Hitler's Hangman (48 page)

Einsatzkommando
leaders, wanting to make sure he had understood his

orders correctly, asked: ‘Are we supposed to shoot the Jews?’ Heydrich

allegedly assured him that the answer to his question was obvious.64

Another witness among the
Einsatzgruppen
officers, Erwin Schulz, testi-

fied that Heydrich spoke in more general terms, while implying that the

Jews in particular had to be dealt with ‘severely’.65

Even if we take into account the consideration that the post-war

testimonies of many
Einsatzgruppen
members were driven by the desire to

whitewash their own direct responsibility for the mass atrocities committed

in the Soviet Union by pointing to a comprehensive killing order that they

had to obey, it seems plausible that Heydrich did indeed give general

orders along these lines. Shortly after the beginning of the German inva-

sion, he summarized his oral instructions of 17 June in two written orders

to the
Einsatzgruppen
commanders and the higher SS and police leaders

for the newly occupied territories.66 Reminding his men in the field that

their immediate task of ‘politically pacifying’ the occupied Soviet Union

demanded ‘ruthless severity’, he reiterated that ‘all Jews in the service

of the [Communist] Party and the state’ should be ‘eliminated’, along

with ‘officials of the Comintern (together with professional Communist

politicians in general), top- and medium-level officials and radical lower-

level officials of the party, the Central Committees and district and sub-

190

HITLER’S HANGMAN

district committees, people’s commissars’, as well as ‘other radical elements

(saboteurs, propagandists, snipers, assassins, demagogues etc)’.67

The target group of people to be executed was deliberately kept vague

but it was clear that the formulation ‘all Jews in the service of the party

and the state’ was merely a coded reference for an order to kill a nebulously

defined Jewish upper class.68 It would be largely left to the commando

leaders themselves to decide who precisely would be included in this class

– an approach that was once more highly characteristic of Heydrich’s

leadership style, which called for intitiative without specifying exact aims,

and which would contribute significantly to the rapid escalation of mass

murder over the following weeks.69

Barbarossa

On 22 June 1941, a historically unprecedented invasion army of 3 million

German soldiers and more than 600,000 Italian, Hungarian and Finnish

troops plunged into the Soviet Union on an extended battle-front of

1,500 kilometres. The speed of the Wehrmacht’s advance was extraordi-

nary. Within two days of launching the invasion, Army Group North had

captured the Baltic cities of Grodno, Vilnius and Kaunas. By the end of

June, Lvov had fallen, too. Army Group Centre pushed eastwards, taking

Smolensk in mid-July, while Army Group South drove deep into the

southern Ukraine. By late autumn, the Wehrmacht had captured more

than 3 million Soviet soldiers, the vast majority of whom would perish in

German POW camps due to starvation, typhus and other infectious

diseases.70

Heydrich’s
Einsatzgruppen
followed in the armies’ rear, grimly deter-

mined to excel in carrying out their orders. Although Heydrich was to be

informed of their progress through daily incident reports, he and Himmler

quickly decided that they would monitor their work first hand.71 Eight

days after the beginning of Operation Barbarossa, on 30 June, they trav-

elled from Hitler’s headquarters in East Prussia to Grodno in the former

Soviet-occupied part of Poland and Augustowo in recently conquered

Lithuania, home to the largest Jewish community of the Baltic States. In

Grodno, Heydrich was dismayed to find that, even though the town had

already been captured a week earlier, not a single representative of the

Security Police or the SD was on hand. He issued a reprimand and a

warning to the commando leader in charge of the area, ordering him

to show ‘greater flexibility in tactical operations’ and ‘to keep pace with

military advances’. The commander of Einsatzgruppe B, Arthur Nebe,

responded with an apology: although ‘only ninety-six Jews were liqui-

dated’ in the first days of the occupation of Grodno and Lida, he assured

AT W A R W I T H T H E W O R L D

191

Heydrich that he had given orders ‘that this must be greatly intensified’.

The ‘implementation of the necessary liquidations’ was ‘guaranteed under

all circumstances’.72

Meanwhile in Augustowo, Heydrich and Himmler caught up with the

Einsatzkommando Tilsit
under the command of Hans-Joachim Böhme.

Over the previous week, Böhme and his men had engaged in various

shootings of civilians and had come to Augustowo in order to initiate

further ‘punitive actions’ in the rear of the quickly advancing Wehrmacht.

Both Himmler and Heydrich approved of these mass shootings ‘in their

entirety’. Encouraged by the endorsement of their superiors, the

Einsatzkommando Tilsit
shot more than 300 civilians the following day,

most of them Jewish men between the ages of seventeen and forty-five.

By 18 July, Böhme’s unit claimed to have murdered a total of 3,302

victims.73

On 11 July, Heydrich and Himmler returned to Grodno to view the

progress of the
Einsatzgruppen
’s extermination campaign. Both could

see for themselves that the murder squads had overcome the ‘passivity’

for which they had been criticized on 30 June: when they arrived, mass

shootings of civilians took place in Grodno, Oschmiany and Vilnius.74

In between these visits, Heydrich found distraction and solace in

daily fencing exercises, preparing himself for the German National

Fencing Championships in Bad Kreuznach in August 1941 (where he

came fifth).75

Heydrich’s inspection tour to Grodno, and the subsequent radicaliza-

tion of pacification measures that followed it, was indicative of a more

general pattern: throughout the first weeks of the war against Soviet

Russia, Himmler, Heydrich and other senior SS officers frequently visited

their men in the field and their inspection tours usually preceded or co-

incided with an increase in the number of atrocities. While there is no

hard evidence that either of them called directly for the killing of unarmed

civilians irrespective of age and gender, Himmler’s and Heydrich’s mere

presence appears to have led to an upsurge in the mass murders of Jewish

civilians in the formerly Soviet-occupied territories. By approving what

had happened already and by encouraging their men to show more initia-

tive, they made a decisive contribution to the swift escalation of mass

murder. Radicalism and initiative were sure to receive praise, a lesson that

was quickly learned by
Einsatzgruppen
officers along the Eastern Front.76

The killings consequently intensified over the course of the summer.

