Otto ohlendorf, who at thirty-three became an S.S. Major General, and at forty was condemned to death at Nuremberg, was to many the image of what a good German should be. This is not the view of a prejudiced non-German: it was the view of those women spectators at his trial who sent flowers to his cell, so moved were they by his appearance and bearing. They did this in the knowledge that two years earlier, also at Nuremberg, where he was a witness for the prosecution of the S.D., he had confessed to the murder of over ninety thousand men, women, and children.
We have mentioned Ohlendorf’s killings before; but it should not be thought that he was a unique figure. He was simply for a period the commander of Action Group D, one of Heydrich’s four Action Groups operating in Russia, which, in the words of the Nuremberg prosecutor, “totaling not more than three thousand men, killed at least one million human beings in approximately two years’ time.” To understand the operations of the Gestapo and the S.D. it is necessary to explore the activities of their Action Groups, and Ohlendorf was the only commander of one of these organizations who was brought to trial at Nuremberg. Group A, which operated in the Baltic Provinces and the Leningrad Front, was commanded by Franz Stah-lecker, who had been head of Section VIA of the R.S.H.A. (S.D. foreign intelligence) before Schellenberg, and who was killed by Estonian partisans. Group B, which operated in White Russia and behind the Moscow front, was commanded by Artur Nebe, the friend of Gisevius, the intriguer against Diels in the early days of the Prinz Albrecht Strasse, the idealist, who vanished, supposedly shot by Kalten-brunner’s men after the attempt on Hitler on July 20th, 1944. Group C, which operated in the Ukraine, was commanded by Otto Rasch, formerly Inspector of Security Police (IdS) for Koenigsberg, who, suffering from Parkinson’s disease, was declared unfit to plead at Nuremberg.
Among the subordinates of these men and their successors a number were brought to trial at Nuremberg; but Ohlendorf is our only specimen of a Group Commander. Like the others, he went straight from an office desk in Berlin to take command of an almost unbelievable collection of scallywags, ranging from failed intellectuals to simple brutes, who roamed the torn and ravaged Russian landscape looking for people to kill—Jews, gypsies, Communists (they had the list of the S.D. to work on). Exactly what went on in their minds we can never know. Why did Stahlecker, the head of the whole foreign intelligence section of the R.S.H.A., which was soon, under Schellenberg, to swallow the whole of military intelligence too—why did this inoffensive intellectual put on jackboots and proceed to the Baltic lands to take charge of the massacre of civilians, putting his name to the most appalling reports of organized slaughter it is possible to conceive? The answer appears to be that he wished to ingratiate himself with Heydrich, with whom he was in disfavor. It was also an order. Why did Nebe, the veteran C.I.D. man, who is supposed to have been plotting actively against Hitler, leave his familiar Berlin office and proceed to the Moscow front in charge of a mere nine hundred men? Perhaps because, feeling vulnerable, he wished to prove his zeal? Certainly because the leader of Action Group B was designated the future Police Chief of Moscow. Again, it was an order. Why did Ohlendorf, the young lawyer and economist, who had risen high in the S.D. and come to command, at thirty-three, Section III of the R.S.H.A., which had a monopoly of internal intelligence, follow suit and break off his brilliant career (he resumed it later as an official in the Ministry of Economics)? He gave no reason—other than that it was inconceivable that any subordinate should disobey an order.
We always come back to obedience: Befehl ist Befehl. And it counted for a very great deal. How much, will have to be considered later. But not for everything. Because the pattern of total obedience is spoiled by the example of Otto Rasch of Action Group C, the man who could not plead at Nuremberg. In an affidavit he declared that it was not until the end of August, 1941, two months after starting operations, that he fully understood what he was required by Hitler to do. And then he jibbed. After some false starts he did at last succeed in getting free of the whole apparatus of the Security Police and in the end, in spite of tempting offers, settled down as Mayor of Wuert-temburg and a company director. He proved—and he was not alone in this—that it was possible not to obey Heydrich—and to survive. The general idea of the Nuremberg defense was that if one disobeyed one was shot. Ohlendorf obeyed. Stahlecker in one of his massacre reports added the following remark: “It should be mentioned that the leaders of the Waffen S.S. and of the uniformed police, who were now on the reserve, have declared their wish to stay with the Security Police and the S.D.”
