Holocaust: The Nazi Persecution and Murder of the Jews by Peter Longerich (booksvooks TXT) 📕

Carl describes how, on the morning of the 27th, an 238

Mass Executions in Occupied Soviet Zones, 1941

officer of Reserve Police Battalion 11 announced to him the order to liquidate of all

the Jews in the city. The battalion command had disregarded his energetic protest

that the vast majority of the Jews there were irreplaceable skilled workers. The

deputy commander of the unit had explained, he said, that ‘he had received the

order from the commander to free the whole city from Jews, making no excep-

tions, as they had in other towns. This cleansing was to happen for political

reasons, and economic factors had never played any part at all.’

The order was implemented despite Carl’s protest and his report describes it as

being carried out with ‘what amounted to sadism. . . . During the operation the city

itself presented a terrifying picture. With indescribable brutality on the part of the

German police and in particular of the Lithuanian partisans, the Jewish people

and some Belarusians were fetched out of their houses and herded together. There

were gunshots ringing out across the whole city and the bodies of murdered Jews

were piled up in the streets. . . . Many times I had to force the German police and

Lithuanian partisans out of workshops literally at gunpoint, using my revolver.’

Furthermore, ‘the police battalion engaged in looting during the operation in an

outrageous manner . . . not only in Jewish houses but in the houses of the Belar-

usians too. They took with them everything usable, such as boots, leather, textiles,

gold and other valuables.’ Carl concluded his report, ‘Please grant me only one

wish: “Protect me from this police battalion in future!”.’136

On 30 October Police Battalion 11 undertook a further ‘operation’ in Kletsk. The

situation report by the Commandant in Belarus for the first half of October

concludes its comments on this ‘cleansing operation in the area of Slutsk-Kletsk’

by saying that ‘5,900 Jews were shot’. 137 At the beginning of November the battalion was removed from the formation of the 707th Division and assigned

again to Police Regiment Centre. 138

The massacres in the General Commissariat of Belarus reached a temporary

apogee in the major ‘operation’ in Minsk in which, between 7 and 11 November,

the Commando of the Minsk Security Police shot on its own reckoning 6,624 Jews

from the ghetto there. 139 On 20 November and 10 and 11 December, the same group committed two further massacres in which 5,000 and 2,000 people were

killed respectively. 140 In the period around 13 November, of the 16,000 Jews in the city and the district of Slonim all but 7,000 previously selected skilled workers

were murdered by the Security Police and the SD. The District Commissar

responsible for this mass murder, Gert Erren, reported that ‘the operation . . . freed

me from unnecessary mouths to feed and the 7,000 or so Jews that are still present

in the city of Slonim are all bound into the labour process, are working willingly

because they are under constant threat of death and will be checked over and

sorted for further reduction in the spring’. 141

These examples show that the police battalions could be deployed for mass

shootings of Jewish civilians under very different command structures. The

battalions were either deployed in the context of a police regiment, sent in as

Extension of Shootings to Whole Jewish Population

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support for Einsatzkommandos, or used for ‘special operations’ or ‘major oper-

ations’ by the Higher SS and Police Commander in which case for the duration of

the relevant ‘operation’ their subordination to a security division was suspended.

It sometimes happened, however, that police battalions undertook such ‘oper-

ations’ precisely within the context of a security division, as the example of

Reserve Police Battalion 11 makes clear.

In the activity report of Einsatzgruppe A for November 1941 the situation in the

whole of Reich Commissariat Eastland is described thus: ‘The Jewish question in

the Eastland should be regarded as solved. Large-scale executions have decimated

the Jewish population and the remaining Jews have been ghettoized. Special

measures have so far been necessary only for individual Jews who have been

able to escape the grasp of the Security Police.’142

The Role of the Local Voluntary Troops

(Schutzmannschaften)

The murder of hundreds of thousands of civilians in the newly occupied territories

during the first months of the war was only possible because the Germans

succeeded in recruiting willing executioners for their policies of racial annihilation

from the indigenous populations of the areas that had been conquered.

After German agencies had begun to set up auxiliary police formations in the

occupied zones during the first few weeks of the war, 143 Himmler gave an order on 25 July 1941 to set up ‘voluntary troop formations’. 144 These units were to be made up of Ukrainians, Balts, and Belarusians, but only men who had not been conscripted into the Red Army or non-Communist prisoners of war. 145 At the end of July 1941 the head of the Order Police, Kurt Daluege, decreed that these new

formations would be called ‘local voluntary troops’ or Schutzmannschaften, and

be run by reliable officers or sergeants from the German police. 146

In Lithuania and Latvia, such voluntary troop units were formed from the

local partisan units and auxiliary formations that had come together in the first

phase of the occupation as early as August. Ukrainian voluntary troops can be

documented from October 1941; Belarusian and Estonian from the beginning of

1942.147 According to the head of the Order Police, Daluege, at the end of 1941

there were in the Reich Commissariat Eastland 31,652 local volunteers and 14,452

in the Ukraine. In the course of 1942 these forces would grow to a strength of

more than 300,000. Such troops therefore became one of the most important

organs of containment and repression within the German occupying forces and

played an indispensable role in the persecution of the Jews. 148 Whilst these bodies were initially recruited exclusively from volunteers, during 1942 more

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and more pressure was put on the male members of local populations to join

these units. 149

Usually a distinction was made between local volunteer troops on individual

duties (in other words attached as auxiliaries to the local German police author-

ities) and battalions of volunteer troops, 150 which were mobile reserves that were often deployed outside their local