Killing Hitler (35 page)

By 1942, however, Jewish life in Dubno was approaching its end. Those of the town’s Jews who managed to survive the early days of the German invasion had been confined to a hastily built ghetto, from which they would be escorted in work details to perform forced labor for their new German masters. Situated close to the town center, the Dubno ghetto was bounded on one side by the meandering waters of the river. Measuring approximately 400 square meters, it was enclosed with wooden boarding and barbed wire, except where three crudely constructed wooden gates controlled access. Beyond the ghetto walls, as one witness recalled, Dubno was “quite empty,” but conditions within were predictably poor.
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Hunger and disease were ever-present, although, perversely, overcrowding was eased by the high death rate. The first round of executions in Dubno had begun soon after the arrival of the German armies the previous summer. They had then restarted in the summer of 1942, when the ghetto was ordered liquidated. Truckloads of Jews were driven to the outskirts of the town, usually the nearby Shibennaya Hill, where they were forced to dig their own graves before being stripped and shot.

That cold October morning, the Ukrainian militia was ordered to finish the job of liquidating the Dubno ghetto. In a chaos of barked orders, screams, and truncheon blows, they began the task of herding the remaining inhabitants into the trucks and driving them to a disused airfield some distance out of
town. There, the Jews—men, women, and children—were forced from the trucks and ordered by an SS officer to undress. Their personal effects were collected in separate piles: shoes, clothing, and underwear. Shivering in the autumnal chill, family groups embraced and said their last goodbyes. As one witness, a German civilian contractor, would later recall:

I watched a family of about eight persons: a man and woman both about fifty years old, with their children of about one, eight, ten and two grown-up daughters of about twenty to twenty-four. An old woman with snow-white hair was holding the one-year-old child in her arms and singing to it and tickling it. The child was cooing with delight…. The father was holding the hand of a boy of about ten years old and speaking to him softly; the boy was fighting back his tears. The father pointed to the sky, stroked the boy’s head and seemed to explain something to him.
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Just beyond, hidden from sight by a long mound of earth, three pits had been dug, each about 30 meters long and 3 meters deep. The SS men present were most likely members of
Einsatzgruppe C
, which had murdered its way through the Ukraine the previous summer. They had developed a grimly efficient method of mass murder, known as “sardine packing.”
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The massacre at Dubno would be a prime example of their “art.” At the edge of each pit stood an execution squad of around twenty soldiers armed with rifles. Commanding them was an SS officer with a machine gun. On his order, a fresh batch of twenty Jews was counted off and herded behind the mound. Those who tried to escape were shot; the remainder were confronted by a huge mass grave containing hundreds of bodies. As a witness recalled:

Tightly packed corpses were heaped so close together that only the heads showed. Most were wounded in the head and the blood flowed over their shoulders. Some still moved. Others raised their hands and turned their heads to show that they were still alive…. The people, completely naked, went down some steps and clambered over the heads of those lying there…. They lay down in front of the dead or wounded; some caressed those who were still alive, and spoke to them in a low voice. Then I heard a series of shots.
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Surprised that he wasn’t moved on by the SS guards, the witness stood transfixed. He watched as the next batch was counted off and ordered forward. An emaciated old woman was being carried by two others; families went by, with sobbing, uncomprehending children and bravely stoic parents. A young woman passed him. She was slim and pretty with long, dark hair. Catching his eye, she pointed to herself and said, “Twenty-three years old.”
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The massacre at Dubno was no wild killing spree. It was cold, calculated mass murder. Each batch of victims was forced to lie on the dead from the previous batch; they were then shot in the back of the head. This continued with deadly efficiency, layer upon layer, until the pit was full. The corpses were then limed to speed decomposition and the pit was covered with soil. At Dubno that day, five thousand Jews are thought to have been slaughtered.

