Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin (45 page)

By spring 1942 the Jews of Minsk were coming to see the forest as less dangerous than the ghetto. Hersh Smolar himself was forced to leave the ghetto for the partisans. Of the ten thousand or so Minsk Jews who found Soviet partisan units, perhaps half survived the war. Smolar was among the survivors. Yet partisans did not necessarily welcome Jews. Partisan units were meant to defeat the German occupation, not to help civilians endure it. Jews who lacked arms were often turned away, as were women and children. Even armed Jewish men were sometimes rejected or even, in some cases, killed for their weapons. Partisan leaders feared that Jews from ghettos were German spies, an accusation that was not as absurd as it might appear. The Germans would indeed seize wives and children, and then tell Jewish husbands to go to the forest and return with information if they wished to see their families again.
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The situation of Jews in the forests slowly improved over the course of 1942, as some Jews formed their own partisan units, a development that the Central Staff of the Partisan Movement eventually sanctioned. Israel Lapidus formed a unit of some fifty men. Sholem Zorin’s 106th Detachment counted ten times as many, and raided the Minsk ghetto to rescue Jews. In individual cases Soviet partisan units provided diversions that allowed Jews to escape from the ghetto. In one case, partisans attacked a German unit on its way to liquidate a ghetto. Oswald Rufeisen, a Jew who worked as a translator for the German police in the town of Mir, smuggled weapons into that ghetto, and warned its inhabitants when the liquidation was ordered.
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Tuvia Bielski, also a Jew, probably rescued more Jews than any other partisan leader. His special gift was to understand the perils of partisan warfare between Stalin and Hitler. Bielski hailed from western Belarus, which is to say from the part of northeastern Poland that the Soviets had annexed in 1939 and then lost to the Germans in 1941. He had served in the Polish Army, and thus had some military training. He and his family knew the woods well, probably because they were small-time smugglers. Yet his tactical sense was not reducible to any particular experience. On the one hand, he understood his goal as rescuing Jews rather than killing Germans. He and his men generally tried to avoid combat. “Don’t rush to fight and die,” he would say. “So few of us are left, we have to save lives. To save a Jew is much more important than to kill Germans.” On the other hand, he was able to work with Soviet partisans, when they appeared, even though their task precisely was to kill Germans. Although his mobile camp was largely composed of women and children, he was able to secure recognition of his status as a partisan leader from the Soviets. By rescuing rather than resisting, Bielski saved more than one thousand people.
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Bielski was an anomaly within a Soviet partisan movement that was ever larger and ever more subordinate to Moscow. When 1942 began, there were (by Soviet reckonings) perhaps twenty-three thousand partisans in Belarus; the number probably doubled by the time that the Central Staff was established in May, and doubled again by the end of the year. Partisans in 1941 had scarcely been able to keep themselves alive; in 1942 they were able to attain specific objectives of military and political value. They laid mines and destroyed railroad tracks and locomotives. They were supposed to keep food from the Germans, and to destroy the German administration. In practice the safest way to attack the German occupation structure was to murder unarmed participants in the civilian administration: small-town mayors, schoolteachers, landowners, and their families. This was not an excess, this was the official policy of the Soviet partisan movement through November 1942. Partisans sought to gain full control of territories, which they called “partisan republics.”
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Partisan operations, effective as they sometimes were, brought inevitable destruction to the Belarusian civilian population, Jewish and gentile alike. When the Soviet partisans prevented peasants from giving food to the Germans, they all but guaranteed that the Germans would kill the peasants. A Soviet gun threatened a peasant, and then a German gun killed him. Once the Germans believed that they had lost control of a given village to the partisans, they would simply torch houses and fields. If they could not reliably get grain, they could keep it from the Soviets by seeing that it was never harvested. When Soviet partisans sabotaged trains, they were in effect ensuring that the population near the site would be exterminated. When Soviet partisans laid mines, they knew that some would detonate under the bodies of Soviet citizens. The Germans swept mines by forcing locals, Belarusians and Jews, to walk hand in hand over minefields. In general, such loss of human life was of little concern to the Soviet leadership. The people who died had been under German occupation, and were therefore suspect and perhaps even more expendable than the average Soviet citizen. German reprisals also ensured that the ranks of the partisans swelled, as survivors often had no home, no livelihood, and no family to which to return.
