Masters of Death (35 page)

At dusk an open car arrived bearing a German officer. He was tall and elegantly uniformed and carried a riding crop—Blobel? He questioned the Ukrainians about the group, a crowd by now, perhaps fifty people. Our own people, the Ukrainians explained. “Shoot the lot at once!” Pronicheva heard the officer shout. “If even one of them gets out of here and starts talking in the city, not a single Jew will turn up tomorrow.”

The militiamen forced the group down into a side canyon. It opened onto Babi Yar well above the ravine floor. Pronicheva saw German soldiers at a bonfire, making coffee. She saw the carnage of bodies below. Before or after one of the soldiers began shooting — at different times she remembered the moment differently — she fell into the masses of the dead and lay still.

“All around and beneath her,” Kuznetsov writes, telling her story as she told it to him, “she could hear strange submerged sounds, groaning, choking and sobbing: many of the people were not dead yet. The whole mass of bodies kept moving slightly as they settled down and were pressed tighter by the movements of the ones who were still living.” Pronicheva found herself unwounded. She waited for darkness. Lights flashed down. Shots were fired. Killers walked around on the dead finishing off the wounded. The air smelled of blood and opened bodies. Later sand rained down as workers began shoveling soil to cover the bodies. Pronicheva was lying face up and the sand choked her and gritted her eyes. She scraped it away, turned over and started crawling toward the ravine wall, out of Babi Yar. She made it, survived the war, testified at war trials and went back to performing for children in puppet shows.

The
Aktion
continued through a second day. “As a result of a very clever piece of organization,” Blobel bragged in a report, “[the Jews] still believed they were going to be resettled right up until the time they were executed.” On the third day, as Anton Heidborn, a member of SK 4a, testified, civilians shoveled sand to cover up the last bodies and then Blobel’s men dynamited the walls of that section of the ravine. “The next few days,” Heidborn recalled, “were spent smoothing out banknotes belonging to the Jews that had been shot. I estimate these must have totalled millions.” Truckloads of clothing were donated to the NSV “for the use of ethnic Germans” and to the Kiev city administration “for use of the needy population.”

An Einsatzgruppen report on 2 October 1941 summarized the Babi Yar
Aktion
brazenly, not even bothering to justify it as retaliation:

Sonderkommando 4a in collaboration with the group staff and two commandos of Police Regiment South on 29 and 30 September 1941 executed 33,771 Jews in Kiev.

Executions continued at Babi Yar every Tuesday and Friday for the next year, by which time the German administration had set up a concentration camp that backed up to the
yar.

When Kiev fell, a German physician, Wilhelm Gustav Schüppe, was posted to the Kiev Pathological Institute assigned to destroy “life unworthy of life.” His commando of about ten physicians and ten SS men dressed as medics used lethal injections to murder the disabled of the Kiev area as well as Jews, Gypsies and Turkmen.
³⁵
Interrogated after the war, Schüppe estimated that in the space of six months, from September 1941 to March 1942, his commando killed more than one hundred thousand people — an average of more than five hundred per day. “The executioners used to boast about their records,” a doctor involved in similar executions at Auschwitz would testify. “ ‘Three in a minute,’ ” he said, quoting their boast. Schüppe had every reason to minimize rather than exaggerate his crimes. Since the Schüppe commando had no crematoria, the bodies were almost certainly dumped into Babi Yar. Anatoli Kuznetsov’s childhood playground thus became the SS’s largest single mass grave.

TWELVE

Pure Murder

“In late September [1941],” writes Wehrmacht officer Siegfried Knappe, still advancing toward Moscow, “it began to rain, and mud started to become a problem for us. Snow came in early October, but it was not cold enough for the ground to freeze and everything turned to mud. By October 8, the earth was simply a quagmire of mud. Great clumps of mud clung to our boots and every step produced a smacking suction noise.” Barracking in peasant hovels, unable to bathe, many of the men picked up lice and skin infections. A corps commander reported in late October 1941 that “the health of men and horses is deteriorating due to the wretched housing facilities.... The men have been lying for weeks in the rain and stand in knee-deep mud. It is impossible to change wet clothing. I have seen the soldiers and spoken with them. They are hollow-eyed, pale, many of them are ill. Frostbite incidence is high.”

