by Jay Winik
Still, Hitler’s decision was not made overnight. As far back as December 1940, Hitler had summoned his field commanders to tell them what he had already confided to his high command: be ready to outline an unparalleled land assault against the Soviets. “The German Armed Forces must be prepared, even before the ending of the war against England, to crush Soviet Russia in a rapid campaign,” his military directive Number 21 insisted. The invasion’s code name was Barbarossa, in honor of the medieval Holy Roman emperor Frederick I, who had won titanic victories in Europe and was considered one of Germany’s greatest kings. With a combination of moral certitude and contempt, Hitler sat his generals down and lectured them about the inevitable death struggle, a “holy war” between National Socialism and the dreaded Bolshevism. And by striking east, he emphasized over and over, Germany could win the war in the west. Britain would sue for peace, and America would stay on the sidelines. Thus he outlined one of the most audacious military efforts ever carried out, a war of annihilation that would entail 3.2 million men plunging across a front 1,800 miles long; an as yet incalculable number of planes, armored vehicles, and tanks; and a battlefield that would extend from the Baltic Sea in the north to the Black Sea in the south, and over miles of open plains in between.
Time was running out. By early spring, Undersecretary of State Sumner Welles began passing on reports to the Kremlin that Hitler planned to strike the Soviet Union. Meanwhile, the Allies’ intelligence continued to pick up the chatter of reports of German divisions hurriedly shifting to the east. But in the fog of war, no one could discern Hitler’s true motives. After all, there were still rumors of a spring assault against Britain, even as Hitler met with a Japanese delegation and dropped broad hints that conflict with the Soviet Union was unavoidable. Only slowly did Stalin begin to prepare for the worst. “Depending on the international situation,” he told officers in the Kremlin, “the Red Army will either wait for a German attack or may have to take the initiative.” But the attack came far sooner than he had expected.
During the third week of June 1941, the Nazi ambassador in Moscow received a blunt cable from Berlin. German guns had opened fire on all Soviet borders at 3:30 a.m., and now, at 6 a.m., two and a half hours after the initial salvos and barrages had begun, the sky was lit a fiery red. The ambassador climbed into his car and was driven to the Soviet Foreign Ministry, where he read the cable aloud to a pale, quivering Molotov. At first the foreign minister showed little emotion, his exhausted eyes, framed by dark circles, remained unblinking.
But then he quietly exploded. After ripping up the communiqué, and spitting on it, the tense Molotov responded: “This is war.” At the same time, while President Roosevelt was asleep in the White House, a shocked and indignant Stalin fell into a state of near collapse.
IT WAS THE DECISION of Hitler’s life, and in many ways the decision of the war. In planning the invasion, the Führer came to believe that Napoleon had been stymied largely because he focused on Moscow. The Nazi generals disagreed; they thought that capturing Moscow would sever the head of the Soviet snake, leaving the country unable to fight west of the Ural Mountains. But as always, Hitler had the last word. So the Germans’ assault took place in the north, south, and middle, and from the start, it seemed that Hitler had destiny on his side. On the first day, German forces destroyed whole armies and more planes than they had managed to neutralize during the entire Battle of Britain.
In Germany, Goebbels exulted in his diary, “Now the guns will be thundering. May God bless our weapons.” Meanwhile, Hitler’s proclamation reverberated over the radio: “The hour has now therefore arrived to counter this conspiracy of the Jewish, Anglo-Saxon warmongers.” In the days that followed, the Wehrmacht continued to strike the Soviets with unheralded ruthlessness and force. Like a “swarm of crawling locusts”—Winston Churchill’s term—they hit the Soviets with everything they had; all told, the Germans deployed over 3 million men, 3,600 tanks, 600,000 motorized vehicles, 7,000 artillery pieces, 625,000 horses, and 2,500 aircraft. And the surprise was complete. Six hundred tanks—three panzer divisions—along with motorcyclists, armored cars, and infantry, steamrollered a defenseless Soviet rifle division in the north. In the center, the Germans deployed even more men, and 1,500 tanks. Confused and cut off, in the days that followed, the dumbstruck Soviet troops radioed in vain: “We are being fired upon. What should we do?” They received no reply. It was the same in the south: another German army made short work of the hapless defenders there. Columns of tanks stretched for miles along hardened roads, past burning Russian villages, while German commanders barked orders and artillery echoed in the distance. At the same time, the Luftwaffe dominated the skies. After the initial onslaught that destroyed a thousand Soviet planes, which were reduced to little more than twisted, smoking metal on the ground, eight hundred more planes were destroyed in the air.
