Hitler’s utopias crumbled upon contact with the Soviet Union, but they were refashioned rather than rejected. He was the Leader, and his henchmen owed their positions to their ability to divine and realize his will. When that will met resistance, as on the eastern front in the second half of 1941, the task of men such as Göring, Himmler, and Heydrich was to rearrange Hitler’s ideas such that Hitler’s genius was affirmed—along with their own positions in the Nazi regime. The utopias in summer 1941 had been four: a lightning victory that would destroy the Soviet Union in weeks; a Hunger Plan that would starve thirty million people in months; a Final Solution that would eliminate European Jews after the war; and a Generalplan Ost that would make of the western Soviet Union a German colony. Six months after Operation Barbarossa was launched, Hitler had reformulated the war aims such that the physical extermination of the Jews became the priority. By then, his closest associates had taken the ideological and administrative initiatives necessary to realize such a wish.
No lightning victory came. Although millions of Soviet citizens were starved, the Hunger Plan proved impossible. Generalplan Ost, or any variant of postwar colonization plans, would have to wait. As these utopias waned, political futures depended upon the extraction of what was feasible from the fantasies. Göring, Himmler, and Heydrich scrambled amidst the moving ruins, claiming what they could. Göring, charged with economics and the Hunger Plan, fared worst. Regarded as “the second man in the Reich” and as Hitler’s successor, Göring remained immensely prominent in Germany, but played an ever smaller role in the East. As economics became less a matter of grand planning for the postwar period and more a matter of improvising to continue the war, Göring lost his leading position to Albert Speer. Unlike Göring, Heydrich and Himmler were able to turn the unfavorable battlefield situation to their advantage, by reformulating the Final Solution so that it could be carried out during a war that was not going according to plan. They understood that the war was becoming, as Hitler began to say in August 1941, a “war against the Jews.”
Himmler and Heydrich saw the elimination of the Jews as their task. On 31 July 1941 Heydrich secured the formal authority from Göring to formulate the Final Solution. This still involved the coordination of prior deportation schemes with Heydrich’s plan of working the Jews to death in the conquered Soviet East. By November 1941, when Heydrich tried to schedule a meeting at Wannsee to coordinate the Final Solution, he still had such a vision in mind. Jews who could not work would be made to disappear. Jews capable of physical labor would work somewhere in the conquered Soviet Union until they died. Heydrich represented a broad consensus in the German government, though his was not an especially timely plan. The Ministry for the East, which oversaw the civilian occupation authorities established in September, took for granted that the Jews would disappear. Its head, Alfred Rosenberg, spoke in November of the “biological eradication of Jewry in Europe.” This would be achieved by sending the Jews across the Ural Mountains, Europe’s eastern boundary. But by November 1941 a certain vagueness had descended upon Heydrich’s vision of enslavement and deportation, since Germany had not destroyed the Soviet Union and Stalin still controlled the vast majority of its territory.
While Heydrich made bureaucratic arrangements in Berlin, it was Himmler who most ably extracted the practical and the prestigious from Hitler’s utopian thinking. From the Hunger Plan he took the categories of surplus populations and useless eaters, and would offer the Jews as the people from whom calories could be spared. From the lightning victory he extracted the four Einsatzgruppen. Their task had been to kill Soviet elites in order to hasten the Soviet collapse. Their first mission had not been to kill all Jews as such. The Einsatzgruppen had no such order when the invasion began, and their numbers were too small. But they had experience killing civilians, and they could find local help, and they could be reinforced. From Generalplan Ost, Himmler extracted the battalions of Order Police and thousands of local collaborators, whose preliminary assignment was to help control the conquered Soviet Union. Instead they provided the manpower that allowed the Germans to carry out truly massive shootings of Jews beginning in August 1941. These institutions, supported by the Wehrmacht and its Field Police, allowed the Germans to murder about a million Jews east of the Molotov-Ribbentrop line by the end of the year.
Himmler succeeded because he grasped extremes of the Nazi utopias that operated within Hitler’s mind, even as Hitler’s will faced the most determined resistance from the world outside. Himmler made the Final Solution more radical, by bringing it forward from the postwar period to the war itself, and by showing (after the failure of four previous deportation schemes) how it could be achieved: by the mass shooting of Jewish civilians. His prestige suffered little from the failures of the lightning victory and the Hunger Plan, which were the responsibility of the Wehrmacht and the economic authorities. Even as he moved the Final Solution into the realm of the realizable, he still nurtured the dream of the Generalplan Ost, Hitler’s “Garden of Eden.” He continued to order revisions of the plan, and arranged an experimental deportation in the Lublin district of the General Government, and would, as opportunities presented themselves, urge Hitler to raze cities.
