Masters of Death (36 page)

At Novograd Volynsky, sixty miles west of Zhitomir, where his platoon had arrived on 17 September 1941, Täubner had befriended the mayor, a dedicated anti-Semite. The Wehrmacht was issuing Jewesses false certificates to protect them, the mayor complained. He had more than three hundred Jews—men, women and children — locked up in a nearby prison, he added enthusiastically; might he be authorized to shoot them? Täubner realized with disgust that the Wehrmacht was afflicted with a corrosive sentimentality. It would be shameful if Ukrainians accomplished the hard duty that German officers had been too weak to perform. He told the mayor he and his platoon would undertake the executions.

Ukrainian militiamen dug the killing pit outside the town while Täubner marshaled his men. Most were willing enough. Only recruit Ernst Schumann balked. “I was deeply astonished,” Schumann testified later, “that our men, as members of a workshop unit, were concerned with killing Jews.” He raised the question with the Untersturmführer. “Täubner merely laughed at me and then said something to me which was frankly nothing short of outrageous. He said something to the effect that for him first came pigs, then nothing at all, and only then, far down the list, came Jews.”

Täubner’s men killed 319 people in Novograd Volynsky. SS-Mann Ernst Göbel complained about the way a Rottenführer named Abraham murdered children:

There were about five of them. These were children whom I would think were aged between two and six years. The way Abraham killed the children was brutal. He got hold of some of the children by the hair, lifted them up from the ground, shot them through the back of their heads and then threw them into the grave. After a while I just could not watch this any more and I told him to stop. What I meant was he should not lift the children up by the hair, he should kill them in a more decent way.

Täubner noticed Schumann hanging back and told him to join in. Schumann asked him if he was ordering him to take part. It was not an official order, Täubner hedged, but the others were volunteering. “He said to me that I was a coward. To this I answered that I had not come to Russia to shoot women and children. I myself had a wife and children at home.” (Social shaming was a form of violent coaching common among killing squads.) Since Täubner knew he was running a rogue operation, he did not argue the point further.

On 17 October 1941 Täubner’s Werkstattzug arrived in the village of Sholokhovo, east of Zhitomir. Someone claimed the Jews had threatened to set fire to the agricultural collective and that two Ukrainian women had been seriously injured stepping on mines. Täubner concluded the area needed to be cleared. Murdering 191 Jewish men, women and children rendered Sholokhovo
Judenfrei.
An SS-UNTERSCHARFÜHRER from another unit, Walter Müller, asked to participate and took it upon himself to shoot the children, Abraham-style. Täubner still had enough discipline to reproach Müller, but he did not order Müller to stop his murders.

From 22 October to 12 November 1941 Täubner and his Werkstattzug were stuck in Aleksandriya, southeast along the Dnieper about 175 miles beyond Kiev, for dreary weeks with bad weather and bad roads and nothing to do. Most of the Jews in the area had already been “resettled.” Täubner put his ear to the ground and discovered that the few Jews still around intended to poison the creeks. He ordered them rounded up and delivered to him at his unit. Youth of the German labor service posted to Aleksandriya volunteered to dig a killing pit.

In the meantime there was sport with the Jews impressed for work. The Jews who cut firewood in the courtyard of the quarters took beatings for not working properly. SS-Sturmmann
³⁷
Karl Ackermann got his blood up and pounded one of them with a spade. SS-Sturmmann Rudolf Wüstholz joined in and ordered two Jews to beat each other to death. To motivate them he promised that whoever survived wouldn’t be executed. The men knocked each other down, but they stopped short of killing. Täubner took over. He had one man hanged and sent the other out behind the quarters to be shot.

Täubner had ten or fifteen Jewish men and women, mainly men, locked into the cellar without food, water, light or any kind of toilet. The Aleksandriya mayor came by one evening with two friends. Over schnapps Täubner organized a viewing party. He sent an advance man down with candles. He armed himself and his guests with clubs and ordered SS-Mann Heinrich Hesse and several other guards to accompany them. In the fetid cellar bearded men cowered anxiously in the flickering light. “Täubner was the first to go crazy in the cellar,” Hesse testified. “He lashed out with a heavy wooden club at random at the Jews lying on the ground. He poked around between the legs in the genital area of an elderly Jewess.” The mayor and the others joined in. All the flailing and screaming unnerved Hesse and he backed away. Täubner saw his flinch and demanded he participate. Hesse had no weapon. “I just gave a few Jews less forceful punches or pushes with my fist,” he claimed in his trial testimony.

