The Holocaust : Memories and History [1 ed.] 9781443859356, 9781443854771

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The Holocaust: Memories and History

The Holocaust: Memories and History

Edited by

Victoria Khiterer with

Ryan Barrick David Misal

The Holocaust: Memories and History Edited by Victoria Khiterer, Ryan Barrick and David Misal This book first published 2014 Cambridge Scholars Publishing 12 Back Chapman Street, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2XX, UK British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Copyright © 2014 by Victoria Khiterer, Ryan Barrick, David Misal and contributors All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner. ISBN (10): 1-4438-5477-8, ISBN (13): 978-1-4438-5477-1

Dedicated to the Memory of Maria (Musia) Brovarnik and her sons Victor and Anatolii Brovarnik, killed by the Nazis in Rostov–on–Don in August 1942

TABLE OF CONTENTS Acknowledgements ................................................................................... ix Introduction ............................................................................................... xi Victoria Khiterer Chapter One: Holocaust by Bullets and Extermination Camps Holocaust by Bullets: “Hitler’s Hidden Holocaust”? ................................. 2 Peter Black Rethinking the Elimination of Traces of Mass Murder at the Treblinka Extermination Camp ................................................................................. 43 Tomas Vojta Chapter Two: Visualizing the Holocaust Is Seeing Believing? Photographs, Eyewitness Testimony, and Evidence of the Holocaust ..... 64 David Shneer Jewish Ghetto Photographers ................................................................... 86 Judith Cohen Chapter Three: In the Shadow of the Holocaust Testimonies of Jewish Holocaust Survivors: Characterizing the Narratives of Resistance and Resilience .................................................................. 106 Judith Kaplan–Weinger and Yonit Hoffman The Double–Edged Sword of Remembering the Holocaust: The Case of Jewish Self–Identity ........................................................... 133 Eric D. Miller Babi Yar: The Absence of the Babi Yar Massacre from Popular Memory ............. 143 Jacqueline Cherepinsky

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Chapter Four: Representation of the Holocaust in Russian Literature Lev Ozerov as a Literary Witness to the Shoah in the Occupied Soviet Territories .................................................................................... 176 Maxim D. Shrayer Art from Agony: Vasily Grossman and the Holocaust ........................... 188 John and Carol Garrard Life and Fate of Soviet Jews in Aleksandr Galich’s Play Matrosskaia Tishina and the Film Papa ................................................. 208 Victoria Khiterer Chapter Five: The Holocaust and the Armenian Genocide in Film Early Holocaust Cinema: Jews under the Sign of the Cross ................... 232 Stuart Liebman Non–Belated Trauma: Jean–Pierre Melville and the Beginnings of Holocaust Cinema............. 263 Marat Grinberg The Armenian–Jewish Connection: The Influence of Holocaust Cinema on Feature Films about the Armenian Genocide .................................... 289 Lawrence Baron Dehumanization and the Achievement of Schindler’s List..................... 311 Dan McMillan Holocaust Fantasy Films and Historical Considerations ........................ 335 Michael W. Rubinoff Chapter Six: Teaching the Holocaust Remembering the Architecture of Death: Teaching the History and Psychology of the Holocaust ......................... 356 Kevin Simpson and Jon David K. Wyneken Utilizing Holocaust Films in the College Classroom: One Instructor’s Insights ........................................................................ 371 Valerie S. Thaler Notes on Authors and Editors ................................................................. 389

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS This volume includes selected papers from the 2010, 2011 and 2012 Millersville University Conferences on the Holocaust and Genocide. I was the Director of the 2011 and 2012 conferences and helped organize the 2010 conference. I would like to thank my colleagues for their innovative essays that constitute this volume and for their advice and encouragement. I want to thank especially Dr. Carol Garrard, who gave me the original idea to start this project, and Professor Antony Polonsky, whom I consulted numerous times during the preparation phase of the manuscript. Furthermore, I would like to thank the Millersville University administration and conference donors for their generous ongoing support of the conferences. I am also very grateful to my colleagues, the former Directors of the Millersville University Conference on the Holocaust and Genocide, Professors Jack Fischel and Saulius Suziedelis for their mentoring and providing detailed instructions for preparation of the conference. I would like to give my thanks to Professor of San Diego State University Lawrence Baron, and Professors of Millersville University and Conference Organizational Committee members Onek Adyanga, Robert Bookmiller, Dennis Downey, and Tanya Kevorkian, and the Conference Administrator, Ms. Maggie Eichler, who provided exceptional help in the organization of the conferences. I want to give my special thanks to the Dean of the School of Humanities and Social Sciences Dr. Diane Umble and the Chair of the History Department Dr. Ronald Frankum for their support for the preparation of the conferences and encouragement of my work on the conference proceedings. I would like to thank Judith Cohen, the Director of the Photographic Reference Collection of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Dr. Daniel Uziel, the Head of the Photo Collection of Yad Vashem Archives, and to Das Bundesarchiv (Koblenz, Germany) for allowing use of their archival photographic materials as illustrations for the volume. Two of my students, David Misal and Ryan Barrick, co–edited the book with me. I am deeply indebted to them for their superb editorial work. I am also grateful my student Ashley Swift for her formatting of the text. Professor Marcus Levitt of the University of Southern California

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performed an elegant polishing of several chapters, for which I give my sincere thanks. My husband James Danaher devoted untold hours to perfecting the text and illustrations of this work. I am so grateful for his unflagging enthusiasm and for the inspiration that he gives me every day. Without the collaborative work of many people, the preparation of the volume would certainly have been impossible. I appreciate their contributions, support, and encouragement throughout this endeavor. Victoria Khiterer

INTRODUCTION VICTORIA KHITERER Where are you my boy? Where are you my dear? It seems you scream to me, From the ghetto fires … Moisei Teif, Kikhelekh un Zemelekh1 The mother and son of the Yiddish poet Moisei (Moishe) Teif (1904– 1966) were killed by the Nazis in the Minsk ghetto. Teif devoted his poem Kikhelekh un Zemelekh (Cookies and Rolls) to the memory of his son. Many Holocaust survivors and bystanders were haunted by painful memories. Sometimes the memories were so traumatic that the survivors were unable to return to normal life. Some Holocaust survivors committed suicide after the war, many suffered from nervous breakdowns, and others died early, because the psychological trauma affected their health. My mother’s uncle Grigorii Brovarnik was mobilized into the Soviet Army as soon as Nazi Germany attacked the Soviet Union. His wife Maria (Musia) and two children, eleven year old Victor and two year old Anatolii were killed by the Nazis with all other Jews in Rostov–on–Don in August 1942. Musia perhaps could have survived the Nazi occupation with her children, because her appearance was more Slavic than Jewish: she had blond hair and blue eyes. However her neighbor—polizei (a local member of the Nazi militia) denounced her to the Nazis. Grigorii returned from the war as a disabled veteran, he lost both of his feet to frostbite in the battle for Stalingrad. Grigorii told my grandparents that he had nothing left to lose, he had lost already everything: his wife, sons, and his health. He said that if he found the traitor who denounced his family, he would strangle him with his bare hands. Grigorii was not afraid of anything, because in any case he did not want to live after his family perished. But the traitor disappeared after the war. Grigorii died in 1949 at the age of forty–seven from a heart attack.

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The memories of the Holocaust survivors affected also the next generation, who often felt that they grew up in the shadow of the Holocaust. The painful memories that Holocaust survivors shared with their children often traumatized them. But in spite of the very traumatic character of memories about the Holocaust, the victims and survivors wanted that people never forget about their experience. Many Jews in the Warsaw ghetto, who did not hope to survive the war, wrote diaries and hid them in a clandestine archive, which was organized by the historian Emanuel Ringelblum. They did this, because they wanted to pass the true memory about their life to the world.2 Two thirds of European Jews (six of nine million) perished during the Holocaust. Often memories are all that is left of many of these people. These memories allow scholars better to understand the personal experience of Holocaust victims and bystanders and have, as a result, become a valuable source of information for a number of academic disciplines: history, philology, psychology, philosophy and arts. In addition, many films and fictional works also were inspired by the Holocaust survivors’ reminiscences. However, personal memories alone cannot restore the entire picture of the Holocaust. In many cases the Holocaust survivors, bystanders and perpetrators provide contradictory information about the same events. Often they did not know or do not remember the names of the victims and perpetrators and the exact dates of the events they are describing. Because of this scholars are obliged carefully to analyze these memories and compare them with other available sources. Furthermore, since the Nazis exterminated entire Jewish communities in many cities and towns of the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe during the Holocaust, personal memories are not always available for researchers. In such cases scholars use other available documentary sources and research methods: archival materials, including photography and films, archeology, and statistics. Thus through a combination of all available sources and research methods scholars enable us better to understand the Holocaust and other genocides. This book is a collection of seventeen articles which analyze Holocaust memories, photo documents, literature and films, as well as teaching methods in Holocaust education. Most of these essays were originally presented as papers at the Millersville University Conferences on the Holocaust and Genocide in 2010–2012. The first chapter of the book, Holocaust by Bullets and Extermination Camps, analyzes two different ways that the Nazis used to murder Jewish people: mass shooting in occupied Soviet territory and killing in gas chambers in Nazi extermination camps.

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In his essay Holocaust by Bullets—“Hitler’s Hidden Holocaust”? Peter Black rejects the widespread view that the gas chambers were developed because the Nazis were psychologically traumatized with the mass shooting of Jews. Black shows that the Nazis used both methods of killing simultaneously: “gas chambers had been an instrument of Nazi mass murder well before the invasion of the Soviet Union or Yugoslavia; shooting operations continued in occupied territories wherever that method was more practical, long after stationary killing centers were functioning in areas where they were more practical.”3 Black also argues that the mass shooting of Jews in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe was not “the hidden Holocaust,” which was allegedly discovered or rediscovered by Father Patrick Desbois.4 The first scholarly publications on these topics appeared in the early and mid–1950s, but the mass shooting of Jews in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe was overshadowed by the factories of death, the extermination camps, which had the capacity to kill tens of thousands of people per day. Thus the Soviet film–maker Roman Karmen reported that Babi Yar was “a country cemetery compared with Maidan [Majdanek concentration camp].”5 Black wrote that another reason why the topic remained under–researched for a long time was the ban on discussion of the Holocaust in communist countries. Only with the collapse of communism in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe did Holocaust archival materials become available to scholars. The second essay in chapter one, Rethinking the Elimination of Traces of Mass Murder at the Treblinka Extermination Camp by Tomas Vojta, is based on the testimonies of camp prisoners and perpetrators. The article describes the development of killing methods in Treblinka, one of the largest extermination camps where the Nazis killed between 870,000 and 925,000 Jews.6 The essay also discusses how the Nazis, and after the war Polish communist authorities, attempted to erase the traces of the crime. The second chapter of the book Visualizing the Holocaust analyzes the reliability of photo materials about the Holocaust. Soviet propaganda often falsified photographs for ideological reasons; because of this the West did not want to believe the Soviet photography about horrible Nazi crimes during the Holocaust. The Nazis, bystanders and victims of the Holocaust had a totally different outlook on the same events, and their photographs are affected by their views. David Shneer shows in his essay Is Seeing Believing? Photographs, Eyewitness Testimony, and Evidence of the Holocaust that the West did not trust Soviet photojournalism due to its ideological bias. So when the Soviet media published photographs of the victims of the Holocaust, the

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West considered these pictures unreliable. After the liberation of the Nazi Concentration Camp at Majdanek, the Soviets organized visits there of the local population and foreign journalists so that they could see for themselves this factory of death. Shneer also describes the new research methods of the Holocaust, which scholars have begun to use in the twenty first century. Thus to provide more evidence about the mass killing of the prisoners in Sobibor extermination camp archaeologists have recently began its excavation. Judith Cohen shows in her essay Jewish Ghetto Photographers how differently Nazi and Jewish photographers saw the life of Jews in the East European ghettos. Although many Nazi photographers were professionals and provide the best quality pictures, there is no compassion in their photography to the sufferings of the ghetto inhabitants. Jewish photographers show many nuances and aspects of the Jewish life in the ghettos hidden from the Nazis. These pictures help us better to visualize the life of Jews in the ghettos. Chapter Three In the Shadow of the Holocaust analyzes survivors’ testimonies and memories about the Holocaust. The chapter deals also with collective memories about the Holocaust and its suppression in the Soviet Union. Judith Kaplan–Weinger and Yonit Hoffman analyze in their essay Testimonies of Jewish Holocaust Survivors: Characterizing the Narratives of Resistance and Resilience the narrative testimonies of survivors who engaged in organized resistance activities and those who did not. They show that resilience was a key psychological characteristic of the individuals who joined partisan groups and actively resisted the Holocaust. Eric D. Miller’s essay The Double–Edged Sword of Remembering the Holocaust: The Case of Jewish Self–Identity shows that memories about the Holocaust shaped the self–identity and consciousness not only of the Holocaust survivors, but all Jewish people. Jacqueline Cherepinsky’s paper Babi Yar: The Absence of the Babi Yar Massacre from Popular Memory discusses why the memory of one of the largest massacres of Jews during the Holocaust is absent from the public consciousness. She explains that because of state anti–Semitism Soviet authorities intentionally erased all traces of the Holocaust from the collective memory. Chapter Four Representation of the Holocaust in Russian Literature shows how many Soviet Jewish writers and poets experienced the Holocaust as shocking and traumatic, and turned to it in their writings. Many of them witnessed the Shoah as war correspondents and lost close relatives in the Holocaust. However Soviet censorship allowed

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publications about the Holocaust only during the war and for a few years afterwards. With the development of the policy of state anti–Semitism in the late 1940s all publications about the Holocaust were forbidden in the Soviet Union. Maxim D. Shrayer analyzes in his essay Lev Ozerov as a Literary Witness to the Shoah in the Occupied Soviet Territories the poem Babi Yar by Lev Ozerov (pen name of Lev Goldberg, 1914–1996). Ozerov visited his native Kiev after its liberation in November 1943. Based on eyewitness testimonies about the massacre in Babi Yar, Ozerov wrote an article Kiev, Babi Yar for Ilia Ehrenburg’s and Vasily Grossman’s Black Book.7 Ozerov also described the horror of the Jewish massacre in Kiev in his poem Babi Yar. The poem was written in 1944–45 and published in 1946 and become one of the first Soviet literary works about the Shoah. Shrayer wrote “Given the dearth of official Soviet information about the Shoah, Ozerov’s Babi Yar was—or immediately became—much more than a literary text.”8 However the poem should not be over–read “as a historical document at the expense of its artistry and aesthetics.”9 John and Carol Garrard discuss the Holocaust theme in Grossman’s novel Life and Fate in their essay Art from Agony: Vasily Grossman and the Holocaust. The book was banned by Soviet censorship and the manuscript was confiscated by the KGB in 1961. The reason for such harsh treatment of the book was not only the Holocaust theme, which was forbidden in the Soviet Union, but also the criticism of Stalinism in Grossman’s work. A copy of the manuscript was smuggled to the West and published there in 1980. The book was published in the Soviet Union only with the liberalization of the political regime during Perestroika in 1989.10 The Garrards show that Grossman’s depiction of the Holocaust in his novel Life and Fate is based upon historical fact and the personal tragedy of the author. Grossman’s mother and a mentally ill relative were killed during the massacre of the Jews of Berdichev. Based on archival materials, opened for researchers after the collapse of Communism, the Garrards reveal the history of the Berdichev massacre and found the names of its perpetrators and local collaborators. Victoria Khiterer’s essay The Life and Fate of Soviet Jews in Aleksandr Galich’s Play “Matrosskaia Tishina” and the Film “Papa” discusses how the play and film represent important processes of Jewish life in the Soviet Union in the late 1920s – mid 1950s, including assimilation, the Holocaust and the Jewish national awakening. Both main characters of the play and film, the father Abram Schwartz and his son David, perished during World War II. Abram was killed by the Nazis in his native town Tul’chin, while David was mortally injured fighting

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against the Nazis on the front. The Holocaust and the tragic fate of his father compelled David to rethink his negative attitude toward his Jewish origins and cause his national awakening just before his death. Chapter Five The Holocaust and the Armenian Genocide in Film discusses the representation of the Holocaust and the Armenian Genocide in film from the early Holocaust and genocide cinema to recently made films. The authors analyze the relevance and accuracy of Holocaust and Genocide representations, the possibilities and limitations for artistic expression of these themes. Stuart Liebman’s essay Early Holocaust Cinema: Jews Under the Sign of the Cross analyzes four early Holocaust films—Vernichtungslager Majdanek—Cmentarzysko Europy (1944), Death Mills (1945), Osventsim (1945), and Daleka cesta (1948). The author shows that both documentary and fiction films used the Christian cross as symbol of the suffering and death of the Holocaust victims. These films “de–judaized” the Holocaust victims and showed their sufferings though universal symbols accepted by the gentile society. Thus early Holocaust films “made in both east and west, sidestepped a truth that we know all too well today: namely, that the Jews—and to a somewhat lesser extent, the Roma and Sinti peoples— suffered a unique fate among the countless Nazi victims …”11 Marat Grinberg demonstrates in his essay Non–Belated Trauma: Jean–Pierre Melville and the Beginnings of Holocaust Cinema how scholars and film critics have neglected the question of Jewishness in the works of French film director Jean–Pierre Melville (1917–1973). Grinberg provides a new analysis of Melville’s first film, The Silence of the Sea (1947–49), and argues that “Jewishness was of tremendous importance to Melville and played a fundamental role in his aesthetics in both coded and implicit, but also direct ways.”12 Grinberg argues that this film about the French Resistance “needs to be viewed as essentially a Holocaust film.” The film provides an entire discourse on the Nazi extermination camp Treblinka. Lawrence Baron’s essay The Armenian–Jewish Connection: The Influence of Holocaust Cinema on Feature Films about the Armenian Genocide shows the parallels and connections between films about the Armenian Genocide and Holocaust films. Baron shows that the production of films about the Armenian Genocide was for a long time blocked by the Turkish government. However, Jews in interwar and wartime Europe turned to the topic of the Armenian Genocide, because they saw in the Armenian Genocide a precursor to their own persecution by Nazi Germany. After World War II several movies about the Armenian

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Genocide were produced, which made analogies to Holocaust films, and used images and scenarios from them. Dan McMillan’s essay Dehumanization and the Achievement of Schindler’s List discusses Steven Spielberg’s film Schindler’s List (1993). He argues that the film explores the theme of dehumanization in the Holocaust using as an example the behavior of two of the film’s protagonists, Oskar Schindler and Amon Goeth, Kommandant of the Plaszow slave labor camp. While Schindler in the film underwent a moral transformation and became committed to saving the Jews, “Goeth has become something inhuman by embracing the belief that Jews are vermin.”13 McMillan believes that Schindler’s List was “ahead of its time in exploring the degree and forms of dehumanization in the Holocaust”14 and that the film makes a significant contribution in the understanding and popularization of Holocaust history. In his essay Holocaust Fantasy Films and Historical Considerations Michael Rubinoff analyzes why the genre of Holocaust fantasy films has become very popular among audiences in recent years. In his view, recent films of this genre, such as Max (Mejyes, 2002), The Boy in the Striped Pajamas (Herman, 2004), and Inglourious Basterds (Tarantino, 2009) “have drawn their inspiration from creative fantasies.”15 He believes that the popularity of such films can be explained by the public’s continued interest in the Holocaust, and the use film directors take with the genre through dark comedy, implausible storylines, the exaggeration of heroic Jewish resistance, and desire to revise of historical outcomes. These films distort the traditional views of the Holocaust and have a strong impact on the perception of the Holocaust by the popular audience. Chapter Six Teaching the Holocaust searches for new and innovative methods of teaching the Holocaust to college students. The young generation of college students sees the Holocaust as an event of the distant past, so new teaching methods are needed to explain for students the importance of these events. Kevin Simpson and Jon David K. Wyneken propose in their essay Remembering the Architecture of Death: Teaching the History and Psychology of the Holocaust to teach the Holocaust as an interdisciplinary course, using historical and psychological approaches to the topic. They give special emphasis to the processes of the memorialization of the Holocaust and the ambiguities of the recollections of the perpetrators, collaborators, and bystanders. Simpson and Wyneken recommend the use of audiovisual materials such as documentary films, podcasts, memoir excerpts, and archival photographs in teaching the Holocaust.

