PART II
The proportions of life and death have radically changed. Times were, when life occupied the primary place, when it was the main and central concern, while death was a side phenomenon, secondary to life, its termination. Nowadays, death rules in all its majesty; while life hardly glows under a thick layer of ashes. Even this faint glow of life is feeble, miserable and weak, poor, devoid of any free breath, deprived of any spark of spiritual content. The very soul, both in the individual and in the community, seems to have starved and perished, to have dulled and atrophied. There remain only the needs of the body; and it leads merely an organic-physiological existence.
—Abraham Lewin, eulogy in honor of Yitshak Meir Weissenberg, September 31, 1941
CHAPTER IV
On September 29, 1941, the Germans shot 33,700 Kiev Jews in the Babi Yar ravine near the city. As the rumors about the massacre spread, some Ukrainians initially expressed doubts. “I only know one thing,” Iryna Khoroshunova inscribed in her diary on that same day, “there is something terrible, horrible going on, something inconceivable, which cannot be understood, grasped or explained.” A few days later, her uncertainty had disappeared: “A Russian girl accompanied her girlfriend to the cemetery [at the entrance of the ravine], but crawled through the fence from the other side. She saw how naked people were taken toward Babi Yar and heard shots from a machine gun. There are more and more such rumors and accounts. They are too monstrous to believe. But we are forced to believe them, for the shooting of the Jews is a fact. A fact which is starting to drive us insane. It is impossible to live with this knowledge. The women around us are crying. And we? We also cried on September 29, when we thought they were taken to a concentration camp. But now? Can we really cry? I am writing, but my hair is standing on end.”1 In the meantime, the war in the East was entering its fourth month.
For Dawid Rubinowicz the unleashing of the German attack was merely a noisy event at first: “It was still dark,” he noted on June 22, “when father woke us all up and told us to listen to that terrible din coming from the north-east. It was such a din the earth quaked. The whole day thundering could be heard. Toward evening Jews dropped in from Kielce and said Soviet Russia was at war with the Germans, and only then did it dawn on me why there had been that din all day.”2
Of necessity the Lodz chronicles had to keep to the barest facts: “In connection with the war against the Soviets, in the last ten days of June there has been a sudden increase in the price of packaged goods, which the ghetto had received mostly from the USSR,” they recorded in their entry of June 20–30, 1941. The mention of the German attack in the East elicited no further comment.3 The restraint imposed on the official ghetto recorders was not shared by the individual diarists, however. Young Sierakowiak was elated: “Incredible, wonderful news!” he wrote on the twenty-second, though he was not yet entirely sure that the “free, beloved, great Soviets” were not being attacked by a German-British coalition.4 On the twenty-third he triumphantly confirmed: “It is all true!…The entire ghetto is buzzing like one big beehive. Everybody feels that a chance for liberation is finally possible.”5
Not all Jewish diarists shared Sierakowiak’s high spirits. In Romania—which had joined the anti-Bolshevik crusade—fear spread: “In the evening, we gather early at the house,” Sebastian noted on June 22. “With the shutters drawn and the telephone out of service, we have a growing sense of unease and anguish. What will happen to us? I hardly dare ask. You are afraid to imagine what you will be like in another day, another week, another month.”6 Two days later Sebastian described a poster put up in the streets with the text ‘Who are the masters of Bolshevism?’, showing “a Jew in a red gown, with side curls, skullcap, and beard, holding a hammer in one hand and a sickle in the other. Concealed beneath his coat are three Soviet soldiers. I have heard that the posters were put up by police sergeants.”7
In Vilna, Hermann Kruk did not partake of Sierakowiak’s enthusiasm either. Kruk had fled from Warsaw to Lithuania a few days after the beginning of the war. In the Polish capital he had been active in Yiddish cultural circles and was in charge of the cultural activities of the Bund’s youth movement, Zukunft, and of the central Yiddish library.8 On June 22, 1941, he thought of fleeing again but did not succeed. Fatalistically he resigned himself to staying and recording the oncoming events: “I make a firm decision,” he noted on June 23, 1941. “I leave myself to the mercy of God; I am staying. And, right away, I make another decision: if I am staying anyway and if I am going to be a victim of fascism, I shall take pen in hand and write a chronicle of a city. Clearly, Vilna may also be captured. The Germans will turn the city fascist. Jews will go into the ghetto—I shall record it all. My chronicle must see, must hear, and must become the mirror and the conscience of the great catastrophe and of the hard times.”9
In the Warsaw ghetto, as in Lodz, the immediate everyday consequences of the new war seemed to be the main concern. “A newspaper special on the war with the Soviets,” Czerniaków noted on June 22. “It will be necessary to work all day, and perhaps they will not let one sleep at night.”10 For days on end the Warsaw chairman hardly mentioned the war in Russia; he had other, more urgent worries. “In the streets the workers are being impressed for labor outside the ghetto, since there are few volunteers for a job which pays only 2.80 zlotys and provides no food,” he noted on July 8. I went to [Ferdinand von] Kamlah to obtain food for them. So far, no results. Considering their dire predicament, the Jewish masses are quiet and composed.”11
Among the Germans, as far as Klemperer could observe, the news of the campaign in the East was well received: “Cheerful faces everywhere,” he noted on June 22. “A new entertainment, a prospect of new sensations, the Russian war is a source of new pride for people, their grumbling of yesterday is forgotten.”12 In fact, most observers would not have agreed with Klemperer: the news of the attack, although not unexpected, caused surprise and, at times, consternation.13
I
During the first days and weeks of the campaign, the German onslaught seemed, once again, irresistible. Despite repeated warnings from the most diverse sources (including several Soviet-controlled spy rings), Stalin and the Red Army had been caught by surprise. “We will still have some heavy battles to fight,” Hitler told Goebbels on July 8, “but the Bolshevik armed forces will not be able to recover from the present series of defeats.”14 Unperceived and unimagined by any observer at the time, Germany’s descent to defeat had begun.
Optimism pervaded the high-level meeting convened at Hitler’s headquarters on July 16 and attended by Göring, Bormann, Lammers, Keitel, and Rosenberg. In a memorable formula, the “greatest military leader of all times” [Grösste Feldherr aller Zeiten, according to Keitel] set the guidelines for German policy in the occupied Soviet Union: “Basically we have to divide this enormous cake in the right way in order, first to rule it, second to administer it, third to exploit it.” In this context the Nazi chief considered Stalin’s July 3 appeal to Red Army soldiers to start partisan warfare behind the German lines as one more favorable development: “This partisan warfare gives us an advantage by enabling us to destroy everything in our path…in this vast area, peace must be imposed as quickly as possible, and to achieve this it is necessary to execute even anyone who doesn’t give us a straight look.”15
It was at the same meeting that Alfred Rosenberg was officially appointed Reich minister for the occupied eastern territories; yet Himmler’s responsibility for the internal security of the territories was reaffirmed. According to the formal arrangement confirmed by Hitler on the next day, Rosenberg’s appointees, the Reichskommissare, would have jurisdiction over Himmler’s delegates in their areas, but de facto the HSSPF got their operational orders from the Reichsführer. The arrangement, which was meant to safeguard both Himmler’s and Rosenberg’s authority, was of course a recipe for constant infighting. Although the tension between both systems of domination has often been highlighted—a tension that also pervaded the control over the General Government—in fact the “results” prove that cooperation in implementing the tasks on hand, particularly in regard to mass murder, usually overcame competition.16 After all, Rosenberg’s appointees, headed by Reichskommissar Hinrich Lohse, former Gauleiter of Schleswig-Holstein, in the Ostland, and Reichskommissar Erich Koch, Gauleiter of East Prussia, in the Ukraine, as well as their district chiefs, were drawn from the party’s inner core: These local governors and the Reichsführer’s delegates—HSSPF Hans-Adolf Prützmann (Russia North), Erich von dem Bach-Zalewski (Russia Center), Friedrich Jeckeln (Russia South), and Gert Korsemann (Extreme South and “Caucasia”)—shared the same beliefs and the same goals; together with the Wehrmacht they were intent, beyond anything else, on imposing German domination, exploitation, and terror in the newly conquered territories.
As weeks went by neither the Red Army nor Stalin’s regime collapsed; the progress of the Wehrmacht slowed down, and German casualties steadily mounted. In mid-August, following tense discussions with his top military commanders, Hitler—against his generals’ advice to concentrate all available forces for an attack on Moscow—decided that although Army Group Center had already made considerable progress in its own part of the front, it would now turn southward to conquer the Ukraine before turning northward again for the final assault on the Soviet capital. Kiev surrendered on September 19, and more than 600,000 Russian soldiers—and their equipment—fell into German hands. Hitler was again in an ebullient mood; yet time was running dangerously short for the attack on the center of Soviet power.
In the meantime the international situation was becoming more ominous for Germany, given the policy systematically pursued by President Roosevelt. After his reelection and his use of the “garden hose” metaphor at the press conference of December 17, 1940, the American president had declared during his December 29 “fireside chat” radio broadcast that the United States would become “the great arsenal of democracy.” On March 11, 1941, Roosevelt signed the Lend-Lease Bill: It would take effect on March 26. Within days British ships were carrying “lent” American weapons and supplies across the Atlantic. In the early summer American assistance to the Soviet Union started. The major problem for Washington was not whether to supply the Communist victim of German aggression but to get the American supplies to their destination in the face of increasingly successful German submarine operations.
In April 1941, invoking the Monroe Doctrine and the need to defend the Western Hemisphere, Roosevelt sent American troops to Greenland; two months later U.S. forces established bases in Iceland. Then, in mid-August, Roosevelt and Churchill met off the coast of Newfoundland, and at the end of their talks proclaimed the rather hazy principles of what became known as the Atlantic Charter. In Berlin, as elsewhere, the meeting was interpreted as signaling a de facto alliance between the United States and Great Britain. Secretly Roosevelt had indeed promised Churchill that the U.S. Navy would escort British convoys at least halfway across the Atlantic. By September major incidents between American naval units and German submarines had become unavoidable.
By midsummer 1941 the German population showed some signs of unease. The war in the East was not progressing as rapidly as expected, casualties were growing, and regular food supply became a source of mounting concern.17 It was under these circumstances that a major incident rattled the Nazi leadership.
On Sunday, August 3, Bishop Clemens Count von Galen defied Hitler’s regime. In a sermon at the Münster cathedral, the prelate forcefully attacked the authorities for the systematic murder of the mentally ill and the handicapped. The sermon came four weeks after the German episcopate had issued a pastoral letter, read from every pulpit in the country, denouncing the taking of “innocent lives.” Protestant voices, including that of Bishop Theophil Wurm of Württemberg, among others, also rose. Hitler had to respond.18
The Nazi leader decided not to retaliate against Galen at this crucial stage of the war. Accounts with the church would be settled later, he declared. Officially operation T4 was discontinued, but in fact the extinction of “lives unworthy of living” continued nonetheless, in less visible ways. Thereafter the victims were mainly chosen from prisoners of concentration camps: Poles, Jews, “criminals against the race,” “asocials,” cripples. Under the code name 14f13, Himmler had already launched these killings in April 1941 in Sachsenhausen; after mid-August 1941 it became a modified euthanasia operation. Morever, in mental institutions “wild euthanasia” took the lives of thousands of resident inmates. Yet despite the roundabout pursuit of the killings, it was the only time in the history of the Third Reich that prominent representatives of the Christian churches in Germany voiced public condemnation of the crimes committed by the regime.19
II
It seems that during the early months of the new campaign Hitler had decided to leave the fate of the Jews of Europe in abeyance until final victory in the East. Between June and October 1941, the Nazi leader’s mention of the Jewish enemy remained almost as perfunctory in his public addresses as it had been since the beginning of the war.
Of course the Jewish menace had not been forgotten. During Hitler’s broadcast to the German people on June 22, the Jews headed the enumeration of the Reich’s enemies; they were mentioned along with democrats, Bolsheviks, and reactionaries.20 The Jews surfaced again close to the end of the address, as Hitler explained and justified the attack that had just begun: “Now the hour has struck for the necessary counteraction against this plot of Jewish-Anglo-Saxon instigators of the war and the Jewish leaders of Bolshevik headquarters in Moscow.”21 By Hitler’s standards this sounded almost trite.
To the Croatian marshal Slavko Kvaternik the Nazi leader declared during a July 21 meeting that after the completion of the eastern campaign, the Jews of Europe would be sent to Madagascar or possibly to Siberia.22 Manifestly Hitler was using “Madagascar” as a standard illustration of the end goal of his policy: the expulsion of the Jews from Europe. On August 12 the departing Spanish ambassador Eugenio Espinosa was treated to Hitler’s usual diatribe against “Roosevelt, his freemasons, his Jews and the whole Jewish bolshevism.”23 A few days later, on August 25, in a meeting with Mussolini, Hitler came back to the same topic: “The Führer gave a detailed analysis of the Jewish clique surrounding Roosevelt and exploiting the American people. He stated that for anything in the world he would not live in a country like the United States, which had a concept of life inspired by the most vulgar commercialism and had no feeling for any of the most sublime expressions of the human spirit.”24
Similarly, in haranguing the guests and habitués who assembled in his apartments at headquarters near Rastenburg, East Prussia (then at Vinnytsa in the Ukraine, and later at Rastenburg again), the Nazi leader did not dwell at any length on the Jewish topic during the summer of 1941. On July 10 he compared himself to Robert Koch who had discovered the tuberculosis bacillus; he, Hitler, had uncovered the Jews as the element of all social disintegration. He had demonstrated that a state [Germany] could live without Jews.25 The next day the Nazi leader brought up his theory about religion and world history: “The worst blow to have hit humankind is Christianity; Bolshevism is a bastard child of Christianity; both are the monstrous product of the Jews.”26 In early September, Hitler mentioned the Germans’ “extreme sensitivity”: the expulsion of six hundred thousand Jews from the territory of the Reich was considered utmost brutality, he argued, while nobody had paid any attention to the expulsion [by the Poles] of eight hundred thousand Germans from East Prussia (at the end of World War I).27 That was it for the summer.
The Nazi leader possibly wished to maintain the public posture of supreme statesman and strategist who at the time of his greatest historical achievement left the talking to his subordinates. Only once Soviet resistance became a formidable obstacle and when, simultaneously, Roosevelt’s initiatives brought the United States closer to a confrontation with Germany, did the Führer’s aloofness disappear. The underlings, however, were pushed into action. When Goebbels met Hitler at headquarters on July 8, he was instructed to intensify anti-Bolshevik propaganda to the utmost. “Our propaganda line is clear,” the minister recorded the next day. “We must continue to expose the cooperation between Bolshevism and plutocracy and now increasingly stress the Jewish aspect of this common front. In a few days, starting slowly, the anti-Semitic campaign will begin; I am convinced that also in this direction, we can increasingly bring world opinion to our side.”28
In fact, as early as the very first day of the war in the East, on June 22, Reich Press Chief Dietrich, in his “theme of the day” (Tagesparole) for the German press, insisted on the Jewish dimension of the Bolshevik enemy: “It has to be pointed out that the Jews pulling the strings behind the Soviet scene have remained the same, and so have their methods and their system…. Plutocracy and Bolshevism have an identical starting point: the Jewish striving for world domination.”29 On July 5 the Reichspressechef conveyed once more the daily message: “The greatest Jewish swindle of all time is now uncovered and exposed: the “workers’ paradise” turns out to be a gigantic fraud and exploitation system, in the face of the entire world.” After describing the horror of existence in the Soviet Union, Dietrich returned to his main theme: “The Jew pushed the peoples of the Soviet Union into this undescribable misery by way of his devilish Bolshevik system.”30
The tone was set. It would be sustained, with innumerable variations, to the very end. Goebbels’s first personal contribution came on July 20, in a massive anti-Jewish attack published in Das Reich under the title “Mimicry.” Under the minister’s pen the Jews became quintessential mimics: “It is difficult to detect their sly and slippery ways…. Moscow’s Jews invent lies and atrocities, the London Jews cite them and blend them into stories suitable for the innocent bourgeois.” The argument was clear: Jews camouflage their presence and move to the background in order to maneuver behind the scenes. The conclusion of Goebbels’s tirade was foreseeable: The nations that had been deceived would see the light. “From every corner of the earth the cry would rise: ‘The Jews are guilty! The Jews are guilty!’ The punishment will be terrible. We need not do anything to bring it about,” the minister prophesied. “It will come of itself, because it has to come. As the fist of awakening Germany smashed this racial filth, so one day the fist of awakening Europe will smash it too.”31 From then on and throughout the summer, the minister returned repeatedly to the same theme, on every available occasion.32
In those same days Goebbels discovered two “sensational” documents: Roosevelt’s picture in Masonic attire and the American president as initiator of the criminal anti-German ideas of the Jew Kaufman. The first document, found in a Norwegian archive, “proves beyond any doubt that the warmonger Roosevelt is under Jewish-Masonic domination,” read the instructions to the press.33 On July 23, the Völkischer Beobachter published a full-page article titled “High-Ranking Mason Roosevelt, the Main Instrument of World Jewry.”34 All major German papers toed the line.
