Ostkrieg (20 page)

Important in these early days was the blurring of the distinction between ideologically inspired murder and the pacification operations of the rear-area security units of the army. The Army High Command consistently encouraged a harsh response to “anti-German” elements as an effective preventive measure, while the OKW had already in mid-May issued guidelines demanding “ruthless and energetic action against Bolshevik agitators, guerrillas, saboteurs, and Jews.” Some commanders had, on their personal initiative, gone even further. Colonel-General Hoepner, the commander of Panzergruppe A, asserted that the war against the Soviet Union touched on the very existence of Germany and, thus, demanded the “complete destruction of the enemy,” especially the “exponents of the present Russian-Bolshevik system.” To many officers, the political commissars, the “exponents of the Jewish-Bolshevik world outlook,” had introduced “Asiatic methods” of barbarity into the war. These “Asiatic methods,” Hitler had stressed in an earlier order, “could not be countered with western European means.” As one staff officer concluded in a mid-July report: “We have all come to know these Asiatic methods, every town, every village in the Ukraine harbors its unfortunate victims. . . . Our duty and our right to free the world from the Red plague are all the greater.”
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In addition, top German commanders had a visceral hatred of communism based on their traumatic experiences of the revolutionary chaos and political collapse of November 1918, for which they held the Jews primarily responsible, an attitude reinforced by the growing brutality of the war in the east. In early October, Field Marshal von Reichenau, commander of the Sixth Army, stressed to his men that the goal of the
campaign was the complete destruction of the Jewish-Bolshevik system, reminding his troops, “The soldier in the east is not just a fighter according to the rules of war, but also the bearer of an implacable national idea, and the avenger of all the bestialities inflicted on the German[s]. . . . For that reason, the soldier must have full understanding of the need for a harsh but just punishment of Jewish subhumanity.” Nor was Reichenau's attitude unique. Colonel-General Hoth also understood the war as an ideological struggle to the death, urging his troops to recognize, “This struggle can only end with the annihilation of one or the other; there can be no settlement.” Hoth justified this harsh attitude, and the executions being carried out by Einsatzgruppe C, by pointing to the alleged guilt of the Jews for German sufferings after World War I. Manstein, too, picked up on this theme of justified revenge, stressing to his men, “The Jewish-Bolshevik system must be wiped out once and for all. . . . [The German soldier must be] the bearer of a national idea, and avenger of all the atrocities inflicted on him and the German people.” The Jews, as the supporters of the partisans and the intellectual carriers of “Bolshevik terror,” Manstein stressed, had to be harshly punished. Terror had to be legitimized; mass executions were to be seen not as murder but as justifiable reprisals for atrocities against the German people as well as a preventive measure to provide security in the present.
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Nor were non-Nazi generals unaffected by the poisoned ideological climate. When General Franz von Roques, the commander of Rear Army North, complained to the commander in chief, Field Marshal Ritter von Leeb, about mass executions of Lithuanian Jews in Kaunas, Leeb, a deeply religious man, noted in his diary, “We have no influence over these measures. The only thing to do is keep clear of them. Roques is no doubt correct that the Jewish question will probably not be solved in this manner. The surest way to solve it would be through sterilization of all Jewish men.” If even Leeb, surely no friend of the Nazis, saw mass sterilization as a humane alternative to mass murder, it could surely be no surprise, then, that army personnel shot large numbers of political commissars, regarded as Jews and easily recognizable by their special uniform insignia, in the first weeks of the war.
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Although Hitler had intended just such an overlapping of motivations, two other factors also encouraged a radicalization of operations: the shootings and mutilation of German prisoners of war by Soviet troops and Stalin's call on 3 July for unleashing partisan war against the invaders and killing them everywhere. Hitler positively welcomed the latter measure, remarking in mid-July that the partisan war “gives us the possibility of exterminating anyone who opposes us.” As for the
former, within the first two weeks of the war, numerous incidents of shootings of German prisoners had been reported as well as instances of inhuman treatment. Both were played up by Goebbels's propaganda machine as typical examples of the perfidy of Jewish-Bolshevism, the propaganda minister boasting that Soviet atrocities had demonstrated to the Landsers the justice and necessity of the German attack while assuring that “our soldiers will return from the Soviet Union as radical anti-Bolsheviks.”
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Nor did German troops, increasingly concerned for their own survival, find it difficult to dehumanize an enemy who chose to resist fanatically. “It's not people we're fighting against here, but simply animals,” concluded one Landser in early July after witnessing the mutilated remains of comrades recently taken prisoner by the Russians. Karl Fuchs, a committed Nazi ideologue, remarked of Russian prisoners of war in a letter to his wife, “Hardly ever do you see the face of a person who seems rational and intelligent. . . . The wild, half crazy look in their eyes makes them appear like imbeciles.” The tendency of Soviet troops to respond in kind to German atrocities led one soldier to conclude, “Bestiality breeds bestiality.” Nazi propaganda had demonized and dehumanized the Soviet population even before the campaign, but specific actions, such as the early July massacre and mutilation of 153 German prisoners, found with eyes gouged out and limbs and genitals hacked off, seemed to confirm this judgment while instilling an elemental fear of the enemy in many Landsers.
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One Landser in early July expressed well this intersection of the political and personal, noting graphically in a letter to his parents what he and his fellow soldiers had done after discovering the bound and mutilated bodies of German Landsers, as well as some two thousand Ukrainians and ethnic Germans, left behind by the retreating Soviets:

Revenge was quick to follow. Yesterday we and the SS were merciful, for every Jew we found was shot immediately. Today things have changed, for we again found 60 fellow soldiers mutilated. Now the Jews must carry the dead out of the basement, lay them out nicely, and then they are shown the atrocities. After they have seen the victims, they are killed with clubs and spades.

So far, we have sent about 1,000 Jews into the hereafter, but that is far too few for what they have done. The Ukrainians have said that the Jews had all the leadership positions and, together with the Soviets, had a regular public festival while executing the Germans and Ukrainians. I ask you, dear parents, to make this
known. . . . If there should be doubts, we will bring photos with us. Then there will be no more doubts.
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The presence of SS personnel was also revealing, confirming as it did the reports of excellent cooperation between the army and the death squads. This cooperation, at a minimum, involved providing the Einsatzgruppen with equipment, supplies, ammunition, transport, and housing. Without the logistic and administrative support provided by the Wehrmacht, murder on such a large scale would hardly have been possible. At times, army units played a more active role, helping set up ghettos, identifying and guarding the victims, and participating in the shootings themselves. An early July diary entry of Robert Neumann, a corporal in the Sixty-second Infantry Division, illustrated well the de facto nature of the cooperation of army units in the killing process: “We arrived in Minsk. Our battalion got the task of guarding six-thousand prisoners and shooting all the Jews in the city. Many prisoners fled in the night and we had to make use of our weapons. We killed five-hundred Jews alone.” A few months later, evidently hardened to such tasks, Neumann reported on a mass execution near Orsha. “Yesterday our lieutenant sought fifteen men with strong nerves,” he noted.

Naturally I volunteered. . . . The lieutenant explained to us what we had to do. There were about a thousand Jews in the village of Krupka and they were all supposed to be shot today . . . Punctually at 7:00
A.M
. all the Jews reported to the assembly point—men, women, and children. . . . The whole formation then marched off in the direction of the nearest swamp. The execution squad, to which I belonged, marched in front. . . . The Jews had been told that they were all going to be sent to Germany to work there. But as we went straight over the tracks . . . and further in the direction of the swamp, the light went on for most of them. A panic broke out and the guard detail had their hands full to keep the bunch together. As we reached the swamp . . . fifteen yards ahead was a deep ditch full of water. The first ten had to stand next to this ditch and undress to the waist, then wade into the water, and the firing squad, that is us, stood over them. . . . Ten shots, ten Jews bumped off. It went on like that until we had disposed of all of them. . . . It was a spectacle that one will not quickly forget.