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The Soviet leadership was not especially concerned with the plight of Jews. After November 1941 Stalin never singled out the Jews as victims of Hitler. Some partisan commanders did try to protect Jews. But the Soviets, like the Americans or the British, seem not to have seriously contemplated direct military action to rescue Jews. The logic of the Soviet system was always to resist independent initiatives and to value human life very cheaply. Jews in ghettos were aiding the German war effort as forced laborers, so their death over pits was of little concern to authorities in Moscow. Jews who were not aiding but hindering the Germans were showing signs of a dangerous capacity for initiative, and might later resist the reimposition of Soviet rule. By Stalinist logic, Jews were suspect either way: if they remained in the ghetto and worked for the Germans, or if they left the ghetto and showed a capacity for independent action. The previous hesitation of local Minsk communists turned out to be justified: their resistance organization was treated as a front of the Gestapo by the Central Staff of the Partisan Movement in Moscow. The people who rescued Minsk Jews and supplied Soviet partisans were labeled a tool of Hitler.
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Jewish men who did make it into the partisans “already felt liberated,” as Lev Kravets recalled. Jewish women generally had a more difficult time. In partisan units the standard form of address to girls and women was “whore,” and women usually had no choice but to seek a protector. This is perhaps what Rosa Gerassimova, who survived with the partisans, meant when she recalled that “life was actually unbearable, but the partisans did rescue me.” Some partisan commanders, Jews and non-Jews, did try to protect “family camps” for women and children and the elderly. Children who had the good luck to be in family camps played a version of hide-and-seek, in which Germans hunted Jews who were protected by partisans. This was true in their case; yet while the partisans saved some thirty thousand Jews, it is unclear whether their actions on balance provoked or prevented the killing of Jews. Partisan warfare behind the lines drew German police and military power away from the front and to the hinterland, where policemen and soldiers almost always found it easier to kill Jews than to hunt down and engage partisans.
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In the second half of 1942, German anti-partisan operations were all but indistinguishable from the mass murder of Jews. Hitler ordered on 18 August 1942 that partisans in Belarus be “exterminated” by the end of the year. It was already understood that the Jews were to be killed by the same deadline. The euphemism “special treatment,” meaning shooting, appears in reports about both Jews and Belarusian civilians. The logic for the two undertakings was circular but nevertheless somehow compelling: Jews were initially to be killed “as partisans” in 1941, when there were not yet any truly threatening partisan formations; then once there were such partisan formations, in 1942, villagers associated with them were to be destroyed “like Jews.” The equivalence between Jews and partisans was emphasized over and over again, in a downward cycle of rhetoric that could end only when both groups were simply gone.
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By the middle of 1942, the number of Jews was in rapid decline, but the number of partisans was in rapid ascent. This had no effect on Nazi reasoning, except to make the methods for dealing with Belarusian civilians ever more similar to the methods of dealing with Jews. As partisans became difficult to target because they were too powerful, and as Jews became difficult to target because they were too scarce, the Germans subjected the non-Jewish Belarusian population to ever more extraordinary waves of killing. From the perspective of the German police, the Final Solution and the anti-partisan campaigns blurred together.

To take a single example: on 22 and 23 September 1942, Order Police Battalion 310 was dispatched to destroy three villages for ostensible connections to the partisans. At the first village, Borki, the police apprehended the entire population, marched the men, women, and children seven hundred meters, and then handed out shovels so that people could dig their own graves. The policemen shot the Belarusian peasants without a break from 9:00 in the morning until 6:00 in the evening, killing 203 men, 372 women, and 130 children. The Order Police spared 104 people classified as “reliable,” although it is hard to imagine how they could have remained so after this spectacle. The battalion reached the next village, Zabloitse, at 2:00 in the morning, and surrounded it at 5:30. They forced all of the inhabitants into the local school, and then shot 284 men, women, and children. At the third village, Borysovka, the battalion reported killing 169 men, women, and children. Four weeks later, the battalion was assigned to liquidate Jews at a work camp. When they killed 461 Jews on 21 October, they used very similar methods: the only difference was that there was no need to surprise the population, since it was already under guard in the camp.
