Russia's War

by Richard Overy

  About five million Jews lived in the Soviet Union in 1941; most in the western regions, which came directly under German rule. Anti-Semitism was no stranger to Soviet Jews. There was a long history of popular anti-Semitism in the Ukraine and the Baltic states, going back far into the Tsarist past. Before the First World War hundreds of thousands of Russian Jews emigrated to Western Europe or America to escape the pogroms. Anti-Semitism was never a formal policy of the new Soviet state – which was officially committed to the socialist ideal of racial equality – but under Stalin, who was described by Khrushchev as ‘a dyed-in-the-wool anti-Semite’, the Jewish population and its leaders faced an uncertain future.26

  In the 1920s the Soviet authorities decided to establish a separate Jewish homeland where Jews from the western regions could settle and till the land. The area chosen was the Crimea, the very area later designated by Hitler for German colonization. During the 1920s thousands of poor Jews from the Ukraine and Belorussia, the old Pale of Settlement, migrated to the Crimean steppe. In the 1930s the plan changed. Stalin did not want a Jewish homeland in the Crimea, half of which was populated by Tatars, who had their own autonomous republic. A new site was found in the Soviet far east, on the banks of the Amur River, in the region of Birobidzhan. This desolate area abutted the new Japanese empire in Manchuria. No Jews had ever lived there. But a new stream of settlers moved across Siberia to set up the Jewish Autonomous Region, with its own Jewish press, Jewish theatre and Jewish authorities. It was not quite a ghetto; Soviet propaganda made great play with the idea that the regime was protecting the culture and identity of the Jewish people. But its remoteness from the traditional centres of Jewish culture and settlement made it an unattractive prospect. Few western Jews moved there. Birobidzhan was a failed experiment in Soviet apartheid.27

  During the Stalinist terror of the 1930s Jews featured prominently among the list of victims in one show trial after another. Anti-Semitism was never given as the ground for their persecution, and the large number of Jews in the senior ranks of the Party and the state apparatus made it inevitable that they would suffer disproportionately when Stalin turned on his former colleagues. Anti-Semitism was more evident in the savage purge that followed the sacking of Maxim Litvinov from the Foreign Affairs Commissariat in May 1939. Although the Jewish Litvinov was spared, his staff was not. They were arrested and forced to confess that they were all part of a counter-revolutionary circle of spies, headed by Litvinov himself. Almost all of those purged were Jews. The NKVD began to prepare a show trial, the ‘trial of ambassadors’. All but one of those singled out for the trial were Jewish.28 The trial never took place. The unstable international situation made a further purge too dangerous. The Foreign Affairs Commissariat under Molotov was gradually filled with ethnic Russians. The NKVD was purged at the same time, and many Jews prominent in the organization were arrested and murdered. Contact with ‘Zionist circles’ began to appear in the lists of fabricated crimes drawn up by the Lubyanka torturers.

  After war broke out in September 1939 the Soviet regime was drawn into sudden complicity with German anti-Semitism. Thousands of German and Polish Jews flooded across the new Soviet-German border. The Red Army turned many of them back, only to have German guards open fire on the helpless crowds caught in a stateless no-man's-land. German Jews who had sought sanctuary in the Soviet Union during the 1930s were now rounded up and shipped back to Germany, where they were imprisoned or murdered. Other Jewish refugees from German occupation were exiled to Siberia or Kazakhstan or thrown into prison or labour camps (from which they finally emerged in the late summer of 1941, when the German invasion of the Soviet Union made Jews everywhere into allies of the Soviet cause). In the Soviet-occupied area of Poland, where Jews had already been the victims of Polish discrimination, the new authorities launched a further attack on the communities of small-town – shtetl – Jews. In just twenty-one months the traditions of Jewish life were demolished. Jewish leaders were arrested and deported; Jewish associations and youth movements were closed down; many synagogues were closed and used as warehouses or stables. The ideological drive against religion and class distinctions was used to justify the public drive against Jewish religious practice and the richer or more cultured elements of the Jewish community. The Jewish slaughterhouses were closed down, and the public practice of circumcision and bar mitzvah prevented. The Sabbath was abolished as an official holy day, along with Jewish festivals and holidays. The characteristic Jewish economy of small artisan shops and market stalls was closed down. In the deserted squares of the small towns appeared statues of Stalin.29

