Holocaust: The Nazi Persecution and Murder of the Jews (54 page)

battalions were either deployed in the context of a police regiment, sent in as

Extension of Shootings to Whole Jewish Population

239

support for Einsatzkommandos, or used for ‘special operations’ or ‘major oper-

ations’ by the Higher SS and Police Commander in which case for the duration of

the relevant ‘operation’ their subordination to a security division was suspended.

It sometimes happened, however, that police battalions undertook such ‘oper-

ations’ precisely within the context of a security division, as the example of

Reserve Police Battalion 11 makes clear.

In the activity report of Einsatzgruppe A for November 1941 the situation in the

whole of Reich Commissariat Eastland is described thus: ‘The Jewish question in

the Eastland should be regarded as solved. Large-scale executions have decimated

the Jewish population and the remaining Jews have been ghettoized. Special

measures have so far been necessary only for individual Jews who have been

able to escape the grasp of the Security Police.’
142

The Role of the Local Voluntary Troops

(Schutzmannschaften)

The murder of hundreds of thousands of civilians in the newly occupied territories

during the first months of the war was only possible because the Germans

succeeded in recruiting willing executioners for their policies of racial annihilation

from the indigenous populations of the areas that had been conquered.

After German agencies had begun to set up auxiliary police formations in the

occupied zones during the first few weeks of the war,
143
Himmler gave an order on 25 July 1941 to set up ‘voluntary troop formations’.
144
These units were to be made up of Ukrainians, Balts, and Belarusians, but only men who had not been conscripted into the Red Army or non-Communist prisoners of war.
145
At the end of July 1941 the head of the Order Police, Kurt Daluege, decreed that these new

formations would be called ‘local voluntary troops’ or Schutzmannschaften, and

be run by reliable officers or sergeants from the German police.
146

In Lithuania and Latvia, such voluntary troop units were formed from the

local partisan units and auxiliary formations that had come together in the first

phase of the occupation as early as August. Ukrainian voluntary troops can be

documented from October 1941; Belarusian and Estonian from the beginning of

1942
.147
According to the head of the Order Police, Daluege, at the end of 1941

there were in the Reich Commissariat Eastland 31,652 local volunteers and 14,452

in the Ukraine. In the course of 1942 these forces would grow to a strength of

more than 300,000. Such troops therefore became one of the most important

organs of containment and repression within the German occupying forces and

played an indispensable role in the persecution of the Jews.
148
Whilst these bodies were initially recruited exclusively from volunteers, during 1942 more

240

Mass Executions in Occupied Soviet Zones, 1941

and more pressure was put on the male members of local populations to join

these units.
149

Usually a distinction was made between local volunteer troops on individual

duties (in other words attached as auxiliaries to the local German police author-

ities) and battalions of volunteer troops,
150
which were mobile reserves that were often deployed outside their local areas.
151
In addition to guard and containment duties volunteer troops were mainly deployed in mass executions of Jews and

Communists, or for ‘cleansing’ and partisan ‘operations’ whose victims were

usually Jews who were under general suspicion as ‘supporters of armed gangs’.

There is detailed documentation for the participation of Lithuanian Volunteer

Battalion no. 12, which was under the immediate command of the German

Reserve Police Battalion 11, in the mass murders perpetrated by this unit in

Belarus—and in particular for its participation in the massacres of Smilovichi,

Rudensk, Koydanava, and Slutsk in October and November 1941.
152

Murders of the Mentally Ill, Gypsies, and ‘Asians’

The mass murder of the Jews in the newly occupied areas is at the heart of policies

of racial annihilation, but other groups also fell victim to them, notably the

mentally ill, the Gypsies, and so-called ‘Asians’.

As had been the case in Poland in 1939 and 1940, the inmates of medical and

care institutions in the newly occupied areas were also murdered in huge num-

bers.
153
Murders of this type can be documented for all four Einsatzgruppen.

