Masters of Death (40 page)

Latvians also participated in the massacre. Based on his estimate of seventeen hundred positions to fill, Ezergailis concludes that the number of Latvians involved must have been about one thousand, known to have been drawn from five groups: Latvians who worked for Lange in the SD, precinct police, Riga city police, “battalion police who were being trained for military action in Russia” and some one hundred Latvian ghetto guards.

Organizing transportation was difficult. Rather than transport the Jewish victims by rail, Jeckeln decided to march them the six miles from the ghetto to Rumbula, but he still needed trucks and buses to carry personnel, small children, the sick and the elderly and to pick up the bodies of victims shot along the way. Ezergailis estimates that Jeckeln’s stock of motor pool automobiles and motorcycles would have sufficed for transporting dignitaries and the killing squad, but that trucks—he needed a minimum of twenty-five—were in short supply. Jeckeln probably scavenged trucks and buses from the Latvian police organizations and the city of Riga and possibly from the Wehrmacht as well.

There was further conflict between Rosenberg and Himmler over whether or not to preserve Eastern Jews who could be exploited for labor. Ohlendorf had lost the argument with Himmler where Ukrainian farmers were concerned, but Rosenberg, with more authority, won a minor concession, at least temporarily sparing the lives of able-bodied Jewish males between the ages of sixteen and sixty. To facilitate this selection, the Germans fenced off four blocks of the Riga ghetto with barbed wire and on 28 November 1941 posted an order commanding the men to move and the people remaining in the large ghetto to prepare to be relocated. “The relocation of the Jews to be transported,” as Ezergailis paraphrases it, “would begin at six o’clock on the morning of November 30; they were told that they could take a twenty-kilogram [forty-four pound] bag.” Since previous selections of able-bodied men had led to their murder, the people of the ghetto feared for their men but believed they themselves were actually only being moved. “The whole ghetto was in motion like ants in an anthill,” a ghetto resident, Frida Michelson, remembers. “We made and remade packages; we prepared knapsacks, selected and re-selected the more necessary clothing and food, compared lighter things against heavier. We tested the packs for each person for the weight and comfort of carrying them.” About four thousand men moved into the small ghetto on 29 November 1941. Five hundred seamstresses and women with tailoring skills were also separated from the main population, housed in a Riga prison and returned later to housing near the ghetto to repair Wehrmacht uniforms.

That same day Jeckeln briefed the German commanding officers in the Ritterhaus conference hall. “He stressed that participation in the killings was a patriotic obligation,” Ezergailis says in paraphrase, “and pointed out that refusal to participate was equal to the refusal to participate in a war, equal to desertion. Those HSSPF
⁴³
staff members who did not have specific assignments, Jeckeln ordered to the pits as observers”—in Jeckeln’s revealing words, they should “make it their obligation to be present at the executions as witnesses, so that no one is spared knowledge and complicity.”

Ezergailis lists five significant factors Jeckeln had to weigh in his planning:

1) the killing grounds were about ten kilometers from the ghetto, a stretch that would take three hours to traverse at regular infantry pace; 2) there were only seven hours of daylight [at that time of year in northern Latvia], and even taking in the twilight hours, the killing time could be no more than eight hours; 3) the last column sent out was at 12:00 noon and would have to arrive in Rumbula around 3:00 p.m.; 4) more than 12,000 people a day would have to be transported and killed; 5) the Jews were to be driven in 1,000-person columns with the guards posted on both sides.

About three inches of snow fell in the Riga area on the night of 29 November 1941; the temperature dropped to 18 degrees Fahrenheit (it would rise into the mid-thirties during the day). A train from Berlin carrying about a thousand Jewish men, women and children arrived in Riga that Saturday evening and was left standing on a siding through the night at Skirotava station, three miles from Rumbula. Later it would prove to be a source of conflict between Jeckeln and Himmler.

