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

areas. 151 In addition to guard and containment duties volunteer troops were mainly deployed in mass executions of Jews and

Communists, or for ‘cleansing’ and partisan ‘operations’ whose victims were

usually Jews who were under general suspicion as ‘supporters of armed gangs’.

There is detailed documentation for the participation of Lithuanian Volunteer

Battalion no. 12, which was under the immediate command of the German

Reserve Police Battalion 11, in the mass murders perpetrated by this unit in

Belarus—and in particular for its participation in the massacres of Smilovichi,

Rudensk, Koydanava, and Slutsk in October and November 1941. 152

Murders of the Mentally Ill, Gypsies, and ‘Asians’

The mass murder of the Jews in the newly occupied areas is at the heart of policies

of racial annihilation, but other groups also fell victim to them, notably the

mentally ill, the Gypsies, and so-called ‘Asians’.

As had been the case in Poland in 1939 and 1940, the inmates of medical and

care institutions in the newly occupied areas were also murdered in huge num-

bers. 153 Murders of this type can be documented for all four Einsatzgruppen.

Einsatzgruppe A, for example, murdered patients in a Lithuanian asylum in

Aglona on 22 August 1941 (claiming 544 victims), 154 in asylums in Mariampole (also in Lithuania) and Mogutovo, near Luga (with 204 victims in total), 155 and in mental homes in Riga and Jelgava (Mitau), where 237 mentally ill Jews were

murdered. 156 Einsatzgruppe B also participated in such murders, as the incident report of 9 October 1941 indicates: ‘in Chernigov the mad will be treated in the

usual way. In Minsk 632 mentally ill patients were given special treatment, and in

Mogilev 836. ’157

After September 1941, Einsatzgruppe B, under the command of the head of the

Reich Criminal Bureau Artur Nebe, began to look for alternative methods for

murdering the inhabitants of the asylums. In Minsk there was an attempt made by

the Institute for Criminological Technology in September to use explosives to

murder the inmates; shortly afterwards in Mogilev asylum inmates were mur-

dered using vehicle exhaust fumes. On the basis of such experiments those

responsible made a decision to use gas as the method of choice, which, as part

of the ‘euthanasia’ programme, had already been responsible for the deaths of tens

of thousands of people. Gas vans such as those that had been deployed by Sonder-

kommando Lange in the Warthegau since the beginning of 1940 were now

Extension of Shootings to Whole Jewish Population

241

commissioned for use in the occupied Eastern areas. The murder of the mentally

ill in Mogilev using gas in October 1941 is an important step in the transfer of

killing techniques that had been developed in the context of the ‘euthanasia’

programme to the systematic murder of the Jews. 158

All the commandos of Einsatzgruppe C can also be shown to have murdered

the sick. In September 1941, at the request of the local commander’s office in

Vasilkov, Sonderkommando 4a shot 200 Jews but also a number of mentally ill

women; a sub-commando of the same unit shot 270 mentally ill patients on 24

October in Chernigov, 159 Sonderkommando 4b shot 599 inmates from the Poltava asylum at the beginning of November, 160 and Einsatzkommando 5 murdered 300

mentally ill Jews on 18 October in Kiev. 161 The incident reports say of Einsatzkommando 6 that ‘by 12 November 1941’ it had shot ‘800 of a total of 1,160

mentally disordered inmates of the asylum of Igrin near Dnepropetrovsk. 162

Murders of asylum inmates by Einsatzgruppe D during 1942 are widely documen-

ted. 163

Prisoners of war and civilians who in the eyes of the Einsatzgruppe troops had

an ‘Asiatic’ appearance also fell victim to the policies of annihilation. 164 The Soviet Commissars had already been described in the ‘Guidelines for the Treatment of

Political Commissars’ as ‘the originators of barbarian Asiatic methods of com-

bat’, 165 and the ‘Guidelines for the Conduct of troops in Russia’ had read, ‘the Asiatic soldiers of the Red Army in particular are inscrutable, incalculable,

guileful, and unfeeling’. 166 Behind the National Socialist stereotype of the ‘Asiatic’

enemy was the image that large sections of the originally Slavic peasant population

had been extirpated by the Soviet regime whilst, as a result of ‘intermingling’ with

Asiatic or Mongolian races, the remainder of the population represented a

worthless but latently dangerous ‘sub-humanity’ that ‘the Jews’ dominated with

the help of Bolshevist ideology. The danger supposedly emanating from this

conglomerate was elucidated by Himmler speaking in July 1941 to soldiers from

the Waffen-SS. According to Himmler, in the East ‘the same struggle against the

same sub-human peoples, the same inferior races’ that have sometimes gone

‘under the name of the Huns, at others . . . under the name of Magyars, or under

the name of Tartars, or under the names of Ghenghis Khan and the Mongols’. 167

The murder of ‘Asiatic’ people in the Soviet Union is one of the chapters in the

history of the Nazi regime’s policies of racial annihilation that have yet to be

written. Only a few isolated examples are currently available. The systematic

murder of ‘Asiatic’-looking people by the Einsatzkommandos can be documented

from the civilian prisoner camp in Minsk that had been set up by the Wehrmacht

in 1941, in which almost the entire non-Jewish male population of military age

had been imprisoned. 168 The ‘Asiatics’ were viewed there with the same suspicion and treated in the same undiscriminating manner as ‘Bolshevist functionaries,

agents, criminals’. 169 They were shot because their external appearance made them appear to be ‘elements of inferior value with a predominantly Asiatic

242

Mass Executions in Occupied Soviet Zones, 1941

look’. 170 The same blanket justification was given by Einsatzgruppe B, for example, when they shot 83 men from the civilian camp in Mogilev on 15 October 1941.

These were said to be ‘racially inferior elements with an Asiatic look’ that ‘it would

not be responsible to allow to remain behind the lines any further’. 171

Gypsies living in the Soviet Union also fell victim to the Nazis’ policies of racial

annihilation, although they were not pursued with anything like the same merci-

less determination as the Jews. This was the case in 1941 and also for later periods.

Einsatzkommandos were shooting small groups of Gypsies on their advance in

summer and autumn 1941: Einsatzkommando 3 did so on 22 August, and Ein-

satzkommando 8 in the second