Hitler's Foreign Executioners

by Christopher Hale

  Frank’s disdain was widely shared. Otto Ohlendorf, commander of Einsatzgruppe D which, as mentioned before, was active in Romania, grumbled:

  the way in which the Romanians are dealing with the Jews lacks any method. No objections could be raised against the numerous executions of Jews, but the technical preparations and the executions themselves were totally inadequate. The Romanians usually left the victims’ bodies where they were shot, without trying to bury them.

  He concluded: ‘The Einsatzkommando has recommended that the Romanian police be more orderly from that standpoint.’46

  German complaints about inefficient Romanian methods had results. By the end of July, historian Raul Hilberg estimated 10,000 Jews had been murdered in Bessarabia and northern Bukovina by German and Romanian militias. The Iaşi pogrom heralded systematic mass murder that engulfed Bessarabia and Bukovina. The Romanian Holocaust was driven not only by indigenous hatreds, but by a much broader and calculated strategy that had been hatched up in Berlin and then mimicked in Bucharest. From the German point of view, they learnt the bloody events at the central police headquarters was more evidence that what Reinhard Heydrich called ‘self-cleansing’ had to be properly managed – and that the principal means of doing this would be specialised local militias formed under the auspices of the SS and modelled on SS paramilitary police divisions.

  This is not in any sense to exonerate the Romanian terrorists and soldiers who killed and murdered so many thousands of Jews in the summer of 1941 and in the months that followed. In October, Romanian troops burned alive 19,000 Jews in Odessa; at nearby Dalnick they shot another 16,000; and they grossly mistreated Jews who were being pushed east across the Dniester River.47

  The second lesson that the Germans learnt in Romania was more complex. Romanian hatred of Jews, to be sure, had deep roots. But to the Nazi mind, indigenous anti-Semitism was, as Hans Frank and his dinner guests agreed, a species of barbarism. The task of the Reich was to modernise these rusticated hatreds and to replace the club and the hunting rifle with the scalpel. Modernisation would be driven by the image of a new kind of villain: the ‘Jewish-Bolshevik’ – a foe that, like the Antichrist of medieval eschatology, menaced the foundations of European civilisation.

  The axiom that Marxism was, behind its egalitarian mask, ‘Judeo Bolshevism’ underpinned Nazi ideology. In an important study, Jeffrey Herf quotes art historian E.H. Gombrich, who monitored German radio broadcasts during the war. He pointed out that what characterised Nazi propaganda was not so much lies, but the imposition of a ‘paranoiac pattern on world events’; by this he meant a global, overarching narrative that shaped the chaos of history into a simple story of good and evil. According to this modern fairy story, the duty of virtuous Germans was to wage war on evil ‘Asiatic’ Jews who had somehow penetrated the political bloodstream of Anglo-Saxon nations like the United States and Great Britain and then compelled them to take up arms against Germany. The global power driving this devious plan was the Soviet Union. According to Nazi ideology, the roots of Bolshevism could be traced to the Jewish culture; it was the Jews’ declaration of war against western culture. A Jewish cabal in Moscow, Hitler said in Nuremberg in 1936, intended to exterminate the ‘existing blood and organically rooted leadership and replace it with Jewish elements alien to the Aryan peoples’. Bolshevism was the mask of the Jew. A ‘Jewish head rested on a communist body’.

  Hitler’s crusade against Bolshevism was another way of waging war on world Jewry. In his notorious speech made to the Reichstag on 30 January 1939, Hitler used this seamless identification of Jews and Soviet Communism to make a chilling prophecy: ‘If international finance Jewry inside and outside Europe should succeed in plunging the nations once more into a world war, the result will not be the Bolshevization of the earth and thereby the victory of Jewry, but the annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe.’

  All over Europe, the German crusade against Jewish Bolshevism would soon supply an intoxicating rallying cry for Hitler’s foreign executioners.

  Part Two:

  June 1941–February 1944

  4

  Horror Upon Horror

  The [Sicherheitspolizei und SD] was determined to solve the Jewish question by any means necessary … It had to appear to the outside world that the native people themselves had reacted naturally to decades of oppression by the Jews … and carried out these first measures of its own accord.

