The Second World War (41 page)

Using the fieldcraft and camouflage which came naturally to those who had lived their lives in the countryside and forests, Soviet partisans soon became a far greater threat than the planners of Barbarossa had ever imagined. By the beginning of September 1941, sixty-three
partisan
detachments with a total of nearly 5,000 men and women were operating behind German lines in Ukraine alone. The NKVD was also planning to insert another eighty groups, while a further 434 detachments were being trained as stay-behind groups. Altogether over 20,000 partisans were already in place or being prepared. A number included specially trained assassins who could pass themselves off as German officers. Railway lines, rolling stock and locomotives, troop trains, supply trucks, motorcycle couriers, bridges, fuel, ammunition and food depots, landlines, telegraph and airfields, all were targeted. Using parachuted radios, partisan detachments led by officers mainly from NKVD frontier forces transmitted intelligence back to Moscow and received instructions.

Not surprisingly, the partisan campaign made the idea of colonizing Hitler’s ‘Garden of Eden’ rather less appealing to potential Germans and
Volksdeutsch
settlers who had been promised farms there. The whole
Lebensraum
plan in the east required ‘cleansed’ areas and a completely subservient peasantry. Predictably, Nazi reprisals became increasingly savage. Villages near partisan attacks were burned to the ground. Hostages were executed. Conspicuous punishments included the public hanging of young women and girls accused of aiding the partisans. But the harsher the reaction, the greater the determination to resist. In many cases, Soviet partisan leaders deliberately provoked German reprisals to increase hatred for the invader. It was indeed a ‘
time of iron
’. The life of an individual seemed to have lost all value on both sides, especially in German eyes if the individual was Jewish.

There were essentially two parts to the Holocaust–what Vasily Grossman later called ‘
the Shoah by bullets
and the Shoah by gas’–and the process which eventually led to the industrialized murder of the death camps was uneven, to say the least. Until September 1939, the Nazis had hoped to force German, Austrian and Czech Jews to emigrate through
maltreatment, humiliation and the expropriation of their property. Once war began, that became increasingly difficult. And the conquest of Poland brought a further 1.7 million Jews under their jurisdiction.

In May 1940, during the invasion of France, Himmler had written a paper for Hitler entitled ‘
Some Thoughts on the Treatment
of Alien Populations in the East’. He suggested screening the Polish population so that the ‘racially valuable’ could be Germanized, while the rest were turned into slave labour. As for the Jews, he wrote: ‘I hope completely to erase the concept of Jews through the possibility of a great emigration to a colony in Africa or elsewhere.’ At that stage, Himmler considered genocide–‘the Bolshevik method of physical extermination’–to be ‘un-German and impossible’.

Himmler’s idea of shipping European Jews abroad focused on the French island of
Madagascar
. (Adolf Eichmann, still a junior functionary, was thinking of Palestine, a British mandate.) Reinhard Heydrich, Himmler’s deputy, also argued that the problem of 3.75 million Jews then on German-occupied territory could not be resolved through emigration, so a ‘
territorial solution
’ was needed. The problem was that, even if Vichy France agreed, the ‘Madagaskar Projekt’ could not work in the face of British naval superiority. Yet the idea of deporting Jews to a reservation somewhere still remained the preferred option.

In March 1941, with the ghettos in Poland overflowing, mass sterilization was considered. Then, with Hitler’s plans for Operation Barbarossa, senior Nazis embraced the idea of removing Europe’s Jews, as well as thirty-one million Slavs, to some area deep in the Soviet Union once victory was achieved. This would be when German armies reached the Arkhangelsk–Astrakhan line, and the Luftwaffe could switch to the long-range bombing of any remaining Soviet arms factories and communication centres in the Urals and beyond. For Hans Frank, the regent of the Generalgouvernement, the invasion promised the opportunity to deport all Jews who had been dumped in his territory.

Others, including Heydrich, concentrated on more immediate concerns, particularly the ‘pacification’ of the conquered territories. Hitler’s notion of ‘pacification’ was quite clear. ‘
This will happen best
’, he told Alfred Rosenberg, the minister for the eastern territories, ‘by shooting dead anyone who even looks sideways at us.’ Soldiers should not be prosecuted for crimes against civilians, unless the needs of discipline absolutely required it.

