Hitler's Foreign Executioners (25 page)

On the eve of the German invasion, Himmler and Heydrich met with the head of the Order Police, Kurt Daluege, to co-ordinate strategy along the front line. In Tilsit on the East Prussian border, where Army Group North awaited the signal to march into Soviet Lithuania, SS General Hans-Adolf Prützmann, HSSPF for ‘Northern Russia’ (which included the Baltic States), had overall command of the SS militias. Himmler would soon discover that Prützmann was rather too squeamish for the task in hand – and he came to rely on the hard nosed Stahlecker. Stahlecker arrived in Tilsit on 24 June and was informed that Gargždai had been chosen for the first
Judenaktion
. Stahlecker in turn communicated this decision to his subordinates: SS-Major Dr Martin Sandberger in charge of Sonderkommando Ia and SS-Colonel Karl Jäger heading Einsatzkommando 3.
³⁵

Stahlecker’s Einsatzgruppe A was the biggest of Heydrich’s murder squads, totalling 990 personnel. According to Hilberg, Einsatzgruppen A included 340 Waffen-SS, 172 motorcycle rider, 18 administrators, 35 SD men, 41 criminal police, 89 state police, 87 auxiliary police, 133 Order Police, supported by 13 female secretaries and clerks, as well as teletype and radio operators.
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Each Kommando crossed the Soviet border equipped with trucks and motorcycles, shovels to dig mass graves and an extensive armoury of Lugers, Bergmann machine pistols, hand grenades and Walther P-38 pistols (considered ideal for administering the
coup de grâce
in the back of the neck). Every member of the Task Forces, Heydrich had confided to SS spymaster Walther Schellenberg, ‘will have the opportunity to prove himself’. When one SD man realised the meaning of ‘special tasks’, he stammered ‘
Du bist ja verrückt!
’ (‘You must be mad!’) His informant replied, ‘
Ihr werdet ja sehen
’ (‘Wait and see’).
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The most dedicated became known as ‘Dauer-Schützen’ (permanent shooters). Extinguishing so many lives required only the most rudimentary skills. Thanks to Heydrich’s deal with the LAF, Lithuanian auxiliaries usually dug a pit to German specifications and then helped round up local Jewish men. The Germans then rushed their victims to the edge of the pit: ‘Hurry up Isidor [anti-Semitic term]! The faster you go the sooner you will be with your God.’ Then: ‘Gustav, shoot well!’ Later when a few recruits fretted about the day’s work, an officer bucked them up: ‘For God’s sake don’t you see? One generation has to go through all of this, so that our children have it better.’
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So began the catastrophe that would engulf so many tens of thousands of Lithuanian, Latvian and Estonian Jews.

In a few Lithuanian villages and small towns, the general population reacted to news of the German ‘liberation’ by turning with horrible savagery on their Jewish neighbours. On the roads out of Vilnius, Polish peasants ambushed and killed Jews fleeing the city. Others set fire to synagogues and burnt Torah scrolls. They plundered homes. They killed. Some accounts of the Holocaust give the impression that
the majority of ordinary Lithuanians and later Latvians and Estonians, when they had the opportunity, took part in killing sprees. To accept this would be to fall for Heydrich’s carefully laid trap that pogroms must be made to appear spontaneous. The SS managed mass murder because they had learnt that ‘cleansing’ could not be delegated to the mob or unreliable national militias. Surgery not butchery – the ‘Stahlecker reports’ reveal how this lesson was applied ‘in the field’.

In the last week of June, Stahlecker reached Kaunas. He informed Berlin that ‘To our surprise, it was not easy at first to set in motion an extensive pogrom against Jews’. What did Stahlecker mean by these puzzling words? In the first place, ‘to our surprise’, he is implicitly criticising SS experts who almost certainly exaggerated the level of anti-Semitic hostility in the wider Lithuanian community. He makes the same point more than once: ‘Native anti-Semitic forces were
induced
to start pogroms … but this inducement
proved to be very difficult
.’ But Stahlecker boasted that he quickly came up with a solution: ‘every attempt was made from the start to ensure that
reliable elements
in the local population participated in the fight against the pests in their country, that is the Jews and Communists.’
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Instead of relying on the general population, Stahlecker turned not to any passing Lithuanian but to known activists – who had, as we have seen, already been informed of Heydrich’s pact with the LAF.

