EINSATZGRUPPEN

    In the summer and autumn of 1941, the Wehrmacht steadily advanced on Moscow, encircling and destroying one Soviet army group after another, most notably around Kiev in September. Following closely in wake of the triumphant Wehrmact were the Einsatzgruppen, or Strike Commandos. Their task was the execution of Jews in the cities, towns, and villages of the occupied territories. In two vast sweeps across Russia (in 1941 and '42), the Einsatzgruppen, by simply shooting Jews, were responsible for the murder of over a million.

    The Einsatzgruppen numbered about three thousand men was divided into four different groups spread across the occupied Russian territories. The leaders of the Einsatgruppen commandos included a university professor, a Protestant pastor, a physician, a professional opera singer, and a large number of lawyers. Historian Raul Hilberg has said, "These men were in no sense hoodlums, delinquents, common criminals, or sex maniacs. Most were intellectuals." Although the killers were dedicated to National Socialist ideology, none asked for assignment to the Einsatzgruppen. In two sweeps across the occupied Russian territories, the Einsatzgruppen accounted for the murder of one million Jews, most shot on the edge of a pit outside their ancestral home, a pit the Jews were forced to dig.

    In September 1941, a massacre occurred outside the Ukrainian city of Kiev: the Nazis murdered over thirty-three thousand Jews at a ravine called Babi Yar. The German army and the SS killers worked very closely together. "The armed forces surprisingly welcomed the hostility against the Jews," reported Einsatgruppen C on July 6, 1941. The commander of Einsatzgruppen A, Dr. Stahlecker, described his relations with the German army as "very close, yes, almost cordial." Soldiers, some dressed in bathing suits, gathered near the killing pits to watch the executions of Jewish families. Some photographed the grisly scenes; others described them in letters home; just about everyone talked about it. In August 1941, the German Sixth Army issued instructions that photographs taken by soldiers of the massacres be confiscated and that officers work closely with the killing units to keep spectators away.

    In the autumn of 1941, Himmler witnessed the massacre of a hundred Jews in Russia. During each volley of shots Himmler looked at the ground. The local Nazi officer, von dem Bach-Zelewski, said to Himmler:
 

    "Look at the eyes of the [German] men in this kommando. How deeply shaken they are. These men are finished ('fertig') for the rest of their lives. What kind of followers are we training here? Either neurotics or savages!"

    On July 31, 1941, Goering, as head of the Four Year Plan, sent a letter to Heydrich: "I hereby charge you with making all necessary preparation with regard to organizational and financial matters for bringing about a complete solution of the Jewish question in the German sphere of influence in Europe." This letter, drafted by Eichmann, was of fatal significance for European Jewry. The Holocaust historian Raul Hilberg has written, "The centuries old policy of expulsion was terminated and a new policy of annihilation was inaugurated."

WANNSEE CONFERENCE

    On January 20, 1942, the ministers of the various bureaucracies of the German government met at a villa in the Berlin suburb of Wannsee known for the nearby lake of the same name, hence the name given to the occasion: the Wannsee Conference. The officials had been invited by the SS general Heydrich, whose assistant Eichmann took notes during the meeting. Heydrich explained to the assembled that the fuhrer "had given sanction for the evacuation of the Jews to the east." The purpose of the conference, he continued, was to organize the destruction of all the Jews in Europe, although he didn't put it that way.
 

    The transcript of the Wannsee Conference is filled with references to 'wandering off,' 'evacuated,' 're-settled,' and 'disappeared.' The word murder is not mentioned. "These terms were not the product of naivete," Raul Hilberg has written. "They were convenient tools of psychological repression."