  Suddenly, in August 1941, Stalin ordered a complete turnabout on the Jewish question. Imprisoned Jews were released, including two famous Polish Jewish socialists, Genrikh Erlich and Viktor Alter, who had spent eighteen months in the Lubyanka and had been condemned to death for agitating against the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact – in July 1941, a month after the German invasion!30 On August 24 a rally of Jewish people was held in a Moscow park, and was addressed by prominent Jewish figures from the worlds of film, art and literature. Erlich and Alter proposed the establishment of an international Jewish Anti-Hitler Committee that would unite Jews everywhere in the anti-Nazi cause. This proved too much for Stalin. When government offices were rushed to Kuibyshev in October, as German forces threatened to encircle Moscow, Erlich and Alter were sent there under NKVD guard. They were settled in a smart hotel, whence they were summoned to an urgent meeting in the local NKVD residence. Neither was ever seen in public again. Erlich committed suicide in prison in May 1942 and Alter was executed in February of the following year.31 The plans for a broad Jewish anti-Hitler movement came to nothing. Instead Stalin sponsored a new organization in April 1942, the Jewish Anti-fascist Committee. Headed by the actor Solomon Mikhoels, the new Committee was part of the Soviet Information Bureau, the state propaganda agency. Its purpose was to secure funds and support for the Soviet war effort from both inside and outside the country. The hidden hand behind the committee was that of an NKVD official, Sergei Shpigelglaz, whose job was to monitor its activities. Throughout its wartime life it was a branch of the Soviet apparatus, part of the frantic effort to mobilize the energies of all Soviet peoples for the struggle against the invader. Only towards the end of the war, when the committee's leaders began to plan for a Jewish homeland in the Soviet Union, did Stalin turn against it, suspicious that its real purpose was to create a Trojan horse for American capitalism and imperialism inside the Soviet Union itself.32

  Stalin's fantasies about Zionist conspiracies were nothing compared with the ideological obsessions of his erstwhile German ally. Stalin was an anti-Semite, but he was too much of an opportunist to allow his prejudices to stand in the way of the Soviet war effort. Hitler and the racist circle around him were ideological purists. The war with the Soviet Union opened up undreamed-of opportunities to complete a project of racial engineering unparalleled in human history. Just when Hitler decided in his own mind to initiate the active extermination of the Jewish people is not known with certainty. The most likely hypothesis is that Hitler made the first of a number of decisions that led to genocide in the first flush of victory as German forces rushed forward into Soviet territory, seizing the Ukraine, the Baltic states and Belorussia, triumphant, unstoppable. There were witnesses to the enhanced state of euphoria that overtook Hitler's headquarters in June and July 1941.33 He was a man on the crest of a wave; his achievements were regarded as extraordinary, world-historic. He had already crossed every moral threshold: he had authorized the liquidation of mentally and physically disabled Germans in the spring of 1939; in September 1939 he approved the liquidation of thousands of Polish civilians; in the months before Barbarossa he had approved the ‘criminal orders’ to liquidate Communist and Jewish functionaries of the Soviet state. No radical moral leap was necessary to extend these criminal orders to include all Soviet Jews. Adolf Eichmann, the man who organized the transport of Jewish victims in Europe, later recalled that he
was told in the middle of July 1941 by Himmler's deputy. Reinhard Heydrich, that Hitler had ordered ‘physical extermination’.34

  By the autumn of 1941 Hitler had almost certainly extended the decision to slaughter the Jews in the East to the Jewish communities of the rest of German-occupied Europe, precipitating full-scale genocide. Preparations for the Holocaust can be found throughout the months of the German advance into Russia: grotesque experiments to determine the most rational form of extermination, rather than simple massacre; the preliminary orders for crematoria and camp equipment; the search for sites suitable for the new death camps. All of this pre-dated the final crisis in front of Moscow. The accumulating evidence of German preparations in 1941 for extermination undermines the argument that the slowdown of the German advance and the sudden reverses before Moscow pushed Hitler over the edge to a policy of Jewish annihilation in revenge for Communist successes. Exultant victory triggered the genocide, not unexpected defeat. The Soviet collapse in 1941 sealed the fate of Europe's Jews.

