Inferno - Max Hastings [321]
For more than two years after war came, the priority of securing victory was held to require postponement of an absolute elimination of European Jewry. Between August 1939 and the summer of 1942, when the death camp programme achieved full capacity, the Nazis contented themselves with killing large numbers of people in many countries on an arbitrary and opportunistic basis. During the first months after German troops entered Poland, some 10,000 Poles were murdered—a mixture of Jews and non-Jews deemed inimical to German interests. Designated SS Einsatzgruppen—death squads—followed the armoured spearheads. Their commanders were granted generous discretion about selecting victims, which some exploited to eliminate prostitutes, gypsies and the mentally ill. Around 60,000 Polish Jewish soldiers were segregated from their fellow POWs and earmarked for later disposal; all of Poland’s 1.7 million Jews were designated for resettlement in ghettos. Early in 1940, the Nazis embarked on the enforced removal of 600,000 Jews from areas of the country now incorporated in the Greater Reich; the deportees were transferred to the “General Government” rump, which was administered separately. Large numbers, displaced without provision for their shelter or feeding, perished within months.
At this stage, Nazi policy was still incoherent. There was much discussion about deportation: in May 1940 Himmler presented a memorandum to Hitler about the possibility of shipping Europe’s Jews to Africa or Madagascar. The Reichsführer SS mentioned the radical alternative of the “Bolshevist method of the physical extermination of a people,” but rejected this as “un-Germanic and impossible.” It was agreed that as many Jews as possible should perish in the course of the normal business of administering occupation, but there was no commitment to their systematic slaughter.
During the next two years, and especially after the invasion of Russia, Germans killed Jews at whim, on a scale largely determined by availability of manpower and resources. A German ordnance sergeant from a bakery company recalled: “I saw these people being rounded up and then just had to look away, as they were clubbed to death right before our eyes … A great many German soldiers, as well as Lithuanians, stood there watching. They did not express either assent or disapproval—they just stood, totally indifferent.” A handful of German officers displayed the courage to protest: Col. Walter Bruns, an engineer who chanced upon a massacre of Jews while out riding near the Rumbuli forest in Latvia on 30 November 1941, submitted a formal report to Army Group North. He also made a personal visit to army headquarters at Angerburg to deliver a further copy. No formal response was forthcoming, save that the chief of staff urged that in future such killing “must be done with greater caution.”
The Einsatzgruppen were relatively few and small; they achieved some impressive massacres, notably in Ukraine, but their victims were still numbered only in tens of thousands. Energetic efforts by the SS Mounted Brigade in the Pripet Marshes during early August 1941 accounted for 6,504 Jewish victims. The unit’s final report for the month cited 15,878 killings, though the real total was probably over 25,000. The logistical difficulties of wholesale murder proved immense, even when labour-saving expedients were adopted, such as herding victims into mass graves before shooting them. At such a sluggish pace, the process of “solving Europe’s Jewish problem” would require decades, and in the late summer of 1941 SS commanders began to demand a much more radical and comprehensive approach. In September, Einsatzgruppe C proposed working the Jews to death: “If we entirely dispense with the Jewish labour force, then the economic rebuilding of Ukrainian industry … is virtually impossible. There is only one possibility … the