Holocaust: The Nazi Persecution and Murder of the Jews (78 page)

with other units, murdered all the 5,000 Jews still living in the city. On 27 and

28 July, 5,673 Jews from Olyka and the surrounding areas, the entire Jewish

population, were shot. In Berdichev in the General Commissariat of Zhitomir

the members of the KdS outstation murdered the last Jews living there, at least

350

Extermination of the European Jew, 1942–1945

300, on 15/16 July 1942
.221
The escalation of the murders since July corresponded to developments in the General Government. On 19 July, Himmler had ordered

the extermination of the Jewish population there by the end of the year, and

after 22 July the deportations began from the Warsaw ghetto—5,000 people per

day—to Treblinka extermination camp.

From the end of August 1942 the murders in the Ukraine became even more

widespread and systematized; the goal was now the complete extermination of the

Jewish population.

At the meeting of the district commissars in Luck, held between 28 and

31 August, the representatives of the civil administration agreed with the KdS

that, during the coming five weeks, they would kill all the Jews in the General

Commissariat of Volhynia-Podolia with the exception of 500 skilled workers.

During this meeting, Reichskommisar Koch’s deputy gave an assurance that

these ‘hundred per cent cleansings’ were ‘also the emphatic wish of the Reichs-

kommissar’.
222
This ‘wish’ on Koch’s part may also have had something to do with the fact that he had just had higher delivery quotas imposed upon him by

Berlin.
223
Shortly before the conference, between 19 and 23 August, about 15,000

Jews had been murdered in the city.

After this massacre the occupying power systematically set to work on the

General Commissariats of Volhynia-Podolia and Zhitomir murdering county by

county almost all the Jews still living there.

The murders in Volhynia-Podolia are comparatively well documented. The

Pinsk out-station 9 of the SD played a considerable role in the destruction of the

ghettos in the District Commissariats of Pinsk and Stolin, most of which had been

set up in the spring of 1942. The shootings themselves were carried out by the

SD.
224
They were supported by the district commissars, the Gendarmerie, local auxiliary police, as well as several police battalions. The biggest of these massacres

took place in Pinsk in late October/early November and cost far more than 15,000

people their lives, perhaps even more than 26,000. The destruction of the ghetto

had been ordered by Himmler at short notice.
225

After this the first ghetto to be destroyed in August was the one in Mokrov, in

which 280–300 people were shot. On 3 September 1942 the ghettos in Kozan-

grodek and Lakhva were destroyed. During the night of 2/3 September the 500

inhabitants of the ghetto in Kozangrodek were shot. Then the execution com-

mando squad of Pinsk SD travelled to the neighbouring town of Lakhva and

murdered 500, possibly 2,000 people there.

On 18 September, during the liquidation of the Luniniec ghetto between 1,000

and 2,800 people were murdered. In the period between 9 and 12 September 1942,

the ghettos in the department of Stolin were destroyed, with 8,000 to 10,000

people murdered.
226
After that the murder detachment returned its attention once more to the District Commissariat of Pinsk. On 24 and 25 September, during

the liquidation of the ghetto of Yanov, between 1,500 and 2,000 people were

Extermination on a European Scale, 1942

351

murdered. At around the same time in Drohotshin (in the neighbouring District

Commissariat of Kobrin) between 1,500 and 2,000 people were also killed. Then

the members of the Pinsk SD station set about wiping out the ghetto in Pinsk itself

with the help of units of the Order Police. This mass murder lasted from

29 October until 1 November and involved at least 16,200 victims.

There is a written order from Himmler to HSSPF Prützmann about this

massacre, dated 27 October 1942: ‘On the basis of the reports I have received,

the ghetto in Pinsk should be seen as the headquarters of the entire bandit

movement in the Pripet Marshes. I therefore recommend, despite the existence

of economic concerns, that the ghetto in Pinsk be immediately dealt with and

destroyed. A thousand male workers should, if the action allows it, be handed over

to the Wehrmacht to make wooden huts. But the work of these 1,000 workers may

only take place in a closed and heavily guarded camp. If this guard cannot be

guaranteed, these 1,000 are also to be exterminated.’
227

In the district of Antoniny (also in the General Commissariat of Volhynia-

Podolia), the German civil administration had interned the population that was fit

for work, over 300 people, in forced labour camps in Orlincy and Antoniny in

October 1941. At the beginning of 1942, in three places, small ghettos for Jews who

were not fit for work were set up. These people were murdered in July 1942 by

members of the KdS post Staro-Konstantinov, as were those Jews fit for work who

were still alive in autumn 1942.
228
For the district of Kamentsk-Podolsk there is a report from the SD out-station there, issued at the beginning of August, which

stated that 1,204 victims had been recently killed during two actions in three

villages in Rayon Dunayevtse.
229

In August, in the District Commissariat of Kremenec (Kreminanec), members

of the KdS out-station, with the help of the District Commissariat, the Gendarm-

erie, Ukrainian volunteers, and the police battalion 102 murdered the Jews still

living in the ghettos. Between 10 August and early September 1942 the ghetto in

Kremenec, which was set up early in 1942, was liquidated, with 8,000–12,000

people murdered. Over the next few months 1,500 ‘work-Jews’ who were excluded

from the action were also shot.
230
This was followed on 13 August by the murders of 238 Jews from Berezhy as well as 1,000–2,000 people from the ghetto of