Einsatzgruppe A, for example, murdered patients in a Lithuanian asylum in

Aglona on 22 August 1941 (claiming 544 victims),
154
in asylums in Mariampole (also in Lithuania) and Mogutovo, near Luga (with 204 victims in total),
155
and in mental homes in Riga and Jelgava (Mitau), where 237 mentally ill Jews were

murdered.
156
Einsatzgruppe B also participated in such murders, as the incident report of 9 October 1941 indicates: ‘in Chernigov the mad will be treated in the

usual way. In Minsk 632 mentally ill patients were given special treatment, and in

Mogilev 836.
’157

After September 1941, Einsatzgruppe B, under the command of the head of the

Reich Criminal Bureau Artur Nebe, began to look for alternative methods for

murdering the inhabitants of the asylums. In Minsk there was an attempt made by

the Institute for Criminological Technology in September to use explosives to

murder the inmates; shortly afterwards in Mogilev asylum inmates were mur-

dered using vehicle exhaust fumes. On the basis of such experiments those

responsible made a decision to use gas as the method of choice, which, as part

of the ‘euthanasia’ programme, had already been responsible for the deaths of tens

of thousands of people. Gas vans such as those that had been deployed by Sonder-

kommando Lange in the Warthegau since the beginning of 1940 were now

Extension of Shootings to Whole Jewish Population

241

commissioned for use in the occupied Eastern areas. The murder of the mentally

ill in Mogilev using gas in October 1941 is an important step in the transfer of

killing techniques that had been developed in the context of the ‘euthanasia’

programme to the systematic murder of the Jews.
158

All the commandos of Einsatzgruppe C can also be shown to have murdered

the sick. In September 1941, at the request of the local commander’s office in

Vasilkov, Sonderkommando 4a shot 200 Jews but also a number of mentally ill

women; a sub-commando of the same unit shot 270 mentally ill patients on 24

October in Chernigov,
159
Sonderkommando 4b shot 599 inmates from the Poltava asylum at the beginning of November,
160
and Einsatzkommando 5 murdered 300

mentally ill Jews on 18 October in Kiev.
161
The incident reports say of Einsatzkommando 6 that ‘by 12 November 1941’ it had shot ‘800 of a total of 1,160

mentally disordered inmates of the asylum of Igrin near Dnepropetrovsk.
162

Murders of asylum inmates by Einsatzgruppe D during 1942 are widely documen-

ted.
163

Prisoners of war and civilians who in the eyes of the Einsatzgruppe troops had

an ‘Asiatic’ appearance also fell victim to the policies of annihilation.
164
The Soviet Commissars had already been described in the ‘Guidelines for the Treatment of

Political Commissars’ as ‘the originators of barbarian Asiatic methods of com-

bat’,
165
and the ‘Guidelines for the Conduct of troops in Russia’ had read, ‘the Asiatic soldiers of the Red Army in particular are inscrutable, incalculable,

guileful, and unfeeling’.
166
Behind the National Socialist stereotype of the ‘Asiatic’

enemy was the image that large sections of the originally Slavic peasant population

had been extirpated by the Soviet regime whilst, as a result of ‘intermingling’ with

Asiatic or Mongolian races, the remainder of the population represented a

worthless but latently dangerous ‘sub-humanity’ that ‘the Jews’ dominated with

the help of Bolshevist ideology. The danger supposedly emanating from this

conglomerate was elucidated by Himmler speaking in July 1941 to soldiers from

the Waffen-SS. According to Himmler, in the East ‘the same struggle against the

same sub-human peoples, the same inferior races’ that have sometimes gone

‘under the name of the Huns, at others . . . under the name of Magyars, or under

the name of Tartars, or under the names of Ghenghis Khan and the Mongols’.
167

The murder of ‘Asiatic’ people in the Soviet Union is one of the chapters in the

history of the Nazi regime’s policies of racial annihilation that have yet to be

written. Only a few isolated examples are currently available. The systematic

murder of ‘Asiatic’-looking people by the Einsatzkommandos can be documented

from the civilian prisoner camp in Minsk that had been set up by the Wehrmacht

in 1941, in which almost the entire non-Jewish male population of military age

had been imprisoned.
168
The ‘Asiatics’ were viewed there with the same suspicion and treated in the same undiscriminating manner as ‘Bolshevist functionaries,

agents, criminals’.
169
They were shot because their external appearance made them appear to be ‘elements of inferior value with a predominantly Asiatic

