Holocaust: The Nazi Persecution and Murder of the Jews (46 page)

Romanian police’.
91
Sections of Sonderkommando 10b carried out further executions of Jewish men in other towns over the weeks that followed.
92

At the beginning of August Sonderkommando 11a reported the liquidation of

‘551 Jews so far’ in Chişinău (Kishinev), citing ‘sabotage’ and ‘reprisal’ as the

reasons.
93
These executions took place while the leader of Einsatzgruppe D, Ohlendorf’s staff was in Chişinău and he witnessed at least one of the shootings.
94

Sonderkommando 11b undertook its first mass executions on 7 August 1941

in Thigina, where an incident report notes that 155 Jews were shot on that

The Mass Murder of Jewish Men

203

date.
95
Einsatzkommando 12 carried out two executions on 20 and 21 July in Babtshinsky, which the 23 August incident report said claimed 94 lives.
96

Police Battalions

It was not only the Einsatzgruppen that were massacring the Jewish civilian

population in the occupied Eastern zones in the first weeks of the campaign;

various battalions of the German Order Police were also involved.

In Bialystok Police Battalion 309 carried out a massacre as early as 27 June in

which at least 2,000 Jews, including women and children, were killed. Members of

the battalion drove at least 500 people into the synagogue and put them to an

agonizing death by setting fire to the building.
97
The very precise reconstruction of these events undertaken by the Wuppertal District Court in 1973 makes it clear

how some fanatical officers in the battalion seized the initiative and transformed

the planned arrest of the Jews in the synagogue quarter into a bloodbath; there was

looting, and some excesses were perpetrated by policemen under the influence of

alcohol. Bialystok was also the scene of a massacre organized by Police Battalions

316 and 322 in the middle of July when a total of about 3,000 Jewish men were

killed.
98

A few days before this mass murder, on 8 July, Himmler appeared in Bialystok

together with the head of the Order Police, Daluege.
99
At a meeting with SS and police officers Himmler is said by Bach-Zelewski to have remarked that ‘every Jew

must in principle be regarded as a partisan’.
100
On the following day Daluege announced to a meeting of members of Police Regiment Centre that ‘Bolshevism

must now be eradicated once and for all’.
101
Two days later, on 11 July, the commander of Police Regiment Centre issued an order to shoot all Jewish men

between the ages of 17 and 45 convicted of looting.
102
The police made the task of

‘convicting’ Jewish ‘looters’ very straightforward: three days beforehand, members

of Battalion 322 had carried out a search of the Jewish quarter and designated all

confiscated goods as ‘plunder’;
103
Jews were therefore looters by definition.

In the second half of July Police Battalion 316 carried out another massacre in

Baranowicze, which probably claimed several hundred victims, and took part in

two mass shootings in Mogilev in which 3,700 Jews (including women and

children) were killed on 19 September.
104
In Brest-Litovsk, on or around 12 July, Police Battalion 307 shot several thousand Jewish civilians, almost all men between 16 and 60 years old—another alleged ‘reprisal’. Immediately before the

massacre Daluege, the chief of Police Regiment Centre, Max Montua, Bach-

Zelewski, and other Higher SS Commanders had been in Brest.
105

On 2 August Battalion 322 received a radio message from the Higher SS and

Police Commanders to deploy a company ‘exclusively for the liquidation of

Jews’.
106
In the battalions’ war diary for 9 August there is the note: ‘comp. arrests all male Jews between 16 and 45 in Bialowicza and carries out the evacuation of all

204

Mass Executions in Occupied Soviet Zones, 1941

the remaining Jews from Bialowicza’. And the following day has ‘the 3rd comp.

today carried out the liquidation of all the male Jews in the prisoners’ holding

camp in Bialowicza. 77 Jews aged between 16 and 45 were shot.’
107

The same company of the 322nd Battalion shot more Jewish men a few days

later in Moravka-Malá near Bialowicza. The battalion’s war diary for 15 August

notes, ‘259 women and 162 children were resettled in Kobryn. All male Jews

between the ages of 16 and 65 (282 head), as well as one Pole, were shot for

looting.
’108
An order must have arrived between 10 and 15 August that increased the upper age-range from 45 to 65.

Conclusions

The following conclusions may be drawn from all these individual cases and

examples about the way orders were given to the Einsatzgruppen and police

battalions. Almost all Einsatzkommandos and Sonderkommandos, and a number

of police battalions, can be shown to have carried out mass shootings of Jewish

men of military age at the end of June or in July, a total of thousands of

individuals. These shootings were generally carried out under the pretext of

‘reprisals’, as punishments for ‘looting’ or as a means of dealing with ‘partisans’.

This manner of proceeding corresponded to the orders that the Einsatzgruppen

had received at the beginning of the campaign. Some of the Einsatzgruppe

commanders even referred explicitly to these orders, as we have seen.

The conduct of the Einsatzgruppen followed a single pattern but was not wholly

uniform. The upper age limit for the victims differed between Einsatzgruppen:

whilst in some towns almost the entire male population in the relevant age-range

was shot, executions in other places affected varying proportions of the male

population. The different unit commanders therefore had a certain amount of

room for manoeuvre, which was not completely precise, as has been shown, but

left some latitude for initiative.

