Masters of Death (38 page)

Rauca in his gray-green uniform, carrying a baton, positioned himself on a mound at one end of the square and the selection began. With the flick of a black-gloved finger he directed groups and families left or right. For some time it wasn’t clear which side meant life and which side death, and people sometimes asked to be moved. If the move was to the right, says Tory, “smiling sarcastically, Rauca gave his consent.” Soon enough, as the sick and the elderly accumulated on the right side, which side meant death became clear. “From time to time, Rauca feasted on a sandwich . . . or enjoyed a cigarette, all the while performing his fiendish work without interruption.” From time to time an assistant brought a scrap of paper bearing a tally of those sent right—they were quickly moved into the empty Little Ghetto—which indicated that Rauca had a quota to fulfill. People died waiting in the square to be sorted. As the day wore on and the tallies showed him short of his quota, Rauca sorted as much by appearance as by work pass or specialty; all five hundred of the night-shift airbase workers who, muddy and exhausted, had come directly to Democracy Square from work he sent right, but he sent the fresh day-shift workers left.

The selection dragged on through the day. “It was beginning to grow dark,” Tory writes, “yet thousands of people remained standing in the square. Captain Jordan now opened another selection place; he was assisted by Captain Tornbaum.” The Jewish ghetto police tried to slip people across from one side to the other and sometimes succeeded. One of them saved Mishell’s brother-in-law and his wife and child that way.

It was dark when the Germans completed the selection. About ten thousand people had been transferred to the Little Ghetto, where they settled into the cold buildings for the night. The others returned home, says Tory, “hungry, thirsty, crushed, and dejected . . . most of them bereaved or orphaned, having been separated from a father, a mother, children, a brother or sister, a grandfather or a grandmother, an uncle or an aunt. A deep mourning descended on the ghetto. In every house there were now empty rooms, unoccupied beds and the belongings of those who had not returned from the selections. One third of the ghetto population had been cut down. The sick people who had remained in their homes in the morning had all disappeared. They had been transferred to the Ninth Fort during the day.”

The next morning it was the turn of the ten thousand. A teenage boy escaped the ensuing slaughter and returned to Kaunas to warn the Jewish Council; Tory’s summary reflects the boy’s eyewitness account:

The procession, numbering some 10,000 people, and proceeding from the Little Ghetto to the Ninth Fort, lasted from dawn until noon. Elderly people, and those who were sick, collapsed by the roadside and died. Warning shots were fired incessantly, all along the way and around the Big Ghetto. Thousands of curious Lithuanians flocked to both sides of the road to watch the spectacle, until the last of the victims was swallowed up by the Ninth Fort.

In the fort, the wretched people were immediately set upon by the Lithuanian killers, who stripped them of every valuable article—gold rings, earrings, bracelets. They forced them to strip naked, pushed them into pits which had been prepared in advance, and fired into each pit with machine guns which had been positioned there in advance. The murderers did not have time to shoot everybody in one batch before the next batch of Jews arrived. They were accorded the same treatment as those who had preceded them. They were pushed into the pit on top of the dead, the dying and those still alive from the previous group. So it continued, batch after batch, until the 10,000 men, women and children had been butchered.

Jäger listed the 29 October 1941 massacre at the Ninth Fort as “2,007 Jewish men, 2,920 Jewish women, 4,273 Jewish children,” and justified it as “removal from the ghetto of surplus Jews.”

While the Jews of Kaunas were undergoing selection and being murdered in batches at the Ninth Fort, Himmler was pretending to enjoy a weeklong hunting party at Schönhof, the hunting lodge of German foreign minister Joachim von Ribbentrop. The Italian foreign minister, Count Galeazzo Ciano, was the guest of honor, and Himmler’s masseur Felix Kersten was a guest as well. On 26 October 1941 the party bagged 2,400 pheasants, 260 hares, 20 crows and one roebuck. “Count Ciano alone shot 620 pheasants,” Kersten writes; “he’s the champion. Ribbentrop shot 410 pheasants, Himmler only 95.” Himmler told Kersten he had only joined the shoot because the Führer had “expressly wished me to do so.” He groused about Ciano’s success: “I wish the Italians in Africa had been such good shots. . . . Where there’s no danger, the Italians are heroes.” After dinner that evening Ciano told Kersten privately, “War will last a long time.” Kersten agreed, “and Ciano remarked that we were the only ones to share this opinion. Here at Schönhof everyone is saying that the war will soon be over.”

