Black Earth(91)

Intuitions fail. The extremely different outcomes seem to have little to do with popular attitudes and prewar politics, and much to do with different experiences of war and occupation. Auschwitz reminds us of Hitler’s vision of a world without Jews; it should also teach us of the importance of politics in hastening or hindering the realization of that vision.

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Estonia shared the fate of Lithuania and Latvia in 1940. Like the other two Baltic states, it was granted by Germany to the Soviets by the terms of the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact, as modified and confirmed by the Treaty on Borders and Friendship of September 1939. The Soviet occupation of Estonia brought the complete destruction of the Estonian upper administration and political elite. President P?ts, for example, was taken from his farm and deported to the Soviet Union, where he died. Laidoner, the commander in chief of the armed forces, also perished in exile after deportation. Of the eleven members of the last Estonian government, ten were imprisoned and nine of these killed (four by execution, five dying in Soviet camps).

Soviet law was applied retroactively in occupied Estonia, under the logic that the Estonian state not only did not exist, but had never existed. State service in the 1920s and 1930s was thus considered a crime. In what quickly became Soviet Estonia, the new Soviet authorities carried out some four hundred executions, and were preparing mass deportations as the German armed forces assembled to invade the Soviet Union in June 1941. On the night of June 14, the Soviet NKVD deported about 10,200 Estonian citizens, one percent of the entire population (and about ten percent of the Jewish minority, which was hugely overrepresented in Soviet repressions). A few days later, as German forces raced north through the Baltics to Estonia, the Soviets were shooting Estonian prisoners and leaving their corpses in the prisons.

The Germans arrived in Estonia in early July 1941 with their handpicked Estonians. As in Lithuania and Latvia, the Soviet occupation of Estonia had forced thousands of people to flee the country, many to Berlin. This left the Germans their choice of future collaborators. Many Estonians wished to return; the Germans could choose the ones they saw as most useful to their own purposes. The double occupation, here as elsewhere, meant a double filtering of the political elite. The Soviets destroyed the former ruling class; the Germans now prevented anyone who did not seem sufficiently pliable from returning. Naturally, the Nazi selection excluded the political Left and Center. As elsewhere that summer, the Germans could exploit moral, material, and political resources created by the Soviet occupation.

As in Latvia and Lithuania, the political resource in Estonia was especially abundant. An entire state had been destroyed in humiliating and vicious fashion only a year earlier, so people were prepared for personal and political redemption. By July 1941, when Einsatzgruppe A reached Estonia, the Germans had perfected their argument that the liberation that they offered was from Jews and that local participation in such liberation was a precondition to political negotiations. As in Lithuania and Latvia, locals in Estonia served as translators of this message, adding the element that the Germans themselves would not have understood: that if Estonians collaborated with the second (German) occupier, their first (Soviet) collaboration would be forgotten. No pogroms of Jews took place in Estonia, nor were such seen as necessary by the Germans.

Double collaboration was quite widespread. Some of the Estonian anti-Soviet partisans known as the Home Guard killed Jews; the most zealous killers among those partisans were Estonian communists who had switched sides as the German invasion began in order to clear their names. The Estonian policemen who had collaborated in the Soviet deportations of Estonians and Jews now carried out the German murder of Estonians and Jews. Whereas the Soviets deported about ten thousand Estonian citizens, including about 450 Jews, under German occupation some ten thousand Estonian citizens were executed, among them 963 Jews. From the local perpetrator’s perspective the work was not entirely different.

Former employees of the Soviet NKVD were especially significant in the mass murder of Jews in Estonia. Ain-Ervin Mere, for example, was an NKVD agent and director of a special department of the Estonian Rifle Corps, a Soviet unit that was supposed to defend Soviet Estonia from capitalist invasion. Instead he joined the Estonian Security Police under the Germans, serving as its commander from May 1942 through March 1943. The Estonian Security Police was the major agency charged with the murder of Jews. From April 1943 through the end of the war, Mere was a battalion commander in a Waffen-SS division. Ervin Viks, an Estonian policeman in the interwar period, worked for the NKVD in 1940 and 1941. Then he joined the Estonian Security Police under the Germans, where he ordered hundreds of executions of Jews and non-Jews. Alexander Viidik had served in the Estonian Political Police before the war, then offered his services to the Soviet NKVD in 1940. After the German invasion he worked for the SD, the intelligence section of the SS, where he recruited his former Soviet contacts.