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The War and the Final Solution on the Russian Front Joshua Rubenstein Press The terrible images associated with Adolf HitlerMaterial and the Nazis are engraved in our collective memory. Once that regime came to power in Germany, each of its crimes created the momentum for a more destructive act of cruelty. From the burning of books in 1933 to the Nuremberg laws of 1935, from Kristallnacht in 1938 to the cre- ation of the Warsaw ghetto in 1940, the murder of as many as six million Jews appears to have been an inevitable consequence of Nazi racial hatred. In the initial months of the German occupation of Soviet territory—betweenUniversity June and December of 1941— the Germans murdered nearly a million Jews.1 It was here, before a single Jew was killed in the gas chambersCopyrighted of Treblinka, that the Nazis first manifested the breadth of their murderous intentions. Adolf Hitler, HeinrichIndiana Himmler, and Reinhard Heydrich—the principal archi- tects of the Final Solution—may not have grasped the full logic of their hatred until military victories gave them opportunities to realize their vision of a Europe rid of Jews. Between 1939 and 1941—when the Wehrmacht invaded Poland, and then targeted Western Europe and the Balkans—the Nazi dictator was still planning to “cleanse” Europe by expelling the Jews to Madagascar or some other far-off location. After the invasion of Poland, there were plans to create a kind of reservation for the Jews in the Lublin region of southeastern Poland. But this idea was soon put aside. More ominously, the Germans began to single out Jews for humiliating persecution, 1. Jürgen Matthäus estimates that between 500,000 and 800,000 were murdered by the end of 1941— “on average 2,700 to 4,200 per day.” See Christopher R. Browning, with contributions by Jürgen Matthäus, The Origins of the Final Solution: The Evolution of Nazi Jewish Policy, September 1939– March 1942 (Lincoln, Neb., and Jerusalem, 2004), p. 244. | 3 expulsion from their homes, and random murder. Still, the Germans began to push Jews over the demarcation line into Eastern Poland, which was occupied by Soviet troops, or to compel them to live in sealed-off urban districts—ghettos—where their labor could be exploited while their numbers were severely reduced through starva- tion and disease. One of the first ghettos was established in the spring of 1940 in Lodz, the second largest city in Poland, and over the four years of its existence came to house more than 200,000 Jews; there was not even a sewer system to connect it to the outside world. Hermetically closed off, the Jews were forced to work, subjected to random shooting, starvation, and disease. In Warsaw, too, after several months of construc- tion, a ghetto was officially established in fall 1940, enclosed behind high walls. At one point, the population of the ghetto reached 400,000. As in Lodz, thousands of Jews succumbed to starvation and disease. But as awful as life was in the ghettos of Eastern Europe, the Nazis had yet to embark on their plan of systematic mass murder. By spring 1940, the Germans found themselves in control of 4,000,000 Jews, far more than the mere 550,000 who had been living in Germany on the eve of Hitler’s coming to power. At this point the Nazi leadership was apparentlyPress still considering shipping them to the island of Madagascar, a MaterialFrench colony off the eastern coast of Africa, a kind of “territorial Final Solution.” 2 With the defeat of France in June 1940, the Germans assumed they would gain control of its colonial empire. And with the (presumably) impending defeat of Great Britain, Hitler expected to have its mer- chant marine at his disposal, which would make it possible to transport so many people to such a remote location. Hitler confided his plan to MussoliniUniversity in June 1940, and a month later the Germans even halted work on the Warsaw ghetto because, in the words of one German offi- cial, “according to theCopyrighted plan of the Führer, the Jews of Europe were to be sent to Madagascar at the end of the war and thus ghetto building was for all practical pur- poses illusory.” 3 Britain’sIndiana unexpected and effective resistance, however, rendered shipping Jews to the Indian Ocean impractical.4 It was not until Hitler initiated the planning of Operation Barbarossa, the inva- sion of the Soviet Union, that the Nazis finally abandoned the idea of making Europe judenfrei (free of Jews) through expulsion. On the eve of invading the Soviet Union, where Bolshevik ideology and a Jewish population numbering over five million people (after Germany and the Soviet Union’s division of Europe into “spheres of 2. Ibid., p. 83, where Browning cites a phrase attributed to Reinhard Heydrich. 3. Christopher R. Browning, “The Madagascar Plan,” The Holocaust Encyclopedia (New Haven, 2001), pp. 408–409. 