The enormity of Russian disaster was staggering. While whole villages were put to the torch, German armored columns sped along parallel paths, then crisscrossed, ensnaring entire Soviet divisions, sometimes even entire armies. The city of Brest-Litovsk, central to the Soviet frontline, quickly fell. By the week’s end, the Germans had taken both Lithuania and Latvia. In the north, where Leningrad was the strategic prize, the Nazis had pushed close to Ostrov. In the center, most of White Russia had fallen. And Minsk was surrounded and fell within five days. Within a matter of months, some 3 million Soviet soldiers would become captives of the Germans. Most would never return home. And by mid-July, as the Germans pressed on to Smolensk, they were only two hundred miles from Moscow; by mid-October, they would be within forty miles of it. By every criterion, this was war on a grand scale; the Nazis seemed to be unstoppable. They raced along the Baltic toward Leningrad, while General von Rundstedt swept into the Ukraine. From Riga on the Baltic Sea to Bialystock in the center, from Odessa to Sebastopol along the Black Sea in the South, the German march continued.
The Führer had grandiloquently predicted that this would be France all over again, a lightning campaign accomplished within eight weeks, before the first snows set in. Now, his prophecy seemed to be coming true. German infantry moved so quickly across Soviet territory that runners had to bring telephone wires to forward positions—the Nazis were outstripping the primitive Soviet communication system. Hitler now stood astride as master of Europe as had no one else in history. Not Bismarck, not Napoleon, not even Julius Caesar had seized so much territory and conquered so many people. A continent now lay in the Führer’s grip.
And the Nazis were after more than land or territory. As part of his conquest, Hitler had authorized Heinrich Himmler to terrorize civilians and slaughter all Soviet political officers. Pillaging entire villages, the Nazis became unspeakably cruel. That, however, was just the beginning. During the early days of this Nazi conquest, Hitler and the Reich made one other fateful decision: once and for all, to deal with the problem of the Jews.
HITLER’S PURPOSE IN INVADING the Soviet Union was not only to seize territory and riches, but also to create a new imperium in the east, under which his murderous prophecy about the “Jewish question” would finally be fulfilled. As the Wehrmacht pushed forward along a two-hundred-mile swath, genocide was now in the air. For the Jews, the dying soon began.
Interestingly, the Final Solution had at one time been conceived as a territorial solution. Hitler originally planned to resettle the European Jews from beyond the Urals in the freezing, windswept wastes of Siberia. There they would, as Hitler’s biographer Ian Kershaw memorably noted, be worked to death as slaves and starved to death as subhumans. The same was true for the 5 million to 6 million Jews of the Soviet Union. With uncharacteristic candor, Hitler boasted to his personal lawyer and Governor General of occupied Poland, Hans Frank, that the Jews would be “removed,” just as the Führer had prophesied in 1939.
If that was the theory, however, the reality was far different. In the conquered territories of the Soviet Union, Nazi Einsatzgruppen—mobile killing squads�
�were told to exterminate all “extremist elements,” which largely meant Communist functionaries such as commissars, and, of course, “Jews in the service of the party.” Yet the intended barbarity was ambiguous. What exactly did “service of the party” mean? Different elements of the German army had different interpretations.