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Valerie S. Thaler describes in her essay Utilizing Holocaust Films in the College Classroom: One Instructor’s Insights methods of teaching the Holocaust through film for university students. Based on her own teaching experience, Thaler shows the value of films such as A Film Unfinished, Schindler’s List, The Pianist, The Boy in the Striped Pajamas, Sarah’s Key, and Life is Beautiful in teaching the Holocaust. She explains to students how the Holocaust is represented in film and teaches them view the historical material from an analytical, rather than emotional, perspective. She also helps students to think critically about directors’ multiple objectives in making films which deal with the Holocaust. This collection of essays, based on new multi–disciplinary research and innovative methods of the teaching of the Holocaust, opens many new unknown aspects and provides a new outlook on the topic. Lev Ozerov ended his poem Babi Yar by words “Don’t forget … Don’t forgive …”16 It was crucially important for the Holocaust victims and witnesses that people remember these tragic events. This book will help us better understand the Holocaust and pass our knowledge to future generations.

Notes 1 Kikhelekh un zemelekh, http://congressforjewishculture.org/2012/08/moishe-teyf -1904-1966/ (accessed November 29, 2013); https://joindiaspora.com/p/2001571 (accessed November 29, 2013). 2 Samuel D. Kassow, Who Will Write Our History? Emanuel Ringelblum, the Warsaw Ghetto, and the Oyneg Shabes Archive (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2007). 3 Cited in Peter Black, Holocaust by Bullets—“Hitler’s Hidden Holocaust”? 4 Patrick Desbois, The Holocaust by Bullets: A Priest’s Journey to Uncover the Truth Behind the Murder of 1.5 Million Jews (New York: Palgrave–Macmillan, 2008). 5 Roman Karmen, “Lublin Extermination Camp Called ‘Worst Yet’ by Writer,” Daily Worker, August 14, 1944, 8. Cited in David Shneer “Is Seeing Believing? Photographs, Eyewitness Testimony, and Evidence of the Holocaust.” 6 Treblinka. Holocaust Encyclopedia. http://www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/article.php ?ModuleId=10005193 (accessed November 29, 2013). 7 Ilya Ehrenburg, Vasily Grossman, The Complete Black Book of Russian Jewry (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 2003). 8 Cited in Maxim D. Shrayer, Lev Ozerov as a Literary Witness to the Shoah in the Occupied Soviet Territories. 9 Ibid. 10 Antony Polonsky, The Jews in Poland and Russia (Oxford, Portland, OR: The Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 2012), III, 669–670.

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11 Cited in Stuart Liebman, Early Holocaust Cinema: Jews Under the Sign of the Cross. 12 Cited in Marat Grinberg, Non–Belated Trauma: Jean–Pierre Melville and the Beginnings of Holocaust Cinema. 13 Cited in McMillan, Dehumanization and the Achievement of Schindler’s List. 14 Ibid. 15 Cited in Michael Rubinoff, Holocaust Fantasy Films and Historical Considerations. 16 An Anthology of Jewish–Russian Literature. Ed. Maxim D. Shrayer (Armonk, NY, London: M.E. Sharpe, 2007), I, 579.

CHAPTER ONE HOLOCAUST BY BULLETS AND EXTERMINATION CAMPS

HOLOCAUST BY BULLETS: “HITLER’S HIDDEN HOLOCAUST”? PETER BLACK Peter Black’s paper, as inferred from the question mark behind the title of the 2009 National Geographical Film, “Hitler’s Hidden Holocaust,” challenges the notion that that piece of the Holocaust implemented in shooting operations was unknown to or ignored by professional historians of World War II, Nazi Germany, or what is now called the Holocaust—the physical annihilation of the European Jews, only to be “discovered” through the work of popular writers such as journalist Richard Rhodes and cleric Father Patrick Desbois. Black’s article traces the interest in and publications on shooting operations in the USSR and in German occupied–Serbia from the beginnings of legal proceedings against Nazi offenders in the 1940s, through the first histories of what we now call the Holocaust in the 1950s and early 1960s. It covers the importance of the shooting operations in the extensive scholarly debate over the decision– making process initiating the so–called Final Solution during the 1980s and early 1990s. Black also places the Einsatzgruppen (the mobile offices of the Security Police and SD) into a more proper context and role as “expert consultants” on implementing the Final Solution within the broader framework of SS and police command on German–occupied territory; and dispels the stubborn myth that the Nazis invented the gas chamber solely because the shooters were having too much psychological difficulty with this in–your–facing killing. Gas chambers had been an instrument of Nazi mass murder well before the invasion of the Soviet Union or Yugoslavia; shooting operations continued in occupied territories wherever that method was more practical, long after stationary killing centers were functioning in areas where they were more practical. Finally, the paper suggests several factors, including media focus, survivor testimony from Auschwitz–Birkenau, and inaccessibility to documentation, eye–witnesses, and physical sites until after the collapse of the Soviet Union and the Soviet bloc in 1989–1991, in directing public/popular attention to Auschwitz as the iconic image of Nazi mass murder and atrocity.

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This paper is devoted to the topic of the “Holocaust by Bullets,” which happens to be the title of a highly publicized and well–received book published in 2008 by Father Patrick Desbois. Over the past several years, Father Desbois has traveled extensively through Ukraine, Belarus, and, more recently, Poland, uncovering shooting sites and mass graves containing the remains of victims of the Holocaust and other victims of the Nazi regime.1 In a 2002 publication, entitled Masters of Death, and more forcefully in a 2009 National Geographic television documentary, entitled Hitler’s Hidden Holocaust, Richard Rhodes maintained that Nazi shooting operations in the former USSR were virtually unknown to Holocaust scholars and historians. Such commentary infers—implicitly or explicitly—that the “Holocaust by Bullets” remained “hidden” until Rhodes, Desbois, and others discovered it and thrust it into the public consciousness in the first decade of the 21st Century. Consider the following quote from the introduction to Father Desbois’s poignant memoir: “The first mass victims of the Holocaust went largely forgotten through most of the post–World War II era. Their stories and the fates of their communities were obscured by clouds of Soviet secrecy and anti– Semitism.”2 Or consider Rhodes’ blunt statements of 2002: “The story of the Einsatzgruppen is almost unrelievedly grim, which is perhaps why it has hardly been told;” and “… It is impossible to understand how the Holocaust unfolded without knowing this part of the story, because the Einsatzgruppen massacres preceded the invention of the death camps and significantly influenced their development;” or: “Himmler … wanted his victims without bloodshed and his SS men to be just like other workers, which is the fundamental reason he switched the method of killing from Einsatzgruppen executions to gas vans and gas chambers.”3 In the National Geographic documentary, Rhodes reiterated his point and speculated that historians had neglected the significance of the shooting operations because, perhaps like the SS men Rhodes described, they did not want to “confront” that particular horror: “The general belief of historians is that the death camps were the center of the story, that the Einsatzgruppen killings have been shrugged off as wild excesses of the SS, which means to me that those historians also didn’t want to confront this situation.”4 In the same film, Michael Berenbaum remarked that the shooting operations presented three problems for the perpetrators: “The first, it was public. The second was that it was too personal. And finally … it was a waste of bullets.”5 The editors of a volume published to accompany an exhibit in Paris on Father Desbois’s work claimed in 2007 that, despite numerous “judicial inquiries, the Holocaust which took place in Eastern Europe has remained virtually unknown.”6

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Holocaust by Bullets: “Hitler’s Hidden Holocaust”?

There is no question that encouraging public interest in the shooting operations of the Holocaust era, whether or not the victims in each individual case were Jews, deepens understanding of the mechanics of Nazi population policies and, specifically, “final solution” policy and extends the limits of memory relevant to the victims of the Nazi regime. You should understand that I will not minimize the importance of this history in my remarks. Removed from the context of the process of the dissemination of Holocaust era information to the general public, however, the underlying assumptions of these statements might spawn misleading conclusions, both about the history of the “final solution” and about the history of its historiography. Were Nazi–sponsored shooting operations really “hidden”—unnoticed or unconsciously ignored by historians and prosecutors—until the 21st Century? Are they significant because they memorialize only the “first wave” of Holocaust victims, or because they inspired the gas chamber? If we attribute the murder of 2. 5 million Jews to the Einsatzgruppen alone, have we done justice to the memory of the victims by identifying all of the perpetrators? If any of these assumptions are misleading—or even false— what would lead anyone to conclude that they were accurate?

I. Unknown or Unnoticed? A History of the History The crimes of the Einsatzgruppen were neither hidden nor forgotten at the end of World War II. At Nuremberg, shooting operations on the Eastern Front were a focal point of investigators and prosecutors. At the major trial, Allied prosecutors submitted into evidence a monster report of October 15, 1941 by Einsatzgruppe A commander and SS–Brigadeführer Walter Stahlecker. They called to the stand as prosecution witnesses both Einsatzgruppe D commander Otto Ohlendorf and Reich Security Main Office official Walter Schellenberg, who was deeply implicated in working out the agreement between the Security Police and the High Command of the Army on the duties and functions of the Einsatzgruppen in the occupied Soviet Union.7 Moreover, U.S. prosecutors conducted a subsequent Nuremberg proceeding in 1947–1948 under the auspices of the International Military Tribunal against surviving leaders of the Einsatzgruppen. Among the defendants were Einsatzgruppe C commander Karl Rasch, Stahlecker’s successor as commander of Einsatzgruppe A, Heinz Jost, and Erich Naumann, who replaced Artur Nebe as commander of Einsatzgruppe B in November 1941. Prosecutors used many of the documents, including the daily composite reports from the field compiled by the Reich Security Main Office (Reichssicherheitshauptamt—RSHA)

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in Berlin and distributed to all of the key Reich civilian and military agencies, that form the basis for our understanding of the shooting operations today. The IMT judged the officers responsible for the Einsatzgruppen harshly, convicting Ernst Kaltenbrunner, the former chief of the RSHA, and sentencing him to hang at the major trial. In the proceedings against Otto Ohlendorf et al., the tribunal convicted 21 out of 22 defendants, sentencing fourteen of those convicted to death.8 Two of the subsequent Nuremberg proceedings were devoted to military commanders, both in the High Command of the German Armed Forces (Oberkommando der Wehrmacht—OKH) and in the regional commands in the Balkans, responsible for the involvement of military personnel in planning and implementing shooting operations on the Eastern Front and in German–occupied Serbia.9 Postwar authorities in Poland, the former Yugoslavia, and former Soviet Union tried Einsatzgruppen personnel and their auxiliaries at locations near where the crimes were committed. Held behind the Iron Curtain, however, these trials were indeed unknown in the West and their records remained inaccessible to scholars until the late 1980s.10 The developing Cold War cooled ardor for prosecuting Nazi offenders on both sides of the Iron Curtain, particularly after the respective leaders of West and East Germany, Konrad Adenauer and Walter Ulbricht, set the end to such prosecutions as one price that the Western Allies and the Soviet Union had to pay for the integration of the German republics into the respective blocs.11 By 1955, virtually no nation, much less an international court, was prosecuting Nazi offenders. Within three years, all Nazi offenders convicted by Allied or Soviet tribunals, but not executed, were back out on the street. The Cold War, however, did not completely extinguish either prosecutorial or historical interest in the Einsatzgruppen. After a political dispute over civil service tenure for former Nazi officials encouraged the establishment of a West German Central Agency of the State Justice Administrations for the Investigation of National Socialist Crimes (Zentrale Stelle der Landesjustizverwaltungen zur Aufklärung nationalsozialistischer Verbrechen—ZdSt) in 1958, one of the first major proceedings, those against Bernhard Fischer–Schwader et al., in 1958 in Ulm, involved numerous officials of the Einsatzgruppen.12 Over the next fifteen years, West German authorities indicted numerous commanders and mid–level SS and police officials on charges of having conducted or participated in shooting operations on the territory of the occupied Soviet Union.13 Though the proceedings were open and followed extensively in the press, the record of these trials, in accordance with standard practice of

6

Holocaust by Bullets: “Hitler’s Hidden Holocaust”?

the German Federal Republic, was not available, even to scholars, for another two decades. Neither journalistic nor historical interest in shooting operations in the Soviet Union was entirely absent at this time. The two most important works on the Holocaust—indeed before we called it the Holocaust—from this period gave the shooting operations at least as much attention as the killing centers.14 Appearing in 1960, journalist William L. Shirer’s best– selling history of Nazi Germany addressed shooting operations.15 After the conclusion of the Auschwitz Trial in Frankfurt am Main in Germany in 1965, four of the historical briefs prepared for the prosecution were published. Two were related to shooting operations: Helmut Krausnick devoted attention to these killings in “The Persecution of the Jews”; while Hans–Adolf Jacobsen first spotlighted the German Army’s role in Nazi crimes in his “The Commissar Order.”16 Both Reitlinger’s Final Solution and Hilberg’s Destruction of the European Jews were reissued in 1968 and 1967, respectively.17 During the late 1970s, shooting operations again surfaced in legal proceedings, scholarly work, and popular culture. Just as the most significant wave of West German prosecutions receded, FRG requests for the extradition of former Lublin Concentration Camp female auxiliary guard Hermine Braunsteiner–Ryan, who had resided in New York State with her husband since the late 1940s, awakened interest in the United States in taking legal measures against Nazi offenders, who had come in the late 1940s and early 1950s as displaced persons and refugees. Since many had been Soviet nationals and had joined auxiliary units of the SS and police that conducted shooting operations, these received renewed press coverage, keeping the issue alive and generating a tremendous amount of previously unavailable documentation over the next three decades. Many of the proceedings conducted by the U.S. Department of Justice’s Office of Special Investigations (OSI) three decades ago focused on non–German auxiliaries, who participated in shooting operations. These investigations targeted the perpetrators at the ground level. They revealed that the German units often required assistance from non– German police, military, and administrative auxiliaries to implement the “Holocaust with Bullets.” As the OSI was forming in 1977–1978,18 the shooting operations became the pivotal context in the bitter historians’ debate between “intentionalists” and “functionalists” over the timing of the decision to implement the “final solution.” Scholars could now gain access to early FRG proceedings conducted during the late 1950s and 1960s, including documentation obtained by German prosecutors from Polish, Soviet, and

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Czech archives. Stimulated by the publication of the proceedings of a conference in Stuttgart in 1979, no fewer than four volumes appeared specifically on the Einsatzgruppen over the next two decades.19 The Einsatzgruppen and their activities figured into dozens of other books and essays related to the decision to implement the “final solution.”20 Using West German investigative records for his 1992 groundbreaking work, Ordinary Men, Christopher Browning focused on the “Holocaust by Bullets” in Poland. He was one of the first to alert the general public that the Einsatzgruppen and the SS were not the only shooters. Browning’s work analyzed the role of the Order Police (Ordnungspolizei), many of whose officials were not even members of the Nazi Party.21 The two decades between 1975 and 1995 also generated profoundly intensified public interest in the Holocaust, neither excluding nor hiding Nazi shooting operations. Eichmann prosecutor Gideon Hausner published the first English language edition of his memoir and history of the Eichmann trial in 1966.22 Following Nora Levin’s first stab at a history of the Holocaust in 1968, Lucy Dawidowicz’s popular The War Against the Jews appeared in 1975.23 Though each author found in Auschwitz the culmination of that war, neither neglected to cover shooting operations. Nor were these killings “hidden” from the fictional Weiss family in the popular novel by Gerald Green, Holocaust, which appeared in 1978, followed by a CBS television mini–series that captivated millions in the United States, Germany, and elsewhere.24 One year later, President Jimmy Carter issued an executive order establishing a United States Holocaust Memorial Council (USHMC) tasked with establishing a memorial to the victims of the Holocaust on the Mall in Washington, D. C. The Council decided to cast the Memorial in the form of a Museum with a Permanent Exhibition; the narrative of that exhibition did not hide the “Holocaust by Bullets” when the Museum opened in 1993.25 Finally, the bitter debate that erupted in Germany, when the exhibit entitled “Crimes of the Wehrmacht” opened in 1995, focused public attention on the German Army’s responsibility for shooting operations.26 The assumption made by Richard Rhodes and implied in the work of Patrick Desbois that the “Holocaust by Bullets” was, before the 21st century, hidden, forgotten, or underemphasized in historical scholarship and even in offerings to the general public seems open to question. Nevertheless, the notion of a “hidden Holocaust” has some resonance in the public imagination. Neither Babi Yar nor Kam’yanets’–Podols’k became the icon of the Holocaust in the way Auschwitz did, although Babi Yar has become to shooting sites what Auschwitz has always been to killing centers.27 While relatively less significant concentration camp sub–

8

Holocaust by Bullets: “Hitler’s Hidden Holocaust”?

camps, such as Ebensee and Ohrdruf, have furnished the halls of Holocaust memory, the names of countless Holocaust shooting sites in Ukraine, Belarus, the Crimea, and Russia remain unknown to us—if, in fact, they ever had names. Some villages that were located near these sites are also unknown to us because they no longer exist. After killing Jews and Communists, the Germans and their auxiliaries murdered virtually everyone else in so–called anti–partisan operations. Lidice was legion in the occupied USSR. Why did Auschwitz, and the concentration camp in general, become the icon of Nazi evil? After all, as Hitler noted publicly, the democracies, not the Nazis or the Fascists, had invented and named the concentration camp: Great Britain in South Africa, and the United States in the Philippines.28 The trial of Adolf Eichmann, held in Jerusalem in 1961, seems to have had an initial impact here. In tying the murder of all six million Jews to him, Israeli prosecutors lent Eichmann a name recognition that ranks third in Holocaust history behind only Hitler and Anne Frank. In fact, Eichmann, who attained the SS rank of Obersturmbannführer (Lieutenant Colonel), supervised approximately twenty men in a small subsection of the Gestapo. His superiors in the RSHA tasked him with organizing the deportation of Jews from much of Europe, including Germany, Austria, the Czech lands, Slovakia, German–annexed Danzig– West Prussia, Denmark, Norway, Northern Italy, Greece, France, and the Low Countries. Without question, he contributed to the deaths of approximately 1,230,000 Jews and around 20,000 Roma and Sinti—surely enough to hang him many times over. Eichmann had little, however, if anything, to do with the murder of eighty percent of Holocaust victims, LQFOXGLQJWKRVHLQWKH*RYHUQPHQW*HQHUDODQG'LVWULFW%LDá\VWRN.77– 2.9 million); the German and Romanian occupied Soviet Union (approximately 1.5 million); the Gau Wartheland (200,000); Serbia (15,000); and three fourths of those killed in Croatia (20,000).29 Yet Eichmann has two recent scholarly biographies; meanwhile SS– Brigadeführer Odilo Globocnik, whose Operation Reinhard staff killed around 1.7 million Jews and the Higher SS and Police Leaders in the East, including Friedrich Jeckeln, who was responsible for the mass shooting operations at Kam’yanets’–Podols’k, Babi Yar, Riga and Liepaja in Latvia, still await scholarly biographies.30 Second, while more Jews died in Auschwitz than at any other single Holocaust killing site, more Jews survived Auschwitz (perhaps 100,000) than any other facility under Nazi rule—killing center, ghetto, or concentration camp. By comparison, survivors of the other four killing centers number less than five hundred. The three most widely read literary

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figures of the Holocaust survived Auschwitz: Elie Wiesel, Primo Levi, and Anne Frank.31 Moreover, unlike the other four killing centers, let alone the thousands of shooting sites, the physical remains of Auschwitz survived as well. SS and police personnel dismantled Belzec, Treblinka, Sobibor, and &KHáPQR FRPSOHWHO\ EHIRUH WKH DUULYDO RI 6RYLHW WURRSV 7KHUHIRUH RQH should not judge the twenty–first–century explorers in the history of the “Holocaust by Bullets” of excessive self–promotional zeal: it seems little wonder that as Auschwitz became the symbol of Nazi evil for novelists and sociologists, philosophers and playwrights, psychologists and poets, shooting operations receded into the back rooms of the popular imagination.

