Holocaust: The Nazi Persecution and Murder of the Jews

by Peter Longerich

  10a shot 75 Jewish hostages. 88 A sub-unit of the same Sonderkommando was sent to the town of Kodyma in response to a request from the intelligence officer of the

  XXX Army Corps because the ‘Jews and Bolshevists’ there were allegedly intend-

  ing to sabotage measures being taken by the occupying power. The sub-unit

  therefore arrested 400 men on 1 August, most of them Jews, subjected them to

  an ‘interrogation’ and then shot 98 of them. 89

  On 8 and 9 July Sonderkommando 10b (assigned to the 3rd Romanian Army)

  took part in a massacre carried out by Romanian troops in Chernivtsi (Czerno-

  vitz) in which it killed ‘100 Jewish Communists’ by its own account, ostensibly

  because advancing German and Romanian formations had been shot at from

  within the Jewish quarter. 90 At the end of July, Einsatzgruppe D reported that ‘of about 1,200 Jews arrested’ in the city, ‘682 had been shot in cooperation with the

  Romanian police’. 91 Sections of Sonderkommando 10b carried out further executions of Jewish men in other towns over the weeks that followed. 92

  At the beginning of August Sonderkommando 11a reported the liquidation of

  ‘551 Jews so far’ in Chişinău (Kishinev), citing ‘sabotage’ and ‘reprisal’ as the

  reasons. 93 These executions took place while the leader of Einsatzgruppe D, Ohlendorf’s staff was in Chişinău and he witnessed at least one of the shootings. 94

  Sonderkommando 11b undertook its first mass executions on 7 August 1941

  in Thigina, where an incident report notes that 155 Jews were shot on that

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  date. 95 Einsatzkommando 12 carried out two executions on 20 and 21 July in Babtshinsky, which the 23 August incident report said claimed 94 lives. 96

  Police Battalions

  It was not only the Einsatzgruppen that were massacring the Jewish civilian

  population in the occupied Eastern zones in the first weeks of the campaign;

  various battalions of the German Order Police were also involved.

  In Bialystok Police Battalion 309 carried out a massacre as early as 27 June in

  which at least 2,000 Jews, including women and children, were killed. Members of

  the battalion drove at least 500 people into the synagogue and put them to an

  agonizing death by setting fire to the building. 97 The very precise reconstruction of these events undertaken by the Wuppertal District Court in 1973 makes it clear

  how some fanatical officers in the battalion seized the initiative and transformed

  the planned arrest of the Jews in the synagogue quarter into a bloodbath; there was

  looting, and some excesses were perpetrated by policemen under the influence of

  alcohol. Bialystok was also the scene of a massacre organized by Police Battalions

  316 and 322 in the middle of July when a total of about 3,000 Jewish men were

  killed. 98

  A few days before this mass murder, on 8 July, Himmler appeared in Bialystok

  together with the head of the Order Police, Daluege. 99 At a meeting with SS and police officers Himmler is said by Bach-Zelewski to have remarked that ‘every Jew

  must in principle be regarded as a partisan’. 100 On the following day Daluege announced to a meeting of members of Police Regiment Centre that ‘Bolshevism

  must now be eradicated once and for all’. 101 Two days later, on 11 July, the commander of Police Regiment Centre issued an order to shoot all Jewish men

  between the ages of 17 and 45 convicted of looting. 102 The police made the task of

  ‘convicting’ Jewish ‘looters’ very straightforward: three days beforehand, members

  of Battalion 322 had carried out a search of the Jewish quarter and designated all

  confiscated goods as ‘plunder’; 103 Jews were therefore looters by definition.

  In the second half of July Police Battalion 316 carried out another massacre in

  Baranowicze, which probably claimed several hundred victims, and took part in

  two mass shootings in Mogilev in which 3,700 Jews (including women and

  children) were killed on 19 September. 104 In Brest-Litovsk, on or around 12 July, Police Battalion 307 shot several thousand Jewish civilians, almost all men between 16 and 60 years old—another alleged ‘reprisal’. Immediately before the

  massacre Daluege, the chief of Police Regiment Centre, Max Montua, Bach-

  Zelewski, and other Higher SS Commanders had been in Brest. 105

  On 2 August Battalion 322 received a radio message from the Higher SS and

  Police Commanders to deploy a company ‘exclusively for the liquidation of

  Jews’. 106 In the battalions’ war diary for 9 August there is the note: ‘comp. arrests all male Jews between 16 and 45 in Bialowicza and carries out the evacuation of all

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  the remaining Jews from Bialowicza’. And the following day has ‘the 3rd comp.

  today carried out the liquidation of all the male Jews in the prisoners’ holding

  camp in Bialowicza. 77 Jews aged between 16 and 45 were shot.’107

  The same company of the 322nd Battalion shot more Jewish men a few days

  later in Moravka-Malá near Bialowicza. The battalion’s war diary for 15 August

  notes, ‘259 women and 162 children were resettled in Kobryn. All male Jews

  between the ages of 16 and 65 (282 head), as well as one Pole, were shot for

  looting. ’108 An order must have arrived between 10 and 15 August that increased the upper age-range from 45 to 65.

