The War of the World: History's Age of Hatred (71 page)

To achieve an ethnographic transformation on this scale, a new kind of war had to be waged. From the outset Hitler had determined that his campaign against the Soviet Union would be fought according to new rules – or rather, without rules at all. It was to be, as he had told his generals on March 30, ‘a war of extermination’ in which the idea of ‘soldierly comradeship’ would have no place. This meant the ‘destruction of the Bolshevik commissars and the Communist intelligentsia’. The decision systematically to shoot certain Red Army prisoners, foreshadowed by the brutal way the war in Poland had been fought, was taken on the eve of Operation Barbarossa and subsequently elaborated on during the campaign. The ‘Guidelines for the Conduct of Troops in Russia’ issued on May 19, 1941 called for ‘ruthless and vigorous measures against the Bolshevik inciters, guerrillas, saboteurs [and] Jews’. The ‘Commissar Order’ of June 6 required any captured political commissars to be shot out of hand. The justification for this was that

hate-inspired, cruel, and inhumane treatment of prisoners can be expected on the part of
all grades of political commissars
… To act in accordance with international rules of war is wrong and endangers both our own security and the rapid pacification of conquered territory… Political commissars
have initiated barbaric, Asiatic methods of warfare. Consequently they will be dealt with
immediately
and with maximum severity. As a matter of principle, they will be shot at once.

The Wehrmacht High Command reiterated this by decreeing that the army was to ‘get rid of all those elements among the prisoners of war considered Bolshevik driving forces’; this meant handing them over to the SS
Einsatzgruppen
for execution. ‘Politically intolerable and suspicious elements, commissars and agitators’ were to be treated in the same way, according to an order issued by the Army Quartermaster-General Eduard Wagner. In September 1941 the High Command issued a further order that any Soviet troops who had been overrun but then reorganized themselves should be regarded as partisans and shot on the spot. Such orders were passed on by front-line commanders in less euphemistic terms. Troops were ‘totally to eliminate any active or passive resistance’ among prisoners by making ‘
immediate
use of weapons’. General Erich Hoepner, the commander of Panzer Group 4, took his orders to mean that ‘every military action must be guided in planning and execution by an iron will to exterminate the enemy mercilessly and totally… no adherents of the present Russian-Bolshevik system are to be spared.’ The commander of the 12th Infantry Division told subordinate officers: ‘Prisoners behind the front-line… Shoot as a general principle! Every soldier shoots any Russian found behind the front-line who has not been taken prisoner in battle.’ In the confusion that reigned after the huge German advances into Soviet territory, this could be interpreted as a licence to kill almost anyone.

Nazi propaganda deliberately encouraged lawless violence. In issuing instructions to the Propaganda Ministry in July 1941, for example, Hitler emphasized the need for ‘shots of Russian cruelty towards German prisoners to be incorporated in the newsreel so that the Germans know exactly what the enemy is like. He specifically requested that such atrocities should include genitals being cut off and the placing of hand grenades in the trousers of prisoners.’ The results were as Hitler had intended: the ‘great racial war’ became a war to the death. In the first weeks of Barbarossa, the Germans may have summarily executed as many as 600,000 prisoners; by the end of the
first winter of the campaign some two million were dead. Some were killed on the spot because German troops refused to accept their surrender. The recollections of one German soldier give a flavour of the attitudes that quickly took hold:

Sometimes one or two prisoners might emerge from their hideout with their hands in the air, and each time the same tragedy repeated itself. Kraus killed four of them on the lieutenant’s orders; the Sudeten two; Group 17, nine. Young Lindberg, who had been in a state of panic ever since the beginning of the offensive, and who had been either weeping in terror or laughing in hope, took Kraus’s machine gun and shoved two Bolsheviks into a shell hole. The two wretched victims… kept imploring his mercy… But Lindberg, in a paroxysm of uncontrollable rage, kept firing until they were quiet…

We were mad with harassment and exhaustion… We were forbidden to take prisoners… We knew that the Russians didn’t take any… [that] it was either them or us, which is why my friend Hals and I threw grenades… at some Russians who were trying to wave a white flag.

