Masters of Death (10 page)

But the “difficult spiritual situation” was not easily overcome, at least not by Blume. “The total impression of this execution of defenseless men,” he testified at Nuremberg in 1947, “was shocking. When I came back to my office I was seized by stomach cramps and I had to vomit.”

When Blume spoke of conducting the Minsk execution “in a military manner,” he meant following the procedure of assigning three men simultaneously to shoot each victim. This seemingly wasteful arrangement, a long-established practice in both military and civilian executions, served important psychological purposes. It was designed to dilute personal responsibility for killing by making indeterminate which executioner’s bullet had actually caused the victim’s death. Such ambiguity benefited both the executioners and the authorities who directed them. The executioners benefited by being somewhat protected from confronting the emotional and social consequences of killing someone who was not directly threatening them. The authorities benefited because men who were thus protected were more likely to carry out killing orders and remain functional doing so. Nowhere did such traditional protections come under greater challenge than within Himmler’s SS and Order Police on the Eastern Front during the Second World War.

FOUR

Across the Pale

Western Russia was dry and hot in the summer of 1941, Wehrmacht officer Siegfried Knappe remembered. In the Pale of Settlement, the region an Einsatzgruppen report called “the so-called Jewish segment of Europe . . . the human reservoir of western Jewry,” the swath awaited the German scythe. “The days were long and the nights were short during the summer,” Knappe reminisced. “June, July, and August gave us good weather in spite of the extreme heat, and we marched endlessly across this land of boundless expanses, this land with which none of our memories were linked. Every day of marching was just like every other day.” But every day was not just like every other day in the towns and villages of the Pale.

Jews called Vilnius, a city of medieval streets twenty miles southeast of Kaunas on the Neris River, “the Jerusalem of Lithuania” for its density of Jewish religious and secular institutions. Its Jewish museum — rich in books, antique Torah scrolls and works of art—preserved the original texts of the Three Privileges granted Jews by Polish kings. These were the privileges that had drawn Jews to Poland and the Pale when they suffered expulsion from western Europe in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Mass killings only began in Vilnius after Einsatzkommando 9 arrived there on 2 July 1941. The Lithuanian nationalists in Vilnius had not been so eager as those in Kaunas to sign on for pogroms when the Wehrmacht took the city on 24 June. Vilnius had fallen under Polish rule from 1920 to 1939, and it still counted more Polish than ethnic Lithuanian residents. A “Committee of Lithuanian Activists,” fearing it might lose control of the city to the Poles in the wake of Barbarossa, lined up with the Germans. With the approval of the military commander it seized sixty Jews and twenty Poles as hostages at the outset, ostensibly to ensure that the population would follow its orders but hoping also to link the two ethnicities in the minds of the German invaders. “In the view of the Lithuanian population in the [Vilnius] district,” Stahlecker would write, summarizing the situation, “the Jewish question . . . takes second place after the Polish problem.”

The SS hardly agreed. Heydrich, following developments from Berlin and improvising as he learned, issued an order on 1 July 1941 forbidding his Einsatzgruppen “to take measures against” the Polish intelligentsia “apart from cases in which there is danger in delaying the matter.” The Polish inhabitants of the occupied areas, he noted, “may be expected on the basis of their experiences to be anti-Communist and anti-Jewish.” Therefore “cleansing activities have to extend first of all to the Bolsheviks and the Jews . . . especially as the Poles are of great importance as elements to initiate pogroms and for obtaining information.” Heydrich’s order endorsing private violence was another sign that the work of the Einsatzgruppen this time around would not be decapitation, as in Poland previously, but extermination. The military administration assumed full authority over Lithuania on 2 July 1941 and immediately demoted to municipal duties the Lithuanian Committee with which it had formerly shared power.

Then Einsatzkommando 9 got to work. The Lithuanian political police were dissolved and reconstituted under the Einsatzkommando as a Lithuanian auxiliary of 150 men. The auxiliary’s first task, Einsatzkommando 9 reported to Berlin, was “drawing up current lists of names of Jews in Vilnius: first the intelligentsia, political activists and wealthy Jews.” The unit then carried out searches and arrests. “Fifty-four Jews were liquidated on 4 July and 93 were liquidated on 5 July,” the report continues. “Sizeable property belonging to Jews was secured.” Intimidating raids and elimination of Jewish leaders made easier the larger roundups that followed.

