Holocaust: The Nazi Persecution and Murder of the Jews (57 page)

amongst those shot but the extraordinary number of the victims of the Brigade—

some 25,000 people by the middle of August—that led to the general radicalization

of the process of murder amongst the units in the area under the Higher SS and

Police Commander for Russia Centre, in the course of which police battalions and

Einsatzkommandos also significantly extended their murderous activity.

In a series of cases it can be proved that the Einsatzkommandos that had been

instructed by group staff to increase their rate of murder started shooting

women and children in places where earlier ‘cleansing operations’ had already

claimed the men as their victims or had caused the men to flee. In the case of

Einsatzkommando 9 in Vileyka, for example, it can be shown that the com-

mando leader first cleared it with the Einsatzgruppe’s rearguard support before

he shot women and children, and Sonderkommando 4a took a few days before

deciding to shoot the children who had survived in Bila Zerkva, again with the

backing of the Army Commander. Both instances show that there was no clear

order to shoot women and children in existence from the very beginning, but

that the commandos were confronted with situations by their group staffs,

probably quite deliberately, in which they had to decide for themselves what

the nature of the task they had been charged with actually was. Einsatzkom-

mando Tilsit also shot women, old men, and children at the end of July and in

early August on the Lithuanian border after it had earlier executed the men of

military age in the same towns. Einsatzkommando 3 can be shown to have

started to shoot women and children in the first half of August. These murders,

too, took place in towns where members of the same commando had already

shot the men shortly before.

The situation of the sub-unit of Einsatzkommando 3 stationed in the citadel in

Daugavpils (Dünaburg) was somewhat different. Between the end of July and the

middle of August it executed large numbers of men unfit for work, women, and

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Mass Executions in Occupied Soviet Zones, 1941

children and thus proceeded in the same way that would be typical in the months

to come for the selection of victims within the ghettos.

There was a different context again for the shooting of women and children in

the area covered by Einsatzgruppe D, when members of Einsatzkommando 12

shot several hundred Jewish refugees from a large group who were being driven

back over the Dniester into Romanian-controlled territory because they could not

keep pace with the marching tempo.

The murderous practice of including women and children in shootings there-

fore spread amongst the commandos only gradually and not in a uniform manner.

One of the two sub-units of Einsatzkommando 8 was already shooting women

and children in August, but the other seems only to have taken this step in

September. Einsatzkommando 5 also only started to do this in September: by

his own admission, commando leader Schulz could not make up his mind to

put into practice the order he had received in August. And Sonderkommandos

7a and 7b cannot be shown to have carried out large-scale operations in this

period at all.

We can reconstruct the manner in which the order to murder women and

children was passed on from the testimonies of various commando leaders. These

show that they were orally instructed to include women and children in the

murders in August and September by their commanding officers (Filbert and

Bradfisch by Nebe; Schulz by Rasch; Nosske and Drexel by Ohlendorf).

With the mass shooting of women and children, the decisive step on the way

towards a policy of racial annihilation had been taken. After the various units had

crossed this threshold they moved on to ‘major operations’ (again each at a

different pace) that affected the great mass of the Jewish civilian population.

These were the comprehensive ‘cleansing operations’ designed to make whole

swathes of the country ‘free of Jews’, and the mass executions of thousands in the

ghettos that had been established in the meantime.

The first such comprehensive ‘cleansing operations’ are documented for early

August in Lithuania, where a few days after it had begun systematically shooting

women and children Einsatzkommando 3 dramatically increased its total number

of victims. The same can be shown to have happened in Latvia from August

(Einsatzkommandos 2 and 3). Similar ‘cleansing operations’ took place in Belarus,

the work divided between Police Battalion 11 and the 707th Division of the

Wehrmacht. Einsatzgruppe D followed a similar strategy from the end of August

on with Einsatzkommando 12 and Sonderkommando 10b in Transnistria, Ein-

satzkommando 8 in September in the area around the Belarusian city of Borisov,

and Einsatzkommando 5 from September in the Ukraine.

The series of shootings in Daugavpils (Dünaburg) in Latvia at the end of July

was followed by further massacres in the Baltic ghettos from September onwards,

which claimed thousands of victims. In the area covered by Einsatzgruppe B, after

the 1st Cavalry Regiment had already murdered the entire Jewish population of

Extension of Shootings to Whole Jewish Population

253

certain places at the beginning of August, early October saw the exhaustive ‘major

operations’ in which all Jews were indiscriminately murdered. In the area under

Einsatzgruppe C these ‘major operations’ began as early as the end of August

(Kamenetsk-Podolsk); Einsatzgruppe D started them in mid- to late September

(Dubăsari and Nikolayev).

What can be concluded from this is that the range of executions was not

extended as a result of a uniform series of orders but within a broad context for

the issuing of orders that gave individual units considerable leeway over a certain

period and room for manoeuvre that was used by the commandos according to

the situations they encountered and based on their own assessments of the

position. Factors such as the number of Jews present in the relevant district, the

density with which commandos were deployed, collaboration with local forces,

the attitude of allies, the degree of ghettoization, labour needs, the occupying

forces’ need for accommodation, the nutritional situation, and others all played a

significant role in the development of the commandos’ activities. These factors

influenced the decision as to how, in what way and at what speed the two

complementary annihilation strategies of ‘cleansing’ the ‘flat lands’ and ‘major

operations’ in the ghettos would be implemented. The relatively large leeway that

the units enjoyed, however, was reduced from the end of summer 1941: individual

instructions, inspections, and such like by the SS leadership began to impose a

degree of uniformity on the conduct of commandos to produce a strategy for

‘spaces free of Jews’.

