The Third Reich at War (37 page)

Pogroms of this kind took place in many areas in the first few days of German occupation. Antisemitism in the Baltic states had been fuelled by the experience of Soviet occupation since the spring of 1940, under which native elites and nationalists had been persecuted, arrested, deported or killed. Stalin had encouraged the Russian and Jewish minorities to help build the new Soviet states of Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia, and two-thirds of the Central Committee of the Latvian Communist Party were either Russian or Jewish in origin, though like all Communists, of course, they rej ected their previous ethnic and religious identities in favour of secular Bolshevik internationalism. For their part, the Nazis regarded the Baltic peoples not as subhuman Slavs but as potentially assimilable to the German master race. Yet only a tiny minority of extreme nationalists in these countries vented the hatred of Communism they had accumulated over the period of Soviet occupation on the local Jewish population.
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Task Force A, for example, had to get auxiliary police rather than local civilians to kill 400 Jews in Riga. It is more than likely that in practice the same procedure had to be followed in other areas such as Mitau, where the local Jewish population of 1,550 was, it was reported, ‘disposed of by the population without any exceptions’. Finally, in Estonia, the Jewish population was so tiny - a mere 4,500 people - that such actions were not possible at all, and most of the Jews managed to flee to safety.
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By the time German troops reached Estonia, SS Security Task Forces and other units in Latvia and Lithuania had in any case gone over to killing Jewish men themselves. In the Lithuanian border town of Garsden (Gargzdai), where the German troops had encountered fierce resistance from the Red Army, security was left to a unit of German border police from Memel, who arrested between 600 and 700 Jews. Acting under the orders of the Gestapo chief in Tilsit, Hans-Joachim Böhme, they marched 200 Jewish men and one Jewish woman (the wife of a Soviet political commissar) to a nearby field, where they forced them to dig their own graves and then, on the afternoon of 24 June 1941, shot them all. One of the victims was a boy of twelve. Now known as the Tilsit Task Unit, Böhme’s group then moved eastwards, killing over 3,000 civilians by 18 July 1941.
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On 30 June 1941 the group was visited by Himmler and Heydrich, who gave its actions their approval. Böhme and his men were clearly carrying out their wishes. German forces treated all Jewish men as Communists, partisans, saboteurs, looters, dangerous members of the intelligentsia, or merely ‘suspicious elements’, and acted accordingly. Antisemitism also led regular German troops to shoot captured Jewish soldiers rather than send them into captivity behind the front. ‘Up here in what was Lithuania,’ wrote the ordinary soldier Albert Neuhaus from Münster, born in 1909 and therefore a little older than the average soldier, on 25 June 1941, ‘things are pretty much Jewified, and in this case no quarter is given.’
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The mixture of ideologically preconceived antisemitism and military or security rationalization, as well as the involvement of a variety of different agencies in the massacres, was evident in a letter written to his parents by a regular German soldier on 6 July 1941 from Tarnopol in eastern Galicia. After describing the discovery of the mutilated bodies of German soldiers taken prisoner by Red Army troops, the soldier went on:

We and the SS were merciful yesterday, for every Jew we caught was shot right away. It’s different today, for we again found the mutilated bodies of 60 comrades. Now the Jews had to carry the corpses out of the cellar, stretch them out neatly, and then they were shown the atrocities. Then after inspecting the victims they were beaten to death with truncheons and spades. Up to now we have sent about 1,000 Jews into the hereafter, but that’s too few for what they’ve done.
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The Jews of course had no demonstrable connection with the atrocities at all. Nevertheless, altogether some 5,000 of the town’s Jewish population were massacred, including a small number of women and children.
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In late June and through the first weeks of July, the Task Forces set about killing ever-increasing numbers of Jewish men in the occupied territories in the east, encouraged by frequent visits of Himmler and Heydrich to their areas of operation. The SS leaders began to provide the Task Forces with quotas to fill. In Vilna (Vilnius), at least 5,000 and probably as many as 10,000 Jews were killed by the end of July. Most of them were taken out to pits previously dug by the Red Army for a tank base, made to bind their shirts over their heads so they could not see, then machine-gunned in groups of twelve. Three SS Security Service units in Riga, assisted by local auxiliary police, had killed another 2,000 Jews in a wood outside the town by the middle of July, while thousands more Jews were shot in a similar way in other centres of population. As the grisly business proceeded, the gestures towards legal formalities that had often accompanied the early mass shootings, including the conventional rituals of the firing-squad, were quickly abandoned.