For all its inhumanity, the massacre at Dubno was a smalltime affair. It represented the SS tidying up a few loose ends in a provincial East European backwater. In terms of its scale it was insignificant. Its victims were but a fraction of the nearly 1.5 million claimed by the
Einsatzgruppen.
Dubno is virtually unknown, unlike the most notorious killing sites, such as Babi Yar near Kiev (33,000 victims), Ponary near Vilnius (about 80,000), Rumbula near Riga (38,000), and the Ninth Fort in Kaunas (30,000). And yet, two witnesses to the massacre were to ensure that Dubno would earn profound importance.

The first was the German contractor quoted above. Hermann Gräbe was chief engineer of a German construction company operating in the Ukraine, and one of his projects—the building of a grain warehouse close to Dubno airfield—brought him to the site
on that fateful October morning. Though he could do nothing to stop the massacre, he was moved subsequently to protect those Jewish laborers in his charge, earning himself the later distinction of “Righteous amongst the Nations.” His testimony at the Nuremberg trials, meanwhile, would give vital and damning firsthand evidence of the brutal methods of the
Einsatzgruppen.

The second witness was a young Wehrmacht officer. Axel von dem Bussche-Streithorst, a twenty-two-year-old lieutenant in the élite 9th Infantry Regiment, was already a hardened frontline soldier. A veteran of the Polish campaign, the defeat of France, and the attack on the Soviet Union, he had sustained three serious wounds and had been awarded the Iron Cross during the battle for Mogilev. After being shot through the chest, he was recuperating in Dubno when his unit was ordered to participate in the “special operation” at the airfield. Though their participation was refused by a commanding officer, Bussche and his men were nonetheless present at the massacre. What he saw there shocked him to the core. As a Christian and heir to the finest chivalric traditions of the German army, he was horrified by the murder of so many helpless civilians. As he later recalled:

There in the beautiful autumn sunshine, was a queue about a mile long of old men, women, children, babies—all naked…. It was the Jewish population, they were waiting to lie down in these enormous holes—graves that they themselves had been forced to dig—and be shot by the SS.
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One of the condemned, a young woman, fell to her knees before him, begging to be spared. In desperation, Bussche thought whether there was anything that he could do to halt the slaughter. In vain he urged his superior officer to act. He briefly considered the idea of stripping and joining the Jewish victims in the pit. He then thought, somewhat naively, of using his platoon to arrest the SS for their patent contravention of the German law code. There was also the option of simply gunning down the SS and their Ukrainian allies, but, faced with their overwhelming firepower,
he thought better of it. In the end, fearing for his life whatever his course of action, he did nothing, and the young woman was ushered away to her death.
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Back in their barracks, Bussche and his comrades discussed what they had seen. Many were disgusted. The commanding officer, for example, considered that the Wehrmacht’s honor had been impugned. Others felt that it was nothing to do with them and sought, as best they could, to banish the memory. As for Bussche, however, the memory of Dubno and of his impotence and disgust would stay with him. In its aftermath, he concluded that there were only three ways for an honorable soldier to react: “to die in battle, to desert, or to rebel.”
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He chose the last option. He was soon to join the ranks of the German resistance.

Of all the disparate resistance groups, the military opposition to Hitler was perhaps the most contradictory. At first sight, it is easy to assume that the German army was indissolubly wedded to the Nazi regime. As the most conservative and nationalist force in German society, the army was closest to the Nazi worldview and was the primary tool of Hitler’s wars. Its cadres, restored, expanded, and bankrolled by the Nazis, had become one of the pillars of the regime, and its soldiers, whether wholly willingly or not, had become the executors of Hitler’s campaign of territorial conquest. From the North Cape to the Sahara, they were the most visible symbol of Germany’s expansion and Hitler’s insatiable ambition. Yet, in spite of all this, it would be the German army that would supply Hitler with some of his bitterest opponents and which, in due course, would come closest to removing him altogether.