The Jewish-Masonic sensation was a minor matter compared to the unearthing of Theodor N. Kaufman.35 The thirty-one-year-old Kaufman (the middle N. stood for “Newman,” but it became “Nathan” for the Nazis), a native of New Jersey, had a small advertising business in Newark, selling mainly theater tickets. In early 1941 he set up the Argyle Press solely in order to publish a pamphlet he had authored: “Germany Must Perish.” He demanded the sterilization of all German men and the division of the country into five parts to be annexed by the Reich’s neighbors. After printing his pamphlet Kaufman personally wrapped the copies and sent them to the press. The pamphlet found no echo except for a write-up in the March 24, 1941, issue of Time magazine under the ironic heading “A Modest Proposal,” which also included a few details about the author and his one-man enterprise. Thereafter Kaufman faded back into obscurity in the United States—but not in Germany.36
On July 24, 1941, the Völkischer Beobachter ran a front-page story with the bloodcurdling title: “Roosevelt demands the sterilization of the German people” and the shocking subtitle: “A Monstrous Jewish Extermination Plan. Roosevelt’s Guidelines.” Theodor Nathan Kaufman was turned into a close friend of Roosevelt’s main speechwriter—the Jew Samuel Rosenman—and was himself a leading personality of American Jewry. According to the story the president was the real initiator of Kaufman’s ideas; he “had even personally dictated parts of the shameful work. The leading interventionists make no secret of the fact that the devilish plan of the Jew Kaufman represents the political credo of the President of the United States.”37
The German press and radio carried the Kaufman story in endless variations and presented it as the hidden agenda of the mid-August Churchill-Roosevelt meeting. In September one of Goebbels’s main assistants—the head of the broadcasting division of the ministry, Wolfgang Diewerge—published a pamphlet including translated and commented excerpts from Kaufman’s text; it was launched in millions of copies, precisely when the Jews of the Reich were compelled to wear the star.38 And while the Kaufman story was being relentlessly spread, reports of Bolshevik atrocities were regularly carried by all of Goebbels’s channels; of course they were attributed to Jewish executioners.39
According to an SD report of July 31, 1941, “The situation in the United States was being followed with the greatest attention [by the population]. Increasingly, the view spreads that this war would turn into a real world war…. The excerpts from the book of the Jew Kaufmann [sic] and the comments show that this war is really a life-and-death struggle. The Kaufmann plans have deeply impressed even the most obdurate skeptics.”40
To counter Roosevelt’s course, the subtle Ribbentrop decided to directly influence American, even Jewish American, opinion. On July 19, 1941, he expounded to his chargé d’affaires in Washington, Hans Thomsen, that “of all parts of the population in the United States, the Jews, surely, have the greatest interest in America’s not entering the war…. People will soon recall that the Jews were the principal warmongers and they will be made responsible for the losses that occur. The end of the story will be that one day all the Jews in America will be beaten to death.”41
According to an SD report of July 24, newsreel scenes showing “the jailing of Jews responsible for the murders” [in the East] triggered audience reactions claiming that “they were being dealt with much too fairly.” The scenes showing Jews clearing rubble “elicited great satisfaction” even in the annexed French province Lorraine (particularly in its main city, Metz)…. Images of “lynch justice meted out by the population in Riga against its [Jewish] tormentors were greeted with shouts of encouragement.”42
As had been usual over the years, denunciations of political and other known personalities for being Jewish or influenced by Jews demanded exacting research. On June 18, 1941, Streicher’s Der Stürmer sent an inquiry to the Reichsschrifttumskammer (the Reich’s Writers Chamber) to check on the Jewishness of some German writers and that of fifteen well-known authors including, among others, Upton Sinclair, Lewis Sinclair [sic], Romain Rolland, H. G. Wells, Colette, Charles Dickens, Émil [sic] Zola, Viktor [sic] Hugo, Theodor [sic] Dreiser, and Denis Diderot. On July 3, Meyer of the Reichsschrifttumskammer dutifully answered. Of the German writers (Frank Thiess and Ernst Gläser), one was a member of the Kammer, the other worked for the Propaganda Ministry…. As far as the foreign writers were concerned, none was Jewish, the Kammer confirmed, but the three Americans “wrote in accordance with a typical American mentality.” The others, except for one Wilhelm Speyer, were not known to have Jewish origins.43
III
Several documents signed by Heydrich in June and July 1941 outlined the measures to be taken against the Jews living in the newly occupied areas. In a message sent on June 29 to the Einsatzgruppen commanders, the RSHA chief referred to the meeting held in Berlin on the seventeenth and emphasized the need for secretly encouraging local pogroms (Heydrich called it Selbstbereinigung (self-cleansing). Simultaneously the SS units were to get ready to take over from the local “avengers.”44 Then, in a July 2 message to Himmler’s personal delegates to various countries or major areas, the Higher SS and Police Leaders, Heydrich summed up the instructions previously given to the Einsatzgruppen: All Jewish party and state officials were to be executed and local pogroms had to be encouraged.45 Finally, on July 17, Heydrich ordered the execution of all Jewish prisoners of war.46
And so it was. During the first weeks mostly Jewish men were killed, then all Jews without distinction were murdered by SS Einsatzgruppen and other SS units, by the much more numerous Order Police battalions, all of which were assisted from the outset by local gangs, then by local auxiliary units organized by the Germans, and often by regular Wehrmacht troops.47
Contrary to what had long been assumed, Himmler did not give the order for the general extermination of all Jews in Soviet territory during his August 15 visit to Minsk, when, at his request, he attended a mass execution of Jews on the outskirts of the city.48The move from selective to mass murder had started earlier, probably as a result of Hitler’s remarks during the July 16 conference regarding the “possibilities” offered by “antipartisan” operations. All Jews may not have been partisans in German eyes, but why not assume that they would offer assistance to partisans if they could?
The change had already become noticeable at the very beginning of August, for example in Himmler’s order to eliminate the Jewish population of Pinsk in Belorussia. On August 2 or 3 the Reichsführer sent the appropriate instructions to Franz Magill, commander of the SS second cavalry brigade operating near Pinsk and the Pripet Marshes: “All Jews age 14 or over who are found in the area being combed shall be shot to death; Jewish women and children shall be driven into the marshes [where they would drown]. The Jews are the partisans’ reserve force; they support them…. In the city of Pinsk the killing by shooting shall be carried out by cavalry companies 1 and 4…. The ‘Aktion’ is to begin at once. A report on the implementation shall be submitted.”49 The women and children of Pinsk escaped death for a time as the marshes were too shallow; but the order clearly meant that they were to die. The reference to “partisans” once again indicated the link between the July 16 conference and the expanding massacres. Women and children would not yet be shot as men were (presumably to spare the feelings of the units involved), but they would nonetheless be murdered. Such distinctions would rapidly disappear.
It is likely that some of the killings were directly linked to the planned reduction of food supply to Soviet POWs, Jews, and wider Slav populations in order to feed the Ostheer. This “murder for food supply” strategy may have been applied systematically regarding the POWs, but it did not appear as a decisive factor in the murder of Jews during the summer of 1941. Had it been otherwise, the killing would not have been selective from the outset, and some trace of such plans would have surfaced in Heydrich’s directives or in the reports of the Einsatzgruppen and the police batallions.50
The Soviet annexations in Eastern Europe had added some 2 million Jews to the 3 million already living within the borders of the USSR proper. Approximately 4 million lived in areas that were occupied by the Germans; of these 1.5 million managed to flee; those who remained were a relatively easy prey, also as a result of their urban concentration.51
During this “first sweep” (from June 1941 to the end of the year), part of the Jewish populations survived. The intensity of the massacres differed from area to area according to local circumstances, as did the very uneven ghettoization process, particularly in pre-1939 Soviet territory. The ghettos set up in bigger cities, such as Minsk and Rovno, were liquidated in a few large killing operations over the coming eighteen months or so; the smaller ghettos were often destroyed within weeks, and part of the population was not ghettoized at all but killed on the spot during the first or the second sweep (throughout 1942). We shall return to the exterminations in ex-Soviet territory. Suffice it to mention here that by the end of 1941, about 600,000 Jews had been murdered in the newly conquered eastern regions.
Among the nonghettoized Jewish population, the occupiers could use whomever they chose as household slaves. “We took over an apartment that belonged to Jews,” a member of Order Police Reserve Batallion 105, Hermann G., wrote home on July 7, 1941. “The Jews of this place were woken up very early on Sunday morning by a Vorkommando and had, in their great majority, to leave their houses and apartments, and make them available to us. The first thing was to clean these places thoroughly. All Jewish women and girls were put to work: It was a great Sunday morning cleaning. Every morning at 7 o’clock, the chosen people must be present and do all the work for us…. We don’t need to do anything anymore. H.F. and I have a Jew and, each of us, a Jewess, one of whom is 15 and the other 19; one is called Eide, the other Chawah. They do for us everything we want and are at our service…. They have a permit, so that they should not be grabbed by somebody else when they depart. The Jews are fair game [Die Juden sind Freiwild]. Everybody can snatch any of them on the street and keep them. I wouldn’t want to be in a Jew’s skin. No store, insofar as any are open, sells anything to them. What they live on, I don’t know. We give them some of our bread and also some other things. I cannot be so hard. One can only give well-meant advice to the Jews: Do not bring children into the world; they have no future anymore.”52
The author of the letter does not read like a born murderer or dyed-in-the-wool anti-Semite, but rather like someone who just went along and enjoyed his newly acquired power. This was probably the case of most soldiers of the Ostheer. Yet beyond the involvement of ordinary soldiers, the crimes of the Wehrmacht against local populations and Jews can no longer be denied, although their extent remains the object of intense debate.
The protests of some senior officers regarding the murders committed by the SS during the Polish campaign did not reappear at the outset of the war against the Soviet Union. Even among the small group of officers, mostly belonging to the Prussian aristocracy, who congregated at Army Group Center around Lt. Col. Henning von Tresckow and who, to varying degrees, were hostile to Nazism, the need to overthrow the Bolshevik regime seems to have been fully accepted, and none of the orders issued in the spring of 1941 was seriously questioned.53 It appears, moreover, that several of these officers were well informed, from the very beginning of the Russian campaign, about the criminal activities of Arthur Nebe’s Einsatzgruppe B, which operated in their own area, without however admitting to that knowledge.54 Only several months later, after the October 20–21 extermination of the Jews of Borisov, did this nucleus of the military opposition to Hitler explicitly recognize the mass murder surrounding them and start drawing conclusions.
Whereas acknowledgment of criminal operations was but slowly admitted by a small military group, the participation of the Wehrmacht in such operations was widespread, as we shall see, and indirectly encouraged by some of the most senior commanders of the Ostheer. Thus, in a notorious order of the day, on October 10, 1941, Field Marshal Walter von Reichenau, an outright Nazi, set the tone for several of the highest-ranking commanders: “The soldier must have complete understanding for the necessity of the harsh but just atonement of Jewish subhumanity. This has the further goal of nipping in the bud rebellions in the rear of the Wehrmacht which, as experience shows, are always plotted by the Jews.”55 Hitler praised Reichenau’s proclamation and demanded its distribution to all frontline units in the East.56 Within a few weeks, the Nazi field marshal was imitated by Generals Erich von Manstein, Stülpnagel, and the commander of the seventeenth Army, Gen. Hermann Hoth.57 As for Field Marshal Wilhelm Ritter von Leeb, the commander of Army Group North, he did not believe that the Jewish question could be solved by mass executions: “It would most reliably be solved by sterilizing all males.”58
Some commanders were more reticent. Thus, on September 24, 1941, Field Marshal Gerd von Rundstedt, commander of Army Group South, made it clear that operations against foes such as communists and Jews were solely the task of the Einsatzgruppen. “Independent participation of Wehrmacht members or participation of Wehrmacht members in the excesses of the Ukrainian population against the Jews” were forbidden. Members of the Wehrmacht were also forbidden “to watch or take pictures during the measures taken by the Sonderkommandos.”59 The order was only very partially followed.
In the meantime Wehrmacht propaganda units were hard at work promoting anti-Jewish rage in the ranks of the Red Army and among the Soviet populations. In early July 1941, the first major drops of millions of German leaflets over Soviet territory started. The “Jewish criminals,” their murderous deeds, their treacherous plots, and the like were the mainstays in an endless litany of hatred.60 And, more virulently so than during the Polish campaign, soldiers’ letters demonstrate the growing impact of the anti-Jewish slogans.
On the eve of the attack, Pvt. Richard M, stationed somewhere in the General Government, described the Jews he encountered there in a letter to his girlfriend: “This nation of bandits and gypsies (here this expression applies exactly without any exaggeration) hangs about in the streets and alleys and refuses to do any work voluntarily…. They show greater skill at stealing and haggling…. Moreover these creatures are covered with dirty tatters and infected with all kinds of diseases…. They live in wooden huts with thatched roofs. A brief look through the window makes it clear that vice is at home here.”61 On the second day of the campaign, Sgt. A.N. wrote home: “Now Jewry has declared war on us along the whole line, from one extreme to the other, from the London and New York plutocrats to the Bolsheviks.” And he added: “All that is under Jewish domination stands in one common front against us.”62
On July 3 Cpl. F marched through an eastern Galician town (probably Lutsk): “Here, one witnesses Jewish and Bolshevik cruelty of a kind that I hardly thought possible.” After describing the discovery of the massacres that had taken place in local jails before the Soviets departed, he commented: “This kind of thing calls for vengeance, and it is being meted out.”63 In the same area Cpl. WH described the houses in the Jewish quarter as “robber dens” and the Jews he encountered as the most sinister beings. His comrade Helmut expressed their feelings: “How was it possible that this race claimed for itself the right to rule all other nations.”64
On August 4 Pvt. Karl Fuchs was convinced that “the battle against these subhumans, who have been whipped into a frenzy by the Jews, was not only necessary but came in the nick of time. Our Führer has saved Europe from certain chaos.”65 A mid-July letter sent by an NCO was equally blunt: “The German people owes a great debt to our Führer, for had these beasts, who are our enemies here, come to Germany, such murders would have taken place as the world has never seen before…. And when one reads the ‘Stürmer’ and looks at the pictures, this is only a weak illustration of what we see here and the crimes committed here by the Jews.”66 While ordinary soldiers probably garnered their views from the common font of anti-Jewish propaganda and popular wisdom, killer units underwent regular indoctrination courses in order to be up to the difficulties of their tasks.67
IV
Before retreating from eastern Galicia, the Soviet Secret Police, the NKVD, unable to deport all the jailed Ukrainian nationalists (and also some Poles and Jews), decided to murder them on the spot. The victims, in the hundreds—possibly in the thousands—were found inside the jails and mainly in hastily dug mass graves when the Germans, accompanied by Ukrainian units, marched into the main towns of the area: Lwov, Zloczow, Tarnopol, Brody. As a matter of course the Ukrainians accused the local Jews of having sided with the Soviet occupation regime in general, and particularly of having helped the NKVD in its murderous onslaught against the Ukrainian elite.
