Holocaust: The Nazi Persecution and Murder of the Jews (47 page)

the ban on settlement from Tsarist times and because many Jews had fled.

Because so many Jews had fled, therefore, Einsatzgruppe B found that it was

hardly possible ‘to maintain liquidation figures at their previous levels simply

because the Jewish element is to a large extent not present’.
15
Einsatzkommando 6

noted at about the same time that ‘even on the far side of the front’ the Jews ‘seem

to have heard what fate is awaiting them at our hands’. In mid- and eastern

Ukraine 70 per cent to 90 per cent of the Jewish population had fled; in some cases

it was 100 per cent.
16

The flight of the Jews also affected Einsatzgruppe C, as can be seen from the

incident report of 9 August:
17
‘Since news has obviously spread that, as German troops are marching in the Einsatzkommandos are undertaking a systematic trawl

of the occupied areas,’ the Einsatzgruppe concluded, ‘the commandos have now

started to avoid operations of any larger size.’

As more and more of the Jewish population started to flee, as German troops

made rapid progress, and as the Sonderkommandos and Einsatzkommandos were

anxious to follow as closely behind the spearheads as possible, it became clear that

there were often insufficient ‘operational forces’ at the disposal of the Einsatz-

gruppe.
18
From the end of June to September, in particular, the rapid rate of progress and the lack of manpower meant that huge areas that had been conquered were only superficially combed for Jews.

Einsatzgruppe C noted in October that, ‘seen from the perspective of the state

police and SD’, they were confronted by an huge empty space; ‘major successes’

could only happen after 10–14 days, which was true ‘particularly as regards the

Jewish problem’.
19
For Einsatzgruppe B, too, the rapid onward march of German troops means that ‘from the perspective of the security police’ there was a

dangerous ‘lacuna’ opening up; what was missing was ‘so to speak the second

wave of security police’.
20

From Anti-Semitic Terror to Genocide

209

There was an additional problem for Einsatzgruppen C and D on the southern

sector of the front: the influx of tens of thousands of Jews driven out by the

Hungarian and Romanian allies. In the case of Romania we know that the head of

state, Antonescu, referred to an agreement with Hitler in this regard.
21
Hitler had evidently put his Romanian ally in the picture about the planned large-scale

deportations of European Jews to the East even before the war started. However,

on their own initiative, Romania and Hungary (which will have been similarly

informed) made a premature start with the expulsions that had originally been

planned for the period after the Russian campaign had finished. Since on the one

hand the Germans did not wish to snub their allies, and on the other did not wish

to endanger their supply lines or cause other difficulties because of problems with

refugees, they resorted to more radical ‘solutions’ during the month of August, as

will be shown in detail below. Whilst Einsatzgruppe C murdered refugees in what

was at that stage a massacre of unparalleled scale and savagery in Kamenetsk-

Podolsk, Einsatzgruppe D initially attempted to drive the refugees back using

brutal means, which meant that the weakest of them were simply shot. It even-

tually came to an agreement with the Romanians to intern all the Jews living in the

area in question in concentration camps.
22

Towards the end of the summer, yet another problem arose. Both the German

occupation authorities and the central agencies in the Reich gradually began to

cast their eyes towards the potential labour that the Jews represented. At first they

had made every possible effort to replace the Jewish workforce with non-Jewish

labour, but from September 1941 onwards there was a gradual realization that,

during the war, it would not be possible to manage without Jewish workers

altogether.
23
As we shall see, this problem also emerged in the areas controlled by the Einsatzgruppen. During the summer, the victims of mass shootings had

principally been Jewish men of military age; but, from the autumn onwards, the

selection principle was reversed and Jews capable of work were exempted from the

annihilation measures.
24
The occupation authorities adopted a new approach in which the Jewish population was divided into ‘useful’ and ‘superfluous’, which had

consequences for the way the Jewish minority was fed and housed, particularly in

the cities.

Christian Gerlach has developed this line of argument and sees a direct

connection between the expansion of the programme of shootings in September

and October 1941—the transition to the systematic liquidation of ghettos—and the

problems with feeding and housing Jews that were gradually becoming manifest.

He has argued that the murder of the Jewish minority can be attributed directly to

the failure of the systematic starvation policy that had been in place since the

beginning of the war. Because the original plan to starve the general population of

cities proved impossible to fulfil, the occupying power concentrated above all on

the destruction of the two groups that it had in the meantime isolated from the

outside world—the Jews, who represented a considerable proportion of the

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Mass Executions in Occupied Soviet Zones, 1941

population of the cities that could no longer be fed, and prisoners of war.
25
In addition, the difficulties with providing food and shelter had a radicalizing effect

on the conduct of individual authorities with the respect to the ‘Jewish question’.
26

However, Gerlach has not succeeded in proving this hypothesis about anti-

Jewish policy empirically and unambiguously. For, although it seems perfectly

plausible that problems with food and shelter did have a certain radicalizing effect

on anti-Jewish policy in the occupied zones, his basic proposition—that the

expansion of the programme of shootings in summer and autumn 1941 can be

attributed above all to the material shortcomings that the occupying power was

experiencing—does not seem to me to be an adequate explanation of what took

place. Extending the programme of shootings, in my view, represents a process

whereby German organizations were gradually steered by their leadership away

from a ‘security policing’ approach and towards a policy of ethnic annihilation.

