their own set of ghettos and labor camps in Transnistria, where tens of thousands of Jews from Bessarabia and Bukovina perished. All in all, Romania killed about three hundred thousand Jews.64
Yet Romania’s leadership reacted to the changing course of the war differently than did Hitler. Its policies toward Jews remained brutal, but were gradually softened rather than hardened. By summer 1942 Romania was no longer deporting Jews to Transnistria. When the Germans built death facilities, Romania declined to send its Jews to them. By the end of 1942, Romanian policy had diverged significantly from the German. Romania would attempt to switch sides later in the war, and at that time the survival of remaining Jews would come to seem an asset. The year 1942 was thus a crucial turning point, when German and Romanian policies turned in opposite directions. Germany would kill all Jews because the war was lost; Romania, late that year, would save some Jews for much the same reason. The Romanian dictator Ion Antonescu would leave open a crack in the door for negotiations with the Americans and the British; Hitler left the Germans no possibility to escape from their own guilt.65
Over the course of the year 1942, the Germans killed most of the remaining Jews who were under their occupation. West of the Molotov-Ribbentrop line, mass murder would be carried out at gassing facilities. East of the Molotov-Ribbentrop line, the Germans continued the mass shootings, and also used the gas vans that had been tested on the Soviet prisoners of war. In occupied Soviet Ukraine, the killing began again as soon as the earth had thawed enough for the digging of pits, and sometimes, where machines were available for digging, even sooner. In the eastern part of Soviet Ukraine, still under military occupation, the shooting simply continued without any pause from late 1941 through early 1942. In January, Einsatzgruppen, assisted by the Wehrmacht, killed smaller Jewish communities that had survived the first sweep, as well as groups of Jewish laborers. In spring 1942 the action shifted from the east to the west, from the military zone to the civilian occupation authority, the Reichskommissariat Ukraine. Here all of the actions were carried out by stationary police forces, battalions of German Order Police with the assistance of local militiamen. With the help of tens of thousands of local collaborators, the Germans had the necessary manpower.66
Killing became extermination last in the lands that the Germans took first. Though the Germans had overrun all of the former lands of eastern Poland in the first ten days of the war, in June 1941, many of the native Jews of Poland’s southeast, now the west of the Reichskommissariat Ukraine, had survived until 1942. German forces had already passed through by the time Himmler began to order the destruction of whole Jewish communities. By the time German policy had shifted, most German forces had already departed. In 1942 the Germans undertook a second round of mass shootings in the western districts of the Reichskommissariat Ukraine, this time organized by the civilian authorities and implemented by the police, with a great deal of help from local auxiliary policemen.67
These west Ukrainian districts were typical of the many towns and small cities, in the lands that had been eastern Poland, where Jews numbered about half of the population, sometimes a bit less, sometimes a bit more. Jews usually inhabited the center of the cities, in stone houses around town squares, rather than the wood shanties of the outskirts. These were settlements where Jews had lived for more than half a millennium, under varying governments and with varying levels of prosperity, but with a success demonstrated by the simplest measures of architecture and demography. The majority of this Jewish population, in interwar Poland, had remained religiously observant and rather separated from the outside world. The languages remained Yiddish and (for religious purposes) Hebrew, and rates of intermarriage with Christians were low. Eastern Poland had remained the heartland of an Ashkenazic Jewish civilization, speaking Yiddish and dominated by rival clans of charismatic Hasidim. This Jewish tradition had outlived the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth where it had originated, it had outlived the Russian Empire, and it had outlived the interwar Polish Republic.68
After the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact and the joint invasion of Poland, Soviet power and Soviet citizenship were extended to these Jews in 1939-1941, and thus they are usually counted as Soviet Jewish victims of the Nazis. These Jews did live for a time in the Soviet Union after Soviet borders were extended westward to include what had been eastern Poland, and they were subject to Soviet policies. Like the Poles and the Ukrainians and the Belarusians of these lands, they had been subject then to arrests, deportations, and shootings. Jews had lost their businesses and their religious schools. Yet this brief period of Soviet rule was hardly enough to make Soviet Jews of them. With the exception of the very youngest children, people in Rivne and similar settlements had been citizens of Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, or Romania for far longer than they were citizens of the Soviet Union. Of the 2.6 million or so Jews killed on the terrains of the Soviet Union, some 1.6 million had been under Soviet jurisdiction for less than two years. Their civilization had been seriously weakened by Soviet rule during 1939-1941; it would not survive the German Reich.69
Rivne, unusually for these cities, had a
lready seen a mass killing action in 1941. Although Kiev was the center of the German police state in Ukraine, Rivne was in 1941 the provisional capital of the Reichskommissariat Ukraine. The Reichskommissar, Erich Koch, was a man known for his brutality. Hitler’s advisors called Koch a “second Stalin,” and they meant it as a compliment. Koch had already in autumn 1941 ordered that most of the Jews of Rivne be killed. On 6 November 1941 the police had told all Jews without work permits to report for resettlement. Some seventeen thousand people were then transported to nearby woods, known as Sosenky. There they were shot over pits dug earlier by Soviet prisoners of war. The remaining ten thousand or so Jews were then forced to live in a ghetto in the worst part of the city.70
In early 1942, even after the majority of the Jews were dead, the Rivne Judenrat was trying to maintain for the survivors some means of subsistence. The German authorities, however, had decided that Jews were not to exist at all. In summer 1942 Koch, with an eye to food shortages, took the next step, asking his subordinates for a “100% solution” to the Jewish problem. On the night of 13 July 1942 Rivne’s Jews were herded by German police and Ukrainian auxiliaries from the ghetto. The Jews were forced to walk to the train station, where they were enclosed in train cars. After two days without food and water, they were transported to a quarry near woods outside the town of Kostopil. There they were shot by German Security Police and the auxiliary policemen.71
In Lutsk, the Jews constituted about half the population, perhaps ten thousand people. In December 1941 the Jews were forced into a ghetto, where the Germans appointed a Judenrat. Generally the Judenrat served to extract the wealth of the community in exchange for various stays of execution, some true, some false. The Germans also usually established a Jewish police force, which was used to create the ghettos, and then later to clear them. On 20 August 1942 in Lutsk the local Jewish police set out to find Jews who might be in hiding. The same day Jewish men were sent to woods near Hirka Polonka, seven kilometers from Lutsk, to dig pits. The Germans guarding them made no effort to disguise what was about to happen. They told the men to dig well, as their wives and mothers would be resting in the pits the next day. On 21 August the women and children of Lutsk were taken to Hirka Polonka. The Germans ate and drank and laughed, and forced the women to recite: “Because I am a Jew I have no right to live.” Then the women were forced, five at a time, to undress and kneel naked over the pits. The next group then had to lie naked over the first layer of corpses, and were shot. That same day the Jewish men were taken to the courtyard of the Lutsk castle, and killed there.72
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