Masters of Death (9 page)

Despite the deportations, Barbarossa surprised the NKVD, whose jails and prisons in the invaded western territories were crowded with political prisoners. Rather than release their prisoners as they hastened to retreat during the first week of the war, the Soviet secret police had simply slaughtered them. NKVD prisoner executions in the first week after Barbarossa totaled some ten thousand in the western Ukraine and more than nine thousand in Vinnitsa, eastward toward Kiev; comparable numbers of prisoners were executed in eastern Poland, Byelorussia, Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia. These areas had already sustained losses numbering in the hundreds of thousands from the Stalinist purges of 1937–38. “It was not only the numbers of the executed,” historian Yury Boshyk writes of the evacuation murders, “but also the manner in which they died that shocked the populace. When the families of the arrested rushed to the prisons after the Soviet evacuation, they were aghast to find bodies so badly mutilated that many could not be identified. It was evident that many of the prisoners had been tortured before death; others were killed en masse.” In some cases, cells crowded with prisoners had been dynamited, badly mutilating the remains.

The conquering Germans opened up the prisons and jails and invited the communities to collect their dead, organizing the events to implicate local Jewish citizens in the murders. “Jews were paraded out,” historian John-Paul Himka confirms, “forced to clean the corpses and accused of responsibility for the atrocities.”

Even though some locals collaborated with the Nazis, neither Heydrich nor Himmler expected to rely for long on pogroms. As Stahlecker would write in his review of the first months of the war, “The Security Police had fundamental orders for cleansing operations aimed at the most comprehensive possible elimination of the Jews.” Decapitating the occupied countries and murdering the Jews was the responsibility of the fast-moving Einsatzgruppen and the battalions of Order Police that would follow in larger numbers behind them. At the end of June, eager to determine how the operation was progressing, Heydrich and Himmler set out eastward on an inspection tour.

Like Hitler and Göring, Himmler used an armored train as a traveling command post, named
Heinrich
in his honor. He had followed Hitler to East Prussia in
Heinrich
shortly after the beginning of Barbarossa. When Hitler had moved into his new command bunker Wolfschanze — the Wolf’s Lair — dug into a pine forest outside Rastenburg, Himmler had ordered
Heinrich
parked on a railroad siding beside a lake twenty miles away and lived and worked aboard. The train was outfitted with a communications center, a dining car, offices and sleeping cars. People waiting for appointments with the Reichsführer-SS would remember after the war that the dining car was still serving “the good coffee” when only ersatz was available at home. It was from
Heinrich
that the two SS leaders departed on 30 June.

In Augustowo and Grodno, in eastern Poland, they were annoyed to find the Jewish populations still unconfined. Heydrich remedied that oversight the following day with an order that brought killing squads from East Prussia on 3 July 1941. The squads proceeded to murder 316 Jews in Augustowo, including ten women, and the Jewish leadership in Grodno.

Himmler moved on to Bialystok on 8 July 1941, arriving in that medium-sized northeastern Polish city with Higher SS and Police Leader Erich von dem Bach-Zelewski, a large, shrewd Prussian, just after Order Police Battalion 322 had conducted a raid on the Jewish quarter. (A few days earlier in Bialystok, Police Battalion 309 had driven seven hundred Jews into the city’s main synagogue, set fire to the building and burned them alive, and Einsatzkommando 9 had conducted mass executions.) Police Battalion 322 had searched Jewish apartments and shops and “requisitioned” property and goods that the Germans claimed had been stolen. It took twenty trucks to carry all the booty to a “booty depot” set up to receive it: “Groceries and luxury wares of all kinds,” the police report listed, “leather goods, textiles (coats and rolls of suit material), kitchen appliances and rubber goods,” all according to the police “plundered from stores.” The battalion executed twenty-one men and one woman who were supposedly “plunderers and fugitives and almost exclusively Jews.” They were few in number because only those people who refused to admit that they were “plunderers” were executed.

Himmler inspected the booty depot with Bach-Zelewski and asked about the battalion’s duties. He was unhappy with the death toll and ordered more Jews killed. That night, while Himmler and Bach-Zelewski dined with Lieutenant Colonel Max Montua of the Police Regiment Center and the battalion commanders, the police battalions murdered another thousand people.

