Masters of Death (21 page)

PART TWO

“SEVEN DEPARTMENTS OF HELL”

Even the child in the cradle must be trampled down like a poisonous toad. . . . We are living in an epoch of iron, during which it is necessary to sweep with iron brooms.

HEINRICH HIMMLER, September 1941

EIGHT

Dirty Work

At the outset of the war in the East, about four million Jews lived in the western areas of the Soviet Union: 5,000 in Estonia, 95,000 in Latvia, 225,000 in Lithuania, 1,350,000 in eastern Poland, 1,908,000 in Byelorussia and the Ukraine, 300,000 in Bessarabia and 50,000 in the Crimea. Of these four million, about 1,500,000 were evacuated or escaped eastward in the first confused weeks after Barbarossa, leaving perhaps 2,500,000 to face the German onslaught. These were the millions Himmler would have to murder to carry out Hitler’s order to exterminate the Eastern Jews.

In Latvia, a Sonderkommando of “natives” to do what an Einsatzgruppe functionary in Riga called the “dirty work” was already functioning when Himmler ordered auxiliary police units organized at the end of July 1941. A thirty-one-year-old blond, blue-eyed Latvian named Viktors Arajs led the Arajs commando. Arajs was an opportunist with police training and a Soviet diploma in law who had represented himself to Einsatzgruppe A commander Stahlecker as an anti-Soviet partisan when Stahlecker arrived in Riga on 1 July 1941. The next day Stahlecker appointed Arajs to organize and command an auxiliary. Arajs recruited police, soldiers and university fraternity buddies into a Sonderkommando of about three hundred men under the direct supervision and close control of SS-Sturmbannführer Rudolf Lange, who served under Stahlecker as SD tactical coordinator in Latvia.

The Arajs commando spent the summer and fall of 1941 murdering Jews. Twice a week they shot Jewish men into killing pits in Bikernieki Forest, four miles northwest of the center of Riga, executing about four thousand Jews and a thousand Communists in Bikernieki between July and September 1941. Latvian historian Andrew Ezergailis describes the commando’s routine:

The operations would start in darkness, in the very early hours of the morning. The commando members would need to leave their homes as early as 1 a.m. and depart from [commando headquarters] about 3 a.m. If the number of victims was, let us say, two hundred, the operation was finished by breakfast time. On other occasions they worked until noon and beyond. At the end of the operation, and sometimes during it, schnapps and zakuski [appetizers] were delivered. The members doing the shooting were always rewarded with alcohol in Bikernieki, but those standing watch or in the gauntlet had to wait until they returned to headquarters.

Responding to the expanded killing orders in late July 1941, the men of the Arajs commando began boarding blue Swedish-made Riga city buses and riding out into the countryside to render one Latvian town or village after another
Judenfrei,
murdering not only men now but also women and children. Stahlecker and his superiors in Berlin had not expected pogroms alone to suffice, and his “fundamental orders,” in his words, had been to achieve “the most comprehensive possible elimination of the Jews.” The Arajs commando’s work in the countryside followed from that project, as Stahlecker went on to acknowledge: “Special detachments reinforced by selected units — in Lithuania partisan detachments, in Latvia units of the Latvian auxiliary police — therefore performed extensive executions both in the towns and in rural areas.” Ezergailis estimates that Jews lived in some one hundred localities in Latvia; most were small towns or trading centers:

The killing in the [Latvian] provinces began in late July and was almost completed by the end of September. . . . Some towns . . . lost more than half of their population in a weekend. The murder of the provincial Jews was merciless and, unlike in the large cities, total.

The smaller the Jewish community, the less chance did its Jews have of surviving the Holocaust. The establishment of the ghettos in Riga, Daugavpils, and Liepaja [to exploit Jewish labor] inadvertently saved some Jews from destruction.

With some variations, the Bikernieki method was adopted in the killing of the provincial Jews. The first step towards the wholesale killing was an order to make a census. The order was issued by the district police chief, but inasmuch as it occurred everywhere, it ultimately must have come from EK 2 headquarters in Riga. In some districts and towns a census was ordered for the whole population because the SD was also interested in apprehending Communists and in ascertaining who had fled to the Soviet Union. Although only a few of these census lists of registered Jews have been found, we can conclude that the Germans knew the number of provincial Jews very accurately. After the census, the next step was an order to the Jews to assemble at a given location, such as the market place or the synagogue. In locations with a very small Jewish population the local police were ordered to transport the Jews to a larger town.

