Saul Friedlander argues that a balanced assessment of Jewish involvement in the Soviet occupation is ‘quasi impossible’. What nationalists observed was that Jews were well represented in officer schools, mid-rank police appointments, higher education and some administrative positions.29 Many NKVD officers were Russian Jews – a statistical fact that is still exploited by Holocaust ‘deniers’. In his book The Whisperers, Orlando Figes confirms that Jews had ‘flourished in the Soviet Union’. They recalled, of course, the persecution of Jews under the tsars which had reached such a grisly climax in the 1880s. In the 1920s, the Soviet government energetically promoted Yiddish culture, especially in Moscow. For delusional believers in the anti-Semitic conspiracy theories of ‘The Protocols of the Elders of Zion’, such apparent favouritism seemed to be hard evidence of a ‘Jewish-Bolshevik’ conspiracy.
It was, of course, nothing of the sort. Soviet tolerance, in any case, was skin deep. Stalin himself, educated in a seminary, was no friend of the Jews and in the run up to negotiations with Ribbentrop, purged prominent Jews from conspicuous positions to curry favour with Hitler. The Nazi-Soviet Pact in fact traumatised Soviet Jewry and weakened their commitment to the Soviet ideal. To be sure, in the annexed regions of Eastern Europe, many Jews came to see Soviet occupation as the ‘lesser of two evils’. But they soon learnt to their cost that while the Russians may have spared them at least temporarily from the attentions of the Germans, the Soviet occupation authorities targeted any sign of Jewish political activism. The Soviets arrested leaders of the World Zionist Organisation and the radical Zionist Betar group, among them Menachem Begin. Zionist Jews flooded into underground resistance organisations.
Jewish opposition to Soviet rule was especially pronounced in Lithuania. During the Smetona years, the city of Vilnius (Vilna) was a vibrant centre of Jewish life and culture. When Stalin agreed to transfer the city to neutral Lithuania, before annexation, many Jews in Soviet-occupied Poland hoped that Vilnius would offer an escape route from an increasingly dangerous Europe. ‘Vilna fever’ ignited a stampede of desperate Jews on trains, cars and wagons. A year later, when Lithuanian became a Soviet republic, the Vilnius door slammed shut. The old Polish city had become a trap and the NKVD turned its attention to ‘counter revolutionary’ Zionist Jews. This crackdown had no impact on the entrenched chauvinism of Baltic nationalists. They had noted only Jewish acquiescence or ‘collaboration’. They had witnessed Lithuanian Jews welcoming visiting Soviet writers and artists. It is one of the ironies of this troubled period that Soviet Jewry, which had suffered a long religious and cultural decline since 1917, was revitalised through contact with other Jews they now encountered the Soviet ‘sphere of influence’. This energetic fraternisation repelled Baltic nationalists and reinforced the mythological bond between Bolshevism and Jewry. This bond was, of course, the foundation of Nazi propaganda. In the Baltic States, nationalists plotted revenge – and German agents would actively promote their simmering resentment.
RSHA chief Heydrich diligently cultivated the prejudices of Lithuanian nationalists. In 1939, as Soviet forces began to occupy border strongholds, many Lithuanians in the army, government police and state security fled to Germany. Many made contact with German military intelligence and the SS. As Hitler began to prepare for Operation Barbarossa, Wehrmacht planners eagerly tapped Lithuanian expertise. On 17 November 1940 one of the most fanatical exiles, Kazys Škirpa, set up the Lithuanian Activist Front (LAF), which energetically pursued contacts with the SS. In Lithuania, the Germans began to arm local activist groups. Encouraged by the devious Heydrich, Škirpa and the Chairman of the LAF Propaganda Commission, Bronys Raila, drafted a proclamation of Lithuanian independence that is riddled with racist slurs and declares that Lithuanian Jews are ‘outside the bounds of the law’: ‘Traitors [collaborators] will be pardoned only if they provide certain proof that every one of them has liquidated at least one Jew. The Jews must be informed immediately that their fate has been decided upon … The crucial day of reckoning has come for the Jews.’30 In his book The Shoah in Lithuaniase, Joseph Levinson reprints some of the LAF appeals that were widely distributed before the German invasion. They are drenched in ethnic hatred: ‘Away with the Jews, Communists and Lithuanian Judases,’ shrieks one. ‘Let us liberate our Fatherland from the Jews,’ demands another. ‘We will rectify past mistakes and repay Jewish villainy.’ Attacks on ‘Jewish perfidy’ far outweigh references to Soviet misdeeds.31 At RSHA headquarters in Berlin, Heydrich and Škirpa jointly hatched up the idea of ‘self-cleansing actions’ that would provide a rationale for Lithuanian participation in German mass murder. Their secret agreement was then passed through a network of Lithuanian spies and informers attached to the LAF. This ensured that when Hitler’s armies crossed the Lithuanian border on 22 June, Lithuanian activists were ready to act. Naturally Škirpa and his LAF friends expected to be rewarded for their zeal – and at this stage Heydrich was careful not to disillusion them.
