Holocaust: The Nazi Persecution and Murder of the Jews (43 page)

members of the Einsatzgruppen that expose Ohlendorf’s testimony as a defence

Laying the Ground for Racial Annihilation

189

strategy. Ernst Biberstein, who in 1942–3 was leader of Einsatzkommando 6 and

was sentenced to death in Nuremberg, convincingly exposed Ohlendorf’s man-

ipulation of historical events as early as 1948 in a detailed note that was to be given

to his family if he was executed.
69
There is more testimony that illuminates Ohlendorf’s role.
70

The analysis of statements concerning the deployment of Einsatzgruppen made

to German lawyers by former leaders of the Einsatzkommandos and Sonderkom-

mandos between the 1950s and early 1970s also suggest that there was no clear

order to murder all the Jews living in the Soviet Union that had been given before

the start of the war. These statements differ significantly from each other in

respect of place, time, the person transmitting the order, and the content of the

order. Whilst one element in the commando leadership clearly stated that far-

reaching orders such as this had only been issued weeks after the war had started,
71

the statements of those who mention an early comprehensive order are extremely

contradictory, especially when they are traced back over a long period, and are

characterized by memory lapses and reservations.
72
Clear evidence in favour of an early comprehensive order is only provided by the statement of commando leader

Zapp (Sonderkommando 11a)
73
and—with reservations—by that of Ehler, who had originally been designated leader of Einsatzkommando 8
.74
Some of the former commando leaders instead remember a step-by-step mode of receiving

orders, a ‘framework order’, which was intended to be ‘filled in’ on the initiative of

the commandos and by subsequent orders.
75
The fact that the undifferentiated murder of women and children only began weeks after the campaign started, and

the circumstance that the great mass of commando members agree in their claims

that they did not receive orders such as this from their leaders until immediately

before the massacres themselves both show that briefing the Einsatzgruppen was a

process that cannot be reduced to the issuing of a single order.

What emerges from all this is the impression of a degree of vagueness in the

way orders were issued to Einsatzgruppen. A manner of issuing orders in which

the subordinate was supposed to recognize the ‘meaning’ behind the words

intuitively is familiar from National Socialist anti-Jewish policy from 1933 on-

wards, in particular in cases where the orders had something criminal about them.

In contrast to the military model of giving and carrying out orders this practice

presupposes a certain collusiveness, a strongly developed feeling of consensus

amongst those involved about how anti-Jewish policy was going to develop in the

future—which is a consensus that we can assume to be present when we remem-

ber how the leadership of the Einsatzgruppen were recruited from amongst the SS

and the police.

On the basis of the existing statements and other evidence we can ascertain

what organizational processes were at work in directing the leaders of the Einsatz-

gruppen to carry out their duties. Alongside Streckenbach’s visit to Pretzsch in

June, a social ‘farewell’ visit at which there will also have been discussion about

190

Mass Executions in Occupied Soviet Zones, 1941

upcoming tasks, briefing for the SS leadership took place at a decisive meeting

with Himmler in Wewelsburg Castle from 11 to 15 June at which Jeckeln, Pohl, and

Heydrich were also present.
76
The commando leaders were briefed at two sessions with Heydrich, first a meeting in the Prince Carl Palace in Berlin (presumably on

17 June), and second an occasion when the Einsatzgruppe leadership received

instructions from Heydrich in Pretzsch shortly before the outbreak of war, a

meeting that took place immediately after the official farewell to the members of

the Einsatzkommandos who had reported for duty.
77

Even though the leadership of the Einsatzgruppen gave contradictory evidence

about their briefings during the war in the East, what emerges unanimously from

interrogations is that when such conversations took place the ‘firmness’ and

‘severity’ of the deployment about to take place were always stressed, as was the

view that the campaign was a conflict between two ‘world-views’ that had to be

carried out completely ruthlessly and that would demand ‘sacrifices in blood’. At

the same time the central role of the Jews in preserving the Bolshevist system and

their ‘potential enemy’ status were also emphasized.
78

From the tenor of statements such as these it is clear that the Einsatzgruppe

leadership was given a line to take in discussions concerning the treatment of Jews

and Communists, a line that corresponded to the content of the orders and

instructions that pertained to the Wehrmacht (the jurisdiction decree, the com-

missar order, guidelines for the conduct of the troops). Furthermore it is clear that

instructions were given that Heydrich shortly afterwards summarized in writing,

making explicit reference, moreover, to the meeting on 17 June: in a letter to the

heads of the Einsatzgruppen dated 29 June he merely referred to ‘attempts at self-

purification’ that the commandos were to initiate;
79
in a letter to the Higher SS and Police Commanders of 2 July he informed them of the ‘most important instructions given by me to the Einsatzgruppen and Einsatzkommandos of the Security

Police and the SD’.
80
In this second letter the point headed ‘executions’ contains the following list:

Those to be executed are all

Functionaries of the Comintern (and all professional Communist

politicians of any kind)

People’s Commissars

Jews in Party and state posts

other radical elements (saboteurs, propagandists, snipers, assassins,

agitators, etc.)

