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

units had a degree of room for manoeuvre, but only within

the framework established by the SS leadership.

chapter 12

THE TRANSITION FROM ANTI-SEMITIC

TERROR TO GENOCIDE

Changes in the Parameters for Action in the Area of

Deployment and Alterations in the Perception

of the Murderers

The original ‘security police’ model for the way commandos should proceed was

to subject Jewish communities to a wave of terror immediately after occupation

in order to exclude any possible form of resistance from what was seen as the

‘Jewish-Bolshevist complex’, whilst simultaneously isolating the Jews from

the remainder of the population and stigmatizing them as the real enemies of

the occupying power. This model was followed during July and the first half of

August by a large proportion of the commandos and police units in an extremely

radical manner: they had started to decimate the Jewish male population of military

age systematically and indiscriminately. The fact that this expansion of the terror

did not happen suddenly at a particular moment but was introduced over a period

of time (some commandos did not adopt this policy until September or even later

than that) suggests that there was no particular order that decisively brought about

this transition. Rather it was a process of increasingly radical interpretations of

orders—issued at the start of the campaign and deliberately left vague—to kill

From Anti-Semitic Terror to Genocide

207

everyone who was in some way suspicious. It is most trenchantly summarized in

Hitler’s crudely brutal formulation from the middle of July: ‘shoot dead everyone

who so much as blinks at you.’1

The more radical approach of the commandos was manifested in a number of

ways but especially in the alteration of the procedures for executions and in the

invention of more and more reasons for murder. As early as July and August

various formations had adopted procedures for execution that maximized the

number of people murdered in the shortest possible time.

Executions during the first weeks of the campaign were frequently carried out

according to the model of courts martial, which is to say that firing squads were

assembled and in order to maintain a veneer of legality sometimes sentences

were even read out and salvoes of shots discharged on an officer’s order. But

commandos very soon found ways to speed up and perfect mass executions: the

victims were taken in organized groups at fixed intervals to carefully segregated

execution sites, and the executions themselves took place immediately next to,

sometimes actually inside, prepared mass graves (in which cases the victims

often had to lie on the bodies of those who had been shot moments before).

Automatic weapons were used, or victims were killed with a pistol shot to the

head or neck. 2

Where commandos gave any reason at all for their murderous activity, they

tended to describe the Jews they killed as ‘Bolshevist functionaries’, ‘Communists’,

‘Communist sympathizers’, or as ‘agents’. 3 Later, membership of the ‘Jewish intelligentsia’ sufficed as a reason for murder, especially in Einsatzgruppe B, whilst

Einsatzgruppe C used ‘reprisal’ as the grounds for all types of actions. During July

and August new reasons kept appearing for the liquidation of Jews on the grounds

of supposed hostile action against the occupying power. These included arson, 4

dissemination of anti-German propaganda, 5 looting, 6 sabotage, 7 refusal to work, 8

support for partisan groups, 9 or black-market dealing. 10 After September these were supplemented by another ‘security police reason’, namely ‘threat of plague’, 11

which was supposed to originate with Jews.

From August the commandos’ and battalions’ modus operandi began to change

fundamentally. The units made a transition from terrorizing and decimating the

male population to ‘cleansing’, targeting individual communities at first but later

whole swathes of the country. In other words, they murdered the major part of the

local Jewish population, women and children included. Again, this radicalization

of the units’ mode of operation did not take place all of a sudden; different units

changed at different paces and the shift took a while to complete. It was a process

that can only be explained by taking a number of factors into account, notably the

changing conditions under which the commandos were operating in their area of

deployment. From the perspective of the commandos, this cast into doubt the

‘security policing’ model for the solution to the ‘Jewish question’ that had pre-

vailed so far. However, this ‘crisis’ increased their readiness to adapt gradually to a

208

Mass Executions in Occupied Soviet Zones, 1941

new model that was now being propagated by the leadership of the SS: a policy of

systematic ethnic annihilation.

As the war progressed, the commandos found that the further they penetrated

into the East the more difficult it became to carry out pogroms. In the Baltic it had

only been possible to provoke pogroms in the phase immediately after the occupa-

tion and they usually had to be stopped after a few days in order for the occupying

force’s claim to be ‘calming’ the situation to remain credible. 12 In the area under Einsatzgruppe C, as we have seen, it had been possible to start pogroms on a large

scale in East Galicia and Volhynia. As they moved further into old Soviet territory,

however, the Einsatzgruppe was forced to acknowledge the unwillingness of indi-

genous populations to take part in pogroms. 13 Einsatzgruppe B had a similar experience with their commandos in the Russian or Belarus territories, where

indigenous populations were not prepared to take ‘self-help measures against the

Jews’. 14 The further east into Russian territory the Einsatzgruppe went, the fewer Jews they encountered: the proportion of Jews in the population was smaller because of

the ban on settlement from Tsarist times and because many Jews had fled.

Because so many Jews had fled, therefore, Einsatzgruppe B found that it was

hardly possible ‘to maintain liquidation figures at their previous levels simply

because the Jewish element is to a large extent not present’. 15 Einsatzkommando 6

noted at about the same time that ‘even on the far side of the front’ the Jews ‘seem

to have heard what fate is awaiting them at our hands’. In mid- and eastern

Ukraine 70 per cent to 90 per cent of the Jewish population had fled; in some cases

it was 100 per cent. 16

The flight of the Jews also affected Einsatzgruppe C, as can be seen from the

incident report of 9 August:17 ‘Since news has obviously spread that, as German troops are marching in the Einsatzkommandos are