Army commanders, now in Hitler’s thrall after the triumph over France which they had openly doubted, failed to raise any objections. Some of them embraced with enthusiasm the idea of a war of annihilation–
Vernichtungskrieg
. Any lingering outrage about the murderous actions of the
SS in Poland had dissipated. Generalfeldmarschall von Brauchitsch, the commander-in-chief, worked closely with Heydrich on liaison between the army and
the SS during Barbarossa. The German army would provision the Einsatzgruppen
, and would liaise with them through the senior intelligence officer at each army headquarters. Thus at army command and senior staff level nobody could plead ignorance about their activities.

The ‘Shoah by bullets’ is usually remembered by the activities of the 3,000 men in the SS Einsatzgruppen. As a result, the massacres carried out by the 11,000 men in twenty-one battalions of Ordnungspolizei, acting as a second wave well to the rear of the advancing armies, have often been overlooked. Himmler also assembled an SS cavalry brigade and two other Waffen-SS brigades to be ready to assist. The commander of the 1st SS Cavalry Regiment was Hermann Fegelein, who in 1944 married Eva Braun’s sister and thus became part of the Führer’s entourage. Himmler ordered his SS cavalry to execute all male Jews and drive their women into the swamps of the Pripet Marshes. By mid-August 1941, the cavalry brigade claimed to have killed 200 Russians in combat and to have shot 13,788 civilians, most of whom were Jews described as ‘plunderers’.

Each of the three army groups in the invasion was to be closely followed by an Einsatzgruppe. A fourth would be added later down in the south on the Black Sea coast, following the Romanians and the Eleventh Army. The
Einsatzgruppen
personnel were recruited from all sections of Himmler’s empire, including the Waffen-SS, the Sicherheitsdienst (SD), the Sicherheitspolizei (Sipo), the Kriminalpolizei (Kripo) and the Ordnungspolizei. Each Einsatzgruppe of around 800 men would consist of two Sonderkommandos operating closely behind the troops and two Einsatzkommandos a little further back.

Heydrich instructed the Einsatzgruppen commanders who came from the intellectual elite of the SS–the majority had doctorates–to encourage local anti-semitic groups to kill Jews and Communists. These activities were described as ‘
self-cleansing efforts
’. But they were not to indicate official German approval, or allow these groups to believe that their actions might gain them any form of political independence. The Einsatzgruppen themselves were to execute Communist Party officials, commissars, partisans and saboteurs and ‘
Jews in party and state
positions’. Presumably, Heydrich had also suggested that they could and should go beyond these categories as they saw fit when fulfilling their duties with ‘unprecedented harshness’, such as shooting male Jews of military age. But there seems to have been no official indication at this stage of encouraging the murder of Jewish women and children.

The killing of Jewish males began as soon as the German armies crossed the Soviet frontier on 22 June. Many of the early massacres were carried
out by Lithuanian and Ukrainian anti-semites, as Heydrich had predicted. In western Ukraine, they killed 24,000 Jews. In Kaunas, 3,800 were slaughtered. Sometimes watched by German soldiers, Jews were rounded up and tormented, with rabbis having their beards pulled or set on fire. Then they were beaten to death to the cheers of the crowd. The Germans fostered the idea that these killings were revenge for the massacres carried out by the NKVD before it retreated. Einsatzgruppen and police battalions also began to round up and shoot Jews in hundreds and even thousands. Their victims had to prepare their own mass graves. Any who did not dig fast enough were shot. They were then forced to undress, partly so that their clothes could be redistributed later, but also in case they had concealed valuable items or money in them. Forced to kneel on the edge of the pit, they were shot in the back of the head so that the body would roll forwards and drop. Other SS and police units considered it tidier to make their first victims lie in a row along the bottom of the great trench, and shoot them
in situ
with sub-machine guns. Then the next batch would be made to lie down on the bodies, head to toe, and they too would be shot. This was known as
the ‘sardine’ method
. In a few cases, Jews were driven into a synagogue, which would be set on fire. Any who tried to escape were shot down.