The testimony of Ohlendorf was valuable because it went a long way to establish the relationship of the Action Group with the Reichswehr. It established that the Army knew what the Action Groups were doing and provided facilities for them—rations, transport, etc. The instructions were that all Jews as well as the Soviet Political Commissars were to be liquidated. “Since this liquidation took place in the operational area of the Army Group … they had to be ordered to provide support. Moreover, without such instructions to the Army, the activities of the Action Groups would not have been possible.” As far as Ohlendorf’s Group was concerned, the Army was in two minds. It was attached to the Eleventh Army, operating in the extreme South, and on one occasion it received instructions from Army H.Q. that “liquidations were to take place only at a distance of not less than 200 kilometers from the H.Q. of the commanding general” (one hundred twenty-five miles sounds a long way, but it is not far in Russia). On another occasion, however, at Simferopol, “the army command requested the Einsatzkommandos in its area to hasten the liquidations, because famine was threatening and there was a great housing shortage.”
It was also valuable because it confirmed in minute detail and in straightforward and soldierly language the reports of survivors, or less disciplined witnesses, of the manner in which the killings were carried out.
“Do you know,” the Prosecution asked, “how many persons were liquidated by Einsatzgruppe D under your direction?”
“In the year between June, 1941 and June, 1942 the Einsatzkommandos reported ninety thousand people liquidated.”
“Did that include men, women and children?”
“Yes.”
And later, again as question and answer:
“Did you personally supervise mass executions of these individuals?”
“I was present at two mass executions for purposes of inspection.”
“Will you explain to the tribunal in detail how an individual mass execution was carried out?”
“A local Einsatzkommando attempted to collect all the Jews in its area by registering them. This registration was performed by the Jews themselves.”
“On what pretext, if any, were they to be rounded up?”
“On the pretext that they were to be resettled.”
“Will you continue?”
“After the registration the Jews were collected at one place; and from there they were later transported to the place of execution, which was, as a rule, an anti-tank ditch or a natural excavation. The executions were carried out in a military manner, by firing squads under command.”
“In what way were they transported to the place of execution?”
“They were transported to the place of execution in trucks, always only as many as could be executed immediately. In this way it was attempted to keep the span of time from the moment in which the victims knew what was going to happen to them until the time of their actual execution as short as possible.”
“Was that your idea?”
“Yes.”
“And after they were shot what was done with the bodies?”
“The bodies were buried in the anti-tank ditch or excavation.”
“What determination, if any, was made as to whether the persons were actually dead?”
“The unit leaders or the firing-squad commanders had orders to see to this and, if need be, finish them off themselves.”
This young economist from Hohen-Egelson was proud of the orderly, shipshape, and humane manner in which his Commandos carried out their duties. He objected, for example, to what went on in the areas of some of the other Action Groups:
“Some of the unit leaders did not carry out the liquidation in the military manner, but killed the victims singly by shooting them in the back of the neck.”
“And you objected to that procedure?”
“I was against the procedure, yes.”
“For what reason?”
“Because both for the victims and for those who carried out the executions it was, psychologically, an immense burden to bear.”
The burden to bear, the psychological strain, was one of Ohlendorf’s obsessions. This was testified to also by his adjutant, Heinz Schubert. Schubert, twenty-five when he went to Russia straight from the Hitler Jugend, was a descendant of the great composer’s family, and a serious and earnest young man. Speaking particularly of the massacres at Simferopol, he said: “I knew that it was of the greatest importance to Ohlendorf to have the persons who were to be shot killed in the most humane and military manner possible, because otherwise the spiritual strain (seelische Belastung) would have been too great for the execution squad.” And, of course, the strain was there. Himmler, we have seen, was affected by it when he watched the sample massacres at Minsk, and cried aloud when two Jewish women were not killed outright. He told Nebe, who carried out the execution, that more humane means had better be devised, and the answer was the gas van, manufactured by the firm of Saurer in Berlin, and supplied and maintained by Rauff, the transport officer of the R.S.H.A.
