Bloodlands

by Timothy Snyder

  In the second half of 1942, German anti-partisan operations were all but indistinguishable from the mass murder of Jews. Hitler ordered on 18 August 1942 that partisans in Belarus be “exterminated” by the end of the year. It was already understood that the Jews were to be killed by the same deadline. The euphemism “special treatment,” meaning shooting, appears in reports about both Jews and Belarusian civilians. The logic for the two undertakings was circular but nevertheless somehow compelling: Jews were initially to be killed “as partisans” in 1941, when there were not yet any truly threatening partisan formations; then once there were such partisan formations, in 1942, villagers associated with them were to be destroyed “like Jews.” The equivalence between Jews and partisans was emphasized over and over again, in a downward cycle of rhetoric that could end only when both groups were simply gone.37

  By the middle of 1942, the number of Jews was in rapid decline, but the number of partisans was in rapid ascent. This had no effect on Nazi reasoning, except to make the methods for dealing with Belarusian civilians ever more similar to the methods of dealing with Jews. As partisans became difficult to target because they were too powerful, and as Jews became difficult to target because they were too scarce, the Germans subjected the non-Jewish Belarusian population to ever more extraordinary waves of killing. From the perspective of the German police, the Final Solution and the anti-partisan campaigns blurred together.

  To take a single example: on 22 and 23 September 1942, Order Police Battalion 310 was dispatched to destroy three villages for ostensible connections to the partisans. At the first village, Borki, the police apprehended the entire population, marched the men, women, and children seven hundred meters, and then handed out shovels so that people could dig their own graves. The policemen shot the Belarusian peasants without a break from 9:00 in the morning until 6:00 in the evening, killing 203 men, 372 women, and 130 children. The Order Police spared 104 people classified as “reliable,” although it is hard to imagine how they could have remained so after this spectacle. The battalion reached the next village, Zabloitse, at 2:00 in the morning, and surrounded it at 5:30. They forced all of the inhabitants into the local school, and then shot 284 men, women, and children. At the third village, Borysovka, the battalion reported killing 169 men, women, and children. Four weeks later, the battalion was assigned to liquidate Jews at a work camp. When they killed 461 Jews on 21 October, they used very similar methods: the only difference was that there was no need to surprise the population, since it was already under guard in the camp.38

  Despite new offensives, the “war” against the Jews was the only one that the Germans were winning in 1942. Army Group North continued the siege of Leningrad. Army Group Center made no progress toward Moscow. Army Group South was supposed to secure the Volga River and the oil supplies of the Caucasus. Some of its forces reached the Volga in August 1942, but were unable to take Stalingrad. German troops did race through southern Russia into the Caucasus, but were unable to control the crucial areas by winter. This would be the last major German offensive in the eastern front. By the end of 1942 the Germans had killed at least 208,089 Jews in Belarus. Killing Jewish civilians did nothing, however, to hinder the Red Army, or even to slow the partisans.39

  Lacking personnel in the rear and needing to keep troops at the front, the Germans tried in autumn 1942 to make anti-partisan warfare more efficient. Himmler named Bach, the local Higher SS and Police Leader, chief of anti-partisan warfare in the areas under civilian authority. In practice the responsibility fell upon his deputy, Curt von Gottberg, a drunk whose SS career had been rescued by Himmler. Gottberg suffered no war injuries but had lost part of a leg (and his SS commission) by driving his automobile into a fruit tree. Himmler paid for the prosthetic leg and had Gottberg reinstated. The assignment to Belarus was a chance to prove his manhood, which he seized. After only one month of police training he formed his own Battle Group, which was active from November 1942 through November 1943. In their first five months of campaigning, the men of his Battle Group reported killing 9,432 “partisans,” 12,946 “partisan suspects,” and about 11,000 Jews. In other words, the Battle Group shot an average of two hundred people every day, almost all of them civilians.40