  The Stahlecker Report, 1941

  All nationally conscious Latvians … who would like to actively participate in the cleansing of our country of destructive elements should report at the administration of the Sicherheitskommando [SD] at Valdemara.

  Public announcement in Tevija, 4 July 1941

  The small Lithuanian town of Svencioneliai can be found some 50 miles north-east of Vilnius in a region of forests and lakes. In 1941, many Jews lived here alongside Poles and Lithuanians. Today only Lithuanians live in Svencioneliai. Not far from the town, close to the banks of the Zeimena River, a simple memorial stands in a quiet wooded area. Here, we discover, German SS men and Lithuanian partisans murdered 8,000 Jews on 7 and 8 October 1941. A metre or so above the ground, there are curious depressions in the gnarled trunks of some of the trees. In this now silent place, Lithuanian žydšaudžiai (shooters of Jews) smashed the heads of Jewish infants against these trees. Traces of mass murder, like these wounded trees, can be found all over Lithuania – though very few Lithuanians choose to look.1 Some 220,000 Jews or ‘Litvaks’ lived in Lithuania before 1941. Just 8,000 remained alive in 1945: a ‘victimology rate’ of 96.4 per cent.2 The majority of victims were murdered close to their homes, often by their neighbours. The killing began very soon after 22 June, when German troops crossed into the Soviet-occupied Baltic States, followed by Special Task Force murder squads. There is incontrovertible evidence that Lithuanian citizens eagerly participated in the mass murders that followed the German assault at places like Svencioneliai all over Lithuania. Many survivors and some historians of the Holocaust believe that the majority of Lithuanians became willing executioners, murdering their Jewish neighbours with spontaneous zeal. RSHA chief Reinhard Heydrich frequently asserted that his Special Task Forces merely encouraged local pogroms by Jew-hating Lithuanian villagers, a process he euphemistically called ‘self-cleansing’. But was the Lithuanian genocide more closely managed than the German occupiers cared to admit? And if so, how?

  On the morning of 27 June 1941, a colonel in the German army arrived in Kaunas (Kovno), the main centre of Jewish life and culture in Lithuania. It was nearly a week after the German invasion of the Soviet Union had begun and both Hitler and his generals were increasingly confident of a quick victory. The colonel had come to Kaunas to arrange suitable accommodation for the commander of Army Group A, Field Marshall Wilhelm Ritter von Leeb. As he passed the small Lietukis Garage opposite the Kovna cemetery on the junction of Greenwald Street and Vytatas Boulevard, he noticed a large, noisy crowd gathered on the forecourt.3 The colonel appears not to have noticed that a German army photographer was also present and was taking pictures with his Leica camera. Both men provided eyewitness accounts of what took place. In the forecourt, mothers had hoisted children on to their shoulders or stood them on chairs or boxes to see better what was happening. There was a carnivalesque atmosphere. The colonel asked another onlooker to explain what was happening. He was told that the ‘death dealer of Kaunas’ was at work. This was where ‘collaborators and traitors’ received their ‘rightful punishment’. Pushing forward, the colonel now faced a spectacle of medieval horror. At the centre of the crowd stood a young blonde man of medium height leaning on a ‘wooden club’, in fact an iron crowbar, which reached as high as his shoulders. It was crusted with blood and other body matter and was ‘as thick as [his] arm’. In the photographs taken by the German army photographer, the death dealer looks unashamedly into the lens. He is well turned out in knee length black boots, dark trousers and a dark jacket with a white shirt. At his feet lay
between fifteen and twenty dead and dying men, all bleeding copiously from head wounds. Someone had turned on a hose and blood-stained water gushed into a drainage gully. But the death dealer had not yet completed his day’s work.

  A short distance away armed Lithuanians guarded some twenty other men who awaited execution ‘in silent submission’. All were Jews. As the German officer watched, the blonde executioner raised the iron bar, made a ‘cursory wave’ and another ‘collaborator’ was ‘beaten to death in the most bestial manner’. Each savage blow brought enthusiastic cheers and cries from the crowd. A bystander informed the German colonel that when the Soviets had occupied Lithuania, the parents of the death dealer had been arrested and ‘immediately shot’. Now he was taking his revenge. The German colonel made no attempt to intervene and left the scene before the death dealer had completed his repugnant task. The photographer’s account, however, tells us what happened next: ‘after the entire group [of Jews] had been beaten to death, the young man put the crow bar to one side, fetched an accordion … stood on the mountain of corpses and played the Lithuanian national anthem.’