This was but the latest phase of a history reaching back several centuries and punctuated by massive and particularly murderous pogroms: the killings led by Bogdan Chmielnicki in the seventeenth century, by the Haidamaks in the eighteenth century, and by Semyon Petlura on the morrow of World War I.68 The traditional hatreds between Ukrainians and Poles, Ukrainians and Russians, and Poles and Russians added their own exacerbating elements to the attitudes of these groups toward the Jews, particularly in areas such as eastern Galicia, where Ukrainians, Poles, and Jews lived side by side in large communities, first under Hapsburg rule, then under Polish domination after World War I, and finally under the Soviets between 1939 and 1941, until the German occupation.
Traditional Christian anti-Jewish hostility was reinforced in the Ukraine by the frequent employment of Jews as estate stewards for Polish nobility, thus as the representatives (and enforcers) of Polish domination over the Ukrainian peasantry. Drawing on such hostility, modern Ukrainian nationalists accused Jews of siding with the Poles after World War I in fought-over areas such as eastern Galicia (while as we saw, the Poles accused the Jews of siding with the Ukrainians), and throughout the interwar period as being part and parcel either of Bolshevik oppression or of Polish measures against the Ukrainian minority, according to region. Such intense nationalist anti-Semitism was further exacerbated when a Ukrainian Jew named Sholem Schwarzbart assassinated the much-admired Petlura in Paris on May 25, 1926, in retaliation for the postwar pogroms.69
Within the Ukrainian nationalist movement itself, the extremists led by Stepan Bandera and supported by the Germans gained the upper hand against more moderate groups.70 Bandera’s men led the OUN–B (Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists–Bandera) auxiliary units that marched into eastern Galicia in June 1941 together with the Wehrmacht.
In Lwov the Ukrainians herded local Jews together and forced them to dig up the corpses of the NKVD’s victims from their mass graves or retrieve them from the jails. The Jews then had to align the bodies of those recently murdered and also of already badly decomposed corpses along the open graves, before being themselves shot into the pits—or being killed in the jails and the fortress, or on the streets and squares of the main east Galician town.71
In Zloczow the killers belonged first and foremost to the OUN and to the Waffen SS “Viking” Division, while Sonderkommando 4b of Einsatzgruppe C kept to the relatively passive role of encouraging the Ukrainians (the Waffen SS did not need any prodding). The murders took place under the watchful eye of the 295th Infantry Division, and it was finally as a result of the protests of the first general staff officer of the division, who sent a complaint to Seventeenth Army headquarters, that the killings of Jews stopped—temporarily.72
In his first diary entry, on July 7, 1943, Aryeh Klonicki, a Jew from Kovel, described the events of June 1941 in Tarnopol: “I came one day before the outbreak of the war [with the Soviet Union] as a guest of my wife’s sister who lives there. On the third day of the [German] invasion a massacre lasting three consecutive days was carried out in the following manner. The Germans, joined by Ukrainians, would go from house to house in order to look for Jews. The Ukrainians would take the Jews out of the houses where the waiting Germans would kill them, either right by the house or they would transport the victims to a particular site where all would be put to death. This is how some five thousand people found their death, mostly men. As for women and children they were murdered only in exceptional cases. I myself and my wife were saved at the time only because we were living in a street inhabited by Christians who declared that there were no Jews living in our house.”73
On July 6 Pvt. Franzl also recorded the events at Tarnopol, for the enjoyment of his parents in Vienna. The discovery of the mutilated corpses of Volksdeutsche and Ukrainians led to vengeance against the local Jews: They were forced to carry the corpses from the cellars and line them up by newly dug graves; afterward the Jews were beaten to death with truncheons and spades. “Up to now,” Franzl went on, “we have sent approximately 1,000 Jews to the other world, but this is by far too little for what they have done.” After asking his parents to spread the news, Franzl ended his letter with a promise: “If there are doubts, we will bring photos. Then, no more doubts.”74
In smaller towns in eastern Galicia most of the murderous anti-Jewish outbreaks during these early days of occupation took place without apparent German intervention. Witnesses from Brzezany, a town to the south of Zloczow, described, decades later, the sequence of events: As the Germans entered the town, “the Ukrainians were ecstatic. Throngs of Ukrainian peasants, mostly young people, carrying yellow-and-blue flags adorned with the Ukrainian trident, filled the…streets. They came from the villages, dressed in Ukrainian national costumes, singing their Ukrainian songs.” In the prisons and outside, the corpses of Ukrainian activists killed by the NKVD were uncovered: “The sights were indescribable, [so was] the stench from the corpses. They were spread out on the prison cellar floor. Other corpses were floating in the river, the Zlota Lipa. People blamed the NKVD and the Jews.” What followed was to be expected: “Most of the Jews who perished in Brzezany on that day were murdered with broomsticks with nails attached to them…. There were two rows of Ukrainian bandits, holding big sticks. They forced those people, the Jews, in between the two rows and murdered them in cold blood with those sticks.”75 Farther east the attitude of the populations was somewhat different.
On August 1, 1941, eastern Galicia was annexed to the General Government and became part of the district of Galicia with Lwov as its main administrative center. Some 24,000 Jews had been massacred before the annexation; afterward the fate of the Jews in the new district differed for some time from the situation prevailing in other parts of the General Government. For several months Frank forbade the setting up of ghettos in order to keep the option of transferring these additional Jewish populations “to the East,” eventually to the Pripet Marshes area.
In Lwov, for example, ghettoization started only in November 1941. The Governor-general’s desire to get rid of his newly acquired Jews was so intense that little was done to hinder thousands of them from fleeing to Romania and Hungary. Otherwise tens of thousands of Jewish men from Galicia were soon herded into labor camps, mainly along the new strategic road that would link Lwov to the southern Ukraine and eventually to the Black Sea. This notorious Durchgangstrasse IV (transit road IV) would be useful both to the Wehrmacht and to Himmler’s colonization plans. It is this project that, in the later summer of 1941, inaugurated de facto the systematic annihilation of Jews by way of slave labor.76
In early August 1941, the small town of Bjelaja Zerkow, south of Kiev, was occupied by the 295th Infantry Division of Army Group South; the Wehrmacht area commander, Colonel Riedl, ordered the registration of all Jewish inhabitants and asked SS Sonderkommando 4a, a subunit of Einsatzgruppe C—which in the meantime had moved from eastern Galicia to pre-1939 Soviet Ukraine—to murder them.
On August 8 a section of the Sonderkommando, led by SS Obersturmführer August Häfner, arrived in the town.77 Between August 8 and August 19 a company of Waffen SS attached to the Kommando shot all of the 800 to 900 local Jews, with the exception of a group of children under the age of five.78 These children were abandoned without food or water in a building on the outskirts of the town near the army barracks. On August 19 many were taken away in three trucks and shot at a nearby rifle range; ninety remained in the building, guarded by a few Ukrainians.79
Soon the screams of these ninety children became so unbearable that the soldiers called in two field chaplains, a Protestant and a Catholic, to take some “remedial action.”80 The chaplains found the children half naked, covered with flies, and lying in their own excrement. Some of the older ones were eating mortar off the walls; the infants were mostly comatose. The divisional chaplains were alerted and, after an inspection, they reported the matter to the first staff officer of the division, Lt. Col. Helmuth Groscurth.
Groscurth went to inspect the building. There he met Oberscharführer Jäger, the commander of the Waffen SS unit who had murdered the other Jews of the town; Jäger informed him that the remaining children were to be “eliminated.” Colonel Riedl, the field commander, confirmed the information and added that the matter was in the hands of the SD and that the Einsatzkommando had received its orders from the highest authorities.
At this point Groscurth took it upon himself to order the postponement of the killings by one day, notwithstanding Häfner’s threat to lodge a complaint. Groscurth even positioned armed soldiers around a truck already filled with children and prevented it from leaving. He communicated all this to the staff officer of Army Group South. The matter was referred to the Sixth Army, probably because Einsatzkommando 4a operated in its area. That same evening, the commander of the Sixth Army, Field Marshal Reichenau, personally decided that “the operation…had to be completed in a suitable way.”81
The next morning, August 21, Groscurth was summoned to a meeting at local headquarters in the presence of Colonel Riedl, Captain Luley, a counterintelligence officer who had reported to Reichenau on the course of the events, Obersturmführer Häfner, and the chief of Einsatzkommando 4a, the former architect SS Standartenführer Paul Blobel. Luley declared that, although he was a Protestant, he thought that the “chaplains should limit themselves to the welfare of the soldiers”; with the full support of the field commander, Luley accused the chaplains of “stirring up trouble.”
According to Groscurth’s report, Riedl then “attempted to draw the discussion into the ideological domain…The elimination of the Jewish women and children,” he explained, “was a matter of urgent necessity, whatever form it took.” Riedl complained that the division’s initiative had delayed the execution by twenty-four hours. At that point, as Groscurth later described it, Blobel, who had been silent up until then, intervened: He supported Riedl’s complaint and “added that it would be best if those troops who were nosing around carried out the executions themselves and the commanders who were stopping the measures took command of these troops.” “I quietly rejected this view,” Groscurth wrote, “without taking any position as I wished to avoid any personal acrimony.” Finally Groscurth mentioned Reichenau’s attitude: “When we discussed what further measures should be taken, the Standartenführer declared that the commander in chief [Reichenau] recognized the necessity of eliminating the children and wished to be informed once this had been carried out.”82
On August 22 the children were executed. The final sequence of the events was described by Häfner at his trial: “I went out to the woods alone. The Wehrmacht had already dug a grave. The children were brought along in a tractor. The Ukrainians were standing around trembling. The children were taken down from the tractor. They were lined up along the top of the grave and shot so that they fell into it. The Ukrainians did not aim at any particular part of the body…. The wailing was indescribable…. I particularly remember a small fair-haired girl who took me by the hand. She too was shot later.”83 The following day Captain Luley reported on the completion of the task to Sixth Army headquarters and was recommended for a promotion.84
The first Germans with any authority to be confronted with the fate of the ninety Jewish children were the chaplains. The field chaplains were compassionate, the divisional ones somewhat less so. In any case, after sending in their reports the chaplains were not heard from again.
The killing of the Jewish adults and children was public. In postwar court testimony, a cadet officer who had been stationed in Bjelaja Zerkow at the time of the events, after describing in gruesome detail the execution of a batch of approximately 150 to 160 Jewish adults, made the following comments: “The soldiers knew about these executions and I remember one of my men saying that he had been permitted to take part…. All the soldiers who were in Bjelaja Zerkow knew what was happening. Every evening, the entire time I was there, rifle fire could be heard, although there was no enemy in the vicinity.”85 The same cadet added, however: “It was not curiosity which drove me to watch this, but disbelief that something of this type could happen. My comrades were also horrified by the executions.86
The central personality in the Bjelaja Zerkow events was in many ways Lt. Col. Helmuth Groscurth. A deeply religious Protestant, a conservative nationalist, he did not entirely reject some of the tenets of Nazism and yet became hostile to the regime and close to the opposition groups gathered around Adm. Wilhelm Canaris and Gen. Ludwig Beck. He despised the SS and in his diary referred to Heydrich as “a criminal.”87 His decision to postpone the execution of the children in Bjelaja Zerkow by one day, notwithstanding Häfner’s threat, and then to use soldiers to prevent an already loaded truck from leaving, is certainly proof of courage.
Moreover Groscurth did not hesitate to express his criticism of the killings in the conclusion of his report: “Measures,” he wrote, “against women and children were undertaken which in no way differed from atrocities carried out by the enemy about which the troops are continually being informed. It is unavoidable that these events will be reported back home where they will be compared to the Lemberg atrocities.” [This is probably an allusion to executions perpetrated by the NKVD.]88 For these comments Groscurth was reprimanded by Reichenau a few days later. Yet his overall attitude is open to many questions.
After mentioning Reichenau’s order to execute the children, Groscurth added: “We then settled the details of how the executions were to be carried out. They are to take place during the evening of August 22. I did not involve myself in the details of the discussion.”89 The most troubling part of the report appears at the very end: “The execution could have been carried out without any uproar if the field and local headquarters had taken the necessary steps to keep the troops away…. Following the execution of all the Jews in the town it became necessary to eliminate the Jewish children, particularly the infants. Both infants and children should have been eliminated immediately in order to avoid this inhuman agony.”90
Groscurth was captured by the Russians at Stalingrad, together with the remaining soldiers and officers of the Sixth Army. He died in Soviet captivity shortly afterward, in April 1943.
V
In Lithuania the first victims of the Germans were the 201 mostly Jewish men (and one woman) of the small border town Gargždai (Garsden), executed on June 24 by an Einsatzkommando from Tilsit and a Schutzpolizei (SCHUPO) unit from Memel under the overall command of SS Brigadeführer Franz Walter Stahlecker, the commander of Einsatzgruppe A (the Tilsit unit received its orders directly from Gestapo chief Müller).91 The Jewish women and children (approximately 300), spared at the outset, were locked up in barns and shot in mid-September.92
A few days later the killings started in the main cities, Vilna and Kovno, and went on in several waves, during the summer and the fall; at the same time the Jewish populations of small towns and villages were entirely exterminated. The destruction of the Jews of Lithuania had begun. Next to Warsaw, Vilna—the “Jerusalem of Lithuania”—a city inhabited on the eve of the German occupation by some 60,000 Jews, was for centuries one of the most important centers of Jewish life in Eastern Europe. In the eighteenth century, Rabbi Elijah ben Solomon, the “Vilna Gaon,” carried religious scholarship to rarely equaled heights; albeit in a tradition of strict intellectual orthodoxy that fiercely opposed Hasidism, the emotional and popular Jewish revivalism born at the same time in the Ukrainian borderlands. It was also in Vilna that the Jewish workers’ party, the Bund, was created at the end of the nineteenth century. As we saw, the Bund was a fervent protagonist of the international proletarian struggle, but it was decidedly anti-Bolshevist; it advocated Jewish cultural (Yiddish) and political (socialist) autonomy in Eastern Europe and thus opposed the Zionist brand of Jewish nationalism. It was possibly the most original and numerically important Jewish political movement of the interwar period—and the most unrealistic.
On the morrow of World War I, the Baltic countries became independent, but Lithuania lost Vilna to Poland. At that stage the hatred of Lithuanian nationalists and of their fascist fringe, the Iron Wolf movement, was essentially directed against the Poles, much less so against the Jews. In fact, for a short period, Jewish existence in the new state thrived (the government even established a Ministry of Jewish Affairs) and the community, 150,000 strong, could shape its own educational system and, more generally, its own cultural life with a great measure of autonomy. In 1923, however, the Ministry of Jewish Affairs was abolished, and soon Jewish educational and cultural institutions were denied government support. Stepwise, from 1926 on, Lithuania moved to the right, first under the government of Antanas Smetona and Augustin Voldemaras, then under Smetona alone. Yet the Lithuanian strongman did not initiate any anti-Semitic laws or measures.
