Bloodlands (41 page)

The fifth and final version of the Final Solution was mass death. In Nazi parlance, the word
resettlement
now shifted from description to euphemism. For years German leaders had imagined that they could “resolve” Europe’s Jewish “problem” by resettling Jews to one place or another. Jews would be worked to death wherever they landed, and perhaps sterilized so that they could not reproduce, but they would not all be killed as such. Thus
resettlement
was incomplete though not entirely inaccurate as a description of Jewish policy in 1940 and into 1941. Henceforth
resettlement
or
resettlement to the East
would mean mass murder. Perhaps the
resettlement
euphemism, by suggesting an essential continuity of policy, helped Nazis to overlook the fact that German policy not only changed but had to change because the war was not going as expected. It might thus have allowed the Germans to shield from themselves the reality that military disaster conditioned their Jewish policy.
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The Germans had already shown, by December 1941, that they could do something far worse than deport Jews to Poland, Madagascar, or the Soviet Union. They could kill the Jews under their control, and blame the victims for their fate. The reality of
resettlement
from which the Germans now distanced themselves can be brought closer by simple quotation of German usage: “Resettlement site: on the resettlement site eight trenches are situated. One squad of ten officers and men are to work at each trench and are to be relieved every two hours.”
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By the time Hitler conveyed his preferences in December 1941, Himmler’s SS and police forces (aided by the Wehrmacht and local policemen) had already killed about a million Jews in the occupied Soviet Union. Retrospect conveys a sense of inevitability, and the new German policy of killing all European Jews may appear to be nothing more than the fulfillment of a goal that was, in some sense, already a given. While it is true that Hitler took for granted that the Jews would have no place in his future Europe, and that Himmler’s escalating murder must have corresponded to Hitler’s wishes, Hitler’s decision to speak of the mass murder of all Jews must be seen as just that: a decision. Other responses to the same events, after all, were possible.
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Germany’s ally Romania showed the possibility of such reversals. Bucharest had also been pursuing national purification. As of December 1941, Romanian Jews had suffered more than German Jews. Romania had joined in the invasion of the Soviet Union—like Germany, under propaganda associating communism with Jews. By invading the Soviet Union along with the Germans, Romania recovered the Bessarabian and Bukovinan territory that the Soviet Union had annexed in 1940. Romania then added a new region called “Transnistria,” seized from the southern part of Soviet Ukraine. In this zone in 1941, Romanian policies toward Jews were every bit as brutal as their German equivalents. After taking Odessa, Romanian troops killed about twenty thousand local Jews in “reprisals” for an explosion that destroyed their headquarters in the city. In the Bohdanivka district the Romanians shot more than forty thousand Jews in a few days in late December 1941. The Romanians also created their own set of ghettos and labor camps in Transnistria, where tens of thousands of Jews from Bessarabia and Bukovina perished. All in all, Romania killed about three hundred thousand Jews.
⁶⁴

Yet Romania’s leadership reacted to the changing course of the war differently than did Hitler. Its policies toward Jews remained brutal, but were gradually softened rather than hardened. By summer 1942 Romania was no longer deporting Jews to Transnistria. When the Germans built death facilities, Romania declined to send its Jews to them. By the end of 1942, Romanian policy had diverged significantly from the German. Romania would attempt to switch sides later in the war, and at that time the survival of remaining Jews would come to
seem an asset. The year 1942 was thus a crucial turning point, when German and Romanian policies turned in opposite directions. Germany would kill all Jews because the war was lost; Romania, late that year, would save some Jews for much the same reason. The Romanian dictator Ion Antonescu would leave open a crack in the door for negotiations with the Americans and the British; Hitler left the Germans no possibility to escape from their own guilt.
⁶⁵

Over the course of the year 1942, the Germans killed most of the remaining Jews who were under their occupation. West of the Molotov-Ribbentrop line, mass murder would be carried out at gassing facilities. East of the Molotov-Ribbentrop line, the Germans continued the mass shootings, and also used the gas vans that had been tested on the Soviet prisoners of war. In occupied Soviet Ukraine, the
killing began again as soon as the earth had thawed enough for the digging of pits, and sometimes, where machines were available for digging, even sooner. In the eastern part of Soviet Ukraine, still under military occupation, the shooting simply continued without any pause from late 1941 through early 1942. In January, Einsatzgruppen, assisted by the Wehrmacht, killed smaller Jewish communities that had survived the first sweep, as well as groups of Jewish laborers. In spring 1942 the action shifted from the east to the west, from the military zone to the civilian occupation authority, the Reichskommissariat Ukraine. Here all of the actions were carried out by stationary police forces, battalions of German Order Police with the assistance of local militiamen. With the help of tens of thousands of local collaborators, the Germans had the necessary manpower.
⁶⁶