Indifferent to the physical trial his armies were suffering, Hitler was euphoric. The collapse of Budënny’s forces and the fall of Kiev had been followed within two weeks by further encirclements and victories at Vyazma, only 125 miles from Moscow, and southward at Bryansk. “In these two pockets,” Alan Clark notes, “over five hundred thousand [Red Army soldiers] were pinned down for liquidation.” Goebbels observed Hitler on his return to Berlin in early October 1941 and decided “he looks at his best and is in an exuberantly optimistic frame of mind. He literally exudes optimism. . . . The offensive has been surprisingly successful so far. . . . The Führer is convinced that if the weather remains halfway favorable, the Soviet army will be essentially demolished in fourteen days.”

Hitler had intended to deal with the European Jews after he won the war. Göring’s commission to Heydrich on 31 July 1941 to begin planning the Final Solution, an adviser to the Reich interior ministry would explain to a colleague later in the year, was supposed to lead to “an immediate and unified solution of the Jewish question in Europe after the conclusion of the war.” Since Hitler thought the war was nearly over, the Final Solution was much on his mind in October 1941.

The Jews of Poland were already marked for slaughter, and Globocnik in Lublin was making progress toward developing a killing program. Ninety-two men previously under the authority of the Führer Chancellery who had organized and operated the euthanasia gassing centers in Germany that Hitler had reluctantly closed in late August were assigned to Globocnik in October 1941. At Auschwitz Höss had begun experimenting with a prussic acid insecticide powder with the brand name Zyklon,
³⁶
testing it first in early September 1941 on Russian prisoners of war. In October 1941, if not earlier, Globocnik’s subordinates began planning camps devoted exclusively to mass murder at Belzec, a small town southeast of Lublin, and at Chelmno, about 43 miles due east of Lublin. The euthanasia killing centers had used pure bottled carbon monoxide; the new death camps, which would require larger quantities of gas and to which Himmler begrudged only minimal funds, would borrow from gas van technology and generate carbon monoxide cheaply using large diesel engines scavenged from Russian tanks and submarines.

Even before Globocnik could clear Poland, Hitler was keen to render the Reich
Judenfrei
by moving its Jewish population eastward. On 11 October 1941 Stahlecker turned up at the private apartment of the Generalkommissar of Latvia, Otto-Heinrich Dreschler, to ask for help fulfilling the “Führer’s wish” that a big concentration camp be built near Riga to hold Western Jews. Lodz, in central Poland, was another temporary destination; the first four trainloads of Jews shipped east left Vienna bound for Lodz on 16 October 1941. Though many died from starvation, writes historian Christian Gerlach, “there is no evidence from Lodz to indicate that any consideration was being given to the idea of executing the Jews who arrived from Germany.” Further transports followed from Berlin, Prague, Cologne, Düsseldorf, Frankfurt, Hamburg and Luxembourg, forcefully deporting by 2 November 1941 about twenty thousand people. By moving German Jewish citizens temporarily to Lodz the SS was able to invoke a law under which they lost their citizenship and property for having taken up residence in a foreign country; maliciously, the law made no distinction between voluntary emigration and emigration at gunpoint. Himmler had persuaded the German governor of the Lodz region to accept the Jewish émigrés by promising that they would be “moved farther east next spring.”

Himmler called Heydrich on 18 October 1941 and ordered an end to the “overseas emigration of Jews,” closing the last escape route from Nazi-occupied Europe. A memo to that effect was circulated through the RSHA five days later. The first of twenty-two trainloads of Jews from Germany, Austria and Czechoslovakia — each train carrying about a thousand people — began departing eastward early in November 1941. Ten trains went to Riga, five to Kaunas, seven to Minsk. By 25 October 1941 Eichmann had passed the message to the Reichskommissar Ostland, Heinrich Lohse, that “given the present state of affairs, there are no objections to getting rid of those Jews not capable of work with the Bracksian device.” The “Bracksian device” was Viktor Brack’s lethal gas van.

