Masters of Death (23 page)

The deaths in Kamenets-Podolsky mounted for the first time to five figures, but evil cannot be quantified. A massacre in Belaja Cerkov (Bila Cerkva) the previous week had made even the executioners tremble: fewer than one hundred died, but all the victims were children.

At Belaja Cerkov, a small town fifty miles south of Kiev on the main road to Uman, a Teilkommando
²⁷
of Blobel’s Sonderkommando 4a led by the young Obersturmführer August Häfner had been busy during the second half of August exterminating the Jewish population, shooting several hundred people a day into killing pits at a military firing range behind the grounds of a genetics institute. Häfner’s Teilkommando included Sonderkommando men, a platoon of young Waffen-SS (perhaps the same men who had been shaken by the executions at Zhitomir) and Ukrainian auxiliaries. A Wehrmacht officer cadet who liked to stroll the institute grounds after evening mess encountered the executions by following the sounds of rifle fire back to the firing range:

That first evening I saw some 162 people being executed. . . . Nine people were shot at a time while a further nine had to wait their turn. They were then led over to the grave. The people who were to be shot walked towards this grave as though they were taking part in a procession. They walked in a line, each person with his hands on the shoulders of the person in front. They went composed and quietly to their deaths. I saw only two women weep the whole time I observed such executions. I found it simply inexplicable.

During his time in Belaja Cerkov the officer cadet observed six such executions, on successive evenings at about six o’clock, and heard about others. He estimated he saw some eight hundred to nine hundred people killed. Only two of them were children, both boys. Evidently Häfner was not yet prepared to ask his German subordinates to murder children routinely. Instead, he had the children of his adult victims dragged away in the August heat to a house off the main road on the edge of town and locked into two rooms on the second floor without food or water, accumulating them for execution by his Ukrainian auxiliaries. Three truckloads of children went off to the firing range to be murdered on Tuesday evening, 19 August 1941. Another ninety children, many of them diapered infants, the oldest no more than seven, remained behind in the house overnight without adult supervision.

The next day around one o’clock a contingent of distressed enlisted men approached two Wehrmacht chaplains, Catholic and Protestant, in the Military Hospital Division mess. “We heard from German soldiers,” the chaplains wrote in a subsequent report, “that quite a large number of children had been locked up in intolerable conditions in a house near our quarters. A Ukrainian was said to be guarding these children.” In their naïveté the two chaplains suspected the incarceration to be “some arbitrary action on the part of the Ukrainians.” They decided to investigate.

What they found appalled them: “About ninety children packed together into two small rooms in a filthy state. Their whimpering could be heard in the vicinity of the house. Some of the children, mainly infants, were completely exhausted and almost lifeless. There was no German guard or supervision present, only a Ukrainian guard armed with a rifle. German soldiers had free access to the house and were expressing outrage over these frightful conditions.” The two chaplains went off to report the situation to the local commander. He returned to the house with them to see for himself, then bucked them up to the field commander. The field commander was unavailable. The two chaplains conferred, decided that the most senior ranking officer in the area was the commander of the 295th Infantry Division and sought out the division’s Catholic and Protestant chaplains.

The four chaplains inspected the house together. The 295th Catholic chaplain described its condition in a report written the same day:

In the courtyard in front of the house the crying and whimpering of children could be heard very loudly. Outside there were a Ukrainian militiaman keeping guard with a rifle, a number of German soldiers and several young Ukrainian girls. We immediately entered the house unobstructed and in two rooms found some ninety (I counted them) children aged from a few months to five, six or seven years old. . . .

A large number of German soldiers, including a sanitation officer, were inspecting the conditions in which the children were being kept when we arrived. . . .