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Already on 27 June 1941, men from a variety of units under the overall command of the army’s 221st Security Division had driven more than 500 Jews into a synagogue in Bialystok and burned them alive, while army units blew up the surrounding buildings to stop the fire spreading. Other Jewish men were arrested in the streets. Their beards were set on fire and they were forced to dance before being shot. At least 2,000 Jews were killed in all. Shortly afterwards, a German police battalion entered what was left of the Jewish quarter and took out twenty truckloads of loot. Himmler and Heydrich arrived in Bialystok early in July 1941 and are said to have complained that despite these killings not enough was being done to combat the Jewish menace. Almost immediately, over 1,000 Jewish men of military age were arrested, taken out of the city and also shot.
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The Task Force reported that it aimed to ‘liquidate’ the entire ‘Jewish-Bolshevist leadership cadre’ in the area, but in practice it rounded up and killed virtually the whole adult male Jewish population without distinction of occupation or educational attainment.
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The German invasion of 1941 had initially come as a surprise to the Jews as well as to Stalin, and most Jews had not fled, unless they had some connection with the Communist Party. Many of them had relatively positive memories of the German occupation in the First World War, and they had been alienated by the Soviet suppression of Jewish institutions, the Communist expropriation of their businesses, and the anti-religious campaigns that had forced them to abandon their traditional dress and stop celebrating the Sabbath.
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One German soldier reported that his unit had been welcomed in eastern Poland not only by villagers offering them milk, butter and eggs but also by Jews, who, he remarked, ‘haven’t yet realized that their hour has come’.
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But this situation soon changed. News of the massacres spread quickly, and the Jewish population began to flee en masse as the German forces approached. The speed of the German army’s advance was such that they were often overtaken, and so were then unable to escape the SS Task Forces following hard behind.
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Nevertheless, a report filed by Task Unit 6 of Task Force C on 12 September 1941 noted that 90 or even 100 per cent of the Jewish population in many Ukrainian towns had already fled. ‘The expulsion of hundreds of thousands of Jews,’ it added, ‘ - from what we hear, in the most cases across the Urals - has cost nothing and constitutes a considerable contribution to the solution of the Jewish question in Europe.’
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II

Felix Landau, a thirty-year-old Austrian cabinet-maker, was in the area of Lemberg (Lvov) in early July. Landau had joined the SS in April 1934 and taken part in the murder of the Austrian Chancellor Dollfuss in 1934.
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He was a committed Nazi and antisemite, therefore. He had volunteered for service in Task Force C, and it was with one of the Task Force’s units that he arrived in Lemberg in the wake of the advancing German armies on 2 July 1941. Landau kept a diary in which he recorded his unit’s progress. German troops entering Lemberg, he reported, had discovered the mutilated bodies of Ukrainian nationalists killed by the Soviet secret police after an attempted uprising, along, it was alleged, with a number of captured German airmen treated in the same way.
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Indeed, in Lemberg as in other towns, the Soviet secret police had tried to evacuate ‘counter-revolutionary elements’ from the prisons in advance of the German invasion, and massacred all those whom they were unable to march off. The murdered men included a number of German prisoners of war. Many of the victims had been beaten to death and were exhumed with broken bones, though common reports that they had had their eyes put out or their genitals mutilated more likely reflected the depredations of rats and other scavenging beasts. There is also some evidence that Ukrainian nationalists in Lemberg nailed bodies to the prison wall, crucified them or amputated breasts and genitals to give the impression that the Soviet atrocities were even worse than they actually were.
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The discovery of the mutilated corpses led to an orgy of violence by the military, the Ukrainians and the Task Force unit alike.
