Bloodlands (39 page)

In October 1941, Mahileu became the first substantial city in occupied Soviet Belarus where almost all Jews were killed. A German (Austrian) policeman wrote to his wife of his feelings and experiences shooting the city’s Jews in the first days of the month. “During the first try, my hand trembled a bit as I shot, but one gets used to it. By the tenth try I aimed calmly and shot surely at the many women, children, and infants. I kept in mind that I have two infants at home, whom these hordes would treat just the same, if not ten times worse. The death that we gave them was a beautiful quick death, compared to the hellish torments of thousands and thousands in the jails of the GPU. Infants flew in great arcs through the air, and we shot them to pieces in flight, before their bodies fell
into the pit and into the water.” On the second and third of October 1941, the Germans (with the help of auxiliary policemen from Ukraine) shot 2,273 men, women, and children at Mahileu. On 19 October another 3,726 followed.
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Here in Belarus a direct order to kill women and children came from Erich von dem Bach-Zelewski, the Higher SS and Police Leader for “Russia Center,” the terrain behind Army Group Center. Bach, whom Hitler regarded as a “man who could wade through a sea of blood,” was the direct representative of Himmler, and was certainly acting in accordance with Himmler’s wishes. In occupied Soviet Belarus the accord between the SS and the army on the fate of the Jews was especially evident. General Gustav von Bechtolsheim, commander of the infantry division responsible for security in the Minsk area, fervently advocated the mass murder of Jews as a preventive measure. Had the Soviets invaded Europe, he was fond of saying, the Jews would have exterminated the Germans. Jews were “no longer humans in the European sense of the word,” and thus “must be destroyed.”
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Himmler had endorsed the killing of women and children in July 1941, and then the total extermination of Jewish communities in August 1941, as a small taste of the paradise to come, the Garden of Eden that Hitler desired. It was a post-apocalyptic vision of exaltation after war, of life after death, the resurgence of one race after the extermination of others. Members of the SS shared the racism and the dream. The Order Police sometimes shared in this vision, and were of course corrupted by their own participation. The Wehrmacht officers and soldiers often held essentially the same views as the SS, girded by a certain interpretation of military practicality: that the elimination of the Jews could help bring an increasingly difficult war to a victorious conclusion, or prevent partisan resistance, or at least improve food supplies. Those who did not endorse the mass killing of Jews believed that they had no choice, since Himmler was closer to Hitler than they. Yet as time passed, even such military officers usually came to be convinced that the killing of Jews was necessary, not because the war was about to won, as Himmler and Hitler could still believe in summer 1941, but because the war could easily be lost.
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Soviet power never collapsed. In September 1941, two months after the invasion, the NKVD was powerfully in evidence, directed against a most sensitive
target: the Germans of the Soviet Union. By an order of 28 August, Stalin had 438,700 Soviet Germans deported to Kazakhstan in the first half of September 1941, most of them from an autonomous region in the Volga River. In its speed, competence, and territorial range, this one act of Stalin made a mockery of the confused and contradictory deportation actions that the Germans had carried out in the previous two years. It was at this moment of Stalin’s sharp defiance, in mid-September 1941, that Hitler took a strangely ambiguous decision: to send German Jews to the east. In October and November, the Germans began to deport German Jews to Minsk, Riga, Kaunas, and Łódź. Up to this point, German Jews had lost their rights and their property, but only rarely their lives. Now they were being sent, albeit without instructions to kill them, to places where Jews had been shot in large numbers. Perhaps Hitler wanted revenge. He could not have failed to notice that the Volga had not become Germany’s Mississippi. Rather than settling the Volga basin as triumphant colonists, Germans were being deported from it as repressed and humbled Soviet citizens.
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Despair and euphoria were on intimate terms in Hitler’s mind, and so an entirely different interpretation is also possible. It is perfectly conceivable that Hitler began to deport German Jews because he wished to believe, or wished others to believe, that Operation Typhoon, the secondary offensive on Moscow that began on 2 October 1941, would bring the war to an end. In a moment of exaltation Hitler even claimed as much in a speech of 3 October: “The enemy is broken and will never rise again!” If the war was truly over, then the Final Solution, as a program of deportations for the postwar period, could begin.
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Though Operation Typhoon brought no final victory, the Germans went ahead anyway with the deportations of German Jews to the east, which began a kind of chain reaction. The need to make room in these ghettos confirmed one mass killing method (in Riga, in occupied Latvia), and likely hastened the development of another (in Łódź, in occupied Poland).