Hesse particularly noticed one young woman in the cellar. “She was a beautiful woman,” he testified, “aged between twenty and thirty.” After the night visit Hesse began to worry that she would fall into the hands of the Untersturmführer. He resolved to protect her. He watched for his chance, and when it was possible to do so he went down into the cellar and ordered her out, telling her that Täubner wished to speak to her. Outside, Hesse made the woman walk in front of him, heading toward the killing pit, which still gaped empty awaiting its burden. “My only thought was that if I had to do something I should cause the person as little pain as possible. I did not want the Jewess to suffer fear of death.” As she walked ahead of him, he raised his carbine and shot her suddenly in the head from behind. “I was glad to be able to shoot her,” he testified, “but please don’t take that to mean that I enjoyed it.”

Now Täubner filled the killing pit. He encouraged his men to kill with abandon. He himself sometimes slashed victims in the face with his whip. He had SS-Sturmmann Ernst Fritsch taking photographs and took photographs himself. Between executions Täubner broke out his accordion and played “You Are Crazy, My Child” in a wild tempo. The older men especially did not agree with the way the executions were run.

Surprisingly, Täubner was brought up on charges before an SS court in 1942. It was never the business of workshop platoons to kill Jews, the court would decide:

The accused shall not be punished because of the actions against the Jews as such. The Jews have to be exterminated and none of the Jews that were killed is any great loss. Although the accused should have recognized that the extermination of the Jews was the duty of commandos which have been set up especially for this purpose, he should be excused for considering himself to have the authority to take part in the extermination of Jewry himself. Real hatred of the Jews was the driving motivation for the accused. In the process he let himself be drawn into committing cruel actions in Aleksandriya which are unworthy of a German man and an SS officer. . . . It is not the German way to apply Bolshevik methods during the necessary extermination of the worst enemy of our people. In so doing the conduct of the accused gives rise to considerable concern. The accused allowed his men to act with such vicious brutality that they conducted themselves under his command like a savage horde. The accused jeopardized the discipline of the men. It is hard to conceive of anything worse than this. Although the accused may have otherwise taken care of his men, by his conduct he however neglected his supervisory duty which, in the view of the SS, also means not allowing his men to become psychologically depraved.

The court also pointed out that Täubner, on leave, had the photographs taken at the executions developed at two photographic shops in southern Germany and showed them to his wife and friends. “Such pictures could pose the gravest risks to the security of the Reich if they fell into the wrong hands,” the SS judges worried. The photographs were “tasteless and shameless,” an “expression of an inferior character. Particularly revealing in this connection is the fact that the accused evidently took particular pleasure in a photograph of a Jewish woman who was almost completely naked.” Täubner was also accused of ordering the execution of the leader of the Ukrainian militia in Aleksandriya, a manslaughter, and of inciting his wife to attempt an abortion. For all these crimes he was sentenced to a total of ten years in prison, expelled from the SS and declared unfit for service.

(Himmler would pardon Täubner late in the war and send him to the front. In the unauthorized shooting of Jews, the Reichsführer-SS discerned a difference between “executions for purely political motives” and “men acting out of self-seeking, sadistic or sexual motives.”)

Sarra Gleykh kept a diary in a pink school notebook. A young Jewish woman who had fled Kharkov for Mariupol, on the Sea of Azov in the far southeastern Ukraine, where her parents lived, she worked in a telegraph office. Ilya Ehrenburg edited her diary after the war. “It is amazing,” he wrote in his memoirs, “how she hurriedly and disjointedly wrote down everything from day to day.” The Wehrmacht took Mariupol on 8 October 1941. “The Germans entered the town at noon,” Gleykh wrote. “The town was surrendered without a fight.” The Gleykh family had stayed home except for Sarra’s sister Basya, who was caring for a friend who had typhoid, and her sister Fanya, who had gone to work but walked home in the afternoon after the Germans arrived. By the next day the Gleykhs were out of food and an order had already been posted requiring Jews to wear a white six-pointed star. “Jews are forbidden to change apartments,” Sarra noted. “Fanya and her maid,Tanya, are bringing their things from the factory apartment to Mama’s anyway.”

