THE FINAL SOLUTION [ 1941 - 1945 ] - PART 3
[ t h e f i n a l s o l u t i o n ]
[ 1 9 4 1 - 4 5 ]
The Final Solution in the USSR
By mid-August 1941 all the Einsatzgruppen interpreted their task as the extermination of all Soviet Jews. Karl Jager, head of Einsatzkommando 3 of Einsatzgruppen A, kept extensive execution records. In July 1941, the kommando killed 4,293 Jews, of whom only 135 were women. In September 1941, by contrast, the kommando killed 56,459 Jews - 15,104 men, 26,243 women and 15,112 children. By 25 November Jager reported the following number of deaths: 1,064 Communists, 56 partisans, 653 mentally ill, 44 Poles, 28 Russian prisoners, 5 Gypsies, 1 Armenian, and 136,421 Jews. The situation was the same elsewhere. Perhaps the most notorious killing took place outside Kiev (the USSR's third largest city) in September 1941. A few days after the capture of the town on 19 September 1941 a huge explosion killed many German soldiers in the Continental Hotel, the German army headquarters. In reprisal, 33,771 Jews were shot, over a three-day period, at the Babi Yar ravine on the outskirts of Kiev.
Not only the Einsatzgruppen carried out the killings. Auxiliary forces, recruited from people of the Baltic States and the Ukraine, were also willing executioners. So were ordinary German soldiers. The mass shootings of Jews had the support of the army authorities. The following order was issued by Field-Marshal von Reichenau on 10 October 1941:
The main aim of the campaign against the Jewish-Bolshevist system is the complete destruction of its forces and the extermination of the asiatic influence on the sphere of European culture. As a result, the troops have to take on tasks which go beyond the conventional purely military ones. In the eastern sphere the soldier is not simply a fighter according to the rules of war, but the supporter of a ruthless racial ideology and the avenger of all the bestialities which have been inflicted on the German nation and those ethnic groups related to it. For this reason soldiers must show full understanding for the necessity for the severe but just atonement required of the Jewish subhumans. It also has the further purpose of nipping in the bud uprisings in the rear of the Wehrmacht which experience shows are invariably instigated by Jews.
On 28 October, after Hitler described Reichenau's order as excellent, the army high command instructed all its field commanders to issue orders along the same lines.
After 1945 the Wehrmacht tried to hide the fact that it was involved in the Holocaust. However, there is now little doubt about its complicity in the USSR killings - at every level. Army leaders gave the commands and ordinary soldiers willingly carried them out. Indeed they sometimes undertook brutal 'cleansing' operations on their own initiative. The 'primeval' fighting on the eastern front in the Second World War seems to have had a particularly brutalising effect on German troops. The nature of the war - the terrible climatic conditions, the horrendous losses (the Germans suffered some six million casualties in the USSR), the cultural differences between the invaders and the occupied - resulted in German soldiers becoming indifferent to death and suffering. The murder of tens of thousands of Jews was viewed by many as an unavoidable by-product of the battle for survival: probably few had serious misgivings about it. The German army was thus a crucial part of the genocidal machinery in the USSR.
The following description of a killing in the Ukraine in 1942 was given by Hermann Graebe, a German engineer, to a Nuremberg tribunal in 1945.
The people who had got off the lorries - men, women, and children of all ages - had to undress on the orders of an SS man who was carrying a riding or dog whip in his hand. ... Without weeping or crying out these people undressed and stood together in family groups, embracing each other and saying good-bye while waiting for a sign from another SS man who stood on the edge of the ditch and who also had a whip. During the 15 minutes which I stood near the ditch, I did not hear a single complaint or a plea for mercy. I watched a family of about eight, a man and a woman, both about fifty years old with their children of about one, eight, and ten, as well as two grown-up daughters of about twenty and twenty-four. An old woman with snow-white hair held a one-year-old child in her arms singing to it and tickling it. The child squeaked with delight.The married couple looked on with tears in their eyes. The father held the ten-year-old boy by the hand speaking softly to him.The boy was struggling to hold back the tears.The father pointed a finger to the sky and stroked his head and seemed to be explaining something to him. At this moment, the SS man near the ditch called out something to his comrade. The latter counted off about twenty people, and ordered them behind the mound. The family of which I have just spoken was among them. ... I walked round the mound and stood in front of the huge grave. The bodies were lying so tightly packed together that only their heads showed, from almost all of which blood ran down over their shoulders. Some were still moving. Others raised their hands and turned their heads to show they were still alive. The ditch was already three quarters full. I estimate that it already held about a thousand bodies. I turned my eyes towards the man doing the shooting. He was an SS man; he sat, legs swinging, on the edge of the ditch. He had an automatic rifle resting on his knees and was smoking a cigarette. The people, completely naked, climbed down steps which had been cut into the clay wall of the ditch, stumbled over the heads of those lying there and stopped at the spot indicated by the SS man. They lay down on top of the dead or wounded; some stroking those still living and spoke quietly to them. Then I heard a series of rifle shots. I looked into the ditch and saw the bodies contorting or, the heads already inert, sinking on the corpses beneath."
The following extract was written in January 1942 by Dr Rudolf Lange, responsible for Einsatzgruppen operations in Latvia:
The aim of Einsaztkommando 2 from the start was a radical solution of the Jewish problem through the execution of all Jews. For this purpose comprehensive purges were carried out in the whole area of our operations by special teams with the help of selected forces from the Latvian auxiliary police (mainly relatives of Latvians who had been abducted or murdered by the Bolsheviks). In early October, the number of Jews executed in the kommando's sphere of operations was about 30,000. In addition, a few thousand Jews have been eliminated by Latvian self-defence formations off their own bat after they had been given suitable encouragement....