In Riga, the police commander was now Friedrich Jeckeln, as Higher SS and Police Leader for Reichskommissariat Ostland. Jeckeln, a Riga native, had organized the first massive shooting of Jews at Kamianets-Podilskyi in August, in his former capacity as Higher SS and Police Leader for Reichskommissariat Ukraine. Now, after his transfer, he brought his industrial shooting methods to Latvia. First he had Soviet prisoners of war dig a series of pits in the Letbartskii woods, in the Rumbula Forest, near Riga. On a single day, 30 November 1941, Germans and Latvians marched some fourteen thousand Jews in columns to the shooting sites, forced them to lie down next to each other in pits, and shot them from above.
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The city of Łódź fell within the domain of Arthur Greiser, who headed the Wartheland, the largest district of Polish territory added to the Reich. Łódź had been the second-most populous Jewish city in Poland, and was now the most populous Jewish city in the Reich. Its ghetto was overcrowded before the arrival of the German Jews. It could be that the need to remove Jews from Łódź inspired Greiser, or the SS and Security Police commanders of the Wartheland, to seek a more efficient method of murder. The Wartheland had always been at the center of the policy of “strengthening Germandom.” Hundreds of thousands of Poles had been deported beginning in 1939, to be replaced by hundreds of thousands of Germans who arrived from the Soviet Union (before the German invasion of the USSR made shipping Germans westward utterly pointless). But the removal of the Jews, always a central element of the plan to make this new German zone racially German, had proven the hardest to implement. Greiser confronted a problem on the scale of his district that Hitler confronted on the scale of his empire: the Final Solution was officially deportation, but there was nowhere to send the Jews. By early December 1941 a gas van was parked at Chełmno.
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Hitler’s deportation of German Jews in October 1941 smacked of improvisation at the top and uncertainty below. German Jews sent to Minsk and Łódź were not themselves killed but, rather, placed in the ghettos. The German Jews sent to Kaunas were however killed upon arrival, as were those of the first transport sent to Riga. Whatever Hitler’s intentions, German Jews were now being shot. Perhaps Hitler had decided by this point to murder all of the Jews of Europe, including German Jews; if so, even Himmler had not yet grasped his intention. It was Jeckeln who killed the German Jews arriving in Riga, whom Himmler had
not
wished to murder.

Himmler did set in motion, also in October 1941, a search for a new and more effective way of killing Jews. He made contact with his client Odilo Globocnik, the SS and Police Leader for the Lublin district of the General Government, who immediately set to work on a new type of facility for the killing of Jews at a site known as Bełżec. By November 1941 the concept was not entirely clear and machinery was not yet in place, but certain outlines of Hitler’s final version of the Final Solution were visible. In the occupied Soviet Union,
Jews were being killed by bullets on an industrial scale. In annexed and occupied Poland (in the Wartheland and in the General Government), gassing facilities were under construction (at Chełmno and Bełżec). In Germany, Jews were being sent to the east, where some of them had already been killed.
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The Final Solution as mass murder, initiated east of the Molotov-Ribbentrop line, was spreading to the west.

In November 1941 Army Group Center was pushing toward Moscow, to win the delayed, but no less glorious, final victory: the end of the Soviet system, the beginning of the apocalyptic transformation of blighted Soviet lands into a proud German frontier empire. In fact, German soldiers were heading into a much more conventional apocalypse. Their trucks and tanks were slowed by the autumn mud, their bodies by the lack of proper clothing and warm food. At one point German officers could see the spires of the Kremlin through their binoculars, but they would never reach the Soviet capital. Their men were at the very limits of their supplies and their endurance. The resistance of the Red Army was ever firmer, its tactics ever more intelligent.
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On 24 November 1941 Stalin ordered his strategic reserves from the Soviet East into battle against Army Group Center of the Wehrmacht. He was confident that he could take this risk. From a highly placed informer in Tokyo, and no doubt from other sources, Stalin had reports that there would be no Japanese attack on Soviet Siberia. He had refused to believe in a German attack in summer 1941 and was wrong; now he refused to believe in a Japanese attack in autumn 1941 and was right. He had kept his nerve. On 5 December the Red Army went on the offensive at Moscow. German soldiers tasted defeat. Their exhausted horses could not move their equipment back quickly enough. The troops would spend the winter outside, huddling in the cold, short on everything.
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Stalin’s intelligence was correct. Japan was about to commit decisively to a war in the Pacific, which would all but exclude any Japanese offensive in Siberia. The southern course of Japanese imperialism had been set by 1937. It had been clear to all when Japan invaded French Indochina in September 1940. Hitler had discouraged his Japanese ally from joining in the invasion of the Soviet Union; now, as that invasion had failed, Japanese forces were moving further in the other direction.

Even as the Red Army marched west on 6 December 1941, a Japanese task force of aircraft carriers was sailing toward Pearl Harbor, the base of the United States Pacific Fleet. On 7 December, a German general, in a letter home, described the battles around Moscow. He and his men were “fighting for our own naked lives, daily and hourly, against an enemy who in all respects is superior.” That same day, two waves of Japanese aircraft attacked the American fleet, destroying several battleships and killing two thousand servicemen. The following day the United States declared war on Japan. Three days later, on 11 December, Nazi Germany declared war on the United States. This made it very easy for President Franklin D. Roosevelt to declare war on Germany.
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