Potschajew (Pochayev). During the three days that followed, 5,000 Jews from

the ghetto of Wischnewez (Wisnowiec) were murdered, and on 14 August and the

days that followed the Jews of Schumsk (Szumsk) were massacred leaving around

2,000–3,000 people dead.
231

The ghetto of Sarny, built in April 1942, into which the Jews from the towns of

the surrounding district had been driven, was cleared on 25 August, and the Jews

put in a camp. On 28 August all the Jews from the camp along with about 200

Gypsies were shot next to prepared pits. Figures for the victims vary between

10,000 and 17,000. On 20 August, the ghetto of Rafalovka was encircled by

Ukrainian militias, who took some 3,000 Jews out of the ghetto on 29 August

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Extermination of the European Jew, 1942–1945

and had them shot by the same firing squad that had previously been active in

Sarny.
232

In the district of Kobryn, at a date that can no longer be precisely estab-

lished, between 11,000 and 14,500 Jews from Kobryn Bereza-Kartuska, Antopol,

Drogitschin (Drogichin), and other towns were shot. Some of the people were

deported in railway trains to the vicinity of the town of Bronnaja (Bronnaya)

Gora, where a shooting facility had been set up.
233
In Ljudvipol (Sosnovoye) in the District Commissariat of Kostopol 1,500 Jews from the ghetto there, which

had been set up in April 1942, were shot in August or September (possibly on

14 September).
234
In Vladimir-Volynsky 13,500 people were murdered at the beginning of September, and with the dissolution of the ghetto of Dubno on

5 October about 3,000.
235
In the liquidation of the ghetto of Lubomil in October 1942 about 8,000 people died.
236

In the massacre in Brest-Litovsk on 15 October 1942, in which the local SD out-

station, the gendarmerie, a police unit, and various other police agencies took part,

at least 10,000–15,000 people were killed.
237
In September, in the District Commissariat of Brest at least 5,000 people had already been killed in several ghettos and

camps.
238
In the liquidation of the ghettos of Sdolbunov, Misocz, and Ostrog, all immediately to the south of Rovno, over 2,000 people in all were murdered on 13, 14,

and 15 October.
239
In the District Commissariat of Dunajewzy (Dunayevtsy), according to a Soviet Commission report, a total of 5,000 Jews are supposed to

have been shot in the spring and autumn of 1942.
240

In November the SS and the occupying administration extended the murder

actions to the north, into White Russian Polesia, and again to the south. After the

last Jewish forced labourers had been murdered in Luck on 12 December, the

workers in Podolia suffered the same fate: 4,000 people fell victim to the murders

in Kamenetsk-Podolsk in November 1942, and a similar number in Starokonstan-

tinov on 29 December 1942. Not only did the civil administration provide

the crucial impulse for total extermination at short notice, but the District

Commissars also played a considerable part in the organization of the individual

massacres.
241

For the Ukraine, therefore, we have the following overall picture: altogether,

between May and December 1942, some 150,000 Jews fell victim to the massacres

carried out by the police and the civil administration in Volhynia between

May and December 1942, and in Podolia just to the south at least 35,000.

There were also several thousand victims in the General Commissariat of

Shitomir (Zhitomir). At the end of 1942, only a few thousand Jewish skilled

workers remained alive.
242

By mid-October 1942 the district of Bialystok, which was not part of the General

Government, but was under the control of the Governor of the Province of East

Prussia and Reichskommissar of the Ukraine, Erich Koch, and formed a bridge

between the two territories, had been caught up in the systematic extermination.

Extermination on a European Scale, 1942

353

After an initial deportation of 3,300 people from the ghetto of Ciechanowiec to

Treblinka on 15 October, the majority of the Jews of the district had been rounded

up into five large collection camps at the beginning of November (Kielbasin,

Volkovysk, Zambrov, Boguze, and one more near Bialystok), while ghettos con-

tinued to exist only in Bialystok, Grodno, Pruzany, Sokolka, and Krynki. In the

months of November, December, and January (interrupted by a transport mora-

torium from mid-December until mid-January) more than 80,000 people were

transported mainly to Treblinka, some also to Auschwitz, and murdered there.

Finally, at the beginning of February, some 10,000 people from the Bialystok

ghetto, which had hitherto been spared, were deported to Treblinka, after more

far-reaching plans for the deportation of 30,000 people which Himmler had

already approved in December, had proved to be impracticable. In mid-February,

a similar ‘action’ occurred in Grodno, with more than 4,000 victims who were

deported to Treblinka.
243

The HSSPF Russia South, Hans-Adolf Prützmann, reported to Himmler on

26 December 1942 that following the ‘anti-Partisan campaign’ between 1 September

and 1 December 1942 a total of 363,211 ‘Jews had been executed’ within his area of

responsibility, which included Ukraine and Bialystok. On 29 December Himmler

passed on the report to Hitler, who took note of it.
244

Unlike the situation in Poland, where the inhabitants of the ghettos in 1942

reacted in a largely ‘passive’ way to the ‘actions’, the second wave of massacres

in the occupied Soviet territories encountered considerable organized and

largely armed resistance. In many places resistance groups formed against the

occupying forces, even though the chances of success were extremely poor. They

had hardly any firearms, so that the resistance fighters often only had home-

made incendiary materials, knives, and tools that had been converted into

weapons. It was also extraordinarily difficult for the resistance groups in the

individual ghettos, isolated from one another, to receive information about the

overall picture, and it was impossible to develop a unified resistance strategy. It

also proved extraordinarily difficult for the resistance fighters to win support

within the ghetto population. It was not just the fact that the extraordinarily bad

living conditions meant that any remaining energy was absorbed by the daily

fight for survival, but above all the fear that any acts of resistance would be

avenged with collective reprisal against the general population of the ghetto.

There was also the often hostile attitude of the non-Jewish indigenous popula-

tion and the difficulties involved in making contact with non-Jewish resistance

groups, let alone receiving support from such groups. In other words, the

resisters knew from the outset that their rebellion had little prospect of success.

But the fact that resistance could exist on a considerable scale in spite of this can

be explained above all by the fact that few illusions about the brutality of the

German occupying forces could still exist among those who had survived the