The Years of Extermination: Nazi Germany and the Jews, 1939-1945 (36 page)

During this “first sweep” (from June 1941 to the end of the year), part of the Jewish populations survived. The intensity of the massacres differed from area to area according to local circumstances, as did the very uneven ghettoization process, particularly in pre-1939 Soviet territory. The ghettos set up in bigger cities, such as Minsk and Rovno, were liquidated in a few large killing operations over the coming eighteen months or so; the smaller ghettos were often destroyed within weeks, and part of the population was not ghettoized at all but killed on the spot during the first or the second sweep (throughout 1942). We shall return to the exterminations in ex-Soviet territory. Suffice it to mention here that by the end of 1941, about 600,000 Jews had been murdered in the newly conquered eastern regions.

Among the nonghettoized Jewish population, the occupiers could use whomever they chose as household slaves. “We took over an apartment that belonged to Jews,” a member of Order Police Reserve Batallion 105, Hermann G., wrote home on July 7, 1941. “The Jews of this place were woken up very early on Sunday morning by a
Vorkommando
and had, in their great majority, to leave their houses and apartments, and make them available to us. The first thing was to clean these places thoroughly. All Jewish women and girls were put to work: It was a great Sunday morning cleaning. Every morning at 7 o’clock, the chosen people must be present and do all the work for us…. We don’t need to do anything anymore. H.F. and I have a Jew and, each of us, a Jewess, one of whom is 15 and the other 19; one is called Eide, the other Chawah. They do for us everything we want and are at our service…. They have a permit, so that they should not be grabbed by somebody else when they depart. The Jews are fair game [
Die Juden sind Freiwild
]. Everybody can snatch any of them on the street and keep them. I wouldn’t want to be in a Jew’s skin. No store, insofar as any are open, sells anything to them. What they live on, I don’t know. We give them some of our bread and also some other things. I cannot be so hard. One can only give well-meant advice to the Jews: Do not bring children into the world; they have no future anymore.”
⁵²

The author of the letter does not read like a born murderer or dyed-in-the-wool anti-Semite, but rather like someone who just went along and enjoyed his newly acquired power. This was probably the case of most soldiers of the
Ostheer
. Yet beyond the involvement of ordinary soldiers, the crimes of the Wehrmacht against local populations and Jews can no longer be denied, although their extent remains the object of intense debate.

The protests of some senior officers regarding the murders committed by the SS during the Polish campaign did not reappear at the outset of the war against the Soviet Union. Even among the small group of officers, mostly belonging to the Prussian aristocracy, who congregated at Army Group Center around Lt. Col. Henning von Tresckow and who, to varying degrees, were hostile to Nazism, the need to overthrow the Bolshevik regime seems to have been fully accepted, and none of the orders issued in the spring of 1941 was seriously questioned.
⁵³
It appears, moreover, that several of these officers were well informed, from the very beginning of the Russian campaign, about the criminal activities of Arthur Nebe’s
Einsatzgruppe
B, which operated in their own area, without however admitting to that knowledge.
⁵⁴
Only several months later, after the October 20–21 extermination of the Jews of Borisov, did this nucleus of the military opposition to Hitler explicitly recognize the mass murder surrounding them and start drawing conclusions.

Whereas acknowledgment of criminal operations was but slowly admitted by a small military group, the participation of the Wehrmacht in such operations was widespread, as we shall see, and indirectly encouraged by some of the most senior commanders of the
Ostheer
. Thus, in a notorious order of the day, on October 10, 1941, Field Marshal Walter von Reichenau, an outright Nazi, set the tone for several of the highest-ranking commanders: “The soldier must have complete understanding for the necessity of the harsh but just atonement of Jewish subhumanity. This has the further goal of nipping in the bud rebellions in the rear of the Wehrmacht which, as experience shows, are always plotted by the Jews.”
⁵⁵
Hitler praised Reichenau’s proclamation and demanded its distribution to all frontline units in the East.
⁵⁶
Within a few weeks, the Nazi field marshal was imitated by Generals Erich von Manstein, Stülpnagel, and the commander of the seventeenth Army, Gen. Hermann Hoth.
⁵⁷
As for Field Marshal Wilhelm Ritter von Leeb, the commander of Army Group North, he did not believe that the Jewish question could be solved by mass executions: “It would most reliably be solved by sterilizing all males.”
⁵⁸

Some commanders were more reticent. Thus, on September 24, 1941, Field Marshal Gerd von Rundstedt, commander of Army Group South, made it clear that operations against foes such as communists and Jews were solely the task of the
Einsatzgruppen
. “Independent participation of Wehrmacht members or participation of Wehrmacht members in the excesses of the Ukrainian population against the Jews” were forbidden. Members of the Wehrmacht were also forbidden “to watch or take pictures during the measures taken by the
Sonderkommandos
.”
⁵⁹
The order was only very partially followed.

