I have been doing a close reading of Martin Gilbert’s 1982 Atlas of the Holocaust. Gilbert’s seven years of research resulted in this breakdown of the over-all figures usually reported of casualties of the Holocaust in a manner that more powerfully brings home its horror. Along with hundreds of maps his text outlines the progress of the Nazi offensive against the Jews from the early sporadic killings, to mass executions, the systematic expulsion of populations from their homelands, the development of ghettos in central cities with the starvation of those held within, the creation of labour and death camps filled by means of mass deportations, and the death marches and executions that continued even as the Allies were invading Germany. When statistics are reduced to smaller units one can more easily envision the impact of this juggernaut of aggression on individuals, families, and communities. For example, a map of the Banat area of Yugoslavia shows the distribution of about 3000 Jews scattered in small towns and rural areas, prior to the German invasion in April, 1941. By August all had been expelled from their homes and forcibly taken to a camp called Tasmajdan, close to Belgrade. On the banks of the Danube they were shot in a series of daily executions. By the end of August the SS commander in charge, proclaimed Banat “Judenrein -- purged of Jews.” Gilbert comments that in this fashion, “the life, the culture and the achievements of more than thirty communities had been destroyed for all time.”
The infamous Wannsee conference held in January, 1942 to plan and organize the mass execution of Jews and other “undesirables” through the establishment of death camps, is often viewed as a definitive moment in the progression from sporadic killings and the herding of people into ghettos to an outright determination to eliminate these populations entirely. That determination had, however, been made much earlier. Even before the invasion of Poland Hitler had declared that a European war would result in the extermination of the Jewish race. Many read his announcement as simply one threat among many, designed to warn the Allies off an armed response to further planned aggression. But he was absolutely in earnest. Wannsee merely co-ordinated and focussed the means to this end.
In preparation for the German advance eastward into the USSR in June, 1941, Heydrich and Himmler, following the orders of Hitler, had instituted four killing squads of up to 1,000 men each, drawn from the SS, the SD, the Gestapo, and later, local police and volunteers. Known as Einsatzgruppen A, B, C, and D, each followed the progress of the army on the long front of the German penetration into the USSR, fanning out from north to south, each responsible for the annihilation of Jews in the area they covered. Entering villages these commando groups would kill any known communists or partisans before entering the Jewish quarters. There they would burn the houses and shoot all of the inhabitants: men, women, and children. In larger settlements the Jewish population would be rounded up and taken to a clearing where some would be forced to dig deep trenches. Then the entire group in shifts would be pushed into the trenches, eventually on top of others already killed or dying, where they also would be slaughtered with machine guns and pistols. Careful records were kept and sent to Berlin of the numbers thus massacred. One sent from Einsatzkommando 3 in December, 1941 lists 99,804 civilians murdered. In the Vilna, Lithuanian area a German lieutenant recorded the precise numbers murdered each day, his report subdivided into the numbers of men, women, and children.
The massacre at Babi Yar, a ravine in the suburbs of Kiev is relatively well known because of its centrality in the novel The White Hotel by DM Thomas. I remember well the shock with which I read decades ago the passages in his novel describing this event. Though I had by then some knowledge of the Nazis, my first impulse was to believe the brutal facts recounted to be fictional. But they were not. On the 29th and 30th of September, 1941 in Kiev 33,771 Jews and some gypsies were rounded up and forcibly driven to Babi Yar. Here they were made to undress and to wait in large groups for their turn to be annihilated by machine guns. The atrocities committed there are but a piece of those enacted throughout all of the eastern areas overrun by the Germans in 1941. During this period similar massacres killed 48,000 Jews in Odessa, 15,000 in Dnepropetrovsk, 28,000 in Vinnitsa, as well as hundreds of thousands in other small and large settlements behind the lines of the German advance during that year.
Anti-Semitism was especially virulent in communities east of Germany where over the centuries Jews had been variously tolerated, ghettoized, expelled, and/or randomly murdered in spontaneous or politically organized pogroms. As the German army and their killing squads moved east, they were assisted by local police, militia, and civilians in rounding up and murdering Jews whose communities had dwelled with them for centuries. At Babi Yar, for example, the SS squads were assisted by Ukrainian militiamen. In Lithuania the SS had to stop the killing of Jews by local peasantry in order to bring greater systemization to the process. In Rumania an already well formed fascist community co-operated openly with the Germans as did many in Estonia, Latvia, Serbia, and Bosnia, for example.
In my next post I will look at the “more efficient” method of killing of Jews and others put in place after 1941.
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