Masters of Death (39 page)

Suddenly the Gestapo men ordered the Jews not to undress any more, as the pit was full. Only closely packed heads were to be seen when one looked into the pit. The Jews already stripped naked were thrown by the Gestapo men onto the heads of those already crammed in the pit. And all the while we had to collect and sort out clothing, footwear, bundles, food, eiderdowns and the like. This lasted until noon and then a truck came from the road and stopped on the path by the clearing. I noticed four vat-like containers. Then the Germans set up a small motor—it was probably a pump—connected it with hoses to one of the vats and two of them brought the hoses from the motor up to the pit. They started the motor and the two Gestapo men began to pour some liquid on the Jews. I think it was water, at any rate it looked like water. The hose was connected in turn to the other containers. Apparently, because of the slaking of the lime, people in the pit were boiling alive.
⁴¹
The cries were so terrible that we who were sitting by the piles of clothing began to tear pieces off to stop our ears. The crying of those boiling in the pit was joined by the wailing and lamentation of the Jews waiting for their perdition. All this lasted perhaps two hours, perhaps longer. When darkness fell we were taken along a forest path leading to the road at the edge of the forest . . . and here we were halted.

We were given coffee to drink and a quarter of a kilo of bread each.

Along the edge of the forest stood six or seven trucks covered with tarpaulins. We were herded into the vehicles in such a way that we were lying one next to another with our faces down so that we could not move. We were told to sleep like that. I could still hear the cries until I fell asleep, which happened rather quickly because I was so tired. The next morning the Gestapo men ordered us to cover the large pit with soil. The pit looked as if it had been dusted with a layer of earth. The human mass inside it seemed to have collapsed and dropped to the bottom. The bodies were so tightly packed that they looked as if they were standing, only the heads lolled in all directions. We did not fill the pit very thoroughly and the hands of some of the corpses were still sticking out, because trucks began to arrive and we were stopped. We were told to throw into them all the sorted-out stuff: clothing separately, footwear separately and so with other articles.

At a time when killing technologies were still under development at Auschwitz and elsewhere, this fathomless horror seems to have been an attempt—most probably, given the location, by Globocnik’s subordinates—to combine killing and corpse processing into one operation: slaked lime dissolves organic matter, including human tissue, which is why the “human mass” the veterinarian saw the morning after the massacre seemed to have “collapsed and dropped to the bottom.” The victims were not literally boiled alive, although the slaking process liberates a great deal of heat; they were chemically burned to death and partly dissolved by being flooded with the calcium equivalent of concentrated household bleach.

The Germans frequently used quicklime to accelerate the decomposition of corpses killed by shooting, of course, and it was often distributed layer by layer over bodies (dead or wounded and still alive) in killing pits, but the available record reveals no other instance of its having been used to kill as well as to decompose. Mercifully for later victims, the experiment did not lead to adoption of the quicklime process. Since it seems to have been effective, it probably was not adopted because the suffering of the victims was so extraordinary that it disturbed even perpetrators hardened by months of participation in mass shootings.

The veterinarian, continuing his account, also describes witnessing the results of gas-van murders, another indication that these massacres in western Poland were experimental, part of the transition developing in late 1941 from individual killing by shooting to mass-killing technologies:

In the afternoon a dark gray vehicle, looking like an ambulance, arrived in the clearing a number of times. When the back door was opened, human bodies fell out, men, women and children. They too were Jews. This gray car drove past me three times at hourly intervals. Whether it continued to come when I was taken away, I don’t know. The bodies falling out of the cars were joined together, as if linked by a convulsive embrace in distorted postures, with faces bitten away. I saw one man’s teeth sunk in another’s jaw. Some had their noses bitten off, some their fingers. Many were holding their hands in a convulsive grip—they must have been members of the same family. These corpses we were told to separate by force. When this could not be done, we were ordered to hack them, cut off hands, legs and other parts. Then we had to put them in the smaller pit, heads to feet, packed very tightly. The severed limbs were to be put between the torsos. While I was there three layers of bodies were packed like that, and one car was not yet unloaded. . . .

The corpses brought in the gray car were, apparently, victims of gassing. One could smell the gas coming from inside the vehicle and the clothes of the dead.

