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

undertaking a systematic trawl

of the occupied areas,’ the Einsatzgruppe concluded, ‘the commandos have now

started to avoid operations of any larger size.’

As more and more of the Jewish population started to flee, as German troops

made rapid progress, and as the Sonderkommandos and Einsatzkommandos were

anxious to follow as closely behind the spearheads as possible, it became clear that

there were often insufficient ‘operational forces’ at the disposal of the Einsatz-

gruppe. 18 From the end of June to September, in particular, the rapid rate of progress and the lack of manpower meant that huge areas that had been conquered were only superficially combed for Jews.

Einsatzgruppe C noted in October that, ‘seen from the perspective of the state

police and SD’, they were confronted by an huge empty space; ‘major successes’

could only happen after 10–14 days, which was true ‘particularly as regards the

Jewish problem’. 19 For Einsatzgruppe B, too, the rapid onward march of German troops means that ‘from the perspective of the security police’ there was a

dangerous ‘lacuna’ opening up; what was missing was ‘so to speak the second

wave of security police’. 20

From Anti-Semitic Terror to Genocide

209

There was an additional problem for Einsatzgruppen C and D on the southern

sector of the front: the influx of tens of thousands of Jews driven out by the

Hungarian and Romanian allies. In the case of Romania we know that the head of

state, Antonescu, referred to an agreement with Hitler in this regard. 21 Hitler had evidently put his Romanian ally in the picture about the planned large-scale

deportations of European Jews to the East even before the war started. However,

on their own initiative, Romania and Hungary (which will have been similarly

informed) made a premature start with the expulsions that had originally been

planned for the period after the Russian campaign had finished. Since on the one

hand the Germans did not wish to snub their allies, and on the other did not wish

to endanger their supply lines or cause other difficulties because of problems with

refugees, they resorted to more radical ‘solutions’ during the month of August, as

will be shown in detail below. Whilst Einsatzgruppe C murdered refugees in what

was at that stage a massacre of unparalleled scale and savagery in Kamenetsk-

Podolsk, Einsatzgruppe D initially attempted to drive the refugees back using

brutal means, which meant that the weakest of them were simply shot. It even-

tually came to an agreement with the Romanians to intern all the Jews living in the

area in question in concentration camps. 22

Towards the end of the summer, yet another problem arose. Both the German

occupation authorities and the central agencies in the Reich gradually began to

cast their eyes towards the potential labour that the Jews represented. At first they

had made every possible effort to replace the Jewish workforce with non-Jewish

labour, but from September 1941 onwards there was a gradual realization that,

during the war, it would not be possible to manage without Jewish workers

altogether. 23 As we shall see, this problem also emerged in the areas controlled by the Einsatzgruppen. During the summer, the victims of mass shootings had

principally been Jewish men of military age; but, from the autumn onwards, the

selection principle was reversed and Jews capable of work were exempted from the

annihilation measures. 24 The occupation authorities adopted a new approach in which the Jewish population was divided into ‘useful’ and ‘superfluous’, which had

consequences for the way the Jewish minority was fed and housed, particularly in

the cities.

Christian Gerlach has developed this line of argument and sees a direct

connection between the expansion of the programme of shootings in September

and October 1941—the transition to the systematic liquidation of ghettos—and the

problems with feeding and housing Jews that were gradually becoming manifest.

He has argued that the murder of the Jewish minority can be attributed directly to

the failure of the systematic starvation policy that had been in place since the

beginning of the war. Because the original plan to starve the general population of

cities proved impossible to fulfil, the occupying power concentrated above all on

the destruction of the two groups that it had in the meantime isolated from the

outside world—the Jews, who represented a considerable proportion of the

210

Mass Executions in Occupied Soviet Zones, 1941

population of the cities that could no longer be fed, and prisoners of war. 25 In addition, the difficulties with providing food and shelter had a radicalizing effect

on the conduct of individual authorities with the respect to the ‘Jewish question’. 26

However, Gerlach has not succeeded in proving this hypothesis about anti-

Jewish policy empirically and unambiguously. For, although it seems perfectly

plausible that problems with food and shelter did have a certain radicalizing effect

on anti-Jewish policy in the occupied zones, his basic proposition—that the

expansion of the programme of shootings in summer and autumn 1941 can be

attributed above all to the material shortcomings that the occupying power was

experiencing—does not seem to me to be an adequate explanation of what took

place. Extending the programme of shootings, in my view, represents a process

whereby German organizations were gradually steered by their leadership away

from a ‘security policing’ approach and towards a policy of ethnic annihilation.

The presupposition for this radical shift was first and foremost a changed

perception of the situation by these organizations: during the summer the

Einsatzgruppen and other SS and police units were forced to conclude that the

original security policing approach could not lead to a solution to the ‘Jewish

question’ for reasons suggested above. They therefore became more and more

ready to accept a new and more comprehensive approach that the leadership

brought in very gradually—with the help of a massive reinforcement of the deadly

commandos—the approach that envisaged the blanket ethnic annihilation of

the Jewish population.

Extending the campaign of shootings, therefore, had a variety of causes,

although a fundamental factor was the racist hierarchy on which the occupying

power based its assessment and treatment of the indigenous population and in

which the Jews occupied the lowest rung. This way of viewing things, rather than

any objective assessment of the difficulties of the situation, was decisive in the

occupying power’s belief that the annihilation of the Jews would solve a broad

range of different problems.

The longer the war lasted, the more completely what was originally a fairly

abstract idea of the