Masters of Death (28 page)

On 20 January 1942 Heydrich convened a conference at this official residence on the Wannsee, a lake outside Berlin. Hitler’s program to eliminate the Jews had escalated from expulsion to confinement and mortal privation. In July 1941 he had ordered the direct murder of the Eastern Jews. The Wannsee Conference implemented direct murder of the German and western European Jews as well.

Otto Ohlendorf, an economist, commanded Einsatzgruppe D, operating throughout the southern Ukraine and the Crimea. At the International Military Tribunal Nuremberg trial he admitted to 90,000 executions. He was executed for crimes against humanity in 1951.

This notorious image of a German policeman preparing to murder a Jewish mother holding a child while other victims dig their own graves was found by Polish postal workers enclosed in a German soldier’s letter home. The inscription on the back read “Ukraine 1942, Jewish action, Ivangorod.”

Wilhelm Kube (right), the Generalkommissar for Byelorussia, was conflicted about murdering Jews from western Europe but strewed candy into a Minsk killing pit filled with Eastern Jewish children.

Max Täubner (far right), an SS Untersturmführer in charge of an equipment repair unit, staged voluntary massacres to fulfill his resolution personally to “get rid of” 20,000 Jews.

In a final massacre in the western Ukrainian town of Vinnitsa in April 1942, an Einsatzkommando murdered the last of the region’s Jews to secure the area around Adolf Hitler’s forward bunker Werwolf.

At Vinnitsa in April 1942 a thousand children were torn from their parents’ arms and shot to death in a separate killing pit. Mounded over with grass and marked with a small obelisk, the children’s pit at Vinnitsa remains unexhumed to this day.

Hitler appointed Heydrich (center) governor of occupied Czechoslovakia. In May 1942 Heydrich was grenaded on his way into Prague by Czech patriots, and he died on 4 June. His two sons shared the front row at his funeral in Berlin with (left to right) Wilhelm Frick, Himmler, Göring and Hitler. “Is the swine dead at last?” one of his rivals asked.

By the spring of 1942, having almost rendered eastern Europe
Judenfrei,
the Einsatzgruppen turned increasingly to fighting partisans. Hitler and Himmler authorized a paramilitary unit made up of violent criminals collected from German prisons and named for Oskar Dirlewanger (right), the brutal SS professional who led it. Sonderkommando Dirlewanger murdered the populations of entire Byelorussian villages suspected of supporting partisans and burned the villages to the ground.

The growing enthusiasm for mass killing among his Einsatzgruppen led Himmler to order his units to begin using gas vans to murder women and children. Gassing technology reached its full development in death camps such as Chelmno,Treblinka, Belzec, Sobibor and Auschwitz-Birkenau. (Here, war crimes commissioners examine a mobile killing van at Chelmno in 1945.)

Himmler called the final round of SS murders of ghetto inhabitants in the fall of 1943 “Operation Harvest Festival.” By then (as here, in 1942, for the Mizocz ghetto outside Rovno in the western Ukraine), most of the victims were women and children.

Himmler called the final round of SS murders of ghetto inhabitants in the fall of 1943 “Operation Harvest Festival.” By then (as here, in 1942, for the Mizocz ghetto outside Rovno in the western Ukraine), most of the victims were women and children.