Planning for ‘special tasks’ in Russia

Hitler’s invasion of the Soviet Union on 22 June 1941 was a turning point in the Second World War and came to be seen as ‘a tragic turning point’ in German anti-Jewish policy. According to the historian Martin Gilbert, ‘a new policy was carried out, the systematic destruction of entire Jewish communities’. However, Hitler did not order the invasion primarily because of anti-Semitism, or even anti-Bolshevism (which amounted to much the same thing in his mind). The decision to invade stemmed from his strategic dilemma in mid-1940, and policy towards the Jewish population in the opening phase of the campaign was, if anything, a continuity of earlier practices. To be sure, the number of Jews murdered was far greater than in Poland in 1939 but the wave of targeted killings followed by anti-Jewish regulations and the formation of ghettos demonstrated a striking contiguity. When anti-Jewish measures lurched into a second, incomparably more destructive phase it was the result of a foundering military campaign. The contest of arms, more than a preconceived agenda for the treatment of the Jews, created the conditions for a murderous dynamic of unprecedented proportions and stupefying savagery. Both originated from the same German quandary: how to fight and win a war with limited resources against more powerful enemies.¹

A year earlier, Germany appeared to be at the height of its power. Yet Britain refused to capitulate and the Reich found itself saddled with responsibility for sustaining the countries it had vanquished as well as supporting its allies. Thanks to the continuing British blockade and the inability of France, Belgium and the Netherlands (plus, later, Yugoslavia and Greece) to feed themselves, it was simply not feasible to sit tight. Before long German industry would run short of raw materials, the military would have to draw on stocks of fuel and lubricants, while famine would threaten Europe. The impending crisis was no secret: William Shirer was briefed to this effect by government officials. He reported that the German Foreign Office ‘told us today [8 August 1940] that Germany declines all responsibility for any food shortages which may occur in the territories occupied by the German army’. The threat of dearth in the Reich raised the spectre of declining morale and the danger that 1918 could be repeated. This was no fantasy of the regime. In January 1941, Sydney Redecker, the US consul in Frankfurt-am-Main, told the State Department that the population was becoming depressed by the increasing hardships. The ‘food situation in particular is a principal source of dissatisfaction’.²

The Soviet Union emerged as the key to unlocking this predicament. After Hitler conferred with his service chiefs at the Berghof on 31 July 1940, General Halder summarized the Führer’s conclusions, ‘with Russia smashed, Britain’s last hope will be shattered. Germany would then be master of Europe and the Balkans.’ Triumph would leave the Reich in possession of vast agricultural regions that could feed the German population and supply grain to Germany’s clients; it would give German industry access to unlimited natural resources; and it would lead to control of the largest oil fields in Europe, putting Germany in a position to challenge the USA for global dominance. But the very factors that drove Hitler towards this expedient rendered it extremely problematic. The assault would consume enormous resources and could not be protracted, because the Reich lacked the wherewithal to sustain a campaign on such a titanic scale for more than a few months. In the short term, hostilities would make the supply situation much worse: it would disrupt the flow of grain, raw materials and mineral oil from Russia as agreed under the German-Soviet pact of August 1939. Victory would have to be swift.³

From the outset, the war against the Soviet Union was planned as a ‘colonial war of extraction’. It might be more accurate to describe it as a smash and grab operation, since less attention was paid to establishing a long-term colonial regime than to stripping the territory of assets for the war effort and shipping the residue back to the Reich as quickly as possible. During the winter of 1940–41, Herbert Backe, State Secretary for Food and Agriculture and head of the Food Division of Göring’s Four-Year Plan, drew up a memorandum on the Reich’s food situation for 1941, predicting a significant shortfall due to a poor harvest. Around the same time, he also wrote a paper setting out the implications of a campaign against the USSR. Backe pointed out the enormous growth of home demand for grain and meat products in the USSR due to industrialization and the expansion of its cities. Consequently, the country’s grain surplus had steadily declined. If Germany conquered the Soviet Union it would not be sufficient merely to extract this surplus, it would be necessary to ‘suppress’ local consumption. Furthermore, to feed the German army for the duration of the campaign and the occupation without causing severe shortages for the German population, the army would have to live off the land. Backe stated bluntly that ‘the war can only continue if the entire Wehrmacht is fed from Russia in the third year of the war [1941]’. He foresaw that these simultaneous policies would lead to mass starvation and estimated that thirty million Russians would die as a result.⁴

Backe’s nutritional prognosis, combined with contemporaneous reports on the supply and stockpiling of fuel, lubricants and crucial raw materials, had a dramatic effect on the military’s thinking. In February 1941, General Thomas, head of the army’s economic and armaments department, warned General Keitel, chief of the high command, that there were only adequate supplies to keep the army in the field, fully mobile and at maximum fighting capacity until September 1941 – at the outside. The following month, the army set up an Economic Staff East devoted to securing local resources in the context of a rapid, successful campaign; the staff did not anticipate feeding the Russian population or restoring production to Russian industry. On 2 May, Thomas met with the senior civil servants of the Reich ministries for food and the economy, plus other officials, to discuss exploitation of the land. During these discussions Backe reiterated his belief that to feed both the army and the home front it would be essential to strip the Soviet Union bare, even at the cost of ‘tens of millions’ of deaths. The military did not object to his proposal, although they diverged somewhat by emphasizing the desirability of reviving some industrial production to meet the army’s immediate needs. Regardless of any differences of emphasis, on 23 May the army issued ‘Economic and Political Guidelines for Operation Barbarossa’ that stressed the need to limit food consumption locally so that the maximum could be diverted to the Wehrmacht. Furthermore, the guidelines required that Russia should be divided into a northern grain deficit zone and a southern grain surplus zone. The northern zone contained the majority of the cities and industrial centres, while the south comprised the rich arable lands of Ukraine. The demarcation line was to be policed so that grain from the surplus zone would be exported solely to the Reich; by implication the cities of the north would starve. ‘Many tens of millions of people in this country will become superfluous and will die or must emigrate to Siberia.’⁵

The projected onslaught was not only intended to denude the native inhabitants of the means to live. As planning reached its climax in spring 1941, Hitler, Himmler and the army refined the tools and the procedures to destroy both the military assets and political structures of the USSR.

The Wehrmacht intended to engage the bulk of the Soviet armies close to the border where they were deployed and annihilate them in a series of encirclement battles. Everything was going to be thrown into a fast-moving assault of overwhelming strength and ferocity designed to wipe out Soviet resistance in a matter of weeks. Halder noted in his journal prior to one high command conference, ‘force must be used in its most brutal form’. Hitler injected the political dimension into the campaign at a briefing session with 250 of his generals on 30 March 1941. In his notes of the Führer’s speech (which lasted two and a half hours), Halder included references to ‘colonial tasks’ and the ‘clash of ideologies’. It was not going to be an ordinary war: with chilling clarity he jotted down, ‘This is a war of extermination.’⁶

The task of uprooting and eliminating Bolshevism would fall to the regime’s political soldiers: the security police-SD assisted by the order police and the Waffen-SS. To avoid the sort of clashes over jurisdiction that bedevilled Operation Tannenberg, on 13 March 1941 Heydrich commenced negotiations with the quartermaster-general of the army, Eduard Wagner. A fortnight later they concluded an agreement that formed the basis for instructions issued by the army high command to the troops as ‘Orders for Special Areas in Connection with Directive 21 [Operation Barbarossa]’. The army leadership stipulated that the Reichsführer-SS, Himmler, was to be entrusted with ‘special tasks for the preparation of the political administration – tasks which will derive from the decisive struggle that will have to be carried out between the two opposing political systems. Within the framework of these tasks the RFSS will act independently and on his own responsibility.’ Security police units would get logistical support from the army and liaise with its intelligence officers as well as the secret field police; but otherwise the special units of the Sipo-SD would be left to operate against the civilian population at will.⁷

Taking their cue from Hitler’s characterization of the coming struggle, the army gave its personnel legal immunity for ruthless measures against civilians. The ‘Decree on the Exercise of Military Jurisdiction’ did away with the need to convene courts martial and empowered officers at battalion and regimental level to sanction the execution of individuals caught in acts of resistance or suspected of being involved in anti-German activity. They could also order collective punishments where specific individuals were not identified. In ‘Guidelines for the Conduct of the Troops in Russia’ the high command explained that the war was not to be fought within the usual parameters. No quarter was to be given or expected. ‘Bolshevism is the deadly enemy of the National Socialist German people … The struggle requires ruthless and energetic action against Bolshevik agitators, guerrillas, saboteurs, and Jews, and the total elimination of all active and passive resistance.’ Finally, under the ‘Guidelines for the Treatment of Political Commissars’, issued on 6 June 1941, officers and men of the Wehrmacht were instructed to separate party officials attached to army units from other prisoners and shoot them immediately.⁸

Despite the habitual conflation of Jews with Bolsheviks, and awareness that ‘Jewry is strongly represented in the USSR’ (to quote the ‘Guidelines for the Conduct of the Troops in Russia’), specific planning for the Jewish population was left late and remained vague. In Hitler’s way of thinking the Jews were of course behind every development in the geo-strategic constellation. He saw the attack on Russia as a blow against the ‘Jewish’ blockade of Germany that was held in place by Jews acting behind the scenes in Washington, London and Moscow. When a coup in Yugoslavia toppled the pro-German regime in Belgrade in March 1941, leading to a treaty of friendship with the USSR, Hitler blamed the ‘conspiracy of Anglo-Saxon warmongers and the Jewish men in power in the Moscow Bolshevik headquarters’. Nevertheless, Jewish policy across the continent remained in a ‘holding pattern’, typified by various blends of emigration, segregation, confinement and exploitation. The planning process for Operation Barbarossa did not produce any specific initiatives regarding the Jews.⁹

To Himmler and Heydrich, control of Jewish policy in the coming struggle was as much about extending their power, and compensating for the setbacks they had experienced after the western campaigns, as it was about the realization of any sweeping vision. Himmler was particularly keen to show Hitler that he was capable of implementing far-reaching settlement plans to colonize the Ukraine, unlike the stop-start disappointments that typified the ingathering of Volksdeutsche to Poland. The closer the invasion came, the grander became the fantasies about Lebensraum. For his part, Heydrich was determined to impose his role as pacifier and prevent the army wresting responsibility for security – as had occurred in France. For this reason he envisaged a campaign of unbridled terror, putting all other security agencies in the shade. Since security on the ground was a prerequisite for settlement, Himmler was happy to support him and throw his own units into the fray. However, apart from immediate security issues relating to the Jews, the larger policy seems to have been a continuation of practices in Poland: expulsion to a territory at the fringes of or just beyond the boundaries of National Socialist power. Hence, until days before the campaign opened, the Jews figured mainly in discussions about security, jurisdiction, and the possibility of exploiting the area beyond the Urals as a dumping ground for European Jewry. The only innovation was that the ‘territorial solution’ (expulsion) now built on the ambitions that crystallized at the time of the Madagascar episode for removing all Jews from all the parts of Europe under German domination.¹⁰

The ‘special tasks’ assigned to the SS were to be carried out, as in Poland, by task forces or Einsatzgruppen. During March and April, the head of personnel at the RSHA, Bruno Streckenbach, and Heydrich selected the men who would lead each Einsatzgruppe (EG) and the sub-units into which they would break down, the Einsatzkommando (EK) and Sonderkommando (SK). The senior officers were almost all drawn from the higher ranks of the SS Head Office, especially the department heads of the Sipo-SD and Kripo. Well over half of the commanders of Einsatzgruppen, Einsatzkommandos and Sonderkommandos were officers of Sipo-SD, the ideological core of the SS. Many of the lower-ranking positions were filled by cadets from the Sipo leadership school, young men who were soaked in National Socialism. During April and June these cadres received briefing and training at improvised facilities in Pretzch, Düben and Bad Schmeidenburg in Lower Saxony. At the same time, the RSHA pulled together support staff and assigned the 9th Reserve Police Battalion and elements of 1st SS Infantry Brigade to provide the manpower and security that they would need.¹¹

Each task force was roughly the size of a battalion with 600–1,000 men (and some women in the clerical and communication sections). The groups were entirely motorized and subdivided into elements that could vary in size from company strength to a platoon – which gave them the flexibility to respond quickly to opportunities or emergencies and to cover a lot of ground, quickly. However, the total force never exceeded 3,000 and it relied on the army for fuel, provisions and quarters. At crucial points they had to call on the army for manpower while at other difficult, and rather more serious, moments the army was prone to summon the Einsatzgruppen to reinforce endangered sectors of the front.¹²

Einsatzgruppe A, under SS-Colonel Dr Walter Stahlecker, was assigned the Baltic area, operating in the rear of Army Group North (comprising 18th Army, 4th Panzer Group, 16th Army). Einsatzgruppe B, led by SS-General Arthur Nebe, the head of the criminal police, had responsibility for Byelorussia and took under its wing the vanguard unit destined for the Soviet capital, the Vorkommando Moscow. It tucked itself behind Army Group Centre (9th Army, 3rd Panzer Group, 2nd Panzer Group, 4th Army). Einsatzgruppe C, commanded by SS-Brigadier General Dr Otto Rasch, followed in the wake of Army Group South (6th Army, 1st Panzer Group, 17th Army). Rasch, who had two doctorates and was addressed as Dr Dr Rasch, was borrowed from his post as commander of the Sipo-SD in Königsberg, where he had overseen the killing of the mentally ill in sanatoria across East Prussia. Rasch had to cover a vast area of north and central Ukraine, including much of the Pripet Marshes. Einsatzgruppe D was headed by SS-Colonel Professor Otto Ohlendorf, seconded from running the Inland Office of the SD. Ohlendorf, too, faced a daunting task as he was directed to operate across the southern Ukraine and down into the Crimean peninsula.¹³

At the temporary bases the officers were informed about the extensive nature of the undertaking. The Einsatzgruppen were expected to ensure rear-area security, seeking out and eliminating resistance. They also had to supply the RSHA with intelligence on the political situation, the mood of the people, and economic data. These situation reports, similar to the secret reports on the Reich that the SD had been compiling since the mid-1930s, were to be transmitted regularly to the head office of the Gestapo in the RSHA, where they would be analysed, digested and distributed. The reports were to include details of arrests and executions. Typically, Himmler added a further layer of senior officers who reported directly to him. These were the Higher SS Police Leaders. One HSSPF was appointed for each army group: Hans Prutzmann in the north, Erich von dem Bach-Zelewski in the centre and Friedrich Jeckeln in the south. These men were to exercise a crucial command and control function as well as deploying substantial forces of their own to back up the Einsatzgruppen.¹⁴

The precise content of the briefings for senior commanders and their preparation is hard to reconstruct due to the lack of surviving contemporary documentation. However, it is almost certain that the Einsatzgruppen officers were instructed to seize and execute Jewish men credibly associated with Soviet power. This was the gist of an ill-tempered memorandum to the HSSPF that Heydrich circulated ten days into Operation Barbarossa, setting out guidelines for the activities of the security police and Einsatzgruppen. He explained that ‘Owing to the fact that the Chief of the Order Police [Daluege] invited Higher SS Police Leaders to Berlin and commissioned them to take part in Operation Barbarossa without informing me of this in time [22 June] I was unfortunately not in a position also to provide them with basic instructions regarding the sphere of jurisdiction of the Security Police and SD.’ He therefore set out ‘the most important instructions given by me to the Einsatzgruppen and Kommandos of the Sipo-SD’. These included under the heading ‘Executions’: ‘All the following are to be executed: Officials of the Comintern (together with professional Communist politicians in general; top and medium-level officials and radical lower-level officials of the Party, Central Committee and district and sub-district committees; People’s Commissars; Jews in the Party and State employment, and other radical elements (saboteurs, propagandists, snipers, assassins, inciters etc.).’ He added the qualification that they were to be killed insofar as they no longer had value as sources of information or ‘for the economic reconstruction of the Occupied Territories’. The Einsatzgruppen were also to foster spontaneous actions against Jews. ‘No steps will be taken to interfere with any purges that may be initiated by anti-Communist or anti-Jewish elements … On the contrary, these are to be secretly encouraged.’ This was an invitation to unleash the sort of mayhem that characterized the occupation of Austria in 1938 and the depredations by Volksdeutsche in Poland in 1939, although it is noteworthy that Heydrich did not want the SS to be held responsible.¹⁵

Heydrich’s hasty reminder about the functions of the Einsatzgruppen was intended to avoid any confusion about who was in charge of their activities and what those activities were to consist of. It is a striking indication of the haphazard preparations and the usual, bewildering chain of command. It is also significant because it underlines the paramount security role of the Einsatzgruppen: the murder of Jews was a subset of activities devoted to purging the occupied areas of communists, breaking the power of the Communist Party, and eradicating the leadership of Soviet society.

