Masters of Death (25 page)

The Wehrmacht overran Berdichev in early July 1941, when only a third of its Jewish population had been evacuated. Those left behind were crowded into a temporary ghetto in late August 1941. Jeckeln established his headquarters in Berdichev, which is probably why the large-scale September massacres in the region west of Kiev started there. While prisoners of war began digging five long killing pits on open land at the end of Brodsky Street near the Berdichev airport, Jeckeln’s own staff company staged a preliminary mass killing with help from Police Battalion 45.

According to Grossman, on 4 September 1941 “the Germans and traitors who had joined their police force [i.e., Ukrainian auxiliaries] ordered 1,500 young people to leave for agricultural work. The young people made bundles of bread and food, said goodbye to their relatives and set out. On that very day they were shot. . . . The henchmen prepared the execution carefully — so carefully that none of the doomed people suspected until the very last minutes that there was a massacre in the offing.” Along a railroad line near the village of Khazhin, POWs had dug two killing pits sufficiently deep that victims approaching the pit could not see the bodies of those already killed. Jeckeln numbered as victims in his report to Berlin “1,303 Jews, among them 875 Jewesses over 12 years [of age].” For justification he claimed that “on 1–2 September 1941 leaflets and inflammatory pamphlets were distributed by Jews in Berdichev,” and “since the perpetrators could not be found,” the victims were executed in reprisal. But Kurt Daluege had flown in to Berdichev on 4 September 1941 to meet with Jeckeln; Richard Breitman speculates that Jeckeln had probably staged the massacre of young people that day in Daluege’s honor. “This execution,” Grossman notes, “removed from the ghetto all the young people capable of resistance.”

The mayor of Berdichev, who was German (a POW in the Great War who had stayed on in the Ukraine), and the chief of police — Reder and Koroliuk, Grossman identifies them — participated in the larger massacre in Berdichev a week and a half later. On 14 September 1941 transport planes disgorged units of a Waffen-SS regiment at the Berdichev airport. Koroliuk mobilized the city police. That night they surrounded the temporary Berdichev ghetto. The raid began at four a.m. on 15 September 1941. “Many of those who could not walk,” Grossman writes— “feeble old people and cripples—were killed by the executioners on the spot. The terrible wails of women and the crying of children wakened the entire town.” The Germans herded their victims into the market square at the center of the temporary ghetto.

Reder, the Berdichev mayor, stationed himself at a high point in the market square surrounded by guards and proceeded to perform a selection, sorting out about four hundred people — doctors, electricians, shoe repairmen, locksmiths, barbers, a photographer—who were allowed to collect their families before being led off into a side street to safety. Some of them had trouble finding their families in the crowded square, Grossman reports: “Witnesses tell of terrible scenes. People attempting to make themselves heard in the fear-crazed crowd shouted the names of their wives and children, and hundreds of doomed mothers stretched out their own sons and daughters to them, begging them to pass them off as their own and thus save them from death. ‘You won’t find your own family in this crowd anyway!’ the women shouted.”

The police formed the remaining twelve thousand people — those who could march—into columns and herded them down Brodsky Street toward the airport. Trucks loaded small children and the elderly. At the airport, SS men led the victims fifty yards across an open field to the pits in groups of forty and murdered them with automatic weapons while the next in line watched from the road. The shooting took all day. Grossman, who interviewed survivors at the end of the war, describes the aftermath:

All five pits were filled to the brim, and mounds of earth were heaped above them to cover the bodies. The ground moved as if in shuddering breath. That night many dug themselves out from under these burial mounds. Fresh air penetrated the loose soil of the upper layers and lent strength to those who were only wounded, whose hearts were still beating but who had been lying unconscious. They crawled in different directions along the field, instinctively attempting to get as far away as possible from the pits. Exhausted, and streaming blood, many of them died right there in the field, a few yards from the place of execution.

