Cruel World (7 page)

This was not the first major famine in twentieth-century Russia. Only ten years before, thousands of tons of emergency rations had been sent there by international relief agencies. But this time no aid was requested, foreign help agencies such as the Quakers were expelled, and no journalists were allowed in the affected areas, whose borders were sealed to prevent both escape and the importation of food. The existence of famine was firmly denied by the Soviet government. But reports smuggled out of the USSR by foreign reporters, who found the countryside strewn with corpses, described scenes of unbelievable horror:

Stalin referred to it as a war too, but one being waged by the peasants against the government.

The carrying out of instructions was brutal indeed. In order to achieve the unrealistic wheat production quotas demanded by Moscow, cadres of dedicated young Communist Party members were sent forth to find any stores of grain that the peasants might have concealed. Indoctrinated to believe that the unachieved quotas were due to “sabotage” on the part of the peasants and armed with long metal drills, they descended on villages where the corpses already lay in heaps and the hovels were peopled by whole families near death, to probe every possible place in which the smallest handful of food could be hidden. The results were catastrophic:

Many families were driven to cannibalism, which became so widespread that the government had to print a poster forbidding it. A surprised American reporter saw one in the Moscow office of a Soviet functionary:

The surviving populations of whole villages deemed uncooperative were loaded onto the soon to be ubiquitous cattle cars and sent to lands in Siberia that often had no infrastructure whatsoever in place for the new arrivals, and where thousands more would perish.

In an attitude that would have warmed the hearts of the eugenicists, no quarter was given to the children of the kulaks, who were considered “Members of the Family of a Traitor to the Fatherland” and whose “kulakism” was assumed to be inherited.
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As the famine took hold, parents were
forced to let the weakest children die. Some took them to towns and abandoned them, hoping that someone would take them in:

Boys and girls would arrive home from school to find that everyone in the house had died. Gangs of these children congregated around the train stations catching birds and cats to eat. They begged and stole, and hoped for handouts. The author Arthur Koestler, observing from his train window, thought they looked like “embryos out of alcohol bottles.”
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The small thieves, when caught, were sent to “children’s labor colonies,” where their future was not bright. In some stations more humane officials put guarded railroad cars on sidings for them and provided minimal rations of ersatz coffee and bread. In one town, it is estimated, some 3,000 children aged seven to twelve died of starvation in the spring and summer of 1933.
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They were buried in rough holes. A station worker commented, “This procedure became so common at that time that nobody paid the slightest attention to it.”
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Activists who began to have doubts about what they were ordered to do convinced themselves that for the sake of “the universal triumph of Communism” it was permissible “to destroy hundreds of thousands and even millions of people, all those who were hindering our work … everyone who stood in the way. And to hesitate or doubt about all this was to give in to ‘intellectual squeamishness’ and ‘stupid liberalism.’ ”
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Those who had too many doubts were deported or executed along with their targets. There are no accurate figures for child mortality, but Robert Conquest, in his devastating history of the famine, estimates that by the end of May 1933 about three million young children had succumbed.
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Despite their heredity, some of the children were useful to the Soviet authorities. Healthy children were indoctrinated on the need to guard the interests and property of the state at all costs. They were shown propaganda films of kulaks burying wheat and murdering the young party workers who had come to find it, and were taught to “seek out and recognize
the enemy, who was to be removed forcibly, by methods of economic pressure, organizational-political isolation, and methods of physical destruction.” Children who turned in their own parents were extravagantly praised in the Soviet press and given prizes ranging from cash to sets of Lenin’s
Collected Works
. A thirteen-year-old who had reported his mother for stealing grain from a collective farm was said to have written a poem on his feats that included the lines “Mother, you do harm to the State; I can no longer live with you.” The Reuters correspondent who transmitted the incident to the Western press observed that it was not known whether the mother was stealing the grain “in order to supplement the rations of her children.”
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Nor were deportation and the destruction of family enough. As Stalin continued his paranoid purging of any opposition to his power, the deported kulaks in Siberia and elsewhere were among the first groups targeted for “the supreme penalty,” as they were considered “counterrevolutionary insurrectionists.” Quotas setting the number to be executed in each region were established centrally. The total came to 72,000 persons, who were to be chosen by local officials, investigated “in a swift and simplified manner,” and then sentenced by extralegal, three-man boards. The timing, funding, and organization of the purge were organized down to the rail transport for the condemned. The utilization of the 167,200 souls sentenced not to death but to further exile and the Gulag, was carefully set out. The families of these unfortunates were “not as a rule subject to punitive measures” unless they were “capable of anti-Soviet actions.” But they could not live in “border areas,” or most big cities, and would be placed under “systematic observation.”
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Wives and children of “enemies of the people” were routinely arrested and “repressed” so that they would not “spread all kinds of complaints … and degeneration.” As Stalin put it in his toast at a dinner celebrating the anniversary of the October Revolution in 1937: “We will destroy each such enemy … we will destroy his kin, his family.… Anyone who by his actions and thoughts—yes, his thoughts—encroaches on the unity of the socialist state we will destroy. To the destruction of all enemies to the very end, them and their kin!”
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The Soviet actions were not lost on Hitler, but in his early days in power he could not yet, as Stalin had, simply close off vast territories, destroy dwellings, send in indoctrinated party workers to remove all available food, and by massive starvation and deportation to Siberia rid Germany of its half-million Jews. Indeed, as part of its anti-Bolshevist campaign, the Nazi press had been printing highly critical reports of the situation in Russia.
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The capability to act as Stalin had would only come later. As the fate of the Gypsies demonstrates, the secret reaches of the soon to be conquered areas to the east of Germany, which would provide the German Volk with the vital
Lebensraum
, or living space, Hitler believed it deserved, would have many uses.