At the end of the Schönhof shoot, on the night of 28–29 October 1941, while the Kaunas ten thousand were making their beds in the cold buildings of the Little Ghetto, knowing what the morning would bring, Kersten talked with Himmler about hunting while he gave him a massage:

I said that I loved it and never felt so well as when out deer-stalking. I became quite a different person when I was in the open air stalking deer for hours on end, and continued to reap the benefit of those days out hunting for a considerable time afterwards.

Himmler replied that that was certainly the best part of hunting, but the real aim of deer-stalking, to have a shot at a wretched deer, went against the grain with him. “How can you find any pleasure, Herr Kersten, in shooting from behind cover at poor creatures browsing on the edge of a wood, innocent, defenseless and unsuspecting? Properly considered, it’s pure murder.”

THIRTEEN

Rumbula

As October 1941 chilled into November, the pressure on the Einsatzgruppen and the Higher SS and Police Leaders to accelerate their massacres increased. To make room for European Jews shipped eastward, as well as for the influx of SS and German civil administration personnel, the towns, ghettos and camps of the occupied East needed to be cleared.

Slonim, for example, a town in western Byelorussia about halfway between Bialystok and Minsk, had a housing problem. Gebietskommissar
⁴⁰
Gerhard Erren explained the difficulty in a report:

The town of Slonim is a haphazard jumble of a few good stone buildings, quite a few serviceable wooden houses and a good many dilapidated log shacks ripe for demolition. There are no uniformly well-maintained enclosed quarters which would be suitable as areas for Germans to live in. One third of the town has been completely destroyed. As a result of this and the heavy influx of refugees [from the surrounding countryside], when I arrived Slonim was severely overpopulated and the housing situation in some places catastrophic.

Since he needed to clear an area in preparation for a “future SS base,” and “operating on the premise that my colleagues need the highest standard of overall living conditions in order to maintain peak performance,” Erren “saw to it from the first day that each of our men not only had decent accommodation and enough to eat but that his whole style of living embodies German culture and the prestige appropriate to it.” How did he do that?

At the time of Erren’s arrival about twenty-five thousand Jews were living in the Slonim area, about sixteen thousand in the town itself— some two-thirds of the total town population. Erren lacked barbed wire and sufficient guards to set up a ghetto, so he began preparations for a major
Aktion.
He expropriated property and furnishings from the Jews of Slonim to equip Wehrmacht and German civil administration buildings. He registered the entire Jewish population, noting age, gender and profession, and issued passes and arranged separate accommodations for “all craftsmen and workers with qualifications” so that they would not be inadvertently taken in the
Aktion.
Then he called in an extermination commando from Einsatzgruppe B and on 13 November 1941 saw to the murder of at least nine thousand and perhaps as many as eighteen thousand Jewish victims. Indicating that Erren himself was present, his driver and interpreter, Alfred Metzner, reported participating in the massacre:

I was holding a whip or a pistol. I was loading or unloading. The men, children and mothers were pushed into the pits. Children were first beaten to death and then thrown feet [first] into the pits. . . . There were a number of filthy sadists in the extermination commando. For example, pregnant women were shot in the belly for fun and then thrown into the pits. . . . Before the execution the Jews had to undergo a body search, during which . . . anuses and sex organs were searched for valuables and jewels.

The brutal violation of searching body cavities before execution was not an Einsatzgruppen routine; it may have been an Erren innovation. Raul Hilberg says Erren used to call a meeting after the
Aktionen
he instigated (the November 1941
Aktion
was only the first). “The meeting was the occasion for celebration, and employees of the Kommissariat who had distinguished themselves were praised.” Erren’s enthusiasms, Hilberg adds, earned him the nickname “Bloody
Gebietskommissar.
” His driver’s reference to “filthy sadists” indicates that the Einsatzgruppen killers were descending in increasing numbers into fully malefic violent expression.

