The Years of Extermination: Nazi Germany and the Jews, 1939-1945 (37 page)

On August 1, 1941, eastern Galicia was annexed to the General Government and became part of the district of Galicia with Lwov as its main administrative center. Some 24,000 Jews had been massacred before the annexation; afterward the fate of the Jews in the new district differed for some time from the situation prevailing in other parts of the General Government. For several months Frank forbade the setting up of ghettos in order to keep the option of transferring these additional Jewish populations “to the East,” eventually to the Pripet Marshes area.

In Lwov, for example, ghettoization started only in November 1941. The Governor-general’s desire to get rid of his newly acquired Jews was so intense that little was done to hinder thousands of them from fleeing to Romania and Hungary. Otherwise tens of thousands of Jewish men from Galicia were soon herded into labor camps, mainly along the new strategic road that would link Lwov to the southern Ukraine and eventually to the Black Sea. This notorious
Durchgangstrasse IV
(transit road IV) would be useful both to the Wehrmacht and to Himmler’s colonization plans. It is this project that, in the later summer of 1941, inaugurated de facto the systematic annihilation of Jews by way of slave labor.
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In early August 1941, the small town of Bjelaja Zerkow, south of Kiev, was occupied by the 295th Infantry Division of Army Group South; the Wehrmacht area commander, Colonel Riedl, ordered the registration of all Jewish inhabitants and asked SS
Sonderkommando 4a,
a subunit of
Einsatzgruppe C
—which in the meantime had moved from eastern Galicia to pre-1939 Soviet Ukraine—to murder them.

On August 8 a section of the
Sonderkommando,
led by SS Obersturmführer August Häfner, arrived in the town.
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Between August 8 and August 19 a company of Waffen SS attached to the
Kommando
shot all of the 800 to 900 local Jews, with the exception of a group of children under the age of five.
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These children were abandoned without food or water in a building on the outskirts of the town near the army barracks. On August 19 many were taken away in three trucks and shot at a nearby rifle range; ninety remained in the building, guarded by a few Ukrainians.
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Soon the screams of these ninety children became so unbearable that the soldiers called in two field chaplains, a Protestant and a Catholic, to take some “remedial action.”
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The chaplains found the children half naked, covered with flies, and lying in their own excrement. Some of the older ones were eating mortar off the walls; the infants were mostly comatose. The divisional chaplains were alerted and, after an inspection, they reported the matter to the first staff officer of the division, Lt. Col. Helmuth Groscurth.

Groscurth went to inspect the building. There he met Oberscharführer Jäger, the commander of the Waffen SS unit who had murdered the other Jews of the town; Jäger informed him that the remaining children were to be “eliminated.” Colonel Riedl, the field commander, confirmed the information and added that the matter was in the hands of the SD and that the
Einsatzkommando
had received its orders from the highest authorities.

At this point Groscurth took it upon himself to order the postponement of the killings by one day, notwithstanding Häfner’s threat to lodge a complaint. Groscurth even positioned armed soldiers around a truck already filled with children and prevented it from leaving. He communicated all this to the staff officer of Army Group South. The matter was referred to the Sixth Army, probably because
Einsatzkommando 4a
operated in its area. That same evening, the commander of the Sixth Army, Field Marshal Reichenau, personally decided that “the operation…had to be completed in a suitable way.”
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The next morning, August 21, Groscurth was summoned to a meeting at local headquarters in the presence of Colonel Riedl, Captain Luley, a counterintelligence officer who had reported to Reichenau on the course of the events, Obersturmführer Häfner, and the chief of
Einsatzkommando 4a
, the former architect SS Standartenführer Paul Blobel. Luley declared that, although he was a Protestant, he thought that the “chaplains should limit themselves to the welfare of the soldiers”; with the full support of the field commander, Luley accused the chaplains of “stirring up trouble.”

