Inferno - Max Hastings [323]
In the winter of 1941, administrative confusion persisted about whether Jews capable of forced labour service should be kept alive. Local commanders adopted diverse policies: in Kaunas 1,608 men, women and children “ill or suspected of being infectious” were murdered on 26 September, followed by a further 1,845 in a “punishment operation” on 4 October, and 9,200 more after a new screening on 29 October. On 30 October, the head of the German civil administration in Slutsk in western Russia made a formal protest to the general commissioner in Minsk about the massacre of the city’s Jews. “One simply could not do without the Jewish craftsmen,” he said, “because they were indispensable for the maintenance of the economy … All vital enterprises would be paralysed with a single blow if all Jews were liquidated.”
His complaints, he said, had been brushed aside by the commander of the police battalion carrying out the killings, who expressed astonishment “and explained that he had received instructions … 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 otherwise have credibly 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, the 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 middle-man between the enemy at our backs and the remains of the Red Army.” Karl-Heinrich von Stülpnagel of the 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 eastern 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