His warning fell on deaf ears. German soldiers continued to carry out brutal acts of revenge for attacks they were unable to counter. ‘Today was a record!!’ wrote one lieutenant on 29 July 1941. ‘This morning we shot 122 Communists and Jews in Belgrade.’
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The appointment of a puppet Serb government under Milan Nedi’, a pro-German and anti-Communist Serb politician, did little to help the situation. The overall commander in the region, Field Marshal Wilhelm List, a Bavarian Catholic and a professional soldier of long standing, became increasingly frustrated. The Serbs, in his view, were naturally violent and hot-blooded and could only be tamed by force. In August 1941 Hitler personally underlined the need for ‘the harshest intervention’ in the military suppression of the revolt.
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Goebbels was less convinced. On 24 September 1941, he noted with some concern that the ‘bloody reign of terror’ of the Croats against the Serbs was driving them ‘to desperation . . . so that the movements of revolt are reaching out ever further’.
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And indeed the Chetniks became ever bolder, capturing 175 Germans in two separate incidents in early September 1941. List elbowed aside the serving military commander in Serbia, an air force general, and imported an Austrian, General Franz Böhme, as Commander-in-Chief. B̈hme was trusted by Hitler, who indeed had put him forward as Commander-in-Chief of the Austrian army at one point during his negotiations with the Austrian dictator Schuschnigg shortly before the German invasion of Austria in 1938. Böhme shared the anti-Serb and antisemitic prejudices and resentments of the Austrian officer corps in full measure. ‘Your mission,’ he told his troops on 25 September 1941,
is to be carried out in a country in which in 1914 rivers of German blood flowed because of the treachery of the Serbs, men and women. You are the avengers of the dead. An intimidating example has to be created for the whole of Serbia, one that hits the whole population in the severest manner. Anyone who shows mercy is betraying the lives of his comrades. He will be called to responsibility without respect of his person and put before a court-martial.
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Böhme systematized the existing practice of violent retaliation. He ordered punitive expeditions to towns and villages, the opening of concentration camps for alleged ‘Communists’ and Jews at ˇabac and Belgrade, and the shooting of all suspected Bolsheviks - over 1,000 of whom had already been killed by 4 October 1941. On 16 September 1941 Field Marshal Wilhelm Keitel, the head of the Combined Armed Forces Supreme Command, had ordered fifty to 100 Communists to be shot in retaliation for every single German soldier killed in German-occupied areas all across Europe. Böhme issued an even more far-reaching command on 10 October 1941: ‘Communists or male inhabitants who are suspected of being Communists, all Jewish men, and a specified number of nationalistic and democratically inclined inhabitants’ were to be seized as hostages and killed in the ratio of 100 to every German soldier killed by the partisans and fifty to every one wounded.
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Böhme was exceeding Keitel’s orders, which did not mention Jews. There was a general assumption that because of their treatment in Germany and Poland the Jews would automatically be enemies of the German occupation of Serbia. A similar reasoning was applied to the Gypsies, though those who had a regular job and whose family had ceased to be nomadic since 1850 at the latest were explicitly exempted.
Without presenting any concrete evidence at all, the military administration claimed ‘that the Jewish element participates to a considerable extent in the leadership of the bands and that it is Gypsies who are responsible for particular atrocities, and for espionage activities’.
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On Böhme’s orders, 2,200 prisoners from the S
ˇ
abac and Belgrade concentration camps were shot, 2,000 of them Jews, 200 Gypsies. There were plenty of witnesses. Milorad Jelesic’, a Serb interned in another, nearby camp, was taken out to a field near ˇabac and with others was ordered to dig an open ditch while a detachment of German soldiers ate their lunch. Then, he later testified,
A group of fifty people who I could see were Jews were led from behind a field of corn . . . An officer gave the command and then the Germans would aim at the back of the head - two soldiers for each Jew. We then had to run to the open grave and throw the dead into it. Then the Germans ordered us to go through all their pockets and take out any items of value . . . If we couldn’t get the rings off, the Germans gave us a little knife and we had to cut off their fingers and give them the rings like that.
