Hitler's Foreign Executioners (32 page)

At the end of the afternoon, the SS marched Jewish men a few miles out of the town and into a wooded area. Here they were all executed. When the SS men left, villagers descended on the execution site and took clothes and shoes. Magill's SS brigade now turned their attention to the towns and villages strung out along the Pinsk Road. Himmler was finally getting the numbers he demanded.

From the mid-sixteenth century, Pinsk had been a vibrant Jewish religious and cultural centre. Like any city with a large Jewish population, Pinsk had suffered a succession of pogroms, but in 1941 20,000 Jews lived there and 10,000 more, fleeing the German advance, had taken shelter. On 4 July, a month before Magill's men arrived, the Wehrmacht and an SD squad had entered Pinsk. They harassed the Jews, murdered some and ordered them to form a Judenrat (Jewish council). The Wehrmacht troops then moved east, leaving behind SD Chief Hermann Worthoff to keep order. Magill, shamed by Himmler's rebukes, realised Pinsk, with its large captive Jewish community, would offer him a fresh opportunity to please the SS chief.
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He sent SS-Hauptsturmführer Stefan Charwat to confer with Worthoff – and together they began planning a large-scale ‘Action'. On 5 August, Charwat ordered Jewish men between 16 and 60 to assemble at Pinsk station for a three-day
‘work assignment'. That night, SS men began assaulting Jews to persuade the ‘Judenrat' to do as it was told. The following morning, several thousand men reported ‘for work' at the station. Many carried parcels of food. In the meantime, SS men again led a sweep, assisted by Poles and Ukrainians, searching for any Jews who had managed to avoid the round-up. By midday, some 8,000 men and young boys stood waiting in searing temperatures at the station; SS men walked through the crowd, separating out any doctors and craftsmen. They then confiscated identification papers and valuables like wristwatches from the majority of assembled Jews who had been left behind. The SS cavalrymen herded their captives into columns and marched them out of Pinsk in the direction of a neighbouring village. The Germans shot anyone who tried to escape or fell exhausted by the road. Then a halt was called close to a break of birches and alders. The Jews of Pinsk had, in fact, reached their final destination. In the soft sandy ground between the trees, a Polish work brigade had already dug pits. The SS men and their Polish accomplices organised the Jews into groups of twenty and ordered them to remove their clothes and shoes, and to wait in line. The SS men then executed them using their carbines. At 1.21 p.m., Magill reported to Bach-Zelewski that 2,461 ‘bandits' had been shot so far. Soon afterwards, Bach-Zelewski himself arrived at the killing site and, after hearing Magill's report, congratulated him and returned to his headquarters ‘satisfied'. By 6 p.m., Magill reported by radio, another 2,300 Jewish men had been executed. As the sun began to set, Charwat, faced with more than a thousand Jews who still remained alive, panicked, and ordered his men to start firing at will. His victims prayed and sang. Magill chose not to report these messier executions – but it is believed that by the end of that first day, Magill's men murdered 6,500 Jewish men in the woods on the edge of Pinsk.

It was Lombard, however, who won the lion's share of praise from Himmler. On 14 August, he was invited to a high-level lunch with Fegelein, Bach-Zelewski, Prützmann and Himmler. He was promoted shortly afterwards. Himmler's fleet of black Mercedes then raced on towards Minsk. An SS man who overheard some of the conversation between the SS top brass commented, ‘Now things are getting going, the Jews really are going to have their arses torn out.'
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This casual remark provides a chilling glimpse of the racial triumph that percolated through SS ranks in the weeks and months after the German attack on the Soviet Union. The SS brigades, managed by Himmler's Kommandostab and comprising both Germans and foreign volunteers, had proved to be proficient mass murderers. By the end of 1941, Himmler's ‘private army' may have killed at least 100,000 Jews, as well anyone else judged to have ‘abetted the Soviet system'. Equally as savage as the SS cavalry was the 1st SS Brigade, commanded by HSSPF Friedrich Jeckeln.