Before Barbarossa the Soviet authorities had begun constructing a fuel depot in the Baltic pinewood five miles southwest of Vilnius at a place called Ponary, close to a railroad line. Fuel tanks of various diameters were to be sunken below ground level and circular pits to receive them were being excavated in the sandy soil. With the German invasion, the excavations had been abandoned, leaving a pit sixty feet in diameter half-cleared, with a semicircular trench twenty feet deep on its perimeter shored up with planking, and another sixty-foot pit next to it fully excavated. Smaller pits pocked the woods behind the main excavations like bomb craters. This place, which a young Vilnius Jew keeping a diary would call “the great grave,” was the place Einsatzkommando 9 chose for a killing site and immediately began to fill.

Two Wehrmacht drivers and a company clerk saw the early killings. All three reported watching daily columns of about four hundred Jewish prisoners marching out to Ponary from the direction of Vilnius, with armed civilians wearing armbands and carrying carbines guarding them. “They were all men,” the company clerk attested, “aged between about twenty and fifty. There were no women and children. These prisoners were really quite well-dressed and most of them were carrying hand luggage such as small suitcases, parcels and bundles.” The Einsatzgruppen played games of deception with their Jewish victims to make assembling them easier; the commonest, as here, was ordering them to appear for “labor duty” with minimal luggage. Victims unable to imagine the mass slaughters that the Germans were planning — who could?—credited the orders or feared to disobey them.

The Lithuanian auxiliaries led the Jewish men in groups down into the semicircular trench of the partly dug pit, which they were using as a holding area. “An elderly man stopped in front of the entrance for a moment,” one of the drivers reports, “and said in good German, ‘What do you want from me? I’m only a poor composer.’ The two civilians standing at the entrance started pummelling him with blows so that he literally flew into the pit.” When all the men had been herded into the trench, the guards standing above them on the partial excavation ordered them to strip to the waist, toss their jackets and shoes out of the trench and wrap their shirts around their heads. The guards enforced this order, the other driver says, by beating the men “with heavy truncheons and rifle butts.” He also noticed that the Lithuanians rummaged among the clothes and shoes. A Pole who lived near Ponary and kept a diary commented on the vulturing. “To the Germans,” this diarist wrote, “three hundred Jews means three hundred enemies of humanity. To the Lithuanians it means three hundred pairs of pants, three hundred pairs of boots.” His view was myopic; the Germans looted on a far grander scale.

Now the killing proceeded. The guards led ten hooded men at a time out of the trench and lined them up by having each man hold on to the waist of the man in front of him. A guard offered a club crosswise to the first man in line and led the line across and out of the first excavation to the edge of the second. Here the eyewitnesses’ stories diverge, suggesting how quickly the Einsatzkommandos adapted their techniques to improve the efficiency of their killing. One of the two drivers watched a ten-man Lithuanian firing squad shoot the ten hooded Jewish men one-on-one into the deep second pit. The other driver and the company clerk both describe seeing a light machine gun set up on the path between the two pits. When the lead guard had cleared the line, the machine gun rattled quickly and without warning, and blew the wounded or dying men over the edge. All three eyewitnesses saw a guard with a pistol finish off the wounded with
Genickschüssen.
“We stayed there for about one hour,” the company clerk concludes, “and during this time some four to five groups were executed, so I myself watched the killing of about forty to fifty Jews.”

Looking into the killing pit, one of the drivers estimated that some four hundred Jewish men “who had been shot the previous day were also there. They were covered with a thin sprinkling of sand. Right on top, on this layer of sand, there were a further three men and a woman who had been shot on the morning of the day in question.” Since the Einsatzgruppen were not yet killing women in large numbers, the dead woman may have been a special-category victim—a teacher, a doctor, a commissar—or she may have been one of the men’s wives who refused to be separated from her husband.