THERESIENSTADT

    The Nazis recognized that the "evacuation" of certain Jews, the prominent, the elderly, the decorated and disabled World War I veteran, would lead to protests in foreign nations, some of which were allied to the Nazis. Hence, Heydrich and Eichmann decided to create a "model" ghetto for prominent Jews at the Czech town of Terezin sixty kilometers north of Prague. The town, named Theresienstadt, had been a fortress built by the Austrian empress Maria Theresia in the 18th century to fend off Prussian aggression. In 1941, once the Czech population was expelled, the town, surrounded by walls and a moat, proved an ideal setting for a concentration camp that had a veneer of normalcy but for all intents and purposes was a mere transit camp to Auschwitz-Birkenau. Deportations (or "transports") left Theresienstadt almost continuously, but between September and October 1944, 18,400 Jews, including the last of the Jewish children, were sent to their death at Auschwitz-Birkenau. The Judenrat (or Jewish Council) in Theresienstadt, under orders from the Nazis, compiled the lists of the Jews to be placed on the transports. To save Jews, the Jewish leaders were forced to send others to their death. In 1944, partly to assuage the fears of Dutch authorities who were concerned about the four hundred (or so) Dutch Jews sent to Theresienstadt, the SS conducted a tour of the "model ghetto" for the benefit of the International Red Cross, which had developed a belated concern for the Jews. On the day of the visit, the representatives of the Red Cross were treated to the sight of a group of elderly Jews enjoying a cup of coffee at a open air cafe, listening to an orchestra. This was hardly a representative image. The representatives, by design or stupidity, were fooled by the Nazis and left Theresienstadt after a short visit, marveling at how well the Jews were being treated. It was all a mere facade, a Potemkin Village, a curtain before death. The Nazis even made a propaganda film about Theresienstadt: "The Fuehrer gives the Jews a City."

THE DESTRUCTION OF POLISH JEWRY

    Poland was the setting of the Holocaust. When the Nazis talked of "evacuating" Jews "to the east," that meant killing Jews in Poland. In this country the Nazis built their six major death camps: Auschwitz-Birkenau; Chelmno; Belzec; Sobibor; Treblinka; and Majdanek. In addition, German concentration or labor camps, in which Jews were worked to death, dotted the countryside.

    The first Jews annihilated by the Nazis were the Jews of eastern Poland. Before the Second World War, three and a half million Jewish people lived in Poland, or ten percent of the population of the country. The Nazis murdered three million Polish Jews. The first step in the process was humiliation in public. This was to break the will to resist and to demonstrate to all that the Jews were subhuman and not to be helped nor pitied. The most concentrated period of Nazi killing was between 1942 and '43. In fourteen months, the majority of Polish Jewry was annihilated. One quarter died in the ghettos from starvation, disease, or random Nazi violence. Six hundred thousand Jews died at Belzec. In August 1942 alone, 145,000 Jews from Galicia and the Lublin region, the heartland of world Jewry, were murdered at Belzec. In September, at least ninety-six thousand perished there, and in October fifty-eight thousand shared the same fate. Between July and September 1942, 350,000 Jews were deported from the Warsaw ghetto and exterminated at Treblinka, where a total of 850,000 died. Two hundred and fifty thousand Jews were murdered at Chelmno. One million died at Auschwitz-Birkenau. The technique in every village, town, and city was the same: the Jews were terrorized and humiliated in public; they were robbed of their valuables and then of everything save for what they could take with them in a bag; they were expelled from their homes and forced into overcrowded ghettos; they were starved and subjected to disease; some were shot and buried in pits they had been forced to dig at the edge of town; the rest were forced on to trains that took them to a death camp; they were gassed almost immediately except for the few (usually) young Jewish men spared for the task of burning the bodies of (among others) their loved ones. In this fashion, eight hundred years of Polish Jewry came to an end.
 
 