It was impossible to achieve the complete elimination of Jews from Latvia in view of the economic factors and, in particular, the demands of the army.
As the above source makes clear, economic concerns resulted in some Jews escaping immediate death. This issue produced considerable friction between civilian authorities and the army on the one hand, and the SS on the other. Orders from Berlin in December 1941 made it clear that 'economic considerations are to be regarded as fundamentally irrelevant in the settlement of the problem'. However, in practice, a compromise was struck between the SS and the army and economic agencies, whereby a few Jews were given a stay of execution for labour purposes. Nevertheless, over the next two years the Russian ghettos were progressively liquidated, first through piecemeal selections of those no longer capable of work, and then, more comprehensively, during the so-called 'second sweep' starting in the summer of 1942.
The numbers of Jews killed in the course of the Einsatzgruppen operations in the USSR can only be estimated. During the first sweep from June 1941 to April 1942 some 750,000 were probably murdered. A further 1.5 million may have been killed in the second sweep of 1942-3. Most of the victims were shot - sometimes by machine gun. A number died in special gas vans, used from December 1941. Others died in labour camps where they were worked to death or succumbed to disease brought about by malnutrition.
It was not just Jews who suffered. The fate of the non-Jewish peoples in the occupied zones depended essentially on the Nazis' conception of where they came on the racial scale. The Estonians, Latvians and Lithuanians, who were considered partially German, were treated reasonably well. Other peoples were not so fortunate. The 40 million Ukrainians, whose hatred for Soviet oppression was so intense that most welcomed the Germans at first, were soon in the grip of a terror similar to that in Poland. Disobedience of the most trivial kind resulted in summary execution. Tens of thousands of able-bodied Ukrainians were transported to Germany as slave labourers.
The Fate of the German Jews
From August 1941 it became illegal for German Jews to emigrate voluntarily. On 1 September all Jews were forced to wear the yellow star of David sewn on their clothing, a move which facilitated the implementation of further anti-Semitic measures. Later that month Hitler declared that the Reich should be liberated of Jews 'as rapidly as possible'. In October Eichmann began transporting German Jews eastwards. Given the situation in Germany, it was not too difficult to find volunteers. Those Jews who were to be 'resettled' in the east were allowed to take with them some money, a case or two of luggage and food for the journey. (The rest of their property was confiscated by the state.) Whatever feelings of optimism the 20,000 Jews who were deported to Lodz in October 1941 had ended as soon as they reached their destination. Some of those deemed incapable of working were killed on arrival. The rest were dumped in the over-crowded ghetto, where many died from starvation and disease. Protests from the authorities in Warthegau about their inability to absorb more Jews led to a temporary end of the transportations to Lodz on 4 November. By then there were other - worse - destinations.
In November and December 1941 some 25,000 Reich Jews were deported to Riga, Minsk and Kovno, towns in the Ostland - a territory in which the Einsatzgruppen operated. (See map) Events in Ostland suggest that, if the ultimate fate of Jews was not in doubt, the actual timing and form of killing was largely improvised, with members of each transport having different experiences depending on where and when they arrived. Some Jews were spared to eke out a survival in the ghettos or nearby labour camps. But in late November 1941, five transports of Jews were massacred at Kovno soon after their arrival and without prior screening to select those fit for labour. The same thing happened in Riga on 30 November 1941. 14,000 Jews from Riga itself were massacred, as well as l,000 Jews who had arrived from Berlin the night before. On 8 December another 13,000 were massacred on the outskirts of Riga. After the war the Ostland SS police leader claimed that Himmler had told him (in November) that 'all Jews in the Ostland must be exterminated right down to the very last one'. Even so, it seems to have been presumed that there would be a Jewish presence for some time in both Riga and Minsk. Trains of Jewish deportees continued to arrive in both towns until the spring of 1942.
The Start of Gassing
Until the winter of 1941-2 the main method of eliminating Jews was mass shootings. While effective in terms of the number killed, this method had some disadvantages, not least the fact that such massacres were hard to conceal, as well as occasionally producing psychological stress among the killers. In August 1941 Himmler commissioned his SS technical advisers to test different ways of killing and recommend those which were more efficient and more 'humane'. Tests with explosives proved to be a gruesome failure. Not surprisingly the SS soon hit upon the idea of gas, which had proved to be a highly effective method in the euthanasia programme. Added to this was the fact that Hitler's Chancellery was eager to redeploy the T-4 personnel.
The initial gassing experiment occurred in the Warthegau. By the autumn of 1941 conditions in the Lodz ghetto were appalling and thousands more Jews were still expected. In October Wilhelm Koppe, the area's police chief, aware of the thinking in Berlin, appointed Herbert Lange to find a suitable place for the killing of Warthegau's Jews. (Koppe had already used a special unit commanded by Lange in 1940 to kill some 1,500 mental patients.) In early November Lange recommended Chelmno, some 40 miles north-west of Lodz. An SS team set about converting an old mansion into a barracks where Jews would arrive and undress. A forest clearing, some three miles from the village, was chosen as the site for a mass grave. The first victims in December 1941 were killed in gas vans, the exhaust fumes from which were taken by pipes into the sealed rear. By January 1942 a permanent gas chamber was in use. Chelmno was a pure killing centre: it had no labour camp. By the time it was destroyed in March 1943, some 140,000 Jews (and a few thousand Gypsies, Poles and Russians) are thought to have died there.
Himmler selected Odilo Globocnik, the Lublin police chief, to oversee the killing of Jews in the General Government. Dozens of SS and ex-T-4 men were assigned to him in the autumn of 1941. His task was to construct and run a number of death camps in the Lublin region. Work at Belzec, the first of three sites, began in November 1941. Meanwhile, at Auschwitz (in Upper Silesia), the first gassing experiments on Russian prisoners of war took place in September 1941. ...
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