In the meantime Wehrmacht propaganda units were hard at work promoting anti-Jewish rage in the ranks of the Red Army and among the Soviet populations. In early July 1941, the first major drops of millions of German leaflets over Soviet territory started. The “Jewish criminals,” their murderous deeds, their treacherous plots, and the like were the mainstays in an endless litany of hatred.
⁶⁰
And, more virulently so than during the Polish campaign, soldiers’ letters demonstrate the growing impact of the anti-Jewish slogans.

On the eve of the attack, Pvt. Richard M, stationed somewhere in the General Government, described the Jews he encountered there in a letter to his girlfriend: “This nation of bandits and gypsies (here this expression applies exactly without any exaggeration) hangs about in the streets and alleys and refuses to do any work voluntarily…. They show greater skill at stealing and haggling…. Moreover these creatures are covered with dirty tatters and infected with all kinds of diseases…. They live in wooden huts with thatched roofs. A brief look through the window makes it clear that vice is at home here.”
⁶¹
On the second day of the campaign, Sgt. A.N. wrote home: “Now Jewry has declared war on us along the whole line, from one extreme to the other, from the London and New York plutocrats to the Bolsheviks.” And he added: “All that is under Jewish domination stands in one common front against us.”
⁶²

On July 3 Cpl. F marched through an eastern Galician town (probably Lutsk): “Here, one witnesses Jewish and Bolshevik cruelty of a kind that I hardly thought possible.” After describing the discovery of the massacres that had taken place in local jails before the Soviets departed, he commented: “This kind of thing calls for vengeance, and it is being meted out.”
⁶³
In the same area Cpl. WH described the houses in the Jewish quarter as “robber dens” and the Jews he encountered as the most sinister beings. His comrade Helmut expressed their feelings: “How was it possible that this race claimed for itself the right to rule all other nations.”
⁶⁴

On August 4 Pvt. Karl Fuchs was convinced that “the battle against these subhumans, who have been whipped into a frenzy by the Jews, was not only necessary but came in the nick of time. Our Führer has saved Europe from certain chaos.”
⁶⁵
A mid-July letter sent by an NCO was equally blunt: “The German people owes a great debt to our Führer, for had these beasts, who are our enemies here, come to Germany, such murders would have taken place as the world has never seen before…. And when one reads the ‘Stürmer’ and looks at the pictures, this is only a weak illustration of what we see here and the crimes committed here by the Jews.”
⁶⁶
While ordinary soldiers probably garnered their views from the common font of anti-Jewish propaganda and popular wisdom, killer units underwent regular indoctrination courses in order to be up to the difficulties of their tasks.
⁶⁷

IV

Before retreating from eastern Galicia, the Soviet Secret Police, the NKVD, unable to deport all the jailed Ukrainian nationalists (and also some Poles and Jews), decided to murder them on the spot. The victims, in the hundreds—possibly in the thousands—were found inside the jails and mainly in hastily dug mass graves when the Germans, accompanied by Ukrainian units, marched into the main towns of the area: Lwov, Zloczow, Tarnopol, Brody. As a matter of course the Ukrainians accused the local Jews of having sided with the Soviet occupation regime in general, and particularly of having helped the NKVD in its murderous onslaught against the Ukrainian elite.

This was but the latest phase of a history reaching back several centuries and punctuated by massive and particularly murderous pogroms: the killings led by Bogdan Chmielnicki in the seventeenth century, by the Haidamaks in the eighteenth century, and by Semyon Petlura on the morrow of World War I.
⁶⁸
The traditional hatreds between Ukrainians and Poles, Ukrainians and Russians, and Poles and Russians added their own exacerbating elements to the attitudes of these groups toward the Jews, particularly in areas such as eastern Galicia, where Ukrainians, Poles, and Jews lived side by side in large communities, first under Hapsburg rule, then under Polish domination after World War I, and finally under the Soviets between 1939 and 1941, until the German occupation.