Testimony by Ohlendorf about a visit Himmler made to Nikolayev in early October 1941 also demonstrates the ramping up of killing and clearing. Einsatzgruppe D had finished its slaughters in the Nikolayev area. “In agreement with the army,” Ohlendorf testified at his trial, “we had excluded from the executions a large number of Jews — the farmers.” The Wehrmacht had wanted to make sure agricultural production would continue in the Ukraine, Russia’s breadbasket, to sustain further campaigns. Himmler was incensed to learn that the Jewish farmers had been spared. He had never liked Ohlendorf, whom he considered arrogant, and here was another example of his insubordination. “I was reproached for this measure,” Ohlendorf complained, “and [Himmler] ordered that henceforth, even against the will of the army, the executions should take place as planned.” That evening Ohlendorf assembled all his available commanders. “The
Reichsführer
addressed these men and repeated the strict order to kill all those groups. . . . He added that he alone would carry the responsibility, as far as accounting to the Führer was concerned. None of the men would bear any responsibility, but he demanded the execution of this order, even though he knew how harsh these measures were.” Ohlendorf claimed he pursued the matter further: “Nevertheless, after supper, I spoke to the
Reichsführer
and deplored the inhuman burden which was being imposed on the men in killing all these civilians. I didn’t even get an answer.”

The mistaken belief that Germany was about to defeat the Soviet Union accounts for Himmler’s determination to kill even the farmers among the Jews of the East; he expected to replace them soon enough with SS
Wehrbauern.
Heydrich was developing similarly optimistic plans as he took up new responsibilities for what had been the Czech part of Czechoslovakia and was now the Reich Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia. Hitler had made Heydrich Deputy Protector and effective authority over Bohemia and Moravia on 3 September 1941, pushing aside the ineffective former German Foreign Minister Constantin von Neurath. In Prague to meet secretly with his new administrative subordinates on 2 October 1941, Heydrich sketched out a program derived from Himmler’s master plan to resettle the East.

“It is clear that we must find an entirely different way in which to treat these peoples,” Heydrich told his administrators, speaking of the Czechs, “from the way used for peoples of other races, the Slavs and so on. Racial Germanics [i.e., Czechs who looked German] must be seized firmly but justly; they must be humanely led in a similar way to our own people if we want to keep them permanently in the Reich and to merge them with us.” Heydrich envisioned a hierarchy of forces arrayed at the Urals to hold back the Asiatic hordes: not only
Wehrbauern
but also armies of serfs to farm and guard. He went on to allude to the Final Solution, ordering a national register compiled for the Protectorate to prepare for the deportation of its Jews and Slavs. “For those of good race who are well-intentioned towards us,” he concluded, “the matter will be very simple — they will be Germanized. The others — those of inferior racial origin with hostile intentions—these people I must get rid of. There is plenty of space in the East for them.”

Hitler could hardly keep his mouth shut about the Final Solution that month. “The law of existence prescribes uninterrupted killing, so that the better may live,” he lectured his subordinates over lunch on 10 October 1941. When the Department of War Administration at the Quartermaster General’s office complained that the “deportations of Jews” were interfering with military rail traffic, Hitler responded bluntly: “The Jewish question takes priority over all other matters.” In another meal-time monologue on 21 October 1941 he bragged, “When we finally stamp out this plague, we shall have accomplished for mankind a deed whose significance our men out there on the battlefield cannot even imagine yet.” And at dinner after Himmler and Heydrich met with him at Wolfschanze on 25 October 1941 he reminisced about his 1939 prophecy with a wink and a nudge to his black-uniformed minions about the rumor going around:

From the rostrum of the Reichstag I prophesied to Jewry that if war proved inevitable, the Jew would disappear from Europe. That race of criminals has the two million dead of the World War on its conscience and now already hundreds of thousands more. Let no one tell me that we really can’t ship them off to the swamps! Who’s worrying about our people? If the rumor is going around that we have a plan to exterminate the Jews, that’s all right with me. Terror is a good thing.

Handsome young SS-Untersturmführer Max Täubner was a fanatical enemy of the Jews. He kept himself trim and tanned, his dark hair shaped close to his symmetrical skull, his mouth ironic above a strong chin, a flick of contempt in his smile. A man of action, a party member since 1932 (but expelled for late payment of dues, readmitted in 1937), he had joined the SS in 1933. Yet Barbarossa had found him stuck commanding merely a Werkstattzug, a supply workshop platoon responsible for repairing SS equipment. Assigned to duty in the Ukraine with his Werkstattzug in September 1941, part of the First SS Brigade, he had resolved to “get rid of” twenty thousand Jews.