Black Earth(80)

Because Army Group South of the Wehrmacht was slow to advance across Soviet Ukraine, Soviet authority in Stalino and the surrounding Donets Basin collapsed in stages rather than all at once. Communists tore up their party cards in expectation of the German arrival. Peasants were pleased because they expected that the Germans would abolish collective farming. Local men were sent to the front; their families had time to protest Soviet policies before the war came to Stalino. The NKVD tried to plant explosives in the mines to be tripped when the Germans arrived; women and children tried to stop this at Mine 4/21 in Stalino and were shot. The Red Army took livestock from the countryside when it retreated, and communist party members in Stalino absconded with food that was meant for the general population. The local militias, largely made up of miners, dispersed rather than fight the Germans. As the German army reached the Donbas region, Einsatzgruppe C killed Jews, sometimes alongside Gypsies, sometimes in mines.

In Stalino, as elsewhere, the stigmatization and murder of local Jews permitted a bridge between occupiers and occupied. The Germans quickly established a local administration in the city, headed by a longtime communist and largely staffed by communists. These new authorities recruited a local police force of some two thousand people, many of whom had also been members of the communist party. These local policemen assisted the Germans in the shooting of some fifteen thousand Jews in Stalino. In some considerable measure, the murder of Jews for their supposed communism was carried out by communists. By murdering the Jews, the local people of Stalino, like local people elsewhere, partook in a lie that emptied their own pasts of responsibility while providing a measure of protection from German rule. Whereas people in the doubly occupied lands were exorcising the specter of their own participation in a Soviet regime that lasted for a year or two, in places such as the Donbas the history that was evacuated was that of a whole generation.

Later, when Soviet power returned, people switched sides again. From that point forward the memory of typically Soviet places such as the Donets Basin has been dominated by a Soviet myth of anti-fascism, in which all Soviet citizens suffered equally under and struggled valiantly against German rule. This is just as true, which is to say just as false, as the wartime myth of anti-communism. The myth of Judeobolshevism in 1941 allowed Soviet citizens to separate themselves from their Jewish neighbors; the myth of the Great Fatherland War against Nazi Germany allowed them to separate themselves from their murder of their Jewish neighbors.

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Belarus was the European republic of the USSR most altered by Soviet rule. It was a crucial test for German policy, since here—unlike in Lithuania, Latvia, or even parts of Ukraine—there was no national political resource. There was no meaningful Belarusian national question, and only a few Belarusian nationalists were brought by the German invaders from emigration or from one region of Belarus to another.

The initial German policy to Jews had been the same in Belarus as elsewhere. Indeed, the German mass murder of Jewish women and children began in Belarus on July 19, 1941, when Himmler ordered Waffen-SS troops behind Army Group Center to clear the Pripiat Marshes of Jews. On July 31, he indicated that the order included the murder of women. The Waffen-SS murdered some 13,788 children, women, and men. As of mid-August, Einsatzgruppe B, responsible for Belarus, had killed more Jews than any other Einsatzgruppe. But Arthur Nebe, its commander, had no recruitment opportunities comparable to those of Stahlecker in Lithuania and Latvia, since in Belarus there was no political resource. Local collaborators were generally Belarusians and Poles, usually people lacking any political motivation. Nebe also had less reinforcement by other German police units than Jeckeln to his south. In September 1941, the killing of Jews in Belarus fell behind that in the Baltics and in Ukraine.

With less local collaboration in the offing, the SS in Belarus in effect recruited the German army. Whereas Soviet citizens could be recruited by the equation of Bolsheviks and Jews, German army officers were sensitive to a modified logic: the triple equation of Jews, Bolsheviks, and partisans. If Jews were Bolsheviks, then a politically minded local might take part in their killing in order to prove that he was not a Bolshevik (and to profit from the dead Jew’s property). If Jews were partisans, then German officers might want them dead in order to be able to fight a clean and victorious war. The army, which could not steal very much immobile property, also realized that killing Jews and allowing locals to take their houses was a kind of social policy. On September 18, 1941, at Krupki, northeast of Minsk, German soldiers of the Third Battalion of the 354th Infantry Division chose the site for the killing of Jews, and escorted them from the village to the awaiting SS. One soldier, presumably a father himself, allowed a Jewish mother to step away from the column for a moment to pull up her little boy’s pants.