Holocaust: The Nazi Persecution and Murder of the Jews

by Peter Longerich

  to endanger their supply lines or cause other difficulties because of problems with

  refugees, they resorted to more radical ‘solutions’ during the month of August, as

  will be shown in detail below. Whilst Einsatzgruppe C murdered refugees in what

  was at that stage a massacre of unparalleled scale and savagery in Kamenetsk-

  Podolsk, Einsatzgruppe D initially attempted to drive the refugees back using

  brutal means, which meant that the weakest of them were simply shot. It even-

  tually came to an agreement with the Romanians to intern all the Jews living in the

  area in question in concentration camps. 22

  Towards the end of the summer, yet another problem arose. Both the German

  occupation authorities and the central agencies in the Reich gradually began to

  cast their eyes towards the potential labour that the Jews represented. At first they

  had made every possible effort to replace the Jewish workforce with non-Jewish

  labour, but from September 1941 onwards there was a gradual realization that,

  during the war, it would not be possible to manage without Jewish workers

  altogether. 23 As we shall see, this problem also emerged in the areas controlled by the Einsatzgruppen. During the summer, the victims of mass shootings had

  principally been Jewish men of military age; but, from the autumn onwards, the

  selection principle was reversed and Jews capable of work were exempted from the

  annihilation measures. 24 The occupation authorities adopted a new approach in which the Jewish population was divided into ‘useful’ and ‘superfluous’, which had

  consequences for the way the Jewish minority was fed and housed, particularly in

  the cities.

  Christian Gerlach has developed this line of argument and sees a direct

  connection between the expansion of the programme of shootings in September

  and October 1941—the transition to the systematic liquidation of ghettos—and the

  problems with feeding and housing Jews that were gradually becoming manifest.

  He has argued that the murder of the Jewish minority can be attributed directly to

  the failure of the systematic starvation policy that had been in place since the

  beginning of the war. Because the original plan to starve the general population of

  cities proved impossible to fulfil, the occupying power concentrated above all on

  the destruction of the two groups that it had in the meantime isolated from the

  outside world—the Jews, who represented a considerable proportion of the

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  Mass Executions in Occupied Soviet Zones, 1941

  population of the cities that could no longer be fed, and prisoners of war. 25 In addition, the difficulties with providing food and shelter had a radicalizing effect

  on the conduct of individual authorities with the respect to the ‘Jewish question’. 26

  However, Gerlach has not succeeded in proving this hypothesis about anti-

  Jewish policy empirically and unambiguously. For, although it seems perfectly

  plausible that problems with food and shelter did have a certain radicalizing effect

  on anti-Jewish policy in the occupied zones, his basic proposition—that the

  expansion of the programme of shootings in summer and autumn 1941 can be

  attributed above all to the material shortcomings that the occupying power was

  experiencing—does not seem to me to be an adequate explanation of what took

  place. Extending the programme of shootings, in my view, represents a process

  whereby German organizations were gradually steered by their leadership away

  from a ‘security policing’ approach and towards a policy of ethnic annihilation.

  The presupposition for this radical shift was first and foremost a changed

  perception of the situation by these organizations: during the summer the

  Einsatzgruppen and other SS and police units were forced to conclude that the

  original security policing approach could not lead to a solution to the ‘Jewish

  question’ for reasons suggested above. They therefore became more and more

  ready to accept a new and more comprehensive approach that the leadership

  brought in very gradually—with the help of a massive reinforcement of the deadly

  commandos—the approach that envisaged the blanket ethnic annihilation of

  the Jewish population.

  Extending the campaign of shootings, therefore, had a variety of causes,

  although a fundamental factor was the racist hierarchy on which the occupying

  power based its assessment and treatment of the indigenous population and in

  which the Jews occupied the lowest rung. This way of viewing things, rather than

  any objective assessment of the difficulties of the situation, was decisive in the

  occupying power’s belief that the annihilation of the Jews would solve a broad

  range of different problems.

  The longer the war lasted, the more completely what was originally a fairly

  abstract idea of the Jews as the pillars of the Bolshevist regime was replaced by a

  concept whereby the Jews were endowed with the capacity to present a variety of

  concrete threats. They were seen as the source of many and various forms of

  resistance to the occupying power—they spread rumours, sabotaged measures

  taken by the Germans, started fires, and maintained contact with Soviet partisan

  groups; they spread plagues, and were active on the black market; by virtue of their

  mere existence they created problems in the fields of supplies, housing, and

  labour. Such perceptions make it clear how the racist and radically anti-Semitic

  attitude of the occupiers created its own distorted image of reality.

