The Record of German Violence
In the European theatre, World War II began with a double attack on Poland, with Germany invading from the West on i September, and the Soviet Union following suit, from the East, days later.
Stalin’s and Hitler’s regimes stood out among other European states as two ruthless dictatorships that openly advocated massive political violence for the sake of enacting their social or racial utopias. Both began occupation with campaigns to crush national elites on enemy soil, killing thousands of captured officers, aristocrats, intellectuals, political activists and priests. Both carried out deportations on a vast scale. Yet these similarities obscure important differences. Germany’s occupation policy was more lethal as it served a more ambitious purpose to incorporate into the Aryan Reich portions of Poland which were predominantly inhabited by ethnic Poles and Jews.[489] Entrusted with a scheme of comprehensive racial reordering, SS chief Heinrich Himmler prepared the resettlement of ethnic Germans from other parts of Europe into western Poland. To clear the ground, Himmler dispatched his Einsatzgruppen killing squads into Poland where they executed scores of Polish nationalists and forced Jews into ghettos, randomly killing many in the process.[490] The ‘higher' law of Germany's racial survival and enhancement necessitated the enormous violence in Poland in the eyes of many. Condescension towards the neighbour in the East as a less civilised type also played a role. As the occupation progressed, Joseph Goebbels recorded Hitler's ‘devastating' verdict on the Poles: ‘More like animals than human beings.'[491]Intensely deadly, the Polish campaign emerged in retrospect as but a prelude to Operation Barbarossa, the code name for Germany's war against the Soviet Union, which radically extended and reforged Nazi violence in World War II.
During the invasion of Poland, at least some German army leaders saw themselves bound by the conventions of international law and objected to the SS terror on these grounds.[492] Operation Barbarossa was planned in such a way as to ensure that every single German soldier became a conscious agent of the Nazi war of annihilation. This campaign would be unlike any other, Hitler believed, because it would be fought against Nazism's mortal enemy, Judeo-Bolshevism. Military orders issued in spring 1941 commanded an army of several million conscripted men to adapt their conscience to the laws of Nazi racial ideology. To prevail against the ‘criminal', ‘cruel' and ‘barbaric' Soviet enemy, German soldiers were directed to set aside principles of humanity and international law.[493] Only a year before, Himmler had drawn a principled line between the Nazis as ‘civilized Europeans' and the ‘Bolsheviks'. As he presented Hitler with a plan to improve the racial stock in Germany's east by separating racially valuable Polish children from their parents, he described the project as ‘cruel and tragic' for the concerned individuals, but ‘mild and... better, when compared to the Bolshevik method of physical extermination of a people, a method that we reject in principle as non-Germanic and impossible'.[494] [495] Now, about to come face to face with millions of ‘Bolsheviks' who were supposedly more beastly than human, German soldiers were to resort to the very cruelty and ruthlessness that was ascribed to the enemy. As Hitler directed his generals in a 30 March 1941 address: ‘The troops must fight back with the methods with which they are attacked.'11Beyond the specific instruction to isolate and execute Soviet commissars, Nazi notions about the nature of the Jewish Bolshevik enemy were vague, however. German commandos proceeded to apply them broadly and leth- ally. As they entered Soviet homes the first question soldiers would pose to frightened residents was: ‘Jude, Kommunist?' Individuals that fitted either category would be taken away and executed.
Einsatzgruppen internal reports revealed some conceptual flux as they alternated between ‘communists', ‘Jewish communists' or ‘Jews and other communist elements' in their classification of the same people they had shot. By August 1941, the widespread sentiment that Jews and Bolsheviks were interchangeable, or that at the very least Jews firmly backed the Bolshevik system, so much so that ‘every Jew, in principle' had to be regarded as a partisan (as Heinrich Himmler instructed his commandos in Bialystok) prompted the SS to annihilate entire Jewish settlements, complete with women, children and the elderly.[496] The mass killing of Soviet Jews thus unfolded as part of Nazism's ideological struggle against the carriers of ‘Judeo-Bolshevism', an enemy whom the Nazis portrayed as terroristic and savage.These killings refashioned Germany's way of war. The murderous campaign against the Soviet agents of ‘Judeo-Bolshevism', who could be killed with greatest ease as they were imagined as most radically removed from European norms of civilisation, became the template into which the treatment ofJews from Germany and other parts of Europe was fitted. The image of the Judeo-Bolshevik enemy, and the forms of mass violence that it generated, travelled west in autumn 1941, inaugurating what is often identified as the Holocaust. The fact that the decision to annihilate all the Jews of Europe came after, and was an effect of, Operation Barbarossa underscores how centrally the war against the Soviet Union defined the Nazi regime of violence.
