Holocaust: The Nazi Persecution and Murder of the Jews (53 page)

controversy between Stahlecker and Lohse of summer 1941 demonstrates that

Extension of Shootings to Whole Jewish Population

235

the murder of the Jews in the occupied Eastern areas cannot be understood as the

implementation of a single order issued by the National Socialist hierarchy. It was

a process that went through a series of different phases and in which the mid-level

protagonists possessed considerable room for manoeuvre.

When Reichskommissar Lohse sent the draft for his planned ‘Provisional

Guidelines for the Treatment of Jews in the Reich Commissariat’ to the Reich

Ministry for the East on 13 August he had added an introduction to the text, which

was otherwise unaltered. This addition was a safeguard against accusations that he

was infringing upon areas for which the Security Police was responsible: ‘With

reference to the definitive solution to the Jewish question in the area of Reich

Commissariat Eastland, the instructions given in my speech on 27 July 1941 in

Kaunas will apply.
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Where further measures have been taken in carrying out these oral instructions of mine, especially those taken by the Security Police, they

are not covered by the following guidelines. These provisional guidelines are only

intended to ensure minimum measures to be taken by Commissars General or

Area Commissars if, and only if, further measures with respect to a definitive

solution to the Jewish question are not possible.’ On 18 August Lohse sent a signed

copy of these guidelines to the Commissars General.
122

Continuation of the Mass Executions in the Autumn of 1941

As Einsatzkommando 3 continued its series of murders in Lithuania in the flat

land in September 1941, it was single-handedly responsible for the deaths of some

25,000 Jews. After one swathe of country after another had thereby been rendered

‘free of Jews’,
123
the commando turned to the step-by-step murder of the people who had been corralled in the ghettos set up in the main cities. These murder

operations were primarily directed at those who were assessed as incapable of

work; the surviving specialist workforce and their dependents were repeatedly

scrutinized for their ‘capacity for work’ and gradually murdered in ‘operation’

after ‘operation’.

In the autumn of 1941 a new phase of Jewish persecution began in Lithuania and

the other areas of the Reich Commissariat, the second wave of murders that aimed

ultimately at the systematic annihilation of all the Jews (with the exception of a

limited and continually reduced number of those able to work). The Germans no

longer assumed, as they had in August, that the ‘Final Solution’ to the Jewish

question would be postponed until after the war, and in consequence they did not

focus on medium-term solutions such as housing Jewish men and women separ-

ately. Instead, in autumn 1941 the total destruction of the Jews was, from the

perspective of those responsible, a goal that could be achieved according to plan

within a very short time.

In Kaunas, where a ghetto had been set up in the middle of August, more than

1,608 men, women, and children (‘ill or suspected of being infectious’) were

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Mass Executions in Occupied Soviet Zones, 1941

murdered on 26 September; on 4 October another 1,845 people were murdered on

the pretext of a ‘punishment operation’; on 29 October after a large-scale filtration

operation 9,200 people were shot (‘cleansing the ghetto of superfluous Jews’).
124

The methodical nature of the activities of the Germans can also be demon-

strated using the example of the annihilation of the Jews in Vilnius, where all the

inhabitants of the ghetto except a tiny core of specialist workers were systemat-

ically killed over a period of a few months. At the beginning of September, a major

series of arrests was made and 3,700 men, women, and children were shot in the

woods at Ponary; the surviving Jewish population was resettled into two new

ghettos. During September further shootings took place and thousands more were

killed. On 1 October, the day of Yom Kippur, several thousand men were taken out

of the ghetto and shot, mostly those who were not registered as specialist workers.

In the middle of October the so-called Small Ghetto was dissolved and some

15,000 people murdered. Towards the end of the month the occupants of the

Large Ghetto who were fit for work were transferred into the Small Ghetto

and those who remained were shot in two ‘operations’ by the beginning of

November, which cost 8,000 and 3,000 lives respectively. On 20 and 21 December

those without identity papers to confirm that they were skilled workers or their

dependents were shot—a total of 15,000 people.
125

In Jäger’s report for 1 December the situation in Lithuania is described thus: ‘I

can confirm today that the goal of solving the Jewish problem in Lithuania has

been achieved by Einsatzkommando 3. There are no more Jews in Lithuania

except worker Jews and their families. That makes: in Šiauliai c.4,500, in Kaunas,

c.15,000, in Vilnius, c.15,000.’
126
Jäger added, as if by way of apology, ‘I also wished to bump off these worker Jews and their families but this was strongly resisted by

the civilian administration (the Reichskommissar) and the Wehrmacht and pro-

voked the following ban: these Jews and their families must not be shot.’ By the

end of November Jäger gave a total figure for those murdered in the General

Region of Lithuania of 125,000 people, overwhelmingly Jews.

At the end of October the rural areas of Latvia were also ‘wholly cleansed’ of

Jews. The survivors were imprisoned in the ghettos of Liepāja (Libau), Daugavpils

(Dünaburg), and Riga, where the enforced resettlement was only completed at the

end of that month. In November and December the Latvian Jews were also almost

wholly annihilated in a series of large-scale ‘ghetto operations’. First of all,

between 7 and 9 November, at least 3,000 Jews were murdered in the Daugavpils

ghetto, where similar ‘operations’ had already taken place in August and Septem-

ber.
127
Friedrich Jeckeln, who had just been made Higher SS and Police Commander for Russia North and who, when he had held the same office in Russia