II. Did Shooting Operations Inspire the Killing Centers? This notion originated in the 1950s, based largely on a 1946 postwar account of SS–Obergruppenführer Erich von dem Bach–Zelewski that Himmler grew sick to his stomach as he observed a shooting operation outside of Minsk in mid–August 1941. Himmler, so the story goes, remained deeply unsettled by the carnage that he had seen and continued to fret about the psychological health of his killers, whom he believed to be “decent” men. That evening, he directed Einsatzgruppe B commander and SS–Brigadeführer Artur Nebe to explore other, more “humane” means of killing. Ultimately, he approved the gas van and the gas chamber in order to get the job done without the splatter of brain matter on the uniforms of his men and without an unnecessary waste of bullets.32 The chronological Holocaust sequence of shooting operations in the USSR (1941–1942) and mass murder in gas chambers (1942–1944) appears to lend support to this theory, as do Himmler’s orders concerning rest and recreation during “comradely evenings” for the shooters after a hard days’ work. The story of Himmler’s indisposition at the shooting site outside Minsk lends it color. The weakness of the source material for this last, and simple, but often forgotten, chronology of the context of events in the Holocaust era undermines the viability of the theory of linear development from close range shooting to gas van and gas chamber killing technology. To begin with, Christian Gerlach has questioned the reliability of von dem Bach– Zelewski’s account of Himmler’s illness at the killing site near Minsk. After the shooting, Himmler visited a psychiatric clinic in Nowinki and ordered Nebe to liquidate the in–patients. In the context of this order, Himmler and Nebe discussed other means of killing. Nebe later experimented with carbon monoxide gas and explosives on persons

10

Holocaust by Bullets: “Hitler’s Hidden Holocaust”?

suffering from mental illness. The only certainty about Himmler’s immediate response to the shooting is that he gave an impromptu speech to the shooters in which he depicted the operation as “repulsive” (widerlich), adding that he would not be pleased if Germans did this sort of thing “gladly,” but that this “bloody business” (das blütige Handwerk) was a “necessary defensive operation.”33 Not that Himmler was unaffected or unconcerned for the psychological welfare of his men.34 He had understood from before the war that the treatment of the real and perceived enemies of Nazi Germany would demand difficult psychological sacrifices from his men but that their duty was to be “tough,” while remaining “decent” in performing these stressful tasks. On November 8, 1938, speaking to SS generals at a commemoration of the 1923 Hitler putsch, Himmler, referring to the SS Death’s Head Units (Totenkopfverbände), which guarded the concentration camps, remarked that: “A master race must be able to exclude people who are harmful to the community from the community without Christian compassion, but nevertheless remain decent while doing this … A master race must be able to shoot when a harmful person flees, but must never abuse him. That would not be decent, since he cannot defend himself.”35 Five years later, shortly before the completion of the “final solution,” Himmler spoke to his SS generals in 3R]QDĔDQGWROGWKHP Most of you know what it means when 100 corpses are lying there together, when 500 are lying there, or when 1000 are lying there. To have held fast through that and, other than exceptions spurred by human weaknesses, to have remained decent: that has made us tough … All in all we can say that we have carried out this most difficult assignment out of love for our nation [Volk]. In doing so, we have sustained no internal damage, in our souls, in our character.36

Himmler was concerned for the welfare of his men—his prescriptions for how they should spend their evenings after a day of shooting innocent human beings reflect that concern as much as they do his pedantic inclination to monitor their private lives.37 Nevertheless, he expected them to “produce” in “final solution” policy, regardless of whether they shot or gassed “enemies” of the Third Reich. If the issue of motivation already undermines the viability of a linear development from shooting operations to gas chambers, two chronologies make the argument difficult to sustain. The first concerns the use of gas to murder. The Germans did not start thinking about either gas chambers or gas vans in the late summer 1941. They adopted poison gas as a method to carry out mass murder in the late autumn 1939 and developed the gas van

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as a killing implement in 1940; well before the campaign against the Soviet Union, the initiation of the final solution, and the beginning of the “Holocaust by Bullets.” The victims were generally not Jews, but rather people with physical and intellectual disabilities living in institutions on the territory of the so–called Greater German Reich, including parts of German–annexed Poland. Neither the Gestapo nor the SD had much to do with the so–called “euthanasia” program. Personnel from the Criminal Police Detective force and the police crime laboratory were the chief perpetrators, along with health care professionals—physicians, nurses, orderlies, and clinic administrators from all over Germany and Austria.38 German officials transplanted the dreadful methods—and even much of the management personnel, who were later employed at the Operation Reinhard killing centers (Belzec, Sobibor, and Treblinka 2)—directly from “euthanasia” operations in the Reich to District Lublin in German– occupied Poland in the winter of 1941–1942. Assembly line methodology, techniques of killing by poison gas, and procedures on transport and deception were operational in Germany a full year before mobile killing units crossed the borders of the Soviet Union in June 1941.39 Gassing RSHUDWLRQVDW&KHáPQRLQ*DX:DUWKHODQGRZHGmore inspiration to 1940 gas van killings in German–annexed northern Poland than to concurrent shooting operations further east.40 Gassing at Auschwitz (as in Mauthausen and Stutthof) began in a limited fashion in the autumn of 1941, as a tool to eliminate small, targeted groups of enemies of the Reich as defined by the Security Police and SD, and to weed out prisoners who could no longer work. SS authorities did not determine to establish their central facility for the murder of the Central European, West European, and Balkan Jews at Auschwitz–Birkenau until the late winter of 1942. Gas chambers and gas vans in German–occupied Poland and in the Reich in 1940, not reservations about the impact on men and ammunition of the shooting operations in the occupied Soviet Union in 1941, inspired murder by gas in the Warthegau and the Government General in 1942. The second chronological problem with a linear development from shooting operations to gas chambers is that the availability of stationary killing facilities did not end shooting operations in the USSR. The Germans continued to kill primarily by shooting until their military advance halted—after the killing centers became operational and even after they were dismantled. The last Jewish communities to fall victim to shooting operations in the USSR were those of the northern Caucasus region in the summer of 1942.41 German troops even found and shot one Jew during the battle for Stalingrad.42 Retreating west in 1943 and 1944, the Germans slaughtered any Jews they could find as well as hundreds of

12

Holocaust by Bullets: “Hitler’s Hidden Holocaust”?

thousands of non–Jews in the name of a security that their own policies rendered impossible to establish, let alone sustain. Even during Operation Reinhard, implemented in the Government General and known for its gas chambers at Belzec, Sobibor, and Treblinka 2, SS and police killed as many as 200,000 Jews in shooting operations. I am not referring here to those countless thousands shot at the killing center burial pits, cynically dubbed “infirmaries” because they could not walk to the gas chambers on their own. In addition to the nearly 50,000 Jews shot in and near forced labor camps in District Lublin in November 1943 as part of Operation “Harvest Festival” (Unternehmen Erntefest), German SS and police units along with non–German auxiliaries shot at least 150,000 Jews in the localities in which they lived or had been concentrated between April 1942 and June 1943.43 Was this a “hidden” Holocaust? Maybe, but certainly not since 1992— not even from the lay public—when Christopher Browning published Ordinary Men. Chronology renders untenable the idea that psychological distress in the mobile killing squads or concerns about the supply of ammunition inspired mass murder by use of poison gas. Himmler did fret, but he expected his men to do what had to be done—to be both “tough” and “decent” in his own definition of the terms. Tragically for the victims—Jewish and non–Jewish—they generally performed. This still begs the question, however: why did the Germans build stationary gassing centers? And why did they build them in German–occupied Poland? The answer is not that they expected killing centers for Jews to be more acceptable in a land known for its interwar political anti–Semitism, a notion that continues to survive in the popular imagination. The answer involves demographics, logistics, occupation strategy, and situational context. The murderous content of the Nazi myth world did not preclude the Nazi leaders and policy implementers from problem–solving in practical and efficient ways, making the most out of available resources and bending geographical, political, and military constraints to best facilitate completion of the task at hand. The energy, imagination, flexibility, and can–do dynamism that the Nazis brought to solving their perceived security problems within the framework of their ideology is fully as horrifying as the murderous brutality with which they implemented their policies. Put simply: wherever the Jewish population was dense and numerous (as in Gau Wartheland, the Government General, and the %LDá\VWRN'LVWULFW WKH*HUPDQVFRQVWUXFWHGVWDWLRQDU\NLOOLQJFHQWHUVDQG if rolling stock were available, transported Jews to these facilities to kill them. Where rolling stock was not available or where the location of the

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Jewish community precluded easy access to a rail line, German SS and police, supported by auxiliaries, shot entire Jewish communities where they lived or where their residents had been concentrated.44 The murder of the Polish Jews in stationary killing centers was dictated not only by logistical constraints, however. In early 1942, German–occupied Poland remained relatively quiet and was certainly sufficiently distant from the front lines to reduce dramatically what little value existed in justifying the mass murder as an anti–partisan operation. Worse still, a semi–public murder of Jews would do little to reduce unease in the Polish population, rendering Poles perhaps inclined to resist German occupation policies. Finally, the density and numbers of the Jewish population in Poland seemed in German eyes to increase the possibility for the Jews to organize armed resistance.45 Stationary killing centers made good sense in German– occupied Poland. The SS and police had unchallenged control of the security apparatus and unchallenged authority to implement security policy.46 Nearly half of the Jewish civilians, who were to die in the Holocaust, lived in the region; the incremental movement of Jews from larger communities in numerous transports to killing centers in rural areas served to reduce German fears both that the Jews would successfully organize resistance and that non–Jewish Poles would become sufficiently uneasy to increase parallel resistance efforts or, worse still, to come to the aid of Polish Jews. The Germans had to be even more sensitive to public opinion in Western Europe and the Reich itself. This related less to whatever identification of common cultural ground individual German occupation officials may have experienced, and even to a sense of racial common stock with the Northern Europeans (Norwegians, Danes, Dutch, and Flemings), than to the military priority of maintaining indigenous calm and compliance sufficient to sustain total war in the East and preparations to defend against an Allied invasion of France or Italy. Moreover, the Germans were highly dependent on local bureaucracies and police forces not only to maintain order in occupied territories, but also to implement “final” solution policy.47 Put bluntly, the Germans could afford neither to shoot Jews in Western Europe, nor to deport them with the same overt brutality characteristic of deportation and shooting operations in the East. Likewise, they could not risk constructing a killing center in the West.48 German “final solution” policy in the West was dramatically less thorough and less visible to those who were not its immediate victims than in the East. Instead of brutal deportation operations, German and indigenous authorities moved West European Jews to the East via a system of police transit camps, where

14

Holocaust by Bullets: “Hitler’s Hidden Holocaust”?

families might stay as long as a year before deportation to the East: Westerbork in Holland; Malines in Belgium; Drancy in France, and Bolzano in Italy.49 In the West, the deportation journey sometimes began in passenger rail cars, which the Germans then exchanged for freight cars, when the victims arrived at the eastern borders of the Reich. Moreover, with the exception of the Netherlands, the German implementation of “final solution” policy was less successful in occupied Western Europe. The percentage of the Jews able to survive, particularly if they were citizens of the nation in which they lived, was dramatically higher than in the East (e. g., France, at least 75 percent; in Belgium, at least 53 percent and possibly as high as 70 percent; in Norway, 56 percent; in Denmark, 93 and in Italy, 80 percent).50 This discussion is not meant to minimize the suffering and death endured by West European Jews or in any way to reduce the tragedy inflicted by the loss of those whom the Germans and their Axis partners deported. It serves only to demonstrate that the Germans adapted the methodology of implementing “final solution” policy in accordance with variations in situational context, including consideration of other German priorities. Germany especially had to respect the sensitivities of its Axis partners. The Foreign Office presence at the Wannsee Conference in January 1942 reflected RSHA understanding that diplomacy was preferable to threats or military occupation to persuade the Axis partners that their best interests were served by giving up their Jews.51 Except in Slovakia and Croatia, the two Axis partners who owed their political and economic existence to Germany, the Germans had limited success in getting the cooperation of the Axis partners for “final solution” policy, particularly after the killing centers began to operate.52 The overwhelming majority of the Jewish population of the core provinces under indigenous control in Romania and Bulgaria survived World War II because their respective governments refused to transfer them into German custody and the Germans, lacking the resources, were unwilling to bear the costs of intervening with force.53 Had they not invaded Hungary in March 1944, the Germans would have failed there as well, for the Hungarian government had refused to transfer Hungarian Jews into German custody after January 1942. Although the Finns turned over Jewish Soviet POWs to the Germans, the number of Jewish residents of Finland the Germans got can be counted on the fingers of a person’s hands. Italian military authorities in Greece, Croatia, and Dalmatia sometimes opposed and even obstructed German “final solution” policy; even under occupation, the Italians cannot be said to have been fully cooperative in facilitating the implementation of this core Nazi goal,

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even if humanitarian considerations were not the chief motive of Italian obstructionism.54 Inside the Reich, where more than half of German and Austrian Jews had emigrated by the winter of 1941, the Nazi regime was keenly sensitive to negative response on the part of the German population to overt physical violence against German Jews.55 Shooting operations on German soil were out of the question. Given the seepage of information into the public domain relating to the top secret killing operations that targeted people with disabilities living in institutions, and Archbishop Clemens von Galen’s speech denouncing the crimes in August 1941, the potential for public protest advised against operating killing centers in Germany proper.56 In 1941 and 1942, German, Austrian, and Czech Jews were WUDQVSRUWHGWRWKH*RYHUQPHQW*HQHUDOWRWKHàyGĨJKHWWRDQGWRVLWHVLQ Belarus and the Baltic States. The overwhelming majority died in Belzec, 7UHEOLQND&KHáPQRDQGWKHNLOOLQJILHOGVRXWVLGHRf Minsk, Riga, Kaunas, and Tallinn. Only in the fall of 1942 and early 1943 did Auschwitz– Birkenau, with the expansion of its killing capacity, become the primary graveyard of the Central European Jews.57 Conversely, in the German–occupied Soviet Union, particularly east of the 1937 borders, the Jewish population was generally more thinly settled, widely dispersed, and, at least in the cities, better integrated into non– Jewish life. Transportation and communications facilities were more primitive, while gasoline for large transports of civilians was in short supply. Moreover, combat, whether on the front lines or in the form of a partisan threat, made the justification for mass shootings of “spies” and “saboteurs” sufficiently credible. In the occupied Soviet Union, to annihilate Jewish communities in areas where they lived made more sense than to transport them long distances on primitive transportation routes to stationary killing centers.58 Even in the Government General, the Germans conducted shooting operations when train transport was not available or the killing facility could not “receive” the victims.59 In summary, the concern of the SS and police leadership about the psychological impact on the men did not inspire or make necessary the development of the gas van and the stationary killing center. This is neither to say that the SS leadership was indifferent to the psychological impact on the shooters nor to opine that shooters did not suffer psychological stress.60 As Browning has noted, however, the operations of Police Battalion 101 demonstrate that commanders always found enough men willing to shoot.61 Other factors drove the introduction of gas chambers and gas vans into the implementation of “final solution” policy.62

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Holocaust by Bullets: “Hitler’s Hidden Holocaust”?

III. Is the Emphasis on the Einsatzgruppen Justified? The simple answer to this question is, of course: yes, but with an important caveat. The affirmative answer should not ignore the culpability of the broader range of perpetrators. Focusing exclusively on the role of the Einsatzgruppen reinforces an unintended misconception arising from the Nuremberg proceedings that the SS alone—and within the SS, the Gestapo, and SD—were the primary, indeed exclusive, perpetrators of the “Holocaust by Bullets.” This is not to exonerate or mitigate the guilt of the organizations that the Tribunal convicted. Exclusive focus on them permitted other seriously implicated organizations to avoid the spotlight. Among these organizations were the Criminal Police (Kriminalpolizei— Kripo), the Order Police, the Waffen–SS (Military SS), and the combat, security, and intelligence units of the Wehrmacht.63 Less than half of all Holocaust victims died in stationary killing centers (perhaps 2.55 million). Excluding the approximately 800,000 Jews, who died in ghettos and concentration camps, a minimum of 2.4 million Jews were killed in shooting operations. The Germans and their auxiliaries shot at least 1.3 million Jews on the territories of the Soviet Union within the pre–1939 borders. Is it reasonable to assume that the personnel of the four Einsatzgruppen that followed the Army into the Soviet Union, perhaps 3,000 at full strength, could complete this dreadful task? That the daily RSHA composite reports of Einsatzgruppe activities were readily available and generally well publicized, even in the years immediately following World War II, certainly explains why the mobile Security Police and SD units got all the “credit” (and, as the aforementioned National Geographic documentary indicates, still do). Shooting operations, however, depended on the engagement of the broader SS and Police apparatus under the command of the regional Higher SS and Police Leader (Höhere SS—und Polizeiführer—HSSPF), to whom the chief of the Einsatzgruppe reported. They often required the active participation and, in areas close to the front lines, the initiative, of the Wehrmacht commanders and soldiers. The broad range of participation in the “Holocaust by Bullets,” as we now know it, renders prescient the subtitle of Gerald Reitlinger’s 1957 history of the SS (Alibi of a Nation).

IV. The Holocaust Era in the Soviet Union—Nazi Ideology I will try to place the “Holocaust by Bullets” into the broader context of Nazi ideology and German occupation practice. The Nazi leadership envisioned long–term German rule in the East of Europe, among an

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indigenous population whose ethnic composition the conquerors intended to fundamentally alter. The Germans set annihilating the European Jews as a priority goal against a much more extensive long–term population policy. The origins of the Nazi perception of the “Jewish enemy” and the reasons for participation by the indigenous Soviet populations in implementing Nazi “final solution” policy are complex. They derive from contemporaneous, often racist, reconstructions of stereotypes about Jews and Jewish behavior that developed or were reinforced following the first millennium and that relate to medieval, early modern, and post–French Revolutionary legal, economic, social, and theological relations between Jews and non–Jews in Europe. This is not the place to present them.64 Let me just note that the Nazis and their collaborators consistently identified the Jews as the standard bearers of Bolshevism, and, slightly less consistently, as the manipulative wire–pullers behind the alleged plutocratic capitalists, who controlled the governments of the Great Powers in Paris, London, and Washington. Consistent with their racist outlook on human history, the Nazis perceived the Jews alone to have the capacity to mobilize inferior races of the world to fight a war for a “Jewish” domination of the globe, destroying Germany in the process. As former RSHA chief Ernst Kaltenbrunner remarked under interrogation in September 1946, while awaiting judgment in his cell at Nuremberg, The Jew in the East is not, as in the civilized European lands, to be found in the professions of high finance, literature, the media, medicine and law, but [is] rather the sole intellectual, the sole governor of all [human] transactions, that group which alone had the intellectual organizing capacity sufficient to provide the enemy the participants necessary for the realization of his plans”65

The “annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe,” as Hitler put it in his Reichstag speech of January 30, 1939,66 would not and did not signify the culmination of restructuring in Europe by means of physical elimination but was merely a necessary prerequisite. The Nazi rulers envisioned employing such brutal means to physically eliminate or intellectually decapitate additional population groups. First and foremost on the list was the elite of the Soviet regime. Two ideological principles lay behind this aim: 1) to extirpate Bolshevism by killing all of its actual, perceived, and potentially future adherents; and 2) to proactively prevent the development of a class—be it ethnic, nationalist, or communist—capable of organizing resistance—present or future—to German rule. The Jews and the Soviet elite were not interchangeable groups, however; this ideological awareness underwrote Nazi policy towards Soviet prisoners of war, especially

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Holocaust by Bullets: “Hitler’s Hidden Holocaust”?

officers. Both SS and German Army operated on the principle that Soviet prisoners of war, unless racially and politically suitable for collaboration or even “Germanization,” had in the course of military training internalized an irreversible loyalty to the Bolshevik regime. They therefore had to die. After screening prisoners by nationality and political persuasion, SS–Police and German military authorities shot as many as 600,000 of them, including Jewish soldiers, soldiers perceived to have “Asiatic features,” and soldiers who demonstrated in any fashion that they were loyal to or successful in the Soviet state. This last category included virtually all officers and any identified as political commissars. The Quartermaster General’s Office of the German Army High Command (Oberkommando des Heeres—OKH), which had responsibility for prisoners of war, deliberately cut food rations issued to the Soviet soldiers below starvation levels in September 1941, condemning another 1.5–1.7 million prisoners to death from starvation, disease, and exposure in the winter of 1941–1942.67 The German invaders likewise targeted Roma (also known as Gypsies) in the occupied USSR. Building on pre–existing prejudice about Roma, including myths about their supposed inherent alienation from the communities in which they lived, their alleged biologically–sourced deviousness, and their perceived predilection to engage in criminal behavior, Nazi ideology defined Roma as useful tools of Jewish– Bolshevik masters, specifically as spies, informants, and saboteurs. German military units, and SS and police forces, routinely shot Roma in the USSR: the best estimate is that the Germans and their Romanian partners killed around 30,000 Soviet Roma.68 People with intellectual or physical disabilities living in institutional facilities also died by the thousands in German–sponsored shooting operations. I am not going to even hazard a guess at how many; we will never know. Unlike the murder of people with disabilities in the Reich, these shootings had no specifically racist rationale. They rather 1) served the needs of the SS or the Army for barrack space, field hospitals, or administrative buildings, or 2) conveniently accelerated the inevitable result of the intent of the German authorities not to feed people with disabilities. These two so–called practical justifications were often related.69 Perhaps the most numerous group to die in the German–occupied Soviet Union were non–Jewish Soviet civilians. German military and economic experts intended to provision the invading army from European food supplies for no more than two months. After this, German soldiers and, eventually, settlers were expected to live off of the land. Such

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planning was conditioned by the following presumptions: 1) European sources could not produce sufficient supplies of food to feed the occupying army and maintain the standard of living in the Reich; 2) east of the 1937 Soviet borders, German troops expected to encounter severe transportation difficulties; and 3) the Germans expected that the Soviet Union would collapse within eight weeks. Military and post–victory settlement operations required provisioning from the conquered territory at the expense of the indigenous population. German planners reckoned with as many as thirty million Soviet civilian deaths from starvation during the winter of 1941/1942 alone! They intended to steer this mass death both politically and racially by denying food to large urban areas, stigmatized as “breeding grounds for Bolshevism,” and by moving “undesirable” ethnic groups, such as Russians and Belarusians, to regions of northern and eastern Russia, which the Germans did not intend to provision.70 Two factors prevented the Germans from implementing this ambitious mass murder program: 1) the Soviet Union did not collapse as expected; and 2) to secure the territory behind the front lines, the German occupation authorities were forced to feed the indigenous population. Nevertheless, harsh and often racist–driven German security measures took the lives of hundreds of thousands of Soviet civilians, whose only offense was to have had the bad fortune to live under German occupation. The number of Soviet civilian deaths caused by the Germans ranges from 7.7 million to 14.2 million, including between 1.3 and 1.5 million Jews.71 Indeed, the question still begs: could 3,000 people accomplish or even manage this dreadful, premeditated human destruction? In fact, the extent of the killing apparatus was significantly broader, encompassing tens of thousands and possibly hundreds of thousands of perpetrators.