  Conclusions

  The following conclusions may be drawn from all these individual cases and

  examples about the way orders were given to the Einsatzgruppen and police

  battalions. Almost all Einsatzkommandos and Sonderkommandos, and a number

  of police battalions, can be shown to have carried out mass shootings of Jewish

  men of military age at the end of June or in July, a total of thousands of

  individuals. These shootings were generally carried out under the pretext of

  ‘reprisals’, as punishments for ‘looting’ or as a means of dealing with ‘partisans’.

  This manner of proceeding corresponded to the orders that the Einsatzgruppen

  had received at the beginning of the campaign. Some of the Einsatzgruppe

  commanders even referred explicitly to these orders, as we have seen.

  The conduct of the Einsatzgruppen followed a single pattern but was not wholly

  uniform. The upper age limit for the victims differed between Einsatzgruppen:

  whilst in some towns almost the entire male population in the relevant age-range

  was shot, executions in other places affected varying proportions of the male

  population. The different unit commanders therefore had a certain amount of

  room for manoeuvre, which was not completely precise, as has been shown, but

  left some latitude for initiative.

  This manner of ‘indirectly’ issuing orders that relied on the intuition and

  initiative of subordinates was highly characteristic of the National Socialist sys-

  tem. It was deployed in cases where procedures were being demanded of subor-

  dinates that clearly contravened a valid law. The Party Supreme Court of the

  NSDAP neatly encapsulated this ‘indirect’ form of giving orders when it dealt with

  the question of whether Party members who had participated in the November

  1938 pogrom should be punished for committing a serious crime. The Party

  Supreme Court explained at the time, that ‘it was obvious to any active National

  Socialist from the period of struggle’—i.e. pre-1933—‘that operati
ons where the

  Party does not wish to appear as the instigator will not be regulated with complete

  clarity and in full detail. As a consequence, therefore, more is to be read into

  orders of that kind than the words literally state, and on the part of those issuing

  such orders, in the interests of the Party, the practice of not saying everything but

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  hinting what an order is intended to convey has now become widespread,

  especially when these orders concern illegal political rallies.’109 This technique of issuing orders was deployed in 1941 for the mass murder of Soviet Jews. The

  leaders of individual units had a degree of room for manoeuvre, but only within

  the framework established by the SS leadership.

  chapter 12

  THE TRANSITION FROM ANTI-SEMITIC

  TERROR TO GENOCIDE

  Changes in the Parameters for Action in the Area of

  Deployment and Alterations in the Perception

  of the Murderers

  The original ‘security police’ model for the way commandos should proceed was

  to subject Jewish communities to a wave of terror immediately after occupation

  in order to exclude any possible form of resistance from what was seen as the

  ‘Jewish-Bolshevist complex’, whilst simultaneously isolating the Jews from

  the remainder of the population and stigmatizing them as the real enemies of

  the occupying power. This model was followed during July and the first half of

  August by a large proportion of the commandos and police units in an extremely

  radical manner: they had started to decimate the Jewish male population of military

  age systematically and indiscriminately. The fact that this expansion of the terror

  did not happen suddenly at a particular moment but was introduced over a period

  of time (some commandos did not adopt this policy until September or even later

  than that) suggests that there was no particular order that decisively brought about

  this transition. Rather it was a process of increasingly radical interpretations of

  orders—issued at the start of the campaign and deliberately left vague—to kill

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  207

  everyone who was in some way suspicious. It is most trenchantly summarized in

  Hitler’s crudely brutal formulation from the middle of July: ‘shoot dead everyone

  who so much as blinks at you.’1

  The more radical approach of the commandos was manifested in a number of

  ways but especially in the alteration of the procedures for executions and in the

  invention of more and more reasons for murder. As early as July and August

  various formations had adopted procedures for execution that maximized the

  number of people murdered in the shortest possible time.

  Executions during the first weeks of the campaign were frequently carried out

  according to the model of courts martial, which is to say that firing squads were

  assembled and in order to maintain a veneer of legality sometimes sentences

  were even read out and salvoes of shots discharged on an officer’s order. But

  commandos very soon found ways to speed up and perfect mass executions: the

  victims were taken in organized groups at fixed intervals to carefully segregated

  execution sites, and the executions themselves took place immediately next to,

  sometimes actually inside, prepared mass graves (in which cases the victims

  often had to lie on the bodies of those who had been shot moments before).