  The reports of the Einsatzgruppen show that Einsatzgruppen B and C, in

  particular, displayed some considerable perplexity about the ‘solution to the

  Jewish question’ in the newly occupied Eastern zones. The staff officers of

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  Einsatzgruppe B reasoned thus about the situation in Belarus in July 1941: ‘The

  solution to the Jewish question during the war seems impossible in this area and

  given the extra-large numbers of Jews it can only be reached via evacuation and

  resettlement.’ They described the Jews’ ‘accommodation in ghettos’, which was in

  train across the board, as ‘a matter of high priority and, in the light of the large

  number of Jews, a particularly difficult one’. 27

  After August the matter of the labour deployment of the Jewish population also

  began to emerge in the reports from the Einsatzgruppen. Einsatzgruppe C, for

  example, reported on the developments in the Ukraine in the first half of August

  and suggested that the Jews should be exhausted in cultivating the extensive Pripet

  Marshes and those on the north bank of the Dnieper or on the Volga.

  In an incident report for September 1941, 28 on the basis of their previous observations Einsatzgruppe C came to the following conclusion: ‘The work of the Bol-

  shevists depends on Jews, Russians, Georgians, Armenians, Poles, Latvians, and

  Ukrainians: the Bolshevist apparatus is not by any means identical with that of the

  Jewish population. . . . If we entirely dispense with the Jewish labour-force, then the

  economic rebuilding of Ukrainian industry or the expansion of urban administrative

  centres is virtually impossible. There is only one possibility, which the German

  administration in the General Government
has neglected for a long time: the

  solution of the Jewish question via the full-scale deployment of the Jewish labour-

  force. That would bring with it the gradual liquidation of Jewry, a development that

  corresponds perfectly with the economic conditions of the country.’

  Einsatzkommando 6 of Einsatzgruppe C, which according to an incident report

  of 12 September had drawn attention to the fact that 70–90 per cent of the Jewish

  population of many central and eastern Ukrainian towns had fled—rising to 100

  per cent in some cases—drew the following striking conclusion from this phe-

  nomenon: ‘this can be seen as a success deriving indirectly from the work of the

  Security Police, since the cost-free deportation of hundreds of thousands of Jews—

  mostly over the Urals, to judge by the results of interrogations—makes a substan-

  tial contribution to the solution to the Jewish question in Europe.’29

  This problem had been brewing since July and had produced a situation that

  was very difficult grasp as a whole. Pogrom activity was declining, more and more

  Jews were fleeing, although there were refugees turning up in the areas that the

  commandos were leaving behind, it was impossible to control the vast areas of

  territory with such small units, there was an ever-increasing need for a larger

  labour-force, and the food supply was increasingly precarious. The original

  ‘security policing’ approach had been designed for the duration of a short war

  and had essentially consisted of overwhelming Jewish communities with a sudden

  wave of terror immediately upon occupation; as the war dragged on, this policy

  was clearly reaching its limits.

  Mass executions in August had killed tens of thousands of people and in the

  light of this the units that were carrying them out began to question the mid- and

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  Mass Executions in Occupied Soviet Zones, 1941

  longer-term perspectives for continued Jewish persecution in the occupied East-

  ern zones. How broadly should the range of victims be drawn? And where would

  the human resources for carrying out further murders be found? How were they

  to prevent Jews escaping murder by fleeing? How could the mass murder of Jewish

  skilled workers be justified in the face of the growing need for labour?

  This degree of uncertainty on the part of the commandos explains their

  readiness to adjust to the new and far more radical approach to Jewish persecution

  in the East that had been pursued by the SS leadership since July. Indeed, it

  explains how their commitment towards the success of this new approach,

  involving a high degree of initiative on their own account, tentatively in July,

  but thereafter massively, especially in August and September, contributed towards

  its breakthrough. The Einsatzkommandos, now considerably strengthened in

  terms of personnel, started to expand the range of the executions by murdering

  women and children, whilst at the same time collaborating with the military and

  civil authorities to confine the survivors of these massacres in ghettos. In this

  manner rural districts in particular were rendered ‘free of Jews’. Because the

  survivors were often absorbed into the labour force by the German authorities,

  the goal of the complete annihilation of the Jewish minority was initially post-

  poned, but only until 1942.

  The step-by-step implementation of the annihilation policies included a com-

  plementary role for Jewish ghettos. 30 These began to be set up from the second half of July onwards, initially primarily in order to keep the Jewish population

  under control, to free up living space (principally in devastated cities), and to gain

  the capacity to set up Jewish labour gangs for clearing operations and the like. At

  the same time Jews could thereby also be excluded from participation in the

  economic life of their communities. Just as with the occupation of Poland, the

  formation of ghettos was by no means a standardized procedure.

