The Second World War (42 page)
A Jewish woman called Ida Belozovskaya described the scene when the Germans entered her town near Kiev on 19 September. ‘
People with fawning
, happy, servile faces were standing along both sides of the road greeting their “liberators”. On that day I knew already that our life was coming to an end, that our ordeal was beginning. We were all in a mouse-trap. Where could one go? There was nowhere to escape.’ Jews were not just denounced to the German authorities out of anti-semitism, but also out of fear, as Belozovskaya testified. The Germans would kill any family found sheltering Jews, so even those who were sympathetic and prepared to give food did not dare to take them in.
Although the Hungarian army attached to Rundstedt’s Army Group South did not take part in mass killings, the Romanians attacking Odessa, a city with a large Jewish population, committed appalling atrocities. Already in the summer of 1941 Romanian troops were said to have killed about 10,000 Jews when seizing back the Soviet-occupied areas of Bessarabia and the Bukovina. Even German officers regarded the conduct of their ally as chaotic and unnecessarily sadistic. In Odessa, the Romanians killed 35,000.
The German Sixth Army, commanded by Generalfeldmarschall von Reichenau, the most convinced Nazi among all senior commanders, had the 1st SS Brigade attached to it. An army security division, the Feldgendarmerie, and other military units were also involved in mass killings along the way. On 27 September, shortly after the capture of Kiev, Reichenau attended a meeting with the town commandant and SS officers from Sonderkommando 4a. It was agreed that the town commandant should put up posters instructing the Jews to muster for ‘evacuation’, bringing with them identity papers, money, valuables and warm clothing.
The Nazis’ murderous intentions were unexpectedly helped by a curious
by-product of the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact. Stalinist censorship had stifled any hint of Hitler’s virulent anti-semitism. As a result, when the Jews in Kiev were ordered to report for ‘resettlement’, no fewer than 33,771 turned up as instructed. The Sixth Army, which was assisting with transport, had expected no more than 7,000 to appear. It took the SS Sonderkommando three days to murder them all in the ravine of Babi Yar outside the city.
Ida Belozovskaya, who was married to a Gentile, described the assembly of Jews in Kiev, including members of her own family. ‘
On 28 September
, my husband and his Russian sister went to see my unfortunate ones off on their last journey. It seemed to them, and we all wanted to believe this, that the German barbarians would just send them away somewhere, and for several days people kept moving in big groups to their “salvation”. There was no time to receive everyone, people were ordered to come back on the following day (the Germans didn’t overload themselves with work). And the people kept turning up day after day, until their turn to leave this world finally came.’
Her Russian husband followed one of the transports to Babi Yar to find out what was happening. ‘That’s what he saw through a little crack in the high fence. The people were being separated, men were told to go to one side, and women and children to the other side. They were naked (they had to leave their things in another place), and then they were mowed down by sub-machine guns and machine guns, the sound of firing drowned their screams and howling.’
It has been estimated that more than one and a half million Soviet Jews escaped the killing squads. But the concentration of most of the Soviet Union’s Jews in the western parts, especially in cities and large towns, made the work of the
Einsatzgruppen
much easier. The
Einsatzgruppen
commanders were also pleasantly surprised by how cooperative and often eager to help their army counterparts proved to be. By the end of 1942, the total number of Jews killed by SS
Einsatzgruppen
, Ordnungspolizei, anti-partisan units and the German army itself is estimated to have exceeded 1.35 million people.
The ‘Shoah by gas’ also had a haphazard development. As early as 1935, Hitler had indicated that once war came he would introduce a programme of euthanasia. The criminally insane, the ‘feeble-minded’, the incapacitated and children with birth defects, all were included in the Nazi category of ‘life unworthy of life’. The first case of euthanasia was carried out on 25 July 1939 by Hitler’s personal physician, Dr Karl Brandt, whom the Führer had asked to set up an advisory committee. Less than two weeks before the invasion of Poland, the ministry of the interior ordered hospitals to report back on every case of ‘
deformed newborns
’. The reporting
process was extended to adults at about the same time.
