Holocaust and Genocide 16:1

Home , Berdychiv, Curt von Gottberg, Erich Koch, Erwin Schulz, Fritz Todt, Hegewald (colony)

“Anticipatory Obedience” and the Nazi Implementation of the Holocaust in the Ukraine: A Case Study of Central and Peripheral Forces in the Generalbezirk Zhytomyr, 1941–1944

Wendy Lower Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies United States Holocaust Memorial Museum

Numerous recent studies of the Holocaust as it occurred in the occupied So- viet territories have shifted attention from the central German leadership to the role of regional ofﬁcials and administrators. The following case study offers an example of the ways central Nazi leaders directly and indirectly shaped the Holocaust at the regional level. In Zhytomyr the presence of Himmler, Hitler, and their SS-Police retinues created a unique setting in which the interaction of center and periphery can be traced. On this basis the author argues for the reconsideration of Berlin’s role in regional events generally.

Since the appearance of Raul Hilberg’s path-breaking study The Destruction of the European Jews, which masterfully reconstructed the “machinery of destruction” that drove the Holocaust, historians have placed differing emphases on the role of the oper- ative functionaries and the leaders. In the past decade several young German historians (inspired by the work of Götz Aly and the sudden deluge of Nazi material from the former Soviet regional archives) have followed Hilberg’s lead by stressing both the role of district-level leaders in the “Final Solution” and the regional features of the Holo- caust itself. Indeed these scholars have impressively demonstrated the inner workings of what might be called the “regional Holocaust.” Recent Holocaust scholarship has shifted our attention away from the origins of the genocide at the level of state policy to the role of regional leaders and events on the ground in the former Soviet Union. At least eight regional studies of the Holocaust in Galicia, Volhynia, Lublin, Sile- sia, Lithuania, and Belorussia have appeared since 1990 (and at least six more are near completion). The common theme is that lower-ranking administrators provided the radical push to genocide. Instead of terror-stricken automatons who were “just following orders,” we ﬁnd in these works local functionaries who became perpetrators on their own initiative and with a clear sense of purpose. Furthermore these monographs have thrown light on the multiple lateral forces (German and non-German) that made the murder possible.1

Holocaust and Genocide Studies, V16 N1, Spring 2002, pp. 1–22 1 Such regional studies, however, make little mention of Hitler, Himmler, Hey- drich, and other Nazi leaders. If these leaders do enter into the narrative, they appear as background figures who reacted to events and initiatives stemming from below. For example, Christian Gerlach’s work on the Holocaust in Belorussia downplays the prominence of Himmler’s apparatus by focusing on the crimes of the Wehrmacht and other non-SS-Police agencies. Gerlach found “genocidal intent” in pre-Barbarossa proposals of the Army’s Economics and Armaments Office and the Reich Ministry of Food and Agriculture, arguing that economic exigencies during wartime triggered the mass killing “from below.” In Gerlach’s words, “the resolution of the economic prob- lems of the occupation authorities was the final, decisive impulse for the complete liquidation of the Jews in Army Group Center.”2 Bogdan Musial’s study of the General Gouvernement puts forth that Soviet atrocities committed during the Red Army’s re- treat in the summer of 1941 sparked pogroms and reprisals, which spiraled into the mass murder of the Jews. According to Musial, in early October 1941 SS-Police leader Odilo Globocnik decided to kill all the Jews of the General Gouvernement in con- junction with his plans to “Germanize” the area, and presented his decision to Himm- ler who then sought Hitler’s final approval.3 Thomas Sandkühler similarly concluded that in eastern Galicia “the impulses for radicalization came . . . from the periphery, to be bundled in Berlin and relayed back. The exact role of the central agencies in this process, however, is still unclear.” Dieter Pohl tended not to lose sight of Himmler and Hitler, stressing that in the General Gouvernement they served to motivate and legit- imate the mass murder.4 These case studies suggest that Hitler, Himmler, and Heydrich neither initiated nor directly managed the Final Solution at the regional level. With their select tele- scopic focus on the region itself, such works tend to fall into the trap of neglecting the panoramic view of the Holocaust. In effect, they overlook the various ways in which the center of Nazi power retained its presence at the periphery. Thus, one is left question- ing whether the local or regional view of the Holocaust is sufficient. Were Nazi leaders so removed from the regional administration of the Final Solution? In what ways did they influence the actions of their subordinates who carried out the murder? This es- say takes a bottom-up view not only to shed light on the local, or lateral, forces that drove the murder, but also to deepen our understanding of the center’s role at the local level. Situated about 145 kilometers west of the Dniepr River, the Zhytomyr General Commissariat was a Nazi geographic construct formed from the Soviet oblasts of Vin- nytsia, Zhytomyr, and parts of the Belorussian regions of Polissia and Gomel. It was one of six regional entities that comprised the civilian zones of the Reichskommissariat Ukraine (RKU). The Zhytomyr Commissariat encompassed a total area of 64,800 square kilometers with a population of 2.3 to 2.9 million persons and was divided into twenty-five subdistricts, known as Gebietskommissariate. Each was led by a Gebiets- kommissar (district commissar) and an SS-Police district leader.5 For German leaders,

2 Holocaust and Genocide Studies the Zhytomyr region was an important eastern borderland ripe for Volksdeutsche col- onization. The placement of a headquarters there by Hitler, Himmler, Göring, and Ribbentrop also made it an important center of Nazi strategy and policy experimenta- tion within the southern tier of the Eastern Front. Wedged between these was Himm- ler’s ethnic German settlement, known as Hegewald or “preservation forest.” The Holocaust in Zhytomyr occurred in two distinct chronological phases. The first phase was the military occupation period from July through October 1941, when the Wehrmacht and SS-Police killing squads introduced and established administra- tively the Nazi policy of genocide in the Ukraine and other parts of the Soviet Union. The second phase began under the civil administration in November 1941 when Reich Minister for the Occupied Eastern Territories Alfred Rosenberg’s commissars and Himmler’s gendarmes and district SS chiefs took charge of the administration of the Final Solution. In July 1941, there were about 170,000 Jews living in and around Zhytomyr, Berdychiv, and Vinnytsia. By November 1941, when Rosenberg’s commissars began arriving at their posts, about half of this population had been killed. Units directly subordinated to Higher SS and Police Leader Friedrich Jeckeln (e.g., the 1st SS Bri- gade, and Order Police battalions 9, 45, 314, 82, 311, 303, 304, and 320), Einsatz- gruppe C, and Wehrmacht personnel (from the Sixth Army, Seventeenth Army, and Rear Area Command of Army Group South) already had swept through the region and massacred nearly all of the women, children, and elderly in Zhytomyr’s largest Jewish communities.6 During these first months of military occupation (July through November 1941) Hitler, Himmler, and Jeckeln visited the area to assess the military situation, to tour tri- umphantly their new Lebensraum, and to deal directly with the security and “racial” threats to Nazi rule. They met with the most senior regional leaders to clarify Nazi policy in the Vernichtungskrieg (war of annihilation). Hitler flew to Berdychiv on August 6 to meet with the commander of Army Group South, Gerd von Rundstedt. On this oc- casion, Hitler also awarded his Romanian ally Antonescu the Ritterkreuz and a swath of territory along the Ukraine’s southern border, a tract known as Transnistria. Jeckeln, Himmler’s right-hand man in the Ukraine, flew to Berdychiv for a meeting with Sixth Army officers as they planned for joint SS-Police and Army “security measures.” As did the other senior SS-Police leaders collectively known as “little Himmlers,” Jeckeln rep- resented the intersection of the center and periphery.7 From Jeckeln’s temporary field headquarters in Berdychiv, he initiated an unprecedented wave of mass killing sprees that began in late August and continued through September 1941. In early October, Himmler made his first visit to the region and inspected its Volksdeutsche communities just southwest of Zhytomyr, an area that became the site of his secret Hegewald headquarters.8 From the start of the Nazi campaign in the East, central Reich leaders were in the field interacting directly with regional authorities in the Wehrmacht and SS-Police.