According to Groscurth’s report, Riedl then “attempted to draw the discussion into the ideological domain…The elimination of the Jewish women and children,” he explained, “was a matter of urgent necessity, whatever form it took.” Riedl complained that the division’s initiative had delayed the execution by twenty-four hours. At that point, as Groscurth later described it, Blobel, who had been silent up until then, intervened: He supported Riedl’s complaint and “added that it would be best if those troops who were nosing around carried out the executions themselves and the commanders who were stopping the measures took command of these troops.” “I quietly rejected this view,” Groscurth wrote, “without taking any position as I wished to avoid any personal acrimony.” Finally Groscurth mentioned Reichenau’s attitude: “When we discussed what further measures should be taken, the Standartenführer declared that the commander in chief [Reichenau] recognized the necessity of eliminating the children and wished to be informed once this had been carried out.”
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On August 22 the children were executed. The final sequence of the events was described by Häfner at his trial: “I went out to the woods alone. The Wehrmacht had already dug a grave. The children were brought along in a tractor. The Ukrainians were standing around trembling. The children were taken down from the tractor. They were lined up along the top of the grave and shot so that they fell into it. The Ukrainians did not aim at any particular part of the body…. The wailing was indescribable…. I particularly remember a small fair-haired girl who took me by the hand. She too was shot later.”
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The following day Captain Luley reported on the completion of the task to Sixth Army headquarters and was recommended for a promotion.
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The first Germans with any authority to be confronted with the fate of the ninety Jewish children were the chaplains. The field chaplains were compassionate, the divisional ones somewhat less so. In any case, after sending in their reports the chaplains were not heard from again.

The killing of the Jewish adults and children was public. In postwar court testimony, a cadet officer who had been stationed in Bjelaja Zerkow at the time of the events, after describing in gruesome detail the execution of a batch of approximately 150 to 160 Jewish adults, made the following comments: “The soldiers knew about these executions and I remember one of my men saying that he had been permitted to take part…. All the soldiers who were in Bjelaja Zerkow knew what was happening. Every evening, the entire time I was there, rifle fire could be heard, although there was no enemy in the vicinity.”
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The same cadet added, however: “It was not curiosity which drove me to watch this, but disbelief that something of this type could happen. My comrades were also horrified by the executions.
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The central personality in the Bjelaja Zerkow events was in many ways Lt. Col. Helmuth Groscurth. A deeply religious Protestant, a conservative nationalist, he did not entirely reject some of the tenets of Nazism and yet became hostile to the regime and close to the opposition groups gathered around Adm. Wilhelm Canaris and Gen. Ludwig Beck. He despised the SS and in his diary referred to Heydrich as “a criminal.”
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His decision to postpone the execution of the children in Bjelaja Zerkow by one day, notwithstanding Häfner’s threat, and then to use soldiers to prevent an already loaded truck from leaving, is certainly proof of courage.

Moreover Groscurth did not hesitate to express his criticism of the killings in the conclusion of his report: “Measures,” he wrote, “against women and children were undertaken which in no way differed from atrocities carried out by the enemy about which the troops are continually being informed. It is unavoidable that these events will be reported back home where they will be compared to the Lemberg atrocities.” [This is probably an allusion to executions perpetrated by the NKVD.]
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For these comments Groscurth was reprimanded by Reichenau a few days later. Yet his overall attitude is open to many questions.

After mentioning Reichenau’s order to execute the children, Groscurth added: “We then settled the details of how the executions were to be carried out. They are to take place during the evening of August 22. I did not involve myself in the details of the discussion.”
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The most troubling part of the report appears at the very end: “The execution could have been carried out without any uproar if the field and local headquarters had taken the necessary steps to keep the troops away…. Following the execution of all the Jews in the town it became necessary to eliminate the Jewish children, particularly the infants. Both infants and children should have been eliminated immediately in order to avoid this inhuman agony.”
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Groscurth was captured by the Russians at Stalingrad, together with the remaining soldiers and officers of the Sixth Army. He died in Soviet captivity shortly afterward, in April 1943.