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‘Shortly after our arrival,’ Landau recorded, ‘the first Jews were shot by us.’ He did not particularly like doing this, he said - ‘I have little inclination to shoot defenceless people - even if they are only Jews. I would far rather good honest open combat’ - but on 3 July 1941 his unit shot another 500 Jews, and on 5 July 1941 another 300 Poles and Jews.
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Soon after arriving in the town, Landau’s unit was informed that local Ukrainians and German soldiers had taken 800 Jews to the former citadel of the Soviet secret police and started attacking them, holding them responsible for the prison massacres. As he made his way towards the citadel, Landau saw

hundreds of Jews walking along the street with blood pouring down their faces, holes in their heads, their hands broken and their eyes hanging out of their sockets. They were covered in blood. Some of them were carrying others who had collapsed. We went to the citadel; there we saw things that few people have ever seen. At the entrance of the citadel there were soldiers standing guard. They were holding clubs as thick as a man’s wrist and were lashing out and hitting anyone who crossed their path. The Jews were pouring out of the entrance. There were rows of Jews lying one on top of the other like pigs, whimpering horribly. The Jews kept streaming out of the citadel completely covered in blood. We stopped and tried to see who was in charge of the unit. Someone had let the Jews go. They were just being hit out of rage and hatred.
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Landau found such violence ‘perfectly understandable’ in view of what had gone before. The hatred of some Ukrainians for the Jews was fuelled by religious prejudice and nationalist resentments derived from the fact that many Jews had worked for Polish landlords. It found expression in support for antisemitic and extreme nationalist militias that marched into eastern Galicia alongside the advancing German troops. Above all, however, the Jews were blamed by both Ukrainian militiamen and German troops for the massacres of prisoners carried out by the retreating Soviet secret police. Ukrainians took what they believed to be their revenge by beating the Jews to death, in one place, Brzezany, using clubs studded with nails. In Boryslaw, the commanding German general, seeing the corpses of young men killed in the prison by the Soviet secret police laid out on the town square, gave an enraged crowd twenty-four hours to do what they wanted with the local Jews. The Jews were rounded up, made to wash the corpses, forced to dance, then beaten to death with lead pipes, axes, hammers and anything else that came to hand.
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Altogether, 7,000 Jews were murdered in Lemberg alone in these early weeks of the invasion. The participation of Ukrainian nationalists was widely noted, and Ukrainians indeed murdered a further 2,000 Jews in the city at the end of the month. Even so, these operations were generally unsystematic.
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Only a relatively small minority of Ukrainians were out-and-out nationalists keen to take revenge against the Soviet Communists for years of oppression and the mass starvation of the early 1930s. Task Force C was obliged to conclude that ‘The attempts which were undertaken cautiously to incite pogroms against Jews have not met with the success we hoped for . . . A decided antisemitism on a racial or spiritual basis is, however, alien to the population.’
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After leaving Lemberg, Landau’s unit went on to Cracow, where the shootings resumed.
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As he took twenty-three Jews, some of them refugees from Vienna, including two women, out to a wood to be shot, he asked himself as the Jews began to dig their own graves: ‘What on earth is running through their minds during those moments? I think that each of them harbours a small hope that somehow he won’t be shot. The death candidates are organized into three shifts as there are not many shovels. Strange, I am completely unmoved. No pity, nothing,’ he wrote.
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After digging the graves, the victims were made to turn round. ‘Six of us had to shoot them. The job was assigned thus: three at the heart, three at the head. I took the heart. The shots were fired and the brains whizzed through the air. Two in the head is too much. They almost tear it off.’
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Following these killing actions, Landau was placed in charge of recruiting Jews for forced labour. He had twenty shot for refusing to appear on 22 July 1941, after which, he reported in his diary, everything ran smoothly.
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Aside from such cool descriptions of mass murder, much of Landau’s journal was devoted to worrying about his girl-friend, a twenty-year-old typist he had met in Radom. By the end of the year he was living with her in a large villa, where he commissioned the Jewish artist and writer Bruno Schulz, whose work impressed him, to paint a mural. This temporarily preserved the artist’s life, though Schulz was shot dead shortly afterwards by one of Landau’s rival officers in the local SS.
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If Landau showed any remorse, he did not record it.