Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and Warning (22 page)

In doubly occupied northeastern Poland, where there was no national question and thus no political resource, the chain of events was rather different. In the weeks after the invasion, the Germans dedicated far more of their own resources to provoking violence against Jews, with far weaker results. Jews were killed by the Germans, and eventually also by Poles, but in smaller numbers and in fewer places.

In Białystok, a major city of northeastern Poland, the Germans began the mass killing themselves in June 1941. By this time the city had already been occupied twice. First had come the German army in September 1939, followed by the bloodiest German special unit of the Polish campaign,
Einsatzgruppe
IV, which killed Poles and Jews in the city. By the terms of the Treaty on Borders and Friendship between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union of the twenty-eighth of that month, the
Wehrmacht
and SS withdrew from Białystok to be replaced by the Red Army and the NKVD. Under Soviet power, much of the city center was disassembled, and Jewish enterprises (along with all others) were closed. The Soviet occupation then continued until the German reinvasion of June 1941. On June 27, 1941, Order Police Battalion 329 entered Białystok, with general orders to eliminate Soviet stragglers and “enemies.” What followed was a new type of German mass murder, perhaps meant as a prototype.

Jews were ordered to clear Białystok of Lenin and Stalin statues as Soviet music played in the background. German policemen spread through the city, with orders to seize all Jewish men of military age. They shot a number of them on the spot. German policemen shot ten Jews inside one of the city’s many small synagogues and then left their corpses on its steps. They seized some women and children and well over a thousand men. Some Germans raped Jewish women. Meanwhile, other German policemen sealed the neighborhood around the synagogue and mounted a machine gun in front of it. The Germans then forced the Jews into the synagogue, poured gasoline on the exterior, and set it aflame. The screaming was punctuated by machine gun fire for about half an hour. The logic of this scenography was evident: The Jews were responsible for the Soviet occupation, and liberation meant killing them. This was no doubt clear enough to a population that was fully aware of the Judeobolshevik myth, which had been widespread on the Polish Right in the interwar period. Nevertheless, the German mass murder by immolation of June 27 did not lead to the immediate results the Germans seem to have expected.

In those days of late June and early July 1941, Poles were settling scores in northeastern Poland. Just as the arrival of the Red Army twenty months before had brought local violence, so, too, did the arrival of the German army. Some Poles killed some Jews, but some Poles also killed other Poles. These spontaneous individual killings followed no scenography. Poles did not immediately follow the Białystok example, as clear as it was. Two days after the mass murder in Białystok, Heydrich issued a specific order to his
Einsatzgruppen
to inspire pogroms while this was still possible, in the chaos of the collapse of Soviet power. These “self-cleansing efforts” were to be “provoked without leaving a trace, to be intensified when necessary, to be channeled into the proper course. The local ‘self-defense’ should be denied the possibility of later referring to political assurances.”

If Heydrich’s order was meant to bring about widespread pogroms in northeastern Poland, it failed. In contrast to southeastern Poland, where Ukrainian nationalists were at work, there was no obvious political question, no prior political organization, and no body of selected and trained emigrants to translate the German program into a local liberation. In early July 1941, northeastern Poland received unusually intense attention from the Nazi leadership and the German police. Heydrich repeated his orders to incite pogroms. Himmler, who was disappointed with the absence of pogroms in the region, came to Białystok and gave a similar order. Even Göring visited the region during these days and issued the same instructions himself.

The presence and preferences of three of the highest Nazi officials brought an unusually thick presence of German police forces to the region. They came from three different directions. Elements of
Einsatzgruppe
B returned from the east, police from the enlarged Reich arrived from the northeast, and police from Warsaw in the General Government arrived from the southwest. The members of all three of these units had a great deal of experience in the mass murder of Poles and Jews. Indeed, some of the policemen coming from Warsaw already had memories of prior murder in Białystok, since the Warsaw stationary police had been constituted from
Einsatzgruppe
IV, which had ravaged the city in 1939. Even this unusual attention by the top German leadership and the rally of German police forces from all sides could not compensate for the absence of the political resource. The Germans provoked about a dozen pogroms, and local Poles killed several thousand Jews. These results were far inferior, from the German perspective, to the killing in southeastern Poland, where politically motivated Ukrainians were at work.

The scale of the murder was also inferior to what the Germans were already achieving to the north and east, as they drove Soviet forces from Lithuania and Latvia and occupied these countries themselves. Indeed, the return visit of German forces to northeastern Poland in early July 1941 was probably an attempt to match the results already achieved in Lithuania and Latvia. The pogroms in northeastern Poland began after Germans and Lithuanians were already killing Jews in Lithuania, one whole country to the north and east. For that matter, the pogroms in northeastern Poland began after Germans and Latvians were killing Jews in Latvia, two whole countries to the north and east. The killings in northeastern Poland, in this broader perspective, represented a de-escalation rather than an escalation, since murder in the region was much less widespread than in Lithuania and Latvia. And it stopped after a few weeks. Pogroms without a political resource were a blind alley.

The Germans were learning a new politics, and both success and failure were instructive. The distribution of pogroms, and the absence of truly spontaneous pogroms, demonstrated that the initial Nazi assumptions about local behavior were wrong. The Nazi logic was that the subhumans could be provoked to kill their Jewish exploiters. In fact, pogroms in northeastern Poland tended to take place where non-Jews had collaborated with the Soviet regime. In places where Jewish communists were numerous, pogroms were actually less common, since communism in a given locality meant contacts between Jews and non-Jews and a habit of conspiracy. Communist Jews had places to seek advice and places to hide. The same held for Piłsudski’s interwar electoral bloc, which had been a multinational undertaking. When it was significant in a given community, Jews and Poles tended to have civil relations, and pogroms were less likely to take place.

