Bloodlands (35 page)

In fact, local Soviet elites fled to the east; and the more elite such people were, the more likely they were to have been evacuated or to have had the resources to arrange their own escape. The country was vast, and Hitler had no ally invading on another vector who might be able to capture such people. German policies of mass murder could affect the Soviet leadership only in the lands that were actually conquered: Ukraine, Belarus, the Baltic States, and a very thin wedge of Russia. This was not very much of the Soviet Union, and the people in question were not of critical importance to the Soviet system. People were shot, but with only minimal consequences for the Soviet state. Most Wehrmacht units seemed to have little difficulty in obeying the “commissar order”; eighty percent of them reported having executed commissars. The military archives preserve the records of 2,252 shootings of such people by the army; the actual number was probably greater .
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Shooting civilians was mainly the task of the Einsatzgruppen, one that they had already performed in Poland in 1939. As in Poland, the Einsatzgruppen were assigned to murder certain political groups so that the state would collapse. Four Einsatzgruppen followed the Wehrmacht into the Soviet Union: Einsatzgruppe A following Army Group North into the Baltics toward Leningrad, Einsatzgruppe B following Army Group Center through Belarus toward Moscow, Einsatzgruppe C following Army Group South into Ukraine, and Einsatzgruppe D following the 11th Army in the extreme south of Ukraine. As Heydrich clarified
in a telegram of 2 July 1941, after having issued the relevant orders orally, the Einsatzgruppen were to kill communist functionaries, Jews in party and state positions, and other “dangerous elements.” As with the Hunger Plan, so with the elimination of people defined as political threats: those in confinement were most vulnerable. By mid-July the orders had come through to carry out mass murder by shooting in the Stalags and Dulags. On 8 September 1941 Einsatzkommandos were ordered to make “selections” of the prisoners of war, executing state and party functionaries, political commissars, intellectuals, and Jews. In October the army high command gave the Einsatzkommandos and the Security Police unrestricted access to the camps.
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The Einsatzkommandos could not screen the Soviet prisoners of war very carefully. They would interrogate Soviet prisoners of war in their holding pens, immediately after they were taken. They would ask commissars, communists, and Jews to step forward. Then they would take them away, shoot them, and throw them into pits. They had few interpreters, and these tended to remember the selections as being somewhat random. The Germans had imprecise notions of the ranks and insignia of the Red Army, and initially mistook buglers for political officers. They knew that officers were allowed to wear their hair longer than enlisted men, but this was an uncertain indicator. It had been some time since most of these men had seen a barber. The only group that could easily be identified at this point were male Jews; German guards examined penises for circumcision. Very occasionally Jews survived by claiming to be circumcised Muslims; more often circumcised Muslims were shot as Jews. German doctors seem to have collaborated willingly in this procedure; medicine was a highly nazified profession. As a doctor at the camp at Khorol recalled: “For every officer and soldier it was, in those times, the most natural thing that every Jew was shot to death.” At least fifty thousand Soviet Jews were shot after selection, and about fifty thousand non-Jews as well.
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The German prisoner-of-war camps in the East were far deadlier than the German concentration camps. Indeed, the existing concentration camps changed their character upon contact with prisoners of war. Dachau, Buchenwald, Sachsenhausen, Mauthausen, and Auschwitz became, as the SS used them to execute Soviet prisoners of war, killing facilities. Some eight thousand Soviet prisoners were executed at Auschwitz, ten thousand at Mauthausen, eighteen thousand at Sachsenhausen. At Buchenwald in November 1941, the SS arranged a method
of mass murder of Soviet prisoners that strikingly resembled Soviet methods in the Great Terror, though exhibiting greater duplicity and sophistication. Prisoners were led into a room in the middle of a stable, where the surroundings were rather loud. They found themselves in what seemed to be a clinical examination room, surrounded by men in white coats—SS-men, pretending to be doctors. They would have the prisoner stand against the wall at a certain place, supposedly to measure his height. Running through the wall was a vertical slit, which the prisoner’s neck would cover. In an adjoining room was another SS-man with a pistol. When he saw the neck through the slit, he would fire. The corpse would then be thrown into a third room, the “examination room,” be quickly cleaned, and the next prisoner invited inside. Batches of thirty-five to forty corpses would be taken by truck to a crematorium: a technical advance over Soviet practices.
