Black Earth(65)

Even the most hidebound Nazis realized, once they had actually arrived in eastern Europe, that the situation was not so simple as this. The truly spontaneous score settling that followed the arrival of German troops was politically rather than racially motivated and killed a very small number of Jews—and also killed people who were not Jewish. The instructions conveyed to the Einsatzgruppen commanders were to create the appearance of local spontaneity, which, of course, suggests that the reality was absent. In practice, the Germans concluded within a few weeks that the stimulation of pogroms among people who had been ruled by the Soviet Union was not the way forward to a Final Solution. In consecutively occupied Lithuania, where the Holocaust began, less than one percent of the Jews who were murdered were victims of pogroms. For that matter, Germans were present at every single pogrom.

After the war, Soviet propaganda repeated the Nazi case. One unpleasant reality with which Soviet propagandists had to contend was that the Holocaust had begun precisely where the Soviet Union had brought its own new revolutionary order in 1939 and 1940. A second was that Soviet citizens of all nationalities, including considerable numbers of communists, had collaborated with the Germans in the killing of Jews everywhere that contact with Germans was made: both in the territories that the Soviets annexed in 1939 and 1940 and in the territories of the prewar Soviet Union, including Soviet Russia. Thus, Soviet propagandists tried with Orwellian precision to ethnicize history and to limit responsibility for the Holocaust to Lithuanians and Latvians, precisely the peoples whose states the Soviet Union had destroyed in 1940, and to west Ukrainians, whose national aspirations were also crushed by Soviet power. This export of moral responsibility seemed to justify the renewed Soviet takeover of these lands after the war. Thus the Nazis first and the Soviets later made efforts to direct responsibility for the killing of the Jews to the countries they both invaded.

Certainly there was abundant local antisemitism in eastern Europe. Hostility to Jews in the major Jewish homeland had been an important current in religious, cultural, and political life for hundreds of years. In interwar Poland in particular, the idea that Jews were alien to the national body and should leave the national territory was ever more popular in the 1930s. Yet the relationship between sentiment and killing is not straightforward. Age-old antisemitism cannot explain why pogroms began precisely in summer 1941. Such an explanation ignores the suggestive fact that pogroms were most numerous where Germans drove out Soviet power, and the obviously material fact that the instigation of pogroms in such places was explicit German policy. Pogroms and other forms of local collaboration in killing were less likely in Poland, where antisemitism had been more prevalent before the war, than they were in Lithuania and Latvia, where antisemitism was less prevalent. In the Soviet Union, where before the war antisemitism was a crime, there was much more direct collaboration in the killing of Jews than in Poland. In the occupied USSR, the killing of Jews began immediately upon contact with German forces. In occupied Poland, the Holocaust began more than two years after the German invasion and was largely isolated from the local population. In the occupied Soviet Union, the killing of Jews took place in the open air, in front of the population, with the help of young male Soviet citizens.

It is tempting to imagine that a simple idea in the minds of simple people decades past and thousands of miles away can explain a complex event. The notion that local east European antisemitism killed the Jews of eastern Europe confers upon others a sense of superiority akin to that the Nazis once felt. These people are quite primitive, we can allow ourselves to think. Not only does this account fail as an explanation of the Holocaust; its racism prevents us from considering the possibility that not only Germans and Jews but also local peoples were individual human agents with complex goals that were reflected in politics. When we fall into the trap of ethnicization and collective responsibility, we collude with Nazi and Soviet propagandists in the abolition of political thought and the lifting of individual agency.

What happened in the second half of 1941 was an accelerating campaign of murder that took a million Jewish lives and apparently convinced the German leadership that all Jews under their control could be eliminated. This calamity cannot be explained by stereotypes of passive or communist Jews, of orderly or preprogrammed Germans, of beastly or antisemitic locals, or indeed by any other cliché, no matter how powerful at the time, no matter how convenient today. This unprecedented mass murder would have been impossible without a special kind of politics.

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The commencement of mass killing in the doubly occupied lands was the latest stage in the development of the new politics initiated eight years earlier, when Hitler came to power in Germany. Just as Nazis had to reach other Germans to develop biological politics within Germany, so Germans had to reach non-Germans for Nazi ideology to be realized beyond Germany.