Holocaust: The Nazi Persecution and Murder of the Jews (50 page)

of 13 Jews and 27 Jewesses as well as 11 Jewish children. Of these, 13 Jews and 19

Jewesses were executed in cooperation with the SD.
’31
Only when this bloody demonstration had been completed did Einsatzgruppe B set about the indiscriminate murder of members of the Jewish population within its sphere of operations.

This involved the massacre of thousands of Jews on each occasion, including

women and children.

On 2 October a company of Police Battalion 322 in Mogilev (which is where

Bach-Zelewski had his headquarters) undertook a ‘special operation on the orders

of the Higher SS and Police Commander’ and picked up ‘2,208 Jews of both sexes’

(a formulation that implies the inclusion of children). These people were all shot

in an operation also involving members of the Ukrainian militia.
32
On 19 October, four days before Himmler arrived for an inspection of Bach’s new headquarters in

Mogilev, the incident reports confirm that ‘a large-scale anti-Jewish operation was

carried out in which 3,726 Jews of both sexes and all ages were liquidated’, which is

a clear indication that children were once more amongst the victims.
33
This operation involved Einsatzkommando 8 and Police Battalion 316. These two

massacres in Mogilev heralded a whole series of similar ‘major operations’ in

the east of Belarus under Bach-Zelewski’s command.

Extension of Shootings to Whole Jewish Population

223

From then on, city by city, town by town, district by district the whole of the

Jewish population, except a few remaining members of the workforce, was shot.

These ‘operations’ involved Einsatzkommandos, the Order Police, the civilian

administration, and indigenous auxiliary police officers. The focus lay on major

cities with large Jewish populations in the eastern portion of the occupation zone.

Thus, to name only the most significant places, the Vitebsk ghetto was cleared

between 8 and 10 October and 4,090 Jews were shot (according to reports by

Einsatzkommando 9);
34
when the Borisov ghetto was cleared on 20 and 21

October, at least 6,500 Jews were shot after 1,500 people with specialist training

had been filtered out;
35
in Gomel Einsatzkommando 8 shot 2,500 inhabitants of the ghetto on 3 and 4 November;
36
in Bobruisk November saw the deaths of 5,281

Jews at the hands of Einsatzkommando 8 and Police Battalion 316 during their

‘special operation’ to make the city ‘free of Jews’.
37
Other cities saw further mass executions, although exact dating and precise figures are not always easy to

establish.
38

Executions evidently progressed without let or hindrance during the winter of

1941–2. Einsatzgruppe B had already reported 45,467 liquidations by the end of

October, in which Einsatzkommandos 8 and 9 were able to demonstrate particu-

larly high figures (28,218 and 11,452 respectively).
39
By the end of February 1942, that Einsatzgruppe had reported a total of 91,012 victims.
40

Higher SS and Police Commander Russia

South and Einsatzgruppe C

Higher SS and Police Commander Jeckeln and the 1st SS Brigade played key roles

in extending the range of murders in the southern section of the front. The 1st

Brigade, which was under Jeckeln’s command, was already including Jewish

women in the murders by the end of July 1941, which was the point at which (at

the request of the 6th Army) it conducted a ‘cleansing operation’ in the area

around Zwiahel between 27 and 30 July.
41
Jeckeln’s deployment order to the Brigade includes the instruction that, besides the commissars, suspicious ‘female

agents or Jews . . . are to be treated accordingly’.
42
The Brigade reported that as a result of this ‘operation’ it had arrested 1,658 Jews (allegedly people ‘who have

significantly aided and abetted the Bolshevist system’); 800 people, ‘Jews and

Jewesses between the ages of 16 and 60’, had been shot.
43
Following this, units from the Brigade carried out further ‘operations’ in August and shot 1,385 people

on the same pretext, including 275 Jewish women and 1,109 Jewish men.
44

In the following weeks Jeckeln gave further ‘cleansing assignments’ to the 1st SS