Like Bach-Zelewski, Jeckeln was a decorated war veteran. He had joined the NSDAP in 1929 and rapidly climbed the slippery ladder of SS promotion and became police chief in Brunswick. His hatred of Jews was both personal and extreme. Immediately after the war, Jeckeln had married Charlotte Hirsch whose father was a wealthy landowner. His son-in-law administered the estates. The couple had three children but Friedrich's overbearing manner and occasional violence led to protracted divorce proceedings. In the aftermath, Charlotte's father made sure her former husband coughed up his substantial alimony payments on time. Hirsch was not Jewish, but Jeckeln developed a consuming hatred of him because of his ‘typically Jewish characteristics'. This grotesque personal vendetta would inspire some of the very worst German pogroms of the Second World War.
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On 22 July, the brigade passed through L'viv, then began ‘purification' operations in northern Ukraine on the southern rim of the Pripet Marshes. These tasks were characterised as ‘encircling and annihilating the enemy' and ‘encircling and annihilating bands in the forests'. What this really meant becomes evident from Jeckeln's report that ‘the Brigade faced no resistance … and the Brigade suffered no losses'. In other words, his men were murdering not bandits but unarmed civilians. This is confirmed by another more explicit report sent by Jeckeln informing Himmler that his SS brigade men had killed ‘around 800 Jews and Jewesses between the age of 16 and 60' close to Novohrad-Volynsky. Evidently authorisation to murder women and children as well as male Jews was seeping down through the various SS murder squads. But Himmler was not impressed; he complained to Jeckeln that the SS brigade was not ‘active enough'.
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Nevertheless, for a short period, he allocated the 1st SS Brigade to Field Marshall Walther von Reichenau's 6th Army to help pacify rear areas; according to reports‘The Jews who abetted the bands [of partisans] were executed' and ‘The territory is pacified: there are no Jews or Bolsheviks there'.
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Evidently, the German army top brass endorsed the SS doctrine that ‘Jews' and ‘bandits' were one and the same.

Then on 26 August, Jeckeln flew to the Ukrainian town of Kamianets-Podilsky, located in western Ukraine near the old Soviet-Polish border and now under German army administration. At the end of July, many thousands of Jews had fled here, the majority of them expelled by the anti-Semitic Hungarian Horthy regime from the Marmaros district in disputed Carpatho-Ukraine. The German administrators, both civil and military, warned Berlin that unless the Hungarians took the Jewish refugees back, they would be forced to deal with the problem in more radical ways. Since the SD Special Task Force C had already moved further east, Himmler assigned Jeckeln to the task of dealing with the Hungarian Jews. Neither he nor Himmler nor the German army administrators believed for a moment that the Hungarians would ever change their minds concerning these ‘undesirable' Jews.
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Jeckeln's task was daunting, and the ghastly events that took place in Kanianets-Podilsky at the end of August 1941 marked another step change in SS methodology. Jeckeln had at his immediate disposal a small personal staff and a few inexperienced German police. He desperately needed reinforcements and called in Order Police Battalion 320 – which had been bolstered with ethnic Germans transferred from the Baltic region. Jeckeln next turned to the Hungarian military authorities, who agreed to provide army and Field Police units. But Jeckeln still needed to find a way to maximise the efforts of this relatively modest force. After the First World War, before he joined the Nazi Party and the SS, Jeckeln had trained as an engineer. Now he devised a technical solution to the demands of mass murder that he called ‘Sardine Packing'; this would revolutionise SS strategy in the east. Sardine packing was, in crude terms, a means of ramping up the productivity of the execution squad. Tens of thousands of defenceless people could be extinguished in the most gruesome and debasing manner. The key innovation in Jeckeln's system was the systematic excavation of deep, vertical-sided pits. These simple receptacles permitted successive waves of mass executions and then the layering or ‘packing' of victims in their tens of thousands inside the pit. Jeckeln's other improvement was to set up a kind of production line using auxiliary policemen who would progressively strip their victims of their possessions and clothes as they moved in stages to the hidden edge of the pit where the shooters waited. The only tools required for this diabolical system were spades and rifles. The result was mass murder on an industrial scale.