The revealing ‘etc.’ at the end of that list and the fact that Heydrich wrote in this

letter of ‘removing all obstacles in the way of attempts at self-purification by anti-

Communist or anti-Jewish circles in the areas to be occupied’, and of supporting

such attempts, ‘albeit invisibly’,
81
suggest that the range of those to be executed was by no means clearly delimited. One can assume instead that the formulation

Laying the Ground for Racial Annihilation

191

‘all Jews in Party and state posts’ is an understated way of giving the order for

annihilating a vaguely defined upper layer of Jews, mostly men, leaving the

decision of how exactly to define this layer to the commandos themselves. The

instructions given on 2 July do not, for example, expressly forbid the murder of

women and children. The significance of the meetings that Heydrich held with the

leadership of the Einsatzgruppen before the outbreak of war was therefore to make

it clear to them that Soviet Jews and Bolshevism represented a closely interlinked

collection of enemies, leaving it to them to shoot the Jews under one pretext or

another, whether under the heading of state and Party functionaries, or agitators,

or propagandists, or merely ‘etc.’.

chapter 11

THE MASS MURDER OF JEWISH MEN

In the very first days of the war against the Soviet Union there is evidence to

document both the attempts of the Einsatzgruppen to initiate ‘self-purification

processes’ and the execution of Jewish men.

Pogroms Organized by the Einsatzgruppen

During the early days of the war, in Lithuania, Latvia, Western Ukraine (the

eastern Polish area occupied by the Soviet Union), and to a lesser extent also in

Belarus,
1
radical nationalist and anti-Semitic forces carried out large-scale pogroms against the local Jewish population. In accordance with the stereotype of

‘Jewish Bolshevism’ these forces made the Jewish minority responsible for the

terror of Soviet occupation and exercised a bloody retribution. This manner of

going about things was perfectly in accordance with the German formula of

initiating ‘attempts at self-purification’, ‘invisibly’ where possible. Despite the

disguise, German influence on these pogroms can be demonstrated in a large

number of cases, as will be shown in what follows, using the reports made by the

Einsatzgruppen.
2

However, even where pogroms were already in progress before German troops

arrived, there is evidence that they were not the expression of a spontaneous

popular movement. The fact that all the pogroms proceeded in a similar way

The Mass Murder of Jewish Men

193

suggests instead that they were to a very large extent triggered and steered by

underground organizations formed under the regime of occupation; there is

evidence, too, that in the months before the German attack these underground

organizations were cooperating with German agencies and were planning for a

radical policy of anti-Semitism after the ‘liberation’ of their homelands.
3

It has been proved, for example, that during preparations for the war against

the Soviet Union the Germans, and in particular military intelligence and the

Reich Security Head Office, were working closely with Lithuanian émigrés who

had fled to the German Reich and established their own organization, the LAF

(Lithuanian Activist Front), which was in frequent contact with the Lithuanian

underground. It is demonstrable, too, that the LAF made use of these channels in

order to commit their comrades at home to violent attacks on Jews during the

process of ‘liberating’ their country. It is more than likely that this approach was at

least supported by the Germans, given the close cooperation between the LAF and

German agencies.
4

There were similarly close contacts between German agencies and Estonian and

Latvian émigré organizations that were also drawn into the preparations for war.
5

The Germans also harnessed both wings of the OUN (Organization of Ukrainian

Nationalists) into their plans for attack and will have sustained and strongly

encouraged the already radically anti-Semitic OUN in that direction.
6
Whether this also included an appeal to initiate pogroms cannot be demonstrated with

sufficient certainty.
7
However, even where it is likely but not provable that local forces were briefed in the run-up to the war the reports of the Einsatzgruppen

nonetheless show clearly how strong German influence was on the outbreak of

pogroms.

In the summary activity report prepared in mid-October by Einsatzgruppe A in

the operational area of Army Group A—the so-called Stahlecker Report—there is

a detailed account of the ‘attempts at self-cleansing’ initiated by the Einsatzgruppe

itself:
8
‘It was necessarily the responsibility of the Einsatzgruppe to set in train the self-purification attempts and guide them into the correct channels in order to

achieve the goal of cleansing as quickly as possible. It was no less important to

create for a later date the firm and demonstrable fact that the liberated population

was of its own accord resorting to the harshest measures against its Bolshevist and

Jewish opponents without leaving any trace of instructions from the German side.’

It was also ‘immediately obvious that only the first days after the occupation

would offer opportunities for carrying out pogroms’.

The Stahlecker Report goes on to say that, ‘astonishingly’, initiating the first

pogrom in Kaunas in Lithuania had not proved ‘straightforward’; it had only got

going after the Lithuanian partisan leaders, who had been brought in to carry it

out, had been given ‘tips’ by the ‘small advance commando deployed in Kaunas’,

again ‘without any German instructions or stimulus being discernible from the

outside’. During this pogrom, which took place between 25 and 28 July and cost

194

Mass Executions in Occupied Soviet Zones, 1941

the lives of some 3,800 people, Jewish men were violently dragged from their

homes by Lithuanian ‘militia’, collected together in public squares and killed there

or taken to fortresses and shot.
9
By the beginning of July, however, as an incident report makes clear, Einsatzgruppe A had already come to the conclusion that ‘no

more mass shootings [were] possible’ in Kaunas;
10
a stop was therefore put to them.

In Riga the Einsatzgruppe succeeded in initiating a pogrom in which 400 Jews

were killed, but only after ‘appropriate influence [had been exerted] on the Latvian

auxiliary police’. Further pogroms in that city were not felt to be ‘sustainable’

because of the rapid calming of the population in general.
11
At the end of July Einsatzgruppe A reported on pogroms in other Latvian cities: according to these

reports ‘in Jelgava [Mitau] and the surrounding areas . . . the remaining 1,550 Jews

were expunged from the population without trace’.
12

Pogroms that can be proved to have been initiated by the Germans were above

all carried out by Einsatzgruppe C in the Ukraine. In Lvov (Lemberg), where the

NKVD (the Soviet People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs) had shot some