Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and Warning (20 page)

The subsequent and rapid Soviet takeover of the two sovereign states created psychological, material, and especially political resources in Latvia and Lithuania on a scale far greater than in Poland. The material resource was enormous: Soviet rule quickly opened the question of the property rights of the entire nation. The Soviets expropriated Jews (not as Jews, but as businessmen), raising the question of the ultimate ownership of their property. The psychological resource was also of an extraordinary scale. The destruction of the two states generated feelings of shame, humiliation, and the desire for revenge. In both Lithuania and Latvia, an entire political order was destroyed and an entire population could imagine its return. By destroying the Lithuanian and Latvian states, the Soviets gave the Germans the ability to promise a war of liberation. This was the political resource in its purest form.

The political resource included the supply of cadres: people displaced by Soviet policy who could be exploited by the Germans. The fact that the Soviets controlled the capitals and decimated the political elite enabled the Germans to make a certain important selection. In the main, the men who had actually ruled Lithuania and Latvia were sent to the Gulag or killed. But some Lithuanian and Latvian nationalists who had fled the interwar regimes or Soviet power made their way to Berlin. Beyond that, a considerable number of Lithuanians and Latvians posed as Germans in 1940, which allowed them to be “repatriated” to Germany under a German-Soviet agreement. The Germans could then decide which of these people they would bring when they reinvaded Latvia and Lithuania.

The timing of the Soviet annexation of Latvia and Lithuania led to a tragic coincidence. By the time the Soviets had readied the trains for their major deportations of Lithuanian and Latvian citizens to the Gulag, the Germans had prepared their trains for an invasion of the Soviet Union. The deportations from Lithuania began in the early morning of June 14, 1941. About seventeen thousand people were loaded onto boxcars (of whom only about a third ever returned). The German invasion came a week later. Because the Soviets were preparing major repressions when the Germans invaded, the prisons were full. Stalin raged until the very last moment that all reports of a German invasion were propaganda. As a result, no one could make preparations for evacuation or defense, and, of course, prisoners were the last priority and considered dangerous. Most of them were shot by their guards, in Lithuania and Latvia and everywhere across the front. As a result, Germans who arrived in Lithuania and Latvia were able to display the fresh corpses as palpable evidence of Soviet terror. In June 1941 in the Baltics the Soviet project of state destruction met the German project of state destruction in time and in place.

For the German state destroyers, the men of the
Einsatzgruppen
arriving to begin a second occupation of eastern Poland, Lithuania, and Latvia in summer 1941, the encounter with Soviet power was an opportunity. They could not have known beforehand how bountiful the political resource would be, since they had not been trained to think of the Soviet Union as a polity nor of Slavs or Balts as people with political motivations. Because Germans could not know how deep the Soviet reach into occupied societies had been, the new politics after summer 1941 would be a spontaneous creation of Germans and the local peoples whose lands they reinvaded.

The German entrepreneurs of violence would react to a new situation and exploit its possibilities. They did not know what they would find and were mistaken in some of their expectations. What they brought was the yearning for anarchy that can only be brought to the stranger, what they learned was to exploit the experience of the Soviet occupation to further the most radical goals of their own, and what they invented was a politics of the greater evil. In the zone of double darkness, where Nazi creativity met Soviet precision, the black hole was found.

“T
he epoch of statehood has come to an end.” So proclaimed the German legal theorist Carl Schmitt. Throughout Hitler’s career, Schmitt had provided elegant theoretical support for his
Führer
’s actions, in domestic and then foreign policy, as Hitler mutated the German state and began to destroy its neighbors. The lesson that Hitler had drawn from the Balkans, Schmitt presented as a purely German idea: There is no such thing as domestic politics as such, since everything begins with the confrontation with a chosen foreign enemy. The definition of the domestic was that which had to be manipulated to destroy what is foreign. Germany itself had no content. The idea of the people, the
Volk
, was there to persuade Germans to throw themselves into their murderous destiny as a race. The people were only what they proved themselves to be, which without struggle was nothing.