Brigade. Members of the Brigade shot 232 Jews in Tschernjachov (Chernyachov)

on 7 August; after Himmler had expressed his disquiet to Jeckeln about the

224

Mass Executions in Occupied Soviet Zones, 1941

inactivity of the 1st Brigade and had summoned him to a meeting,
45
it shot 300

Jewish men and 139 women on or around 20 August in Starokonstantinov;

between 2 and 7 September it murdered ‘1,009 Jews and Red Army supporters’.
46

In fact the Brigade almost certainly murdered more people between the end of July

and the middle of August than their own reports suggest. The total is probably

around 7,000 Jewish men, women, and children.
47
The activity reports of the 1st SS

Brigade for August and September and Jeckeln’s radio messages confirm that in

this period the Brigade was continuously shooting Jews.
48

At the end of August Jeckeln carried out a massacre in Kamenetsk-Podolsk that

far exceeded all the Brigade’s previous ‘operations’: according to the incident report

of 22 August, ‘a commando under orders from the Higher SS and Police Commander

[shot] 23,600 Jews in three days’, men, women, and children.
49
The victims in Kamenetsk-Podolsk were mostly Jews who had been deported as ‘burdensome

foreigners’ by the Hungarian authorities in July and August into the recently

occupied Galician areas. These were largely people who had come under Hungarian

rule when Karpato-Ukraine (formerly Slovakian) was annexed in 1939. It is evident

from the minutes of a meeting held on 25 August with the Quartermaster General of

the Army that this massacre was planned in advance. At that meeting an officer of

the Quartermaster General’s staff referred to Jeckeln’s commitment to complete the

liquidation of the Jews deported into Kamenetsk-Podolsk by 1 September.
50
Of the 18,000 Jews deported from Hungary some 14,000–16,000 were shot at the end of

August about 15 km from Kamenetsk-Podolsk by Jeckeln’s staff company and Police

Battalion 320 along with further thousands of Jews from the local area; the Ukrainian

militia and Hungarian soldiers helped seal off the area.
51

After ‘a total of 44,125 persons, mostly Jews’ had been shot by ‘formations under

the Higher SS and Police Commander’ in the month of August alone, according to

incident reports,
52
Jeckeln went on with his massacres. In the early days of September a commando under the Higher SS and Police Commander Russia

South executed ‘1,303 Jews, including 876 women over the age of 12’, again

according to incident reports.
53
The murder of more than 3,000 Jews still living in the Zhitomir ghetto that took place on 19 September with the participation of

Sonderkommando 4a is also in all likelihood to be laid at Jeckeln’s door.
54
Jeckeln certainly played a leading role in the massacre of the Kiev Jews in Babi Yar, which

involved Sonderkommando 4a, Police Regiment South, Battalions 45 and 303 and

a company of Waffen-SS. This mass execution, which incident reports indicate

claimed the lives of 33,771 Jews,
55
was planned on 26 September in a meeting attended by Jeckeln, the head of Einsatzgruppe C, Otto Rasch, the leader of

Sonderkommando 4a, Paul Blobel, and the City Commandant of the Wehrmacht.

This massacre was ‘justified’ as a reprisal for a huge fire in the city that had

allegedly been started by Jews.

Jeckeln was also responsible for the massacre of the Jews in Dnepropetrovsk

on 13 October, where, according to the incident reports, of some 30,000 Jews

Extension of Shootings to Whole Jewish Population

225

remaining in the city, ‘approximately 10,000 were shot by a commando of the

Higher SS and Police Leader on 13 October 1941’. In this series of massacres,

personally supervised by Jeckeln up to October, 1941, more than 100,000 people

were murdered. This wave of mass murders provides the background for the

activities of Einsatzgruppe C and the Police Battalion deployed in the southern

parts of the occupied Soviet Union during the late summer and autumn. Some of

these units had already been directly involved in the major ‘operations’ initiated

by Jeckeln. Jeckeln was responsible for giving the decisive impetus that prompted

the commandos and police battalions to move towards the comprehensive anni-

hilation of the Jewish population.
56

Erwin Schulz, the leader of Einsatzkommando 5, testified that during his stay in

Berdichev (between 24 July and 17 August) Rasch, Commander of the Einsatz-

gruppe C, had summoned him to Zhitomir to explain that not only those Jews

who were not being used as labour but also their wives and children were to be

shot. Rasch claimed that this order came from Jeckeln. Schultz testified further to

the effect that, as a result, he went at once to Berlin to have this order confirmed by

