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

Jews as the pillars of the Bolshevist regime was replaced by a

concept whereby the Jews were endowed with the capacity to present a variety of

concrete threats. They were seen as the source of many and various forms of

resistance to the occupying power—they spread rumours, sabotaged measures

taken by the Germans, started fires, and maintained contact with Soviet partisan

groups; they spread plagues, and were active on the black market; by virtue of their

mere existence they created problems in the fields of supplies, housing, and

labour. Such perceptions make it clear how the racist and radically anti-Semitic

attitude of the occupiers created its own distorted image of reality.

The reports of the Einsatzgruppen show that Einsatzgruppen B and C, in

particular, displayed some considerable perplexity about the ‘solution to the

Jewish question’ in the newly occupied Eastern zones. The staff officers of

From Anti-Semitic Terror to Genocide

211

Einsatzgruppe B reasoned thus about the situation in Belarus in July 1941: ‘The

solution to the Jewish question during the war seems impossible in this area and

given the extra-large numbers of Jews it can only be reached via evacuation and

resettlement.’ They described the Jews’ ‘accommodation in ghettos’, which was in

train across the board, as ‘a matter of high priority and, in the light of the large

number of Jews, a particularly difficult one’. 27

After August the matter of the labour deployment of the Jewish population also

began to emerge in the reports from the Einsatzgruppen. Einsatzgruppe C, for

example, reported on the developments in the Ukraine in the first half of August

and suggested that the Jews should be exhausted in cultivating the extensive Pripet

Marshes and those on the north bank of the Dnieper or on the Volga.

In an incident report for September 1941, 28 on the basis of their previous observations Einsatzgruppe C came to the following conclusion: ‘The work of the Bol-

shevists depends on Jews, Russians, Georgians, Armenians, Poles, Latvians, and

Ukrainians: the Bolshevist apparatus is not by any means identical with that of the

Jewish population. . . . If we entirely dispense with the Jewish labour-force, then the

economic rebuilding of Ukrainian industry or the expansion of urban administrative

centres is virtually impossible. There is only one possibility, which the German

administration in the General Government has neglected for a long time: the

solution of the Jewish question via the full-scale deployment of the Jewish labour-

force. That would bring with it the gradual liquidation of Jewry, a development that

corresponds perfectly with the economic conditions of the country.’

Einsatzkommando 6 of Einsatzgruppe C, which according to an incident report

of 12 September had drawn attention to the fact that 70–90 per cent of the Jewish

population of many central and eastern Ukrainian towns had fled—rising to 100

per cent in some cases—drew the following striking conclusion from this phe-

nomenon: ‘this can be seen as a success deriving indirectly from the work of the

Security Police, since the cost-free deportation of hundreds of thousands of Jews—

mostly over the Urals, to judge by the results of interrogations—makes a substan-

tial contribution to the solution to the Jewish question in Europe.’29

This problem had been brewing since July and had produced a situation that

was very difficult grasp as a whole. Pogrom activity was declining, more and more

Jews were fleeing, although there were refugees turning up in the areas that the

commandos were leaving behind, it was impossible to control the vast areas of

territory with such small units, there was an ever-increasing need for a larger

labour-force, and the food supply was increasingly precarious. The original

‘security policing’ approach had been designed for the duration of a short war

and had essentially consisted of overwhelming Jewish communities with a sudden

wave of terror immediately upon occupation; as the war dragged on, this policy

was clearly reaching its limits.

Mass executions in August had killed tens of thousands of people and in the

light of this the units that were carrying them out began to question the mid- and

212

Mass Executions in Occupied Soviet Zones, 1941

longer-term perspectives for continued Jewish persecution in the occupied East-

ern zones. How broadly should the range of victims be drawn? And where would

the human resources for carrying out further murders be found? How were they

to prevent Jews escaping murder by fleeing? How could the mass murder of Jewish

skilled workers be justified in the face of the growing need for labour?

This degree of uncertainty on the part of the commandos explains their

readiness to adjust to the new and far more radical approach to Jewish persecution

in the East that had been pursued by the SS leadership since July. Indeed, it

explains how their commitment towards the success of this new approach,

involving a high degree of initiative on their own account, tentatively in July,

but thereafter massively, especially in August and September, contributed towards

its breakthrough. The Einsatzkommandos, now considerably strengthened in

terms of personnel, started to expand the range of the executions by murdering

women and children, whilst at the same time collaborating with the military and

civil authorities to confine the survivors of these massacres in ghettos. In this

manner rural districts in particular were rendered ‘free of Jews’. Because the

survivors were often absorbed into the labour force by the German authorities,

the goal of the complete annihilation of the Jewish minority was initially post-

poned, but only until 1942.

The step-by-step implementation of the annihilation policies included a com-

plementary role for Jewish ghettos. 30 These began to be set up from the second half of July onwards, initially primarily in order to keep the Jewish population

under control, to free up living space (principally in devastated cities), and to gain

the capacity to set up Jewish labour gangs for clearing operations and the like. At

the same time Jews could thereby also be excluded from participation in the

economic life of their communities. Just as with the occupation of Poland, the

formation of ghettos was by no means a standardized procedure.

At first ghettos were set up in response to pressure from the Wehrmacht. The

economic staff of the Wehrmacht was demanding the immediate ghettoization of

the Jews in the occupied Eastern territories as early as 14 July. 31 A meeting between the head of the Military High Command’s armaments section, Georg Thomas,

and the state secretary for the Four-Year Plan, Paul Körner, on 31 July