In the summer and autumn of 1941, Himmler ignored what was impossible, pondered what was most glorious, and did what could be done: kill the Jews east of the Molotov-Ribbentrop line, in occupied eastern Poland, the Baltic States, and the Soviet Union. Aided by this realization of Nazi doctrine during the months when German power was challenged, Himmler and the SS would come to overshadow civilian and military authorities in the occupied Soviet Union, and in the German empire. As Himmler put it, “the East belongs to the SS.”
The East, until very recently, had belonged to the NKVD. One secret of Himmler’s success was that he was able to exploit the legacy of Soviet power in the places where it had most recently been installed.
In the first lands that German soldiers reached in Operation Barbarossa, they were the war’s second occupier. The first German gains in summer 1941 were the territories Germans had granted to the Soviets by the Treaty on Borders and Friendship of September 1939: what had been eastern Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia, annexed in the meantime to the Soviet Union. In other words, in Operation Barbarossa German troops first entered lands that had been independent states through 1939 or 1940, and only then entered the prewar Soviet Union. Their Romanian ally meanwhile conquered the territories that it had lost to the Soviet Union in 1940.
The double occupation, first Soviet, then German, made the experience of the inhabitants of these lands all the more complicated and dangerous. A single occupation can fracture a society for generations; double occupation is even more painful and divisive. It created risks and temptations that were unknown in the West. The departure of one foreign ruler meant nothing more than the arrival of another. When foreign troops left, people had to reckon not with peace but with the policies of the next occupier. They had to deal with the consequences of their own previous commitments under one occupier when the next one came; or make choices under one occupation while anticipating another. For different groups, these alternations could have different meanings. Gentile Lithuanians (for example) could experience the departure of the Soviets in 1941 as a liberation; Jews could not see the arrival of the Germans that way.
Lithuania had already undergone two major transformations by the time that German troops arrived in late June 1941. Lithuania, while still an independent state, had appeared to benefit from the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact of August 1939. The Treaty on Borders and Friendship of September 1939 had granted Lithuania to the Soviets, but Lithuanians had no way of knowing that. What the Lithuanian leadership perceived that month was something else: Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union destroyed Poland, which throughout the interwar period had been Lithuania’s adversary. The Lithuanian government had considered Vilnius, a city in interwar Poland, as its capital. Lithuania, without taking part in any hostilities in September 1939, gained Polish lands for itself. In October 1939, the Soviet Union granted Lithuania Vilnius and the surrounding regions (2,750 square miles, 457,500 people). The price of Vilnius and other formerly Polish territories was basing rights for Soviet soldiers.
Then, just half a year after Lithuania had been enlarged thanks to Stalin, it was conquered by its seeming Soviet benefactor. In June 1940 Stalin seized control of Lithuania and the other Baltic States, Latvia and Estonia, and hastily incorporated them into the Soviet Union. After this annexation, the Soviet Union deported about twenty-one thousand people from Lithuania, including many Lithuanian elites. A Lithuanian prime minister and a Lithuanian foreign minister were among the exiled thousands. Some Lithuanian political and military leaders escaped the Gulag by fleeing to Germany. These were often people with some prior connections in Berlin, and always people embittered by their experience with Soviet aggression. The Germans favored the right-wing nationalists among the Lithuanian émigrés, and trained some of them to take part in the invasion of the Soviet Union.
Thus when the Germans invaded the Soviet Union in June 1941, Lithuania occupied a unique position. It had profited from the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact; then it had been conquered by the Soviets; now it would be occupied by the Germans. After the ruthless year of Soviet occupation, many Lithuanians welcomed this change; few Lithuanian Jews were among them. Two hundred thousand Jews lived in Lithuania in June 1941 (about the same number as in Germany). The Germans arrived in Lithuania with their handpicked nationalist Lithuanians and encountered local people who were willing to believe, or to act as if they believed, that Jews were responsible for Soviet repressions. The Soviet deportations had taken place that very month, and the NKVD had shot Lithuanians in prisons just a few days before the Germans arrived. The Lithuanian diplomat Kazys Škirpa, who returned with the Germans, used this suffering in his radio broadcasts to spur mobs to murder. Some 2,500 Jews were killed by Lithuanians in bloody pogroms in early July.
