Masters of Death (30 page)

I saw nothing like this spectacle either in the First World War, during the Civil War in Russia or in the Western campaign. I have seen many unpleasant things, having been a member of the Freikorps in 1919, but I have never seen anything like this. I cannot begin to conceive the legal basis on which these executions were carried out. Everything that is happening here seems to be absolutely incompatible with our [German] views on education and morality. Right out in the open, as if on a stage, men murder other men. I must add that, according to the accounts of the soldiers, who often see spectacles of this kind, hundreds of people are killed in this way every day.

Then it was Vinnitsa’s turn. The administrative center of a large district, with a prewar population of 70,000, of whom about 36,000 were Jews, Vinnitsa had already been brutally purged in 1937 and 1938 by the NKVD. In the early summer of 1943, with unparalleled audacity, the SS would publicly exhume the victims of the NKVD killings in Vinnitsa; in three mass grave sites in an orchard, a Russian Orthodox cemetery and a public park near the town stadium, the homicide squad the SS sent from Berlin would find 9,432 bodies, of which 169 were female. With one exception, all the men had been bound, and most of the victims had been killed with shots to the head with small-caliber weapons. The victims had been “enemies of the people,” not specifically Jews, and included a large number of collective farm workers and priests. The Nazi authorities would invite forensic experts from the International Commission of Foreign Medical Examiners to observe the exhumations, hoping to focus international attention on the Soviet atrocities comparable with the attention that followed the discovery earlier in 1943 of the 1940 Soviet massacre of twelve thousand Polish officers in the Katyn Forest, 125 miles west of Moscow.

Had the foreign medical examiners looked a little farther, they would have found Einsatzgruppen mass graves all over the Vinnitsa region. Already in September 1941 some 2,400 people — old men, women and children — had been shot to death at a brickworks near Nemirov, twenty-five miles southeast of Vinnitsa on the road to Uman. On 22 September 1941, the first day of the Jewish New Year, a major massacre reduced the Jews of Vinnitsa by half. The record of the Vinnitsa massacre is sparse. Erwin Bingel, stationed in the area, witnessed it “in close proximity to our quarters” and thought that it “did not lag behind that of Uman in any respect.” He took two complete rolls of photographs and estimated the number of Jewish victims as 28,000.

Faina Vinokurova, the Ukrainian Jewish historian, has studied the surviving Ukrainian and German documents; she points out that a large number of Vinnitsa’s 36,000 Jews were evacuated eastward at the beginning of the war. The Jews who stayed behind, she found, did so in part because they remembered that German authorities had protected Jews from pogroms after the First World War and believed that they would fare well in German hands. Her own grandfather was one who stayed behind. The Soviet government had confiscated the inn he owned and he believed the Germans would allow him to reopen it. When he made that proposal to the German authorities, he was tied to a horse and dragged through the city to his death.

On 22 September 1941 the SS used the town stadium, across from the public park where NKVD victims were buried, as a gathering and sorting center. Vinokurova estimates the death toll in the massacre that day — the massacre Bingel photographed — as around ten thousand.

The victims of these September mass killings in the Ukraine total about 42,000. There were other massacres in the region that month as well: 8,890 “Jews and Communists” in Kikorino; 22,467 in the Nikolayev area; 1,107 adults and then 561 children by Blobel’s Sonderkommando 4a in Radomyshl to reduce “overcrowding”; a thousand people murdered around a well at Kachovka; 920 at Lahoysk with support from the Waffen-SS division Das Reich; the small Nevel ghetto near Minsk cleared of 640 human beings and their houses burned because “scabies broke out”; 1,025 murdered at nearby Janovichi because of “contagious disease,” an operation “carried out solely by a commander and twelve men”; 2,278 from the Minsk ghetto in a “screening operation.” In Lithuania, Einsatzkommando 3 proudly reported eleven districts
Judenfrei,
bringing the Jäger commando’s total as of 19 September 1941, “together with Lithuanian partisans,” to 46,692. And the month had not yet come to its bloody end.

