Holocaust: The Nazi Persecution and Murder of the Jews
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appropriate simply to align the Wehrmacht with the death squads of the Police
and the SS without further differentiation. It is much more important to stress
precisely the distinctive functions of the Police and the SS on the one hand as
bodies inflicting terror and aiming at the annihilation of the Jews and the
Wehrmacht on the other as a military organization. At the same time, however,
it is vital not to lose sight of the functional interplay of these different remits
within the context of the war of annihilation. The basis for the division of
functions between the Wehrmacht and the SS/Police is of particular importance
here: as a matter of principle the military left the mass murder of Communists and
Jews to Himmler’s forces. This distinction in principle still pertained even if it was
treated very flexibly in practice. Thus, just as formations of the SS and Police could
be used for front-line duties, Wehrmacht units and military agencies frequently
participated in, and even helped organize, the ‘cleansing operations’ behind the
front line.
In any discussion of how to assess the role of the Wehrmacht in the murder of
the European Jews it is important not to underestimate the fact that the division
of responsibilities in principle was much more significant than the participation of
Extension of Shootings to Whole Jewish Population
247
individual Wehrmacht units in specific ‘operations’ whose extent is sometimes
difficult to ascertain. However, because the Wehrmacht leadership declared itself
satisfied with the basic principles of the ideological war and permitted a second
war against the civilian population behind its front line, it too, bears the respon-
sibility for implementing the Holocaust.
The Fate of Jewish and Non-Jewish Prisoners of War
From the very earliest stages, the policies for annihilating the Jewish population of
the Soviet Union particularly affected the Jewish soldiers of the Red Army. They
were amongst those groups of prisoners who were separated out in the camps and
liquidated as a matter of course. The relevant orders from the Reichsführer SS
have been preserved. In Deployment Order no. 8 from 17 July 1941 Heydrich
instructed the commanders of the Security Police in the General Government and
the Gestapo in East Prussia to detach special Einsatzkommandos to comb the
prisoner-of-war camps in those areas. 202 These commandos were to conduct a
‘political monitoring of all inmates’ and separate out certain groups of prisoners,
including state and Party functionaries, Red Army commissars, leading economic
figures, ‘members of the intelligentsia’, ‘agitators’, and, quite specifically, ‘all Jews’.
Heydrich had already come to an agreement with the Prisoner of War Depart-
ment of the Armed Forces High Command about separating out the different
groups of prisoners that were mentioned in the annex to Deployment Order no. 8.
The whole tenor of these guidelines is marked by the conception of an ideological
war of annihilation; they oblige the commandants of the prisoner-of-war camps to
work closely with the Einsatzkommandos. The commandants are enjoined in
these guidelines to overcome any doubts they might have about international or
criminal law or any human considerations: the campaign in the East, they claim,
demands ‘special measures that must be carried out free of bureaucratic and
administrative influence by those willing to accept responsibility’. 203 Neither here nor in any other order from the Armed Forces or Army High Commands
is it specifically laid down that the Jewish prisoners were to be handed over to the
Einsatzkommandos; however, the guidelines were formulated such that the camp
commandants were to leave the choice to the commandos. 204
This order was supplemented by Deployment Orders no. 9, dated 21 July, and
no. 14, of 29 October 1941, which instructed the rest of the State Police
headquarters in the Reich and the Einsatzgruppen in the occupied Eastern areas
to detach Sonderkommandos to search the prisoner-of-war camps. 205 Even before such explicit permission had been given, the Einsatzgruppen in the occupied
Eastern areas had already filtered prisoners out of the camps in large numbers,
which would not have been possible without the cooperation of the camp
commandants. 206
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Mass Executions in Occupied Soviet Zones, 1941
The commandos reported the prisoners selected in this way by name to the
Reich Security Head Office, which usually ordered their execution ‘as inconspicu-
ously as possible’. 207 The prisoners screened out within the Reich were executed in concentration camps, by far the majority in a so-called ‘Genickschussanlage’, an
apparatus for shooting people in the back of the neck disguised as a height-
measurement stadiometer. Within the occupied Eastern areas the Einsatzgruppen
had the right to decide which prisoners would be killed, and the executions were
performed by members of the Einsatzgruppen or police battalions. 208 There were many occasions, however, on which a prisoner who had already been selected was
killed by the guard detail itself. 209 On the other hand, however, there is a whole series of examples that demonstrates how the camp commandants attempted to
limit or even prevent the activities of the Einsatzkommandos. 210
The total number of prisoners ‘screened’ and liquidated in this manner is
unknown. Alfred Streim suggests 140,000 victims as a minimum, but estimates
that the true total is ‘considerably higher’. 211 According to the reports of individual screening operations that have been preserved, amongst what were probably
hundreds of thousands of victims of these ‘operations’212 there was a large proportion of Jews. The chronological ‘high point’ for these operations was the
second half of 1941, when the number of captured Red Army members was at its
highest and when the policy of ‘labour deployment’ had not yet been conceived.