The Higher SS and Police Commanders evidently played a decisive role in the

transition to a comprehensive racial cleansing, not least because the terrible wave

of mass murders that they initiated in August and which reached hitherto

unimagined magnitudes effectively meant that they seized the initiative from the

Einsatzgruppe leadership. The role of the Higher SS and Police Commanders,

Himmler’s plenipotentiaries, but also Himmler’s own indefatigable inspections

during this period both point towards the central role that the Reichsführer SS

fulfilled in the implementation of this process. A starting point can even be

identified: the moment when the ‘securing of [the Eastern areas] by policing

measures’ was made Himmler’s responsibility on 17 July. Himmler’s political

motivation must have been his belief that the radicalization of ethnic ‘cleansing’

in the East would provide him with his way in to taking on the complete

‘reordering’ of Lebensraum in the East. The long-term utopian plans for a ‘new

order’ in the Eastern areas to be conquered foresaw the need to reduce the

indigenous population there by 30 million, and it was intended that they should

be implemented, at least in part, during the war. This anticipation of the future

was bound to end in the destructive measures that constituted a politics of

annihilation.

This all suggests that it is doubtful whether the extension of executions in the

occupied Eastern areas in summer and autumn 1941 can be adequately understood

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Mass Executions in Occupied Soviet Zones, 1941

using the paradigm of ‘coming to a decision, giving an order, carrying the order

out’ that has its origins in the military. It casts into doubt, too, whether the search

for a decisive ‘order’ which triggered the radicalization of the persecution of the

Jews in the occupied areas can constitute an adequate research strategy.

Hitler’s fundamental decision of 16–17 July about where responsibility was to lie

in the occupied Eastern areas, and Himmler’s appearance in Minsk on 14–15 of

that month merely represent certain situations in a much more complex process

in which decisions and their implementation were intimately linked. The starting

point is characterized by a degree of consensus between the decision makers that

the persecution of the Jews would indeed be intensified and radicalized as the war

progressed. This consensus situation was the basis for instructions formulated in a

very general manner and reckoning with the need for subordinates to use their

initiative, instructions that were then transmitted via a series of different channels,

and which created not a clear-cut command structure but a ‘climate of command’.

In the first instance, this gave individual initiative considerable room for man-

oeuvre; later on the whole process was steered and made more uniform at senior

leadership level. This is a dialectical process, then, in which the top levels of

leadership and the organs implementing decisions radicalized each other. How-

ever, each element in this process is essential for putting the whole process into

practice, and the process cannot be distilled into a single ‘order from the Führer’

or one instruction authorized by Hitler.

The reports made by the Einsatzgruppen allow us to construct at least an

approximate estimate of the number of people murdered in the occupied Eastern

areas during the first months of the war. Einsatzgruppe A reported that it had

killed 118,000 Jews by mid-October and more than 229,000 by the end of January

1942.
228
Of these 80,000 had been killed in Lithuania alone by mid-October, and by the end of January this figure had reached 145,000; in Latvia the totals were

30,000 by mid-October and 35,000 by January; in Estonia some 1,000 indigenous

Jews had been killed by the end of January; in Belarus the figure was 41,000 and in

the old Soviet areas within the area covered by the Einsatzgruppe some 3,600 had

been killed. Einsatzgruppe B reported 45,467 shootings by 31 October 1941 and in

its situation report of 1 March 1942 it noted a total of 91,012 who had received

‘special treatment’ since the start of the war. The figures for Einsatzkommandos 8

and 9—60,811 and 23,509 respectively—are particularly horrific.
229
The total number of Jews murdered by Einsatzgruppe C was 75,000 by 20 October.
230

Einsatzgruppe D reported on 12 December 1941 that it had shot 54,696 people to

date, and on 8 April 1942 the total was 91,678 of which at least 90 per cent were Jews.
231

These monstrous figures indicate the huge extent of the mass murders but they

do not represent precise statistics for the numbers of victims. It is not out of the

question that, in order to underline their assiduousness, some commandos

reported exaggerated totals or reported the same figures twice. On the other

hand, whilst the Einsatzgruppe reports contain data on the Jewish victims who

Extension of Shootings to Whole Jewish Population

255

had been killed by other units, this information is neither reliable nor complete,

especially when one considers the numbers of civilians murdered by units of the

Wehrmacht or by the local militias.

Nevertheless, the total number of Jewish civilians killed by the end of 1941

during the first two phases of the persecution of the Jews in the occupied Eastern

areas must be of the order of at least 500,000.

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PART IV

GENESIS OF THE FINAL SOLUTION ON A

EUROPEAN SCALE, 1941

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chapter 14

PLANS FOR A EUROPE-WIDE DEPORTATION

PROGRAMME AFTER THE START

OF BARBAROSSA

Decision on the Final Solution in the Summer of 1941?

The Interpretation of Some ‘Key Documents’

In parallel with the preparation and escalation of the racist war of extermination

against the Soviet Union, from the spring of 1941 onwards a general, gradual

radicalization of Judenpolitik can be observed within the whole German sphere of

influence. Historians dispute whether a key decision to murder all European Jews

lies behind this radicalization, and when the decision occurred. Thus the first

mont
hs1
of 1941, the summer,
2
the autumn,
3
or even December
4
of the same year are given as possible dates for a ‘Führerentscheidung’ (decision by the Führer) in