“Anticipatory Obedience” and the Holocaust in the Ukraine 3 Sources such as the war diary of Hitler’s personal security forces, Himmler’s appointment book, Heydrich’s written orders to his Einsatzgruppen leaders, and postwar testimonies reveal the active involvement of these leaders in events on the front and behind the lines. In Zhytomyr (and elsewhere in the East) these initial months of Nazi occupation were also among the worst for the Jewish population. In mid-July 1941 an advance unit of Sonderkommando 4a (Sk4a) arrived in the city of Zhytomyr with the Wehrmacht and systematically shot Jewish men in groups of about 150.9 Then on Au- gust 7, after the public hanging in Zhytomyr’s marketplace of two Jews accused as NKVD officials, Sk4a commander Paul Blobel and his riflemen, along with a Waffen- SS platoon and officials from the Sixth Army staff, collaborated in the mass shooting of four hundred Jewish men at a horse cemetery on the outskirts of town.10 Berdychiv’s historic Jewish community suffered the most devastating Nazi blows in August and September 1941. Wehrmacht personnel and Heydrich’s men from a mo- bile killing commando attached to Einsatzgruppe C humiliated, tortured, and then killed the Jewish elders in the synagogue. At the nearby Brodecki forest, Einsatzkom- mando 5 and army personnel carried out mass shootings of Jews, Red Army prisoners of war, and other targets of Nazi racial “cleansing.” The death toll in the forest cannot be precisely determined, but estimates range from a few hundred to several thousand. When Jeckeln arrived in Berdychiv on August 26 he initiated the ghettoization of Berdychiv’s Jewish community, an “Aktion” that claimed the lives of about 3,000 Jews.11 A few days after the ghetto action on September 1, Jeckeln met with the new commander of the Order Police for the Ukraine, Otto von Oelhafen, at his Berdychiv headquarters. During their lunch, Jeckeln boasted to von Oelhafen that already during that week a number of Jews had been killed. In fact besides the Berdychiv ghetto action, Jeckeln could take credit for the largest massacre thus far in the Barbarossa campaign—the murder of 23,600 Jews at Kamianets-Podolsk, situated 201 kilometers southwest of Berdychiv. During the meeting, Jeckeln also instructed von Oelhafen that future requests from the security police to employ Order Police battalions in the executions of Jews were to be communicated orally.12 Despite deliberate attempts at secrecy, Nazi perpetrators could hardly hide the mass killings that occurred in the following weeks. On September 15 and 16 killing commandos from Einsatzgruppe C and Jeckeln’s Order Police murdered more than ten thousand Jews at an airfield near Berdychiv. A few days later, they shifted their attention to the Jews of Zhytomyr and Vinnytsia. According to Einsatzgruppe C’s report, the Wehrmacht assisted the SS-Police in the final liquidation of Zhytomyr’s “ghetto,” killing 3,145 Jews on Friday, September 19. Meanwhile in the city of Vinnytsia, the Nazis unleashed a two-day killing spree against about 15,000 Jews, mainly women, children, and the elderly.13 The extreme escalation in Nazi anti-Jewish massacres was precipitated by at least three factors: the direct involvement of Reich leaders who pressured their subordinates to kill more Jews, the accumulation and expansion of available killing forces in

4 Holocaust and Genocide Studies the region, and the collaboration of local commanders from the Wehrmacht and SS- Police, who proved to be efﬁcient killers. On August 1, 1941, Gestapo Chief Heinrich Müller sent an order to the Einsatzgruppen leaders in the Soviet Union stating that Hitler now wanted personally to receive ongoing reports about the “work of the Ein- satzgruppen in the East.”14 As one of the worst perpetrators from Sk4a related after the war, the pressure from above was both directly and indirectly brought to bear. Al- though some SS-Police units had killed Jewish women and children since the end of July, Obersturmführer August Häfner claimed that the shootings also suddenly ex- panded against women and children about the time that Heydrich was in Zhytomyr.15 The former commander of Einsatzkommando 5, Erwin Schulz, further corroborated the Nazi leadership’s role in the escalation. In postwar criminal investigations he stated that he was summoned in August to Zhytomyr where he learned from his superior, Dr. Otto Rasch, that the higher-ups were displeased because the SS-Police units were not acting aggressively enough against the Jews. According to Schulz, Jeckeln and Himm- ler demanded the execution of all nonworking Jews, i.e., women, children, and the elderly.16 Häfner and Schulz may have been trying to exonerate themselves by placing the impetus for killing women and children in the hands of their superiors. Yet the results of Himmler’s visits to Riga and Minsk, for example, and Jeckeln’s aggressive behavior in Kamianets-Podolsk, Berdychiv, Kiev, and Riga demonstrate that the direct inter- vention of central leaders in peripheral events played a decisive part in the escalation to genocide. Furthermore, as of late July Himmler deployed the SS-Police forces who soon became the foot soldiers of the Final Solution. After July 19, SS Infantry Regiments and Order Police battalions scoured the newly occupied territory for “security threats,” and the Jews proved to be one of their primary targets. At this time Himmler also approved the formation of native auxiliary SS-Police units, thereby supplying the needed force of Ukrainian Schutzmänner to patrol behind-the-lines.17 Around Zhytomyr, for example, the number of available SS-Policemen jumped during August from a few hundred to several thousand. In addition Wehrmacht secret police (Geheime Feld- polizei), sharpshooters, and other army security units joined in the search, seizure, and killing of Reich “security threats.”18 As Einsatzgruppe C chief Dr. Rasch explained in early August, “Army circles show a steadily growing interest in and understanding of tasks and matters concerning the work of the Sipo-SD particularly during the executions.” Moreover, Rasch reported, the Army pursued the tasks of the Sipo-SD by ar- resting communists and Jews.19 For example, during the Berdychiv ghetto action, members of the 2.Feld Fern- sprech Kompanie/643 volunteered to assist the SS-Police in the sealing off and liquidation of the ghetto.20 About forty kilometers north of Zhytomyr at Volodarsk- Volynskiy German infantrymen and Order Police (attached to Security Division 454) lashed out at the Jewish population. According to the report of Infantry Regiment 375, Red Army soldiers occupied the town with the alleged help of the Jewish population

“Anticipatory Obedience” and the Holocaust in the Ukraine 5 and forced out the ethnic Germans and other “German-friendly” elements. In early August when a reconnaissance unit of Order Police Battalion 82 arrived in Volodarsk- Volynskiy to check out the situation, they were shot at and two policemen were killed. According to the reprisal policy issued by the High Command of the Army on July 25, 1941, the Voldarsk-Volynskiy incident was to be avenged through collective measures against the local population, and aimed specifically against the local Jews.21 About two weeks later on August 7, 1941, the 3rd battalion of the 1st SS Brigade set out to “cleanse” the area. When they arrived they found neither Jews nor Bolsheviks, because (as the SS unit reported) a unit of Infantry Regiment 375 already had “cleansed the area during the past 8 days, [and] Jews and Bolsheviks had been shot.”22 Despite the propagandistic tendency of the published Soviet sources, a reprint of one Soviet news bulletin stated that atrocities against civilians occurred at Volodarsk-Volynskiy. On Au- gust 19, the Soviets publicized an account in which German officers and Ukrainian na- tionalists in “drunken bands” herded the civilians into a barn, “plucked out their eyes, broke their limbs, chopped them into pieces, and burned them alive.”23 Altogether the presence of senior Nazi officials in the field (who circulated verbal orders to kill more Jews), the leadership’s deployment of more killing forces, and the willingness of subordinates to carry out the murder created a lethal combination of central and peripheral forces. This convergence of forces made the intensification of anti-Jewish massacres in the Zhytomyr region “possible.” Individuals in the Wehr- macht (both officer corps and the rank and file); SS-Policemen attached to the Einsatz- gruppen, Waffen-SS, and Wehrmacht’s Security Divisions; as well as local militiamen (ethnic Germans and Ukrainians) demonstrated rather quickly to Nazi leaders that a genocidal “solution” was possible for the Soviet Union. Hence, when Rosenberg’s civilian “commissars” arrived at their Zhytomyr posts in November 1941, the Nazi policy of Judeocide already had manifested itself. To be sure, a relative handful of Nazi top leaders could not micromanage the hun- dreds of regional and district administrations that comprised Hitler’s new empire in the East. Thus in the implementation of the Final Solution, as in other leading occupation policies, Nazi leaders granted their subordinates substantial leeway. As Hitler put it, “I wish only broad instructions to be issued from Berlin: the settlement of day-to-day is- sues can be safely left in the hands of the respective regional commissars.”24 The Gen- eral Commissar of Zhytomyr, Kurt Klemm, who was the region’s highest-ranking civil leader, echoed Hitler’s wish when he declared upon the inauguration of his rule in Zhy- tomyr that “we commissars shall fulfill the tasks that have been conferred upon us by the Führer with a cheerful devotion . . . and without bureaucratic formalism.” 25 According to this principle of rule, an August 1941 decree empowered the commissars—who were charged with the care of the Jewish populations within their districts—to enforce all police measures against local Jews.26 Some historians, such as Gerald Reitlinger and Jonathan Steinberg, have characterized the regional administrators as corrupt party bureaucrats and older SA men who were imperious, greedy,