South, had been responsible for the death of an estimated 100,000 Jews, claimed to

have received an explicit order directly from Himmler on or around 10 November

to liquidate the ghetto in Riga. On Jeckeln’s orders, during Riga’s Bloody Sunday

on 29–30 November, more than 10,000 people were shot outside Riga near the

Extension of Shootings to Whole Jewish Population

237

railway station at Rumbuli. Previously, Jeckeln had had 4,500 working Jews

separated from the rest and put into a separate area of the ghetto, the ‘Small

Ghetto’. In a second major ‘operation’ on 8 and 9 December—also at Rumbuli—

the total of Jewish victims from Riga rose to 27,800, on Jeckeln’s own admission.
128

In Liepāja between 15 and 17 December a further 2,350 Jews were murdered, which

meant the whole population of the ghetto except for 350 craftsmen.
129

Of only 4,500 Jews living in Estonia the invading army had merely encountered

some 2,000. The male Jews above the age of 16 and the female Jews fit for work and

between 16 and 60 were imprisoned in provisional camps and most of the men

were shot. Einsatzgruppe A reported from Estonia as early as October that ‘the

rural communities are now already free of Jews’.
130
In February the women and children in a camp near Pskov (Pleskau) who had not been detailed for forced

labour were also murdered on the instructions of Higher SS and Police Com-

mander Jeckeln.
131

In the areas of Belarus under civilian administration the ‘major operations’

aimed at women, men, and children began in October. They were carried out by a

sub-unit of Einsatzkommando 6, the Commando of the Security Police Minsk

(formerly Einsatzkommando 1b), the Order Police and the Wehrmacht.
132
They began initially with the ‘cleansing’ of the ‘flat land’. For this purpose, according to

a report by the division commander, Reserve Police Battalion 11, which was part of

the 707th Security Division, was deployed for a ‘major operation’ between 8 and 15

October 1941 ‘under the command of the Intelligence Office at Minsk’. This

involved shooting more than 2,000 people in Smilovichi in Rudensk and other

Belarusian towns—people who had been labelled ‘partisans, Communists, Jews

and other suspicious rabble’. The battalion was supported by two companies of

Lithuanian auxiliary police, the Secret Field Police and the Engineers’ Company of

the 707th Division. The reports and orders signed off at the same time by the

divisional commander are very clear with respect to the treatment of Jews in the

‘area to be secured’: they talk of ‘annihilation’ and ‘extermination’. The statement

made by the battalion leader in 1960 that he received the order for the ‘operation’

from the staff of the 707th Division therefore seems perfectly credible.
133
At the same time that this series of mass murders was being carried out, a sub-unit of

Einsatzkommando 3 murdered more than 3,000 Jews in the areas around Minsk

and Borisov.
134

Following the ‘major operation’ in the area of Smilovichi, members of the

battalion shot ‘1,000 Jews and Communists’ in the city of Koydanava (now

Dzerzhinsk) on 21 October (again with the support of the Lithuanians). There

exists a report by the Regional Commissioner, Heinrich Carl, concerning the

deployment of the battalion on 27 October in Slutsk, which the Commissar

General in Minsk, Kube, was to use as the occasion to petition the Reichskom-

missar Eastland for disciplinary proceedings to be initiated against all the officers

of the battalion.
135
In his report Carl describes how, on the morning of the 27th, an 238

Mass Executions in Occupied Soviet Zones, 1941

officer of Reserve Police Battalion 11 announced to him the order to liquidate of all

the Jews in the city. The battalion command had disregarded his energetic protest

that the vast majority of the Jews there were irreplaceable skilled workers. The

deputy commander of the unit had explained, he said, that ‘he had received the

order from the commander to free the whole city from Jews, making no excep-

tions, as they had in other towns. This cleansing was to happen for political

reasons, and economic factors had never played any part at all.’

The order was implemented despite Carl’s protest and his report describes it as

being carried out with ‘what amounted to sadism. . . . During the operation the city

itself presented a terrifying picture. With indescribable brutality on the part of the

German police and in particular of the Lithuanian partisans, the Jewish people

and some Belarusians were fetched out of their houses and herded together. There

were gunshots ringing out across the whole city and the bodies of murdered Jews

were piled up in the streets. . . . Many times I had to force the German police and

Lithuanian partisans out of workshops literally at gunpoint, using my revolver.’

Furthermore, ‘the police battalion engaged in looting during the operation in an

outrageous manner . . . not only in Jewish houses but in the houses of the Belar-

usians too. They took with them everything usable, such as boots, leather, textiles,

gold and other valuables.’ Carl concluded his report, ‘Please grant me only one

wish: “Protect me from this police battalion in future!”.’
136

On 30 October Police Battalion 11 undertook a further ‘operation’ in Kletsk. The

situation report by the Commandant in Belarus for the first half of October

concludes its comments on this ‘cleansing operation in the area of Slutsk-Kletsk’

by saying that ‘5,900 Jews were shot’.
137
At the beginning of November the battalion was removed from the formation of the 707th Division and assigned

again to Police Regiment Centre.
138

The massacres in the General Commissariat of Belarus reached a temporary

apogee in the major ‘operation’ in Minsk in which, between 7 and 11 November,

the Commando of the Minsk Security Police shot on its own reckoning 6,624 Jews

from the ghetto there.
139
On 20 November and 10 and 11 December, the same group committed two further massacres in which 5,000 and 2,000 people were

killed respectively.
140
In the period around 13 November, of the 16,000 Jews in the city and the district of Slonim all but 7,000 previously selected skilled workers

were murdered by the Security Police and the SD. The District Commissar

responsible for this mass murder, Gert Erren, reported that ‘the operation . . . freed

me from unnecessary mouths to feed and the 7,000 or so Jews that are still present

in the city of Slonim are all bound into the labour process, are working willingly

because they are under constant threat of death and will be checked over and

sorted for further reduction in the spring’.
141

These examples show that the police battalions could be deployed for mass

shootings of Jewish civilians under very different command structures. The