Black Earth(68)

In Lwów on July 25, 1941, more than four weeks after the NKVD had shot its prisoners, Jews were killed in a pogrom organized by the Germans with the help of local nationalists. This was anything but a spontaneous reaction. Active assistance in pogroms in summer 1941 provided useful political cover for the large number of Ukrainians who had been communists or Soviet collaborators or both. The Judeobolshevik myth, spread locally by militias, provided the perfect escape route for most Soviet collaborators, who, in fact, were Ukrainian. Nationalists told fellow Ukrainians that they could purge themselves of the stain of collaboration with the Soviets by killing one Jew. Quite often, as in the town of Mizoch, some of the collaborators with Soviet rule were Ukrainian nationalists who, until summer 1941, had cooperated with Jews in the Soviet apparatus.

By reducing actual Ukrainian political experience to the abstraction of Judeobolshevism, the Germans gave Ukrainians who had collaborated with the Soviets a chance, which they quickly took. Again and again, Ukrainians identified Jews as communists and Soviet collaborators, thereby sheltering themselves and their families. In the town of Klevan, for example, Ukrainians went from Jewish house to Jewish house, pointing out supposed Soviet collaborators. In Dubno, where three-quarters of the population was Jewish, some of the Ukrainians allowed by the Germans to run the town in 1941 had offered their services to the Soviets in 1939. In other words, Ukrainians who spent the first two years of the war helping the local NKVD commander (who was Jewish) deport Poles, Jews, and Ukrainians shifted to helping the SS kill Jews, Ukrainians, and Poles whom they—actual Soviet collaborators—denounced as Soviet collaborators. The Germans were unable to process the rush of denunciations, and, falling back upon their own racial illusions, were often manipulated. Double collaboration was noticed by Jews and Poles in these places, but is absent in both Ukrainian and German histories of the war.

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In doubly occupied northeastern Poland, where there was no national question and thus no political resource, the chain of events was rather different. In the weeks after the invasion, the Germans dedicated far more of their own resources to provoking violence against Jews, with far weaker results. Jews were killed by the Germans, and eventually also by Poles, but in smaller numbers and in fewer places.





In Bia?ystok, a major city of northeastern Poland, the Germans began the mass killing themselves in June 1941. By this time the city had already been occupied twice. First had come the German army in September 1939, followed by the bloodiest German special unit of the Polish campaign, Einsatzgruppe IV, which killed Poles and Jews in the city. By the terms of the Treaty on Borders and Friendship between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union of the twenty-eighth of that month, the Wehrmacht and SS withdrew from Bia?ystok to be replaced by the Red Army and the NKVD. Under Soviet power, much of the city center was disassembled, and Jewish enterprises (along with all others) were closed. The Soviet occupation then continued until the German reinvasion of June 1941. On June 27, 1941, Order Police Battalion 329 entered Bia?ystok, with general orders to eliminate Soviet stragglers and “enemies.” What followed was a new type of German mass murder, perhaps meant as a prototype.

Jews were ordered to clear Bia?ystok of Lenin and Stalin statues as Soviet music played in the background. German policemen spread through the city, with orders to seize all Jewish men of military age. They shot a number of them on the spot. German policemen shot ten Jews inside one of the city’s many small synagogues and then left their corpses on its steps. They seized some women and children and well over a thousand men. Some Germans raped Jewish women. Meanwhile, other German policemen sealed the neighborhood around the synagogue and mounted a machine gun in front of it. The Germans then forced the Jews into the synagogue, poured gasoline on the exterior, and set it aflame. The screaming was punctuated by machine gun fire for about half an hour. The logic of this scenography was evident: The Jews were responsible for the Soviet occupation, and liberation meant killing them. This was no doubt clear enough to a population that was fully aware of the Judeobolshevik myth, which had been widespread on the Polish Right in the interwar period. Nevertheless, the German mass murder by immolation of June 27 did not lead to the immediate results the Germans seem to have expected.

In those days of late June and early July 1941, Poles were settling scores in northeastern Poland. Just as the arrival of the Red Army twenty months before had brought local violence, so, too, did the arrival of the German army. Some Poles killed some Jews, but some Poles also killed other Poles. These spontaneous individual killings followed no scenography. Poles did not immediately follow the Bia?ystok example, as clear as it was. Two days after the mass murder in Bia?ystok, Heydrich issued a specific order to his Einsatzgruppen to inspire pogroms while this was still possible, in the chaos of the collapse of Soviet power. These “self-cleansing efforts” were to be “provoked without leaving a trace, to be intensified when necessary, to be channeled into the proper course. The local ‘self-defense’ should be denied the possibility of later referring to political assurances.”