said, had spoken with Heydrich and then confirmed that this order came directly
from Hitler. Streckenbach corroborated this version of the sequence of events in his
testimony after the war. Schulz’s response was to ask to be replaced, a request that
was granted. 57
The murder by Einsatzkommando 5 of every single inhabitant of a town,
including women and children, can be documented for the first time for the
middle of September 1941 (in other words probably following the departure of
Schulz). On 15 September, as an incident report explains, the town of Boguslav was
made ‘free of Jews’ ‘via the execution of 322 Jews and 13 Communist functionar-
ies’. 58 On 22 and 23 September Einsatzkommando 5 carried out a ‘major operation’
in Uman in which, according to their own report, 1,412 Jews were shot. 59 In Cybulov, on 25 September, 70 Jews were shot; 537 Jews (men, women, and
young people) were shot on 4 October in Pereyaslav; and shortly thereafter in
Koshchevatoye ‘all the Jews in the town’ were executed. 60
On the basis of the generalized order to murder issued in August, the number of
the people killed by Einsatzkommando 5 increased considerably. For the period
between 7 September and 5 October, the commando reported that ‘207 political
functionaries, 112 saboteurs and looters, as well as 8,800 Jews had been liquid-
ated’. 61 A few weeks later, the Commando reported that ‘as of 20 October 1941, the number of those executed by Einsatzkommando 5 came to 15,110’. 62
Einsatzkommando 6 (sub-unit Kronberger) began shooting Jewish women
in October in Krivoi-Rog after Himmler had inspected it on 3 October. 63 On 20 October, Krivoi-Rog was declared ‘free of Jews’. In the incident report
of 19 November Einsatzkommando 6 stated that ‘1,000 further Jews had been
shot’. 64
226
Mass Executions in Occupied Soviet Zones, 1941
From the beginning of August onwards, Sonderkommando 4a shot women in
large numbers in the area around Zhitomir, and shortly thereafter also children. 65
In Bila Zerkva, too, 500 men and women were shot on 8 or 9 August by the
vanguard of Sonderkommando 4a designated for Kiev. The Jewish children who
had initially been abandoned in a school building to fend for themselves were shot
on 19 and 22 August by the members of Sonderkommando 4a. The second round
of shootings could only take place after the Commander in Chief of the 6th Army,
von Reichenau, had intervened and lifted a ban on shooting children that had
been imposed by the staff of an infantry division. 66 According to commando reports, before the end of August in Fastov ‘the entire Jewish population aged
between 12 and 60, 252 in all, were shot’. 67 In Radomyshl on 6 September, a further 1,668 Jewish men, women and children were executed. 68 In Zhitomir, where they were based and where a ghetto had been established, Sonderkommando 4a
proceeded to murder all Jewish inhabitants regardless of age or sex. After multiple
mass executions in the second half of August that claimed several thousand lives,
3,145 Jews were shot in the course of liquidating the ghetto on 19 September 1941,
according to the commando’s own report. 69 By 24 August Sonderkommando 4a had shot 7,152 people in all, again according to its own reports. 70
Police Battalion 45, which was part of Police Regiment South, began to murder
Jews regardless of their age or sex at the end of July and at the beginning of
August. The first victims were the entire Jewish population of the town of
Shepetovka, where the Battalion had been based between 26 July and 1 August
1941. According to the account of Battalion Commander Besser made after the
war, this meant some 40 to 50 men and women, but in reality this figure was
probably significantly higher. 71 Besser claimed to have been acting on orders from the Commander of the Police Regiment South, who in turn had referred to a
general order for liquidation issued by Himmler. 72
In the following weeks the Battalion repeated this pattern in other Ukrainian
villages. It murdered Jewish men and women in Slavuta (according to the declar-
ation of Higher SS and Police Commander for Russia South this came to 522
people), 73 in Sudylkov (471 dead) and in Berdichev (where there were 1,000
victims). 74 When Besser’s successor, Rosenbauer, was being briefed on his tasks as Battalion Commander by the Higher SS and Police Commander for Russia
South, Jeckeln, according to his own testimony he was given very clear instruc-
tions: ‘Jeckeln said that there was an order from Reichsführer SS Himmler that
would be the basis for solving the Jewish question. The Ukrainians would become
a slave population working only for us. We had no interest, however, in letting the
Jews multiply, so the Jewish population had to be exterminated. ’75
Police Battalion 314, which was likewise part of Police Regiment South, was also
shooting women and children as early as July. This can be documented for the first
time in the case of a company of the Battalion on 22 July in a town near Kovel: the
Extension of Shootings to Whole Jewish Population
227
private diary of a member of the Battalion states that on that day 217 people,
among them entire families, had been shot. 76
In December 1941 the Higher SS and Police Commander for Russia South
organized the murder of the Jews of Kharkov—Jeckeln’s successor, Prützmann,
was represented by Korsemann who had been chosen to become Higher SS and
Police Commander for the Caucasus. Sonderkommando 4a and Police Battalion
314 shot between 12,000 and 15,000 Jews. 77 Further massacres followed in Stalino (on 9 January), Kramatorsk (on 26 January), Artemovsk (also in January), and
Zaporozhe (in March 1942). 78
Einsatzgruppe D
The way Einsatzgruppe D acted continued to be determined by the Judenpolitik of
Germany’s Romanian allies. From the end of July on, Romanian troops were
expelling tens of thousands of Jews from the reconquered areas of Bessarabia and
the Bukovina over the Dniester and into Soviet territory under German occupa-
tion. Einsatzgruppe D had been assigned to drive the Jews back again. In this
context it also began to include women and children in the shootings. 79 The fact that the Jews expelled from Hungary had been murdered on a hitherto unprecedented scale by Jeckeln at the end of August in Kamenetsk-Podolsk, leaving some
23,600 dead, will also have had repercussions for the manner in which Einsatz-
gruppe D acted.