With almost the same exterminatory zeal that they showed toward Jews, Germans proceeded to killed Soviet POWs. Their systematic destruction was an integral component of Nazi policy towards the Soviet Union. The lethal motive extended beyond starving to death millions of ‘superfluous eaters'. Soviet POWs (even absent the commissars who had already been shot) were widely identified as ‘Bolsheviks', with all the consequences that this appellation entailed.
German military guards were under explicit orders to train their weapons on captured Red Army men with ‘particular severity’.[497] When the SS began to introduce gas vans in Sachsenhausen and gas chambers in Auschwitz, it performed the first deadly experiments on Soviet POWs. By the end of January 1942, almost 60 per cent of the 3.35 million Soviet prisoners of war who had been captured by then had died. This number dwarfed even the number of Jews who had been killed by the Germans up to that point.1[498]To turn German soldiers into agents of the Nazi war of annihilation required ongoing indoctrination beyond the Barbarossa decrees of spring 1941. This work was performed by army field orders, including the directive that Field Marshal von Reichenau issued to the Ukraine-based soldiers of the Sixth Army on 10 October 1941. Reichenau reminded the German soldiers stationed ‘in the East’ of their political mission ‘to free the German people once and for all from the Asiatic-Jewish danger’. His order specifically called for the annihilation of resisting enemy male soldiers, female soldiers (‘degenerate women’) and suspected partisans as perpetrators of ‘subhuman insidious cruelty’.[499]
Three months after Reichenau issued this order, Pravda presented it to its readers as an order ‘so monstrous and cynical that all Soviet people and the entire civilised world must know about it’.[500] In May 1942, Pravda published excerpts from Goring’s ‘Green Folder’, a policy directive that ordered the total economic exploitation of the conquered Soviet Union for the exclusive needs of Nazi Germany.[501] Already in a November 1941 address to Moscow officials, Stalin had quoted from German military orders found on the battlefield to describe the nature of ‘Hitlerism’ and ‘fascism’ (he used these terms interchangeably). Stalin also quoted from Herrmann Rauschning’s recently published ‘Conversations with Hitler’: ‘Hitler says: I liberate man from the degrading chimera called conscience.
The conscience, as well as education, cripple man. I have the advantage of not being constrained by any theoretical or moral concerns whatsoever.’[502] Soviet leaders publicised available German documents, the Barbarossa decrees in particular, to flag the Soviet war effort as a moral campaign against a depraved invader. Ilya Ehrenburg practised this method from the very outbreak of the war. He was also one of the earliest Soviet observers to call attention to the Nazi annihilation of Jews in western parts of the Soviet Union. On 25 August 1941, Pravda carried his accusation: ‘They kill children, forcing their mothers to watch. They force terrified old men to act the buffoon. They rape girls. They stab, torture, and burn. Because of them, Belostok, Minsk, Berdichev, and Vinnitsa have turned into terrible names.' ‘Mankind as a whole’, Ehrenburg concluded, ‘is now waging war against Germany - not for territorial gains, but for the right to breathe.’19During the first months of the invasion, Soviet knowledge of German atrocities against civilians was episodic. In November 1941, the media reported the shooting murder of an estimated 52,000 Jews from Kiev, men, women and children, at Babi Yar.20 This grisly picture filled up with more detail after the Red Army drove the Germans back from near Moscow and in southern Russia. In January 1942, authorities dug up the remains of thousands of executed civilians in Kerch and Rostov, for the most part Jews. Images showing landscapes of bodies strewn along antitank ditches, or close-ups of the dead were publicised in Soviet newspapers and magazines.21 A commission of Moscow historians began to interview survivors and witnesses of German occupation, starting in the liberated areas near Moscow.22 Planning also began for the creation of an Extraordinary State Commission (ChGK) that would catalogue the crimes committed by the Germans, in anticipation of postwar trials and reparations.
