On August 4 Pvt. Karl Fuchs was convinced that “the battle against these subhumans, who have been whipped into a frenzy by the Jews, was not only necessary but came in the nick of time. Our Führer has saved Europe from certain chaos.”65 A mid-July letter sent by an NCO was equally blunt: “The German people owes a great debt to our Führer, for had these beasts, who are our enemies here, come to Germany, such murders would have taken place as the world has never seen before…. And when one reads the ‘Stürmer’ and looks at the pictures, this is only a weak illustration of what we see here and the crimes committed here by the Jews.”66 While ordinary soldiers probably garnered their views from the common font of anti-Jewish propaganda and popular wisdom, killer units underwent regular indoctrination courses in order to be up to the difficulties of their tasks.67
IV
Before retreating from eastern Galicia, the Soviet Secret Police, the NKVD, unable to deport all the jailed Ukrainian nationalists (and also some Poles and Jews), decided to murder them on the spot. The victims, in the hundreds—possibly in the thousands—were found inside the jails and mainly in hastily dug mass graves when the Germans, accompanied by Ukrainian units, marched into the main towns of the area: Lwov, Zloczow, Tarnopol, Brody. As a matter of course the Ukrainians accused the local Jews of having sided with the Soviet occupation regime in general, and particularly of having helped the NKVD in its murderous onslaught against the Ukrainian elite.
This was but the latest phase of a history reaching back several centuries and punctuated by massive and particularly murderous pogroms: the killings led by Bogdan Chmielnicki in the seventeenth century, by the Haidamaks in the eighteenth century, and by Semyon Petlura on the morrow of World War I.68 The traditional hatreds between Ukrainians and Poles, Ukrainians and Russians, and Poles and Russians added their own exacerbating elements to the attitudes of these groups toward the Jews, particularly in areas such as eastern Galicia, where Ukrainians, Poles, and Jews lived side by side in large communities, first under Hapsburg rule, then under Polish domination after World War I, and finally under the Soviets between 1939 and 1941, until the German occupation.
Traditional Christian anti-Jewish hostility was reinforced in the Ukraine by the frequent employment of Jews as estate stewards for Polish nobility, thus as the representatives (and enforcers) of Polish domination over the Ukrainian peasantry. Drawing on such hostility, modern Ukrainian nationalists accused Jews of siding with the Poles after World War I in fought-over areas such as eastern Galicia (while as we saw, the Poles accused the Jews of siding with the Ukrainians), and throughout the interwar period as being part and parcel either of Bolshevik oppression or of Polish measures against the Ukrainian minority, according to region. Such intense nationalist anti-Semitism was further exacerbated when a Ukrainian Jew named Sholem Schwarzbart assassinated the much-admired Petlura in Paris on May 25, 1926, in retaliation for the postwar pogroms.69
Within the Ukrainian nationalist movement itself, the extremists led by Stepan Bandera and supported by the Germans gained the upper hand against more moderate groups.70 Bandera’s men led the OUN–B (Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists–Bandera) auxiliary units that marched into eastern Galicia in June 1941 together with the Wehrmacht.