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The Germans shot, on a conservative estimate, half a million Soviet prisoners of war. By way of starvation or mistreatment during transit, they killed about 2.6 million more. All in all, perhaps 3.1 million Soviet prisoners of war were killed. The brutality did not bring down the Soviet order; if anything, it strengthened Soviet morale. The screening of political officers, communists, and Jews was pointless. Killing such people, already in captivity, did not much weaken the Soviet state. In fact, the policies of starvation and screening stiffened the resistance of the Red Army. If soldiers knew that they would starve in agony as German captives, they were certainly more likely to fight. If communists and Jews and political officers knew that they would be shot, they too had little reason to give in. As knowledge of German policies spread, Soviet citizens began to think that Soviet power was perhaps the preferable alternative.
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As the war continued into November 1941, and more and more German soldiers died at the front and had to be replaced by conscripts from Germany, Hitler and Göring realized that some prisoners of war would be needed as labor inside the Reich. On 7 November Göring gave the order for positive selections (for labor). By the end of the war more than a million Soviet prisoners of war were working in Germany. Mistreatment and hunger were not easily overcome. As a sympathetic German observer noted: “Of the millions of prisoners only a few thousand are capable of work. Unbelievably many of them have died, many have typhus, and the rest are so weak and wretched that they are in no condition to work.” Some four hundred thousand prisoners sent to Germany died .
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By the terms of the German plans, the invasion of the Soviet Union was an utter fiasco. Operation Barbarossa was supposed to bring a “lightning victory”; in late autumn 1941, no victory was in sight. The invasion of the Soviet Union was supposed to resolve all economic problems, which it did not. In the end, occupied Belgium (for example) was of greater economic value to Nazi Germany. The Soviet population was supposed to be cleared; in the event, the most important economic input from the Soviet Union was labor. The conquered Soviet Union was also supposed to provide the space for a “Final Solution” to what the Nazis regarded as the Jewish problem. Jews were supposed to be worked to death in the Soviet Union, or sent across the Ural Mountains, or exiled to the Gulag. The Soviet Union’s self-defense in summer 1941 had made yet another iteration of the Final Solution impossible.
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By late 1941 the Nazi leadership had already considered, and been forced to abandon, four distinct versions of the Final Solution. The Lublin plan for a reservation in eastern Poland failed by November 1939 because the General Government was too close and too complicated; the consensual Soviet plan by February 1940 because Stalin was not interested in Jewish emigration; the Madagascar plan by August 1940 because first Poland and then Britain fought instead of cooperating; and now the coercive Soviet plan by November 1941 because the Germans had not destroyed the Soviet state. Though the invasion of the USSR provided no “solution,” it certainly exacerbated the Jewish “problem.” Germany’s eastern zone of conquest was now essentially identical with the part of the world most densely inhabited by Jews. In occupying Poland, the Baltics, and the western Soviet Union, the Germans had taken control of the most important traditional homeland of European Jews. About five million Jews now lived under German rule. With the exception of the late Russian Empire, no polity in history had ever ruled so many Jews as Germany did in 1941.
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The fate of some of the Soviet prisoners who were released from camps in the east suggested what was to come for the Jews. At Auschwitz in early September 1941, hundreds of Soviet prisoners were gassed with hydrogen cyanide, a pesticide (trade name Zyklon B) that had been used previously to fumigate the barracks of the Polish prisoners in the camp. Later, about a million Jews would be asphyxiated by Zyklon B at Auschwitz. At about the same time, other Soviet prisoners of war were used to test a gas van at Sachsenhausen. It pumped
its own exhaust into its hold, thereby asphyxiating by carbon monoxide the people locked inside. That same autumn, gas vans would be used to kill Jews in occupied Soviet Belarus and occupied Soviet Ukraine. As of December 1941, carbon monoxide would also be used, in a parked gas van at Chełmno, to kill Polish Jews in lands annexed to Germany.
