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

that the formulation

Laying the Ground for Racial Annihilation

191

‘all Jews in Party and state posts’ is an understated way of giving the order for

annihilating a vaguely defined upper layer of Jews, mostly men, leaving the

decision of how exactly to define this layer to the commandos themselves. The

instructions given on 2 July do not, for example, expressly forbid the murder of

women and children. The significance of the meetings that Heydrich held with the

leadership of the Einsatzgruppen before the outbreak of war was therefore to make

it clear to them that Soviet Jews and Bolshevism represented a closely interlinked

collection of enemies, leaving it to them to shoot the Jews under one pretext or

another, whether under the heading of state and Party functionaries, or agitators,

or propagandists, or merely ‘etc.’.

chapter 11

THE MASS MURDER OF JEWISH MEN

In the very first days of the war against the Soviet Union there is evidence to

document both the attempts of the Einsatzgruppen to initiate ‘self-purification

processes’ and the execution of Jewish men.

Pogroms Organized by the Einsatzgruppen

During the early days of the war, in Lithuania, Latvia, Western Ukraine (the

eastern Polish area occupied by the Soviet Union), and to a lesser extent also in

Belarus, 1 radical nationalist and anti-Semitic forces carried out large-scale pogroms against the local Jewish population. In accordance with the stereotype of

‘Jewish Bolshevism’ these forces made the Jewish minority responsible for the

terror of Soviet occupation and exercised a bloody retribution. This manner of

going about things was perfectly in accordance with the German formula of

initiating ‘attempts at self-purification’, ‘invisibly’ where possible. Despite the

disguise, German influence on these pogroms can be demonstrated in a large

number of cases, as will be shown in what follows, using the reports made by the

Einsatzgruppen. 2

However, even where pogroms were already in progress before German troops

arrived, there is evidence that they were not the expression of a spontaneous

popular movement. The fact that all the pogroms proceeded in a similar way

The Mass Murder of Jewish Men

193

suggests instead that they were to a very large extent triggered and steered by

underground organizations formed under the regime of occupation; there is

evidence, too, that in the months before the German attack these underground

organizations were cooperating with German agencies and were planning for a

radical policy of anti-Semitism after the ‘liberation’ of their homelands. 3

It has been proved, for example, that during preparations for the war against

the Soviet Union the Germans, and in particular military intelligence and the

Reich Security Head Office, were working closely with Lithuanian émigrés who

had fled to the German Reich and established their own organization, the LAF

(Lithuanian Activist Front), which was in frequent contact with the Lithuanian

underground. It is demonstrable, too, that the LAF made use of these channels in

order to commit their comrades at home to violent attacks on Jews during the

process of ‘liberating’ their country. It is more than likely that this approach was at

least supported by the Germans, given the close cooperation between the LAF and

German agencies. 4

There were similarly close contacts between German agencies and Estonian and

Latvian émigré organizations that were also drawn into the preparations for war. 5

The Germans also harnessed both wings of the OUN (Organization of Ukrainian

Nationalists) into their plans for attack and will have sustained and strongly

encouraged the already radically anti-Semitic OUN in that direction. 6 Whether this also included an appeal to initiate pogroms cannot be demonstrated with

sufficient certainty. 7 However, even where it is likely but not provable that local forces were briefed in the run-up to the war the reports of the Einsatzgruppen

nonetheless show clearly how strong German influence was on the outbreak of

pogroms.

In the summary activity report prepared in mid-October by Einsatzgruppe A in

the operational area of Army Group A—the so-called Stahlecker Report—there is

a detailed account of the ‘attempts at self-cleansing’ initiated by the Einsatzgruppe

itself:8 ‘It was necessarily the responsibility of the Einsatzgruppe to set in train the self-purification attempts and guide them into the correct channels in order to

achieve the goal of cleansing as quickly as possible. It was no less important to

create for a later date the firm and demonstrable fact that the liberated population

was of its own accord resorting to the harshest measures against its Bolshevist and

Jewish opponents without leaving any trace of instructions from the German side.’

It was also ‘immediately obvious that only the first days after the occupation

would offer opportunities for carrying out pogroms’.

The Stahlecker Report goes on to say that, ‘astonishingly’, initiating the first

pogrom in Kaunas in Lithuania had not proved ‘straightforward’; it had only got

going after the Lithuanian partisan leaders, who had been brought in to carry it

out, had been given ‘tips’ by the ‘small advance commando deployed in Kaunas’,

again ‘without any German instructions or stimulus being discernible from the

outside’. During this pogrom, which took place between 25 and 28 July and cost

194

Mass Executions in Occupied Soviet Zones, 1941

the lives of some 3,800 people, Jewish men were violently dragged from their

homes by Lithuanian ‘militia’, collected together in public squares and killed there

or taken to fortresses and shot. 9 By the beginning of July, however, as an incident report makes clear, Einsatzgruppe A had already come to the conclusion that ‘no

more mass shootings [were] possible’ in Kaunas; 10 a stop was therefore put to them.

In Riga the Einsatzgruppe succeeded in initiating a pogrom in which 400 Jews

were killed, but only after ‘appropriate influence [had been exerted] on the Latvian

auxiliary police’. Further pogroms in that city were not felt to be ‘sustainable’

because of the rapid calming of the population in general. 11 At the end of July Einsatzgruppe A reported on pogroms in other Latvian cities: according to these

reports ‘in Jelgava [Mitau] and the surrounding areas . . . the remaining 1,550 Jews

were expunged from the population without trace’. 12

Pogroms that can be proved to have been initiated by the Germans were above

all carried out by Einsatzgruppe C in the Ukraine. In Lvov (Lemberg), where the

NKVD (the Soviet People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs) had shot some

3,500 prisoners at the end of June and bloodily suppressed an attempted uprising

by the OUN, pogroms were started by the indigenous population on 30 June, the

day of the city’s occupation