The Jews under Soviet rule

Just over three million Jews lived in the Soviet Union on the eve of Operation Barbarossa, representing about 1.8 per cent of the Soviet population. Although they bulked large in the Nazi imagination, the Jewish citizens of Stalin’s Russia wielded little influence, had virtually no power, and were rapidly ceasing to be Jewish at all. Jews had lived on land ruled by the Russian Empire since the eighteenth century but for most of the time were confined to the region on its western borderlands, conquered from Poland, known as the Pale of Settlement. Forced by residential controls into hundreds of cities and small towns, shtetls, across the overcrowded and impoverished Pale, they endured state discrimination and periodic anti-Jewish violence. Nevertheless, Russian Jews were extraordinarily resilient and creative, giving birth to practically every major modern Jewish ideology.¹⁶

Under Lenin and Stalin they experienced a breathtaking social transformation. Prior to 1917 the Russian Jewish masses were Yiddish-speaking, religiously observant, and mainly earned a living from commerce and crafts. The abolition of residential, educational and occupational restrictions enabled Jews to move into the cities and benefit from both the huge expansion of the state sector and rapid industrialization. By the 1930s, the majority lived in cities and held white-collar jobs or worked in the professions: a quarter of a million Jews lived in Moscow, 224,000 in Kiev and 200,000 in Leningrad. Nearly 90 per cent of the entire Jewish population were urbanized and fully half congregated in just eleven cities. Still, around 290,000 laboured on the land in collective farms, mainly in southern Ukraine and the Crimea. In some districts they enjoyed local self-government. While religious observance had been suppressed since the revolution, Jews were recognized as a separate nationality and enjoyed extensive cultural autonomy during the 1920s. That ended with Stalin’s ascendancy: the use of Yiddish was curbed and in the following decade a distinctive Russian Jewish identity began to ebb away as Jews became successfully integrated into Soviet society. Even so, anti-Jewish prejudice persisted. Although anti-Semitism was officially outlawed, it contributed to the gradual removal of Jews from positions of power in the Communist Party and state agencies. Once, Jews had played a disproportionate role in the leadership of the revolutionary movements and the early governance of the USSR, but by the late 1930s they were distinctive mainly by their absence.¹⁷

The total of Jews in the USSR was greatly increased as a result of Soviet expansion into territories that were historically areas of dense Jewish settlement. Under the Nazi–Soviet pact of August 1939, the Soviet Union had occupied eastern Poland and seven months later annexed Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia, as well as the eastern rim of Romania known as Bessarabia plus northern Bukovina (all previously part of the Russian Empire). This occupation did not just add to the numbers of Soviet Jewish citizens: it had a shattering effect on Jewish society in these regions and poisoned relations between Jews and non-Jews.

The Jewish population of eastern Poland, divided between west Byelorussia in the north and west Ukraine in the south, stood at 1,300,000 in the Polish census of 1931, although refugee movements meant that the actual number was probably closer to one and half million by June 1941. The largest concentration in the north was in Bialystok, a city with a well-developed textile industry and a long tradition of Jewish political activism. Its 42,000 Jewish inhabitants formed 42 per cent of the city’s populace. Around 25,000 Jews lived in Grodno. The central region, known as Polesie, was the heartland of the old Pale of Settlement and contained up to half a million Jews, spread across numerous villages, towns, and small cities, like Pinsk and Slonim, with respectively 20,000 and 16,000 Jewish dwellers. A quarter of a million Jews lived in Volhynia, most of them in large towns. In Rovno, Lutsk and Kovel they comprised up to 40 per cent of the inhabitants with a maximum number of 25,000. There were many more smaller places, where Jews might comprise anywhere from 50–60 per cent of the total, although the absolute number ranged from just a few hundred to a few thousand. Jews were a vital element of commerce in these regions. A high proportion were also employed in crafts or small manufacturing. Over half a million Jews dwelled in the southernmost region, eastern Galicia. Approximately one fifth of them lived in the provincial capital Lwow, although this number grew to well over 200,000 due to the influx of refugees from German-occupied Poland. Lwow boasted a large, cosmopolitan Jewish middle class drawing its livelihood from the professions, commerce and manufacturing. A substantial slice of the community was made up of humble artisans and traders, mostly Yiddish-speaking and Orthodox. The countryside was dotted with towns and villages each containing a high ratio of Jewish inhabitants. These shtetl Jews, many of them farmers or part of the agricultural economy, were steeped in Orthodoxy and Hassidism in particular. Galicia had been part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and Jews had enjoyed civic equality there since 1867. But Lwow and its surrounds was a cauldron of national and ethnic rivalries between Poles, Ukrainians and Jews.¹⁸

The Jewish inhabitants of Lithuania numbered approximately 147,000 before the war, but their ranks were swollen to over 240,000 by the incorporation of Vilnius after the Soviet annexation and the influx of refugees from Poland. The native Jewish population had a long and distinguished history, boasting several of the world’s leading Talmudic academies. Jews were concentrated in the main cities of Kaunus and Vilnius, but there were hundreds of small rural communities, shtetls, across the country where Jewish people lived humble lives, mostly in strict adhesion to traditional Judaism. During the 1920s the Lithuanian Jews had enjoyed a measure of cultural autonomy that enabled Yiddish and Hebrew language schools to flourish, along with every variety of Jewish cultural and political life. Sadly, this expansive environment contracted in the 1930s due to the collapse of democracy and the development of an authoritarian regime. Right-wing nationalist movements that were pro-German and pro-Nazi gained strength in the years before the Soviet annexation, and after the imposition of Russian rule many leading nationalists fled to Germany, where they were nurtured by the Third Reich in preparation for a Russo-German conflict.¹⁹

A similar dynamic occurred in Latvia, which had roughly 95,000 Jewish citizens. They were concentrated in three cities, Riga, Liepaja and Daugavpils, where they were engaged mainly in business, manufacturing and the professions. There were also many smaller, rural communities in the Latvian countryside. During the 1920s, Jews had benefited from full civic equality and prospered. In 1934, however, a fascist coup curtailed the tolerant atmosphere and allowed nationalistic and anti-Semitic groups to mushroom. The leaders of these movements were pro-German and many escaped to the Third Reich when Soviet rule was imposed in 1940. The exiles worked with Nazi intelligence agencies and the military in anticipation of the time when Hitler and Stalin fell out. Estonia had a tiny Jewish population of 4,500 who lived almost entirely in the capital, Tallinn.²⁰

In the Baltic states, across eastern Poland and in Bessarabia many Jews, especially veterans of the Communist Party and the young, acclaimed the Soviet occupation. Nachum Alport, in Slonim, recalled that the Jews ‘welcomed the Red Army with joy and relief, as if they sensed an end to Polish anti-semitism. No more discrimination and demeaning of Jews … And, more important, no more danger of falling into the hands of the murderous Hitlerites.’ Moty Stromer, a small businessman in Lwow, was elated: ‘The Soviet government turned many Jews into human beings.’ This may only have been the perspective of a few, youthful idealists, but such attitudes coloured the perception of Poles who were suddenly displaced from power and rendered liable to persecution. In fact, the Soviet security apparatus decapitated the Jewish communities, too, arresting office holders and liquidating political along with religious institutions. While some small traders and artisans benefited from Sovietization of the economy, Jewish factory owners and merchants were considered capitalists and saw their businesses nationalized. Professionals, too, suffered a major setback. One victim of the new communist order was Simon Wiesenthal, a young architect living in Lwow; he was interrogated by the Soviet secret police and deprived of his job and his apartment. Jews in the annexed areas of Poland joked that they had escaped a death sentence under the Germans only to face life imprisonment under the Soviets.²¹

A few attained positions in local government and the security apparatus, but the Soviet authorities were as loath to promote Jews in the new Soviet republics as in the old Soviet Union. Thousands who were considered capitalists or opponents of communism were arrested in the course of 1939–40. Up to 260,000 Jews who refused to accept Soviet citizenship in mid-1940 (including the bulk of Jewish refugees from Poland who had crossed into the Soviet-occupied areas) were deported to camps in Siberia and central Asia. Nevertheless, it remained a popular belief that Jews had relished Soviet rule and collaborated with the occupiers. It did not matter that, whether calculated in either absolute numerical or proportional terms, more Poles, Ukrainians, Lithuanians and Latvians had rallied to the Soviet regime. The facts did not stop right-wingers, abetted covertly by the Nazis, from sedulously fostering the myth that all Jews were communists and traitors. Consequently, as soon as Operation Barbarossa commenced and Soviet power began to rock, nationalist partisans, assisted by German special forces and Berlin-trained émigrés, launched insurrections that were aimed almost as equally against the Jews as against the Red Army.²²

The Einsatzgruppen

At 0315 hours on 22 June, German artillery unleashed a furious bombardment of Soviet border positions as three air fleets of the Luftwaffe delivered a devastating blow to the Soviet air force while it was still on the ground. Then 3 million men, 3,600 armoured fighting vehicles, 600,000 halftracks, lorries and prime-movers, as well as 600,000 horses towing artillery and supply wagons plunged across the frontier. They were closely followed by the lead elements of the Einsatzgruppen, so closely in fact that Sipo-SD men were frequently caught up in the fighting to clear towns and cities in the path of the invaders. The course of the fighting determined where the Einsatzgruppen could operate and how long they would spend in any one place. It also influenced thinking in the Führer’s headquarters about future policy on civil as well as military affairs. For these reasons the unfolding of the campaign, spatially and temporally, became critical for determining the fate of Soviet Jews.²³

Army Group North advanced rapidly into Lithuania, spearheaded by special forces and aided by nationalist partisans. By early July, Wilhelm Ritter von Leeb’s army group had overrun Lithuania and cleared southern Latvia up to Riga and the Dvina river. The armoured and motorized divisions of Army Group Centre smashed through the Soviet border defences and advanced nearly 400 miles in ten days. A series of pincer movements severed the Soviet armies concentrated in western Byelorussia from their command centres and cut off their supplies. On 28 June, Minsk fell, although it took another week to eliminate the huge pocket that stretched back to Bialystok containing 300,000 beleaguered Soviet troops. Meanwhile, the advance elements of the army group closed up to the land bridge between the Dniepr and Dvina rivers, the historic route to Moscow. Smolensk was captured on 15 July as the result of another pincer movement, although substantial Soviet forces were able to escape the envelopment. The exhausted German divisions were now encountering ever-stronger resistance and had to repel numerous powerful counter-attacks. Four days later Hitler ordered Army Group Centre to go onto the defensive.²⁴

The mass execution of Jewish men began as soon as German troops crossed into Soviet-occupied Lithuania. In fact, the first costly skirmishes with Russian border guards provided the justification for the killing. As in Poland in September 1939, the military blamed their losses partly on unscrupulous tactics by the enemy and the use of francs-tireurs. Communists and Jewish civilians were automatically suspected of firing on German troops so they were immediately rounded up and condemned to the firing squad. The shooting of Jews in towns along the border also typifies the ad hoc nature of the operations, which drew on Einsatzgruppen personnel, regular army formations, police units and the civil authorities – in this case, customs officers from Tilsit. Local Lithuanians played their part, too, helping to identify suspects and soon taking part in the massacres. Ad hoc though they may have been, these scratch forces were effective: by 18 July, 3,302 Jews had been ‘liquidated in the course of cleansing operations on the other side of the Soviet–Lithuanian border’. It was the murderous consensus across a spectrum of agencies that made such killing rates possible. The widely shared belief that Jews were the enemy, combined with the absence of significant resistance to that idea, made it possible to mobilize substantial numbers of men to seek out and destroy Jews on a staggeringly large scale.²⁵

Meanwhile, the Einsatzkommando sub-units of Einsatzgruppe A sallied forth from Tilsit, crossed the frontier, and raced towards Kaunus, which they reached on 25 June. Sub-units moved into Leipaja, Yelvaga and Shauli by 27 June. During the first week of July, Stahlecker’s headquarters entered Riga while Einsatzkommando 1b followed the army into Daugavpils. Even before German troops and security police arrived in these cites, Lithuanian nationalists organized in partisan groups fell on the Jewish inhabitants. Around 5,000 Jews were seized on the street or hauled out of their homes and murdered by members of the Lithuanian Activist Front and ethnic Germans. Kaunus, the pre-war capital of Lithuania and focal point of nationalist agitation, was the epicentre of the atrocities. Abraham Golub, a Hebrew educationalist, kept a diary throughout the occupation and recorded the shock felt by Jews who were suddenly exposed to the fury of local mobs. The Lithuanians ‘did not conceal their joy at the outbreak of the war: they saw their place on the side of the Swastika and expressed this sentiment openly’. With the retreat of the Red Army and the collapse of Soviet power, ‘The Jews are left behind as fair game; hunting them is not unprofitable … Slaughter the Jews and take their property – this was the first slogan of the restored Lithuanian rule.’ Orthodox Jews, identified by their beards and clothing, were routinely humiliated; hundreds of yeshiva students and their rabbis were massacred in the Slobodka yeshiva. Long columns of men were marched from the city, leaving their homes wide open to invasion. ‘Many Jews were murdered in their apartments. Robbery and looting followed. There were cases where women were raped at the very moment when looting and murder were in progress.’ In one horrific episode, forty Jewish men were herded into the forecourt of a garage on Vitauskus Avenue and bludgeoned to death by Lithuanian patriots wielding iron poles. The incident took place in mid-afternoon and attracted crowds of spectators, including German servicemen who filmed and photographed the incident.²⁶

