Masters of Death (46 page)

Ohlendorf confirmed problems with gas vans in his Nuremberg trial testimony. “An order came from Himmler that in the future women and children were to be killed only in gas vans,” he testified, but “I received the report that the
Einsatzkommandos
did not willingly use the vans. . . . Because the burial of the victims was a great ordeal for [them].” Evidently gassing only reduced trauma to the perpetrators in stationary applications, where prisoners could be assigned to corpse disposal while SS supervisors kept their distance.

Himmler notified his camp administrator of the impending deportation of 150,000 Reich Jews to concentration camps on 26 January 1942, but Albert Speer, now chief of armament construction responsible for repairing the Russian railroads that the Soviets had destroyed, notified Rosenberg on the same day that Wehrmacht resupply on the Russian front would preempt all rail transport, postponing deportations until spring.

While the hecatomb of European Jews was delayed, mass murder continued in the East. SS-Obersturmbannführer Eduard Strauch, a lawyer who commanded Einsatzkommando 1b (Einsatzgruppe A), scheduled an
Aktion
against the Minsk ghetto for 2–3 March 1942. The dates coincided with the Jewish festival of Purim, which commemorates the defeat of Haman’s plot to massacre the Jews—a little SS joke. Strauch wrote Bach-Zelewski in a later report that “in order to disguise the
Aktion
the [Minsk ghetto] Council of Elders was to be informed that 5,000 Jews . . . were to be resettled. These Jews were to be notified by the Council of Elders and told to get ready. Each Jew would be permitted to take along five kilograms [eleven pounds] of luggage.”

The Generalkommissar for Byelorussia, a balding Gauleiter named Wilhelm Kube, was conflicted about the Final Solution (at least where it concerned the European Jews) and hostile to the SS. In December 1941 he had written his old friend Lohse, “I am certainly tough and prepared to do my part towards the solution of the Jewish question, but people from our own cultural sphere are rather different from the brutalized hordes living here.” The report that Strauch sent to Bach-Zelewski accused Kube of protecting Jews. By preventing the Jews who worked for him in Minsk from going home to the ghetto on the evening before the Purim massacre, Strauch charged, Kube had given the game away.

Minsk ghetto resident Hersh Smolar, who by then was organizing a resistance movement, says his group discerned what the SS was planning when an actor among them who spoke fluent German asked whether children and old people could be included in the five-thousand-person “work detail.” “The answer was cruel and unambiguous,” Smolar writes: “ ‘
Ganz egal
’ (It’s all the same . . .). Clearly they simply wanted five thousand Jews to murder.” Smolar and his group spread the word: Find a way to save yourself:

A night of terror fell upon the ghetto. The only people who had an encouraging word to say were the older Jews who knew that the next day, March 2nd, was Purim. They comforted each other— “perhaps another miracle would happen and our enemies would suffer the same fate as Haman. . . .” We did not know then that the [Einsatzkommando] had deliberately chosen Purim for their massacre in order to show the Jews that they had nothing left to hope for, there would be no miracle. . . .

At precisely 10 a.m. the Einsatzkommando, assisted by groups of Lithuanian fascists and Byelorussian “Black police,” began their pogrom. They invaded the ghetto near the Judenrat building and pounced brutally upon people who were trying to take refuge there. “Where are the five thousand Jews we ordered?” The Commander dispersed the Jewish police, accompanied by squads of his own men, to go out and bring in the victims.

From Strauch’s perspective the disappearance of his victims into hiding was Kube’s fault:

As a result of the betrayal no Jew appeared at the appointed time. There was nothing else to do but to round the Jews up by force. The Jews put up resistance and the men taking part in the Aktion had to use firearms. When matters were at their worst, just as the men were going all out to break down the resistance, the Gauleiter appeared.

