America's Nazi Secret: An Insider's History (17 page)

The killing went on throughout the day. Stankievich had underestimated the manpower needed for the operation, and German troops had to be called out to guard the ghetto so more policemen could be sent to deal with the crowds at the execution grounds. Too many trucks arrived at the same time, and there were not enough men to direct the unloading. A few Jews tried to escape, but most were killed before they reached the woods. Others were too frightened to move until prodded toward the graves. Many accepted the futility of resistance and quietly followed the line to the pit to which they were assigned. Some of the guards raped the younger women before forcing them into the pits. Heads were smashed by rifle butts, and bodies were mutilated. Autopsies conducted after the war showed that some babies, out of sheer savagery or to save ammunition, had been thrown into the pits and buried alive.

The SS professed to be shocked by the Borissow massacre – not at the slaughter of the Jews but at the carnival aspects of it. Over the next three years, as the Byelorussian holocaust increased in intensity and dimension, the Einsatzgruppen supervised the actual shooting themselves. Then, at least, the moment of execution would be devoid of the demonic games favored by the collaborators. But even after the sport of pulling the trigger at the pits had been taken from them, hundreds of collaborators guarded the roads, chased fugitives, and forced the living down into the graves.
³⁴
Children were thrown into wells and hand grenades dropped down upon them, and Byelorussian policemen swung infants by the heels and smashed their heads against rocks. More Jews perished in Poland and Germany, but the holocaust in Byelorussia was unique. In no other nation under German occupation did the inhabitants so willingly and enthusiastically visit such a degree of inhumanity upon their neighbors.

Borissow was merely the beginning.
³⁵
On November 15, 1941 Franz Kushel’s Byelorussian police conducted a roundup of Jews in the Minsk ghetto and trucked them to an execution ground outside the city. The Einsatzgruppen did the actual killing. A report prepared by the SS that week contained a map of the German-occupied area of the Soviet Union with coffins labeled according to the number of Jews who had been exterminated. The coffin representing Minsk contained the figure 42,000. Sometimes the murderous frenzy of the collaborators outstripped their capacity to kill. On one occasion the SS issued orders for the extermination of the Jews of Slutsk, but owing to a major pogrom scheduled for the nearby town of Pinsk, insufficient Byelorussian volunteers were available. Units were brought in from the Baltic, but they were inexperienced. The mass graves were overfilled, and some of the victims, who had only been wounded, dug themselves out.
³⁶

The ghettos of Minsk and Baranoviche were rapidly emptied of their original inhabitants to make room for the Jews of Western Europe being shipped to Byelorussia. One morning in 1942 some 50,000 Jews in the Minsk ghetto were herded into Ubelanyie Square. Those who fainted in the press of bodies were shot where they lay by black-uniformed Byelorussian police. They crammed dozens of Jews at a time into large, box-shaped vans and closed the doors behind them, pummeling them with their rifle butts until the bolts fitted into the door locks. As each truck drove away, the driver pulled a switch that channeled exhaust fumes into the passenger compartment. Soviet prisoners were forced to unload the bodies into long graves that had been bulldozed along the highways, and the gas vans returned to the ghetto for a new load of victims. In 1944, victorious Russian troops crossing Byelorussia saw miles and miles of bulldozer tracks along the highways and wondered what they were.

When the Jews learned the fate of those taken away in the vans it was impossible to load them except by force. The SS altered procedures and sent the vans to meet transports of Western European Jews at the Minsk railroad station so no one could warn them. Eventually a ring of holding camps was established around the city to handle the overflow of Jews, and a small crematorium was built in the suburb of Malyi Trostynets. During the summer of 1942 the SS ordered the Byelorussian mayors and police officials to liquidate all the smaller ghettos. The Jews were told they were going to be ransomed to America, and they marched out in columns of a hundred at a time to execution grounds where they were shot by the Einsatzgruppen. The SS boasted that they were killing ten thousand Jews per week. In all, about two-thirds of the approximately 375,000 Jews who lived in Byelorussia before the Nazi invasion were swallowed up by the Holocaust.