The drivers spoke to the Lithuanian killers. One of them, a fellow truck driver, claimed the NKVD had suspected him of spying, had tortured him and torn out his fingernails. He said “each of the guards present had had to endure the most extreme suffering”— supporting Stahlecker’s report of how the Einsatzgruppen picked the collaborators for their execution detachments. The Lithuanian further claimed, however, that “a Jewish Commissar had broken into a flat, tied up a man and raped his wife before the man’s very eyes,” after which the commissar “had literally butchered the wife to death, cut out her heart, fried it in a pan and had then proceeded to eat it.” The Wehrmacht driver who repeated this story does not say if he believed it, but a story the other driver heard, about a man’s family having been locked up in a Siberia-bound train by the Bolsheviks and left to starve to death when the Germans invaded, seemed to him “highly improbable.” More credible to the first driver was a report he heard from Wehrmacht comrades that “a German soldier had been shot dead from a church tower” in Vilnius and “for this another three hundred to four hundred Jews were executed in the same quarry.” The retreating Soviet forces left snipers behind, which the Einsatzgruppen thought as good an excuse as any to murder Jews.

On the last day the Wehrmacht company camped in the area, one of the drivers noticed that the shooting had stopped and went to Ponary with a friend “to look at the place again.” An SD
¹³
man in a gray uniform standing in the path between the two pits tried to wave the two soldiers off. “We kept going, however, and when we got close to him I said to him that there was no need to make such a fuss, as we had already seen everything.” Near the SD man “there was a coach with two horses, a landau,” and on the box of the coach another SD man:

In the coach sat two very well-dressed elderly Jews. I had the impression that these were high-class or important people. I inferred this because they looked very well groomed and intelligent and “ordinary Jews” would certainly not have been transported in a coach. The two Jews had to climb out and I saw that both were shaking dreadfully. They apparently knew what was in store for them. The SD man who had initially gestured to us to keep away was carrying a submachine gun. He made the two Jews go and stand at the edge of the pit and shot both of them in the back of the head, so that they fell in. I can still remember that one of them was carrying a towel and a soapbox, which afterwards also lay in the trench.

Had the victims bought a private death together, or had they expected a private “resettlement”? The towel and soap travel case, which the Germans usually advised their victims to take with them (to deceive them into cooperating), suggest that the couple believed they would be delivered to a camp in their landau, so they may not have known “what was in store for them” until they reached the edge of the pit and saw the strew of stiffened bodies dusted with sand. “We all said to one another,” the driver concludes nervously, “what on earth would happen if we lost the war and had to pay for all this?”

“In Vilnius by 8 July,” Einsatzgruppe A reported to Berlin on 13 July 1941, “the local Einsatzkommando liquidated 321 Jews. The Lithuanian special detachment . . . was instructed to take part in the liquidation of the Jews. . . . They arrested the Jews and put them into concentration camps where they were subjected the same day to special treatment. This work has now begun, and thus about 500 Jews, saboteurs among them, are liquidated daily. About 460,000 rubles in cash, as well as many valuables belonging to Jews who were subject to special treatment, were confiscated as property belonging to enemies of the Reich.”

An Einsatzkommando “confiscated vast documentary materials in the local Jewish museum,” the report adds, “which was a branch of the central Moscow Institute for Jewish Culture.” With their haul of
pinkes
historical chronicles, antique Torah scrolls and letters of the very founder of Zionism, Theodor Herzl, the mythologizers of the Third Reich could further document Jewish perfidy.

Three hundred fifty miles south of Vilnius, Einsatzgruppe C
¹⁴
stabbed into Galicia, a region—fought over for centuries among Poland, Austria and the Ukraine — that was the epicenter of Hasidism, the ecstatic wing of Orthodox Judaism. Advancing through Byelorussia, Knappe may have seen, or chosen to see, an empty landscape, but an Italian war correspondent moving up through Bessarabia onto the fertile steppes of the western Ukraine later in the summer saw carnage and squander:

Dust and rain, dust and mud. Tomorrow the roads will be dry, the vast fields of sunflowers will crackle in the hot, parching wind. Then the mud will return. . . . This is the Russian war, the eternal Russian war, the Russian war of 1941. Nichts zu machen, nichts zu machen.
¹⁵
Tomorrow the roads will be dry, then the mud will return, and everywhere there will be corpses, gutted houses, hordes of ragged prisoners with the air of sick dogs, everywhere the remains of horses and vehicles, the wreckage of tanks, of airplanes, of L.K.W.s,
¹⁶
of guns, the corpses of officers, NCOs and men, of women, children, old men and dogs, the remains of houses, villages, towns, rivers and forests. Nichts zu machen, nichts zu machen.