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By Root 1014 0

… to make the city free of Jews without exception, as they had also done in other cities. The cleansing had to take place on political grounds, and nowhere had economic factors so far played a role … During the action the city itself offered a horrible picture … The Jews, among them also craftsmen, were brutally mistreated in a frightfully barbarous way. One can no longer speak of a Jewish action, it appeared much more like a revolution.’ None of this, of course, deflected Himmler or his officers: on 29–30 November more than 10,000 inhabitants of the Riga ghetto were shot outside the city, and another 20,000 a week later. By December, most Jews in the Baltic states were dead; thousands of collaborators recruited by the Germans as ‘local voluntary troops’ participated enthusiastically in the killings. For the rest of the war, Latvians, Lithuanians, Estonians and Ukrainians played an important part in implementing Himmler’s Jewish extermination programme – over 300,000 were eventually enlisted as auxiliaries to the SS, men who might credibly otherwise have served in Hitler’s armies.

The Wehrmacht was wholly complicit in Himmler’s operations, even though the SS did most of the killing. On 10 August 1941, Sixth Army commander Walter von Reichenau cited in an order the ‘necessary execution of criminal, Bolshevist and mainly Jewish elements’ which the SS must carry out. Manstein described Jews on 20 November as ‘the middleman between the enemy at our backs and the remains of the Red Army’. Karl-Heinrich von Stülpnagel of Seventeenth Army cautioned his units on 30 July not to shoot civilians indiscriminately, but instead to concentrate upon ‘Jewish and communist inhabitants’. The Wehrmacht routinely provided logistical support for SS massacres, together with troops to cordon killing fields. On many documented occasions, army units participated in shootings, despite orders from higher commanders against such sullying of soldierly honour. Soviet partisan activity provided a pretext for ‘security operations’, such as that for which the orders issued by the Wehrmacht’s 707th Division’s commander in Belarus are preserved. ‘Jews,’ he wrote on 16 October 1941, ‘are the only support the partisans have for surviving now and over the winter. Their annihilation must therefore be carried out uncompromisingly.’ Without the Wehrmacht’s active assistance, mass murder on the scale that took place in 1941–42 would have been impossible. By the end of 1941, at least half a million east European Jews were dead.

The elimination of European Jewry assumed an ever-higher priority on the Nazis’ agenda: Hitler convinced himself that the August 1941 Atlantic Charter, together with America’s looming entry into the war, were driven by Jewish influence on the United States government. This lent a new urgency to his determination to kill their co-religionists in Europe. During the months and years that followed, Germany’s leader came to view this as an objective as important as military victory, and even as a precondition for achieving it. Attempts to discern rationality in Nazi strategy, especially from 1941 onwards, founder in the face of such a mindset.

Peter Longerich, one of the more authoritative historians of the Holocaust, has convincingly argued that the Nazi leadership’s commitment to executing the Final Solution through designated death camps was not made until the end of 1941: ‘The leadership at the centre and the executive organizations on the periphery radicalized one another through a reciprocal process.’ Construction of the first purpose-built extermination camp at Bełec near Lublin began only on 1 November 1941. Longerich cites evidence that, until very late that year, key SS officers were still talking of mass deportations rather than extermination, and were chiefly preoccupied with how best to organise and mobilise Jews for slave labour. That autumn, anti-Jewish propaganda within the Reich was sharply increased, to prepare public opinion for the deportation of German Jews to the east. If the distinction sounds arcane between shipping the