Masters of Death (20 page)

On 19 July 1941, after the Hitler conference and just before he left for Lublin to meet Globocnik, Himmler assigned part of his Kommandostab army to Higher SS and Police Leader Gruppenführer Erich von dem Bach-Zelewski, responsible for Russia–Center. On 22 July 1941, after Himmler met with Globocnik, he assigned the remainder of his Kommandostab army to Obergruppenführer Friedrich Jeckeln, responsible for Russia–South. Bach-Zelewski’s forces were directed to undertake what Himmler called “combing the Pripet marshes”— that is, they were supposed to flush out Jews living or taking refuge in the vast area of the Pripet marshes east of Lublin in the borderlands of Byelorussia and the Ukraine. In a radio message of 29 July 1941 Himmler made clear what they would then do with them: “Express order of the
RFSS.
All [male] Jews must be shot. Drive Jewish females into the swamps.” Jeckeln’s orders were even plainer: his forces were to shoot all Jews in the western Ukraine except those required for labor (which was much the same program as the one Globocnik had spun at fireside for Höss). On 23 July 1941 Himmler also reassigned at least eleven battalions of Kurt Daluege’s Order Police—about 5,500 men — to the Higher SS and Police Leaders of Russia–North, –Central and –South.

These tens of thousands of SS and Order Police added to the three thousand men of the Einsatzgruppen clearly marked the expansion of the mass-killing program, but they were not yet all the forces Himmler intended to deploy. On 25 July 1941 he also ordered the rapid formation of auxiliary police units “from the reliable non-Communist elements among Ukrainians, Estonians, Latvians, Lithuanians and Byelorussians” to augment the Order Police. By the end of the year, more than thirty-three thousand men would be active in these auxiliary battalions.

Himmler flew to Kaunas on 29 July 1941 to ramp up mass killings in the Baltic states. Higher SS and Police Leader Gruppenführer Hans-Adolf Prützmann met the Reichsführer-SS and led him on a three-day tour that moved on to Riga, the major Latvian trading and industrial city built on the delta lands of the Daugava River where it enters the Bay of Riga on the Baltic Sea. Prützmann lived elegantly there in the Ritterhaus, the old Riga castle, giving popular and glittering parties that Wehrmacht generals vied to attend. Himmler inspected a Latvian auxiliary company in Riga and ordered what he called “criminal elements” to be “resettled.” Then he flew south to Baranowicze, eighty-five miles southeast of Minsk in Byelorussia, to meet with Bach-Zelewski at his headquarters there. (The day after Himmler left Riga, one of Prützmann’s subordinates asked Prützmann what the Reichsführer-SS meant by “resettled.” “Not what you think,” Prützmann told him, “they’re supposed to be dispatched into the next world.”)

While Himmler was moving to clear the East of Jews, Heydrich sat down with Göring in Berlin on 31 July 1941 to begin planning to move the Jews of western Europe eastward. He needed a legal order to involve the civil bureaucracy of the Third Reich — finance offices, railways and other agencies. Göring, in his capacity as Reich Marshal and chairman of the ministerial council for national defense, was the proper person to originate that legal order while preserving the Führer’s deniability. Eichmann had drafted the order. Heydrich now handed it to Göring to sign—which Göring did, Heydrich told a colleague later, at the Führer’s instruction. The order read:

Complementing the task already assigned to you in the decree of 24 January 1939 to undertake by emigration or evacuation a solution of the Jewish question as advantageous as possible under the conditions of the time, I hereby charge you with making all necessary organizational, functional and material preparations for a complete solution of the Jewish question in the German sphere of influence in Europe. In so far as the jurisdiction of other central agencies may be touched thereby, they are to be involved. I charge you furthermore with submitting to me in the near future an overall plan of the organizational, functional and material measures to be taken in preparing for the implementation of the goal of a final solution of the Jewish question.