During those same years the Jewish minority in Polish-controlled Vilna also energetically developed its cultural and internal political life. Apart from a vast school system in Yiddish, Hebrew, and Polish, the Vilna community boasted a Yiddish theater, a wealth of newspapers and periodicals, clubs, libraries, and other cultural and social institutions. The city became home to major Yiddish writers and artists, as well as to the YIVO research center in the Jewish humanities and social sciences founded in 1925—a Jewish university in the making.93
The political scene changed radically with the Soviet annexation of the Baltic countries in July 1940: Jewish religious institutions and political parties such as the Bund or the Zionist-Revisionist Betar soon became targets of the NKVD. As we saw in regard to eastern Poland, any kind of balanced assessment of Jewish involvement in the new political system is rendered quasi impossible by contrary aspects in various domains: Jews were highly represented in officer schools, midrank police appointments, higher education, and various administrative positions. The situation was not different in the two other Baltic countries. Thus, it was not too difficult for extremist Lithuanian right-wing émigrés who had fled to Berlin and who, together with the Germans, were fostering anti-Soviet operations in the home country, to pretend—by exaggerating and twisting numbers that the Jews collaborated with the Bolsheviks. Elimination of the Jews from Lithuania became a goal of the underground “Lithuanian Activists’ Front” (LAF). When, a week before the German invasion, the NKVD deported some 35,000 Lithuanians to the Soviet interior, the Jews were widely accused of being both agents and informers.94
The Wehrmacht occupied Vilna in the early morning hours of June 24. The systematic killings in the city started on July 4, two days after the arrival of Einsatzkommando 9. Lithuanian gangs (self-styled “partisans”) had started rounding up hundreds of male Jews whom they either slaughtered on the spot or in the woods of Ponar, close to the city. Once the Germans openly stepped in, they extended and organized the anti-Jewish operations, and the Lithuanians became willing auxiliaries in the German murder campaign. According to report no. 21 of July 13 about the activities of Einsatzgruppe A: “In Vilna…the Lithuanian Ordnungspolizei, which was placed under the command of the Einsatzkommando…received instructions to take part in the Jewish extermination actions. Consequently, 150 Lithuanians are engaged in arresting and taking Jews to the concentration camp, where after one day they were given ‘special treatment’ (Sonderbehandlung).”95
The massacre of some 5,000 Vilna Jewish men in Ponar during July inaugurated a series of mass killings that lasted throughout the summer and the fall. Women and children were included from August onwards; the German aim seems to have been the extermination of Jews unable to work, while workers and their families were left alive. Itzhak Rudashevski, a Vilna schoolboy, not yet fourteen in the summer of 1941, described in the diary he had probably started in June the Yom Kippur round-up (as the Jews were already in the ghetto): “Today the ghetto is full of storm troopers. They thought Jews would not go to work today, so they came to the ghetto to take them. At night things suddenly became turbulent. The people get up. The gate opens. An uproar develops. Lithuanians have arrived. I look at the courtyard and see them leading away people with bundles. I hear boots pounding on the stairs. Soon, however, things calmed down. The Lithuanians were given money and they left. In this way the defenseless Jews attempted to rescue themselves. In the morning the terrible news spread. Several thousand people were uprooted from the ghetto at night. These people never came back again.”96 Rudashevski’s last sentence indicates that his entry was written later, from memory; it shows clearly nonetheless that neither he nor the Jews being taken away had any idea of what was going on and where they were headed. By the end of these successive Aktionen, in December 1941, some 33,000 Jewish inhabitants of Vilna had been murdered.97
For many Lithuanians the prospect of easy looting became a major incentive. A Pole who lived near Ponar and observed the traffic in Jewish possessions shrewdly noted: “To the Germans, 300 Jews means 300 enemies of humanity. To the Lithuanians it means 300 pairs of pants, 300 pairs of boots.”98 This Polish observer probably did not know at the time that before murdering them the Germans robbed the “enemies of humanity” much more systematically than the Lithuanians did. According to the same Einsatzgruppe report of July 13, “about 500 Jews…are liquidated daily. About 460,000 rubles in cash, as well as many valuables belonging to Jews who were subject to special treatment, were confiscated as property belonging to enemies of the Reich.”99
In Kovno, Lithuanian murder squads [the “partisans”] ran wild during the early days of the occupation. In a postwar statement a German soldier in the 562nd Bakers’ Company (which moved to Kovno at the time and witnessed the killings) volunteered a remark that expressed much more than it was meant to convey: “From where I was standing I saw Lithuanian civilians beating a number of civilians with different types of weapons until they showed no signs of life. Not knowing why these people were being beaten to death in such a cruel manner, I asked a medical-corps sergeant standing next to me…. He told me that the people being beaten to death were all Jews…. Why these Jews were being beaten to death I did not find out.”100 Other reports describe the enthusiastic attendance of the Lithuanian population (many women with children settling in “front rows” for the day) and of throngs of German soldiers, all of them goading the killers with shouts and applause. Over the following days groups of Jews were shoved off to the forts surrounding the city (Forts VII and IX in particular) and shot.
While some German soldiers did not grasp what exactly was going on with the Jews, many Jews themselves didn’t understand either. Thus on July 2, a Jewish woman from Kovno, Mira Scher, wrote to the chief of the Security Police to ask why, on June 26, Lithuanian “partisans” had arrested most of her family, including her granddaughters Mala (thirteen), Frida (eight) and her grandson Benjamin (four). As “all the people mentioned are entirely innocent,” Mrs. Scher added, “I ask, with all courtesy, to free them.” On the same day a similar letter was sent to the same authorities by Berkus Friedmann, whose wife, Isa (forty-two), daughter, Ester (sixteen), and son, Eliahu (two and a half), were also arrested by the “partisans.” Friedmann assured the chief of the SIPO [Sicherheitspolizei] that his family had never belonged to any party and that they all were legal citizens.”101
Whereas in eastern Galicia the OUN squads had started on their own to murder Jews from day one, in the Baltic countries some German prompting may have been necessary at times. In a notorious October 15, 1941, report about the activities of Einsatzgruppe Ain the Baltic countries, Stahlecker repeatedly insisted on this point. “Native anti-Semitic forces were induced to start pogroms against Jews during the first hours after capture [occupation],” Stahlecker wrote in the introductory part of the report, “though this inducement proved to be very difficult [emphasis added].” Further on Stahlecker returned to this point in his description of the events in Lithuania: “This [local involvement in the killings] was achieved for the first time by partisan activities in Kovno. To our surprise it was not easy at first to set in motion an extensive pogrom against Jews [emphasis added]. Klimatis, the leader of the partisan unit…who was primarily used for this purpose, succeeded in starting a pogrom on the basis of advice given to him by a small advanced detachment acting in Kovno, and in such a way that no German order or German instigation was noticed from the outside.”
Stahlecker may of course have emphasized these initial difficulties to underscore his own talents of persuasion; Lithuanian reticence did not last long in any case, as, according to Stahlecker himself, in Kovno the local gangs murdered some fifteen hundred Jews during the first night of the occupation.102
The extermination frenzy that engulfed the immense majority of the Jews of Lithuania raged throughout the other two Baltic countries as well. By the end of 1941 the quasi totality of the 2,000 Jews of Estonia had been killed. A year later the approximately 66,000 Jews of Latvia had been almost entirely exterminated (some 12,000 Jews remained on Latvian territory, 8,000 of whom were deportees from the Reich).103
The massacres spread throughout the occupied eastern territories. Even the Reich’s downtrodden victims, the Poles, took a hand in the mass killing of Jews. The best-known massacres occurred in the Bialystók district, in Radzilow and in Jedwabne, on July 10. After the Wehrmacht occupied the area, the inhabitants of these small towns exterminated most of their Jewish neighbors by beating them, shooting them, and burning scores of them alive in local barns. These basic facts seem indisputable, but some related issues demand further investigation. Apparently, a high humber of fiercely anti-Semitic priests indoctrinated their flock in the Jedwabne region.104 Was this high pitch of anti-Jewish hatred exacerbated by German incitement or even by direct German intervention, but also by the role of Jewish Communist officials in the Bial/ystok district during the Soviet occupation?105 Most helpful throughout, as far as incitement and killing went, were the ethnic Germans; they greatly facilitated the task of their new masters.106
At times, however, local populations refused to participate in the anti-Jewish violence. In Brest Litovsk, for example, both the White Russians and the Poles expressed quite openly their pity for the Jewish victims and their disgust for the “barbaric” methods of the Germans, the “hangmen of the Jews.”107 The same reluctance to initiate pogroms was noticed in the Ukraine, in the Zhytomyr region for example. According to an Einsatzgruppe C report from August and early September 1941, “almost nowhere could the population be induced to take active steps against the Jews.” The Germans and the Ukrainian militia had to take the initiative and to instigate the violence in various ways.108 Similar attitudes were indirectly confirmed in Wehrmacht reports dealing with the impact of anti-Semitic propaganda operations on the Russian population. “After examining the reasons behind the relatively small impact of German propaganda to date,” an Army Group Center report indicated in August 1941, “it appears that German propaganda basically deals with matters of no real interest to the average Russian. This is particularly true of anti-Semitic propaganda. Attempts to spark pogroms against the Jews have come to naught. The reason is that in the eyes of the average Russian, Jews live a proletarian life and thus do not represent a target for attack.”109
As weeks and months went by a basic fact became obvious to the populations of the occupied eastern territories: No law, no rule, no measure protected a Jew. Even children understood as much. On October 21, 1941, a Polish schoolboy, Georg Marsonas, wrote to the Gebietskommissar(district commissar) in Pinsk: “I am thirteen years old and I want to help my mother because she is having a difficult time making a living. I cannot work because I have to go to school but I can earn some money as a member of the municipal band because it plays in the evenings. Unfortunately, I do not have an accordion, which I know how to play. I know a Jew who has an accordion, so I very much ask your permission to have the instrument given or lent to the municipal band. That way I’ll have a chance to fulfill my wish—to be useful to my family.”110
VI
While the Germans and their local auxiliaries actively pursued their killing campaign in the north, center, and south of the Eastern Front, the Romanian army and gendarmerie were outperforming Otto Ohlendorf ’s Einsatzgruppe D.111 Over a one-year period the Romanians were to massacre between 280,000 and 380,000 Jews.112 They could not compete with the Germans in the total number of victims, but like the Latvians, the Lithuanians, the Ukrainians, and the Croats, they were ingenious tormentors and murderers.
The earliest large-scale massacre of Romanian Jews took place, in Romania proper, before the reoccupation of the “lost provinces” (Bessarabia and northern Bukovina), particularly in Iasi, the capital of Moldavia. On June 26, 1941, in “retaliation” for two Soviet air raids and “to quell a Jewish uprising,” the killings started, organized by Romanian and German army intelligence officers and local police forces. After thousands of Jews had been massacred in the city, several thousand more were packed into the hermetically sealed cars of two freight trains and sent on an aimless journey, lasting several days. In the first train 1,400 Jews suffocated to death or died of thirst; 1,194 bodies were recovered from the second one. The exact number of the victims of the Iasi pogrom remains in dispute, but it may have exceeded 10,000.113
The decimation of the Jews of Bessarabia and Bukovina, which began as a local initiative (mainly in the countryside), then continued on orders from Bucharest. On July 8 Ion Antonescu harangued his ministers: “I beg you, be implacable. Saccharine and vaporous humanitarianism has no place here. At the risk of being misunderstood by some traditionalists who may still be among you, I am for the forced migration of the entire Jewish element from Bessarabia and Bukovina, which must be thrown over the border.” After ordering similar measures against Ukrainians and other unreliable elements, Antonescu turned to historical precedents and national imperatives as supreme justifications: “The Roman Empire performed a series of barbarous acts against its contemporaries and yet it was the greatest political establishment. There are no other more favorable moments in our history. If need be, shoot with machine guns, and I say that there is no law…. I take full legal responsibility and I tell you, there is no law!”114And, while the supreme leader invoked history, the head of the government, Mihai Antonescu (not related to Ion Antonescu), turned again, in the Iron Guard’s steps, to the rhetoric of Christian anti-Jewish hatred: “Our Army has been humiliated [by the Soviet occupation]—forced to pass under the Caudine Forks of its barbaric enemies—accompanied solely by the treacherous scorn of the accomplices of Bolshevism, who added to our Christian crucifixion their Judaic offense.” The crusade was now launched against those “who had desecrated the altar in the land of our ancestors, against the Yids and Bolsheviks [who] have emptied the house of the Redeemer, crucifying the faith on their vilainous [sic] cross.”115
The massacre of Jews became an everyday occurrence; tens of thousands were herded into ghettos (the most important being in Kishinev, the main city of Bessarabia) until, in the autumn, they were driven over the river Dniester into “Transnistria,” the area of southern Ukraine that was Romanian-occupied and was to remain under Romanian control.116
On October 16, 1941, the Romanian army entered Odessa; a few days later, on October 22, its headquarters were destroyed by an explosion set up by the NKVD. The murderous fury of the occupiers of course turned against the Jews of the city. After killing some 19,000 Jews (according to German estimates) in the Odessa harbor area, the Romanians drove a further 25,000 to 30,000 to neighboring Dalnic, where they exterminated them by shooting, explosives, or by burning them alive.117
On several occasions in October 1941 the president of the Union of Jewish Communities in Romania, Wilhelm Filderman, and Chief Rabbi Alexander Safran interceded with Antonescu to stop the deportations to Transnistria and ease the fate of the Jews of Bessarabia and Bukovina. On October 19, in a violent answer released to the press, Antonescu accused the Jews of Romania of treachery toward their country and of responsibility for the supposed mutilations of Romanian officers captured by Soviet Jews, their “brethren”: “In keeping with tradition,” Antonescu went on, “you wish now to transform yourselves from accused into accusers, acting as if you have forgotten the reasons which caused the situation of which you complain…. From the cellars of Chisinau [Kishinev] our martyrs are removed daily, terribly mutilated cadavers thus rewarded for the friendly hand which, for twenty years, they stretched out to those ungrateful beasts…. Do not pity, if you really have a soul, those who do not merit it.”118
As public as Antonescu’s letter had been, so was information about the massacres, from the outset. “Lunch at Alice’s with Hillard, a cavalry lieutenant who returned yesterday from the Ukrainian front,” Sebastian recorded on August 21, 1941. “A lot about the massacre of the Jews on both sides of the Dniester. Tens, hundreds, thousands of Jews were shot. He, a simple lieutenant, could have killed or ordered the killing of any number of Jews. The driver who took them to Iasi had himself shot four.”119
Over time, ever more details about the killings kept reaching Bucharest: “The roads of Bessarabia and Bukovina are filled with corpses of Jews driven from their homes toward Ukraine.” Sebastian noted on October 20: “It is an anti-Semitic delirium that nothing can stop. There are no breaks, no rhyme or reason…This is sheer uncontrolled bestiality without shame or conscience, without goal or purpose. Anything, absolutely anything, is possible.”120
Sebastian’s perception of the events was confirmed by the American minister in the Romanian capital who, however, set greater emphasis upon Ion Antonescu’s crucial role: “It is becoming more and more evident,” Gunther wrote on November 4, “that the Romanians, obviously with the moral support of the Germans, are utilizing the present period for handling the Jewish problem in their own way. I have it on good authority that Marshal Antonescu has stated…that ‘this is wartime, and a good time to settle the Jewish problem once and for all.’”121
After the German victory in the Balkans, Yugoslavia had been divided: The Germans occupied Serbia and the Italians large stretches of the Dalmatian Coast; the Hungarians were given the Backa and Baranya regions, and the Bulgarians received Macedonia. An independent Croatian state was established under the leadership of Ante Pavelíc and his Ustasha movement. While the Dalmatian coast of Croatia remained partly under Italian control, some German troops also stayed on Croatian territory.