The first mental patients to be killed, however, were in Poland three weeks after the invasion. They were shot in a nearby forest. Massacres of other asylum inmates rapidly followed. Over 20,000 were killed in this way. German patients from Pomerania were then shot. Two of the hospitals thus emptied were turned into barracks for the Waffen-SS. By late November, gas chambers using carbon monoxide were in operation, and Himmler observed one of these killings in December. Early in 1940, experiments had been tried using sealed trucks as mobile gas chambers. This was regarded as a success because it reduced the complications of transporting patients. The organizer was promised ten Reichsmark a head.
Directed from Berlin, the system was extended within the Reich under the name T4. Parents were persuaded that their handicapped children, some of whom simply had learning difficulties, could be better cared for at another institution. They were then told that the child had died of pneumonia. Some 70,000 German adults and children were murdered in gas chambers by August 1941. This figure also included German Jews who had been hospitalized for a significant time.
The vast numbers of victims and the unconvincing death certificates had failed to keep the euthanasia programme secret. Hitler ordered it to be halted that August after churchmen, led by Bishop Clemens August Graf von Galen, had denounced it. But a covert version continued afterwards, killing another 20,000 by the end of the war. Personnel involved in the euthansia programme were recruited for the death camps of eastern Poland in 1942. As several historians have emphasized, the Nazis’ eutha nasia programme provided not just the blueprint for the Final Solution, but also the foundation for their ideal of a racially and genetically pure society.
Because of Hitler’s avoidance of confiding controversial decisions to paper, historians have interpreted the evasive and often euphemistic language of subsidiary documents in different ways when trying to assess the exact moment at which the decision was made to launch the Final Solution. This has proved an impossible task, especially since the movement towards genocide consisted of unrecorded encouragement from the top, as well as an uncoordinated series of steps and experiments carried out on the spot by the different killing groups. In a curious way, it happened to mirror the
Auftragstaktik
of the army, whereby a general instruction was translated into action by the commander on the ground.
Some historians argue plausibly that the basic decision to go for outright genocide took place in July or August 1941, when a quick victory still seemed to be within the Wehrmacht’s grasp. Others think that it did not take place until the autumn, when the German advance in the Soviet Union slowed perceptibly and a ‘territorial solution’ looked increasingly
impracticable. Some put it even later, suggesting the second week of December when the German army was halted outside Moscow, and Hitler declared war on the United States.
The fact that each different
Einsatzgruppe
interpreted its mission slightly differently suggests that there was no centrally issued instruction. Only from the month of August did total genocide become standard, with Jewish women and children also killed en masse. Also on 15 August, Himmler witnessed for the first time an execution of a hundred Jews near Minsk, a spectacle organized at his request by Einsatzgruppe B. Himmler could not bear to look. Afterwards, Obergruppenführer Erich von dem Bach-Zelewski underlined the point that on that occasion only a hundred had been shot. ‘
Look at the eyes
of the men in this
Kommando
,’ Bach-Zelewski said to him, ‘how deeply shaken they are! These men are finished for the rest of their lives. What kind of followers are we training here? Either neurotics or savages!’ Bach-Zelewski himself, suffering from nightmares and stomach pains, was later taken to hospital to be treated on Himmler’s orders by the head physician of the SS.
Himmler made a speech afterwards to the men justifying their action and indicated that Hitler had issued an order for the liquidation of all Jews in the eastern territories. He compared their work to the elimination of bedbugs and rats. That afternoon, he discussed with Arthur Nebe, the
Einsatzgruppe
commander, and Bach-Zelewski alternatives to shooting. Nebe suggested an experiment with explosives, which Himmler approved. This proved a crude, messy and embarrassing failure. The next stage was the gas van, using carbon monoxide from the exhaust. Himmler wanted to find a method which was more ‘humane’ for the executioners. Concerned for their spiritual welfare, he urged commanders to organize social events in the evenings with sing-songs. Most of the killers, however, preferred to seek oblivion in the bottle.
An intensification of the slaughter of Jews also coincided with the Wehrmacht’s increasingly brutal treatment and outright killing of Soviet prisoners of war. On 3 September, the insecticide Zyklon B, developed by the chemical conglomerate IG Farben, was used at Auschwitz-Birkenau for the first time in a test on Soviet and Polish prisoners. At the same time, Jews from Germany and western Europe transported to the eastern territories were being murdered on arrival by police officials, who claimed that this was the only way to cope with the numbers foisted on them. Senior officials in the German-occupied eastern territories, the Reichskommissariat Ostland (the Baltic states and part of Belorussia) and the Reichskommissariat Ukraine, had no idea what the policy was. This would only be made clear after the Wannsee conference the following January.