Killing became extermination last in the lands that the Germans took first. Though the Germans had overrun all of the former lands of eastern Poland in the first ten days of the war, in June 1941, many of the native Jews of Poland’s southeast, now the west of the Reichskommissariat Ukraine, had survived until
1942. German forces had already passed through by the time Himmler began to order the destruction of whole Jewish communities. By the time German policy had shifted, most German forces had already departed. In 1942 the Germans undertook a second round of mass shootings in the western districts of the Reichskommissariat Ukraine, this time organized by the civilian authorities and implemented by the police, with a great deal of help from local auxiliary policemen.
⁶⁷

These west Ukrainian districts were typical of the many towns and small cities, in the lands that had been eastern Poland, where Jews numbered about half of the population, sometimes a bit less, sometimes a bit more. Jews usually inhabited the center of the cities, in stone houses around town squares, rather than the wood shanties of the outskirts. These were settlements where Jews had lived for more than half a millennium, under varying governments and with varying levels of prosperity, but with a success demonstrated by the simplest measures of architecture and demography. The majority of this Jewish population, in interwar Poland, had remained religiously observant and rather separated from the outside world. The languages remained Yiddish and (for religious purposes) Hebrew, and rates of intermarriage with Christians were low. Eastern Poland had remained the heartland of an Ashkenazic Jewish civilization, speaking Yiddish and dominated by rival clans of charismatic Hasidim. This Jewish tradition had outlived the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth where it had originated, it had outlived the Russian Empire, and it had outlived the interwar Polish Republic.
⁶⁸

After the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact and the joint invasion of Poland, Soviet power and Soviet citizenship were extended to these Jews in 1939-1941, and thus they are usually counted as Soviet Jewish victims of the Nazis. These Jews did live for a time in the Soviet Union after Soviet borders were extended westward to include what had been eastern Poland, and they were subject to Soviet policies. Like the Poles and the Ukrainians and the Belarusians of these lands, they had been subject then to arrests, deportations, and shootings. Jews had lost their businesses and their religious schools. Yet this brief period of Soviet rule was hardly enough to make Soviet Jews of them. With the exception of the very youngest children, people in Rivne and similar settlements had been citizens of Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, or Romania for far longer than they were citizens of the Soviet Union. Of the 2.6 million or so Jews killed on the terrains of the Soviet
Union, some 1.6 million had been under Soviet jurisdiction for less than two years. Their civilization had been seriously weakened by Soviet rule during 1939-1941; it would not survive the German Reich.
⁶⁹

Rivne, unusually for these cities, had already seen a mass killing action in 1941. Although Kiev was the center of the German police state in Ukraine, Rivne was in 1941 the provisional capital of the Reichskommissariat Ukraine. The Reichskommissar, Erich Koch, was a man known for his brutality. Hitler’s advisors called Koch a “second Stalin,” and they meant it as a compliment. Koch had already in autumn 1941 ordered that most of the Jews of Rivne be killed. On 6 November 1941 the police had told all Jews without work permits to report for resettlement. Some seventeen thousand people were then transported to nearby woods, known as Sosenky. There they were shot over pits dug earlier by Soviet prisoners of war. The remaining ten thousand or so Jews were then forced to live in a ghetto in the worst part of the city.
⁷⁰

In early 1942, even after the majority of the Jews were dead, the Rivne Judenrat was trying to maintain for the survivors some means of subsistence. The German authorities, however, had decided that Jews were not to exist at all. In summer 1942 Koch, with an eye to food shortages, took the next step, asking his subordinates for a “100% solution” to the Jewish problem. On the night of 13 July 1942 Rivne’s Jews were herded by German police and Ukrainian auxiliaries from the ghetto. The Jews were forced to walk to the train station, where they were enclosed in train cars. After two days without food and water, they were transported to a quarry near woods outside the town of Kostopil. There they were shot by German Security Police and the auxiliary policemen.
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