Karl Jäger, the commander of Einsatzkommando 3, arrived to take charge of security and policing on 7 July. Since his kommando had less than 140 personnel he needed the local police and militia that Lithuanian politicians had called into being during the brief period when they thought the Germans would allow them independence. These auxiliaries, known as Schutzmannschaften, became essential to the implementation of anti-Jewish policy. Now acting under German direction, they carried out systematic round-ups, taking Jewish men to disused Tsarist-era fortresses on the edge of the city. The Seventh Fort and the Ninth Fort, bleak and forbidding structures honeycombed with subterranean chambers, were converted into prisons. In reality they were no more than holding pens: the forts were surrounded by deep earthworks that were convenient as both shooting sites and burial pits. Between 7 and 14 July, 5,000 Jewish men were executed there.²⁷

Jews were stunned by the attitude of the local population. While a few courageous Lithuanians offered refuge to Jews, the vast majority in the city and the countryside either abetted the killers or remained passive. When a Jewish deputation managed to see the Lithuanian foreign minister in the short-lived provisional government to plead for his intercession, he replied that the Jewish response to the Soviet occupation revealed that ‘we did not have a common path with the Jews and never will’. He concurred with the German plan for a ghetto: ‘the Lithuanian and the Jew must be separated’.²⁸

The German army had already ordered the marking of Jews with an armband adorned by the Star of David and subjected them to a curfew. On 10 July the military authorities issued orders for all Jews in Kaunus to move into the dilapidated suburb of Vilijampole where the wrecked Slobodka yeshiva was located. Ignoring Jewish protestations that the district lacked basic amenities or sufficient room, they were given until 15 August to transfer. Meanwhile, Jäger’s security police, reinforced by Lithuanians (who continued to cooperate despite the dissolution of the Lithuanian provisional government in August), settled down to a routine of arrests and executions. The German actions were aimed primarily against Jewish men, more or less of military age. Although 740 Jewish women were among the victims, hundreds who had been taken to the Ninth Fort were subsequently released. By mid-August over 8,200 Jews had been shot at the forts.²⁹

Vilnius, the capital of Lithuania, fell to the Germans on 30 June. The command element of Einsatzgruppe B arrived a few days later, then moved off and left the city in the hands of Einsatzkommando 9. It proved harder for the Germans stationed there to trigger ‘self-cleansing’ actions because a large proportion of the population was Polish. Nevertheless, within a short while Einsatzkommando 9, led by Alfred Filbert, was able to organize teams of Lithuanian Ordnungspolizei and with this additional resource was able to begin shooting 500 Jews daily. The atmosphere in the terrified city is captured in the diary of Herman Kruk, a middle-aged Jewish socialist and cultural organizer who had fled to Vilnius from Warsaw in October 1939. The day after the invasion started he resolved to stay and record what transpired: ‘I leave myself to the mercy of God; I’m staying. And, right away, I make another decision: if I’m staying and I’m going to be a victim of fascism, I shall take pen in hand and write a chronicle of the city.’ Notwithstanding his remarkable courage, Kruk was soon on the run, staying at a different house each night to evade the ‘Lithuanian snatchers’ in the Ipatinga Buris militia, who were searching for Jewish men. Kruk noticed that when Lithuanians tormented and beat up religious Jews the German soldiers in the vicinity watched, laughed and filmed the degradation ritual. Occasionally though, an indignant German would free a Jew from the mob. During early July, the military administration ordered the formation of a Jewish council and imposed the wearing of an armband with a Star of David. The Jewish council had to pay a huge ‘fine’ to the SS and also supply the military and the municipality with forced labour. Rumours started to trickle back to the cowed Jewish population that those who were arrested were being taken to the Ponary forest not far from the city and murdered.³⁰

What happened to the men detained in Vilnius and then transported beyond the city limits was recorded in a wartime diary by Kazimierz Sakowicz, a forty-seven-year-old Pole who had moved to a cottage in the forest in 1939 after he was forced to give up work as a publisher. His home overlooked a large fenced-off area, close to the main road between Kaunus and Vilnius, that had been developed by the Red Army as a fuel depot. The Soviet engineers had only got as far as excavating a number of circular pits when they were chased away by the Germans. This was the place to which the Jews from Vilnius were brought in columns of several hundred at a time. On 11 July, Sakowicz noted ‘the first day of executions. An oppressive overwhelming atmosphere. The shots quiet down after eight in the evening; later, there are no volleys, but rather individual shots … By the second day, July 12th, a Saturday, we already know what is going on …’ At three in the afternoon he saw a line of 300 men, ‘mainly intelligentsia, with suitcases, beautifully dressed’ being marched into the site. An hour later the volleys began. The killers, who Sakowicz dubbed Shaulists (a local paramilitary association), were mainly young men acting under German command. From a window in the attic of his house he could observe Jews being shot in batches of ten. ‘They took off their overcoats, caps, and shoes, but not their trousers.’ That would alter within about ten days as a result of the changing behaviour of the Jewish men. When one column of 500 arrived on 23 July they resisted in various ways, most commonly by making a dash for the perimeter fence. As a result, the killers had to chase them and the operation fragmented. Sakowicz observed elliptically, ‘They began to escape; shooting throughout the forest the whole night and during the morning. They were caught, shot, and finished off.’ From then on the Jews were forced to strip to their underwear. That proved a major psychological obstacle to flight and had the added benefit of adding to the stock of clothing to be distributed and sold afterwards. He noted contemptuously, ‘Brisk business in clothing … Shaulists with bulging knapsacks, with watches, money etc.’³¹

As German rule consolidated, murder spread across the Lithuanian countryside, engulfing one small Jewish community after another. Sometimes Lithuanians would take the initiative, at others they were triggered into action by the arrival of a German Sipo-SD contingent. Nesya Miselevich was living in Tauroggen, close to the border, when war broke out. She fled to Rosenay, where Germans and ‘local fascists’ were arresting men and women and putting them to forced labour. ‘While they were working the women were subjected to all sorts of humiliations. The arrested men were first sent to do forced labour in the forests; there they were abused and tortured.’ In mid-July she fled the town and made her way from village to hamlet, usually finding that the Jewish denizens had already been slaughtered. Eventually she ended up in a camp run by Lithuanians at Vyshvyany near Telshay, a town famous for its yeshiva. The Jews of Telshay had been plundered and then forced into the camp, which consisted of some barns and stables, without any sanitation. They were barely fed and were subject to random assaults. ‘The bandits would burst into the camp by night, drag young women out, and have their way with them.’ Since most of the men had already been shot, the women tried to defend themselves against these brutal incursions. After a few weeks, the female survivors were released.³²

When the German 18th Army pushed up into Latvia and occupied Riga, the military authorities issued a slew of anti-Jewish orders. In the first weeks Jews were ordered to register and were marked, their property and assets were confiscated, they were subjected to a curfew, and finally ordered into a ghetto. As in Lithuania, the arrival of the German forces was pre-empted by local militants who started arbitrarily arresting Jews on the grounds that they were communist sympathizers. Within a matter of days these patriots were organized into auxiliary police units under the control of the Sipo-SD. The fluid situation was reflected in the reports transmitted by Einsatzgruppe A to Berlin. On 4 July it informed the Gestapo Head Office that ‘Entire nationalist leadership of Riga deported or murdered [by the Soviets]. Pogroms have been started.’ There was doubtless a connection between the recent deportations and the anti-Jewish violence that followed the departure of the Soviets, but it is not clear how far the assaults were spontaneous or engineered by the Germans. In any case, ideological motives would not explain the burning of synagogues, including the Elijas Street synagogue, which was set on fire after dozens of Jews from the neighbourhood had been forced inside. This suggests that the eruption of violence was as much an explosion of traditional Jew-hatred, aggravated by recent events, as it was a direct response to Soviet repression. Two weeks later, Einsatzgruppe A reflected that ‘The Latvians, including their leading activists, have been, so far, absolutely passive in their anti-semitic attitudes, not daring to take action against Jews.’ In this respect they were ‘unlike the Lithuanians who had an active attitude, the Latvians are hesitatingly organising and forming a front against the Jews’. This reticence did not prevent the Germans from recruiting useful numbers of ex-Latvian army men and members of the AIZSARGI [Aizsargi organizacija] self-defence militia into auxiliary police companies. The most prominent was a 300-strong unit commanded by Victor Arajs, a former police lieutenant who led one of the anti-Soviet partisan groups that emerged on 22 June.³³

The additional manpower made it possible for Stahlecker to initiate ‘cleansing operations’ in Riga and across occupied Latvia. Beginning in early July, Jewish men were systematically arrested by units of the German and Latvian Sipo-SD, taken to the police headquarters in Riga and imprisoned. After a few days they were trucked in groups of 200–400 to the Bikernieki woods a few miles outside town, where they were shot into pits. Max Kaufman was caught in one of these raids. In a postwar memoir he recalled that on 3 July, ‘Armed Latvian youngsters pushed into my residence, plundered what they could find, and took my unwell son and me with them as they did the other Jewish residents of the house.’ As the Jews trudged to the prefecture, volunteer Latvian militia assaulted them and chanted ‘Jews, Bolsheviks’. The police building was ‘full of Jews. From all sides came screams – the Latvians tortured their victims. Their sadism knew no limits. Old and sick people were brought into the courtyard, without their underwear, completely naked … Young women who were brought in were stripped naked and thrown into the cellar of the prefecture for the purposes of orgies.’ A special room was set aside for holding Jewish girls, who would be raped at night then shot in the morning. Kaufman and his son were rescued from this nightmare by a neighbour, an ethnic German, who arranged for them to work at a German army facility. They were fortunate. The Einsatzgruppe informed Berlin that ‘the arrested men are shot without ceremony and interred in previously prepared graves’. In addition to the 400 Jews slaughtered in the pogroms, 1,500 men were shot by Latvian security police and Einsatzkommando 2. Other mass shootings by Latvian units occurred in Daugavpils and Liepaja, where over 1,000 Jews were shot into pits dug in the sand dunes overlooking the Baltic Sea.³⁴

While the northerly elements of Einsatzgruppe B passed through Vilnius, the bulk of its activity was further south. Here Nebe’s men were pushing into an area of dense Jewish settlement. Separate Einsatzkommandos charged through Brest-Litovsk, Slonim and Baranovichi, converging on Minsk on 3–4 July. Einsatzkommando 8 passed through Bialystok then remained in Byelorussia, based in Minsk and later Mogilev. Several smaller sections were active in Bobriusk, Gomel and Roslavl. Einsatzkommando 9 operated in Grodno before moving eastward when Army Group Centre resumed its advance. The pause of several weeks from late July to early September and the evolving security situation were to have a dramatic effect on the nature of the Einsatzgruppen operations.³⁵

As in the Baltic, the initial German advance was rapid and only about 5 per cent of the Jewish population was able to escape. Jews of military age mobilized into the Red Army were amongst them, although many never got further than depots or assembly areas before they were cut off by the German vanguard. Units of Einsatzgruppe B arrested hundreds of Jewish men – mainly those considered part of the Jewish leadership, professionals or those with a higher education – and executed them. The task was so great that they were assisted by other formations, notably police battalions, army security divisions and often by the regular army. Police Battalion 307 shot 5,000 Jews in Brest-Litovsk, including many women, while Police Battalion 309 accounted for up to 7,000 Jewish men in Bialystok during late June and early July. However, Nebe’s Einsatzkommando 8 managed to kill 1,200 Jews in Slonim more or less unaided. In other centres, such as Baranovichi and Novogrudok, the number was in the low hundreds. Much depended on the available manpower and the duration of the stay by the Sipo-SD men who drove the killing process.³⁶

German troops assaulted and humiliated Jews as they passed through one town after another, as if there was a seamless continuity between their behaviour in September 1939 and June 1941. In Radziwil, in eastern Poland, ‘Soldiers ordered the Jews to bring out all the holy books of the Torahs from the synagogue and the prayer house and burn them. When the Jews refused, the Germans ordered them to unroll the Torahs and to douse them with kerosene and set them alight. They ordered Jews to sing and dance around the huge burning pile. Around the dancing Jews a jeering crowd was assembled that beat them freely.’ These spectacles, exemplifying anti-Judaism as much as anti-Bolshevism, gave licence to local people once the front line moved on. When it seemed clear that the Soviets were gone for good pogroms swept across the region.³⁷

The worst anti-Jewish riots in eastern Poland occurred in the province of Suwalki. In Radzilow, crowds of Poles forced Jews to desecrate their holy books, perform ‘exercises’, and beat them up. According to a post-war deposition, ‘Around the tortured ones crowds of Polish men, women and children were standing and laughing at the miserable victims who were falling under the blows of the bandits … The only Polish doctor who was in town … refused medical assistance to people who had been beaten.’ After days of such sport, on 6 July, Poles from the town and surrounding hamlets fell on the Jews with knives and axes and slew up to 1,000 men, women and children. In nearby Jedwabne a spate of murderous assaults culminated in a few hours of mayhem on 10 July, during which seventy Jews were ‘butchered’ by ‘local hooligans’ armed with axes and clubs studded with nails. The dead were buried in a pit into which Jews had previously been forced to consign a statue of Lenin. A survivor recalled that as the day wore on, ‘Beards of old Jews were burned, newborn babies were killed at their mothers’ breasts, people were beaten murderously and forced to sing and dance.’ Finally, the surviving Jews, perhaps 800, were driven into a barn which was set alight. Their assailants came from all parts of Polish society, including professionals and members of the local authorities who had been restored to power by the Germans. They were incited by representatives of the new order, but the pogrom followed a time-honoured pattern in which religious antipathy was leavened with greed and opportunism.³⁸

Having swept across the pre-1939 frontier between Poland and the USSR, the Germans occupied Minsk on 28–29 June. It was the first large Soviet city to fall into their hands and due to the successful German encirclement, which trapped 300,000 soldiers of the Red Army, few of its 75,000 Jewish inhabitants escaped. The Jewish communist Hersh Smolar, who compiled the first account of the occupation, conveyed an impression of what it was like in the early days. ‘When the Germans appeared in town, people were robbed, raped and shot for no reason. Jews were subjected to particular harassment.’ Soldiers went from house to house, driving away with truckloads of loot from humble Jewish abodes. But the Germans soon noticed a difference in relations between Jews and non-Jews in comparison to occupied Poland: there were no pogroms. Indeed, the military authorities reinforced the solidarity of the city’s citizens by arresting many of the male population and imprisoning them along with tens of thousands of dejected, hungry POWs in the Drozdy camp. Approximately 2,000 Jewish men regarded as members of the ‘intelligentsia’ were taken from the camp and executed in the first days of July, but this was only a fraction of the total who were shot or perished in the dreadful enclosure. Nevertheless, several thousand Jews were actually released. Even though the registration of the Jewish population, the order to fix a yellow patch on their outer clothing, and the creation of a ghetto set Jews apart, important links remained between them and the other inhabitants of the benighted city.³⁹

The magnitude of the task that confronted the Germans in Byelorussia stimulated somewhat anxious reflections on their objectives. One month into the campaign, Einsatzgruppe B grumbled to Gestapo headquarters that ‘A solution to the Jewish question during the war seems impossible in this area because of the tremendous number of Jews. It could only be achieved through deportations.’ This message reveals once again the astounding lack of foresight and planning for the ‘Jewish question’, notwithstanding the importance it held for Nazi thinkers and leaders. It may only represent what Nebe and his staff thought, yet if the commanders of one Einsatzgruppe were confounded by the size and density of the Jewish population it suggests that others may have been similarly ill-prepared for what greeted them in the USSR. It is also significant to note that at this point the expulsion of the Jewish population was considered a desideratum, even if no one was quite sure how it was to be accomplished or to where. Nebe’s headquarters reported that in the meantime Jewish councils had been set up, the Jews were registered, marked and subjected to forced labour; but the Germans were apprehensive about the prospect of erecting ghettos in Byelorussia due to the size of the Jewish population.⁴⁰

