Black Earth(82)

The policy of mass murder of Jewish women and children came slightly later to Belarus, and the Germans found it no easier. Here as elsewhere the imperative to kill women and children became an argument for involving locals—or auxiliary policemen already recruited in Lithuania or Latvia. It was also presumably one of the reasons that a new technique of killing was applied. The method of mass murder by carbon monoxide, already used in Germany and in occupied Poland against people deemed “unworthy of life,” was applied in Belarus to Jews. Vans were adapted so that they pumped their exhaust into their own hold. Packing Jews, especially Jewish children, into these vans was a way to kill them without facing them directly. The children called the vehicles “black ravens.” This is what their parents had called the NKVD vehicles that had taken people away during Stalin’s Great Terror three years before.

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By the end of 1941, the Germans, with help from Soviet citizens, had killed some one million Jews in the occupied Soviet Union. The Einsatzgruppen had improvised techniques of killing and perfected their political approach to local populations. Along with the Order Police and the Wehrmacht, they were moving imperceptibly toward a full implementation of the Judeobolshevik logic—which imperceptibly had become a way of covering defeat rather than of bringing about victory. They could not bring down the Soviet state, but they could kill Jews where they had demolished Soviet institutions. Otto Rasch, the commander of Einsatzgruppe C, noted in September 1941 that “the elimination of the Jews” was “practically easier” than the general campaign of colonial exploitation that had been the war’s original aim.

The war proceeded differently along different fronts, with disappointment reaching first Army Group North, then Army Group South, and then Army Group Center. But everywhere the commanders of the Einsatzgruppen, Wehrmacht, and police knew that they were not as far east as they were supposed to be. The policemen were available in large numbers for killing Jews precisely because they could not fulfill their original assignment, which had been to control the much larger territory that was supposed to be conquered by the end of 1941. Army commanders were anxious. Soviet resistance was real. Only the Einsatzgruppen, and their SS commanders, seemed to have an answer: a war against the Jews in fact as well as in name.

The national identities of the peoples of the Soviet Union, so important to the mental world of German racists, and so prominent in later polemics, made very little difference to their behavior. The Soviet state was a barrier to German power, but no Soviet nation was. Jews died on the territories of the prewar Soviet Union in much the same ways and in much the same proportions as they did in the territories annexed by the Soviet Union in 1939 and 1940. The Germans were aided in their campaign of murder by members of all Soviet nationalities they encountered. When the Germans crossed the border from one Soviet republic to another, they paid little attention. Nor did they need to.

Whereas the Germans occupied Soviet Belarus and Soviet Ukraine in their entirety for much of the war, some 95 percent of the territory of Soviet Russia was spared German occupation. But in the parts of Soviet Russia where German power did reach, Soviet citizens reacted much the same way as Soviet citizens elsewhere. Russians who had been prominent in the communist apparatus were informed by other Russians that they could clear their slate if they killed one Jew. Russian house managers, like house managers everywhere, provided the Germans with lists of Jews in their buildings. Russians (and others) served the Germans as policemen in Soviet Russia from the beginning. The Germans used Russian policemen in anti-Jewish actions in Soviet Russia as soon as they reached its territory. Russians in these auxiliary police forces tracked down Jews in Pskov, Briansk, and Kursk. Russian policemen were present at all of the mass shootings of Jews in occupied Soviet Russia, such as Rostov and Mineral’nye Vody. Russian policemen, like policemen everywhere, reported people who were hiding Jews in order to get their property. Russians informed on one another everywhere, including in the outskirts of besieged Leningrad. Russians were also present in the local police forces that killed Jews beyond Russia, for example, in Vilnius, Riga, Minsk, and Kharkiv.

In the cities of Soviet Russia that fell under German occupation, the local politics and the fate of Jews were the same as in Soviet Ukraine or Soviet Belarus. Army Group Center was held back for two months at Smolensk in western Russia, finally winning an encirclement battle on September 10, 1941. By this time, most of the local Jews, about ten thousand people, had been able to flee. Their Russian neighbors, some of whom had lost their own houses during the intense battle for the city, looted the Jews’ property and took their apartments before the Germans arrived. The appropriation of mobile and immobile property was brought under control and regulated by the authorities installed by the Germans. The initial plunder created an appetite for more. The collaborating local administration of Smolensk, led by Russian communists with impressive records of service to the Soviet Union, ordered a census to record the place of residence of remaining Jews. They then provided the Germans with the personnel needed to place these people in a ghetto. This allowed the rapid seizure of the remaining Jewish property of the city. Once that was achieved, the residences of the ghetto itself could become the next object of desire. In May 1942, the Russian mayor, the noted Soviet jurist Boris Men’shagin, suggested to the Germans that clearing the ghetto would improve the living situation of Russians. Local Russian policemen aided the Germans in murdering the remainder of the Jews of Smolensk a few weeks later.