Black Earth(81)

Not long afterwards, German soldiers would murder Jews in Belarus with no assistance from the SS. At a conference at Mahileu, where Army Group Center of the Wehrmacht had made its headquarters, Nebe and the Higher SS and Police Leader for the region, Erich von dem Bach-Zelewski, briefed army officers on partisan warfare. They even organized a demonstration. In a village where no partisans were actually found, Germans killed thirty-two Jews, most of them women. The message conveyed there was difficult to miss. Army officers reacted to the lessons of the conference, which took place on September 23–24, in different ways. But enough of them were willing or indeed eager to treat Jews as partisans that the default behavior of the army seemed to change.

By October 1941, the second major German offensive in the east, Operation Typhoon, was under way. There was never supposed to be a second German offensive, since Operation Barbarossa, launched in June, was expected to destroy the Soviet state by September. As terrifying as the initial German advance had been, it was far slower than the Germans had anticipated. The anxiety of delay was experienced first by Army Group North, which did not reach Leningrad. Army Group South made slower progress through Ukraine than expected. Hitler decided to send part of Army Group Center to help Army Group South in September. Once the breakthrough in Ukraine was achieved, Operation Typhoon was to follow: a final push toward Moscow by a regrouped and reinforced Army Group Center, gathering in Belarus almost two million soldiers.

Unlike Operation Barbarossa, which began in doubly occupied territory and reached prewar Soviet territory, Operation Typhoon was to begin and end in prewar Soviet territory. Nevertheless, it had the same basic consequences for Jews. After German troops advanced on September 30, 1941, Soviet Belarus became a killing zone very much like the Baltics and Ukraine. On October 2 and 3, Mahileu became the first sizable city in Belarus where all of the Jews were killed. Even as the German army was advancing east in huge numbers, the German killers presented their actions as defensive. To shoot Jewish babies in Mahileu was, as one German (Austrian) explained to his wife, to prevent something worse: “During the first try, my hand trembled a bit as I shot, but one gets used to it. By the tenth try I aimed calmly and shot surely at the many women, children, and infants. I kept in mind that I have two infants at home, whom these hordes would treat just the same, if not ten times worse. The death that we gave them was a beautiful quick death, compared to the hellish torments of thousands and thousands in the jails of the GPU. Infants flew in great arcs through the air, and we shot them to pieces in flight, before their bodies fell into the pit and into the water.”





Once Operation Typhoon was under way, very little was needed to induce German soldiers to murder Jews. The Third Company of the 691st Regiment of the 339th Infantry Division had been serving the German occupation in France, stationed in the Loire Valley. A few days after its transfer to Belarus, on October 10, 1941, its men were sealing the village of Krucha, marching its Jews to pits, and shooting them all. The soldiers did not relish the task; the commanders seemed to wish to avoid the appearance of weakness in their new assignment. Whatever the reason, murder the soldiers did, although they were not punished if they asked to be excused from the shooting. This army unit, freshly arrived from French wine country, carried out the mass murder of the Jews of Krupki by themselves, with no assistance from the SS.

In Minsk, the capital of prewar Soviet Belarus, the Germans revealed a spectacular scenography of the Judeobolshevik myth. On November 7, 1941, the anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution, Germans and local Belarusians and Russians forced the Jews of Minsk to carry Soviet flags and sing Soviet songs as they marched away from the city. Then the Jews were shot. The symbolism was obvious to all: The Jews were responsible for communism and for the Soviet Union; their elimination would mean its defeat, and of course the excision of responsibility for everyone else. The Germans repeated the performance in Minsk on other Soviet holidays such as Red Army Day and International Women’s Day. As they established a civilian administration in occupied Soviet Belarus they could rely upon Soviet citizens, as they could in Soviet Ukraine and Soviet Russia. In Belarus, communists and members of the Komsomol, the communist youth group, joined the local police and took part in the mass shooting of Jews and other German policies.

With the advance of Operation Typhoon, Belarus became the hinterland of Army Group Center. With all of its swamps and forest, Belarus was well suited to partisan warfare. Even before the Soviets themselves grasped the utility of a partisan war behind the German lines, Germans had found the new ideological cover for the anti-partisan campaign to come: “a partisan is a Jew and a Jew is a partisan.” Jews were first associated with the Soviet regime’s creation, then with its predicted collapse, and then with an expected form of counterattack. Although the Germans had announced that they would not be observing the laws of war in the Soviet Union, and although German campaigns of mass killing were obvious violations of these laws, they were enormously sensitive to partisan campaigns directed against themselves. Any war by the rules must be a war the Germans were winning; so, if the Germans were not winning, someone else must be breaking the rules. Jews appear in this logic as the iniquitous force that seeks to thwart Germans who are struggling righteously for the triumph that nature owes them.