Further south, separated from Einsatzgruppe B by the expanse of the Pripet Marshes, Einsatzgruppe C erupted into eastern Galicia and thence into Volhynia. On 30 June, after heavy fighting around Brody, German forces entered Lwow. Deportations by the Soviets had reduced the volume of Jewish refugees in the city and a significant number of Jews were able to flee thanks to the protracted battle. Nevertheless, about 160,000 Jews were still there. The advance elements of the army were accompanied by two battalions of special forces, codenamed ‘Nightingale’ or ‘Nachtigall’ and ‘Roland’, consisting of Ukrainian exiles with German officers. These Ukrainians had been recruited from the nationalist underground movement, the OUN, that had operated in independent Poland. After the Soviet annexation, OUN activists decamped to Berlin where they were nurtured by the Abwehr, German military intelligence. On their return to Ukraine they attempted to establish a provisional government in conjunction with local nationalists. Also high on their agenda was settling scores with the Jews on account of their alleged support for Soviet rule. Before they evacuated the city, Soviet security forces had slain dozens of political prisoners in the military gaol. The Germans hardly needed to turn this atrocity into anti-Jewish propaganda: people jumped to their own conclusions. The Einsatzgruppe reported that ‘The population is greatly excited. 1,000 Jews have been forcefully gathered together.’ Their work was made easier thanks to a pastoral letter issued by the metropolitan archbishop, Andrey Sheptytsky, welcoming the Germans and thanking them for liberating Ukrainians from Soviet tyranny. In a recap on 16 July, the Einsatzgruppe explained that ‘The prisons of Lvov were crammed with the bodies of murdered Ukrainians … Maltreating them, the Lwow inhabitants rounded up about 1,000 Jews and took them to the GPU [Soviet secret police] prison.’⁴¹

According to a Polish observer, ‘hundreds of Jews were removed from the nearby houses, men, women, old people, youngsters, boys and girls, children, all naked, after their clothes and underwear had been plucked from them, bleeding, followed by blows and kicks into the prison courtyard’. One Jewish witness testified that ‘The local fascists, accompanied by SS men, dragged Jews from their apartments and took them away to the prisons and barracks of Lvov. At the entrance to the assembly points clothes were ripped off and valuables and money were confiscated. The fascists tormented and beat people until blood flowed … Then these people were shot.’ Edmund Kessler, a lawyer from an assimilated Jewish family, kept a diary throughout the period. He noted how the first hours of the occupation were relatively calm, distinguished only by occasional assaults on religious Jews by German military police and the sudden appearance of the Ukrainian national colours on badges worn by locals. Then news of the prison massacre spread. ‘A fanatic mob orgy of bloodshed and pillage began, but even so it took place according to a certain system. The orchestrators were the Germans. It is they who decided when to begin the pogrom, when to stop it, how long to torture the victims; whether until they lost consciousness or to slaughter them.’ For three days, Ukrainians organized into a militia seized Jews and delivered them to the Germans. ‘A furious search of Jewish homes commences. The rioting, ransacking, and plundering grows in strength and intensity. Beaten, whipped, and tortured, the inhabitants are dragged into the streets. Hiding in the cellar or attic mostly does not help. Gangs of Ukrainian children inspect the nooks and crannies of houses and apartments and point out hidden Jews.’ In addition to the hundreds beaten or shot to death in the prison precincts, the German security police executed 7,000 ‘in retaliation for the atrocities’.⁴²

A lesser bloodbath occurred in Tarnopol, where thousands of Ukrainians had been deported and murdered by the exiting Soviets. ‘In retaliation’, reported Einsatzkommando 4b, ‘arrest of Jewish intelligentsia has begun, since they are responsible … The number is estimated at 1,000.’ On 5 July, ‘about 70 Jews were assembled by the Ukrainians and finished off with concentrated fire. 20 more were slain in the streets by Ukrainians and soldiers in retaliation for the murder of 3 soldiers who were found in prison.’ The Sipo-SD reporter added that ‘The German army demonstrates a gratifyingly good attitude towards Jews.’ Similar eruptions occurred across the region. For example, some 300 Jews were killed by Ukrainian militia in Zlochow; in Dobromil, German security police and Ukrainian auxiliaries shot about 130 Jews before locals destroyed the ancient synagogue; while in Sambor, Ukrainian police killed fifty Jews.⁴³

Pogroms spread across Volhynia, too, claiming the lives of perhaps 500 Jewish men and women. Peasants routinely plundered the homes of Jewish village dwellers, driving off the cattle of Jewish farmers. In numerous towns Ukrainian residents helped the Germans to locate Jews and guard them prior to mass shootings. Rape was common. From the commencement of the military administration, Jews were excluded from the economy, subjected to a curfew, and prevented from travelling. They were forced to wear distinguishing yellow patches on their outer garments. In the large towns, Jewish councils were set up and required to supply Jews for forced labour. Many Jewish communities were obliged to pay levies or special taxes to the Germans. Under the mantle of the army, contingents of Sipo-SD constantly executed Jews accused of being communists or suspected of anti-German activity: 2,000 in Lutsk, 3,000 in Ostrog, 1,075 in Dubno. An estimated 15,000 Jewish men perished in these first weeks. Frantic to evade the firing squads and forced labour, Jewish men ran to nearby forests or hid in their houses; but this tactic only exposed their womenfolk who had to either perform forced labour or forage for food.⁴⁴

The southern wing of Einsatzgruppe C, comprising Einsatzkommandos 4a and 4b, pressed on to Zhitomir and Berdichev in the Soviet Ukraine. This huge region was home to about 1.5 million Jews and their fate hung on the progress of the campaign. Initially Army Group South encountered heavy resistance from strong Soviet forces and made relatively little progress. This gave Jews more time to flee or take advantage of the evacuation procedures put in place by the Soviet authorities. By the time the Einsatzkommando reached Zhitomir on 9 July most of the Jewish population had escaped. However, when the front stalled for several weeks in mid-July the pause gave the killing units time to sweep through towns and cities that had been briefly visited or bypassed. Several hundred Jewish men were shot in Zhitomir and over a thousand in Berdichev, many of them Jews who had fled to the town from other locations.⁴⁵

The southern Ukraine, including Bessarabia, which the Soviets had annexed, the Black Sea coast and the Crimea, was assigned to Einsatzgruppe D, which had travelled all the way from Bratislava to its jumping-off point. Military operations along the Romanian–Soviet border opened several days later than further north and the advance of the German 11th Army and the Romanian armies was sluggish once they had sliced through Bessarabia and reached the Dniester river. Part of the Romanian leadership actually wanted to halt there and simply digest the recovered territory. Eventually, the Romanian army group was thrust forward in its role of protecting the right flank of Army Group South, taking it all the way to Odessa at the start of August. In the meantime, the Romanians commenced the expulsion of Jews from Bessarabia and northern Bukovina with a savagery that shocked even German observers.⁴⁶

The Romanians

Romania embarked on the invasion of the USSR in alliance with Nazi Germany partly in the hope of recovering some of the land and prestige it had lost during the previous year. With the collapse of France, Romania was diplomatically isolated and at the mercy of more powerful neighbours. King Carol opted for the protection of Germany. He invited a Wehrmacht mission to Bucharest and to further demonstrate its realignment, the Romanian government declared that it would proceed to tackle the ‘Jewish problem’ in the country. However, German friendship came at a steep price. In June 1940, when Hitler wanted peace and quiet in the east, he acquiesced while Stalin compelled Romania to give up Bessarabia and northern Bukovina to the USSR. Two months later, Germany obliged the Romanian government to cede northern Transylvania to its more senior client, Hungary. In September, as the final indignity, the province of Dobruja was handed to the Bulgarians.⁴⁷

The Romanians responded by looking for a scapegoat, the role traditionally performed by Jews. Romanian troops and police on their way out of Bessarabia and Bukovina attacked Jewish communities, killing an estimated 200 men and women. They also staged pogroms as they settled into the new border strip in Moldavia, claiming several hundred more innocent lives. On 9 August, King Carol’s government promulgated a new statute on Jewish citizenship. It restricted full civil rights to Jews who had been settled in Romania prior to 1916 and veterans of the armed forces. Jews not in those categories were dismissed from government employment and forced to pay special taxes. Jews were also summarily evicted from border towns and sent to do forced labour. Emil Dorian reflected that the laws would prove ‘especially harmful first to the poor and then to the middle class, the professionals. The wealthy Jews, the businessmen, and the industrialists will continue to do well for a while.’ Nevertheless, he smarted at the imputation of disloyalty. ‘Many gentiles do not understand the feeling of human degradation the Jew experiences now that he is a pariah in Romanian society.’ He recalled a joke that the three categories to which Jews were assigned entailed three different greetings: ‘“Mr Kike”, “Hey, you kike” and “Up yours, kike!”’⁴⁸

King Carol sought to shore up his authority, and also please the Nazis, by bringing representatives of the Iron Guard into his government. However, none of these measures could salvage his popularity and he abdicated in October 1940, leaving power in the hands of the prime minister, Marshal Ion Antonescu. For several months Antonescu attempted to balance the need to appease the Germans against the disruptive antics of the rabidly anti-Semitic Iron Guard. Antonescu was anti-foreigner and anti-Bolshevik but he knew several wealthy Jewish businessmen and respected both their patriotism and their contribution to the economy. He therefore announced that Romania would seek an ‘orderly’ and an authentically Romanian solution to the Jewish question. The regime set about the legal expropriation of Jewish-owned land and imposed high taxes on Jewish enterprises. It set up commissions to nationalize Jewish firms, remove Jewish employees, and send unemployed Jews to forced labour. Such devices only tried the patience of the Iron Guard, who preferred boycotts and extortion. When Emil Dorian heard that they were entering government, he immediately feared ‘a strict implementation of the programme to exterminate the Jews’. Wherever they held power in local or regional government guardists marked Jewish businesses, forced Jews to sell up, and extorted funds for their movement. They were so parasitical that Jews preferred to sell their enterprises to ethnic Germans or carpetbaggers from the Third Reich. In certain cases, the German legation ended up protecting Jewish-run concerns. Towards the end of 1940, Iron Guard violence in the provinces was spiralling out of control: entire Jewish communities were pillaged and driven out of their towns and villages. Dorian, who was now working in a Jewish school, witnessed the turmoil. ‘The Jewish merchants are being systematically eliminated. Jewish stores are being expropriated. Very many Jews are led to Iron Guard police stations where they are beaten up. Hundreds of thousands of lei [Romanian money] taken from them …’⁴⁹

The revolutionary, not to say chaotic and corrupt, shenanigans of the Iron Guard threatened to destabilize the country and provoked a showdown with Antonescu. The result was three days of confused street fighting that ended with the killing or imprisonment of the militants. In the process, law and order broke down in the capital and the Iron Guard rampaged against the city’s Jews. Over one hundred were abducted to woodlands outside the city and murdered; more were attacked in their homes. Men were tortured and murdered, women raped. Emil Dorian struggled to describe the scenes. ‘Shop after shop with shutters wrenched off their hinges, windows smashed, walls burned, rooms emptied – it is impossible to tell what had been there before. The mind cannot grasp how looting bands were able to wreak such utter destruction in so short a time … Jews were taken from their homes by Iron Guard bands and led to several spots in the city where they were slaughtered. On the road to Jilava dozens of corpses have been found … Before the victims were killed, their noses were smashed, their limbs broken, their tongues cut out, their eyes gouged.’ Unlike the official Jewish leadership, Dorian did not feel much relief that the Iron Guard had been crushed. He observed German troops pouring into the country and pondered what would happen to the Jews when war came. With great acuity he understood that in the German mind the Jews would be held responsible.⁵⁰

For the next six months, though, Jews had to endure nothing worse than laws for the expropriation of their property, including their homes, and further dismissals from work to make way for Romanians. They did not know that when Antonescu met with Hitler in Munich on 12 June 1941 the two dictators shared information about the forthcoming attack on Russia and the associated anti-Jewish policy. Romania was on the verge of regaining its lost possessions and Antonescu determined that the Jewish inhabitants, whom he regarded as aliens, would be scourged from them. He personally issued secret orders to this effect to the gendarmerie and special army units. The marshal later explained to his cabinet, ‘I am all for the forced migration of the entire Jewish element of Bessarabia and Bukovina, which must be displaced across the border.’ He thereby authorized a programme of population transfer that degenerated into a carnival of murder, rapine and sexual violence that interacted fatally with the mass executions of Jewish men that were simultaneously being carried out by the Germans.⁵¹

It began with a pogrom on 28–29 June in Iasi, a city that was actually in Moldavia, a Romanian province. Iasi had a Jewish population of 50,000, half the city’s denizens, and with the opening of hostilities every one of them became a potential fifth columnist. The frenzy was apparently triggered by allegations that Jews were signalling to Soviet bombers during an air raid or spying for the Red Army. In fact, Antonescu had previously intimated that he wanted Iasi cleansed of Jews and communists. Within hours, police and men of the ‘second section’ of army intelligence had murdered 8,000 Jews in their homes, on the streets, or at the main police station. A further 4,530 were loaded into box-cars on two trains that were sent on a three-day journey to Calarisi, halfway to the Black Sea. The freight wagons were not supplied with food, water or sanitation and by the time the human cargo was released just over 1,000 men on the first and 818 on the second were still alive.⁵²

As Romanian army units fought their way across Bukovina and Bessarabia, police and special units carried out massacres of Jewish men in all the main urban centres. These massacres were pre-planned. At a conference at Galati on the eve of the invasion, the inspector general of the gendarmerie, General Vasiliu, bluntly told his officers to ‘cleanse the land’ of Jews. Over the following weeks approximately 2,000 were shot in Cernauti, occupied on 5–6 July, and 10,000 in Chisenau, reached on 17 July. These figures dwarf the modest accomplishments of Einsatzkommando 10b which executed 682 and 551 Jews in these same cities as well as a few hundred more elsewhere. Over 10,000 Jews were massacred in the first weeks of Operation Barbarossa by Romanian police units and contingents of the security services, abetted by rehabilitated Iron Guard formations. Police and army cadets were drafted in, too. Nevertheless, the Romanians did not earn gratitude or admiration from their German partners. On the contrary, the Einsatzgruppen reports express persistent criticism of Romanian conduct. In Palesti, the Sipo-SD men complained, ‘the Romanians content themselves with looting everything’. In Beltsi they were responsible for ‘considerable excesses’, probably referring to the murder of women and children, which was not then standard German practice. The greatest drawback of working with the Romanians was their sloppiness. ‘The Romanians take action against the Jews without any preconceived plan. There would be nothing to criticise about the many executions of Jews had their technical preparations and their manner of execution not been inadequate. The Romanians leave the bodies of those who are executed where they fall, without burying them. The Einsatzkommando has required the Romanian police to be more orderly from that standpoint.’⁵³