This manner of ‘indirectly’ issuing orders that relied on the intuition and

initiative of subordinates was highly characteristic of the National Socialist sys-

tem. It was deployed in cases where procedures were being demanded of subor-

dinates that clearly contravened a valid law. The Party Supreme Court of the

NSDAP neatly encapsulated this ‘indirect’ form of giving orders when it dealt with

the question of whether Party members who had participated in the November

1938 pogrom should be punished for committing a serious crime. The Party

Supreme Court explained at the time, that ‘it was obvious to any active National

Socialist from the period of struggle’—i.e. pre-1933—‘that operations where the

Party does not wish to appear as the instigator will not be regulated with complete

clarity and in full detail. As a consequence, therefore, more is to be read into

orders of that kind than the words literally state, and on the part of those issuing

such orders, in the interests of the Party, the practice of not saying everything but

The Mass Murder of Jewish Men

205

hinting what an order is intended to convey has now become widespread,

especially when these orders concern illegal political rallies.’
109
This technique of issuing orders was deployed in 1941 for the mass murder of Soviet Jews. The

leaders of individual units had a degree of room for manoeuvre, but only within

the framework established by the SS leadership.

chapter 12

THE TRANSITION FROM ANTI-SEMITIC

TERROR TO GENOCIDE

Changes in the Parameters for Action in the Area of

Deployment and Alterations in the Perception

of the Murderers

The original ‘security police’ model for the way commandos should proceed was

to subject Jewish communities to a wave of terror immediately after occupation

in order to exclude any possible form of resistance from what was seen as the

‘Jewish-Bolshevist complex’, whilst simultaneously isolating the Jews from

the remainder of the population and stigmatizing them as the real enemies of

the occupying power. This model was followed during July and the first half of

August by a large proportion of the commandos and police units in an extremely

radical manner: they had started to decimate the Jewish male population of military

age systematically and indiscriminately. The fact that this expansion of the terror

did not happen suddenly at a particular moment but was introduced over a period

of time (some commandos did not adopt this policy until September or even later

than that) suggests that there was no particular order that decisively brought about

this transition. Rather it was a process of increasingly radical interpretations of

orders—issued at the start of the campaign and deliberately left vague—to kill

From Anti-Semitic Terror to Genocide

207

everyone who was in some way suspicious. It is most trenchantly summarized in

Hitler’s crudely brutal formulation from the middle of July: ‘shoot dead everyone

who so much as blinks at you.’
1

The more radical approach of the commandos was manifested in a number of

ways but especially in the alteration of the procedures for executions and in the

invention of more and more reasons for murder. As early as July and August

various formations had adopted procedures for execution that maximized the

number of people murdered in the shortest possible time.

Executions during the first weeks of the campaign were frequently carried out

according to the model of courts martial, which is to say that firing squads were

assembled and in order to maintain a veneer of legality sometimes sentences

were even read out and salvoes of shots discharged on an officer’s order. But

commandos very soon found ways to speed up and perfect mass executions: the

victims were taken in organized groups at fixed intervals to carefully segregated

execution sites, and the executions themselves took place immediately next to,

sometimes actually inside, prepared mass graves (in which cases the victims

often had to lie on the bodies of those who had been shot moments before).

Automatic weapons were used, or victims were killed with a pistol shot to the

head or neck.
2

Where commandos gave any reason at all for their murderous activity, they

tended to describe the Jews they killed as ‘Bolshevist functionaries’, ‘Communists’,

‘Communist sympathizers’, or as ‘agents’.
3
Later, membership of the ‘Jewish intelligentsia’ sufficed as a reason for murder, especially in Einsatzgruppe B, whilst

Einsatzgruppe C used ‘reprisal’ as the grounds for all types of actions. During July

and August new reasons kept appearing for the liquidation of Jews on the grounds

of supposed hostile action against the occupying power. These included arson,
4

dissemination of anti-German propaganda,
5
looting,
6
sabotage,
7
refusal to work,
8

support for partisan groups,
9
or black-market dealing.
10
After September these were supplemented by another ‘security police reason’, namely ‘threat of plague’,
11

which was supposed to originate with Jews.

From August the commandos’ and battalions’ modus operandi began to change

fundamentally. The units made a transition from terrorizing and decimating the

male population to ‘cleansing’, targeting individual communities at first but later

whole swathes of the country. In other words, they murdered the major part of the

local Jewish population, women and children included. Again, this radicalization

of the units’ mode of operation did not take place all of a sudden; different units

changed at different paces and the shift took a while to complete. It was a process

that can only be explained by taking a number of factors into account, notably the

changing conditions under which the commandos were operating in their area of

deployment. From the perspective of the commandos, this cast into doubt the

‘security policing’ model for the solution to the ‘Jewish question’ that had pre-

vailed so far. However, this ‘crisis’ increased their readiness to adapt gradually to a

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Mass Executions in Occupied Soviet Zones, 1941

new model that was now being propagated by the leadership of the SS: a policy of

systematic ethnic annihilation.

As the war progressed, the commandos found that the further they penetrated

into the East the more difficult it became to carry out pogroms. In the Baltic it had

only been possible to provoke pogroms in the phase immediately after the occupa-

tion and they usually had to be stopped after a few days in order for the occupying

force’s claim to be ‘calming’ the situation to remain credible.
12
In the area under Einsatzgruppe C, as we have seen, it had been possible to start pogroms on a large

scale in East Galicia and Volhynia. As they moved further into old Soviet territory,

however, the Einsatzgruppe was forced to acknowledge the unwillingness of indi-

genous populations to take part in pogroms.
13
Einsatzgruppe B had a similar experience with their commandos in the Russian or Belarus territories, where

indigenous populations were not prepared to take ‘self-help measures against the

Jews’.
14
The further east into Russian territory the Einsatzgruppe went, the fewer Jews they encountered: the proportion of Jews in the population was smaller because of