TEN

Lords of Life and Death

Heinrich Himmler personally attended a mass execution in Minsk on 15 August 1941, at the end of the Pripet marshes campaign. The previous day he and some of his staff had flown in one of his command Junker 52s to Baranowicze to meet Higher SS and Police Leader Bach-Zelewski and the commander of the SS Cavalry Brigade, Hermann Fegelein. From there the group, which included Himmler’s handsome chief of staff, Karl Wolff, traveled on to Minsk, where Himmler spoke to the officers and NCOs of Nebe’s Einsatzgruppe B.

After the speech, according to Bach-Zelewski, “Himmler asked Nebe how many prisoners scheduled for execution he had in custody at that moment. Nebe stated a number of around one hundred. The
Reichsführer-SS
then asked if it would cause any ‘special difficulties’ if these prisoners were executed the next morning. He wanted to observe such a liquidation in order to get an idea of what it was like. He requested that I accompany him together with
Gruppenführer
Wolff.” Wolff later claimed to know “from [Himmler’s] own mouth” that the Reichsführer-SS had never seen a man killed up to that time. Himmler spent the night in Lenin House, one of the few public buildings still standing in Minsk after Wehrmacht artillery barrages and NKVD arson.

Otto Bradfisch’s Einsatzkommando 8 and members of Police Battalion 9 organized the executions the next morning in a forest north of the city. Two pits had been dug in open ground. Bach-Zelewski claimed in his postwar testimony that “the criminals were without exception partisans and their helpers, among which a third to a half were Jews,” but Bradfisch testified to the contrary that “the shooting of the Jews was not a matter of destroying elements that represented a threat either to the fighting troops or to the pacification of the field of operations behind the lines; it was simply a matter of destroying Jews for the sake of destroying Jews.” Of the victims, whose number Bradfisch estimated as between 120 and 190, two were women—still a new category of victims in mid-August.

Bradfisch claimed to have questioned Himmler before proceeding with the executions, asking him “who was taking responsibility for the mass extermination of the Jews. . . . Himmler answered me in a fairly sharp tone that these orders had come from Hitler as the supreme Führer of the German government, and that they had the force of law.”

The victims were held inside the forest and brought up to the pits by truck, one group at a time, to face a twelve-man firing squad. Wolff remembered them as “ragged forms, mostly young men.” Bach-Zelewski described an unforgettable confrontation between Himmler and one of the victims:

Among the Jews was a young man of perhaps twenty who was blond and blue-eyed. He was already standing in front of the rifle barrels when Himmler intervened. The barrels were lowered; Himmler approached the young man and asked several questions.

“Are you a Jew?”

“Yes.”

“Are both your parents Jews?”

“Yes.”

“Do you have any ancestors who were not Jews?”

“No.”

The Reichsführer stamped his foot and said: “Then even I can’t help you.”

Bach-Zelewski’s version of the massacre conflicts with Bradfisch’s. Rather than a stand-up execution, Bradfisch described a
Sardinenpackung:
forcing the victims to lie face down in the pit and shooting down on them from above. Both Wolff and Bach-Zelewski remembered that Himmler was shaken by the murders. “Himmler was extremely nervous,” Bach-Zelewski testified. “He couldn’t stand still. His face was white as cheese, his eyes went wild and with each burst of gunfire he always looked at the ground.”

When the two women were laid down to be murdered, Bach-Zelewski said, “the members of the firing squad lost their nerve” and shot badly; the two women were injured but “did not die immediately.” Himmler panicked then. “
Reichsführer
Himmler jumped up and screamed at the squad commander: ‘Don’t torture these women! Fire! Hurry up and kill them!’ ”

Immediately after the massacre, Bach-Zelewski claimed, he challenged Himmler to reconsider ordering mass killings:

I said to him, “Reichsführer, that was only a hundred!”

“What do you mean by that?”

I answered: “Look at the men, how deeply shaken they are! Such men are finished for the rest of their lives! What kind of followers are we creating? Either neurotics or brutes!”