The most notorious pogrom in northeastern Poland, at Jedwabne on July 10, 1941, demonstrated how little the Germans understood. German police returned to Jedwabne on that day, more than two weeks after the actual change of regime, and two weeks after the Białystok example. In Jedwabne, the Germans had, although they did not know this, the ideal conditions for a pogrom. In the interwar years communism and the Piłsudski movement had been weak in the area, which meant that there was little tradition of Jewish-Polish contacts. The person who had betrayed the anti-Soviet Polish underground in Jedwabne to the Soviets was a Pole, not a Jew. The Germans were offering, as the Poles understood even if the Germans did not, an opportunity for self-cleansing, in which responsibility for the Soviet regime could be placed upon the local Jews and then eliminated.

The scenography in Jedwabne followed closely that of Białystok, except that here Germans set the rules and Poles followed them. In the presence of German police, some local Poles forced some local Jews to remove the Lenin statue. Then about three hundred Jews, some carrying a red banner to symbolize their supposed link to communism, were marched to a barn and burned alive by some of their Polish neighbors. As in most such cases, individuals who had collaborated with communism were certainly killing individuals who had not. The mass murder created a collective stereotype, ethnicizing the guilt and rearranging the past. The Lenin statue was burned in the barn along with the Jews (much as Lenin signs were burned with “Jewish” books back in Germany). The lie that the Germans told to the Poles through posters and megaphones—that Jews were communists and communists Jews—was told back to the Germans by the Poles in cinders and ash.

In northeastern Poland, pogroms followed the Białystok choreography. Germans assembled Poles; Poles assembled Jews; Poles beat and humiliated Jews. Poles forced Jews to sing Soviet songs, carry Soviet flags, and destroy a nearby Lenin or Stalin monument when one was available. These murderous rituals were a reformulation of the experience of a shattering era that had now passed, but not an immediate and unreflective reaction to suffering. These pogroms were not spontaneous acts of revenge, but a joint effort, by Germans and locals, to reassemble the experience of the Soviet occupation in a way that was acceptable to both sides.

The Jedwabne method of killing Jews, horrible as it was, could not become a Final Solution because there was no political resource. The Germans could appeal to psychological and material resources: Poles could exculpate themselves from their own association with Soviet rule by killing Jews, and they could take Jewish property. In the Jedwabne region, where owning a mule was a mark of prosperity, this motive cannot be discounted. But Germany could not even pretend to offer Poland to the Poles. Germany had already invaded Poland once. Indeed, during the first invasion of September 1939, German forces had actually reached Jedwabne and the other places in northeastern Poland where the July 1941 pogroms took place. That first time around, in September 1939, German forces had mainly been interested in murdering Poles. After withdrawing from the region, the Germans had annexed and colonized much of western and central Poland, as everyone knew. When the Germans returned in 1941 they did not even bother to make political promises to Poles. In fact, the Germans intended to kill Poles after using them to kill Jews.

The presence or absence of pogroms in doubly occupied eastern Poland had to do with recent political history and thus with a political sensibility that Nazis did not believe that subhumans could possess. But the political learning came quickly. In Lithuania, where the political resource was vast, pogroms were training grounds for people who could be selected by the Germans for more organized methods of mass killing. By the time the Germans reached Latvia, they had understood that pogroms were useful mainly as a method of recruitment. Rather than being discouraged that the masses did not join in pogroms, they hired the people who seemed interested in leading them.

It was in the consecutively occupied lands of Lithuania and Latvia that the Holocaust began. Unlike in eastern Poland, in Lithuania and Latvia the apparently chaotic killing did escalate to a systematic Final Solution. At the end of 1941 the vast majority of Polish Jews were still alive, but almost all Lithuanian and Latvian Jews were dead.

The Germans understood that there was a Lithuanian question and came to grasp the full potential of the political resource. Lithuanians were Balts and therefore racially more valuable, from a Nazi perspective, than Slavs such as Poles. The Soviets had destroyed the Lithuanian state, and thousands of Lithuanian emigrants sought shelter in Germany. The Germans had a year between the Soviet destruction of Lithuania in June 1940 and their own invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941 to screen and train these people, preparing a corps of locals to implement German policy. A Lithuanian Activist Front was founded in Berlin in November 1940. The Lithuanian politicians involved believed that they would be exploiting German military force to liberate Lithuania, whereas the Germans assumed they could channel Lithuanian political energies to their own purposes.

The Lithuanian activists arrived with the Germans in June 1941 and served as translators, literally and figuratively, of German intentions. Lithuanians hung German posters (in the Lithuanian language) identifying Jews with Soviet rule and Soviet crimes. This had a different resonance in Lithuania than it had in Germany: If communism could be limited to Jews, an exoneration was gifted to Lithuanians and all the other non-Jews who had collaborated with Soviet authorities. Germans did not understand, though Lithuanians did, that Soviet rule had already brought about the expropriation of Lithuanian Jews. Of the 1,593 businesses that the Soviets had nationalized in Lithuania in autumn 1940, Jews had owned 1,327, or 83 percent. With the Soviets gone, all of these businesses could be claimed by Lithuanians—provided that their previous Jewish owners did not reappear. Many of the wealthier Lithuanian Jews had been deported by the Soviets to the Gulag; those who remained would be vulnerable to Germans who wanted them killed and Lithuanians (and other inhabitants of Lithuania, including Poles and Russians) who were sitting in their businesses or offices. In the media and in person Lithuanians made the case to other Lithuanians that the German policy of murdering Jews was part of a transaction that would favor the revival of Lithuania and the renewal of its middle class. The Lithuanian Activist Front declared Lithuanian independence.