And again, as at Slonim, there is indication of increasingly malefic violence, violence in the service of extreme and entirely gratuitous depravity:

I also remember that during the extermination of Jews in the forest, one of the Gestapo men snatched a small child from its mother’s hands and smashed its head before her very eyes on the edge of his car. When the mother cried out, he lashed out with the body of the child so that the head hit her on her mouth and brain tissue stuck to it. Then he took something from his car—lime or Plaster of Paris—and stopped her mouth.

But given the volume of material at hand for the experiment, who can doubt that the substance the SS man stuffed into the mother’s mouth to stop her screaming was quicklime?

Some eight thousand Jews were murdered at Konin in this mid-November 1941 operation.

On the twenty-fourth anniversary of the October Revolution, 6–7 November 1941 (24 October on the old-style Russian calendar), Sonderkommando 1b under Erich Ehrlinger, a lawyer, staged a contemptuous extravaganza in Minsk. “Gallows were thrown up all over Minsk,” Vasily Grossman writes—“on the streets, in the parks, in the bazaars and on the outskirts of town.” Some one hundred Russians and Byelorussians were hanged and left hanging; wooden signs around their necks labeled them “Partisan,” “For collaborating with partisans,” “Communist.” But worse was reserved for the Jews of Minsk in their crowded ghetto. Early on the morning of 7 November 1941 a detachment of SS and police marched into the ghetto with a large escort of local and Lithuanian militia. They rounded up “men, women and children,” writes ghetto resident Hersh Smolar, “herding them into Jubilee Square under a hail of blows and curses.” Grossman says they were “ordered to put on their best clothing and to dress their children as if for a holiday. Even small babies had to be taken.” The point, it seemed, was to stage a fake parade. The people crowded into Jubilee Square were ordered to line up in rows, eight wide, and handed Soviet flags, and the men in the first row were given a banner to carry:

LONG LIVE THE 24TH ANNIVERSARY
OF THE GREAT SOCIALIST OCTOBER REVOLUTION

“People began pushing, dragging their children, trying to keep their families together,” Smolar recalls:

From the Judenrat
⁴²
building nearby came groups of men in civilian clothing carrying huge movie cameras. From all angles they filmed the “demonstration,” as they ordered the Jews to smile and look happy, to put their children on their shoulders and start marching. The march went along Opanski Street, where a long line of black trucks was waiting. The police ordered the Jews to climb into the trucks, which then started moving toward Tutshinka Street.

The crowds were jammed into former NKVD storehouses on Tutshinka Street without food or water. From there, across the next three days, as children and the elderly died in the thronged deprivation of the storehouse prisons, the victims were trucked to a killing site and shot into pits. Einsatzgruppe A listed 6,624 Jews shot by Sonderkommando 1b in the course of this
Aktion;
but both Grossman and Smolar (who cites “information available to the [Minsk ghetto]
Judenrat
”) give twelve thousand as the number of Minsk Jews murdered in the
Oktiabrske
massacre.

Its purpose had been to make room for Reich Jews being shipped East from Germany. Seven trainloads left for Minsk on 8 November 1941. Soon afterward, writes Grossman, “German Jews began to arrive by the thousands” from Hamburg, Berlin and Frankfurt. A further massacre of seven thousand Minsk Jews on 20 November 1941 was justified on the grounds that “the plan [of 7 November 1941] had not been fulfilled,” meaning, Grossman explains, “that a smaller number of Jews had been destroyed than was demanded by the authorities.”

A detachment of Einsatzkommando 5 under SS-Obersturmbannführer August Meier assisted by Order Police murdered “about 15,000 Jews” on the
Oktiabrske
anniversary in Rovno, in the western Ukraine. Einsatzkommando 5 was busy that month; Meier, a former business-man, also reported shooting 15 “political officials,” 21 “saboteurs and looters,” 414 “hostages” and “10,650 Jews” in Kiev in the first three weeks of November 1941—more victims for Babi Yar.