The shooting of women and children in the area of Einsatzgruppe D is documen-
ted for the first time for the period at the end of August. On or around 29 August, in
the region of Yampol, Einsatzkommando 12 shot several hundred women and
children from a convoy of more than 11,000 people, which the commando was
driving over the Dniester bridge into Romanian-occupied territory. 80
Shortly thereafter, at least three, but probably all four of the commandos of
Einsatzgruppe D began the systematic murder of the entire Jewish population of a
number of villages. The decisive order for the transition to this new stage of mass
murder came at the end of August or the beginning of September from Otto
Ohlendorf. Gustav Nosske, who was leader of Einsatzkommando 12, stated on this
point in 1969 that around the beginning of September, Ohlendorf, together
with
Rasch, the Leader of Einsatzgruppe C, visited him and revealed ‘that there is now
an order from the Führer according to which all Jews are to be killed indiscrim-
inately’. Until that point, he said, murders of Jews had been carried out ‘only in the
context of a general order for the security and pacification of the area behind the
lines’. 81
A report of Einsatzgruppe D for September 1941 reflects this new modus
operandi. It states that ‘the majority of our forces have been employed for the
purposes of political pacification in places that showed evidence of incipient
Jewish and communist terrorist groups, especially in the area of Ananyev and
228
Mass Executions in Occupied Soviet Zones, 1941
Dubăsari. In this area pacification was carried out extremely thoroughly.’82 The German ‘pacification operations’83 were predicated on the way the Romanian occupying powers were operating: they had begun using camps and ghettos to
imprison the 150,000 to 200,000 Jews who had remained in Transnistria and the
approximately 135,000 Jews who had been systematically deported from Bess-
arabia and the Bukovina into this area. Moreover, Jeckeln’s massacre of 23,600
Jews deported from Hungary in Kamenetsk-Podolsk took place relatively close to
Einsatzgruppe D’s area of operation and will have had a radicalizing effect on its
attitude.
In fact, by ‘extremely thorough’ pacification Einsatzgruppe D meant the mur-
der of the entire population of both villages. On 28 August in Ananyev, Sonder-
kommando 10b ‘shot about 300 Jewish men and women’, 84 or in other words all the Jews who had arrived in the town. 85 It then split into smaller sub-units that carried out murders in other places. 86 A sub-unit of Einsatzkommando 12 that had halted in Dubăsari at the end of August or early September killed small groups of
Jews there virtually every day. 87 In mid-September on the other hand, the sub-unit first murdered all of the approximately 1,500 Jewish inhabitants of the town and
then a few days later a further 1,000 Jews from the nearby areas. Drexel, the sub-
unit leader, testified on this point that he had received orders from a member of
the staff of Ohlendorf’s group ‘to shoot the Jews living in Dubăsari’. 88
Sonderkommando 10a carried out an execution in Berezovka, also probably in
September, in which 200 Jewish men, women, and children were killed. The
presence at this ‘operation’ of the commander of Einsatzgruppe D, Ohlendorf, is
documented. 89 The deputy leader of the commando, Otto-Ernst Prast, stated under interrogation in 1965 that shortly before these executions his unit, which
was already in Berezovka, had been told of an ‘order from the Führer’ for the
comprehensive shooting of all Jews. A second lieutenant from the same unit
testified that Ohlendorf and Seetzen, the leader of Sonderkommando 10a, had
announced in Berezovka that ‘from now on the Jewish question is going to be
solved and that means liquidation’. 90
In September 1941 the main body of Einsatzgruppe D crossed the River Bug and
thus left the Romanian zone of influence, the area called ‘Transnistria’ between the
Dniester and the Bug. At the end of September, Sonderkommando 11a, together
with a sub-unit of the Einsatzkommando 12 and probably with support from
Sonderkommando 11b, shot all the inhabitants of the ghetto in Nikolayev, where
the headquarters of the staff of Einsatzgruppe D was now located. This involved
some 5,000 women, men, and children. 91 At around the same time, probably a few days later, the entire Jewish population of Kherson was murdered by Sonderkommando 11a. 92
The mass executions of Ananyev, Dubăsari, Nikolayev, and Kherson that took
place between the end of August and the end of September marked the transition
to the undifferentiated murder of the Jewish civilian population in the area under
Extension of Shootings to Whole Jewish Population
229
Einsatzgruppe D. In this instance, too, Himmler personally inspected the mass
murders: for the period from 30 September until 6 October, we have evidence that
Himmler carried out an inspection tour in the Ukraine in which he also visited
Nikolayev and Kherson, so that it is clear that he was present in both places either
during or directly after the mass executions. 93
In the conclusion to its incident report for 26 September Einsatzgruppe D
