Authors: Lynn H. Nicholas
For the older students it was, at first, all a lark, and they flocked with their friends to the recruiting centers and went out to the construction sites taking little with them, thinking they would be back within a day. In town, during the idyllic white nights, they sat on roofs with their buckets, shovels, and axes, reciting poetry and watching the surreal scenes around them. “It was so quiet … hardly any cars on the street. Strange. I felt as though I were flying over the city—a silvery city, each roof and each spire engraved against the sky. And the blimps!… At night, in the air, they swam like white whales under the clouds.”
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The realities of war came soon. German fighters continually strafed the streams of refugees heading toward the city and those working on the outer defenses of Leningrad.
Over the roads the shells fell. Methodically. Precise. The Germans had an artillery spotter … who through his binoculars could see the road as well as the palm of his hand. Soldiers dashed from their dugouts, grabbing youngsters and women, pulling them from the road, out of the line of fire. A herd of cattle, stirring up a cloud of dust, frightened by the flaming asphalt of the road (set afire by a shell), dashed out into a mined field.
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Despite the efforts of the soldiers, thousands of young people were killed and hastily buried nearby. There was little food and no facilities for
the workers, who, after weeks away, would straggle back into the city in pitiful condition. By the end of June, the young volunteers were not just being recruited for construction work, but also were being sent into the front lines, where their total lack of training led to enormous losses. The Germans and their allies gave no quarter to the teenage fighters. Most of the boys in one defiant detachment, wounded and captured near Vyborg, were shot, and one was dragged by the neck behind a car and left for dead.
By July 10, as rumors of airborne attacks on Leningrad multiplied, plans were being made to train children as young as eight in hand-to-hand combat. Other groups of young boys were sent to paint over road signs so that the Germans would lose their way if they penetrated the city. The paratroopers did not come, but on September 9 the Germans cut the last rail line out of Leningrad, and no further escape was possible. The killing on the outer defenses would continue and, once German artillery was within range, death would prevail in the city.
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Similar efforts would later be made in Moscow as the German vanguard advanced to a line less than fifty miles from the capital:
Those were dreadful days.… I was ordered, like most of the girls at the factory, to join the Labor Front. We were taken some kilometers out of Moscow. There was a large crowd of us, and we were told to dig trenches. We were all very calm, but dazed, and couldn’t take it in. On the very first day we were machine-gunned by a Fritz who swooped right down. Eleven of the girls were killed and four wounded.
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Some two million other Muscovites fled or were evacuated eastward in enormous rail convoys, which went in sporadic stages to various cities in Siberia. Once again, the Germans would be stopped just short of the city.
In all the chaos of the first triumphant weeks of the invasion, the implementation of the Nazi extermination policies was easily shrouded in deception. In the Baltic nations, and in eastern Poland and the bordering areas of the Ukraine, considerable use was made of local dissident groups and ancient hatreds in the carrying out of the program. Pro-German and nationalistic militias in the Baltic states were recruited as auxiliary police forces to help root out Communists, partisans, and Jews. The commander of the Einsatzgruppe operating in that area later testified:
It was desirable … that the Jewish question not be raised immediately, as the unusually tough measures would also have created shock in German
circles. It had to appear to the outside that the indigenous population itself reacted naturally against the decades of oppression by the Jews and against the terror created by the Communists in recent history, and that the indigenous population carried out these first measures of its own accord.… It was the duty of the Security Police to initiate these self purging actions and to guide them into the proper channels.
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In areas where pogroms and massacres could not easily be fomented, the killings of Jews were said to be reprisals for looting or partisan activity. In the early days the targets were mostly men. Large groups were also still taken away for forced labor. As the Einsatzgruppen themselves became more accustomed to these executions, the killing would be extended to women and children. The numbers being shot rose exponentially, and less and less care was taken to hide the murders from the inhabitants or from regular German troops. Indeed, Romanian troops participating in the murders in the southern USSR did so with such gusto that even the SS was “disturbed” and felt that more discipline should be introduced into their operations.
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Whether the target group was large or small, the Nazi killing methodology was, with a few variations, the same. Troops would enter a village or town and order Jews to assemble for “resettlement.” Sometimes the soldiers went from house to house, forcing Jews before them. Those too old or young or too sick to walk were often shot in situ. The rest were taken to a planned killing ground, where huge burial pits had usually been dug, sometimes by the victims themselves. In the first five months of their activities, the Einsatzgruppen would kill some half-million people, of whom the vast majority were Jews. These unbelievable events have been described many times; but almost every historian returns to the account of a Nuremberg witness, the German engineer Hermann Graebe, simply because his words convey, better than any other, the horror that results when one group of humans has been indoctrinated to regard another group as so alien that it must be exterminated:
I accompanied M. to the … site and near it saw large mounds of earth.… A few trucks were parked in front of the mounds from which people were being driven by armed Ukrainian militia under the supervision of an SS man.… I could now hear a series of rifle shots from behind the mounds. The people who had got off the trucks—men, women and children of all ages—had to undress … they had to place their clothing on separate piles for shoes, clothing and underwear.…
Without weeping or crying these people undressed and stood together in family groups, embracing each other and saying good-bye.… I did not hear a single complaint or plea for mercy.… I watched a family of about eight, a man and a woman … with their children of about one, eight and ten, as well as two grown up daughters of about twenty and twenty-four. An old woman with snow-white hair held the one-year-old child in her arms, singing to it and tickling it.… The child squealed with delight. The married couple looked on with tears in their eyes. The father held the ten-year-old boy by the hand speaking softly to him. The boy was struggling to hold back his tears. The father pointed … to the sky, stroked his head and seemed to explain something to him. At this moment, the SS man near the ditch called out something to his comrade. The latter counted off about twenty people and ordered them behind the mound. The family of which I have just spoken was among them.…
I walked around the mound and stood in front of the huge grave. The bodies were lying so tightly packed … 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.… I estimate that [the ditch] already held about a thousand bodies.… 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 … saw the bodies contorting or, the heads already inert, sinking on the corpses beneath.… I was surprised not to be ordered away, but I noticed three postmen in uniform standing nearby. Then the next batch came up.