Elsewhere Soviet prisoners were taken but then lined up and shot. Those who were spared found themselves herded into improvised camps where they were given neither shelter nor sustenance. Many starved or died of disease; others were taken out and shot in batches. Some were transported to concentration camps like Buchenwald, where they were shot in the course of fake medical examinations, or to the death camp at Auschwitz. Altogether in the course of the war over three million Soviet soldiers died in captivity – substantially more than half and perhaps close to two-thirds of the total number taken prisoner, a mortality rate more than ten times higher than that for Russian prisoners in the First World War. Once again, living space turned out to mean killing space.

As in Poland, the killing was directed not only against captured combatants but also against certain civilians. To be precise, anyone identified as a partisan was liable to be killed. The process whereby ‘partisan’ became a blanket term including Jews, Gypsies and anyone else the Germans felt inclined to kill is not easily traced in written records. We have seen that the war against Communism was always, in Hitler’s mind, a war against the Jews. The surprising thing is how many ordinary Germans seem to have understood from the outset
that this was an integral part of Operation Barbarossa. On the eve of the invasion, for example, the commander of Order Police Battalion 309 told his men that Jews, regardless of age or sex, were to be destroyed. Within days they were putting his words into effect in Białystok, herding five hundred men, women and children into a synagogue and burning them alive. Just a few weeks after the invasion, it was becoming clear that the Jews were to be totally eradicated.

The Nazis estimated that there were nearly 5.5 million Jews
*
living in the former Soviet territory they occupied by the end of 1941, as many as in all the rest of occupied Europe. The success of Operation Barbarossa put the Germans in complete control of the entirety of the old Tsarist Pale of Settlement, from the Baltic to the Black Sea. Hitler was never wholly precise about what should be done with the Jews; he spoke merely of taking ‘all necessary measures’, of ‘eradicating whatever puts itself against us’ and of ‘shooting anyone who even looks sideways at us’. ‘If there were no more Jews in Europe,’ he explained to the Croatian Commander-in-Chief Slavko Kvaternik on July 22, 1941, ‘then the unity of the European states would no longer be destroyed.’ But ‘if even just one state for whatever reasons tolerates one Jewish family in it, then this will become the bacillus source for a new decomposition’. At this time, Madagascar was still being mentioned as a possible post-war destination. However, Adolf Eich-mann, who had devised the Reich Main Security Office’s Madagascar Project, now entrusted his subordinate Friedrich Suhr with a new brief: the ‘Final solution of the Jewish question’. On July 31 Heydrich obtained Göring’s authorization to make ‘all necessary preparations’ for a ‘total solution of the Jewish question in the German sphere of influence in Europe’ and to draw up a ‘comprehensive’ draft plan. It seems unlikely that he would have sought Göring’s approval if all this had meant was more deportations and more ghettos. It also seems
significant that not long after this the commander of
Einsatzgruppe
A, Franz Walter Stahlecker, referred to orders relating to the treatment of the Jews ‘from a higher authority to the Security Police which cannot be discussed in writing’. Stahlecker was arguing against the creation of new ghettos in former Soviet territory and in favour of ‘an almost 100 per cent immediate cleansing of the entire Ostland of Jews’. Such arguments dovetailed neatly with the pressure from other parts of the Nazi empire – France, Serbia and the Reich itself – to deport ‘their’ Jews eastwards, so that they too might be subsumed in the projected ‘final solution’, as well as the reluctance of the authorities in Poland to accept a new influx of Jews to their ghettos. Thus the genocidal concept would seem to have crystallized in the last week of September and the first weeks of October 1941, at the very zenith of Hitler’s fortunes, with Kiev in his hands, Leningrad besieged and the onslaught on Moscow poised to begin. He unveiled his intentions at a meeting of senior party functionaries in Berlin on December 12. The order – ‘liquidate them’, in Hans Frank’s words – was swiftly relayed down the chain of command.

Who were the perpetrators of what came to be known as the Holocaust? In the wake of the invasion of the Soviet Union the first phase of systematic killing was carried out by four roving
Einsatzgruppen
, as had happened in Poland.
*
By the end of July 1941 they had murdered around 63,000 men, woman and children, 90 per cent of whom were Jews. By mid-April 1942, the
Einsatzgruppen
had already killed precisely 518,388 people; again, the vast majority were Jews.

Predominantly this was a war against the Jews, waged behind the lines asa kind of counterpoint to the real war against the Red Army. Other groups were equally at risk, however, notably Gypsies and mental patients, and such was the scale of the diabolical undertaking that it could not possibly be carried out by the
Einsatzgruppen
alone. From an early stage, therefore, other less specialized formations became involved, including not only Wehrmacht units but also regular police battalions.