V

In Lithuania the first victims of the Germans were the 201 mostly Jewish men (and one woman) of the small border town Gargždai (Garsden), executed on June 24 by an
Einsatzkommando
from Tilsit and a Schutzpolizei (SCHUPO) unit from Memel under the overall command of SS Brigadeführer Franz Walter Stahlecker, the commander of
Einsatzgruppe A
(the Tilsit unit received its orders directly from Gestapo chief Müller).
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The Jewish women and children (approximately 300), spared at the outset, were locked up in barns and shot in mid-September.
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A few days later the killings started in the main cities, Vilna and Kovno, and went on in several waves, during the summer and the fall; at the same time the Jewish populations of small towns and villages were entirely exterminated. The destruction of the Jews of Lithuania had begun. Next to Warsaw, Vilna—the “Jerusalem of Lithuania”—a city inhabited on the eve of the German occupation by some 60,000 Jews, was for centuries one of the most important centers of Jewish life in Eastern Europe. In the eighteenth century, Rabbi Elijah ben Solomon, the “Vilna Gaon,” carried religious scholarship to rarely equaled heights; albeit in a tradition of strict intellectual orthodoxy that fiercely opposed Hasidism, the emotional and popular Jewish revivalism born at the same time in the Ukrainian borderlands. It was also in Vilna that the Jewish workers’ party, the Bund, was created at the end of the nineteenth century. As we saw, the Bund was a fervent protagonist of the international proletarian struggle, but it was decidedly anti-Bolshevist; it advocated Jewish cultural (Yiddish) and political (socialist) autonomy in Eastern Europe and thus opposed the Zionist brand of Jewish nationalism. It was possibly the most original and numerically important Jewish political movement of the interwar period—and the most unrealistic.

On the morrow of World War I, the Baltic countries became independent, but Lithuania lost Vilna to Poland. At that stage the hatred of Lithuanian nationalists and of their fascist fringe, the Iron Wolf movement, was essentially directed against the Poles, much less so against the Jews. In fact, for a short period, Jewish existence in the new state thrived (the government even established a Ministry of Jewish Affairs) and the community, 150,000 strong, could shape its own educational system and, more generally, its own cultural life with a great measure of autonomy. In 1923, however, the Ministry of Jewish Affairs was abolished, and soon Jewish educational and cultural institutions were denied government support. Stepwise, from 1926 on, Lithuania moved to the right, first under the government of Antanas Smetona and Augustin Voldemaras, then under Smetona alone. Yet the Lithuanian strongman did not initiate any anti-Semitic laws or measures.

During those same years the Jewish minority in Polish-controlled Vilna also energetically developed its cultural and internal political life. Apart from a vast school system in Yiddish, Hebrew, and Polish, the Vilna community boasted a Yiddish theater, a wealth of newspapers and periodicals, clubs, libraries, and other cultural and social institutions. The city became home to major Yiddish writers and artists, as well as to the YIVO research center in the Jewish humanities and social sciences founded in 1925—a Jewish university in the making.
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The political scene changed radically with the Soviet annexation of the Baltic countries in July 1940: Jewish religious institutions and political parties such as the Bund or the Zionist-Revisionist Betar soon became targets of the NKVD. As we saw in regard to eastern Poland, any kind of balanced assessment of Jewish involvement in the new political system is rendered quasi impossible by contrary aspects in various domains: Jews were highly represented in officer schools, midrank police appointments, higher education, and various administrative positions. The situation was not different in the two other Baltic countries. Thus, it was not too difficult for extremist Lithuanian right-wing émigrés who had fled to Berlin and who, together with the Germans, were fostering anti-Soviet operations in the home country, to pretend—by exaggerating and twisting numbers that the Jews collaborated with the Bolsheviks. Elimination of the Jews from Lithuania became a goal of the underground “Lithuanian Activists’ Front” (LAF). When, a week before the German invasion, the NKVD deported some 35,000 Lithuanians to the Soviet interior, the Jews were widely accused of being both agents and informers.
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