But the gas vans, when they arrived in 1942, were to cause Ohlendorf further spiritual burdens. He preferred shooting, and so did his men. The general concept was a plain van so constructed that when the motor was started up “gases were conducted into the van causing death in ten to fifteen minutes.… The vans were loaded with the victims” (Ohlendorf is speaking) “and driven to the place of burial, which was usually the same as that used for the mass executions. The time needed for transportation was sufficient to ensure the death of the victims.” The vans varied in size and could take fifteen to twenty-five people. The reason why Ohlendorf and his subordinates did not like the gas vans was not because they were inhumane—he was sure the victims did not know what was happening to them—but because “the unloading of the corpses was an unnecessary mental strain.” It was less tiresome to stand people on the edge of a ditch and shoot them down and shovel earth over their bodies. But when Ohlendorf was asked what he meant by “an unnecessary mental strain” he replied in terms which indicated quite clearly that the victims were aware of what was happening to them: “As far as I can remember the conditions at that time—the picture presented by the corpses and probably because certain functions of the body had taken place leaving the corpses lying in filth.”
The victims, of course, were aware. We know that from other witnesses. The “death vans” became notorious, and more often than not they failed to work either quickly or humanely. When they were used in a wholesale manner at Chelmno extermination camp in Poland, before Auschwitz got into its stride, there were many complaints from their designer, Lieutenant Becker, of their improper use. Although they added their own flourish to the fantastic world inhabited not only by the Gestapo and the S.D. but by every German soldier and official behind the lines in Russia and Poland, their contribution to the number killed in Russia was really very small.
Ohlendorf was questioned at length about his preference for what he called shooting in the military manner, and in the course of his explanation he threw some official light on the habitual form:
“On the one hand, the aim was that the individual leaders and men should be able to carry out the executions in a military manner acting on orders and should not have to make a decision of their own; it was, to all intents and purposes, an order which they were to carry out. On the other hand, it was known to me that through the emotional excitement of the executions ill-treatment could not be avoided, since the victims discovered too soon that they were to be executed and could not therefore endure prolonged nervous strain. And it seemed intolerable to me that individual leaders and men should in consequence be forced to kill a large number of people on their own decision.”
When questioned as to what he meant by “ill-treatment,” Ohlendorf replied:
“If, for instance, the manner in which the executions were carried out caused excitement and disobedience among the victims, so that the Commandos were forced to restore order by means of violence … if, as I have already said, in order to carry out the liquidation in an orderly fashion it was necessary, for example, to resort to beating.”
It is as well that we have this testimony of the gifted and highly educated commander of Einsatzgruppe D. It prepares us for the impression created by these orderly and humane operations on others.
On October 30th, 1941, the Commissioner of the territory of Slutzk in White Russia wrote to the Commissioner General of Minsk, criticizing the actions of the Einsatzkommandos belonging to Einsatzgruppe B (commanded by our old friend Artur Nebe). Here are excerpts from his letter:
“On October 27th, in the morning at about eight o’clock, a first lieutenant of the Police Battalion Number 11, from Kovno [i.e., an officer of Daluege’s Orpo], Lithuania, appeared and introduced himself as the adjutant of the battalion commander of the Security Police. The first lieutenant explained that the police battalion had received the assignment to effect the liquidation of all Jews here in the town of Slutzk within two days. The battalion commander with his battalion in the strength of four companies, two of which were made up of Lithuanian partisans, was on the march here, and action would have to begin immediately. I replied to the first lieutenant that I had to discuss the action in any case first with the commander. About half an hour later the police battalion arrived in Slutzk. Immediately after the arrival a conference with the battalion commander took place according to my request. I first explained to the commander that it would not very well be possible to effect the action without previous preparation, because everybody had been sent to work and it would lead to terrible confusion. At least it would have been his duty to inform me a day ahead of time. Then I requested him to postpone the action one day. However, he refused this with the remark that he had to carry out this action everywhere in all towns and that only two days were allotted for Slutzk. Within two days the town of Slutzk had by all means to be cleared of Jews.”
