Holocaust: The Nazi Persecution and Murder of the Jews (44 page)

3,500 prisoners at the end of June and bloodily suppressed an attempted uprising

by the OUN, pogroms were started by the indigenous population on 30 June, the

day of the city’s occupation by German troops. They were probably initiated by

the OUN and its militia. It is likely, however, that a special unit of the Wehrmacht

played a key role in triggering this pogrom when it entered the city as an advance

guard together with a battalion of Ukrainian nationalists under its command. The

pogroms cost at least 4,000 lives and were finally ended by the Wehrmacht on 2

July after it had spent two days observing but not intervening.
13
At that point, however, Einsatzgruppe C took over the organization of murderous activities:

over the next few days, by way of ‘retribution’ for the murders committed by the

NKVD, three Einsatzgruppe C commandos that had entered the city murdered

2,500 to 3,000 Jews.
14
At the end of July, Ukrainian groups took back the initiative and were responsible for a further pogrom for which support from the German

Special Purposes Commando was probably decisive once again. During the so-

called ‘Petljura Days’ more than 2,000 Jews were murdered in Lviv.
15

In Zloczow at the beginning of July, under the very eyes of Sonderkommando

4b and tolerated by the city commandant, Ukrainian activists had organized a

massacre of the Jewish population in which members of the SS Viking Division

took part on a huge scale. The total number of victims is estimated to be at least

2,000
.16
In the district of Tarnopol, too, Ukrainian nationalist murdered Jews under the supervision of Sonderkommando 4b—on 7 July some 70 Jews were

‘herded together and finished off with a big salvo’. When it had finished, the

commando described its deployment in Tarnopol in an incident report of 11 July,

announcing more than 127 executions that it had conducted and a further 600

dead ‘as part of the [Ukrainians’] anti-Jewish persecutions inspired by the

Einsatzkommando’.
17

The Mass Murder of Jewish Men

195

There are more ‘self-purification attempts’ inspired by Einsatzgruppe

C that can be documented on the basis of its incident reports. ‘In Dobromil

the synagogue was torched. In Sambor 50 Jews were murdered by the

outraged crowd.’
18
A few days later came the report, ‘in Krzemieniec between 100 and 150 Ukrainians were murdered by the Russians. . . . By way of reprisal

the Ukrainians beat 150 Jews to death with clubs.’
19
In Tarnopol and Choroskow they succeeded in ‘bringing 600 and 110 Jews to their deaths’ in

pogroms.
20
What is remarkable, but also characteristic of the attitude of the Germans towards these ‘self-purification attempts’ is the ‘encouragement’

(noted by Einsatzgruppe C in an incident report from early July) that the

High Command of the 17th Army gave ‘for using first the anti-Jewish and

anti-Communist Poles living in the newly conquered areas for these

self-purification attempts’.
21

In total, in the areas occupied by the Soviet Union between 1939 and 1941

pogroms have been documented in more than 60 places; estimates place the

number of dead at no less than 12,000, possibly as many as 24,000.
22
Despite the large number of victims, however, the Germans were disappointed with the results

of the ‘self-purification attempts’ that they had initiated amongst the Ukrainian

population. At the end of July Einsatzgruppe C was forced to admit, ‘recent

attempts circumspectly to inspire anti-Jewish pogroms have unfortunately not

had the desired effect’.
23
The deeper the Einsatzgruppe penetrated into the Ukraine, the more it was forced to recognize that the indigenous population

was not prepared to carry out pogroms.
24

Whilst these Einsatzgruppe reports create the impression that the initiative for

the pogroms had always lain with the commandos themselves—as Heydrich had

ordered—there are indications that in many places the pogroms were already

under way when the commandos arrived and where the commandos concentrated

on escalating the murders and bringing them under their own control. However, a

closer analysis of the course of these pogroms shows how—as has already been

noted—they were not spontaneous operations by indigenous populations but

responses to initiatives from radical nationalist and anti-Semitic forces that had

come together in the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists. Immediately after

the withdrawal of the Soviet occupying forces, the OUN had seized the initiative in

many places, set up provisional authorities and militias, and in some places, like

