Ostkrieg (21 page)

The capture of Kiev took place against a backdrop of continued frantic Soviet resistance and unexpected difficulties in occupying the city. Numerous buildings and facilities had been booby-trapped, putting German soldiers and authorities on edge. Between 24 and 26 September, powerful explosions rocked the city center, destroying a number of buildings in which the Wehrmacht had set up headquarters, and killing several hundred occupation troops. Obsessed with security, and determined to punish the guilty party, army and SS officials met on 26 September to discuss the situation and settle on appropriate “retaliatory measures.” Not surprisingly, the decision was taken to kill a large number of Jews. Einsatzgruppe representatives were informed, “You have to do the shooting,” even though army leaders had no objections to such a
massacre and were, in fact, promoting it. In this instance, security concerns and ideology blended seamlessly; the excuse of retaliatory measures could be used to justify what would have happened in any case. As an SS report to Berlin confirmed, “The Wehrmacht welcomes the measures and requests a radical approach.”
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Implementation of this “security” decision was entrusted to the reliably murderous men of Blobel's Sonderkommando 4a, composed of members of the Security Police and the SD, as well as Waffen-SS men on special assignment and two detachments of Police Regiment South (along with Ukrainian auxiliary police). As with other such actions in larger cities, the operation began with the posting of orders in Russian, Ukrainian, and German ordering the Jewish population to assemble at a designated location at 8:00
A.M
. on 29 September, with failure to comply punishable by death. That morning a far larger number of Jews appeared at the
Umschlagplatz
(assembly point) than anticipated, with most, amazingly in retrospect, believing the German promise that they were to be resettled. German officials on the spot then ordered the Jews to begin walking toward the area of the city where the Jewish cemetery and a section of the Babi Yar ravine were located. Photographs taken at the time show long columns of well-dressed people moving calmly, despite the presence of occasional bloody corpses. The route itself was guarded by army soldiers, with the killing site manned by men of the murder squad.
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Once at the ravine, the Jews had to strip and hand over their clothes and luggage, then were sent by the Ukrainian helpers in groups through a narrow opening into the ravine. Then, as a participant remembered,

The Jews had to lie face down on the earth by the ravine walls. There were three groups of marksmen down at the bottom of the ravine, each made up of about twelve men. . . . Each successive group of Jews had to lie down on top of the bodies of those that had already been shot. The marksmen stood behind the Jews [i.e., walked on the bodies] and killed them with a shot in the neck. I still recall today the complete terror of the Jews. . . . It's almost impossible to imagine what nerves of steel it took to carry out that dirty work. . . . I had to spend the whole morning down in the ravine. For some of the time I had to shoot continuously. . . . The shooting that day must have lasted until . . . 5:00 or 6:00
P.M
. Afterwards we were taken back to our quarters . . . [and] given alcohol again.

Although another participant remembered the chaos, shouting, and tumult at the scene, official SS reports regarded the two-day shooting as
quite successful: “The operation went smoothly, with no unforeseen incidents. The measures to ‘relocate' Jews were definitely regarded favorably by the population. Hardly anyone is aware that the Jews were in fact liquidated. . . . The Wehrmacht also expressed its approval of the measures carried out.” The local army commanders had, in fact, done more than merely condone the killings; not only had they helped plan and organize the massacre, but the political unit of the Sixth Army also produced two thousand wall posters in its printing shop directing the Jews to their fate, and after the shootings a pioneer unit concealed the action by blowing up the area.
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In alleged retaliation for the bombings in Kiev, 33,771 Jews were executed on 29–30 September 1941.

