The War of the World: History's Age of Hatred

by Niall Ferguson

  Nazi propaganda deliberately encouraged lawless violence. In issuing instructions to the Propaganda Ministry in July 1941, for example, Hitler emphasized the need for ‘shots of Russian cruelty towards German prisoners to be incorporated in the newsreel so that the Germans know exactly what the enemy is like. He specifically requested that such atrocities should include genitals being cut off and the placing of hand grenades in the trousers of prisoners.’ The results were as Hitler had intended: the ‘great racial war’ became a war to the death. In the first weeks of Barbarossa, the Germans may have summarily executed as many as 600,000 prisoners; by the end of the first winter of the campaign some two million were dead. Some were killed on the spot because German troops refused to accept their surrender. The recollections of one German soldier give a flavour of the attitudes that quickly took hold:

  Sometimes one or two prisoners might emerge from their hideout with their hands in the air, and each time the same tragedy repeated itself. Kraus killed four of them on the lieutenant’s orders; the Sudeten two; Group 17, nine. Young Lindberg, who had been in a state of panic ever since the beginning of the offensive, and who had been either weeping in terror or laughing in hope, took Kraus’s machine gun and shoved two Bolsheviks into a shell hole. The two wretched victims… kept imploring his mercy… But Lindberg, in a paroxysm of uncontrollable rage, kept firing until they were quiet…

  We were mad with harassment and exhaustion… We were forbidden to take prisoners… We knew that the Russians didn’t take any… [that] it was either them or us, which is why my friend Hals and I threw grenades… at some Russians who were trying to wave a white flag.

  Elsewhere Soviet prisoners were taken but then lined up and shot. Those who were spared found themselves herded into improvised camps where they were given neither shelter nor sustenance. Many starved or died of disease; others were taken out and shot in batches. Some were transported to concentration camps like Buchenwald, where they were shot in the course of fake medical examinations, or to the death camp at Auschwitz. Altogether in the course of the war over three million Soviet soldiers died in captivity – substantially more than half and perhaps close to two-thirds of the total number taken prisoner, a mortality rate more than ten times higher than that for Russian prisoners in the First World War. Once again, living space turned out to mean killing space.

  As in Poland, the killing was directed not only against captured combatants but also against certain civilians. To be precise, anyone identified as a partisan was liable to be killed. The process whereby ‘partisan’ became a blanket term including Jews, Gypsies and anyone else the Germans felt inclined to kill is not easily traced in written records. We have seen that the war against Communism was always, in Hitler’s mind, a war against the Jews. The surprising thing is how many ordinary Germans seem to have understood from the outset that this was an integral part of Operation Barbarossa. On the eve of the invasion, for example, the commander of Order Police Battalion 309 told his men that Jews, regardless of age or sex, were to be destroyed. Within days they were putting his words into effect in Białystok, herding five hundred men, women and children into a synagogue and burning them alive. Just a few weeks after the invasion, it was becoming clear that the Jews were to be totally eradicated.

  The Nazis estimated that there were nearly 5.5 million Jews* living in the former Soviet territory they occupied by the end of 1941, as many as in all the rest of occupied Europe. The success of Operation Barbarossa put the Germans in complete control of the entirety of the old Tsarist Pale of Settlement, from the Baltic to the Black Sea. Hitler was never wholly precise about what should be done with the Jews; he spoke merely of taking ‘all necessary measures’, of ‘eradicating whatever puts itself against us’ and of ‘shooting anyone who even looks sideways at us’. ‘If there were no more Jews in Europe,’ he explained to the Croatian Commander-in-Chief Slavko Kvaternik on July 22, 1941, ‘then the unity of the European states would no longer be destroyed.’ But ‘if even just one state for whatever reasons tolerates one Jewish family in it, then this will become the bacillus source for a new decomposition’. At this time, Madagascar was still being mentioned as a possible post-war destination. However, Adolf Eich-mann, who had devised the Reich Main Security Office’s Madagascar Project, now entrusted his subordinate Friedrich Suhr with a new brief: the ‘Final solution of the Jewish question’. On July 31 Heydrich obtained Göring’s authorization to make ‘all necessary preparations’ for a ‘total solution of the Jewish question in the German sphere of influence in Europe’ and to draw up a ‘comprehensive’ draft plan. It seems unlikely that he would have sought Göring’s approval if all this had meant was more deportations and more ghettos. It also seems significant that not long after this the commander of Einsatzgruppe A, Franz Walter Stahlecker, referred to orders relating to the treatment of the Jews ‘from a higher authority to the Security Police which cannot be discussed in writing’. Stahlecker was arguing against the creation of new ghettos in former Soviet territory and in favour of ‘an almost 100 per cent immediate cleansing of the entire Ostland of Jews’. Such arguments dovetailed neatly with the pressure from other parts of the Nazi empire – France, Serbia and the Reich itself – to deport ‘their’ Jews eastwards, so that they too might be subsumed in the projected ‘final solution’, as well as the reluctance of the authorities in Poland to accept a new influx of Jews to their ghettos. Thus the genocidal concept would seem to have crystallized in the last week of September and the first weeks of October 1941, at the very zenith of Hitler’s fortunes, with Kiev in his hands, Leningrad besieged and the onslaught on Moscow poised to begin. He unveiled his intentions at a meeting of senior party functionaries in Berlin on December 12. The order – ‘liquidate them’, in Hans Frank’s words – was swiftly relayed down the chain of command.

