Holocaust: The Nazi Persecution and Murder of the Jews Peter Longerich (grave mercy .TXT) 📖

Wehrmacht offices.’98

Various massacres by Sonderkommando 10a can also be documented in detail.

This unit shot the whole of the Jewish population of the city of Melitopol in mid-

October; a few days later, on 18 and 19, it murdered all 8,000 Jewish inhabitants of

Mariupol and a week after that the Jewish population of Taganrog, some 1,800

people. 99 In December Sonderkommando 11b murdered the Jewish population of Karasubasar, Alushta, and Eupatoria. 100 In November and December Sonderkommando 10b murdered the Jewish inhabitants of Skadovsk, Feodosia, Kertsh,

and Dzhankoy. 101

In November, Ohlendorf moved his staff to Simferopol in the Crimea. On

9 December it and Sonderkommando 11b murdered the 1,500 Krymchaks living in

the city (these were a Muslim group that the SS categorized as ‘Jewish’), and

between 11 and 15 December, assisted by members of two police reserve battalions,

they murdered the entire Jewish population of the city. 102

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Mass Executions in Occupied Soviet Zones, 1941

However, it was not only the SS and Police units that had been dispatched from

the Reich into the Soviet Union that had begun the systematic murder of the

major part of the Jewish population across a wide area in the autumn of 1941.

Romanians and ethnic Germans in the Romanian area of influence, Transnistria,

also pursued the same goals. Between December 1941 and February 1942 the

Romanians murdered at least 70,000 Jews in ghettos as part of the bloody

‘clearance’ of the county of Golta. 103 A militia composed of ethnic Germans also played a considerable role in the murders in Transnistria: it was guided in its

activities by a Sonderkommando of the SS Ethnic Germans’ Office that had been

sent to Transnistria to protect ethnic Germans. The Germans in Transnistria

murdered more than 28,000 Jews in the winter of 1941–2 alone. 104

The Reich Commissariat Eastland (Einsatzgruppe A)

Transition to Shooting Women and Children

Einsatzkommando 3 and Einsatzkommando Tilsit both began to shoot women

and children at the end of July and the beginning of August. For Einsatzkom-

mando 2 this seems to have taken place during the month of August.

The comprehensive report of the leader of Einsatzkommando 3, Jäger, shows

that from the very beginning women were also being shot in the executions

carried out by this Einsatzkommando in Lithuania, although in far fewer numbers

than men. 105 At this point the shooting of women was regarded as justified when there was even a vague suspicion that they were involved in Communist activity or

connected with the partisans. A fundamental change can be observed, however, as

in the case of other commandos, in the month of August. According to the Jäger

report, ‘in cooperation with Lithuanian partisans’, Einsatzkommando 3 shot 213

Jewish men and 66 Jewish women in Rassainiai on 5 August. A few days later,

between 9 August and 16 August, it shot ‘294 Jewish women, 4 Jewish children’ in

the same place. It is also noteworthy that for 15 and 16 August the shooting of a

total of ‘3,200 Jewish men, Jewish women, and Jewish children’ in Rokiskis is

reported. Not only is this number far higher than for previous executions, but also

the summary form of the report (without the distinction hitherto made between

women, men, and children) indicates a new procedure. It thus seems likely that

between 5 August and 16 August at the latest, the commando charged with

carrying out these murders received a new order: now it was on principle no

longer necessary to discriminate between men and women and the murder of

children was permitted.

In the following days, too, the number of women shot by Einsatzkommando 3

sometimes reached the same level as the number of men, in some cases even

significantly higher. The large number of children murdered points to the

Extension of Shootings to Whole Jewish Population

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likelihood that the transition had now taken place to the indiscriminate shooting

of Jews of any age and both sexes. Accounts in the Jäger report include, among

other items, ‘Panevėžys, 23 August: 1,312 Jewish men, 4,602 Jewish women,

1,609 Jewish children; Zarasai, 26 August: 767 Jewish men, 1,113 Jewish women,

687 Jewish children; Utena and Molėtai, 29 August 1941: 582 Jewish men, 1,731

Jewish women, 1,469 Jewish children; Mariampolė, 1 September 1941: 1,763

Jewish men, 1,812 Jewish women, 1,404 Jewish children.’ On 2 September,

Einsatzkommando 3 also reported the shooting of women and children from

Vilna: ‘Apart from 864 Jewish men, 2,019 women and 817 children were shot. ’106

In Daugavpils in Latvia, a sub-unit of Einsatzkommando 3 shot more than 9,000

Jews, among them a large number of women and children in several ‘operations’

between 13 July and 21 August, with the support of Latvian forces. 107

Einsatzkommando 2, which was stationed in Latvia, had liquidated almost

18,000 Jews by September or had had them shot by Latvian auxiliaries. 108 The high number of victims points to the possibility that this commando had also

begun shooting women and children.

By the end of July and the beginning of August, Einsatzkommando Tilsit,

which was operating in the border areas, had begun systematically extending

the shootings beyond the group of men of military age. Members of the

commandos returned to places that had already been ravaged but where

surviving Jewish family members had been imprisoned by the Lithuanian

‘order patrol’. Thus, with the support of Lithuanians, at least 100 to 200 Jews

(women, old men, and children) were shot in Jurbarkas (Georgenburg) and

Virbalis at the end of July and the beginning of August; in Gargždai

(Garsden) in August and September at least 100 women, children, and elderly

men were shot. The District Court of Ulm that was later charged with

examining these activities found more such executions had taken place

continuing into September. 109

In contrast to Einsatzgruppen B and C this huge increase in the number of

murder victims in the area under Einsatzgruppe A was not attributable to the

deployment of a brigade of the Waffen-SS. Higher SS and Police Commander

Hans-Adolf Prützmann evidently did not deploy the 2nd SS Brigade that had

been put at his disposal for a short time in September for the shooting of

Jews. He had sufficient indigenous auxiliary units available, in addition to the

Einsatzgruppen, who were more than prepared to undertake these murders.

In the same period in which the murders were extended to include women

and children and the numbers of those killed rose in leaps and bounds a

remarkable controversy sprang up between the civilian