Masters of Death (12 page)

These murders — allowed to include women and children, since they were set up as “spontaneous” pogroms—were ostensibly in reprisal for the mutilation of three German soldiers whose corpses had been discovered in the Tarnopol prison.

The total death count EK 4b reported when the commando finished its work in Tarnopol on 11 July 1941 was 127 executions and 600 killed in pogroms, but the relatively low numbers (compared with Luck and Lvov) obscure the shattering reverberation of each individual loss of life. A survivor, Janett Margolies, a daughter, wife and mother, testified to that loss in a postwar memoir:

Friday, July 4, 1941, at 9:00 a.m., machine guns were posted on street corners. Death’s-Head SS detachments in black uniforms appeared in the streets. Near each house a Gentile watchman pointed to who was living where. People were taken (allegedly to work) outside and shot on the spot. Mass executions took place in many parts of the city.

Among the mass executions on the night of 4 July, thirteen families in a house on Russian Street were locked inside and the house torched. Guards shot anyone who tried to escape, and neighbors who attempted to help were met with machine-gun fire.

Saturday, Margolies continues, “the Jews were ordered to bury the bodies [of the previous days’ massacres] because the stench poisoned the air. In the afternoon, the massacres started again. On that day, Saturday, 5 July 1941, my father was murdered in the prison.”

Many of the Jewish residents of Tarnopol had gone into hiding, believing rampaging soldiers were perpetrating the violence. On Sunday the Germans posted notices ostentatiously forbidding private violence and promising law and order. “Not suspecting anything bad, the Jews started to crawl out of their hiding places,” Margolies writes. “When the Jews were back in the apartments, the Ukrainian Nationalists started to come into the houses, assuring the Jews that the killing was over and that they were now only taking people to work.”

SS men forced their way into Margolies’s apartment and ordered her husband and late-adolescent son out to labor duty carrying heavy ammunition boxes. Margolies followed after them in panic, trying to retrieve at least her son, until one of the guards chased her away. While she was gone, her mother “was pulled from the house and forced to carry away the dead bodies lying on the streets. Having returned from trying to help my son, I saw my mother pulling a dead body, the face all red. I ran forward to help her.” Margolies was interrupted by the screams of a young woman whom two soldiers were trying to rape in the presence of the woman’s two small children. “Seeing me, the Germans let the woman go and started plundering.” Margolies turned back to find that her mother had disappeared. “I spotted a group of Jews with their hands up at the house where my mother was installed.” She was afraid to approach too closely, so she waited nearby. “Suddenly I heard a machine-gun burst. After a few minutes the Germans left. . . . One of them said that all of them were
hin
there [gone, done for]. I understood that my mother was no longer alive.”

Her despair then “was endless. Yesterday, my father, and today, my mother; my son, in the meantime, was also not around. But after one hour, I heard a voice say, ‘Mama, I am here.’ I threw my arms around him.” Her neighbor across the hall returned. Her husband emerged from hiding.

Only two families remained in the darkened apartments. For hours they debated whether the men should obey orders to report for labor duty or go into hiding. “Our neighbor was for going. I was against it. After long arguments, it was decided that they should go.” Margolies and her husband lay on their bed that night fully dressed and awake. They arose early. “I prepared something to eat, but nobody could swallow anything. My husband and son shaved. They dressed in new underwear and suits, getting ready to go.”

Before they left, Margolies went out to find the place where her mother had been killed the day before:

A horrible picture appeared before my eyes. A large open pit full of dead bodies, and on top of them was my poor mother, kneeling with her face down, all stiff. From one side of the pit, some Germans took a picture with their camera. Assuming that I was not Jewish, they asked who did it. Not being able to control myself with the pain I felt, I threw it in their faces, saying: “You and yours alike!”

Margolies ran home then, “cry[ing] hysterically,” and her husband and son cried with her.