From late June onwards, nearly all
Einsatzkommandos
as well as a range of

German police battalions along the entire front line began to shoot indis-

criminately Jewish men of military age, often hundreds or even thousands

at a time. These executions took place under a variety of pretexts, ranging

192

HITLER’S HANGMAN

from ‘retribution’ for atrocities committed by the Soviet secret service, the

NKVD, to the punishment of ‘looters’ and the combating of ‘partisans’.77

With memories of clashes between the SS and the army in occupied

Poland stil fresh, Heydrich had been concerned that tensions over the

executions might re-emerge and instructed the leaders of advance units to

show ‘the necessary political sensitivity’ in carrying out their tasks. His fears

proved to be unfounded. Co-operation with the Wehrmacht was ‘excel ent’,

the first activity report of the
Einsatzgruppen
noted.78 Individual complaints

continued to be submitted to army commanders, but no widespread

outrage similar to that in Poland occurred. When, in August 1941, partisan

activities behind the vastly overstretched German front began to burgeon,

the Wehrmacht’s wil ingness to tolerate and participate in atrocities further

increased. Manpower shortages on a rapidly overextended front went hand

in hand with growing fears of partisan warfare. The response to this

dilemma was greater ‘pre-emptive’ violence against potential as wel as real

enemies.

Mass murder was not, however, restricted to the SS task forces. In

numerous newly occupied territories, the SS succeeded in unleashing

pogroms carried out by local populations. On 29 June, presumably in

response to the horrific pogrom which took place in Kaunas in late June

and which cost the lives of some 3,800 Jews, Heydrich reminded task-

force commanders that ‘self-cleansing efforts of anti-Communist or anti-

Jewish groups’ in the occupied Soviet territories ‘are not to be hindered’.

On the contrary, they were to be actively encouraged and incited ‘without

leaving a trace’ of German involvement so that they would look like spon-

taneous outbursts of anti-Jewish rage.79 In the areas occupied by the Red

Army from 1939 onwards, there is evidence of anti-Jewish pogroms in at

least sixty towns, particularly in Lithuania, Latvia and the western

Ukraine. Although estimates of victims vary, at least 12,000 and possibly

as many as 24,000 Jews fell victim to these pogroms.80

Despite his eagerness to use pogroms as an indicator of local hatred

towards ‘Jewish Bolsheviks’, Heydrich was also aware of the dangers

inherent in this policy. Given the complex mix of nationalistic, opportun-

istic and anti-Semitic motives at work, pogroms contained an element of

unpredictability that ran counter to any systematic anti-Jewish policy. The

basic ingredients recommended by the RSHA – instigating pogroms and

making use of local collaborators without officially sanctioning their

auxiliary function – did not strike army commanders in the field as a

recipe for efficient occupation policy. On 1 July, following an enquiry from

the Seventeenth Army under General Carl-Heinrich von Stülpnagel,

Heydrich elaborated on his previous order regarding the ‘non-prevention

of self-cleansing measures by anti-Communist and anti-Jewish circles’,

AT W A R W I T H T H E W O R L D

193

partly to prevent an uncontrollable mushrooming of violence by non-

Germans and partly to avoid clashes with the army. Heydrich called it

‘self-evident that the cleansing actions have to be directed primarily

against Bolshevists and Jews’. Poles, on the other hand, were to be

exempted for the time being, as Heydrich believed them to be sufficiently

anti-Semitic to be ‘of special importance as initiators of pogroms’.81 Their

long-term fate was to be decided at a later stage.

The fate of Bolshevik commissars, by contrast, was straightforward:

when captured, they were to be shot immediately, although Heydrich

managed to convince the army that, whenever possible, they should be

interrogated by SD and Abwehr officers before their execution. Their

statements, usually given after sustained periods of torture, helped

Heydrich to gain a clearer picture of the organizational structure and

operational methods of the NKVD.82

For Heydrich, the German attack against the Soviet Union thus

marked the end of a highly unsatisfactory period of stagnation in terms of

both ideological fulfilment and career ambitions. Between the invasion of

Poland and the beginning of Operation Barbarossa, he had failed to

advance the influence of the SD and the Security Police in the occupied

territories of Western Europe. Simultaneously, both the Germanization of

Western Poland and the Jewish question remained unresolved. Operation

Barbarossa offered him a potential exit strategy from this stalemate.

Fateful Decisions

Following the lightning German advances into Soviet territory in June

and early July 1941, which led Heydrich to issue detailed instructions for

the role of the Security Police in the capture of Moscow, a jubilant Hitler

announced to a number of top Nazi officials his plans for the future of the

occupied East. Until this point, there had been considerable uncertainty

about what would happen with the conquered territories in the myste-

rious hazy realm that the Germans called ‘the East’ – a supposedly uncul-

tivated wilderness of swamps, impenetrable forests and marshes between

the Baltic and the Black Sea.83 In a speech of 16 July Hitler offered

some clarity: the East was to become Germany’s ‘Garden of Eden’ and