Beyond manipulation itself there was no object or subject of politics. There was only the darkness that is consummate when gifted minds such as Schmitt’s cloak evil with unreason. As Germany undid Austria and Czechoslovakia, as the Soviet Union occupied and annexed Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia, and as the two together destroyed Poland, Schmitt prepared the legal theory of statelessness. It began from the axiom that international law arises not from norms but from power. Rules are interesting only insofar as they reveal who can make exceptions to them. For Schmitt, “obsolete interstate international law” was a masquerade, since all that mattered was who could destroy states. If Germany followed its
Führer
and ignored “the empty concept of state territory,” German power would flow to its natural frontiers. The result would be a “sensibly divided earth,” untroubled by the normative restraints on political and military action that Schmitt described as Jewish.

Schmitt believed that the German understanding of law had to be purged of the Jewish “infection,” by which he meant principles that blocked conclusions such as his own. Affirming the end of the state meant applying the law of the jungle and presenting it as actual law. Might did make right, not just in practice, but as a matter of principle; and, of course, this conclusion came very close to abolishing the very idea of principle. The same case was made, in different ways, by other Nazi legal thinkers, such as Viktor Bruns and Edgar Tartarin-Tarnheyden. Arthur Seyß-Inquart, who presided over the end of the Austrian state and administered the occupied Netherlands, was a lawyer and doctor of law. In between those two assignments he was the assistant to Hans Frank, the governor-general of occupied Poland. In western Europe, said Seyß-Inquart, we have a function; in eastern Europe “we have a National Socialist mission.”

Frank, Hitler’s personal lawyer, never ceased to provide circular and specious defenses of the “legality” of what he was doing in occupied Poland: “The law is what serves the race, and lawlessness is what hurts the race.” Non-racist norms were simply the work of Jews, “who instinctively saw in jurisprudence the best possibility to carry out their own racial work.” Frank never forgot that racial triumph meant racial comfort, that
Lebensraum
was about the pleasures of his living room. He was the sort of man who not only stole a royal castle for his own residence, but actually made tours of other castles to steal their silver for his own table. He sent his wife to make shopping excursions to the Cracow ghetto, where the price was always right. When he left Poland he took its Rembrandts with him.

Lawyers were extremely prominent among those who exported anarchy from Germany. Bruno Müller, for example, commanded an
Einsatzgruppe
in Poland in 1939 and then an
Einsatzkommando
in the Soviet Union in 1941. He was a mass murderer of Poles and Jews in two campaigns to obliterate the state. At the first execution of his second campaign he lifted into his hands a two-year-old Jewish child and said: “You must die so that we can live.”

This is what law for the race and against the state had become—and indeed had always meant.

Germany at war remained a state, if an altered one. For most Germans most of the time, law in its entirely traditional sense, implemented by state instances, still organized life. Policies directed chiefly against German citizens, such
as the discrimination of Jews, were most significant as a preparation for a larger struggle. Policies that seemed to weaken the German state, such as the lawless zones of the concentration camps, were templates for the far larger stateless spaces that would arise in the East. Policies that seemed to transform the state, such as the creation of hybrid institutions that united both SS and traditional police, revealed their potential east of Germany, where prewar states were destroyed. Only beyond Germany could the exception truly become the rule, as Schmitt wished, because only beyond Germany could normal political life be obliterated and a new ethos of nihilistic power be created.

As the
Einsatzgruppen
followed the German army eastward into the doubly occupied lands and then into the prewar Soviet Union, their commanders sometimes communicated with Berlin. British authorities, aided by Polish cryptographers, had built for themselves a replica of the Enigma machine that the Germans used for encoding and decoding messages. As the British came to realize, what they were decoding were kill figures. “We are in the presence,” said Winston Churchill, “of a crime without a name.” Its perpetrators were human beings, operating with initiative and creativity in political circumstances of their own making. State destruction did not alter politics, but rather created a new form of politics, which enabled a new kind of crime.