Hitler’s attack on the Soviet Union has been called ‘the most appalling, devastating and savage conflict in the history of warfare’. Above all, it was an ideological crusade, a war of irreconcilable world views, a clash of races. ‘And the hour will come,’ Hitler ranted, ‘when the world’s most evil enemy of all time will have no further role to play for at least a 1,000 years.’32 This eschatological logic appealed to Protestant clerics in Germany who dispatched a telegram to Hitler congratulating him for ‘summoning our nation’ to a ‘decisive passage of arms’ to ‘eradicate the source of this [Bolshevik] pestilence’. In Moscow, a traumatised Stalin fled to his dacha for two days, either in a funk or to test the loyalty of his satraps – and moaned that ‘we [Lenin’s] heirs have fucked up [his inheritance]’.33
On the Baltic front, twenty-nine Soviet infantry divisions, four cavalry divisions, four armoured divisions and armoured brigades faced von Leeb’s Army Group North, which included the SS Death’s Head division. In the build up to 22 June, German commanders had done little to conceal the masses of German troops crossing the Nemen to reach their assembly points or furious bridge-building activity. This made Soviet commanders on the front line increasingly anxious, but Moscow appeared blithely unconcerned and even ordered the withdrawal of some frontier divisions. German strategy relied on fast flanking movements, spearheaded by panzers that could race deep and fast into enemy territory. Russian forces were thus divided and chopped into pockets to be mopped up by a second German wave.
The stunning surprise of the German attack (which was also a political shock) overwhelmed Soviet forces. During these first weeks, German advance divisions sometimes advanced as much as 50 miles a day. But the strategy of encirclement left in its wake an archipelago of intact Soviet strongholds. Many put up fierce resistance. One such was the city of Gargždai (Garsden) on the Lithuanian border, where German troops fought a protracted and bloody battle to crush fanatical Soviet troops.
When Stahlecker’s Einsatzgruppe A men arrived hard on the heels of Wehrmacht troops, this would be site of the first Judenaktion. And this time Himmler had made sure that his men could get on with the job without any whining from weak-minded army generals. His confidence that SS shock troops would not be hindered was well founded. In the months leading up to Operation Barbarossa, Himmler and Heydrich had wrung crucial concessions from Wehrmacht Quartermaster-General, Major (General Staff) Hans-Georg Schmidt von Altenstadt, concerning the ‘execution of political tasks’. These hard won agreements authorised the SD Special Task Forces to ‘carry out on their own responsibility, executive measures concerning the civilian population’. Schmidt von Altenstadt agreed too that the SS commandos could carry out ‘special tasks’ not only in rear areas but close to the front line. For Himmler, this was a decisive breakthrough. His SS militias, instead of being confined to the rear, had secured a place on what Heydrich called ‘the fighting line’. Combat and ideology could be inextricably woven together. Wehrmacht negotiators had not been innocent dupes. Schmidt von Altenstadt
accepted that while the army would ‘fight the enemy into the ground’, it was also necessary to fight ‘a political police struggle against the enemy’. Co-operation between the two wings of the German assault would guarantee the ‘final liquidation of Bolshevism’. He listed politically dangerous individuals: ‘Jews, émigrés, terrorists, political church-men’. This threat warranted measures of ‘extreme hardness and harshness’.