The Riga city blue bus was large enough to carry about forty men and their rifles, which was sufficient for the provincial executions. A supply officer with vodka, sausages and cigarettes always traveled on the provincial missions. When the commando arrived in a town it established a home base in an empty farmhouse or in a school building. The Germans and Arajs, if he came, traveled by passenger car.

The blue bus was observed in all corners of Latvia. . . . On some occasions the blue bus made a circuit, visiting several towns on a single trip.

Ezergailis estimates that Stahlecker’s forces murdered more than twenty-three thousand provincial Jews. “In addition to Jews,” he adds, “the blue-bus visits also included the execution of the mentally ill.”

The methodical killing of the Jewish people in the rural areas of the East has hardly been examined in the literature of the Holocaust, probably because the Iron Curtain blocked access to documentation for almost fifty years; Ezergailis’s investigation of the Arajs commando is nearly unique. But maps in Jewish museums from Riga to Odessa confirm that almost every village and town in the entire sweep of the Eastern territories has a killing site nearby.

Two thousand Jews, for example, lived in and around the small town of Tykocin, northwest of Warsaw on the road to Bialystok in eastern Poland, worshiping in a square, fortified synagogue with a turreted tower and a red mansard roof, built in 1642, more than a century after Jewish settlement began in the region. Lush farm country surrounds Tykocin: wheat fields, prosperous villages, cattle in the fields, black-and-white storks brooding wide, flat nests on the chimneys of lucky houses. Each village maintains a forest, a dense oval stand of perhaps forty acres of red-barked pines harvested for firewood and house and barn construction. Inside the forests, even in the heat of summer, the air is cool and heady with pine; wild strawberries, small and sweet, strew the forest floor. Police Battalions 309 and 316, based in Bialystok, invaded Tykocin on 5 August 1941. They drove Jewish men, women and children screaming from their homes, killed laggards in the streets, loaded the living onto trucks and jarred them down a potholed, winding dirt road past the storks and the cattle to the Lopuchowo village forest two miles southwest. In the center of the Lopuchowo forest, men dug pits, piling up the sandy yellow soil, and then Police Battalions 309 and 316, out for the morning on excursion from Bialystok, murdered the Jews of Tykocin, man, woman and child. For months the forest buzzed and stank of death. (Twenty miles northwest of Tykocin in the village of Jedwabne, Polish villagers themselves, with German encouragement, had murdered their Jewish neighbors on 10 July 1941 by driving them into a barn and burning them alive, a massacre examined in Jan T. Gross’s book
Neighbors.
)

In Daugavpils, the second-largest city in Latvia, southeast of Riga and approximately equidistant from Riga, Kaunas and Minsk, Obersturmführer Joachim Hamann of Einsatzkommando 3 directed massacres during August 1941 that ended more than nine thousand lives, with the assistance after the first week of Latvian auxiliaries and regular Daugavpils police. “The old policemen in particular fulfilled their assignments cleanly,” a Daugavpils precinct chief reported proudly on 11 August 1941. “. . . During the liquidation of the Jews there was no lack of volunteers in the precinct to carry out this unpleasant task. [It] was carried out without hatred and shame, the men understanding that it would help all Christian civilization.” Among the murdered were four hundred children from a Daugavpils orphanage trucked to a military training ground and shot. At a dinner party later in the war, Viktors Arajs would explain why his experienced killers often threw children up into the air to shoot them: not because of boyish exuberance, he said, but because the bullets often passed completely through the children’s bodies, so that shooting children on the floor or the street risked dangerous ricochets.

On 1 August 1941 Gestapo chief Hermann Müller radioed Einsatzgruppen commanders Stahlecker, Nebe, Rasch and Ohlendorf that “the Führer is to be kept informed continually from here about the work of the
Einsatzgruppen
in the East.” Müller wanted the Einsatzgruppen to send “visual materials of special interest, such as photographs,” via “the speediest possible delivery.” If Jews were to be murdered down to the last newborn infant, Hitler was eager to see.