In Serbia the Germans set up a collaborationist government under Prime Minister Milan Nedíc, a fervent anticommunist. Nedíc hardly mattered, though, and even before the German attack against the Soviet Union, armed resistance started mainly in the countryside. Throughout the summer relatively small and untrained Wehrmacht forces fought a losing battle against the spreading insurrection by Communist and Serbian nationalist guerrillas belonging to Tito (Josip Broz) and Draža Mihajlovic, respectively. Notwithstanding the widespread shooting of hostages (Serbs and mainly Jews) by the Germans, the destruction of villages, and the killing of their inhabitants, the rebellion spread. In September, on the recommendation of Field Marshal List, the commander in chief of the Wehrmacht in the Balkans, Hitler appointed the Austrian general Franz Boehme, a notorious Serb hater, as commanding general of the forces stationed in Serbia and gave him a free hand to use “severe methods” to regain control of the situation. Boehme complied, enthusiastically.122
In Croatia, no sooner did Pavelíc return from Italian exile and establish his new regime–a mixture of fascism and devout Catholicism—then, as the German envoy to Zagreb, Edmund von Glaise Horstenau, reported “the Ustasha went raging mad.”123 The poglavnik (“leader,” in Serbo-Croat) launched a genocidal crusade against the 2.2 million Christian Orthodox Serbs (out of a total population of 6.7 million) living on Croatian territory, and against the country’s 45,000 Jews, particularly in ethnically mixed Bosnia. The Catholic Ustasha did not mind the continuous presence of Muslims or Protestants, but Serbs and Jews had to convert, to leave or to die. According to historian Jonathan Steinberg, “Serbian and Jewish men, women and children were literally hacked to death. Whole villages were razed to the ground and the people driven to barns to which the Ustasha set fire. There is in the Italian Foreign Ministry archive a collection of photographs of the butcher knives, hooks and axes used to chop up Serbian victims. There are photographs of Serb women with breasts hacked off by pocket knives, men with eyes gouged out, emasculated and mutilated.”124
While Archbishop Alois Stepinac, the head of the Catholic Church in Croatia, waited for months to denounce the savage murder campaign publicly, some local bishops rejoiced at the extermination of the schismatics and the Jews, or at their forced conversion. In the words of the Catholic bishop of Mostar, “There was never such a good occasion as now for us to help Croatia to save the countless souls.”125 And while bishops blessed the unique occasion to save souls, some Franciscan monks took a leading role in the most vicious murder operations and in the decimation of Serbs and Jews in the uniquely Croat Jasenovac extermination camp.126
The Vatican was well informed, of course, of the unfolding atrocities perpetrated by the new Catholic state. Yet, not everything appeared in a negative light either to the Curia or to the Holy See’s apostolic visitor to Zagreb, the Benedictine abbot Giuseppe Ramiro Marcone. In May 1941 anti-Semitic laws and the wearing of the star inscribed with the letter Z (for Zidov, or Jews) had been introduced throughout Pavelíc’s state. On August 23, shortly after his arrival, Marcone reported to the Vatican secretary of state, Luigi Maglione: “The badly tolerated badge and the hatred of the Croats toward them [the Jews], as well as the economic disadvantages to which they are subjected, often brings about in the minds of the Jews the desire to convert to the Catholic Church. Supernatural motives and the silent action of divine grace cannot be a priori excluded from this. Our clergy facilitates their conversion, thinking that at least their children will be educated in Catholic schools and therefore will be more sincerely Christian.”127
In his answer of September 3, 1941, Maglione did not comment on the role of God’s hand in the conversions, nor did he instruct his delegate to protest against the treatment of Serbs or Jews: “If your Eminence [Marcone] can find a suitable occasion, he should recommend in a discreet manner that would not be interpreted as an official appeal, that moderation be employed with regard to Jews on Croatian territory. Your Eminence should see to it that activities of a political nature engaged in by the clergy should not cause friction between the parties, and that the impression of loyal cooperation with the civil authorities be always preserved.”128 Throughout 1941 and early 1942 the Croats exterminated some 300,000 to 400,000 Serbs and most of the 45,000 Jews (either directly or by delivering them to the Germans). Throughout the entire period not a word about the Ustasha murders was heard from the pope himself.129
In the meantime Serbs and Jews were seeking refuge in the Italian zone in ever greater numbers, and the Croats were increasingly treated as enemies by Mussolini’s army. Soon the Italians went one step further and, to put an end to Ustasha crimes, they moved forces farther into Croatian territory.130 On September 7, 1941, the commander of the Italian Second Army, General Vittorio Ambrosio, issued a proclamation that established Italian authority over the new occupation area; its final lines read: “All those who for various motives have abandoned their country are herewith invited to return to it. The Italian armed forces are the guarantors of their safety, their liberty and their property.” The Germans were outraged; Italian protection of Serbs and Jews had become open, and Italian declarations were hardly disguised expressions of scorn and disgust at Croatian behavior and even more so at that of their German masters.131
In their mixture of Christian beliefs, fascist policies, and savage murderousness, the Croat Ustasha and the Romanian Iron Guard, or even Antonescu’s regime, had much in common; the same extremist ingredients characterized the Ukrainian nationalists, mainly Bandera’s faction in the OUN, and the sundry groups of Lithuanian and Latvian “partisans.” For all these radical killer groups, local Jews were a prime target, as we saw. Similar ideological components also characterized the Slovak People’s Party—created before World War I by a Catholic priest, Father Andrej Hlinka—and its armed militants, the Hlinka Guard. Hlinka, who died in 1938, had fought for Slovak autonomy and the defense of church interests. From the outset the People’s Party was divided between traditional conservatives and a militant quasifascist wing led by Vojtech Tuka (a former law professor at the University of Bratislava), a fierce nationalist and no less fierce anti-Semite. After Hlinka’s death, Dr. Jozef Tiso, a conservative priest, became the chief of the party and the president of independent Slovakia in March 1939, while Tuka drifted ever closer to National Socialism and was soon appointed prime minister of the new state.132 Of course the new Slovak regime did not forfeit the confidence of its Berlin masters—nor could it; its anti-Semitism was inherent in a religious tradition and open to direct German influence.133
The great majority of the largely rural Slovak population of approximately 2.6 million was devoutly Catholic; the Evangelical community counted around 15 percent of the population, and at the end of 1940, the Jews (after the transfer to Hungary of a south Slovak province) represented some 80,000 people—that is, around 3.3 percent of the population.134
It may be remembered that when Tiso, Tuka, and Interior Minister Sano Mach were received by Hitler on July 28, 1940, the Nazi leader demanded of his Slovak partners that they coordinate their anti-Jewish legislation.135 Soon thereafter SS Hauptsturmführer Dieter Wisliceny arrived in Bratislava as “adviser for Jewish affairs.” A Central Office for the Economy (UHU) was established to oversee the Aryanization of Jewish property and expel the Jews from any significant functions in business life; a Jewish Council (Už) was set up, and in September 1941 the “Jewish Codex,” a whole array of anti-Jewish laws, was promulgated. The new decrees included the wearing of the Jewish star (just then being introduced in the Reich and in the Protectorate), and compulsory labor; the measures closely copied the basic anti-Jewish legislation in existence in Germany.136 The stage was set for further steps that would lead Catholic Slovakia to be the first country—after the Reich—to start the deportation of its Jews.
Hungary remained relatively calm; in 1941 some 825,000 Jews lived in the country (according to the census of that year, which included provinces annexed since the fall of 1938, with German support: a part of southern Slovakia, Subcarpathian Russia (also previously a part of Czechoslovakia), northern Transylvania (transferred to Hungary by Romania as a result of German “arbitration,” and finally the Banat, previously a Yugoslav province, acquired after the April 1941 campaign. Thus around 400,000 Jews of these new provinces were added to the 400,000 Jews who lived in pre-1938, so-called Trianon Hungary. In the larger cities of pre-1938 Hungary—and mainly in Budapest—most Jews were a highly assimilated community that had thrived in a quasi symbiosis with the country’s social elite until the end of World War I.137
In 1918 the political situation changed radically. A defeated and “dismembered” Hungary was engulfed by revolution. Although Béla Kun’s communist dictatorship lasted only 133 days, his own Jewish origins and the massive presence of Jews in his government triggered a violent anti-Semitic reaction and a “white terror” that left thousands of Jewish victims in its wake. Moreover, the presence of a substantial minority of nonassimilated, mainly Polish Jews added to growing anti-Jewish hostility, fueled over the following years by nationalist revisionism, militant anticommunism, and increasingly so by the ever stronger pull of Nazism.
Yet through the interwar period, the regent, Adm. Miklós Horthy, succeeded in keeping conservative governments in power and in staving off Ferenc Szalasi’s Arrow Cross fascist and rabidly antisemitic movement. One of the methods chosen by Horthy and the traditional conservatives to stem the rise of the Arrow Cross was to enact anti-Jewish discriminatory laws. An early law of 1920 introducing an anti-Jewish quota in the universities—the first anti-Semitic law in postwar Europe—was adopted but not applied very stringently. The laws of 1938 and 1939, however, concretely limited Jewish participation in the political and economic life of the country, at least as far as the Jewish middle class was concerned (the Jewish banking and industrial elites generally remained untouched). The “third law,” that of August 1941—was a replica of the Nuremberg racial legislation. In most of these policies Horthy was backed by the Hungarian Catholic Church and by the Protestant churches. The Hungarian episcopate readily accepted the anti-Jewish decrees of 1938 and 1939 but, as could be expected, balked at the law of August 1941 because of its openly racial dimension, a threat to Jewish converts.138
Thousands of foreign Jews who lived in Hungary had to pay for the regent’s appeasement tactics. In the course of August 1941, 18,000 of these foreign Jews (almost all Polish, some of whom had barely escaped from occupied eastern Galicia) were rounded up by the Hungarian police and turned over to the SS in the western Ukraine, in the area of Kolomea and Kamenets-Podolsky. On August 27–28 the expellees and a few thousand local Jews (around 23,600 in all) were exterminated.139 When the news of the massacre seeped back to Hungary, the minister of the interior ordered an end to the deportation. In the meantime, however, first thousands, then tens of thousands of Jewish men were being drafted for forced-labor in the occupied Ukraine. By the end of 1941 some 50,000 Jews had been conscripted; some 40,000 of the first lot would not return. It became apparent, however, that Horthy was not ready to go beyond a certain limit in his anti-Jewish measures, despite repeated German prodding. A stabilization of sorts would last from March 1942, when the relatively liberal Miklós Kallay replaced the pro-German Laszlo Bardossy as the head of government, until the German occupation of the country in March 1944.
VII
For the SS Reichsführer the conquest of immense expanses in the East meant first and foremost the sudden possibility of implementing his colonization dreams: SS strongholds of racially perfect warrior-farmers would become the infrastructure of German domination from the Lublin district in the General Government to the Ural Mountains. Hostile population groups (Russians and Ukrainians) would be subdued, deported (part of the Polish population), or annihilated by expulsion to the polar wastes of northern Russia or by mass-murder operations (the Jews). Such extraordinary prospects demanded immediate action.
After Hitler’s decision of July 16 about the division of authority between the SS chief and Rosenberg, Himmler finalized the administrative technicalities in a conversation with Lammers and Brautigam on the seventeenth.140 On July 20, he was in Lublin. It was probably there, in a meeting with Globocnik and Oswald Pohl (the chief of the SS Main Office for Economy and Administration) that the first measures required by the new projects were decided upon.141 Existing workshops on Lipowa Street in Lublin (with Jewish forced laborers) would be expanded; a new and much larger slave labor camp would be set up in the city (Lublin-Majdanek) for Jews, Poles, and Russians, and the first settlement plans for Volksdeutsche in the Zamóść area of the district were discussed.142
Of course the complementary aspect to the grandiose colonization plans had to be implemented simultaneously: The group considered as most hostile and dangerous for the security of the newly conquered territories, the Jews, had to be eliminated. Himmler’s plans fitted perfectly with the killings that had started immediately after the beginning of the campaign, and with Hitler’s new directives regarding “partisans.” In this sense the rapid expansion of the murder operations from Jewish men only to that of entire Jewish communities was determined by a convergence of policies; these new dimensions in the scope of the killings in turn demanded the most efficient mass murder methods. The execution of women and children seemed to Himmler to be too stressful for his commando members; toxic gas was more promising.
In the euthanasia program the gassing of mental patients had been used alongside other killing methods. Carbon monoxide was released from bottles into stationary gas chambers or into vans (first adopted for this purpose in the Warthegau in the summer of 1940). In September 1941 a technical modification in the euthanasia gas vans, developed at the Criminal Technical Institute of the RSHA, opened new possibilities. The redesigned vans (Saurer models equipped with powerful engines) would become mobile suffocating machines for batches of around forty people per van and per operation: A metal pipe connected to the exhaust gas hose would be inserted into a hermetically sealed van. Running the engine sufficed to asphyxiate its human cargo. The van was first tested on Soviet prisoners in Sachsenhausen, and the first units were activated in Poltava, in the Southern Ukraine, in November 1941, under the direct command of Paul Blobel’s Einsatzkommando 4a, which itself belonged to Max Thomas’s Einsatzgruppe C.
In his postwar testimony, commando member Lauer described the process: “Two vans were in service [in Poltava]…. They drove into the prison yard, and the Jews—men, women and children—had to get straight into the vans from their cells…. The exhaust fumes were piped into the interior of the vans. I can still hear the hammering and the screaming of the Jews—‘Dear Germans, let us out!’…As soon as the doors were shut, the driver started the engine. He drove to a spot outside Poltava. I was there when the van arrived. As the doors were opened, dense smoke emerged, followed by a tangle of crumpled bodies. It was a frightful sight.”143 Within a few months some thirty gas vans were to become operational in the Baltic countries, in Belorussia, in the Ukraine, in the Warthegau, and in Serbia.
It was but a short step from the gas van to the stationary gas chamber, which functioned on the same technical principles: the use of carbon monoxide produced by attached engines. As we shall see, while several gas vans were used at the Chelmno extermination site in the Warthegau from early December 1941 on, the construction of gas chambers—activated by the exhaust gas from various engines—began in November on the site of the future Belzec extermination camp. Somewhat earlier, in September 1941, a different set of murder experiments by gas had started at Auschwitz.
Auschwitz had undergone several stages of development since opening its gates in June 1940 as a concentration camp for Polish political prisoners. Situated near the eastern Upper Silesian town of the same name (half of whose fourteen thousand inhabitants were Jewish), it was conveniently located between the rivers Vistula and Sola and close to a railway junction of some importance. On April 27, 1940, Himmler had decided on the setting up of the camp and, on May 4, Rudolf Höss, formerly on the staff of Dachau, was put in charge. On June 14, as the Wehrmacht marched into Paris, the first transport of 728 Polish political prisoners from Tarnów in Galicia arrived at the new camp.144
In September 1940, Pohl, who, during a visit, had grasped the possibilities offered by the camp’s location at the rim of sand and gravel pits, ordered Höss to add a second story to each of the existing barracks; new batches of inmates would become slave laborers in the production of building materials, a cost-effective addition to the usual fare of torture and executions.
Pohl’s project was soon overshadowed by plans of a totally different scale. In March 1941 it was Himmler’s turn to visit the Upper Silesian camp, in the company of representatives of the chemical industry giant, I.G. Farben. This visit had been preceded by arduous negotiations between I.G. Farben, officials of Göring’s four-year-plan administration and the SS. The continuation of the war with England and the planned attack on the Soviet Union had convinced Hitler and Göring that the production of synthetic rubber and gasoline should be given the highest priority. I.G. Farben, the German pioneer in this domain, was ordered to expand its production capability considerably. A new plant had to be built as rapidly as possible.