In Lwov the Ukrainians herded local Jews together and forced them to dig up the corpses of the NKVD’s victims from their mass graves or retrieve them from the jails. The Jews then had to align the bodies of those recently murdered and also of already badly decomposed corpses along the open graves, before being themselves shot into the pits—or being killed in the jails and the fortress, or on the streets and squares of the main east Galician town.71
In Zloczow the killers belonged first and foremost to the OUN and to the Waffen SS “Viking” Division, while Sonderkommando 4b of Einsatzgruppe C kept to the relatively passive role of encouraging the Ukrainians (the Waffen SS did not need any prodding). The murders took place under the watchful eye of the 295th Infantry Division, and it was finally as a result of the protests of the first general staff officer of the division, who sent a complaint to Seventeenth Army headquarters, that the killings of Jews stopped—temporarily.72
In his first diary entry, on July 7, 1943, Aryeh Klonicki, a Jew from Kovel, described the events of June 1941 in Tarnopol: “I came one day before the outbreak of the war [with the Soviet Union] as a guest of my wife’s sister who lives there. On the third day of the [German] invasion a massacre lasting three consecutive days was carried out in the following manner. The Germans, joined by Ukrainians, would go from house to house in order to look for Jews. The Ukrainians would take the Jews out of the houses where the waiting Germans would kill them, either right by the house or they would transport the victims to a particular site where all would be put to death. This is how some five thousand people found their death, mostly men. As for women and children they were murdered only in exceptional cases. I myself and my wife were saved at the time only because we were living in a street inhabited by Christians who declared that there were no Jews living in our house.”73
On July 6 Pvt. Franzl also recorded the events at Tarnopol, for the enjoyment of his parents in Vienna. The discovery of the mutilated corpses of Volksdeutsche and Ukrainians led to vengeance against the local Jews: They were forced to carry the corpses from the cellars and line them up by newly dug graves; afterward the Jews were beaten to death with truncheons and spades. “Up to now,” Franzl went on, “we have sent approximately 1,000 Jews to the other world, but this is by far too little for what they have done.” After asking his parents to spread the news, Franzl ended his letter with a promise: “If there are doubts, we will bring photos. Then, no more doubts.”74
In smaller towns in eastern Galicia most of the murderous anti-Jewish outbreaks during these early days of occupation took place without apparent German intervention. Witnesses from Brzezany, a town to the south of Zloczow, described, decades later, the sequence of events: As the Germans entered the town, “the Ukrainians were ecstatic. Throngs of Ukrainian peasants, mostly young people, carrying yellow-and-blue flags adorned with the Ukrainian trident, filled the…streets. They came from the villages, dressed in Ukrainian national costumes, singing their Ukrainian songs.” In the prisons and outside, the corpses of Ukrainian activists killed by the NKVD were uncovered: “The sights were indescribable, [so was] the stench from the corpses. They were spread out on the prison cellar floor. Other corpses were floating in the river, the Zlota Lipa. People blamed the NKVD and the Jews.” What followed was to be expected: “Most of the Jews who perished in Brzezany on that day were murdered with broomsticks with nails attached to them…. There were two rows of Ukrainian bandits, holding big sticks. They forced those people, the Jews, in between the two rows and murdered them in cold blood with those sticks.”75 Farther east the attitude of the populations was somewhat different.
On August 1, 1941, eastern Galicia was annexed to the General Government and became part of the district of Galicia with Lwov as its main administrative center. Some 24,000 Jews had been massacred before the annexation; afterward the fate of the Jews in the new district differed for some time from the situation prevailing in other parts of the General Government. For several months Frank forbade the setting up of ghettos in order to keep the option of transferring these additional Jewish populations “to the East,” eventually to the Pripet Marshes area.
In Lwov, for example, ghettoization started only in November 1941. The Governor-general’s desire to get rid of his newly acquired Jews was so intense that little was done to hinder thousands of them from fleeing to Romania and Hungary. Otherwise tens of thousands of Jewish men from Galicia were soon herded into labor camps, mainly along the new strategic road that would link Lwov to the southern Ukraine and eventually to the Black Sea. This notorious Durchgangstrasse IV (transit road IV) would be useful both to the Wehrmacht and to Himmler’s colonization plans. It is this project that, in the later summer of 1941, inaugurated de facto the systematic annihilation of Jews
by way of slave labor.76
In early August 1941, the small town of Bjelaja Zerkow, south of Kiev, was occupied by the 295th Infantry Division of Army Group South; the Wehrmacht area commander, Colonel Riedl, ordered the registration of all Jewish inhabitants and asked SS Sonderkommando 4a, a subunit of Einsatzgruppe C—which in the meantime had moved from eastern Galicia to pre-1939 Soviet Ukraine—to murder them.
On August 8 a section of the Sonderkommando, led by SS Obersturmführer August Häfner, arrived in the town.77 Between August 8 and August 19 a company of Waffen SS attached to the Kommando shot all of the 800 to 900 local Jews, with the exception of a group of children under the age of five.78 These children were abandoned without food or water in a building on the outskirts of the town near the army barracks. On August 19 many were taken away in three trucks and shot at a nearby rifle range; ninety remained in the building, guarded by a few Ukrainians.79
Soon the screams of these ninety children became so unbearable that the soldiers called in two field chaplains, a Protestant and a Catholic, to take some “remedial action.”80 The chaplains found the children half naked, covered with flies, and lying in their own excrement. Some of the older ones were eating mortar off the walls; the infants were mostly comatose. The divisional chaplains were alerted and, after an inspection, they reported the matter to the first staff officer of the division, Lt. Col. Helmuth Groscurth.