Following this first wave of killing, the Romanians began to organize the expulsion of the Jewish population. This was a forbidding task: there were 93,000 Jews in Bukovina, with over half in Cernauti alone, and over 200,000 in Bessarabia, 20 per cent of whom were in Chisenau. But Antonescu told officials setting out to govern the reconquered areas that they were to aim for ‘complete ethnic liberation’ and ‘the removal or isolation of all Jews to labour camps’. Local officials in Dorohoi county in northern Moldavia and villages adjacent to the annexed territories actually jumped the gun and began expelling Jews even though these areas were not slated for clearance. In early to mid-July, columns of Jews started to wend eastwards, escorted by police, gendarmes and soldiers. As they left, their homes and property were seized by officials or looted by locals. En route the Jews were stripped of anything valuable, robbed by their guards or peasants standing by the wayside. About 25,000 were herded as far as the Dniester river, but only a portion crossed. The Germans did not want thousands of destitute, starving and sick Jews wandering in the rear of their armies. At least 8,000 were turned round and marched back.⁵⁴

In a letter to a friend, penned in 1944, Rakhil Fradis-Milner recorded her experiences on one of these marches. Her hometown, Edineti, was occupied on 5 July. For the next three weeks ‘savage terror reigned in the shtetl, during which eight hundred people were shot and numerous young girls, practically children, were raped, and this is even without mentioning the cruel beatings and the plundering.’ On 28 July, ‘the entire Jewish population was driven out of the shtetl’. Along with hundreds of Jews from other places they were ‘driven out like cattle, struck with whips and rifle butts’. The journey went on ‘from Bessarabia to Ukraine, back to Bessarabia, then back to Ukraine. The whole way was strewn with corpses.’ Even the Einsatzgruppe staff took exception to the Romanians’ relentless ‘quest for plunder’ and remarked censoriously that ‘shootings and rape are frequent occurrences’.⁵⁵

The Romanian plan for ejecting Jews from Bukovina and Bessarabia into the USSR ground to a halt, much as German plans for expelling Jews in 1939–40 had failed for lack of proper planning or coordination. Instead, the Jews of Cernauti and Chisenau, plus refugees from the surrounding areas, were confined in hastily demarcated ghettos, with about 50,000 and 11,000 respectively. Thousands of others were herded into camps located close to the Dniester: 26,000 at Vertujeni; 11,000 at Marculesti; 12,000 at Edineti; and 17,000 at Secureni. Conditions in these makeshift centres were dreadful. In Cernauti, Jews were marked and used for forced labour, repairing war damage. Women were employed in laundries and sorting looted clothing; they were frequently targets for rape. The German commandant of the city used Jewish labour to construct a bridge over the Prut river; many Jews fell off the structure and drowned. Meanwhile, the Romanian National Bank confiscated the cash Jews possessed (on the pretext of exchanging roubles for lei), leaving them without means to purchase food. Starvation and sickness were soon endemic. For the moment, the Romanian solution to its Jewish problem was stuck. In a short time, though, developments at the front line would open up new possibilities.⁵⁶

German military progress in Russia and anti-Jewish measures

Despite the intensity of the fighting, persistent worries about the supply situation, and the unpleasant discovery that Soviet tanks were better, the mood in the army high command and at Hitler’s headquarters after the successful conclusion of the frontier battles was jubilant. On 28 June, Christa Schroeder, Hitler’s secretary, heard him say that in four weeks’ time ‘Moscow will be razed to the ground.’ Having mentally bagged the Soviet capital, the Führer addressed the chief of the army general staff, Franz Halder, about future operations in theatres as distant as Afghanistan. A few days later even the normally cautious Halder was brimming with confidence. He wrote in his war diary that enemy forces had been destroyed to the west of the Dnieper–Dvina river line leaving nothing more than ‘partial forces, not strong enough to hinder realization of German operational plans’. He believed it was not an overstatement to say that ‘the Russian campaign has been won in the space of two weeks’. At the Führer HQ the talk was of German power extending as far as the Nile and the Euphrates.⁵⁷

Intoxicated with the prospect of imminent triumph, on 16 July 1941 Hitler met with Himmler, Göring, Rosenberg, Lammers, Bormann and Field Marshal Keitel, head of the army high command, to determine the civilian administration in the occupied territories and set out future policy. Alfred Rosenberg was formally installed as minister for the occupied eastern territories (the Ostministerium). Serving immediately under him were two Reichkommissars: Hinrich Lohse was appointed overlord of the Ostland, an artificial area encompassing the Baltic states and part of northern Byelorussia, and Erich Koch was placed in charge of the sprawling Reichskommissariat Ukraine. Reich governors were also selected to oversee the Bialystok district and east Galicia, which was bolted on to the General Government. The participants agreed to the speedy resettlement of the newly conquered land: in Hitler’s pithy formulation they were going to ‘first, dominate it, secondly administer it and, third, exploit it’. The east was going to be their ‘Garden of Eden’. Moscow and Leningrad were to be ‘razed’. Hitler had little patience for Rosenberg’s proposal to treat the locals well. Göring’s only interest in them was to ensure that the harvest was brought in and food shipped back to the Reich. Of course, this was subsequent to pacification of the territories. Hitler advised ‘shooting anyone who even looks sideways at us’. Keitel, speaking for the army, pointed out that it was impossible to guard every installation, so the goal of security policy should be to instil fear. That would be Himmler’s job: he was made supremo of all security matters.⁵⁸

Security and resettlement had been Himmler’s responsibility in Poland in 1939–40, and he learned the hard way that to succeed he needed complete autonomy and sufficient resources. The day before the meeting at the Führer headquarters he received the draft of a long-term plan for the east prepared by Dr Konrad Meyer, a professor of agronomy who was also chief planning officer for Himmler’s settlement organization, the RKfDV. The document, one of several versions known as Generalplan Ost (General Plan for the East), never got beyond utopian fantasies for settling Germans in the occupied lands, but it was clear about one thing: the Jews would be expelled to Siberia to make room for them. Having achieved freedom of action in all policing issues, which included determining the fate of the Jews, Himmler took steps to increase the forces at his disposal. Over the following days he assigned the SS Cavalry Brigade to Erich von dem Bach-Zelewski, the HSSPF for the area of Army Group Centre, and the 1st SS Brigade to Jeckeln, his Higher Police Leader in the south. Despite Hitler’s leery attitude towards arming locals, Himmler also authorized raising more units of auxiliary policemen, Schutzpolizei or Schutzmannschaften. By the end of the year there were 32,000 auxiliaries in the Ostland and 14,000 in Ukraine. During 1942 the number of Schutzmannschaften would rise to a total of 300,000.⁵⁹ According to the record of the meeting on 16 July, the future of the Jews was not discussed. But the decisions were fateful nonetheless. In the best of circumstances there could be no place for Jews in a ‘Garden of Eden’ for the German Volk. When circumstances changed for the worst, the presence of Jews lurched from being an inconvenience to being a deadly menace.

The appearance of partisans in the occupied areas, combined with the temporary paralysis of the front line, caused jitters amongst the German leadership. Halder had noted the problem of scattered enemy forces in the rear of Army Group North as early as 28 June: cut-off Red Army personnel who declined to surrender burned and looted villages; some of them operated with tanks. Worryingly, the ‘application of effective counter-measures’ was ‘frustrated by the expanse of the country and the limitation of our manpower resources’. Although these groups were often stragglers who raided German supply columns simply to survive, they disrupted provisioning and spread anxiety. Others coalesced around a genuine partisan mission and made contact with Soviet commanders. On 3 July, in his first public speech since the offensive opened, Stalin declared that ‘Conditions in the occupied regions must be made unbearable for the enemy and all of his accomplices.’ Although his call for partisan warfare did not immediately lead to the organization and reinforcement of these groups, it created a degree of hysteria amongst the Germans, who automatically associated Jews with Bolsheviks and, hence, with partisans.⁶⁰

Quite suddenly, the mood in the Führer headquarters and the high command changed. Hitler got worried about the concentration of Russian forces in Ukraine and around Kiev that menaced the southern flank of a potential advance on Moscow. He was also tempted to divert forces from Army Group Centre to reinforce the thrust towards Leningrad. Despite stunning operational successes, leading to the destruction of several Soviet armies and the capture of hundreds of thousands of prisoners, within a month of the first cannonade the strategic conception of Operation Barbarossa began to unravel.⁶¹

The roots of the July crisis went back to the planning stage. Despite the enormity of the commitment, the campaign had been approached in an astonishingly casual spirit. German intelligence on Russian military strength was poor and senior officers made up for lack of hard data with preconceptions that were based on little more than racist assumptions. It was assumed that the Red Army would shatter under the impact of the first blows, leaving the way clear for the Germans to advance on Moscow virtually unopposed. The high command believed that the defeat of France offered an operational blueprint for achieving such a rapid, crushing victory. Yet the conditions that made fast, mobile warfare possible in the west were absent in the east. The relatively small size of the theatre in western Europe made it possible to concentrate forces to achieve overwhelming superiority in the key sectors. The German armoured spearhead advancing from the Ardennes had to travel only 200 miles to reach the English Channel, along a superb road network, assisted by conveniently located petrol stations and a railroad system compatible with that of the Reich. In any case, the field of battle was close to the main supply centres in Germany. The opposite was the case in Russia. As German forces advanced they became more spread out. The railroad gauge was different, so the network had to be converted to take German locomotives and rolling stock. In the meantime, the motorized units and supply columns had to move along appalling roads that steadily deteriorated, especially in bad weather. The distances were forbidding: it was 600 miles from the start line to Moscow, yet even in France half the vehicles had suffered mechanical failure covering a third of that. Crucially, the German armed forces had limited manpower reserves and only stockpiled sufficient petrol and oil, spare parts for vehicles, and ammunition for a campaign running at full tilt for a few weeks. Instead of collapsing, though, the Red Army rallied after a succession of devastating setbacks. The Soviet system demonstrated an awesome capacity for ‘force generation’, raising new units faster than the Germans could pulverize them. Finally, the Germans had not foreseen the problem of stragglers and partisans operating in the forests and marshes in their rear. By the time Army Group Centre paused at the land bridge, combat casualties as well as wear and tear had reduced the strength of its armoured and motorized strike force by a third to a half. The supply situation was dire.⁶²

The Wehrmacht’s failure to deliver a knock-out blow to the Red Army exposed a fundamental rift between Hitler and his commanders. The generals wanted to launch an all-out assault on Moscow in the belief that capturing the capital would so disrupt Soviet command and control mechanisms that effective resistance would end. Hitler wanted to strike south to eliminate the threatening concentration of Soviet forces in the Kiev area and capture Ukraine, the fabled breadbasket of the USSR. He also wanted to strengthen the attack on Leningrad. This disagreement over priorities had been latent during the planning of Operation Barbarossa but Halder had sidestepped a confrontation with Hitler by blurring the objectives. Now it was in the open and after several rancorous encounters, Hitler got his way.⁶³

During August one part of Army Group Centre’s armour was diverted to the north while another part was sent southwards, cutting behind the bulge of Soviet forces around Kiev to link up with Army Group South. This manoeuvre, aided by poor Russian generalship, inflicted a disaster on the Red Army. Kiev was captured and 400,000 Russians went into captivity, leaving Ukraine open to the Germans. As spectacular as it was, though, the battle of Kiev was a pyrrhic victory. The distances travelled and the ferocity of the fighting further eroded the strength of German forces. When Hitler ordered the resumption of the advance on Moscow, on 30 September, German infantry divisions were at barely more than 50 per cent of their complement while the panzer divisions could field only 30–40 per cent of their fighting vehicles.⁶⁴

Military failure had an impact on all aspects of German policy, long before the retreat from Moscow. As early as mid-August, the high command recognized that it had severely miscalculated. Halder lamely admitted, ‘We have underestimated the Russian colossus.’ By October Hitler accepted that the war would be prolonged into 1942, stretching the resources of the Reich and the morale of the Volk. Just two months after the euphoric leadership discussed razing Moscow and Leningrad to the ground, Backe met Göring to discuss food rationing over the coming year. Some members of Hitler’s retinue even considered seeking a negotiated peace with Stalin. Meanwhile, captured Red Army soldiers were dying by the thousand every day because the Wehrmacht had not anticipated having to handle them for very long and did not intend to divert food supplies to feed captured Bolsheviks. Between summer 1941 and spring 1942, two million captured Russians would die of starvation, exposure and associated diseases.⁶⁵

To add to the German nightmare, in the autumn Soviet partisans emerged as a potent force. They were now being equipped by airdrops and reinforced by officers and commissars who were parachuted in to lead them. One example of the damage they were doing was the delay that ‘railway disruption’ imposed on the transfer of the Spanish ‘Blue’ Division to the Leningrad front. Infuriated by such incidents, on 6 September 1941 Hitler issued a directive for dealing with the ‘bandit war’. His orders to the army denied the partisans any legitimacy as a fighting force; they were criminals who had to be wiped out. A month later, Himmler sent out his own instructions for combating ‘bandits’. He made explicit the connection with the Jewish population and echoed the call for their extermination.⁶⁶

Army commanders issued blood-curdling imprecations against the Jews, inciting and legitimizing murderous actions against them. In a proclamation forbidding the army to utilize Jews for auxiliary services Keitel proclaimed that ‘The struggle against Bolshevism demanded ruthless and energetic action, and first of all against the Jews as well, as the main bearers of Bolshevism.’ In his order of the day on 10 November 1941, Field Marshal Walter von Reichenau, commander of 6th Army, declared that ‘the soldier must have complete understanding for the necessity of the severe 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.’⁶⁷

The combined effect of these developments was to shift anti-Jewish policy in a new, even more murderous direction. This change was not the result of anti-Semitism alone or a logical outgrowth of existing practices, a process of radicalization. It certainly contained elements of continuity, but it was pre-eminently a response to the conjunctural crisis that gripped the civilian and military leadership of the Third Reich from late July 1941. Paradoxically, the utopian optimism of early July and the sober practicality of late July edged policy in the same direction: towards the total annihilation of the Jewish population in the occupied USSR. To Göring and Backe, Jews were a drain on food supplies, so measures that constricted or eliminated their consumption of resources were welcome. In pressing his claims to supremacy regarding security matters and clearing the undergrowth to enable the Garden of Eden to flower, Himmler had resolved to remove the Jews by the most radical means imaginable. For Heydrich, the destruction of Jewish populations would signal to the civil administration that their anti-Jewish policies were superseded and put the security forces at the vanguard of meeting Hitler’s wishes. The army, strapped for supplies, hard pressed at the front and harassed in the rear, largely approved the liquidation of Jewish-Bolsheviks. Some officers dissented from the means that were employed, but few challenged the policy in principle.⁶⁸

