Bloodlands (46 page)

Operation Hermann, named for Hermann Göring, reached the extreme of this economic logic in summer 1943. Between 13 July and 11 August, German battle groups were to choose a territory, kill all of the inhabitants except for promising male labor, take all property that could be moved, and then burn everything left standing. After the labor selections among the local Belarusian and Polish populations, the Belarusian and Polish women, children, and aged
were shot. This operation took place in western Belarus—in lands that had been invaded by the Soviet Union and annexed from Poland in 1939 before the German invasion that followed in 1941.
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Polish partisans were also to be found in these forests, fighters who believed that these lands should be restored to Poland. Thus German anti-partisan actions here were directed against both the Soviet partisans (representing the power that had governed in 1939-1941) and the Polish underground (fighting for Polish independence and territorial integrity with the boundaries of 1918-1939). The Polish forces were part of the Polish Home Army, reporting to the Polish government in exile in London. Poland was one of the Allies, and so in principle Polish and Soviet forces were fighting together against the Germans. But because both the Soviet Union and Poland claimed these lands of western Soviet Belarus (from the Soviet perspective) or northeastern Poland (from the Polish), matters were not so simple in practice. Polish fighters found themselves trapped between lawless Soviet and German forces. Polish civilians were massacred by Soviet partisans when Polish forces did not subordinate themselves to Moscow. In Naliboki on 8 May 1943, for example, Soviet partisans shot 127 Poles.
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Red Army officers invited Home Army officers to negotiate in summer 1943, and then murdered them on the way to the rendezvous points. The commander of the Soviet partisan movement believed that the way to deal with the Home Army was to denounce its men to the Germans, who would then shoot the Poles. Meanwhile, Polish forces were also attacked by the Germans. Polish commanders were in contact with both the Soviets and the Germans at various points, but could make a true alliance with neither: the Polish goal, after all, was to restore an independent Poland within its prewar boundaries. Just how difficult that would be, as Hitler’s power gave way to Stalin’s, was becoming clear in the Belarusian swamps.
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The Germans called the areas cleared of populations in Operation Hermann and the succeeding operations of 1943 “dead zones.” People found in a dead zone were “fair game.” The Wehrmacht’s 45th Security Regiment killed civilians in Operation Easter Bunny of April 1943. Remnants of Einsatzgruppe D, dispatched to Belarus in spring 1943, contributed to this undertaking. They came from southern Russia and southern Ukraine, where the remnants of Army Group South were falling back after the defeat at Stalingrad. The task of
Einstazgruppe D there had been to cover the German retreat by killing civilians wherever resistance had been reported. In Belarus, it was burning down villages where no resistance whatsoever was encountered, after taking whatever livestock it could. Einsatzgruppe D was no longer covering a withdrawal of the Wehrmacht, as it had been further south, but preparing for one.
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The resort to dead zones implied a recognition that Soviet power would soon return to Belarus. Army Group South (much reduced and fighting under other names) was in retreat. Army Group North still besieged Leningrad, pointlessly. Belarus itself was still behind the lines of Army Group Center, but not for long.

 

At various points during the German occupation of Belarus, it did dawn on some German military and civilian leaders that mass terror was failing, and that the Belarusian population had to be rallied by some means other than terror to support German rule if the Red Army was to be defeated. This was impossible. As everywhere in the occupied Soviet Union, the Germans had succeeded in making most people wish for a return of Soviet rule. A German propaganda specialist sent to Belarus reported that there was nothing that he could possibly tell the population.
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The German-backed Russian Popular Army of Liberation (RONA in a Russian abbreviation) was the most dramatic attempt to gain local support. It was led by Bronislav Kaminskii, a Soviet citizen of Russian nationality and Polish and perhaps German descent, who had apparently been sent to a Soviet special settlement in the 1930s. He presented himself as an opponent of collectivization. The Germans permitted him an experiment in local self-government in the town of Lokot, in northwestern Russia. There Kaminskii was placed in charge of anti-partisan operations, and locals were indeed allowed to keep more of the grain that they produced. As the war turned against the Germans, Kaminskii and his entire apparatus were dispatched from Russia to Belarus, where they were supposed to play a similar role. Kaminskii was ordered to fight the Soviet partisans in Belarus, but he and his group could barely protect themselves in their home base. Understandably, the Belarusian locals regarded RONA as foreigners who were taking land while speaking about property rights.
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In 1942 and 1943, Wilhelm Kube, the head of the General Commissariat White Ruthenia, tried to reverse some of the basic principles of German colonialism in the hope of rallying the population to resist the Red Army. He tried
nationality concessions, sponsoring Belarusian schools and organizing various Belarusian advisory councils and militias. In June 1943 he went so far as to undo the collectivization of agriculture, decreeing that Belarusian peasants could own their own land. The policy was doubly absurd: much of the countryside was controlled by the partisans, who killed people who opposed collective farming; and the German army and police, in the meantime, were rejecting property rights in a comparably categorical way, by looting and burning farmsteads, killing farm families, and sending farmers to work as forced laborers in Germany. Since the Germans did not respect the Belarusian peasants’ right to life, peasants found it hard to take seriously the new commitment to private property.
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Even if Kube had somehow succeeded, his policies revealed the impossibility of a German colonization of the East. The Slavs were meant to be starved and displaced; Kube wanted to govern and fight with their help. The collective farm was to be maintained to extract food; Kube proposed to dissolve it and allow Belarusians to farm as they wished. By undoing both Soviet and Nazi policies, Kube was revealing their basic similarity in the countryside. Both Soviet self-colonization and German racial colonization involved purposeful economic exploitation. But because the Germans were more murderous, and because German murders were fresher in the minds of the locals, Soviet power came to seem like the lesser evil, or even like a liberation. The Soviet partisans put an end to Kube’s experiments. He was killed by a bomb that his maid placed under his bed in September 1943.
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In Belarus, more than anywhere else, the Nazi and Soviet systems overlapped and interacted. Its relatively small territory was the site of intensive warfare, partisan campaigning, and mass atrocity. It was the rear area of a German Army Group Center that would do anything to take Moscow, and the target of the Red Army divisions of the Belarusian Front who were planning to return. It was fully controlled by neither the German administration nor the partisans, each of which used terror in the absence of reliable material or moral inducements to loyalty. It was home to one of Europe’s densest populations of Jews, doomed to destruction, but also unusually capable of resistance. It seems likely that more Jews resisted Hitler in Minsk and Belarus than anywhere else—although, with rare exceptions, they could not resist Nazi rule without aiding
Soviet power. Bielski’s and Zorin’s units were the largest Jewish partisan formations in Europe.
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There was no gray area, no liminal zone, no marginal space; none of the comforting clichés of the sociology of mass murder applied. It was black on black. Germans killed Jews as partisans, and many Jews became partisans. The Jews who became partisans were serving the Soviet regime, and were taking part in a Soviet policy to bring down retributions upon civilians. The partisan war in Belarus was a perversely interactive effort of Hitler and Stalin, who each ignored the laws of war and escalated the conflict behind the front lines. Once both Operation Barbarossa and Operation Typhoon had failed, the German position in the rear was doomed. Initial anti-partisan policy, like so much else in German planning, depended upon a quick and total victory. Personnel were sufficient to kill Jews but not to fight partisans. Lacking adequate personnel, the Germans murdered and intimidated. Terror served as a force multiplier, but the forces multiplied were ultimately Stalin’s.