  We now know that the death dealer was Algirdą Antaną Pavalkį, some of whose family had indeed been deported by the Soviets, as had many thousands of Lithuanian Jews. Later, Pavalkį served in the Gestapo, but changed sides at the end of the war and became a Soviet agent. A photograph of him taken in 1950 shows he was working as a rather well-paid doctor – 2,000 roubles a month.4

  Scenes of equal barbarity unfolded elsewhere in Kaunas. Many were witnessed by gawping German soldiers. A lance corporal of the 562nd Bakers’ Company watched Lithuanian convicts and Freikorps armed with clubs, cudgels and iron crowbars killing Jews in a small, cobbled square. A Baker reported: ‘The actions seemed extremely cruel and brutal.’ He had turned away: ‘I could not watch any longer.’ He heard someone say: ‘these were Jews who had swindled the Lithuanians before the Germans arrived.’ The German colonel who had watched the death dealer at work returned to headquarters and reported what he had seen to his commander-in-chief, Colonel General Busch, who listened impassively. Since the German campaign had begun on 22 June, pogroms like the one he had witnessed had become all too commonplace. Busch explained that these ‘cruel excesses’ were ‘spontaneous action on the part of the Lithuanian population’. They had to be treated as ‘internal matters’ to be dealt with by the ‘Lithuanian state’; the German army could not intervene. Orders to this effect had been received from the highest military authorities. He was, he regretted, ‘powerless’ to take action. In any case, he had been ‘forbidden’ to do so. 5

  These eyewitness accounts of apparently spontaneous pogroms in Eastern Europe figure significantly in accounts of the Holocaust. They provide evidence, it is claimed, that autochthonous anti-Semitism fuelled mass murder under German occupation. But a closer examination of many eyewitness statements reveals that these ‘spontaneous pogroms’ may not have been quite what they appeared. In the photographs taken by the Wehrmacht photographer, the self-proclaimed death dealer of Kaunas unmistakably wears a uniform: black jacket and trousers, high black boots. Armed men stand guarding the Jewish men he will kill. In the case of the town square massacre, the Wehrmacht Baker describes the perpetrators as ‘Lithuanian criminals’ and ‘Freikorps’, in other words a militia of some kind. These sometimes overlooked details strongly suggest that this was ‘organised spontaneity’. But organised by whom? There was another eyewitness at the Lietukis Garage and his account provides at least part of the answer.

  On that terrible day, Julius Vainilavičius had been fishing and passed by the garage on his way home: ‘I saw some civilians there. The Germans were treating them roughly.’ Vainilavičius noted that the civilians were all Jews. The Germans had, he discovered, ordered the Jews to clear horse dung from the garage forecourt using their bare hands. When this humiliating task was completed, Vainilavičius goes on, ‘a great massacre began’. The Germans and ten to fifteen Lithuanians’s wooped down on the Jews, belabouring them with rifle butts, spades, sticks and crow bars’. Soon they lay moaning and crying. Then a hose was turned on and some of the Jews revived. A truck then appeared, with a number of Jewish prisoners already on board. The corpses were loaded into the rear of the truck and ‘the Germans dispersed the onlookers’.6 Who were these mysterious Germans?

  The answer is in the German colonel’s report. He tells us that by the beginning of July, when Army Group North arrived in Kaunas, ‘the squads of [Lithuanian] guards now wore a kind of militia uniform of German origin. Amongst these men were also members of the SD who had, as I subsequently learned, started their activities in [Kaunas] on 24 June.’ So German SD agents had arrived in Kaunas three days before the slaughter at the petrol station; plenty of time to organise a ‘spontaneous’ pogrom. The other account of the petrol station murders by the German photographer confirms that SD men were present: ‘an SS officer came up’ and tried to confiscate his camera. He refused and produced his official military pass and suggested that the ‘SS man’ discuss the matter with Colonel General Busch, ‘whereupon I was allowed to go on my way unhindered’. Both SS and SD men wore black uniforms.

