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

by German troops. They were probably initiated by

the OUN and its militia. It is likely, however, that a special unit of the Wehrmacht

played a key role in triggering this pogrom when it entered the city as an advance

guard together with a battalion of Ukrainian nationalists under its command. The

pogroms cost at least 4,000 lives and were finally ended by the Wehrmacht on 2

July after it had spent two days observing but not intervening. 13 At that point, however, Einsatzgruppe C took over the organization of murderous activities:

over the next few days, by way of ‘retribution’ for the murders committed by the

NKVD, three Einsatzgruppe C commandos that had entered the city murdered

2,500 to 3,000 Jews. 14 At the end of July, Ukrainian groups took back the initiative and were responsible for a further pogrom for which support from the German

Special Purposes Commando was probably decisive once again. During the so-

called ‘Petljura Days’ more than 2,000 Jews were murdered in Lviv. 15

In Zloczow at the beginning of July, under the very eyes of Sonderkommando

4b and tolerated by the city commandant, Ukrainian activists had organized a

massacre of the Jewish population in which members of the SS Viking Division

took part on a huge scale. The total number of victims is estimated to be at least

2,000.16 In the district of Tarnopol, too, Ukrainian nationalist murdered Jews under the supervision of Sonderkommando 4b—on 7 July some 70 Jews were

‘herded together and finished off with a big salvo’. When it had finished, the

commando described its deployment in Tarnopol in an incident report of 11 July,

announcing more than 127 executions that it had conducted and a further 600

dead ‘as part of the [Ukrainians’] anti-Jewish persecutions inspired by the

Einsatzkommando’. 17

The Mass Murder of Jewish Men

195

There are more ‘self-purification attempts’ inspired by Einsatzgruppe

C that can be documented on the basis of its incident reports. ‘In Dobromil

the synagogue was torched. In Sambor 50 Jews were murdered by the

outraged crowd.’18 A few days later came the report, ‘in Krzemieniec between 100 and 150 Ukrainians were murdered by the Russians. . . . By way of reprisal

the Ukrainians beat 150 Jews to death with clubs.’19 In Tarnopol and Choroskow they succeeded in ‘bringing 600 and 110 Jews to their deaths’ in

pogroms. 20 What is remarkable, but also characteristic of the attitude of the Germans towards these ‘self-purification attempts’ is the ‘encouragement’

(noted by Einsatzgruppe C in an incident report from early July) that the

High Command of the 17th Army gave ‘for using first the anti-Jewish and

anti-Communist Poles living in the newly conquered areas for these

self-purification attempts’. 21

In total, in the areas occupied by the Soviet Union between 1939 and 1941

pogroms have been documented in more than 60 places; estimates place the

number of dead at no less than 12,000, possibly as many as 24,000. 22 Despite the large number of victims, however, the Germans were disappointed with the results

of the ‘self-purification attempts’ that they had initiated amongst the Ukrainian

population. At the end of July Einsatzgruppe C was forced to admit, ‘recent

attempts circumspectly to inspire anti-Jewish pogroms have unfortunately not

had the desired effect’. 23 The deeper the Einsatzgruppe penetrated into the Ukraine, the more it was forced to recognize that the indigenous population

was not prepared to carry out pogroms. 24

Whilst these Einsatzgruppe reports create the impression that the initiative for

the pogroms had always lain with the commandos themselves—as Heydrich had

ordered—there are indications that in many places the pogroms were already

under way when the commandos arrived and where the commandos concentrated

on escalating the murders and bringing them under their own control. However, a

closer analysis of the course of these pogroms shows how—as has already been

noted—they were not spontaneous operations by indigenous populations but

responses to initiatives from radical nationalist and anti-Semitic forces that had

come together in the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists. Immediately after

the withdrawal of the Soviet occupying forces, the OUN had seized the initiative in

many places, set up provisional authorities and militias, and in some places, like

Lvov, with the imminent end of Soviet domination in sight, had organized

uprisings. There is something to be said for seeing the pogroms as components

of an OUN strategy to seize power in this transitional phase, and some likelihood

that the anti-Semitic components of this strategy were fostered by the German

side even before war had broken out. 25

But even if the pogroms can be attributed in large part to German plans to spark

off ‘attempts at self-cleansing’, it has to be admitted that they would not have been

possible if there had not already been a significant potential for anti-Semitic

196

Mass Executions in Occupied Soviet Zones, 1941

violence in the indigenous population and if they had not been susceptible to

mobilization for such murderous campaigns.

This is true of the pogrom that a book by the historian Jan Tomasz Gross

has made virtually emblematic of the indigenous population’s active partici-

pation in and co-responsibility for the murder of Jews, and which has led to

a wide-ranging debate on this topic, in Poland especially:26 the murder of several hundred Jews in the town of Jedwabne on 10 July 1941 by—according

to Gross—their Polish neighbours. 27 Some of the victims were killed immediately, others burned alive in a barn. Even if the murders were carried out

by local people—or more precisely by a group of forty or so men, distinct

from other members of the indigenous population, mostly not from the town

itself but from the surrounding area—closer analysis of the crime has now

demonstrated that the pogrom was engineered by a unit of the German

Security Police. This was probably a commando from the Gestapo office in

Zichenau that had been assigned to Einsatzgruppe B as an auxiliary troop

and which had organized several pogroms in the western part of the Voivo-

deship of Bialystok (in which Jedwabne was located); it had recruited local

Poles as auxiliary ‘pogrom police’ for this purpose. 28 This was also in accordance with Heydrich’s order of 1 July in which he had described Poles

as an ‘element . . . for initiating pogroms’. 29

Organized Shootings by Einsatzgruppen and Police

Battalions in the First Weeks of the War

Einsatzgruppe A

Three of the four commandos under Einsatzgruppe A can be shown to have