A wake-up gang—German police, Arajs militiamen, Jewish ghetto police—began pounding on western ghetto doors at four a.m. on 30 November 1941. At the eastern end of the ghetto a team cut exits through the barbed wire so the columns could pass. An Arajs blue bus delivered German SD personnel. People emerged from houses with their bags and knapsacks. There was running, shouting, attempts to escape back into the vacated houses. Frida Michelson saw young women, women with infants in their arms, old women, handicapped, helped by their neighbors, young boys and girls—all marching, marching. Suddenly, in front of our window, a German SS man started firing with an automatic gun point blank into the crowd. People were mowed down by the shots and fell on the cobblestones. . . . People were trampling over those who had fallen, they were pushing forward, away from the wildly shooting SS man. Some were throwing away their packs so they could run faster. The Latvian policemen were shouting “Faster! Faster!” and lashing whips over the heads of the crowd.

Michelson was observing a Baltic German Sturmbannführer named Brasch, an accountant. He was not firing wildly. He told a Jewish ghetto policeman who had formerly been a high-ranking Latvian police official and who asked him what he was doing, “We are supposed to adhere strictly to the time schedule for moving the column to its destination, and therefore we are eliminating from the ranks everyone who could slow down the pace of the column.”

The ghetto was already strewn with bodies when the first column passed through the opened wire at six a.m., picking up an escort of Latvian and German police. The blue bus loaded children and elderly. Six miles eastward at Rumbula at eight-fifteen Jeckeln had the thousand Berlin Jews shot into the pits, the first Rumbula victims. The leading column of Riga ghetto Jews arrived at Rumbula at nine. Moving a thousand people of all ages and health conditions six miles on foot in three hours had been brutal: the guards had shot people who tried to run or simply stopped to rest, and possessions and bodies had been left strewn along the road.

The system Jeckeln organized for Rumbula was adapted from the system he had used in the Ukraine, the system Blobel adapted for Babi Yar. From the road an outer gauntlet of about one hundred guards, some with dogs, funneled the victims three hundred yards across scrubland to the edge of the forest. An outer apron of another hundred guards “was to watch for escapees,” Ezergailis writes. “Several machine guns were set up on the periphery, ready to stop even a massive flight.” Between the road and the forest edge, with shouts and blows, the guards seized the victims’ packs and bags. A wooden box positioned along the gauntlet received valuables—watches, rings, coins, jewelry. Coats came off next.

From the outer gauntlet the victims were sent forward in groups of fifty into the forest, down a narrower gauntlet manned by another hundred guards. Limiting each group to fifty may have been determined by the capacity of the clip of the Russian submachine guns the killers were using. Jeckeln’s aide Paul Degenhart testified that the Russian weapons were used because they could be set on single fire and their clips held fifty bullets. With more shouts and blows the victims were forced to undress. As they approached the killing pits the gauntlet narrowed them to single file. Since three pits were being operated, the gauntlet was probably shifted from one to the next for each group of fifty, diverting the line to whichever executioner was ready to receive it. The victims descended the earthen ramp into a pit. Packers would have been stationed in the pit, as at Babi Yar, to position the victims lying down on the bodies of those who had preceded them. A
Genickschüss
by one of Jeckeln’s bodyguards ended their suffering. When a killer had emptied a clip, another man replaced him and he took a break.

Jeckeln entertained guests:

Jeckeln stood on the top of the embankment with many other high SS, SD and police officials. . . . Arajs, heavily drunk, took a more active role, working closer to the pits, overseeing his men. Jeckeln invited guests from all levels of the German hierarchy: Reichskommissar Ostland Lohse was there for a time, so perhaps was the Gebietskommissarof Latvia, Drechsler. . . . [Jeckeln] also called in police commanders from . . . other cities in the region to witness the killings. Stahlecker was called in from the Leningrad front to be present, perhaps to point out to him that he had not finished the job and to show how it must be done. . . . Although the police officials came from a long distance, Jeckeln had not invited anyone from the Wehrmacht.

Thirteen thousand Riga Jews were murdered at Rumbula that day. Thirteen thousand people in columns of one thousand each is thirteen columns marched out from Riga to Rumbula and two hundred sixty groups of fifty people moved down the gauntlet to the killing pits. If the first column arrived at nine a.m. and the last at three p.m. and if the killing continued in three pits until five p.m., an hour and a half after sundown, nine people had to be murdered in each pit every minute, three
Genickschüssen
every seven seconds. If only twelve men did the killing, as Ezergailis concludes, then each man personally murdered— pointed a submachine gun at, pulled the trigger, saw the skull tear and blood spray and the body slacken and convulse—more than one thousand human beings, most of them elderly parents and grandparents stripped to their underwear, half-naked women and children. Jeckeln’s
Sardinenpackung
method was efficient because it meant bodies did not have to be moved or even rearranged, but the number of murders per man suggests another advantage as well. The back and the back of the head are relatively featureless aspects of the human body, relatively anonymous; not having to look their victims in the face as they murdered them made killing them easier. What was easier for the perpetrators, however, was harder for the victims: having to lie down on the dying and the dead and wait in fresh gore to be murdered increased their suffering.