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Another group of fifty Jews was then led out, and the operation repeated over the next two days, with Gypsies making up an increasing proportion of the victims. Some of the Jews were Austrian refugees, who with grim historical irony thus found themselves being killed by mainly Austrian troops in reprisal for acts of resistance carried out by Serbian partisans on the German army.
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B̈hme’s measures, directed against people who had nothing to do with the partisan uprising, had crossed the line that separated military reprisals, however excessive, from gratuitous mass murder. Further shootings followed. In many cases they were filmed for propaganda purposes. In the two weeks after the order of 10 October was issued, army units in Serbia shot more than 9,000 Jews, Gypsies and other civilians. Some soldiers even took part in the killings as if they were some kind of sport. When one Viennese soldier returned to his regiment in Belgrade from leave, he was greeted by his regimental comrades with the flippant inquiry: ‘Are you going along with us to shoot Jews?’
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If the troops ran out of supposed Communists, democrats, nationalists, Jews and Gypsies to kill in any particular place to which they had been ordered, they simply rounded up the rest of the male inhabitants and shot them too. In this way, for example, units of the 717th Infantry Division shot 300 men in the town of Kraljevo who seemed to belong to the categories outlined in B̈hme’s order, before going on to round up indiscriminately a further 1,400 Serbs and shooting them too in order to reach their quota of 100 ‘hostages’ for every dead German.
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Like Böhme, almost all the senior army officers and SS commanders in occupied Yugoslavia were Austrians; so too were many army units, including the 717st Infantry Division. The extreme violence they meted out to the local population, Serbs, Gypsies and Jews, reflected not least their deep-rooted hostility towards the Serbs, and the particularly virulent nature of antisemitism in the country from which, like Hitler himself, they came.
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Across the whole of Eastern Europe by the end of 1941, the overall numbers of murders, above all of Jews, carried out by the army, the SS Security Service Task Forces and their associates had reached hundreds of thousands. Task Force A reported that by the middle of October it had killed more than 118,000 Jews, a figure that had increased to nearly 230,000 by the end of January 1942. Task Force B had reported exactly 45,467 Jews shot by the end of October, rising to just over 91,000 by the end of the following February. Task Force C had shot around 75,000 by 20 October 1941, and Task Force D reported nearly 55,000 by 12 December 1941 and a total of almost 92,000 by 8 April 1942. How accurate these figures were cannot be precisely ascertained; they may in some cases have been exaggerated, or double-counted. On the other hand they did not include all the Jews killed by local militias or units of the German army, whose commanders had issued orders to kill ‘Jewish Communists’ and other ‘Jewish elements’. The fact that senior army officers repeatedly felt it necessary to ban their troops from taking part in pogroms, looting and mass shootings of Jewish civilians indicates how commonplace such actions were. In some instances, indeed, as in that of the 707th Army Division in Belarus, the extermination of Jews was actually organized by the military in the name of combating partisan activity.
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In all, it is probable that around half a million Jews were shot by the Task Forces and associated military and paramilitary groups by the end of 1941.
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Unevenly, but unmistakeably, an important step had been taken: the extension of the killings to women and children, and the effective abandonment of the pretext or in many cases indeed the belief that Jews were being killed because they had organized resistance to the invading German forces. The timing, manner and extent of the murders were more often than not a matter for local SS commanders on the ground. Himmler’s role in ordering this extension and then, sometimes jointly with Heydrich, in driving it on through inspection visits to the areas where the killings were taking place, and in strengthening the SS forces in the area to enable more killing to be done, was nevertheless central.