  The unit responsible for more atrocities than any other was the SS Special Commando Dirlewanger, which had arrived in Belarus in February 1942. In Belarus and indeed in all the theaters of the Second World War, few could compete in cruelty with Oskar Dirlewanger. He was an alcoholic and drug addict, prone to violence. He had fought in the German right-wing militias after the First World War, and spent the early 1920s tormenting communists and writing a doctoral dissertation on planned economics. He joined the Nazi party in 1923, but jeopardized his political future by traffic accidents and sexual liaisons with an underage girl. In March 1940 Himmler placed him in charge of a special Poachers’ Brigade, a unit made up of criminals imprisoned for hunting on the property of others. Some Nazi leaders romanticized these men, seeing them as pure primitive German types, resisting the tyranny of the law. The hunters were first assigned to Lublin, where the unit was strengthened by other criminals, including murderers and the clinically insane. In Belarus, Dirlewanger and his hunters did engage partisans. Yet more often they killed civilians whose villages were in the wrong place. Dirlewanger’s preferred method was to herd the local population inside a barn, set the barn on fire, and then shoot with machine guns anyone who tried to escape. The SS Special Commando Dirlewanger killed at least thirty thousand civilians in its Belarusian tour of duty.41

  Dirlewanger’s unit was one of several Waffen-SS and Order Police formations assigned to Belarus to reinforce the battered regular army. By late 1942, German soldiers were horribly fatigued, conscious of defeat, relieved of normal legal obligations to civilians, and under orders to treat partisans with extreme brutality. When assigned to anti-partisan duty, soldiers faced the anxiety of fighting a foe who could appear and disappear at any time, and who knew the land as the soldiers did not. Wehrmacht troops were now cooperating with the police and the SS, whose main task for some time had been the mass murder of civilians, above all Jews. All knew that they were supposed to exterminate the partisans. In these circumstances, the death toll among civilians was bound to be terribly high, regardless of the particulars of German tactics.

  The main German actions of mid-1942 and onward, known as “Large Operations,” were actually designed to kill Belarusian civilians as well as Belarusian Jews. Unable to defeat the partisans as such, the Germans killed the people who might be aiding the struggle. Units were given a daily kill quota, which they generally met by encircling villages and shooting most or all of the inhabitants. They shot people over ditches or, in the case of Dirlewanger and those who followed his example, burned them in barns or blew them up by forcing them to clear mines. In autumn 1942 and early 1943, the Germans liquidated ghettos and whole villages associated with the partisans. In Operation Swamp Fever in September 1942, the Dirlewanger Brigade killed the 8,350 Jews still alive in the ghetto in Baranovichi, and then proceeded to kill 389 “bandits” and 1,274 “bandit suspects.” These attacks were led by Friedrich Jeckeln, the Higher SS and Police Chief for Reichskommissariat Ostland, the same man who had organized the mass shootings of Jews at Kamianets-Podilskyi in Ukraine and the liquidation of the Riga ghetto in Latvia. Operation Hornung of February 1943 began with the liquidation of the Slutsk ghetto, which is to say the shooting of some 3,300 Jews. In an area southwest of Slutsk the Germans killed about nine thousand more people.42

  By early 1943, the people of Belarus, especially the young men, were caught in a deadly competition between German forces and Soviet partisans that made nonsense of the ideologies of both sides. The Germans, lacking personnel, had recruited local men to their police forces (and, in the second half of 1942, to a “self-defense” militia). Many of these people had been communists before the war. The partisans, for their part, began in 1943 to recruit Belarusian policemen in the German service,
since these men had at least some arms and training.43

  It was the battlefield failures of the Wehrmacht, rather than any local political or ideological commitment, that determined where Belarusians chose to fight, when they had a choice. The summer offensive of Army Group South failed, and the entire Sixth Army was destroyed in the Battle of Stalingrad. When news of the Wehrmacht’s defeat reached Belarus in February 1943, as many as twelve thousand policemen and militiamen left the German service and joined the Soviet partisans. According to one report, eight hundred did so on 23 February alone. This meant that some Belarusians who had killed Jews in the service of Nazis in 1941 and 1942 joined the Soviet partisans in 1943. More than this: the people who recruited these Belarusian policemen, the political officers among the partisans, were sometimes Jews who had escaped death at the hands of Belarusian policemen by fleeing the ghettos. Jews trying to survive the Holocaust recruited its perpetrators.44

