Ostkrieg (19 page)

His consistent social Darwinism, in fact, provided all the justification Hitler needed for his actions. In order to secure the existence of the Volk, all measures were acceptable: might made right. Indeed, a culturally superior people denied adequate living space had an obligation to take what it needed; that was, after all, the law of nature. Nor would the struggle ever end; for Hitler, only two options existed: fight and win or die. Shaped profoundly by his own experience of war, Hitler saw in it the essence of human activity. “What meeting a man means for a girl,” Jochmann recalled him revealing, “war meant for him.” Living meant killing: “Coming into being, existing, and passing away, there's always a killing. Everything that is born must later die.”
²⁸

Less well-known but no less important to Hitler were his ideas on
a new social order, which perhaps could be termed
racialist modernism
. The other formative experience of his life, his resentment that his “talents” had been left unrecognized by a class-bound society, smoldered constantly. Much of the appeal of National Socialism in the 1930s, in fact, was based on Hitler's promise to build a new society that would reward talent. He thus advocated free education for all talented young people, regardless of social or class origin, the improvement of working conditions in factories, the provision of holidays for workers, the creation of a cheap automobile the average worker could afford, and the construction of suitable housing for working families. He was fascinated as well with modern technology and the way in which it could improve the quality of life of a people. In a sense, Hitler sought to create a modern, classless, mobile society that rewarded talent and provided security, but one that substituted racial for class distinctions. The fault line in the National Socialist Volksgemeinschaft was clear: those classified as Aryans would enjoy the benefits of the new social order and prosperity to be created out of exploitation of the east; those outside the community, depending on their racial status, could expect victimization, enslavement, or death.
²⁹

Barbarossa, as Adam Tooze has stressed, thus marked a significant departure: it was not only the most massive military campaign in history, but it also unleashed an unprecedented campaign of genocidal violence, of which the Holocaust remains the best-known example. This Judeocide, however, was not an isolated act of murder; rather, it formed part of a deliberate, comprehensive plan of exploitation, a utopian scheme of racial reorganization and demographic engineering of vast proportions. The Nazis had attempted, and failed, in 1939–1940 amid appalling brutality to carry off a smaller resettlement scheme in Poland and had seen the inflated hopes of the Madagascar Plan come to naught because of the intransigence of the British, but, if anything, these failures only intensified their enthusiasm for population transfer and resettlement. Why not? The presumed quick victory in the east would bring millions more Jews under Nazi control, and it conjured visions not only of solving the Jewish question but also of reordering the racial composition of Eastern Europe. At the same time, vast areas would be opened to German colonization. Best of all, it could be accomplished entirely under German control. In the short term, German administrators of the conquered eastern territories would ruthlessly exploit the food resources of the area to ensure, as Hitler emphasized repeatedly, that in this war it would not be Germans who starved. Complementing this would be the long-term project of racial engineering that would open the eastern
lands to German colonization and development, as the ethnic boundary of Germany was to be pushed to the Ural Mountains. In the process, tens of millions of Slavic inhabitants (and Jews) would be killed, either through deliberate starvation or as a result of forcible emigration.
³⁰

If in execution the German plans for the occupied east resembled the last act in the bloody history of European colonialism, in inspiration Nazi ideas actually had more in common with American Manifest Destiny. Hitler had little interest in colonies, preferring, along the lines of the American frontier myth, millions of farmers who would settle and develop the area, modernize it, and make it a realm of new beginnings. “Our Mississippi must be the Volga, not the Niger,” Hitler declared in the autumn of 1941, while emphasizing that the bloody conquest of the American West provided both historical precedent and justification. “Here in the east a similar process will repeat itself for the second time as in the conquest of America,” he exulted, whereby an allegedly superior settler population had displaced a supposedly inferior native population, thus opening unlimited economic possibilities. “Europe—and not America—will be the land of unlimited possibilities.” This was a modernizing vision, one closely tied to the Nazi promise of the 1930s that the Germans should finally achieve a quality of life commensurate with their racial value. The abundant resources of the east, combined with German expertise and capital investment, would propel a dramatic increase in the standard of living, made possible at the expense of the eastern peoples.
³¹