242

Mass Executions in Occupied Soviet Zones, 1941

look’.
170
The same blanket justification was given by Einsatzgruppe B, for example, when they shot 83 men from the civilian camp in Mogilev on 15 October 1941.

These were said to be ‘racially inferior elements with an Asiatic look’ that ‘it would

not be responsible to allow to remain behind the lines any further’.
171

Gypsies living in the Soviet Union also fell victim to the Nazis’ policies of racial

annihilation, although they were not pursued with anything like the same merci-

less determination as the Jews. This was the case in 1941 and also for later periods.

Einsatzkommandos were shooting small groups of Gypsies on their advance in

summer and autumn 1941: Einsatzkommando 3 did so on 22 August, and Ein-

satzkommando 8 in the second half of September.
172
The group staff of Einsatzgruppe C reported in September that during the previous days ‘6 asocial elements

(Gypsies) and 55 Jews had been dealt with’, amongst others, and Sonder-

kommando 6 reported in October that it had apprehended a ‘band of Gypsies’

and executed 32 people.
173
The next evidence of the murder of Gypsies is for spring 1942, when large numbers were killed.
174

The Participation of the Wehrmacht in the Murders

It has already become clear as this part has progressed that the Wehrmacht

actively supported many of the ‘operations’ of the Einsatzgruppen and other SS

and police units. This prompts the question of how far the Wehrmacht itself

played an active and material role in the annihilation of the Jewish population of

the Soviet Union.
175
Numerous appeals from officers in the higher echelons of the Wehrmacht show quite distinctly that the ideological war of annihilation against

the ‘Jewish-Bolshevist complex’ was waged with the same intensity within the

ranks of the Wehrmacht itself as in the guidelines and orders issued by the

leadership at the beginning of the war.

According to an order for Panzer Group 4 of 2 May, the war that was by then

imminent was to be ‘the age-old battle of the Teutons versus the Slavs, the defence

of European culture in the face of a Muscovite-Asiatic deluge, resistance to the

onslaught of Jewish Bolshevism’. Every act in battle was to be ‘motivated by an

iron will to achieve the total, merciless annihilation of the enemy’, and there

should be in particular ‘no quarter given to the proponents of today’s Russian

Bolshevist system’.
176
The Commander of the 6th Army, Walther von Reichenau, spoke in an order dated 10 August of the ‘necessary execution of criminal,

Bolshevist, and mainly Jewish elements’ that would have to be carried out by

the organs of the Reichsführer SS.
177
The Commander of the 11th Army, Erich von Manstein, described ‘Jewry’ in an order of 20 November as ‘the middle-man

between the enemy at our backs and the remains of the Red Army that are still

fighting on and the red leaders’.
178
The Commander of the 17th Army, Karl-Heinrich von Stülpnagel, gave an order on 30 July not to take indiscriminate

Extension of Shootings to Whole Jewish Population

243

reprisal measures against the civilian population but—if the deed could not be

pinned on to the Ukrainians—to concentrate on ‘Jewish and Communist inhab-

itants’, amongst whom the ‘Jewish Komsomol members’ in particular were to be

‘regarded as perpetrators of sabotage and responsible for forming young people

into gangs’.
179

What effect did orders and guidelines such as these have on the conduct of the

troops? This part has already demonstrated a high degree of cooperation between

the Wehrmacht on the one hand and the Police and the SS on the other. It was not

merely the case that the Wehrmacht was informed in full detail about the

shootings perpetrated by the SS and Police formations, as can be shown from