The Holocaust has ingrained racial stereotypes in our own minds; but no stereotype can explain why and how, in the six months after the German invasion of the Soviet Union, a technique to kill Jews in large numbers was developed and some one million Jews were murdered. A stereotype of Germans is that they are orderly and follow plans. Yet when the invasion of the Soviet Union began on June 22, 1941, Berlin had no plan for the mass extermination of Soviet Jews, let alone for all Jews under German control. One notion was that Soviet Jews would be sent to Siberia after a quick and triumphant military campaign against the Red Army. There was no discussion of a Final Solution to take place during the war, nor could there have been, since German leaders took for granted that the war would take weeks and the Final Solution years.

Sometimes the
Einsatzgruppen
who followed the
Wehrmacht
into the Soviet Union are presented as unstoppable agents of evil with an unambiguous program of total killing. In this argument, the men of the
Einsatzgruppen
knew from the beginning, regardless of whether or not there was a plan, that they were supposed to kill all of the Jews. An image emerges of the
Einsatzgruppen
as special antisemitic units with perfect knowledge and exclusive responsibility. But this was not, in fact, the case. The
Einsatzgruppen
had orders to shoot some Jews from the beginning, but not to shoot them all; their initial instructions mentioned Jews as one category among others. Their basic task at the beginning of the invasion of the Soviet Union was to demolish the state, as they had done in Poland. Thus their targets were groups thought to be mainstays of the Soviet regime. In Poland this had meant educated Poles; in the Soviet Union this meant, as the Nazis saw matters, communists and Jewish males.

Antisemitism cannot fully explain the behavior of the members of the
Einsatzgruppen
. The
Einsatzgruppen
sent into Austria and Czechoslovakia in 1938 did not kill Jews. The
Einsatzgruppen
sent into Poland in 1939 killed far more Poles than Jews. Even the
Einsatzgruppen
sent into the USSR killed others besides Jews. Throughout the occupation of the Soviet Union they murdered the disabled, Gypsies, communists, and, in some regions, Poles. There were for that matter no Germans (or collaborators) whose only task was to shoot Jews; everyone who was expected to shoot Jews was also expected to shoot others, and did so. Among the thousands of members of the
Einsatzgruppen
and the tens of thousands of Germans who shot Jews there is no known perpetrator who agreed to kill Jews but refused to kill Gypsies or Belarusian civilians or Soviet prisoners of war. Nor were there perpetrators who agreed to kill Belarusian civilians or Soviet prisoners of war or Gypsies but not Jews. The people who killed people, killed people.

The
Einsatzgruppen
shot others besides Jews; and others besides the
Einsatzgruppen
shot Jews. Although the
Einsatzgruppen
were the first to shoot Jews in large numbers, they were a small minority of the German perpetrators. The myth of their total responsibility arose during postwar trials in the Federal Republic of Germany as a way to protect the majority of German killers and isolate the killing from German society as such. In fact, German policemen were far more numerous than the
Einsatzgruppen
on the eastern front and killed more Jews. These men usually lacked the special preparation of the
Einsatzgruppen
, but they had been a focus of Himmler and Heydrich’s attempt to create hybrid institutions within Germany that would permit destruction and racial warfare beyond its borders. Policemen deemed unreliable had been removed from service. By the time of the invasion of the USSR, about a third of policemen with officer rank belonged to the SS, and about two-thirds belonged to the National Socialist party. Regardless of whether or not they were party or SS members, German policemen were dispatched to the East and murdered Jews. German soldiers also killed a large number of Jews, and assisted the
Einsatzgruppen
and the police in organizing ever larger mass shootings in 1941.