Otto Ambros, the head of the Commission for Rubber and Plastics at I.G. Farben, had been aware for some time of the favorable conditions for a new plant in the Auschwitz area (abundant water supply, flat land, a nearby railway junction). Yet the firm’s directorate hesitated to send its workers and engineers to the rundown Polish town.145 In March and April 1941 Himmler finalized the deal by promising the supply of cheap slave labor (from Auschwitz and other concentration camps) and the construction of adequate housing for the German personnel. Höss was ordered to expand the capacity of the camp from 11,000 to 30,000 inmates. The Jews from the town of Auschwitz were expelled and their homes taken over while Poles were rounded up for construction work both at the camp and at I.G. Farben’s future Buna plant site at Dwory.146
As these vast expansion plans were set in motion and as, in the meantime, the new campaign in the East had started, the function of the camp as a mass murder center was also taking shape. By sheer coincidence, just after the beginning of the Russian campaign, an Auschwitz disinfection team “discovered” that the powerful pesticide Zyklon B—used for the decontamination of ship hulls and military barracks and thus also regularly utilized in Auschwitz—could kill animals and, therefore, human beings.147 Testing on a small group of Soviet prisoners of war successfully took place in early September 1941 in the cellar of Block 11, in the main camp. According to the camp chronicler, Danuta Czech, a major test then followed: This time the victims were first selected from the camp infirmary (some were brought on stretchers) and packed into the basement of Block 11, where all windows had been filled with earth. “Then,” Czech reported, “some 600 Russian war prisoners, officers and commissars who had been selected by the special units of the Gestapo in war prisoners’ camps, are pushed in. As soon as the prisoners have been pushed into the cells and the SS men have thrown in the Zyklon B gas, the doors are closed and isolated. The action takes place during the evening roll-call in the camp; after that, curfew is imposed: it means that the inmates are forbidden to leave their barracks and to move around in the camp.”148 As some of the prisoners were still alive on the next day, the operation was repeated.149
Even when the gas vans and gas chambers were used at full capacity, the Germans never abandoned mass executions by shooting or starvation, mainly in the occupied territories of the Soviet Union but also in Poland, even close to extermination camps. Their victims were not only Jews. Three and a half million Russian POWs were starved to death by the Wehrmacht, under the expert guidance of Quartermaster General Edward Wagner.150 Hundreds of thousands of Russian civilians were executed by the Army or by the Einsatzgruppen for any reason whatsoever. Further west, the execution of Polish civilians did not reach the same scope but became, from the outset, a matter of routine within the context of “anti-resistance operations.” In that context the diaries of anatomist Hermann Voss, a professor at the Reich University in Posen, leave very little to the imagination. On June 15, 1941, Voss noted: “Yesterday I viewed the cellar for corpses and the cremation oven that is also located in the cellar. This oven was built to eliminate parts of bodies left over from dissection exercises. Now it serves to incinerate executed Poles. The gray car with the gray men—that is, SS men from the Gestapo—comes almost daily with material for the oven.”151 On September 30 Voss had good news: “Today I had a very interesting discussion with the chief prosecutor, Dr. Heise, about obtaining corpses for the anatomical institute. Königsberg and Breslau also get corpses from here. So many people are executed here that there are enough for all three institutes.”152
VIII
While technical improvements in the murder methods were progressing apace, alongside common mass executions, at the top of the Nazi hierarchy hesitation between several possible “solutions” of the Jewish question did persist throughout the summer of 1941. On occupied Soviet territory, as we saw, the extermination was first aimed at Jews as carriers of the Soviet system, then at Jews as potential partisans and finally as hostile elements living in territories ultimately destined for German colonization: The three categories merged of course into one but did not apply, at least during the summer and the fall of 1941, to the entire European continent. In terms of mass murder the first phase of what was to become the “Final Solution of the Jewish Question in Europe” had started on Soviet territory, but it was probably not yet seen as part of an overall extermination plan of all European Jews. How, then, should we interpret the letter addressed by Göring to Heydrich on July 31, 1941?
“In completion of the task which was entrusted to you in the edict dated January 24, 1939, of solving the Jewish question by means of emigration or evacuation in the most convenient way possible, given the present conditions,” Göring wrote, “I herewith charge you with making all the necessary preparations with regard to the organizational, practical and financial aspects for an overall solution [Gesamtlösung] of the Jewish question in the German sphere of influence in Europe.” The letter went on: “Insofar as the competencies of other central organizations are affected, they are to cooperate with you. I further charge you with submitting to me promptly an overall plan of the preliminary organizational, practical and financial measures for the execution of the intended final solution (Endlösung) of the Jewish question.”153
Göring’s letter had been drafted by Heydrich and submitted to the Reichsmarschall for his signature; this much we know from Eichmann’s deposition at his 1961 trial in Jerusalem.154 Manifestly the document was meant to ensure Himmler’s (and thus Heydrich’s) authority on all matters pertaining to the fate of the Jews, either in regard to all ongoing operations on Russian territory or in regard to the expected deportations after victory in the East. It seems probable that, contrary to what had happened in March 1941 (as we saw in the previous chapter), this time Göring did not demand the inclusion of Rosenberg’s name, precisely in order to limit the new minister’s ambitions. The letter was meant to inform all those concerned that, in practical terms, the solution of the Jewish question was Himmler’s domain (subject, of course, to Hitler’s instructions.)
Göring’s letter was also appropriately vague concerning any particular time frame, as it seems that Hitler still held to the view that the general evacuation of the Jews to northern Russia would take place only after the end of the campaign. This was confirmed by Eichmann in early August 1941, at a conference of high officials of the Propaganda Ministry convened to prepare Goebbels’s forthcoming visit to his leader. “The Führer,” Eichmann declared, “had rejected Obergruppenführer Heydrich’s official request regarding evacuations [of Jews] during the war.” Consequently Heydrich drew up a proposal for a partial evacuation of Jews from the main cities.155 It was an idea submitted to Hitler when Goebbels met him at the Rastenburg headquarters on August 18, and—as we shall presently see—was also rejected.
According to Goebbels’s diary entry of August 19 (in which he recorded the events of the previous day), Hitler agreed to the marking of the Jews in the Reich “with a large and clearly visible sign,” but in regard to the deportations he merely indicated that the Jews would be evacuated from Berlin to the East, once the first means of transportation were available. “There [in the East], under a hard climate, they would be worked over.”156 On the next day (August 20), Goebbels again referred to his discussion with Hitler on the eighteenth and, this time, quoted him as promising that the Jews of Berlin would be evacuated “after the end of the Eastern campaign.”157 The two time frames were in fact two complementary elements of one conversation: The Jews would be deported after the victory in the East, when the first transportation means were to become available. According to Hitler’s assessment of the military situation, this meant approximately mid-October 1941.
During the August 18 conversation, the Nazi leader again mentioned his “prophecy” regarding the price the Jews would pay for unleashing the war. “The Führer is convinced,” Goebbels recorded, “that the prophecy he made in the Reichstag, namely that if Jewry succeeded once again in unleashing a world war, it would end with the extermination of the Jews, is being fulfilled. It [the prophecy] is being confirmed during these last weeks and months with what appears to be an almost uncanny certainty. In the East, the Jews are paying the bill; in Germany, they have already paid it in part and will have to pay more in the future. Their last refuge is North America; and there, either in the long or the short run, they will have to pay as well. Jewry is a foreign body among the cultured nations and its activity over the last three decades has been so devastating that the reaction of the peoples is absolutely understandable, necessary, and one could almost say naturally compelling. In any case, in the world that is coming, the Jews will not have many grounds for laughing. Today, in Europe, there is already in good part a united front against the Jews.”158
Significantly, immediately after this tirade Hitler made mention of the eight points of the Roosevelt-Churchill declaration (the Atlantic Charter). Next, he once again returned to the Jewish issue: “And, regarding the Jewish Question one can ascertain today that somebody like Antonescu for example goes ahead in this matter even more radically than we did up to now. But, in this matter, I shall not rest until we too have exacted the ultimate consequences in regard to Jewry (Aber ich werde nicht ruhen und nicht rasten, bis auch wir dem Judentum gegenüber die letzten Konsequenzen gezogen haben).”159
Hitler’s declarations to Goebbels were indeed highly threatening; still, it is notable that these threats remained vague. The Jews of Germany “will have to pay more in the future” could mean that after victory was achieved in the East, the Jews of Germany would be deported to northern Russia and there “under a hard climate, they would be worked over.” Mass death was implicit in Hitler’s words; however, it is unlikely that at this stage the Nazi leader’s declaration meant organized, generalized, and immediate extermination.160
IX
There is something at once profoundly disturbing yet rapidly numbing in the narration of the anti-Jewish campaign that developed in the territories newly occupied by the Germans or their allies. History seems to turn into a succession of mass killing operations and, on the face of it, little else. The chief of Einsatzkommando 3 (belonging to Einsatzgruppe A), the notorious SS colonel Karl Jäger, reported, by September 10, 1941, the massacre of 76,355 persons, almost all Jews; by December 1, 1941 the number of the Jews murdered had reached 137,346. Two months later Stahlecker, the commander of Einsatzgruppe A, reported the results achieved by his unit (excluding mass executions in Riga): 218,050 Jews killed by February 1, 1942.161 All there is to report, it seems, is a rising curve of murder statistics, in the North, the Center, the South, and the Extreme South. And yet another history unfolds, over short or longer periods from prewar years and decades to the last moment, literally to the edge of the execution pits.
For long periods before the beginning of the war, notwithstanding the political and social tensions to which we alluded, there were also close relations on an individual basis between the Jews and their gentile neighbors; at times, after the German conquest, some of these relations included the occupiers. Thus, in the smaller communities, the killers, whether local auxiliaries or Germans, often knew their victims, adding a further layer of horror to the massacres. In any case, each community, large or small, had an existence of its own, as did each Judenrat, each resistance organization, or, for that matter, every Jewish inhabitant. In some cases the “meeting of East and West” (Jews deported from central Europe and local Jews) in Lodz or in Minsk, for example, would create difficult problems and add yet another dimension to the history of the victims. As for the extermination of the ghetto populations, it took place at different sites, at different times, under different circumstances, all of importance and significance for historians—but it inexorably took place, before the arrival of any liberating force, even during the very last months of the war.
In Vilna a first Judenrat was established in July; most of its members were among the Jews murdered in early September. A second council was appointed under the chairmanship of Anatol Fried; the real authority, however, was increasingly in the hands of Jacob Gens, the Jewish police chief, who was to become the head of the council in July 1942. On September 6, 1941, the remaining Jews were ordered to move into the ghetto.
“They came before dawn today,” Kruk recorded, “and gave half an hour to pack and take whatever you can. Flocks of wagons drove in and, right in front of the inhabitants who were already gathered in the courtyard, the last pieces of furniture were dragged out of their abandoned homes…. The mournful track of being driven out of your home into the ghetto lasts for hours.”162 Rudashevski also recorded the miserable exodus from the city into the ghetto: “The small number of Jews of our courtyard begin to drag the bundles to the gate. Gentiles are standing and taking part in our sorrow…. People are harnessed to bundles which they drag across the pavement. People fall, bundles scatter. Before me a woman bends under her bundle. From the bundle a thin string of rice keeps pouring over the street.”163
The young diarist then went on to describe the first hours of ghetto life: “The newcomers begin to settle down, each in his tiny bit of space, on his bundles. Additional Jews keep streaming in constantly. We settle down in our place. Besides the four of us there are eleven persons in the room. The room is a dirty and stuffy one. It is crowded. The first ghetto night. We lay three together on two doors…. I hear the restless breathing of people with whom I have been suddenly thrown together, people who have just like us suddenly been uprooted from their homes.”164 The ghetto area, previously inhabited by some 4,000 people, was now home to 29,000 Jews.
In Kovno, after the first wave of killings, the remaining 30,000 Jews were expelled into the old Jewish suburb of Slobodka, across the river, where on July 10, 1941, a ghetto was officially established. The ghettoization was of course a German measure, but in Kovno, as in most cities and towns of Eastern Europe, it was fully supported by local authorities and populations. Abraham Tory, a former law office clerk and, from June 22, 1941, the chronicler of Kovno Jewry, noted a conversation between the newly appointed Lithuanian finance minister, Jonas Matulionis, and a Kovno Jewish personality, Jacob Goldberg: “The Lithuanians are divided on the Jewish question,” Matulionis explained. “There are three main views: according to the most extreme view all the Jews in Lithuania must be exterminated; a more moderate view demands setting up a concentration camp where Jews will atone with blood and sweat for their crimes against the Lithuanian people. As for the third view? I am a practicing Roman Catholic; I—and other believers like me—believe that man cannot take the life of a human being like himself…but during the period of Soviet rule I and my friends realized that we did not have a common path with the Jews and never will. In our view, the Lithuanians and the Jews should be separated from each other and the sooner the better. For that purpose the Ghetto is essential. There you will be separated and no longer able to harm us. This is a Christian position.”165
In late July the Germans ordered the appointment of a “chief Jew” (Oberjude). On August 4 delegates of the Jewish community met to choose their main representative. According to Tory, “There was one candidate nobody was prepared to let go, Dr. Elchanan Elkes.” Elkes, a physician, argued that he lacked experience for the position. It was then that a member of the assembly, Rabbi Shmukler, rose and delivered a memorable speech: The Kovno Jewish community stands on the brink of disaster…. The German authorities insist that we appoint an Oberjude, but what we need is a “head of the community,” a trustworthy public servant. The man most fitting for this position at this tragic moment is Dr. Elkes. We therefore turn to you and say: Dr. Elkes, you may be our Oberjude for whoever wants to regard you as such, but for us you will be our community leader. We all know that your path will be fraught with hardship and danger, but we will go with you all the way and may God come to our aid.”166
Elkes accepted, but there was little he could do to fend off or mutigate the German decrees that from the outset descended on the ghetto inhabitants, mainly by way of SA captain Fritz Jordan, the spokesman of the town commander. One of the first edicts, issued on August 10, forbade Jews “to walk on the shores of the Viliga River” and also “to walk in the streets with their hands in their pockets.”167
During these same days, at the end of August 1941, Klukowski took a week off and traveled to Warsaw. “I passed through the Jewish ghetto a few times,” he noted in his diary. “It is almost impossible to figure out how something like this can happen. All points of entry are guarded by Germans. High brick walls around the perimeter divide the Jewish ghetto from the rest of the city. Traffic on the streets is rather heavy; many stores are open. That’s how it looks from the streetcar. From a friend of mine I learned that the mortality rate in the ghetto is very high, especially among the poor Jews, who are living in terrible conditions.”168
Nothing out of the ordinary daily misery happened on the other side of the walls that Klukowski saw from his streetcar. In August 1941, as may be recalled, the monthly death rate in the ghetto was stabilizing at around 5,500 persons. Thus, if the Germans had been aiming at a slow death of the population, tighter controls and some patience would have sufficed. Auerswald told Czerniaków as much on July 8: “The Jews should show good will by volunteering for labor. Otherwise the ghetto would be surrounded by barbed wire. There is plenty of it, the spoils of war captured in Russia. The ring will be tightened more and more and the whole population will slowly die out.”169 Outbreaks of typhus added their toll, and nobody was immune from the danger, not even the chairman himself: “Last night,” he noted on July 10, “I spotted a louse on my nightshirt. A white, many-footed, revolting louse.”170
And, against this background of desolation, none of the ongoing power struggles, none of the distrust, none of the hatreds of old lost any of their virulence—quite the contrary. Converted Jews whom the Germans had herded together with their “racial brethren” supposedly got the better positions in the ghetto hierarchy. In some cases they did (commander of the Jewish police, chairman of the health council, director of the ghetto hospital), as a result of their former training and professional ability. Such reasoning did not assuage the more militantly “Jewish” members of the community: “The rabbis are in an uproar,” Czerniaków noted on July 2, “because Ettinger [Dr. Adam Ettinger, a former professor of criminology at Warsaw Free University], who was engaged as criminal counsel, is a baptized Jew.”171
As for the converts themselves—1,761 ghetto inhabitants were registered as such, on January 1, 1941172—whether belonging to the prewar Christian community, the elite, or to the newly converted Jews usually less educated and of lower social background—most wished to distance themselves as much as possibly from the Jewish population.173 Each of the two groups of converts congregated around its own church, led by its own priest (All Saints’ Church and Father Godlewski for the old converts, Birth of the Holy Virgin Mary Church and Father Poplawski for the newly converted). Both Godlewski and Poplawski were themselves converted Jews and both were long-standing anti-Semites. The converts garnered a few advantages from their special situation (better organized and more systematic welfare assistance, some respite, during services and Christian holidays, from the pressure of everyday ghetto life, their own support group, and the right to be buried in a Christian cemetery outside the ghetto walls). But they could not escape the basic fact that for the Germans, they were full-fledged Jews and treated as such.174 As one of the ghetto underground newspapers put it: “As a foreign entity, they were thrust into a dual exile in the ghetto. A decisive majority of the Jewish population maintains no contact with these ‘Jews.’ Foreign to the Jewish masses in their culture, hopes and yearnings, they share the Jews’ suffering as uninvited partners in misfortune.”175
The anti-Semitism displayed by some of the baptized Jews was virulent and unabashed: “I returned a visit to Reverend Poplawski who called on me at one time on the subject of assistance to the Christians of Jewish origins,” Czerniaków recorded on July 24, 1941. He proceeded to tell me that he sees God’s hand in being placed in the ghetto, that after the war he would leave as much of an anti-Semite as he was when he arrived there, and that the Jewish beggars (children) have considerable acting talents, even playing dead in the streets.”176
For some of the Jewish children, the detestation was not reciprocal, and if it existed at all, it didn’t preclude the wish to enjoy the peace and quiet of the All Saints’ gardens. Thus a few children from Dr. Janusz Korczak’s orphanage addressed a letter to Father Godlewski.