  PERPETRATORS

  Who were the perpetrators of what came to be known as the Holocaust? In the wake of the invasion of the Soviet Union the first phase of systematic killing was carried out by four roving Einsatzgruppen, as had happened in Poland.* By the end of July 1941 they had murdered around 63,000 men, woman and children, 90 per cent of whom were Jews. By mid-April 1942, the Einsatzgruppen had already killed precisely 518,388 people; again, the vast majority were Jews.

  Predominantly this was a war against the Jews, waged behind the lines asa kind of counterpoint to the real war against the Red Army. Other groups were equally at risk, however, notably Gypsies and mental patients, and such was the scale of the diabolical undertaking that it could not possibly be carried out by the Einsatzgruppen alone. From an early stage, therefore, other less specialized formations became involved, including not only Wehrmacht units but also regular police battalions.

  As dawn broke on July 13, 1942, Reserve Battalion 101 arrived at the Polish village of Józefów, which had been bombed by the Germans and briefly occupied by the Russians two years previously. Their commander, Major Wilhelm Trapp, explained to his men that their orders were to round up the local Jews, of whom there were around 1,800. They were to pick out the able-bodied young men who could be used as forced labourers or ‘work Jews’; there were around 300 of these. Using trucks, they would then drive the rest – the sick, the elderly, the women and the children – to a quarry in the nearby forest. There they would shoot them all.

  Reserve Battalion 101 was not a hardened group of Nazi fanatics. Most of its 486 men came from working-class and lower middle-class neighbourhoods of Hamburg. On average, they were older than the men in front-line units. Over half were aged between thirty-seven and forty-two. Very few were members of the Nazi Party, though Trapp had joined in 1932. They were, without a doubt, just ordinary Germans. They were also willing executioners. Often, after the war, those accused of war crimes claimed that they were merely following orders. That was not the case at Józefów. Before the killings began, Trapp made an extraordinary offer to his battalion: if anyone did not feel up to the task that lay before them, he could step forward and be a
ssigned to other duties. Only twelve men did so.

  Killing people is harder than it looks in the cinema, which is the closest most of these middle-aged policemen had previously come to murder. The standard procedure was to get the victims to kneel down in rows, then to shoot each one individually through the nape of the neck. Despite instructions from the battalion physician on where exactly to point their weapons, the men were soon spattered with blood, bone splinters and brains. As one of them later recalled, ‘Through the point-blank range shot that was… required, the bullet struck the head of the victim at such a trajectory that often the entire skull or at least the entire… skullcap was torn off.’ Once the shooting began, several more soldiers asked to be relieved of their duties. Later, a number of others broke down and could not continue. But the majority pressed on with their dirty work. By midday they were being offered bottles of vodka to ‘refresh’ them. This evidently helped. The killing continued throughout the afternoon and evening. It took seventeen hours in all. The bodies of the victims were left unburied, a sign of the amateurishness of the operation. (Einsatzgruppen knew to get their victims to dig a pit before shooting them on the edge of it so that they fell in neat rows, the dying on top of the dead and half-dead; burial would suffocate any chance survivors.) Finally, at about 9 o’clock that night, the weary battalion returned to the village. The marketplace was deserted except for the piles of luggage belonging to the victims, which the soldiers proceeded to burn. In the grotesquely euphemistic language of the Third Reich, Józefów was now Judenrein – ‘cleansed of Jews’.