Peasants driving at dawn from Romanovka to town saw that the entire field was covered with the bodies of the dead. In the morning the Germans and the police removed the bodies, killed all of those who were still breathing, and buried them again.

Uman was next, the birthplace of the Hasidic movement. German and Hungarian forces had surrounded the town in early August 1941; resistance in the Uman pocket had collapsed within two weeks. A German army officer, Oberleutnant Erwin Bingel, arrived in Uman on 15 September 1941, the day of the Berdichev massacre, commanding a company of reservists attached to the Twelfth Army. Bingel commanded reservists because he had been wounded earlier in the war and was partly disabled. His company was posted from Vinnitsa for guard duty in Uman: permanent guard duty for the railroads in the area, he was told, and temporary assignment “to surround the airport of Uman,” which by special order “was to be closed the following day to all traffic, including members of the German Army.”

The following day was 16 September 1941. Early in the morning Bingel’s company — “strengthened by reinforcements,” he says — marched to the Uman airport about a mile north of town. The men were restive, uncertain what their duty that day might involve. Bingel picketed them at the edge of the airfield. Then, in the dawn light:

From the town, voices of a crowd of people singing Russian melodies could be heard, intimating that large masses of people were on the move and drawing near. The main streets could be seen very clearly and along them huge columns marching six abreast came by, singing all the time, approaching the confines of the airfield. We soon observed that they included not only men, but also women and children of all ages. Nobody could imagine the possible purpose of bringing this crowd of people there, and the whole affair became still more mysterious when I was given orders to withdraw my guards from the nearest posts.

Bingel moved his men back about four hundred yards, leaving a few stationed ahead of him on the main Uman-Kiev road about two hundred yards from the square in front of the airport where the people were gathering. Two long pits had been dug in the square the previous day. As the sun came up, Bingel and his men had a clear view.

Trucks followed the people crowding into the square, disgorging a field gendarmerie (military police) troop that moved off to one side. Men unloaded tables and lined them up spaced well apart. Several truckloads of Ukrainian militia arrived, men with shovels; from one truck, driving slowly along the pit line, they unloaded at regular intervals sacks of quicklime, a powerful caustic that reacts strongly with water.

In the meantime, in a roar of engines, transport planes had begun landing at the airport — Bingel identifies them as Junker 52s. “Out of these stepped several units of SS soldiers who, having fallen in, marched up to the field gendarmerie unit, subsequently taking up positions alongside it.” Bingel watched as the two units were sworn in. His interpreter returned from mingling with the crowd. The man was Jewish, Bingel notes, a secret the Oberleutnant kept. It seemed the crowd had come to the airport because the Ukrainian militia had posted an order throughout the Uman area requiring “all Jews, of all ages” to report there for a census, an order accompanied by the usual German threat that “persons failing to comply . . . will be punished most severely.”

The news that the gathering was only a census relieved Bingel and his men—the “relatively harmless summons” allowed them to “[take] the matter lightly,” he says — but relief soon turned to horror as the Jews in the first row were ordered forward to the tables, made to surrender their valuables and belongings, made to undress and pile their clothes to one side. Whereupon the troops menaced the row of naked people to the brink of one of the pits:

The commandos then marched in behind the line and began to perform the inhuman acts. . . . With automatic pistols and 0.8 pistols these men mowed down the line with such zealous intent that one could have supposed this activity to have been their lifework.

Even women carrying children a fortnight to three weeks old, sucking at their breasts, were not spared this horrible ordeal. Nor were mothers spared the terrible sight of their children being gripped by their little legs and put to death with one stroke of a pistol butt or club, thereafter to be thrown on the heap of human bodies in the ditch, some of which were not quite dead. Not before these mothers had been exposed to this worst of all tortures did they receive the bullet that released them from this sight.

The people in the first row thus having been killed in the most inhuman manner, those of the second row were now ordered to step forward. The men in this row were ordered to step out and were handed shovels with which to heap quicklime upon the still partly moving bodies in the ditch. Thereafter, they returned to the tables and undressed. . . .