The presupposition for this radical shift was first and foremost a changed

perception of the situation by these organizations: during the summer the

Einsatzgruppen and other SS and police units were forced to conclude that the

original security policing approach could not lead to a solution to the ‘Jewish

question’ for reasons suggested above. They therefore became more and more

ready to accept a new and more comprehensive approach that the leadership

brought in very gradually—with the help of a massive reinforcement of the deadly

commandos—the approach that envisaged the blanket ethnic annihilation of

the Jewish population.

Extending the campaign of shootings, therefore, had a variety of causes,

although a fundamental factor was the racist hierarchy on which the occupying

power based its assessment and treatment of the indigenous population and in

which the Jews occupied the lowest rung. This way of viewing things, rather than

any objective assessment of the difficulties of the situation, was decisive in the

occupying power’s belief that the annihilation of the Jews would solve a broad

range of different problems.

The longer the war lasted, the more completely what was originally a fairly

abstract idea of the Jews as the pillars of the Bolshevist regime was replaced by a

concept whereby the Jews were endowed with the capacity to present a variety of

concrete threats. They were seen as the source of many and various forms of

resistance to the occupying power—they spread rumours, sabotaged measures

taken by the Germans, started fires, and maintained contact with Soviet partisan

groups; they spread plagues, and were active on the black market; by virtue of their

mere existence they created problems in the fields of supplies, housing, and

labour. Such perceptions make it clear how the racist and radically anti-Semitic

attitude of the occupiers created its own distorted image of reality.

The reports of the Einsatzgruppen show that Einsatzgruppen B and C, in

particular, displayed some considerable perplexity about the ‘solution to the

Jewish question’ in the newly occupied Eastern zones. The staff officers of

From Anti-Semitic Terror to Genocide

211

Einsatzgruppe B reasoned thus about the situation in Belarus in July 1941: ‘The

solution to the Jewish question during the war seems impossible in this area and

given the extra-large numbers of Jews it can only be reached via evacuation and

resettlement.’ They described the Jews’ ‘accommodation in ghettos’, which was in

train across the board, as ‘a matter of high priority and, in the light of the large

number of Jews, a particularly difficult one’.
27

After August the matter of the labour deployment of the Jewish population also

began to emerge in the reports from the Einsatzgruppen. Einsatzgruppe C, for

example, reported on the developments in the Ukraine in the first half of August

and suggested that the Jews should be exhausted in cultivating the extensive Pripet

Marshes and those on the north bank of the Dnieper or on the Volga.

In an incident report for September 1941,
28
on the basis of their previous observations Einsatzgruppe C came to the following conclusion: ‘The work of the Bol-

shevists depends on Jews, Russians, Georgians, Armenians, Poles, Latvians, and

Ukrainians: the Bolshevist apparatus is not by any means identical with that of the

Jewish population. . . . If we entirely dispense with the Jewish labour-force, then the

economic rebuilding of Ukrainian industry or the expansion of urban administrative

centres is virtually impossible. There is only one possibility, which the German

administration in the General Government has neglected for a long time: the

solution of the Jewish question via the full-scale deployment of the Jewish labour-

force. That would bring with it the gradual liquidation of Jewry, a development that

corresponds perfectly with the economic conditions of the country.’

Einsatzkommando 6 of Einsatzgruppe C, which according to an incident report

of 12 September had drawn attention to the fact that 70–90 per cent of the Jewish

population of many central and eastern Ukrainian towns had fled—rising to 100

per cent in some cases—drew the following striking conclusion from this phe-

nomenon: ‘this can be seen as a success deriving indirectly from the work of the

Security Police, since the cost-free deportation of hundreds of thousands of Jews—

mostly over the Urals, to judge by the results of interrogations—makes a substan-

tial contribution to the solution to the Jewish question in Europe.’
29

This problem had been brewing since July and had produced a situation that

was very difficult grasp as a whole. Pogrom activity was declining, more and more

Jews were fleeing, although there were refugees turning up in the areas that the

commandos were leaving behind, it was impossible to control the vast areas of

territory with such small units, there was an ever-increasing need for a larger

labour-force, and the food supply was increasingly precarious. The original

‘security policing’ approach had been designed for the duration of a short war

and had essentially consisted of overwhelming Jewish communities with a sudden

wave of terror immediately upon occupation; as the war dragged on, this policy

was clearly reaching its limits.

Mass executions in August had killed tens of thousands of people and in the

light of this the units that were carrying them out began to question the mid- and

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Mass Executions in Occupied Soviet Zones, 1941

longer-term perspectives for continued Jewish persecution in the occupied East-

ern zones. How broadly should the range of victims be drawn? And where would

the human resources for carrying out further murders be found? How were they

to prevent Jews escaping murder by fleeing? How could the mass murder of Jewish

skilled workers be justified in the face of the growing need for labour?

This degree of uncertainty on the part of the commandos explains their

readiness to adjust to the new and far more radical approach to Jewish persecution

in the East that had been pursued by the SS leadership since July. Indeed, it

explains how their commitment towards the success of this new approach,

involving a high degree of initiative on their own account, tentatively in July,

but thereafter massively, especially in August and September, contributed towards

its breakthrough. The Einsatzkommandos, now considerably strengthened in

terms of personnel, started to expand the range of the executions by murdering

women and children, whilst at the same time collaborating with the military and

civil authorities to confine the survivors of these massacres in ghettos. In this