Their neighbor pestered them to get going. To avoid saying goodbye, Margolies followed her husband and son to the labor muster outside the prison. She stood “among a group of Christians who were watching the show” while the men were ordered to line up and then to exercise— Nazi humor, as was labor duty itself, because Jews were supposed to be lazy and cunning at avoiding work. When her husband and son were led inside the prison, a sense of impending doom overwhelmed her. “I wanted to do something in order to save them. Wherever I went, I met indifference or helplessness.” Recognizing the futility of her quest, she gave up and went home.

The endless day finally ended:

In the evening our neighbor returned alone, without my husband and son. I understood that they were no more. I blamed my neighbor for insisting upon going to work and pulling them to their death. But what was the use? It had already happened. I started to cry, hitting my head with my fists and banging my head against the wall. I wanted to commit suicide. My neighbors were watchful. They tried to overcome my desperation with whiskey. It didn’t help. Corpses, corpses.

Just then her sister-in-law arrived with the news that all the Jews in her husband’s native village, including her father-in-law and brother-in-law, had been gathered, transported to the communal forest the village maintained for firewood and building materials and murdered. “My pain had no limit,” Margolies writes. “I saw everything around me crumbling. I was left almost without relatives—six dead among the nearest. I stopped eating, and lit the candles for the dead souls. I didn’t go outside. People started to come into the house to tell me stories that my husband and son had been seen somewhere. I ran and searched for them everywhere.”

Eventually Margolies learned how her husband and son had died:

They had been forced to carry out the Ukrainian dead bodies from the city prison to the cemetery. While my husband was working on the wagon, my son and other Jews were pulled down, chased around and beaten with wooden sticks or planks. My son allegedly cried out, “You have no right to beat and maim us. We aren’t guilty. Kill us, but stop torturing us.” As a reply, he was beaten to death. My husband, seeing his son dead, lost consciousness. The Germans noticed that he stopped working, and they started to beat him murderously until he stopped moving and they later pumped a bullet into his body.

“This story broke me down again,” Margolies writes. “I felt that I was on the verge of losing my mind. Day and night I saw before my eyes this terrible picture. Physically, I felt the blows.” It would be ten weeks before the Tarnopol Jewish community opened a mass grave at the cemetery and Margolies identified the remains of her son and her husband and reburied them privately, “one near the other.” She would come to believe “that I had a special mission to fulfill . . . to find the bodies of my dearest ones and rebury them in Israel.” Her belief sustained her and she survived the war, but she never found her father’s remains.

The Wehrmacht arrived in Trembowla, twenty miles south of Tarnopol, on 5 July 1941, the day Janett Margolies’s father and mother were murdered. “At approximately eleven o’clock in the morning,” a Jewish eyewitness remembers, “the Ukrainian population gathered in the streets to see the Germans who were arriving from the north.” Three motorcycles appeared at noon. Trembowla would soon erupt in massacre, as Luck, Lvov and Tarnopol had before, but a survivor, a teenage boy in Trembowla, describes another individual loss at the very outset, of his friend Abe Briller:

You were a frequent guest in our home. Even though [you were] much older, fully grown up when I was a teenager, we were best friends. There was something special about you. You were the incarnation of goodness. I can still see you before my eyes, a medium-sized man, somewhat plump, with two pink cheeks, eyes that shone eternally with friendliness and kindness, a face continuously covered with a smile, a willingness to be of help. . . .

You came from a destitute family. You lost your father when yet very young. I do not remember him; maybe I never knew him or saw him. Your mother was left with fifteen children. They died one by one, of different causes, but surely the main cause was malnutrition, the eternal grinding poverty. Your mother cried until she lost all ability to cry. Of all the children only you and a brother of yours in Lvov survived. I do not know how you managed it, but you not only survived, you also educated yourself—not in school but in the dark corners of your mother’s poor dwelling. You learned by yourself. You learned to write letters for people, to fill out official papers; you learned to speak and write Polish, English, Ukrainian, Hebrew and Russian. Later you learned bookkeeping, and this became your main means of supporting yourself. . . .