The air resounded with the cries of the children and the tortured. With senses numbed by what had happened, one could not help thinking of wives and children back home who believed they had good reason to be proud of their husbands and fathers.

Two of Bingel’s men in the forward posting, along the Uman-Kiev road, were sufficiently horrified to abandon their posts before their relief arrived—a capital offense under military law. The sergeant major whom Bingel had put in charge of the forward line took it upon himself to move the rest of his men back to Bingel’s position. All day, relentlessly, the killing went on, row after row of human beings shot or smashed into the filling pits and dusted with quicklime glaring white in the September sun. Until the pits were full, the SS men loaded into the Junker 52s and the planes roaring off beyond the horizon, the gendarmerie and the militia marched and trucked away. “At five p.m. the square lay deserted in deadly desolation,” Bingel testifies, “and only some dogs, attracted by the scent of blood in the air, were roving the site. The shots were still ringing in our ears.”

Back at their quarters, Bingel’s men importuned him to demand an explanation for the massacre from the town commandant. He did, and the town commandant told him “that a special, express order had been issued by Reichsführer-SS Himmler and personally signed by him.” Bingel asked to see it. As he recalled it in August 1945, this is what it said:

Soldiers of the Waffen-SS!

In the forest of Vinnitsa, District of Kiev, six of our best officers were found assassinated, hanging on a tree.

The details are as follows:

They were found naked, with their legs pointing upward, their bodies slit open and their intestines showing.

As a result of this case, I have decided upon the following measures: As it may be taken for granted that this action was carried out by Jewish partisans, I hereby order that in the District of Kiev 10,000 Jews — irrespective of sex or age—are to die for each of the six officers mentioned above.

Even the child in the cradle must be trampled down like a poisonous toad.

May each one of you be mindful of his oath and do his duty, whatever may be demanded of you.

We are living in an epoch of iron during which it is also necessary to sweep with iron-made brooms.

Bingel puts the number murdered in Uman that day at 24,000. Ukrainian historians dispute that total, since the Jewish population of Uman prior to the German invasion had been 22,000 and another massacre of 6,000 would occur the following year. But the census order Bingel cites was issued for the entire Uman area, including outlying villages and small towns, so a total larger than the Jewish population of Uman itself is plausible. Whatever the precise number, thousands were murdered that day.

Two of Bingel’s men, including the sergeant major, broke down after the massacre and had to be sent the next day to the field hospital in Lvov. Two enlisted men in Bingel’s company were arrested for having taken photographs of the Uman massacre. Beyond shipping their personal possessions (in which he hid some of the photographs) home to their wives, Bingel was unable to protect them; they received one-year prison sentences, which they served in a military facility in Germany. By 19 September 1941, the third day after the Uman massacre, Bingel had to send a fifth of the men in his company on a leave of absence. “As a result of their recent experiences,” he explains, “they were quite incapable of performing any duty.”

That same day Blobel’s Sonderkommando 4a was busy at massacre in Zhitomir. SK 4a had been systematically combing the Zhitomir region throughout September, continuing the work it had accomplished so gruesomely at Belaja Cerkov in August. A Waffen-SS division had seized Zhitomir in late July; Peter Neumann, the young SS officer, recorded the conditions there at that time in his diary:

Zhitomir, July 28th. We occupied the town some days ago. Perhaps I am exaggerating when I call it a town, because all we have seen are miles and miles of ruins, and again ruins.

Fresh orders have reached the division.

In addition to People’s Commissars, we are to shoot, without trial, all Jewish functionaries we find, whether civil or military.

Liquidations, executions, purges. All these words, synonymous with destruction, seem completely banal and devoid of meaning once one has gotten used to them.

It is a vocabulary which has become general usage, and we use such words just as we talk of swatting disagreeable insects or destroying a dangerous animal.

These words however are applied to men. But men who happen to be our mortal enemies.