Hitler. 1936-1945: Nemesis полностью

Reinhard Heydrich had already in March received the green light from Hitler to send the Einsatzgruppen into the Soviet Union in the wake of the Wehrmacht to ‘pacify’ the conquered areas by eradicating ‘subversive elements’. Hitler had specified in March that ‘the Bolshevist-Jewish intelligentsia must be eliminated’.⁷ Heydrich had been more than ready to apply a most liberal interpretation to this mandate in his briefings to the Einsatzgruppen in Pretzsch and Berlin in the weeks before the campaign.

According to a letter which Heydrich sent on 2 July to the four newly appointed Higher SS and Police Leaders for the conquered areas of the Soviet Union, the Einsatzgruppen had been instructed to liquidate, alongside Communist functionaries and an array of ‘extremist elements’, ‘all Jews in the service of the Party and state’.⁸ Heydrich’s verbal briefings must have made clear that the widest interpretation was to be placed on such an instruction.

From the beginning, the killings were far from confined to Jews who were Communist Party or State functionaries. Already on 3 July, for instance, the chief of the Einsatzkommando in Luzk in eastern Poland had some 1,160 Jewish men shot. He said he wanted to put his stamp on the town.⁹ In Kaunas (Kowno) in Lithuania as many as 2,514 Jews were shot on 6 July.¹⁰ Shootings were carried out by Einsatzkommando 3, based in this area, on twenty days in July. Of the ‘executions’, totalling 4,400 (according to a meticulous listing), the vast majority were Jews.¹¹ But the briefings had evidently not been unambiguous.¹² They were capable of being interpreted in different ways. Whereas Einsatzgruppe A, in the Baltic, was almost unconstrained in its killing, Einsatzgruppe Β in White Russia initially targeted, in the main, the Jewish ‘intelligentsia’, while Einsatzgruppe C spoke of working the Jews to death in reclaiming the Pripet Marshes.¹³ While some Einsatzkommandos were slaughtering Jews more or less indiscriminately, one killer squad in Chotin on the Dniester confined its murderous action in early July to Communist and Jewish ‘intellectuals’ (apart from doctors).¹⁴

In the Baltic, the butchery of Einsatzgruppe A was especially ferocious. The first massacre of Jews took place on 24 June, only two days after the beginning of ‘Barbarossa’, in the small Lithuanian township of Gargzdai, lying just behind the border. Men from the Security Police and a police unit from Memel shot dead 201 Jews that afternoon. By 18 July, the killing squads had claimed 3,300 victims; by August the death-toll had reached between 10,000 and 12,000 mainly male Jews together with Communists.¹⁵

The killing units were assisted in the early stages by Lithuanian nationalists who were prompted into savage pogroms against the Jews.¹⁶ In Kowno, Jews were clubbed to death one by one by a local enthusiast while crowds of onlookers — women holding their children up to see — clapped and cheered. One eyewitness recalled that around forty-five to fifty Jews were killed in this way within three-quarters of an hour. When the butcher had finished his slaughter, he climbed on to the heap of corpses and played the Lithuanian national anthem on an accordion. German soldiers stood by impassively, some of them taking photographs.¹⁷ The Wehrmacht commander in the area, General-Colonel Ernst Busch, took the view, on hearing reports of the atrocities, that it was a matter of internal Lithuanian disputes, and that he had no authority to intervene. It was seen as exclusively a matter for the security police.¹⁸

Hitler was keen to keep abreast of the killing operations in the Soviet Union. On 1 August SS-Brigadeführer Heinrich Müller, head of the Gestapo, had passed an encyphered message to the commanders of the four Einsatzgruppen: ‘Continual reports from here on the work of the Einsatzgruppen in the east are to be presented to the Führer.’¹⁹