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

and children Einsatzkommando 3 dramatically increased its total number

of victims. The same can be shown to have happened in Latvia from August

(Einsatzkommandos 2 and 3). Similar ‘cleansing operations’ took place in Belarus,

the work divided between Police Battalion 11 and the 707th Division of the

Wehrmacht. Einsatzgruppe D followed a similar strategy from the end of August

on with Einsatzkommando 12 and Sonderkommando 10b in Transnistria, Ein-

satzkommando 8 in September in the area around the Belarusian city of Borisov,

and Einsatzkommando 5 from September in the Ukraine.

The series of shootings in Daugavpils (Dünaburg) in Latvia at the end of July

was followed by further massacres in the Baltic ghettos from September onwards,

which claimed thousands of victims. In the area covered by Einsatzgruppe B, after

the 1st Cavalry Regiment had already murdered the entire Jewish population of

Extension of Shootings to Whole Jewish Population

253

certain places at the beginning of August, early October saw the exhaustive ‘major

operations’ in which all Jews were indiscriminately murdered. In the area under

Einsatzgruppe C these ‘major operations’ began as early as the end of August

(Kamenetsk-Podolsk); Einsatzgruppe D started them in mid- to late September

(Dubăsari and Nikolayev).

What can be concluded from this is that the range of executions was not

extended as a result of a uniform series of orders but within a broad context for

the issuing of orders that gave individual units considerable leeway over a certain

period and room for manoeuvre that was used by the commandos according to

the situations they encountered and based on their own assessments of the

position. Factors such as the number of Jews present in the relevant district, the

density with which commandos were deployed, collaboration with local forces,

the attitude of allies, the degree of ghettoization, labour needs, the occupying

forces’ need for accommodation, the nutritional situation, and others all played a

significant role in the development of the commandos’ activities. These factors

influenced the decision as to how, in what way and at what speed the two

complementary annihilation strategies of ‘cleansing’ the ‘flat lands’ and ‘major

operations’ in the ghettos would be implemented. The relatively large leeway that

the units enjoyed, however, was reduced from the end of summer 1941: individual

instructions, inspections, and such like by the SS leadership began to impose a

degree of uniformity on the conduct of commandos to produce a strategy for

‘spaces free of Jews’.

The Higher SS and Police Commanders evidently played a decisive role in the

transition to a comprehensive racial cleansing, not least because the terrible wave

of mass murders that they initiated in August and which reached hitherto

unimagined magnitudes effectively meant that they seized the initiative from the

Einsatzgruppe leadership. The role of the Higher SS and Police Commanders,

Himmler’s plenipotentiaries, but also Himmler’s own indefatigable inspections

during this period both point towards the central role that the Reichsführer SS

fulfilled in the implementation of this process. A starting point can even be

identified: the moment when the ‘securing of [the Eastern areas] by policing

measures’ was made Himmler’s responsibility on 17 July. Himmler’s political

motivation must have been his belief that the radicalization of ethnic ‘cleansing’

in the East would provide him with his way in to taking on the complete

‘reordering’ of Lebensraum in the East. The long-term utopian plans for a ‘new

order’ in the Eastern areas to be conquered foresaw the need to reduce the

indigenous population there by 30 million, and it was intended that they should

be implemented, at least in part, during the war. This anticipation of the future

was bound to end in the destructive measures that constituted a politics of

annihilation.

This all suggests that it is doubtful whether the extension of executions in the

occupied Eastern areas in summer and autumn 1941 can be adequately understood

254

Mass Executions in Occupied Soviet Zones, 1941

using the paradigm of ‘coming to a decision, giving an order, carrying the order

out’ that has its origins in the military. It casts into doubt, too, whether the search

for a decisive ‘order’ which triggered the radicalization of the persecution of the

Jews in the occupied areas can constitute an adequate research strategy.

Hitler’s fundamental decision of 16–17 July about where responsibility was to lie

in the occupied Eastern areas, and Himmler’s appearance in Minsk on 14–15 of

that month merely represent certain situations in a much more complex process

in which decisions and their implementation were intimately linked. The starting

point is characterized by a degree of consensus between the decision makers that

the persecution of the Jews would indeed be intensified and radicalized as the war

progressed. This consensus situation was the basis for instructions formulated in a

very general manner and reckoning with the need for subordinates to use their

initiative, instructions that were then transmitted via a series of different channels,

and which created not a clear-cut command structure but a ‘climate of command’.

In the first instance, this gave individual initiative considerable room for man-

oeuvre; later on the whole process was steered and made more uniform at senior

leadership level. This is a dialectical process, then, in which the top levels of

leadership and the organs implementing decisions radicalized each other. How-

ever, each element in this process is essential for putting the whole process into

practice, and the process cannot be distilled into a single ‘order from the Führer’

or one instruction authorized by Hitler.

The reports made by the Einsatzgruppen allow us to construct at least an

approximate estimate of the number of people murdered in the occupied Eastern

areas during the first months of the war. Einsatzgruppe A reported that it had

killed 118,000 Jews by mid-October and more than 229,000 by the end of January

1942. 228 Of these 80,000 had been killed in Lithuania alone by mid-October, and by the end of January this figure had reached 145,000; in Latvia the totals were

30,000 by mid-October and 35,000 by January; in Estonia some 1,000 indigenous

Jews had been killed by the end of January; in Belarus the figure was 41,000 and in

the old Soviet areas within the area covered by the Einsatzgruppe some 3,600 had

been killed. Einsatzgruppe B reported 45,467 shootings by 31 October 1941 and in

its situation report of 1 March 1942 it noted a total of 91,012 who had received

‘special treatment’ since the start of the war. The figures for Einsatzkommandos 8

and 9—60,811 and 23,509 respectively—are particularly horrific. 229 The