Black Earth(75)

The easternmost part of Czechoslovakia, Subcarpathian Ruthenia, underwent a different history. In October and November 1938, Germany had forced Czechoslovakia to cede southern Slovak territories as well as some of Subcarpathian Ruthenia to Hungary. In March 1939, when Czechoslovakia was completely dismantled, Hungary was granted the rest of the region. The Jews of Subcarpathian Ruthenia fell under Hungarian law. Jewish professionals and tradesmen were required to seek licenses, which often led to their losing their livelihoods. To become Hungarian citizens, Jews had to show that they or their families had been subjects of the Hungarian crown in 1918. In fact, Hungarian officials were instructed to treat Jews as “suspicious elements” regardless of what documents they assembled. Jews went to great trouble and expense to demonstrate their connection to the prior Hungarian state, but were excluded from state protection anyway. Hungary deported Jews and others from its new territories to Poland and to Slovakia as best it could beginning in March 1939. Not long after Germany invaded the Soviet Union in June 1941, Hungary began to deport populations regarded as undesirable, including but not limited to the Jews, to areas of Soviet Ukraine under German occupation.

Hungary made Jews stateless, and Germany killed them. What from the perspective of Budapest was an ethnic cleansing campaign became for Jeckeln the impulse towards a policy of industrial-scale killing. On August 26 and 27, 1941, Jeckeln oversaw a mass shooting operation in Kamianets’ Podils’kyi designed to eliminate these stateless Jews who had been removed from Czechoslovak protection and excluded from the Hungarian state, as well as thousands of other local Jews. Vladimir P., for example, was from a family of local Jews. They were Soviet citizens who had experienced the risks and opportunities of the communist regime for two decades. His father had survived an arrest by the NKVD but did not escape the Germans. Vladimir himself slipped away only because he knew a local police officer, an acquaintance from Soviet times; all local collaborators, like all local victims, had been Soviet citizens. Vladimir’s family were among the 23,600 Jews assembled and shot. The episode began with the conventional Nazi association of the communist and the Jew. Jeckeln chose a Jewish man at random and called him “Béla Kun,” the name of the founder of a short-lived communist state in Hungary.

If the Judeobolshevik symbolism was the same for the pogroms and the mass killings, the scale and method were new. Crucially, Jeckeln learned that German Order Policemen would carry out mass shootings of thousands of innocent people who had not even been charged with a crime. For about half of the Order Policemen who served in the Soviet Union, the first stateless zone had been Poland after 1939. Such men had experience in murder of one kind or another. But roughly half came straight from Germany to the occupied USSR. The policemen learned to kill Jews very quickly, some writing letters home within weeks in which they took for granted the necessity of the murder of all Jews. The Germans themselves probably did not expect such rapid self-radicalization. Order Police officers quickly came to outnumber the Einsatzgruppen by a factor of ten: Some thirty-three thousand were on site by the end of 1941. Policemen carried out more shootings than members of the Einsatzgruppen; no mass shooting in the East would take place without them. At Kamianets’ Podils’kyi, Jeckeln also demonstrated that the Wehrmacht would assist with supplies and coordination. In uniting SS, regular police, and soldiers, he developed a triumvirate that would persist in mass murder throughout the war.

Jeckeln’s second major demonstration was in Kyiv, which had been the capital of Soviet Ukraine since 1934. Here the occasion for industrial-scale murder was not the unexpected appearance of stateless Jewish refugees but the surprise of Soviet sabotage. The Soviets had left bombs on timers in several major buildings in downtown Kyiv, which caused explosions that killed German officials and officers. This act of Soviet resistance was an opportunity for the Germans to claim and then stage Judeobolshevism. If the Soviets had attacked Germans, then Jews had to be held responsible.

On September 28, 1941, the German army printed and posted notices requiring Jews to appear at a certain intersection in western Kyiv with their documents and their valuables on the following day. Most of the Jews who had remained in Kyiv obeyed the order. People gathered early, before dawn, thinking that they would get the best seats on the trains. Elderly women wore strings of onions around their necks, food for the journey. Yom Kippur, the day of atonement, was on the morrow; people told themselves that they would be safe. At the screening point at the intersection non-Jews who had accompanied their families or friends were told to return home, and most did. From that point forward the Jews walked in a cordon made by German police and dogs to a ravine at Babyi Iar, where the German army had prepared trenches for mass shootings. There Germans, assisted by local collaborators, shot some 33,761 Jews over pits. They took some young Jewish women aside to be raped first. Jeckeln was improving upon his technique of killing. He now deployed what he called the “sardine method,” in which people were forced to lie down in careful rows in a pit before they were shot. The next group was then forced to lie directly upon that layer of corpses, and so on. Once a pit was full, a German would tread over the pile of corpses, looking for signs of life, and firing bullets downward. This form of industrial murder, which allowed more than ten thousand individuals to be shot on a single day, was Jeckeln’s personal invention. After the successful trial at Babyi Iar, he invited the Order Policemen who had assisted in the preparations to a drinking party where he explained the political logic of murder.