As a result of trained collaboration and local assistance, German killers had all the help that they needed in Lithuania. The initial guidelines for killing Jews in certain positions were quickly exceeded by Einsatzgruppe A and the local collaborators it enlisted. Einsatzgruppe A had followed Army Group North into Lithuania. Einsatzkommando 3 of Einsatzgruppe A, responsible for the major Lithuanian city of Kaunas, had as many helpers as it needed. Einsatzkommando 3 numbered only 139 personnel, including secretaries and drivers, of which there were forty-four. In the weeks and months to come, Germans drove Lithuanians to killing sites around the city of Kaunas. By 4 July 1941 Lithuanian units were killing Jews under German supervision and orders. As early as 1 December Einsatzkommando 2 considered the Jewish problem in Lithuania resolved. It could report the killing of 133,346 persons, of whom some 114,856 were Jews. Despite Škirpa’s wishes, none of this served any Lithuanian political purpose. After he tried to declare an independent Lithuanian state, he was placed under house arrest.
The city of Vilnius had been the northeastern metropolitan center of independent Poland and briefly the capital of independent and Soviet Lithuania. But throughout all of these vicissitudes, and indeed for the previous half-millennium, Vilnius had been something else: a center of Jewish civilization, known as the Jerusalem of the North. Some seventy thousand Jews lived in the city when the war began. Whereas the rest of Lithuania and the other Baltic States were covered by Einsatzgruppe A, the Vilnius area (along with Soviet Belarus) fell to Einsatzgruppe B. The unit assigned to kill the Vilnius Jews was its Einsatzkommando 9. Here the shooting took place at the Ponary Forest, just beyond the city. By 23 July 1941 the Germans had assembled a Lithuanian auxiliary, which marched columns of Jews to Ponary. There, groups of twelve to twenty people at a time were taken to the edge of a pit, where they had to hand over valuables and clothes. Their gold teeth were removed by force. Some 72,000 Jews from Vilnius and elsewhere (and about eight thousand non-Jewish Poles and Lithuanians) were shot at Ponary.
Ita Straż was one of the very few survivors among the Jews of Vilnius. She was pulled by Lithuanian policemen to a pit that was already full of corpses. Nineteen years old at the time, she thought: “This is the end. And what have I seen of life?” The shots missed her, but she fell from fear into the pit. She was then covered by the corpses of the people who came after. Someone marched over the pile and fired downward, to make sure that everyone was dead. A bullet hit her hand, but she made no sound. She crept away later: “I was barefoot. I walked and walked over corpses. There seemed to be no end to it.”13
Neighboring Latvia, too, had been annexed by the Soviet Union just one year before the German invasion. Some twenty-one thousand Latvian citizens (many of them Latvian Jews) were deported by the Soviets, just weeks before the Germans arrived. The NKVD shot Latvian prisoners as the Wehrmacht approached Riga. The Germans’ main collaborator here was Viktor Arajs, a Latvian nationalist (German on his mother’s side) who happened to know the translator that German police forces brought to Riga. He was allowed to form the Arajs Commando, which in early July 1941 burned Jews alive in a Riga synagogue. As the Germans organized mass killings, they took care to choose Latvian shooters from among those whose families had suffered under Soviet rule. In July, under the supervision of Einsatzgruppe A commanders, the Arajs Commando marched Riga Jews to the nearby Bikernieki Forest and shot them. The Germans first carried out a “demonstration shooting,” and then had the Arajs Commando do much of the rest. With the assistance of such Latvians, the Germans were able to kill at least 69,750 of the country’s 80,000 Jews by the end of 1941.
In the third Baltic State, Estonia, the sense of humiliation after the Soviet occupation was just as great as in Lithuania and Latvia, if not greater. Unlike Vilnius and Riga, Tallinn had not even partially mobilized its army before surrendering to the Soviets in 1940. It had yielded to Soviet demands before the other Baltic States, thus precluding any sort of Baltic diplomatic solidarity. The Soviets had deported some 11,200 Estonians, including most of the political leadership. In Estonia, too, Einsatzgruppe A found more than enough local collaborators. Estonians who had resisted the Soviets in the forests now joined a Self-Defense Commando under the guidance of the Germans. Estonians who had collaborated with the Soviets also joined, in an effort to restore their reputations.
Estonians greeted the Germans as liberators, and in return the Germans regarded Estonians as racially superior not only to the Jews but to the other Baltic peoples. Jews in Estonia were very few. Estonians from the Self-Defense Commando killed all 963 Estonian Jews who could be found, at German orders. In Estonia the murders and pogroms continued without the Jews. About five thousand non-Jewish Estonians were killed for their ostensible collaboration with the Soviet regime.
