Gestapo (20 page)

It goes on to describe the looting:

“In conclusion I find myself obliged to point out that the police battalion looted in an unheard-of manner during the action and that not only in Jewish houses but equally those of the White Ruthenians. Anything of use, such as boots, leather, cloth, gold, and other valuables was taken away. According to statements of the troops, watches were torn off the arms of Jews openly on the street and rings pulled off their fingers in the most brutal manner. A disbursing officer reported that a Jewish girl was asked by the police to obtain immediately five thousand roubles to have her father released. The girl is actually said to have run about everywhere to obtain the money.”

The outraged official could not bring himself to stop there. He finished up on a burst of indignation:

“I am submitting this report in duplicate so that one copy may be submitted to the Reich Minister. Peace and order cannot be maintained in White Ruthenia with methods of that sort. To have buried alive seriously
wounded people, who then worked thier way out of their graves again, is such extreme beastlness that this incident as such must be reported
to
the Fuehrer and the Reich Marshal.”

This was the impression made on a German official, who had already in the nature of his job seen many dreadful things, who was prepared to see the Jews of Slutzk completely liquidated provided he had a day's warning to organize the affair in an orderly manner, but who, nevertheless, was so shocked and affronted by the reality that, after brooding about it for three days, he still could not overcome his indignation and, taking his courage in both hands, laid bare his heart to his Fuehrer, via Goering. He was an innocent, of course. The Fuehrer had ordered that these people should be killed, and did not care how.

The Commissioner of Slutzk seems to have sat in his office and listened to the shots and heard the reports brought in by his men and the troops. We now turn to the report of another German, a civilian, an engineer belonging to the building firm of Joseph Jung, who managed the branch office at Sdolbunov in the Ukraine. He was responsible, amongst other things, for a building site in Rovno, where, during the night of July 13th, 1942, all the Jews, about five thousand of them, were liquidated. Engineer Hermann Graebe was an interested party because a number of the Jews living in the Rovno ghetto were his employees. He had heard rumors of a forthcoming action against them, and had marched his Jews out of harm's way. Then the rumors had been officially denied by S.S. Major Puetz, commanding the Rovno Security Police and S.D. But later it was admitted, and, after a great deal of bargaining, Engineer Graebe managed to obtain a written paper, officially stamped by the Rovno Area Commissioner, that his hundred worker Jews should be spared. This is what Engineer Graebe saw, as described in his Nuremberg affidavit:

“On the evening of this day I drove to Rovno and posted myself with Fritz Einsporn [his foreman] in front of the house in the Bahnhofstrasse in which the Jewish workers of my firm slept. Shortly after ten p.m. the ghetto was encircled by a large S.S. detachment and about three times as many members of the Ukrainian
militia. Then the electric arc lights which had been erected in and around the ghetto were switched on. S.S. and militia squads of four to six men entered or at least tried to enter the houses. Where the doors and windows were closed and the inhabitants did not open at the knocking, the S.S. men and militia broke the windows, forced the doors with beams and crowbars, and entered the houses. The people living there were driven on to the street just as they were, regardless of whether they were dressed or in bed. Since the Jews in most cases refused to leave their houses and resisted, the S.S. and militia applied force. They finally succeeded, with strokes of the whip, kicks, and blows from rifle butts, in clearing the houses. The people were driven out of their houses in such haste that small children in bed had been left behind in several instances. In the streets women cried out for their children and children for their parents. That did not prevent the S.S. from driving the people along the road at running pace, and hitting them, until they reached a waiting freight train. Car after car was filled, and the screaming of women and children and the cracking of whips and rifle shots resounded unceasingly. Since several families or groups had barricaded themselves in especially strong buildings and the doors could not be forced with crowbars or beams, the doors were blown open with hand grenades. Since the ghetto was near the railroad tracks in Rovno, the younger people tried to get across the tracks and over a small river to get away from the ghetto area. As this stretch of country was beyond the range of the electric lights, it was illuminated by small rockets. All through the night these beaten, hounded, and wounded people moved along the lighted streets. Women carried their dead children in their arms, children pulled and dragged their dead parents by their arms and legs down the road toward the train.…

