In Minsk in autumn 1941, the Germans were celebrating an imaginary triumph, even as Moscow held fast. On 7 November, the anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution, the Germans organized something more dramatic than mere mass shootings. On that morning, they rounded up thousands of Jews from the ghetto. The Germans forced the Jews to wear their best clothes, as though they were dressing up for the Soviet holiday. Then the Germans formed the captives into columns, gave them Soviet flags, and ordered them to sing revolutionary songs. People had to smile for the cameras that were filming the scene. Once beyond Minsk, these 6,624 Jews were taken in trucks to a former NKVD warehouse in the nearby village of Tuchinka. Jewish men returning that evening from forced labor assignments found their entire families gone. As one recalled: “Out of eight people—my wife, my three children, my elderly mother, and her two children—not a soul remained!”2
Terror itself was nothing new. People had been taken from Minsk to Tuchinka, in the black ravens of the NKVD, not so long before, in 1937 and 1938. Yet even at the height of Stalin’s Great Terror of those years, the NKVD was always discreet, taking people by ones and twos in the dark of night. The Germans were carrying out a mass action in the middle of the day, made for public consumption, ripe with meaning, suitable for a propaganda film. The staged parade was supposed to prove the Nazi claim that communists were Jews and Jews were communists. It followed from this, to the Nazi way of thinking, that their removal not only secured the rear area of Army Group Center but was also a kind of victory in itself. Yet this hollow expression of triumph seemed designed to disguise a more obvious defeat. By 7 November 1941, Army Group Center was supposed to have taken Moscow, and had not.3
Stalin was still in the Soviet capital, and was organizing his own victory celebrations. He had never abandoned the city, not during the initial offensive of Operation Barbarossa of June 1941, not during the secondary offensive of Operation Typhoon of October. Lenin’s embalmed corpse was sent away from the Kremlin for safekeeping, but Stalin remained and ruled. Leningrad was besieged, and Minsk and Kiev were taken, but Moscow defended itself under Stalin’s obstinate command. On the 6th of November, Stalin spoke defiantly to Soviet citizens. Noting that the Germans called their campaign a “war of annihilation,” he promised them the same. He referred, for the one and only time, to the Germans’ murder of the Jews. In calling the Nazi regime an empire eager to organize “pogroms,” however, he fell far short of a true description of the ongoing mass murder. The Minsk Jews taken to Tuchinka on 7 November (the Soviet holiday) were shot on 9 November (the National Socialist holiday). Five thousand more followed on 20 November. Traditional empires had never done anything like this to Jews. On any given day in the second half of 1941, the Germans shot more Jews than had been killed by pogroms in the entire history of the Russian Empire.4
The German murder of Jews was never going to play much of a role in the Soviet vision of the war. From a Stalinist perspective, it was not the killing of Jews that mattered but the possibilities for its political interpretation. The German identification of Jews with communism was not just a Nazi conviction and a pretext for mass murder; it was also a propaganda weapon against the Soviet Union. If the Soviet Union was nothing more than a Jewish empire, then surely (went the Nazi argument) the vast majority of Soviet citizens had no reason to defend it. In November 1941 Stalin was thus preparing an ideological as well as a military defense of the Soviet Union. The Soviet Union was not a state of the Jews, as the Nazis claimed; it was a state of the Soviet peoples, first among whom were the Russians. On 7 November, as the Jews marched through Minsk to their deaths, Stalin reviewed a military parade in Moscow. To raise the spirits of his Soviet peoples and to communicate his confidence to the Germans, he had actually recalled Red Army divisions from their defensive positions west of Moscow, and had them march through its boulevards. In his address that day he called upon the Soviet people to follow the example of their “great ancestors,” mentioning six prerevolutionary martial heroes—all of them Russians. At a time of desperation, the Soviet leader appealed to Russian nationalism.5
Stalin was associating himself and his people with the earlier Russian Empire, which just one day before he had mentioned in connection with pogroms of Jews. As the General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union summoned the heroes of prerevolutionary Russian history, he had to negotiate with their ghosts. By placing Russians at the center of history, he was implicitly reducing the role of other Soviet peoples, including those who suffered more than Russians from the German occupation. If this was a “Great Patriotic War,” as Stalin’s close associate Viacheslav Molotov had said on the day of the German invasion, what was the fatherland? Russia, or the Soviet Union? If the conflict was a war of Russian self-defense, what to make of the German mass murder of the Jews?