  The men of Reserve Battalion 101 were beginners. But practice makes perfect. Between the summer of 1942 and the autumn of 1943 they and other mobile police units were responsible for shooting approximately 38,000 Jews and deporting a further 45,000, most of them to the Treblinka extermination camp. By the end of 1943 the Germans had killed around 2.7 million Soviet Jews, nearly half the pre-Barbarossa population.

  Why did they do it? One view is that they, like most Germans, were imbued with a virulent brand of anti-Semitism that needed only the right opportunity to manifest itself in murder. Certainly, some of the letters that soldiers wrote home indicate that they had thoroughly internalized Hitler’s message that, to quote one lance-corporal, ‘Only a Jew can be a Bolshevik, for this blood-sucker there can be nothing nicer than to be a Bolshevik.’ Another described to his parents how he and his comrades had killed a thousand Jews in Tarnopol ‘with clubs and spades’, having found sixty mutilated German corpses nearby; the Jews could be held responsible, since they had occupied ‘all the leadership positions’ under the Soviet regime ‘and, together with the Soviets, had a regular public festival while executing the Germans and Ukrainians’. How deeply rooted such notions were in German culture and how far they were mere products of post-1933 indoctrination is debatable. Even Victor Klemperer could not be sure of this, sometimes believing that National Socialism was a ‘homegrown… strain of cancer’ and at other times dismissing ‘the idea that all Germans, including the workers, are without exception anti-Semites’ as a ‘nonsensical thesis’. Another interpretation, based in large measure on post-war testimony, is that these ‘ordinary men’ were well aware that what they were doing was wrong, but suppressed their qualms because of a mixture of deference to authority (shirking might damage chances of promotion or leave) and peer-group pressure.

  Nevertheless, we should not forget the obvious impulse of self-preservation. Though far smaller than those they inflicted, the casualties suffered by the German forces in the first phase of Operation Barbarossa were in fact much heavier than in any of Hitler’s earlier campaigns. In July 1942, the month of the Józefów massacre, the total number of German soldiers killed or missing in action was just under 40,000 and it rose to more than 60,000 the following month. In the midst of a full-scale war, killing Jews was a soft option compared with front-line duties. Old men, women and children could, after all, be relied on not to shoot back. When the SS Cavalry Brigade swept through the Pripet Marshes in August 1941, slaughtering 14,000 mostly Jewish civilians, their total casualties numbered just two, both killed when they drove over a stray landmine. That same month the 1st SS Brigade shot 44,125 people, mostly Jews, in the vicinity of Kamenets, having been explicitly ordered by Himmler to spare only ‘working Jews’. Again, no one fought back. It was not until the Warsaw ghetto uprising of April–May 1943 that the Germans encountered any serious resistance from Jewish populations.

  Just how easy the task of mass murder could become is chillingly clear from a German eyewitness account of the mass execution of 500 Jews at Dubno in the Ukraine in 1942:

  The people who had got off the lorries – men, women and children of all ages – had to undress on the orders of an SS man who was carrying a riding or dog whip in his hand. They had to place their clothing in separate piles for shoes, clothing and underwear. I saw a pile of shoes containing approximately 800–1,000 pairs, and great heaps of underwear and clothing…

  I can still remember how a girl, slender and dark, pointed at herself as she went past me saying ‘twenty-three’.

  I walked round the mound and stood in front of the huge grave. The bodies were lying so tightly packed together that only their heads showed, from almost all of which blood ran down over their shoulders. Some were still moving. Others raised their hands and turned their heads to show they were still alive. The ditch was already three quarters full. I estimate that it already held about a thousand bodies. I turned my eyes towards the man doing the shooting. He was an SS man: he sat, legs swinging, on the edge of the ditch. He had an automatic rifle resting in his knees and was smoking a cigarette. The people, completely naked, climbed down steps which had been cut into the clay wall of the ditch, stumbled over the heads of those lying there and stopped at the spot indicated by the SS man. They lay down on top of the dead or wounded: some stroked those still living and spoke quietly to them. Then I heard a series of rifle shots… I was surprised not to be ordered away, but I noticed three postmen in uniform standing nearby. Then the next batch came.