Groscurth went to inspect the building. There he met Oberscharführer Jäger, the commander of the Waffen SS unit who had murdered the other Jews of the town; Jäger informed him that the remaining children were to be “eliminated.” Colonel Riedl, the field commander, confirmed the information and added that the matter was in the hands of the SD and that the Einsatzkommando had received its orders from the highest authorities.
At this point Groscurth took it upon himself to order the postponement of the killings by one day, notwithstanding Häfner’s threat to lodge a complaint. Groscurth even positioned armed soldiers around a truck already filled with children and prevented it from leaving. He communicated all this to the staff officer of Army Group South. The matter was referred to the Sixth Army, probably because Einsatzkommando 4a operated in its area. That same evening, the commander of the Sixth Army, Field Marshal Reichenau, personally decided that “the operation…had to be completed in a suitable way.”81
The next morning, August 21, Groscurth was summoned to a meeting at local headquarters in the presence of Colonel Riedl, Captain Luley, a counterintelligence officer who had reported to Reichenau on the course of the events, Obersturmführer Häfner, and the chief of Einsatzkommando 4a, the former architect SS Standartenführer Paul Blobel. Luley declared that, although he was a Protestant, he thought that the “chaplains should limit themselves to the welfare of the soldiers”; with the full support of the field commander, Luley accused the chaplains of “stirring up trouble.”
According to Groscurth’s report, Riedl then “attempted to draw the discussion into the ideological domain…The elimination of the Jewish women and children,” he explained, “was a matter of urgent necessity, whatever form it took.” Riedl complained that the division’s initiative had delayed the execution by twenty-four hours. At that point, as Groscurth later described it, Blobel, who had been silent up until then, intervened: He supported Riedl’s complaint and “added that it would be best if those troops who were nosing around carried out the executions themselves and the commanders who were stopping the measures took command of these troops.” “I quietly rejected this view,” Groscurth wrote, “without taking any position as I wished to avoid any personal acrimony.” Finally Groscurth mentioned Reichenau’s attitude: “When we discussed what further measures should be taken, the Standartenführer declared that the commander in chief [Reichenau] recognized the necessity of eliminating the children and wished to be informed once this had been carried out.”82
On August 22 the children were executed. The final sequence of the events was described by Häfner at his trial: “I went out to the woods alone. The Wehrmacht had already dug a grave. The children were brought along in a tractor. The Ukrainians were standing around trembling. The children were taken down from the tractor. They were lined up along the top of the grave and shot so that they fell into it. The Ukrainians did not aim at any particular part of the body…. The wailing was indescribable…. I particularly remember a small fair-haired girl who took me by the hand. She too was shot later.”83 The following day Captain Luley reported on the completion of the task to Sixth Army headquarters and was recommended for a promotion.84
The first Germans with any authority to be confronted with the fate of the ninety Jewish children were the chaplains. The field chaplains were compassionate, the divisional ones somewhat less so. In any case, after sending in their reports the chaplains were not heard from again.
The killing of the Jewish adults and children was public. In postwar court testimony, a cadet officer who had been stationed in Bjelaja Zerkow at the time of the events, after describing in gruesome detail the execution of a batch of approximately 150 to 160 Jewish adults, made the following comments: “The soldiers knew about these executions and I remember one of my men saying that he had been permitted to take part…. All the soldiers who were in Bjelaja Zerkow knew what was happening. Every evening, the entire time I was there, rifle fire could be heard, although there was no enemy in the vicinity.”85 The same cadet added, however: “It was not curiosity which drove me to watch this, but disbelief that something of this type could happen. My comrades were also horrified by the executions.86
The central personality in the Bjelaja Zerkow events was in many ways Lt. Col. Helmuth Groscurth. A deeply religious Protestant, a conservative nationalist, he did not entirely reject some of the tenets of Nazism and yet became hostile to the regime and close to the opposition groups gathered around Adm. Wilhelm Canaris and Gen. Ludwig Beck. He despised the SS and in his diary referred to Heydrich as “a criminal.”87 His decision to postpone the execution of the children in Bjelaja Zerkow by one day, notwithstanding Häfner’s threat, and then to use soldiers to prevent an already loaded truck from leaving, is certainly proof of courage.