East of the Molotov-Ribbentrop line, the Germans encountered the fresh traces of Soviet statebuilding as they began to build their own empire. The signs were even starker in what had been eastern Poland than in the Baltics. Whereas Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania had been incorporated by the Soviet Union a year before the German invasion, in June 1940, eastern Poland had been annexed by the Soviets nine months before that, in September 1939. Here the Germans found evidence of a social transformation. Industry had been nationalized, some farms had been collectivized, and a native elite had been all but destroyed. The Soviets had deported more than three hundred thousand Polish citizens and shot tens of thousands more. The German invasion prompted the NKVD to shoot some 9,817 imprisoned Polish citizens rather than allow them to fall into German hands. The Germans arrived in the western Soviet Union in summer 1941 to find NKVD prisons full of fresh corpses. These had to be cleared out before the Germans could use them for their own purposes.
Soviet mass murder provided the Germans with an occasion for propaganda. The Nazi line was that suffering under the Soviets was the fault of the Jews, and it found some resonance. With or without German agitation, many people in interwar Europe associated the Jews with communism. Interwar communist parties had in fact been heavily Jewish, especially in their leaderships, a fact upon which much of the press throughout Europe had commented for twenty years. Right-wing parties confused the issue by arguing that since many communists were Jews therefore many Jews were communists. These are very different propositions; the latter one was never true anywhere. Jews were blamed even before the war for the failings of national states; after the war began and national states collapsed during the Soviet or German invasion, the temptation for such scapegoating was all the greater. Estonians, Latvians, Lithuanians, and Poles had lost not only the independent states made for their nations but their status and local authority. They had surrendered all of this, in many cases, without putting up much of a fight. Nazi propaganda thus had a double appeal: it was no shame to lose to the Soviet communists, since they were backed by a powerful worldwide Jewish conspiracy; but since the Jews were ultimately to blame for communism, it was right to kill them now.
In an arc that extended southward from the Baltic Sea to the Black Sea, the last week of June and the first weeks of July 1941 brought violence against Jews. In Lithuania and Latvia, where the Germans could bring local nationalists with them, and could pose at least for a moment as a liberator of whole states, the resonance of propaganda was greater and local participation more notable. In some important places in what had been eastern Poland, such as Białystok, the Germans carried out large-scale killings with their own forces, thereby setting a kind of example. Białystok, just east of the Molotov-Ribbentrop line, had been a city in northeastern Poland, then in Soviet Belarus. Immediately after it was taken by the Wehrmacht on 27 June, Order Police Battalion 309 began to plunder and kill civilians. German policemen killed about three hundred Jews and left the bodies lying around the city. Then they drove several hundred more Jews into the synagogue and set it on fire, shooting those who tried to escape. In the two weeks that followed, local Poles took part in some thirty pogroms in the Białystok region. Meanwhile, Himmler journeyed to Białystok, where he gave instructions that Jews were to be treated as partisans. The Order Police took a thousand Jewish men from Białystok to its outskirts and shot them between 8 and 11 July.18
Further south in what had been eastern Poland, in regions where Ukrainians were a majority, Germans appealed to Ukrainian nationalism. Here the Germans blamed the Jews for Soviet oppression of Ukrainians. In Kremenets, where more than a hundred prisoners were found murdered, some 130 Jews were killed in a pogrom. In Lutsk, where some 2,800 prisoners were found machine-gunned, the Germans killed two thousand Jews, and called this revenge for the wrongs done to Ukrainians by Jewish communists. In Lviv, where about 2,500 prisoners were found dead in the NKVD prison, Einsatzgruppe C and local militia organized a pogrom that lasted for days. The Germans presented these people as Ukrainian victims of Jewish secret policemen: in fact, some of the victims were Poles and Jews (and most of the secret policemen were probably Russians and Ukrainians). The diary of a man belonging to another of the Einsatzgruppen recorded the scene on 5 July 1941: “Hundreds of Jews are running down the street with faces covered with blood, holes in their heads, and eyes hanging out.” In the first few days of the war, local militias, with and without various kinds of German aid and encouragement, killed and instigated others to kill about 19,655 Jews in pogroms.