Streckenbach, head of personnel at the Reich Security Head Office. Streckenbach, he

said, had spoken with Heydrich and then confirmed that this order came directly

from Hitler. Streckenbach corroborated this version of the sequence of events in his

testimony after the war. Schulz’s response was to ask to be replaced, a request that

was granted.
57

The murder by Einsatzkommando 5 of every single inhabitant of a town,

including women and children, can be documented for the first time for the

middle of September 1941 (in other words probably following the departure of

Schulz). On 15 September, as an incident report explains, the town of Boguslav was

made ‘free of Jews’ ‘via the execution of 322 Jews and 13 Communist functionar-

ies’.
58
On 22 and 23 September Einsatzkommando 5 carried out a ‘major operation’

in Uman in which, according to their own report, 1,412 Jews were shot.
59
In Cybulov, on 25 September, 70 Jews were shot; 537 Jews (men, women, and

young people) were shot on 4 October in Pereyaslav; and shortly thereafter in

Koshchevatoye ‘all the Jews in the town’ were executed.
60

On the basis of the generalized order to murder issued in August, the number of

the people killed by Einsatzkommando 5 increased considerably. For the period

between 7 September and 5 October, the commando reported that ‘207 political

functionaries, 112 saboteurs and looters, as well as 8,800 Jews had been liquid-

ated’.
61
A few weeks later, the Commando reported that ‘as of 20 October 1941, the number of those executed by Einsatzkommando 5 came to 15,110’.
62

Einsatzkommando 6 (sub-unit Kronberger) began shooting Jewish women

in October in Krivoi-Rog after Himmler had inspected it on 3 October.
63
On 20 October, Krivoi-Rog was declared ‘free of Jews’. In the incident report

of 19 November Einsatzkommando 6 stated that ‘1,000 further Jews had been

shot’.
64

226

Mass Executions in Occupied Soviet Zones, 1941

From the beginning of August onwards, Sonderkommando 4a shot women in

large numbers in the area around Zhitomir, and shortly thereafter also children.
65

In Bila Zerkva, too, 500 men and women were shot on 8 or 9 August by the

vanguard of Sonderkommando 4a designated for Kiev. The Jewish children who

had initially been abandoned in a school building to fend for themselves were shot

on 19 and 22 August by the members of Sonderkommando 4a. The second round

of shootings could only take place after the Commander in Chief of the 6th Army,

von Reichenau, had intervened and lifted a ban on shooting children that had

been imposed by the staff of an infantry division.
66
According to commando reports, before the end of August in Fastov ‘the entire Jewish population aged

between 12 and 60, 252 in all, were shot’.
67
In Radomyshl on 6 September, a further 1,668 Jewish men, women and children were executed.
68
In Zhitomir, where they were based and where a ghetto had been established, Sonderkommando 4a

proceeded to murder all Jewish inhabitants regardless of age or sex. After multiple

mass executions in the second half of August that claimed several thousand lives,

3,145 Jews were shot in the course of liquidating the ghetto on 19 September 1941,

according to the commando’s own report.
69
By 24 August Sonderkommando 4a had shot 7,152 people in all, again according to its own reports.
70

Police Battalion 45, which was part of Police Regiment South, began to murder

Jews regardless of their age or sex at the end of July and at the beginning of

August. The first victims were the entire Jewish population of the town of

Shepetovka, where the Battalion had been based between 26 July and 1 August

1941. According to the account of Battalion Commander Besser made after the

war, this meant some 40 to 50 men and women, but in reality this figure was

probably significantly higher.
71
Besser claimed to have been acting on orders from the Commander of the Police Regiment South, who in turn had referred to a

general order for liquidation issued by Himmler.
72