Himmler orchestrated this step-change in a series of visits to Einsatzgruppen commanders and Higher SS Police Leaders during late July and mid-August. He encouraged them to up the rate of executions and no longer to stop at Jewish men or those plausibly connected with the communist apparatus or anti-German activity. It was time to wipe out the Jews entirely. Although his instructions were delivered orally, they were echoed in a written order dated 1 August to the SS Cavalry Brigade, which was detailed to clean out partisans and resistance in the Pripet Marshes: ‘All Jews must be shot. Jewish women to be herded into the marshes.’ Hence, after each encounter with his field commanders the number of Jews murdered increased massively and now routinely included women and children. Whole communities were rounded up and slaughtered. In a parallel development, ghettos were created to contain the Jews and also to enable selections prior to the massacres. Skilled workers and their families were held back, temporarily, if a strong case could be made that they were servicing the army or the civil administration. These ghettos were mostly short-lived and the conditions in them were atrocious: they were barely supplied with food and the Germans made no effort to provide amenities. Despite Himmler’s direct intervention, though, there was still little consistency in the application of the new policy. The extraordinary escalation in the rate of killing occurred mainly in Lithuania, Byelorussia and the Ukraine. Some ghettos created in June and July were purged of non-working Jews while others were relatively unscathed until later in the year, when they were hit for different reasons. Nor was the policy carefully coordinated with the German civilian authorities. There was constant friction between the SS executioners who answered to Himmler, and the Reich commissioners subordinate to Rosenberg. There was still no uniformity about anti-Jewish policy.⁶⁹

In order to accomplish the task of eliminating hundreds of thousands of Jews and forming ghettos, Himmler drafted in fresh units and authorized the creation of many more. The assignment of the SS Cavalry Brigade and 1st SS Infantry Brigade added 19,000 men to the roster of killing units. Ohlendorf and Einsatzgruppe D were able to draw on newly formed Ukrainian auxiliary police formations as well as the Romanians. In the north, the Higher SS Police Leader Prützmann and Einsatzgruppe A could rely on the reservoir of Lithuanian and Latvian police battalions.⁷⁰

By the end of the year, 12,000 officers and men of the order police, grouped in three police regiments (north, centre, and south, each comprising three battalions), were also engaged in anti-Jewish actions. Nine others partnered Wehrmacht infantry regiments in security divisions and each army group headquarters disposed of a regiment for rear-area duties. These men were mainly young conscripts who had been trained by the SS for policing duties in the occupied territories. Older men who served in reserve police battalions had been indoctrinated in their regular police service in the Reich and received further ideological training when they were inducted into the militarized police battalions. A third of the officers in the police battalions were members of the Nazi Party and up to a quarter were ‘old fighters’ from the SA.⁷¹

Killing innocent men, the elderly, women, children and babies appears to have presented few problems for most of the rank and file. They were predisposed to view the inhabitants of the east as virtually savages, the Jews even more so. Those who were ideologically honed saw themselves waging a racial war for the supremacy, if not the survival, of the German Volk. Almost all policemen, troops and those in the civilian echelons shared this outlook to some extent. The harder the fighting and the longer the campaign, the more Germans were inured to pangs of compassion; on the contrary, feelings of solidarity with their comrades and anxiety about the future of loved ones at home came to the fore. The real problems of food supply and raids by partisans offered proof that ruthless, merciless action was essential to prevent the situation deteriorating.⁷²

While some historians argue that the Nazi leadership used the partisan menace to ease ordinary Germans into killing innocents, the evidence points in the opposite direction. On 10 August, Einsatzgruppe A requested advice from Berlin for the reason that ‘Army Group Centre urgently demands a quick solution because of the difficult situation with the partisans.’ It mentioned partisan attacks again on 15 and 22 August, including a strike against the vital Pskov–Luga highway. From mid-August, Einsatzgruppe B reported clashes with partisans along the Minsk–Moscow highway. This main artery for Army Group Centre passed through a chain of cities and towns with substantial Jewish populations. In Byelorussia and more widely it was a fatal coincidence that German lines of communication ran through areas of Jewish population, drawing attention constantly to the presence of an ‘enemy’ in close proximity to essential supply routes, transport hubs and depots.⁷³

On 24 September 1941, the commander of the rear area of Army Group Centre invited officers who had experience of anti-partisan warfare to share their knowledge at a three-day conference in Mogilev. Most of the sixty participants were junior officers from security divisions but there were also personnel from infantry regiments. Amongst the speakers were Nebe, Bach-Zelewski and the commander of the SS Cavalry Brigade. A summary of the presentations and recommendations for anti-partisan warfare was later distributed and the commander of the German army, Brauchitsch, incorporated parts of the proceedings into the ‘Guidelines for Fighting Partisans’ issued a month later by the high command. In these guidelines, German soldiers were instructed to be absolutely merciless in dealing with the partisan threat.⁷⁴

The fact that German anti-partisan operations in 1941 did not lead to many casualties amongst the security units does not mean that counter-insurgency was merely a cover for killing defenceless men, women and children. The point of guerrilla tactics is to avoid confrontations with superior enemy forces; Soviet partisans created havoc but were adept at evading German countermeasures. Conversely, the point of counter-insurgency is to deny the enemy civilian support by winning over the population or deterring it from aiding guerrillas. At its most brutal, as practised by the Germans, anti-partisan warfare involved removing or killing civilians suspected of abetting the enemy.

So the war on partisans was not just a pretext for mass murder or a device to engage ingénues in the unpleasant business of slaughtering Jews. Letters, diaries and interrogations of German soldiers and officers, policemen, and civilian officials show that it was a shared belief, a matter of common sense, that Jews were Bolsheviks and therefore nurtured the partisans. Jews may have been an imaginary enemy, but it was not irrational to think of them as a foe. On the day after the invasion started one corporal wrote, ‘Now Jewry has declared war on us … All that are in bondage to the Jews stand in a fight against us. The Marxists fight shoulder to shoulder with high finance as before 1933 in Germany …’ Corporal Paul Lenz put it bluntly, ‘Only a Jew can be a Bolshevik.’ In Russia, he continued, ‘wherever one spits one finds a Jew’. German troops were convinced that Jews were behind the atrocities revealed when the Red Army retreated. A private, referring to the massacres in Lwow and Tarnopol, asserted, ‘You see evidence of Jewish, Bolshevik cruelties which I can hardly believe possible.’ Lance Corporal Paul Rubelt echoed this claim, ‘Jews were for the most part the evil doers’ in Lwow. A month into the campaign, a corporal wrote home, ‘The great task that has placed us in battle against Bolshevism lies in the destruction of Judaism … When you see what the Jew has brought about here you can begin to understand why the Führer began this struggle with Judaism.’ In October, a railroad inspector reacting to partisan raids casually mentioned that ‘In case of attack numbers of people are picked out of the local population, especially Jews, and are shot there on the spot and their homes set on fire.’⁷⁵

Karl Fuchs, who advanced into the USSR in a tank of the 25th Panzer Regiment, told his wife Madi that ‘we are fighting for the existence of our entire people, of our Volk’. Russia was ‘nothing but misery, poverty and depravity! That is Bolshevism.’ And behind it all were the Jews. He wrote to his father that ‘Everyone, even the last doubter, knows today that the battle against these sub-humans, who’ve been whipped into a frenzy by the Jews, was not only necessary but came in the nick of time.’⁷⁶

Crucially, senior officers held in respect by their men confirmed such preconceptions and incited the rank and file to see Jews as a threat. On 20 November, Manstein issued an order of the day to 11th Army in the Crimea stating that ‘Jewry constitutes the mediator between the enemy in the rear and the still fighting remnants of the Red Army and the Red leadership … The Jewish-Bolshevik system must be eradicated once and for all.’ At roughly the same time Herman Hoth, commander of 17th Army in Ukraine, advised his troops that they were in a battle against an opposing spiritual conception ‘whipped up by a small number of mostly Jewish intellectuals’. The battle ‘can only end with the destruction of the other; a compromise is out of the question’.⁷⁷

The new mission called for new techniques. Jeckeln figured out that it helped to maximize the use of the space in the burial pits if the Jews walked into them and lay down before being killed. This became known as the ‘sardine packing’ method. It also made it easier for officers to walk over the corpses to deliver a coup de grâce to those only wounded by the fusillade. Notwithstanding the increased efficiency of the killing, the experience of slaughtering women, children and babies was beginning to take a psychological toll on the killers. When Himmler observed a mass execution in Minsk in mid-August he was troubled by the potential effects on his officers and men. He was already getting word that some SS personnel were suffering nervous disorders as a result of constant involvement in killing operations and it seems that around this time he asked for research into other techniques for mass murder. After seeing a mass shooting, also in Minsk but probably in November 1941, Adolf Eichmann protested to colleagues in the SD in Lwow that ‘Those men will either go mad or turn into sadists.’ He repeated to Heinrich Müller, head of the Gestapo in Berlin, ‘we’re training our men to be sadists’.⁷⁸

Mass murder and ghettoization in the occupied USSR

In Lithuania the first mass killing to include women and children occurred at Rokisis on 14–15 August, claiming 3,200 victims. Over the next two weeks the Einsatzkommandos and their Lithuanian assistants murdered 33,000 Jews across the country. Stasis at the front meant that the killing units had more time to comb through small towns and villages. Once the advance on Leningrad resumed, the growing anxiety about the shortage of food, supply difficulties and partisans in the rear of Army Group North added impetus to the massacres. The intensified slaughter was sustained for the rest of the year thanks to the plethora of Lithuanian auxiliaries who provided the firepower. Viktor Kutorga, a member of the Lithuanian underground, later published a brief account of these days in the hope of stirring the world’s conscience. One entry on one community can stand for dozens of others: ‘October 16. They did away with 900 Jews in Semelishki. There, in the ghetto, the “partisans” and the Germans particularly distinguished themselves by their savagery – they robbed, killed and raped women. The Jews worked every day in three shifts, day and night at the airfield – 1,200 men and 800 women from the ages of 17 to 55. When on any day these numbers did not reach their preliminary levels, the Germans would go through apartments in the ghetto and drag men and women out of their beds to work.’ As this extract shows, Jews were not murdered if they could be exploited for labour. This only meant that a fraction of the communities survived for the time being. By December, the Germans and their Lithuanian collaborators had shot to death 133,000 Jewish men, women and children.⁷⁹

Ghetto-building, exploitation of Jewish labour and mass murder were synchronized. In Lithuania, the Germans formed three ghettos: Kaunus, Vilnius and Shauli. The Jews of Kaunus moved into the designated area between 10 July and 15 August. During the last frantic days Abraham Golub saw ‘Lithuanians simply throw Jewish residents out onto the streets and take for themselves “liberated” apartments.’ Dr Elchanan Elkes, a much-respected physician who had been elected as ‘Oberjude’ (head Jew) of the community, negotiated tenaciously with the authorities over the extent of the ghetto, the food supply, and forced labour. Despite his courageous efforts the ghetto was shrunk and divided into two parts, one large and the other small. It soon became apparent that this bifurcation was intended to facilitate the policy of eliminating all Jews except those considered essential for the economy or the war effort. An Order Service was created at around the same time and from its inception Golub doubted that it would be a force for good.⁸⁰

Meanwhile the slaughter at the Seventh Fort continued. The inclusion of women and the extensive employment of Lithuanians for guard duties alongside the shooting squads changed the procedure somewhat: mass rape as well as mass murder became routine. Golub reported that ‘Night after night the Lithuanian henchmen would proceed to elect their victims: the young, the pretty. First they would rape them, then torture them, and finally murder them.’ For the killers there was also good business to be done. Lithuanian police and militiamen took the clothes of the dead and sold them. Officials and opportunists stripped apartments vacated by Jews and disposed of the furniture and household goods. The Germans, though, reserved the real estate to themselves – and this was considerable. Jews owned nearly 40 per cent of the residential dwellings in Lithuania, a total of 35,600 units. Regardless of religion, racism or ideology, greed was a powerful incentive for both locals and carpetbaggers to eliminate the Jewish population.⁸¹

In early October, the boss of the ghetto, an SA captain called Fritz Jordan, gave the Jewish council 5,000 work certificates. This placed the Jewish leadership in a horrendous position since they guessed that non-possession of a certificate was tantamount to a death sentence. Three weeks later the SS sergeant responsible for Jewish affairs, Helmut Rauca, ordered the Jewish council to separate working from non-working Jews. Golub recorded the agonizing debate that ensued when the Jewish council sought rabbinical advice. Rabbi Shapira judged that ‘communal leaders were bound to summon their courage, take the responsibility, and save as many lives as possible’. By virtue of this decision, Golub commented scathingly, the Jewish council thereby ‘inadvertently became a collaborator with the oppressor’. Jews working for the German military, skilled workers and of course anyone connected with the Jewish council received the prized certificates. Rauca then summoned a roll call of the entire ghetto and divided those with work permits and their families from those without, sending 10,000 to the small ghetto and 17,000 back to their homes in the main ghetto. Next day, 29 October, some 9,000 Jews were taken to the Ninth Fort and murdered. The Order Service was directed to search the small ghetto for any recalcitrants. Thereafter the survivors were left alone, stunned and mournful.⁸²

The ghetto in Vilnius was not set up until early September, after the inauguration of civilian rule in the Ostland. Herman Kruk watched as 29,000 Jews trundled their possessions into a district where 4,000 once dwelled. ‘Christians came to help – friends, comrades, fellow workers. Others came to buy for almost nothing; others came like jackals – already waiting for the Jews’ belongings.’ From the start the ghetto was in two parts: ghetto 1 housed about 30,000 Jews, while 10,000 were immured in the lesser ghetto 2. The Germans appointed a Jewish council and ordered the creation of an Order Service, which took shape under Jacob Gens, an ex-Lithuanian army officer. The Jews in ghetto 1 were gradually issued with work certificates that they hoped would save them from the culling that occurred regularly. When the Jewish council made sure it got 400 permits for its employees there was outrage. Eventually about 12,000 Jews held the priceless documents. Almost immediately, the Germans began removing non-working Jews. The Order Service assisted, in the belief that work permits would be respected, although Jews in the large ghetto were targeted as well. The purges went on until the small ghetto was emptied and over 15,000 Jews had been sent to Ponary. A further effort to reduce the number of Jews in the main ghetto in November encountered passive resistance: thousands hid, with the result that German police and Lithuanian auxiliaries entered the ghetto and shot hundreds on the spot before rounding up over 1,000. By the end of the year only 15,000 ‘legal’ Jews were left in the Vilnius ghetto, although probably a few thousand more survived in ‘malinas’ (hiding places) or bunkers.⁸³

Kazimierz Sakowicz continued to observe the fate of those who made the short, one-way journey to Ponary. During August he counted 250–300 shot every day for seventeen days, except for Sunday, the day of rest. Throughout this time he spotted only one woman. In late August larger numbers of women began to appear. He heard one shooter, who he happened to know slightly, boast that ‘stripped naked they looked very pretty’. The Germans, the man said enviously, held them for an hour before they were shot and ‘“contaminated the race with the Jewish women”’. The Lithuanians were somewhat placated because they were able to sell the women’s silk stockings the next day. In early September the dejected columns included many more women plus children and babies. The Lithuanians now comprised almost the entire complement of one hundred guards and eighty shooters. ‘They shot while they were drunk. Before the shooting they tormented the men and women horribly … The women were stripped to their underwear.’ Sakowicz observed that the victims were forced to lie on top of the corpses already in the pits while the shooters walked back and forth over the bodies, firing into their heads. Children and babies were torn from their mothers and thrown onto the piles of dead and dying. Other Lithuanian guards ‘took the little ones from their mothers and killed them with rifle butts’.⁸⁴

