Masters of Death (33 page)

Ohlendorf claimed to have been especially alert to the passage of his men from defensive to malefic violence and to have attempted to prevent that maleficence from spreading through the group:

My mission was to see to it that this general order for executions would be carried out as humanly as conditions would permit. Therefore, I gave orders for the manner of carrying out these executions. These orders had as their purpose to make it as easy as possible for the unfortunate victim and to prevent the [development of] brutality in the men [which] would lead to inevitable excesses. Thus I directed first that only so many victims should be brought to the place of execution as the execution commandos could handle. Any individual action by any individual man was forbidden. The Einsatzkommandos shot in a military manner only upon orders. It was strictly ordered to avoid any mistreatment; undressing was not permitted. The taking of any personal possessions was not permitted. Publicity was not permitted, and at the very moment when it was noted that a man had experienced joy in carrying out these executions it was ordered that this man may never participate in any more executions [emphasis added].

Besides the rationalizations incorporated into his speeches, Himmler found other ways to relieve his subordinates of their burdens so that they could continue to kill. At the early massacres in Bialystok, Browning reports, “the shooters were rewarded with an unusual treat of strawberries and cream.” The Einsatzgruppe A staff officer who described breakdowns in Riga scoffed at one of Himmler’s measures:

When [these breakdowns] happened Himmler issued an order stating that any man who no longer felt able to take the psychological stresses should report to his superior officer. These men were to be released from their current duties and would be detailed for other work back home. As I recall, Himmler even had a convalescent home set up close to Berlin for such cases. This order was issued in writing; I read and filed it myself. . . . In my view this whole order was an evil trick; I do not think I would be wrong to say it bordered on the malicious — for after all, which officer or SS man would have shown himself up in such a way? Any officer who had declared that he was too weak to do such things would have been considered unfit to be an officer.

With Hitler’s authorization to expand the killing in the East to include women and children, Himmler ordered the formation of native auxiliaries that were expendable and thus could relieve his Germans of the worst of the dirty work. By November 1941, according to a German observer, Himmler had established mental hospitals and rest areas “where SS men are cared for who have broken down while executing women and children.” Following his own experience of mass killing in Minsk in August 1941, the Reichsführer-SS had also begun exploring less personal methods of mass killing. August Becker, who worked on the development of gas vans, testified to the connection later in the year:

Himmler wanted to deploy people who had become available as a result of the suspension of the euthanasia program, and who, like me, were specialists in extermination by gassing, for the large-scale gassing operations in the East which were just beginning. The reason for this was that the men in charge of the Einsatzgruppen in the East were increasingly complaining that the firing squads could not cope with the psychological and moral stress of the mass shootings indefinitely. I know that a number of members of these squads were themselves committed to mental asylums and for this reason a new and better method of killing had to be found. Thus in December 1941 I started working in [the RSHA, where my superior] explained the situation to me, saying that the psychological and moral stress on the firing squads was no longer bearable and that therefore the gassing program had been started.

But the complaints made Himmler impatient, caught as he was on the horns of a dilemma: How to accomplish the Führer’s order to exterminate the Jews while preserving his SS men’s civility, their “repugnance”; how to keep them from becoming, as Bach-Zelewski phrased it, either neurotics or brutes. His own truncated violent socialization left him concerned to find a way to exterminate an entire people while remaining within the bounds of what Foucault calls “suspended rights” (death being the ultimate suspension of rights): to orchestrate a genocide but remain “civilized.” His frustration is apparent in a secret order he issued on 12 December 1941 to all his Higher SS and Police Leaders:

Our assigned duty, to guarantee the security, peace and order of the districts entrusted to us, above all the rear area behind the German front lines, requires that we eliminate every pocket of resistance and deliver the enemies of the German people mercilessly to their just execution.

It is the holy duty of senior leaders and commanders personally to ensure that none of our men who have to fulfill this burdensome duty should ever be brutalized or suffer damage to their spirit and character in doing so. This task is to be fulfilled through the strictest discipline in the execution of official duties and through comradely gatherings in the evenings of those days which have included such difficult tasks. The comradely gathering must on no account, however, end in the abuse of alcohol. It should be an evening on which — as far as possible — they sit and eat at table in the best German domestic style, and music, lectures and introductions to the beauties of German intellectual and emotional life occupy the hours.

To relieve men at the appropriate point from such difficult missions, send them on leave or transfer them to other absorbing and fulfilling tasks — possibly even to another area — I regard as important and urgent.

I wish it to be understood as well, however, that it fundamentally remains valid that it is impermissible and improper to discuss facts and related numbers or even to mention them. Orders and duties necessary for the existence of a Volk must be carried out. Τhis material is unsuited to subsequent discussion or conversation.

In practice, Himmler’s
gemütlich
evenings were drunken more often than not. “Despite the mental anguish that the killing often aroused,” writes historian Konrad Kwiet of Police Battalion 322, which was active in Lithuania, “a festive atmosphere surrounded the murders. In Gargzdai, Kretinga and Palanga, coveted schnapps rations were distributed following each
Judenaktion,
and as a lasting memento group photographs were taken. Jovial and noisy gatherings often took place in the evenings, with local inns celebrating Lithuanian ‘sakustas,’ or prebooked and prepaid (typically with Jewish money) dinner parties. . . . Within the framework of
seelische Betreuung
(pastoral care), social get-togethers in the evenings as well as excursions and other forms of entertainment took place in order to wipe out the impressions of the day.” In such shared experience the violent coaching, social bonding and acknowledgments of violent reputation necessary to socialize men to full maleficence could flourish.

Ultimately, men either broke down or they adjusted and adapted. They were anything but civilized. They demonstrate that the sum of violence available to a modern, “civilized” nation-state is at least as extravagant as it was in barbaric ages (as did the nineteenth-century colonialism on which Hitler modeled his policy of
Lebensraum
). But most of the killers became at least the hard-eyed men of Himmler’s vision, malefic but obedient. Himmler’s fantasy was not fulfilled, however; they did not remain uncorrupted. “Members of the [border police] were, with a few exceptions, quite happy to take part in shootings of Jews,” a Krakow police official testified. “They had a ball! . . . Nobody failed to turn up [for such assignments]. . . . I want to repeat that people today [i.e., after the war] give a false impression when they say that the actions against the Jews were carried out unwillingly. There was great hatred against the Jews; it was revenge, and they wanted money and gold. Don’t let’s kid ourselves, there was always something up for grabs during the Jewish actions. Everywhere you went there was always something for the taking. The poor Jews were brought in, the rich Jews were fetched and their homes were scoured.” While Himmler himself, as late as January 1942, was still dithering over whether to have a transport of Jews from western Europe shot in Riga or to “chase them into the swamp somewhere,” some of his minions — how many has never been determined—opened new departments in Hitler’s hell by choosing to become killers malefic to a degree unimaginable outside of genocides.

“There was, for example,” writes historian Leon Poliakov, “the police constable who afterwards at Lvov used to kill Jewish children to amuse his own children; or another who used to bet that he could cut off the head of a ten-year-old boy with a single saber stroke. . . . We find the interpreter for the superintendent of police in the region of Slonim, one Metzner, using this terrible phrase in his testimony: ‘The action was the work of a special SS commando that carried through the exterminations out of idealism, without using schnapps.’ ” In Trembowla, a survivor remembers, “the Gestapo man, Szklarek, always took part in the actions to liquidate the Jews. Once he ordered a little Jewish girl to lace her shoe, and when the child bent down, he shot her.” Nor has malefic violence ever found plainer expression—and explanation — than in this testimony of SS-Hauptsturmführer Lothar Heimbach, one of Ohlendorf’s supposedly proper and military killers in Einsatzgruppe D: “A man is the lord over life and death when he gets an order to shoot three hundred children — and he kills at least one hundred fifty himself.”

ELEVEN

Babi Yar

Kiev fell on 19 September 1941.