Strauch then quoted from a file note written three days after the
Aktion
describing an agitated Kube, “accompanied by his personal adjutant and an
SS-Untersturmführer,
” berating him “about the outrageous proceedings,” complaining of dangerous ricochets inside and outside the ghetto from the gunfire, repeatedly using expressions such as “filthy business” and “you haven’t heard the last of this.” Strauch wrote that he considered himself to have been “grievously insulted” and noted that Kube “is said to have distributed sweets to Jewish children on this occasion.” Smolar’s description of the massacre that followed the violent roundup identifies the mysterious Untersturmführer and details Kube’s bizarre act of charity, if that is what it was:

Soon afterward came the crackling of rifles and the explosion of hand grenades. The first victims were people who could not move fast enough—the old, the sick, the infants. Then the Nazis began searching for hiding places. They would stop outside a place they suspected and the Jewish police would call out that “there was nothing to be afraid of.” But no one came out. Then the grenades did their murderous work. The streets of Minsk were red with Jewish blood that day.

Their next “military objective” was the Jewish Children’s Home. They forced the frightened youngsters to line up and march. At the head of the line was the director of the home, a devoted mother to the orphans. Her name was Fleisher. In one arm she carried a sick child. Her other hand clutched the hand of her own young son, walking beside her. Last in line was another self-sacrificing woman, Dr. Tshermin. . . .

The march of the children was halted at a freshly dug ditch at the lower end of Tatomski Street, not far from the Judenrat building. The air was suspiciously still, but the executioners had already taken up their “positions” around the ditch. In command was the Nazi governor of Byelorussia, Gauleiter Wilhelm Kube. At his side stood a tall SS officer in a long leather coat. From the German Jews we later learned that this was Himmler’s righthand man—Adolf Eichmann. At his signal the murderers began throwing the children into the ditch and covering them with sand.

The screams and cries could be heard far into the ghetto. Children stretched out their hands, pleading for their lives. Kommissar Kube walked alongside the ditch, tossing pieces of candy into it. . . . From the Jewish police we learned that Eichmann swore angrily when blood splattered his coat. Upon the mound of dying Jewish children the Nazis threw the dead bodies of their guardians—Director Fleisher and Doctor Tshermin.

Eichmann remembered the Purim massacre vividly, if not entirely accurately, and described it in his memoir as well as to his Israeli interrogator. The memoir version:

Later that year [sic] I watched my first Jewish execution. It was at Minsk, then recently [sic] come under German occupation. I was sent by my immediate superior, General Müller. Müller never stirred from his desk at Gestapo headquarters on the second floor of the Prinz Albrecht Strasse building, but he knew everything that went on in Europe. He liked to send me around on his behalf. I was in effect a traveling salesman for the Gestapo, just as I had once been a traveling salesman for an oil company in Austria.

Müller had heard that Jews were being shot near Minsk, and he wanted a report. I went there and showed my orders to the local SS commander. “That’s a fine coincidence,” he said. “Tomorrow 5,000 of them are getting theirs.”

When I rode out the next morning, they had already started, so I could see only the finish. Although I was wearing a leather coat which reached almost to my ankles, it was very cold. I watched the last group of Jews undress, down to their shirts. They walked the last 100 or 200 yards—they were not driven—then they jumped into the pit. It was impressive to see them jumping into the pit without offering any resistance whatsoever. Then the men of the squad banged away into the pit with their rifles and machine pistols.

Why did that scene linger so long in my memory? Perhaps because I had children myself. And there were children in that pit. I saw a woman hold a child of a year or two into the air, pleading. At that moment all I wanted to say was, “Don’t shoot, hand over the child. . . .” Then the child was hit.

I was so close that later I found bits of brains splattered on my long leather coat. My driver helped me remove them. Then we returned to Berlin.

(In a psychiatric interview before his trial in Israel in 1961, Eichmann described his response to this massacre: “Then I encapsulated myself and carried out my work. I told myself: ‘Up till now [
sic
] I never killed anybody.’ I created a situation for myself in which I could find a spark of inner calm. The main medicament was: I have nothing to do with it all personally. They are not my people. But my nervousness got worse. I had no rest at night. The images came back to me in the darkness.”)

Frustrated by the ghetto’s resistance, Strauch had Jewish workers stopped on their way into the ghetto that evening, ordered to lie down in the snow and shot. Even so, he was able to report no more than 3,412 people murdered that day.

(Kube’s complaint to Heydrich in December 1941 about decorated Jewish war veterans and other “exceptions” included in the first transports of Reich Jews to Minsk elicited this response from Heydrich in March 1942, a characteristic example of Heydrich’s sarcasm and contempt:

You will agree with me that, in the third year of the war, even for the Security Police and the Security Service there are tasks which are more important for the war effort than running about pandering to the bellyaching of Jews, making time-consuming lists and distracting so many of my colleagues from other far more important duties. If I instigated an investigation into the persons on your list at all this was only in order to prove such attacks wrong once and for all in writing. I regret to have to write yet another such justification six and a half years after the enactment of the Nuremberg laws.)