As dawn broke on July 13, 1942, Reserve Battalion 101 arrived at the Polish village of Józefów, which had been bombed by the Germans and briefly occupied by the Russians two years previously. Their commander, Major Wilhelm Trapp, explained to his men that their orders were to round up the local Jews, of whom there were around 1,800. They were to pick out the able-bodied young men who could be used as forced labourers or ‘work Jews’; there were around 300 of these. Using trucks, they would then drive the rest – the sick, the elderly, the women and the children – to a quarry in the nearby forest. There they would shoot them all.

Reserve Battalion 101 was not a hardened group of Nazi fanatics. Most of its 486 men came from working-class and lower middle-class neighbourhoods of Hamburg. On average, they were older than the men in front-line units. Over half were aged between thirty-seven and forty-two. Very few were members of the Nazi Party, though Trapp had joined in 1932. They were, without a doubt, just ordinary Germans. They were also willing executioners. Often, after the war, those accused of war crimes claimed that they were merely following orders. That was not the case at Józefów. Before the killings began, Trapp made an extraordinary offer to his battalion: if anyone did not feel up to the task that lay before them, he could step forward and be assigned to other duties. Only twelve men did so.

Killing people is harder than it looks in the cinema, which is the closest most of these middle-aged policemen had previously come to murder. The standard procedure was to get the victims to kneel down in rows, then to shoot each one individually through the nape of the neck. Despite instructions from the battalion physician on where exactly to point their weapons, the men were soon spattered with blood, bone splinters and brains. As one of them later recalled, ‘Through the
point-blank range shot that was… required, the bullet struck the head of the victim at such a trajectory that often the entire skull or at least the entire… skullcap was torn off.’ Once the shooting began, several more soldiers asked to be relieved of their duties. Later, a number of others broke down and could not continue. But the majority pressed on with their dirty work. By midday they were being offered bottles of vodka to ‘refresh’ them. This evidently helped. The killing continued throughout the afternoon and evening. It took seventeen hours in all. The bodies of the victims were left unburied, a sign of the amateurishness of the operation. (
Einsatzgruppen
knew to get their victims to dig a pit before shooting them on the edge of it so that they fell in neat rows, the dying on top of the dead and half-dead; burial would suffocate any chance survivors.) Finally, at about 9 o’clock that night, the weary battalion returned to the village. The marketplace was deserted except for the piles of luggage belonging to the victims, which the soldiers proceeded to burn. In the grotesquely euphemistic language of the Third Reich, Józefów was now
Judenrein
– ‘cleansed of Jews’.

The men of Reserve Battalion 101 were beginners. But practice makes perfect. Between the summer of 1942 and the autumn of 1943 they and other mobile police units were responsible for shooting approximately 38,000 Jews and deporting a further 45,000, most of them to the Treblinka extermination camp. By the end of 1943 the Germans had killed around 2.7 million Soviet Jews, nearly half the pre-Barbarossa population.

Why did they do it? One view is that they, like most Germans, were imbued with a virulent brand of anti-Semitism that needed only the right opportunity to manifest itself in murder. Certainly, some of the letters that soldiers wrote home indicate that they had thoroughly internalized Hitler’s message that, to quote one lance-corporal, ‘Only a Jew can be a Bolshevik, for this blood-sucker there can be nothing nicer than to be a Bolshevik.’ Another described to his parents how he and his comrades had killed a thousand Jews in Tarnopol ‘with clubs and spades’, having found sixty mutilated German corpses nearby; the Jews could be held responsible, since they had occupied ‘all the leadership positions’ under the Soviet regime ‘and, together with the Soviets, had a regular public festival while executing the Germans and Ukrainians’. How deeply rooted such notions were in
German culture and how far they were mere products of post-1933 indoctrination is debatable. Even Victor Klemperer could not be sure of this, sometimes believing that National Socialism was a ‘homegrown… strain of cancer’ and at other times dismissing ‘the idea that all Germans, including the workers, are without exception anti-Semites’ as a ‘nonsensical thesis’. Another interpretation, based in large measure on post-war testimony, is that these ‘ordinary men’ were well aware that what they were doing was wrong, but suppressed their qualms because of a mixture of deference to authority (shirking might damage chances of promotion or leave) and peer-group pressure.