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

find those amongst the members of certain racial groups whom

they might win over as collaborators, they also practised ‘negative’ selection in that

they looked for ‘seditious Soviet functionaries, Commissars, Politruks, etc., long-

serving professional soldiers in the Soviet Army, Jews, [and] criminal elements’.

The prisoners of war seized in this manner had to be reported to the camp

commandant for ‘appropriate treatment’, which meant execution. 213

However, prisoners of war who had not been identified as Jews, Communists, or

members of the intelligentsia and who therefore remained in the Wehrmacht’s

camps also fell victim in large numbers to the policies of annihilation. Soviet soldiers

who had surrendered to German troops were often killed on the spot. 214 There is much documentary evidence to show that this practice was widespread. Numerous

orders to Wehrmacht units have been preserved that explicitly demand the taking of

‘no prisoners’, although there are also orders that appealed to the troops to refrain

from indiscriminate shootings. 215 Army Group Centre described the situation in a report from August 1941 which mentions ‘the corpses of soldiers lying all over the

place after military action, without weapons, with their hands raised and with

injuries inflicted from close range’. 216 How widespread this practice was cannot now be reconstructed: soldiers who were shot by German troops after being taken

prisoner do not appear in any statistics relating to prisoners of war.

Extension of Shootings to Whole Jewish Population

249

This practice can be attributed to the gradual brutalization of the war, but closer

analysis of how prisoners were fed and treated generally shows that the systematic

destruction of Soviet prisoners of war was an integral component of German

policy towards the Soviet Union. Congruently with the hunger strategy that the

German leadership proposed from the very beginning of the war, the mass of Red

Army members captured by the Wehrmacht were never provided with adequate

foodstuffs. 217

Christian Gerlach has reconstructed the decision-making process that led to those

responsible on the German side (Goering, Backe, Quartermaster General Wagner,

and others) taking the conscious decision, as part of the means of addressing the

general food shortages in October 1941, to lower the already meagre rations for non-

working prisoners such that their death by starvation was foreseeable. 218 At a meeting on 16 September 1941 at which problems with food supplies were being discussed,

Goering said that a reduction in the rations for the German population was out of the

question given the ‘mood at home during the war’, and that, on the contrary, rations

should be increased. As a consequence of these priorities, it was unavoidable, he said,

that in the occupied areas the level of nutrition would inevitably decline: ‘on

principle, in the occupied areas only those who are working for us should be fed’.

Provisions for ‘Bolshevist prisoners’ could only be determined ‘in relation to their

work performance for us’. Put more plainly, this meant that those prisoners who

were not working would in future not be fed. 219

Correspondingly, the rations for prisoners of war were massively reduced by the

Quartermaster General in an order dated 21 October 1941.220 The conclusions implied by this approach were drawn by Quartermaster General Wagner at a

heads of department meeting on 13 November 1941: ‘prisoners of war in the

camps who are not working will have to starve. ’221 On the day after that far-reaching order from Wagner, 22 October, Backe informed Goebbels personally that the levels

of sustenance had now reached critical levels; Goebbels’s view was that they would

have to ‘take more rigorous measures in respect of prisoners of war’. 222

Nutrition levels, living conditions in what were mostly very primitive camps

(often they were only fenced-in areas of land where the prisoners had to fend for

themselves in holes in the ground or tents), and the long distances travelled on

foot or in transports in open goods wagons even in winter—all these factors meant

that in the autumn and winter of 1941 the Soviet prisoners of war began to die in

huge numbers. 223 Many were killed as a result of indiscriminate use of arms by camp guards, since the Wehrmacht leadership had practically given those detailed

to guard the Soviet prisoners carte blanche to use their weapons at will. This is

made clear in a quotation from the instruction for the treatment of Soviet

prisoners of war of 8 September 1941:

Thus ruthless and forceful intervention is required given the slightest sign of any form of obstructiveness, especially towards Bolshevist rabble-rousers. Obstructive behaviour and

250

Mass Executions in Occupied Soviet Zones, 1941

active or passive resistance must be thoroughly eliminated via the use of the weapon

(bayonet, rifle butt and firearm). . . . With Soviet prisoners of war it is necessary for purely disciplinary reasons to use weapons with particular severity. Anyone who fails to use his weapon in carrying out an order, or who uses it with insufficient force, is liable to

punishment. 224

After the German leadership had taken the decision in October 1941 to use

prisoners of war as forced labour, this did not initially have any direct effects on

the situation of most prisoners. Only a minority of prisoners of war were deployed

for work225 (in March 1942 there were only 167,000; this figure rose to reach 488,000 in October). Improvements in nutrition and accommodation for the

prisoners only filtered through very gradually. The change of direction therefore

came too late for most prisoners: on 1 February 1942 almost 60 per cent of the

3.35 million Soviet prisoners of war who had been captured by then had died. 226

By the end of the war the situation had not improved significantly, even though

more efforts were being made from summer 1943 onwards to use Soviet prisoners

for work details. Of the 5.7 million Red Army members taken prisoner by the

Germans during the war, approximately 3.3 million died. 227

Conclusion

This part has described the inconsistent process taking place over several months

during 1941 whereby a transition occurred from a restricted mode of terrorism

aimed mainly at Jewish men of military age to a strategy of ethnic annihilation.

The decisive turning point that initiated this transition was the mass shooting of

women and children by units and formations of various types; this began as early

as July and August. It should be remembered, too, that, even in the period before

this point, when operations were mostly