6 Holocaust and Genocide Studies brutal, impulsive, and power-hungry.27 These characterizations originated in Nazi wartime critiques of (as Himmler put it) Rosenberg’s “bunch of overpaid bureaucrats.”28 Indeed only weeks after the commissars arrived, memoranda about their behavior began to surface in Berlin. On November 29, 1941, the armaments inspector in Rovno, the capital of the Reich Commissariat Ukraine, wrote to Berlin that “the district commissars conduct themselves as if they are omnipotent; they have the power to allow natives to be shot at will.”29 Ideologically this was a generally uniform group, but as historian Dieter Pohl found in the General Gouvernement, professionally they were a “motley assemblage of career officials, incompetent employees of the Reich administration, and, not infrequently, freelance soldiers of fortune.”30 In Zhytomyr as elsewhere in the Occupied Eastern Territories the commissars’ participation in the Holo- caust was almost imperative. Thus when left to their own initiative, as Hitler had envisioned, how did the most peripheral German leaders influence the “local” course of the Holocaust? Little documentation has survived from the commissars’ briefings at Krösinsee, the assembly point for newly appointed commissars en route to Zhytomyr and other stations in the East.31 A few postwar testimonies of former commissariat administrators and regional SS-policemen concurred that not until they arrived in the region in November 1941 did they fully understand “Hitler’s wish to kill every Jew.”32 The actions of the commissars within days and weeks of the initiation of their rule reveal how they responded to this government mandate. If military officials had not done so already, the commissars first enlisted local collaborators to carry out successive anti- Jewish measures—identification, registration, arbitrary taxation, and concentration of the population into camps and so-called ghettos. A division of labor emerged in the office of the Gebietskommissar, which consisted of a small staff of three or four de- partmental chiefs, one of whom was the local SS and police leader, plus two or three agricultural specialists and a female typist. For example the commissar’s so-called nutrition, medical, and labor experts saw to it that Jews were left to die of starvation and disease in the camps, while the commissar’s accountant tallied Jewish gold, silver, and cash before and after the massacres.33 In preparing for the eventual liquidations of the Jewish camps and ghettos, the commissar contacted local Wehrmacht commanders, agricultural experts, gendarmerie leaders, and others to obtain trucks, to as- sign mass-grave diggers, and so forth. He arranged the final date of the massacre with one of the regions’ six Sipo-SD offices. For example, Gebietskommissar SA Standarten- führer Vollkammer decided personally to supervise the rounding up of Jews in Lityn in December 1941, then stood by the pits to witness the shootings. The commissars did not serve as executioners, but they were the chief administrators of all the anti-Jewish acts preceding the executions, and in some cases also participated directly in the final massacres. In short the commissars made it possible for the SD riflemen to carry out the final act of murder.34 In addition to the district-level actions, local German leaders were expected to

“Anticipatory Obedience” and the Holocaust in the Ukraine 7 search extensively for every last hidden Jew in the rural areas, which German gendarmes and their Ukrainian and ethnic German auxiliaries patrolled.35 When the gendarme leaders first arrived at their posts in early 1942, patrol procedures were confusing. In January 1942 Otto von Oelhafen issued a secret order about the pro- cedure of gendarme posts regarding the killing of Jews. The commissar, the local SD chief, or the regional SS and police leader assigned Order Police to the killing actions. In towns with smaller Jewish populations, the Jews were brought to the nearest camps. In March 1942 this changed, however, as central Nazi authorities and local leaders prepared for the final intense searches and massacres of Jews across the districts. From the standpoint of local leaders, they had a brief period of time to make the region “judenfrei”—about six months prior to July 1942, when Hitler and Himmler were sched- uled to move into their headquarters. Thus, in March 1942, Zhytomyr’s Commander of the Gendarmerie informed his subordinates that henceforth the gendarmes (and later the foresters) could kill Jews on the spot without higher authorization.36 Con- sequently the most peripheral personnel in the German hierarchy began routinely to shoot smaller groups of remaining Jews, such as Jewish families hiding in the forests; they simply reported the killings ex post facto to their superiors.37 This new administrative policy also marked a shift in evolving Nazi bureaucratic procedures for admin- istering the Holocaust. At first few details about the killing process were committed to paper, then (as Jeckeln had instructed von Oelhafen) the details were to be communicated verbally. But as of early 1942 even verbal orders were deemed unneces- sary for authorizing the murderous “mopping-up” actions against Jews in hiding. Thus more local leaders learned what was expected of them, and fewer needed explicit orders to do it. The commissars and regional police forces did not carry out the Nazi goal of genocide in a banal fashion: they fulfilled it barbarically, often encouraging sadistic methods that exceeded the expectations of their superiors, who wanted to maintain order, a measure of control, and secrecy. Local leaders found that unlike other policies, eradicating Jews could be implemented relatively easily. Completing such an “un- pleasant” task actually boosted their status as administrators. In June 1942, the Zhyto- myr General Commissariat’s office reported to Berlin that the region was “judenfrei,” although several thousand Jews still struggled for their lives in the camps, ghettos, and forests of the region.38 If the remoteness of the periphery may have permitted a heightened brutality, in some cases it also allowed for individual resistance to Nazi policies. On all levels of the local hierarchy one finds examples of leaders who clandestinely employed Jews in their offices and homes, or who sought to retain Jewish laborers for special projects. This de- fied numerous SS and police orders in the summer and fall of 1942 pressuring offices to turn over Jews still working for the administration.39 Furthermore, local leaders, including General Commissar Klemm, complained about the loss of skilled labor that oc-

8 Holocaust and Genocide Studies curred with the destruction of the Jews.40 In fact Klemm was so critical of SS-Police actions in general that he was forced out of his position and sent back to the Reich. Like Hitler, Commissar Klemm envisioned the Ukraine as the German “India.” Klemm fancied himself a highbrow imperialist and demanded strict adherence to the hierarchy, but did not recoil from Nazi-style atrocities against civilians, and even introduced his own brutal reprisal measures.41 Yet while Klemm insisted that he was the master of “his” region, he failed to realize that “his” region was not really “his” at all. He sub- mitted written and verbal complaints about the encroaching power of the SS-Police to Reich Minister Rosenberg, Reich Commissar Koch, and Higher SS-Police Leader Prützmann. Consequently SS-Police leaders blacklisted him as “uncooperative.” Shortly after Himmler arrived at his Hegewald headquarters outside Zhytomyr in July 1942, he summoned Klemm to the SS-Police compound and reprimanded him for challenging the authority of the SS-Police. The following month Klemm resigned his position and returned to Münster, Germany. Although he received official com- mendations from Hitler for his good work in the East, to his deep regret Klemm was denied permission to wear his general’s uniform in public.42 In the wake of Klemm’s departure, Rosenberg and Himmler in September 1942 issued a joint memorandum that clearly defined the lines of authority between their two respective agencies. Accordingly, the Higher SS and Police Leader for the Ukraine, Prützmann, and his regional SS and Police leaders (in Zhytomyr SSPF Otto Hellwig) were to cooperate in fulfilling Himmler’s wishes and work especially closely regarding anti-Jewish measures. Henceforth the district commissars could issue orders directly to Order Policemen in the rural gendarmerie and urban Schutzpolizei but not to the SS-Police commanders in the district headquarters or urban centers.43 The ex- panding power of the SS-Police in Zhytomyr was manifested further by the appointment of Klemm’s successor as General Commissar—SS-Brigadeführer Ernst Leyser, who had proven his loyalty to the SS in the 1930s. Leyser’s appointment was not unique in the administrative history of Nazi rule in the East, but part of a discernable pattern in which SS men infiltrated the leading posts in the civilian administration, particularly in the areas with Volksdeutsche settlements and in partisan warfare zones.44 In another local conflict that occurred within the SS-Police hierarchy, the SD chief for Berdychiv, Alois Hülsdünker, resisted an order to liquidate the last Jewish camp in Berdychiv in July 1942. The camp contained three hundred Jews who worked on the construction of Himmler’s Hegewald bunker, which featured thick concrete walls, stately apartments, and banquet halls. They had transformed this former Soviet airbase into a highly secured SS-Police hub with about one thousand SS men and officers. To prepare for Himmler’s arrival on July 24, 1942, the SD chief of Zhytomyr, Franz Razesberger, ordered Hauptsturmführer Hülsdünker to execute the Jewish laborers from the construction site, as well as eighty women and ten children discovered after the last massacre. Hülsdünker, who was a devout Catholic and was in the East be-

