Black Earth(76)

Many of the aged and infirm among Kyiv’s Jews had been unable to gather as instructed by the posters printed by the German army. After the murder of their families and friends, they were left alone, helpless, in their apartments with their possessions. Some of them were then killed by their neighbors, until recently their fellow Soviet citizens, who took their property for themselves. In Soviet conditions multiple families crowded together in a single apartment, which meant that empty apartments were in high demand. Some of the pogromists in Kyiv were Soviet citizens who had suffered under Stalinism and who blamed the Jews. Very likely others were people who used the idea of Judeobolshevism as a retroactive justification of their own robbery. Throughout Europe, the murder of Jews created opportunities for theft, which in turn created a felt need for moral justification.

At the end of 1941, the murderous innovations were brought together. In November 1941, Jeckeln was transferred by Himmler from Ukraine to be the Higher SS and Police Leader of Reichskommissariat Ostland, which included Latvia. Ordered by Himmler to kill the remaining Jews of Riga, Jeckeln brought together his own technique of mass shooting with Stahlecker’s technique of organizing locals. Using Germans as the shooters and the Arājs Kommando as the auxiliaries, Jeckeln had some fourteen thousand Riga Jews killed at pits in the Letbarskii Forest outside the city on November 30, 1941. The feat was repeated on December 8, 1941. The killing technology on display was conceived after the invasion, in the zone of consecutive occupation, by the Nazi entrepreneurs of violence.

Hundreds of thousands of Jewish children, women, and men were shot behind the lines, on what had been Soviet territory, as the German army battled the Red Army. The method of killing was perfected in late 1941, as the German attack upon the supposedly Jewish state was halted. The war on the Jews was being won, as the war against the USSR was being lost. The state destroyers of the SS could say that they were succeeding where all others had failed.





7


Germans, Poles, Soviets, Jews


“The East belongs to the SS!” So Heinrich Himmler liked to exclaim, and in a certain way he was right. It was not easy for the German civilian administrators, the men responsible for the zones known as Reichskommissariat Ostland and Reichskommissariat Ukraine, to exploit local laborers while stealing their food. Nor did it prove a simple task for the Wehrmacht to defeat the Red Army. The destruction of previous state authority gave Himmler’s SS men a demonstrably achievable task in the military campaign and in the occupation. Clearing away previous institutions did not enable quick victory or colonization, but it did make possible the extermination of Jews. In the zone where the SS destroyed Soviet state structures, the vague concept of a Final Solution of the Jewish “problem” could become the specific project of killing Jews where they lived.

Himmler’s subordinates, entrepreneurs of violence such as Stahlecker and Jeckeln, learned to exploit the resources left by Soviet rule, and invented the techniques they needed. It was already known that Einsatzgruppen could kill tens of thousands of people in cold blood; this they had done to Polish citizens in 1939. It was learned in 1941 that other Germans, with less training and weaker ideological preparation, could also kill in the tens of thousands. It transpired after June 1941 that almost every German who was ordered to shoot a civilian, Jewish or otherwise, would obey that order—even though asking to be spared from such duties brought no consequences beyond peer pressure. Although local populations disappointed Germans by not rising up as mindless hordes against local Jews, tens of thousands of local people could be recruited to auxiliary police or special commandos that, among other tasks, would shoot Jews in large numbers. With this learning and these instruments in place, Himmler could travel through the occupied Soviet Union in August 1941 and urge the German forces who were slower to kill to keep up with those who were setting the pace. By September 1941, the killing shifted from shootings of Jewish men of military age to massacres of entire Jewish populations.

The invasion of summer 1941 was a special encounter of Nazi expectations with Soviet experiences. The more drastic the Soviet assault on prior politics, the greater the political resource, and the more extensive the field for Nazi innovation. Yet what the Germans learned about themselves and others turned out to have some application beyond the special zone of consecutive occupation where the Holocaust began. The double destruction of the state created the conditions for the crucial innovations. Once the concept of a Final Solution became the practice of mass murder, the new techniques of murder could be applied to the east of the zone, in the prewar Soviet Union.