By the beginning of 1943 most pockets of Byelorussian Jewry had been eradicated except for a few thousand technicians and specialists held in special ghettos and concentration camps because they had essential skills. Koldichevo, in southwestern Byelorussia, was one such camp.
³⁷
Built to house thousands of Soviet prisoners, it was administered by a handful of German officers, while most of the staff were Byelorussians. Two hundred Jews remained alive to keep the camp’s equipment functioning. They were all that were left of the 50,000 or so Jews who had lived in the district, except for a handful hiding in the swamps.

Solomon Schiadow, one of the few inmates who escaped Koldichevo, later described the conditions there.
³⁸
The Byelorussian guards were so brutal that the prisoners prayed that they would be replaced by Germans. One day a Byelorussian caught a youngster looking at the sky as planes flew overhead and accused the prisoner of attempting to signal enemy aircraft. The guard ordered several other Jews to hold the youth down over a table. He warned them that anyone who let go would replace the man on the table. He took out his knife and began to carve large steaks out of the living flesh of the young man, as if he were a butcher calmly working on a side of beef.

In the early period of the occupation of Byelorussia the peasants got along well with the Germans and the collaborators. The breakup of the agricultural collectives was begun, and taxes were lower than those that had been collected by the Soviets. Opinion polls taken by the SS purported to show that almost 80 percent of the population favored a German victory. The entire nation appeared to have defected to the Nazis.
³⁹

One of the most powerful weapons in the collaborationist arsenal was the religious fervor of the Byelorussian peasants, despite the years of official atheism under the Communists and the attempt by the Catholic Church to close Orthodox churches during the Polish occupation.
⁴⁰
The SS “ordained” sympathizers from the Byelorussian seminaries and religious colleges and established an independent, or autocephalous, Byelorussian Orthodox Church free of the patriarch of Moscow, who was actively propagandizing for the Soviet government. (Early in the war Stalin had promised the patriarch religious freedom in return for total support of the Soviet regime.) These priests had considerable influence with the peasantry, and they actively supported the Nazi cause. In every church the Einsatzgruppen were depicted as waging a holy war against atheistic-Judeo communism.

This reservoir of goodwill was forfeited by the brutality and arrogance of the erstwhile liberators in their campaign against the partisan bands that lived in the marshes and forests. The Nazis indulged in an orgy of slaughter, murdering the innocent, burning the villages, and looting everything of value. The peasants were also angered by the increasing confiscation of their livestock and grain, and by the conscription of their sons and daughters for forced labor. As a result, the pro-Russian ranks of the partisan guerillas were swelled by volunteers from the peasantry. “The situation in Russia grows more unstable,” noted Joseph Goebbels, the Nazi propaganda minister. “The partisan danger is increasing week by week.”
⁴¹

The Soviet secret police, the NKVD, began to infiltrate the collaborationist network in Byelorssia.
⁴²
Soviet “moles” not only engaged in sabotage and spying but tried to inspire hatred of the Germans among the local populace. Many enlisted in the police and the units organized to hunt for partisans, and some of them rose to become police chiefs and ranking administrators. Others obtained low-level jobs as typists, translators, and even cleaning women in German offices. Nina Litwinczyk, a typist in the Gestapo headquarters in Minsk, had access to lists containing the names of every collaborator on the Nazi payroll. “We would choose the quietest settlement, with a population loyal to the occupants,” one Soviet saboteur later recalled. “Then we would kill a German soldier, or we would mine the railroads in the vicinity; the Germans would retaliate upon the whole village and the peasantry learned a cruel lesson.”
⁴³

As the NKVD anticipated, these provocations increased the German determination to rid Byelorussia of its “bandit” underground. Front-line units were diverted to the rear areas to conduct widespread search-and-destroy missions. The Soviets also stepped up their activities. Officers were parachuted in to coordinate the forest warfare, supplies were airdropped, and the scattered partisan units were directed by radio from Moscow. The guerrilla war was taking a heavy toll on the Germans. Railroad lines were disrupted, bridges blown up, and supply dumps burned. Generalkommissar Wilhelm Kube, the overseer of Byelorussia, was killed when his mistress planted a bomb under his bed.
[3]
Political leaders in the outlying villages were murdered along with their families. Replacements became harder to find as the partisans warned that anyone who collaborated with the Nazis would be killed.