“Anticipatory Obedience” and the Holocaust in the Ukraine 9 cause his superiors had questioned his ideological commitment to Nazism, secretly employed thirty Jews in his SD outpost.45 After the commander of the Sipo-SD for the Ukraine, Dr. Max Thomas, ordered Razesberger to liquidate the Berdychiv Jewish camp, Razesberger drove to Berdychiv to speak with Hülsdünker about the imminent “Aktion.” Although Hülsdünker protested to Razesberger that the Jews were useful workers, Razesberger insisted that they posed a great security threat since they had worked at or had knowledge of the Himmler headquarters. Hülsdünker gave in, and several days later SD men shot the Jews with the help of local Ukrainian auxiliaries. Hülsdünker telephoned Razes- berger to report that the liquidation order had been carried out. Unbeknownst to Razesberger, the thirty Jews working in the SD office were spared and some managed to escape when the office closed in autumn 1943.46 The fact that Hülsdünker and the SD office in Berdychiv continued to conceal the Jews in their office demonstrates that at the local level it was possible to disobey official policy and even save Jewish lives. To be sure, this incident did not represent a general pattern at the periphery, a pattern in which lower-level German leaders in the SS and police, or from other agencies, tried to resist the Final Solution or rescue Jews. Al- together, superiors’ strong pressure to remove the Jews who slaved in the local German administrations meant that by the end of 1942 nearly all of Zhytomyr’s remaining Jews also had been killed. The interaction of central and peripheral forces in Zhytomyr’s Holocaust history is even more apparent in the construction of Hitler’s secret “Werwolf” bunker, located 129 kilometers south of Himmler’s compound (and nine kilometers north of Vinny- tsia). Between December 1941 and April 1942 few massacres occurred in the entire Reichskommissariat Ukraine, with the significant exception of the Vinnytsia district, where top Nazi security personnel focused their attention at this time. Hitler’s personal SS escort, known as the Reich Security Service (RSD) played a leading role in the plan- ning and implementation of the Vinnytsia massacres. The RSD was a “separate Reich agency not subordinated institutionally to any other Reich authority . . . but only to the Führer himself.”47 It consisted of SS-men grouped into detachments that secured the neighborhoods of meeting sites, residences, and field headquarters of the Nazi elite. The RSD’s top priority was the protection of “the Führer.” Himmler handpicked the RSD men, and Hitler personally approved each candidate. Acceptable candi- dates swore a personal allegiance directly to Hitler (in the familiar form of second per- son singular). The commander of the RSD, SS-Gruppenführer Hans Rattenhuber, received his orders directly from Hitler (or Martin Bormann). Although Himmler tried to gain control over the RSD, Hitler reserved the command over this agency “for himself personally.”48 In Vinnytsia, the RSD primarily secured Hitler’s secret compound, including re- moving all racial and political enemies of the Reich. To this end, Commander Ratten- huber made his first inspection trip to Vinnytsia in December 1941. About five thou-

10 Holocaust and Genocide Studies sand Jews remained in the city. Prior to Rattenhuber’s inspection trip, local SS-Police leaders had begun to “secure” the area by massacring Jews, the mentally ill, and other “undesirables,” but the RSD ofﬁcials accelerated the killing campaign, and also provided the extra manpower to implement it more extensively and quickly. Several agencies, including the city commissar’s ofﬁces, the Organization Todt, the Wehrmacht, and above all the SS and police, worked together to carry out the 1942 massacres.49 For example, on January 13, 1942, the SS and Police Leader for Vinnytsia, Ma- jor Pomme, hosted a meeting with the district commissar for Vinnytsia, Gemein- schaftsführer Fritz Halle; the SD-Sipo chief for Vinnytsia, Theodor Salmanzig; and Rattenhuber’s deputy, SS-Sturmbannführer Friedrich Schmidt. They convened to determine the remaining number and location of Vinnytsia’s Jews, the timing of the next killing action, and the number of Jews to be spared as laborers. SS-Police forces combed the villages north of Vinnytsia and cleared sections of the city of their Jew- ish inhabitants to provide additional housing for the Wehrmacht.50 An estimated 7,040 Jews in Chmelnik (just north of the Werwolf construction site) were murdered on January 9, and on January 10 the RSD killed 227 Jews at Strizhavka, the actual grounds of the site. SS-Sturmbannführer Schmidt described the massacre at Strizhavka:

In the village of Strishawka there were 227 Jewish residents. The large number of Jews is explained by the fact that a GPU camp was in that village. Since the Jews were a big dan- ger for the site [Führer headquarters], I made a request to the Gebietskommissar to have the Jews evacuated. Because of special circumstances, an evacuation was not possible. Therefore the Jews were done in [umgelegt] on January 10, 1942 between the hours of 8:30 a.m. and 10:30 a.m. In order to carry out the operation, our office had to provide a pit, and after the “transfer” had to level [the mass grave] in an orderly fashion. With the assistance of OT- men and POWs, the pit was dug out with explosives because of the hard frost. Four officials of the Security Police, twenty officials of the Feldgendarmerie and Schutzpolizei, and all of the officials from the office took part in the operation. The employment of officials was necessary in order to bring the Jews out of their dwellings to the distant pit and to secure the execution site from unauthorized persons.51 The next day another twelve Jews were discovered near Strizhavka, brought to the POW camp in Vinnytsia, and shot on January 12, 1942. The culmination of these killing campaigns occurred on April 16, 1942, when SS-Police forces in Vinnytsia murdered 4,800 Jews. One thousand Jewish handworkers were spared from the April massacre and assigned to the Werwolf site. To speed up the construction of the military barracks around the headquarters, the OT-construction chief brought in thousands of Soviet POWs. Friedrich Schmidt assured RSD chief Rattenhuber that the Jewish handworkers were closely guarded, but he immediately “withdrew” the POWs because they posed a security risk and would infest the barracks with lice.52 According to Soviet Extraordinary Commission reports, in addition to the Jewish laborers, several thousand POWs who worked at the compound were killed.53

“Anticipatory Obedience” and the Holocaust in the Ukraine 11 To Hitler’s and Himmler’s minions in the SS-Police, the presence of even one Jew in or near the headquarters spelled disaster. A breach of this rule jeopardized not only one’s career, but the security of the Reich, since the Nazis claimed that all Jews were the “bearers of Bolshevism” and the Reich’s primary racial enemy. The RSD protested vehemently against the use of Jewish laborers at the compound, but Reich construction chief Fritz Todt and Reich Commissar for the Ukraine Erich Koch could not find enough skilled Ukrainian laborers. Many of the Ukrainians assigned to the site stopped coming to work because of the credible rumor that all Ukrainian laborers also would be killed. As a result, while the Germans annihilated most of Vinnytsia’s Jews, they brought in thousands of Jewish workers from neighboring regions of Volhynia, Kiev, Luzk, and Rovno to construct the bunker.54 After completion of the bunker, these Jewish laborers and those who labored in nearby camps and factories were immediately targeted as a “security threat.” On the eve of Hitler’s arrival, on July 16, Razesberger wrote to his subordinates in Vinnytsia that his superior, Dr. Thomas, demanded a final cleansing action against all the Jews of Vinnytsia. Razesberger added to the order that he knew of sixteen Jews working at the Waldhof project (a military clubhouse on the Werwolf site) who should be re- placed with Ukrainians “for security reasons.”55 A few days after Hitler’s arrival in the latter half of July 1942, the military field police near Vinnytsia reported to the RSD office at Hitler’s compound that three Jews were felling trees in a lumberyard at the nearby village of Slobodka. A Ukrainian fore- man supervised them, not German military or police personnel. As the local military police official put it, “in view of the security of the compound, it is impossible [sic] that Jews are near the security area without military or police supervision.”56 The military police immediately seized and interrogated the three Jews (a mechanic, a blacksmith, and a wheelwright). The police determined that the Jews held proper papers, worked for a German mechanics firm in Vinnytsia, and were confined to a Jewish “camp” (a garage) on Fastovskastrasse. This information did not satisfy RSD chief Rattenhuber, who ordered that the SD-Sipo officials in Vinnytsia kill the three immediately. In Rat- tenhuber’s words, “it is absolutely unacceptable for security reasons that Jews working in offices or firms be located in or near the Werwolf compound, and especially that they are not being supervised as they should be. All such Jews in the future must be handed over to the Sipo-SD office in Vinnytsia.”57 Rattenhuber ordered the SSPF chief in Vinnytsia, SS-Sturmbannführer Bock, to check for additional Jewish laborers in the area. He warned that firms in Vinnytsia were not to use Jewish laborers in the area and that military officials overseeing firms em- ploying Jews would be criminally charged. Within a day of his admonishments, his sub- ordinate SS-Untersturmführer Danner noted that the Jews had been killed according to Rattenhuber’s instructions.58 When Hitler and Himmler arrived in the region in July 1942, the Nazis and their accomplices already had annihilated between 150,000 and 160,000 Jews from the Zhytomyr-Vinnytsia region. A few hundred remained in towns along the region’s south-

12 Holocaust and Genocide Studies ern border with Romania, and most of these Jews were killed in 1942 or worked to death in 1943 constructing the autobahn (Durchgangstrasse IV).59 During the Nazis’ hasty evacuation of the region, a Wehrmacht economics official discovered some Jew- ish skilled laborers performing “essential” work in Berdychiv’s saddlery. The fate of these laborers is not clear. The official stated briefly that the laborers were “abtransportiert” from the region in September 1943.60

