The methodical nature of the activities of the Germans can also be demon-
strated using the example of the annihilation of the Jews in Vilnius, where all the
inhabitants of the ghetto except a tiny core of specialist workers were systemat-
ically killed over a period of a few months. At the beginning of September, a major
series of arrests was made and 3,700 men, women, and children were shot in the
woods at Ponary; the surviving Jewish population was resettled into two new
ghettos. During September further shootings took place and thousands more were
killed. On 1 October, the day of Yom Kippur, several thousand men were taken out
of the ghetto and shot, mostly those who were not registered as specialist workers.
In the middle of October the so-called Small Ghetto was dissolved and some
15,000 people murdered. Towards the end of the month the occupants of the
Large Ghetto who were fit for work were transferred into the Small Ghetto
and those who remained were shot in two ‘operations’ by the beginning of
November, which cost 8,000 and 3,000 lives respectively. On 20 and 21 December
those without identity papers to confirm that they were skilled workers or their
dependents were shot—a total of 15,000 people. 125
In Jäger’s report for 1 December the situation in Lithuania is described thus: ‘I
can confirm today that the goal of solving the Jewish problem in Lithuania has
been achieved by Einsatzkommando 3. There are no more Jews in Lithuania
except worker Jews and their families. That makes: in Šiauliai c.4,500, in Kaunas,
c.15,000, in Vilnius, c.15,000.’126 Jäger added, as if by way of apology, ‘I also wished to bump off these worker Jews and their families but this was strongly resisted by
the civilian administration (the Reichskommissar) and the Wehrmacht and pro-
voked the following ban: these Jews and their families must not be shot.’ By the
end of November Jäger gave a total figure for those murdered in the General
Region of Lithuania of 125,000 people, overwhelmingly Jews.
At the end of October the rural areas of Latvia were also ‘wholly cleansed’ of
Jews. The survivors were imprisoned in the ghettos of Liepāja (Libau), Daugavpils
(Dünaburg), and Riga, where the enforced resettlement was only completed at the
end of that month. In November and December the Latvian Jews were also almost
wholly annihilated in a series of large-scale ‘ghetto operations’. First of all,
between 7 and 9 November, at least 3,000 Jews were murdered in the Daugavpils
ghetto, where similar ‘operations’ had already taken place in August and Septem-
ber. 127 Friedrich Jeckeln, who had just been made Higher SS and Police Commander for Russia North and who, when he had held the same office in Russia
South, had been responsible for the death of an estimated 100,000 Jews, claimed to
have received an explicit order directly from Himmler on or around 10 November
to liquidate the ghetto in Riga. On Jeckeln’s orders, during Riga’s Bloody Sunday
on 29–30 November, more than 10,000 people were shot outside Riga near the
Extension of Shootings to Whole Jewish Population
237
railway station at Rumbuli. Previously, Jeckeln had had 4,500 working Jews
separated from the rest and put into a separate area of the ghetto, the ‘Small
Ghetto’. In a second major ‘operation’ on 8 and 9 December—also at Rumbuli—
the total of Jewish victims from Riga rose to 27,800, on Jeckeln’s own admission. 128
In Liepāja between 15 and 17 December a further 2,350 Jews were murdered, which
meant the whole population of the ghetto except for 350 craftsmen. 129
Of only 4,500 Jews living in Estonia the invading army had merely encountered
some 2,000. The male Jews above the age of 16 and the female Jews fit for work and
between 16 and 60 were imprisoned in provisional camps and most of the men
were shot. Einsatzgruppe A reported from Estonia as early as October that ‘the
rural communities are now already free of Jews’. 130 In February the women and children in a camp near Pskov (Pleskau) who had not been detailed for forced
labour were also murdered on the instructions of Higher SS and Police Com-
mander Jeckeln. 131
In the areas of Belarus under civilian administration the ‘major operations’
aimed at women, men, and children began in October. They were carried out by a
sub-unit of Einsatzkommando 6, the Commando of the Security Police Minsk
(formerly Einsatzkommando 1b), the Order Police and the Wehrmacht. 132 They began initially with the ‘cleansing’ of the ‘flat land’. For this purpose, according to
a report by the division commander, Reserve Police Battalion 11, which was part of
the 707th Security Division, was deployed for a ‘major operation’ between 8 and 15
October 1941 ‘under the command of the Intelligence Office at Minsk’. This
involved shooting more than 2,000 people in Smilovichi in Rudensk and other
Belarusian towns—people who had been labelled ‘partisans, Communists, Jews
and other suspicious rabble’. The battalion was supported by two companies of
Lithuanian auxiliary police, the Secret Field Police and the Engineers’ Company of
the 707th Division. The reports and orders signed off at the same time by the
divisional commander are very clear with respect to the treatment of Jews in the
‘area to be secured’: they talk of ‘annihilation’ and ‘extermination’. The statement
made by the battalion leader in 1960 that he received the order for the ‘operation’
from the staff of the 707th Division therefore seems perfectly credible. 133 At the same time that this series of mass murders was being carried out, a sub-unit of
Einsatzkommando 3 murdered more than 3,000 Jews in the areas around Minsk
and Borisov. 134
Following the ‘major operation’ in the area of Smilovichi, members of the
battalion shot ‘1,000 Jews and Communists’ in the city of Koydanava (now
Dzerzhinsk) on 21 October (again with the support of the Lithuanians). There
exists a report by the Regional Commissioner, Heinrich Carl, concerning the
deployment of the battalion on 27 October in Slutsk, which the Commissar
General in Minsk, Kube, was to use as the occasion to petition the Reichskom-
missar Eastland for disciplinary proceedings to be initiated against all the officers
of the battalion. 135 In his report Carl describes how, on the morning of the 27th, an 238
Mass Executions in Occupied Soviet Zones, 1941
officer of Reserve Police Battalion 11 announced to him the order to liquidate of all
the Jews in the city. The battalion command had disregarded his energetic protest
that the vast majority of the Jews there were irreplaceable skilled workers. The
deputy commander of the unit had explained, he said, that ‘he had received the
order from the commander to free the whole city from Jews, making no excep-
tions, as they had in other towns. This cleansing was to happen for political
reasons, and economic factors had never played any part at all.’