V. The Killing Apparatus In January 1939, SS–Obergruppenführer Reinhard Heydrich, the chief of the Security Police (Sicherheitspolizei—Sipo) and the Security Service (Sicherheitsdienst—SD) secured from Hitler’s deputy chief of state, Hermann Göring, authority to coordinate, direct, and implement a “solution” to the “Jewish Question” within the borders of the Reich. In July 1941, as German troops slashed deep into the Soviet Union, Göring extended this authorization to cover all of Europe.72 The authority of the Security Police and SD, now organized in the RSHA, to manage the “Jewish Question” was unchallenged in the Reich, in dealings with Germany’s Axis partners, in regions where indigenous administrations had significant leeway in managing internal affairs, and in two directly

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occupied countries (The Netherlands and Greece), even if success in “final solution” policy often depended on the collaboration of indigenous authorities (here Greece appears to be the only exception). Supervised by Adolf Eichmann, the desk chief of RSHA Section IV B 4, deportation experts organized the removal and transport of the European Jews to killing centers.73 In the USSR, Serbia, and most of Poland, however, RSHA representatives from Berlin had little to do with managing operations in the field. Regional RSHA authorities, known as Commanders of Security Police and SD (Befehlshaber der Sipo und des SD—BdS), and at the sub regional level, Kommandeure der Sipo und SD—KdS), participated and consulted in many operations commanded and coordinated by others, namely the HSSPFs. In the Government General, the regional SS and Police Leader (SS– und Polizeiführer—SSPF) in Lublin, SS– Brigadeführer Odilo Globocnik, managed “final solution” policy in all aspects: physical annihilation, exploitation of labor, and seizure of personal assets and property. Regional Security Police officials provided Globocnik’s Operation Reinhard Staff with support and guidance. Globocnik’s men not only operated the killing centers, however, but also coordinated deportations, arranged with the other SSPFs for local police and administrative support, and scheduled train transport.74 In Gau Wartheland, civilian authorities under Reich Governor (Reichsstaathalter) Arthur Greiser managed “final solution” operations, utilizing RSHA personnel to operate the killing cenWHU LQ &KHáPQR EXW HVVHQWLDOO\ excluding the RSHA and its representative, the Inspector of Security 3ROLFH DQG 6' LQ 3R]QDĔ DQG +663) LQ WKH :DUWKHJDX  IURP management of the killing operation and the material profits to be drawn from it.75 Before the assignment of an HSSPF to German–occupied Serbia in January 1942, the Einsatzgruppe coordinated “final solution” measures with the Chief of Military Administration in Belgrade, who in turn received his orders from the Military Commander in Belgrade. The chief of the Einsatzgruppe, Wilhelm Fuchs, cooperated closely with the German Military Administration in shooting operations in the summer and autumn of 1941, which targeted male Jews, male Roma, and interwar communist, democratic, or Serb nationalist politicians and administrators. While the Military Commander issued the overall orders, the Security Police and SD provided “political expertise” and guidance down to the level of the individual military field administrative headquarters. Of the at least 11,000 people shot in the summer and autumn of 1941, military units killed nearly 8,000, virtually all selected for shooting by the “experts” of the Einsatzgruppe. Only after the deployment of SS–Brigadeführer August

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Meyszner as the HSSPF in Serbia did the SS and police take over the murder of Jewish women and children.76 The Einsatzgruppen had more influence in occupied Soviet territory, particularly in areas close to the front, under direct military administration. Overall management of the “final solution,” however, explicitly fell to the HSSPFs: Friedrich Jeckeln, Hans–Adolf Prützman, and Erich von dem Bach–Zelewski. They reported directly to Himmler.77 We should recall here the place of the Security Police and SD within the SS and Police apparatus and the specific tasks of the Einsatzgruppen. The Security Police consisted of the Secret State Police (Geheime Staatspolizei—Gestapo), which investigated politically oriented crime, and the Criminal Police, which investigated crime absent a political motive. The SD was an intelligence agency tasked with developing information on supposed underlying connections and links between various enemies—real and perceived—of Germany. The SD also provided ideological guidance to the police in its quest for permanent and absolute security for Germany, a quest driven by extremely proactive and ideologically driven measures. After the Security Police and the SD were institutionally joined in the RSHA in September 1939, the chain of command in occupied territory ran from the RSHA in Berlin via the BdS and the KdS to local Security Police and SD field offices (KdS– Aussenstellen).78 The Einsatzgruppen of the Security Police and the SD were mobile field offices of the RSHA that functioned in territory that had not yet passed under civilian authority or where the situation at the nearest front had become volatile. They were neither new nor exclusive to the Soviet campaign: the first Einsatzgruppen (though they were only called this from October 1938, during the occupation of the Sudetenland) moved into Austria after German troops during the Anschluß in 1938; the last Einsatzgruppe followed the German Army into the Ardennes Forest in December 1944.79 These mobile units had five tasks: 1) identify, secure and neutralize immediately dangerous individuals and groups; 2) identify hidden networks of real or perceived opposition, based more on racial calculation than on pursuing leads to persons actually resisting; 3) secure key government buildings and official documentation; 4) establish informant nets to gather information on local conditions; and 5) screen locals for suitable and reliable collaborators. Once in the field, mobile units radioed reports daily to the RSHA outlining progress in all tasks; they also kept the regional military commander and the HSSPF informed.80 RSHA officials condensed and consolidated these reports in Berlin and then disseminated daily reports on the activities and intelligence developed by the

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Einsatzgruppen. Hence, the reports contained information on many activities and operations—including killing operations—in which the Einsatzgruppen may or may not have been involved, but of which the Security Police and SD had been informed.81 In concept, Einsatzgruppen functions in the Soviet Union were no different than they had been in the Reich, in Poland, or in Serbia. Special situational factors, however, characterized the Soviet campaign. For the first time, the SS and police could rely upon previously negotiated arrangements with the Army to take security measures as they saw fit behind the front lines. Army commanders were fully briefed and generally comfortable with the tasks of the Einsatzgruppen. Since they were to wage the war against the USSR, as the centerpiece of Nazi race–planning, with appropriate ruthlessness, they were prepared to order their own men to conduct such “security” operations. Moreover, since the Soviet Union never surrendered, the ever present front line, whether the lines of combat or the partisan threat, presented a credible danger to German troop security and thus provided convenient justification for race–based killing. Finally, German planners had already calculated on the mass death of millions of civilians.82 When the shooting began, few among the German invaders should have been surprised. The Einsatzgruppen carried out their usual functions within the intensified context of the war against the Soviet Union. In the Baltic States, they established specialized auxiliary security police detachments to shoot Jews and Communists. Even reinforced by the locals, they lacked the manpower to kill all whom they perceived to be dangerous, let alone those who actually raised a finger against the German occupation authorities. They needed other SS and police units, military units, and, wherever necessary, armed units of the civilian occupation authorities. Much as Heydrich hoped to control “final solution” policy implementation in the East, the RSHA lacked the personnel resources to do the job. It provided guidance, intelligence, and shooter role models, but only the HSSPF and the Army Group Commanders could marshal the resources to make the “Holocaust by Bullets” happen on a community–annihilating scale. Established in 1937, the HSSPF was Himmler’s regional deputy, promoting and advancing all SS and Police interests in his jurisdiction. In times of emergency, he commanded all SS and police forces stationed in his region.83 As the occupied USSR was always in a state of emergency, the power of the HSSPF was not theoretical, but quite real. He could issue orders to the numerically more significant Order Police and to the Waffen– SS. He worked with regional military commanders in areas under military

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jurisdiction. His regional power base and his direct link to Himmler often enabled him to prevail in jurisdictional struggles, including those with the commander of the Einsatzgruppe or the BdS.84 HSSPF Ukraine, and after October 26, 1941, HSSPF Ostland Friedrich Jeckeln was the driving force behind the massive operations in Kam’yanets’–Podols’k (22,000 Jews), at Babi Yar (33,771 Jews), and in Riga, Latvia (27,000 Jews).85 Einsatzgruppen personnel were present and reported on virtually all SS and police shootings and some of those implemented by the Wehrmacht. They provided intelligence, expertise, and coordinated initial killing in the regions until reinforcements arrived. They also supervised, often provided shooters and reported back to Berlin. They were not present in large numbers, however, for the mobile units had to move forward with the troops to secure areas further to the east. In German–occupied Poland, Security Police and SD personnel advised, offered guidance, and provided shooters, but the main perpetrators of the Holocaust—whether by bullet or by poison gas––were Order Police personnel, Order Police auxiliaries, and locally stationed Municipal Police Detachments (Schutzpolizei). They operated under the command of regional SS and police leaders; Globocnik’s Operation Reinhard staff coordinated and managed the deportation operations and the killing centers.86 While the SS and Police had exclusive responsibility for security in areas under civilian control, military commanders shouldered this responsibility not only for combat regions, but also for areas under military administration. Military units initiated and implemented the identification, concentration, economic exploitation, and physical annihilation of Jews and other “enemies” as often as the Einsatzgruppen did. Directly behind the front lines, the military and the SS–police cooperated as institutional and ideologically informed equals in “final solution” policy. As Dieter Pohl notes, German authorities killed up to half a million Jews in areas under Military Administration.87

VI. Conclusion As we have seen, the “Holocaust by Bullets” was not “hidden,” nor was it suddenly discovered in the 21st Century by Richard Rhodes and Father Patrick Desbois. It was a significant focus, both at the Trial of the Major War Criminals in Nuremberg and at the subsequent Einsatzgruppe proceeding in 1947–1948. Shooting operations remained the context for dozens of prosecutions in the German Federal Republic from 1958 and in the United States from 1979. Scholarship on the Nazi regime addressed

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them in the early and mid–1950s, despite the fact that many of the crimes were committed inside the former Soviet Union. A number of factors, however, distracted popular attention and interest from these crimes, so as to make them seem new to the lay public before 2000. First and foremost among these factors was perhaps the Eichmann trial in Jerusalem and the popular attention and interest that it generated.88 Though the Israeli prosecution sought to present the Holocaust in its entirety as connected to Eichmann, the tribunal judges––and thereafter historians, novelists, journalists, filmmakers, and, generally, survivors––linked him to that for which he was, in fact, responsible—the deportation of the European Jews to the East, primarily to Auschwitz. As interest in both the Nazis and the Holocaust increased during the 1960s and 1970s, culminating in the TV miniseries of 1978 that gave it a vaster stage and outreach than ever before, Auschwitz and the killing center became the universal symbol of both Nazi and general human capacity for evildoing. The number of Auschwitz survivors—so small in relation to the number of Jews sent there (perhaps 100,000 or ten percent), but nevertheless enormous when compared to the number of survivors of the other four killing centers and all shooting operations put together (probably less than 5,000)—who remembered and spoke out, personalizing and publicizing the experience of the Holocaust for future generations, undoubtedly reinforced Auschwitz as the representation of the Holocaust, as did the fact that Auschwitz, having physically survived, became accessible in the 1970s to thousands of visitors, from survivors to school children. Finally, while most Auschwitz survivors (insofar as they were Jewish) came west after World War II as Displaced Persons or immigrants to Israel, those with first–hand knowledge of the shooting operations in the Soviet Union, Poland, and Yugoslavia (other than the perpetrators, who had reason enough to be silent), virtually all of them bystanders, remained unreached and unreachable behind the inner boundaries of the Iron Curtain, within the former Soviet Union. It seems little wonder that, as memorials specifically to the Holocaust began to proliferate in the late 1980s and early 1990s to meet the popular will to honor the memory of those who suffered and died under Nazi rule, to educate new generations about the history, and to raise awareness through such education of our responsibilities to make democracy––based on tolerance and equality––work, that Auschwitz became the symbol of the ultimate evil to which humans could descend. The collapse of the USSR, the disintegration of the Soviet bloc and the revelations of reams of scholarship and dozens of trials of Nazi offenders in the United States, Germany, and elsewhere over the next fifteen years revealed the full extent of participation in the “Holocaust by Bullets.”

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Historians had not, as Rhodes opined in 2009, avoided the subject. Indeed, they had begun to grapple with it in unprecedented detail and scope already in the late 1970s and the early 1980s, utilizing recently available records from the West German trials of the 1950s and 1960s. The opening of archives in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, and the scholarship that these documentary treasures inspired, led to the identification of not only the Einsatzgruppen as perpetrators, but also the Criminal Police, the Order Police, the HSSPFs and their staffs, the Waffen–SS, the Wehrmacht, armed units of the civilian authorities (such as the Special Service (Sonderdienst) in the Government General), the Organization Todt in the occupied USSR,89 and finally, tens of thousands of local auxiliaries. It led as well to the revelation of the key role played by German and other Axis civilian and military authorities in massive larceny operations targeting the property of the victims.90 Finally, the collapse of the Soviet Union has, for the first time, opened access to hundreds, perhaps thousands of eye– witnesses, who are prepared to offer interested and committed explorers of the desolate landscape of shooting operations their accounts of what they saw and heard. Sadly, only those who were teens and small children remain alive. But for many shooting operations, only they can provide the intensity of an eyewitness account of those killings, the traces of which still dot the former German–occupied East. These words should not be construed as downplaying either the significance or culpability of the Einsatzgruppen. I seek rather to place their actions within the context of the SS and Police apparatus so that those who worked with—not for—them on Nazi “final solution” policy do not get a free pass from history. Just as implementation of the Holocaust in Germany required complicity from among the broadest range of Germans, the “Holocaust by Bullets” required active, mission–oriented participation of SS and police forces, Wehrmacht units, German civilian authorities, support from Germany’s Axis partners (particularly Romania), and from indigenous collaborators. The Nazis conceived, planned, and implemented the Holocaust—the annihilation of the European Jews—as part of a broader vision to profoundly alter the ethnic composition of the future European New Order that they intended to construct. Nor are these words intended to minimize the importance of focusing public attention on a process by which more than half of all Jewish Holocaust victims—and hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions of others––died. This renewed— as opposed to new—emphasis on the “Holocaust by Bullets” is welcome: its reception in the public imagination should be accompanied by an understanding of Nazi methods and goals in context.

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Notes 1

Patrick Desbois, The Holocaust by Bullets: A Priest’s Journey to Uncover the Truth Behind the Murder of 1. 5 Million Jews (New York: Palgrave–Macmillan, 2008). 2 Ibid., viii. 3 Richard Rhodes, Masters of Death: The SS Einsatzgruppen and the Invention of the Holocaust (New York: Knopf, 2002), xi–xii, 282. 4 National Geographic Documentary, Hitler’s Hidden Holocaust (Aired August 2009), 4: 30–4: 41. 5 Ibid., 31: 25. 6 Boris Czerny et al., The Mass Shooting of Jews in Ukraine, 1941–1944: The Holocaust by Bullets (Paris: Memorial de la Shoah, 2007), 9. 7 Top Secret Report, “Einsatzgruppe A: Cumulative Report to October 15, 1941,” signed Stahlecker, Document 180–L, in International Military Tribunal (hereafter: IMT), Trial of the Major War Criminals, 42 vols. (Nuremberg, Germany: 1947), Vol. XXXVII, 670–717. U.S. prosecutors also introduced excerpts from a second cumulative report of Einsatzgruppe A, issued at the end of January 1942. See Document 2273–PS, Ibid., XXX,71–83. See also testimony of Otto Ohlendorf, ibid. Vol. IV, 311–354; and testimony of Walter Schellenberg, Ibid., 374–385. 8 The entire record of the IMT and excerpts of the twelve subsequent Nuremberg trials had appeared in the English language and were widely and inexpensively available by 1950. See citation in footnote 7 and Trials of War Criminals (hereafter: TWC), 15 volumes (Washington: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1946–1949). Excerpts of records of the Proceedings against Ohlendorf et al. are in Vol. IV,. 1–596. Only four of the fourteen were actually executed, however. U.S. Army Review Boards commuted the remaining ten sentences to life imprisonment (one on grounds of ill health) and the defendants who were still alive were out by 1958. Neither Stahlecker nor Nebe survived the war. 9 Excerpts from the record of the “High Command Case” (IMT v. Leeb et al.) and the “Hostage” Case (IMT v. List et al.) can be found in Ibid., vols. X and XI, passim. 10 Examples are the proceedings against Friedrich Jeckeln, the Higher SS and Police Leader in Ukraine and, after November 1941, the Baltic States. Jeckeln planned and managed the mass shooting operations in Kam’yanets’–Podols’k (August 1941), Babi Yar outside Kiev (September 1941), Riga (November 1941) and Liepaja (December 1941). A copy of the proceedings against Jeckeln et al. is now available in file ZM–1683, Bundesarchiv–Zwischenarchiv in Dallwitz– Hoppegarten (hereafter BZ–DH). See Andrej Angrick and Peter Klein, The “Final Solution” in Riga: Exploitation and Annihilation, 1941–1944 (New York: Berghahn, 2009), 439, 459 (ftn. 9); Ruth Bettina Birn, Die Höhere SS– und Polizeiführer: Himmlers Vertreter im Reich und in den besetzten Gebieten (Düsseldorf: Droste, 1986), 337. Yugoslav authorities tried, convicted, and executed the commander of the Einsatzgruppe deployed in Yugoslavia, Wilhelm Fuchs, and other Einsatzgruppe and Security Police personnel. Individual

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interrogations from these proceedings surfaced as evidence in the proceedings against Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem in 1961. For example, see protocol of interrogation of Hans Helm, September 16, 1946, records of the Military Court in Belgrade, Sud. Broj. 725/46, copy in proceedings against Adolf Eichmann, Jerusalem, Document No. 1434, proceedings against W. Fuchs, file 503 AR–Z 179/74, Bundesarchiv/Zentrale Stelle, Ludwigsburg (hereafter BA–ZSt). 11 See, for instance, the discussion in Michael Wildt, Generation des Unbedingten: Das Führungskorps des Reichssicherheitshauptamtes (Hamburg: Hamburger Edition, 2002), 762–766, 838–843; Konrad H. Jarausch, After Hitler: Recivilizing Germans, 1945–1955 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), 48–55. 12 Judgment in Proceedings against Bernhard Fischer–Schweder et al., August 29, 1958, Ks 2/57, Landgericht Ulm, Document No. 465, published in Justiz und NS– Verbrechen: Sammlung Deutscher Strafurteile wegen nationalsozialistischen Tötungsverbrechen, 1945–1966(Amsterdam: University Press Amsterdam, 1976), Vol. 15, 1–265. 13 For examples, see Judgment in Proceedings in Georg Heuser, the Commander of Security Police and SD in Minsk, May 25, 1963, file 9 Ks 2/62, Landgericht Koblenz, document No. 552, reproduced in Ibid., Vol. 19 (1978), 159–317; Judgment in Proceedings against E. [Erich Ehrlinger] et al., December 20, 1961, file, VI Ks 1/60, Landgericht Karlsruhe, Document No. 526, Ibid., Vol. 18, 65– 126; Judgment in Proceedings against Otto Bradfisch et al., July 21, 1961, file 22 Ks 1/61, Landgericht Munich I, document no. 519, Ibid., Vol. XVII, 657–708 (Bradfisch commanded Einsatzkommando 8 of Einsatzgruppe B, active in Belarus and Russia); Judgment in Proceedings against Albert Rapp (commander of Sonderkommando 7a operating in Russia), March 29, 1965, file 29 Ks 1/64, Landgericht Essen, document no. 588, Ibid., XX, 715–815. See also Judgment in Proceedings against Erhard Grauel et al. (active in Latvia), file 2 Ks 3/68, Landgericht Hannover; and Judgment in Proceedings against Viktor Arajs (commander of the Latvian Auxiliary Security Police in Riga), December 21, 1979, file no. (37) 5/76, Landgericht Hamburg, document no. 856, published in Ibid,. Vol. XLIII, 172–237. 14 Gerald Reitlinger, The Final Solution: The Attempt to Exterminate the Jews of Europe, 1939–1945 (New York: Beechhurst Press, 1953); Raul Hilberg, The Destruction of the European Jews (Chicago: Quadrangle, 1961). Reitlinger also referred to the shooting operations in his The SS: Alibi of a Nation, 1922–1945 (New York: Viking, 1957), 175–187. 15 William L. Shirer, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich: A History of Nazi Germany (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1960). 16 Helmut Krausnick et al., Anatomie des SS–Staates (Olten–Freiburg im Breisgau: Walter Verlag AG, 1965). Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag released a two volume paperback edition in 1967; the work appeared in English (though not in paperback) in 1968. See Helmut Krausnick et al., Anatomy of the SS–State (New York: Walker and Co., 1968). 17 Gerald Reitlinger, The Final Solution: The Attempt to Exterminate the Jews of Europe, 1939–1945, New and Augmented ed. (Cranberry, N. J: Thomas Yoseloff, 1968). Quadrangle produced a paperback of Hilberg’s book in 1967.