reported: ‘Commando’s sphere of operations made free of Jews: from 19 August
to 15 October, 8,890 Jews and Communists executed. Total number: 13,315. Cur-
rently the Jewish question in Nikolayev and Kherson is being solved. About 5,000
Jews were dealt with. ’94 About a week later, the report states: ‘the commandos have continued to clear the area of Jews and Communist elements. In particular,
the cities of Nikolayev and Kherson have been freed of Jews and functionaries still
present were dealt with accordingly.’95
At this point, October 1941, Sonderkommando 11b was still in the Romanian
zone of occupation west of the Bug to take part in the conquest of Odessa that was
eventually achieved on 16 October. When a Soviet commando that had remained
behind in the city blew up the headquarters set up by the Romanian army a week
later, the Romanians reacted by carrying out a massacre of the Jews of Odessa that
probably claimed 40,000 victims. The Sonderkommando played its part in this
massacre by carrying out the mass execution of hostages. 96
Einsatzgruppe D continued its mass murders in the months that followed. In
the first half of October it reported that ‘the areas newly occupied by the
commandos have been rendered free of Jews’. 97 In the Einsatzgruppe’s October report it claimed: ‘the solution of the Jewish question has been energetically
undertaken by the Security Police Einsatzgruppen and the SD, in particular in
the area east of the Dnieper. The areas newly occupied by the commandos have
been made free of Jews. In the process 4,891 Jews were liquidated. In other places
the Jews have been marked out and registered. This made it possible to put labour
gangs of up to 1,000 strong at the disposal of the Wehrmacht offices.’98
Various massacres by Sonderkommando 10a can also be documented in detail.
This unit shot the whole of the Jewish population of the city of Melitopol in mid-
October; a few days later, on 18 and 19, it murdered all 8,000 Jewish inhabitants of
Mariupol and a week after that the Jewish population of Taganrog, some 1,800
people. 99 In December Sonderkommando 11b murdered the Jewish population of Karasubasar, Alushta, and Eupatoria. 100 In November and December Sonderkommando 10b murdered the Jewish inhabitants of Skadovsk, Feodosia, Kertsh,
and Dzhankoy. 101
In November, Ohlendorf moved his staff to Simferopol in the Crimea. On
9 December it and Sonderkommando 11b murdered the 1,500 Krymchaks living in
the city (these were a Muslim group that the SS categorized as ‘Jewish’), and
between 11 and 15 December, assisted by members of two police reserve battalions,
they murdered the entire Jewish population of the city. 102
230
Mass Executions in Occupied Soviet Zones, 1941
However, it was not only the SS and Police units that had been dispatched from
the Reich into the Soviet Union that had begun the systematic murder of the
major par
t of the Jewish population across a wide area in the autumn of 1941.
Romanians and ethnic Germans in the Romanian area of influence, Transnistria,
also pursued the same goals. Between December 1941 and February 1942 the
Romanians murdered at least 70,000 Jews in ghettos as part of the bloody
‘clearance’ of the county of Golta. 103 A militia composed of ethnic Germans also played a considerable role in the murders in Transnistria: it was guided in its
activities by a Sonderkommando of the SS Ethnic Germans’ Office that had been
sent to Transnistria to protect ethnic Germans. The Germans in Transnistria
murdered more than 28,000 Jews in the winter of 1941–2 alone. 104
The Reich Commissariat Eastland (Einsatzgruppe A)
Transition to Shooting Women and Children
Einsatzkommando 3 and Einsatzkommando Tilsit both began to shoot women
and children at the end of July and the beginning of August. For Einsatzkom-
mando 2 this seems to have taken place during the month of August.
The comprehensive report of the leader of Einsatzkommando 3, Jäger, shows
that from the very beginning women were also being shot in the executions
carried out by this Einsatzkommando in Lithuania, although in far fewer numbers
than men. 105 At this point the shooting of women was regarded as justified when there was even a vague suspicion that they were involved in Communist activity or
connected with the partisans. A fundamental change can be observed, however, as
in the case of other commandos, in the month of August. According to the Jäger
report, ‘in cooperation with Lithuanian partisans’, Einsatzkommando 3 shot 213
Jewish men and 66 Jewish women in Rassainiai on 5 August. A few days later,
between 9 August and 16 August, it shot ‘294 Jewish women, 4 Jewish children’ in
the same place. It is also noteworthy that for 15 and 16 August the shooting of a
total of ‘3,200 Jewish men, Jewish women, and Jewish children’ in Rokiskis is
reported. Not only is this number far higher than for previous executions, but also
the summary form of the report (without the distinction hitherto made between
women, men, and children) indicates a new procedure. It thus seems likely that
between 5 August and 16 August at the latest, the commando charged with
Holocaust: The Nazi Persecution and Murder of the Jews Page 41
