Hitler. 1936-1945: Nemesis

victim.’²¹

Such were the extreme, pathological expressions of sentiments which, often in scarcely less overtly genocidal form, had a wide currency among the new masters of the eastern territories, and were far from confined to diehard Nazis.

In contrast to the conflicts between the Wehrmacht and the SS following the invasion of Poland, the close cooperation established between Heydrich and the army leadership in the build-up to ‘Barbarossa’ enabled the barbarity of the Einsatzgruppen in the eastern campaign to proceed without hindrance, and often in close harmony.²² The Wehrmacht leadership aligned itself from the start with the ideological aim of combating ‘Jewish-Bolshevism’. Cooperation with the SD and Security Police was extensive, and willingly given. Without it, the Einsatzgruppen could not have functioned as they did.²³ ‘The relationship to the Wehrmacht is now, as before, wholly untroubled (ohne jede Trubung),’ ran an Einsatzgruppe report in mid-August. ‘Above all, a constantly growing interest in and understanding for the tasks and business of the work of the security police can be seen in Wehrmacht circles. This could especially be observed at the executions.’²⁴

In an order issued on 12 September 1941, the head of the OKW, Field-Marshal Wilhelm Keitel, declared: ‘The struggle against Bolshevism demands ruthless and energetic, rigorous action (Durchgreifen) above all against the Jews, the main carriers of Bolshevism.’²⁵ Other exhortations from military leaders went still further. A month later, the emphatically pro-Nazi Field-Marshal Walter von Reichenau, Commander-in-Chief of the 6th Army, told his troops: ‘The soldier in the eastern sphere is not only a fighter according to the rules of the art of warfare, but also the bearer of a pitiless racial (volkisch) ideology and the avenger of all the bestialities which have been inflicted on the German and related ethnic nation (Volkstum). The soldier must therefore have full understanding for the necessity of the severe but just atonement from the Jewish subhumans (am judischen Untermenschentum).’ He concluded: ‘Only in this way will we fulfil our historic duty of liberating the German people from the Asiatic-Jewish threat once and for all.’²⁶

The Commander-in-Chief of the 17th Army, Colonel-General Hermann Hoth, went, if anything, even further than Reichenau. He spoke in an order on the ‘Behaviour of German Soldiers in the East’, issued on 17 November, of a struggle of ‘two inwardly unbridgeable philosophies… German feeling of honour and race, centuries-old German soldierly tradition (Soldatentum), against asiatic ways of thinking and primitive instincts whipped up by a small number of mainly Jewish intellectuals.’ His men should act out of ‘belief in a change in the times, in which, on the basis of the superiority of its race and achievements, the leadership of Europe has passed to the German people’. It was a ‘mission to rescue European culture from the advance of asiatic barbarism’. He pointed to the way the Red Army had ‘bestially murdered’ German soldiers. Any sympathy with the native population was wholly misplaced. He stressed the guilt of Jews for circumstances in Germany after the First World War. He saw the extermination of the ‘spiritual support of Bolshevism’ and ‘aid of the partisans’ as ‘a rule of self- preservation’.²⁷

Towards the end of November, the Commander-in-Chief of the 11th Army, Erich von Manstein, in a secret order to his troops, was equally uncompromising. The German people had stood since 22 June, he stated, in a life- and-death struggle against the Bolshevik system, which was not being fought according to traditional European rules of war. The clear implication was that a Soviet regime dominated by Jews was responsible for this. Manstein referred to the Soviet partisan war behind the front lines. Jewry, with ‘all the key-points of the political leadership and administration, trade, and crafts’ in their hands, formed, he claimed, the ‘intermediary between the enemy in the rear and the remainder still fighting of the Red Army and Red Leadership’. From this, he drew his conclusion. ‘The Jewish-Bolshevik system must be eradicated (ausgerottet) once and for all,’ he wrote. ‘Never again must it enter into our European living space. The German soldier has the task, therefore, not solely of smashing the military means of power of this system. He is also the bearer of a racial (volkisch) idea and avenger of all atrocities perpetrated on him and the German people… The soldier must show sympathy for the necessity of the hard atonement demanded of Jewry, the spiritual bearer of the Bolshevik terror….’²⁸