JUNE–DECEMBER 1941
C
hurchill was notorious for his incontinent rush of ideas on prosecuting the war. One of his colleagues remarked that the trouble was that he did not know which of them were any good. Yet Churchill was not just a fox, in Isaiah Berlin’s definition. He was also a hedgehog, with one big idea right from the start. Britain alone did not stand a chance against Nazi Germany. He knew that he needed to bring the Americans in to the war, just as he had predicted to his son Randolph in May 1940.
While never wavering over this objective, Churchill wasted no time in forming an alliance with the Bolshevik regime he had always loathed. ‘
I will unsay no word
that I have spoken about it,’ he declared in a broadcast on 22 June 1941, following news of the German invasion of the Soviet Union. ‘But all this fades away before the spectacle which is now unfolding.’ And he remarked later to his private secretary, John Colville, that ‘
if Hitler invaded Hell
, I would at least make a favourable reference to the Devil in the House of Commons’. His speech that evening, prepared with the American ambassador John G. Winant, promised the Soviet Union ‘any technical or economic assistance in our power’. It made a fine impression in Britain, in the United States and in Moscow, even though Stalin and Molotov remained convinced that the British were still hiding the true nature of Rudolf Hess’s mission.
Two days later, Churchill instructed Stewart Menzies, the head of the Secret Intelligence Service, to send Ultra decrypts to the Kremlin. Menzies warned that ‘
it would be fatal
’. The Red Army did not possess effective cyphers, and the Germans would trace the source of the intelligence very quickly. Churchill agreed, but Ultra-sourced intelligence was passed on later, suitably disguised. An agreement on military cooperation between the two countries was negotiated soon afterwards, although at this stage the British government did not expect the Red Army to survive the Nazi onslaught.
Churchill was encouraged by developments across the Atlantic. On 7 July, Roosevelt informed Congress that US forces had landed in Iceland to replace British and Canadian troops. On 26 July, the United States and Britain acted together to freeze Japanese assets in retaliation for their occupation of French Indochina. The Japanese wanted air bases from which
to attack the Burma Road, along which arms and supplies reached the Nationalist Chinese forces. Roosevelt was keen to support Chiang Kaishek’s Nationalists, and a force of mercenary American pilots, known as the Flying Tigers, was recruited in the United States to defend the Burma Road from Mandalay along which their supplies came. But when the United States and Britain placed an embargo on the sale of oil and other materials to Japan, the stakes were raised much further. The Japanese were now within easy striking distance of Malaya, Thailand and the oilfields of the Dutch East Indies, which looked increasingly like their next objective. Not surprisingly, Australia also saw itself at risk.
No suitor prepared as carefully as Churchill for his first wartime meeting with the American President in early August. Secrecy on both sides was effectively maintained. Churchill and his party, many of whom had no idea where they were headed, embarked on the battleship HMS
Prince of Wales
. The prime minister took with him some grouse shot before the season opened to entertain the President, as well as some ‘golden eggs’ of Ultra decrypts to impress him. He grilled Harry Hopkins, Roosevelt’s close friend and adviser who accompanied them, on everything he could tell him about the American leader. Churchill had no recollection of his first meeting with Roosevelt in 1918, when he had failed to make a good impression on the future President.
Roosevelt, with his chiefs of staff, had also gone to some trouble for this meeting. Outwitting the press, he had transferred from the presidential yacht
Potomac
to the heavy cruiser USS
Augusta
. Then, with a strong escort of destroyers, they had sailed on 6 August to the rendezvous of Placentia Bay off Newfoundland. Warm relations rapidly developed between the two leaders, and a combined church service on the after-deck of the
Prince of Wales
, carefully stage-managed by Churchill, produced a deep emotional effect. Yet Roosevelt, although charmed and impressed by the British prime minister, remained detached. He had, as one biographer noted, ‘
a gift for treating
every new acquaintance as if the two had known each other all their lives, a capacity for forging a semblance of intimacy which he exploited ruthlessly’. In the interests of amity divisive questions were avoided, particularly Britain’s empire of which Roosevelt so disapproved. The joint document known as the Atlantic Charter, which they signed on 12 August, promised self-determination to a liberated world, with the implicit exception of the British Empire, and no doubt the Soviet Union.