The concrete expression of this program of racial reorganization, the blueprint for the social order to be erected in the east, was
Generalplan Ost
(General plan for the east), developed by Professor Konrad Meyer of Himmler's Reich Commissariat for the Strengthening of the German People (RKFDV). Officially charged by Himmler just one day before the launch of Barbarossa with drawing up a blueprint for the colonization and restructuring of the eastern territories, Meyer presented a first draft of the plan just three weeks later, on 15 July, that clearly indicated that he had been working on the matter for some time. A project that envisioned extensive German settlement and exploitation of the east as well as the forced Germanization, displacement, and expulsion of millions of people, it necessitated the creation of slave labor camps whose inmates would be set to work on the enormous construction projects. Meyer himself foresaw the “resettlement” of 65–85 percent of the Baltic, Polish, Ukrainian, and Belorussian populations, with numbers thrown around ranging from 31 to 51 million people. Since the ultimate destination of those displaced remained unclear, “natural wastage” on a vast scale must have been assumed, so genocide was implicit in Generalplan Ost
from the beginning. In its assumption of mass death through slave labor and the physical destruction of certain groups (Bolsheviks, Communist bureaucrats, Jews, the urban population of Russia), the plan anticipated and was directly linked to the so-called Final Solution.
³²

By the time German forces invaded the Soviet Union, then, a considerable murderous momentum had already been built up. Large numbers of Jews were already dying of “natural causes” in the wretchedly overcrowded ghettos of Poland, while the brutal treatment of the local population in occupied Poland as well as Hitler's firm intention to fight a war of annihilation in Russia both lowered the threshold of genocidal violence. If the purpose of the war was threefold—to destroy the threat of Jewish-Bolshevism, to find a solution to the Jewish question, and to secure living space for Germany's elevation to great power status—the ends would determine the means. The SS and Einsatzgruppen would implement the first two goals, while the Ostheer, in feeding itself off the land, would reduce the strain on the German home front while ensuring that malnutrition would claim the lives of millions of Soviet citizens.

Given the set of criminal orders issued to the army and the creation of the SS murder squads, it should be no surprise that killings of civilians began almost immediately after German forces crossed the Soviet frontier and quickly escalated in scope and intensity. Although Heydrich had briefed Einsatzgruppen leaders on their tasks, his early instructions had been relatively restrictive, even if imprecise. The initial killings were to target those groups listed in the Commissar Order: political officers in the army, Communist Party officials and functionaries, the Jewish-Bolshevik intelligentsia, and young male Jews (as the likely source of any partisan resistance). Still, Heydrich granted wide discretionary powers to squad leaders to interpret their instructions in a suitably radical fashion. Not atypically, then, zealous local commanders often interpreted the vague guidelines in more radical fashion in order, for example, to kill all male Jews in a village or rural area. The first killings, in fact, were perpetrated by a local Gestapo official in Tilsit, in East Prussia along the Lithuanian border, who on his own initiative but in accordance with directives issued by the leader of Einsatzgruppe A, Franz Walter Stahlecker, on 24 June ordered the shooting of two hundred male Jews in Garsden. A few days later, a police battalion slaughtered two thousand Jews in Bialystok, including women and children, many of them burned alive in a synagogue that had been set on fire. German police officials also encouraged the local population, especially in Lithuania, to foment pogroms against the Jewish population. Some, such as that in Kaunas, the Lithuanian capital, on the night of 25–26 June involved appalling
brutality, with more than fifteen hundred Jews “eliminated” and several synagogues burned in a chaos of horror. In one frightful scene, a young Lithuanian with a club beat fifteen to twenty Jews to death amid a chorus of enthusiastic cheers and laughter from the onlooking crowd, which burst into the national anthem at the end. Invariably, these destructive precedents established on the local level were sanctioned by Himmler or Heydrich, thus setting new levels of acceptable violence.
³³