  Only the Jews, or the few who remained in Belarus in 1943, had a clear reason to be on one side rather than the other. Since they were the Germans’ obvious and declared enemy in this war, and German enmity meant murder, they had every incentive to join the Soviets, despite the dangers of partisan life. For Belarusians (and Russians and Poles) the risks were more balanced; but the possibility of uninvolvement kept receding. For the Belarusians who ended up fighting and dying on one side or the other, it was very often a matter of chance, a question of who was in the village when the Soviet partisans or the German police appeared on their recruiting missions, which often simply involved press-ganging the young men. Since both sides knew that their membership was largely accidental, they would subject new recruits to grotesque tests of loyalty, such as killing friends or family members who had been captured fighting on the other side. As more and more of the Belarusian population was swept into the partisans or the various police and paramilitaries that the Germans hastily organized, such events simply revealed the essence of the situation: Belarus was a society divided against itself by others.45

  In Belarus, as elsewhere, local German policy was conditioned by general economic concerns. By 1943, the Germans were worried more about labor shortages than about food shortages, and so their policy in Belarus shifted. As the war against the Soviet Union continued and the Wehrmacht took horrible losses month upon month, German men had to be taken from German farms and factories and sent to the front. Such people then had to be replaced if the German economy was to function. Hermann Göring issued an extraordinary directive in October 1942: Belarusian men in suspicious villages were not to be shot but rather kept alive and sent as forced laborers to Germany. People who could work were to be “selected” for labor rather than killed—even if they had taken up arms against Germany. By now, Göring seemed to reason, their labor power was all that they could offer to the Reich, and it was more significant than their death. Since the Soviet partisans controlled ever more Belarusian territory, ever less food was reaching Germany in any case. If Belarusian peasants could not work for Germany in Belarus, best to force them to work in Germany. This was very grim reaping. Hitler made clear in December 1942 what Göring had implied: the women and children, regarded as less useful as labor, were to be shot.46

  This was a particularly spectacular example of the German campaign to gather forced labor in the East, which had begun with the Poles of the General Government, and spread to Ukraine before reaching this bloody climax in Belarus. By the end of the war, some eight million foreigners from the East, most of them Slavs, were working in the Reich. It was a rather perverse result, even by the standards of Nazi racism: German men went abroad and killed millions of “subhumans,” only to import millions of other “subhumans” to do the work in Germany that the German men would have been doing themselves—had they not been abroad killing “subhumans.” The net effect, setting aside the mass killing abroad, was that Germany became more of a Slavic land than it had ever been in history. (The perversity would reach its extreme in the first months of 1945, when surviving Jews were sent to labor camps in Germany itself. Having killed 5.4 million Jews as racial enemies, the Germans then brought Jewish survivors home to do the work that the killers might have been doing themselves, had they not been abroad killing.)

  Under this new policy, German policemen and soldiers were to kill Belarusian women and children so that their husbands and fathers and brothers could be used as slave laborers. The anti-partisan operations of spring and summer 1943 were thus slavery campaigns rather than warfare of any recognizable kind. Yet because the slave hunts and associated mass murder were sometimes resisted by the Soviet partisans, the Germans did take losses. In May and June 1943 in Operations Marksman and Gypsy Baron (named after an opera and an operetta), the Germans aimed to secure railways in the Minsk region as well as workers for Germany. They reported killing 3,152 “partisans” and deporting 15,801 laborers. Yet they took 294 dead of their own: an absurdly low ratio of 1:10, if one assumed (wrongly) that reported partisan dead were actual partisans rather than (generally) civilians, but still a significant number.47