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It was Himmler who, in repeated verbal orders issued to his subordinates, accomplished the transition to the indiscriminate killing of Jews of both sexes and all ages in July and August 1941. He clearly believed, now and later, that he was carrying out Hitler’s own wish of 16 July to shoot ‘anyone who even looks askance’. Here too, as in other instances, the Nazi chain of command worked indirectly. There was no one specific, precise order; Hitler set the overall parameters of action, Himmler interpreted them, and the SS officers on the ground, with his encouragement, used their initiative in deciding when and how to put them into effect, as the uneven timing of the transition from shooting Jewish men to shooting Jewish women and children clearly showed. Nevertheless, it is clear that the mass murder of Eastern European Jews that began at this time was above all a reflection of Hitler’s own personal desires and beliefs, repeatedly articulated both in public and in private during these months.
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Thus, for example, on 25 October 1941 Hitler was having dinner with Himmler and Heydrich, and so his thoughts naturally turned to the massacres they had set in motion in Russia, and in particular Himmler’s order of early August to ‘Drive Jewish women into the marshes’:
In the Reichstag, I prophesied to Jewry, the Jew will disappear from Europe if war is not avoided. This race of criminals has the two million dead of the [First World] war on its conscience, and now hundreds of thousands again. Nobody can tell me: But we can’t send them into the morass! For who bothers about our people? It’s good if the terror that we are exterminating Jewry goes before us.
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On 1 August 1941, Heinrich M̈ller, head of the Gestapo, ordered the Reich Security Head Office to forward the reports it was receiving from the Task Forces to Hitler. Altogether, forty to fifty copies of each report were usually circulated to Party and government offices.
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The ‘Event Report number 128’, issued on 3 November 1941 and containing the first six full reports of the Task Forces from July to October, was for example distributed in fifty-five copies not only to the Party Chancellery but to government departments as well, including the Foreign Office, where it was countersigned by no fewer than twenty-two officials.
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Thus not only Hitler but also many people in the senior ranks of the Party and state administration were fully informed of the massacres being carried out by the SS Task Forces in the east.
LAUNCHING GENOCIDE
I
Given Hitler’s reference on 25 October 1941 to his own prophecy of the annihilation of the Jews in the event of a world war, it is not surprising that he was thinking on a global scale at this time. In the background of Hitler’s mind throughout Operation Barbarossa and what followed was the thought that the rapid defeat of the Soviet Union would also bring about the capitulation of the British. The attempt to bomb the British into submission in 1940 had clearly failed. But there were other ways of bringing them to the negotiating table. Chief among these was the disruption of their supplies, which by necessity had to come by sea, partly from Britain’s far-flung Empire, but principally from the United States. The US President, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, had up to now won considerable domestic support by keeping America out of the war. But for some time he had privately thought that the USA would have to act to stop further German aggression.
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Roosevelt therefore began a large-scale programme of arms manufacture, with Congress voting through huge sums of money for the construction of aircraft, ships, tanks and military equipment. Already on 16 May 1940, Roosevelt had brought to Congress a proposal to build no fewer than 50,000 military airplanes a year, starting immediately. This was many times the output that any of the European combatants could achieve. Secret technical discussions with the British ensured these aircraft would be of direct benefit to the British war effort. Not long afterwards, Congress also passed the Two Oceans Navy Expansion Act, inaugurating the construction of enormous Atlantic and Pacific fleets grouped around aircraft carriers that would enable the US Navy to strike at America’s enemies around the world. Conscription was next, starting with the drafting and training of an army of 1.4 million men. In November 1940, Roosevelt was re-elected. Buoyed by bipartisan support in Congress, he transferred increasing quantities of military and naval supplies, as well as foodstuffs and much else, to Britain under ‘lend-lease’ arrangements. In 1940 alone, the British were able to purchase more than 2,000 combat aircraft from the USA; in 1941 the number rose to more than 5,000. These were significant quantities. In the middle of August 1941 Roosevelt and Churchill met to sign the ‘Atlantic Charter’, which included the provision that US submarines would accompany convoys to Britain for at least half of their Atlantic passage.
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