By 10 October 1941 nine thousand people had been registered. “There have not yet been any mass repressions, but our neighbor Trievsky says that the Gestapo detachment [i.e., an Einsatzkommando] has not yet arrived and that things will change after that.” Three nights later German soldiers looted the Gleykhs’ apartment. “They pointed a revolver in our faces and asked where the sugar and meat were. Then they began to smash the doors of the armoire, even though it was not locked. . . . Two of them looted nonstop. They took everything — even the meat grinder. . . . In the morning we learned that looting had gone on all over town during the night. It continued during the day. . . . You can hear them from far away, since their boots make so much noise. After the Germans left, Mama cried and said: ‘They don’t consider us people; we’re doomed.’ ”

On 18 October 1941 the Jews of Mariupol were required to turn in their valuables at collection points around the city. Sarra, Basya and their mother and father turned in three silver soup spoons and a ring. “After that, they did not let us leave the yard. When the entire population of the region had turned in their valuables, it was announced to us that we had to leave the city within two hours. We will have to walk to the nearest collective farm, where we will be settled. We have to take enough food and warm clothing for four days. We are to present ourselves together with our things in two hours. There will be trucks for the elderly and women with babies.” Sarra recorded Solomonic regulations the conquerors promulgated that must have caused great agony: Jewish women married to Russians or Ukrainians whose husbands were in town would be allowed to remain, while those whose husbands were absent would have to leave with their children. “If a Russian woman is married to a Jew, she can choose to remain or go with her husband. The children may remain with her.”

The Gleykhs’ Ukrainian friends evidently knew what was coming: “The Royanovs asked Fanya to give them her grandson [Vladya]. Papa insisted that Fanya take Vladya to the Royanovs. Fanya categorically refused, cried and begged Papa not to throw her out and make her go to the Royanovs. She said: ‘Without you, I’ll do myself in anyway. I won’t survive, so I’ll go with you.’ She would not give up Vladya and decided to take him with her.” Fanya’s maid begged her to give the boy up and promised to take care of him, “but Fanya would not even hear of this.”

The Germans kept the crowds standing in the street until evening. Then “everyone was herded into a building for the night; we got a corner in the basement. It was dark, wet and dirty.” The next day, 19 October 1941, was Sunday. “The Gestapo was resting,” so the Gleykhs and the others were confined to the building for the day. Tanya, the maid, and friends brought food packages. Mr. Gleykh pooled his funds with two other men and bought a horse and cart. “The number of people kept increasing. . . . Vladya can’t stand being here any longer, and he is begging to go home. . . . Tomorrow at seven a.m. we are to leave our last haven in town.”

On 20 October 1941, Sarra wrote: “Judging by how the Germans treated those who came to say goodbye to us and brought packages, the future holds nothing good. The Germans beat all the passersby with clubs and chased them a block away from the building. The time came for Mama, Papa, Fanya and Vladya to get in the truck.” The Gleykhs left first; Sarra’s sister and grandnephew had not been ready to go. A little later Sarra began worrying about her parents. “It was rumored that the trucks were taking the elderly out of town to be destroyed.” Fanya left by truck with Vladya. “We went on foot. The road was terrible and had been washed away by the rain. It was impossible to walk, difficult to raise a foot. If you stopped, you were struck with a club. People were beaten without regard to age.” They approached the Petrovsky Agricultural Station at about two o’clock in the afternoon. It was crowded with people. Sarra searched for Fanya and her parents. “Fanya called to me. She had been searching for our parents before my arrival and had not found them. Probably they were already in the barn to which people were being taken in groups of forty or fifty.” Vladya was hungry. Sarra had apples and toasted bread in her pocket to feed him. It was all she had; they had been forbidden to take food with them.

And then:

Our turn arrived, and the horrible image of a senseless, a wildly senseless and meek death was before our eyes as we set off behind the barns. The bodies of Papa and Mama were already there somewhere. By sending them by truck, I had shortened their lives by a few hours. We were herded toward the trenches which had been dug for the defense of the city. These trenches served no other function than as receptacles for the death of nine thousand Jews. We were ordered to undress to our underwear, and they searched for money and documents. Then we were herded along the edge of the ditch, but there was no longer any real edge, since the trench was filled with people for a half kilometer. Many were still alive and were begging for another bullet to finish them off. We walked over the corpses, and it seemed to me that I recognized my mother in one gray-haired woman. I rushed to her and Basya followed me, but we were driven back with clubs. At one point I thought that an old man with his brains bashed out was Papa, but I could not approach him any closer. We began to say goodbye, and we managed to kiss. . . . Fanya did not believe that this was the end: “Can it be that I will never again see the sun and the light?” she said. Her face was blue-gray, and Vladya kept asking: “Are we going to swim? Why are we undressed?” Fanya took him in her arms, since it was difficult for him to walk in the wet clay. Basya would not stop whispering: “Vladya, Vladya, why should this happen to you too? No one even knows what they have done to us.” Fanya turned around and answered: “I am dying calmly with him, because I know I am not leaving him an orphan.” These were Fanya’s last words. I could not stand it any longer, and I held my head and began to scream in a wild voice. I seem to remember that Fanya had time to turn around and say: “Be quiet, Sarra, be quiet.” At that point everything breaks off.