Conclusion In 1942 Himmler spoke before a gathering of senior SS and police leaders in his secret Hegewald compound. He urged them, “Go to your men in the isolated gendarme stations, visit the poor wretches who are sitting around outside in small groups and whom no one bothers about. . . . Take care of things on the spot. . . . Do not cling to your desk, instead make decisions in the field!”61 A few days later, on September 20, Himmler made a surprise visit to a gendarme station at Tschernjachow, just north of Zhytomyr. He was shocked to find that the German gendarme post leader was not there. Instead a reservist wearing knee breeches and slippers greeted him. To Himmler’s added disgust, the kitchen was run by a Czech woman, not a Volksdeutsche, and the Nazi flag was left outside flying in the dark.62 This quotation from Himmler’s Hegewald speech, and the subsequent incident at Tschernjachow, provide us with a revealing depiction of the regional setting of Nazi rule in the Zhytomyr General Commissariat. First, the local presence of Himmler and Hitler brought the center of Nazi power directly into the peripheral events of Zhyto- myr’s occupation history. At the same time, the remoteness of even the Tschernjachow station typifies the situation in the occupied East, where a handful of German officials were left generally unsupervised to carry out the Final Solution. Himmler was certainly aware, as his Hegewald speech indicates, that regional conditions and peripheral leaders could further or hinder the implementation of Nazi goals. While based in the region, Hitler, Himmler, and their entourages formulated Reich policies that were shaped in part by what they witnessed outside their headquarters around Zhytomyr. For example, after Hitler’s deputy Martin Bormann toured the collective farms around Vinnytsia on July 22, 1942, he returned to the Führer’s bunker and argued against the “prolific breeding” of Ukrainians. Hitler replied “in view of the extraordinary fertility of the local inhabitants, we should be only too pleased to encourage the women and the girls to practice the arts of contraception.”63 The next day Bormann authorized German officials to encourage sterilization and abortions of Ukrainians.64 This example typifies the kind of Hitler-centric policymaking of the Third Reich, a phenomenon that the regional view of the Holocaust tends to overlook. The case of Zhytomyr shows that while Germans at the periphery often acted independently, the highest Nazi leaders—whether physically present or indirectly involved—shaped events at the local level to a far greater extent than most authors of

“Anticipatory Obedience” and the Holocaust in the Ukraine 13 regional studies would accept. In the Zhytomyr Commissariat, these Nazi leaders made sure that the machinery of the Holocaust functioned all the way down to the low- est levels; they did so by empowering local leaders, for instance, to hunt down and kill Jews without bureaucratic constraints. They communicated their orders and guide- lines in writing or verbally. In early August 1941, Himmler, Jeckeln, and Rasch placed increased pressure on SS-Police and Wehrmacht in the periphery to target all Jews in security raids and killing sweeps. Later, in early 1942, regional SS-Police orders provided a framework that enabled subordinates in the field to conduct manhunts against the Jews without seeking higher authorization. In the Vinnytsia and Zhytomyr districts, where top Nazi leaders were personally present, these manhunts intensified further in early 1942, as in the case of the directives and actions by RSD chief Rattenhuber and Einsatzgruppe C head and then Sipo-SD chief for the Ukraine Dr. Thomas, who en- sured that his regional SS-Police leaders completed the anti-Jewish actions around the compounds before the Führer arrived. To enforce this rigorous policy of annihilation, Hitler and Himmler strategically placed their most loyal henchmen in key positions across the occupied East, and certainly around their own secret headquarters. At the same time, Himmler pushed through the regional implementation of the genocide across Europe, issuing sweeping orders such as the July and August 1942 demands for the final liquidation of ghettos in Poland and the Ukraine.65 Above and beyond their direct orders and physical presence, the core of the Nazi leadership shaped regional events in less tangible ways. At a psychological level, local leaders relied on the instructions and intentions voiced by the highest Nazi leaders, do- ing so to legitimize their own criminal actions. Regional functionaries were also moti- vated to work “towards their superiors” and diligently carried out their duties with what Germans refer to as “anticipatory obedience.” Once Nazi leaders officially sanctioned the murder of Jews as a “solution,” their subordinates in the field planned and carried out mass murder without explicit orders, and often only because it was tacitly under- stood or implied that this was expected from the higher-ups. Even without direct trans- mission of command, the machinery of destruction drew upon widespread anti- Semitism, bureaucratic conformism, and a common zeal to work towards the Führer’s wishes. The resulting climate was one of a silent mutual agreement that bridged the spatial divide between center and periphery. While it is striking that the decentraliza- tion of the Holocaust did not result in more conflicts and infighting—there was, for example, more resistance to the resettlement of the region’s Volksdeutsche than to the Holocaust—it is important to realize that the consensus that made the Final Solution possible resided between center and periphery.

Notes 1. Dieter Pohl, Von der Judenpolitik zum Judenmord: Der Distrikt Lublin des Generalgouverne- ments 1939–1944 (Frankfurt: Lang, 1993), and Nationsozialistische Judenverfolgung in Ost- galizien 1941–1944: Organisation und Durchführung eines staatlichen Massenverbrechens

14 Holocaust and Genocide Studies (Munich: Oldenbourg, 1997); Thomas Sandkühler, “Endlösung” in Galizien: Der Judenmord in Ostpolen und die Rettungsinitiativen von Berthold Beitz, 1941–1944 (Bonn: Dietz, 1996); Bern- hard Chiari, Alltag hinter der Front: Besatzung, Kollaboration, und Widerstand in Weissruss- land, 1941–1944 (Düsseldorf: Droste, 1998); Walter Manoschek, “Serbien ist Judenfrei”: Mil- itärische Besatzungspolitik und Judenvernichtung in Serbien 1941–1942 (Munich: Oldenbourg, 1993); Bogdan Musial, Deutsche Zivilverwaltung und Judenverfolgung im Generalgouverne- ment: Ein Fallstudie zum Distrikt Lublin, 1939–1944 (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 1999); Chris- tian Gerlach, Kalkulierte Morde: Die deutsche Wirtschafts- und Vernichtungspolitik in Weiss- russland 1941–1944 (Hamburg: Hamburger Ed., 2000); Sybille Steinbacher, “Musterstadt” Auschwitz: Germanisierungspolitik und Judenmord in Ostoberschlesien (Munich: Saur, 2000); Christoph Dieckmann, “Deutsche Besatzungspolitik im Litauen 1941–1944: Eine Regional- studie zur deutschen Wirtschafts-Siedlungs und Judenpolitik im 2. Weltkrieg,” unpublished master’s thesis. The excellent regional study of Volhynia by Shmuel Spector falls outside this current trend because it focuses on the Jewish experience and not on the Nazi power structure per se. See Spector, The Holocaust of Volhynian Jews, 1941–1944 (Jerusalem: Yad Vashem, 1990). Current dissertations in progress or recently completed ones to be published include local studies of Kiev, Riga, Lviv, Lodz, the Warthegau, Bialystok, Bohemia-Moravia, and Zhytomyr.

2. Gerlach, Kalkulierte Morde, pp. 44–81; and Christian Gerlach, “German Economic Inter- ests, Occupation Policy, and the Murder of the Jews in Belorussia, 1941–1943,” in Ulrich Her- bert, ed., National Socialist Extermination Policies: Contemporary German Perspectives and Controversies (New York: Berghan, 2000), p. 222.

3. Bogdan Musial, Konterrevolutionäre Elemente sind zu erschiessen: Die Brutalisierung des deutsch-sowjetischen Krieges im Sommer 1941 (Berlin: Propyläen, 2000). On the role of Globoc- nik, see Musial’s “The Origins of ‘Operation Reinhard’: The Decision-Making Process for the Mass Murder of the Jews in the Generalgouvernement,” in David Silberklang, ed., Yad Vashem Studies XXVIII (Jerusalem, 2000), p. 115. Steinbacher also stressed economic interests plus the germanization campaign as the major motivation for lower-level perpetrators in East Upper Sile- sia; see her study, Musterstadt, pp. 326–28.

4. Thomas Sandkühler, “Anti-Jewish Policy and the Murder of the Jews in the District of Gali- cia, 1941-1942,” in Herbert, ed., National Socialist Extermination Policies, p. 122. Dieter Pohl, “The Murder of the Jews of the General Government,” in ibid., pp. 85–86.

5. Population ﬁgures found in “Der Generalbezirk Shytomyr,” 15 March 1942, RMfdb0, Zhy- tomyr State Archive (hereafter ZhSA), P1151-1-51. In February 1943 the Generalbezirk was remapped into 29 subdistricts. ZhSA, P1151-1-26.