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18 In 1977, the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) established a Special Litigation Unit for the investigation of alleged Nazi offenders who had entered the United States under false pretenses. Due to INS unwillingness to fund and staff the office in a way to encourage effective investigations, the Department of Justice moved it to the Criminal Division in 1979 and renamed it the Office of Special Investigations. 19 Helmuth Krausnick and Hans–Heinrich Wilhelm, Die Truppe der Weltanschauungskrieges: die Einsatzgruppen der Sicherheitspolizei und des SD, 1938–1942 (Deutsche Verlags–Anstalt, 1981); Ronald Headland, Messages of Murder: A Study of the Reports of the Einsatzgruppen of the Security Police and the Security Service (London–Toronto: Associated University Presses, 1992); Ralf Ogorreck, Die Einsatzgruppen und die Genesis der “Endlösung” (Berlin: Metropol, 1996); and Peter Klein, ed., Die Einsatzgruppen in der besetzten Sowjetunion 1941/1942: Die Tätigkeits– und Lageberichte des Chefs der Sicherheitspolizei und des SD (Berlin: Hentrich, 1997). 20 Helmut Krausnick, “Hitler und die Befehle an die Einsatzgruppen im Sommer 1941,” in Eberhard Jäckel and Jürgen Rohwer, Der Mord an den Juden im Zweiten Weltkrieg (Frankurt am Main: Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, 1987), 88–106; Alfred Streim, “Zur Eröffnung des allgemeinen Judenvernichtungsbefehls gegenüber den Einsatzgruppen,” in Ibid., 107–114; Richard Breitman, The Architect of Genocide: Himmler and the Final Solution (New York: Knopf, 1991); Christian Gerlach, Kalkulierte Morde: Die deutsche Wirtschafts– und Vernichtungspolitik in Weißrußland, 1941 bis 1944 (Hamburg: Hamburger Edition HIS, 1999); Peter Longerich, Politik der Vernichtung: Ein Gesamtdarstellung der nationalsozialistischen Judenverfolgung (Munich–Zurich: Piper, 1998); Dieter Pohl, Nationalsozialistische Judenverfolgung in Ostgalizien, 1941–1944: Organisation und Dürchführung eines staatlichen Massenverbrechens (Munich: R. Oldenbourg, 1997); and Walter Manoschek, “Serbien ist judenfrei”: Militärische Besatzungspolitik und Judenvernichtung in Serbien, 1941/42 (Munich: Oldenbourg, 1993). 21 Christopher Browning, Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland (New York: Harper Collins, 1992). The almost as well known and intensely publicized, but not as thoroughly analyzed or as clearly written volume of Daniel Goldhagen, Hitler’s Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust (New York: Knopf, 1996), covers some of the same ground as Browning, though it spins the motivation of the shooters in a very different direction. Heiner Lichtenstein published a popular history of the role of the Order Police in the Final Solution in 1990. Heiner Lichtenstein, Himmlers Grüne Helfer: Die Schutz– und Ordnungspolizei im “Dritten Reich” (Köln: Bund– Verlag, 1990). This wave of publications included works devoted to revealing the role of other perpetrators and the suffering and death of other victims of shooting operations. For example, see Christian Streit, Keine Kameraden: Die Wehrmacht und die sowjetischen Kriegsgefangenen, 1941–1945(Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlagsanstalt, 1978); Michael Zimmermann, Rassenutopie und Genozid: Die nationalsozialistische “Lösung der Zigeunerfrage”(Hamburg: Christians, 1996).

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Gideon Hausner, Justice in Jerusalem (New York: Schocken, 1968). The paperback edition came out in 1968. 23 Nora Levin, The Holocaust: The Destruction of European Jewry, 1933–1945 (New York: Schocken, 1968); Lucy S. Dawidowicz, The War Against the Jews, 1933–1945 (New York: Holt, Reinhardt, and Winston, 1975). 24 Gerald Green, Holocaust, (Garden City, N. Y. Nelson–Doubleday, 1978; Holocaust Titus Productions and Paramount Pictures, “Holocaust” produced for CBS and directed by Marvin J. Chomsky, 1978. 25 Edward T. Linenthal, Preserving Memory: The Struggle to Create America’s Holocaust Museum (New York: Viking, 1995); Michael Berenbaum, The World Must Know: The History of the Holocaust as Told in the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (Washington: U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, 1993). On the other hand, the television miniseries, “Holocaust” aired by NBC in the spring of 1978 and exerting a tremendous impact on the general public in the United States and Germany, gave only scant attention to shooting operations. 26 Hannes Heer and Klaus Naumann, eds., Vernichtungskrieg: Verbrechen der Wehrmacht (Hamburg: Hamburger Edition, 1995). 27 Perhaps as the result of the poet Evgeniy Yevtushenko’s immortalization of the site in his poem, “Babi Yar,” which was first translated into English in 1962. 28 Hitler pointed to the British precedent in his Reichstag speech of January 30, 1940 in response to what he claimed were British charges that the Germans were waging war against women and children. Referring to the Boer War, he opined: “The concentration camp was invented at that time; the idea was born in an English brain. We merely found it in the dictionary and copied the idea. ”Max Domarus, Hitler: Reden und Proklamationen, 1932–1945 (Neustadt an der Aisch: Verlagsdruckerei, Schmidt, 1963), 1459. See also Hitler‘s Reichstag speech of January 30, 1941, Ibid., 1658. Regarding the British in the Boer War, see Denis Judd and Keith Surridge, The Boer War (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2003), 4–5, 194–196, 208–270. For an account justifying the intent of the British, if not the actual result, see A. C. Martin, The Concentration Camps, 1900–1902: Facts, Figures, and Fables (Cape Town: Howard Timmins, 1957). For the U.S. in the Philippines, see Stuart Creighton Miller, “Benevolent Assimilation”: The American Conquest of the Philippines, 1899–1903 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1982), 208–218; Bernadita Reyes Churchill, “Life in a War of Independence,” in Stewart Lone, ed., Daily Lives of Civilians in Wartime Asia: From the Taiping Rebellion to the Vietnam War (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2007), 29–64; and Peter Maguire, Law and War: An American Story (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000), 55–56. In confronting a Filipino insurgency using guerilla tactics against the U.S. takeover of the Philippines from Spain, U.S. troops resorted to shooting operations as well. 29 One can argue that the murder of nearly 100,000 Jews in Budapest after its encirclement by Soviet troops was also beyond Eichmann’s reach. The numbers of Jews he failed to deport due to the opposition or reluctance of local authorities were significant as well, totaling nearly 680,000 people: Denmark (7,500), Norway (1,000), Italy (35,000), France (275,000), Belgium (at least 36,000), Bulgaria (50,000), and Romania (275,000)! These figures are calculated based on a

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Holocaust by Bullets: “Hitler’s Hidden Holocaust”?

balancing between the following three sources: Raul Hilberg, Destruction, 1301– 1321; Wolfgang Benz, ed., Dimension des Völkermords: Die Zahl der jüdischen Opfer des Nationalsozialismus (Munich: R. Oldenbourg, 1991); and Martin Gilbert, The Routledge Atlas of the Holocaust, 4th ed. (New York: Routledge, 2009). Where appropriate, I have factored in demographic data from scholarship on individual nations and occupied regions: e. g., Evan Bukey, Hitler’s Austria: Popular Sentiment in the Nazi Era, 1938–1945 (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2000), 132; Livia Rothkirchen, The Jews of Bohemia and Moravia: Facing the Holocaust (Lincoln, Nebraska: University of Nebraska Press, 2005, 29; Alfred Gottwaldt and Diane Schulle, Die “Judendeportationen” aus dem Deutschen Reich, 1941–1945 (Wiesbaden: Marix Verlag, 2005), 443–467; Mark Mazower, Inside Hitler’s Greece: The Experience of Occupation, 1941–1944 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001), 235–261; Randolph L. Braham, The Politics of Genocide: The Holocaust in Hungary, rev. and enlarged edition (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 1298; Michele Sarfatti, The Jews in Mussolini’s Italy: From Equality to Persecution (Madison, Wis.: University of Wisconsin Press, 200624, 179, 202; Mordechai Altshuler, Soviet Jewry on the Eve of the Holocaust: A Social and Demographic Profile (Jerusalem: Avha Press, 1998), 2, 329–331; Jozo Tomasevich, War and Revolution in Yugoslavia, 1941– 1945: Occupation and Collaboration (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001), 607. 30 David Cesarani, Becoming Eichmann: Rethinking the Life, Crimes, and Trial of a “Desk Murderer” (Cambridge: Da Capo Press, 2007); Hans Safrian, Eichmann’s Men (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010). On Globocnik, see only Peter Black, “Odilo Globocnik—Himmler’s Vorposten im Osten,” in Die Braune Elite 2, Ronald Smelser et al., eds. (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgemeinschaft, 1993), 103–115. More journalistically, see Josef Poprzeczny, Odilo Globocnik: Hitler’s Man in the East (Jefferson, N. C.: McFarland, 2004); and Berndt Rieger, Creator of Nazi Death Camps: The Life of Odilo Globocnik (London: Vallentine Mitchell, 2007). On Jeckeln, there is only Richard Breitman, “Friedrich Jeckeln: Spezialist für die ‘Endlösung’ im Osten,” in Ronald Smelser and Enrico Syring, eds., Die SS: Elite unter dem Totenkopf (Paderborn: Schöningh, 2000), 267–275. 31 Elie Wiesel, Night (New York: Avon Books, 1969); Primo Levi, Survival in Auschwitz: The Nazi Assault on Humanity (New York: Collier Books, 1986); idem, The Drowned and the Saved (New York: Summit Books, 1988); Anne Frank, The Diary of a Young Girl (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1952). 32 Hilberg (Destruction, 343–344 and ftn. 210) notes that von dem Bach– Zelewski’s account appeared in the New York Jewish newspaper Aufbau in August 1946. Gerald Reitlinger drew this conclusion as early as 1953 in the first edition of Final Solution (p. 130) and repeated it in SS in 1955, 183. The direct link from distress at shooting to the development of the gas van has even slipped into some of the scholarly literature. For examples, see Christopher Browning, Fateful Months: Essays on the Emergence of the Final Solution (New York: Holmes and Meier, 1985); idem., The Path to Genocide: Essays on Launching the Final Solution (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 110. Browning became

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more tentative, but did not totally abandon this idea in The Origins of the Final Solution: The Evolution of Nazi Jewish Policy, September 1939–March 1942 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2004), 283. In his new biography of Himmler, Peter Longerich is more cautious about drawing this line, though he still draws it. See Heinrich Himmler (Pößneck: Pantheon, 2010), 552–553. In popular literature, this linear development of killing methodology and the reasoning behind it has almost axiomatic. See Michael Berenbaum, The World Must Know: The History of the Holocaust as Told in the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, 2nd Edition (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum), 96– 97; Shmuel Spector, “Gas Vans,” Encyclopedia of the Holocaust, Israel Gutman, ed., Vol. 1 (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1990), 541–544; Richard Rhodes, Masters, xi–xii, 282; and Michael Berenbaum in National Geographic, Hidden Holocaust, 31: 25. 33 Gerlach, Morde, 571–573; see also Peter Witte, et al., eds., Der Dienstkalender Heinrich Himmlers, 1941/42 (Hamburg: Christians, 1999), entry for August 15, 1941, 195 and ftns. 14, 15. The editors of the Service Diary (including Gerlach) note that experimentation with murder by poison gas may have been the initiative of von dem Bach–Zelewski, but not that of Himmler or Nebe. The German police murdered 120 mentally ill patients in Nowinki on September 18, 1941. 34 Himmler sat with the leaders of the shooting operation that evening and appears to have been more unhinged by the excessive consumption of alcohol than by the shooting earlier in the day. See the sources in footnotes 32 and 33. 35 “Speech of Himmler to SS Generals at an SS Generals Conference at the Officer’s Quarters of the SS–Standarte ‘Deutschland’am 8.11.1938,” reproduced in Bradley F. Smith and Agnes F. Peterson, eds., Heinrich Himmler: Geheimreden, 1933 bis 1945 und andere Ansprachen (Frankfurt am Main: Propyläen Verlag, 1974), 32. 36 “Speech of Himmler at the Conference of SS–Gruppenführer in Posen on October 4, 1943,” document 1919–PS, IMT, Vol. XXIX, 145, 146. 37 Order of Himmler, December 12, 1941, Fond 83, opus 1, folder 80, Central State Archive of the Latvian Republic, Riga as cited in Hilberg, Destruction, 342. 38 7KH JDV YDQ PXUGHUV LQ *DX :DUWKHODQG DQG WKH &LHFKDQyZ 'LVWULFW ZHUH implemented under the leadership of a Security Police and SD detachment, the Special Detachment Lange. The majority of the rank and file, however, were Order Police personnel. On the planning and implementation of mass murder of people with physical and intellectual disabilities by means of gas and other methods in the so–called Greater German Reich, see Henry Friedlander, The Origins of the Nazi Genocide: From Euthanasia to the Final Solution (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina, 1995). For the timing both of the development of stationary gas chambers and the use of gas vans in German–occupied Poland, see Eugen Kogen et al., eds., Nazi Mass Murder: A Documentary History of the Use of Poison Gas (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993), 37–40; Friedlander, Origins, 136–140; and Patrick Montague, &KHáPQRDQGWKH+RORFDXVW7KH+LVtory of Hitler’s First Death Camp (Chapel Hill, North Carolina: University of North Carolina Press, 2012), 14–32.

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39 Patricia Heberer, “Eine Kontinuität der Tötungsoperationen: T–4 Täter und die ‘Aktion Reinhardt’”, in Bogdan Musial, ed., “Aktion Reinhardt”: Der Völkermord an den Juden im Generalgouvernement, 1941–1944 (Osnabrück: Fibre, 2004), 285–308; Friedlander, Origins, 284–302. 40 The SS and police reconstructed the Special Detachment Lange under the same leadership in the summer 1941. Veterans of the gas van killings in 1940, the GHWDFKPHQW XOWLPDWHO\ FDUULHG RXW PDVV PXUGHU DW &KHáPQR EHWZHHQ 'HFHPEHU 1941 and March 1943 and again, briefly in June–July 1944. See Montague, &KHáPQR, passim; Kogon, Mass Murder, 73–80; Peter Klein, Die “Gettoverwaltung Litzmannstadt”, 1940–1944: Eine Dienststelle im Spannungsfeld von Kommunalbürokratie und staatlicher Verfolgungspolitik (Hamburg: Hamburger Edition, 2009), 341–342. 41 For the murder of the Crimean Jews in the winter and spring of 1942, see Andrej Angrick, Besatzungspolitik und Massenmord: Die Einsatzgruppe D in der südlichen Sowjetunion, 1941–1943 (Hamburg: Hamburger Edition, 2003), 509– 520. For the murder of Jews in the Caucasus region, see Ibid., 557–590. 42 Dieter Pohl, Die Herrschaft der Wehrmacht: Deutsche Militärbesatzung und einheimische Bevölkerung in der Sowjetunion, 1941–1944 (Munich: R. Oldenbourg, 2008), 276. 43 The estimate of numbers shot under the auspices of Operation Reinhard is based on the following: the total death count of 1. 7 million Jews killed; the figures of those who had arrived at the Operation Reinhard killing centers by December 31, 1942 and estimates of those who arrived at Sobibor and Treblinka 2 in 1943; the figures of the Jewish victims of SS and police shooting operations in District Galicia in the spring and summer 1943; the above mentioned estimate of Jewish victims during Operation “Harvest Festival”; and the testimony and personnel documentation of foreign auxiliaries, primarily former Soviet soldiers, deployed on multiple shooting operations in District Lublin and District Radom in the autumn of 1942. See Yitzhak Arad, Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka: The Operation Reinhard Death Camps (Bloomington: Indiana U. Press, 1987), 365–369, 379, 383–398;Top Secret Radio Transmission from the SS and Police Leader in Lublin [signed Höfle] to the Commander of Security Police and S'LQ.UDNyZ-DQXDU\UDGLR telegram no. 13. /15., Decode GPDD 355a, distributed on January 15, 1943, HW 16/23, Public Record Office, Kew England, reproduced and discussed in Peter Witte and Stephen Tyas, “A New Document on the Deportation and Murder of Jews during ‘Einsatz Reinhardt’,” in Holocaust and Genocide Studies, Vol. 15, no. 3 (Winter 2001), 468–486; Adalbert Rückerl, NS–Vernichtungslager im Spiegel deutscher Strafprozesse (Munich: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, 1979), 155– 158;SS and Police Leader in Galicia District [signed Katzmann] to Higher SS and Police Leader East, “Lösung der Judenfrage im Distrikt Galizien,” June 30, 1943, document L–18, IMT, Vol. XXXVII, 391–431; Pohl, Judenverfolgung, 246–265; and Peter Black, “Footsoldiers of the Final Solution: The Trawniki Training Camp and Operation Reinhard,” in Holocaust and Genocide Studies, Vol. 25, No. 1 (Spring 2011), 38, and 93, ftn. 285. On the testimony of the foreign auxiliaries, see, as examples, protocols of interrogation of I. A. Tarasov, February 8, 1965, Proceedings against N. G. Matvienko et al., 4/100366, vol. 6, 80–83, Arkhiv

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Federalnoy Sluzby Bezopasnosti po Krasnodarskomu Krayu (Archives of the Federal Security Services in Krasnodar Region); and protocol of interrogation of B. I. Babin, January 8, 1965, Ibid., vol. 13, 83–94. For support of foreign auxiliaries trained at the Trawniki Training Camp to Police Battalion 101 operating in Kreise 5DG]\Ĕ–3RGODVNL 3DUF]HZ  DQG %LDáD–3RGODVND àRPD]\ DQG 0LĊG]\U]HF–Podlaski), see Browning, Ordinary Men, 79–80, 95–96, 104, 134– 135. For reference to shootings in Radom District, see report of Municipal Police 'HSDUWPHQW 3LRWUNyZ WR &RPPDQGHU RI 2UGHU 3ROLFH LQ 5DGRP 'LVWULFW November 28, 1942, I. Mandrikow Trawniki Personnel File, RG 20869, “Guards,” vol. 20, 24, Tsentralnyy Arkhiv Federal’naya sluzhba bezopasnosti (Archive of the Federal Security Service), Russian Federation (hereafter: TsAFSB). 44 Reserve Police Battalion 101 generally conducted shooting operations in remote, rural areas RI ZHVWHUQ /XEOLQ 'LVWULFW DQG HDVWHUQ .UDNyZ 'LVWULFW UHODWLYHO\ distant from the killing centers at Belzec and Treblinka and at times when rail transport did not exist and truck transport was not available. Even in better connected areas, the Germans and their auxiliaries had to contend with unavailability of rolling stock, or technological glitches at the killing centers. See Browning, Ordinary Men, 55–70, 78–87, 97–103. Police Battalion 101 also engaged in deportation operations. Ibid., 88–96, 104–120. For rail transport issues and delays in deportations due to technological breakdowns or enhancements in the killing centers, see Arad, Death Camps, 73, 87–88, 92. 45 Indeed, underground Jewish organizations eventually did organize armed resistance behind ghetto walls, as the numerous ghetto revolts in late 1942 and 1943 demonstrate. For examples, see Barbara Engelkind and Jacek Leociak, The Warsaw Ghetto: A Guide to the Perished City (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009), 749–800; Barbara Epstein, The Minsk Ghetto, 1941–1943: Jewish Resistance and Soviet Internationalism(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008), 110–227; and Sara Bender, The Jews of Bialystok during World War II and the Holocaust (Hanover: University Press of New England, 2008). 46 “Decree on the Transfer of Official Duties to the State Secretary for Security Matters,” signed Governor General Hans Frank, June 3, 1942, Verordungsblatt für das Generalgouvernement, No. 50, June 23, 1942, 321–324, Library of Congress. 47 The Germans remained sensitive to Vichy “sovereignty” virtually until the Allies were at the gates of Paris, initially to help keep the French colonial rulers in line and later, particularly after the fall of Mussolini and the Allied invasion of the Italian mainland in 1943, to counter the increasing appeal of de Gaulle’s Free French forces based in North Africa. See Chief of the Political Division [Woermann], German Foreign Office to the German Ambassador in Paris [Abetz], February 25, 1941, Akten zur Deutschen Auswärtigen Politik (hereafter ADAP), Series D, XII, Part 1, Document no. 83, 128–129; Abetz to Woermann, February 28, 1941, Ibid., Document no. 103, 155; German Ambassador in Paris to the German Foreign Ministry, November 23, 1941, Documents on German Foreign Policy (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1953), Series D, XII, Document no. 494, 815–816; and Eberhard Jäckel, Frankreich in Hitlers Europa: Die deutsche Frankreichpolitik im Zweiten Weltkrieg (Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlags–Anstalt, 1966), 277–295.

