Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and Warning (25 page)

When the Kharkiv Municipal Authority decreed its right to distribute the property of Jews who had fled the German advance, it was transforming a German war of conquest into the possibility of relative social advancement for local Soviet citizens. Naturally, the capacity to redistribute extended also to the property of any Jews who might disappear for other reasons. The Kharkiv Municipal Authority ordered the building supervisors to carry out a census of their buildings, placing remaining Jews on a “yellow list.” In early December 1941, the building supervisors created troikas to help them establish where the remaining Jews lived. On December 14, an announcement appeared around the city requiring Jews to report to a tractor factory the following day on pain of death. The following day, a long and miserable procession of Jews walked along Moskovs’kyi Prospekt, guided by local policemen and a few Germans. One woman stopped at the side of the road and gave birth, there and then, to twins; she and the babies were immediately shot. In the barracks of the tractor factory Jews were guarded by their fellow Kharkiv residents. These guards had the right to kill Jews, and sometimes did. The building supervisors reported that their houses were free of Jews and that apartments and movable property could be redistributed.

The mass shooting of the Jews of Kharkiv that began on December 27, 1941, was carried out by Germans:
Sonderkommando
4a of
Einsatzgruppe
C along with Security Police Battalion 314. By January 2, 1942, the men of these units had murdered some nine thousand people. The bulk of the work that brought Jews to their places of death was done by their fellow Soviet citizens, working within institutions that resembled Soviet models and behaving much as they had under Soviet rule. A few of the local authorities acted from political conviction as anti-communists. Some residents of Kharkiv did hate Soviet rule as a result of the terror of the late 1930s and the famine of the early 1930s. The main political lesson of those experiences, however, had been submission. For the most part, the people who made the murder of Jews possible were simply products of the Soviet system, following a new line, adapting to a new master. The hunt for surviving Jews, ordered by the mayor, was carried out under the banner of the elimination of “Jewish-Communist and bandit-Bolshevik trash.” This language is a hybrid of Soviet form and Nazi content.

No matter where the Germans arrived in the Soviet Union, the result was essentially the same: the mass murder of Jews who remained, planned by the Germans but achieved with much assistance from people of all Soviet nationalities. The Judeobolshevik myth separated Jews from other Soviet citizens and many Soviet citizens from their own pasts. The murder of Jews and the transfer of property eliminated the sense of responsibility for the past, creating a class of people who had gained from the German occupation, and seeming to promise relative social advance in a German future. Soviet Gypsies were not presented as an ideological enemy to the same extent, and did not provide the same degree of harmonization of German worldviews and local fears and needs. But they, too, were murdered in the occupied Soviet Union, and their property was also reallocated by the collaborating local administrations. In Kharkiv, the Gypsies were rounded up at the horse market.

Kharkiv, though a Russian-speaking city, was one of the cradles of Ukrainian culture; the same could not be said of the city named after the leader of the Soviet Union. Stalino, the major industrial city of southeastern Ukraine, known today as Donetsk, was something close to a model Soviet city. Its coal mines and industry, although they predated the Bolshevik Revolution, had been vastly expanded during Stalin’s First Five-Year Plan of 1928–1933. Its hinterlands had been starved during the famine of 1932–1933 and resettled by people from throughout the Soviet Union. The growing city itself attracted workers from Soviet Russia and elsewhere. Stalino was a Soviet melting pot, a Russian-speaking city where Ukrainian national identity was far less present than in Kharkiv, and perhaps less so than anywhere else in Soviet Ukraine. The political identity seems to have been a Soviet one—if so, this was no more hindrance to collaborating with the Germans than anything else. The murder of Jews proceeded in Stalino much as elsewhere.

Because Army Group South of the
Wehrmacht
was slow to advance across Soviet Ukraine, Soviet authority in Stalino and the surrounding Donets Basin collapsed in stages rather than all at once. Communists tore up their party cards in expectation of the German arrival. Peasants were pleased because they expected that the Germans would abolish collective farming. Local men were sent to the front; their families had time to protest Soviet policies before the war came to Stalino. The NKVD tried to plant explosives in the mines to be tripped when the Germans arrived; women and children tried to stop this at Mine 4/21 in Stalino and were shot. The Red Army took livestock from the countryside when it retreated, and communist party members in Stalino absconded with food that was meant for the general population. The local militias, largely made up of miners, dispersed rather than fight the Germans. As the German army reached the Donbas region,
Einsatzgruppe
C killed Jews, sometimes alongside Gypsies, sometimes in mines.

