The War of the World: History's Age of Hatred (72 page)

Nevertheless, we should not forget the obvious impulse of self-preservation. Though far smaller than those they inflicted, the casualties suffered by the German forces in the first phase of Operation Barbarossa were in fact much heavier than in any of Hitler’s earlier campaigns. In July 1942, the month of the Józefów massacre, the total number of German soldiers killed or missing in action was just under 40,000 and it rose to more than 60,000 the following month. In the midst of a full-scale war, killing Jews was a soft option compared with front-line duties. Old men, women and children could, after all, be relied on not to shoot back. When the SS Cavalry Brigade swept through the Pripet Marshes in August 1941, slaughtering 14,000 mostly Jewish civilians, their total casualties numbered just two, both killed when they drove over a stray landmine. That same month the 1st SS Brigade shot 44,125 people, mostly Jews, in the vicinity of Kamenets, having been explicitly ordered by Himmler to spare only ‘working Jews’. Again, no one fought back. It was not until the Warsaw ghetto uprising of April–May 1943 that the Germans encountered any serious resistance from Jewish populations.

Just how easy the task of mass murder could become is chillingly clear from a German eyewitness account of the mass execution of 500 Jews at Dubno in the Ukraine in 1942:

The people who had got off the lorries – men, women and children of all ages – had to undress on the orders of an SS man who was carrying a riding or dog whip in his hand. They had to place their clothing in separate piles for shoes, clothing and underwear. I saw a pile of shoes containing approximately 800–1,000 pairs, and great heaps of underwear and clothing…

I can still remember how a girl, slender and dark, pointed at herself as she went past me saying ‘twenty-three’.

I walked round the mound and stood in front of the huge grave. The bodies were lying so tightly packed together that only their heads showed, from almost all of which blood ran down over their shoulders. Some were still moving. Others raised their hands and turned their heads to show they were still alive. The ditch was already three quarters full. I estimate that it already held about a thousand bodies. I turned my eyes towards the man doing the shooting. He was an SS man: he sat, legs swinging, on the edge of the ditch. He had an automatic rifle resting in his knees and was smoking a cigarette. The people, completely naked, climbed down steps which had been cut into the clay wall of the ditch, stumbled over the heads of those lying there and stopped at the spot indicated by the SS man. They lay down on top of the dead or wounded: some stroked those still living and spoke quietly to them. Then I heard a series of rifle shots… I was surprised not to be ordered away, but I noticed three postmen in uniform standing nearby. Then the next batch came.

By this time stripping the victims had become standard practice. The motivation was as much prurience as parsimony; a desire to degrade and humiliate those who were about to die, as well as to ogle the younger women. Indeed, as this account makes clear, there was something consciously spectacular about these monstrous crimes. There were voyeurs as well as perpetrators; some even took photographs.

Some men – like police secretary Walter Mattner from Vienna – were able to rationalize shooting women and children by the hundred. ‘When the first truckload arrived,’ he wrote to his wife from Mogilev in Byelorussia in October 1941, ‘my hand was slightly trembling when shooting, but one gets used to this. When the tenth load arrived I was already aiming more calmly and shot securely at the many women, children, and infants. Considering that I too have two infants at home, with whom these hordes would do the same, if not ten times worse. The death we gave to them was a nice, quick death compared with the hellish torture of thousands upon thousands in the dungeons of the GPU. Infants were flying in a wide circle through the air and we shot them down still in flight, before they fell into the pit and into the
water. Let’s get rid of this scum that tossed all of Europe into the war and is still agitating in America… After our return home, then it will be the turn of our Jews.’ Not everyone was so utterly devoid of human feeling. Only gradually did the SS come to realize that steps should be taken to conceal what was being done – and to find a more efficient, and less demoralizing, mode of murder. Himmler himself did not much relish the sight of the one mass execution he witnessed, at Minsk in August 1941. Was there no third way, preferable both to mass shootings and to starvation or epidemics in the ghettos, which were becoming impossibly crowded as the first transports of Jews began to arrive from Western Europe?

As early as July 16, 1941,
Sturmbannführer
Rolf-Heinz Höppner wrote to Eichmann asking whether the use of ‘a quick-acting agent’ would not be ‘the most humane solution to dispose of the Jews, insofar as they are not capable of work’. The answer had, as we have seen, already been pioneered in the mental asylums of Germany. In September 1941, following the example of the T-4 ‘euthanasia’ programme, 500 mental patients were gassed at Mogilev. Three months later, at Chelmno, specially designed vans with exhaust pipes connected to sealed rear compartments were used for the first time to asphyxiate Jewish prisoners. The first and only industrialized genocide had begun.