Lvov, with the imminent end of Soviet domination in sight, had organized

uprisings. There is something to be said for seeing the pogroms as components

of an OUN strategy to seize power in this transitional phase, and some likelihood

that the anti-Semitic components of this strategy were fostered by the German

side even before war had broken out.
25

But even if the pogroms can be attributed in large part to German plans to spark

off ‘attempts at self-cleansing’, it has to be admitted that they would not have been

possible if there had not already been a significant potential for anti-Semitic

196

Mass Executions in Occupied Soviet Zones, 1941

violence in the indigenous population and if they had not been susceptible to

mobilization for such murderous campaigns.

This is true of the pogrom that a book by the historian Jan Tomasz Gross

has made virtually emblematic of the indigenous population’s active partici-

pation in and co-responsibility for the murder of Jews, and which has led to

a wide-ranging debate on this topic, in Poland especially:
26
the murder of several hundred Jews in the town of Jedwabne on 10 July 1941 by—according

to Gross—their Polish neighbours.
27
Some of the victims were killed immediately, others burned alive in a barn. Even if the murders were carried out

by local people—or more precisely by a group of forty or so men, distinct

from other members of the indigenous population, mostly not from the town

itself but from the surrounding area—closer analysis of the crime has now

demonstrated that the pogrom was engineered by a unit of the German

Security Police. This was probably a commando from the Gestapo office in

Zichenau that had been assigned to Einsatzgruppe B as an auxiliary troop

and which had organized several pogroms in the western part of the Voivo-

deship of Bialystok (in which Jedwabne was located); it had recruited local

Poles as auxiliary ‘pogrom police’ for this purpose.
28
This was also in accordance with Heydrich’s order of 1 July in which he had described Poles

as an ‘element . . . for initiating pogroms’.
29

Organized Shootings by Einsatzgruppen and Police

Battalions in the First Weeks of the War

Einsatzgruppe A

Three of the four commandos under Einsatzgruppe A can be shown to have taken

part in mass executions of Jewish men in the first days and weeks after the

outbreak of war.
30
Einsatzkommando 1a shot 1,150 Jewish men in Daugavpils (Dünaburg) at the beginning of July 1941; the men had first been captured by

Latvian auxiliaries after ‘they had been supported at the rear by the operations of

the Einsatzkommando’.
31
After the pogrom in Riga, Einsatzkommando 2 reported the killing of more than 2,000 more Jews by the middle of July, partly ‘by Latvian

auxiliary police, partly by our own forces’.
32
What this refers to is the infamous commando led by the Latvian Victor Arajas; it played an important role in these

shootings, which mostly took place in the Bikernieki Forest.
33
At the end of June and in July the same commando, a company of Police Battalion 13, together with

Latvian auxiliaries and members of the army and navy shot what were believed to

be several thousand Jews in Liepāja (Libau).
34
In Jelgava (Mitau) a sub-unit of Einsatzkommando 2 shot some 160 Jews, including women and children, apparently in the first half of July.
35

The Mass Murder of Jewish Men

197

Einsatzkommando 3 had been organizing mass shootings of Jewish men

since early July in the city of Kaunas (Kovno).
36
The leader of this commando, Karl Jäger, reported on 1 December 1941 that the executions that had

taken place in Fort VII of the fortress of Kaunas since 4 July had been carried

out ‘by the Lithuanian partisans but on my orders and arranged by me’;
37

according to Jäger’s own list, 2,530 Jewish men and 47 women fell victim to

these shootings. From 7 July onwards, Jäger went on to report, a group of

men in his commando had also begun to carry out mass executions ‘in

cooperation with the Lithuanian partisans’ outside the city of Kaunas, which

claimed a total of more than 1,400 people, mostly Jewish men, in the month

of July.

Einsatzgruppe A was additionally supported by a commando that was made

up of members of the SD and the Gestapo and had been put together in the

city of Tilsit near the German border, thus receiving the name Einsatzkom-

mando Tilsit. In the towns of Gargždai (Garsden), Kretinga (Krottingen), and

(Palanga) Polangen (in the area immediately over the border with Lithuania),

on 24, 25, and 27 June, this unit executed respectively 201, 214, and 111

civilians, mostly Jewish men, by way of ‘reprisal’ for alleged attacks by

civilians on units from the advancing Wehrmacht.
38
In the days that followed, Einsatzkommando Tilsit carried out further ‘cleansing operations’ in the

border zone, including operations on 2 July in Taurage (Tauroggen), on 3

July in Jurbarkas (Georgenburg) and Augustowo, as well as in Marijampole

and Wladislawo,
39
during which an incident report, dated 18 July, claims 3,302

people were shot.
40

More executions by the commando are documented for the whole of July, in

many towns and villages, overwhelmingly of Jewish men.
41
The fact that in reports on later shootings carried out in the border zone the data for some towns only

includes the numbers of women, older men, and children, and not men of military

age, is an indication that the first wave of shootings had already claimed all the

Jewish men in that age-group.
42

These executions were fully in alignment with the intentions of the SS

leadership. A telex from the Gestapo office in Tilsit dated 1 July makes it clear

that Himmler and Heydrich had visited the border zone at the end of June, had

been informed about the ‘measures taken’ and had ‘fully approved’ them.
43
A few days later Heydrich expressly confirmed in a written order that the executions carried out by the Einsatzkommando Tilsit were in accordance with his

instructions: in Order No. 6 he informed the Einsatzgruppe chiefs that he had

‘authorized the eastern commanders of the SPSD (Security Police and SD) and

the state police offices to undertake cleansing operations in the newly occupied

areas opposite their border zones in order to relieve pressure on the Einsatz-

gruppen and Einsatzkommandos, and above all to ensure their freedom of

movement’.
44

198

Mass Executions in Occupied Soviet Zones, 1941

Einsatzgruppe B

All four of the commandos under Einsatzgruppe B can be shown to have

undertaken mass executions of Jewish men during the month of July.
45

Sonderkommando 7 was responsible for what an incident report calls ‘the

complete liquidation of male Jewry’ in Vilejka by the end of June or early July

1941.
46
The same commando was responsible for shooting 332 Jews in Vitebsk at the end of July or early in August,
47
and for a subsequent ‘operation’ in Grodek (Gorodok) in which 150–200 Jewish men were shot.
48
Mass shootings of Jewish men by Sonderkommando 7 are documented in Borisov (in July) and in the area

around Orsha/Mogilev (late July or early August).
49

At the beginning of July Einsatzkommando 8 initiated in Bialystok alone two

‘operations’ in which German courts established that at least 800 and 100 Jewish

men were shot dead; thereafter there were two executions in Baranowicze each

with at least 100 victims. The commando was involved in mass shootings in Minsk

at the end of July and in August during which more than 1,000 Jews were killed.
50

A sub-unit of Einsatzkommando 8 was sent to Slonim in the middle of July where,

according to an incident report of 24 July,
51
‘in cooperation with the Order Police a major operation was conducted against Jews and other Communist elements in

which c.2,000 persons were arrested for Communist subversion and looting; 1,075

of them were liquidated on the same day’.
52
The leader of Einsatzkommando 8, Otto Bradfisch, testified in respect of this operation that he had already ascertained during the march to Minsk that there was no express order ‘to annihilate

the Jewish population of a town or area solely on the grounds of their racial

identity’, but that orders from Einsatzgruppe B were in practice interpreted so

broadly that ‘every Jew was to be seen as a danger to combat troops and therefore