  Whatever the motives and timing of Hitler's decision, the process of killing Jews began almost immediately after German forces crossed the frontier. The Einsatzgruppen rounded up any male Jews who worked for the Soviet regime or the Communist Party and shot them outright. They spread the net wide; their situation reports referred to the slaughter of ‘Jews’, ‘intellectual Jews’, ‘Jewish activists’, ‘wandering Jews’, ‘rebellious Jews’, but could be applied to ‘suspicious elements’, ‘hostile elements’ or ‘undesirable elements’.35 So broad were these categories that within weeks of the invasion the Einsatzgruppen were routinely murdering women and children along with adult male Jews. They also got other people to do their dirty work for them. Local anti-Semites were armed by the Germans and encouraged to launch vicious pogroms of their own. The first occurred in the Lithuanian city of Kovno on the night of June 25, when 1,500 Jews were massacred and Jewish property and synagogues destroyed. A few days later another pogrom was staged in the Latvian capital of Riga. Nine further pogroms were instigated, in which thousands of helpless Jews were humiliated, beaten, tortured and murdered.36 This proved only a temporary solution, however. The local anti-Semitic gangs were soon disarmed and incorporated into the Einsatzgruppen or the local German police organization. The systematic slaughter of Soviet Jews then began in earnest.

  The mastermind of the killing campaign was an SS general, Erich von dem Bach-Zalewski. In the last two weeks of July 1941 he was given control of some 11,000 SS troops – almost four times the number originally assigned to the Einsatzgruppen – so that the pace of the killing could be stepped up. Around 6,000 ordinary police were put under Bach-Zalewski's authority. By the end of 1941 33,000 local auxiliaries had joined them, a total of over 50,000 men whose job was to kill not only Jews, but other race enemies such as gypsies and the mentally and physically disabled.37 The overwhelming number of victims were Jews. They were rounded up in camps and ghettoes, transported to woods or fields, stripped of possessions and clothes, gunned down and buried in mass graves they themselves had been forced to dig. In rural areas Jewish settlements were simply destroyed, one after another. The villagers were herded into the open and mown down, and the buildings were razed to the ground. Within weeks reports informed Berlin that whole areas of the occupied East were now judenrein, free of Jews.

  The most notorious crime of all was the massacre of 33,771 Jews in just two days in a ravine at Babi Yar, outside Kiev. Shortly after the German occupation, partisans blew up the Continental Hotel in the heart of the city, the headquarters of the German 6th Army. The authorities decided on ‘reprisals’. On 26 September 1941 notices were posted in the city ordering all Jews to report within three days for resettlement. Over 30,000 appeared, most of whom assumed that the Germans meant what they said. They were marched to the outskirts of the city to the ravine, a one-mile-long anti-tank ditch that ran between sand dunes. There they were taken in small groups with their luggage to the edge of the ravine, at the bottom of which a pit some sixty yards long and eight feet deep had been dug. The victims were stripped and their valuables collected. They then stood on planks placed on the edge of the ravine, where they were shot in the back of the neck. Some were made to run the gauntlet and were shot at as they ran. The slaughter took two days, September 29 and 30. According to eyewitnesses thousands of Soviet prisoners and the captured commanders of the city were also murdered at Babi Yar. The pit was then covered with a shallow layer of quicklime and earth was spread over the scar.38 Six months later small explosions could be heard in the ravine and columns of earth could be seen shooting into the air. Gases from the decomposing bodies had made the burial site physically unstable. Paul Blobel, whose Einsatzkommando had carried out the massacre in September, was ordered by Heydrich to exhume Babi Yar and other mass graves to dispose of the bodies more effectively. The dead were unceremoniously cremated to remove any trace of the crime.39