In Stalino, as elsewhere, the stigmatization and murder of local Jews permitted a bridge between occupiers and occupied. The Germans quickly established a local administration in the city, headed by a longtime communist and largely staffed by communists. These new authorities recruited a local police force of some two thousand people, many of whom had also been members of the communist party. These local policemen assisted the Germans in the shooting of some fifteen thousand Jews in Stalino. In some considerable measure, the murder of Jews for their supposed communism was carried out by communists. By murdering the Jews, the local people of Stalino, like local people elsewhere, partook in a lie that emptied their own pasts of responsibility while providing a measure of protection from German rule. Whereas people in the doubly occupied lands were exorcising the specter of their own participation in a Soviet regime that lasted for a year or two, in places such as the Donbas the history that was evacuated was that of a whole generation.

Later, when Soviet power returned, people switched sides again. From that point forward the memory of typically Soviet places such as the Donets Basin has been dominated by a Soviet myth of anti-fascism, in which all Soviet citizens suffered equally under and struggled valiantly against German rule. This is just as true, which is to say just as false, as the wartime myth of anti-communism. The myth of Judeobolshevism in 1941 allowed Soviet citizens to separate themselves from their Jewish neighbors; the myth of the Great Fatherland War against Nazi Germany allowed them to separate themselves from their murder of their Jewish neighbors.

Belarus was the European republic of the USSR most altered by Soviet rule. It was a crucial test for German policy, since here—unlike in Lithuania, Latvia, or even parts of Ukraine—there was no national political resource. There was no meaningful Belarusian national question, and only a few Belarusian nationalists were brought by the German invaders from emigration or from one region of Belarus to another.

The initial German policy to Jews had been the same in Belarus as elsewhere. Indeed, the German mass murder of Jewish women and children began in Belarus on July 19, 1941, when Himmler ordered
Waffen-SS
troops behind Army Group Center to clear the Pripiat Marshes of Jews. On July 31, he indicated that the order included the murder of women. The
Waffen-
SS murdered some 13,788 children, women, and men. As of mid-August,
Einsatzgruppe
B, responsible for Belarus, had killed more Jews than any other
Einsatzgruppe
. But Arthur Nebe, its commander, had no recruitment opportunities comparable to those of Stahlecker in Lithuania and Latvia, since in Belarus there was no political resource. Local collaborators were generally Belarusians and Poles, usually people lacking any political motivation. Nebe also had less reinforcement by other German police units than Jeckeln to his south. In September 1941, the killing of Jews in Belarus fell behind that in the Baltics and in Ukraine.

With less local collaboration in the offing, the SS in Belarus in effect recruited the German army. Whereas Soviet citizens could be recruited by the equation of Bolsheviks and Jews, German army officers were sensitive to a modified logic: the triple equation of Jews, Bolsheviks, and partisans. If Jews were Bolsheviks, then a politically minded local might take part in their killing in order to prove that he was not a Bolshevik (and to profit from the dead Jew’s property). If Jews were partisans, then German officers might want them dead in order to be able to fight a clean and victorious war. The army, which could not steal very much immobile property, also realized that killing Jews and allowing locals to take their houses was a kind of social policy. On September 18, 1941, at Krupki, northeast of Minsk, German soldiers of the Third Battalion of the 354th Infantry Division chose the site for the killing of Jews, and escorted them from the village to the awaiting SS. One soldier, presumably a father himself, allowed a Jewish mother to step away from the column for a moment to pull up her little boy’s pants.

Not long afterwards, German soldiers would murder Jews in Belarus with no assistance from the SS. At a conference at Mahileu, where Army Group Center of the
Wehrmacht
had made its headquarters, Nebe and the Higher SS and Police Leader for the region, Erich von dem Bach-Zelewski, briefed army officers on partisan warfare. They even organized a demonstration. In a village where no partisans were actually found, Germans killed thirty-two Jews, most of them women. The message conveyed there was difficult to miss. Army officers reacted to the lessons of the conference, which took place on September 23–24, in different ways. But enough of them were willing or indeed eager to treat Jews as partisans that the default behavior of the army seemed to change.

