Black Earth(74)

On July 4, 1941, Arājs published advertisements, worded quite vaguely, encouraging Latvians to register for a new auxiliary police unit that would work for the Germans. He made no mention of Jews. Many of his first recruits were Red Army soldiers who had been soldiers of the Latvian army before that. Very likely these were men who wished to undo the double shame of losing Latvian independence and wearing the Soviet uniform. Volunteers who had served in the Soviet militias were probably also hoping to cleanse themselves of a Soviet past. Arājs also recruited with some success, following instructions from Stahlecker, among Latvians who had a grievance against Soviet rule. One new recruit, for example, had seen his parents deported by the Soviets. The largest age group among the new auxiliary policemen was between sixteen and twenty-one. For many such young people, the prior year of Soviet occupation, one way or another, must have been a decisive experience. Most of the new auxiliary policemen were working class. None of the first recruits knew in advance that his major duty would be to shoot Jews. Many of them did not volunteer at all, but were transferred from the regular police because the initial number of volunteers was insufficient. Certainly not all of these people were Latvian nationalists. Some of them were Russians.

The Arājs Kommando, the brainchild of Stahlecker, was overseen by his subordinates Rudolf Batz and Rudolf Lange. They taught its members how to assemble Jews and shoot them, and then passed responsibility for the killing to Arājs. He and his men shot Riga Jews in the forest of Bikernieki beyond the city. Then they traveled by an infamous blue bus throughout the countryside for six months, between July and December 1941, killing the Jews of the towns and villages. Of the sixty-six thousand or so Jews living in Latvia in summer 1941, the Arājs Kommando shot about twenty-two thousand, and then assisted in the killing of some twenty-eight thousand more. Like other murderers serving German policy, and like the German murderers themselves, they killed whom they were assigned to kill. Like all of the mass murderers of Jews, they also murdered non-Jews. As they moved through the country, they shot patients of psychiatric hospitals, for example. After most of the Latvian Jews had been killed, the Arājs Kommando was dispatched to combat Soviet partisans, which in practice meant shooting Belarusian civilians.

Throughout all of this, Arājs was personally troubled that his legal credentials, assembled under Latvian and Soviet rule, were no longer valid. After his career of mass murder, he returned to university at Riga, where he completed a German degree in law.

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The Einsatzgruppen were a hybrid institution, serving a state that was defined in racial terms, following ambiguous orders that allowed some room for maneuver. In Germany itself, the Einsatzgruppen existed only in training academies. Beyond Germany, they murdered and they pioneered. The Arājs Kommando represented a major innovation, developed within two weeks of the invasion itself: the organized use of substantial numbers of armed locals under German command to find, assemble, and kill Jews. Before the invasion there had been no thought of arming local people for any purpose; indeed, Hitler had explicitly forbidden this. Stahlecker and other commanders quickly saw and exploited the psychological, material, and political resources they inherited from the Soviets, thereby moving towards Hitler’s grand design. By August 6, 1941, Stahlecker was able to contemplate “the unique possibility of a radical treatment of the Jewish question in the Ostraum,” the East.

Aside from the Einsatzgruppen, the other German hybrid institution operative in the East was the Higher SS and Police Leaders. These men commanded both SS and police forces in a given zone of the occupied Soviet Union, bringing together racial and state organizations. In Germany, the Higher SS and Police Leaders had next to no meaning, but in the occupied Soviet Union they were Himmler’s key subordinates. They reported directly to him, just as the Einsatzgruppen commanders reported directly to Heydrich. They, too, were expected to learn, experiment, and innovate. For example, Himmler could tell Friedrich Jeckeln, the Higher SS and Police Leader for Southern Russia (in practice, Ukraine), that Jewish children and women were to be shot, as he seems to have done on August 12, 1941. Just how this would be achieved was to be decided on the spot.

Jeckeln was the outstanding entrepreneur of violence among the Higher SS and Police Leaders. By the end of August 1941, he had determined that essentially all German units, be they SS, police, or army, could take part in mass coordinated shootings of Jews. Jeckeln’s operations would show that even Germans who had no special preparation could participate in mass murder on a truly titanic scale.

Jeckeln’s innovation was a result of the unexpected appearance of stateless Jewish refugees from Czechoslovakia in a zone of Soviet Ukraine under German occupation. The history of their death, which is also the history of the emergence of industrial killing, began years earlier with the destruction of their state. As Czechoslovakia was disassembled in 1938 and 1939, Czechoslovak Jews lost protection from their state. When Germany annexed the “Sudetenland” in November 1938, the Jews there either fled and abandoned their property or found themselves second-class citizens of the German Reich. Between November 1938 and March 1939, Jews were still citizens of the new truncated republic of Czecho-Slovakia. In March 1939, when Hitler moved to complete the destruction of the Czechoslovak state, these Jews were divided into different communities of fate. Jews from Bohemia and Moravia found themselves in a Protectorate where only Germans were granted citizenship, subjected to the racial laws of the Reich. Jews of Slovakia found themselves at the mercy of lawmakers of a newly independent Slovak state.