That was how it began. It was not one of Ohlendorf’s tidy actions. It took place in the streets of Slutzk. After further preamble the letter continues:
“For the rest, as regards the execution of the action, I must point out, to my deepest regret, that the latter almost bordered on sadism. The town itself during the action offered a picture of horror. With indescribable brutality on the part both of the German police officers and particularly of the Lithuanian partisans, the Jewish people, and also with them White Ruthenians, were taken out of their dwellings and herded together. Everywhere in the town shots were to be heard, and in different streets the corpses of Jews who had been shot accumulated. The White Ruthenians were in the greatest anguish to free themselves from the encirclement. In addition to the fact that the Jewish people, among whom were also artisans, were barbarously maltreated in sight of the White Ruthenian people, the White Ruthenians themselves were also beaten with clubs and rifle butts. It was no longer a question of an action against the Jews. It looked much more like a revolution.…”
It goes on to describe the looting:
“In conclusion I find myself obliged to point out that the police battalion looted in an unheard-of manner during the action and that not only in Jewish houses but equally those of the White Ruthenians. Anything of use, such as boots, leather, cloth, gold, and other valuables was taken away. According to statements of the troops, watches were torn off the arms of Jews openly on the street and rings pulled off their fingers in the most brutal manner. A disbursing officer reported that a Jewish girl was asked by the police to obtain immediately five thousand roubles to have her father released. The girl is actually said to have run about everywhere to obtain the money.”
The outraged official could not bring himself to stop there. He finished up on a burst of indignation:
“I am submitting this report in duplicate so that one copy may be submitted to the Reich Minister. Peace and order cannot be maintained in White Ruthenia with methods of that sort. To have buried alive seriously wounded people, who then worked thier way out of their graves again, is such extreme beastlness that this incident as such must be reported to the Fuehrer and the Reich Marshal.”
This was the impression made on a German official, who had already in the nature of his job seen many dreadful things, who was prepared to see the Jews of Slutzk completely liquidated provided he had a day’s warning to organize the affair in an orderly manner, but who, nevertheless, was so shocked and affronted by the reality that, after brooding about it for three days, he still could not overcome his indignation and, taking his courage in both hands, laid bare his heart to his Fuehrer, via Goering. He was an innocent, of course. The Fuehrer had ordered that these people should be killed, and did not care how.
The Commissioner of Slutzk seems to have sat in his office and listened to the shots and heard the reports brought in by his men and the troops. We now turn to the report of another German, a civilian, an engineer belonging to the building firm of Joseph Jung, who managed the branch office at Sdolbunov in the Ukraine. He was responsible, amongst other things, for a building site in Rovno, where, during the night of July 13th, 1942, all the Jews, about five thousand of them, were liquidated. Engineer Hermann Graebe was an interested party because a number of the Jews living in the Rovno ghetto were his employees. He had heard rumors of a forthcoming action against them, and had marched his Jews out of harm’s way. Then the rumors had been officially denied by S.S. Major Puetz, commanding the Rovno Security Police and S.D. But later it was admitted, and, after a great deal of bargaining, Engineer Graebe managed to obtain a written paper, officially stamped by the Rovno Area Commissioner, that his hundred worker Jews should be spared. This is what Engineer Graebe saw, as described in his Nuremberg affidavit:
“On the evening of this day I drove to Rovno and posted myself with Fritz Einsporn [his foreman] in front of the house in the Bahnhofstrasse in which the Jewish workers of my firm slept. Shortly after ten p.m. the ghetto was encircled by a large S.S. detachment and about three times as many members of the Ukrainian militia. Then the electric arc lights which had been erected in and around the ghetto were switched on. S.S. and militia squads of four to six men entered or at least tried to enter the houses. Where the doors and windows were closed and the inhabitants did not open at the knocking, the S.S. men and militia broke the windows, forced the doors with beams and crowbars, and entered the houses. The people living there were driven on to the street just as they were, regardless of whether they were dressed or in bed. Since the Jews in most cases refused to leave their houses and resisted, the S.S. and militia applied force. They finally succeeded, with strokes of the whip, kicks, and blows from rifle butts, in clearing the houses. The people were driven out of their houses in such haste that small children in bed had been left behind in several instances. In the streets women cried out for their children and children for their parents. That did not prevent the S.S. from driving the people along the road at running pace, and hitting them, until they reached a waiting freight train. Car after car was filled, and the screaming of women and children and the cracking of whips and rifle shots resounded unceasingly. Since several families or groups had barricaded themselves in especially strong buildings and the doors could not be forced with crowbars or beams, the doors were blown open with hand grenades. Since the ghetto was near the railroad tracks in Rovno, the younger people tried to get across the tracks and over a small river to get away from the ghetto area. As this stretch of country was beyond the range of the electric lights, it was illuminated by small rockets. All through the night these beaten, hounded, and wounded people moved along the lighted streets. Women carried their dead children in their arms, children pulled and dragged their dead parents by their arms and legs down the road toward the train.…
“About six o’clock in the morning I went away for a moment leaving behind Einsporn and several other German workers who had returned in the meantime. I thought the greatest danger was past and that I could risk it. Shortly after I left, Ukrainian militia men forced their way into 5 Bahnhofstrasse and brought seven Jews out and took them to a collection point inside the ghetto. On my return I was able to prevent further Jews from being taken out. I went to the collecting point to save these seven men. I saw dozens of corpses of all ages and both sexes in the streets I had to walk along. The doors of the houses stood open, windows were smashed. Pieces of clothing, shoes, stockings, jackets, caps, hats, coats were lying in the street. At the corner of a house lay a baby, less than a year old, with his skull crushed. Blood and brains were spattered over the house wall and covered the area immediately around the child. The child was dressed only in a little shirt. The commander, S.S Major Puetz, was walking up and down a row of about eighty to one hundred male Jews who were crouching on the ground. He had a heavy dog-whip in his hand. I walked up to him, showed him the written permit of Stabsleiter Beck and demanded the seven men whom I recognized among those who were crouching on the ground. Puetz was very furious about Beck’s concession and nothing could persuade him to release the seven men. He made a motion with his hand encircling the square and said that anyone who was here once would not get away. Although he was very angry with Beck, he ordered me to take the people from 5 Bahn-hofstrasse out of Rovno by eight o’clock at the latest. When I felt Puetz, I noticed a Ukrainian farm cart with two horses. Dead people with stiff limbs were lying on the cart. Legs and arms projected over the side boards. The cart was making for the freight train.…”
Engineer Graebe did not follow that freight train to its destination, which was the death pit at Kostopol, so we cannot through his observant eyes follow the five thousand Jews of Rovno (it was, incidentally, Rovno’s second massacre: most of the five thousand did not belong to the place, but had been moved from other parts of Poland to the ghetto for easier handling). But a few months later, on October 5th, 1942, he was able to do the next best thing. He attended a mass execution of very similar people at Dubno in Volhynia, on a disused aerodrome where his firm had a building site. He saw the vans arriving with prisoners, and went to look; and his account, read by Sir Hartley Shawcross in his final speech at Nuremberg, filled even those who for week after week had accustomed themselves to tales of unimaginable horror with an emotion deeper than any they had yet experienced.