Nowhere did the Wehrmacht advance more rapidly in the first months after Barbarossa than in the Ukraine, but the scale of battle on that vast, open steppe was immense. “The mass of the Red Army was battered to pieces,” Alan Clark summarizes, “in a colossal ‘annihilation battle’ which cost the Russians nearly a million casualties.” On 10 July 1941 Stalin reorganized his forces in the Ukraine under Marshall S. M. Budënny and political commissar Lieutenant General Nikita S. Khrushchev, ordering Budënny to hold Kiev at all costs. Khrushchev concentrated on dismantling and shipping eastward the Ukraine’s factories and refineries, succeeding in salvaging nearly a quarter of the Soviet Union’s industrial capacity. Budënny deployed more than 1.5 million soldiers on a front between Kiev and the strategic town of Uman, 120 miles due south. By mid-July Wehrmacht Panzer forces had captured two major towns eighty-five miles west of the Kiev-Uman front and paralleling it: Zhitomir, due west of Kiev, and Vinnitsa, seventy-five miles south of Zhitomir.

From the Zhitomir-Vinnitsa line, while Field Marshal Walther von Reichenau’s Sixth Army pushed toward Kiev, Field Marshal Ewald von Kleist’s Panzer Group drove south and east around Uman in an enveloping pincer. Other Panzer Groups deployed from farther north in Byelorussia rolled down behind Kiev to encircle it and cut off its lines of supply. The Russians fought back with fierce artillery barrages and waves of suicidal frontal infantry assaults. A young Waffen-SS officer, Peter Neumann, described the result in his diary on 10 August 1941:

Everywhere [between Vinnitsa and Uman] lie tens of thousands of Russian corpses.

They have fallen on the hillsides, on the banks of the rivers, on both sides of the bridges, in the open country. They have been scythed down as they fought, by divisions, by battalions, by regiments, by sections.

Often the piles of interlaced bodies are a yard or more high, as though a machine gun has mown them down, wave after wave of them.

One has to have seen this monstrous mass of decomposing corpses to realize fully what war is like.

At certain times of day, when the sun is hot, gas dilates the ballooning, distended bellies, and then one hears the most horrible and unbelievable gurgling sounds.

Wherever we camp, we first have to spray all the carrion in the vicinity with quicklime or gasoline.

Mass death on the Eastern front was a daily reality, giving grisly cover to the feral mass murders of the Einsatzgruppen.

Einsatzgruppe C had moved into Zhitomir in mid-July, finding it heavily damaged by arson and its population reduced from ninety thousand to forty thousand, of which the group staff estimated about five thousand were Jews. By the end of July 1941 Sonderkommando 4a, Paul Blobel’s commando, had shot several hundred “Jews, Communists and informants for the NKVD” in and around Zhitomir, bringing the commando’s total so far in the war to 2,531 executions. Blobel had recovered from his illnesses, mental and physical, and was again directing Sonderkommando 4a operations. Perhaps because Einsatzgruppe C was operating so close to the front line, word had not yet reached it of Himmler’s order to enlarge operations; in early August 1941 Blobel was still organizing public events designed to encourage pogroms. Thus on 7 August 1941 in Zhitomir Sonderkommando 4a staged the public hanging of a Jewish Soviet judge, Wolf Kieper, and his assistant, posting a large sign accusing the judge of having murdered “1,350 ethnic Germans and Ukrainians.” A Wehrmacht truck driver hurried to the market square that Thursday to watch the execution and found Jewish men assembled there under SS guard:

Round and about stood about 150 civilians watching. There were also, of course, members of the Wehrmacht among the onlookers. The Jews sat on the ground.... The guards asked the people standing around if they had any scores to settle. Thereupon more and more Ukrainians spoke up and accused one or other of the Jews of some misdemeanor. These Jews were then beaten and kicked and ill-treated where they were, mostly by Ukrainians. This went on for about forty-five minutes. Then [two] from this group were taken out and executed on a gallows.

Obersturmführer August Häfner of Sonderkommando 4a, the young first lieutenant who had helped escort Blobel to a mental hospital earlier in the summer, put the number of Jewish men in the square that day at four hundred—he could tell they were Jews, he testified, “because many of them had long beards and were wearing caftans.” After the hangings Blobel told him, “Now four hundred Jews are going to be shot.” The executioners were young Waffen-SS. Both Häfner and a military judge who watched the executions — at a killing pit on the outskirts of town— remembered that the executioners were shaken by the experience. The victims had been positioned facing them at the edge of the pit, and when the young soldiers fired they had been sprayed with their victims’ blood and brains. “I also remember hearing yelling and screaming further back among the crowd [of waiting victims],” the judge testified, “from where each group was led for execution.” The same day, 7 August 1941, Einsatzgruppe C extracted a “fee” of one hundred thousand rubles from the Vinnitsa Jewish community — “as a contribution for residence rights,” a Ukrainian historian reports.