Matthäus’s summary includes crucial details also found in the protocols: the basic procedure of the “Jewish actions,” which was continually being modified; the problems and difficulties encountered when executions were carried out; the modifications and instances of optimization that followed; and the behavior of those involved: the officers, shooters, and victims, as well as the eyewitnesses or, perhaps more accurately, curious audience members.208 The mass executions, it needs to be reiterated, were the end result of a series of relatively unprofessional experiments about how to kill the greatest number of people in the shortest possible time. Reports from individual death squads were passed on to high-ranking SS and reserve police officers, who then regularly met to debate the most efficient methods.209 In this fashion, innovations such as having the victims disrobe or choosing the most suitable sort of firearms were quickly incorporated into the job of killing and helped standardize the execution procedure.
The stories told by army, navy, and Luftwaffe soldiers revolve around “Jewish actions” that began in mid-1941 in the occupied territories behind the front lines. In the subsequent four years, some 900,000 Jewish men, women, and children were systematically executed.210
GRAF: The infantry say they shot 15,000 Jews on the aerodrome at POROPODITZ. They drove them all together, fired machine guns at them and shot them all. They left about a hundred of them alive. First they all had to dig a hole—a sort of ditch—then they shot them all, except a hundred, whom they left alive. Then these hundred had to put them all in a hole and cover them up, leaving a small opening. Then they shot the hundred and put them in too and closed it. I wouldn’t believe it but someone showed me the hole, where they were, all trodden down. Fifteen thousand of them! It’s in a clearing in the wood, like this camp here. He says they worked for a fortnight at the hole.211
KRATZ: I once saw a big lorry convoy came into NIKOLAJEV, with at least thirty trucks. And what was in them? Nothing but naked bodies—men, women and children all together in one truck. We went over to see where they were going—soldiers: “Come here.” I watched; there was a big hole. Formerly they simply made the people stand on the edge, so that they just toppled in. But that meant too much work in throwing the bodies out, because not enough go in when they just fall in anyhow. So men had to get down into the hole—one had to stand up on the edge and the other got down inside. The bodies were laid out on the bottom with others on top—it was nothing but a spongy mass afterwards; they piled one on top of another, like sardines. That sort of thing is not forgotten. I shouldn’t like to be an S.S. man. It’s not only the Russian commissars who’ve shot people in the back—others have too. Such things are avenged.212
Sergeant Kratz, a mechanic deployed with his unit, Bomber Wing 100, in southern Russia in 1942, focuses on how the executions have been technically optimized. He notes, in a professional tone, that the forms of killing are still not adequate because too few victims fall into the graves.
