Hitler's Foreign Executioners (20 page)

At police headquarters, municipal workers began to clear away the corpses and hose down the streets that were encrusted with blood and brain matter. A work party of
Jews was compelled to scrub every single stone in the courtyard. An 80-year-old woman recalled: ‘I remained there without food for three days. On the third day, a general arrived … admonishing us that whatever happened there was because of the Jews who had fired on the Romanian-German army.’

Months later, the Italian journalist Curzio Malaparte visited Hans Frank, the Governor General of the German General Government, at his headquarters in the Wewel Castle in Kraków. At a sumptuous dinner, Frank asks Malaparte about ‘that night in Iaşi’. Mihai Antonescu, he says, ‘mentions 500 dead’. Malaparte corrects him: the unofficial figure is 7,000. ‘That is a respectable figure,’ Frank responds. But he adds: it ‘wasn’t nice’. Also at Frank’s dinner table is the Austrian governor of Kraków, Baron Otto von Wächter. ‘It’s an uncivilised method,’ he says with a tone of disgust. Frank has a ready explanation: ‘The Romanians are an uncivilised people … We use the art of surgery, not that of butchery. Has anyone seen a massacre of Jews on the streets of a German town?’

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

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

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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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