CASE STUDY #4: OLESZYCE       Oleszyce (Oh-la-shit-za) is a small town in Poland where Poles, Jews, and Ukrainians lived before the war. It was a quintessential multi-ethnic community, with profound differences but with a rhythm of cooperation. In September 1939, the first month of the Second World War, Poland was divided between the Nazis and the Soviets as a result of a secret agreement in the Nazi-Soviet Pact, also known as the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact after the respective foreign ministers. The Nazis occupied Oleszyce for a few months before withdrawing in response to the renegotiated border. The Soviets then occupied the town for almost two years, until Hitler finally attacked the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941. When the Nazis returned to Oleszyce, the humiliation of the Jews was played out in public for everybody to see. This was done to satisfy the sadistic impulses of the perpetrators (and the observers), but it was also done with a purpose in mind. The victims were brutalized, but so were the spectators.  ...  1. Eva and Henry Galler, who are Jewish, were "sweethearts" in Oleszyce before the war. "It was a typical Jewish religious city," Henry remembered. "The life was quiet. Nobody knew any better," Eva said. "So we were happy."          2. Janek Skulomovski, who is Polish, was eight years old when the Soviets deported he and his family to the depths of Siberia in April 1941.            3. Eva Galler was sixteen when the Nazis returned to Oleszyce in 1941 She describes the public humiliation of the Jews at the market-place.          4. Franek Zaremba and his wife Franciska, who are Polish, still live in Oleszyce. Franek fought in the Polish army and then as a partisan, or guerrilla fighter, in the forest. He was captured and tortured seven times (by the Soviets, by the Nazis, and, at the moment of so-called liberation, by the Polish communists). Franek remembers Henry Galler and his family's fabric store. Franciska remembers the day the Jews were expelled to the nearby town of Lubachow, the transit ghetto to Belzec.          5. On January 6, 1943, the Jews of Oleszyce were loaded on trains in Lubachow for the short trip to Belzec. With a brother and a sister, Eva jumped from the train. They were killed "right away" by the guards on top of and between the train cars. Eva fell in a snow bank and was hidden. She emerged and sought refuge first with a Ukrainian woman and then with a Polish woman.          6. The Polish family Valavander hid the Jewish man Puzik in their barn. Puzik was betrayed to the Nazis by an unknown neighbor. The Valavanders suffered the Nazi penalty for harboring Jews: death.          7. After the war Henry Galler returned to Oleszyce. He learned the fate of his family from Mrs. Byianska, "a personal friend of my Moma's" who was also Henry's school teacher. Before leaving Oleszyce, Henry visited his house a final time, the house where he spent his "sweet childhood."

 

ORDINARY MEN

    The SS and Gestapo were the implementers of Hitler's order to destroy the Jewish people. After the war these two Nazi organizations were blamed for their role in the Holocaust. The SS, for one, became "the alibi of the nation." In other words, the SS was guilty but nobody else. This was patently false. The murder of Europe's Jews required the services of ordinary Germans as well as the professional killers.

    The historian Christopher Browning, in his book Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland, describes the attitudes of a German police battalion that was engaged in anti-Jewish "aktiones" in Poland. Police Battalion 101 comprised five hundred middle aged men of working class and lower-middle class backgrounds who had been pressed into service. They were not soldiers, but policemen; they were not killers; they became killers. These men had been ordered to Poland because no other German men could be spared. They were off fighting on Germany's many fronts: in France, in North Africa, in Italy, in Yugoslavia, in Russia, etc.

    After the war, these "ordinary men" slipped back into ordinary lives, but in the 1960's the men were tried by a German court in Hamburg. Browning was able to study the interrogations of 210 men of the unit that consisted of slightly less than 500 when it was sent to Poland in 1942. The unit was responsible for the murder of 38,000 Jews. The first "Judenaktion" the unit launched was on July 13, 1942. At dawn the unit arrived in the Polish town of Jozefow (in eastern Poland) and, through the course of the day, shot 1,500 Jewish old men, women, and children (the young men were taken as slave labor). Before the executions began, the unit's commander, fifty-three year old career policeman Major Trapp, addressed the assembled men and made an extraordinary offer: if any of the older men among them did not feel up to the task, he could be excused from the actual killing. A dozen men out of the five hundred in the unit took this opportunity to step aside. Through the course of the relentless shooting of Jews (in a forest) a number of the unit's soldiers also stepped aside. However, Browning writes that no more than twenty percent of the men availed themselves of the opportunity to cease with the murderous work. Browning cites the "pressure of conformity" as an important factor. He describes this as "The basic identification of men in uniform with their comrades and the strong urge not to separate themselves from the group by stepping out." Twenty years later, one policeman told interrogators, "If the question is posed to me why I shot with the others in the first place, I must answer that no one wants to be thought a coward." Most of the policemen denied that they had any choice. One objected to shooting a German Jew, although he had no problem shooting Polish Jews. Though few of the policemen spoke of anti-Semitism, the years of Nazi propaganda had already reduced the Jews to "the other." As Browning writes, the Jews stood outside their circle of human obligation and responsibility. The majority of the men who did drop out once the shooting began cited "sheer physical revulsion" as the prime motive, but did not express any ethical or political principles behind this revulsion.
 

    "To break ranks and step out, to adopt overtly nonconformist behavior, was simply beyond most of the men. It was easier for them to shoot," Browning concluded.

Browning writes,
 

    "Insidiously, most of those who did not shoot only reaffirmed the 'macho' values of the majority, according to which it was a positive quality to be 'tough' enough to kill unarmed, non combatant men, women and children, and tried to not to rupture the bonds of comradeship that constituted their social world."

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