After the depot inspection, before dinner, Himmler and his subordinates had gone into secret conference. The order that emerged a few days later, on 11 July 1941, signed by Montua and distributed to three police battalions, ratcheted the killing operations one notch higher. It specified, “1. All male Jews between 17–45 years of age convicted of looting are to be executed immediately.” Since the battalions conducted neither investigations nor trials, the word “convicted” was a fig leaf, much like the euphemism “shot while trying to escape.” Stripped of dissimulation, what the order meant was that from that day forward, any male Jews nominally of military age could be rounded up and murdered without evidence that they had committed any crime.

Increasingly, then, rather than operating behind the scenes promoting pogroms, Germans would be seen organizing and often carrying out mass killings themselves. It followed that such killings could no longer be conducted on garage aprons and in town squares among cheering crowds: “2. The executions are to take place away from cities, villages and traffic routes. The graves are to be leveled to prevent them from becoming places of pilgrimage. I forbid photography and the admittance of spectators. Executions and places of burial are not to be made public.”

Himmler’s psychological signature clearly marks this early killing order, even beyond the imperious “I forbid” of the second paragraph. The concerns addressed in the third paragraph, and even the language, are Himmler’s:

3. Battalion and company leaders are to pay special attention to the pastoral care of the participants in this action. The impressions of the day are to be dispelled through evening gatherings with comrades. In addition, the men are to be instructed regularly on the necessity of this measure, resulting from the political situation.

Montua’s order did not reach beyond the Police Battalions, but it signals Himmler’s impatience with the body count his killing squads had delivered during the first two weeks of Barbarossa. Other testimony corroborates an increasing application of pressure from Berlin.

Walter Blume, a thirty-five-year-old police colonel with a law doctorate who had been assigned to lead Sonderkommando 7a of Nebe’s Einsatzgruppe B, claimed at the trial of the Einsatzgruppen leadership in 1947 that he had worked consistently after leaving Pretzsch to avoid having to carry out mass executions. Whether that claim was true or not (and the Tribunal evidently disbelieved it, since Blume was one of fourteen defendants sentenced to be hanged), his testimony chronicles the initiatives and the troubles of one SS commando on the Eastern front in the early days of the war as it adjusted itself to mass killing.

Sonderkommando 7a advanced first to Vilnius. Shortly after Blume arrived with his commando, he learned that Einsatzkommando 9 of Nebe’s group had also turned up in Vilnius. Army Intelligence had denied Blume permission to advance with the Wehrmacht front line. With Vilnius now covered by Einsatzkommando 9, the Sonderkommando leader decided to ignore the Wehrmacht directive, pulled his commando out of the Lithuanian city on 3 July 1941 and headed southeastward toward Minsk:

The road between Vilnius and Minsk made a good impression, good European impression, and was not destroyed. Our vehicles kept their prescribed distance because of [Russian] air attacks. The tempo was set by the slowest truck. We did not take any rest, and therefore we arrived in Minsk on the same day, but very late at night, after it had become dark. The city of Minsk had not been cleared of snipers. Units of the army gave us a place near the theater, where we awaited the next morning. This, then, was the 4th of July 1941. On this day I immediately occupied the most important buildings of the Soviet authorities, especially the Big House of the Soviets with its two to three hundred rooms. It was completely undestroyed and contained most of its materials, especially documents and libraries. My three detachments had their hands full of work in order to safeguard this material.

The next day Nebe turned up in Minsk a day ahead of his staff, called Blume on the carpet and dressed him down for defying the army’s directive. Blume countered that his initiative had allowed him to confiscate valuable Soviet documents that might otherwise have been destroyed. When he gave Nebe a long report the following afternoon, the Einsatzgruppe leader was mollified, but then asked Blume why his commando “had not undertaken executions of Jews.” Blume claimed he argued that executions “would only cause the Jews to flee and . . . join the partisans. Nebe did not see my point of view. He said it was impossible that he would mention the garrison of a commando in a city in his reports without at the same time reporting about executions of Jews. They expected him, in Berlin, to show activity in this respect, and he would also have to demand that from me.”