What Himmler’s wanderings meant in practical terms was already evident to the Jews of Schepetovka (Sepetivka), a middle-sized town in the western Ukraine about halfway between Lvov and Kiev, and in the Pripet marshes. If the solution was to be final, then not only men had to be killed: women and children would have to be killed as well. Himmler acknowledged the problem in a 1943 speech. “Then the question arose,” he told his audience of Gauleiters: “What about the women and children? I decided to find a perfectly clear-cut solution to this too. For I did not feel justified in exterminating the men—that is, to kill them or have them killed — while allowing the avengers, in the form of their children, to grow up in the midst of our sons and grandsons.” But he also acknowledged that “for the organization that had to carry out this mission, it was the most difficult that we have received to date.”

This “avenger” argument was communicated to the Einsatzgruppen officers directly responsible for mass killings, as well as to their counterparts in the Order Police. When Ohlendorf was asked at his 1947 trial about murdering children, for example, he responded, “I believe that it is very simple to explain if one starts from the fact that this order did not only try to achieve a security but also a permanent security because for that reason the children were people who would grow up and surely being the children of parents who had been killed they would constitute a danger no smaller than that of their parents.” (“That is the master race exactly, is it not,” the exasperated prosecutor responded, “the decimation of whole races in order to remove a real or fancied threat to the German people.” To which Ohlendorf countered lamely, “Mr. Prosecutor, I did not see the execution of children myself although I attended three mass executions.”)

The order to murder the Jews of Schepetovka came down during the last week in July 1941 from Himmler through the commander of Police Regiment South to the commander of Reserve Police Battalion 45, a Major Franz. Franz remembered the order well, because for the first time it specifically included women and children. Reserve Police Battalion 45 carried out the order with support from the local Ukrainian militia before the end of the month. Higher SS and Police Leader Friedrich Jeckeln began personally commanding mass killings in the western Ukraine on 28 July 1941. Whether he personally directed Battalion 45’s roundup of the Schepetovka Jews is not clear from the record, but at that time or during a mopping-up operation later, a minor bureaucrat named August Meier stood beside him in Schepetovka and watched him at work:

Jeckeln had ongoing permission to shoot Jews, one can say, at almost every location. As a result, he personally organized the executions of many thousands of Jews. I still particularly recall an Aktion in Schepetovka which stands out in my mind as extraordinarily gruesome. It involved about a hundred people. Women and children were among those shot. Jeckeln said: “Today we’ll stack them like sardines.” The Jews had to lie layer upon layer in an open grave and were then killed with neck shots from machine pistols, pistols and rifles. That meant they had to lie face down on those previously shot [whereas] in other executions they were shot standing up and fell into the grave or were dragged in. During the execution in Schepetovka I stood for some time beside Jeckeln and then managed somehow to slink away. I did not do any shooting myself. I don’t know if Jeckeln did any shooting, but I don’t believe so.

Jeckeln, a compact, handsome man with shrewd eyes who looked Russian, was a reliably efficient killer, cold and unapproachable. He called the method of mass killing he invented
Sardinenpackung.
As Meier describes, it involved forcing victims to lie together face down and side by side and killing them with
Genickschüssen,
then forcing the next group of victims to lie down on top of the torn, bleeding corpses of the victims who preceded them to form another layer, ignoring the victims’ terror and horror in the interest of efficiently filling up the killing pit. Jeckeln’s despicably cruel execution protocol destroys SS claims, during and after the war, that its executions were “correct,” military-style executions of partisans. Himmler’s goal was mass murder, and to achieve that goal he was willing to use less humane methods than slaughter-houses use to limit the suffering of animals killed for food. By the end of August 1941, commanding the Kommandostab SS First Brigade in the western Ukraine, Jeckeln had personally supervised the murder of more than 44,000 human beings, the largest total of Jews murdered by any of Himmler’s virulent legions that month.

Between 27 July and 11 August 1941, two regiments of the SS Cavalry Brigade commanded by SS-Sturmbannführers Gunther Lombard and Bruno Magill carried out Himmler’s order to “comb” the Pripet marshes, killing every Jewish man, woman and child they could find in the large area of marshes and small villages that the Einsatzgruppen had bypassed. Himmler had flown to Baranowicze to supervise the Pripet marshes operation personally, working through Bach-Zelewski, who was formally in charge. The Reichsführer-SS personally briefed the field commanders, leaving them in no doubt that “pushing the women and children into the swamps” meant killing them. Jews were to be referred to as “looters” or “partisans”; the troops were to “shoot everyone suspected of supporting the partisans,” and all the villages were to be burned to the ground.