  By this time stripping the victims had become standard practice. The motivation was as much prurience as parsimony; a desire to degrade and humiliate those who were about to die, as well as to ogle the younger women. Indeed, as this account makes clear, there was something consciously spectacular about these monstrous crimes. There were voyeurs as well as perpetrators; some even took photographs.

  Some men – like police secretary Walter Mattner from Vienna – were able to rationalize shooting women and children by the hundred. ‘When the first truckload arrived,’ he wrote to his wife from Mogilev in Byelorussia in October 1941, ‘my hand was slightly trembling when shooting, but one gets used to this. When the tenth load arrived I was already aiming more calmly and shot securely at the many women, children, and infants. Considering that I too have two infants at home, with whom these hordes would do the same, if not ten times worse. The death we gave to them was a nice, quick death compared with the hellish torture of thousands upon thousands in the dungeons of the GPU. Infants were flying in a wide circle through the air and we shot them down still in flight, before they fell into the pit and into the water. Let’s get rid of this scum that tossed all of Europe into the war and is still agitating in America… After our return home, then it will be the turn of our Jews.’ Not everyone was so utterly devoid of human feeling. Only gradually did the SS come to realize that steps should be taken to conceal what was being done – and to find a more efficient, and less demoralizing, mode of murder. Himmler himself did not much relish the sight of the one mass execution he witnessed, at Minsk in August 1941. Was there no third way, preferable both to mass shootings and to starvation or epidemics in the ghettos, which were becoming impossibly crowded as the first transports of Jews began to arrive from Western Europe?

  As early as July 16, 1941, Sturmbannführer Rolf-Heinz Höppner wrote to Eichmann asking whether the use of ‘a quick-acting agent’ would not be ‘the most huma
ne solution to dispose of the Jews, insofar as they are not capable of work’. The answer had, as we have seen, already been pioneered in the mental asylums of Germany. In September 1941, following the example of the T-4 ‘euthanasia’ programme, 500 mental patients were gassed at Mogilev. Three months later, at Chelmno, specially designed vans with exhaust pipes connected to sealed rear compartments were used for the first time to asphyxiate Jewish prisoners. The first and only industrialized genocide had begun.

  NEIGHBOURS

  The executioners at Józefów knew few, if any, of their victims personally. They were in a war zone, in an unfamiliar landscape, killing alien people. But 150 miles to the north, the Jews of Jedwabne – who had accounted for over 60 per cent of that town’s population of just over 2,000 in 1931 – were killed by their very own neighbours, people they had lived alongside all their lives.

  On the morning of July 10,1941, eight Germans came to Jedwabne and met with the town authorities, including the mayor, Marian Karolak. The Germans argued that at least one Jewish family from each profession should be left alive, but a local Polish carpenter replied: ‘We have enough of our own craftsmen, we have to destroy all the Jews, none should stay alive.’ The mayor and other Poles present agreed. According to the testimony of Szmul Wasersztajn, one of the few Jewish survivors, what followed was a full-scale pogrom: ‘Beards of old Jews were burned, newborn babies were killed at their mothers’ breasts, people were beaten murderously and forced to sing and dance. In the end they proceeded to the main action – the burning.’ The Jews were herded into the barn of the town baker, Bronislaw Sleszynski, and incinerated. This was not the work of a few local ruffians, but of roughly half the male Polish population, led by respectable notables like Karolak and Sleszynski. Any Jews who tried to escape were hunted down in the surrounding fields – again, by their own neighbours. The few Germans present confined themselves to taking photographs. In the words of historian Jan Gross, ‘Everybody who was in town on this day, and in possession of a sense of sight, smell, or hearing, either participated in or witnessed the tormented deaths of the Jews of Jedwabne.’ Only a handful of people acted to save their fellow citizens. Stanislaw Ramotowski helped his future wife Rachela Finkelsztejn to hide. Antonina Wyrzykowska kept seven Jews hidden in her house, among them Szmul Wasersztajn, with whom she had an affair. The father of Leszek Dziedzic also helped Wasersz-tajn to survive the war. It is notable that two out of these three were sexually involved with at least one of the people they saved, underlining the degree of intimacy that had previously existed between Jews and Christians in Jedwabne.