It would be a mistake to view this rapprochement merely as a shotgun wedding. At a meeting with army commanders-in-chief on 30 March Hitler insisted that Operation Barbarossa, like the Polish campaign, must be grasped (according to Halder’s notes) as a ‘war of extermination’. ‘We do not wage war,’ he continued ‘to preserve the enemy’ – otherwise Germany would need to fight the same battles all over again in a few decades times. Since Bolshevism was by definition a criminal regime, the German army must be freed from any legal restraints: ‘This is no job for military courts.’ The majority of army top brass led by Dr Rudolf Lehman, head of the Wehrmacht’s legal department, completely agreed. Between March and June, a stream of decrees and army ordinances created the conditions that would transform traditional Prussian ruthlessness into barbarism. These reached a climax on 6 June when the OKW issued a draft of ‘Guidelines on the treatment of political commissars’, the so-called ‘Commissar Order’. This repellent document sanctioned the execution of ‘exponents of the Jewish-Bolshevik system’ either at the moment of capture or as soon as possible at POW collection points. It was widely recognised by the OKW as well as Dr Lehmann that the Commissar Order defied international law. This was justified by means of grotesque sophistry: political commissars of all kinds, the drafters argued, were ‘originators of barbaric Asiatic fighting methods’, and thus had placed themselves beyond the reach of ‘the principles of humanity or international law’. We should note that an army education pamphlet described these ‘commissars’ as ‘mostly filthy Jews’. This then was how the German Wehrmacht and the SD militias would fight a ‘war of annihilation’.34
On the eve of the German invasion, Himmler and Heydrich met with the head of the Order Police, Kurt Daluege, to co-ordinate strategy along the front line. In Tilsit on the East Prussian border, where Army Group North awaited the signal to march into Soviet Lithuania, SS General Hans-Adolf Prützmann, HSSPF for ‘Northern Russia’ (which included the Baltic States), had overall command of the SS militias. Himmler would soon discover that Prützmann was rather too squeamish for the task in hand – and he came to rely on the hard nosed Stahlecker. Stahlecker arrived in Tilsit on 24 June and was informed that Gargždai had been chosen for the first Judenaktion. Stahlecker in turn communicated this decision to his subordinates: SS-Major Dr Martin Sandberger in charge of Sonderkommando Ia and SS-Colonel Karl Jäger heading Einsatzkommando 3.35
Stahlecker’s Einsatzgruppe A was the biggest of Heydrich’s murder squads, totalling 990 personnel. According to Hilberg, Einsatzgruppen A included 340 Waffen-SS, 172 motorcycle rider, 18 administrators, 35 SD men, 41 criminal police, 89 state police, 87 auxiliary police, 133 Order Police, supported by 13 female secretaries and clerks, as well as teletype and radio operators.36 Each Kommando crossed the Soviet border equipped with trucks and motorcycles, shovels to dig mass graves and an extensive armoury of Lugers, Bergmann machine pistols, hand grenades and Walther P-38 pistols (considered ideal for administering the coup de grâce in the back of the neck). Every member of the Task Forces, Heydrich had confided to SS spymaster Walther Schellenberg, ‘will have the opportunity to prove himself’. When one SD man realised the meaning of ‘special tasks’, he stammered ‘Du bist ja verrückt!’ (‘You must be mad!’) His informant replied, ‘Ihr werdet ja sehen’ (‘Wait and see’).37 The most dedicated became known as ‘Dauer-Schützen’ (permanent shooters). Extinguishing so many lives required only the most rudimentary skills. Thanks to Heydrich’s deal with the LAF, Lithuanian auxiliaries usually dug a pit to German specifications and then helped round up local Jewish men. The Germans then rushed their victims to the edge of the pit: ‘Hurry up Isidor [anti-Semitic term]! The faster you go the sooner you will be with your God.’ Then: ‘Gustav, shoot well!’ Later when a few recruits fretted about the day’s work, an officer bucked them up: ‘For God’s sake don’t you see? One generation has to go through all of this, so that our children have it better.’38 So began the catastrophe that would engulf so many tens of thousands of Lithuanian, Latvian and Estonian Jews.
In a few Lithuanian villages and small towns, the general population reacted to news of the German ‘liberation’ by turning with horrible savagery on their Jewish neighbours. On the roads out of Vilnius, Polish peasants ambushed and killed Jews fleeing the city. Others set fire to synagogues and burnt Torah scrolls. They plundered homes. They killed. Some accounts of the Holocaust give the impression that the majority of ordinary Lithuanians and later Latvians and Estonians, when they had the opportunity, took part in killing sprees. To accept this would be to fall for Heydrich’s carefully laid trap that pogroms must be made to appear spontaneous. The SS managed mass murder because they had learnt that ‘cleansing’ could not be delegated to the mob or unreliable national militias. Surgery not butchery – the ‘Stahlecker reports’ reveal how this lesson was applied ‘in the field’.