The massacres were considered both a spectacle and a bonanza. Sakowicz was disgusted at the sight of ‘two amused Lithuanian “ladies” in the company of a certain “gentleman” who were on a day excursion to see the executions’. Because the weather was now cooler and the Jews were not told exactly where they were going, they wore as much as they could and included valuable apparel. During one day of shooting in early September, Sakowicz saw the Lithuanian commanding officer swaggering around in a woman’s fur. The carnage supplied the basis for a grotesque economy. He noticed that ‘when the trucks returned from the forests, the Lithuanian soldiers sitting inside were already dividing up the possessions’. Traffic went the other way, too: ‘Lithuanian women came for the clothing.’ On one occasion he heard a soldier say that he had taken an order for garments from a local and ‘had gone to the “trouble” of choosing a woman from the fourth line whose height was about that of the villager’. The perception of Jews as a source of booty led Sakowicz to identify a fundamental difference between the Germans and the Lithuanians: ‘For the Germans 300 Jews are 300 enemies of humanity; for the Lithuanians they are 300 pairs of shoes, trousers and the like.’⁸⁵

Thanks to the increasing number of victims, the amount of alcohol, and the ill-discipline of both the guards and the shooters, several Jews were only wounded and crawled out of the mass graves once night fell. A few made it back to the ghetto, including Peyse Schloss, a sixteen-year-old girl who described her experiences to Herman Kruk. ‘Few people knew we were in Ponary and few imagined what they were going to do with us. But we saw it with our own eyes, as the shootings were taking place no more than 200 yards from us. The men were numbed with blows to the head and only later were they shot. There were mountains of people lying. They all surrendered, obeying orders. All the work was done by the Lithuanians. They were only supervised by one German.’ Peyse was in the last batch to be shot, at sunset, and was only hit in the arm. She clawed her way out and made it to safety with the help of kindly Lithuanians. Kruk added, ‘Can the world not scream? Can history never take revenge?’⁸⁶

By the end of the year the situation of the Vilnius ghetto stabilized. Thousands of Jews were now employed by the German army, producing fur and leather items, or working in the huge vehicle park. The ghetto developed the familiar panoply of institutions: there were five communal kitchens and a range of welfare and health services. Jacob Gens and the Order Service emerged as the dominant element. Noting that the Order Service men took bribes at the ghetto gates, Kruk complained that ‘The homes of the Jewish police are full of everything: bread, butter, fat galore. Really, police work is the best livelihood.’ The OS men established intimate relations with their German counterparts. On New Year’s Eve Gens held a party attended by a gaggle of Jewish girls who were ‘close to the Germans’. The Order Service organized merry events with ‘girls, brandy and recently an orchestra’ at which they were joined by Gestapo men. Gens used work for the Jews and bribes for the Germans to preserve the ghetto, but his tactics were not immediately obvious. Kruk lamented that the Lithuanians stole from the dead, while the Jewish council stole from the living.⁸⁷

In Latvia the Germans established ghettos in Riga and Daugavpils. To create Riga’s ghetto, situated in the run-down Moscow suburb, 27,000 Jews and 10,000 non-Jews had to be relocated during August, although the ghetto was not actually sealed until October. A Jewish council and an Order Service were set up, and a system for forced labour and provisioning put in place. Of the 30,000 ghetto inhabitants, over 15,000 were female and 5,000 were juveniles. Due to mobilization by the Red Army, evacuations and shootings, there were only about 8,000 men. Most of the adults were employed by the German army and navy, with thousands toiling at the docks unloading ships bringing supplies for Army Group North. Gertrude Schneider, who was a teenager when she entered the ghetto, later recalled that these outside workers were vital for bringing in food. In her memoir she recounted the emergence of something like normality: the hospital, the schools, and soup kitchens. The ‘people began to get used to the grimness of their lives and it assumed a drab kind of stability. There was the belief that the central position of Riga, with its supply line to the Russian front, would ensure the need for Jewish workers and thus be of help to the survival of the ghetto inmates.’ This was an illusion. There was constant bickering between Lohse and the Sipo-SD over who owned the Jews and their property. The civil administration provided the budget for the upkeep of the ghetto and intended to recoup the cost by exploiting Jewish labour; but the Sipo-SD insisted that the SS should be paid for Jewish workers. Nor did Lohse’s officials fare much better with expropriated property and household goods. The cost of collecting rents from formerly Jewish-owned apartments outweighed the income derived from them, while much of the contents simply vanished into the hands of locals.⁸⁸

The 15,000 Jews of Daugavpils were given orders to move into a ghetto in the Griva district. It consisted of little more than a collection of barracks and stables, once used by a Latvian cavalry regiment, surrounded by barbed wire. Hundreds more Jews were added from settlements in the surrounding countryside. The Germans called an Order Service and a Jewish council into being and the new leadership made efforts to construct a ghetto economy. In early August the ghetto rulers started demanding lists of unemployed Jews for resettlement. Initially the council complied, but they soon realized something was wrong. In fact the approximately 8,000 Jews removed from the ghetto on 8–9 and 18–19 August were murdered in forests or railway yards outside the town. Conditions for the remaining Jews improved once the population had been reduced but the Germans did not leave it at that. Another action in early November targeted non-working Jews, the ill and children: 3,000–5,000 were shot to death. A twelve-year-old Jewish boy, Syoma Shpungin, who lived through this period recalled after the war, ‘It [the ghetto] was very crowded and dirty. And it was very cold … The belongings of the victims were kept by the executioners for themselves … The butchers were very often drunk.’⁸⁹

Conditions at the killing site were described by a German, Heinrich Kittel, the commander of an infantry regiment who was secretly recorded in a British POW camp after he was captured in November 1944. ‘I was lying in bed early one Sunday morning when I kept hearing two salvoes followed by small arms fire,’ he told a fellow captive officer. He went to investigate and found himself amidst a crowd of spectators: ‘Latvians and German soldiers were just standing there, looking in.’ Kittel saw about sixteen Sipo-SD and sixty Latvians lined up at a trench where ‘men, women and children … were counted off and stripped naked; the executioners first laid all the clothes in one pile. Then twenty women had to take up their position – naked – on the edge of the trench, they were shot down and fell into it.’ His interlocutor then asked, ‘How was it done?’ Kittel elaborated: ‘They faced the trench, then twenty Latvians came up behind and simply fired once through the back of their heads. There was a sort of step in the trench, so that they stood rather lower than the Latvians, who stood up on the edge and simply shot them through the head, and they fell down forwards into the trench. After that came twenty men and they were killed by a salvo in the same way.’ Kittel was angered by what he saw and went to the senior Sipo officer to complain. ‘“Once and for all,”’ Kittel told him, ‘“I forbid these executions outside, where people can look on. If you shoot people in the wood or somewhere no one can see, that’s your own affair. But I absolutely forbid another day’s shooting there. We draw our drinking water from deep springs; we’re getting nothing but corpse water there.”’ Oblivious to his moral myopia, Kittel then got very excited and added, ‘They seized three-year-old children by their hair, held them up, and shot them with a pistol and then threw them in.’⁹⁰

After the first wave of mass shooting in the Bialystok district the situation stabilized. At the start of August, 43,000 Jews in the city were herded into two, widely separated ghettos. Efraim Barash, the head of the Jewish council, persuaded the Germans to include factories and workshops in the larger one and Jews were soon turning out footwear, clothing and furs for use by the German army. Buoyed-up by the success of his strategy of putting Jews to work, Barash enjoyed considerable authority. He presided over an elaborate ghetto organization and for a while the Jews enjoyed calm and reasonable conditions. The ghetto was not actually sealed until early November 1941 and evaded further purges because it had become so profitable to the Germans that Erich Koch, the Gauleiter, was able to repel efforts by the SS to remove the Jews. A similar dynamic occurred in Grodno, where about 25,000 Jews were sealed into a two-site ghetto.⁹¹

Further east, in Byelorussia, which under civilian administration became the Gebietskommissariat Weissruthenien, ghettos were formed at an uneven pace. Although the Minsk ghetto was established in July, Baranovichi and Novogrudok were unaffected until the end of the year. Nor was there much uniformity to orders for Jews to form councils, Order Service detachments, or even to wear the Star of David. Mass shootings occurred, but erratically and according to no obvious plan. In certain cases, they even triggered protests from civilian officials. On 27 October, the 11th Lithuanian Police Battalion under German command arrived in Slutsk, which had a Jewish community of about 7,000, with orders to liquidate the Jewish population. Heinrich Carl, the district commissioner, asked the commander to postpone the operation until he had sorted out essential workers and suggested forming two ghettos to facilitate the selection. The officer at first seemed to agree, but then unleashed his men, who began an indiscriminate massacre that brought factories and workshops to a standstill. Carl later addressed a letter to Wilhelm Kube, the Gebietskommissar, complaining about this action and describing how ‘with indescribable brutality on the part of the German officers, and especially of the Lithuanian partisans, the Jews, including some Belorussians, were taken from their homes and concentrated together. The shots could be heard all over town and the corpses of Jews were piled in certain streets.’ The operation was conducted so sloppily that ‘some people who had been shot got out of the graves shortly after being covered’. He concluded, ‘This day adds no glory to Germany and will not be forgotten … use all means to keep this police battalion well away from me.’ Kube forwarded the letter to Lohse with a request that the officer should be disciplined and that skilled Jewish workers should be spared. It was not the principle of mass murder that bothered him, though. He urged the security forces to better coordinate executions with the civilian authorities and avoid alarming the locals. Lohse, in turn, sent the letter to Rosenberg, minister for the east, but he added nothing to the correspondence and the matter rested there. However, the incident was symptomatic of a wider conflict over policy between civilians and the SS that would flare up repeatedly until the end of the year.⁹²

By contrast, the civil authorities in Slonim worked closely with the Lithuanian police unit sent in November to reduce the size of the Jewish population, which then stood at about 22,000. The Jews had been confined to a ghetto in a waterlogged quarter of the town called Zabinka. Thousands worked for the Germans in local quarries, in joinery workshops and at the railway station. Unusually, youngsters inside the ghetto began organizing an underground resistance almost immediately and acquired a small arsenal of rifles and pistols. In the autumn, when they got wind of the forthcoming action, they contacted local partisans. Other Jews prepared hideouts and dug bunkers. Unfortunately, they were not able to deflect the blow when it came. On 14 November, 9,000–10,000 Jews without work permits were removed and shot. The city commissioner, Gerhardt Erren, may not have known about the contacts between the ghetto Jews and the Soviet partisans, but he certainly knew about the adverse food situation. He subsequently informed Berlin that ‘The Juden-Aktion of November 14, 1941 has greatly ameliorated the housing problem and also rid us of 10,000 unnecessary mouths to feed.’⁹³

The strategically sensitive Pripet Marshes were an early target for the new German approach to the Jewish population. Between 27 July and 11 August, the 2nd SS Cavalry Regiment shot 6,526 ‘looters’ in the Pripet area. The commander, Franz Magill, attempted to use the technique recommended by Himmler but informed his superiors that ‘The driving of women and children into the marshes did not have the expected success, because the marshes were not so deep that one could sink.’ Nevertheless, over a period of two weeks an estimated 25,000 Jews were butchered throughout the Pripet region.⁹⁴

The wave of killing was particularly severe in the cities and towns located in the rear area of Army Group Centre, which remained under military administration. Here the combined effects of food shortages and security paranoia had a catastrophic impact. Ghettos were formed partly to restrict the ability of Jews to obtain food and so leave more for the local population, which was, in any case, under severe pressure due to army requisitioning. But they rarely lasted beyond the turn of the year. Instead, they came to function as holding pens from which Jews could be taken and massacred when sufficient manpower could be concentrated to do the job. The slaughter began in Borisov, where a ghetto had been constructed in August. In October, 7,000 Jews were taken from the ghetto to pits dug outside town and killed by men of Einsatzkommando 8. Over half the Jews of Vitebsk, a community with a glittering Jewish history, had either fled or been evacuated before the town was captured on 11 July. A ghetto was formed soon afterwards and was sealed in early September. There was hardly any time for ghetto organizations to develop before 8–10 October, when units of Einsatzkommando 9 massacred the population of 4,000. The 7,000 Jews in Bobriusk were ghettoized in October; three months later they were annihilated by the SS Cavalry Brigade, fresh from its triumphs in the Pripet Marshes. The tsunami of destruction rolled over Mogilev, where Einsatzkommando 8, reinforced by police units, slaughtered 6,500 Jews; Orsha, where 2,000 were shot; Gomel, where 7,000 were killed; and Polotsk, where another 7,000 were murdered.⁹⁵

Two accounts may serve to give an impression of what these killing operations were like and also illustrate the attitude of the killers. The first is by Walter Mattner, a Viennese police officer, who described his experience at Mogilev in a letter to his wife dated 5 October 1941: ‘I aimed calmly and shot with confidence at the women, children and numerous babies, aware that I have two babies of my own at home, and these hordes would treat them just the same, or even ten times worse, perhaps. The death we gave them was nice and quick, compared with the hellish suffering of the thousands and thousands in the GPU jails. The babies flew in great arcs and we shot them to pieces in the air before they fell into the ditch and the water. We need to finish off these brutes who have plunged Europe into war and who, even today, are prospecting in America.’ The second is the deposition of a survivor of a massacre at Mstislavl, taken by a war crimes investigator in January 1944. Mstislavl was a small town in the Mogilev district, south-west of Smolensk. The Jews, who numbered about 1,300, worked as artisans and on a nearby collective farm. On 15 October 1941 a German police unit came to the town and ordered the Jews to assemble in the market square. Men and women were separated, and thirty elderly Jews were placed in a truck and driven away. ‘From the assembled women the Germans selected the young ones, herded them into a shop, stripped them naked and subjected them to rape and torture. Anyone who resisted was shot on the public square.’ Later in the day, the Jews were marched to a ditch. ‘The fascist cannibals led the Jews in groups of ten up to the pits dug ahead of time, took their clothes and jewellery, then shot them. They killed the men in this way first, followed by the women with older children. The small children were thrown into the pit alive.’ By the end of the year, the Germans had murdered 200,000 Jews in Soviet Byelorussia; barely 25,000 were left, mainly in isolated rural communities.⁹⁶

Ghettos were enforced across Volhynia in the late summer of 1941, usually located in the worst parts of a particular city or town. But the Germans found it hard to contain such a numerous and widely dispersed population. Many remained open for months, so Jews wandered in and out searching for food and sanctuary elsewhere. Most communities were kitted out with a Jewish council, an Elder, and an Order Service, although none of them lasted long or became well established. Throughout the autumn, Einsatzkommandos and security units moved from town to town shooting Jews: for example, 17,000–18,000 in Rovno and 2,500 in Ostrog. The exceptionally large toll in Rovno was connected with the decision of the Reichkommissar, Erich Koch, to make the place his headquarters. However, there was not sufficient manpower to stage major actions in more than a few large centres. By the end of the year, three-quarters of Volhynian Jews were still living in their native towns and villages.⁹⁷

