Black Earth(77)

Organized massacres involving multiple German institutions with local assistance began in the zone where the Soviets destroyed the interwar state and the Germans drove out Soviet power. The Germans continued the practice, with comparable success, in the lands that had been part of the USSR before 1939: prewar Soviet Belarus, prewar Soviet Ukraine, and prewar Soviet Russia. The death rate of Jews in the lands of the prewar Soviet Union occupied by Germany (95 percent) was almost as high as that in the doubly occupied lands where Soviet occupation of other sovereign states preceded German occupation (97 percent). Soviet citizens collaborated in the mass murder of Jews, regardless of whether they received Soviet passports in 1939 and 1940 or had spent their lives under Soviet rule. Communists collaborated with the Germans regardless of whether their party cards had been stamped a year or a decade before. There were, of course, some differences. Only in the prewar Soviet Union, it seems, did officers of the Soviet NKVD volunteer for the German police in order to kill enemies behind the front. Naturally, such people had to take part in the mass shootings of Jews, since not doing so would have drawn attention.

The Germans reached the prewar Soviet Union within a matter of weeks, but by then they had already learned from experience. By the time SS officers reached the prewar Soviet Union, they knew that the failure of the pogrom strategy did not really matter. In Estonia, the northernmost of the three Baltic states, and the last to be conquered, no pogroms at all were instigated—and yet almost all of the Jews who had not fled were found and killed by the Estonian Security Police under German authority. Pogroms did break out in the prewar Soviet Union, but usually in the aftermath of mass shooting rather than as a prelude. The Germans knew that they could exploit the local Soviet administrations, and they knew that they could recruit enough young men.

The prewar Soviet Union was far poorer than the Baltic states and even than eastern Poland, so every bit of property was all the more valued. Soviet policy in the annexed territories in 1939 and 1940 had created uncertainty about property; Soviet policy in the prewar Soviet Union had created widespread misery. Jews who lived in the lands of the prewar Soviet Union were farther to the east and therefore had more time to flee the German advance. This created a huge supply of houses and apartments, promptly appropriated by their Soviet neighbors. The very fact that some Jews were already gone and their residences already taken by others when the Germans arrived prompted the thought that more property would be available if the remaining Jews were removed. The acquisitive and the ruthless came to the fore. Soviet citizens were already classified by nationality in their internal passports, and Soviet culture was already one of ethnic denunciations. There had been no Jewish operation among the national operations of the Great Terror of 1937 and 1938. But the denunciatory frenzy had reached Jews nonetheless. In the interwar Soviet Union, Soviet Jews were accused of ritually murdering children and young women. In Moscow, Kharkiv, and Minsk, among other places, Soviet citizens partook in the blood libel. In Minsk, the man who accused Jews of ritual murder for Passover “to bake matzah” was a worker and a member of a communist party. This was in the capital of a Soviet republic in 1937, just as the Great Terror was beginning.

In an unhappy sequence, Soviet mass terror (1937–1938) was followed by an alliance with Nazi Germany (1939–1941), and then an invasion by Nazi Germany (1941). In the lands that German forces first reached after crossing through the new Soviet territories, in western Soviet Belarus and western Soviet Ukraine, the Great Terror had taken some three hundred thousand lives. Because shootings and deportations had removed much of the Polish minority from precisely this region, local Ukrainians, Belarusians, and Russians had already seen a minority removed from their midst by state policy. The major settlements of Jews in the western Soviet Union had also been, almost without exception, major settlements of Poles. In 1939 and 1940, the Soviet alliance with Nazi Germany sowed ideological confusion among Soviet citizens. The Soviet press ceased to criticize German policies and began to publish Nazi speeches. Soviet citizens in public meetings occasionally misspoke, praising “Comrade Hitler” when they meant “Comrade Stalin” or calling for “the triumph of international fascism.” Swastikas began to appear as graffiti in Soviet cities. When the Germans arrived in 1941, Soviet citizens who had denounced their Polish neighbors for their apartments three years before presumably had little hesitation about denouncing their Jewish ones. Soviet citizens—Russians, Ukrainians, Belarusians, and others—did hand over their Jewish neighbors to the Germans. The experience of running the errand of denunciation must have been very much the same. In Kyiv, Ukrainians and Russians helped the German Order Police find and register Jews before the mass shooting at Babyi Iar. Afterwards, the German police received the denunciations in what had been NKVD headquarters.