There are a number of factors that serve, at least in part, to explain this paradox. Firstly, the German army was largely immune to the penetration of Gestapo agents and party influence. In a throwback to its “apolitical” origins in the aftermath of World War One—a measure that was intended to protect against the contagion of communism—the army forbade active members of political parties from joining its ranks. Individuals conscripted or
volunteering for service, therefore, were obliged to surrender their party membership, while Nazi functionaries who chose to sample the “glory” of life at the front rarely enjoyed the preferential treatment that they considered they deserved. This comparative insulation meant that the army could also serve as a haven for those compromised or even incriminated in the eyes of the authorities. One example was the writer Ernst Jünger, who went to ground in the ranks of the Wehrmacht to escape the politically charged atmosphere of civilian life.
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Indeed, the army’s autonomy, though largely symbolic, was jealously guarded to the very end. In the autumn of 1944, for instance, when it was decreed that the traditional military salute should be replaced by “Heil Hitler,” many officers passed on the order and then concluded their announcement with the newly banned salute.
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More important, perhaps, the army was seen by many, not least among its own ranks, as the repository of all that was best in Germany. Though the sentiment had been somewhat diluted by the large expansion of the military in the late 1930s, many of the army’s more established regiments still held to an older, more chivalric ethos than that propagated by Hitler. Those minority elements, while sharing the enthusiasm at Germany’s rebirth and territorial expansion under Nazism, viewed the regime’s excesses with undisguised distaste. When confronted with evidence of SS atrocities during the Polish campaign, for example, General List complained to his superiors of “illegal activities” and noted an “open ill-feeling” on the part of his men “towards anyone wearing an SS uniform.”
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Another officer, who would later find his way into the resistance, wrote during the Polish campaign that what he had seen there made him “ashamed to be German.”
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This is not to suggest that the Wehrmacht was whiter than white, untouched by and immune to the barbarism of the SS. It was not. Though that myth was energetically propagated for some years after the war, it is untenable. The nature of the warfare on the Eastern Front and elsewhere led to an erosion of morality, which pervaded all strata of the military. Many of the atrocities—though arguably inspired by the SS—were actually carried out by regular troops and even reservists. In one well-documented
case, a massacre in occupied Poland was found to be the work of a reserve police battalion from the solidly middle-class suburbs of Hamburg.
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Clearly, the SS did not and could not operate alone, as if in a vacuum. Wehrmacht soldiers participated in the slaughter of the Holocaust at every level, from planning to execution. Their cooperation—or at least acquiescence—was arguably essential for the whole nefarious scheme to take place at all.
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Yet, though there are numerous examples of Wehrmacht soldiers closing their eyes to the mass murders or even participating in them, there are sufficient cases of the contrary to demonstrate that, among the officer corps at least, a sense of honor had not quite been extinguished. And it was this moral outrage that would drive many, like Bussche, to actively oppose the Nazi regime.

As a resistance center, the German military also had a number of distinct advantages over its rivals. As noted above, it was more or less immune to the attentions of the Nazi security organs. More important, it was perhaps the only body capable of removing the party leadership while simultaneously maintaining order, both at home and at the front, and providing a replacement administration. Most crucially, a few military figures, at staff level and above, had access to their target. They were also armed and, to put it bluntly, in the business of killing.

But the Wehrmacht also suffered a number of fundamental obstacles that hindered action. Firstly, the German military had a tradition of noninvolvement in politics. Though this tradition had been somewhat tarnished by the turmoil of the interwar years, it remained almost a mantra for many senior personnel and staff officers. For them, the German army was more than just the military arm of the state; it was the guarantor of the nation itself. In the opinion of one field marshal, who would repeatedly refuse to join the conspiracy, the use of force against the authorities was “totally contrary to the German military tradition.”
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Moreover, Hitler’s government, though dictatorial, was legitimate, legal, and extremely successful. In such circumstances it was virtually impossible to contemplate that it might become the target of a military coup.