  The massacre at Babi Yar was not the largest. At Odessa an estimated 75,000 to 80,000 Jews were killed by Germany's Romanian allies and the local Einsatzgruppe. In the Ukrainian city of Dneprpetrovsk only 30,000 of the city's 100,000 Jews remained when the Germans arrived. They were ordered to ‘resettle’ and were marched eight abreast through the city, clutching their bundles of clothing. In a single operation in October 1941, 11,000 elderly Jews and children were machine-gunned over a two-day period, the noise clearly audible from the edge of the city. The shootings continued until March. In Kharhovsk, with a large and famous Jewish community, 20,000 Jews remained. They were not massacred all at once but were denied food or clothing. Thousands died of starvation and hypothermia. They were forced to inhabit a huge tractor plant. In March 1942 the survivors were taken to a nearby gully and shot in small groups. The tractor plant, piled high with Jews long dead, was burned to the ground in April.40

  Most Soviet Jews who died at the hands of the German occupiers were murdered in the orgy of killing in the first nine months of the occupation, before the extermination camps had been built and brought into operation. Around four million of the five million Soviet Jews lived in the area. An estimated one and a half million fled before the German invaders. Of the rest the reports of the killing squads suggest that a total of 1,152,000 were killed by the end of December 1942. There were other deaths not inflicted by the SS or the German army. The German authorities found that the local populations were often so hostile to the Jews that they engaged in extermination and property seizures of their own. The Einsatzgruppen were inundated with denunciations from the local people of Jews, Communists or political ‘undesirables’. In the Crimea, village leaders asked permission of the German authorities to liquidate the Jews themselves. In the massacre at Babi Yar, Ukrainians helped to round up Jews for the march to their deaths. The Germans came to rely on a network of informers who routinely betrayed partisans or Jews in return for bread or the protection of their village.41 The murder of the Jews brought out the worst in both populations, Soviet and German, but it is unthinkable that atrocity on such a scale would ever have been perpetrated against the Jewish population without the encouragement of the invader. The descent into lawlessness was sparked by one thing: the German treatment of Soviet Jews as vermin, to be flushed out and exterminated. The ultimate responsibility lay with Hitler and the Nazi leadership, who chose in 1941 to make legitimate an unimaginable barbarism.

  German rule in the Soviet Union did not go unopposed. For the thousands who collaborated there were thousands who resisted. The guerrilla war waged by partisan forces behind German lines became the symbol of defiance against fascism; the partisans became in Soviet propaganda the shock troops of the Motherland, heroes of the revolutionary struggle against the evil threat of Hitlerism. The historical reality was very different. Partisans were often reluctant fighters for the cause; their military impact was limited; their victims were to be found not only among the German occupiers but among the ordinary Soviet people, who came to fear their own side almost as much as they did the enem
y.

  Partisan warfare had a long and honourable history in Russia. Peasant bands had attacked Napoleon's great army during its catastrophic campaign in Russia in 1812. Guerrillas fought on the Bolshevik side in the civil war against the forces of the counter-revolution. Partisan warfare was part of the Russian military tradition. But during the 1930s the famous partisan leaders of the civil war were liquidated. Stalin regarded partisan war as a threat, something beyond the reach of the highly centralized and suspicious state apparatus. The existing partisan cadres and the supply dumps of food and weapons which had been set up in the 1930s to nourish and arm them were all closed down. When Germany invaded in 1941 there were no plans for partisan war.42 The movement grew at first spontaneously and incoherently, a product of circumstances, not of revolutionary spirit.

  Stalin soon laid aside his distrust of popular warfare. On 3 July 1941, in his first wartime appeal to the Soviet people, he summoned up the partisan struggle against the invader: ‘Conditions must be made unbearable for the enemy and his collaborators; they must be pursued and annihilated wherever they are…’43 The first irregular units were sent copies of an article penned by Lenin in 1906, ‘Partisan Warfare’, in which terrorism was presented as a legitimate instrument of class struggle. Every partisan had to swear an oath on entering the force promising utmost loyalty to the Soviet cause and swearing to ‘work a terrible, merciless, and unrelenting revenge upon the enemy… Blood for blood! Death for death!’ The partisan committed himself and his family to die rather than surrender; if ‘through fear, weakness or personal depravity’ the recruit broke his oath, he was asked to approve, in advance, his own death warrant at the hands of his own comrades.44 More than any other Soviet citizens, partisans found themselves caught between the devil and the deep blue sea.