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A slower methodology was used to eliminate the Soviet prisoners of war, among whom were thousands of the teenagers so hastily recruited to defend the nation. By late September 1941, their numbers would reach more than 1.8 million, and by war’s end, more than 5 million. Of these, more than 4 million died.
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The Germans would later admit to killing 3.7 million, but the policies of Stalin were also responsible in great part for this slaughter. The prisoners’ chances of survival were, unbeknownst to them, marginal from the beginning. Though tsarist Russia had adhered to the Hague Convention of 1907, the Soviet regime had refused to sign the 1929 Geneva Convention, and, despite strong efforts by the International Red Cross, the United States, and other nations to persuade them to do so once the war began, continued to reject it and to refuse all help.
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As had been true during the famines Stalin had inflicted on the Ukraine, he did
not wish any scrutiny of his operations by foreign observers and was willing to sacrifice millions of his own citizens to maintain his secrets.
Hitler was delighted at this attitude, which released him from any requirement to allow inspections of the POW camps and enabled him to make whatever feeding and shelter arrangements he desired. These were precious few. Even before the invasion, orders had been issued not to waste food on the Russians. At the sites where they surrendered, the Germans had made no provision to care for the hundreds of thousands of prisoners, some of whom were as young as fifteen. Rationing quotas promulgated by the Nazis in August 1941 were far below the Geneva Convention standard, and even these were seldom fulfilled.
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Early plans to take the POWs back to camps that had been prepared for some 790,000 of them in the Reich and Poland were canceled when the sheer numbers of captured “Bolsheviks” became too threatening to Nazi officials. Instead, in ghastly forced marches, during which hundreds of men, so weakened by hunger that they could not go on, were shot in full view of the local population, the prisoners were sent away from the combat zones and confined in excrement-covered transit enclosures with virtually no food and no sanitary facilities whatsoever. The wounded were put to death by lethal injection. Tens of thousands more prisoners died of typhus. But most of the POWs, in some places as many as 2,500 a day, died of pure starvation.
But two could play at this game. In the spring of 1943 the Germans would find a mass grave at Katyn, near Smolensk, containing the remains of 4,000 of the Polish officers who had been murdered by the Russians. German prisoners of war taken by Soviet forces, most notably after Stalingrad, would also receive brutal treatment.
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One German soldier remembered that the Russians had forced some captives “to stand naked in the cold with hands raised and poured water over them until they died from exposure.”
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The USSR’s ethnic German population would also suffer. Soon after Hitler’s rise to power, Stalin had taken certain precautions in regard to those living west of the Urals. In late 1934, the Central Committee of the Communist Party, under the guise of recording the original nationalities of all Soviet workers, had, like the Nazis, managed to create secret files on all the ethnic Germans in the nation, including their occupations and the size of their families.
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Within a few weeks, as one official involved in the list project later testified:
Every German born in Russia or brought there temporarily or permanently as a worker in the wide field of Soviet industry … was individually
registered to the fullest extent … and this [was done] in each and every National Commissariat, and also all personnel data were listed.… Thus there was no longer a single corner in the whole Soviet Union that was not completely covered by the registration, nor were there any longer Germans whose official employment and family size were not known.
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In January 1935, all Germans living in a sixty-mile-wide strip along the western borders of the USSR were rounded up and sent to remote Murmansk. In other areas, they were carefully removed from jobs in strategic industries and services, and many were put under surveillance. Once the Nazis invaded, ethnic German men aged sixteen to sixty in the western battle zones were evacuated east in the very first convoys, along with the livestock and industrial matériel. Their wives, teenaged daughters, and young children stayed behind to work on fortifications and then were also sent east, not necessarily to the same places as their male relatives.
Rounding up ethnic Germans in the combat zones was necessarily haphazard, and many were left behind, but in the case of the Autonomous Volga Republic, farther to the east, where two-thirds of the population was of German descent, many of their families having lived in the region since the days of Catherine the Great, the deportation was highly organized and complete. In early July 1941, NKVD units moved into the capital and major towns and isolated them. Communications and transportation were closed down. German community leaders were shot, and commando units took control of houses and farms. Incidents were fabricated to imply that the German residents were saboteurs and spies. The first transports left in late July, and by the end of September the area had been completely cleared of its 500,000 or so German settlers and the Autonomous Volga Republic dissolved.
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Within days of the departure of each relay, refugees and evacuees from the war zones, including a large group of Spanish Civil War children, were brought in and placed in the abandoned houses and institutions of the Volga Germans. Here too, half-eaten meals on tables, miserable unmilked cattle in the barns, and other evidence of the rapid departure of the former owners shocked the new residents.
More deportations in the usual cattle cars would take place from every German enclave, and as the summer passed and the cold set in, death stalked these groups as it did all others. In one train sent from the Caucasus in November 1941, 400 children died. And, like the Poles before them, the deportees who survived were billeted in the mud huts of long-exiled kulaks and found little to sustain life at their remote destinations.
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