From September 1941 onwards, there were also special ‘prisoner of war assess-
ment commissions’ from the Ministry for the East that screened the camps
alongside the commandos from the Security Police. These commissions did not
merely attempt to find those amongst the members of certain racial groups whom
they might win over as collaborators, they also practised ‘negative’ selection in that
they looked for ‘seditious Soviet functionaries, Commissars, Politruks, etc., long-
serving professional soldiers in the Soviet Army, Jews, [and] criminal elements’.
The prisoners of war seized in this manner had to be reported to the camp
commandant for ‘appropriate treatment’, which meant execution. 213
However, prisoners of war who had not been identified as Jews, Communists, or
members of the intelligentsia and who therefore remained in the Wehrmacht’s
camps also fell victim in large numbers to the policies of annihilation. Soviet soldiers
who had surrendered to German troops were often killed on the spot. 214 There is much documentary evidence to show that this practice was widespread. Numerous
orders to Wehrmacht units have been preserved that explicitly demand the taking of
‘no prisoners’, although there are also orders that appealed to the troops to refrain
from indiscriminate shootings. 215 Army Group Centre
described the situation in a report from August 1941 which mentions ‘the corpses of soldiers lying all over the
place after military action, without weapons, with their hands raised and with
injuries inflicted from close range’. 216 How widespread this practice was cannot now be reconstructed: soldiers who were shot by German troops after being taken
prisoner do not appear in any statistics relating to prisoners of war.
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249
This practice can be attributed to the gradual brutalization of the war, but closer
analysis of how prisoners were fed and treated generally shows that the systematic
destruction of Soviet prisoners of war was an integral component of German
policy towards the Soviet Union. Congruently with the hunger strategy that the
German leadership proposed from the very beginning of the war, the mass of Red
Army members captured by the Wehrmacht were never provided with adequate
foodstuffs. 217
Christian Gerlach has reconstructed the decision-making process that led to those
responsible on the German side (Goering, Backe, Quartermaster General Wagner,
and others) taking the conscious decision, as part of the means of addressing the
general food shortages in October 1941, to lower the already meagre rations for non-
working prisoners such that their death by starvation was foreseeable. 218 At a meeting on 16 September 1941 at which problems with food supplies were being discussed,
Goering said that a reduction in the rations for the German population was out of the
question given the ‘mood at home during the war’, and that, on the contrary, rations
should be increased. As a consequence of these priorities, it was unavoidable, he said,
that in the occupied areas the level of nutrition would inevitably decline: ‘on
principle, in the occupied areas only those who are working for us should be fed’.
Provisions for ‘Bolshevist prisoners’ could only be determined ‘in relation to their
work performance for us’. Put more plainly, this meant that those prisoners who
were not working would in future not be fed. 219
Correspondingly, the rations for prisoners of war were massively reduced by the
Quartermaster General in an order dated 21 October 1941.220 The conclusions implied by this approach were drawn by Quartermaster General Wagner at a
heads of department meeting on 13 November 1941: ‘prisoners of war in the
camps who are not working will have to starve. ’221 On the day after that far-reaching order from Wagner, 22 October, Backe informed Goebbels personally that the levels
of sustenance had now reached critical levels; Goebbels’s view was that they would
have to ‘take more rigorous measures in respect of prisoners of war’. 222
Nutrition levels, living conditions in what were mostly very primitive camps
(often they were only fenced-in areas of land where the prisoners had to fend for
themselves in holes in the ground or tents), and the long distances travelled on
foot or in transports in open goods wagons even in winter—all these factors meant
that in the autumn and winter of 1941 the Soviet prisoners of war began to die in
huge numbers. 223 Many were killed as a result of indiscriminate use of arms by camp guards, since the Wehrmacht leadership had practically given those detailed
to guard the Soviet prisoners carte blanche to use their weapons at will. This is
made clear in a quotation from the instruction for the treatment of Soviet
prisoners of war of 8 September 1941:
Thus ruthless and forceful intervention is required given the slightest sign of any form of obstructiveness, especially towards Bolshevist rabble-rousers. Obstructive behaviour and
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Mass Executions in Occupied Soviet Zones, 1941
active or passive resistance must be thoroughly eliminated via the use of the weapon
(bayonet, rifle butt and firearm). . . . With Soviet prisoners of war it is necessary for purely disciplinary reasons to use weapons with particular severity. Anyone who fails to use his weapon in carrying out an order, or who uses it with insufficient force, is liable to
punishment. 224
After the German leadership had taken the decision in October 1941 to use
prisoners of war as forced labour, this did not initially have any direct effects on
the situation of most prisoners. Only a minority of prisoners of war were deployed
for work225 (in March 1942 there were only 167,000; this figure rose to reach 488,000 in October). Improvements in nutrition and accommodation for the
prisoners only filtered through very gradually. The change of direction therefore
came too late for most prisoners: on 1 February 1942 almost 60 per cent of the
3.35 million Soviet prisoners of war who had been captured by then had died. 226
By the end of the war the situation had not improved significantly, even though
more efforts were being made from summer 1943 onwards to use Soviet prisoners
for work details. Of the 5.7 million Red Army members taken prisoner by the
Germans during the war, approximately 3.3 million died. 227
Conclusion
This part has described the inconsistent process taking place over several months
during 1941 whereby a transition occurred from a restricted mode of terrorism
aimed mainly at Jewish men of military age to a strategy of ethnic annihilation.
