Holocaust: The Nazi Persecution and Murder of the Jews (56 page)

liquidated as a matter of course. The relevant orders from the Reichsführer SS

have been preserved. In Deployment Order no. 8 from 17 July 1941 Heydrich

instructed the commanders of the Security Police in the General Government and

the Gestapo in East Prussia to detach special Einsatzkommandos to comb the

prisoner-of-war camps in those areas.
202
These commandos were to conduct a

‘political monitoring of all inmates’ and separate out certain groups of prisoners,

including state and Party functionaries, Red Army commissars, leading economic

figures, ‘members of the intelligentsia’, ‘agitators’, and, quite specifically, ‘all Jews’.

Heydrich had already come to an agreement with the Prisoner of War Depart-

ment of the Armed Forces High Command about separating out the different

groups of prisoners that were mentioned in the annex to Deployment Order no. 8.

The whole tenor of these guidelines is marked by the conception of an ideological

war of annihilation; they oblige the commandants of the prisoner-of-war camps to

work closely with the Einsatzkommandos. The commandants are enjoined in

these guidelines to overcome any doubts they might have about international or

criminal law or any human considerations: the campaign in the East, they claim,

demands ‘special measures that must be carried out free of bureaucratic and

administrative influence by those willing to accept responsibility’.
203
Neither here nor in any other order from the Armed Forces or Army High Commands

is it specifically laid down that the Jewish prisoners were to be handed over to the

Einsatzkommandos; however, the guidelines were formulated such that the camp

commandants were to leave the choice to the commandos.
204

This order was supplemented by Deployment Orders no. 9, dated 21 July, and

no. 14, of 29 October 1941, which instructed the rest of the State Police

headquarters in the Reich and the Einsatzgruppen in the occupied Eastern areas

to detach Sonderkommandos to search the prisoner-of-war camps.
205
Even before such explicit permission had been given, the Einsatzgruppen in the occupied

Eastern areas had already filtered prisoners out of the camps in large numbers,

which would not have been possible without the cooperation of the camp

commandants.
206

248

Mass Executions in Occupied Soviet Zones, 1941

The commandos reported the prisoners selected in this way by name to the

Reich Security Head Office, which usually ordered their execution ‘as inconspicu-

ously as possible’.
207
The prisoners screened out within the Reich were executed in concentration camps, by far the majority in a so-called ‘Genickschussanlage’, an

apparatus for shooting people in the back of the neck disguised as a height-

measurement stadiometer. Within the occupied Eastern areas the Einsatzgruppen

had the right to decide which prisoners would be killed, and the executions were

performed by members of the Einsatzgruppen or police battalions.
208
There were many occasions, however, on which a prisoner who had already been selected was

killed by the guard detail itself.
209
On the other hand, however, there is a whole series of examples that demonstrates how the camp commandants attempted to

limit or even prevent the activities of the Einsatzkommandos.
210

The total number of prisoners ‘screened’ and liquidated in this manner is

unknown. Alfred Streim suggests 140,000 victims as a minimum, but estimates

that the true total is ‘considerably higher’.
211
According to the reports of individual screening operations that have been preserved, amongst what were probably

hundreds of thousands of victims of these ‘operations’
212
there was a large proportion of Jews. The chronological ‘high point’ for these operations was the

second half of 1941, when the number of captured Red Army members was at its

highest and when the policy of ‘labour deployment’ had not yet been conceived.

From September 1941 onwards, there were also special ‘prisoner of war assess-

ment commissions’ from the Ministry for the East that screened the camps

alongside the commandos from the Security Police. These commissions did not

merely attempt to find those amongst the members of certain racial groups whom

they might win over as collaborators, they also practised ‘negative’ selection in that

they looked for ‘seditious Soviet functionaries, Commissars, Politruks, etc., long-

serving professional soldiers in the Soviet Army, Jews, [and] criminal elements’.

The prisoners of war seized in this manner had to be reported to the camp

commandant for ‘appropriate treatment’, which meant execution.
213

However, prisoners of war who had not been identified as Jews, Communists, or

members of the intelligentsia and who therefore remained in the Wehrmacht’s

camps also fell victim in large numbers to the policies of annihilation. Soviet soldiers

who had surrendered to German troops were often killed on the spot.
214
There is much documentary evidence to show that this practice was widespread. Numerous

orders to Wehrmacht units have been preserved that explicitly demand the taking of

‘no prisoners’, although there are also orders that appealed to the troops to refrain

from indiscriminate shootings.
215
Army Group Centre described the situation in a report from August 1941 which mentions ‘the corpses of soldiers lying all over the

place after military action, without weapons, with their hands raised and with

injuries inflicted from close range’.
216
How widespread this practice was cannot now be reconstructed: soldiers who were shot by German troops after being taken

prisoner do not appear in any statistics relating to prisoners of war.

Extension of Shootings to Whole Jewish Population

249

This practice can be attributed to the gradual brutalization of the war, but closer

analysis of how prisoners were fed and treated generally shows that the systematic

destruction of Soviet prisoners of war was an integral component of German

policy towards the Soviet Union. Congruently with the hunger strategy that the

German leadership proposed from the very beginning of the war, the mass of Red

Army members captured by the Wehrmacht were never provided with adequate

foodstuffs.
217

Christian Gerlach has reconstructed the decision-making process that led to those

responsible on the German side (Goering, Backe, Quartermaster General Wagner,

and others) taking the conscious decision, as part of the means of addressing the

general food shortages in October 1941, to lower the already meagre rations for non-

working prisoners such that their death by starvation was foreseeable.
218
At a meeting on 16 September 1941 at which problems with food supplies were being discussed,

Goering said that a reduction in the rations for the German population was out of the

question given the ‘mood at home during the war’, and that, on the contrary, rations

should be increased. As a consequence of these priorities, it was unavoidable, he said,

that in the occupied areas the level of nutrition would inevitably decline: ‘on

principle, in the occupied areas only those who are working for us should be fed’.