“About six o'clock in the morning I went away for a moment leaving behind Einsporn and several other German workers who had returned in the meantime. I thought the greatest danger was past and that I could risk it. Shortly after I left, Ukrainian militia men forced their way into 5 Bahnhofstrasse and brought seven Jews
out and took them to a collection point inside the ghetto. On my return I was able to prevent further Jews from being taken out. I went to the collecting point to save these seven men. I saw dozens of corpses of all ages and both sexes in the streets I had to walk along. The doors of the houses stood open, windows were smashed. Pieces of clothing, shoes, stockings, jackets, caps, hats, coats were lying in the street. At the corner of a house lay a baby, less than a year old, with his skull crushed. Blood and brains were spattered over the house wall and covered the area immediately around the child. The child was dressed only in a little shirt. The commander, S.S Major Puetz, was walking up and down a row of about eighty to one hundred male Jews who were crouching on the ground. He had a heavy dog-whip in his hand. I walked up to him, showed him the written permit of
Stabsleiter
Beck and demanded the seven men whom I recognized among those who were crouching on the ground. Puetz was very furious about Beck's concession and nothing could persuade him to release the seven men. He made a motion with his hand encircling the square and said that anyone who was here once would not get away. Although he was very angry with Beck, he ordered me to take the people from 5 Bahn-hofstrasse out of Rovno by eight o'clock at the latest. When I felt Puetz, I noticed a Ukrainian farm cart with two horses. Dead people with stiff limbs were lying on the cart. Legs and arms projected over the side boards. The cart was making for the freight train.…”

Engineer Graebe did not follow that freight train to its destination, which was the death pit at Kostopol, so we cannot through his observant eyes follow the five thousand Jews of Rovno (it was, incidentally, Rovno's second massacre: most of the five thousand did not belong to the place, but had been moved from other parts of Poland to the ghetto for easier handling). But a few months later, on October 5th, 1942, he was able to do the next best thing. He attended a mass execution of very similar people at Dubno in Volhynia, on a disused aerodrome where his firm had a building site. He saw the vans arriving with prisoners, and went to look; and his account, read by Sir Hartley Shawcross in his final speech at Nuremberg, filled
even those who for week after week had accustomed themselves to tales of unimaginable horror with an emotion deeper than any they had yet experienced.

“… an old woman with snow-white hair was holding this one-year-old child in her arms and singing and tickling it. The child was cooing with delight. The parents were looking on with tears in their eyes. The father was holding the hand of a boy about ten years old and speaking to him softly; the boy was fighting his tears. The father pointed towards the sky, stroked the boy's head, and seemed to explain something to him. At that moment the S.S. man at the pit shouted something to his comrade. The latter counted off about twenty persons and instructed them to go behind the earth mound. The family I have described was among them. I well remember the girl, slim and with black hair, who, as she passed me, pointed to herself and said, ‘Twenty-three years old.'

“I then walked around the mound and found myself confronted by a tremendous grave. People were closely wedged together and lying on top of each other so that only their heads were visible. Nearly all had blood running over their shoulders from their heads. Some of the people shot were still moving. Some lifted their arms and turned their heads to show that they were alive. The pit was already two-thirds full. I estimated that it held a thousand people. I looked for the man who did the shooting. He was an S.S. man who sat at the edge of the narrow end of the pit, his feet dangling into it. He had a tommy gun on his knees and was smoking a cigarette. The people—they were completely naked—went down some steps which were cut in the clay wall of the pit and clambered over the heads of those who were lying there to the place to which the S.S. man directed them. They lay down in front of the dead and wounded. Some caressed the living and spoke to them in a low voice. Then I heard a series of shots. I looked into the pit and saw that their bodies still twitched or that their heads lay motionless on top of the other bodies before them. Blood ran from their necks.