“The
Judenaktion
on 13 November alleviated the [housing] situation perceptibly,” Erren concluded his report. “. . . [It] rid me of unnecessary mouths to feed. The some seven thousand Jews now present in the town of Slonim have all been allocated jobs. They are working willingly because of the constant fear of death. Early next year they will be rigorously checked and sorted for a further reduction.” Erren had also set up what he called “craft colleges,” where he intended to make “the best of the skilled workers among the Jews . . . pass their skills on to intelligent [Gentile] apprentices . . . so that Jews will finally be dispensable in the skilled craft and trade sector and can be eliminated.”

Another massacre with unusual features carried out at about the same time—mid-November 1941—in the western Polish town of Konin perhaps indicates continuing experimentation with mass-killing technology. Theo Richmond, an English descendant of Konin Jewish émigrés, writes that Konin in czarist days was “a clean, handsome little town near the German frontier, on a river, with a wooden bridge. Nearby were meadows, orchards and forests. In winter, people skated on the river. In summer they strolled in the municipal park, where a military band played on Sunday afternoons. . . . The Jewish community was composed of pious but unfanatical Jews. Religious observance coexisted with a lively interest in secular culture. . . . There was a synagogue, a House of Study, and several small congregations. The Jewish quarter had a square, which was the heart of Jewish life in Konin.”

Three thousand Konin Jews were shot into killing pits in the Kazimierz Forest outside Konin in October 1941. A larger
Aktion
in mid-November 1941 was described in detail by a Polish veterinarian, Mieczyslaw Sekiewicz, in a deposition he gave the Local Court of Konin in 1945. What is unusual is the killing method:

In the middle of November 1941, at four o’clock in the morning, Gestapo men came to my prison cell and told me to get ready for a trip. They handcuffed me and took me to a private car where I found two of my fellow prisoners, my comrades in misfortune. They were sitting in the back of the car with their hands and legs shackled together. . . . I sat down by them and the Gestapo men shackled my legs. They got into the car and drove away. . . . Past [the village of] Kazimierz Biskupi [five miles northwest of Konin], when we entered the forest, the car turned left onto a forest path. . . . [In the forest] across a clearing were two pits. The first one, nearer to the path, was about eight meters [twenty-five feet] long and six meters [twenty feet] wide and two meters [six feet] deep. Almost parallel to it at the other end of the clearing . . . there was a second pit of the same depth, six meters [twenty feet] wide and fifteen meters [fifty feet] long. Between these two pits was open space. . . . All around the clearing . . . groups of Jews were standing or sitting. . . . I cannot say how many there were, as they were standing among trees. . . .

In the crowd were women, men, children, mothers with children in their arms. Whether they were all Polish Jews I cannot say. I was told later that they came from Zagorow [a village fifteen miles southwest of Konin downriver]. Among them I recognized a tailor and a shopkeeper from Konin, but I don’t know their names. The paths, the clearings, the whole forest swarmed with Germans. Besides the three of us brought from Konin there were about thirty other Poles assembled there. I don’t know where they came from. On the bottom of the larger pit I saw a layer of quicklime. I don’t know how thick the layer was. There was no lime in the smaller pit. The Gestapo men warned us that the forest was surrounded and closely watched, and if we attempted to escape we would be shot in the head. Then they ordered the assembled Jews to strip—first those who were standing near the large pit. They ordered the naked people to jump into the larger pit. I could not describe the wailing and the crying. Some Jews were jumping without an order—even most of them—some were resisting and they were being beaten about and pushed down. Some mothers jumped in holding their children, some were throwing their children in, others were flinging their children aside. Still others threw the children in first and then jumped in. Some were crawling at the feet of the Gestapo men kissing their boots, their rifle butts and the like. We were told to go among the standing Jews and collect clothing and shoes. I saw Gestapo men come up to where we were heaping watches, rings, jewelry, and stuff their pockets with them. Seeing that, some of us, and I among them, stopped putting anything precious in heaps, but threw watches, rings further into the forest.