Himmler was frustrated with the slow pace of extermination in Latvia. Stahlecker had been more interested in moving on to help conquer Leningrad than in “cleansing” Latvia and had supervised the murder of less than half of the sixty-six thousand Latvian Jews trapped by Barbarossa. His successor, Hans-Adolf Prützmann, the Higher SS and Police Leader for the Baltic and Byelorussia, had deferred to the determination of the civilian Reichskommissar Ostland, Lohse, to confine the Riga Jews to ghettos and use them for skilled slave labor. Lohse’s orders from Alfred Rosenberg, Andrew Ezergailis points out, “were to raise the productivity of the Ostland and to supply the army with daily necessities and hardware.” On the other hand, Prützmann’s counterpart in the Ukraine, Jeckeln, had shown ruthless initiative and efficient organization at Kamenets-Podolsky and Babi Yar. Himmler decided to solve his Latvian problem by switching Jeckeln for Prützmann, which he did on 31 October 1941.

By 5 November 1941 Jeckeln’s staff had moved to Riga. The Obergruppenführer detoured through Berlin, where Himmler briefed him on the problem and ordered him to finish off the Riga Jews—because they were Jews, but also because Reich Jews were about to be shipped to Riga to continue clearing Germany. After the war Jeckeln reported Himmler’s exact words: “Tell Lohse that it is my order, which is also the Führer’s wish.” Armed with Himmler’s order, Jeckeln traveled on to Riga, arriving sometime after 13 November 1941. A
Führerbefehl
trumped Lohse’s instructions from Alfred Rosenberg; the Reichskommissar prudently gave way. Jeckeln took over Prützmann’s quarters in the Ritterhaus and got busy.

Once moral and psychological questions have been answered, mass killing is primarily a problem of logistics. As far as Jeckeln was concerned, a
Führerbefehl
answered any moral question. The Higher SS and Police Leader had his own answer to the psychological question. As he told a reluctant new Einsatzgruppe commander the following year, “I have thought and considered this very carefully, and if I catch somebody who objects to this [mass killing] or breaks down, then he will also be shot.” It remained, then, to organize the
Aktion,
a project to which he brought his considerable experience in the Ukraine.

The Riga ghetto was located on the east side of town. Jeckeln therefore searched southeastward of Riga for a killing site. Since the Riga area is low-lying, sandy and coastal—almost swampland—the site would have to be elevated, or the killing pits would fill up with groundwater. Jeckeln at first thought of shipping the victims to the site by railroad, so he drove toward Salaspils, where a concentration camp was under construction, along the road that paralleled the railroad line. (The camp was the one Stahlecker had told the Gebietskommissar of Latvia in October it was the “Führer’s wish” to build as a way station for Reich Jews.) Six miles southeast of the Riga ghetto Jeckeln found his location: a pine forest covering a low hill situated between the railroad and the main road to Daugavpils. On the railroad side there was a small station where only local trains stopped. The station name was Rumbula, which is the name the killing site took.

Ezergailis summarizes the site preparation:

Jeckeln assigned SS-Untersturmführer Ernst Hemicker, a construction specialist [on his staff], to organize the digging of the pits. Hemicker, accompanied by [other staff members], drove out to Rumbula and was informed about the number of people to be killed [about twenty-five thousand]. Hemicker later testified that he was shocked by the number, but made no protestations. On November 20 or 21, 300 Russian POWs were assigned to Rumbula, where under the supervision of Germans and Latvians they dug six pits. Hemicker supervised the digging. Each pit was ten meters [33 feet] on a side and from two and a half to three meters [8 to 10 feet] deep, the size of a small house. The Russian POWs dug the pits in the shape of an inverted pyramid, lifting the dirt by stages upwards, from platform to platform. There was a walk-in ramp at one side. . . . The job was finished in about three days . . . by approximately November 23.

Besides preparing the site, Jeckeln also had to organize personnel and transportation. Ezergailis estimates that the Higher SS and Police Leader needed about seventeen hundred men to control and guard the various locations that the
Aktion
would encompass. He ordered his personal bodyguard of ten or twelve men to do the actual killing. He tried to enlist the dozen Ritterhaus motor pool drivers as a relief execution commando, but none was willing to volunteer. For guards Jeckeln turned to Rudolf Lange, the ranking Gestapo and SD officer in Latvia, who mobilized the three hundred men of the Arajs commando as well as, says Ezergailis, “perhaps half the fifty-man Latvian guard unit of the . . . SD headquarters, plus perhaps four dozen German SD men in Riga, the remnants of Einsatzkommando 2. All together, Lange could deliver about 400 men with SD experience, meaning that most of them had taken part in killing civilians prior to November.” The Order Police contributed about 140 German policemen from companies in Riga and Jelgava.