The order was implemented despite Carl’s protest and his report describes it as
being carried out with ‘what amounted to sadism. . . . During the operation the city
itself presented a terrifying picture. With indescribable brutality on the part of the
German police and in particular of the
Lithuanian partisans, the Jewish people
and some Belarusians were fetched out of their houses and herded together. There
were gunshots ringing out across the whole city and the bodies of murdered Jews
were piled up in the streets. . . . Many times I had to force the German police and
Lithuanian partisans out of workshops literally at gunpoint, using my revolver.’
Furthermore, ‘the police battalion engaged in looting during the operation in an
outrageous manner . . . not only in Jewish houses but in the houses of the Belar-
usians too. They took with them everything usable, such as boots, leather, textiles,
gold and other valuables.’ Carl concluded his report, ‘Please grant me only one
wish: “Protect me from this police battalion in future!”.’136
On 30 October Police Battalion 11 undertook a further ‘operation’ in Kletsk. The
situation report by the Commandant in Belarus for the first half of October
concludes its comments on this ‘cleansing operation in the area of Slutsk-Kletsk’
by saying that ‘5,900 Jews were shot’. 137 At the beginning of November the battalion was removed from the formation of the 707th Division and assigned
again to Police Regiment Centre. 138
The massacres in the General Commissariat of Belarus reached a temporary
apogee in the major ‘operation’ in Minsk in which, between 7 and 11 November,
the Commando of the Minsk Security Police shot on its own reckoning 6,624 Jews
from the ghetto there. 139 On 20 November and 10 and 11 December, the same group committed two further massacres in which 5,000 and 2,000 people were
killed respectively. 140 In the period around 13 November, of the 16,000 Jews in the city and the district of Slonim all but 7,000 previously selected skilled workers
were murdered by the Security Police and the SD. The District Commissar
responsible for this mass murder, Gert Erren, reported that ‘the operation . . . freed
me from unnecessary mouths to feed and the 7,000 or so Jews that are still present
in the city of Slonim are all bound into the labour process, are working willingly
because they are under constant threat of death and will be checked over and
sorted for further reduction in the spring’. 141
These examples show that the police battalions could be deployed for mass
shootings of Jewish civilians under very different command structures. The
battalions were either deployed in the context of a police regiment, sent in as
Extension of Shootings to Whole Jewish Population
239
support for Einsatzkommandos, or used for ‘special operations’ or ‘major oper-
ations’ by the Higher SS and Police Commander in which case for the duration of
the relevant ‘operation’ their subordination to a security division was suspended.
It sometimes happened, however, that police battalions undertook such ‘oper-
ations’ precisely within the context of a security division, as the example of
Reserve Police Battalion 11 makes clear.
In the activity report of Einsatzgruppe A for November 1941 the situation in the
whole of Reich Commissariat Eastland is described thus: ‘The Jewish question in
the Eastland should be regarded as solved. Large-scale executions have decimated
the Jewish population and the remaining Jews have been ghettoized. Special
measures have so far been necessary only for individual Jews who have been
able to escape the grasp of the Security Police.’142
The Role of the Local Voluntary Troops
(Schutzmannschaften)
The murder of hundreds of thousands of civilians in the newly occupied territories
during the first months of the war was only possible because the Germans
succeeded in recruiting willing executioners for their policies of racial annihilation
from the indigenous populations of the areas that had been conquered.