By October 1941, the second major German offensive in the east, Operation Typhoon, was under way. There was never supposed to be a second German offensive, since Operation Barbarossa, launched in June, was expected to destroy the Soviet state by September. As terrifying as the initial German advance had been, it was far slower than the Germans had anticipated. The anxiety of delay was experienced first by Army Group North, which did not reach Leningrad. Army Group South made slower progress through Ukraine than expected. Hitler decided to send part of Army Group Center to help Army Group South in September. Once the breakthrough in Ukraine was achieved, Operation Typhoon was to follow: a final push toward Moscow by a regrouped and reinforced Army Group Center, gathering in Belarus almost two million soldiers.

Unlike Operation Barbarossa, which began in doubly occupied territory and reached prewar Soviet territory, Operation Typhoon was to begin and end in prewar Soviet territory. Nevertheless, it had the same basic consequences for Jews. After German troops advanced on September 30, 1941, Soviet Belarus became a killing zone very much like the Baltics and Ukraine. On October 2 and 3, Mahileu became the first sizable city in Belarus where all of the Jews were killed. Even as the German army was advancing east in huge numbers, the German killers presented their actions as defensive. To shoot Jewish babies in Mahileu was, as one German (Austrian) explained to his wife, to prevent something worse: “During the first try, my hand trembled a bit as I shot, but one gets used to it. By the tenth try I aimed calmly and shot surely at the many women, children, and infants. I kept in mind that I have two infants at home, whom these hordes would treat just the same, if not ten times worse. The death that we gave them was a beautiful quick death, compared to the hellish torments of thousands and thousands in the jails of the GPU. Infants flew in great arcs through the air, and we shot them to pieces in flight, before their bodies fell into the pit and into the water.”

Once Operation Typhoon was under way, very little was needed to induce German soldiers to murder Jews. The Third Company of the 691st Regiment of the 339th Infantry Division had been serving the German occupation in France, stationed in the Loire Valley. A few days after its transfer to Belarus, on October 10, 1941, its men were sealing the village of Krucha, marching its Jews to pits, and shooting them all. The soldiers did not relish the task; the commanders seemed to wish to avoid the appearance of weakness in their new assignment. Whatever the reason, murder the soldiers did, although they were not punished if they asked to be excused from the shooting. This army unit, freshly arrived from French wine country, carried out the mass murder of the Jews of Krupki by themselves, with no assistance from the SS.

In Minsk, the capital of prewar Soviet Belarus, the Germans revealed a spectacular scenography of the Judeobolshevik myth. On November 7, 1941, the anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution, Germans and local Belarusians and Russians forced the Jews of Minsk to carry Soviet flags and sing Soviet songs as they marched away from the city. Then the Jews were shot. The symbolism was obvious to all: The Jews were responsible for communism and for the Soviet Union; their elimination would mean its defeat, and of course the excision of responsibility for everyone else. The Germans repeated the performance in Minsk on other Soviet holidays such as Red Army Day and International Women’s Day. As they established a civilian administration in occupied Soviet Belarus they could rely upon Soviet citizens, as they could in Soviet Ukraine and Soviet Russia. In Belarus, communists and members of the Komsomol, the communist youth group, joined the local police and took part in the mass shooting of Jews and other German policies.

With the advance of Operation Typhoon, Belarus became the hinterland of Army Group Center. With all of its swamps and forest, Belarus was well suited to partisan warfare. Even before the Soviets themselves grasped the utility of a partisan war behind the German lines, Germans had found the new ideological cover for the anti-partisan campaign to come: “a partisan is a Jew and a Jew is a partisan.” Jews were first associated with the Soviet regime’s creation, then with its predicted collapse, and then with an expected form of counterattack. Although the Germans had announced that they would not be observing the laws of war in the Soviet Union, and although German campaigns of mass killing were obvious violations of these laws, they were enormously sensitive to partisan campaigns directed against themselves. Any war by the rules must be a war the Germans were winning; so, if the Germans were not winning, someone else must be breaking the rules. Jews appear in this logic as the iniquitous force that seeks to thwart Germans who are struggling righteously for the triumph that nature owes them.