Traditional Christian anti-Jewish hostility was reinforced in the Ukraine by the frequent employment of Jews as estate stewards for Polish nobility, thus as the representatives (and enforcers) of Polish domination over the Ukrainian peasantry. Drawing on such hostility, modern Ukrainian nationalists accused Jews of siding with the Poles after World War I in fought-over areas such as eastern Galicia (while as we saw, the Poles accused the Jews of siding with the Ukrainians), and throughout the interwar period as being part and parcel either of Bolshevik oppression or of Polish measures against the Ukrainian minority, according to region. Such intense nationalist anti-Semitism was further exacerbated when a Ukrainian Jew named Sholem Schwarzbart assassinated the much-admired Petlura in Paris on May 25, 1926, in retaliation for the postwar pogroms.
⁶⁹

Within the Ukrainian nationalist movement itself, the extremists led by Stepan Bandera and supported by the Germans gained the upper hand against more moderate groups.
⁷⁰
Bandera’s men led the OUN–B (Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists–Bandera) auxiliary units that marched into eastern Galicia in June 1941 together with the Wehrmacht.

In Lwov the Ukrainians herded local Jews together and forced them to dig up the corpses of the NKVD’s victims from their mass graves or retrieve them from the jails. The Jews then had to align the bodies of those recently murdered and also of already badly decomposed corpses along the open graves, before being themselves shot into the pits—or being killed in the jails and the fortress, or on the streets and squares of the main east Galician town.
⁷¹

In Zloczow the killers belonged first and foremost to the OUN and to the Waffen SS “Viking” Division, while
Sonderkommando 4b
of
Einsatzgruppe C
kept to the relatively passive role of encouraging the Ukrainians (the Waffen SS did not need any prodding). The murders took place under the watchful eye of the 295th Infantry Division, and it was finally as a result of the protests of the first general staff officer of the division, who sent a complaint to Seventeenth Army headquarters, that the killings of Jews stopped—temporarily.
⁷²

In his first diary entry, on July 7, 1943, Aryeh Klonicki, a Jew from Kovel, described the events of June 1941 in Tarnopol: “I came one day before the outbreak of the war [with the Soviet Union] as a guest of my wife’s sister who lives there. On the third day of the [German] invasion a massacre lasting three consecutive days was carried out in the following manner. The Germans, joined by Ukrainians, would go from house to house in order to look for Jews. The Ukrainians would take the Jews out of the houses where the waiting Germans would kill them, either right by the house or they would transport the victims to a particular site where all would be put to death. This is how some five thousand people found their death, mostly men. As for women and children they were murdered only in exceptional cases. I myself and my wife were saved at the time only because we were living in a street inhabited by Christians who declared that there were no Jews living in our house.”
⁷³

On July 6 Pvt. Franzl also recorded the events at Tarnopol, for the enjoyment of his parents in Vienna. The discovery of the mutilated corpses of
Volksdeutsche
and Ukrainians led to vengeance against the local Jews: They were forced to carry the corpses from the cellars and line them up by newly dug graves; afterward the Jews were beaten to death with truncheons and spades. “Up to now,” Franzl went on, “we have sent approximately 1,000 Jews to the other world, but this is by far too little for what they have done.” After asking his parents to spread the news, Franzl ended his letter with a promise: “If there are doubts, we will bring photos. Then, no more doubts.”
⁷⁴

In smaller towns in eastern Galicia most of the murderous anti-Jewish outbreaks during these early days of occupation took place without apparent German intervention. Witnesses from Brzezany, a town to the south of Zloczow, described, decades later, the sequence of events: As the Germans entered the town, “the Ukrainians were ecstatic. Throngs of Ukrainian peasants, mostly young people, carrying yellow-and-blue flags adorned with the Ukrainian trident, filled the…streets. They came from the villages, dressed in Ukrainian national costumes, singing their Ukrainian songs.” In the prisons and outside, the corpses of Ukrainian activists killed by the NKVD were uncovered: “The sights were indescribable, [so was] the stench from the corpses. They were spread out on the prison cellar floor. Other corpses were floating in the river, the Zlota Lipa. People blamed the NKVD and the Jews.” What followed was to be expected: “Most of the Jews who perished in Brzezany on that day were murdered with broomsticks with nails attached to them…. There were two rows of Ukrainian bandits, holding big sticks. They forced those people, the Jews, in between the two rows and murdered them in cold blood with those sticks.”
⁷⁵
Farther east the attitude of the populations was somewhat different.