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

Sonderkommando 11b undertook its first mass executions on 7 August 1941

in Thigina, where an incident report notes that 155 Jews were shot on that

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date. 95 Einsatzkommando 12 carried out two executions on 20 and 21 July in Babtshinsky, which the 23 August incident report said claimed 94 lives. 96

Police Battalions

It was not only the Einsatzgruppen that were massacring the Jewish civilian

population in the occupied Eastern zones in the first weeks of the campaign;

various battalions of the German Order Police were also involved.

In Bialystok Police Battalion 309 carried out a massacre as early as 27 June in

which at least 2,000 Jews, including women and children, were killed. Members of

the battalion drove at least 500 people into the synagogue and put them to an

agonizing death by setting fire to the building. 97 The very precise reconstruction of these events undertaken by the Wuppertal District Court in 1973 makes it clear

how some fanatical officers in the battalion seized the initiative and transformed

the planned arrest of the Jews in the synagogue quarter into a bloodbath; there was

looting, and some excesses were perpetrated by policemen under the influence of

alcohol. Bialystok was also the scene of a massacre organized by Police Battalions

316 and 322 in the middle of July when a total of about 3,000 Jewish men were

killed. 98

A few days before this mass murder, on 8 July, Himmler appeared in Bialystok

together with the head of the Order Police, Daluege. 99 At a meeting with SS and police officers Himmler is said by Bach-Zelewski to have remarked that ‘every Jew

must in principle be regarded as a partisan’. 100 On the following day Daluege announced to a meeting of members of Police Regiment Centre that ‘Bolshevism

must now be eradicated once and for all’. 101 Two days later, on 11 July, the commander of Police Regiment Centre issued an order to shoot all Jewish men

between the ages of 17 and 45 convicted of looting. 102 The police made the task of

‘convicting’ Jewish ‘looters’ very straightforward: three days beforehand, members

of Battalion 322 had carried out a search of the Jewish quarter and designated all

confiscated goods as ‘plunder’; 103 Jews were therefore looters by definition.

In the second half of July Police Battalion 316 carried out another massacre in

Baranowicze, which probably claimed several hundred victims, and took part in

two mass shootings in Mogilev in which 3,700 Jews (including women and

children) were killed on 19 September. 104 In Brest-Litovsk, on or around 12 July, Police Battalion 307 shot several thousand Jewish civilians, almost all men between 16 and 60 years old—another alleged ‘reprisal’. Immediately before the

massacre Daluege, the chief of Police Regiment Centre, Max Montua, Bach-

Zelewski, and other Higher SS Commanders had been in Brest. 105

On 2 August Battalion 322 received a radio message from the Higher SS and

Police Commanders to deploy a company ‘exclusively for the liquidation of

Jews’. 106 In the battalions’ war diary for 9 August there is the note: ‘comp. arrests all male Jews between 16 and 45 in Bialowicza and carries out the evacuation of all

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the remaining Jews from Bialowicza’. And the following day has ‘the 3rd comp.

today carried out the liquidation of all the male Jews in the prisoners’ holding

camp in Bialowicza. 77 Jews aged between 16 and 45 were shot.’107

The same company of the 322nd Battalion shot more Jewish men a few days

later in Moravka-Malá near Bialowicza. The battalion’s war diary for 15 August

notes, ‘259 women and 162 children were resettled in Kobryn. All male Jews

between the ages of 16 and 65 (282 head), as well as one Pole, were shot for

looting. ’108 An order must have arrived between 10 and 15 August that increased the upper age-range from 45 to 65.

Conclusions

The following conclusions may be drawn from all these individual cases and

examples about the way orders were given to the Einsatzgruppen and police

battalions. Almost all Einsatzkommandos and Sonderkommandos, and a number

of police battalions, can be shown to have carried out mass shootings of Jewish

men of military age at the end of June or in July, a total of thousands of

individuals. These shootings were generally carried out under the pretext of

‘reprisals’, as punishments for ‘looting’ or as a means of dealing with ‘partisans’.

This manner of proceeding corresponded to the orders that the Einsatzgruppen

had received at the beginning of the campaign. Some of the Einsatzgruppe

commanders even referred explicitly to these orders, as we have seen.

The conduct of the Einsatzgruppen followed a single pattern but was not wholly

uniform. The upper age limit for the victims differed between Einsatzgruppen:

whilst in some towns almost the entire male population in the relevant age-range

was shot, executions in other places affected varying proportions of the male

population. The different unit commanders therefore had a certain amount of

room for manoeuvre, which was not completely precise, as has been shown, but

left some latitude for initiative.

This manner of ‘indirectly’ issuing orders that relied on the intuition and

initiative of subordinates was highly characteristic of the National Socialist sys-

tem. It was deployed in cases where procedures were being demanded of subor-

dinates that clearly contravened a valid law. The Party Supreme Court of the

NSDAP neatly encapsulated this ‘indirect’ form of giving orders when it dealt with

the question of whether Party members who had participated in the November

1938 pogrom should be punished for committing a serious crime. The Party

Supreme Court explained at the time, that ‘it was obvious to any active National

Socialist from the period of struggle’—i.e. pre-1933—‘that operations where the

Party does not wish to appear as the instigator will not be regulated with complete

clarity and in full detail. As a consequence, therefore, more is to be read into

orders of that kind than the words literally state, and on the part of those issuing

such orders, in the interests of the Party, the practice of not saying everything but

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hinting what an order is intended to convey has now become widespread,

especially when these orders concern illegal political rallies.’109 This technique of issuing orders was deployed in 1941 for the mass murder of Soviet Jews. The

leaders of individual