Killings had escalated into mass butchery. Security was now to be achieved through the ruthless pursuit and annihilation of partisans and their accomplices, especially the Jews. Reports from the summer and fall of 1941 show the grisly result: a vast discrepancy between the number of partisans killed and casualties suffered by German soldiers and only slight differences between the number of people arrested and those shot. One unit, unusual only in its murderous efficiency and not in the trend, killed over ten thousand people in a single month, with the loss of only two dead and five wounded. To promote this policy of pacification, army officials even inaugurated an exchange of ideas and experiences between army and SS officers. “It's good when the horror precedes us that we are exterminating Jewry,” Hitler remarked to Himmler and Heydrich in late October 1941, significantly enough, after he had blamed the Jews for the dead of the First World War and reminded them of his 1939 prophecy. As events on the ground demonstrated, criminal orders from above and vengeful impulses from below created a climate of violence that would remove any inhibitions about murder. The four Einsatzgruppen and their helpers killed well over 500,000 Soviet Jews in the first six months of Barbarossa in addition to tens of thousands of partisans and Soviet prisoners of war, none of which would have been possible without the willing and active cooperation of the Wehrmacht.
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Hitler had long considered military operations against the Soviet Union to win Lebensraum and political-police measures aimed at securing the newly won territory and exterminating racial-ideological enemies as simply different facets of the same war. As events in the field demonstrated, those involved in the killing process fully understood this complementarity.