Magill filed a report on 12 August 1941 describing his regiment’s previous weeks of work. The whole Pripet marshes area, he wrote, consisted of “large marshes interspersed with patches of sand, so that the ground is not very fertile. There are some better places, but others were all the poorer.” The population in the area was “mainly Ukrainian; Byelorussians in second place; in third place Poles and Russians; only a very few of the latter. The Jews are mainly in the larger places, where they make up a high percentage of the population, in some cases from 50 to 80 percent, but in others as little as 25 percent.” Doctors among the population tended to be Jewish; “in the towns and villages it was also noticeable that only Jewish artisans were found. There was a large number of Jewish émigrés from the Old Reich [i.e., Germany before 1938, indicating that these were refugees from Nazism] and [Austria].” When his units moved in, Magill remarks without apparent irony, “we found that, according to a Ukrainian practice, a table with a white cloth had been prepared with bread and salt that was offered to the commanders. In one case there was even a small band of musicians to welcome the troops.”

“Pacification,” as Magill calls the mass killing his mounted soldiers carried out, was organized by contacting the local mayors and discussing “all matters concerning the population”:

On these occasions the numbers and composition of the population, i.e., Ukrainians, Byelorussians, etc., were checked. Further, whether there were still Communists in the locality or secret members of the Red Army, or others who had been active Bolsheviks. In most cases local residents also reported that they had seen gangs or other suspicious persons. Where such individuals were still in the locality, they were detained and, after a brief interrogation, they were either released or shot.

Jews received not even a brief interrogation. “Jewish looters were shot. Only a few skilled workers employed in the Wehrmacht repair workshops were permitted to remain.” Magill was prepared to take Himmler’s order about women and children literally and therefore had to explain why he failed to do so: “The driving of women and children into the marshes did not have the expected success, because the marshes were not so deep that one could sink. After a depth of about a meter there was in most cases solid ground (probably sand) preventing complete sinking.”

The cavalry regiment did not have to carry out its odious duties alone, Magill reported:

The Ukrainian clergy were very cooperative and made themselves available for every Aktion. It was also conspicuous that, in general, the population was on good terms with the Jewish sector of the population. Nevertheless they helped energetically in rounding up the Jews. The locally recruited guards, who consisted in part of Polish police and former Polish soldiers, made a good impression. They operated energetically and took part in the fight against looters.

Two companies of Magill’s regiment had in fact been diverted from the marshes to Pinsk in early August to assist an Einsatzgruppe unit preparing to murder the entire Jewish population of that southwestern Byelorussian city, more than thirty thousand people, the first large city scheduled to be rendered “free of Jews”
—Judenfrei.
“On 2 August [1941],” writes Israeli historian Yehoshua Büchler, “when the order to murder the Jews of Pinsk was transferred from SS Cavalry Brigade headquarters to units in the field, Himmler began the psychological preparation of the soldiers who were to take part in the murder. He rebuked them for their ‘soft behavior,’ so to speak, regarding the Jews. He demanded that the SS Cavalry kill more Jews.” Using trucks to transport Jewish men to killing sites, the cavalry shot to death eight thousand men on 5 August 1941 and at least three thousand more men on 7 August 1941. Confusion between the various units, and perhaps also resistance to killing women and children directly, led to the withdrawal of the cavalry on 8 August 1941 to return to combing the marshes. As a result, writes Büchler, the larger part of the Pinsk Jewish community — about twenty thousand people, including nearly all the women and children—survived for another year. In the marsh villages, however, children caught in the roundups with their parents were shot, and women and children were included in some of the massacres.

The commander of the SS Cavalry Brigade, Standartenführer Hermann Fegelein, summarized the Pripet marshes operations in an after
- Aktion
report: the task of “imposing final peace in the area was carried out in full.” His units had executed 1,000 partisans, 699 Red Army soldiers, and 14,178 “looters”—meaning Jews.

The time of Einsatzgruppen decapitations was over. On the Eastern front, wholesale murder had begun.