The number of those killed was at first small but then quickly escalated. The Einsatzgruppen wasted little time in getting to work; two days after Operation Barbarossa began, men from the security police lined up 201 Jews in a Lithuanian village and shot them dead. Within three weeks, the killing squads could boast nearly 3,500 victims; by August, more than 12,000 male Jews had been murdered. Joseph Goebbels, reading the detailed reports of the executions, was ecstatic. “Vengeance,” he wrote in his diary, “was being wreaked on the Jews and the big towns of the Baltic.”
The vengeance was just beginning. The Nazis’ atrocities were soon being copied by anti-Semitic locals. One of the first pogroms that set the tone took place in the Lithuanian town of Kovno (Kaunas). Jews were herded together and pushed into the town center, while crowds of murmuring enthusiastic onlookers gathered. Then the violence started. One by one, Jews were savagely clubbed to death; meanwhile, the Lithuanians egged the killers on, clapping and cheering. There was no pretense of a trial, or of any reason for the executions, except the fact that the victims were Jews. Approving German officers stood by on the sidelines grinning and joking, a number snapping photographs for posterity—or to send home to their families. The savagery was a public spectacle; women even hoisted children onto their shoulders or held them up to witness the mayhem. Robespierre, the bloody mastermind of the Terror during the French Revolution, likely would have approved; the SS certainly did. For forty-five minutes, the butchery continued, with a relish that was almost hard to fathom, until there were no more Jews left alive. Then one of the villagers leaped onto a mound of the dead and began to dance, while serenading the crowd with the Lithuanian national anthem on an accordion. When it was all over, an entire segment of the town had been annihilated.
From then on, the Nazis, vain, cruel, and megalomaniacal, strutted about in their uniforms and took particular delight in such actions by the local populations, goading them on. The Nazis repeated that this genocide was just and necessary in the life-and-death struggle against the Jews. Goebbels scornfully insisted that the Jews were “vile,” they were “lice,” and the only way to cope with them was with brutality. “If you spare them,” he reasoned, “you later will be their victim.” The professional military officers, whose voices were of considerable influence and who should have exercised better judgment, agreed. For example, the commander in chief of the Sixth Army exhorted his men to be bearers “of a pitiless racial ideology” and “avengers” upon the Jewish “subhumans.” In Berlin, Hitler was more philosophical about the carnage: “If there were no more Jews in Europe,” he said, “the unity of the European states would be no longer disturbed.”
So it began. At the outset, true, the victims were mainly men. But as time passed, the massacres included defenseless women and innocent children, and the killings often amounted to little more than forcing naked Jews to kneel at the edge of a pit before spraying them with submachine-gun fire.
On September 29 and 30, 1941, the Jews of Kiev were instructed by the Nazis to gather at the Jewish cemetery, with all their possessions, money, documents, “valuables,” and “warm clothing.” From there, they would—or so they believed—be loaded onto trains and resettled. But then events took a sudden, unexpected turn. The Germans had prepared for only five thousand or six thousand to report; more than thirty thousand came. The panic-stricken victims were formed into a long, snaking line and told to give up their luggage, their coats, their shoes, their valuables, and then their other garments—even their underwear. Each article of clothing had to be meticulously put in the appropriate pile. Shoes here. Coats here. Pants here. Hats here. Socks here. Belts here. Valuables here. And on it went. Once they had undressed, they were instructed to stand on a mound of freshly plowed earth, above the high, narrow mouth of a deep ravine whose name would live in infamy: Babi Yar.
The Germans lined up old men and old women, pointing at their slack bellies and breasts with rifle butts; they lined up mothers carrying small children; and they lined up schoolchildren.
Then they lined up machine gunners.
The killing squads did their bloody work, and this became a blind, wanton slaughter. Machine-gun salvo was followed by machine-gun salvo, hour after hour, for two days. And throughout those two days, not far from an ordinary stretch of road and a small, innocuous town, the naked corpses of the victims tumbled into a pit. As the pit filled with the dead, their bodies were heaped on one another in deepening layers, their blood staining the earth. Many were killed outright by the machine-gun fire, although many others were only wounded and became like confused animals trapped in a maze, scurrying this way and that. In one of Babi Yar’s more despicable cruelties, children were simply grabbed by their legs and thrown alive into the pit.
