Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin (35 page)

Even had the Soviet prisoners all been healthy and well fed, death rates in winter 1941-1942 would have been high. Despite what many Germans thought, Slavs had no inborn resistance to cold. Unlike the Germans, Soviet soldiers had sometimes been equipped with winter gear; this the Germans stole. The prisoners of war were usually left without shelter and without warm clothing, enduring temperatures far below freezing. As the camps were often in fields, no trees or hills broke the ruthless winter winds. Prisoners would build for themselves, by hand in the hard earth, simple dugouts where they would sleep. At Homel three Soviet soldiers, comrades, tried to keep one another warm by sleeping in a tight group. Each would have a turn sleeping in the middle, in the best spot, taking the warmth of his friends. At least one of the three lived to tell the tale.
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For hundreds of thousands of prisoners of war, this was the second political famine in Ukraine in the space of eight years. Many thousands of soldiers from Soviet Ukraine saw their bellies swell for the second time, or witnessed cannibalism for the second time. No doubt very many survivors of the first mass starvation died in the second one. A few Ukrainians, such as Ivan Shulinskyi, managed to survive both. The son of a deported kulak, he recalled the starvation of 1933, and told people that he came from the “land of hunger.” He would cheer himself in German captivity by singing a traditional Ukrainian song:
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If I only had wings
I would lift myself to the sky
To the clouds
Where there is no pain and no punishment

As during the Soviet starvation campaign of 1933, during the German starvation campaign of 1941 many local people in Ukraine did their best to help the dying. Women would identify men as relatives and thus arrange their release. Young women would marry prisoners who were on labor duty outside the camps. The Germans sometimes allowed this, since it meant that the men would be working in an area under German occupation to produce food for Germans. In the city of Kremenchuk, where the food situation seems not to have been dire, laborers from the camps would leave empty bags in the city when they went to work in the morning, and recover them full of food left by passersby in the evening. In 1941 conditions were favorable for such help, as the harvest was unusually good. Women (the reports are almost always of women) would try to feed the prisoners during the death marches or in the camps. Yet most prisoner-of-war camp commanders, most of the time, prevented civilians from approaching the camps with food. Usually such people were driven away by warning shots. Sometimes they were killed.
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The organization of the camps in the east revealed a contempt for life, the life of Slavs and Asians and Jews anyway, that made such mass starvation thinkable. In German prisoner-of-war camps for Red Army soldiers, the death rate over the course of the war was 57.5 percent. In the first eight months after Operation Barbarossa, it must have been far higher. In German prisoner-of-war camps for soldiers of the western Allies, the death rate was less than five percent. As many Soviet prisoners of war died
on a single given day
in autumn 1941 as did British and American prisoners of war over the course of the entire Second World War.
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Just as the Soviet population could not be starved at will, the Soviet state could not be destroyed in one blow. But the Germans certainly tried. Part of the idea of the “lightning victory” was that the Wehrmacht would cover terrain so quickly that the soldiers, and the trailing Einsatzgruppen, would be able to kill Soviet political elites and Red Army political officers. The official “Guidelines for the Behavior of the Troops in Russia,” issued on 19 May 1941, demanded a “crackdown” on four groups: agitators, partisans, saboteurs, and Jews. The “Guidelines for the Treatment of Political Commissars” of 6 June 1941 specified that captured political officers were to be killed.
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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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