The two rooms where the children had been accommodated — there was a third empty room adjoining these two—were in a filthy state. The children lay or sat on the floor which was covered in their feces. There were flies on the legs and abdomens of most of the children, some of whom were only half dressed. Some of the bigger children (two, three, four years old) were scratching the mortar from the wall and eating it. Two men, who looked like Jews, were trying to clean the rooms. The stench was terrible. The small children, especially those who were only a few months old, were crying and whimpering continuously. The visiting soldiers were shaken, as we were, by these unbelievable conditions and expressed their outrage over them. In another room, accessible through a window in one of the children’s rooms, there were a number of women and other children, apparently Jews. I did not enter this room. Locked in a further room there were some other women, among them one woman with a small child on her arm. According to the guard on duty — a Ukrainian boy aged about sixteen or seventeen, who was armed with a stick — it had not yet been established whether these women were Jews or not.

The 295th Protestant chaplain, reporting separately, adds that the children “were partly lying in their own filth, there was not a single drop of drinking water and the children were suffering greatly due to the heat.”

As the chaplains left the house, some of the soldiers told the 295th Catholic chaplain “that they had their quarters in a house right next door and that since the afternoon of the previous day they had heard the children crying uninterruptedly.” This chaplain’s response was to ask the soldiers to make sure that no one else, locals in particular, entered the house; he was concerned for the army’s reputation. A medical officer emerged then and “declared to me that water should be brought in urgently.” Despite all the comings and goings, despite the soldiers’ distress and expressions of outrage and the four chaplains’ observations, no one seems to have thought to perform the simple kindness of giving water to the suffering children, who after all were little Jews.

The two divisional chaplains carried their story to an officer of the 295th Infantry Division general staff, Lieutenant Colonel Groscurth. By now it was four o’clock. Thirty minutes later, Groscurth in turn collected an inspection party and marched off to the house. “There were about ninety children and several women crammed into the rooms,” he would write in a lengthy and indignant report. “A woman was cleaning up the farthermost room, which contained almost only babies. The other rooms were unbelievably filthy. There were rags, diapers and filth all over the place. The half-naked children were covered in flies. Almost all the children were crying or whimpering. The stink was unbearable. A German-speaking woman was claiming she was completely innocent, had never had anything to do with politics and was not Jewish.”

Just then the Oberscharführer
²⁸
walked in, the NCO who was in charge of the Waffen-SS platoon that was part of Häfner’s Teilkommando. Groscurth asked the man what would happen to the children. “He informed me that the children’s relatives had been shot and the children were also to be eliminated.” Keeping his own council, Groscurth proceeded to the local commander’s office and demanded an explanation. The local commander denied jurisdiction and sent Groscurth on to the field commander. “The
Feldkommandant
reported that the head of the
Sonderkommando
had been to see him, had notified him about the execution and was carrying it out with his knowledge.” Groscurth asked if the Sonderkommando “had also received orders from the highest authority to eliminate children as well; I had heard nothing about this.” The field commander assured him that the order was necessary and correct.

Groscurth found that hard to believe. He decided to pursue the question to the next level, which was division headquarters. He asked the field commander to seal off the area around the house while he contacted division headquarters. He knew he was treading on dangerous ground:

I had misgivings about interrupting the measures [i.e., the execution] as I thought that the children would not be transported until evening, by which time division headquarters would have made its decision known. I was aware that suspending the measures would inevitably lead to complications with the political authorities and I wanted to avoid this if possible. However, the Feldkommandant stated that the transport would take place shortly. I then instructed the Feldkommandantto inform the head of the Sonderkommando that he would have to postpone the transport until a decision had been taken by headquarters.

Groscurth immediately telephoned division headquarters, which bucked him up to Sixth Army headquarters. “It took me some time to contact the operations officer there. Finally I was told that he would not be able to have a decision from the commander-in-chief until the evening.” The commander in chief was von Reichenau, who had ordered the mass execution of Jews in Luck at the end of June when ten German soldiers had been found executed. Groscurth was evidently unaware of von Reichenau’s enthusiasm for the Führer’s
Lebensraum
policies.