Before they arrived in Kaunas, Stahlecker and his adjutant SS-Sturmbannführer Horst Eichler made contact with Iron Wolf stalwarts Major Kazys Simkus and Bronius Norkus, who had founded the Voldemaras partisans to harass the Russians. They came to the meeting wearing Lithuanian army uniforms and it was evident that they had assumed that the Germans would assign them to a military division.
⁴⁰
Stahlecker reported that he saw straightaway that this would be a mistake. If partisans fought alongside German soldiers against a foreign power, it implied that they had been accepted as military allies – and thus as a Lithuanian army, which could be used to legitimate a sovereign Lithuanian state.

Stahlecker had every reason to be cautious. The Germans had been ambushed by Lithuanian nationalists right at the start of Operation Barbarossa. On 23 June, as the Soviet authorities fled Kaunas, Lithuanian LAF gangs seized the radio station and announced that a provisional Lithuanian government had been formed under Juozas Ambrazevičius-Brazaitis and called on Lithuanians to ‘extirpate the Soviet regime’. Even in Polish-dominated Vilnius, the German ‘liberators’, whose tanks arrived in the night, inspired wild enthusiasm. A rash of Lithuanian flags erupted and radios played the old national anthem ad nauseam. A Citizens’ Committee was set up to press for independence. Sideswiped by the LAF, the German military authorities reacted with shrill indignation: Lieutenant-General Wilhelm Schubert
protested that the Lithuanians had the effrontery to regard themselves as ‘equal partners in the territory liberate from the Russians’. They plainly had the impression, he blustered, that Germany had ‘only gone to war’ with the Bolsheviks to grant Lithuania independence! When Schubert met the former Lithuanian Foreign Minister he made sure he knew who was in charge – and he had the tanks to back him up. The new Lithuanian state was strangled at birth.
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Despite this bitter disappointment, Stahlecker had little difficulty harnessing nationalist energies – for his own strategic purposes. He ferreted out ‘reliable elements’ that would do his bidding. Assisted by ethnic German Richard Schweizer, who spoke fluent Lithuanian, he sidelined Major Simkus and the Iron Wolf army faction and turned instead to radical journalist Algirdas Jonas Klimaitis who was well known as a self-proclaimed radical anti-Semite. Stahlecker authorised Klimaitis and a ‘Dr Zigonys’ to recruit dependable types as auxiliary policemen. In his report, Stahlecker states: ‘Klimatis [sic] succeeded in starting a pogrom
on the basis of advice given to him
… in such a way that no German order or German instigation was noticed from the outside.’ (My italics.) Stahlecker set his willing Lithuanian auxiliaries to work with breathtaking speed. Led by Klimaitis, the Lithuanian auxiliaries set fire to synagogues and houses in the old Jewish quarter. They began plundering homes and shooting down Jews caught in the street; on the first night alone, some 1,500 Lithuanian Jews were killed. On the second night, double that number.

Opportunity for plunder provided a powerful motivation (as it did for the German SD men and soldiers). After their owners had been murdered, auxiliaries looted homes and warehouses. They ripped valuables from bodies. On 28 June, Einsatzkommando 1B reported with satisfaction that ‘During the last three days Lithuanian partisan groups have already killed several thousand Jews’.
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Two days after arriving in Kaunas, Stahlecker had moved on to Riga in Latvia. The means of carrying out mass murder had now been settled. It was succinctly described in Einsatzgruppe Report No 21, sent to Berlin from Minsk on 13 July: ‘By 8 July in Vilnius, the local Einsatzkommando liquidated 321 Jews. The
Lithuanian Ordnungsdienst
which was placed under the Einsatzkommando … was instructed to take part in the liquidation of the Jews. 150 Lithuanian officials were assigned to this task.’

