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

In the massacre in Brest-Litovsk on 15 October 1942, in which the local SD out-

station, the gendarmerie, a police unit, and various other police agencies took part,

at least 10,000–15,000 people were killed. 237 In September, in the District Commissariat of Brest at least 5,000 people had already been killed in several ghettos and

camps. 238 In the liquidation of the ghettos of Sdolbunov, Misocz, and Ostrog, all immediately to the south of Rovno, over 2,000 people in all were murdered on 13, 14,

and 15 October. 239 In the District Commissariat of Dunajewzy (Dunayevtsy), according to a Soviet Commission report, a total of 5,000 Jews are supposed to

have been shot in the spring and autumn of 1942. 240

In November the SS and the occupying administration extended the murder

actions to the north, into White Russian Polesia, and again to the south. After the

last Jewish forced labourers had been murdered in Luck on 12 December, the

workers in Podolia suffered the same fate: 4,000 people fell victim to the murders

in Kamenetsk-Podolsk in November 1942, and a similar number in Starokonstan-

tinov on 29 December 1942. Not only did the civil administration provide

the crucial impulse for total extermination at short notice, but the District

Commissars also played a considerable part in the organization of the individual

massacres. 241

For the Ukraine, therefore, we have the following overall picture: altogether,

between May and December 1942, some 150,000 Jews fell victim to the massacres

carried out by the police and the civil administration in Volhynia between

May and December 1942, and in Podolia just to the south at least 35,000.

There were also several thousand victims in the General Commissariat of

Shitomir (Zhitomir). At the end of 1942, only a few thousand Jewish skilled

workers remained alive. 242

By mid-October 1942 the district of Bialystok, which was not part of the General

Government, but was under the control of the Governor of the Province of East

Prussia and Reichskommissar of the Ukraine, Erich Koch, and formed a bridge

between the two territories, had been caught up in the systematic extermination.

Extermination on a European Scale, 1942

353

After an initial deportation of 3,300 people from the ghetto of Ciechanowiec to

Treblinka on 15 October, the majority of the Jews of the district had been rounded

up into five large collection camps at the beginning of November (Kielbasin,

Volkovysk, Zambrov, Boguze, and one more near Bialystok), while ghettos con-

tinued to exist only in Bialystok, Grodno, Pruzany, Sokolka, and Krynki. In the

months of November, December, and January (interrupted by a transport mora-

torium from mid-December until mid-January) more than 80,000 people were

transported mainly to Treblinka, some also to Auschwitz, and murdered there.

Finally, at the beginning of February, some 10,000 people from the Bialystok

ghetto, which had hitherto been spared, were deported to Treblinka, after more

far-reaching plans for the deportation of 30,000 people which Himmler had

already approved in December, had proved to be impracticable. In mid-February,

a similar ‘action’ occurred in Grodno, with more than 4,000 victims who were

deported to Treblinka. 243

The HSSPF Russia South, Hans-Adolf Prützmann, reported to Himmler on

26 December 1942 that following the ‘anti-Partisan campaign’ between 1 September

and 1 December 1942 a total of 363,211 ‘Jews had been executed’ within his area of

responsibility, which included Ukraine and Bialystok. On 29 December Himmler

passed on the report to Hitler, who took note of it. 244

Unlike the situation in Poland, where the inhabitants of the ghettos in 1942

reacted in a largely ‘passive’ way to the ‘actions’, the second wave of massacres

in the occupied Soviet territories encountered considerable organized and

largely armed resistance. In many places resistance groups formed against the

occupying forces, even though the chances of success were extremely poor. They

had hardly any firearms, so that the resistance fighters often only had home-

made incendiary materials, knives, and tools that had been converted into

weapons. It was also extraordinarily difficult for the resistance groups in the

individual ghettos, isolated from one another, to receive information about the

overall picture, and it was impossible to develop a unified resistance strategy. It

also proved extraordinarily difficult for the resistance fighters to win support

within the ghetto population. It was not just the fact that the extraordinarily bad

living conditions meant that any remaining energy was absorbed by the daily

fight for survival, but above all the fear that any acts of resistance would be

avenged with collective reprisal against the general population of the ghetto.

There was also the often hostile attitude of the non-Jewish indigenous popula-

tion and the difficulties involved in making contact with non-Jewish resistance

groups, let alone receiving support from such groups. In other words, the

resisters knew from the outset that their rebellion had little prospect of success.

But the fact that resistance could exist on a considerable scale in spite of this can

be explained above all by the fact that few illusions about the brutality of the

German occupying forces could still exist among those who had survived the

first wave of murders in the summer and autumn of 1941. 245

354

Extermination of the European Jew, 1942–1945

The pattern of these resistance activities was, in spite of the isolation of the

ghettos, always the same: small resistance groups organized a few weapons and

prepared to confront a new German ‘action’. In part, these preparations were also

backed by the Jewish council and the Jewish police, in part they occurred without

their support or even against their will.

In fact this resistance tactic was applied in a large number of ghettos: resistance

groups attacked the German police and native auxiliary forces as they made their

way into the ghetto, and set the ghetto itself on fire. Shielded by the flames, the

inhabitants of the ghetto attempted a mass break-out; this always cost a large

number of Jewish people their lives. Apart from such mass break-outs, fleeing

secretly into the forests, individually or in groups, presented the most significant

opportunity to escape mass murder; as such it also represented a form of resist-

ance against the German policy of extermination. Overall, only a small minority

managed to escape into the forests, where few in turn survived.

Apart from such organized, violent acts of resistance, and flight, there were

many other forms of individual resistance: ghetto-dwellers refused to follow

instructions from the Germans, tried to hide in their houses or to barricade

them up; in many cases spontaneous