The decisive turning point that initiated this transition was the mass shooting of
women and children by units and formations of various types; this began as early
as July and August. It should be remembered, too, that, even in the period before
this point, when operations were mostly directed against men, there was no ban in
principle on shooting women and children, too. Jewish women were shot by SS
and Police formations from the very earliest days, singly or in small groups, if they
were seen as in any way ‘suspect’ (i.e. likely to be ‘agents’ or ‘active Communists’).
There is a large quantity of evidence to show that the shooting of women increased
in the second half of July and that, alongside this shift in practice, some children
were also being shot.
It was not the Einsatzkommandos, however, but other SS and Police units that
moved over in late July to the systematic shooting of Jewish women and children
not suspected of any misdeeds but targeted merely because they were Jews. The
two SS Brigades played a precursor role in this. The 1st SS Brigade reported at the
end of July that 800 ‘Jews, male and female, aged between 16 and 60’ had been
shot, and a few days later, that 275 Jewish women had been shot between 3 and 6
August. In total the Brigade is thought to have murdered 7,000 Jewish people by
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251
the middle of August. It can also be established that two Police battalions,
Battalions 45 and 314, carried out the execution of a larger number of women
and children before then, in July. All these units were under the command of
Higher SS and Police Commander for Russia South, Friedrich Jeckeln, under
whom the massacre of 23,600 Jews in Kamenetsk-Podolsk took place at the end of
August. This mass murder can be described as the initial spark for igniting
systematic genocide in the area under the Higher SS and Police Commander for
Russia South. It primarily affected commandos in Einsatzgruppe C, but those in
Einsatzgruppe D were also affected.
The 1st Regiment of the SS Cavalry Brigade, which was under the Higher SS and
Police Commander for Russia Centre, reacted to Himmler’s brutal orders by
shooting women and children from early August on, indeed in some places the
entire Jewish population of a town. The 2nd Regiment initially restricted execu-
tions to Jewish men, but from early September women and children were also
amongst their victims. But it was not only the inclusion of women and children
amongst those shot but the extraordinary number of the victims of the Brigade—
some 25,000 people by the middle of August—that led to the general radicalization
of the process of murder amongst the units in the area under the Higher SS and
Police Commander for Russia Centre, in the course of which police battalions and
Einsatzkommandos also significantly extended their murderous activity.
In a series of cases it can be proved that the Einsatzkommandos that had been
instructed by group staff to increase their rate of murder started shooting
women and children in places where earlier ‘cleansing operations’ had already
claimed the men as their victims or had caused the men to flee. In the case of
Einsatzkommando 9 in Vileyka, for example, it can be shown that the com-
mando leader first cleared it with the Einsatzgruppe’s rearguard support before
he shot women and children, and Sonderkommando 4a took a few days before
deciding to shoot the children who had survived in Bila Zerkva, again with the
backing of the Army Commander. Both instances show that there was no clear
order to shoot women and children in existence from the very beginning, but
that the commandos were confronted with situations by their group staffs,
probably quite deliberately, in which they had to decide for themselves what
the nature of the task they had been charged with actually was. Einsatzkom-
mando Tilsit also shot women, old men, and children at the end of July and in
early August on the Lithuanian border after it had earlier executed the men of
military age in the same towns. Einsatzkommando 3 can be shown to have
started to shoot women and children in the first half of August. These murders,