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From among the terrorized and starving population of the prisoner-of-war camps, the Germans recruited no fewer than a million men for duties with the army and the police. At first, the idea was that they would help the Germans to control the territory of the Soviet Union after its government fell. When that did not happen, these Soviet citizens were assigned to assist in the mass crimes that Hitler and his associates pursued on occupied territory as the war continued. Many former prisoners were given shovels and ordered to dig trenches, over which the Germans would shoot Jews. Others were recruited for police formations, which were used to hunt down Jews. Some prisoners were sent to a training camp in Trawniki, where they learned to be guards. These Soviet citizens and war veterans, retrained to serve Nazi Germany, would spend 1942 in three death facilities in occupied Poland, Treblinka, Sobibór, and Bełżec, where more than a million Polish Jews would be gassed.
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Thus some of the survivors of one German killing policy became accomplices in another, as a war to destroy the Soviet Union became a war to murder the Jews.

Hitler’s utopias crumbled upon contact with the Soviet Union, but they were refashioned rather than rejected. He was the Leader, and his henchmen owed their positions to their ability to divine and realize his will. When that will met resistance, as on the eastern front in the second half of 1941, the task of men such as Göring, Himmler, and Heydrich was to rearrange Hitler’s ideas such that Hitler’s genius was affirmed—along with their own positions in the Nazi regime. The utopias in summer 1941 had been four: a lightning victory that would destroy the Soviet Union in weeks; a Hunger Plan that would starve thirty million people in months; a Final Solution that would eliminate European Jews after the war; and a Generalplan Ost that would make of the western Soviet Union a German colony. Six months after Operation Barbarossa was launched, Hitler had reformulated the war aims such that the physical extermination of the Jews became the priority. By then, his closest associates had taken the ideological and administrative initiatives necessary to realize such a wish.
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No lightning victory came. Although millions of Soviet citizens were starved, the Hunger Plan proved impossible. Generalplan Ost, or any variant of postwar colonization plans, would have to wait. As these utopias waned, political futures depended upon the extraction of what was feasible from the fantasies. Göring, Himmler, and Heydrich scrambled amidst the moving ruins, claiming what they could. Göring, charged with economics and the Hunger Plan, fared worst. Regarded as “the second man in the Reich” and as Hitler’s successor, Göring remained immensely prominent in Germany, but played an ever smaller role in
the East. As economics became less a matter of grand planning for the postwar period and more a matter of improvising to continue the war, Göring lost his leading position to Albert Speer. Unlike Göring, Heydrich and Himmler were able to turn the unfavorable battlefield situation to their advantage, by reformulating the Final Solution so that it could be carried out during a war that was not going according to plan. They understood that the war was becoming, as Hitler began to say in August 1941, a “war against the Jews.”
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Himmler and Heydrich saw the elimination of the Jews as their task. On 31 July 1941 Heydrich secured the formal authority from Göring to formulate the Final Solution. This still involved the coordination of prior deportation schemes with Heydrich’s plan of working the Jews to death in the conquered Soviet East. By November 1941, when Heydrich tried to schedule a meeting at Wannsee to coordinate the Final Solution, he still had such a vision in mind. Jews who could not work would be made to disappear. Jews capable of physical labor would work somewhere in the conquered Soviet Union until they died. Heydrich represented a broad consensus in the German government, though his was not an especially timely plan. The Ministry for the East, which oversaw the civilian occupation authorities established in September, took for granted that the Jews would disappear. Its head, Alfred Rosenberg, spoke in November of the “biological eradication of Jewry in Europe.” This would be achieved by sending the Jews across the Ural Mountains, Europe’s eastern boundary. But by November 1941 a certain vagueness had descended upon Heydrich’s vision of enslavement and deportation, since Germany had not destroyed the Soviet Union and Stalin still controlled the vast majority of its territory.
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