Other army commanders increasingly used the spread of partisan warfare as justification for the no-holds- barred treatment of the Jews. Already in the first weeks of ‘Barbarossa’, Jews were being equated with partisans by some commanders or seen as the major source of their support.²⁹ But the ‘partisan struggle’ only began in earnest in the autumn.³⁰ In the rear area of Army Group Centre, a ‘seminar’ was organized in September 1941 to allow an exchange of views and experiences between selected officers and SS spokesmen on the ‘combating of partisans’. The speakers included the Higher SS and Police Leader of Russia-Centre, SS- Gruppenfuhrer Erich von dem Bach-Zelewski, on the ‘Taking of Commissars and Partisans’, and the head of Einsatzgruppe ? (situated in the Minsk region), SS-Gruppenfuhrer Arthur Nebe, on the ‘Cooperation of Army and SD in Combating Partisans’, and the connections between the Jews and the partisan movement. The participants took away from their ‘orientation course’ the plain message to serve as the guideline for future ‘pacification’ policy: ‘Where there’s a partisan, there’s a Jew, and where there’s a Jew, there’s a partisan.’³¹

Such voices were influential. There were, however, others.³² Some commanders insisted on rigorous separation of the Wehrmacht from the actions of the Security Police. One of these, General Karl von Roques, put out an order at the end of July prohibiting any participation by his men in pogroms on the grounds that it was ‘unsoldierly’ and would seriously damage the standing of the Wehrmacht.³³ However, his order was ineffective. Cases continued to occur in which ‘soldiers and also officers had independently undertaken shootings of Jews or participated in them’. In September, he was forced to issue another order, in which he repeated that ‘executive measures’, especially against Jews, were solely the province of the Higher SS and Police Leader, and any unauthorized shootings by individual soldiers, or participation in ‘executive measures’ of the SS and police would be treated as disobedience and subjected to disciplinary action.³⁴

From letters home from the front, it is plain that many ordinary German soldiers needed little persuasion that the merciless onslaught on the Jews was justified. Subjected for years to incessant indoctrination at school and in the Hitler Youth about the Jews, and inundated since the beginning of ‘Barbarossa’ with propaganda about the horrors of ‘Jewish-Bolshevism’, on the march into Russia they frequently looked to confirm their prejudices.³⁵ One soldier, writing home in July, remarked on his shock at ‘evidence of Jewish, Bolshevik atrocities, the likes of which I have hardly believed possible’, and promised that he and his comrades were taking revenge.³⁶ Another wrote, also in July: ‘Everyone, even the last doubter, knows today that the battle against these subhumans, who’ve been whipped into a frenzy by the Jews, was not only necessary but came in the nick of time. Our Fuhrer has saved Europe from certain chaos.’³⁷ Given such a mentality, it was not surprising that many Wehrmacht units were themselves involved in the shooting of Jews and other atrocities from the earliest phase of ‘Barbarossa’.³⁸

In the early weeks of ‘Barbarossa’, the ‘actions’ undertaken by the Einsatzgruppen and their sub-units mainly targeted male Jews. The killing, though horrifying, was on nothing like the scale that it reached from August onwards. One particularly murderous Einsatzkommando in Lithuania, for example, killed nine times as many Jews in August and fourteen times as many in September as it had done in July.³⁹ What was regarded as a large-scale ‘action’ in the first weeks had usually involved the shooting of hundreds of Jews, in rare instances more than 1,000. But by the beginning of October Einsatzkommando 4a, attached to Einsatzgruppe C in the Ukraine, could report with cold precision: ‘In retaliation for the arson in Kiev, all Jews were arrested and on 29 and 30.9 a total of 33,771 Jews were executed.’⁴⁰ This was the notorious massacre at Babi-Yar, outside Kiev. The Jews — many of them women, children, and old people — had been rounded up in retaliation for a series of explosions in the city, killing some hundreds of German soldiers, a few days earlier, just before Kiev had fallen to the Wehrmacht. They were marched in small groups to the outskirts of the city, forced to undress, then to stand on a mound above the ravine of Babi-Yar. As the repeated salvoes of the killing-squads rang out, the lifeless bodies of the victims fell on to the growing mound of corpses below them.⁴¹

Women and children — seen as possible ‘avengers’ of the future — were now, following verbal instructions passed down the line by Himmler then by the commanders of the various killer squads during August, generally included in the massacres.⁴² Thus, Einsatzkommando 3 shot 135 women among 4,239 Jews ‘executed’ during July, but 26,243 women and 15,112 children in the total of 56,459 Jews murdered during September 1941.⁴³ Taking the four Einsatzgruppen and their sub-units together, the Jews killed