6. The role of the different German units in the atrocities is scattered in various sources. On the Einsatzgruppen, the activities reports of Einsatzgruppe C are published (in part) in Yitzhak Arad, Shmuel Krakowski, and Shmuel Spector, The Einsatzgruppen Reports: Selections from the Dispatches of the Nazi Death Squads’ Campaign Against the Jews in the Occupied Territories of the Soviet Union, July 1941–January 1943 (New York: Holocaust Library, 1989). The German originals are at the U.S. National Archives and Records Administration (NARA), RG 242, T-175, roll 233. On the role of the 1st SS Brigade, the Sixth Army, and the Security Divisions, see the war diary of Kommandostab RFSS, Prague Military Archive, carton 1, microﬁlm held at the USHMM, RG 48.004M, reel 1; the war diary of Bfh.rückw.H.Geb.Süd, NARA, RG 242, T-501, roll 5, frames 000557–639, and war diary of SD454, NARA, RG 242, T-315, roll 2215. Material about Jeckeln’s forces and the Order Police in Berdychiv is in the German Police Decodes, Nos.

“Anticipatory Obedience” and the Holocaust in the Ukraine 15 344–386, NARA, RG 457, Box 1386. Additional quantitative detail on the massacres has been compiled by Aleksandr Kruglov in his Entsiklopediia khlokosta: Evreiskasia entsiklopediia Ukrainy (Kiev, 2000).

7. Richard Breitman, Ofﬁcial Secrets: What the Nazis Planned, What the British and Americans Knew (New York: Hill and Wang, 1998), p. 64; Ruth Bettina Birn, Die höheren SS- und Polizeiführer: Himmlers Vertreter im Reich und in den besetzten Gebieten (Düsseldorf: Droste, c. 1986), p. 3. Also see “Friedrich Jeckeln: Spezialist für die ‘Endlösung’ im Osten,” in Die SS Elite unter dem Totenkopf, Ron Smelser and Enrico Syring, eds. (Paderborn: Schöningh, 2000).

8. For Hitler’s visit to Berdychiv, see the war diary of his personal security forces, NARA, RG 242, T-78, roll 351, frames 6311391 and 6311205. Himmler’s schedule and activities are detailed in Der Dienstkalender Heinrich Himmlers 1941/1942, Peter Witte, Michael Wildt, Martine Voigt, et al., eds. (Hamburg, 1999), p. 224, and in Richard Breitman, The Architect of Genocide: Himmler and the Final Solution (New York: Knopf, 1991), p. 213. For Heydrich’s involvement, see his orders especially from July 1941 in Peter Klein, ed., Die Einsatzgruppen in der besetzten Sowjetunion 1941/42: Die Tätigkeits- und Lageberichte des Chefs der Sicherheitspolizei und des SD (Berlin: Hentrich, 1997).

9. See Wendy Lower, “Nazi Colonial Dreams: German Policies and Ukrainian Society in Zhy- tomyr, Ukraine, 1941–1944,” (Ph.D. Dissertation, American University, 1999), pp. 146–60; Die- ter Pohl, “Schauplatz Ukraine: Der Massenmord an den Juden im Militärverwaltungsgebiet und im Reichskommissariat 1941–1943,” in Nobert Frei, Sybille Steinbacher, and Bernd C. Wagner, eds., Ausbeutung, Vernichtung, Öffentlichkeit: Neue Studien zur nationalsozialistischen Lager- politik (Munich: Saur, 2000), pp. 135–37.

10. This “spectacle” and mass-shooting incident have been recounted in Ernst Klee, Willi Dressen, and Volker Riess, eds., “The Good Old Days”: The Holocaust as Seen by its Perpetra- tors and Bystanders (New York: Free Press, 1991).

11. Ilya Ehrenburg and Vasily Grossman, The Black Book (New York: Holocaust Library, 1980), p. 14. German Police Decodes, 27 August 1941, ZIP/MSGP.28/12 September 1941. GPDs from 13–31 August, section.5, “Executions.” NARA, RG 457, Box 1386. Also see the statement of a member of the 2.Feld-Fernsprech Komapnie/643 about the ghetto massacres, reprinted in Hans Safrian’s “Komplizen des Genozids: Zum Anteil der Heeresgruppe Süd an der Verfolgung und Ermordung der Juden in der Ukraine 1941,” in Die Wehrmacht im Rassenkrieg: Der Ver- nichtungskrieg Hinter der Front, Walter Manoschek, ed. (Wien: Picus, 1996), p. 106. Eyewit- ness testimony of shootings of Jews in Berdychiv in late July, see testimony of Hans Wilhelm Isenmann, member of SS Wiking Division, USHMM, FSB (KGB), RG 06.025*02 Kiev. Also see the “Abschlussbericht” in the West German war crimes case against Friedrich Becker, chief of the Schutzpolizei in Berdychiv, Zentrale Stelle der Landesjustizverwaltungen, Ludwigsburg (ZStL) 204 AR-Z 129/67, 1000.

12. Von Oelhafen statement of 7 May 1947, NARA, RG 238, roll 50, m1019. Under civil administration Kamianets-Podolsk fell within the Generalbezirk Volhynia.

13. On the destruction of Zhytomyr’s population of approximately 5,000 Jews, see the Einsatz- gruppe C reports of 19, 22, 30 July 1941, 19 September 1941, 7 October 1941, in Arad, Krakowski, and Spector. Also eyewitness accounts in the West German case against SK4a members Kuno Callsen et al., ZStL, 207 AR-Z 419/62. The Vinnytsia massacres are enumerated in Aleksandr Kruglov’s Unichtozhenie evreiskogo naseleniia v Vinnitskoi oblasti v 1941–1944

16 Holocaust and Genocide Studies (Mogilev Podol’skii, 1997); and described in “The Extermination of Two Ukrainian Jewish Com- munities: Testimony of a German Army Ofﬁcer, Erwin Bingel, August 1945,” reprinted in Yad Vashem Studies on the European Jewish Catastrophe and Resistance, volume 3 (Jerusalem, 1959), pp. 303–20.

14. Reprint of Mueller’s order “Beschaffung von Anschauungsmaterial,” 1 August 1941, in Klein, ed., Die Einsatzgruppen, p. 342. Klaus-Michael Mallman, “Die Türöffner der ‘Endlö- sung’: Zur Genesis des Genozids,” in Die Gestapo im Zweiten Weltkrieg: “Heimatfront” und be- setztes Europa (Darmstadt: Primus, 2000), p. 453.

15. Häfner statement, 6 July 1965, Callsen trial, ZStL, 207 AR-Z 419/62, 17. The author has not found any evidence of Heydrich’s visit to Zhytomyr in August 1941. Häfner’s claim shows traces of the “Ohlendorf” defense in which lower-level killers tried to hide their crimes under a “Führerbefehl.” On the evolution of such trial defenses in West Germany and the radical role of lower-level types in the expansion of victims to women and children, see Mallman’s “Die Türöffner,” pp. 437–63.

16. Afﬁdavit of Erwin Schulz, 26 May 1947, Nuremberg Military Tribunal, NO-3644, volume 4, pp. 135–36. Additional postwar Schulz statements are analyzed by Christopher Browning in The Path to Genocide: Essays on Launching the Final Solution (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992), p. 108. HSSPF Jeckeln had personally supervised the massacre of 800 “Jews and Jewesses” 16 to 60 years old around Zwiahel 27–30 July 1941, see Unsere Ehre Heisst Treue: Kriegstagebuch des Kommandostabes Reichsführer SS Tätigkeitsberichte der 1. und 2. SS-Inf. Brigade, der 1. SS-Kav-Brigade und von Sonderkommandos der SS (Vienna: Europa Verlag, 1965), pp. 95–96; Ralf Ogorreck argues that there was a “caesura” in August 1941, basing his case on the actions, orders, and postwar testimonies of the Einsatzgruppen, see his Die Einsatz- gruppen und die “Genesis der Endlösung” (Berlin: Metropol, 1996), pp. 178–79. Recent regional studies have used the evident expansion of the massacres from groups of male Jews to entire communities to argue that the Nazi decision to exterminate Soviet Jewry evolved in the summer of 1941, thereby stressing decision-making phases that were driven “from the ﬁeld” as opposed to implementation phases directed from above. See Ulrich Herbert, ed., National Socialist Extermination Policies (New York: Berghan, 2000). For a contrasting view of the evolution of the policy that stresses the leadership’s clear intentions as of early 1941, see Breitman’s The Architect of Genocide.

17. Browning, The Path to Genocide, pp. 105–9.

18. The widespread collaboration of the Wehrmacht was not limited to the Zhytomyr region, although the Sixth Army under von Reichenau distinguished itself as particularly ignominious. See Hannes Heer and Klaus Naumann, War of Extermination: The German Military in World War II, 1941–1944 (and particularly the chapter by Bernd Boll and Hans Safrian, “On the Way to Stalingrad: The Sixth Army in 1941–1942”) (New York: Berghan, 2000), pp. 237–71.

