The Winds of War

Much of the European continent in that area is a low-lying, soggy saucer almost like everglades, spreading over thousands of square miles. This big swamp, the Pripet Marshes, has always confronted western invaders of Russia. They have had to go south or north of it. Adolf Hitler’s generals, intending to break the Soviet state with one sharp blow in a few summer weeks, were hitting north and south of the great swamp at the same time.

But the Special Action Units had no military purpose. Their mission concerned the Jews. From the time of Catherine the Great, Russia had compelled its millions of Jews to live in the “Pale,” a borderland to the west, made up of districts taken in war from Poland and Turkey. The revolution had ended the Pale, but most of the Jews, impoverished and used to their towns and villages, had stayed where they were.

The border defense belt held by the Red Army, from the Baltic to the Black Sea, was therefore precisely where most of the Soviet Union’s Jews lived. The Special Action Units were travelling executioners, and their orders were to kill Russia’s Jews without warning and without regard to age or sex. These orders were unwritten; they came down from Adolf Hitler through Goring and Heydrich to the “Security Service,” Germany’s federal police, which organized the units. These squads had collateral orders to shoot summarily all commissars — political officers — of the Red Army. But these later orders were on paper.

There were four Special Action Units in all, placed to follow close on the three giant prongs of the German assault.

Army Group South, composed of Germans and Rumanians, was striking into the Ukraine, south of the marshes and along the Black Sea into the Crimea. With them came two Special Action Units, for here the Jewish settlement was dense.

Army Group Center was setting forth on the straight short road Napoleon took — Minsk, Smolensk, Vyazma, Borodino, Moscow. This road points north of the great swamp like an arrow for the capital. It passes between the headwaters of two rivers, one flowing north and the other south, the Dvina and the Dnieper. Military men call it the dry route and greatly favor it. With this main central thrust travelled another Special Action Unit.

Army Group North was driving up along the Baltic toward Leningrad, and a Special Action Unit followed close behind.

Counting officers and men, there were about three thousand of these travelling executioners all told in the four units. They were setting out to kill between three and four million people, which figured out to more than ten thousand murders for each man. It was clearly beyond them. The plan was to start the process, and then recruit native anti-Semites and German soldiers to complete the gruesome, unheard-of, but entirely real job they were setting out to do.

The Germans in the ranks of the Special Action Units were recruited mainly from the civil services: policemen, detectives, clerks, and the like. There were no lunatics or criminals among them. The officers were mostly lawyers, doctors, or businessmen, who through age or disability could not fight in the army. Many had high university degrees; one officer had been a theologian. Officers and men alike were good Germans, the sort of men who did not drive past red traffic lights, who liked opera and concerts, who read books, who wore ties and jackets, who had wives and children, who for the most part went to church and sang hymns, and who worked in little weekend gardens. Obedience was a German virtue. They had been recruited and ordered to kill these people. They had been told that the Jews were Germany’s enemies, and that the only way to deal with them was to kill every last one of them, down to the babes in arms and their mothers. This word came from above. A prime German virtue was to accept such words from above and carry them out.

Strangely, the Jews already in German hands, in the territories stretching west from the invasion line to the Atlantic Ocean, were not yet being killed en masse. Nor was a program even under way to kill them. A mistaken idea exists that the Germans began killing Jews as soon as Hitler took power in 1933. That is untrue. They robbed the Jews, as they later robbed all the peoples they conquered, but the extortion was usually done under expropriation rules. Jews were often insulted, sometimes beaten, sometimes tortured, sometimes done to death or worked to death. But as late as June 22, 1941, only a few concentration camps existed, and most of the inmates were German opponents of Hitler. The existence of camps filled the Jews with terror, but the Germans themselves were terrorized, too.

By June 1941 the European Jews were living a vile life and were yielding the last scraps of their property to the squeeze of German law. But they were living. “One can live under any law,” a German Jewish newspaper put it.

So it happened that a Jew was safer behind the German lines, just then, than ahead of them. The Warsaw Jews, for instance, had reorganized themselves under the draconic Nazi rules. Though overwork, starvation, and disease were taking a toll, they were in the main managing to survive. At this point the Jastrows would have been somewhat better off not to have left Warsaw.

But Berel Jastrow, astute as he was and schooled in living with anti-Semitism, had not anticipated the Special Action Units. They were something new.

Adolf Hitler had given the order for the Einsatzgruppen back in March, so they may not have been much in his mind on June 22. He was following the progress of the invasion in a map room, where the light remained cool and gray long after sunrise. Disliking sunshine, the Fuhrer had ordered his eastern campaign headquarters, which he dubbed Wolfsschanze, to be built facing north. A rail spur in a forest of east Prussia, not far from the jump-off line of Army Group North, led to this “Wolf’s Lair,” a compound of concrete bunkers and wooden huts surrounded by barbed wire, watchtowers, and minefields. Wolfsschanze, in fact, singularly resembled a concentration camp.

At the elbow of General Jodl stood one of the youngest and newest of German generals, Armin von Roon. Hitler did not like Roon and showed his dislike by abruptness. Roon came from a titled family, and spoke a polished Berlin German that contrasted sharply with Hitler’s folksy, coarse Bavarian speech. His uniform, faultlessly tailored, contrasted too with Hitler’s oversize, baggy soldier’s coat. Above all, Roon had a beaked nose that looked a bit Jewish. But as a colonel in Operations, he had taken part in three elaborate Barbarossa war games. His memory was unusual; he knew to the hour the projected advances and had the picture of the thousand-mile-wide battlefield by heart. The Soviet Union was for Roon rather like a table model, spectacularly larger than the ones used in the games. The troops were men, instead of pinned and numbered flags, but the principles and the scenario were the same at least to start with. (At the Nuremberg trials, Roon denied knowledge of the Special Action Units, until confronted with the order to kill the commissars, counter-signed by him for the Operations Section. Then he recalled it, but pleaded ignorance of the Einsatzgruppen’s other purpose. The tribunal judged this farfetched, like some other points in Roon’s defense.)

Until three hours after sunup of the invasion day, Roon dodged the Leader’s harsh nagging questions about the trend of ground operations. Then he gave his judgment that things were going better than planned in the north; much better in the center; worse in the south. It proved an accurate estimate, and for a long period thereafter Hitler warmed to the beak-nosed general.

Here then was the laying down of the first cards in the giant poker hand. Hitler and his staff had guessed that the Russians would mass most strongly in the center, north of the Pripet River bogs, to shield their capital. But whoever had disposed of the Russian forces — Stalin, or his generals to whom he listened — had bet that the Germans would make their main drive south, to seize the Ukrainian farmlands and the Caucasus oil fields. Perhaps this judgment had come from reading Mein Kampf, in which Hitler openly called this seizure his life’s aim. At any rate, the largest mass of Russian defenders lay south of the marsh. Thus the battle line was unbalanced. The Germans found themselves slowed in the south, but punching through with surprising ease toward Moscow. The first big Russian city in their path was Minsk.

When the sun rose in Rome, Aaron Jastrow was already working at his desk in his suite in the Hotel Excelsior. By now Dr. Jastrow’s book on Constantine needed only four or five more chapters, and he was very happy with it. At precisely eight as usual, the unchanging waiter brought the unchanging breakfast. Jastrow finished it and was settling back at his desk when a bedroom door opened noisily, and Natalie waddled in, wearing a pink bathrobe. Pregnancy, besides making her shapeless, had hollowed her cheeks and her eyes, and exaggerated her full mouth. “My God, have you heard the latest?”

“Has something good happened?”

“That depends. The Germans have invaded Russia.”

“What! Are you sure?”