In 1941, the German members of the
Einsatzgruppen
, the German policemen, and the German soldiers worked together with a large number of local people of multiple nationalities who had experienced Soviet rule. Together these groups developed techniques of mass murder during the first six months after the German invasion. The techniques reflected no prior plan; indeed, some of them contravened initial orders. The
Einsatzgruppen
were doing what Himmler and Heydrich told them to do, but their commanders were also refining methods of killing and inventing rationalizations for killing. The commanders had to test whether their operations and rationalizations were acceptable to other German forces; they had to persuade their own men to kill women and children; and they had to find ways to generate local collaboration as the job became too large and difficult.

If the killing of 1941 involved locals, then perhaps it was a result of local antisemitism rather than German politics? This is a popular way to explain the Holocaust without politics: as a historically predictable outburst of the barbarity of east Europeans. This sort of explanation is reassuring, since it permits the thought that only peoples associated with extravagant antisemitism would indulge in disastrous violence. This comforting and erroneous thought is a legacy of Nazi racism and colonialism. The racist and colonial idea that the Holocaust began as an elemental explosion of primitive antisemitism arose as Nazi propaganda and apologetics. The Germans wished to display the killing of Jews on the eastern front as the righteous anger of oppressed peoples against their supposed Jewish overlords.

Even the most hidebound Nazis realized, once they had actually arrived in eastern Europe, that the situation was not so simple as this. The truly spontaneous score settling that followed the arrival of German troops was politically rather than racially motivated and killed a very small number of Jews—and also killed people who were not Jewish. The instructions conveyed to the
Einsatzgruppen
commanders were to create the appearance of local spontaneity, which, of course, suggests that the reality was absent. In practice, the Germans concluded within a few weeks that the stimulation of pogroms among people who had been ruled by the Soviet Union was not the way forward to a Final Solution. In consecutively occupied Lithuania, where the Holocaust began, less than one percent of the Jews who were murdered were victims of pogroms. For that matter, Germans were present at every single pogrom.

After the war, Soviet propaganda repeated the Nazi case. One unpleasant reality with which Soviet propagandists had to contend was that the Holocaust had begun precisely where the Soviet Union had brought its own new revolutionary order in 1939 and 1940. A second was that Soviet citizens of all nationalities, including considerable numbers of communists, had collaborated with the Germans in the killing of Jews everywhere that contact with Germans was made: both in the territories that the Soviets annexed in 1939 and 1940 and in the territories of the prewar Soviet Union, including Soviet Russia. Thus, Soviet propagandists tried with Orwellian precision to ethnicize history and to limit responsibility for the Holocaust to Lithuanians and Latvians, precisely the peoples whose states the Soviet Union had destroyed in 1940, and to west Ukrainians, whose national aspirations were also crushed by Soviet power. This export of moral responsibility seemed to justify the renewed Soviet takeover of these lands after the war. Thus the Nazis first and the Soviets later made efforts to direct responsibility for the killing of the Jews to the countries they both invaded.

Certainly there was abundant local antisemitism in eastern Europe. Hostility to Jews in the major Jewish homeland had been an important current in religious, cultural, and political life for hundreds of years. In interwar Poland in particular, the idea that Jews were alien to the national body and should leave the national territory was ever more popular in the 1930s. Yet the relationship between sentiment and killing is not straightforward. Age-old antisemitism cannot explain why pogroms began precisely in summer 1941. Such an explanation ignores the suggestive fact that pogroms were most numerous where Germans drove out Soviet power, and the obviously material fact that the instigation of pogroms in such places was explicit German policy. Pogroms and other forms of local collaboration in killing were less likely in Poland, where antisemitism had been more prevalent before the war, than they were in Lithuania and Latvia, where antisemitism was less prevalent. In the Soviet Union, where before the war antisemitism was a crime, there was much more direct collaboration in the killing of Jews than in Poland. In the occupied USSR, the killing of Jews began immediately upon contact with German forces. In occupied Poland, the Holocaust began more than two years after the German invasion and was largely isolated from the local population. In the occupied Soviet Union, the killing of Jews took place in the open air, in front of the population, with the help of young male Soviet citizens.