Black Earth(69)

If Heydrich’s order was meant to bring about widespread pogroms in northeastern Poland, it failed. In contrast to southeastern Poland, where Ukrainian nationalists were at work, there was no obvious political question, no prior political organization, and no body of selected and trained emigrants to translate the German program into a local liberation. In early July 1941, northeastern Poland received unusually intense attention from the Nazi leadership and the German police. Heydrich repeated his orders to incite pogroms. Himmler, who was disappointed with the absence of pogroms in the region, came to Bia?ystok and gave a similar order. Even G?ring visited the region during these days and issued the same instructions himself.

The presence and preferences of three of the highest Nazi officials brought an unusually thick presence of German police forces to the region. They came from three different directions. Elements of Einsatzgruppe B returned from the east, police from the enlarged Reich arrived from the northeast, and police from Warsaw in the General Government arrived from the southwest. The members of all three of these units had a great deal of experience in the mass murder of Poles and Jews. Indeed, some of the policemen coming from Warsaw already had memories of prior murder in Bia?ystok, since the Warsaw stationary police had been constituted from Einsatzgruppe IV, which had ravaged the city in 1939. Even this unusual attention by the top German leadership and the rally of German police forces from all sides could not compensate for the absence of the political resource. The Germans provoked about a dozen pogroms, and local Poles killed several thousand Jews. These results were far inferior, from the German perspective, to the killing in southeastern Poland, where politically motivated Ukrainians were at work.

The scale of the murder was also inferior to what the Germans were already achieving to the north and east, as they drove Soviet forces from Lithuania and Latvia and occupied these countries themselves. Indeed, the return visit of German forces to northeastern Poland in early July 1941 was probably an attempt to match the results already achieved in Lithuania and Latvia. The pogroms in northeastern Poland began after Germans and Lithuanians were already killing Jews in Lithuania, one whole country to the north and east. For that matter, the pogroms in northeastern Poland began after Germans and Latvians were killing Jews in Latvia, two whole countries to the north and east. The killings in northeastern Poland, in this broader perspective, represented a de-escalation rather than an escalation, since murder in the region was much less widespread than in Lithuania and Latvia. And it stopped after a few weeks. Pogroms without a political resource were a blind alley.

The Germans were learning a new politics, and both success and failure were instructive. The distribution of pogroms, and the absence of truly spontaneous pogroms, demonstrated that the initial Nazi assumptions about local behavior were wrong. The Nazi logic was that the subhumans could be provoked to kill their Jewish exploiters. In fact, pogroms in northeastern Poland tended to take place where non-Jews had collaborated with the Soviet regime. In places where Jewish communists were numerous, pogroms were actually less common, since communism in a given locality meant contacts between Jews and non-Jews and a habit of conspiracy. Communist Jews had places to seek advice and places to hide. The same held for Pi?sudski’s interwar electoral bloc, which had been a multinational undertaking. When it was significant in a given community, Jews and Poles tended to have civil relations, and pogroms were less likely to take place.

The most notorious pogrom in northeastern Poland, at Jedwabne on July 10, 1941, demonstrated how little the Germans understood. German police returned to Jedwabne on that day, more than two weeks after the actual change of regime, and two weeks after the Bia?ystok example. In Jedwabne, the Germans had, although they did not know this, the ideal conditions for a pogrom. In the interwar years communism and the Pi?sudski movement had been weak in the area, which meant that there was little tradition of Jewish-Polish contacts. The person who had betrayed the anti-Soviet Polish underground in Jedwabne to the Soviets was a Pole, not a Jew. The Germans were offering, as the Poles understood even if the Germans did not, an opportunity for self-cleansing, in which responsibility for the Soviet regime could be placed upon the local Jews and then eliminated.

The scenography in Jedwabne followed closely that of Bia?ystok, except that here Germans set the rules and Poles followed them. In the presence of German police, some local Poles forced some local Jews to remove the Lenin statue. Then about three hundred Jews, some carrying a red banner to symbolize their supposed link to communism, were marched to a barn and burned alive by some of their Polish neighbors. As in most such cases, individuals who had collaborated with communism were certainly killing individuals who had not. The mass murder created a collective stereotype, ethnicizing the guilt and rearranging the past. The Lenin statue was burned in the barn along with the Jews (much as Lenin signs were burned with “Jewish” books back in Germany). The lie that the Germans told to the Poles through posters and megaphones—that Jews were communists and communists Jews—was told back to the Germans by the Poles in cinders and ash.