With Himmler’s constant visits to provide unspecified encouragement to his men, the process became self-escalating. The original target group of ‘Jews in party and state positions’ immediately expanded to include all male Jews of military age, then to all male Jews regardless of age. In late June and early July, it was mainly local anti-semitic groups who killed Jewish women and children. But by the end of July SS Einsatzgruppen, Himmler’s Waffen-SS brigades and the police battalions were regularly killing women and children too. They were assisted, despite Hitler’s instruction against arming Slavs, by some twenty-six battalions of locally recruited police, most of whom were attracted by the chance of robbing their victims.

Ordinary German soldiers and even Luftwaffe personnel also took part in killings, as interrogators from the NKVD 7th Department later found out from German prisoners. ‘
A pilot from the third air squadron
said that he participated in the execution of a group of Jews in one of the villages near Berdichev at the beginning of the war. They were executed as a punishment for handing over a German pilot to the Red Army. A Gefreiter from the 765th Pioneer Battalion named Traxler witnessed executions by SS soldiers of Jews near Rovno and Dubno. When one of the soldiers remarked that it was a terrible sight, an Unteroffizier from the same unit, Graff, said “the Jews are swine and eliminating them is to show that you are a civilized person”.’

One day, a German transport Gefreiter accompanied by his company clerk happened to see ‘
men, women and children
with their hands bound together with wire being driven along the road by SS people’. They went to see what was happening. Outside the village, they saw a 150-metre trench about three metres deep. Hundreds of Jews had been rounded up. The victims were forced to lie in the trench in rows so that an SS man on each side could walk along shooting them with captured Soviet sub-machine guns. ‘Then people were again driven forward and they had to get in and lie on top of the dead. At that moment a young girl–she must have been about 12 years old–cried out in a clear, piteous shrill voice. “Let me live, I’m still only a child!” The child was grabbed, thrown into the ditch, and shot.”’

A few managed to slip away from these massacres. Not surprisingly, they were completely traumatized by what they had experienced. On the north-eastern edge of Ukraine, Vasily Grossman encountered one of them. ‘
A girl–a Jewish beauty
who has managed to escape from the Germans–has bright, absolutely insane eyes,’ he wrote in his notebook.

Younger officers in the Wehrmacht seem to have assented to the killing of Jewish children more than the older generation, mainly because they believed that otherwise those spared would return to take revenge in the future. In September 1944, a conversation between General der Panzertruppe Heinrich Eberbach and his son in the Kriegsmarine was secretly taped while they were in British captivity. ‘
In my opinion
,’ said General Eberbach, ‘one can even go as far as to say that the killing of those million Jews, or however many it was, was necessary in the interests of our people. But to kill the women and children wasn’t necessary. That is going too far.’ His son replied: ‘Well, if you are going to kill off the Jews, then kill the women and children too, or the children at least. There is no need to do it publicly, but what good does it do me to kill off the old people?’

In general, front-line formations did not participate in the massacres but there were notable exceptions, especially the SS
Wiking
Division in Ukraine, and some infantry divisions, which took part in killings such as those in Brest-Litovsk. While there can be no doubt of the close cooperation between SS and army group headquarters, at the same time senior army officers tried to distance themselves from what was happening. Orders were issued against members of the Wehrmacht taking part in or witnessing mass killings, yet increasing numbers of off-duty soldiers turned up to watch and photograph the atrocities. Some even volunteered to take over when the executioners wanted a rest.

As well as in Lithuania, Latvia and Belorussia, the mass killings spread across Ukraine, often assisted by local men recruited as auxiliaries. Antisemitism had greatly increased during the great Ukrainian famine because Soviet agents had started rumours suggesting that Jews were primarily
responsible for the starvation, so as to deflect responsibility away from Stalin’s own policies of collectivization and dekulakization. Ukrainian volunteers were also used for guarding Red Army prisoners. ‘
They’re willing and comradely
,’ a Gefreiter wrote. ‘They represent a considerable relief for us.’

After the massacres in Lwów and other cities, Ukrainians helped by denouncing and rounding up Einsatzgruppe C’s victims in Berdichev, which had one of the highest concentrations of Jews. When German forces entered the city, ‘
the soldiers were shouting
“Jude kaputt!” from their trucks and waved their arms’, Vasily Grossman discovered much later in the war. More than 20,000 Jews were killed in batches out by the airstrip. They included Grossman’s mother, and for the rest of his life he was tormented by guilt that he had not brought her back to Moscow the moment the German invasion began.