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

mean that they did not only affect Jews ‘in Party and state posts’. ‘On the

basis of the instructions received from the Reich Security Head Office, function-

aries of the state and Party apparatus were liquidated in all the towns of Belarus

already mentioned. As for the Jews, they were treated in the same way, as the

orders directed. ’75

In the incident report for 20 August Einsatzgruppe C described a ‘measure’

that reveals just how spurious the term ‘reprisal’ was as grounds for action.

‘In Januszpol, a city with more than 25 per cent Jewish inhabitants, Jewish

women have in recent days displayed impertinent and insolent behaviour

with respect to the restrictions currently imposed on them. They tore their

The Mass Murder of Jewish Men

201

own and their children’s clothes from their bodies. As an interim reprisal

measure, the commando that arrived, once order had been re-established,

shot 15 male Jews. Further reprisals will follow.’76 The report ultimately makes it plain that ‘reprisal measures against looters and Jews will continue

to be carried out as planned [!] as they have already been’, 77 and that these

‘reprisal measures’ were taken systematically and independently of the nature

of the situation on the spot. 78

Einsatzgruppe for Special Purposes

In addition to the four commandos in the Einsatzgruppe, there was an additional

commando under the leader of the Security Police in Cracow, which had been sent

into the eastern Polish area to support Einsatzgruppe C. 79 It too was carrying out mass executions by July, overwhelmingly of male Jews, as the incident report of 3

August documents: ‘between 21 and 31 July 1941 3,947 persons were liquidated.’80

According to an incident report of 9 August, 510 people were killed in Brest-

Litovsk and another 296 in Bialystok. 81

The reports made from early August on by this commando from the eastern

Polish area, which was immediately named Einsatzkommando for Special Pur-

poses, show very clearly how excessive the ‘reprisals’ were at this point and how

this was merely a pretext for mass murder: ‘in the area around Pinsk one member

of the militia was shot in an ambush; 4,500 Jews were liquidated in return. ’82

Einsatzgruppe D

Einsatzgruppe D was assigned to the 11th Army, which together with two Roma-

nian armies was to form the southernmost spearhead of the invasion. Its activity

has to be assessed against the background of Romania’s radical anti-Semitic

politics: Romania was an ally that had pursued a policy of ‘solving’ the ‘Jewish

question since the outbreak of war against the Soviet Union using a mixture of

pogroms, massacres, and violent expulsions. The potential for anti-Semitic vio-

lence that was thereby released was considerable during the first few weeks of the

war; whilst the German Einsatzgruppen mostly directed their measures during the

first weeks of the war at members of the ‘leading’ Jewish social groups and only

then extended the range of the murders to include men of military age, the

Romanian attack was directed at the whole of the Jewish minority from the very

beginning.

On 28 July Romanian soldiers and civilians, supported by members of the

Wehrmacht, carried out a pogrom in the border city of Jasi that had been prepared

by the Romanian secret service. There were countless murders within the city, a

mass execution in the courtyard of the police headquarters, and during the

subsequent transports in crowded goods trains that shuttled back and forth all

202

Mass Executions in Occupied Soviet Zones, 1941

day in the scorching heat, without food and water, thousands of people lost their

lives—4,000 according to the estimate of the German ambassador. 83

Whilst reconquering the areas of Bessarabia and the Bukovina that had been

ceded to the Soviet Union in 1940 under pressure from Moscow, Romanian police

and troops murdered many Jews. They were supported in part by Einsatzgruppe

D and members of the Wehrmacht, but largely acted on their own initiative, but

also supported by Romanian and Ukrainian peasants and farmers. The Romanian

authorities were following a plan dictated by their own government for the

systematic ‘cleansing’ of the country: Jews in rural areas were to be killed on the

spot; those living in cities were to be interned in camps. 84 Raoul Hilberg estimates the total number of victims of this campaign at more than 10,000.85

These murders left a mixed impression with Einsatzgruppe D, as is shown by

one of their reports. ‘There would be no objection to the shooting of numerous

Jews if the technical aspects of preparation and implementation were not so

inadequate.’ It was in that sense that the Einsatzgruppe wished to influence the

activities of the Romanians. 86

All five commandos from Einsatzgruppe D that were assigned to the German

11th Army attacking from Romanian territory or to the two allied Romanian

armies can be shown to have participated in the mass execution of Jewish men

in the period up to the beginning of August 1941.87

In the city of Belzy, as part of a bloody ‘reprisal’ by Romanian police and

soldiers against the city’s Jews in which hundreds were killed, Sonderkommando

10a shot 75 Jewish hostages. 88 A sub-unit of the same Sonderkommando was sent to the town of Kodyma in response to a request from the intelligence officer of the

XXX Army Corps because the ‘Jews and Bolshevists’ there were allegedly intend-

ing to sabotage measures being taken by the occupying power. The sub-unit

therefore arrested 400 men on 1 August, most of them Jews, subjected them to

an ‘interrogation’ and then shot 98 of them. 89

On 8 and 9 July Sonderkommando 10b (assigned to the 3rd Romanian Army)

took part in a massacre carried out by Romanian troops in Chernivtsi (Czerno-

vitz) in which it killed ‘100 Jewish Communists’ by its own account, ostensibly

because advancing German and Romanian formations had been shot at from

within the Jewish quarter. 90 At the end of July, Einsatzgruppe D reported that ‘of about 1,200 Jews arrested’ in the city, ‘682 had been shot in cooperation with the

Romanian police’. 91 Sections of Sonderkommando 10b carried out further executions of Jewish men in other towns over the weeks that followed. 92

At the beginning of August Sonderkommando 11a reported the liquidation of

‘551 Jews so far’ in Chişinău (Kishinev), citing ‘sabotage’ and ‘reprisal’ as the

reasons. 93 These executions took place while the leader of Einsatzgruppe D, Ohlendorf’s staff was in Chişinău and he witnessed at least one of the shootings.