The Bitter Road to Freedom: The Human Cost of Allied Victory in World War II Europe (24 page)

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NOW EVERYBODY KNEW that victory would come,” wrote Alexander Werth. “No one doubted that this was the turning point in World War II.”

Werth, who visited the city in February, soon after the German capitulation, memorably described the scenes he saw there: the trenches filled with debris, burned out tanks and vehicles, bits of clothing containing fro- zen chunks of bodies; steel girders and tangled barbed wire everywhere, mines, scorched buildings. “But now everything was silent and dead in this fossilized hell, as though a raving lunatic had suddenly died of heart failure.” Amid the rubble and piles of corpses, small groups of gaunt, dazed, disease-racked Germans sat about, ignored by their captors, gnawing on the bones of horses. “For a moment,” Werth wrote, “I wished the whole of Germany were there to see it.” Inevitably, this victory was also a time for exultation by the Soviet leadership. Stalin gave himself a promotion to Marshal of the Soviet Union, and bestowed medals and honors upon Zhukov. Vasily Grossman, the sensitive, clear- eyed journalist, seemed to reach back to Shakespeare’s Henry V when he wrote, in Red Star, of the soldiers who fought there, and the half million of them who died there. “If a quarter century from now the men who led the 62nd Army meet with the commanders of the Stalingrad divisions, this will be a reunion of brothers. The old men will embrace, wipe away a tear, and be-

gin recalling the great days of Stalingrad…. It will be a triumphant, joyous reunion. But it will be full of great sorrow, too, for many will be unable to come, the many who are impossible to forget, for no commander will ever forget the great and bitter exploit of the Russian soldier who defended his homeland with his blood.”
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With the victory at Stalingrad, the tide seemed to be turning against the Germans in the east; yet it must be recalled that the front line was still 1,500 miles from Berlin. Two and a half years of great battles lay ahead, costing untold numbers of lives, before the Germans were pushed back and out of Soviet territory. And be- hind that front, in the thousands of square miles under German control, a fearful occupation had been put in place, one whose brutality and sadism profoundly af- fected the way that Russians would treat the Germans, both soldiers and civilians, as they began their long, slow march westward.

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HE INVASION OF the Soviet Union opened ex- traordinary new vistas for Adolf Hitler. At last, after two decades of tawdry boasts and beer-hall

invective, Hitler possessed both the power and the op- portunity to impose his Aryan fantasies upon millions of people in his newly seized eastern territories. His long-cherished goal now seemed within reach: a paci- fied, Jew-free paradise of farms and factories, governed by a race of Germanic settlers, worked by a race of Slav laborers, linked to Germany by modern rail and road networks. The first steps had already been taken: since the invasion and partition of Poland in September 1939,

Hitler had begun the process of cleansing Jews from the areas of Poland to be incorporated into the German Reich and pushing them into a sort of dumping ground in southeastern Poland, called the General Govern- ment. Jews had already been rounded up and sent into ghettoes in various cities across Poland, a preliminary stage in their eventual elimination. The acquisition of thousands of square miles of new territory in the So- viet Union, however, along with millions of new subject peoples of dubious racial value, presented Hitler with a new challenge: to advance the German “New Order” deep into the Soviet Union. On July 16, 1941, just a few weeks after the initial stunning success of the German army in Russia, Hitler spoke at length—for five hours, in fact—with his chief lieutenants about the future of Russia and the east: he told them, “we have now to face the task of cutting up the giant cake according to our needs, in order to be able, first, to dominate it, second, to administer it, and third, to exploit it.” Any opposi- tion would be crushed, and partisans exterminated. His ambitions were clear: “we shall never withdraw from these areas.” Here at last was the lebensraum he had sought, the new German imperium for an impe- rial people. “ We have to create a Garden of Eden,” he declared.
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Yet there was to be no place in this Garden for millions