Soon Häfner arrived to challenge Groscurth’s moratorium. “He asked for an order in writing,” Groscurth records. “I refused this, remarking that a definitive decision could be expected very shortly. He declared in a rather unmilitary tone that he would have to report these instructions to his commanding officer. He had clear orders to carry out the measure.” The infantry lieutenant colonel was up to the first lieutenant’s challenge: “I stated that I had to stick to my instructions and would back them with force if necessary.”

At seven o’clock Groscurth reported to his divisional commander, who approved his intervention. At eight o’clock Sixth Army headquarters rang through to order the execution postponed. By then the children had been loaded into a truck parked in front of the house. The field commander had bread and water delivered to the children. The record does not reveal where they spent the night.

The next day, 21 August 1941, Blobel and Häfner sat down with army representatives, including the field commander and Groscurth, to negotiate a resolution to the Wehrmacht/SS standoff. The two Einsatz officers “admitted there had been shortcomings in the way things had been run,” Groscurth writes, “and stated that a way had to be found to settle the matter quickly given the prevailing conditions.” The field commander criticized the chaplains for stirring up trouble. Groscurth defended them. The field commander “declared that he considered the extermination of Jewish women and children to be pressingly urgent. . . .He was at pains to point out that as a result of the division’s actions the elimination of the children had been delayed unnecessarily by twenty-four hours.” Blobel agreed with him and added nastily “that it would be best if those troops who were nosing around carried out the executions themselves and the commanders who were stopping the measures took command of these troops.” Groscurth restrained himself. “I quietly rejected this view without taking any position, as I wished to avoid any personal acrimony.” Blobel played his trump card: von Reichenau, he claimed, “recognized the necessity of eliminating the children and wished to be informed once this had been carried out.” That was still not enough for Groscurth, but when an intelligence officer at the meeting representing the Sixth Army high command confirmed Blobel’s claim, the indignant infantry officer finally capitulated. “We then settled the details of how the executions were to be carried out,” he writes. “They are to take place during the evening of 22 August. I did not involve myself in the details of this discussion.”

When von Reichenau read Groscurth’s report he was livid. “It would have been far better if the report had not been written at all,” he complained. The commander in chief of the German Sixth Army took particular exception to a comparison Groscurth drew between SS and Soviet policy, quoting Groscurth’s words to condemn them: “The report in question contains the following sentence: ‘In the case in question, measures against women and children were undertaken which in no way differ from atrocities carried out by the enemy about which the troops are continually being informed.’ I have to describe this assessment as incorrect, inappropriate and impertinent in the extreme.” Von Reichenau made sure Groscurth saw this rebuke: he required him to countersign it.

Häfner still had to do Blobel’s dirty work. “Then Blobel ordered me to have the children executed,” he testified after the war. “I asked him, ‘By whom should the shooting be carried out?’ ” Blobel said the Waffen-SS should do it. Häfner objected: they were young men, he said; “how are we going to answer to them if we make them shoot small children?” Blobel countered, “Then use your men.” Häfner said they had small children themselves. “This tug-of-war lasted about ten minutes,” Häfner concludes. “. . . I suggested that the Ukrainian militia of the
Feldkommandant
should shoot the children.” No one objected to passing on the onerous duty to the Ukrainians.

Häfner finishes the story:

I went out to the woods alone. The Wehrmacht had already dug a grave. The children were brought along in a tractor [-drawn wagon]. I had nothing to do with this technical procedure. The Ukrainians were standing round trembling. The children were taken down from the tractor. They were lined up along the top of the grave and shot so that they fell into it. The Ukrainians did not aim at any particular part of the body. They fell into the grave. The wailing was indescribable. I shall never forget the scene throughout my life. I find it very hard to bear. I particularly remember a small fair-haired girl who took me by the hand. She too was shot later. . . . The grave was near some woods. It was not near the firing range. The execution must have taken place in the afternoon at about three-thirty or four. . . . Many children were hit four or five times before they died.