The policy of mass murder of Jewish women and children came slightly later to Belarus, and the Germans found it no easier. Here as elsewhere the imperative to kill women and children became an argument for involving locals—or auxiliary policemen already recruited in Lithuania or Latvia. It was also presumably one of the reasons that a new technique of killing was applied. The method of mass murder by carbon monoxide, already used in Germany and in occupied Poland against people deemed “unworthy of life,” was applied in Belarus to Jews. Vans were adapted so that they pumped their exhaust into their own hold. Packing Jews, especially Jewish children, into these vans was a way to kill them without facing them directly. The children called the vehicles “black ravens.” This is what their parents had called the NKVD vehicles that had taken people away during Stalin’s Great Terror three years before.

By the end of 1941, the Germans, with help from Soviet citizens, had killed some one million Jews in the occupied Soviet Union. The
Einsatzgruppen
had improvised techniques of killing and perfected their political approach to local populations. Along with the Order Police and the
Wehrmacht
, they were moving imperceptibly toward a full implementation of the Judeobolshevik logic—which imperceptibly had become a way of covering defeat rather than of bringing about victory. They could not bring down the Soviet state, but they could kill Jews where they had demolished Soviet institutions. Otto Rasch, the commander of
Einsatzgruppe
C, noted in September 1941 that “the elimination of the Jews” was “practically easier” than the general campaign of colonial exploitation that had been the war’s original aim.

The war proceeded differently along different fronts, with disappointment reaching first Army Group North, then Army Group South, and then Army Group Center. But everywhere the commanders of the
Einsatzgruppen, Wehrmacht
, and police knew that they were not as far east as they were supposed to be. The policemen were available in large numbers for killing Jews precisely because they could not fulfill their original assignment, which had been to control the much larger territory that was supposed to be conquered by the end of 1941. Army commanders were anxious. Soviet resistance was real. Only the
Einsatzgruppen
, and their SS commanders, seemed to have an answer: a war against the Jews in fact as well as in name.

The national identities of the peoples of the Soviet Union, so important to the mental world of German racists, and so prominent in later polemics, made very little difference to their behavior. The Soviet state was a barrier to German power, but no Soviet nation was. Jews died on the territories of the prewar Soviet Union in much the same ways and in much the same proportions as they did in the territories annexed by the Soviet Union in 1939 and 1940. The Germans were aided in their campaign of murder by members of all Soviet nationalities they encountered. When the Germans crossed the border from one Soviet republic to another, they paid little attention. Nor did they need to.

Whereas the Germans occupied Soviet Belarus and Soviet Ukraine in their entirety for much of the war, some 95 percent of the territory of Soviet Russia was spared German occupation. But in the parts of Soviet Russia where German power did reach, Soviet citizens reacted much the same way as Soviet citizens elsewhere. Russians who had been prominent in the communist apparatus were informed by other Russians that they could clear their slate if they killed one Jew. Russian house managers, like house managers everywhere, provided the Germans with lists of Jews in their buildings. Russians (and others) served the Germans as policemen in Soviet Russia from the beginning. The Germans used Russian policemen in anti-Jewish actions in Soviet Russia as soon as they reached its territory. Russians in these auxiliary police forces tracked down Jews in Pskov, Briansk, and Kursk. Russian policemen were present at all of the mass shootings of Jews in occupied Soviet Russia, such as Rostov and Mineral’nye Vody. Russian policemen, like policemen everywhere, reported people who were hiding Jews in order to get their property. Russians informed on one another everywhere, including in the outskirts of besieged Leningrad. Russians were also present in the local police forces that killed Jews beyond Russia, for example, in Vilnius, Riga, Minsk, and Kharkiv.

In the cities of Soviet Russia that fell under German occupation, the local politics and the fate of Jews were the same as in Soviet Ukraine or Soviet Belarus. Army Group Center was held back for two months at Smolensk in western Russia, finally winning an encirclement battle on September 10, 1941. By this time, most of the local Jews, about ten thousand people, had been able to flee. Their Russian neighbors, some of whom had lost their own houses during the intense battle for the city, looted the Jews’ property and took their apartments before the Germans arrived. The appropriation of mobile and immobile property was brought under control and regulated by the authorities installed by the Germans. The initial plunder created an appetite for more. The collaborating local administration of Smolensk, led by Russian communists with impressive records of service to the Soviet Union, ordered a census to record the place of residence of remaining Jews. They then provided the Germans with the personnel needed to place these people in a ghetto. This allowed the rapid seizure of the remaining Jewish property of the city. Once that was achieved, the residences of the ghetto itself could become the next object of desire. In May 1942, the Russian mayor, the noted Soviet jurist Boris Men’shagin, suggested to the Germans that clearing the ghetto would improve the living situation of Russians. Local Russian policemen aided the Germans in murdering the remainder of the Jews of Smolensk a few weeks later.