Political calculation and local suffering do not entirely explain the participation in these pogroms. Violence against Jews served to bring the Germans and elements of the local non-Jewish population closer together. Anger was directed, as the Germans wished, toward the Jews, rather than against collaborators with the Soviet regime as such. People who reacted to the Germans’ urging knew that they were pleasing their new masters, whether or not they believed that the Jews were responsible for their own woes. By their actions they were confirming the Nazi worldview. The act of killing Jews as revenge for NKVD executions confirmed the Nazi understanding of the Soviet Union as a Jewish state. Violence against Jews also allowed local Estonians, Latvians, Lithuanians, Ukrainians, Belarusians, and Poles who had themselves cooperated with the Soviet regime to escape any such taint. The idea that only Jews served communists was convenient not just for the occupiers but for some of the occupied as well.
Yet this psychic nazification would have been much more difficult without the palpable evidence of Soviet atrocities. The pogroms took place where the Soviets had recently arrived and where Soviet power was recently installed, where for the previous months Soviet organs of coercion had organized arrests, executions, and deportations. They were a joint production, a Nazi edition of a Soviet text.
The encounter with Soviet violence east of the Molotov-Ribbentrop line served the SS, and its leaders. Himmler and Heydrich had always maintained that life was a clash of ideologies, and that traditional European understandings of the rule of law had to give way to the ruthless violence needed to destroy the racial and ideological enemy in the East. The traditional enforcers of German law, the police, had to become “ideological soldiers.” Thus before the war Himmler and Heydrich had purged the ranks of the police of men deemed unreliable, encouraged policemen to join the SS, and placed the SS and the Security Police (Order Police plus Gestapo) under a single structure of command. Their goal was to create a unified force dedicated to preemptive racial warfare. By the time of the invasion of the Soviet Union, about a third of German policemen with officer rank belonged to the SS, and about two thirds belonged to the National Socialist party.
The German surprise attack had caught the NKVD off guard, and made the East appear to be a domain of lawlessness primed for a new German order. The NKVD, usually discreet, had been revealed as the murderer of prisoners. Germans broke through the levels of mystification, secrecy, and dissimulation that had covered the (far greater) Soviet crimes of 1937-1938 and 1930-1933. The Germans (along with their allies) were the only power ever to penetrate the territory of the Soviet Union in this way, and so the only people in a position to present such direct evidence of Stalinist murder. Because it was the Germans who discovered these crimes, the prison murders were politics before they were history. Fact used as propaganda is all but impossible to disentangle from the politics of its original transmission.
Because of the visible record of Soviet violence, German forces of order could present themselves as undoing Soviet crimes even as they engaged in crimes of their own. In light of their indoctrination, what Germans found in the doubly occupied lands made a certain kind of sense to them. It seemed to be a confirmation of what they had been trained and prepared to see: Soviet criminality, supposedly steered by and for the benefit of Jews. Soviet atrocities would help German SS-men, policemen, and soldiers justify to themselves the policies to which they were soon summoned: the murder of Jewish women and children. Yet the prison shootings, significant as they were to the local people who suffered Soviet criminality, were for Nazi leaders rather catalyst than cause.
In July 1941, Himmler was eager to show his master Hitler that he was attuned to the darker side of National Socialism, and ready to pursue policies of absolute ruthlessness. His SS and police were in competition for authority in the new eastern colonies with military and civilian occupation authorities. He was also in a personal contest for Hitler’s favor with Göring, whose plans for economic expansion lost credibility as the war preceded. Himmler would demonstrate that shooting was easier than starvation, deportation, and slavery. As Reich Commissar for the Strengthening of Germandom, Himmler’s authority as chief of racial affairs extended only to conquered Poland, not to the conquered Soviet Union. But as German forces moved into the prewar Soviet Union, Himmler behaved as if it did, using his power as head of the police and the SS to begin a policy of racial transformation that depended upon mortal violence.
In July 1941, Himmler traveled personally throughout the western Soviet Union to pass on the new line: Jewish women and children should be killed along with Jewish men. The forces on the ground reacted immediately. Einsatzgruppe C, which had followed Army Group South into Ukraine, had been slower than Einsatzgruppe A (the Baltic States) and Einsatzgruppe B (Vilnius and Belarus) to undertake mass shootings of Jews as such. But then, at Himmler’s instigation, Einsatzgruppe C killed some sixty thousand Jews in August and September. These were organized shootings, not pogroms. Indeed, Einsatzkommando 5 of Einsatzgruppe C complained on 21 July that a pogrom by local Ukrainians and German soldiers hindered them from shooting the Jews of Uman. In the next two days, however, Einsatzkommando did shoot about 1,400 Uman Jews (sparing a few Jewish women who were to take gravestones from the Jewish cemetery and use them to build a road). Einsatzkommando of Einsatzgruppe C seems not to have killed women and children until a personal inspection by Himmler.
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