4. See Philip Friedman, “The Lublin Reservation and the Madagascar Plan: Two Aspects of Nazi Jewish Policy During the Second World War,” Roads to Extinction: Essays on the Holocaust (New York, 1980), pp. 34–58. 4 | Joshua Rubenstein influence”) awaited them, Hitler made clear to the military leadership that this con- flict would be “very different from the war in the West.” 5 Writing in Mein Kampf in 1924, Hitler had declared that “we must regard Russian Bolshevism as Jewry’s attempt to achieve world rule in the twentieth century.” 6 For the Nazis, “Eastern Jewry was the reservoir of Bolshevism.” 7 These Jews “endangered the security of the German Reich,” according to SS General Otto Ohlendorf, who at his postwar trial in Nuremberg admitted to supervising the murder of ninety thousand of them. “The carriers of this blood became especially suitable representatives of this Bolshevism. That is not on account of their faith, or their religion, but because of their human makeup and character.” 8 Wehrmacht commanders soon understood that Jews would be systematically killed. The Germans deployed four paramilitary agencies to carry out the slaugh- ter: a private army under Heinrich Himmler’s personal command known as the Kommandostab Reichsführer-SS brigades; the Order Police; any number of army units; and most important, special mobile killing units—the Einsatzgruppen.9 Many of the commanding officers in the Einsatzgruppen were highly educated, including lawyers and other intellectuals. Otto Ohlendorf, the leader of Einsatzgruppe D, had studied at three universities—he never finished hisPress doctoral degree in law— and for a time in the 1930s held a responsibleMaterial position in the Institute for World Economy and Maritime Transport in Kiel.10 Ernst Biberstein, one of the command- ers of Einsatzgruppe C, was a World War I veteran and Protestant minister; he was a theologian by training and worked as a church official under the Nazis. Paul Blobel, also of Einsatzgruppe C, had been trained as an architect. Other officers included the doctor Erwin Weinmann and the opera singer Waldemar Klingelhofer. Their orders were chilling in their simplicity: to followUniversity the Wehrmacht into Soviet territory, occupy towns and cities along the way, separate out Jews, Gypsies, communist officials, and anyone else regarded asCopyrighted an enemy of the Germans, and then to murder them. What took place in the initial months after June 22, 1941, staggers the imagina- tion. Soviet defenses collapsed,Indiana allowing the Wehrmacht to advance 350 miles in the 5. Speech by Hitler on March 30, 1941, as cited by Browning, The Origins of the Final Solution, p. 218. 6. Cited in Andreas Hillgruber, “War in the East and the Extermination of the Jews,” Yad Vashem Studies 18 (1987), p. 106. 7. Trials of War Criminals Before the Nuernberg Military Tribunals Under Control Council Law No. 10, IV (October 1946–April 1949), U.S. Government Printing Office, Washington, D.C., p. 244, from the affidavit by Dr. Walter Blume, one of the Einsatzgruppen leaders; hereafterEinsatzgruppen Trial Account. 8. Ibid., pp. 274–275. 9. See Yehoshua Büchler, “Kommandostab Reichsführer-SS: Himmler’s Personal Murder Brigades in 1941,” Holocaust and Genocide Studies 1, no. 1 (1986), pp. 11–25. 10. Hilary Camille Earl, Accidental Justice: The Trial of Otto Ohlendorf and the Einsatzgruppen Leaders in Nuremberg Germany, 1945–1958, unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, University of Toronto, 2002, pp. 101–108, for a comprehensive study of Ohlendorf’s education and career before the war. The War and the Final Solution on the Russian Front | 5 first ten days. Vilnius (Vilna) was taken on June 24; Minsk on June 28; Riga on July 1; Kiev on September 19. The 900-day siege of Leningrad began on September 8. By December German troops had reached the suburbs of Moscow. Soviet losses were enormous. Around Kiev alone, five Soviet armies were destroyed, leading to the cap- ture of more than half a million troops. The vast majority of Soviet Jews were living in the westernmost regions of the country, and most of them were quickly trapped. They had no idea of what awaited them. Between August 1939 and June 1941, while Germany and the Soviet Union were in effect allies, the Soviet press had remained silent about Nazi attacks on Jews in Poland.11 German officers were amused at how uninformed some Jews appeared to be. An intelligence official reported from Belorussia on July 12, 1941, that the Jews are remarkably ill-informed about our attitude toward them. They do not know how Jews are treated in Germany, or for that matter in Warsaw, which after all is not so far away. Otherwise, their questions as to whether we in Germany make any distinctions between Jews and other citizens would be superfluous.