A Wehrmacht engineer who commanded a bridge inspection company heard “curious, inexplicable gunfire and screaming” from the direction of Rumbula and followed it to its source and “saw everything,” a comrade of his wrote historian Gerald Fleming many years later; “he also mentioned the brutal laughter of the SD people.” The outraged engineer’s subsequent report eventually reached Admiral William Canaris, the head of German military counterintelligence. Canaris took it up with Hitler himself, who responded, “You’re getting soft, sir! I
have
to do it, because after me no one else will!”

Corpses had to be cleared from the streets of the Riga ghetto. That work began at about two in the afternoon. Men from the Arajs commando finished off the wounded. Twenty invalids were carried out of the ghetto hospital into the street, laid out on straw mattresses and shot in the head. Ezergailis says “sleds, wheelbarrows and horse carts” were used to transport the bodies to a cemetery where the Germans had dynamited a crater for a mass grave. One young man on the burial squad found the body of his murdered mother on the street near the cemetery and added it to his load. “The bodies were thrown into the common pit without rites or prayers,” Ezergailis mourns. “The Jews of the ghetto were not allowed to visit the cemetery.”

Jeckeln repeated the
Aktion
on 8 December 1941 to clear the rest of the Riga ghetto. The weeklong delay has puzzled historians. It occurred because of the conflict between Jeckeln and Himmler over the liquidation of the transport of one thousand Berlin Jews. Himmler spoke to Heydrich on the day of the first massacre, 30 November 1941, specifically excluding the transport from the
Aktion.
He made a note after the phone conversation: “Jewish transport from Berlin, no liquidation.” Since the Berlin Jews had already been murdered by then, Himmler was probably responding to a call Heydrich had made prior to that date. When Himmler learned that Reich Jews had been massacred, he radioed Jeckeln and read him the riot act. He told Jeckeln he would punish “unauthorized actions or actions contrary to directives issued either by me or by the Reich Security Main Office under my authority” concerning “treatment of Jews resettled in the Ostland.” In a second message the same day he ordered Jeckeln to meet with him at his headquarters in East Prussia on 4 December 1941. Jeckeln’s travels account for the gap in time between the first and second Rumbula massacre.

On 8 December 1941 the remaining ten thousand Riga Jews were murdered. Frida Michelson survived by playing dead and finding herself fortuitously covered with discarded shoes. She describes going “numb with terror.” She recounts being seized by “an indescribable fear . . . that bordered on loss of mind.” Another survivor, Ella Medale, a twenty-eight-year-old teacher who “looked Latvian,” was visited far down the gauntlet not with numbness and near loss of mind but with profound and lifesaving clarity:

Without realizing what could occur, mechanically I took off my coat and bent to put it down when suddenly I felt a stinging pain, a blow on my back. I fell down, and for a moment my consciousness became astoundingly clear. The sense of self-preservation awakened in me and gave me an awareness: “Your life is running out! Now or never! If you don’t do anything now, the grave will get you!” . . . I jumped up and ran to the next guard, who was [an Arajs man] who had guarded us frequently. He was ashen and hardly could hold the [rifle] in his hand. Apparently he was nauseated. I grabbed him by his arm and pleadingly told him: “Save me! You know that I am not a Jew!” For an answer he mumbled something incomprehensible and pointed to a group of policemen, who apparently were in charge: “Speak to the higher ups!” I rushed to them. The head executioner Arajs fastened his eyes on me. His face was disfigured, beast-like, and he swayed back and forth, horribly drunk. A shriek broke out of me: “I am not a Jew!” I trembled as in a fever. Arajs waved me away: “Here are only Jews! Today Jewish blood must flow!”