Two days later, Neumann was at it again, this time, since there was no nearby swamp, “depositing” Jews in the sand.
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The assumption of an implicit link between Jews and Communists, as well as the notion that Jews instigated atrocities and acts of resistance, was widespread among officers and in the ranks. The major concern of officers, in fact, seemed to be the often overenthusiastic participation of Wehrmacht soldiers in the shootings as well as the chronic problem of “execution tourism” as soldiers would often flock to scenes of executions and snap photographs. Although some officers urged a different approach, favoring a policy of winning the cooperation of the local population and decrying the large-scale shooting of hostages, the OKH insisted that the security of the German soldier and the rapid pacification of such a vast area required hard and merciless action. Any leniency, it was believed, would be misinterpreted as weakness that would only encourage partisan resistance. By the autumn, in fact, just such an upsurge in the partisan war fed a growing sense of vulnerability among average soldiers as they realized the inadequacy of German security forces in the immensity of Russia. Those assigned to security units, generally older and less trained, often felt beleaguered and isolated in a hostile and alien landscape. Atrocity fed atrocity, as one soldier explained: “We . . . may be ruthless, but the partisans also wage an inhuman war and show no mercy.” War brutalizes, with some dehumanization of the enemy to be expected, but the vicious cycle of atrocities and revenge unleashed by partisan war increased the pressure to participate in or ignore excesses. In this battle for naked existence, as Christian Hartmann has emphasized, many men, seemingly unlikely candidates to commit such crimes because of their age or previous socialization, “began to orient themselves much more strongly around social Darwinistic principles.” Fear of partisans contributed mightily to the Landsers' readiness to cooperate with the Einsatzgruppen and security forces. By the autumn, both army units and, more frequently, rear security units routinely shot Jews as a “retaliatory measure” aimed at quashing the increasingly effective partisan movement.
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By late summer, Wehrmacht, SS, and police officials agreed on the inseparable link between Jews and partisans, which both increased the need for interagency cooperation and meant that intensified pacification measures fell most harshly on Jews. Racial and security concerns thus trumped the economic considerations of using Jews as a labor force; that autumn, Himmler repeatedly assured his men in the field of the need to liquidate Jews in order to crush Bolshevism and secure territory for German settlement. In mid-September, Keitel demanded “relentless and energetic measures, above all against the Jews, the main supporters of Bolshevism,” while, a month later, Brauchitsch echoed this with
his own call for “ruthless and merciless” action. Jews, the commander of one security division emphasized, were “the sole supporters that the partisans can find” and, thus, should be remorselessly destroyed. Throughout Belorussia and Ukraine in late September and early October, as a result, SS and police units, supported by Wehrmacht security divisions, employed a task-oriented, flexible approach, mimicking the famed
Auftragstaktik
(mission-oriented tactics) in the military arena, in order to promote an efficient “de-Jewification” of the region.
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The best known of these ubiquitous mass executions by the murder squads, that of over thirty-three thousand men, women, and children at Babi Yar in late September 1941, illustrated well the intersection of security and ideological motives as well as the ample cooperation between army and SS. Beyond the obvious fact that it was German military success that created the conditions for the murder of the Jews of Kiev, relations between Reichenau, the commander of the Sixth Army, whose units seized the city on 19 September, and the head of Sonderkommando 4a of Einsatzgruppe C, SS Colonel Paul Blobel, were excellent. The two had already worked closely on coordinating the murder of Jews during the preceding months, with Blobel in personal contact with Reichenau during this period. The two also shared similar racial and ideological views that made the killing of Jews imperative. Just over a month earlier, in fact, Reichenau had personally intervened to order the Jewish children of Belaya Tserkov, temporarily spared when their parents had been murdered, to be shot as well. The head of Einsatzgruppe C, Otto Rasch, also valued Reichenau's cooperation highly, while the latter often praised the valuable work of the special murder commandos. From the outset, a harmonious working relationship had been created between the army and the Einsatzgruppe, with the latter repeatedly encouraged to operate as far forward as possible.
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