There was a Soviet partisan movement, and the Germans did try to suppress it. Yet German policies, in practice, were little more than mass murder. In one Wehrmacht report, 10,431 partisans were reported shot, but only ninety guns were reported taken. That means that almost all of those killed were in fact civilians. As it inflicted its first fifteen thousand mortal casualties, the Special Commando Dirlewanger lost only ninety-two men—many of them, no doubt, to friendly fire and alcoholic accidents. A ratio such as that was possible only when the victims were unarmed civilians. Under the cover of anti-partisan operations, the Germans murdered Belarusian (or Jewish, or Polish, or Russian) civilians in 5,295 different localities in occupied Soviet Belarus. Several hundred of these villages and towns were burned to the ground. All in all, the Germans killed about 350,000 people in their anti-partisan campaign, at the very least ninety percent of them unarmed. The Germans killed half a million Jews in Belarus, including thirty thousand during the anti-partisan operations. It was unclear just how these thirty thousand people were to be counted: as Jews killed in the Final Solution, or as Belarusian civilians killed in anti-partisan reprisals? The Germans themselves often failed to make the distinction, for very practical reasons. As one German commander confided to his diary, “The bandits and Jews burned in houses and bunkers were not counted.”
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Of the nine million people who were on the territory of Soviet Belarus in 1941, some 1.6 million were killed by the Germans in actions away from battlefields,
including about 700,000 prisoners of war, 500,000 Jews, and 320,000 people counted as partisans (the vast majority of whom were unarmed civilians). These three general campaigns constituted the three greatest German atrocities in eastern Europe, and together they struck Belarus with the greatest force and malice. Another several hundred thousand inhabitants of Soviet Belarus were killed in action as soldiers of the Red Army.
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The Soviet partisans also contributed to the total number of fatalities. They reported killing 17,431 people as traitors on the terrain of Soviet Belarus by 1 January 1944; this figure does not include civilians whom they killed for other reasons, or civilians whom they killed in the following months. In all, tens of thousands of people in Belarus were killed by the partisans in their own retribution actions (or, in the western regions taken from Poland, as class enemies). A few more tens of thousands of people native to the region certainly died after arrests during the Soviet occupation of 1939-1941 and especially during the Soviet deportations of 1940 and 1941, during the journey or in Kazakhstan.
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A rough estimate of two million total mortal losses on the territory of present-day Belarus during the Second World War seems reasonable and conservative. More than a million other people fled the Germans, and another two million were deported as forced labor or removed from their original residence for another reason. Beginning in 1944, the Soviets deported a quarter million more people to Poland and tens of thousands more to the Gulag. By the end of the war, half the population of Belarus had either been killed or moved. This cannot be said of any other European country.
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The Germans intended worse than they achieved. The starvation of prisoners of war at Stalag 352 in Minsk and other prisoner-of-war camps was only a fraction of the deaths foreseen by the Hunger Plan. The clearings of peasants were on a smaller scale than the massive depopulation of Belarus envisaged by Generalplan Ost. About a million Belarusians were exploited as forced labor, though not always worked to death as envisaged by Generalplan Ost. Mahileu, where the mass extermination of urban Jews began and where the anti-partisan clinic was held, was supposed to become a large killing facility. It did not; it seems that the crematoria ordered by the SS for Mahileu ended up in Auschwitz. Minsk, too, was to be the site of a killing facility, with its own crematoria. Once the work of killing was completed, Minsk itself was to be leveled. Wilhelm Kube imagined replacing the city with a German settlement named Asgard, after the mythical home of the Norse gods.
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