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Holocaust by Bullets: “Hitler’s Hidden Holocaust”?

48 The Germans converted Auschwitz–Birkenau from their original design of a massive forced labor camp into a full–blown killing center in 1942 to “receive” the West European, and, later, German Jews. See Raul Hilberg, “Auschwitz and the Final Solution,” in Yisrael Gutman and Michael Berenbaum, Anatomy of the Auschwitz Death Camp (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998), 81–92. 49 On the RSHA administered transit camps, see Gudrun Schwarz, Die nationalsozialistischen Lager (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, 1996), 94–99. Initially a detention center for foreign Jews in France, Drancy became a transit camp in the spring of 1942, after officials of Eichmann’s section IV B 4 took over its administration in December 1941. See Renée Poznanski, Jews in France during World War II (Hanover, N. H.: University Press of New England, 1996), 222–223. On Fossoli and Bolzano in Italy, see Michele Sarfatti, The Jews in Mussolini’s Italy: From Equality to Persecution (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2006), 196–202. For Malines, see Juliane Wetzel, “Frankreich und Belgien,” in Benz, Dimension, 129–130. 50 In contrast, Jews residing in German–occupied Eastern Europe had but limited chances to survive. In Poland, 10% survived; Hungary, 31%; in Slovakia, 33%; in Greece, between 10% and 17%; in Serbia, 12%, and in Croatia, 25%). Of a pre– war population of just over 3. 0 million in 1939, just over half of those pre–1939 Jewish citizens of the Soviet Union were not killed in the Holocaust, in part because the Soviets moved them to the interior prior to the German invasion, in part because young men were drafted into the Soviet armed forces and into the labor forces, and in part because Soviet authorities moved them East to escape the Germans in the summer and autumn of 1941. For the numbers and percentages, see footnote 29 above. 51 Protocol of the Wannsee Conference [unsigned], January 1942, Document NG– 2586, published in English in Raul Hilberg, ed., Documents of Destruction: Germany and Jewry, 1933–1945 (Chicago: Quadrangle, 1971), 89–99. State Secretary Martin Luther, the chief of Department III Germany and for a short time, its successor, Section Internal Affairs II Secret (Inland II Geheim) in the German Foreign Office, was present at Wannsee. For the role of these two departments in the “final solution”, see Christopher Browning, The Final Solution and the German Foreign Office (New York: Holmes and Maier, 1978); Hans–Jürgen Döscher, Das Auswärtige Amt im Dritten Reich: Diplomatie im Schatten der “Endlösung” (Berlin: Siedler Verlag, 1987), 262–302; Sebastien Weitkamp, Braune Diplomaten: Horst Wagner und Eberhard von Thadden als Funktionäre der “Endlösung” (Berlin: Dietz, 2008). 52 The Germans transported those Jews whom they did get––from Bulgaria, Croatia and Slovakia, Vichy France, and German–occupied Hungary–– to killing centers in occupied Poland. On Bulgaria, see Frederick Chary, The Bulgarian Jews and the Final Solution, 1940–1944 (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1972); and Hans–Joachim Hoppe, “Bulgarien,” in Benz, Dimension, 275–310, here 291–298. On Croatia, see Jozo Tomasevich, War and Revolution in Yugoslavia: Occupation and Collaboration (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001), 592– 604; and Holm Sundhaussen, “Jugoslawien,” in Ibid., 321–326. On Slovakia, see Ivan Kamenec, On the Trail of Tragedy: The Holocaust in Slovakia (Bratislava: H

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& H, 2007); and Eva Schmidt–Hartmann, “Tschechoslowakei,” in Benz, Dimension, 368–374. On Vichy France, see Poznanski, Jews, op. cit.; and Serge Klarsfeld, Vichy–Auschwitz: Die Zusammenarbeit der deutschen und französischen Behörden bei der “Endlösung der Judenfrage” in Frankreich (Nördlingen: Wagner, 1989). On Hungary, see Randolph L. Braham, The Politics of Genocide: The Holocaust in Hungary, 2 Vols. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994); and Christian Gerlach and Götz Aly, Das letzte Kapitel: Der Mord an den ungarischen Juden, 1944–1945 (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, 2004). 53 For Bulgaria see sources in footnote 52 above. For Romania, see Hilberg, Destruction, 839–852. In addition to the resources needed to occupy both countries, Germany risked disrupting Romanian oil shipments and losing Romanian support in conducting the war against the USSR. 54 For Hungary and Italy, see sources footnote 52 above. For Italian opposition to German Final Solution policy in Italian occupied Yugoslavia, see Tomasevich, War, 598–604. For Italian–occupied France, see Michael R. Marrus and Robert O. Paxton, Vichy France and the Jews (New York: Basic Books, 1981), 316–320. See also Sarfatti, Mussolini’s Italy, 176–177. For Finland, see Hannu Rautkallio, Finland and the Holocaust: The Rescue of Finland’s Jews (New York: Holocaust Library, 1987), but also for Finland’s role in assisting the German Security Police select Soviet prisoners of war to be shot, see Oula Silvennoinen, Geheime Waffenbrüderschaft: Die Sicherheitspolizeiliche Zusammenarbeit zwischen Finnland und Deutschland, 1933–1944 (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgemeinschaft, 2010), 153–242. On motivation for Italian obstruction of German Final Solution policy, see Alexander Korb, Im Schatten des Weltkriegs: Massengewalt der Ustaša gegen Serben, Juden und Roma in Kroatien, 1941–1945 (Hamburg: Hamburger Edition, 2013), 388–389. 55 Around 220,000 Jews were left in Germany and Austria at the time of the German invasion of the Soviet Union. See Ino Arndt and Heinz Boberach, “Deutsches Reich,” in Benz, Dimension, 35–36; Jonny Moser, “Österreich,” in Ibid., 68–69; Marion Kaplan, Between Dignity and Despair: Jewish Life in Nazi Germany (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998),197; Thomas Pegelow Kaplan, The Language of Nazi Genocide: Linguistic Violence and the Struggle of Germans of Jewish Ancestry (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 195– 196. 56 Friedlander, Origins, 111–120; and Ernst Klee, “Euthanasie” im Dritten Reich: Die “Vernichtung lebensunwerten Lebens” (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, 2010), 244–267. 57 Arndt and Boberach, “Deutsches Reich” in Benz, Dimension, 46–50, 62–63; Gottwaldt and Diana, “Judendeportationen” pp. 444–461. For greater detail, see 52–365. 58 The SS and police toyed with the idea of establishing killing centers in Riga and Mogilev, both regions where the Jewish population was denser than elsewhere in the occupied Soviet Union. They abandoned the idea, however, and continued to kill by shooting operations. During the course of the final liquidation of the ghettos in Minsk, Lida, and Vilnius, the Germans, fearing the potential for uprising,

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deported the last captured Jewish inhabitants to the still functioning killing center in Sobibor. See Christian Gerlach, “Failure of Plans for an SS Extermination Camp in Mogilev, Belorussia,” Holocaust and Genocide Studies (hereafter HGS), Vol. 11, no. 1 (Winter 1997), 60–78; Angrick and Klein, Riga, 186–192. 59 Peter Black, “Die Trawniki Männer und die ‘Aktion Reinhard’” in Musial, Völkermord, 325–327; idem “Footsoldiers,” 93, ftn. 285. For shootings in Radom District, VHH-DFHN$QGU]HM0á\QDUF]\NJudenmord in Zentralpolen: Der Distrikt Radom im Generalgouvernement, 1939–1945 (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgemeinschaft, 2007), 265–277. For Galicia District, see Pohl, Judenverfolgung, 295–297. For shootings in Lublin 'LVWULFWVHH5REHUW.XZDáHN “Die Durchgangsghettos im Distrikt Lublin (u. a., Izbica, Piaski, Rejowice und Trawniki),” in Musial, Völkermord, 197–232. 60 For a poignant example, see Angrick, Besatzungspolitik, 248–249. 61 Browning, Ordinary Men, 74–75, 103; Angrick, Besatzungspolitik, 247, 250 for the situation among the personnel of Einsatzgruppe D. 62 Another misleading notion has the Germans losing World War II because they devoted critical resources at crucial times to their war against defenseless Jewish communities. In fact, the Germans generally did not deploy human, material, or transport resources suitable for or needed at the front for implementing “final solution” operations. They made efficient use of indigenous police forces and the military and police forces of their Axis allies. In Croatia and in the borderlands east of Romanian Moldavia, Croat and Romanian authorities did much of the “final solution” dirty work themselves, though each had ethnic agendas that differed somewhat from that of the Germans. The Romanians intended to cleanse their re–conquered provinces of Bukovina and Bessarabia of the indigenous Jewish and Ukrainian populations, while the Ustaša regime intended to remove the ethnic Serb presence in Croatia and Bosnia–Herzegovina by a combination of expulsion, physical annihilation and forced conversion to the Catholic faith. For Romania, see Krista Zach, “Rumänien,” in Benz, Dimension, 381–409 and Angrick, Besatzungspolitik, 155–159; for the Ustaša in Croatia, see Michele Frucht Levy, “’The Last Bullet for the Last Serb’: The Ustaša Genocide Against the Serbs,” Nationalities Papers, Vol. 37, no. 6 (November 2009), 807–837; and Korb, Massengewalt, passim. For significant large scale shooting and deportation operations in Eastern Europe, the German SS and police organized and trained mission–oriented units, such as the Soviet prisoners of war trained at Trawniki near Lublin for deployment at the killing centers and in the deportation and shooting operations of Operation Reinhard in the Government General, the Lithuanian auxiliaries in the so–called Rollkommando Hamann, and the Latvian Auxiliary Security Police, based in Riga. See Black, “Trawniki–Männer,” op cit.; idem, Footsoldiers; Knut Stang, “Kollaboration und Völkermord: Das Rollkommando Hamann und die Vernichtung der litauischen Juden,” in Gerhard Paul and Klaus–Michael Mallmann, eds., Die Gestapo im Zweiten Weltkrieg: “Heimatfront” und besetztes Europa,” (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgemeinschaft, 2000), 464–480; Michael MacQueen, “Nazi Policy Towards the Jews in the Reichskommissariat Ostland, June–December 1941: From White Terror to Holocaust in Lithuania,” in Zvi Gitelman, ed., Bitter Legacy:

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Confronting the Holocaust in the USSR (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1997), 91–103; Valdis O. Lumans, Latvia in World War II (New York: Fordham University Press, 2006), 236. For the importance of the Estonian Security Police auxiliaries in implementing Nazi policy, see Ruth Bettina Birn, Die Sicherheitspolizei in Estland, 1941–1944: Eine Studie zur Kollaboration im Osten (Paderborn: Schöningh, 2006). The devotion of resources to the Final Solution was not the reason that Nazi Germany lost World War II. For fundamental and fatal structural weaknesses in German wartime planning and a convincing argument that even Nazi planning for victory required the collapse of the Soviet Union within six weeks, see Adam Tooze, The Wages of Destruction: The Making and Breaking of the Nazi Economy (New York: Penguin, 2008), 429–551. For use of Jewish assets to finance killing operations in the Government General, see Arad, Death Camps, 162. For the self–financing aspect of the killing operations in the Gau Wartheland, see Peter Klein, “Gettoverwaltung”, 479–506. Whenever disaster threatened on the Eastern Front and rolling stock was needed desperately to supply German troops, the German authorities halted most and sometimes all deportations of Jews from Central and Western Europe to the East. See, for example, Gottwaldt and Schulle, “Judendeportationen”, 88–89. 63 The IMT acquitted both the German General Staff and the OKW in 1946. Already waning zeal for German authorities to prosecute military commanders, let alone soldiers, evaporated with the establishment of the German republics in 1949. See the incident of the proceedings against former German General Erich von Manstein in John Zimmermann, Pflicht zum Untergang: Die deutsche Kriegsführung im Westen des Reiches, 1944/45 (Paderborn: Schöningh, 2009), 451–461. The tribunal convicted the Secret State Police (Gestapo), but never indicted the Order Police or the Criminal Police. Although Criminal Police and Order Police personnel were potentially culpable if they were members of the General SS (Allgemeine SS), the Tribunal was not cognizant of the fact that the majority in both organizations were not SS men. While 65% of uniformed police had joined the Nazi Party by 1945, only 30% had joined the SS; a statistical sample done by Jens Banach indicates that just under half of Criminal Police officials had joined the SS by the end of the war. On the other hand, nearly 90% of Gestapo officials and 96% of SD officials were members of the SS. See transcripts of the IMT proceedings, September 30, 1946, IMT, XXII, 512–517, 520–522. For the percentage of SS joiners in the uniformed police, see Eduard B. Westermann, Hitler’s Police Battalions: Enforcing Racial War in the East (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 2005), 102. For the data on Security Police and SD, see Jens Banach, Heydrichs Elite: Das Führerkorps der Sicherheitspolizei und des SD, 1936–1945 (Paderborn: Schöningh, 1998), 131. On the difficulties in indicting Criminal Police Officials, see Patrick Wagner, Volksgemeinschaft ohne Verbrecher: Konzeptionen und Praxis der Kriminalpolizei in der Zeit der Weimarer Republik und des Nationalsozialismus (Hamburg: Christians, 1996), 405–408; and idem., Hitlers Kriminalisten: Die deutsche Kriminalpolizei und der Nationalsozialismus (Munich: C. H. Beck, 2002), 149–171. For difficulties prosecuting even Gestapo and SD members, see Klaus–Michael Mallmann and Andrej Angrick, “Die Mörder sind unter uns: Gestapo–Bedienstete in den

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Holocaust by Bullets: “Hitler’s Hidden Holocaust”?

Nachfolgegesellschaften des Dritten Reiches” and several of the other articles in idem., eds., Die Gestapo nach 1945: Karriere, Konflikten, Konstruktionen (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgemeinschaft, 2009); Michael Wildt, Generation, 814–845; and Ulrich Herbert, Best: Biographische Studien über Radikalismus, Weltanschauung und Vernunft, 1903–1989 (Bonn: Dietz, 1996), 444–460, 491–521. Although the IMT included the Waffen–SS in the guilty verdict against the SS, neither the Allies nor the Germans did much to prosecute Waffen– SS personnel—even generals. On difficulties prosecuting Waffen–SS personnel, see Martin Cüppers, Wegbereiter der Shoah: Die Waffen SS, der Kommandostab Reichsführer–SS und die Judenvernichtung, 1939–1945 (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgemeinschaft, 2005), 313–335. In implementing the provisions of the U.S. Displaced Persons Act, Amendment of 1950, which increased the number of DP visas available for ethnic German and Baltic refugees from Soviet rule, the INS no longer automatically excluded former members of the Waffen–SS from obtaining an immigrant visa. U.S. Displaced Persons Commission Report, The DP Story (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1952), 37–39, 322–325. 64 A general overview can be found in a series of brief articles on the website of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum at the “Related Articles” to the Encyclopedia of the Holocaust online article on anti–Semitism: http://www.ushmm .org/wlc/en/article.php?ModuleId=10005175 (accessed November 29, 2013. There are several works on the origins and impact of political and Nazi anti–Semitism, including James Carroll, Constantine’s Sword: The Church and the Jews (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2001); Peter G. J. Pulzer, The Rise of Political Anti–Semitism in Germany and Austria, Revised Edition, (London: Halban, 1988); Robert Wistrich, Anti–Semitism: The Longest Hatred (London: Thames Meuthen, 1991); Bruce F. Pauley, From Prejudice to Persecution: A History of Austrian Anti–Semitism (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1992); Cornelia Hecht, Deutsche Juden und Antisemitismus in der Weimarer Republic (Bonn: Dietz, 2003); Werner Jochmann, Gesellschaftskrise und Judenfeindschaft in Deutschland, 1870– 1945(Hamburg: Christians, 1991); and Andrew G. Whiteside, The Socialism of Fools: Georg Ritter von Schönerer and Austrian Pan–Germanism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1975). Neither the impact of the secular consequences of discriminatory restrictions against Jews on occupation, property ownership, and location of residence, nor the response of non–Jews to the economic and social consequences of emancipation, particularly in central Europe, have received the attention that they deserve—even for Germany and Austria, let alone other regions of central and eastern Europe. For an interesting perspective on reinforcement of status of “The Other” by occupation and place of residence in early modern Poland, see Aleksander Gella, The Development of Class Structure in Eastern Europe: Poland and her Southern Neighbors (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1989). 65 Protocol of interrogation of Ernst Kaltenbrunner, September 19, 1946, 16–17, file ZS–673, Institut für Zeitgeschichte, Munich. 66 Hitler Speech at the Reichstag, January 30, 1939, in Domarus, Hitler, Vol. II, 1058.