“To the Reverend Father, the Vicar of All Saints’:
We kindly request the Rev. Father to grant us permission to come a few times to the church garden on Saturday, in the morning hours, early if possibly (6:30–10:00).
We long for a little air and greenery. It is stuffy and crowded where we are. We want to become acquainted and make friends with nature. We shall not damage the plants. Please don’t refuse us. Signed: Zygmus, Sami, Hanka, Aronek.”
The reply—if any—is not known.177
On June 6, 1941, Himmler had visited the Lodz ghetto. Accompanied by Rumkowski, the Reichsführer inspected the large tailoring workshop on Jakuba Street and was apparently satisfied with the work done there for the Wehrmacht. The following day the administration promised to raise the food supply for the inhabitants, but the promise was not kept.178 On August 4 the Lodz chroniclers recorded “an extremely characteristic” court case. The “culprits” admitted having cut off part of a dead horse’s hindquarters, as the carcass was already on a rubbish heap and doused with chloride before being buried.179
Since Lodz was part of the Reich, euthanasia in its old or new guise applied to the mental institution of the ghetto. In March 1940 some forty inmates had already been removed and murdered in a nearby forest.180 In May 1941 a German medical commission made the rounds again, and on July 29 another removal took place. A German doctor was on hand for a last check. According to the chroniclers, Rumkowski was also present and pleaded that the twelve patients out of seventy considered as cured be released. The German physician, however, had decided that one of these patients [about to be evacuated] a Mr. Ilsberg, clearly an acquaintance of Rumkowski’s, should be kept among those destined for death. No entreaties helped. “In spite of their mental confusion,” the chroniclers recorded, “the patients realized what fate was in store for them. They understood, for example, why they had been injected with tranquilizers during the night…. They resisted in many cases…. A covered pick-up with a squad of five uniformed escorts came for the patients. Thanks to the selfless work done by the hospital staff, the loading of the tragic transport took place with exemplary order.”181
Three days later the chroniclers added a postscript of sorts to this episode, which in many ways was a telling comment: “In spite of being aware of the sad fate which might be in store for mental patients, the families of people qualified for the hospital for the mentally ill are demanding that they be accepted. Since space is at such a painful premium and conditions are so deplorable in the ghetto, it is a form of deliverance for the families to have their mentally ill relatives in the hospital. Apparently the first patient since the most recent purge has already been admitted.”182
In the larger ghettos the councils assumed that productivity was the only path to survival; if at all possible the ghetto should work for the Wehrmacht. Several council leaders, Ephraïm Barash in Bialystok for example (or later Jacob Gens in Vilna), succeeded for a time to steer their ghetto along the work strategy, as Rumkowski did in Lodz. The acquisition of raw materials was one of the major hurdles. In Bialystok the problem was solved by local ingenuity: Teams of organized ghetto ragpickers and scrap collectors filled part of the needs; rags were also smuggled in from the surrounding areas. Mostly, however, the Germans themselves were ready to supply the bulk of the materials to the factories working for the army. According to one of the speakers at a Bialystok council meeting on August 28, 1941, “All that is necessary for industrial output is gladly furnished by the authorities.”183
In the Bialystok facilities working for the Wehrmacht, employment grew from 1,730 workers in March 1942 to 8,600 in July of that year. After the deportations of April 1943 to Treblinka, “productivization” was pushed to extremes, and approximately 43 percent of the total remaining ghetto population of 28,000 was employed in local industries.184
The German onslaught caught the forty-nine-year-old Jewish Polish novelist Bruno Schulz in Drohobycz in eastern Galicia, the town in which he was born and where he had spent his life.184 Schulz, whose international fame spread only belatedly (after World War II), had been recognized on the Polish literary scene in the mid-1930s following the publication of two volumes of short stories, Cinnamon Shops, and soon thereafter, Sanatorium under the Sign of the Hourglass. The deeply unsettling dreamlike world of this pathologically shy and modest high school teacher found further expression in his drawings and paintings; there fairy tales mixed with representations of grotesque and distorted male figures groveling at the feet of splendid women who showed only sexual superiority, domination, and contempt for their “suitors.”
It was Schulz the painter who, soon after the German occupation, caught the attention of SS Hauptscharführer Felix Landau, “coordinator of Jewish affairs” in Drohobycz.186 Landau was the father of a young child who lived with him and with his mother, Landau’s girlfriend. The SS Scharführer was a man of taste and apart from his well-known hobby—taking aim at Jewish workers from his window and, according to witnesses, rarely missing—he wanted Schulz to cover his walls with fairy-tale paintings for the child, and the walls of Gestapo offices with “frescoes.” Schulz was paid in food and so it went, “peacefully,” from July 1941 to the beginning of 1942.
Farther north, in Riga, it was one of the most eminent Jewish historians of his day, Simon Dubnow, who fell into German hands.187 When the Germans occupied Latvia, in early July 1941, Dubnow was turning eighty-one. His multivolume History of the Jewsand his History of the Jews in Russia and Poland had brought him worldwide fame and admiration. Dubnow had been a steady proponent of Jewish cultural autonomy in the Diaspora and thus was close to the Bund in many ways. Yet in the 1930s, in the face of the mounting dangers, he became increasingly critical of the radical anti-Zionist stance of the Bund. An article published in Zukunft, in June 1938, is indicative of Dubnow’s position and mirrors the internal squabbling in so-called Jewish politics, despite the increasingly threatening world situation: “The Bund’s greatest sin is its tendency toward isolation…. The indisputable failings of Zionism…should not prevent some joint actions. We have seen ‘popular fronts,’ coalitions of all progressive forces in a society, emerge in several European countries. Jewry also needs a ‘popular front’ to fight growing anti-Semitism and worldwide reaction.”188
Soon after German occupation, the Jews of Riga were moved into a ghetto. The well-known Dubnow was tracked by the Gestapo: He tried to hide but was caught and jailed, released, and jailed again. Finally, physically broken, he was also moved to the ghetto.189 In 1934 Dubnow had written a short article for the bulletin of the World Jewish Congress about the growing tragedy of European Jewry. The Völkischer Beobachter quoted Dubnow’s words: “The house of Israel is in flames,” adding: “That is just what we wanted!”190
X
The Jewish population of the USSR was quite well informed about the anti-Jewish persecutions in the Reich and, after September 1939, in German-occupied Poland. Before the Hitler-Stalin pact the Soviet press reported abundantly about the Nazi anti-Semitic policies and atrocities. Then, from the end of August 1939 to June 22, 1941, official reporting stopped, but the stream of Jewish refugees who reached eastern Poland or the Baltic countries spread information about German behavior wherever they went.191
Within days following the German attack, the Soviet media resumed their description of the aggressors’ anti-Jewish drive. Leaflets dropped by the Luftwaffe, and German broadcasts beamed at the Soviet Union, left no doubt, as we saw, about the centrality of the Jewish enemy within the Bolshevik system as the Germans perceived it, which, in their own words, they were intent on destroying. Yet it seems that not a few Jews, mainly “the little Jewish people,” did not believe that their life under German occupation would be worse than before. Some allegedly even hoped that their existence would improve. Many stayed because family members were unable to join them in their flight or because they were loath to abandon a house and property usually acquired at great and lengthy effort.192 When the Wehrmacht marched in, all such hopes and hesitations quickly disappeared; by then, however, it was too late.
Soon all Jews of the Soviet Union understood that their own survival now depended on the survival of their country. For many, identification with the Soviet regime was natural, unquestioned, often enthusiastic. From the outset the regime born from the 1917 revolution had appeared as a liberating force that freed the Jewish population from czarist oppression and territorial segregation in the Pale of Settlement, banned anti-Semitism, and offered equal opportunity to all. While the initial Soviet plans to foster the administrative autonomy and cultural identity of the country’s national groups—and, within that framework, to encourage Yiddish culture and Jewish autonomy in Birobidzan—petered out in the early thirties, the country’s stupendous modernization drive opened vast possibilities for the comparatively well educated Jewish citizens. By 1939 the Jews, who had become an increasingly urban population, although accounting for less than 2.0 percent of the general population, numbered around 7.5 percent of the middle-class professionals (engineers, accountants, physicians) and 13 percent of the student body, mainly in scientific fields. On the eve of World War II, Soviet Jews “constituted the best-educated ethnic group of the roughly 100 nationalities in the USSR.”193Simultaneously many Jews, mostly of the younger generation, abandoned their religious ties and enthusiastically embraced a system that allowed for complete assimilation and considerable social improvement.
Undoubtedly the percentage of Jews among the social and cultural elites of the Soviet Union was many times higher than their share of the country’s population. This predominance was no less striking in the most sensitive areas of the state apparatus. According to historian Yuri Slezkine, “By 1934, when OGPU was transformed into the NKVD, Jews ‘by nationality’ constituted the largest single group among the ‘leading cadres’ of the Soviet secret police (37 Jews, 30 Russians, 7 Latvians, 5 Ukrainians, 4 Poles, 3 Georgians, 3 Belorussians, 2 Germans, and 5 assorted others).”194 As for the high number of Bolshevik leaders of Jewish background (mainly among the first generation), it constituted an obvious fact that of course fueled anti-Semitic propaganda not only in the Reich but throughout the West. Even Lenin—and this was kept a state secret on Stalin’s orders—had a Jewish grandfather.195 The crucial point that anti-Semites missed, however, was the simple fact that Soviet Jews, at all levels of the system, were first and foremost Soviet citizens, devoted to the ideas and goals of the Soviet Union and oblivious of their own origins—until the German invasion. June 22, 1941, transformed many of these “non-Jewish Jews” (according to Isaac Deutscher’s notorious formulation) into Soviet Jews suddenly aware of their origins—and proud of being Jewish:
“I grew up in a Russian city,” the writer and journalist Ilya Ehrenburg proclaimed in a speech in August 1941: “My native language is Russian. I am a Russian writer. Now, like all Russians, I am defending my homeland. But the Nazis have reminded me of something else: my mother’s name was Hannah. I am a Jew. I say this with pride. Hitler hates us more than anyone else. And that does us credit.”196
In all areas of Soviet society, the Jews mobilized to the utmost to participate in the anti-Nazi struggle. Whatever one may think of Ehrenburg’s twisted path in Stalin’s Russia, his stream of articles, mainly in the Red Army’s newspaper, Krasnaya Zvezda, galvanized the soldiers and the population.197 One hundred sixty thousand Jewish members of the Red Army were decorated for bravery (half a million Jewish soldiers fought in the Soviet forces and two hundred thousand were killed or reported missing); fifty Jewish officers were elevated to the rank of general, and 123 received the highest military distinction: “Hero of the Soviet Union.”198 And yet Stalin dismissively told the Polish general Wladyslaw Anders: “Jews are poor warriors.”199
Soon, in the ghettos and forests of occupied Soviet territory, the first Jewish resistance groups would be organized. A few months later (mainly in the summer of 1942), some of these units, such as the group led by the Bielski brothers, acquired legendary fame.200 And, in Minsk, on October 26, 1941, possibly one of the earliest and certainly one of the most famous Soviet resistance fighters, eighteen-year-old Masha Bruskina, was publicly hanged with two comrades; her Jewish origins, however, were unknown to the Germans and never mentioned in Soviet publications, either during the war or later.201
Stalin—whose postwar anti-Semitism had possibly started to show in the late thirties, and who, after 1945, launched his own massive anti-Jewish campaign—considered the Soviet Jews as useful intermediaries to the West, particularly to the United States, as long as the German threat was real. In his own mythic world the Soviet leader (like Hitler) vastly overrated the influence of American Jews. However, he did not overrate the tireless energy Jewish personalities called to meet in August 1941 (and who subsequently established the Jewish Antifascist Committee) would devote to mobilizing Western public support for the USSR from the second half of 1941 onward.202 More than anything else, however, this political effort demonstrated, as did several other initiatives during these years, that the Jews as Jews, East and West, were essentially defenseless instruments, even in the hands of leaders belonging to the anti-Nazi coalition. The Erlich-Alter case was typical.
In the fall of 1939 the NKVD had arrested the two most prominent leaders of the Bund, Henryk Erlich [Dubnow’s son-in-law] and Wiktor Alter, who had fled to the Soviet-occupied area of Poland. They were dragged from cell to cell, from interrogation to interrogation, and both were condemned to death shortly after the German attack of June 1941. In mid-September, however, they were released from prison. The Soviet change of attitude probably had several aims: to use both Bundist leaders in the anti-Nazi propaganda campaign; to impress the West, mainly British and American trade unionists, with Soviet liberalization; to reinforce the socialist wing of the Polish government-in-exile, which showed some readiness to come to an agreement with the USSR, notwithstanding continuing Soviet claims to the territories of eastern Poland.
Erlich and Alter remained in the Soviet Union but rapidly became involved in what could appear in Stalinist eyes as independent, Jewish-socialist political activity on an international scale. Thus, as the Soviet military situation improved, the two Bundist leaders were arrested again in December 1941. The British, obviously unwilling to put any strain on their relations with Moscow, declared the issue to be an internal Soviet matter. The Polish government-in-exile made only feeble attempts to intervene, as it hoped to use the anger of American Jewish labor organizations to bolster its own position in the territorial controversy with Stalin. And the American entry into the war overshadowed any “divisive” issues that could have been raised on the U.S. public scene. Erlich committed suicide in his Soviet jail in May 1942; Alter was executed in February 1943.203
XI
A few days after Goebbels received Hitler’s authorization, the marking of the Reich’s Jews with a “distinctive and clearly visible sign” was launched. A decree of September 1, 1941, issued by the Ministry of the Interior, ordered that from the nineteenth of that month all Jews of the Greater Reich and the Protectorate aged six and above should wear a yellow six-pointed star with the word Jude inscribed on it in (twisted) black letters. The palm-size star had to be sewed to the clothes, on the left side of the breast, at the height of the heart, so as to be fully visible when a Jew was in a public place (defined as any place where people not belonging to the family circle could be encountered).204 From the same date (September 19), it was forbidden to Jews to leave their area or residence without police authorization, as well as to carry medals, honorary decorations, and any other kind of badge.205
The Jews had to obtain the stars at their community offices. On delivery they usually signed a receipt that also included an acknowledgment of the related ordinances: “I certify hereby the receipt of 1 Jewish Star,” Gustav Israel Hamel from Baden Baden certified on September 20. “I am informed of the legal regulations regarding the display of the Jewish Star and of the prohibition to carry decorations, medals and any badges. I also know that I am not allowed to leave my domicile without carrying a written authorization from the local police authorities. I undertake to handle the identification sign with attention and care and to ensure that when sewing it on clothing, the fabric that surrounds the sign will be turned over.”206
In Goebbels’s mind the star allowed for total control over the Jews once they left their home and thus protected Germans from dangerous contact, mainly from the spreading of rumors and defeatist talk. But, as in the case of most anti-Jewish measures, the additional intent was the humiliation and degradation of the victims, and, of course, a further opening for the ongoing anti-Jewish propaganda campaign. Dietrich’s Tagesparole of September 26 was explicit: “On the occasion of the identification of the Jews there are possibilities to deal with the theme in the most diverse ways, to explain to the German people the necessity of these measures and mainly to point to the harmfulness of the Jews. From tomorrow on the information service will publish material that offers proof of the harm the Jews inflicted on Germany and the fate they planned and still plan for it” [the obvious reference here is to the Kaufman story and to the Diewerge pamphlet, which, as we saw, included commentary on excerpts of Kaufman’s book].207
“Today, the Jew’s star,” Klemperer wrote on September 19: “Frau Voss has already sewn it on, intends to turn her coat back over it. Allowed? I reproach myself with cowardice. Yesterday Eva wore out her feet on the pavements and must now go shopping in town and cook afterwards. Why? Because I am ashamed. Of what? From Monday I intend to go shopping again. By then we shall certainly have heard what effect it has” (Klemperer’s wife, Eva, not being Jewish, did not have to wear the star).208 How did the German population react?