The Germans were alarmed because the Red Army had gone on the offensive, and by the end of 1943 Byelorussia was again close to the front. The need to maintain order was imperative. A year before, General Gehlen had suggested in a memorandum to the High Command that steps be taken to appeal to the Russian people to join the Germans in the fight against the partisans.
⁴⁴

This was a complete break with prevailing German policy, for the invaders, regarding the Russians as racially inferior, had ignored the nationalist ambitions of the collaborators despite their loyalty to the Nazi cause. The Byelorussians had not even been permitted to form their own military organization or national police force. Gehlen called for an end to Nazi racial doctrines, urged self-government for the occupied territories, and suggested recruiting anti-Stalinist Russians into the Wehrmacht.

These suggestions had been ignored by Kube, whose faction had displaced SS control over the Byelorussian collaborators for more than a year. During Kube’s brief interregnum, Dr. Six’s agents were subordinated to a motley collection of German political appointees who envied the SS and looked with disfavor on their Slavic proteges. By the end of 1942, however, even Kube had recognized the importance of the local politicians and allowed them to form a number of nationalist “cultural” organizations which assisted the Nazis with police recruiting and intelligence operations. Kube’s chief collaborator was Ivan Ermachenko, called “Herr Jawohl” by those who despised his slavish devotion to the Nazi cause.
[4]
Shortly before his assassination in 1943, Kube sensed a change in the political winds and began to boast in letters to Berlin of how he and his collaborators were helping the SS kill thousands of Jews. However, it was the Soviet partisans operating in Kube’s domain that gave Hitler pause. After Kube’s death, he gave the post of Generalkommissar to the SS chief of anti-partisan operations, General Kurt von Gottberg, a brutal but practical soldier who had little use for Kube’s civilian administrators and their counterproductive racial theories.

Taking a gamble, Gottberg decided to adopt Gehlen’s suggestions in Byelorussia: he offered the collaborators a limited form of national autonomy if they could mobilize the peasantry against the partisans. Radoslaw Ostrowsky was selected by the SS to head the new regime.
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[
1
] The mayor of Minsk was Dr. Vitold Tumash. Tumash, who now lives in New York City, acknowledged to Mike Wallace on the CBS program 60 Minutes (May 16, 1982) that he had been mayor of Minsk for three months but denied having anything to do with the extermination of the Jews. Captured Nazi documents in the National Archives tell a different story. They not only identify him as the mayor of Minsk but also reveal that the municipal authorities supervised the ghetto and issued passports for the elimination of racial undesirables. (Report of 20 July, 1941, Military Administration Group, Army Group Center, National Archives Microfilm Section T175, Roll 2533, Frames 292820-821.) One of Tumash’s fellow Byelorussians has written a book in which he states that Tumash solicited Franz Kushel to organize a Byelorussian police force in Minsk (Konstantine Akula, Combat Trails). There is a copy of this book, published in Toronto in Byelorussian, in the Library of Congress.

[
2
] Byelorussian peasants were rewarded with a kilo of sugar for every Jew they caught trying to escape to the countryside.

[
3
] Since most of the SS documents, such as Obersturmbannfuehrer Friedrich Buchardt’s history of the war, remained classified for many decades, postwar historians have tended to overemphasize the power of Kube’s administration without realizing the more powerful and more enduring relationship between the SS and the indigenous political structure.

[
4
] The SS arranged for Ermachenko’s disgrace by exposing his war profiteering, with the help of a rival faction of Byelorussian collaborators. After the war, Ermachenko settled in Binghamton, New York, where he joined the Byelorussian Government-in-Exile.