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67 Even after Hitler, persuaded that living Soviet soldiers might have value as forced laborers, rescinded orders to eliminate all Soviet POWs in February 1942, German authorities generally treated Soviet soldiers in captivity with more brutality and cruelty than any other group of captured soldiers and most other groups of incarcerated civilians. More than one million additional Soviet soldiers died in German concentration camps, labor camps, and prisoner of war camps from the spring of 1942 until the end of World War II. On ideological foundations of Nazi policy to the Soviet elite, the Soviet prisoners of war, and racially targeted Soviet ethnic groups, see Rolf–Dieter Müller and Gerd R. Ueberschar, Hitler’s War in the East: A Critical Assessment, 3rd ed. (New York: Berghahn, 2009), 209– 280 with extensive bibliography; Christian Streit, “The German Army and the Policies of Genocide,” in Gerhard Hirschfeld, ed., The Policies of Genocide: Jews and Soviet Prisoners of War in Nazi Germany (Boston: Allen and Unwin, 1986), 1–14; Jürgen Förster, “The German Army and the Ideological War Against the Soviet Union,” in Ibid., 15–29. On mass murder of Soviet prisoners of war and Soviet civilians, see Christian Streit, Kameraden, 83–190; Alfred Streim, Die Behandlung sowjetischer Kriegsgefangenen im “Fall Barbarossa”: Eine Dokumentation unter Berücksichtigung der Unterlagen deutscher Strafverfolgungsbehörden und der Materialien der Zentralen Stelle der Landesjustizverwaltungen zur Aufklarung von NS–Verbrechen (Heidelberg– Karlsruhe: Müller, 1981); Reinhard Otto, Wehrmacht, Gestapo und sowjetische Kriegsgefangene im deutschen Reichsgebiet, 1941/42 (Munich: Oldenbourg, 1998); Pohl,Herrschaft, 217–242; and Gerlach, Morde, 774–858. 68 Guenter Lewy, The Nazi Persecution of the Gypsies (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 117–128; Michael Zimmermann, Rassenutopie, 259–276; Pohl, Herrschaft, 271–273. 69 See Friedlander, Origins,. 141–142; Pohl, Herrschaft, 274–276; Gerlach, Morde, 1067–1074. 70 Christian Gerlach, “Deutsche Wirtschaftsinteressen, Besatzungspolitik, und der Mord der Juden in Weißrußland, 1941–1943,” in Ulrich Herbert, ed., Nationalsozialistische Vernichtungspolitik, 1939–1945: Neue Forschungen und Kontroversen (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, 1998), 263–291, here 270–271; Gerlach, Morde, 870–974, 1010–1060, 1074–1092; Pohl, Herrschaft, 64–66, 70–77, 183–200. 71 Eric W. Osborne, “Casualties,” in Spencer C. Tucker, ed., World War II: A Political, Social, and Military History, Vol. 1 (Santa Barbara: ABC–Clio, 2005), 300–301; Paul J. Rose, “Casualty Figures,” in David T. Zabecki et al., World War II in Europe: An Encyclopedia (New York: Garland, 1999), 32–34. 72 The Director of the Four Year Plan [signed Göring] to the Reich Ministry of the Interior, January 24, 1939, R 58/folder 276, Bundesarchiv–Berlin (hereafter: BAB) as cited in Uwe Dietrich Adam, Judenpolitik im Dritten Reich (Düsseldorf: Droste, 1972), 228; Director of the Four Year Plan and Chairman of the Ministerial Council for the Defense of the Reich [signed Göring] to Chief of Security Police and SD [Heydrich], July 31, 1941, Nuremberg Document 710–PS, IMT, Vol. XXVI, 266–267. For the importance of the RSHA in managing the “final solution”

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on a European scale and its particular suitability for this “special task,” see Michael Wildt, Generation, 410–415. 73 Safrian, Men; David Cesarani, Eichmann, 91–158. 74 For the importance of the SSPFs in implementing the “final solution” in the Government General, see Bogdan Musial, “Ursprünge der ‘Aktion Reinhardt’: Planung des Massenmordes an den Juden im General Gouvernement,” in Musial, Völkermord, 49–85; Dieter Pohl, “Die Stellung des Distrikts Lublin in der ‘Endlösung der Judenfrage’,” in Ibid., 87–107; and Black, “Trawniki–Männer,” 309–314, 323–327, 351–352; idem., “Footsoldiers,” 2–6, 38–41; and idem., “Globocnik,” 103–115. 75 Klein, Gettoverwaltung, 377–390; Michael Alberti, Die Verfolgung und Vernichtung der Juden im Reichsgau Wartheland, 1939–1945 (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2006), 148–151, 401–405, 452–458; and Catherine Epstein, Model Nazi: Arthur Greiser and the Occupation of Western Poland (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), 143–145, 188–189. Klein and Epstein attribute Greiser’s unusual authority to a close relationship with Himmler and a Hitler authorization on July 18, 1941. They also note the influence of SS–Oberführer Herbert Mehlhorn, the chief of Department I (General Matters, Internal Affairs and Finance) in the Reich Governor’s Office and a personal opponent of RSHA chief Heydrich. 76 Appendix 4 to the War Diary, Quartermaster General’s headquarters, “Memorandum on the Reprisal Measures Implemented since the Beginning of the Uprising in Serbia to December 5, 1941,” December 20, 1941, RG–238, NOKW– 474, United States National Archives and Records Administration in College Park, Maryland (hereafter: NARA); Administration Staff/Military Commander in Serbia [signed General von Schröder] to FKs, July 17, 1941, RW 40, folder 79, 121–121 reverse, BA–MA; Circular of Military Commander in Serbia/Administration Staff [signed Turner], August 27, 1941, RW 40, folder 11, 122, BA–MA; Circular of Military Commander in Serbia, General Staff [signed Gravenhorst], August 21, 1941, RW 40, folder 5, 140–141, BA–MA; Walter Manoschek, Judenvernichtung in Serbien, 40–49, 169–174; and Pohl, Herrschaft, 77–80. Here, perhaps due to their relatively small numbers (approximately 6,200), RSHA and BdS Belgrade personnel killed the remaining Serbian Jews. To do this, however, they needed assistance from Order Police companies stationed in occupied Serbia. 77 For the importance of HSSPFs for the implementation of “final solution” policy in the USSR, see Circular of Himmler, re: Special Task of the Führer, May 21, 1941, RH 22/156, BA–MA. See also Angrick and Klein, Riga, 41–42. For the general relationship between HSSPF and BdS, SSPF and KdS, see Banach, Heydrichs Elite, 209–217; Birn, Höheren, 96–115, 188–189, 203–204, 220–228, 396–399; and Friedrich Wilhelm, Die Polizei im NS–Staat: Die Geschichte ihrer Organisation im Überblick (Paderborn: Schöningh, 1997), 262. 78 Hans Buchheim, “The SS—Instrument of Domination,” in Krausnick et al., SS State, 180–184, 220–227. 79 Klaus–Michael Mallmann, “Menschenjagd und Massenmord: Das neue Instrument der Einsatzgruppen und–kommandos, 1938–1945,” in Mallmann and Paul, Gestapo, 291–292, 314–316. Mallmann’s statement that the notion of the

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Einsatzgruppen as “’a mobile RSHA, a Gestapo on wheels,’ is misleading,” (p. 305), not only because it mistakenly equates Gestapo with RSHA, but also because the Commander of Einsatzgruppe A, SS–Brigadeführer Walter Stahlecker, did morph from the commander of Einsatzgruppe A into the BdS Ostland after the establishment of the civilian administration in the Ostland and after the front had moved sufficiently further to the north and east. Obviously, the field offices operated in different contexts than the central office in Berlin or their counterparts in the Reich, but their functions were identical. 80 After learning that the chief of the Order Police Main Office, SS– Obergruppenführer Kurt Daluege, had briefed the HSSPFs intended for deployment in the Soviet Union on the role of the Order Police in the newly conquered territory, Heydrich felt compelled to inform them of the instructions given to the Einsatzgruppen commanders. Circular of Chief of Security and SD [Heydrich] to the HSSPFs [Jeckeln, von dem Bach–Zelewski, Prützmann, and Korsemann], July 2, 1941, R 58/241, BA Berlin, reproduced in Klein, Einsatzgruppen, 323–328. 81 These reports are available in the microfilm records of the Reichsführer–SS and Chief of German Police, RG 242, Microcopy Group T–175, Rolls 233–236, NARA. Scholars have used them for decades; they first became available in the early 1960s. For an analysis of the reporting process, see Headland, Messages, 37– 43. 82 Gerlach, “Wirtschaftsinteressen,” 270–271; Pohl, Herrschaft, 64–66. 83 Decree of the Reich Ministry of the Interior [signed Frick], November 13, 1937, RG 242, T–175/123/2649407, NARA; Circular of Reichsführer–SS and Chief of German Police [signed Himmler], “Service Instructions for the Higher SS and Police Leaders,” December 18, 1939, Ibid., frames 2649421–2649423; Birn, Höheren, 93–6. 84 Peter R. Black, Ernst Kaltenbrunner: Ideological Soldier of the Third Reich (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984), 106. 85 Birn, “Höheren,” 391–395; Breitman, “Jeckeln,” 270–273. 86 See sources to footnote 74 above. 87 Pohl, Herrschaft, 281. See also Manoschek, Serbien, 55–108. 88 Cesarani, Becoming Eichmann, 330–343. 89 On the Sonderdienst, see Peter Black, “Indigenous Collaboration in the Government General: The Case of the Sonderdienst,” in Pieter M. Judson and Marsha Rozenblit, eds., Constructing Nationalities in East Central Europe (New York: Berghahn, 2005), 242–266, here, 253–254. On the Organisation Todt (OT), see Wendy Lower, Nazi Empire Building and the Holocaust in Ukraine (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005), 62, 143–146. In general, the role of civilian or paramilitary participation in requesting, planning, implementing, and participating in shooting operations requires more attention. 90 See Martin Dean, Robbing the Jews: The Confiscation of Jewish Property in the Holocaust, 1933–1945 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 173–221.

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The opinions expressed in this article are exclusively those of the author and are not to be construed as official statements of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.

RETHINKING THE ELIMINATION OF TRACES OF MASS MURDER AT THE TREBLINKA EXTERMINATION CAMP TOMAS VOJTA This essay analyzes the genesis and conduct of the obliteration process at the Treblinka extermination camp during 1942–1943. Nazi techniques of body effacement are explored in detail here with the conclusion that this process included components of pragmatism and failures until it was developed into an effective obliteration technology. Quotations of former German personnel as well as former inmates illustrate this less known aspect of the Holocaust. The postwar profanation of the site is also described.

Introduction The Treblinka camp was the largest of the three killing centers of Aktion Reinhard in occupied Poland. Recently published sources, such as Hoefle´s report, place the number of victims at no less than 713,000; this figure covers only the period of July through December 1942.1 In relative numbers, this camp was even more efficient than Auschwitz. The actual scope and pace of the extermination process here is almost beyond human imagination. On an area the size of six football pitches, the remains of more than three quarters of a million human beings were buried and subsequently cremated. The total number of victims is impossible to determine. Nevertheless, estimation is possible and I consider the figure between 780,000 and 790,000 as very probable. The eradication of the traces of mass killing at Treblinka is still an open subject. There is, as yet, no consensus of opinion based on reliable sources. Some authors, like Yitzhak Arad, Shmuel Spector, and Jacek Mlynarczyk, claim that the burning of corpses in the Treblinka extermination camp started in February or March 1943, and was more or less finished by the time of the uprising.2 Closer examination of various

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literature and sources concerning Treblinka indicates that they are still full of contradictions. The most controversial issues concern the timing and the actual modus operandi of the obliteration of the corpses as well as questionable reports of a visit by “Himmler” to Treblinka.3 The main source material for this study comes from copies of transcripts from the trials of former German personnel of the camp. The interrogations obtained during the trial as well as the verdict are crucial for this interpretation.4 Other sources used below are testimonies of survivors and Polish bystanders that were obtained in Jerusalem and Warsaw.5 The purpose of this study is to address the above–mentioned controversial issues and to explain how the mass graves in the Treblinka camp were obliterated.

The Totenlager The extermination section of Treblinka, also known as the “Upper Camp” or Totenlager or Lager zwei, itself was relatively tiny; approximately 200 by 150 meters.6 In the early months of the extermination operation, after the gassings the thousands of bodies were simply put into huge pits which had been dug beforehand using excavators. Exact reconstruction of the dimensions of these pits is no longer possible, but the depth of the burial pits was sizable enough to absorb a huge number of bodies. Willy Mentz, a member of SS Sonderkommando Treblinka, described his first impressions of the extermination area after his arrival at the camp: I arrived at Treblinka in the middle of August [1942 – T. V.]. At that time, Dr. Eberl was the camp commandant. The camp clearly had been fully operational for some time since one pit was already full of corpses and another one was half full. There wasn´t a strict demarcation between the Lower and the Upper Camp at that time. My duty was guarding those Jewish workers who were putting the corpses into the pits.7

2VNDU6WUDZF]\ĔVNLZKRKDGZRUNHGLQTreblinka as a roofer, described in his testimony in 1945 the dimensions of mass graves as being fifty meters long and ten meters deep.8 These dimensions for the pits do not seem exaggerated if the number of victims is taken into account and, especially, the pace of the whole extermination process (around 300,000 during only five weeks between late July and the end of August 1942). The conclusion of Adalbert Rückerl seems to be as precise as possible:

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The specifications about the number and dimensions of burial pits that had been collected during the trials were inconsistent. One can create the image of such pits according to the information given by defendant S. [Franz Suchomel – T. V.], who stated that in just one of these pits, at least 80,000 bodies were buried.9

Irmfried Eberl, the first Lagerkommandant, was dismissed due to incompetency at the end of August after only five weeks of being in charge of the camp operations. The lack of proportion between his ambitions and the actual murderous capacity of the camp was the reason for this decision by his command superiors (Wirth and Globocnik). The situation in the camp at the time of Eberl´s dismissal can be derived from the well–known testimony of the SS member Josef Oberhauser during the visit by Globocnik and Wirth: In Treblinka, everything was in a state of chaos. There was a terrible overload of transports. In front of the camp stood a transport train that couldn´t be unloaded simply because there was no more room inside. There were dead, decomposing bodies lying all over the place.10

The subsequent “reform” in Treblinka consisted of the new Lagerkommandant, Franz Stangl, taking charge, the building of a new structure with much larger gas chambers, the creation of the shooting site known as “the infirmary,” the formation of permanent working units in both parts of the camp, and the creation of a five–meter–high sand wall between both parts of the camp. This sand wall served as a more effective disguise of the real purpose of the camp as well as utilizing the soil that had been dug from the new pits. During the following four months (September–December 1942), the camp ran at the peak of its “capacity.” Considering the above–mentioned Hoefle´s report, the number of victims during this period reached more than 400,000. The complex working of the Totenlager was described by Franz Stangl during his trial in 1967: In my opinion, there could be a transport with thirty freight cars, that is, three thousand people, processed in three hours. There were many days when gassings lasted fourteen hours, when between twelve and fifteen thousand people were processed … It happened also that the work continued under electric lighting. The Arbeitskommando from the Upper camp had to carry the bodies on the stretchers to the pits, and later to the cremation grids. The members of this Arbeitskommando performed their tasks in a circle. After they had emptied their stretchers at the pits, they ran with them back to the ramp at the gas

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Rethinking Elimination of Traces at Treblinka chambers, where their stretchers were loaded again … There was a ramp at the back of the gas chambers building which had a slight slope. On this ramp worked another Häftlingskommando, which had the task of ripping out gold teeth. They were called the Dentistenkommando. During this period, as the bodies were put into the pits, they were covered with chlorine in the evening each day. I think they were also covered with a layer of soil. I know that due to the decomposition of previous layers of bodies they surfaced again after some time and caused a horrible stench around the camp.11

Eliahu Rosenberg described his work in Totenlager at that time: Our task was to carry the bodies on stretchers from the gas chambers to the pit some one hundred and twenty meters long, fifteen meters wide, and six meters deep and already full of tens of thousands of bodies. This had to be done while running … There was a German at the edge of the pit, some 32 years old, who supervised the unloading of the corpses. The bodies had to be placed properly to avoid their slipping or rotating. When, in the German‘s opinion, this was not performed successfully and the bodies weren´t placed into the pit in a proper position, the “perpetrators” received twenty five blows.12

In the autumn of 1942, the extermination process in Treblinka was consolidated. The image that emerges up until this point is that of a well– established and efficiently working killing center. Nevertheless, there was one flaw which troubled the German authorities. The decomposing bodies in the pits had caused such a stench that even a Gendarmerie LQ 2VWUyZ Mazowiecki, twenty kilometers from Treblinka, complained about cadaverous odor.13 -HU]\ .UyOLNRZVNL D 3ROLVK UDLOURDG ZRUNHU ZURWH LQ his diary: A terrible period of our lives had started—not just viewing the doomed people, but also the awful odor, which made us less immune to vomiting. The stench made eating impossible, we couldn´t even open the windows. The stench became more intense especially in the evening and after the dew–IDOO (YHQ LQ 2VWUyZ 0D]RZLHFNL ILIWHHQ NLORPHWHUV QRUWK RI Malkinia), people complained about the unbearable stench.14

If “the big picture” of the Aktion Reinhard is taken into an account, then we know now that the cremation of the bodies already was in progress at WKDW WLPH LQ VLPLODU FDPSV 6RELERU DQG %HOĨHF  The commencing of an equivalent operation in Treblinka was only a matter of time and obtaining the proper “know–how.”

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In any case, the “stench issue” was not the catalyst for the cremations, as it is sometimes claimed.15 Treblinka started its murderous work relatively late due to the delay caused by the reorganization problems. Some postponement, contrary to other death camps, was only a consequence of the “state of affairs.” This was why the cremations in Treblinka started a little later. No correlation with the “stench issue” has thus far been documented. In any case, cremation served as an additional way of getting rid of the annoying “stench problem” but only to a limited extent and secondary effect.

Timing of the Cremations, Questionable Reports of “Himmler” Visit to Treblinka As mentioned above, many authors claim that the burning of corpses started at the Treblinka extermination camp in February or March 1943.16 In my opinion, the cremation of corpses at Treblinka was a more complex issue. The process of erasing the traces of bodies there began in November 1942; in other words, four months earlier than many scholars insist. The cremation operations in Treblinka can be divided into two separate periods. The first period, late November 1942 to March–April 1943, was characterized by experiments and the search for the right methods of handling the enormous task. During the second period, April 1943 to August 1943, most of the corpses were exhumed and burned. Richard Glazar, a young Czech, was probably one of the most effective eyewitnesses among all fifty–four Treblinka survivors. His testimony, a strongly written account, is an excellent source for research into the camp´s history. As a university student, Glazar was expelled from the university in the Protektorat and forced to work as an agricultural laborer until being transported to Treblinka, with a short stay in the Theresienstadt. The context of his testimony, his intellectual and observational skills, as well as the fact that he had come to Treblinka without any relatives make his testimony, in my opinion, highly plausible. The following aspects of his testimony deserve emphasis. He wrote in his book about one day in November 1942: I had suddenly seen a high flame eruption behind the sand wall which augmented itself to a considerable extent. It was like a fantastic scene somewhere from the outer world, of such enormity, that we were absorbed by it, and was moving inside of it while marching to the evening’s Apel. Under a scene of red blaze reaching from the sand wall across all areas, we were moving in confusion between the kitchen and the lights on the roofs

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Rethinking Elimination of Traces at Treblinka of barracks. Even the noise inside the living barracks indicated that there was something unusual going on. A rumor went through the barracks: “They started burning the dead, because there is no more room for burying, and because they want to erase the traces”.17

Franz Stangl remembered a few interesting details on the genesis and implementation of the cremations: Whilst the cremation grids had been put over the ditch, the fire was ignited in order to burn the corpses top down. I recall also the eruption of a huge flame as one pit was set on fire, caused probably by an ignition of gases from the bodies. There was a huge annealing flame over the pit all day long as well as a huge smoke mushroom (orig. “Rauchpilz” – T. V.).18

Otto Horn, a member of SS Sonderkommando Treblinka, spoke of the first cremation test, probably the identical event to that remembered by Glazar: I remember exactly that Stangl was present during the first cremation experiments, accompanied by Floss. The grids were in a pit at that time. This technique was found to be unworkable due to the lack of air supply.19

In their testimonies, it seems that Glazar, Stangl, and Horn each recalled the identical moment as the first cremation, which must certainly have been a remarkable moment for both Germans and inmates. The positioning of the grids, which at first appears to be inconsistent in the testimonies of the two Germans, also could be relevant. During the first cremation, there probably were grids placed both at the bottom and across the ditch. Stangl was present only during the final ignition of the first pyre, while Horn witnessed the setting up and was aware of the lower grids placed in the experimental pit. Having studied many archival sources concerning this subject, it seems obvious that a key figure in the obliteration of the traces of mass murder at Treblinka was a certain Herbert Floss, who was an expert on cremation and had previously been at other extermination camps, very likely including both Sobibor and Belzec. He had arrived at Treblinka with Wirth in November 1942 and tested the possibilities of cremating the corpses. Franz Suchomel added the following regarding Wirth during his interrogation: During the winter of 1942–1943, Wirth used to arrive more often at the Upper Camp as the cremation of the corpses was introduced there. He

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came with a cremation expert, a certain Floss, who had been previously in %HOĨHF … I recall also how stunned Stangl was when he had heard from Wirth regarding the overall cremation of the corpses. He told me about this during a subsequent conversation. He also added a sort of rhetorical question of how this should be done considering the corpses were already putrefied … Wirth later sent an excavator operated by Hackeholt for the emptying of the pits.20

During his interrogation in 1962, Arthur Matches, the Lagerkommandant of the Totenlager, stated the following regarding the issue of mass cremation: When being asked about the initiation of the mass cremations I hereby declare: This was started about autumn 1942. At that time Oberscharführer or Hauptscharführer Floss arrived who, I assumed, had been previously at the other extermination camp.21

During the cremation testing, an experimental pit was used, mentioned by Stangl in a conversation with Gitta Sereny.22 In these initial burning experiments, the railroad rails were placed over and inside the “study” pit. These tests were ineffective due to lack of air supply, as mentioned by Horn, and the usage of narrow gauge rails.23 During his interrogation in Düsseldorf in 1967, Franz Stangl delivered another piece of key information on this issue: This could have begun perhaps in early spring of 1943. At this time several excavators had arrived and started digging up the corpses from the pits. These old corpses were burned on the grids along with new ones. At this point Wirth came to Treblinka. I remember him talking about certain Standartenführer [probably Blobel – T. V.], who had some previous experience with cremation. Wirth told me of the experience of this Standartenführer according to which it was possible to burn corpses on the grids and that this should work very well. I know also that narrow gauge rails were used at first during the construction of the grids but this was found not to work. They were obviously too weak and became deformed by the heat. Later the proper railroad rails were obtained, as far as I remember, from van Eupen [Lagerkommandant of the Treblinka Penal Camp, some two kilometers from the extermination camp – T. V.] I recall Wirth talking with van Eupen about this issue.24

During the period between November 1942 and March – April 1943, the right modus operandi was sought for the cremation process at Treblinka.