Moreover Groscurth did not hesitate to express his criticism of the killings in the conclusion of his report: “Measures,” he wrote, “against women and children were undertaken which in no way differed from atrocities carried out by the enemy about which the troops are continually being informed. It is unavoidable that these events will be reported back home where they will be compared to the Lemberg atrocities.” [This is probably an allusion to executions perpetrated by the NKVD.]88 For these comments Groscurth was reprimanded by Reichenau a few days later. Yet his overall attitude is open to many questions.
After mentioning Reichenau’s order to execute the children, Groscurth added: “We then settled the details of how the executions were to be carried out. They are to take place during the evening of August 22. I did not involve myself in the details of the discussion.”89 The most troubling part of the report appears at the very end: “The execution could have been carried out without any uproar if the field and local headquarters had taken the necessary steps to keep the troops away…. Following the execution of all the Jews in the town it became necessary to eliminate the Jewish children, particularly the infants. Both infants and children should have been eliminated immediately in order to avoid this inhuman agony.”90
Groscurth was captured by the Russians at Stalingrad, together with the remaining soldiers and officers of the Sixth Army. He died in Soviet captivity shortly afterward, in April 1943.
V
In Lithuania the first victims of the Germans were the 201 mostly Jewish men (and one woman) of the small border town Gargždai (Garsden), executed on June 24 by an Einsatzkommando from Tilsit and a Schutzpolizei (SCHUPO) unit from Memel under the overall command of SS Brigadeführer Franz Walter Stahlecker, the commander of Einsatzgruppe A (the Tilsit unit received its orders directly from Gestapo chief Müller)
.91 The Jewish women and children (approximately 300), spared at the outset, were locked up in barns and shot in mid-September.92
A few days later the killings started in the main cities, Vilna and Kovno, and went on in several waves, during the summer and the fall; at the same time the Jewish populations of small towns and villages were entirely exterminated. The destruction of the Jews of Lithuania had begun. Next to Warsaw, Vilna—the “Jerusalem of Lithuania”—a city inhabited on the eve of the German occupation by some 60,000 Jews, was for centuries one of the most important centers of Jewish life in Eastern Europe. In the eighteenth century, Rabbi Elijah ben Solomon, the “Vilna Gaon,” carried religious scholarship to rarely equaled heights; albeit in a tradition of strict intellectual orthodoxy that fiercely opposed Hasidism, the emotional and popular Jewish revivalism born at the same time in the Ukrainian borderlands. It was also in Vilna that the Jewish workers’ party, the Bund, was created at the end of the nineteenth century. As we saw, the Bund was a fervent protagonist of the international proletarian struggle, but it was decidedly anti-Bolshevist; it advocated Jewish cultural (Yiddish) and political (socialist) autonomy in Eastern Europe and thus opposed the Zionist brand of Jewish nationalism. It was possibly the most original and numerically important Jewish political movement of the interwar period—and the most unrealistic.
On the morrow of World War I, the Baltic countries became independent, but Lithuania lost Vilna to Poland. At that stage the hatred of Lithuanian nationalists and of their fascist fringe, the Iron Wolf movement, was essentially directed against the Poles, much less so against the Jews. In fact, for a short period, Jewish existence in the new state thrived (the government even established a Ministry of Jewish Affairs) and the community, 150,000 strong, could shape its own educational system and, more generally, its own cultural life with a great measure of autonomy. In 1923, however, the Ministry of Jewish Affairs was abolished, and soon Jewish educational and cultural institutions were denied government support. Stepwise, from 1926 on, Lithuania moved to the right, first under the government of Antanas Smetona and Augustin Voldemaras, then under Smetona alone. Yet the Lithuanian strongman did not initiate any anti-Semitic laws or measures.
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