Hitler. 1936-1945: Nemesis полностью

In the early weeks of ‘Barbarossa’, the ‘actions’ undertaken by the Einsatzgruppen and their sub-units mainly targeted male Jews. The killing, though horrifying, was on nothing like the scale that it reached from August onwards. One particularly murderous Einsatzkommando in Lithuania, for example, killed nine times as many Jews in August and fourteen times as many in September as it had done in July.³⁹ What was regarded as a large-scale ‘action’ in the first weeks had usually involved the shooting of hundreds of Jews, in rare instances more than 1,000. But by the beginning of October Einsatzkommando 4a, attached to Einsatzgruppe C in the Ukraine, could report with cold precision: ‘In retaliation for the arson in Kiev, all Jews were arrested and on 29 and 30.9 a total of 33,771 Jews were executed.’⁴⁰ This was the notorious massacre at Babi-Yar, outside Kiev. The Jews — many of them women, children, and old people — had been rounded up in retaliation for a series of explosions in the city, killing some hundreds of German soldiers, a few days earlier, just before Kiev had fallen to the Wehrmacht. They were marched in small groups to the outskirts of the city, forced to undress, then to stand on a mound above the ravine of Babi-Yar. As the repeated salvoes of the killing-squads rang out, the lifeless bodies of the victims fell on to the growing mound of corpses below them.⁴¹

Women and children — seen as possible ‘avengers’ of the future — were now, following verbal instructions passed down the line by Himmler then by the commanders of the various killer squads during August, generally included in the massacres.⁴² Thus, Einsatzkommando 3 shot 135 women among 4,239 Jews ‘executed’ during July, but 26,243 women and 15,112 children in the total of 56,459 Jews murdered during September 1941.⁴³ Taking the four Einsatzgruppen and their sub-units together, the Jews killed before mid-August numbered around 50,000 — a massive increase on the scale of the murders in Poland, but only a tenth of the estimated half a million who would perish in the next four months.⁴⁴

The huge increase in number of victims demanded different killing techniques. At first, a semblance of martial law and ‘execution’ by firing-squad was preserved. But after a few weeks, the killers took turns with a submachine-gun, mowing down their naked victims as they knelt at the edge of a pit. The killing had rapidly moved ‘from military procedure to mass butchery’.⁴⁵

Some Einsatzgruppen leaders claimed after the war that Heydrich had conveyed to them in his briefings the Führer’s order to exterminate the Jews in the Soviet Union.⁴⁶ But the actual variation in the scale of the killing operations in the first weeks, and the sharp escalation from around August onwards, strongly suggests that, in fact, no general mandate to exterminate Soviet Jewry in its entirety had been issued before ‘Barbarossa’ began.⁴⁷ The number of men — around 3,00° in all, the core drawn heavily from the Gestapo, criminal police, regular police (Ordnungspolizei), and SD — initially engaged in the Einsatzgruppen actions would, in any case, have been incapable of implementing a full-scale genocidal programme, and could scarcely have been assembled with one in mind.⁴⁸ The sharp increase in their numbers through supplementary police battalions began in late July. By the end of the year, there were eleven times as many members of the killing units as had been present at the start of ‘Barbarossa’.⁴⁹

On 15 August, immediately after witnessing that morning an ‘execution’ of Jews near Minsk which made him feel sick, Himmler had told his men that he and Hitler would answer to history for the necessary extermination of Jews as ‘the carriers of world Bolshevism’.⁵⁰ It was during his visits to the killing units in the east that month that Himmler, as we have seen, instructed them to widen the slaughter, now to include women and children.⁵¹ Had he received explicit new authorization from Hitler? Or did he presume that the Führer’s existing mandate sufficed for the massive extension of the killing operations?