  Automatic weapons were used, or victims were killed with a pistol shot to the

  head or neck. 2

  Where commandos gave any reason at all for their murderous activity, they

  tended to describe the Jews they killed as ‘Bolshevist functionaries’, ‘Communists’,

  ‘Communist sympathizers’, or as ‘agents’. 3 Later, membership of the ‘Jewish intelligentsia’ sufficed as a reason for murder, especially in Einsatzgruppe B, whilst

  Einsatzgruppe C used ‘reprisal’ as the grounds for all types of actions. During July

  and August new reasons kept appearing for the liquidation of Jews on the grounds

  of supposed hostile action against the occupying power. These included arson, 4

  dissemination of anti-German propaganda, 5 looting, 6 sabotage, 7 refusal to work, 8

  support for partisan groups, 9 or black-market dealing. 10 After September these were supplemented by another ‘security police reason’, namely ‘threat of plague’, 11

  which was supposed to originate with Jews.

  From August the commandos’ and battalions’ modus operandi began to change

  fundamentally. The units made a transition from terrorizing and decimating the

  male population to ‘cleansing’, targeting individual communities at first but later

  whole swathes of the country. In other words, they murdered the major part of the

  local Jewish population, women and children included. Again, this radicalization

  of the units’ mode of operation did not take place all of a sudden; different units

  changed at different paces and the shift took a while to complete. It was a process

  that can only be explained by taking a number of factors into account, notably the

  changing conditions under which the commandos were operating in their area of

  deployment. From the perspective of the commandos, this cast into doubt the

  ‘security policing’ model for the solution to the ‘Jewish question’ that had pre-

  vailed so far. However, this ‘crisis’ increased their readiness to adapt gradually to a

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  new model that was now being propagated by the leadership of the SS: a policy of

  systematic ethnic annihilation.

  As the war progressed, the commandos found that the further they penetrated

  into the East the more difficult it became to carry out pogroms. In the Baltic it had

  only been possible to provoke pogroms in the phase immediately after the occupa-

  tion and they usually had to be stopped after a few days in order for the occupying

  force’s claim to be ‘calming’ the situation to remain credible. 12 In the area under Einsatzgruppe C, as we have seen, it had been possible to start pogroms on a large

  scale in East Galicia and Volhynia. As they moved further into old Soviet territory,

  however, the Einsatzgruppe was forced to acknowledge the unwillingness of indi-

  genous populations to take part in pogroms. 13 Einsatzgruppe B had a similar experience with their commandos in the Russian or Belarus territories, where

  indigenous populations were not prepared to take ‘self-help measures against the

  Jews’. 14 The further east into Russian territory the Einsatzgruppe went, the fewer Jews they encountered: the proportion of Jews in the population was smaller because of

  the ban on settlement from Tsarist times and because many Jews had fled.

  Because so many Jews had fled, therefore, Einsatzgruppe B found that it was

  hardly possible ‘to maintain liquidation figures at their previous levels simply

  because the Jewish element is to a large extent not present’. 15 Einsatzkommando 6

  noted at about the same time that ‘even on the far side of the front’ the Jews ‘seem

  to have heard what fate is awaiting them at our hands’. In mid- and eastern

  Ukraine 70 per cent to 90 per cent of the Jewish population had fled; in some cases

  it was 100 per cent. 16

  The flight of
the Jews also affected Einsatzgruppe C, as can be seen from the

  incident report of 9 August:17 ‘Since news has obviously spread that, as German troops are marching in the Einsatzkommandos are undertaking a systematic trawl

  of the occupied areas,’ the Einsatzgruppe concluded, ‘the commandos have now

  started to avoid operations of any larger size.’

  As more and more of the Jewish population started to flee, as German troops

  made rapid progress, and as the Sonderkommandos and Einsatzkommandos were

  anxious to follow as closely behind the spearheads as possible, it became clear that

  there were often insufficient ‘operational forces’ at the disposal of the Einsatz-

  gruppe. 18 From the end of June to September, in particular, the rapid rate of progress and the lack of manpower meant that huge areas that had been conquered were only superficially combed for Jews.

  Einsatzgruppe C noted in October that, ‘seen from the perspective of the state

  police and SD’, they were confronted by an huge empty space; ‘major successes’

  could only happen after 10–14 days, which was true ‘particularly as regards the

  Jewish problem’. 19 For Einsatzgruppe B, too, the rapid onward march of German troops means that ‘from the perspective of the security police’ there was a

  dangerous ‘lacuna’ opening up; what was missing was ‘so to speak the second

  wave of security police’. 20

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  There was an additional problem for Einsatzgruppen C and D on the southern

  sector of the front: the influx of tens of thousands of Jews driven out by the

  Hungarian and Romanian allies. In the case of Romania we know that the head of

  state, Antonescu, referred to an agreement with Hitler in this regard. 21 Hitler had evidently put his Romanian ally in the picture about the planned large-scale

  deportations of European Jews to the East even before the war started. However,

  on their own initiative, Romania and Hungary (which will have been similarly

  informed) made a premature start with the expulsions that had originally been

  planned for the period after the Russian campaign had finished. Since on the one

  hand the Germans did not wish to snub their allies, and on the other did not wish