Black Earth(64)

The Holocaust has ingrained racial stereotypes in our own minds; but no stereotype can explain why and how, in the six months after the German invasion of the Soviet Union, a technique to kill Jews in large numbers was developed and some one million Jews were murdered. A stereotype of Germans is that they are orderly and follow plans. Yet when the invasion of the Soviet Union began on June 22, 1941, Berlin had no plan for the mass extermination of Soviet Jews, let alone for all Jews under German control. One notion was that Soviet Jews would be sent to Siberia after a quick and triumphant military campaign against the Red Army. There was no discussion of a Final Solution to take place during the war, nor could there have been, since German leaders took for granted that the war would take weeks and the Final Solution years.

Sometimes the Einsatzgruppen who followed the Wehrmacht into the Soviet Union are presented as unstoppable agents of evil with an unambiguous program of total killing. In this argument, the men of the Einsatzgruppen knew from the beginning, regardless of whether or not there was a plan, that they were supposed to kill all of the Jews. An image emerges of the Einsatzgruppen as special antisemitic units with perfect knowledge and exclusive responsibility. But this was not, in fact, the case. The Einsatzgruppen had orders to shoot some Jews from the beginning, but not to shoot them all; their initial instructions mentioned Jews as one category among others. Their basic task at the beginning of the invasion of the Soviet Union was to demolish the state, as they had done in Poland. Thus their targets were groups thought to be mainstays of the Soviet regime. In Poland this had meant educated Poles; in the Soviet Union this meant, as the Nazis saw matters, communists and Jewish males.

Antisemitism cannot fully explain the behavior of the members of the Einsatzgruppen. The Einsatzgruppen sent into Austria and Czechoslovakia in 1938 did not kill Jews. The Einsatzgruppen sent into Poland in 1939 killed far more Poles than Jews. Even the Einsatzgruppen sent into the USSR killed others besides Jews. Throughout the occupation of the Soviet Union they murdered the disabled, Gypsies, communists, and, in some regions, Poles. There were for that matter no Germans (or collaborators) whose only task was to shoot Jews; everyone who was expected to shoot Jews was also expected to shoot others, and did so. Among the thousands of members of the Einsatzgruppen and the tens of thousands of Germans who shot Jews there is no known perpetrator who agreed to kill Jews but refused to kill Gypsies or Belarusian civilians or Soviet prisoners of war. Nor were there perpetrators who agreed to kill Belarusian civilians or Soviet prisoners of war or Gypsies but not Jews. The people who killed people, killed people.

The Einsatzgruppen shot others besides Jews; and others besides the Einsatzgruppen shot Jews. Although the Einsatzgruppen were the first to shoot Jews in large numbers, they were a small minority of the German perpetrators. The myth of their total responsibility arose during postwar trials in the Federal Republic of Germany as a way to protect the majority of German killers and isolate the killing from German society as such. In fact, German policemen were far more numerous than the Einsatzgruppen on the eastern front and killed more Jews. These men usually lacked the special preparation of the Einsatzgruppen, but they had been a focus of Himmler and Heydrich’s attempt to create hybrid institutions within Germany that would permit destruction and racial warfare beyond its borders. Policemen deemed unreliable had been removed from service. By the time of the invasion of the USSR, about a third of policemen with officer rank belonged to the SS, and about two-thirds belonged to the National Socialist party. Regardless of whether or not they were party or SS members, German policemen were dispatched to the East and murdered Jews. German soldiers also killed a large number of Jews, and assisted the Einsatzgruppen and the police in organizing ever larger mass shootings in 1941.

In 1941, the German members of the Einsatzgruppen, the German policemen, and the German soldiers worked together with a large number of local people of multiple nationalities who had experienced Soviet rule. Together these groups developed techniques of mass murder during the first six months after the German invasion. The techniques reflected no prior plan; indeed, some of them contravened initial orders. The Einsatzgruppen were doing what Himmler and Heydrich told them to do, but their commanders were also refining methods of killing and inventing rationalizations for killing. The commanders had to test whether their operations and rationalizations were acceptable to other German forces; they had to persuade their own men to kill women and children; and they had to find ways to generate local collaboration as the job became too large and difficult.

If the killing of 1941 involved locals, then perhaps it was a result of local antisemitism rather than German politics? This is a popular way to explain the Holocaust without politics: as a historically predictable outburst of the barbarity of east Europeans. This sort of explanation is reassuring, since it permits the thought that only peoples associated with extravagant antisemitism would indulge in disastrous violence. This comforting and erroneous thought is a legacy of Nazi racism and colonialism. The racist and colonial idea that the Holocaust began as an elemental explosion of primitive antisemitism arose as Nazi propaganda and apologetics. The Germans wished to display the killing of Jews on the eastern front as the righteous anger of oppressed peoples against their supposed Jewish overlords.