19. Einsatzgruppe C Activity Report, 20 August 1941, NARA, RG 242, T-175, roll 233, frame 2721995.

20. Safrian, “Komplizen des Genozids,” pp. 106–7.

21. Von Stülpnagel order, AOK 17, 30 July 1941 NARA, RG 242, T-501, R 674, frame 8308402; RG 238, T-1119, roll 23 frame 61, NOKW 1593.

22. Unsere Ehre Heisst Treue, p. 104.

“Anticipatory Obedience” and the Holocaust in the Ukraine 17 23. See the Goroschki (Volodars’k-Volyns’kyi) report of Infantry Regiment 375, 9 August 1941, Anlage KTB SD 454, NARA, RG 242, T-315/R 2215/000935–6; a brief account is also in the War Diary of SD454, NARA, RG 242, KTB SD 454, T-315, roll 2216, frames 000420–422. Christian Streit, Keine Kamaraden: Die Wehrmacht und die sowjetischen Kreigsgefangenen, 1941–1945 (Bonn: Dietz, 1997), p. 350, n. 193. The Soviet broadcast of August 1941 is reprinted in Zhyto- myrshchyna v period tymchasovoi okypatsii nimets’ko-fashysts’kymy zaharbnykamy, 1941– 1944 (Zhytomyr, 1948), p. 74.

24. Norman Cameron, R. H. Stevens, and H. R. Trevor-Roper, eds., Hitler’s Table Talk, 1941– 1944: His Private Conversations (New York: Enigma, 2000), p. 590. In the subdistricts the Gebietskommissar was supported by the native (Ukrainian and ethnic German) subdistrict leaders and village elders as well as two or more gendarme stations manned by a German Order Police ofﬁcer (lieutenant) and his Ukrainian Schutzmannschaften. For the general administrative structure of the RKU see the RmfdbO’s “Braune Mappe,” ZhSA, P1151–1-31a; also see Hitler’s 17 July 1941 order on the administration of the East naming Rosenberg as the Reich Minister and allocating police and security matters to Himmler. NARA, RG 242, T-454, roll 100, frame 000676.

25. Klemm’s introductory memorandum to his new district commissars, 5 December 1941, ZhSA P1151–1-33.

26. Verordnung über die polizeiliche Strafgewalt der Gebietskommissare, 23 August 1941 in the “Braune Mappe,” pp. 56–57.

27. Gerald Reitlinger, The House Built on Sand: The Conﬂicts of German Policy in Russia, 1939–1945 (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1960); Jonathan Steinberg, “The Third Reich Reﬂected: German Civil Administration in the Occupied Soviet Union, 1941–1944,” English Historical Review 110 (June 1995), pp. 620–51.

28. Himmler to Berger, criticizing Rosenberg’s commissars, August 1942, NARA, RG 242 T- 175, roll 66, frame 2582327.

29. NARA, RG 238, IMT PS-2174.

30. Dieter Pohl, quoted in his “The Murder of Jews in the General Government,” in Herbert, ed., National Socialist Extermination Policies, p. 90.

31. The commissars met RKU Erich Koch in Königsberg and also underwent some political ed- ucation at “Die Falkenburg am Krössinsee” including some time at the Institut für politische Erdkunde. See Commissar Klemm’s ﬁles, ZhSA P1151–1-24, P1151–1-26, and P1151–1-49.

32. Some members of EK5 and EK6 staffed the Sipo-SD ofﬁces in Zhytomyr and Vinnytsia and related their criminal activity to their new colleagues. See statement of SSPF Otto Hellwig in- terrogation at Nuremberg, 21 August 1947, NARA, RG 238, m1019, roll 26. Dr. Franz Razes- berger, former Sipo-SD Chief for Zhytomyr who arrived in January 1942, postwar criminal investigation statements ZStL, ARZ 204 8/80 I, 65–66; III 191–247.

33. Demonstrated in the files of Gebietskommissar Erwin Göllner, Berdychiv, who issued orders to Ukrainian staff about the seizure of Jewish monies (November 1941), forced registrations (January 1942), and individual searches for Jewish “fugitives” (March 1942). When the gendarme units found Jews they brought them first to the district commissar, Göllner, who contacted the SD. See Göllner’s files in Zhytomyr Oblast Records, USHMM, accession 1996.a0269, reel 3, 1188–2-42. Gebietskommissar Dr. Blümel in Tschdnow, Jewish Payment lists, November

18 Holocaust and Genocide Studies 17, 1941–February 28, 1942, in Zhytomyr Oblast Records, USHMM, accession 1996.a0269, reel 8, P1537–1-282. Reich Commissar Koch advised his commissars to ghettoize Jewish populations of 200 or more persons. The Commissars determined the degree of restricted living conditions (street assignments, curfews) against the Jews, see Koch’s September 1941 order on ghettoization in ZhSA, P1151–1-31A. Jews were given rations if food was left over, and the level was not to exceed the caloric intake allotted to children (up to 14 years of age). Jewish rations in the RKU Ernährung und Landwirtschaft report of 20 February 1942, AOR Kiev, USHMM, RG 31.002M, reel 2, 2206–1-65. The Koziatyn camp was co-managed by the district commissar, Steudel, and the SD chief at Berdychiv, Fritz Knop. See the few remaining camp records, in ZhSA P1182–1- 6, and correspondence over its closing, 5 May 1943, ZhSA P1536–1-2. On the involvement of the commissars’ finance office around the massacres, see ZhSA P1182–1-6, and Dr. Muessig (Klemm’s accountant) orders on the collection of Jewish valuables, July 1942, 27 October 1942, ZhSA P1151–1-139. The inventory commission under Herr Plisko of the General Commissar’s office kept files of local requests for Jewish furniture, which the commission fulfilled, ZhSA P1152–1-16. The housing office fulfilled similar requests for former Jewish dwellings, see ZhSA P1151–1-8. These files are on microfilm at the USHMM, accession 1996A.0269, reel 9.

34. “Abschlussbericht,” West German war crimes investigation of the Litin Commissariat, LStL, ARZ 204a 135/6 II, 561–63. On Samhorodok’s Gebietskommissar Steudel’s liquidation orders to Ukrainian mayor in Germanivka, his inspection of the death pits, and the arrival of SD riﬂemen from Vinnytsia, see “Abschlussbericht,” West German war crimes investigation of the Kasatin Commissariat, ZStL, ARZ 204 137/67 II, 20–22. Similar patterns of the commissar’s involvement in the neighboring commissariat of Luzk (Volhynia). See Spector, The Holocaust of Volhynian Jews.

35. Himmler advised Rosenberg of the commissariat’s role in these manhunts in his 10 January 1942 memorandum on the Jewish Question in the East, NARA, RG 242, T-454, roll 154, MR334.

36. Order of 12 March 1942; KdG Shitomir von Bredow to Hauptmannschaft Vinnitsa, to all SSPF, Sonderbefehl; KdO Befehl Nr. 6, 12 January 1942 appeared through KdG, 14 February 1942, “Bei Exekutionen auf Grund vollkommen klar liegender Fälle braucht keine Genehmi- gung eingeholt werden, jedoch ist in jedem Falle unter Angabe des Tatbestandes kurze Mel- dung zu erstatten”; ZhSA P1151–1-9.

37. See the 4 July 1942 order of KdO von Oelhafen on the Einsatz of Forstschutzkommandos (FSK) states that by order of the HSSPF of 22 June 1942 that FSKs be used to secure forests, and that they work in closed units and carry out tasks similar to those of the police, ZhSA P1151– 1-9. On 6 June 1942, Commander of the Gendarmerie, Vinnytsia ordered the shooting of men who have been found in the woods and who “wander without business and look suspicious.” ZhSA P1151–1-9. Gendarme reports of shootings from Meister d. Gen u.Postenführer Mayer- hoher in Pohrebyschche, ZhSA, P1182–1-6, in Ruzhyn, ZhSA P1182–1-36 and in Koziatyn, ZhSA, P1151–1-38. See Martin Dean’s “The German Gendarmerie, the Ukrainian Schutz- mannschaft and the ‘Second Wave’ of Jewish Killings in Occupied Ukraine: German Policing at the Local Level in the Zhitomir Region, 1941–1944,” German History 14 (1996), pp. 176–81.

38. General Commissar Lagebericht, 3 June 1942. Bundesarchiv Koblenz, r6/310, 6. I am grateful to Dieter Pohl for this document.

39. BdO von Bredow to field offices, order states that it is strictly forbidden to employ Jewish dentists, 11 Februaryr 1942, P1151–1-11; Kasatin Gendarme order barred all Jewish workers from the gendarmerie offices, June 1943, ZhSA P1182–1-36. General Commissar Leyser and

“Anticipatory Obedience” and the Holocaust in the Ukraine 19 the case of his Jewish tailor, statement of Hermann Zieren Personalsacharbeiter of Leyser in the case against Franz Razesberger, ZStL I 204 AR-Z 8/80, 53, 41, and 62.