“… an old woman with snow-white hair was holding this one-year-old child in her arms and singing and tickling it. The child was cooing with delight. The parents were looking on with tears in their eyes. The father was holding the hand of a boy about ten years old and speaking to him softly; the boy was fighting his tears. The father pointed towards the sky, stroked the boy’s head, and seemed to explain something to him. At that moment the S.S. man at the pit shouted something to his comrade. The latter counted off about twenty persons and instructed them to go behind the earth mound. The family I have described was among them. I well remember the girl, slim and with black hair, who, as she passed me, pointed to herself and said, ‘Twenty-three years old.’
“I then walked around the mound and found myself confronted by a tremendous grave. People were closely wedged together and lying on top of each other so that only their heads were visible. Nearly all had blood running over their shoulders from their heads. Some of the people shot were still moving. Some lifted their arms and turned their heads to show that they were alive. The pit was already two-thirds full. I estimated that it held a thousand people. I looked for the man who did the shooting. He was an S.S. man who sat at the edge of the narrow end of the pit, his feet dangling into it. He had a tommy gun on his knees and was smoking a cigarette. The people—they were completely naked—went down some steps which were cut in the clay wall of the pit and clambered over the heads of those who were lying there to the place to which the S.S. man directed them. They lay down in front of the dead and wounded. Some caressed the living and spoke to them in a low voice. Then I heard a series of shots. I looked into the pit and saw that their bodies still twitched or that their heads lay motionless on top of the other bodies before them. Blood ran from their necks.
“I was surprised that I was not ordered off, but I saw that there were two or three postmen in uniform near by. Already the next batch was approaching. They went down in the pit, lined themselves up against the previous victims and were shot. When I walked back round the mound I noticed that another truckload of people had arrived. This time it included sick and feeble people. An old, terribly thin woman was undressed by others, who were already naked, while two people held her up. The woman appeared to be paralyzed. The naked people carried her round the mound. I left with my foreman and drove in my car back to Dubno.
“On the morning of the next day, when I visited the site, I saw about thirty naked people lying near the pit—about thirty to fifty meters away from it. Some of them were still alive; they looked straight in front of them with a fixed stare and seemed to notice neither the chilliness of the morning nor the workers of my firm who stood around. A girl of about twenty spoke to me and asked me to give her clothes and help her to escape. At that moment we heard a fast car approach and I noticed that it was an S.S. detail. I moved away to my site. Ten minutes later we heard shots from the vicinity of the pit. Those Jews who were still alive had been ordered to throw the corpses into the pit, then they themselves had to lie down in the pit to be shot in the neck.”
Ohlendorf’s shootings in the “military” manner were tidier, but in other respects identical. The people, men, women, and children, were rounded up in their houses, torn forcibly from them, transported to the death-pits, and shot. But Ohlendorf did not make them undress completely.
The Rovno massacre accounted for only five thousand Jews. Between June and October 1941 some three hundred and fifty thousand were killed directly in this manner, perhaps the greatest slaughter of all having taken place at Kiev, where S.S. Major General Franz Jaeckeln, Higher S.S. and Police Leader with the Southern Army Group, forced the pace in a manner usually associated with Heydrich’s young men of the S.D. It was the greatest single massacre, and Einsatzgruppe C reported to Heydrich that thirty-three thousand seven hundred seventy-one Jews had been killed in two days, on September 29th and 30th, on the very outskirts of Kiev in the Babi Yar ravine. The hero of this operation was the commander of Einsatz-kommando 4a, another of Heydrich’s intellectuals, an architect turned into a Colonel of the S.S., Paul Blobel—who, later, when the Germans were retreating, was made Director of Exhumation Activities by Heydrich, whom he had displeased. His job then was to dig up the death-pits and supervise the burning of the corpses, a laborious and unsalubrious task, before the advancing Russians found them. One of the pits he had to exhume was in the Babi Yar ravine, where, at Nuremberg, he admitted to digging up the contents of one pit sixty yards long and more than eight feet deep.
