Hitler's Foreign Executioners (24 page)

It is tempting to draw a simple causal line between the Baltic radical nationalists and the explosion of mass murder after June 1941. That would be misleading. We cannot ignore the psychological impact of an event that profoundly destabilised civic relations, however fragile, in the Baltic States. On 23 August 1939 Joachim von Ribbentrop, the German Foreign Minister, and his Soviet counterpart Vyacheslav signed a ‘Treaty of Non-aggression between Germany and the Soviet Union’. This pact contained ‘secret protocols’ that divided Eastern Europe between German and Soviet ‘spheres of influence’. The protocols sealed the fate of the Baltic States by ceding them to the Soviet Union’s sphere of influence. Stalin did not rush to take advantage of the pact. Soviet troops moved up to the borders of Latvia and Lithuania in October 1939, but full-scale occupation did not begin until 15 June 1940.
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Nevertheless by the middle of July, the Baltic presidents and their governments had been forced to resign, and newly installed puppet regimes voted for incorporation into the Soviet Union. By the end of 1940, the three former states had been digested by the Soviet Union as the ‘Pri-Baltic Military District’. Immediately after these rigged elections, Soviet NKVD units rounded up 15,000 ‘hostile elements’ and police tribunals were set up to try ‘enemies of the people’. On 21 January 1921 General Ivan Serov, Deputy People’s Commissioner of State Security of the Soviet Union (NKVD), signed Order No 001223: ‘On the procedure of carrying out the Deportation of anti-Soviet Elements from Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia’. Historian Edgars Dunsdorfs, author of
The Baltic Dilemma
, estimates that, between June 1940 and June 1941, the number of Baltic citizens executed, conscripted or deported after the Soviet annexation was at least 125,000 men, women and children, including heads of state and ministers and allegedly dissident members of the intelligentsia. Stalin’s definition of ‘enemies of the people’ threw a net over both individuals and economic classes (for example, large landlords and factory owners), as well as specific professions, including prostitutes and clerics. According to Order No 001223 fitting punishments included ‘confiscation of their property, arrest and incarceration in camps for a term of five
to eight years, and after serving their term in camps, to settlement in remote areas of the USSR’. The great forced migrations set in motion by the Nazi Soviet agreements continued in the Baltic. At railway terminals, NKVD battalions herded many thousands into cattle wagons, often left standing for days, before they began the long journey east. Only a few of the deportees ever returned home.
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In Latvia and Lithuania, Soviet deportations hit Jewish communities harder, proportionally, than any other ethnic or religious group. It is estimated that between 1939 and 1941 the Soviets arrested and exiled 100,000 Jews – which was about 5 per cent of the Jewish population in the annexed territories. The fact that the Soviets deported Jews in such large numbers had no impact on how other Latvians or Lithuanians perceived the ‘terror’. As in Romania, Soviet aggression was instinctively attributed to Jews or some unspecified ‘Jewish’ agency. In short, the Jews were to blame. Soviet aggression galvanised and refashioned age-old hatreds.

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.
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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.’
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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.
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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.’
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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]’.
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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’.
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