Black Earth(52)

Germans found the conditions where “one could do as one pleased,” where they could kill Jews in large numbers for the first time, in 1941, as they invaded the Soviet Union. It was in the zone of double occupation, where Soviet rule preceded German, where the Soviet destruction of interwar states was followed by the German annihilation of Soviet institutions, that a Final Solution took shape. Almost all of the two million or so Jews who came under German rule in 1939 would die. The same was true of the two million Jews who came under Soviet rule in 1939 and 1940. Indeed, the Jews who initially fell under Soviet rule were the first to be murdered en masse by the Germans.

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When the Germans and the Soviets undertook their joint invasion of Poland in September 1939, the Soviets were the senior partners in political violence. The Soviet secret state police, the NKVD, had experience in mass killing that was unrivalled by any German institution. Some 681,692 Soviet citizens had been arrested, shot, and buried in pits in the operations of the Great Terror of 1937–1938. The NKVD had shot twice as many Poles on its own territory while preparing for war in those years than the Einsatzgruppen shot when German forces actually invaded Poland in 1939. In proportional terms the contrast is far greater. The killing of 111,091 Soviet citizens in the Polish Operation of 1937–1938 changed the nationality structure of the western Soviet Union. A third of the male Soviet Poles of military age were killed before the war in this and other terror actions, their wives and children often sent to be denationalized at concentration camps or orphanages. The Soviet republics that bordered Poland, Soviet Ukraine and Soviet Belarus, lost a considerable part of their Polish minority to murder and deportation: some 59,903 people in Ukraine, some 61,501 people in Belarus.

Stalin’s rationale for the mass murder of Soviet citizens of Polish nationality was not racial but ethnostrategic. At Stalin’s behest and under his guidance, the NKVD used interrogations to develop a theory of a vast Polish plot against the Soviet Union, directed by the Polish Military Organization. This was entirely false. While veterans of the Polish Military Organization were quite active in Polish military intelligence and in the higher reaches of the state, the institution as such no longer existed, and certainly not as assassins and saboteurs on Soviet territory. The veterans of the Polish Military Organization, insofar as they were plotting acts of conspiratorial violence in the late 1930s, were thinking of the British in Palestine. By the end of the Great Terror, however, the NKVD had assembled enough confessions by torture to compose a fictional narrative in which even leaders of the Soviet state were secret Polish agents. This proved to be quite risky for the NKVD itself. Since the imagined conspiracy grew from week to week in 1937 and 1938, NKVD commanders could always be charged with having neglected the Polish danger in the past.

In 1938, Stalin was able to turn the Soviet communist party, an early target of the purges, against the NKVD. When higher officers of the secret state police were themselves arrested and killed, younger ones took their places. As a consequence, the nationality structure of the NKVD was altered. It was no longer an exceptionally cosmopolitan elite with revolutionary prestige in which Jews (and Latvians and Poles) were highly represented. Polish officers were removed and often executed in the Polish Operation. Then the entire NKVD was purged: first for not being vigilant enough, then for being too vigilant. By the end of 1938, the NKVD had become an organization dominated by Russians (65 percent of high officers) and Ukrainians (17 percent of high officers). Russians were now overrepresented in the NKVD by comparison to their share in the general Soviet population. The percentage of Jews was down from nearly forty percent to less than four percent. There were no longer any Poles at all.

It was this NKVD, experienced in murder, humbled by Stalin, and russified, that was turned against Polish institutions and elites after the Soviet invasion of eastern Poland of September 17, 1939. An actual assault on potential resisters in eastern Poland was a much safer assignment for the NKVD than the Polish Operation inside the Soviet Union had been, since real enemies could be found among the Polish citizenry, and real progress could be reported. The collapse of Poland brought by German and Soviet arms generated real chaos that could demonstrably be mastered. In eastern Poland, Soviet soldiers beat men to death for their gold teeth and raped women in the knowledge that this would be dismissed as “children playing a little.” Soviet invasion meant local uprisings by native communists, who often robbed and killed Poles who had been in authority, and by native nationalists, who often believed Soviet propaganda about national freedom to the east and national liberation by the Red Army. It meant attacks upon Polish officials and landowners, the score settling that is always to be expected when regimes change with sudden violence.