It was on the first day of the triumphal entrance of the German army into Trembowla. You were by that time already married and the father of a sweet little girl. Maybe God himself envied you your new success. You were sitting at home when you heard the sudden noise of motors. Out of sheer human curiosity, you opened the door to see what all the commotion was about. A few Germans in shining uniforms and on shining new motorcycles came driving along the main road. One of them, an officer, noticed you and suddenly stopped.

“Jude?” he exclaimed, his hands grasping for the rifle that hung over his shoulder.

“Ja,” you answered, not realizing the gravity of the situation.

A sharp, short shot resounded. You fell to the ground, dead.

It is difficult to believe across the long distance of years that these early narratives of criminal brutality and slaughter chronicle only the beginning of the Einsatzgruppen Eastern campaign.

FIVE

Truehearted Heinrich I

More than concern for German and world public opinion forced the SS to escalate its mass killing cautiously. Himmler and his subordinates also needed to test Wehrmacht tolerance and contrive Wehrmacht complicity. Even more fundamentally, both the men doing the killing and the leaders ordering and directing it had to find a way to stomach it. For the killers a conditioning process was necessary to minimize the potentially disabling psychological trauma they would experience as the categories of victims expanded and the killing became harder to rationalize as defensive. For the leaders the problem was more complex.

Those leaders directly exposed to mass killing faced the same risk of disabling trauma as their men, as Paul Blobel’s breakdown demonstrates. Higher-ranking leaders not directly exposed or only briefly exposed, up to and including Himmler, confronted issues of control and transformation. Men prepared to kill victims who are manifestly unthreatening—the elderly, unarmed women, small children, infants— behave differently from men prepared to kill victims such as men of military age who can be construed to be at least potentially dangerous. Men encouraged to murder unthreatening victims would not necessarily emerge from such experiences with the qualities of discipline and noblesse oblige that Himmler’s kitsch vision of the SS as a new Aryan nobility required. Nor would such men necessarily follow orders with the Kadavergehorsam—the corpse-like conformity—that had long been the ideal of German military service and that Himmler demanded of his SS legions and rigidly enforced.

The problem that Eastern Territories Commander Johannes Blaskowitz identified in Poland in 1939 was the problem Himmler confronted as he moved to expand the categories of SS victims in the occupied East: that as a consequence of the SS’s mass slaughters, “tremendous brutalization and moral depravity” might spread “rapidly among precious German manpower like an epidemic.” He needed to condition the men of his Einsatzgruppen, Order Police and Waffen-SS to kill large groups of people without provocation day in and day out for weeks and months on end. At the same time, he needed to preserve them from breakdown or radical, nihilistic maleficence. He was not obviously the right man for the job. Remarkably, though he had vast experience at ordering others to kill, like Hitler he had no personal experience of killing. He idealized the SS organization he had created, investing it with a sham of noble principles. He was a martinet who imposed brutal punishments for even minor disciplinary infractions. He despised drunkenness. Ramping up the butchery in the summer of 1941, he had his squeamish hands full.

Himmler cut a sorry figure. Walter Schellenberg, the SS’s counterintelligence expert, compared the mature Reichsführer’s lumpish, rail-legged corpus to “a stork in a lily pond.” Hermann Rauschning, recalling a young Himmler’s consumptive appearance at a rural political meeting in the 1920s, before the Nazis took power, savages him as “a dirty little bit of vermin”:

The most startling grotesques are real. They are beyond invention. . . . This man, to get the right impression of him, should have been seen before he began wearing fine uniforms of black and silver—when he still went about in the plain shell of the civilian, the very type of ordinariness and commonness. A man barely of medium height, with a face that is no face. Eyes? Has he any? Whether or no, he could not look anyone in the face. He has a sleepy look. An ill-conditioned fellow. Probably with damp hands. . . .

I watched him. He was nervously smoking cigarette after cigarette, throwing away each one after a few puffs. He could not stand still for a moment. He swayed from the knees. He kept shrugging his shoulders. I looked more closely at him. He was clearly not just a vulgar nobody. The man was almost on springs with suppressed passion. His hands shook. His body was tense. There was more in the man than seemed to be at first.