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

directed against men, there was no ban in

principle on shooting women and children, too. Jewish women were shot by SS

and Police formations from the very earliest days, singly or in small groups, if they

were seen as in any way ‘suspect’ (i.e. likely to be ‘agents’ or ‘active Communists’).

There is a large quantity of evidence to show that the shooting of women increased

in the second half of July and that, alongside this shift in practice, some children

were also being shot.

It was not the Einsatzkommandos, however, but other SS and Police units that

moved over in late July to the systematic shooting of Jewish women and children

not suspected of any misdeeds but targeted merely because they were Jews. The

two SS Brigades played a precursor role in this. The 1st SS Brigade reported at the

end of July that 800 ‘Jews, male and female, aged between 16 and 60’ had been

shot, and a few days later, that 275 Jewish women had been shot between 3 and 6

August. In total the Brigade is thought to have murdered 7,000 Jewish people by

Extension of Shootings to Whole Jewish Population

251

the middle of August. It can also be established that two Police battalions,

Battalions 45 and 314, carried out the execution of a larger number of women

and children before then, in July. All these units were under the command of

Higher SS and Police Commander for Russia South, Friedrich Jeckeln, under

whom the massacre of 23,600 Jews in Kamenetsk-Podolsk took place at the end of

August. This mass murder can be described as the initial spark for igniting

systematic genocide in the area under the Higher SS and Police Commander for

Russia South. It primarily affected commandos in Einsatzgruppe C, but those in

Einsatzgruppe D were also affected.

The 1st Regiment of the SS Cavalry Brigade, which was under the Higher SS and

Police Commander for Russia Centre, reacted to Himmler’s brutal orders by

shooting women and children from early August on, indeed in some places the

entire Jewish population of a town. The 2nd Regiment initially restricted execu-

tions to Jewish men, but from early September women and children were also

amongst their victims. But it was not only the inclusion of women and children

amongst those shot but the extraordinary number of the victims of the Brigade—

some 25,000 people by the middle of August—that led to the general radicalization

of the process of murder amongst the units in the area under the Higher SS and

Police Commander for Russia Centre, in the course of which police battalions and

Einsatzkommandos also significantly extended their murderous activity.

In a series of cases it can be proved that the Einsatzkommandos that had been

instructed by group staff to increase their rate of murder started shooting

women and children in places where earlier ‘cleansing operations’ had already

claimed the men as their victims or had caused the men to flee. In the case of

Einsatzkommando 9 in Vileyka, for example, it can be shown that the com-

mando leader first cleared it with the Einsatzgruppe’s rearguard support before

he shot women and children, and Sonderkommando 4a took a few days before

deciding to shoot the children who had survived in Bila Zerkva, again with the

backing of the Army Commander. Both instances show that there was no clear

order to shoot women and children in existence from the very beginning, but

that the commandos were confronted with situations by their group staffs,

probably quite deliberately, in which they had to decide for themselves what

the nature of the task they had been charged with actually was. Einsatzkom-

mando Tilsit also shot women, old men, and children at the end of July and in

early August on the Lithuanian border after it had earlier executed the men of

military age in the same towns. Einsatzkommando 3 can be shown to have

started to shoot women and children in the first half of August. These murders,

too, took place in towns where members of the same commando had already

shot the men shortly before.

The situation of the sub-unit of Einsatzkommando 3 stationed in the citadel in

Daugavpils (Dünaburg) was somewhat different. Between the end of July and the

middle of August it executed large numbers of men unfit for work, women, and

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Mass Executions in Occupied Soviet Zones, 1941

children and thus proceeded in the same way that would be typical in the months

to come for the selection of victims within the ghettos.

There was a different context again for the shooting of women and children in

the area covered by Einsatzgruppe D, when members of Einsatzkommando 12

shot several hundred Jewish refugees from a large group who were being driven

back over the Dniester into Romanian-controlled territory because they could not

keep pace with the marching tempo.

The murderous practice of including women and children in shootings there-

fore spread amongst the commandos only gradually and not in a uniform manner.

One of the two sub-units of Einsatzkommando 8 was already shooting women

and children in August, but the other seems only to have taken this step in

September. Einsatzkommando 5 also only started to do this in September: by

his own admission, commando leader Schulz could not make up his mind to

put into practice the order he had received in August. And Sonderkommandos

7a and 7b cannot be shown to have carried out large-scale operations in this

period at all.

We can reconstruct the manner in which the order to murder women and

children was passed on from the testimonies of various commando leaders. These

show that they were orally instructed to include women and children in the

murders in August and September by their commanding officers (Filbert and

Bradfisch by Nebe; Schulz by Rasch; Nosske and Drexel by Ohlendorf).

With the mass shooting of women and children, the decisive step on the way

towards a policy of racial annihilation had been taken. After the various units had

crossed this threshold they moved on to ‘major operations’ (again each at a

different pace) that affected the great mass of the Jewish civilian population.

These were the comprehensive ‘cleansing operations’ designed to make whole

swathes of the country ‘free of Jews’, and the mass executions of thousands in the

ghettos that had been established in the meantime.

The first such comprehensive ‘cleansing operations’ are documented for early

August in Lithuania, where a few days after it had begun systematically shooting

women