Black Earth(72)

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Vilnius, the Jerusalem of Lithuania, was home to nearly a hundred thousand Jews. Vilnius had been the Lithuanian capital between December 1939, when it was granted to Lithuania after the Soviet invasion of Poland, and June 1940, when the Soviet Union occupied and then annexed Lithuania. Between June 1940 and June 1941, it was the capital of the Lithuanian Soviet Socialist Republic. But throughout all of these political incarnations Vilnius was, in its population, a city of Poles and Jews. The Lithuanian Activist Front was more concerned with the Poles than the Jews in Vilnius, and tried with no success to persuade its German patrons that the Polish problem should be the higher priority. In fact, the Germans used Lithuanians to rid Vilnius of Jews. By July 1941, the main killing site was the Ponary Forest, just beyond the city. The murder operations there were led by Dr. Alfred Filbert, the commander of Einsatzkommando 9, and one of the young intellectuals of the SS. Filbert’s men began very early to shoot Jewish women and children as well as Jewish men.

This innovation took place under the pressure of failure on the battlefield. If the Judeobolshevik myth worked as politics in lands where the Soviets had destroyed the state, it failed as the basis for a military strategy. The Germans were facing difficulties on the battlefield that the Lithuanians could not grasp and that they themselves could not admit. The Soviet Union had not collapsed like a “house of cards” or a “giant with feet of clay.” Lithuania was the hinterland of Army Group North, which in the first weeks of the war was seen by Hitler, the author of those phrases, as the most important. The commanders of Army Group North were quite aware that their advance to Leningrad was not going as quickly as anticipated. By August 1941, Hitler was signaling to some of his closest collaborators, in the most indirect of ways, that the war was not going as planned. In Germany, Jews over the age of six were required to wear the Star of David that September, signifying their responsibility for the lost momentum of the military campaign. They were marked as hostages to the success of German soldiers, an extraordinary shift of responsibility that would be followed to its logical conclusion.

If the Soviet Union could not be brought down by a rapid attack against Jews, then Germany would have to be defended by a systematic campaign against the Jews under German control. Army commanders dropped whatever reservations they might have had about the activities of the Einsatzgruppen. Himmler began to order the murder of Jewish women and children. There was some difficulty in practice with this, even for some SS officers. Stahlecker, the commander of Einsatzgruppe A and thus the immediate superior of Filbert, recognized that the murder of civilians was an “emotional strain.” Extra alcohol was given to German men who shot Jewish children, but this was not enough. Commanders had to explain to their men why they should violate a basic taboo. Though evidence of what they said is sketchy, educated SD officers such as Filbert, a doctor of law, presumably transmitted and adapted ideas making the rounds back in Germany. In the Nazi press, a key idea from Hitler’s My Struggle was brought to public attention in July 1941: that the Jews must be annihilated because they wish to kill all Germans. This notion then quickly appeared in correspondence between the German executioners and their families: The enemy must be exterminated because his goal is our extermination; the children we murder suffer less than the children the Soviets murder. The killers seemed to be taking refuge in the idea that it was the enemy that was guilty of total policies of extermination, to which their deeds were nothing more than local self-defense. It took Einsatzkommandos such as Filbert’s a few weeks to shift from killing a few women and older children to killing them all.





Their hesitations about murdering women and children motivated Germans to recruit local people. Filbert expanded the remit of the Einsatzkommando by engaging local Lithuanians, Poles, and Russians to assist in the shooting. Most of the men he recruited had been in the Red Army, and so had something to prove. Filbert himself had an unusual appreciation of these complex motivations, the need to overcome shadows from the past. He knew that not all communists were Jews, since his own brother was a communist who spent the war in German camps.

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The Germans had come to understand that pogroms were not an effective way to eliminate Jews, but that the production of lawlessness was an appropriate way to find murderers who could be recruited for organized actions. Within weeks they grasped that people liberated from Soviet rule could be drawn into violence for psychological, material, and political reasons. Local people who returned with the Germans brought and amplified the German message that liberation from the Jews was the only liberation on offer, and a precondition for any further political discussions. People who had fled Soviet occupation for Berlin and new recruits in the country itself could be used in this way as translators. Local collaborators added, perhaps for their own purposes, the proposition that killing a Jew would remove the stain of Soviet collaboration. In this way, in June and July 1941, the German entrepreneurs of violence found the way to exploit the available post-Soviet resources.