On 15 July, Himmler returned to the Führer headquarters at Rastenburg in East Prussia after a quick trip to Berlin. As always, it seemed, when these two huddled in these days, bloody consequences followed. In
mid-July, in the euphoria of apparent victory, Hitler now set in motion steps to accelerate the translation of his vision of a National Socialist New Order into horrible reality. With the military situation evidently going even better than expected—“No one doubts anymore our victory in Russia,” Goebbels confided to his diary on 8 July—Hitler in the first half of July was in a self-congratulatory mood, proclaiming himself the Robert Koch of politics, the man who had exposed the “Jewish bacillus” of social decomposition. For the Führer, the connection between the Jews and war was inescapable, a mentality shaped by the personal and national humiliation of defeat in World War I, for which Hitler held the Jews responsible as fomenters of internal unrest and revolution. From his very first public statement, in September 1919, in which he advocated a complete removal of the Jews from Germany, through the notorious passage in
Mein Kampf
in which he expressed the wish that the imperial government had killed thousands of Jews at the beginning of the war, to his political testament at the very end of a second war, Hitler displayed a recurring obsession with the theme of Jews and war. Indeed, he regarded himself as nothing less than the architect and executor of a historic will: a second war had to be fought to undo the disaster of the first. This meant not only achieving Germany's historic destiny of great power status but also rewriting history on a racial basis, gaining revenge on those held responsible for the nation's misfortunes, the Jews. For Germany to win, Jewry had to lose.
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From the late 1930s, as war loomed closer, Hitler and other top Nazi leaders displayed, more than a mere conspiratorial outlook, a vengeful mentality that demanded retribution against the Jews as the cause of wars in general and of Germany's suffering in particular. The key to the Nazi outlook was not that the Jews were inferior but that the Jewish conspiracy represented nothing less than the supreme existential danger, the ultimate threat to Germany's existence. The racial community that Hitler sought to build could never be secure until Jewish power, values, and corruption were eliminated forever. Germany's salvation, as Saul Friedländer has stressed, thus required a “redemptive anti-Semitism” that would remove not just Jewish influence but, one way or another, the Jews themselves.
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In this mood of expectant victory, Hitler met for five hours on 16 July with Goering, Bormann, Rosenberg, Lammers, and Keitel to discuss and establish fundamental guidelines for the administration and exploitation of the occupied areas. After vowing that Germany would never leave these lands, he proclaimed his intention of creating a “Garden of Eden” for the benefit of all Germans, “our India.” The Crimea,
the Baltic states, the oil area around Baku, and former Austrian Galicia would be annexed, with the rest to be treated as a “colonial land” to be ruled and exploited by a handful of administrators. He dismissed the Slavs as by nature a “slave mass crying out for a master.” The goals of German occupation policy would be brutally simple: “First, rule; second, administer; third, exploit.” To accomplish these goals, “all necessary measures—shootings, resettlements, etc.”—would be used. “This vast area must naturally be pacified as quickly as possible,” Hitler emphasized. “This will best be done by shooting anyone who even looks sideways at us.”
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Although Himmler was noticeably absent from this meeting, it was his response that was arguably most critical to the future course of events. In outlining his program, Hitler regarded himself as an architect reconstructing history on a racial basis, but he still needed someone to execute his will. The Führer had sketched a vision of a future utopia for Germans, but realizing this vision would necessitate destruction on a vast scale. That was to be Himmler's task. Nor could he harbor any doubts about what it would entail. The minutes of the meeting, which he received on 17 July, clearly expressed Hitler's will—exterminate anyone who opposes us—a task that would require a large-scale increase in available police forces. On both 19 and 22 July, he designated units from his own
Kommandostab
(command staff), the SS Cavalry Brigade and the First SS Brigade, totaling eleven thousand men, for use in antipartisan sweeps in the central and southern sectors of the front. He also reassigned a number of police battalions, over five thousand men in all, for use in the killing operations, which were now to be expanded, according to an evident Himmler edict on 21 July, to include all Soviet Jews. Searching for new sources of manpower, Himmler on 25 July ordered his police officials to form auxiliary police units from the Baltic, Ukrainian, and Belorussian populations since “the task of the police in the occupied eastern territories cannot be accomplished with the manpower of the police and SS now deployed or yet to be deployed.” Within a few days in late July 1941, then, Himmler, responding to his Führer's wishes, initiated a swift buildup of precisely those units necessary for a rapid escalation of murder. The number of men involved in the killing activities rose from barely three thousand to over sixteen thousand, a figure that would rise to some thirty-three thousand by the end of the year, an elevenfold increase. Himmler then culminated this whirlwind of activity on 31 July by issuing an explicit order to top police officials: “All Jews must be shot. Drive female Jews into the swamp [i.e., Pripet Marshes].” In issuing orders for a radical escalation of the killing operations, Himmler surely
felt confident that, in Ian Kershaw's phrase, he was “working towards the Führer.”
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In late July, as if the Nazi leaders needed another reason to justify their anti-Semitic crusade, a curious and otherwise unimportant episode in the United States provided further “proof” of the destructive conspiracy they had warned against. On 24 July, a bloodcurdling headline, “The War Aim of Roosevelt and the Jews: Complete Extermination of the German People,” with the subtitle “A Monstrous Jewish Extermination Plan according to the Guidelines of Roosevelt,” adorned the front page of the
Völkischer Beobachter
, the main Nazi newspaper. From the beginning of the war in the east, the Nazi press had hammered home the importance of the Jewish dimension of the enemy, that Jews pulled the strings behind the scenes. In both public and private, Goebbels had thundered against the Jewish conspiracy of plutocrats and Bolsheviks that was determined to destroy Germany. Now, he evidently had his proof. In early 1941, Theodore Kaufman, a thirty-one-year-old Jewish businessman from New Jersey angry at the harsh treatment of Jews in Nazi-occupied Europe, self-published a small book he had written entitled
Germany Must Perish!
In it, he advocated the sterilization of all German men and the division of the country into five parts. The book caused a minor stir in the early spring of 1941; then Kaufman faded back into obscurity.
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By late July, the book, “a clear prophesy of what threatens us if we lose our will and thereby throw away our victory . . . , the extermination or sterilization of the entire German people,” had come to Goebbels's attention. He saw in it confirmation of Nazi claims of the existence of a bloodthirsty conspiracy of plutocracy and Bolshevism and further justification for harsh measures in the east. Over the next few months, the German press and radio promoted the Kaufman story in endless variations, most notably to present the war, in a perverse inversion of reality, as a Jewish attempt to exterminate Germans. “Who should die, the Germans or the Jews?” was the stark question posed as Goebbels worked tirelessly to expose the “true goals” of the nation's enemies. “One has to imagine what the Jews would do with us if they had the power,” he noted in his diary on 20 August, “in order to know what one should do with them when we have the power.” The propaganda minister also issued a short brochure designed to create a more determined German attitude toward the war and allow “even the stupidest idiot . . . [to] figure out what threatens us” and that the only choice was victory or death. In fact, Kaufman's book paid instant dividends, an SD report of 31 July on the German mood noting, “The situation in the United States was being followed with the greatest attention. Increasingly the view spreads that . . . this
war is really a life-and-death struggle. The Kaufman plans have deeply impressed even the most obdurate skeptics.” By October, with the “book . . . devoured by all sectors of society,” Goebbels concluded, “It has been extraordinarily useful for us domestically. It is impossible to imagine a better illustration of the desires and goals of the other side.”
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