The situation in east Galicia was especially confused. Hans Frank was hardly pleased that Lwow and the surrounding region, with its considerable Jewish population, had been added to the General Government. His first thought was simply to expel them all to the Pripet region and treat east Galicia as little more than a temporary dump. He devoted little time or effort to setting up a competent or conscientious administration. Instead, the enterprising and energetic SS police leader Odilo Globocnik stepped into the vacuum, grabbing the Jews for use on an ambitious project to construct a highway from Lwow to the Crimea, known as Durchgangstrasse IV. By the end of 1941, primitive work camps lined the route of the putative thoroughfare. Around 20,000 Jewish men were seized from cities and towns across east Galicia, though huge numbers perished due to the abysmal conditions in the camps and the harsh treatment meted out to them. Hundreds of Jews fled to Romania, Hungary and even the General Government to escape these round-ups. At the end of October when Frank realized that there was not going to be any mass deportation he seems to have despaired. He already presided over enormous, squalid and pestilential ghettos in the General Government and now there seemed no hope of removing the Jews to another territory. Bereft of any alternative, he acquiesced in the establishment of a ghetto in Lwow and other Jewish centres, in conjunction with a programme of mass shootings to eliminate non-working Jews or just to reduce the Jewish population.98

From September, Karl Lasch, the governor, and Fritz Katzmann, the HSSPF in the Galicia district, proceeded to create Jewish councils, register Jews for labour, and form ghettos. Katzmann’s men, with Ukrainian collaborators, carried out a succession of huge massacres as the flip side of this process. On one day in Stanislawów, dubbed ‘Bloody Sunday’, 10,000–12,000 Jews were massacred in the old Jewish cemetery, including the entire Jewish council, which cast its lot with the victims. This left about 26,000 Jews to go into the ghetto although it was still disastrously overcrowded. The ghetto was not sealed until late December 1941. In Borislav, home to about 14,000 Jews, despite the outbreak of typhus no ghetto was created until the following May.⁹⁹

The fate of the 135,000 Jews in Lwow was a grim catalogue of chaos and carnage. The local Ukrainians staged a second pogrom on 25–28 July to honour the memory of the nationalist leader Symon Petlyura who had been assassinated by a Jew in Paris in 1926. Mainly young Jewish men and women were taken to the prison where, according to Rabbi David Kahane, ‘hair raising scenes unfolded’. Several thousand never returned. A Jewish council was then named which set about regulating housing, rations and forced labour. Edmund Kessler was relieved by the appointment of Jewish representatives, hoping that this would give ‘a kind of legal status to the Jewish community’. When the Germans decreed the creation of a ghetto in early November, Moty Stromer saw this in a positive light. ‘We were glad to have a place where we could live and keep some of our belongings,’ he thought. Jews outside and Christians inside the designated area then started exchanging properties, often with people they knew. ‘When it came to renting or exchanging apartments, the Christians only wanted to know if the Jewish apartments had gas, electricity, running water and bathrooms. They wanted comfort. None of the “new” Jewish quarters had these luxuries.’ Rabbi Kahane gained a different impression of these transactions. He recalled that Christians were in no hurry to leave and ‘For each square metre to be vacated by them, they demanded astronomical sums. Suits of clothing, English fabric, astrakhan furs, bedroom furniture, gold dollars just flew into the air. Even the smallest space was measured and sold. Each pitiful hole was bought with gold.’ Few Jews were actually so well endowed; the vast majority were dirt-poor, and had little to exchange and, therefore, nowhere to go. Kessler noted that rich Jews aggravated the housing shortage by refusing to share their residences. In any case, a month later the Germans abandoned the plan when they realized it would cause too much disruption.¹⁰⁰

The Jewish quarter offered only a pretence of security. On 12 November, German security police and Ukrainians surrounded the district and established a checkpoint under a bridge from which it was difficult to escape. Over a period of several days, around 10,000 Jewish residents who were not certified as working for German army installations or munitions firms were pulled out of the lines passing through this barrier and sent to killing sites outside the city. Kessler recalled that the guards ‘set up an additional checkpoint to which mostly young women were brought. Under pretext of searching them for jewellery, hard currency and gold they were whipped, forced to totally disrobe, and sadistically violated, struck and kicked.’ The women were then trucked to an area of sandy waste on the edge of an industrial suburb, machine-gunned to death and buried. German police and Ukrainian auxiliaries constantly invaded the Jewish residential streets, often targeting the homes of wealthy Jews. Stromer recollected that ‘One night bandits who had been there before returned. They tied up the parents and raped the two daughters.’ Meanwhile, the Order Service was instructed to seize men for forced labour. Jews sought desperately to evade these depredations. Stromer constructed a hiding place under an oven. To enter it he slid in feet first ‘then with a big effort I would pull my arms into the oven and place them on my chest. After that, I would disguise my head with rags, and there I lay.’¹⁰¹

In the Soviet Ukraine in the weeks that the front was stationary, Einsatzgruppe C was able to carry out a number of large-scale massacres in conjunction with the formation of ghettos, although both policies were carried out inconsistently. In Zhitomir on 9 July the Einsatzgruppe shot about 5,000 Jews, half the pre-war Jewish population of the city. A ghetto was formed to hold the survivors, who were mainly workers, but it was liquidated about eight weeks later. The Einsatzgruppe proudly reported that 25–30 tons of linens, clothing, shoes, and household wares salvaged from the Jewish quarter were distributed to Volksdeutsche.¹⁰²

In Berdichev, around 16,000–17,000 Jews had remained behind out of 25,000 (half of Berdichev’s entire inhabitants). On 25 August they were forced into a ghetto in the Yatki district. A survivor described it to the famed Red Army war correspondent Vasily Grossman as ‘the poorest area of town, an area of unpaved streets that never dried up. The neighbourhood consisted of ancient shacks, tiny single storied houses, and crumbling brick buildings. Weeds grew in the yards and everywhere were piles of junk, garbage, manure.’ In two actions on 4 and 14–15 September, the Germans murdered first about 1,500, then about 12,000 Jews in a field near to the town’s airport. According to Grossman’s informant, ‘Policemen, members of their families, and the mistresses of German soldiers rushed to loot the vacated apartments. Before the eyes of the living dead, the looters carried off scarves, pillows, feather mattresses. Some walked past the girls and took scarves and knitted woollen sweaters from women and girls who were awaiting their death.’ Drunken SS men shot them in batches of forty, while the populace watched. Unfortunately, the pit dug by Soviet POWs was in dense, impervious clay. ‘The pits were filled with blood since the clayey soil could no longer absorb any more, and the blood spilled over the edges, forming enormous puddles.’ Those who were only wounded by the alcohol-befuddled shooters died ‘by drowning in the blood that filled the pits’. Some, however, survived and were able to claw their way out in the darkness. The ghetto was liquidated on 3 November when almost all the remaining Jews were butchered. In Vinnitsa, two police battalions shot 10,000 out of the Jewish population of 17,000 and forced the rest into a ghetto. The decision to locate the Führer’s advanced military headquarters in Vinnitsa doomed them. In Khmelnik, 7,000 Jews were massacred and the rest placed in a ghetto on the outskirts of town. The ghetto was eliminated in January 1942, after the residents had been robbed of all their warm clothing. They were gunned down, naked and shivering in an icy clearing in a pine forest. Some escaped the firing squads but ‘wandered in the fields with no place to take refuge. Others froze to death and were found only in the spring when the snow melted.’¹⁰³

The killing reached a crescendo at the end of September with the mass murder of 33,771 Jews on 29–30 September at the Babi Yar ravine on the edge of Kiev. German troops had marched into the city on 19 September, but dozens had been killed when powerful time-bombs went off in buildings being used by the military administration. With the arrival of Einsatzkommando 4a the military governor decided to punish the Jewish population as a reprisal. Posters instructed the Jewish residents to assemble on the morning of 29 September near the Jewish cemetery, on pain of death. Out of terror and in the hope of being resettled, thousands streamed to the rendezvous. A post-liberation account compiled by Lev Ozerov reported that ‘Families baked bread for the journey, sewed knapsacks, rented wagons and two wheeled carts. Old women and men supported each other while mothers carried their babies in their arms or pushed baby carriages.’ The columns were directed towards Babi Yar where ‘an entire office operation with desks had been set up’. Thirty to forty at a time were processed, but their documents were simply discarded. Instead they were beaten and pushed to an area that was overlooked by German and Ukrainian guards. There they were ‘forced to strip naked: girls, women, children, old men. No exceptions were made. Rings were ripped from the fingers of the naked men and women, and those doomed people were forced to stand at the edge of a deep ravine, where the executioners shot them at point blank range. The bodies fell over the cliff, and small children were thrown in alive. Many went insane when they reached the place of execution.’ Towards the end of the day, Yelena Yefimova Borodyansky-Knysh arrived at the lip of the ravine, clutching the hand of her little girl. She saw another woman try to protect her beautiful teenage daughter, only to be clubbed to death by the Germans. ‘But they weren’t in any hurry with the girl,’ Yelena remembered. ‘Five or six Germans stripped her naked, but I didn’t see what happened after that.’ Soon it was Yelena’s turn, but instead of waiting for the volley of rifle shots she hurled her child into the pit and threw herself on top of her. It was now almost dark and a German walked over the bodies, probing with a bayonet to check they were dead. Miraculously he missed Yelena and she was able to free herself from the jumble of cadavers, grab her child and make her way to a nearby village. Another Kiev survivor, Emilia Borisovna Kotlova, responded to Ilya Ehrenburg’s call for eye-witness accounts with a series of letters in January 1944 in which she recalled acts of defiance and resistance by Jews who realized the fate that awaited them. Old Jews said the traditional prayer ‘Hear, O Israel’ before dying. ‘Young people fought with the executioners, shouting “The people will avenge you”. Before killing them’, she wrote, ‘they still had time to rape the women.’¹⁰⁴

After the fall of Kiev, the 1st Panzer Group and the 6th Army surged towards the Donets river and the Einsatzkommandos advanced again. However, they commonly discovered that most Jews had vanished from their path. Apart from exceptional circumstances, when cities were captured suddenly, the number of Jews falling into their hands diminished. This did not diminish the number of Jews killed, though, because now they were murdering every Jewish person they could. Much of the killing was done with the willing cooperation of their allies. Military operations in the south were a coalition effort, involving detachments of Romanians, Hungarians, Slovakians, as well as Volksdeutsche and local auxiliaries. So was genocide. While Germany’s Axis allies could agree on little else, they shared a desire to be rid of the Jews.¹⁰⁵

In the Ukrainian countryside, the Einsatzkommandos were surprised to come across Jewish rural settlements. They concluded that these places were populated by ‘stupid’ Jews who had failed to get off the land. Most communities were immediately wiped out anyway. During November and December, the spearheads of Army Group South captured cities that before the war had significant Jewish communities, including Nikolayev and Kherson on the Black Sea coast, Kursk and Kharkov, the industrial cities of Kremenchug, Dnepropetrovsk, Kirvoi Rog, Zaporozhe in the Don basin, and Mariupol on the Sea of Azov. In each place the Jews were annihilated either immediately or in stages, some as late as 1942.¹⁰⁶

The experience of Jews in three places may speak for the fate of them all. The pre-war Jewish population of Dnepropetrovsk numbered 90,000 but the Germans found only 30,000 when the city was captured in mid-August. Of these they managed to slaughter about 25,000. Mikhail Petrovich Indik, a shop worker in a cooperative, was accidentally left behind when the Jews were evacuated so he was there to witness the murder and rape that followed. Indik escaped a mass shooting of 2,000 Jews on 13 October and survived in hiding thanks to his wife, who was Russian. At one point she was forced to put up with the attentions of a drunken policeman who lived next door to their home. From his hiding place, Indik could hear when the officer growled, ‘Listen, you whore, when are you going to quit playing the role of an honest woman?’ Like many other Russian, Ukrainian and Byelorussian women married to Jewish men, she endured a double jeopardy. Either they abandoned their menfolk or they went with them to the killing fields. If they hid their husbands they faced the routine perils of being a single women in unsettled times, aggravated by the risk that they could be sexually exploited by men hunting for Jews.¹⁰⁷

Kharkov fell in late October. Immediately on taking the city German soldiers started looting Jewish homes. They were especially keen on clothing, probably because they were already feeling the cold and had no winter wear. Only half of the city’s 20,000 Jews remained and were duly registered. When Soviet agents detonated bombs in several buildings, about 1,000 Jews were executed as a reprisal. During late December a ghetto was set up in a former factory but it was short-lived. Engineer Krivoruchko obeyed the order to go to the ghetto, trudging alongside the other Jews through the snow, robbed and beaten along the way. There was no food or even water in the buildings assigned to them so they had to drink melted ice. ‘Robbery and murder were daily occurrences’, he later testified. ‘Usually, the Germans would burst into the room on the pretext of searching for weapons and steal anything that came to mind. In the event of resistance they dragged people out into the yard and shot them.’ The starving Jews were easy prey when the Germans announced that they would be resettled. Hundreds left each day in trucks, but they got no further than pits beyond the city limits. Eventually Krivoruchko, too, was ordered out. At the end of the short journey he saw a ravine ‘sealed off by a double row of sentries. On the edge of the ravine stood a truck with machine guns.’ The people he was with panicked but the Germans clubbed them into the ravine and forced them to undress. Then they were machine-gunned. Krivoruchko saved himself by hopping back into a truck while the Germans were distracted and hiding under a tarpaulin. Back in the city he was concealed by his non-Jewish wife.¹⁰⁸

Mariupol on the coast surrendered before its 10,500 Jews could get away. In early October, Sara Gleykh, a Jewish schoolgirl, began a diary of the subsequent events. The Germans plundered the city as soon as they were inside, seeking out food because they were at the end of their supplies. As usual, the Jews were registered and at the same time dispossessed of their valuables. On 20 October the Germans announced that all Jews would have to leave, but they got no further than ditches near an agricultural station a few miles away. When her turn came to undress and go into the pit, it was so full that Sara only had to step out onto the carcasses – one of whom she recognized as her mother. She screamed at the sight and lost consciousness. When she came to, it was dusk and she was covered with bodies, some still quivering with life. After the killers departed she dug herself out. She could hear Jews deeper beneath the mass of corpses still alive and unable to escape, but she could do nothing for them. ‘When I had crawled out, I looked around: the wounded were writhing, groaning, attempting to get up and falling again.’ A badly injured man told her and another girl to flee. ‘The two of us, undressed except for our slips, and smeared with blood from head to toe, set off to seek refuge for the night.’ They sought help at several dwellings but were repeatedly driven away. Eventually some kindly peasants gave them clothes and they started walking across the steppes. After days of wandering they reached a Red Army outpost.¹⁰⁹

The bloodbath went on and on. Einsatzkommando 11a carried the tide of death down into the Crimea where, under the protective carapace of Manstein’s 11th Army, they murdered 12,000 Jews in Simferopol, 2,000 in Yalta and 7,000 in Kerch. There was momentary confusion over whether the Krimchaks, converts to Judaism, and the Karaites, Jews who followed the Torah but rejected rabbinic Judaism, were really Jewish, but clarification soon arrived from Berlin. In a peculiar inversion of racial logic, the Krimchaks were slaughtered while the Karaites were spared. The 17,000 Jews living on collective farms that had been set up and funded by the American Jewish Agro-Joint project were all murdered, too.¹¹⁰