It was too much for one watchman, who witnessed in horror this scene of “human grief and despair.” That evening, as the sun began to set, people with plows and spades were put to work and the Germans copiously buried the victims under thick “layers of earth.” But because such great numbers of the victims were still alive, the earth continued to move long afterward: the wounded, writhing and trembling, were still frantically shifting their arms and their legs. And eerie sounds emanated from the ground. Moans could be heard, as could the muffled voices of victims calling out to one another in pain. Sobbing could be heard, and choking. And so could one little girl crying: “Mammy, why do they pour the sand into my eyes?”
Arrogant and willful, German soldiers and the SS continued to make their rounds, holding torches aloft and “firing bullets” from their revolvers into anyone who still appeared to be alive. Other Germans strode over the bodies, stepping on limbs and bellies, looking for valuables. For hours individual pistol shots rang out into the air as a group of loitering soldiers traded jokes and snickered into the night.
In all, more than thirty-three thousand Jews were murdered. Remarkably, one young girl was somehow alive. Keeping very still, she heard the whimpering and wheezing of the few who remained, until one by one they stopped breathing. She heard the SS, barking orders. She heard Germans examining the dead. And she felt pain like nothing she had ever felt when an SS man kicked her breast with his heavy boot and stepped on her right hand until the bones “cracked.” Lying with her mouth up, she began to gag—it was the dirt; she was gradually being buried alive. But, panting and panicked, she managed to dig herself out with a last desperate effort, “scramble over the ledge,” and then make her way to freedom. Many years later, she alone would bear witness to the terrible crimes of Babi Yar.
In a cruel twist of fate, the slaughter at Babi Yar was made possible in part by Hitler’s personal decision to send his vaunted panzer divisions to capture Kiev, in the south, rather than continue on toward Moscow. Hitler’s panzer commander had flown to Berlin and pleaded with the Führer to move north, but Hitler wanted Kiev. His forces had taken 650,000 additional Soviet prisoners by September 27, two days before the killings began at Babi Yar. The Soviets’ collapse at Kiev was, at the time, the greatest defeat ever visited on an army.
But there was more to come.
EACH EXECUTION IN A German-occupied city or a town would beget more executions, and the same crimes would be repeated again and again. In Poland, Nazi-dominated Warsaw was filled with death and disease and despair. People continued to ask how Hitler could have become so strong, how he could have taken over Poland and Czechoslovakia and France and attacked the Soviet Union. They asked about the United States, and why it had not joined in the war. However, most people had no answers, only a more profound sense of exhaustion. The constant hunger made their stomachs churn and their heads ache; but here, not even starvation was enough for the Nazis. One day, German polic
emen, seeking to send a message, dragged thirty trembling Jewish children to clay pits filled with water and held them under until they drowned. Meanwhile, a newspaper reported that Jews were moving through the ghettos “like ghosts.” All across the east, thousands of Jews sought refuge in small, cramped closets or crawl spaces, or even in dank sewers or damp, cold abandoned buildings; but roving bands of Nazis or collaborationists went from building to building looking for them. Their last refuge was crumbling: “We feel like beasts surrounded by hunters,” lamented one fifteen-year-old. Life had become a kind of blind man’s bluff.
The hunters became ever more deadly. Wherever the Germans held sway, they hired assassins, sanctioned torture, and relished the sight of blood. That October in the Ukrainian port city of Odessa, nineteen thousand Jews were pushed into a town square surrounded by a wooden fence. This time there were no shootings. Instead, the executioners methodically doused their victims with gasoline, then roasted them alive in a huge fire. The victims were left to howl in agony and die an agonizing death, until nothing remained of them except singed flesh and bits of dry, white bone.