Himmler was visibly moved, Bach-Zelewski remembered, and impulsively called the men to assemble around him. The Higher SS and Police Leader paraphrases Himmler’s speech, which he thought gave a good impression of his superior’s “confusion”:

Himmler first wanted to emphasize that he demanded from the men a “repugnant” performance of their duty. He would certainly not be pleased if German men enjoyed doing such work. But it should not disturb their consciences in the slightest, because they were soldiers who were supposed to carry out every order unquestioningly. . . . He alone bore the responsibility before God and the Führer for that which had to happen.

They surely had noticed that even he was revolted by this bloody activity and had been aroused to the depth of his soul. But he too was obeying the highest law by doing his duty and he was acting from a deep understanding of the necessity of this operation. We should observe nature: everywhere there was war, not only among human beings, but also in the animal and plant worlds. Whatever did not want to fight was destroyed. . . . Primitive man said that the horse is good, but the bug is bad, or wheat is good but the thistle is bad. Humans characterize that which is useful to them as good, but that which is harmful as bad. Don’t bugs, rats and other vermin have a purpose in life to fulfill? But we humans are correct when we defend ourselves against vermin.

The speech as Bach-Zelewski recalled it is hardly confused; it was a speech Himmler had delivered before and would deliver again. It incorporated arguments he had formulated that he hoped would relieve his men of whatever psychological stress they might feel at shooting unarmed victims: that they were only following orders; that the responsibility was not theirs but his and the Führer’s; that any repugnance they felt was cause for congratulation, since it affirmed that they were civilized; that life at every level struggled for survival (an argument borrowed from Hitler, who had borrowed it in turn from the social Darwinists and the literature of colonialism); that their victims had purposes of their own and of course wished to live, not to die, but were harmful, were comparable to vermin.

But the experience of actually watching people shot down in cold blood was not something Himmler could so easily shrug off. After the executions he and his party inspected a prisoner-of-war camp. On the way to inspect what Bach-Zelewski calls “a small mental institution close by Minsk” they drove through the ghetto that Nebe had established in the Byelorussian capital, crowded by then with more than eighty thousand Jews. According to Bach-Zelewski, the hospital held “the most severe mental patients”; Himmler ordered Nebe to “release” them — that is, to have them murdered—as soon as possible. That raised the question of how to kill them. “Himmler said that today’s event had brought him to the conclusion that death by shooting was certainly not the most humane. Nebe was to think about it and submit a report based on the information he collected.” Bach-Zelewski claimed Nebe asked permission to try killing the patients with dynamite. He claimed that he and Wolff both objected, saying the patients were not mere guinea pigs, but Himmler ignored their objections and authorized the experiment.

The Reichsführer-SS spent another night in Lenin House, toured a museum the next day, flew over the Pripet marshes and Pinsk, then returned to Wolfschanze and shared his experiences with Hitler over lunch.

Himmler’s panic at the sight of injured women, the firing squad’s loss of nerve in the first place at the prospect of having to shoot them and Nebe’s concern for his troops (but not for his victims) indicate the difficulties that the SS had to overcome to perpetrate mass murder on the Eastern front during the Second World War. Hitler’s executioners may have been willing, but they were not always able. More difficulties emerged as the categories of victims enlarged to include women and children and, eventually, transports of western European Jews. Himmler’s response to the Einsatzgruppe execution staged for his benefit in Minsk on 15 August 1941—his “conclusion that death by shooting was certainly not the most humane”— led directly to the development of more impersonal murder technologies; Nebe experimented that autumn not only with dynamite but also with carbon monoxide gas.

The problem of impersonal killing had already been solved at pilot scale within Nazi Germany by exploiting medical technology. Handicapped children began to be killed by medical personnel in Germany in autumn 1939, a program organized secretly out of the Führer Chancellery (KdF) by Himmler’s fellow agriculturalist and former driver Viktor Brack, the son of the private physician who had delivered Himmler’s daughter Gudrun. In special children’s wards in twenty-three state hospitals and clinics, children were killed with barbiturate or opiate overdoses in the form of pills, suppositories or, less frequently, injections. Himmler did not idly select Nebe to experiment with mass-killing techniques; the Einsatzgruppe commander had previous experience. As head of the Central Office of the Reich Detective Forces in 1939 under Heydrich’s Reich Main Security Office, he had arranged to supply Brack’s child killers with untraceable supplies of the necessary drugs.