  The evidence strongly suggests that this notorious slaughter was not a spur-of-the-moment pogrom carried out solely by Lithuanians, but a ‘joint operation’ instigated directly by Heydrich’s SD and Lithuanian militias. Lithuanian historian Alfonsas Eidintas has remarked that ‘reading the hundreds of memoirs by surviving Jews, including those by Lithuanian Jews … I sometimes got the impression that it had been only Lithuanians, Latvians, Poles and Ukrainians who had executed mass murders in their own countries, but not Germans’.7 His remark goes to the very heart of the matter. Leonic Rein, in a paper about local collaboration in Belorussia, asks: ‘was the Holocaust in fact, as Goldhagen argues, a purely “German undertaking”?’ 8 Take for example this account from a recently discovered diary: ‘on Tuesday the 24th of June, we went out into the street and saw that the town was already full of German soldiers. Already there were “Partisans” – Lithuanian bandits wearing white armbands with swastikas … They could already do anything they wanted to a Jew.’ Shortly afterwards, we discover, systematic killing began, conducted – according to this witness by Lithuanian ‘partisans’ and villagers – without any German supervision.9 This short, telling narrative lays out the key elements of this enquiry: the arrival of German troops; the appearance of partisans wearing arm bands; followed by apparently unsupervised mass murder. Many accounts of the Holocaust take for granted that Eastern European peoples, conditioned by centuries of anti-Semitic loathing, impulsively set about murdering their Jewish neighbours. This is an intricate and contentious matter. Historian Dovid Katz, who has devoted his life to the study of the Lithuanian Holocaust, has fought a long battle against Lithuanian apologists – many of whom are active members of the government – who seek to ‘sanitise’ the historical record. The facts are not in doubt: many Lithuanians took a direct and lethal part in the Holocaust. How and why they did so is the subject of this chapter.

  As we have seen, between September 1939 and June 1941, the Germans exploited native antipathies in Slovakia, Croatia and Romania to wage an undeclared war on the racial and ideological enemies of the Reich. The SS and German military intelligence cultivated relations with ultranationalist factions and militias like the Hlinka Guard, the Ustasha and the Romanian Iron Guard. The Germans judged the first results to be unsatisfactory. The Governor General of the General Government, Hans Frank, complained that the Romanian pogroms that began at the end of June had been ‘barbaric’; what was required, he told his dinner guests at his headquarters in Kraków, was not butchery but surgery. German Einsatzgruppe commander Otto Ohlendorf came to the same conclusion. He insisted that ‘the Romanian police be more orderly’. In short, Hitler’s foreign executioners needed expert tuition. So it was that as Hitler’s armies and air force fell on their Soviet allies on midsummer’s day 1941, Reinhard Heydrich’s Special Task Forces set about
applying the lessons learnt in Croatia and Romania. Driving this joint operation was a potent mythology that permitted Germans and their allies to share a language of destruction – the myth of the ‘Jewish-Bolshevik’.

  On 30 January 1941 Hitler told a wildly cheering crowd in the Sportspalast in Berlin that ‘if Jewry were to plunge the world into war, the role of Jewry would be finished in Europe’. In German strategic planning, this delusional claim had a peculiar logic. Hitler understood that America, aligned if not allied to Great Britain, posed a grave threat to his imperial plans. Nazi doctrine and propaganda blamed American Jews for encouraging American rearmament – and inspiring President Roosevelt’s increasingly bellicose posture. Seen in this light, Hitler’s decisions to strike ‘hard and fast’ against the Soviet Union before the Americans entered the war made strategic sense.

  This logic, it should be emphasised, sprang from racial paranoia. Hitler’s war would be a racial struggle directed against a global enemy, namely ‘World Jewry’. This chimerical foe had the power to manipulate both London and Washington, and infested the ‘Bolshevik’ state in Moscow. For this reason, the German attack on the Soviet Union marks a decisive break in European history: it was both the biggest land grab in history and a monstrous chastisement that sought to end for good the baleful influence of Jewry. The security of the new German empire depended on the elimination of their ancient menace.