The executioners at Józefów knew few, if any, of their victims personally. They were in a war zone, in an unfamiliar landscape, killing alien people. But 150 miles to the north, the Jews of Jedwabne – who had accounted for over 60 per cent of that town’s population of just over 2,000 in 1931 – were killed by their very own neighbours, people they had lived alongside all their lives.

On the morning of July 10,1941, eight Germans came to Jedwabne and met with the town authorities, including the mayor, Marian Karolak. The Germans argued that at least one Jewish family from each profession should be left alive, but a local Polish carpenter replied: ‘We have enough of our own craftsmen, we have to destroy
all the Jews, none should stay alive.’ The mayor and other Poles present agreed. According to the testimony of Szmul Wasersztajn, one of the few Jewish survivors, what followed was a full-scale pogrom: ‘Beards of old Jews were burned, newborn babies were killed at their mothers’ breasts, people were beaten murderously and forced to sing and dance. In the end they proceeded to the main action – the burning.’ The Jews were herded into the barn of the town baker, Bronislaw Sleszynski, and incinerated. This was not the work of a few local ruffians, but of roughly half the male Polish population, led by respectable notables like Karolak and Sleszynski. Any Jews who tried to escape were hunted down in the surrounding fields – again, by their own neighbours. The few Germans present confined themselves to taking photographs. In the words of historian Jan Gross, ‘Everybody who was in town on this day, and in possession of a sense of sight, smell, or hearing, either participated in or witnessed the tormented deaths of the Jews of Jedwabne.’ Only a handful of people acted to save their fellow citizens. Stanislaw Ramotowski helped his future wife Rachela Finkelsztejn to hide. Antonina Wyrzykowska kept seven Jews hidden in her house, among them Szmul Wasersztajn, with whom she had an affair. The father of Leszek Dziedzic also helped Wasersz-tajn to survive the war. It is notable that two out of these three were sexually involved with at least one of the people they saved, underlining the degree of intimacy that had previously existed between Jews and Christians in Jedwabne.

What happened there was by no meansunique. In Józefów, too, some local Poles had helped the Germans to round up the town’s Jews. The same happened in the village of Radzilow, where the Poles prevented their Jewish neighbours from fleeing, as well as in Oleksin. In Kraków some Poles eagerly joined in the German-led looting of Jewish stores and public beatings of Jews, and readily seized the opportunity to acquire Jewish property at bargain-basement prices. It is simply not credible to attribute all such violence toactive German encouragement. Nor was this phenomenon peculiarly Polish. In Lwów in July 1941, Jews were massacred by Ukrainians on the ground that they had collaborated with the NKVD. There were similar though smaller-scale reprisals in Kremets. In other Ukrainian towns like Stanyslaviv, Tarnopol, Skalat and Kosiv, local people initiated pogroms, digging
mass graves for their victims without any need for German direction. In the Latvian capital, Riga, there was a ferocious pogrom on the night of July 1, directed not by the Germans but by local Thunder Cross members. Boris Kacel, who had grown up in a ‘middle-class neighbourhood’ of the city where ‘the variousethnic groups… were friendly to each other’ was astonished by what he witnessed:

The Latvians expressed their hatred of the Jews through physical acts and angry words. They accused the Jews of being Communists and blamed them for all the ills to which they had been subjected during Soviet rule. In my wildest dreams, I could never have imagined the hidden animosity the Latvians had for their Jewish neighbours. Trucks arrived carrying small vigilante groups of ten to fifteen armed Latvians, who wore armbands in their national colours of red, white, and red. These men intended to kidnap Jews off the street and take away their personal belongings. The prisoners were then forcibly loaded onto the trucks, taken to the woods, and killed. It was terrifying to go outside, as one had to be aware of the vigilante groups that drove around the streets. The mobile killing squads… were in full command of the city, and nobody challenged their presence or their unconscionable killings. I did not expect such a severe assault; after all, the Jews had lived with the Latvians for many years. The two groups had always tolerated each other and had lived together in a friendly, harmonious atmosphere… The greatest tragedy was that these crimes were committed not by strange, invading forces, but by local Latvians, who knew their victims by their first names… The Jews soon had to seek German protection from the vicious Latvian hordes.