The first new method execution pit was dug a short distance from Kanianets Podilsky. Jeckeln stood on a nearby elevation, with German army observers, to watch his new system in action. There could be no doubting its terrible efficacy: on the second day alone, SS execution squads ‘processed' more than 11,000 victims. When the shooting was finally halted, an exultant Jeckeln radioed SS headquarters in Berlin to report that 23,600 Polish and Hungarian Jews (14,000 from Carpatho-Ukraine) had been liquidated so that, Jeckeln proclaimed, ‘we Germans can survive'. In almost every case, the smooth running of this killing spree depended on close co-operation between the SS, the German Wehrmacht and local Ukrainian auxiliaries. The ideological imperative was the same for every executioner: the eradication of Jews as the ‘bacteriological carriers' of Bolshevism. To ram this mythology home, Jeckeln forced a Jew to wave a red flag over the execution pit before shooting him dead.
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On 5 November 1941 Himmler transferred HSSPF Friedrich Jeckeln to Riga, the capital city of Latvia. Now Himmler ordered him ‘on the express wish of the Führer' to liquidate the Riga ghetto. To accomplish this, Jeckeln would turn to one of Hitler's most notorious foreign executioners.

On 20 November 1941, HSSPF and SS-Obergruppenführer Friedrich Jeckeln ordered Ernst Hemicker, a German construction expert, to begin designing execution pits at a place called Rumbula a few miles outside Riga.
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When he was informed of the numbers of Latvian citizens that would need to be dispatched on what the Germans liked to call the ‘road to heaven’, an astonished Hemicker decided to construct six pits, each one the size of small house. A day or so later, a Latvian auxiliary police ‘commando’, led by a hard-drinking young man called Viktors Arājs, drove 300 Russian POWs to Rumbula in blue buses leased from the Riga transit authority to begin excavation. These blue buses were already feared in many parts of Latvia. In towns and small villages, their arrival, crammed with armed and intoxicated Latvian auxiliary policemen, heralded the beginning of mass executions of Jews and other ‘hostile elements’ like gypsies and the mentally handicapped. Their fate had been sealed not in Riga but in faraway Berlin.

Heinrich Himmler’s
Dienstkalender
(office diary) 1941/42 reveals a great deal about the SS chief’s hectic schedule during that scorching summer of 1941.
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As
German army groups smashed demoralised Soviet defences and pushed into the Baltic and Ukraine, Himmler refined his master plan to dominate the east. In the jungle of Hitler’s court, he knew that he would need to quash fierce competition from Alfred Rosenberg and the Reichsmarschall Hermann Göring, both of whom hoped to become Hitler’s most influential eastern potentates. At 12.30 p.m. on 24 June (postponed from noon), the SS chief met SS-Standartenführer Professor Dr Konrad Meyer at his headquarters on Prinz Albrecht Strasse to discuss the ‘General Plan East’. As he leafed through Meyer’s first draft, Himmler was bitterly disappointed. The plan was timid and lacklustre. With German and SS troops penetrating deep into the lair of the Bolshevik enemy, Meyer’s ideas had been rendered obsolete. Himmler lifted the phone and cancelled his regular appointment with his masseur Felix Kersten, the Baltic German crank who treated the SS chief for persistent excruciating stomach pains. Like a frustrated schoolmaster, Himmler took his pen and stabbed and scratched at the offending document. Meyer rushed back to his splendid offices in Berlin-Dahlem to start, as Himmler instructed, ‘thinking bigger’.

At 11.30 a.m. the following day, Himmler’s special train
Heinrich
steamed out of the Lehrter Bahnhof in Berlin. His destination was Hitler’s military headquarters near Rastenburg – the Wolfsschanze (Wolf’s Lair). Here Todt Organisation engineers had constructed, in a mosquito infested swamp, a vast concrete city of camouflaged bunkers and huts. From inside Security Zone One, Hitler directed his ‘war of annihilation’. Himmler’s train halted close to the lake at Angerburg, a short drive from the Wolf’s Lair. It was from here that he would supervise the escalating slaughter in the east over the coming months. On board the
Heinrich
, sophisticated equipment sucked in the daily reports from the Special Task Force commanders and the SS brigades – as well as Waffen-SS divisions in action on the front line. Assisted by his loyal adjutants Joachim Peiper and Werner Grothmann, Himmler kept in close touch with his Higher SS and police officers Hans-Adolf Prützmann, Erich von dem Bach-Zelewski and Friedrich Jeckeln – the front-line managers of mass murder.