In the winter of 1933, the possibility of serious danger seemed remote to German Jews, who, like most of the diplomats reporting from Berlin, could not imagine that the extreme acts of the Nazis were much more than “measures which have taken place in the heat of the moment of victory.”
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George Messersmith, the American consul in Berlin, sure that “moderate” elements in Germany would soon prevail, reported on March 25: “There is much reason to believe that the Chancellor, Mr. Hitler, does not approve of the indiscriminate and general action which has been taken against Jews in the Government, in the professions and in business.… The Chancellor is said to be aware of the fact that the program of discrimination against Jews, if allowed to continue, may wreck the National Socialist [Nazi] party itself and the present government.” Noting that the anti-Jewish acts were detrimental to the “extraordinary good-will enjoyed by Germany in the United States and Britain,” he said that “prominent Germans of moderate opinion” believed that the Chancellor “must make a definite statement which will make the Jewish situation known in a sane and clear way to the outside world.”
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The Chancellor was indeed about to make some “clear” statements, but they would not be “sane” in the view of the rest of the world. On March 29, the
Völkischer Beobachter
, the leading Nazi newspaper, issued instructions for a boycott of Jewish businesses on April 1.
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This action was blamed in another Nazi journal,
Der Angriff
, on a supposed “campaign of atrocity propaganda inaugurated against Germany” in foreign newspapers, where “lies regarding the alleged sanguinary persecutions of Jews were spread.” These lies, it alleged, had led to threats of boycotts of German goods. The German people, they declared, would now “switch from an attitude of defense, and are going to attack. They will hew off the heads swollen with poison of the Pan-Jewish hydra of lies.” This rather florid threat was followed in a later paragraph by a more practical one: “If the attempt is made to boycott German goods abroad, the German people will be in a position to see to it that no Jew will find any occupation, that no one will buy anymore from Jews.”
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The day after the boycott announcement, using the special powers granted him in a suicidal Enabling Act passed on March 24 by the Reichstag, Hitler dissolved the legislatures of the individual German states, thus centralizing power even more in his own hands. Consul Messersmith, though apparently still convinced of Hitler’s personal moderation, began to see what was to come:

It was one thing to fulminate against the Jews but quite another to define just who they were. That remains a problem to this day, given the human propensity to marry those in proximity, no matter what their religion or race, and to create variants of religions that suit new circumstances. The Nazi definition of Jewry, though always spoken of in racial terms, was not only determined by the anthropological examinations, no matter how pseudo, used for other alien races, but by the declared affiliation of the individual, his spouse, if any, his parents, and his grandparents. This combination of seven or more people led to extremely complex situations and caused much grief to the courts and the burgeoning phalanxes of bureaucrats assigned to deal with Jewish matters. With the passage of the Nuremberg Laws in September 1935, which codified existing anti-Jewish regulations and added many more affecting normal activities, clearer definition of who was a Jew became essential.
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The problem for the Nazi racial agencies was how to protect the German part of a mixed person’s heritage, which might be useful to the state in the form of military service or labor. People with three or four “Jewish” grandparents were no problem. Those with one or two, who were therefore a quarter or half German and were known as
Mischlinge
, were more difficult. To make things worse, many in these categories had married pure Germans or Jews, thus putting their children in still other categories. The basic definition, stated in the First Regulation of the Reich Citizenship Law of November 14, 1935, and continually refined, was as follows: