Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and Warning (21 page)

It is tempting to imagine that a simple idea in the minds of simple people decades past and thousands of miles away can explain a complex event. The notion that local east European antisemitism killed the Jews of eastern Europe confers upon others a sense of superiority akin to that the Nazis once felt. These people are quite primitive, we can allow ourselves to think. Not only does this account fail as an explanation of the Holocaust; its racism prevents us from considering the possibility that not only Germans and Jews but also local peoples were individual human agents with complex goals that were reflected in politics. When we fall into the trap of ethnicization and collective responsibility, we collude with Nazi and Soviet propagandists in the abolition of political thought and the lifting of individual agency.

What happened in the second half of 1941 was an accelerating campaign of murder that took a million Jewish lives and apparently convinced the German leadership that all Jews under their control could be eliminated. This calamity cannot be explained by stereotypes of passive or communist Jews, of orderly or preprogrammed Germans, of beastly or antisemitic locals, or indeed by any other cliché, no matter how powerful at the time, no matter how convenient today. This unprecedented mass murder would have been impossible without a special kind of politics.

The commencement of mass killing in the doubly occupied lands was the latest stage in the development of the new politics initiated eight years earlier, when Hitler came to power in Germany. Just as Nazis had to reach other Germans to develop biological politics within Germany, so Germans had to reach non-Germans for Nazi ideology to be realized beyond Germany.

In a way, the invasion of 1941 mirrored Hitler’s takeover of power in Germany. A planetary vision of bloody racial struggle, something not inherently attractive to most people most of the time, was translated at moments of stress into concepts and images that could generate political support. In Germany in 1933, Hitler’s notion that Jews were communists and communists were Jews was translated into the much more banal but accessible idea that rule from the Left would mean chaos and hunger for Germany. In eastern Europe in 1941, Judeobolshevism was also translated from vision into politics, but in lands where people had actually experienced Soviet rule. The key to this translation of ideology to politics in both cases was an effective appeal to human experience at the crucial time. In Germany in 1933, Hitler directed fear against the eastern neighbor, the Soviet Union. In 1941, in the doubly occupied lands, Germans directed the experience of Soviet occupation against Jewish neighbors.

In a dark irony, Nazis profited from their basic error. Their essential idea was that the Soviet Union was a Jewish empire, which would be destroyed by a German empire. When Germany invaded the Soviet Union in June 1941, however, the societies that German invaders encountered were not divided between Jewish rulers and Christian victims. For one thing, the Soviets had been more effective than the Germans in bodily removing their human targets from the scene. Half a million or so Polish, Lithuanian, and Latvian citizens, including many Jews and members of other national minorities, had been deported to the Gulag (where many of them had already died). The corpses of thousands more Polish, Lithuanian, and Latvian citizens, including Jews and members of other national minorities, were buried in hidden Soviet mass graves. All of these indisputable victims of Soviet rule were dead or thousands of miles away. Even the prisoners of the NKVD could not usually be recruited, since most of them were shot or deported just as the Germans arrived.

To a degree that the Germans could not imagine, the Soviets had integrated the local populations into their own system. This meant that people in the doubly occupied lands could see themselves as victims, even though or indeed precisely because they had exercised a certain amount of power in the Soviet regime. The psychological and political reasons to overcompensate by insisting on victimhood were strong. There were the people of the Left who had first supported the Soviet system and then changed their minds, and now wanted to forget their original commitments. There were the men and women who had at first resisted the Soviet system, and then allowed themselves to be recruited by it as agents and informers. Such people had escaped death or deportation by collaborating with the Soviets, and were thus still at home when the Germans arrived—and eager to purge their own pasts by collaborating again. There were the young men who had been drafted into the Red Army, and then deserted when the Germans arrived. There were the policemen who had served the interwar governments and then the Soviet regime, and thus had helped deport those who had actually resisted the Soviets. When the Germans arrived, such policemen had every reason to prove themselves cooperative. There were the people who had served the Soviet security apparatus at a very high level—so high that they knew others would remember. In those cases the people in question had to maintain an important position with the Germans in order to survive, and they sometimes did.

The Soviet system was not a Jewish conspiracy, and most communist party members, policemen, and collaborators had not been Jews. The Germans had to believe that they were, since the entire premise of the invasion was that a Jewish cabal would quickly crumble as its local Jewish collaborators were eliminated. Whatever local people might have said to save their own skins during the war or ethnicize their experiences thereafter, they generally knew that nothing of the kind was true, since they had actually experienced the Soviet system. The Soviet administration did employ Jews in higher numbers than the prewar regimes, and it did employ them disproportionately to their numbers. Nevertheless, Soviet power was based everywhere in the local majorities: be they Latvian, Lithuanian, Belarusian, Ukrainian, Russian, or Polish. Insofar as non-Jews made the claim that Jews were Soviet collaborators and that Soviet collaborators were Jews (and insofar as such claims are made today), they minimized the indispensable role that non-Jewish locals played in the Soviet regime. In defining communism as Jewish and Jews as communists, the German invaders in fact pardoned the vast majority of Soviet collaborators.

The involvement of essentially everyone in the Soviet system, which was the political reality, could be reduced to the idea of a few guilty Jews, which was a political fantasy. The Judeobolshevik myth confirmed the idea that the Nazis had to hold in order for their own invasion to make sense: that one blow to the Soviet Union could begin the undoing of the world Jewish conspiracy and that one blow to the Jews could bring down the Soviet Union. It simultaneously allowed the people who had actually partaken of Soviet power to separate the past from themselves, both in their own imaginations and in their interactions with the new anti-Soviet Nazi ruler. When Heydrich wrote of the need for “self-cleansing,” he had in mind that communities could be spurred to cleanse themselves of Jews. In fact, insofar as locals sided, or pretended to side, with Nazi policies towards the Jews, they were cleansing themselves of their own past. German ignorance of the politics of Soviet rule and occupation created a certain opportunity for locals to exploit Germans.

As a result, the murderous politics that emerged was a joint creation of Germans and locals, each of whom was performing the undoing of Soviet power, but with different ideas of what that power had been, and with different interests. To be sure, the coordination of actors with different experiences, perceptions, and goals is what politics is about. But here, in this special time and place, where one extraordinarily severe regime gave way to another, where collaboration with the Soviets had been broad and where Nazi instructions for racial murder were general, there was no guiding source of political authority. The politics of the greater evil was a common creation at a time of chaos.

In a sense, 1941 was a reprise of 1938, of the
Anschluss
of Austria, the first Nazi success in state destruction. As some Nazis learned in Vienna, the suspension of state authority itself creates a political resource, since suddenly almost no one wishes to be identified with the old regime and everyone wishes to be supported, or at least spared, by the new one. When the new regime was a Nazi one, racism permitted much of the population to separate itself, by way of public performances, from its own actual political history. In the occupied Soviet Union in 1941, as in Austria in 1938, the collapse of the prior regime supplied aesthetic elements of a political scenography by which the local population performed Nazi ideology, reconciling its own interests and hopes with the perceived ideas of those who now held power. The public and ritual identification of Jews with the prior regime delegitimized both at the same time, in a closed circle of condemnation that left the majority outside and relatively safe. If the regime had collapsed, and the Jews were the regime, then their downfall was the logical consequence. Just as people must be concentrated before they can be murdered
en masse
, so must responsibility be concentrated before it can be abolished. Thus Jews and only Jews were to answer for the past. And when they were assembled and murdered, the responsibility went up in smoke.

In Austria in 1938 a large number of local Nazis had made their own plans for Austrian Jews, and so the actions taken when the state collapsed were immediate and racial. In doubly occupied eastern Poland, the first place reached by German forces in their reinvasion of June 1941, the reaction was not so precise, because locals could not be sure at first what the Nazis expected. Of course, the German displacement of Soviet power led to a good deal of local score settling, just as the Soviet displacement of Polish power had done twenty-one months before. The initial beatings, humiliations, and killings that commenced with the arrival of the Germans were not, however, organized by ethnicity, but rather driven by personal grievances during the occupation. In the days immediately after the Germans arrived, Poles did kill Jews, but they also killed other Poles. Large pogroms of Jews were not precipitated by the withdrawal of the Soviets but by the arrival of the Germans.

The Germans seemed to have conceived a basic scenography of regime change. Brought by the
Einsatzgruppen
and the German Order Police with the invasion of the USSR, it strongly resembled the ritual violence of the SA in Vienna. The equivalent of the “scrubbing parties” of spring 1938 was the ritualized destruction of Lenin and Stalin statues in the doubly occupied lands in summer 1941. Forcing Jews to remove propaganda was a way to blame them for it. Those who forced them to do so or who contemplated the scene were releasing themselves from responsibility for the old order and ingratiating themselves to the masters of the new one.

What local people expected from the German invasion of 1941 depended upon their experience of Soviet rule in 1940. And what the Soviet experience had meant depended, in turn, upon interwar politics. The various peoples of eastern Poland—Poles, Ukrainians, Belarusians, Jews—reacted very differently to the German invasion of June 1941 not because they belonged to various ethnicities, but because they had different hopes and aims arising from prior experiences. In southeastern Poland, there was more collaboration with the Germans in the early days and weeks of the invasion than in northeastern Poland, because in southeastern Poland there were Ukrainian nationalists who could believe that a German invasion would advance their political interests.

As Ukrainian nationalists helped organize pogroms in reinvaded southeastern Poland in summer 1941, they also helped the Germans to translate the experience of Soviet rule into a fantasy of Ukrainian innocence and Jewish guilt. When the corpses of prisoners were found inside an NKVD prison, German propaganda inevitably presented the executioners as Jews. When on June 30 the Germans removed some of the bodies of the thousands of prisoners shot by the NKVD in Lwów, Ukrainian nationalists helped them portray these killings as a Jewish crime against the Ukrainian nation. The actual NKVD officers who had performed the actual executions had gone, but the Jews of Lwów remained. Here, as elsewhere, corpses were put on display wherever they were found, the horror associated with the Jews. The shock of the moment helped transform a political crime into an ethnic one; an ethnic crime meant ethnic responsibility; murder of those held to be responsible was not so much revenge as a transformation of the past. Recent history became a racial fable, with murder as the moral. Of course, in individual cases, matters could be much simpler than this. One Ukrainian survivor of a Soviet prison shooting, for example, became a regional police commander for the Germans.

In Lwów on July 25, 1941, more than four weeks after the NKVD had shot its prisoners, Jews were killed in a pogrom organized by the Germans with the help of local nationalists. This was anything but a spontaneous reaction. Active assistance in pogroms in summer 1941 provided useful political cover for the large number of Ukrainians who had been communists or Soviet collaborators or both. The Judeobolshevik myth, spread locally by militias, provided the perfect escape route for most Soviet collaborators, who, in fact, were Ukrainian. Nationalists told fellow Ukrainians that they could purge themselves of the stain of collaboration with the Soviets by killing one Jew. Quite often, as in the town of Mizoch, some of the collaborators with Soviet rule were Ukrainian nationalists who, until summer 1941, had cooperated with Jews in the Soviet apparatus.

By reducing actual Ukrainian political experience to the abstraction of Judeobolshevism, the Germans gave Ukrainians who had collaborated with the Soviets a chance, which they quickly took. Again and again, Ukrainians identified Jews as communists and Soviet collaborators, thereby sheltering themselves and their families. In the town of Klevan, for example, Ukrainians went from Jewish house to Jewish house, pointing out supposed Soviet collaborators. In Dubno, where three-quarters of the population was Jewish, some of the Ukrainians allowed by the Germans to run the town in 1941 had offered their services to the Soviets in 1939. In other words, Ukrainians who spent the first two years of the war helping the local NKVD commander (who was Jewish) deport Poles, Jews, and Ukrainians shifted to helping the SS kill Jews, Ukrainians, and Poles whom they—actual Soviet collaborators—denounced as Soviet collaborators. The Germans were unable to process the rush of denunciations, and, falling back upon their own racial illusions, were often manipulated. Double collaboration was noticed by Jews and Poles in these places, but is absent in both Ukrainian and German histories of the war.