The Einsatzgruppen report for March 1942 including the Minsk Purim massacre in its summary along with several other
Aktionen,
but the scale of killing had clearly changed:

Since the Eastern territory is largely Judenfrei and the few remaining Jews who are required for the most urgent labor tasks have been put in ghettos, the task of the Security Police and the SD consisted here in the seizure of the Jews mostly hiding in the country. Frequently Jews were seized who had left the ghetto without permission or who did not wear the Jewish star.

In Riga three Jews transported from the Reich to the ghetto who had escaped were captured among others and publicly hanged within the ghetto.

During larger actions against the Jews 3,412 were shot in Minsk, 302 in Wilejka, and 2,007 in Baranowicze. . . .

In the remaining territories of the Eastern front the task of the Security Police and the SD, in addition to measures against individual Jews . . . consisted in general purges of larger villages. Thus 15,000 Jews were shot in Rakov and 1,224 Jews in Artenowsk alone so that these places are Judenfrei.

In the Crimea 1,000 Jews and Gypsies were executed.

From the beginning of 1942 onward, the Einsatzgruppen increasingly turned to fighting Soviet partisans, as did units of the Wehrmacht and the Waffen-SS. Between January 1942 and June 1944, writes military historian French MacLean, “the Germans conducted forty-three large-scale anti-partisan operations in the occupied territory in the Soviet Union.” Their greatest challenge was Byelorussia, which they never more than lightly controlled. Into that commissariat, in February 1942, came a paramilitary unit of unsurpassed viciousness and depravity: Sonderkommando Dirlewanger, Hitler and Himmler’s personal creation.

Sonderkommando Dirlewanger had its beginnings in a 1940 discussion between Hitler and Himmler about poachers. Poachers were hunters, they agreed, good at tracking game; those who hunted with firearms were good shots; how wasteful, then, that the repeat offenders among them should languish in Reich prisons when there was a war on. Himmler proposed forming them into a sharpshooter company to hunt partisans and escaped Jews, and Hitler agreed. The small poacher company grew over the next year as violent criminals and SS criminal offenders were added to its number and it took up ghetto guarding in Lublin and tracking Polish partisans in the forests beyond Lvov. By then it had acquired the commander who gave it his name: Oskar Dirlewanger.

Tall, lean, with a scarred, skull-like face and a Hitler mustache, Dirlewanger had been wounded six times during his service in the First World War—shot in the foot, sabered in the chest, shrapneled in the head, shot in the hand, bayoneted in the leg, shot in the left shoulder—had gone on to fight in four different Freikorps, command an armored train and then study for and receive a doctorate in economics. He rose in the SA, but he was a drunkard and a carouser who liked young girls, and in 1934 he was sent to prison for driving while drunk, causing several accidents with injuries and repeatedly having sex in an official car with a girl under the age of consent, which in Germany at that time was fourteen. Released on parole in 1936, he rehabilitated himself by joining the ground forces of the Luftwaffe’s Condor Legion in Spain during the Spanish Civil War. After that war his sponsor in the SS, Brigadeführer Gottlob Berger, convinced Himmler to assign him to command the “poachers,” which Himmler did, commissioning Dirlewanger an Obersturmführer in the Waffen-SS.

“I said to Dirlewanger,” Himmler would brag in a speech late in the war, “ ‘Now, why not look for suitable candidates among the villains, the real criminals, in the concentration camps?’ . . . The atmosphere in the regiment is often somewhat medieval in the use of corporal punishment and so on.” Dirlewanger, himself a professional killer, fully malefic, organized a Sonderkommando of malefically violent criminals and kept them in line with draconian punishments. “Offenders were beaten with clubs,” MacLean instances, “and some were shot without benefit of any judicial proceeding.” The resulting organization was so vicious—enthusiastically extorting, raping, torturing and murdering Poles and Jews— that it even disgusted men like Globocnik, who had it transferred out of the General Government and into Byelorussia to fight partisans in February 1942.