In the last week of June, Stahlecker reached Kaunas. He informed Berlin that ‘To our surprise, it was not easy at first to set in motion an extensive pogrom against Jews’. What did Stahlecker mean by these puzzling words? In the first place, ‘to our surprise’, he is implicitly criticising SS experts who almost certainly exaggerated the level of anti-Semitic hostility in the wider Lithuanian community. He makes the same point more than once: ‘Native anti-Semitic forces were induced to start pogroms … but this inducement proved to be very difficult.’ But Stahlecker boasted that he quickly came up with a solution: ‘every attempt was made from the start to ensure that reliable elements in the local population participated in the fight against the pests in their country, that is the Jews and Communists.’39 Instead of relying on the general population, Stahlecker turned not to any passing Lithuanian but to known activists – who had, as we have seen, already been informed of Heydrich’s pact with the LAF.
Before they arrived in Kaunas, Stahlecker and his adjutant SS-Sturmbannführer Horst Eichler made contact with Iron Wolf stalwarts Major Kazys Simkus and Bronius Norkus, who had founded the Voldemaras partisans to harass the Russians. They came to the meeting wearing Lithuanian army uniforms and it was evident that they had assumed that the Germans would assign them to a military division.40 Stahlecker reported that he saw straightaway that this would be a mistake. If partisans fought alongside German soldiers against a foreign power, it implied that they had been accepted as military allies – and thus as a Lithuanian army, which could be used to legitimate a sovereign Lithuanian state.
Stahlecker had every reason to be cautious. The Germans had been ambushed by Lithuanian nationalists right at the start of Operation Barbarossa. On 23 June, as the Soviet authorities fled Kaunas, Lithuanian LAF gangs seized the radio station and announced that a provisional Lithuanian government had been formed under Juozas Ambrazevičius-Brazaitis and called on Lithuanians to ‘extirpate the Soviet regime’. Even in Polish-dominated Vilnius, the German ‘liberators’, whose tanks arrived in the night, inspired wild enthusiasm. A rash of Lithuanian flags erupted and radios played the old national anthem ad nauseam. A Citizens’ Committee was set up to press for independence. Sideswiped by the LAF, the German military authorities reacted with shrill indignation: Lieutenant-General Wilhelm Schubert protested that the Lithuanians had the effrontery to regard themselves as ‘equal partners in the territory liberate from the Russians’. They plainly had the impression, he blustered, that Germany had ‘only gone to war’ with the Bolsheviks to grant Lithuania independence! When Schubert met the former Lithuanian Foreign Minister he made sure he knew who was in charge – and he had the tanks to back him up. The new Lithuanian state was strangled at birth.41
Despite this bitter disappointment, Stahlecker had little difficulty harnessing nationalist energies – for his own strategic purposes. He ferreted out ‘reliable elements’ that would do his bidding. Assisted by ethnic German Richard Schweizer, who spoke fluent Lithuanian, he sidelined Major Simkus and the Iron Wolf army faction and turned instead to radical journalist Algirdas Jonas Klimaitis who was well known as a self-proclaimed radical anti-Semite. Stahlecker authorised Klimaitis and a ‘Dr Zigonys’ to recruit dependable types as auxiliary policemen. In his report, Stahlecker states: ‘Klimatis [sic] succeeded in starting a pogrom on the basis of advice given to him … in such a way that no German order or German instigation was noticed from the outside.’ (My italics.) Stahlecker set his willing Lithuanian auxiliaries to work with breathtaking speed. Led by Klimaitis, the Lithuanian auxiliaries set fire to synagogues and houses in the old Jewish quarter. They began plundering homes and shooting down Jews caught in the street; on the first night alone, some 1,500 Lithuanian Jews were killed. On the second night, double that number.
Opportunity for plunder provided a powerful motivation (as it did for the German SD men and soldiers). After their owners had been murdered, auxiliaries looted homes and warehouses. They ripped valuables from bodies. On 28 June, Einsatzkommando 1B reported with satisfaction that ‘During the last three days Lithuanian partisan groups have already killed several thousand Jews’.42 Two days after arriving in Kaunas, Stahlecker had moved on to Riga in Latvia. The means of carrying out mass murder had now been settled. It was succinctly described in Einsatzgruppe Report No 21, sent to Berlin from Minsk on 13 July: ‘By 8 July in Vilnius, the local Einsatzkommando liquidated 321 Jews. The Lithuanian Ordnungsdienst which was placed under the Einsatzkommando … was instructed to take part in the liquidation of the Jews. 150 Lithuanian officials were assigned to this task.’
Hitler's Foreign Executioners Page 18