The Diary of Herman Kruk, who lived in Vilnius, recounts the destruction of Lithuanian Jews day by day, as events unfolded. On 23 June, Kruk records that German bombers roared overhead and pounded the city all night long. A day later, he hears that ‘the Germans push forward with dreadful force and thrust with enormous speed’. Many thousands of Jews, including Kruk himself, tried to escape either by following the fleeing Soviet troops or by booking passage across
Siberia to Vladivostok. But the Russians abandoned the trains and every escape route became barred: ‘Today has turned me into an old man … Everything is lost.’ On 24 June, the Germans entered the city. Kruk then reports a new development: Jews are ordered to wear armbands, 10cm wide and worn on the right arm. In the streets, Lithuanian gangs and Poles rob and beat Jews. It sometimes seems, Kruk writes, ‘as if whole streets scream’. Then in July, Kruk hears stories about Lithuanian ‘Snatchers’ (Yiddish
Hapunes
). At first these sinister figures appear only at night to roam the Jewish districts, seizing anyone unfortunate enough to run into them. They take people ‘wherever they want’. A few days later, Kruk reports, ‘snatching at night has become a frequent event’. On 17 July, Kruk fears ‘The Snatchers are making progress … carrying off entire courtyards’. ‘Horror upon horror.’
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What was really happening in Vilnius? Who were those mysterious ‘Snatchers’? The Einsatzgruppen Reports provide the answer. Between 24 June and 2 July two Einsatzkommandos, 9 and 7a, had arrived in Vilnius – and organised Lithuanian ‘snatch squads’. These squads had begun kidnapping Jews and holding some in Lukiskiai prison. The rest they took to the forest near Ponary and executed them in shallow pits. The Germans had recruited their ‘snatch’ squads from members of an ultranationalist faction called the Ypatingas Burys (the special ones).
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A Lithuanian witness described what took place: ‘The Gestapo [i.e. SD] come in cars and stop in front of Jewish houses. They take out males and order them to bring along a towel and soap … Groups of Polish and Lithuanian youths wearing white armbands appear in the street and snatch the Jews … People call them
Hapunes
.’ The Einsatzkommando leader Dr Alfred Filbert was under pressure; his task was to ‘liquidate the Jews of Vilnius’ and he was a competitive, driven man. He urged Lithuanians to ramp up their ‘productivity’ and organise more ‘Jew hunts’. It was after this that, as Kruk recalled, the snatch squads appeared in daytime, surprising their victims and even preying on Jewish labour gangs recruited by the German administration. This provoked protests from German army officers who resented losing ‘their Jews’. But Dr Filbert was not to be stopped. On 5 July, Kruk reported in his diary that many of those kidnapped had been taken to Lukiskiai. He travelled to the prison to try to find out what had happened to them. ‘Many women,’ he reported, ‘congregate outside the prison.’ Kruk soon discovered that large groups of prisoners had been led away ‘in the direction of Ponary’.

The journey to Ponary was a death sentence.

Less than 10 miles south of Vilnius, and close to the road and rail links to Grodno in the former Russian zone of Poland, Ponary (now Poneriai) was a bucolic patch of pine and beech forest. Before the German attack, Poles and Lithuanians both Christian and Jew had spent happy hours here picnicking and hiking. In the hot, dry
summer of 1941 the Ponary forest became a ‘Valley of Death’. In 1940, the Russians had dug deep pits in the forest for fuel tanks. These were 20ft deep and up to 150ft in diameter, and ringed by high earthen embankments that were bisected by primitive earthen passageways. In photographs they resemble Palaeolithic earthworks. Now in July 1941, these deep pits had become the fiefdom of SS-Obersturmführer Franz Schauschütz, who would turn the Soviet fuel pits into a mass grave.
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It was a Lithuanian ‘snatcher’ who had informed the Germans about the existence of the Ponary pits – and Ypatingas Burys murder squads had already carried out executions using machine guns. The Germans considered this a profligate waste of ammunition. Schauschütz would now apply proper German
Ordnung
. He forbade the use of machine guns. Only rifles could be used; and he taught his Lithuanian comrades how to site precisely and kill instantly, without wasting ammunition.

Schauschütz reorganised the way Jews arrived at the edge of the pits, and by doing so increased daily kill rates to a hundred Jewish men per hour. He set up a waiting zone where victims undressed and were relieved of their valuables. A German soldier from a motorised division witnessed a typical day’s work. He observed a group of approximately 400 Jewish prisoners led from Vilnius to the execution site by Lithuanian civilians armed with carbines and wearing coloured armbands. At the edge of the two large circular pits, whose sides were braced with planks, an elderly man stopped and asked (in good German), ‘What do you want with me? I am just a poor composer.’ Two Lithuanian guards stepped forward and beat the man with such ferocity that he ‘flew into the pit’.
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A ten-man execution squad waited on the opposite embankment. In less than an hour, they had killed the entire convoy of Jewish prisoners. How can you do this, the German driver asked a Lithuanian: ‘After what we’ve gone through under the domination of the Russian Jewish Commissars [sic] …we no longer find it difficult.’ A second ‘SD man’ stood nearby guarding a landau coach drawn by two horses. Inside sat two elderly Jews; both were shaking violently. The first SD man made the terrified couple walk to the edge of the pit; one carried a towel and soapbox. The SD man shot them both in the head.
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