  At first ghettos were set up in response to pressure from the Wehrmacht. The

  economic staff of the Wehrmacht was demanding the immediate ghettoization of

  the Jews in the occupied Eastern territories as early as 14 July. 31 A meeting between the head of the Military High Command’s armaments section, Georg Thomas,

  and the state secretary for the Four-Year Plan, Paul Körner, on 31 July came to a

  similar conclusion: ‘quarter the Jews in barracks and use them in units as labour

  gangs’. 32 Nevertheless, the Army High Command did not issue the order that recommended the establishment of ghettos until 19 August, and then under

  certain conditions. The commanders of the Rear Army Areas North, Central,

  and South gave differing instructions in this respect. 33

  Alfred Rosenberg, the Reich Minister for the Eastern Territories, had described

  the ‘establishment of ghettos and labour gangs’ as the ‘key solution’ to the ‘Jewish

  problem’ in a directive for the Reichskommissar for the Ukraine, who had yet to

  be appointed, 34 and the civilian administration was similarly demanding the formation of ghettos in many towns. 35 The Einsatzgruppen were just as strongly From Anti-Semitic Terror to Genocide

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  in favour, too. A plan for the establishment of ghettos in Kaunas and Minsk36 by Einsatzgruppen A and B can be found in the incident reports for mid-July. The

  Minsk ghetto was in fact set up on the orders of the Field Commandant dated 19

  July, and that in Kaunas was sealed on 15 August. 37

  It was also in mid-July that Einsatzgruppe B—which had described the ‘solution

  to the Jewish question during the war’ as ‘impossible’ in the old Soviet areas—

  suggested the establishment of Jewish councils in all cities, in order to identify

  Jews and deploy them for the purposes of forced labour, but above all to set up

  ghettos across the whole area: in fact, the ‘implementation of this task’ was

  ‘ongoing’. 38 The same group reported further success at the end of July:39 ‘where it was necessary and possible, and with the agreement of the responsible local and

  field command posts, ghettos were being set up, councils of Jewish elders formed,

  the visible identification of Jews implemented and work gangs established, etc.’

  Einsatzgruppe D evidently also did not see the ‘solution to the Jewish question’

  at the end of August 1941 in the immediate and total annihilation of the Jews, as

  can be seen in an incident report from the 25th of that month:40 ‘the solution to one of the most important problems, the Jewish question, has also been tackled,

  even if tentatively. In Kishinev there were 60,000–80,000 Jews before the war. . . .

  On the initiative of the Einsatzkommando the Romanian town commandant set

  up a Jewish ghetto in the old town. This currently comprises some 9,000 Jews.

  They have been formed into work gangs and set to work for various German and

  Romanian agencies on clearing and other operations.’

  The same Einsatzgruppe reported at the beginning of October that ‘the first part

  of the Jewish question has been solved’. The nature of this ‘solution’ emerges from

  the remainder of the report, and consisted in the registration and marking-out of

  Jews, the formation of Jewish councils, ghettoization, and enforced labour. 41

  The establishment of ghettos, the ‘first part’ of the ‘solution to the Jewish />
  question’, was thus a provisional measure in the eyes of the Einsatzgruppen,

  which was initially planned only for the duration of the war. This explains why

  the Einsatzgruppen both extended the range of the murders during the summer to

  include women and children, making whole districts ‘free of Jews’ and, at the same

  time, took measures that were aimed at preserving part of the Jewish population.

  It was still the case that, from their perspective, the ‘Final Solution’ to the ‘Jewish

  question’—the complete annihilation of the Jews—had been postponed until after

  the war. They were still mainly concerned with murdering as many of those Jews

  who were not capable of work as possible. Ghettos played an important part in

  this approach because they achieved the necessary degree of control over the

  Jewish workforce, which for the moment the authorities were unwilling to dis-

  pense with. This view gradually prevailed during the summer of 1941 in place of

  the previous approach, which favoured selective terrorization of the Jewish lead-

  ership, and was still predominant during the autumn and winter of 1941 to 1942.

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  Mass Executions in Occupied Soviet Zones, 1941

  At that point, and with massive acceleration from spring 1942, there followed a

  third phase in which the population of the ghettos was selectively screened and

  murdered, and in which whatever remained of the Jewish population living

  outside the ghettos was traced and killed in so-called ‘cleansing campaigns’ that

  were generally described as anti-partisan measures. This third phase will be

  described in a later chapter. 42

  Himmler’s ‘Mission’ and the Deployment

  of the SS Brigades

  As the original ‘security policing’ approach to the ‘Jewish question’—a selective

  campaign of terror—was replaced by policies aiming at total ethnic annihilation,

  the SS Brigades under the command of the Higher SS and Police Commanders for

  Russia South and Russia Centre played a decisive role at the end of July and in

  early August. The mass murders perpetrated by these formations attained new

  dimensions of horror and made the whole process of annihilation considerably