Similar scenes were played out in Latgale and Daugavpils, where more than a thousand Jews were murdered before a single German had materialized. One German observer described what he saw in Latvia as ‘monstrous’. There was little difference to the south in Lithuania, where nationalist underground posters proclaimed ‘the fateful and final hour… to settle our account with the Jews’. In Kaunas, German soldiers merely stood and watched as locals beat Jews to death in the streets. Between half and two-thirds of the Jews there were killed not by Germans but by other Lithuanians. In Borisov, across the border in Byelorussia, it was drunken policemen who rounded up, stripped and shot the Jews. In parts of Romania, too, the
Jews were killed before the Germans had even arrived. On the night of January 21, 1941, ninety-three Jews were stripped naked and shot in the Jilava forest, near Bucharest; others were slaughtered at the Stralueti abattoir, their bodies hung on meat hooks with labels reading ‘Kosher Meat’. Five months later 4,000 Jews were killed in Iasi in a week-long orgy of violence witnessed by Curzio Malaparte, correspondent for the
Corriere della Sera
:

Hordes of Jews pursued by soldiers and maddened civilians armed with knives and crowbars fled along the streets; groups of policemen smashed in house doors with their rifle butts; windows opened suddenly and screaming dishevelled women in nightgowns appeared with their arms raised in the air; some threw themselves from windows and their faces hit the asphalt with a dull thud. Squads of soldiers hurled hand grenades through the little windows level with the street into the cellars where many people had vainly sought safety; some soldiers dropped to their knees to look at the results of the explosions with in the cellars and turned laughing faces to their companions. Where the slaughter had been the heaviest the feet slipped in blood; everywhere the hysterical and ferocious toil of the progrom filled the houses and streets with shot, and weeping, with terrible screams and cruel laughter.

Far from disappearing after Corneliu Codreanu’s execution (see
Chapter 7
), the Iron Guard had grown in power; indeed, after the overthrow of the monarchy, General Ion Antonescu had appointed Codreanu’s successor, Horia Sima, as his Vice-Premier and proclaimed a ‘National Legionary State’. As loyal allies, Romanian troops were also responsible for some of the worst anti-Semitic violence after the invasion of the Soviet Union, notably in Odessa. Some Hungarians also betrayed their Jewish neighbours, if only by denouncing them once the Germans had occupied their country.

In short, while the ‘final solution’ was unmistakably German in design, it is impossible to overlook the enthusiasm with which many other European peoples joined in the killing. Nor did the anti-Semitic violence of the early 1940scome as a bolt from the blue. It had been prefigured by the escalating persecutions of the 1930s. It did not take much to move some Poles from prejudice to discrimination to violent exclusion and finally, as in Jedwabne, extermination. Yet the point about Jedwabne is that it is simply an extreme, and now well
documented, case of a Europe-wide phenomenon. Collaborators could be found not only in countries that allied themselves with Germany – Italy, Romania, Hungary and Bulgaria – but also in Norway, Denmark, Holland, Belgium, France, Yugoslavia, Greece and the Soviet Union, countries the Germans invaded and occupied. Some were undoubtedly motivated by a hatred of the Jews as violent as that felt by the Nazi leadership. Others were actuated by envy or base greed, seizing the opportunity afforded by German rule to steal their neighbours’ property. Self-preservation also played its part. There were even Jewish collaborators, like the uniformed men of the Office to Combat Usury and Profiteering who policed the Warsaw ghetto, or the leaders of the various Jews’ Councils who helped organize the liquidation of the ghettos, or the concentration camp prisoners who accepted a measure of delegated authority in the (usually vain) hope of saving themselves.

The experience of Jedwabne typifies the way German rule also fomented civil war. It was as if even the approach of German troops encouraged conflict to erupt in multi-ethnic communities. Poles were not the only killers, Jews not the only victims. Germans themselves could fall victim to this kind of violence. Between four and five thousand ethnic Germans were murdered in Poland in September 1939 as Poles took revenge for their country’s invasion. They then retaliated by forming ‘self-protection’ groups, which were ultimately subordinated to SS leadership. By the time that had happened, however, these groups had already massacred more than four thousand Poles. As a philologist, Victor Klemperer was struck by the way the Nazis delighted in euphemistic neologisms like
Volkstumskampf
(ethnic conflict) and
Flurbereinigung
(fundamental cleansing). This daily subversion of the German language, he believed, was far more effective than the more overt kinds of propaganda. Sanitized language also made the cycle of ethnic violence easier to live with.