Hitler’s public anti-Semitism had placed Stalin, like all the leaders of the Allies, in a profound dilemma. Hitler said that the Allies were fighting for the Jews, and so (fearing that their populations might agree) the Allies had to insist that they were fighting to liberate oppressed nations (but not Jews in particular). Stalin’s answer to Hitler’s propaganda shaped the history of the Soviet Union for as long as it existed: all of the victims of German killing policies were “Soviet citizens,” but the greatest of the Soviet nations was the Russians. One of his chief propagandists, Aleksandr Shcherbakov, clarified the line in January 1942: “the Russian people—the first among equals in the USSR’s family of peoples—are bearing the main burden of the struggle with the German occupiers.” By the time Shcherbakov uttered those words, the Germans had killed a million Jews east of the Molotov- Ribbentrop line, including some 190,000 Jews in Belarus.6
As the freezing weather came to a Minsk ghetto without electricity and fuel, Jews called their home “a dead city.” In winter 1941–1942, Minsk held the largest ghetto on the territory of the prewar Soviet Union, confining perhaps seventy thousand Jews. According to the last Soviet census (of 1939), some 71,000 Jews were among the 239,000 residents of the city. Some of the Jews native to Minsk had fled before the Germans took the city at the end of June 1941 and thousands more had been shot in the summer and fall; on the other hand, the Jewish population of the city had been swollen by Jews who had earlier arrived as refugees from Poland. These Polish Jews had fled the German invasion of Poland in 1939, but would flee no further after they were overtaken by German troops in 1941. The escape route east was now sealed. Once Soviet power disappeared from these lands, there could be no more Soviet deportations, which, deadly as they were, preserved Polish Jews from German bullets. There could be no more rescues of the kind organized by the Japanese spy Sugihara in Lithuania in 1940.7
Minsk was the provincial capital of General Commissariat White Ruthenia (as the Germans called Belarus). The General Commissariat comprised about one fourth of Soviet Belarus: the eastern part of the Soviet republic remained under military administration, the southern part was added to the Reichskommissariat Ukraine, and Bialystok was annexed by the Reich. Along with the three occupied Baltic States, General Commissariat White Ruthenia constituted the Reichskommissariat Ostland. Belarusian Jews, whether in this civilian occupation authority or in the military occupation zone to its east, were behind the lines of Operation Typhoon. As the Wehrmacht advanced they were killed; as it stalled, some of them were kept alive, for a time. The inability of the Germans to take Moscow in late 1941 saved the remainder of the Jews of Minsk, at least for the moment. As Red Army divisions reinforced from the Far East defended the Soviet capital, battalions of German Order Police were ordered to the front. These were the very policemen who otherwise would have been tasked with shooting Jews. As the German offensive stalled in late November, the army realized that the boots and coats taken from dead or captured Soviet soldiers would not suffice for the cold winter ahead. Jewish workers in Minsk would have to make more, and so they would have to be allowed to live through the winter.8
Because Moscow held, the Germans had to drop their initial plans for Minsk: it could not be starved; its hinterlands could not be emptied of peasants; some of its Jews would have to live for a time. Germans asserted their dominance in Minsk by marching columns of prisoners of war through the ghetto and through the city. In late 1941, when prisoners of war were very likely to starve to death, some of them survived by fleeing—to the Minsk ghetto. The ghetto was still a safer place than the prisoner-of-war camps. In the last few months of 1941, more people died at nearby Dulags and Stalags than in the Minsk ghetto. The enormous Stalag 352, probably the deadliest prisoner-of-war camp of them all, was a complex of holding pens in and around Minsk. A camp on Shirokaia Street, in the middle of the city, held both prisoners of war and Jews. The former NKVD facility at Tuchinka now functioned as a German prison and execution site.9
German policy in occupied Minsk was one of savage and unpredictable terror. The carnivalesque death march of 7 November 1941 was only one of a series of murderous incidents that left Jews horrified and confused about their fate. Special humiliations were reserved for Jews who were known and respected before the war. A