After German agencies had begun to set up auxiliary police formations in the
occupied zones during the first few weeks of the war, 143 Himmler gave an order on 25 July 1941 to set up ‘voluntary troop formations’. 144 These units were to be made up of Ukrainians, Balts, and Belarusians, but only men who had not been conscripted into the Red Army or non-Communist prisoners of war. 145 At the end of July 1941 the head of the Order Police, Kurt Daluege, decreed that these new
formations would be called ‘local voluntary troops’ or Schutzmannschaften, and
be run by reliable officers or sergeants from the German police. 146
In Lithuania and Latvia, such voluntary troop units were formed from the
local partisan units and auxiliary formations that had come together in the first
phase of the occupation as early as August. Ukrainian voluntary troops can be
documented from October 1941; Belarusian and Estonian from the beginning of
1942.147 According to the head of the Order Police, Daluege, at the end of 1941
there were in the Reich Commissariat Eastland 31,652 local volunteers and 14,452
in the Ukraine. In the course of 1942 these forces would grow to a strength of
more than 300,000. Such troops therefore became one of the most important
organs of containment and repression within the German occupying forces and
played an indispensable role in the persecution of the Jews. 148 Whilst these bodies were initially recruited exclusively from volunteers, during 1942 more
240
Mass Executions in Occupied Soviet Zones, 1941
and more pressure was put on the male members of local populations to join
these units. 149
Usually a distinction was made between local volunteer troops on individual
duties (in other words attached as auxiliaries to the local German police author-
ities) and battalions of volunteer troops, 150 which were mobile reserves that were often deployed outside their local areas. 151 In addition to guard and containment duties volunteer troops were mainly deployed in mass executions of Jews and
Communists, or for ‘cleansing’ and partisan ‘operations’ whose victims were
usually Jews who were under general suspicion as ‘supporters of armed gangs’.
There is detailed documentation for the participation of Lithuanian Volunteer
Battalion no. 12, which was under the immediate command of the German
Reserve Police Battalion 11, in the mass murders perpetrated by this unit in
Belarus—and in particular for its participation in the massacres of Smilovichi,
Rudensk, Koydanava, and Slutsk in October and November 1941. 152
Murders of the Mentally Ill, Gypsies, and ‘Asians’
The mass murder of the Jews in the newly occupied areas is at the heart of policies
of racial annihilation, but other groups also fell victim to them, notably the
mentally ill, the Gypsies, and so-called ‘Asians’.
As had been the case in Poland in 1939 and 1940, the inmates of medical and
care institutions in the newly occupied areas were also murdered in huge num-
bers. 153 Murders of this type can be documented for all four Einsatzgruppen.
Einsatzgruppe A, for example, murdered patients in a Lithuanian asylum in
Aglona on 22 August 1941 (claiming 544 victims), 154 in asylums in Mariampole (also in Lithuania) and Mogutovo, near Luga (with 204 victims in total), 155 and in mental homes in Riga and Jelgava (Mitau), where 237 mentally ill Jews were
murdered. 156 Einsatzgruppe B also participated in such murders, as the incident report of 9 October 1941 indicates: ‘in Chernigov the mad will be treated in the
usual way. In Minsk 6
32 mentally ill patients were given special treatment, and in
Mogilev 836. ’157
After September 1941, Einsatzgruppe B, under the command of the head of the
Reich Criminal Bureau Artur Nebe, began to look for alternative methods for
murdering the inhabitants of the asylums. In Minsk there was an attempt made by
the Institute for Criminological Technology in September to use explosives to
murder the inmates; shortly afterwards in Mogilev asylum inmates were mur-
dered using vehicle exhaust fumes. On the basis of such experiments those
responsible made a decision to use gas as the method of choice, which, as part
of the ‘euthanasia’ programme, had already been responsible for the deaths of tens
of thousands of people. Gas vans such as those that had been deployed by Sonder-
kommando Lange in the Warthegau since the beginning of 1940 were now
Extension of Shootings to Whole Jewish Population
241
commissioned for use in the occupied Eastern areas. The murder of the mentally
ill in Mogilev using gas in October 1941 is an important step in the transfer of
killing techniques that had been developed in the context of the ‘euthanasia’
programme to the systematic murder of the Jews. 158
All the commandos of Einsatzgruppe C can also be shown to have murdered
the sick. In September 1941, at the request of the local commander’s office in
Vasilkov, Sonderkommando 4a shot 200 Jews but also a number of mentally ill
women; a sub-commando of the same unit shot 270 mentally ill patients on 24
October in Chernigov, 159 Sonderkommando 4b shot 599 inmates from the Poltava asylum at the beginning of November, 160 and Einsatzkommando 5 murdered 300
mentally ill Jews on 18 October in Kiev. 161 The incident reports say of Einsatzkommando 6 that ‘by 12 November 1941’ it had shot ‘800 of a total of 1,160
mentally disordered inmates of the asylum of Igrin near Dnepropetrovsk. 162
Murders of asylum inmates by Einsatzgruppe D during 1942 are widely documen-
ted. 163
Prisoners of war and civilians who in the eyes of the Einsatzgruppe troops had
an ‘Asiatic’ appearance also fell victim to the policies of annihilation. 164 The Soviet Commissars had already been described in the ‘Guidelines for the Treatment of
Holocaust: The Nazi Persecution and Murder of the Jews Page 43