“Hold it at all costs,” Stalin had ordered Budënny. The dull-witted marshal had positioned more than a half million men in trenches and dugouts in its suburbs to defend it. But the Luftwaffe had dominated the air, and the Wehrmacht had beaten its way past Uman, wheeled von Kleist’s Panzergruppe around from the south, wheeled Heinz Guderian’s Panzergruppe down from the north and encircled the city on its bluff above the Dnieper with a deadly ring of steel. Bombs and artillery barrages had destroyed its suburbs. “The whole horizon had been lit up by flashes and fire,” twelve-year-old Anatoli Kuznetsov saw from his family’s house on the western outskirts of the city. Then silence had replaced the din of cannons and air-raid sirens and the boy had noticed “the men of the Red Army in their faded khaki uniforms . . . running in twos and threes through the courtyards and across the back gardens.” The Wehrmacht took Kiev itself largely intact, a city twelve centuries old graced with Parisian boulevards and gilded onion-domed churches, luxurious with chestnut and linden trees glowing yellow in the gathering autumn.

Truckloads of German troops rolled into the city, columns of soldiers riding bicycles, teams of bay draft horses pulling artillery. Officers lounged at ease in open motorcars. The Germans dragooned men and women to clear away the barricades that blocked the broad avenues. They moved into the offices and hotels along the Kreshchatik, Kiev’s fashionable main street, formed out of one of the many wide ravines, or
yars,
that centuries of runoff had cut down through the right bank of the Dnieper. Since the departing NKVD had blown up the power stations and water treatment plant, the Germans parked generator sets along the Kreshchatik for electricity and brought up tanker trucks filled with water from the river.

The first building to explode, on 20 September 1941, was the citadel where the Wehrmacht artillery staff was quartered. The artillery commanding general and his chief of staff were killed in the explosion. The Germans thought a delayed-action fuse had set off the explosives, but four days later the headquarters of the Wehrmacht field commander at the corner of Kreshchatik and Proreznaya exploded with such force that windows were blown out blocks away. The explosion set the building afire. As the Germans were seizing and beating anyone they happened to find in the vicinity, a second large explosion reduced the structure to rubble and dusted the Kreshchatik white. A third explosion blew up the offices across the street and started panic.

Explosions up and down the Kreshchatik continued throughout the night and intermittently for several days. The Soviets had stored crates of Molotov cocktails in the upper stories of buildings to defend the city and left them behind when they abandoned it; the explosions shattered the glass bottles and spilled jellied gasoline across the floors that ignited and poured down stairwells to fuel raging fires. “The Germans cordoned off the whole of the center of the city,” Kuznetsov remembers. “But the fire was spreading: the two parallel streets, Pushkin and Mering, were already ablaze, as were the streets which crossed the Kreshchatik— Proreznaya, Institute, Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels and the Arcade. It seemed as though the whole city was being blown up.”

On 17 September 1941 Paul Blobel had left behind in Zhitomir the men of the Sonderkommando 4a orderly room with the commando’s kitchen and vehicle repair equipment and had marched toward Kiev with two commandos of Police Regiment South and his Ukrainian auxiliaries. His Vorkommando
³¹
of fifty men entered Kiev with the 29th Army Corps on 19 September; Blobel arrived on 24 September and the Einsatzgruppe C group staff followed the next day. Between his arrival and 28 September 1941 he reported the conditions in Kiev to Berlin, his training as an architect informing his comments:

The ensuing fire has not yet been extinguished. Fire in the center of the town. Very valuable buildings destroyed. So far, firefighting practically without effect. Demolitions by blasting being carried out to bring the fire under control. Fire in the immediate neighborhood of this office. Had to be evacuated for this reason. . . . Blasts continuing. . . . Up to now, 670 mines detected in buildings, according to a mine-laying plan which was discovered: all public buildings and squares are mined. . . . Buildings being searched most assiduously. . . . In the Lenin Museum, 1,000 pounds of dynamite discovered which were to be touched off by radio. It was repeatedly observed that fires broke out the moment buildings were taken over.