  In May 1943 in Operation Cottbus, the Germans sought to clear all partisans from an area about 140 kilometers north of Minsk. Their forces destroyed village after village by herding populations into barns and then burning the barns to the ground. On the following days, the local swine and dogs, now without masters, would be seen in villages with burned human limbs in their jaws. The official count was 6,087 dead; but the Dirlewanger Brigade alone reported fourteen thousand killed in this operation. The majority of the dead were women and children; about six thousand men were sent to Germany as laborers.48

  Operation Hermann, named for Hermann Göring, reached the extreme of this economic logic in summer 1943. Between 13 July and 11 August, German battle groups were to choose a territory, kill all of the inhabitants except for promising male labor, take all property that could be moved, and then burn everything left standing. After the labor selections among the local Belarusian and Polish populations, the Belarusian and Polish women, children, and aged were shot. This operation took place in western Belarus—in lands that had been invaded by the Soviet Union and annexed from Poland in 1939 before the German invasion that followed in 1941.49

  Polish partisans were also to be found in these forests, fighters who believed that these lands should be restored to Poland. Thus German anti-partisan actions here were directed against both the Soviet partisans (representing the power that had governed in 1939-1941) and the Polish underground (fighting for Polish independence and territorial integrity with the boundaries of 1918-1939). The Polish forces were part of the Polish Home Army, reporting to the Polish government in exile in London. Poland was one of the Allies, and so in principle Polish and Soviet forces were fighting together against the Germans. But because both the Soviet Union and Poland claimed these lands of western Soviet Belarus (from the Soviet perspective) or northeastern Poland (from the Polish), matters were not so simple in practice. Polish fighters found themselves trapped between lawless Soviet and German forces. Polish civilians were massacred by Soviet partisans when Polish forces did not subordinate themselves to Moscow. In Naliboki on 8 May 1943, for example, Soviet partisans shot 127 Poles.50

  Red Army officers invited Home Army officers to negotiate in summer 1943, and then murdered them on the way to the rendezvous points. The commander of the Soviet partisan movement believed that the way to deal with the Home Army was to denounce its men to the Germans, who would then shoot the Poles. Meanwhile, Polish forces were also attacked by the Germans. Polish commanders were in contact with both the Soviets and the Germans at various points, but could make a true alliance with neither: the Polish goal, after all, was to restore an independent Poland within its prewar boundaries. Just how difficult that would be, as Hitler’s power gave way to Stalin’s, was becoming clear in the Belarusian swamps.51

  The Germans called the areas cleared of populations in Operation Hermann and the succeeding operations of 1943 “dead zones.” People found i
n a dead zone were “fair game.” The Wehrmacht’s 45th Security Regiment killed civilians in Operation Easter Bunny of April 1943. Remnants of Einsatzgruppe D, dispatched to Belarus in spring 1943, contributed to this undertaking. They came from southern Russia and southern Ukraine, where the remnants of Army Group South were falling back after the defeat at Stalingrad. The task of Einstazgruppe D there had been to cover the German retreat by killing civilians wherever resistance had been reported. In Belarus, it was burning down villages where no resistance whatsoever was encountered, after taking whatever livestock it could. Einsatzgruppe D was no longer covering a withdrawal of the Wehrmacht, as it had been further south, but preparing for one.52

  The resort to dead zones implied a recognition that Soviet power would soon return to Belarus. Army Group South (much reduced and fighting under other names) was in retreat. Army Group North still besieged Leningrad, pointlessly. Belarus itself was still behind the lines of Army Group Center, but not for long.

  At various points during the German occupation of Belarus, it did dawn on some German military and civilian leaders that mass terror was failing, and that the Belarusian population had to be rallied by some means other than terror to support German rule if the Red Army was to be defeated. This was impossible. As everywhere in the occupied Soviet Union, the Germans had succeeded in making most people wish for a return of Soviet rule. A German propaganda specialist sent to Belarus reported that there was nothing that he could possibly tell the population.53