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

much more radical measures: ‘Lithuanians and Latvians are taking

the law into their own hands against the large number of Jews in the Baltic states.

Their measures are tolerated by the offices of the Wehrmacht and the Security

Police there. Whether the Jewish problem can be solved once and for all only by

shooting male Jews in large numbers is doubted by those involved.’67 A few days later still, two68 of the three SS Brigades under the command staff were to demonstrate how Himmler and his command staff envisaged ‘solving the Jewish

problem once and for all’.

chapter 13

ENFORCING THE ANNIHILATION POLICY:

EXTENDING THE SHOOTINGS TO THE

WHOLE JEWISH POPULATION

Himmler’s decision to subordinate two of the three SS Brigades under his com-

mand staff to Higher SS and Police Commanders Jeckeln and Bach-Zelewski and

deploy them directly for the execution of Jews in the occupied Eastern areas meant

that the murder of the Jewish civilian population acquired a new dimension after

the end of July 1941. All police and SS units were now extending the range of those

shot to include women and children. This escalation was again inconsistent and

did not occur in parallel in all areas, but was introduced gradually. Nonetheless, in

all cases it followed a fundamental underlying pattern.

Higher SS and Police Commander Russia

Centre and Einsatzgruppe B

In the area behind the mid-section of the front the SS Cavalry Brigade was

responsible for bringing the murder campaign to a completely new level. 1 This brigade, composed of two former cavalry regiments, carried out an initial ‘cleansing operation’ in the Pripet Marshes between 29 July and 12 August under the

220

Mass Executions in Occupied Soviet Zones, 1941

leadership of Higher SS and Police Commander Russia Centre, Erich von dem

Bach-Zelewski. For this operation the brigade received special ‘guidelines for

combing marsh areas using mounted units’ that had been signed by Himmler

himself: ‘If the population as a whole is hostile, sub-standard in racial and human

terms, or even, as is very often the case in marsh areas, made up of criminals who

have settled there, then all those who are suspected of supporting partisans are to

be shot, women and children are to be transported, cattle and provisions confis-

cated and secured. The villages are then to be burned to the ground. ’2

Shortly afterwards, on a visit to Baranowicze on 30 July at which he briefed

Bach-Zelewski, Himmler toughened that order still further. He now ordered the

shooting of all Jewish men and in addition demanded that violent measures were

to be taken against women. He deliberately avoided making explicit a requirement

to shoot women, as is indicated by a radio message from the 2nd Cavalry

Regiment on 1 August: ‘Explicit order from the Reichsführer SS. All Jews must

be shot. Drive Jewish women into the marshes.’3 There was a similarly brutal order given by the commander of the mounted unit of the 1st Cavalry Regiment on 1

August to his men, albeit one that was not wholly clear with regard to the

treatment of women: ‘No male Jews are to be left alive, no families left over in

the towns and villages.’4

Further developments show that Himmler’s order was understood in various

different ways. The 1st Cavalry Regiment assumed that it had been ordered to

murder all Jews without distinction and, from 3 August onwards, the SS Cavalry

(and in particular members of the mounted unit) therefore shot thousands of Jews

in Chomsk, Motol, Telechany, Svyataya Volya, Hancewicze, and other places—

men, women, and children. The net in these ‘operations’ was usually cast so wide

that they were effectively aiming at the total annihilation of the Jewish inhabitants of

each place. 5 On 11 August the mounted unit reported that it had shot 6,504 people, although the full total can be estimated at about 11,000 victims. 6

Between 5 and 11 August the mounted unit of the 2nd SS Cavalry Regiment also

shot thousands of Jewish civilians, 6,526 people according to the regiment’s own

reports, but in total probably nearer 14,000. 7 The murder of at least 4,500 (in fact probably 6,500) in Pinsk was the ‘high point’ of this ‘operation’. 8 The victims in Pinsk were almost all Jewish men, as they were in all the other massacres carried

out by the 2nd Regiment. The Regiment reported that ‘Jewish looters’ had been

shot, some urgently needed craftsmen excepted; the report goes on to say that

‘driving the women and children into the marshes was not as successful as it ought

to have been because the marshes were not deep enough for them to sink all the

way in’. 9 The final report made by the Brigade on 18 September 1941, covering both phases of their ‘cleansing operation’, lists altogether ‘14,178 looters shot, 1,001

partisans shot and 699 Red Army supporters shot’. 10 In fact the total number of Jews murdered in August by the Brigade will have exceeded 25,000. 11

Extension of Shootings to Whole Jewish Population

221

In the following weeks the Cavalry Brigade pursued their ‘cleansing operation’

almost uninterruptedly and shot thousands more Jews, chiefly under the pretext

of combating ‘partisans’. From the beginning of September on members of the

2nd Regiment also shot women and children. 12 The mass murder of Jewish civilians that the Cavalry Brigade began so terribly in the first half of August,

and which claimed the lives of thousands of women and children, had a radical-

izing effect on all the units that were under the command of the Higher SS and

Police Commander Russia Centre, Bach-Zelewski. It is true that the total of those

murdered by Einsatzgruppe B in those weeks was lower than in July, but the

decisive shift was that shooting women and children was now the norm across the

whole Einsatzgruppe. 13

In the first half of August members of Einsatzkommando 9 in Vileyka shot at

least 320 Jews in various ‘operations’, including women and children; 14 a few weeks previously Sonderkommando 7a had already ‘liquidated all the male Jews’

in that area. 15 The leader of Einsatzkommando 9, Alfred Filbert, indicated whilst being interrogated that the command to shoot women and children had been

given to him by Nebe, the leader of Einsatzgruppe B, at the beginning of August. 16

After the murders in the area around Vileyka, Einsatzkommando 9 marched to

Vitebsk in August and murdered thousands more people in a series of