of men and women and children who already inhabited these lands. From the Baltic states in the north, down through Belorussia and the Ukraine in the south, the newly acquired Soviet lands would have to be cleansed of their undesirable peoples, chiefly Jews, but also ar- dent Communists, intellectuals, partisans, and any other potential sources of resistance to Nazi rule. As historian Christopher Browning has documented, the German forces were prepared. Immediately after the July meeting, Reichsführer- SS Heinrich Himmler, Hit- ler’s principal henchman for racial matters, sprang into action, sending special Einsatzgruppen (task forces) made up of SS troops and Order Police into Belorus- sia, the Baltic, and the Ukraine right on the heels of the advancing armies, with special orders to round up and shoot Jews. “All the Jews must be shot,” he told these forces, and indeed mass killings of Jews began in Lith- uania two days after the invasion began. In late June and July, Himmler himself toured the killing grounds to inspect the progress of his troops and to egg on the German commanders there to kill off the Jews imme- diately; in mid-July he delivered a rousing speech to Waffen- SS troops that urged them to see their fight against the Soviets as part of a racial struggle against “animals” and the threat of Judeo-Bolshevism; on July 31, he was in Riga and gave explicit orders to begin shooting Jews. On August 15, he personally witnessed

a mass shooting in Minsk. Under Himmler’s prod- ding, the forces of the Einsatzgruppen dramatically increased their shooting of Polish and Soviet Jews in the summer of 1941.
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As historian Martin Gilbert has pointed out, from September 1939 until the invasion of the Soviet Union, around 30,000 Jews had died be- cause of German actions, either through shootings, reprisals, beatings and pogroms, or starvation in the ghettoes of Warsaw and Lodz. After Barbarossa, that figure rose rapidly. Within five months of the German invasion, about half a million Jews in Soviet territory had been killed; by the end of the war, one million So- viet Jews were dead.
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The manner of the killing varied, but had not yet achieved the industrial-style gassing of the death camps. Rather, the killing of Jews in Soviet lands was crude, dirty, difficult work, carried out by shooting or other forms of brutality. On June 27, in Bialystok (in Soviet-occupied Poland), German soldiers rampaged through the Jewish quarter, killing Jews in the streets, and herding others to the great synagogue which, once full of people, was set on fire. On June 30, German units entered Lvov (also in Soviet-occupied Poland), and immediately set about slaughtering Jews. In July, in Minsk, two thousand Jews were rounded up and shot; in Vilna, Jews were rounded up, marched to a great pit

at Ponary, outside the city, and shot; five thousand died there over two weeks. And on it went, in every town and city across the battle-scarred lands from which the Red Army had been expelled. In Martin Gilbert’s words, “within five weeks of the German invasion of Russia on June 22, the number of Jews killed exceeded the total number killed in the previous eight years of Nazi rule.”
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Despite the growing ruthlessness of the killings of Jews—such as the shooting of 33,771 Jews in a ravine outside Kiev at Babi Yar in late September— the German leaders quickly realized that small killing teams could not possibly act with sufficient speed or efficiency to wipe out all the Jews of Europe. For that, a more systematic approach was called for. In the con- text of the rapid military victories in Soviet Russia, Hit- ler’s lieutenants put into motion a planning process in late July that would propose “a final solution of the Jewish question” and would lead directly to the erec- tion of centralized killing centers to which Jews from all across Europe would be sent and gassed to death. The road to Auschwitz passed directly through the bat- tlegrounds of Barbarossa.
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During these assaults on the Jews, the Germans found many willing partners in Lithuania, Latvia, and the Ukraine, where anti- Semitism had strongly affected daily life long before the war and where Jews were of-

ten identified with the much-hated Soviet Communist regime. With the retreat of the Red Army, local police units in these regions, joined by rampaging bands of thugs and bullies, happily, even joyfully, fell upon the Jews. They were determined to settle long-imagined grievances and perhaps eager to show the Germans their own enthusiasm for the new Jew-free order they hoped to establish. In Kovno, Lithuania, one man killed forty-five to fifty Jews by clubbing them to death in public, while onlookers clapped.
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Boris Kacel, a young boy who lived with his Jewish family in Riga, gives an entirely typical account of the local anti- Semitic vio- lence that attended the arrival of German troops in that city on July 1, 1941:

By that afternoon, the calm and peaceful streets of Riga had become crowded and filled with violence. The Lat- vians were celebrating independence from Commu- nist repression, flying their large national red, white, and red flags over buildings and waving smaller ones by hand. I saw happy faces everywhere, which I under- stood, since I, too, was glad to see the fall of the Soviet system. To my surprise, though, I also saw anger and irrational behavior on the streets. The Latvians ex- pressed their hatred of the Jews through physical acts and angry words. They accused the Jews of being Com- munists and blamed them for all the ills to which they

had been subjected during Soviet rule. In my wildest dreams, I could never have imagined the hidden ani- mosity the Latvians had for their Jewish neighbors…. The Latvians saw themselves as the messengers of Nazi evil and began to govern the city as if they had received consent from Berlin to do so…. Trucks appeared car- rying small vigilante groups of ten to fifteen armed Latvians, who wore armbands in their national colors of red, white, and red. These men intended to kidnap Jews off the street and take away their personal belong- ings. The prisoners were then forcibly loaded onto the trucks, taken to the woods, and killed. It was terrifying to go outside, as one had to be aware of the vigilante groups that drove around the streets. The mobile kill- ing squads, as I called them, were in full command of the city, and nobody challenged their presence or their unconscionable killings…. I had lived my entire life there among Latvians, who now considered me their mortal enemy and were prepared to kill me. No one was willing to protect my life.
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Similar scenes of local populations anticipating Ger- man violence against Jews occurred in most of the ma- jor towns and cities in the areas occupied by Germans. In the Ukraine, the Germans formed a local police aux- iliary, and gave them a yellow and blue armband; they were encouraged to round up Jews, and torment and

kill them, which they did.
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Because of such local as- sistance, German killing squads could be effective in conducting roundups, finding Jews in hiding, and in terrorizing Jewish communities. Though many of these occupied peoples shared with their German masters a murderous anti- Semitism, however, Nazi ideology did not accord a place at the table in the Garden of Eden for Slavs of any kind. Indeed, any early enthusiasm for the German “liberation” of Soviet lands from Stalinist rule quickly wore off, as the Germans extended their murderous assaults to all manner of Soviet peoples.

Along with the Jews, the first targets of the German in- vaders were the Red Army political-ideological officers known as commissars. These officers were the enforc- ers of ideological discipline and zeal within the army, and as such were among the most rabid Communists. Hitler ordered their liquidation even before the inva- sion began: the June 6, 1941, “Commissar Order” stat- ed that “the originators of barbaric, Asiatic methods of warfare are the political commissars. So immediate and unhesitatingly severe measures must be under- taken against them. They are therefore, when captured either in battle or offering resistance, as a matter of routine to be dispatched by firearms.”
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But the killing did not stop with commissars. In early July the Ein- satzgruppen were given orders to kill all Bolshevik par-

ty officials, party activists, people’s commissars, “Jews in the service of the Party or the state,” and “saboteurs, propagandists, snipers, assassins, agitators, etc.”
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In practice, this was a license to kill anyone who had any official capacity at all, including Red Army officers and soldiers, as well as anyone who expressed opposition to German rule, especially partisans, broadly defined. Red Army prisoners of war, some of whom may have surrendered out of sheer unwillingness to fight for Sta- lin’s regime, were shot to death in huge numbers; per- haps 600,000 were shot outright. Those who were not killed were sent on lengthy death marches westward to camps in which they were housed in shacks, neglected, and allowed to die of starvation and exhaustion. Of the