If the war had gone as Hitler had expected, the winter of 1941 would have brought massive starvation throughout the western Soviet Union. Instead, Jewish children were being gassed in vans as war continued. The war of colonization against the Slavs, though it continued, was yielding to the war of elimination of the Jews.

In nature, thought Hitler, conflict was over food, and the weaker races were to starve. The objective of the Hunger Plan was precisely the starvation of supposedly inferior Slavs. After the defeat of the Red Army and the collapse of the Soviet state, food from the fertile parts of the western Soviet Union, above all Soviet Ukraine, was to feed German civilians. This reorganization of the European political economy was to make Germany self-sufficient and Germans secure and comfortable. Some thirty million Soviet citizens were supposed to starve in the winter of 1941, among them six million inhabitants of Soviet Belarus. This failed. Soviet citizens did indeed starve, and in large numbers: three million in prisoner-of-war camps, a million in Leningrad, tens of thousands more in Soviet Ukrainian cities such as Kharkiv and Kyiv. Yet the result was barely sufficient to feed the German soldiers fighting on the eastern front, and it did little to bring a new bounty home to Germany.

The German invasion of the USSR did create the possibility of distributing the hunger. As German soldiers were ordered to feed themselves and their animals (the Germans invaded with some 750,000 horses) from the land “like in a colonial war,” the allocation of the foodstuffs that remained became a political problem. The result was the invention of a new politics in 1941 and 1942: the redistribution not of food in western and central Europe but of hunger in eastern Europe. Unable to reward civilians in Germany with plentiful food, German policy used food shortages to motivate peoples under their control and to enforce their own racial hierarchies. As early as September 1941, the Germans were no longer seeking to transform an entire region through starvation, but rather to allocate hunger in such a way as to help them win the war. People wanted Jewish property; they also wanted food rations better than those of the Jews.

Like the politics of Judeobolshevism, the politics of relative deprivation subdued resistance and generated collaboration. In the most drastic cases, people killed quickly in order to avoid dying slowly. Once released from starvation camps, Soviet prisoners of war were willing to do anything to stay out, including aiding Germans in the policy of the mass murder of Jews. Someone had to dig all of those pits. On December 7, Soviet prisoners of war were digging pits in the Letbarskii Forest so that Germans could shoot the Jews of Riga. Perhaps the Germans on the scene regarded this as the control of the Judeobolshevik menace. And yet, no matter how many battles the Germans seemed to win, and how many prisoners they took, starved, or exploited, the Red Army kept fighting.

The autumn of 1941 was eventful for ten-year-old Yuri Israilovich German. He was growing up in Kaluga, a city in Soviet Russia, about 190 kilometers southwest of Moscow. Two years earlier his father had disappeared in the middle of the night, arrested by the NKVD on charges of sabotage. A few weeks after the Germans invaded the Soviet Union, his father returned, emaciated and exhausted, from hard labor in the Soviet north. In September 1941, Yuri’s father was mobilized, despite his condition, for the Red Army. With his father gone again, this time to fight the Germans, Yuri began to feel, for the first time, that he was being stigmatized as a Jew. A Russian neighbor said that the Germans would “deal with” people like him when they arrived. When German troops did reach the city in October 1941, Kaluga residents greeted them with bread and salt. Very quickly a local administration, following German orders, established a ghetto inside a cloister that had been closed under Soviet rule. Yuri and other children were forced to work in the fields, and to dig pits for murdered Jews. Some of the Jews inside the ghetto were shot, including those regarded as disabled and a kind teacher who had tried to help the children. Then, to everyone’s surprise, shells began to burst around the city, and gunfire was heard. It was December 1941, and the Red Army had returned. In haste, the Germans tried to liquidate the ghetto, burning its buildings and shooting with machine guns at the Jews who tried to escape. Yuri and his mother were among the few survivors. They returned to their house, which had in the meantime been taken by an Orthodox priest.