Einsatzgruppen units had also swung into deadly action by early July. On the third, the head of an Einsatzkommando in eastern Poland had 1,160 Jewish men shot. In Kaunas, Lithuania, units of Einsatzgruppe A shot almost 500 Jews on 4 July, while two days later they killed 2,514. In Bialystok, almost 1,000 Jews were murdered in the first half of the month. The other Einsatzgruppen were active as well, with shootings widespread in Belorussia and Ukraine, although the various murder squad leaders in these areas interpreted their orders differently. While Einsatzgruppe A seemed virtually unconstrained in its murderous activities, Einsatzgruppe B in Belorussia initially targeted Jewish intellectuals, while its counterpart in Ukraine, Einsatzgruppe C, indicated its intention of working Jews to death in labor projects. Himmler and Heydrich also fomented the killing process through their frequent visits to the field, appealing to their subordinates' sense of initiative, and exhorting police and SS officials to greater efforts in killing Jews. In this initial phase of the killing process, a complex dynamic developed. Instructions issued from the center both encouraged radical action and protected individuals from any legal consequences, but, in the absence of a specific killing order, top Nazi leaders left considerable room for local initiative. As commanders on the ground began to act in an increasingly murderous fashion, encouraged by SS officials to interpret their orders liberally, news of their actions spread to other commanders, who, anxious to be seen as diligent in such an important matter, also stepped up the pace of killings. This furthered the radicalizing process while at the same time encouraging the top leadership to amend policy in a more deadly direction since little resistance to the killing had emerged. As orders and encouragement from the top mingled with murderous initiatives from below, a tornadic spiral of violence resulted, one that quickly accelerated the pace of radicalization.
³⁴

Although local inhabitants had been encouraged to instigate pogroms, with the exception of a few areas, mostly in Lithuania, this proved much more difficult than anticipated. As a result, the Einsatzgruppen developed a more or less typical routine in which a murder squad would enter a town, assemble the intended victims, march them to a relatively remote
area nearby, and shoot them. A killing operation in Lithuania in early July was characteristic of such actions across the breadth of the Soviet Union. According to an onlooker, a soldier with a motorized infantry unit, hundreds of Jews from the local village had been marched to a gravel pit, where they were sent in groups to be shot. “The firing squad,” the eyewitness recalled,

which was made up of ten men, positioned itself . . . about six to eight meters in front of the group [to be killed]. . . . The group was shot by the firing squad after the order was given. The shots were fired simultaneously so that the men fell into the pit behind them at the same time. The 400 Jews were shot in exactly the same way over a period of about an hour. . . . They were covered with a thin sprinkling of sand. . . . Parts of their bodies protruded out of the sand. . . . The mass shootings in Paneriai were quite horrific.

Similar scenes took place throughout the newly conquered areas. Often, little direction from above was needed. An SS officer recorded in his diary the scene in Drohobycz, in Galicia, where at the fortress “soldiers stood with fist thick clubs” and struck down the Jews, who lay about “whimpering like pigs.” When asked who led the squad, the reply was, “Nobody. . . . Out of rage and hatred the Jews were being struck down.” Inevitably, the killing process developed a bloody momentum, one that could be seen in the meticulously recorded figures of the reports of the various murder squads. Daily numbers in the scores rapidly escalated to the hundreds, then to the thousands, as local commanders, on their own initiative and in response to encouragement from above, broadened the scope of the killing operations. This first killing sweep, in fact, proved to be crucially important for later developments, for it illustrated that few logistic, political, or moral impediments stood in the way of mass murder. A new threshold had been crossed.
³⁵

In all this, the Wehrmacht leadership took an active role. In prewar briefings, Einsatzgruppen commanders and police leaders had been urged to observe scrupulously the agreement between the SS and the army, which suggests that Heydrich was unsure of the extent of Wehrmacht cooperation. Given the negative reaction of some army commanders in Poland in 1939, he could not be sure that they would tolerate mass executions. Despite these concerns, reports from commanders of the murder squads indicated both surprise and relief that from the beginning the army had raised no problems and that cooperation was proceeding “extremely satisfactorily and without friction.”
Despite instances of hesitant implementation of the criminal orders, the army attitude was described as “generally good,” “excellent, almost cordial,” “extraordinary,” and “especially successful.” The Einsatzgruppe B leader, Arthur Nebe, in fact, praised the “excellent” cooperation with Army Group Center that had made possible the successful killing actions in Bialystok and Minsk. Similarly, Stahlecker hailed the spirit of cooperation between Einsatzgruppe A and Army Group North, even though Field Marshal Leeb had expressed initial reservations about their activities. So extensive was the collaboration that in many sectors the Einsatzgruppen, although limited by the prewar agreement only to the rear areas, were allowed to follow immediately behind the advancing troops. Sections of some commandos often advanced with the tank spearheads. Nor was there much doubt about what these special units were doing; one frontline officer noted in early December that the combat officer corps was fully informed about the execution of Jews.
³⁶