“I was surprised that I was not ordered off, but I saw that there were two or three postmen in uniform near
by. Already the next batch was approaching. They went down in the pit, lined themselves up against the previous victims and were shot. When I walked back round the mound I noticed that another truckload of people had arrived. This time it included sick and feeble people. An old, terribly thin woman was undressed by others, who were already naked, while two people held her up. The woman appeared to be paralyzed. The naked people carried her round the mound. I left with my foreman and drove in my car back to Dubno.

“On the morning of the next day, when I visited the site, I saw about thirty naked people lying near the pit—about thirty to fifty meters away from it. Some of them were still alive; they looked straight in front of them with a fixed stare and seemed to notice neither the chilliness of the morning nor the workers of my firm who stood around. A girl of about twenty spoke to me and asked me to give her clothes and help her to escape. At that moment we heard a fast car approach and I noticed that it was an S.S. detail. I moved away to my site. Ten minutes later we heard shots from the vicinity of the pit. Those Jews who were still alive had been ordered to throw the corpses into the pit, then they themselves had to lie down in the pit to be shot in the neck.”

Ohlendorf's shootings in the “military” manner were tidier, but in other respects identical. The people, men, women, and children, were rounded up in their houses, torn forcibly from them, transported to the death-pits, and shot. But Ohlendorf did not make them undress completely.

The Rovno massacre accounted for only five thousand Jews. Between June and October 1941 some three hundred and fifty thousand were killed directly in this manner, perhaps the greatest slaughter of all having taken place at Kiev, where S.S. Major General Franz Jaeckeln, Higher S.S. and Police Leader with the Southern Army Group, forced the pace in a manner usually associated with Heydrich's young men of the S.D. It was the greatest single massacre, and
Einsatzgruppe
C reported to Heydrich that thirty-three thousand seven hundred seventy-one Jews had been killed in two days, on September 29th and 30th, on
the very outskirts of Kiev in the Babi Yar ravine. The hero of this operation was the commander of
Einsatz-kommando
4a, another of Heydrich's intellectuals, an architect turned into a Colonel of the S.S., Paul Blobel—who, later, when the Germans were retreating, was made Director of Exhumation Activities by Heydrich, whom he had displeased. His job then was to dig up the death-pits and supervise the burning of the corpses, a laborious and unsalubrious task, before the advancing Russians found them. One of the pits he had to exhume was in the Babi Yar ravine, where, at Nuremberg, he admitted to digging up the contents of one pit sixty yards long and more than eight feet deep.

But this is not a history of the massacres in Poland and Western Russia. The reader who wishes to grasp the magnitude of these killings and to acquaint himself with the careers and characters of the individuals who carried them out is referred to Mr. Reitlinger's sombre and elaborate study of
The Final Solution
. We are concerned with these terrible events only in so far as they throw light on the nature of the Gestapo and the S.D., and the relationship of the Gestapo and the S.D. with other organizations. It is necessary to show the kind of work they did together.

It may seem that we have come a long way from the Prinz Albrecht Strasse and allowed ourselves to get mixed up with a strange and questionable mob far removed from the pure Gestapo. What were the Lithuanian partisans doing at the massacre at Slutzk? How was it that a civilian Area Commissioner was asked by the Security Police for his help, and afterwards protested to Goering? Why was Engineer Graebe allowed to watch the round-up at Rovno and the massacre at Dubno, when these things were supposed to take place in total secrecy, so that only a handful of Germans knew of them? There are many questions of this kind. How was it, for example, that Higher S.S. and Police Leader Jaeckeln led the massacres at Riga, Kovno, Kiev, and elsewhere—when, according to the defense, Higher S.S. and Police Leaders had no jurisdiction over the Gestapo and the S.D.? And then we have the curious order from Field Marshal von Rundstedt, the dear old, straight-backed, honorable old general who knew nothing about the massacres, like all the other dear old generals:

“Action against Communists and Jews is only to be undertaken by the special commardos of the Security Police and S.D., who carry out such orders on their own responsibility. Participation of members of the Armed. Forces in Ukrainian excesses against the Jewish population is forbidden, also the witnessing and photographing of the measures taken by the special commandos. This order must be made known to the personnel of every unit. All officers and N.C.Os are responsible for carrying it out.”