Holocaust: The Nazi Persecution and Murder of the Jews (45 page)

liquidated’.
53
The Commander of Einsatzgruppe B, Artur Nebe, believed in interpreting the orders ‘sent from above as if in some places and districts all Jews were

to be exterminated irrespective of age or sex’.
54

A statement made in 1966 by Higher SS and Police Commander for Russia

Centre, Erich von dem Bach-Zelewski, indicates that Nebe’s attitude is attribut-

able to an instruction from Himmler. According to Bach, Himmler had told Nebe

as early as his visit to Bialystok (8 July) that ‘every Jew must in principle be

regarded as a partisan’,
55
and three days later the commander of Police Regiment Centre, whose headquarters were in Bialystok, gave the order for the ‘immediate

summary shooting of all male Jews aged between 17 and 45 convicted of looting’.
56

These orders therefore opened the way for the annihilation of all those members

of the Jewish population who were fit for military service without further condi-

tions.

A report by Einsatzgruppe B from July 1941 contains information about the

activities of Einsatzkommando 9 in Vilnius:
57
‘The Einsatzkommando in Vilnius The Mass Murder of Jewish Men

199

has liquidated 321 Jews there in the period up to 8 July. The Lithuanian order

police, who were placed under the command of the Einsatzkommando after the

disbandment of the Lithuanian political police, were ordered to take part in the

liquidation of the Jews. For this purpose 150 Lithuanian officials were assigned to

capture the Jews and get them to concentration camps where they were subjected

to special treatment on the same day. This work has now begun and more than

500 Jews and other saboteurs are now being liquidated daily.’ The total number of

Jews killed in Vilnius by Einsatzkommando 9 and Lithuanians during July—

mostly men—was at least 4,000–5,000,
58
but is thought to be as many as 10,000
.59

It is also demonstrable that Himmler intervened directly in the case of Einsatz-

kommando 9 in order to increase the number of executions. In a report from early

July on the activities of a sub-unit of Einsatzkommando 9 that had been sent to the

towns of Grodno and Lida the leader of Einsatzgruppe B notes, ‘in Grodno and

Lida only 96 Jews were liquidated in the first few days. I have given the order for

this to be greatly intensified’.
60
The background to this order was the fact that on a visit to Grodno on 30 June Himmler and Heydrich criticized deficiencies in the

work of the commando; in a general task order issued on 1 July Heydrich

demanded ‘greater flexibility in the tactical disposition of the Einsatzkommandos’

and deplored the fact that four days after the occupation there were still no

members of the Security Police and SD in Grodno.
61
On 9 July Himmler and Heydrich visited Grodno once more,
62
and were evidently reassured that the order for Einsatzgruppe B to intensify liquidations had by then been implemented.

According to the incident report: ‘The activity of all commandos has developed

satisfactorily. Above all, the liquidations have got going properly and now take

place in large numbers daily. The implementation of the necessary [!] liquidations

is guaranteed under all circumstances.’ This passage makes very clear how only a

few weeks after the start of the Russian campaign there was a perception that

certain liquidation targets had to be systematically attained.

Einsatzgruppe C

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

undertaken mass executions of Jewish men during the month of July.
63
Even before then, on 30 June in Dobromil, on the orders of the Higher SS and Police

Commander Russia South, Friedrich Jeckeln, and the leader of Einsatzgruppe C,

Otto Rasch, Einsatzkommando 6 shot at least 80 Jewish men as a ‘reprisal’ for

alleged attacks by departing Soviet troops.
64

Einsatzkommandos 5 and 6 both participated in the massacre of the Lvov Jews,

which was again mainly organized by Jeckeln and the officers of Einsatzgruppe C.
65

The reason given for this massacre in the incident reports was that it was a

‘reprisal’ for murders of Ukrainian nationalists that had been committed in the

city prisons by Soviets immediately before their departure. The reports record:

200

Mass Executions in Occupied Soviet Zones, 1941

‘approximately 7,000 Jews were rounded up and shot by the Security Police as a

reprisal for [these] inhuman atrocities. . . . Those seized were mostly Jews between

20 and 40; craftsmen and those in specialist trades were exempted where appro-

priate.’
66
After taking part in the Lvov massacre, Einsatzkommando 5 undertook

‘operations’ in Berdichev and surrounding districts,
67
including Chmielnik, where 299 people, mostly Jews, were shot in a ‘reprisal’ operation.
68

After its deployment in Lvov, Einsatzkommando 6 spent the second half of

July in Vinnitsa in the Ukraine, where it carried out further executions, notably

one with 146 victims and another that claimed the lives of 600 Jews.
69

According to its own reports, at the end of June 1941 Sonderkommando 4a had

shot more than 300 people in executions carried out in Sokal—people who had

first been classified as ‘Communists’ and then as ‘Jewish Communists’.
70
At the beginning of July, again according to its own reports, the commando shot a total

of 2,000 Jews in Lutsk ‘as a counter-measure for the murder of Ukrainians’.
71
It then moved on to Zhitomir, where it carried out three ‘operations’ in July, in

which more than 600 Jewish men were murdered, and another on 7 August, when

402 Jews were shot.
72
In the second half of July, Sonderkommando 4b shot at least 100 people in Vinnitsa as part of the so-called ‘intelligence operation’.
73
The report on this operation makes clear how arbitrarily the Einsatzkommandos went about

their attacks on the ‘Jewish-Bolshevist leadership cadre’. After ‘trawling the city

for leading Jewish figures produced a less than satisfactory result’, the report says,

the commando leader ‘sent for the city’s principal Rabbi and directed him to

identify the whole of the Jewish intelligentsia within 24 hours, because this

information was needed for registration purposes. When the first batch proved

to be numerically insufficient, those members of the Jewish intelligentsia who had

presented themselves were sent away with the instruction that they should identify

more of their kind themselves and present themselves along with these people the

following day. This measure was then used a third time with the result that we

were able to seize and liquidate virtually all the Jewish intelligentsia.’
74

The first summary report on the activities of Einsatzgruppe C in ‘the Polish and

Russian parts of White Ruthenia [Belarus]’ from early July 1941 contains an

important indication that the staff of the Einsatzgruppe understood the execution

orders to mean that they did not only affect Jews ‘in Party and state posts’. ‘On the

basis of the instructions received from the Reich Security Head Office, function-

aries of the state and Party apparatus were liquidated in all the towns of Belarus

already mentioned. As for the Jews, they were treated in the same way, as the

orders directed.
’75

In the incident report for 20 August Einsatzgruppe C described a ‘measure’

that reveals just how spurious the term ‘reprisal’ was as grounds for action.

‘In Januszpol, a city with more than 25 per cent Jewish inhabitants, Jewish

women have in recent days displayed impertinent and insolent behaviour

with respect to the restrictions currently imposed on them. They tore their

The Mass Murder of Jewish Men

201

own and their children’s clothes from their bodies. As an interim reprisal

measure, the commando that arrived, once order had been re-established,

shot 15 male Jews. Further reprisals will follow.’
76
The report ultimately makes it plain that ‘reprisal measures against looters and Jews will continue

to be carried out as planned [!] as they have already been’,
77
and that these

‘reprisal measures’ were taken systematically and independently of the nature

of the situation on the spot.
78

Einsatzgruppe for Special Purposes

In addition to the four commandos in the Einsatzgruppe, there was an additional

commando under the leader of the Security Police in Cracow, which had been sent

into the eastern Polish area to support Einsatzgruppe C.
79
It too was carrying out mass executions by July, overwhelmingly of male Jews, as the incident report of 3

August documents: ‘between 21 and 31 July 1941 3,947 persons were liquidated.’
80

According to an incident report of 9 August, 510 people were killed in Brest-

Litovsk and another 296 in Bialystok.
81

The reports made from early August on by this commando from the eastern

Polish area, which was immediately named Einsatzkommando for Special Pur-

poses, show very clearly how excessive the ‘reprisals’ were at this point and how

this was merely a pretext for mass murder: ‘in the area around Pinsk one member

of the militia was shot in an ambush; 4,500 Jews were liquidated in return.
’82

Einsatzgruppe D

Einsatzgruppe D was assigned to the 11th Army, which together with two Roma-

nian armies was to form the southernmost spearhead of the invasion. Its activity

has to be assessed against the background of Romania’s radical anti-Semitic

politics: Romania was an ally that had pursued a policy of ‘solving’ the ‘Jewish

question since the outbreak of war against the Soviet Union using a mixture of

pogroms, massacres, and violent expulsions. The potential for anti-Semitic vio-

lence that was thereby released was considerable during the first few weeks of the

war; whilst the German Einsatzgruppen mostly directed their measures during the

first weeks of the war at members of the ‘leading’ Jewish social groups and only

then extended the range of the murders to include men of military age, the

Romanian attack was directed at the whole of the Jewish minority from the very

beginning.

On 28 July Romanian soldiers and civilians, supported by members of the

Wehrmacht, carried out a pogrom in the border city of Jasi that had been prepared

by the Romanian secret service. There were countless murders within the city, a

mass execution in the courtyard of the police headquarters, and during the

subsequent transports in crowded goods trains that shuttled back and forth all

202

Mass Executions in Occupied Soviet Zones, 1941

day in the scorching heat, without food and water, thousands of people lost their

lives—4,000 according to the estimate of the German ambassador.
83

Whilst reconquering the areas of Bessarabia and the Bukovina that had been

ceded to the Soviet Union in 1940 under pressure from Moscow, Romanian police

and troops murdered many Jews. They were supported in part by Einsatzgruppe

D and members of the Wehrmacht, but largely acted on their own initiative, but

also supported by Romanian and Ukrainian peasants and farmers. The Romanian

authorities were following a plan dictated by their own government for the

systematic ‘cleansing’ of the country: Jews in rural areas were to be killed on the

spot; those living in cities were to be interned in camps.
84
Raoul Hilberg estimates the total number of victims of this campaign at more than 10,000
.85

These murders left a mixed impression with Einsatzgruppe D, as is shown by

one of their reports. ‘There would be no objection to the shooting of numerous

Jews if the technical aspects of preparation and implementation were not so

inadequate.’ It was in that sense that the Einsatzgruppe wished to influence the

activities of the Romanians.
86

All five commandos from Einsatzgruppe D that were assigned to the German

11th Army attacking from Romanian territory or to the two allied Romanian

armies can be shown to have participated in the mass execution of Jewish men

in the period up to the beginning of August 1941
.87

In the city of Belzy, as part of a bloody ‘reprisal’ by Romanian police and

soldiers against the city’s Jews in which hundreds were killed, Sonderkommando

10a shot 75 Jewish hostages.
88
A sub-unit of the same Sonderkommando was sent to the town of Kodyma in response to a request from the intelligence officer of the

XXX Army Corps because the ‘Jews and Bolshevists’ there were allegedly intend-

ing to sabotage measures being taken by the occupying power. The sub-unit

therefore arrested 400 men on 1 August, most of them Jews, subjected them to

an ‘interrogation’ and then shot 98 of them.
89

On 8 and 9 July Sonderkommando 10b (assigned to the 3rd Romanian Army)

took part in a massacre carried out by Romanian troops in Chernivtsi (Czerno-

vitz) in which it killed ‘100 Jewish Communists’ by its own account, ostensibly

because advancing German and Romanian formations had been shot at from

within the Jewish quarter.
90
At the end of July, Einsatzgruppe D reported that ‘of about 1,200 Jews arrested’ in the city, ‘682 had been shot in cooperation with the