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Inevitably, just as in other aspects of Aktion Reinhard, the improvisation and pragmatism of the Nazis was part of this process. The German personnel tried to introduce cremation techniques, which had been recommended by the superior levels of command; Lublin headquarters—Wirth, very likely influenced by Blobel, brought Floss as an “experienced” practitioner. The improvised pattern of Treblinka´s first cremation tests were a result of the camp’s specifications. There were no railroad rails large enough to handle the task, and the lack of air supply already mentioned played an important role. Floss, a cremation expert, perhaps proposed using rails available on the spot (i.e. narrow gauge rails originally used for transport of the corpses), but this was found not to work. The postponement and delay were possibly also caused to a certain extent by exceptionally freezing weather; Glazar stated that temperatures at Treblinka in December 1942 reached minus thirty–one degrees Celsius.25 During the collapse of camp operations caused by Dr. Eberl in late August 1942, Christian Wirth again came with “help.” He brought a solution for the “cremation problem.” He not only had arranged for the arrival of a cremation expert from the other extermination sites where the cremations had been in progress already (Floss), but also helped him in overcoming practical obstacles on the spot. In my opinion, it was Wirth who very likely obtained the new cremation equipment from the Treblinka Penal Camp in response to a demand or complaint from Floss. These indications imply that Floss probably needed some time to get used to Treblinka´s specifications and to introduce a more sophisticated and adequate method. The demands for the cremation operation were also higher than in the other camp where he served; especially in terms of the larger scale of the extermination, the lack of proper cremation equipment and, perhaps, the already mentioned “winter timing.” These facts had slowed the whole cremation process in Treblinka until spring 1943 when the mass scale cremations began. According to Stangl, Wirth frequently visited the camp, and on these occasions meetings with the SS personnel were held. According to several testimonies of SS personnel, Wirth issued new directives regarding all major developments during these meetings. Franz Rum, another member of SS Sonderkommando Treblinka, recalls the following regarding Wirth´s stays in the camp: Wirth frequently visited the camp. On some occasions he came on his own, sometimes he arrived accompanied by higher SS officers from Lublin and Berlin. At least once he came with Eichmann.26 Whether he came to Treblinka with Globocnik, I don´t know, I only recall that Globocnik’s

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presence had been announced once. I don’t know who were the higher SS officers from Lublin accompanying Wirth. When Wirth´s arrival was announced, there was always turmoil and nervousness inside the camp. There was a certain fear present … I know that it was after Wirth´s visit, maybe in April 1943, when the burying of the corpses ceased. In my opinion it was his idea to burn the bodies on the cremation grids, including those corpses which had been previously put into the pits.27

In writing about Treblinka, we should note the question of a possible visit by Heinrich Himmler. Some basic works, relying mainly on the very important testimony of Treblinka´s survivor Eliahu Rosenberg, accept his testimony entirely.28 From my point of view, it deserves a more complex treatment. Rosenberg stated the following in his testimony: Beginning in spring 1943, after the visit of a group of higher SS officers headed by the Reichsführer SS Heinrich Himmler, we stopped burying the dead from the chambers in the pits and started with their burning. Also the previously placed corpses from the pits were burned after they had been exhumed with excavators. Incineration took place on a special construction. The burning of the bodies had been relatively slow, but a certain SS–Oberscharführer Herbert Floss arrived later from the Sobibor camp and he organized the whole burning process.29

Despite this mentioned visit of Himmler as the moment for the commencement of mass–scale cremation, accepted again by some scholars,30 I find this event to be implausible. The notion of Himmler as an “important visitor” must be treated with some reservation. Eliahu Rosenberg certainly was not capable of recognizing Heinrich Himmler because he was 18 years old at the time. In addition, none of the SS personnel mentioned in their interrogations that the Reichsführer had ever been to Treblinka. Rosenberg´s credibility has some obvious limitations that were evident also during the Demjanuk´s trial in 1988. Yankiel Wiernik, another inmate of the Totenlager, also wrote in 1944 about Himmler, but his testimony is in this aspect also implausible.31 The main question remains: if not Himmler, who was this “group of higher SS officers,” which preceded the commencement of mass scale cremation? I am convinced that the key figure at this point was again Christian Wirth. When the nervousness of the SS personnel accompanying Wirth´s visits, as mentioned by Rum and others, is taken into account, this sort of “Wirth psychosis” might have been shifted to the inmates of the Totenlager as well. Considering also the visual similarity of Wirth and Himmler, it is possible that prisoners such as Rosenberg or Wiernik, under permanent psychological strain, could have started to believe Himmler

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was really coming to Treblinka.32 Maybe some rumors were spread by the SS or Ukrainians among the inmates to force them to work harder or just to boost their own egos, or maybe the prisoners spread rumors among themselves. We will never know. The fact remains that none of the SS, who had served in Treblinka, ever mentioned Himmler as a visitor. Of course, this discussion does not pertain to Eichmann since he was at Treblinka only once and did not wear glasses at that time, unlike Wirth and Himmler. If the unsuccessful cremation tests are taken into account, as well as, the increased fear of Wirth mentioned by local SS personnel, then it seems likely that the Upper Camp was in a disturbed state at that time. This fear originated in the person of Wirth, who was a frightening character for all of the local SS. Wirth was very likely the key person who initiated the proper functional mass scale cremations in Treblinka. We will never know who were among his company during this important visit, but it is very likely that the cremation expert from Sobibor, Herbert Floss was among them. After he had reorganized the camp following Eberl´s dismissal in late August 1942, Wirth managed to “reform” the operation of Treblinka for a second time to achieve a desirable scheme. This time, he was “credited” with establishing a workable modus operandi for the cremations. Nevertheless, Rosenberg´s observation of Floss as the key figure of Treblinka´s cremations can be verified through the previously mentioned testimonies and it is in this aspect that his testimony is plausible. The following part of this study will deal with the actual cremation process in Treblinka at its peak.

Modus Operandi of the Obliteration of the Corpses Beginning in spring 1943, probably March or April, following Wirth´s frequent visits and consultations with cremation expert Floss, corpses originally buried in mass graves were exhumed and burned on metal grids constructed from railroad rails. The original cremation test site, which had been used during the cremation trials with narrow gauge tracks since November 1942, was now replaced with a massively constructed concrete base with railroad rails placed on it. During his interrogation regarding the issue of mass cremations in 1962, Arthur Matthes, the Lagerkommandant of the Totenlager, stated that: Floss led the construction and the installation of the facility for the mass cremations of the corpses. The cremation structure consisted of metal grids constructed from railroad rails on a concrete block. On these rails, the

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bodies were burned and there were also some wooden logs placed under them. The wood was doused with petrol. In this way, it was not just the new corpses that were burned but also those removed from the pits.33

Yechiel Reichman described “the work” in the Totenlager during the cremations: The SS “specialist” [likely Floss, could be also Otto Horn – T. V.]34 on body burning ordered us to put women, particularly fat women, on the first layer of the grill, face down. The second layer could consist of whatever was brought—men, women, or children—and so on, each layer on top of another layer … Then the “expert” ordered us to lay dry branches under the grill and to light them. Within a few minutes the fire was so enormous that it was difficult to approach the crematorium from as far as fifty meters away … The work was extremely difficult … The stench was awful.35

Yankiel Wiernik wrote in his “A Year in Treblinka,” published by the Polish underground in 1944: The experiments with the cremations had started at that time but they later proved unsuccessful. We had realized soon that the corpses of women burn in a better way than those of men, so we started taking them for the ignition … The results were not satisfying at first, mainly because the men didn´t burn well despite pouring some flammable liquid over them … If planes were reported, we had to cover the piles of bodies with branches … The sight was terrible, when the bodies of pregnant women were burned, their bellies opened themselves. One day a new SS Oberscharführer came to our camp, some 45 years old, always with a smile on his face. His favorite saying was “tadellos” which soon became his nickname [almost certainly Floss is mentioned here—T. V.] … After his arrival, the real inferno started. He ordered usage of a huge excavator and three thousand bodies per day were exhumed. Over the concrete base were placed railroad rails some one hundred meters long [certainly an exaggeration – T. V.] that formed the cremation grid. The inmates were putting the piles of bodies on the grid after the huge excavator had released them next to the grids. When some three thousand bodies were placed on this construction, they were ignited. The cremations now went smoothly. The Germans created some more grids so that they could burn simultaneously between ten and twelve thousand bodies [certainly an exaggeration again – T. V.]. There was a true inferno created. From afar, it seemed like a volcano eruption with fizzing and explosions. The smoke was all over the place.

54

Rethinking Elimination of Traces at Treblinka The burning was in progress already for some time in the Upper Camp. But despite the cremations that went on for several months, there were still a vast number of corpses. They brought in another two excavators and created other cremation grids. Nearly the entire area between the pits and gas chambers was covered with grids covered with burning bodies. The pace of the working process was getting faster … As it was the end of July, the days were very hot. The worst work was at the pits—people who worked there almost couldn’t stand on their feet because of the awful fumes at the pits. As almost 75% of the bodies were already cremated, the task was now to level the soil in order to erase the traces of the bloody murder. The emptied pits were filled again with a mixture of ashes and soil.36

Eliahu Rosenberg, also an inmate of the Totenlager, added: Instead of one burial place he ordered [Floss – T. V.] the construction of six cremation grids and introduced a new system of placing the bodies on the grids. Floss told us that we would get Sunday off if we succeeded in cremating a thousand bodies the first day, two thousand the second, and three thousand the third; he promised us higher food rations as well. We were cremating the corpses until the end of my stay in Treblinka, that is, the uprising day—2 August 1943.37

Although certain details were undoubtedly exaggerated, these testimonies tell us the story in quite a sufficient frame. The forced laborers, Arbeitskommandos, had to exhume the already buried bodies and burn them on makeshift “ovens” made of rails laid across a concrete base. The excavators had brought the exhumed bodies or partly decomposed body parts next to the grids on which they were placed by the inmates. The so–called Feuerkolonne, using mainly forks, leveled the pyres to a certain height and width. When this was done, a pile of dry branches, placed under the grid, was ignited. This modus operandi proved efficient and expanded with time, especially through the creation of more cremation grids. The cremations took place day and night; in the daytime, corpses and human remains were placed on the grids, while vast fires burnt at night. In the morning, a working group of inmates, called Aschenkolonne, had the task of collecting the ash and removing the remnants of the charred bones from the grid and placing them on tin sheets. Round wooden clubs were then used to break the bones into small fragments. These were then run through a tightly woven screen made of metal wire. Any bones not passing through the screen were returned for further shattering.38 The ashes were then thrown back into the emptied pits and covered with a layer of soil. The “refilled” pits were leveled with the surrounding

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terrain by one of the excavators. Willy Grossmann, another member of the SS serving in the Totenlager, stated the following: Stangl assigned me for the service with the excavators. I assisted the Baggerführer. I operated the small excavator used for leveling work [orig. Planierungsarbeiten – T. V.]. There was also a bigger excavator used for removing corpses from the pits.39

The burning of the corpses, as well as the parallel refilling of the pits with ashes was carried out from approximately April 1943 until late July 1943. During this period, most of the remains of Treblinka´s victims were cremated. According to Wiernik, as of early August, some 20 percent of them remained at that time; there is no other specification for this in any available testimony. On 2 August 1943, the inmates of both parts of the Treblinka Extermination Camp revolted against the German and Ukrainian camp personnel. The history of this uprising is well known and documented sufficiently elsewhere.40 Although many of the camp’s wooden structures were destroyed during the revolt, the extermination capability was preserved. Several thousand Jews from Bialystok ghetto were murdered in Treblinka in August 1943, as its last victims. After the uprising, the camp area was plowed over and trees were planted. The camp was turned into a farm. A Ukrainian guard was settled there, in order, to give the impression that nothing untoward had happened at the camp site. Part of the remaining Jewish prisoners, who had been forced to dismantle the camp, was transferred to Sobibor on 20 October 1943, or they were shot. On 17 November 1943, the last transport departed carrying equipment from the camp.41 This marked the end of the German presence in the Treblinka area where more than three quarters of a million human beings perished.

Aftermath The very interesting set of events took place on the territory of former extermination camp in Treblinka during 1944–1947. Having researched a history of the camp during the postwar period, I have found in Polish and Israeli archives several relatively unknown facts regarding this period. In the area of the camp a sort of “gold rush” reigned during the three postwar years, some kind of parallel with similar events on Alaska at the end of 19th century. The archival material tells us the story of blowing up the former burial pits with aerial bombs, “gang warfare” or sui generis for gold and other valuables, planting of landmines, involvement of the Red

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Army soldiers, and the incredible profanation of the former extermination site by the local population. As the front line had approached this area, probably in late August or early September 1944, the few remaining Ukrainians guarding the site of the camp left. The first evidence of the state of the territory can be derived from the report of the Joint Polish–Soviet Commission for the Investigation of German Crimes, written on 15 September 1944: The camp was situated in a forest about 1 kilometer from the road and the railway line from Malkinija to Siedlce. We have found here burned huts as well as burned foundations of brick and concrete buildings, a quantities of household goods: spoons, pots, books, child toys, photographs, personal documents, torn shoes as well as clothes of all sizes. There is still a fence around the whole place. The cadaverous stench can be smelled all over the place. According to the testimonies of the witnesses, the first part of the camp was called Todes–lager Nr. 2. There were visible burned foundations of two concrete buildings on this area (the old and new gas chambers were the only “non–wooden” structures of the camp – T. V.). The Commission postulates to collect all remains of the victims, especially documents, and deliver them to the Joint Polish–Soviet Investigation Commission. The area of the camp must serve as an international memorial with proper care and protection.42

This postulate had nothing to do with the reality since nothing was done to secure the area. Certainly Michal Kalembasiak and Karol Ogrodowczyk visited Treblinka, one year later, on 13 September 1945. Their report for the Central Jewish Historical Commission contains the following information: Some three kilometers from Treblinka we were hit by a terrible deadly odor or the poisonous gas “Cyklon.” As we arrived on the site of the camp, we encountered a large field ploughed over by the local population. The examination showed the incredible extent to which the field was ploughed over as some pits were even 10 meters deep. There were human remains visible all over the field as jaw bones, leg bones, pelvis bones, or the skulls. We were able to observe also signs of digging under the trees around, probably by the gold seekers. The cadaverous stench was so intense that both me and my colleague started vomiting as well as felt neck scratching. Moving around the place, we encountered some people digging in the ditches; they were digging the soil out. When we asked them what they were doing, they didn´t reply. We have encountered some 300 meters away another group of people digging on the area of crematoria (former Totenlager – T. V.). As we shouted on them they started to run away. The

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whole terrain offered a gloomy picture while walking over human remains as well as over various belongings of victims as spoons, forks, shoes, or wigs. Present state of Treblinka site is that of ploughed over field. Remains of wooden barracks are either burned down or taken to parts by local population. The indication of a huge number of people murdered here offer the pits 10 meters deep full of human bones. We were astonished by the state of the site which is still unsecured from greed and sacking of locals. They are profaning the place to such an extent that the half–burned body parts lie all over. There must have been digging thousands of people as the extent of digging on the site, which has some 2 square kilometers, is colossal.43

Dating back to September 1945, this is not the only evidence of profanation of the site. The Chief of Milicja Obywatelska (i.e. Polish police) from Kosow Lacki wrote a letter to prosecutor of the County Court in Siedlce on 29 September 1945. He was complaining of the hard struggle with the gold seekers—as he expressed: We were organizing roundups as well as dispersing the human hyenas, but they kept coming back to continue the diggings. The site was guarded by unknown armed personnel forbade entering the area, protecting the diggers in this way. There were pieces or remnants of jewelry, watches, or various money found by these diggers. This state of things led to an effacing of the German mass murder traces as well as to an increased risk of epidemics.44

It is very likely that these actions did not bring the profanation of the site to an end. The delegation of Warsaw Regional Municipality visited the place again on 3 June 1954. They found out that the fence surrounding the area had been dismantled by the local population which continued devastation of the area just as an ongoing treasure hunt. There was even one inhabitant of village Wolka Okraglik caught while digging on the site that day (sic! – T. V.).45 The fact remains that the Treblinka Memorial was solemnly inaugurated in its present appearance in 1964.

Conclusion The purpose of this essay was to understand how the traces of mass murder at the Treblinka extermination camp were erased. The obliteration of bodies of the victims here was a process that began in November 1942. An inevitable part of this process, just as in other aspects of Aktion Reinhard, was the improvisation and pragmatism of the Nazis.

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The Nazis’ greatest concern seemed to be the search for effective cremation techniques. After the first cremation tests had been performed in late 1942, the efficient burning of corpses was gradually adopted. This was mainly “credited” to Christian Wirth, the inspector of Aktion Reinhard camps and “manager” of the extermination. After he had been in touch with Paul Blobe, Wirth brought to Treblinka personnel with knowledge of cremation techniques. This contribution was personified in the figure of Herbert Floss, who was the key figure during the eradication of the traces of mass killing at Treblinka. He was the mastermind for the practical side of the problem. During the cremation tests under his command, the “correct modus operandi” in the Totenlager was sought until March or April 1943. The final scheme for the cremation facilities consisted of several metal grids constructed from railroad rails placed over a concrete base. This method was used for most cremations as it had proven to be the most effective. The ashes were placed back in the emptied pits and covered with a thin layer of soil. Once underway, the remains of the majority of bodies were cremated in this way from April to August 1943. The cremations involved hundreds of thousands of corpses exhumed by excavators from the gradually opened huge pits as well as the bodies of victims gassed after the incinerations had begun; their bodies were placed directly on the grids. After an abortive uprising by inmates of both parts of the camp, the whole facility was subsequently shut down and all traces of its purpose removed in November 1943. I wanted to show in this short study that the timing of mass cremations at Treblinka was more complex than is widely represented. The cremations were also a process that had started with pure improvisations and failures until an efficient technique was developed, capable of burning several thousand bodies per day. No wonder the identical technique was used for the burning of corpses at Dresden in February 1945 after the Allies’ devastating air raid. German historian, Wolfgang Scheffler, found that the mastermind of cremations of victims at Dresden was a certain SS Sturmbannführer Karl Streibel, commander of Trawniki camp. Scheffler recalled how a similar method he knew had proven effective earlier at Treblinka.46 After the war, a massive treasure hunt began on the area, particularly as the local population descended on the camp site looking for gold and other valuables. While doing this, they unearthed parts of decomposed bodies and the whole site was a subject of massive profanation.

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Notes 1

Peter Witte, Stephen Tyas, New Document on the Deportation and Murder of Jews during Einsatz Reinhardt 1942, in Holocaust and Genocide Studies, vol. 15, no. 3 (2001), 486. 2 Yitzak Arad, Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka: The Operation Reinhard Death Camps (Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1999), 181; Shmuel Spector, Aktion 1005—Erasing the Murder of Millions, in: Holocaust and Genocide Studies, vol. 5, no. 2 (1990), 161; Jacek Andrzej Mlynarczyk, Treblinka—REy] ĞPLHUFL ³$NFML Reinhadt”, in: Akcja ReinhaUGW =DJáDGD ĩ\GyZ Z *HQHUDOQ\P *XEHUQDWRUVWZLH (Warsaw: Institute of National Remembrance, IPN, 2004), 226. 3 Adalbert Rückerl, NS–Vernichtungslager im Spiegel deutscher Strafprozesse. Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka Chelmno (Munich: Dtv Dokumente, 1977), 197–242; Jens Hoffmann, Das kann man nicht erzählen. ‘Aktion 1005’—Wie die Nazis die Spuren ihrer Massenmorde in Osteuropa beseitigten (Hamburg: Konkret Literatur Verlag, 2008), 234–242; Manfred Burba, Treblinka. Ein NS–Vernichtungslager im Rahmen der “Aktion Reinhardt” (Göttingen: Tyska, 1995); Richard Glazar, 7UHEOLQNDVORYRMDN]GČWVNpĜtNDQN\ (Praha: Ustav pro soudobe dejiny, 1995). 4 Yad Vashem Archives (YVA), TR–10/833, First Treblinka Trial against Franz and others, interrogations and the verdict; YVA; TR–10/1074, Second Treblinka Trial against Stangl, interrogations and the verdict. These files are actually copies of copies as they are hardcopies of material from Ludwigsburg where are kept “primary” copies made from court records. 5 Jewish Historical IQVWLWXWH :DUVDZ $UFKLZXP ħ\GRZVNLHJR ,QVW\WXWX +LVWRU\F]QHJR$ħ,+ Archival collection 302; YVA, Archival collection O. 3. 6 See the ground–breaking study of Alex Bay based on testimonies of survivors, aerial photos of Luftwaffe, and photos from so called “Kurt Franz Album”; idem, The Reconstruction of Treblinka; available online http://www.archive.org /details/TheReconstructionOfTreblinka, (accessed May 10, 2009). 7 Interrogation of Willy Mentz, YVA, TR–10/1074 Bd. 13, 3788. 8 2VNDU 6WUDZF]\ĔVNL