But this is not a history of the massacres in Poland and Western Russia. The reader who wishes to grasp the magnitude of these killings and to acquaint himself with the careers and characters of the individuals who carried them out is referred to Mr. Reitlinger’s sombre and elaborate study of The Final Solution. We are concerned with these terrible events only in so far as they throw light on the nature of the Gestapo and the S.D., and the relationship of the Gestapo and the S.D. with other organizations. It is necessary to show the kind of work they did together.
It may seem that we have come a long way from the Prinz Albrecht Strasse and allowed ourselves to get mixed up with a strange and questionable mob far removed from the pure Gestapo. What were the Lithuanian partisans doing at the massacre at Slutzk? How was it that a civilian Area Commissioner was asked by the Security Police for his help, and afterwards protested to Goering? Why was Engineer Graebe allowed to watch the round-up at Rovno and the massacre at Dubno, when these things were supposed to take place in total secrecy, so that only a handful of Germans knew of them? There are many questions of this kind. How was it, for example, that Higher S.S. and Police Leader Jaeckeln led the massacres at Riga, Kovno, Kiev, and elsewhere—when, according to the defense, Higher S.S. and Police Leaders had no jurisdiction over the Gestapo and the S.D.? And then we have the curious order from Field Marshal von Rundstedt, the dear old, straight-backed, honorable old general who knew nothing about the massacres, like all the other dear old generals:
“Action against Communists and Jews is only to be undertaken by the special commardos of the Security Police and S.D., who carry out such orders on their own responsibility. Participation of members of the Armed. Forces in Ukrainian excesses against the Jewish population is forbidden, also the witnessing and photographing of the measures taken by the special commandos. This order must be made known to the personnel of every unit. All officers and N.C.Os are responsible for carrying it out.”
It all seems very muddled, and indeed it was. We have been at some pains to discover that these massacres were carried out under the leadership of the R.S.H.A.—of the Security Police, that is, and the S.D.—which was strongly denied at Nuremberg. But it is already clear that a great many others were involved as well in actions which the Germans as a nation have firmly maintained were known only to the handful of men who carried them out: the three thousand men of the four Einsatzgruppen.
And those involved were not only Germans. In Einsatzgruppe A Lithuanian mercenaries took to the work with great fervor, and in a short time formed the main elements in Stahlecker’s firing squads. Although they were said to lose their enthusiasm after a time and failed to emulate their German colleagues in plodding, conscientious devotion to duty, this fact about the Lithuanians has to be recorded. Considerable use, also, was made of the indigenous Ukrainian anti-Semitism. At one time certain Germans, Ribbentrop among them, had dreams that the Ukrainians would do all their work for them; but as time went on the Group Commanders found, as the Russians had found before them, that the Ukrainians were unbiddable and that their animal high spirits got in the way of orderly extermination and the compilation of accurate records. There were also the Roumanians, who carried out important massacres of their own, above all in Odessa. They offended the Germans on the spot by not troubling to bury their victims; and they offended the R.S.H.A. by their failure to keep proper records and by their uncontrolled looting. It was above all, however, the volunteers from Lithuania and the Ukraine who provided the mainstay of local help for the hard-pressed Group commanders.
And, indeed, they were hard-pressed. They had immense areas to cover. Stahlecker’s Group was responsible for the extermination of the Jews in a territory half the size of Western Europe. His was the largest Group, certainly; but to set against that, he had the biggest concentrations of Jews, so that he was able to forge ahead of the rival Groups (although Ohlendorf with his ninety thousand in a year protested that he exaggerated). Stahlecker’s elaborately detailed figures for the first four months totaled one hundred thirty-five thousand five hundred sixty-seven, though this figure included nearly four thousand Communists and seven hundred forty-eight lunatics. To cover all this ground he had barely more than a thousand men divided into four commandos, and it took him a very long time to get around the area, until he was given his private airplane.
It is perfectly obvious that his commandos could not operate over these vast distances without assistance from the civil and military authorities. As a rule they received it as their right; only occasionally were the people on the spot obstructive—and then, as a rule, not because they wished to resist the “final solution,” but because they objected to being rushed. Or because they thought such actions were detrimental to the German cause, as indeed they were.