As we saw, the opinion summaries of the SD for the early summer indicated widespread anti-Jewish hostility. Newsreels showing the arrest of Jews, their toil as forced laborers, and even lynch scenes from Riga, apparently received loud approval from movie audiences.209 As such footage regularly emphasized the Jewish “racial traits,” audiences expressed their disgust and often wondered aloud what should be done with these “hordes.”210
Did the introduction of the star change these attitudes? According to a September 26 SD report from Westphalia, the new measure was often greeted with satisfaction; criticism was directed, rather, at the existence of exceptions. Why were the Jewish spouses of Aryans exempted from wearing the tag? As the saying went, there were now “Aryan Jews” and “non-Aryan Jews.”211 An SD report from the previous day (from the same area) mentioned the general opinion that the Jews should also wear the star on the back of their clothes for better visibility: It would compel those still remaining in Germany to “disappear.”212
And yet, many witnesses also recorded different reactions. On September 20 Klemperer described what happened to Frau Kronheim: “The latter took the tram yesterday—front platform. The driver: Why was she not sitting in the car? Frau Kronheim is small, slight, stooped, her hair completely white. As a Jewess she was forbidden to do so. The driver struck the panel with his fist: ‘What a mean thing!’ Poor comfort.”213 The most extraordinary expression of sympathy was recorded on November 25: “Frau Reichenbach…told us a gentleman had greeted her in a shop doorway. Had he not mistaken her for someone else?—‘No, I do not know you, but you will now be greeted frequently. We are a group ‘who greet the Jew’s star.’”214 Yet, exactly a month beforehand, on October 25, Klemperer had written: “I always ask myself: Who among the ‘Aryan’ Germans is really untouched by National Socialism? The contagion rages in all of them, perhaps it is not contagion, but basic German nature.”215
It seems indeed that such expressions of sympathy were not infrequent: “The population in its majority disapproves of this defamation,” Elisabeth Freund, a Jewish woman from Berlin, wrote in her memoir.214 She noted incidents very similar to those mentioned by the Dresden diarist: “I am greeted on the street with special politeness by complete strangers, and in the streetcar ostentatiously a seat is freed for me, although those wearing a star are allowed to sit only if no Aryan is still standing. But sometimes guttersnipes call out abusive words after me. And occasionally Jews are said to have been beaten up. Someone tells me of an experience in the city train. A mother saw that her little girl was sitting beside a Jew: ‘Lieschen, sit down on the other bench, you don’t need to sit beside a Jew.’ At that an Aryan worker stood up, saying: ‘And I don’t need to sit next to Lieschen.’”217
A report sent by the United States consul general in Berlin Leland Morris, to the State Department, on September 30, confirmed the information described by Klemperer and Freund. “It may be noted that a very large proportion of Berliners have shown embarrassment and even sympathy rather than satisfaction at the display of Jewish badges under the recent decree. This may be due to the fact that the Jewish Question as a domestic issue has been deliberately kept out of the public notice since before the war and most ordinary people had willingly tried to forget it. Disapproval of this measure is so general that one of the justifications advanced for it…by those responsible is that Germans in the United States are obliged to wear a swastika with the letter ‘G.’ This preposterous lie is passed from mouth to mouth but finds little credence.”218
In fact the most diverse sources confirmed the disapproval of the badge among part of the German population.219 In David Bankier’s nuanced assessment, it was the visibility of the persecution that caused so many Germans to react as they did, at least for a while: “As long as anonymous Jews were persecuted, the population could remain emotionally distant from the moral consequences of the affliction they had helped to cause, easily coming to terms with persecution since shame and guilt were not involved. Labeling the victim, however, made him an accusing public witness who testified to the cost of conformity and adjustment in a murderous system…. These disturbing feelings obviously did not last long. As had happened with other measures, the penalties exacted from those who sympathized with Jews plus mounting insensibility to what became a common sight, produced increasing apathy and insensitivity.”220
Yet we also have to accept the possibility of an ongoing dissonance in attitudes and reactions, as was bluntly stated in a detailed report sent to the Foreign Ministry in Stockholm by Arvid Richert, the Swedish minister in Berlin, on October 31, 1941. After mentioning the “noteworthy courtesy” of the German population in its attitude to the Jews who had received their “decoration,” he expressed a warning: “In order to avoid any misunderstanding, I would like to add that even if many Germans dislike the draconian measures against the Jews, anti-Semitism appears to be deeply rooted in the people.”221
Oral history confirms both the negative reaction of part of the population to the star and the approval of other Germans; it also confirms that, once the star was introduced, many Germans were astonished at the number of Jews still living in their midst, thus confirming a finding of the SD. According to Eric Johnson’s and Karl-Heinz Reuband’s study, it seems that “older people disapproved of the star much more than younger people, and that Catholics and women were more opposed to the measures than Protestants and men, as were people from urban than rural areas and midsize towns…. In general,…the pattern we found in this regard closely resembles that of Nazi supporters [analyzed in another part of the study.] Those who were least supportive of National Socialism were least positively disposed to the introduction of the Jew’s star.” The authors confirm that among critics of the measure, indifference took over after a while: “For a couple of days, one swallowed hard,” as a respondent put it, and then one accepted it. After all, “There wasn’t any changing it.”222
In fact all interpretations seem to confirm the fact that the negative reactions to the introduction of the star among part of the German population were ephemeral and did nothing to change overall acceptance and passivity. As for the Jews, not all felt unmixed gratitude at the early shows of compassion. Ruth Kluger, a Jewish girl of twelve in the late fall of 1941, born and living in Vienna, was given an orange by a stranger, as the subway they were riding entered a tunnel (for the gesture to pass unnoticed). “By the time we were back in the daylight, I had stowed it in my bag,” she wrote in her memoirs, “and gratefully looked at the stranger, who looked down on me with a benevolent smile. But my feelings were mixed…. I didn’t like the role of the passive victim who could be comforted with a small demonstration of kindness…. An orange, no matter what it stood for, was no help as my life became progressively more restricted and impoverished. It was a sentimental gesture, and I was a prop for the donor’s good intentions.”223 The memory of such mixed feelings in a twelve-year-old, may of course have been influenced by the events that followed: A year later, in September 1942, Ruth and her mother, a nurse and a physical therapist, were on their way to Theresienstadt; later on they would be sent to Auschwitz. The father, a physician, had performed an abortion on an Aryan woman; he had to flee to Italy, then to France, where he was arrested, deported to the Baltic countries, and murdered.
Whether as an afterthought in the wake of the star decree or as an early sign of decisions to come, on September 11, 1941, the Gestapo disbanded the Kulturbund. Most of its cultural activities had already been forbidden beforehand. Thus in July, the association’s musicians met for the last time to celebrate Verdi; then, their instruments were confiscated and handed out to SA and SS units, the pianos were sent to Nazi welfare organizations and Wehrmacht sanatoriums, and their records were recycled by the German record industry.224 In Germany the last remains of authorized Jewish cultural activity had been snuffed out.
XII
After the proclamation of the new statute of June 1941, the Vichy government forged ahead: On July 22, “Aryanization” was introduced in the nonoccupied zone according to the same criteria and methods used in the north. Businesses were liquidated or put under “French” control, assets were seized, and the proceeds were deposited in a special government bank, the Caisse des Dépôts et Consignations.225
For Darlan and Vallat this did not suffice. On the day the June statute was published, the registration of all Jews (according to the new definition) in the Vichy zone was mandated. According to Vallat’s estimate, approximately 140,000 Jews had been registered by the spring of 1942, although the head of the national office of statistics, René Carmille, had reached the much lower total of 109,000.226 The exact number of Jews living in the Vichy zone at that time is not clear.227 More immediately ominous was Darlan’s order of December 1941, to register all Jews who had entered France after January 1, 1936 (even those who had in the meantime acquired French citizenship); this identification was to become an essential element of the Franco-German agreements concerning the round-ups and deportations that were to come.228
On the morrow of the June statute, Lambert noted that Pétain had met Helbronner and told him that all the measures had been ordered by the Germans. The marshal supposedly commented: “These are horrible people!” (Ce sont des gens épouvantables!)229 After some further remarks about the new measures, Lambert naively added: “One gets the feeling that even the details of the law have been inspired or dictated by the German authorities—as the Reich now considers the way France will solve the Jewish question as a test of its sincerity in the policies of collaboration.”230Lambert did not yet dare to acknowledge that the initiative was French and the anti-Jewish decrees were indeed meant as a proof—but one volunteered by Vichy—of its will to collaborate.
And while, during the summer and fall of 1941, the situation of the Jews in France looked more precarious by the month, the Germans made further attempts to convince the French population that the struggle against Jewry was a vital necessity. On September 5 a major anti-Semitic exhibition opened its doors in Paris. Officially it was organized by Sézille’s “Institute for the Study of Jewish Questions”: Thus, it appeared as a French exhibition organized by a purely French institution. On the seventh Biélinky commented: “An anti-semitic exhibition has just opened at the Palais Berlitz, on the Boulevards; a blustering advertisement campaign promotes it in the newspapers and on the walls. A Jewish female friend who does not look semitic went to the opening and heard in the crowd: ‘here at least, one is sure not to meet any Jews.’”231 The exhibition remained open through January 3, 1942, and drew more than three hundred thousand visitors (most of whom had to buy tickets), with indeed a few Jews among them. Apparently some of the Jewish visitors even dared to express open criticism.232
The Germans however, did not keep at propaganda campaigns. On August 20, 1941, on German instructions, the Paris police arrested a further 4,230 Jews, mainly in the eleventh arrondissement; they were sent to Drancy, the newly established concentration camp near the French capital. This second roundup was probably undertaken in reprisal for the anti-German demonstrations organized in the city on August 13 by communist youth organizations; the police had supposedly noticed a substantial number of Jews among the demonstrators (the French police had ready lists of these Jews, as many had served in the French army in 1939–40). This time some French Jews, mainly communists, were also arrested.233
In the autumn further attacks against German military personnel drew reprisals, but mainly against communists (Jewish or not) at first. Even the execution of fifty hostages after the killing of the field commander of Nantes, Lt. Col. Karl Holtz, on October 20, 1941, did not specifically target Jews.234 For Heydrich, Stülpnagel’s anti-Jewish reprisals were too mild, and it is against this background that French pro-Nazi militants perpetrated bomb attacks against three Paris synagogues on October 3, on Knochen’s instigation.235 Stülpnagel, soon informed of the origin of the attacks, lodged a complaint with the OKH against Heydrich, but to no avail. The commander in chief had no choice but to escalate his own anti-Jewish reprisals.
On November 28, 1941, another attack against German soldiers took place. This time Stülpnagel proposed to the OKH that, henceforth, the reaction should be the mass arrest of French Jews and their deportation to the East. On December 12, 743 Jewish men, mainly French and mostly belonging to the middle classes, were seized by the German police and sent to Compiègne, a camp under direct German command. Their deportation was scheduled for the following weeks; it was delayed until March 1942, when this group and additional Jewish prisoners (1,112 in all) were deported to Auschwitz.236 Thus, in France, it was the Army High Command that put into effect increasingly drastic anti-Jewish measures. While the execution of French hostages caused qualms, the deportation of Jews to their death (a fate increasingly known by the upper echelons of the Wehrmacht in Paris)237 was taken in stride and implemented by the largely non-Nazi military elite.
Simultaneously with the multiplication of anti-Jewish measures, with the arrests and the early deportations, Dannecker exercised growing pressure on the Jewish organizations to transform the “coordination committee” into a full-fledged Jewish Council. The Germans expected Vichy to take the initiative of imposing the new institution.238 In the fall of 1941 it became obvious to the Jewish leaders, natives and foreigners alike, that they would have to accept the Diktat. Yet, the common fate imposed upon all did not heal the rift between the two communities.239 Against this background of internecine squabbles, a group of French Jewish personalities—among whom Lambert came to play an increasingly important role—decided to go along with Vichy’s decisions and to participate in repeated consultations with Vallat, against the will of the Consistoire and that of the more activist elements of the “Federation.”240 On November 29, 1941, Vallat signed the decree establishing the Union Générale des Israélites de France. On January 9, 1942, the executive boards of the UGIF-North (occupied zone) and UGIF-South (Vichy zone) were officially appointed. De facto, Lambert became the dominant personality of UGIF-South.
It has been argued that anti-Jewish measures were less readily applied in the countries and areas of Western Europe under direct German military authority than in those under civilian Nazi rule. While this was not the case in occupied France, it seems that in Belgium the commander in chief of the Wehrmacht, Gen. Alexander von Falkenhausen, was indeed reticent in regard to measures that could create unrest in the population. Yet the usual anti-Jewish measures enacted in Holland and in France were imposed in Belgium at approximately the same time.
Thus, on October 28, 1940, the military administration imposed a “Statut des juifs,” similar to the French and Dutch ones, on the 65,000 to 75,000 Jews living in Belgium at the time.241 Registration was ordered, identity cards marked, Jewish businesses listed, Jewish officials dismissed, Jews expelled from the legal professions and from journalism, as elsewhere in the West. In the spring of 1941 the registration of all Jewish property followed, as well as further segregation measures as implemented in neighboring Holland, and approximately at the same time. In the fall of that same year a Jewish Council, the Association des Juifs en Belgique (AJB), was imposed; a few days later the UGIF was established in France.242
There were some differences, however, between the situation of the Jews of Belgium and those of Holland and France. Whereas two-thirds of the Jews of Holland and half of the Jews of France were native or naturalized citizens in 1940, only 6 percent of the Jews of Belgium were Belgian citizens. Whereas in the three Western countries, small pro-Nazi movements had damaged Jewish property and attacked individual Jews once German presence eased the way, only in Belgium did large-scale pogromlike riots take place, on April 14 and 17, 1941. In Antwerp, several hundred militants of the VNV [Vlaamsch National Verbond] set fire to synagogues and to the chief rabbi’s house on Easter Monday after attending the screening of Jud Süss. And, as 1941 was coming to an end, neither the Belgian church dignitaries nor the resistance movements took a strong stand against the German anti-Jewish measures or against the violence of the Belgian (mostly Flemish) extreme Right. A liberal underground publication did protest against the Antwerp riots, concluding: “Dear readers—Do not think that we Belgians are pro-Jewish. No, far from it. Yet, even a Jew is a human being.”243
After the end of the Babi Yar massacre, a few elderly Jews (witnesses mention that there were nine of them) returned to Kiev and sat by the Old Synagogue. Nobody dared to approach or leave food or water for them, as this could mean immediate execution. One after another the Jews died until only two remained. A passerby went to the German sentry standing at the corner of the street and suggested shooting the two old Jews instead of letting them also starve to death. “The guard thought for a moment and did it.”244