Provisions for ‘Bolshevist prisoners’ could only be determined ‘in relation to their

work performance for us’. Put more plainly, this meant that those prisoners who

were not working would in future not be fed.
219

Correspondingly, the rations for prisoners of war were massively reduced by the

Quartermaster General in an order dated 21 October 1941
.220
The conclusions implied by this approach were drawn by Quartermaster General Wagner at a

heads of department meeting on 13 November 1941: ‘prisoners of war in the

camps who are not working will have to starve.
’221
On the day after that far-reaching order from Wagner, 22 October, Backe informed Goebbels personally that the levels

of sustenance had now reached critical levels; Goebbels’s view was that they would

have to ‘take more rigorous measures in respect of prisoners of war’.
222

Nutrition levels, living conditions in what were mostly very primitive camps

(often they were only fenced-in areas of land where the prisoners had to fend for

themselves in holes in the ground or tents), and the long distances travelled on

foot or in transports in open goods wagons even in winter—all these factors meant

that in the autumn and winter of 1941 the Soviet prisoners of war began to die in

huge numbers.
223
Many were killed as a result of indiscriminate use of arms by camp guards, since the Wehrmacht leadership had practically given those detailed

to guard the Soviet prisoners carte blanche to use their weapons at will. This is

made clear in a quotation from the instruction for the treatment of Soviet

prisoners of war of 8 September 1941:

Thus ruthless and forceful intervention is required given the slightest sign of any form of obstructiveness, especially towards Bolshevist rabble-rousers. Obstructive behaviour and

250

Mass Executions in Occupied Soviet Zones, 1941

active or passive resistance must be thoroughly eliminated via the use of the weapon

(bayonet, rifle butt and firearm). . . . With Soviet prisoners of war it is necessary for purely disciplinary reasons to use weapons with particular severity. Anyone who fails to use his weapon in carrying out an order, or who uses it with insufficient force, is liable to

punishment.
224

After the German leadership had taken the decision in October 1941 to use

prisoners of war as forced labour, this did not initially have any direct effects on

the situation of most prisoners. Only a minority of prisoners of war were deployed

for work
225
(in March 1942 there were only 167,000; this figure rose to reach 488,000 in October). Improvements in nutrition and accommodation for the

prisoners only filtered through very gradually. The change of direction therefore

came too late for most prisoners: on 1 February 1942 almost 60 per cent of the

3.35 million Soviet prisoners of war who had been captured by then had died.
226

By the end of the war the situation had not improved significantly, even though

more efforts were being made from summer 1943 onwards to use Soviet prisoners

for work details. Of the 5.7 million Red Army members taken prisoner by the

Germans during the war, approximately 3.3 million died.
227

Conclusion

This part has described the inconsistent process taking place over several months

during 1941 whereby a transition occurred from a restricted mode of terrorism

aimed mainly at Jewish men of military age to a strategy of ethnic annihilation.

The decisive turning point that initiated this transition was the mass shooting of

women and children by units and formations of various types; this began as early

as July and August. It should be remembered, too, that, even in the period before

this point, when operations were mostly directed against men, there was no ban in

principle on shooting women and children, too. Jewish women were shot by SS

and Police formations from the very earliest days, singly or in small groups, if they

were seen as in any way ‘suspect’ (i.e. likely to be ‘agents’ or ‘active Communists’).

There is a large quantity of evidence to show that the shooting of women increased

in the second half of July and that, alongside this shift in practice, some children

were also being shot.

It was not the Einsatzkommandos, however, but other SS and Police units that

moved over in late July to the systematic shooting of Jewish women and children

not suspected of any misdeeds but targeted merely because they were Jews. The

two SS Brigades played a precursor role in this. The 1st SS Brigade reported at the

end of July that 800 ‘Jews, male and female, aged between 16 and 60’ had been

shot, and a few days later, that 275 Jewish women had been shot between 3 and 6

August. In total the Brigade is thought to have murdered 7,000 Jewish people by

Extension of Shootings to Whole Jewish Population

251

the middle of August. It can also be established that two Police battalions,

Battalions 45 and 314, carried out the execution of a larger number of women

and children before then, in July. All these units were under the command of

Higher SS and Police Commander for Russia South, Friedrich Jeckeln, under

whom the massacre of 23,600 Jews in Kamenetsk-Podolsk took place at the end of

August. This mass murder can be described as the initial spark for igniting

systematic genocide in the area under the Higher SS and Police Commander for

Russia South. It primarily affected commandos in Einsatzgruppe C, but those in

Einsatzgruppe D were also affected.

The 1st Regiment of the SS Cavalry Brigade, which was under the Higher SS and

Police Commander for Russia Centre, reacted to Himmler’s brutal orders by

shooting women and children from early August on, indeed in some places the

entire Jewish population of a town. The 2nd Regiment initially restricted execu-

tions to Jewish men, but from early September women and children were also

amongst their victims. But it was not only the inclusion of women and children