Hitler's Foreign Executioners (21 page)

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’.
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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’.
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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”?’
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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.
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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.

Heydrich’s Special Task Forces would spearhead the assault on the ‘Jewish-Bolshevik’ stronghold. At regular meetings with his commanders, Heydrich frequently drummed in the bond between Bolshevism and Jewry. In the meantime, Himmler pushed forward plans for the colonisation of the east – plans of staggering ambition that covertly envisaged the physical annihilation of millions.

Since the 1980s the Holocaust has dominated accounts of the Second World War – and rightly so. But in the minds of Hitler and German imperial strategists, mass murder and the forced ‘evacuation’ of millions was a beginning not an end; a ‘cleansing procedure’ that would pave the way for a complete ethnic reordering of the east. Historian Adam Tooze has shown that Operation Barbarossa was a first step towards a ‘long term programme of demographic engineering’, summarised in that ugly word ‘Germanisation’.
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The idea was not an original one. Germanisation already had a long and shabby pedigree. Heinrich von Treitschke, the nineteenth-century advocate of
Drang nach Osten
(the drive to the east), celebrated the ‘most stupendous and fruitful occurrence of the later Middle Ages – the northward and eastward rush of the German spirit and the formidable activities of our people as conquerors, teachers, discipliners’.
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Now in 1941, the ‘formidable rush’ of Hitler’s war machine and Himmler’s SS militias promised to fulfil that old German dream. Hitler compared his quest for ‘living space’ in the east to the American colonisation of the west: the Volga, he proclaimed, would be Germany’s Mississippi. In 1939, when Germany invaded the then dismembered Poland, Himmler and his racial experts (
Ostforschung
) had embarked on an ambitious experimental programme to settle German colonists in the new German provinces and deport Polish Jews into the Lublin district in occupied Poland. This fist stab at ‘Germanisation’ proved a
dismal failure. More than half a million ethnic German settlers, uprooted from the Baltic and South Tyrol, abandoned their homes only to end up stranded in sordid transit camps. In occupied Poland, the General Governor Hans Frank stymied SS plans to dump millions of Jews in what he regarded as a personal fiefdom. Clearing this ethnic logjam demanded the most radical of solutions: the conquest of the east and the subjugation of its peoples.

Himmler commissioned an ambitious young agronomist SS-Oberführer Dr Konrad Meyer to begin devising a ‘Generalplan Ost’.
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Between May 1941 and the following spring, Meyer toiled away at his office in the upmarket Berlin suburb of Berlin-Dahlem. As German troops penetrated deep into the Soviet Union and Caucasus, Himmler continuously stepped up pressure on Meyer urging him to consider ever more radical solutions. Meyer began by assuming his schemes would take twenty-five years to complete – Himmler wanted that reduced to five. Finally, in May 1942, Meyer delivered his ‘Legal, Economic and Spatial Foundations for Development in the East’. The Generalplan Ost was the high point of a succession of toxic German occupation plans devised after the destruction of Poland. The ‘Hunger Plan’, developed not by the SS but German army planners, proposed diverting Russian agricultural supplies to Germany, condemning to certain death by starvation 30 million people in Belorussia, northern Russia and the major Soviet cities. German military reversals in the winter of 1941 forced the partial abandonment of this wicked scheme, although the German army chiefs used planned famine as a weapon of war during the 900-day siege of Leningrad and other Soviet cities. After February 1942, the Germans focused more intently on the ‘Final Solution of the Jewish problem’ promulgated at the Wannsee Conference.
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Many historians have claimed that the German occupation of the east was chaotic and unplanned. In fact, no other imperial project has generated more occupation plans.

It is also widely assumed that German racial experts believed that the east was occupied by a homogeneous mass of ‘Slavs’. Hitler certainly held this opinion, as his ‘table talk’ frequently demonstrates. But German race science was by no means monolithic and underwent a number of conceptual upheavals, which intensified after 1941 when German anthropologists seized the opportunity to study Russian prisoners of war. For now, we need simply to understand that German race experts increasingly recognised the diversity of eastern peoples – and that Himmler acknowledged this in his grandiose plans for the east. As early as 24 May 1940 Himmler presented Hitler with a short paper: ‘Some Thoughts on the Treatment of Foreign Peoples in the East’.
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He begins by arguing that ‘we must endeavour to recognize and foster as many individual groups as possible’; he lists Ukrainians, White Russians, Gorales, Lemkes and Kashubians. From a purely strategic point of
view, he argues, it makes sense to ‘divide them up into as many parts and splinters as possible’. In other words, divide and rule. By ‘dissolving’ these ethnic groups ‘into countless little splinter groups and particles’, any sense of ‘unity and greatness’,‘national consciousness and national culture’ would be eliminated. Himmler then goes on: ‘we will of course use the members of these ethnic groups … as policemen and mayors.’ The planned outcome would be the ‘dissolution of this ethnic mishmash [in the east]’ so that the most ‘racially valuable’ people could be ‘fished out’ and then ‘assimilated’ in Germany. Himmler then turns to education. Schools for the non-German eastern population would teach the majority only basic maths ‘up to 500’ and how to ‘sign one’s name’. All would be taught that ‘it is God’s commandment to be obedient to the Germans’. But – and here is the crucial point – more ambitious parents could apply to SS authorities to have their children educated to a higher level. On condition that the candidate was ‘racially first class’, successful applicants would be removed from their families and placed in a German school ‘indefinitely’. Himmler assumed that such parental zeal signified the possession of ‘good blood’. Himmler then appears to realise that Germanisation could not depend on parental whim alone, however praiseworthy. German teachers would be required to constantly sift their six to ten charges to winnow out ‘valuable blood’.