40. On the difﬁculties of securing thousands of skilled laborers for the construction of the Hitler compound, see General Kommissar Shitomir, Lagebericht, 3 June 1942, Bundesarchiv Koblenz, R6/310; Economic reports from Klemm’s deputy Nottbohm and the construction setbacks due to lack of skilled labor, ZhSA P1151–31. On the building needs for Klemm’s personal quarters, ZhSA P1151–1-32.

41. Klemm’s collective measures for dealing with local acts of resistance, 14 December 1941, ZhSA P1151–1-21, and 18 December 1941, ZhSA P1151–1-4.

42. See Kurt Klemm’s statement of 22 August 1962, ZStL, 204 AR-Z 129/67 III, p. 830. State- ment of Franz Razesberger, 19 January 1957, ZStL, 204 AR-Z 8/80, III, p. 207, 830. Regarding his uniform, Klemm’s request to Rosenberg was forwarded to Hitler, 12 July 1943, NARA, RG 242, T-454, roll 91, frame 000873.

43. Rosenberg-Himmler memo of September 1942, NARA, RG 242, T-175, roll 17, frame 2521105.

44. SS-Oberführer Otto Jungkunz was later named the Gebietskommissar over the Hegewald settlement. Outside Zhytomyr, SA Obergruppenführer Heinrich Schoene was the General Commissar of Luzk, SS and Police Leader Curt von Gottberg was the General Commissar of Belorussia, and SS-Gruppenführer Otto Wächter was the district governor in Cracow and then Lviv.

45. The Razesberger order to Hülsdünker has not turned up in the documentation. However, Razesberger issued a similar order to the Sipo-SD ofﬁce in Vinnytsia at this time, requesting the total elimination of the Jews there and with a reference to Hitler’s compound. Thus Hüls- dünker’s postwar claim that the order to kill Berdychiv’s Jews came from Razesberger seems very likely. See Justiz und NS Verbrechen: Sammlung Deutscher Strafurteile wegen Nationalsozialis- tischer Tötungsverbrechen 1945–1966. Band XVI case against Knop, et al. (Berdychiv SD of- ﬁce), pp. 345–49.

46. Razesberger claims that he received the order from his superior, Dr. Thomas, in Kiev during May 1942 and that he delayed pushing it through until Himmler arrived. Razesberger’s defense is not very trustworthy given his documented involvement and persistent postwar attempts to conceal his criminal role in face of prosecutors. See case against Razesberger, ZStL III 204 AR-Z 8/80, 326–27; also see Justiz und NS Verbrechen. Band XVI case against Knop, et al. (Berdychiv SD ofﬁce), pp. 345–49. Richard Breitman, The Architect of Genocide, p. 238. The subsequent fate of the thirty Jews is not known.

47. Peter Hoffman, Hitler’s Personal Security (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1979), p. 39.

48. Ibid., pp. 36–39.

49. “Abschlussbericht” in the Schmidt-Danner case, Sta Muenchen, File no. 111 Js 24/69. I am grateful to Konrad Kwiet for the investigative material on the RSD in Vinnytsia.

50. Schmidt report to Rattenhuber, “Judenfrage in Winniza und Umgebung,” AOR Kiev USHMM RG 31.002M, reel 11, 3676–4-116. Kruglov ﬁgures, Unichtozhenie, p. 9.

51. Schmidt activity report of 12 January 1942 to Rattenhuber Kiev, AOR, USHMM, RG 31.002m, reel 11, 3676–4-116.

20 Holocaust and Genocide Studies 52. Schmidt activity report (15 April–15 May 1942) to Rattenhuber, dated 16 May 1942. See Kiev AOR, USHMM, RG 31.002m, reel 11, 3676–4-116.

53. An estimated 40,000 Jews were killed in and around Vinnytsia between July 1941 and Sep- tember 1942, according to an economics ofﬁcial from Rosenberg’s ofﬁce, see his trip report of 10 September 1942, Kiev AOR, USHMM, RG 31.002M, reel 3. Extraordinary Commission report on Vinnytsia, testimony about April 1942, Gregory Stepanovic 29 April 1944, Vinnytsia State Archives, fond 7021–54–1341, p.121 in USHMM, RG 22.002M, reel 4. Also see survivor witness statement of Solomon Goljak, 11 September 1969, West German investigation of the Sipo-SD in Vinnytsia, ZStL, 204a AR-Z 122/68, 196–197; also in this case see the 15 October 1965 statement of SS-Policeman Johann Bahmann, of the Sipo-SD Vinnytsia. Faina Vinokurova, Deputy Director of the Vinnytsia Archives, stressed the role of the Hitler headquarters in the local massacre at the Oxford Conference Remembering for the Future, England, July 2000.

54. Schmidt telegram to Rattenhuber, 28 January 1942, regarding anti-Jewish measures and Fritz Todt, Kiev AOR, USHMM, RG 31.002M reel 11, 3676–4-116.

55. Razesberger order of 11 July 1942, Kiev AOR, USHMM, 3676–4-116. I am grateful to Richard Breitman for this document. According to Shmuel Spector this order was not carried out entirely; some Jewish laborers were spared. See his entry “Vinnitsa” in the Israel Gutman- edited Encyclopedia of the Holocaust, pp. 1575–76.

56. Feldpolizeisekretär Schumacher to RSD Security Group Ost. July 31, 1942, Kiev AOR, USHMM, RG 31.002M, reel 11, 3676–4-116.

57. RSD chief Rattenhuber to SS Police Station Leader Bock, July 31, 1942, Kiev AOR, USHMM, RG 31.002M, reel 11, 3676–4-116.

58. Danner conﬁrmed that Jews were killed on 1 August 1942, Kiev AOR USHMM, RG 31.002M, reel 11, 3676–4-116.

59. Thousands more were brought in from Transnistria and worked to death on the autobahn. See Hermann Kaienburg, “Jüdische Arbeitslager an der Strasse der SS,” Zeitschrift für Sozialgeschichte des 20 JH (1996), pp. 13–39.

60. See September 1943 Vinnytsia military armaments and economics report, NARA, RG 242, T-77, roll 1159, frames 0007–8. Although “abtransportiert” might have been a euphemistic reference to the murder of these Jews, the Germans may have included these Jewish laborers in the death marches to the Reich.

61. Hegewald Speech, NARA, Record Group (RG) 242, T-175, roll 90, frame 2612809.

62. SS and Police Leader Otto Hellwig to the Kommandeur der Gendarmerie Shitomir, 24 Sep- tember 1942, Zhytomyr State Archive (ZhSA) P1151–1-9, Owrutsch, SSPF z.Zt. Einsatz-Stab Nord, 24 September 1942.

63. See Hitler’s monologue from July 22, 1942, reprinted partially in Hitler’s Table Talk, Cameron, Stevens, and Trevor-Roper, eds., pp. 586–90.

64. The policy regarding abortions was not clearly deﬁned and resulted in some confusion. For the original Bormann order to Alfred Rosenberg, 23 July 1942, NARA, RG 238, NO-1878. Later in June 1944, Reich Commissar Koch reported that punishments were not meted out against lo- cals who carried out abortions, only in the case of a Ukrainian doctor who performed an abortion on a Reich German. Otto Brautigam, in the RmfdbO responded to Koch’s report reiterat-

“Anticipatory Obedience” and the Holocaust in the Ukraine 21 ing the Führer’s “will” (interpreted by Bormann in the July order) that only an abortion carried out on a German woman was a punishable offense. See Brautigam memo, 20 June 1944, NARA, RG 238, NO-2597, NO-2598. Another example of Nazi policy formation that stemmed from Hitler’s declaratory monologues is found in Reich Commissar for the Ukraine Erich Koch’s memo about reduced rations for Ukrainians. Koch ordered a ration reduction based on Hitler’s remarks that wheat grew in abundance around his Vinnytsia bunker while Reich Germans were going hungry. Koch order in “Vermerk über die Tagung in Rowno,” 26–28 August 1942, NARA, RG 242 T-454, roll 92, frame 000895. 65. Himmler’s decisive role in the ﬁnal liquidation of ghettos in Poland and the Ukraine is documented. See his July 1942 order for the General Gouvernement, in Helmut Heiber, Briefe an und von Heinrich Himmler; also in Pohl’s Nationalsozialistische Judenverfolgung in Ostgalizien 1941–1944, pp. 204–213. On the Ukraine, see Martin Dean, “The Ghetto Liquidations of 1942– 1943,” in Collaboration in the Holocaust: Crimes of the Local Police in Belorussia and Ukraine, 1941–1944 (New York: St. Martin’s Press, in association with the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, 2000).

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