If Blume in fact resisted, Nebe gave him a direct order:

He then pointed out that the Jews had set their houses in Minsk on fire when the local combat commander had told them to leave their houses to make them available to Byelorussians who no longer had homes. Nebe had seen these fires on the evening of his arrival. . . . This, he said to me, was an excellent reason for a reprisal action. . . . Nebe now explained to me that he wished, and he ordered, that before I left Minsk a Jewish execution was to take place, namely, as reprisal for the burning of these houses.

Blume then claims to have argued that the officers of two of his three Sonderkommando detachments “were still young and somewhat immature men who had not even received military training and who therefore were not suitable to carry out such an execution. The only officer who was militarily trained was the commanding officer of the third detachment, Obersturmführer
¹¹
Voltis, who personally was a hard soldierly character.” Whereupon Nebe had Voltis sent in, and to humiliate Blume he ignored the normal chain of command and directly ordered the Obersturmführer “to proceed with a reprisal action against the Jews on the next morning before leaving Minsk.”

As ordered, Blume testified, Voltis carried out the execution the next morning. Blume claimed to have been “only partly present” to observe it. “As far as I remember it lasted about one to one and a half hours. . . . Ten men at a time would be brought to the execution place. . . . There was [an anti]tank ditch. The ten men were put at that ditch and in a military manner were shot by rifles by the execution commando, which included about forty men. Three men always shot at a victim. . . . The number of victims amounted to about fifty to sixty.”

After the executions Sonderkommando 7a rolled on:

How many days we spent on the way towards Polosk I do not exactly remember. At any rate, the roads were partly very bad, and the vehicles had to proceed in second gear almost constantly. When we had reached the fighting troops we were about two days in the front lines until the tanks finally passed through the city. I went into the city with my commando immediately, even before the infantry. Still we arrived too late, for the streets had already been set on fire by the Communist arson units and the NKVD building too was up in flames.... This must have been between the 10th and 12th of July. We only spent one day in Polosk. . . . [We] proceeded on the next day in the direction of Vitebsk, which had been captured by the Germans on the 11th of July.

In Vitebsk, northeast of Minsk in eastern Byelorussia and a third of the way to Moscow, Blume assigned Voltis — “who was such an active man,” he testified sarcastically—the task of “forming a Jewish Council, registering and marking
¹²
the Jews and drafting them for labor service with the army agencies.” Blume kept busy preparing reports, but soon enough Nebe called him again to task. “I received a very severe [radio] message from Nebe in which he demanded a detailed report about Vitebsk, and especially about the execution of Jews.” At that point Blume simply capitulated. “I therefore gave Voltis the order to prepare a Jewish action [but] limited the order exclusively to able-bodied [Jewish] men. . . . One or two days later in my presence the announced execution was carried out. As far as I remember about eighty able-bodied men were shot in the same manner as they had been shot in Minsk.”

Blume had dodged the Minsk executions; this time he was present throughout. “By my presence,” he testified, “I wanted to show the men of my execution commando that I would not ask of them any more than I would ask of myself.” He watched for two hours as his men murdered eighty unarmed and defenseless human beings, standing them at the edge of a killing pit and shooting them ten at a time; he watched them cry out in agony and crumple and fall, watched dirt scattered over them and the next ten victims marched up to stand where the last ten had stood and be shot in their turn. It affected him:

If I am now asked about my inner attitude which I then held, I can only say that it was absolutely split. On the one hand there was the strict order of my superior . . . and as a soldier I had to obey. On the other hand I considered the execution of this order cruel and humanly impossible. My very presence at this execution convinced me of this in a final manner. I still know that I wanted to make the situation easier for my men who were certainly moved by the same feelings. When ten men were shot there was always a pause until the next had been brought in. During these pauses I let my men sit down and rest and I joined them. I still know that I said exactly the following words to them at that time: “As such it is no job for German men and soldiers to shoot defenseless people but the Führer has ordered these shootings because he is convinced that these men otherwise would shoot at us as partisans or would shoot at our comrades and our women and children were also to be protected if we undertake these executions. This we would have to remember when we carry out this order.” Furthermore, I tried by talking about neutral subjects to make the difficult spiritual situation easier and to overcome it.