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Despite new offensives, the “war” against the Jews was the only one that the Germans were winning in 1942. Army Group North continued the siege of Leningrad. Army Group Center made no progress toward Moscow. Army Group South was supposed to secure the Volga River and the oil supplies of the Caucasus. Some of its forces reached the Volga in August 1942, but were unable to take Stalingrad. German troops did race through southern Russia into the Caucasus, but were unable to control the crucial areas by winter. This would be the last major German offensive in the eastern front. By the end of 1942 the Germans had killed at least 208,089 Jews in Belarus. Killing Jewish civilians did nothing, however, to hinder the Red Army, or even to slow the partisans.
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Lacking personnel in the rear and needing to keep troops at the front, the Germans tried in autumn 1942 to make anti-partisan warfare more efficient. Himmler named Bach, the local Higher SS and Police Leader, chief of anti-partisan warfare in the areas under civilian authority. In practice the responsibility fell upon his deputy, Curt von Gottberg, a drunk whose SS career had been rescued by Himmler. Gottberg suffered no war injuries but had lost part of a leg (and his SS commission) by driving his automobile into a fruit tree. Himmler paid for the prosthetic leg and had Gottberg reinstated. The assignment to Belarus was a chance to prove his manhood, which he seized. After only one month of police training he formed his own Battle Group, which was active from November 1942 through November 1943. In their first five months of campaigning, the men of his Battle Group reported killing 9,432 “partisans,” 12,946 “partisan suspects,” and about 11,000 Jews. In other words, the Battle Group shot an average of two hundred people every day, almost all of them civilians.
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The unit responsible for more atrocities than any other was the SS Special Commando Dirlewanger, which had arrived in Belarus in February 1942. In Belarus and indeed in all the theaters of the Second World War, few could compete in cruelty with Oskar Dirlewanger. He was an alcoholic and drug addict, prone to violence. He had fought in the German right-wing militias after the First World War, and spent the early 1920s tormenting communists and writing a doctoral dissertation on planned economics. He joined the Nazi party in 1923, but jeopardized his political future by traffic accidents and sexual liaisons with an underage girl. In March 1940 Himmler placed him in charge of a special Poachers’ Brigade, a unit made up of criminals imprisoned for hunting on the property of others. Some Nazi leaders romanticized these men, seeing them as pure primitive German types, resisting the tyranny of the law. The hunters were first assigned to Lublin, where the unit was strengthened by other criminals, including murderers and the clinically insane. In Belarus, Dirlewanger and his hunters did engage partisans. Yet more often they killed civilians whose villages were in the wrong place. Dirlewanger’s preferred method was to herd the local population inside a barn, set the barn on fire, and then shoot with machine guns anyone who tried to escape. The SS Special Commando Dirlewanger killed at least thirty thousand civilians in its Belarusian tour of duty.
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Dirlewanger’s unit was one of several Waffen-SS and Order Police formations assigned to Belarus to reinforce the battered regular army. By late 1942, German soldiers were horribly fatigued, conscious of defeat, relieved of normal legal obligations to civilians, and under orders to treat partisans with extreme brutality. When assigned to anti-partisan duty, soldiers faced the anxiety of fighting a foe who could appear and disappear at any time, and who knew the land as the soldiers did not. Wehrmacht troops were now cooperating with the police and the SS, whose main task for some time had been the mass murder of civilians, above all Jews. All knew that they were supposed to exterminate the partisans. In these circumstances, the death toll among civilians was bound to be terribly high, regardless of the particulars of German tactics.