That commission took up its work in November 1942.23 Yet it was only with the sustainedsome ofhis ‘Conversations with Hitler’, wartime readers outside of Germany accepted the book as fact.
19 Il’ia Erenburg, ‘24 Avgusta 1941 goda’, Pravda, 25 August 1941.
20 Mordechai Altshuler, ‘The Holocaust in the Soviet Mass Media during the War and in the First Postwar Years Re-examined’, Yad Vashem Studies 39.2 (2011), 121-68. Einsatzgruppen reports record that 33,771 Jews were killed at Babi Yar on 29-30 September 1941.
21 David Shneer, Through Soviet Jewish Eyes: Photography, War, and the Holocaust (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2011), pp. 100-8.
22 Over the course of the war this Commission on the History of the Great Patriotic War would produce hundreds of interviews with Soviet survivors and witnesses of the German occupation regime. See Jochen Hellbeck, ‘The Antifascist Pact. Forging a First Experience of Nazi Occupation in the Wartime Soviet Union’, Slavonic and East European Review 96.1 (2018), 117-43.
23 Nathalie Moine, ‘La commission d’enquete sovietique sur les crimes de guerre nazis: entre reconquete du territoire, ecriture du recit de la guerre et usages justiciers’, Le Mouvement Social 222, Enqueter sur la guerre (2008), 81-109, at 83-4. According to the commission’s own calculations, around 32,000 public representatives, most of them Communist Party members, took part in investigating Nazi war crimes, and more than 7 million Soviet citizens directly collected and prepared documents for the commission. NataTia S. Lebedeva, Podgotovka Niurnbergskogo protsessa (Moscow: Nauka, 1975), pp. 26-31. liberation campaign that followed on the heels of Soviet victory at Stalingrad that these various bodies started to amass a comprehensive record of German atrocities on Soviet soil.
Since early 1942 the Political Administration of the Red Army had been publishing brochures detailing atrocities committed by the ‘German fascist invaders'. In spring 1943, a new phrase entered these brochures: the ‘mass annihilation of the Soviet civilian population'. As the authors stressed, the Germans conducted their ‘physical extermination' in a ‘planned manner and on a mass scale'.[503] The discovery of crimes unprecedented in size and nature jolted Soviet observers. At the Krasnodar trial of eleven Soviet citizens who had collaborated in Nazi atrocities against Soviet civilians and POWs, held in July 1943, new evidence about the killing methods used by the Germans came to the fore, in particular their use of gas vans adapted to asphyxiate passengers by exhaust fumes. Filmmaker Mark Troianovskii, who directed an official camera team at the trial, wrote to his mother from Krasnodar:
You of course know about the trial from the newspapers. But I must tell you that I was all choked up when I heard Dr. Kazel'skii's story about how the Germans killed his sick patients, the testimony of the teacher Inozemtseva who talked about the killing of the children, and others. Witness Ivan Ivanovich Kotov we couldn't record with audio. His throat is paralysed after he was poisoned with carbon oxide. It's as if he has arisen from the dead. He's the only one who has miraculously survived the gas van.[504]
War crime trials, at Krasnodar and elsewhere, were but a few of numerous sites at which Soviet citizens were instructed and educated about the nature of the ‘German-fascist atrocities'. In liberated towns and villages, Red Army political officers gathered rank and file soldiers around the exposed corpses of victims or near former Gestapo prisons. Local survivors who had personally witnessed Nazi atrocities spoke; agitators lectured about the horrors committed by the Germans. These ‘meetings of vengeance' culminated with ritualistic vows by the assembled soldiers to fight the enemy with redoubled force. The sight of German massacres of civilians held enormous mobilising power for the present soldiers; it stirred into action even recruits who had initially disliked Stalin or were unwilling to fight. In the face of such atrocities, the war acquired an even higher moral purpose: ‘as every day of occupation meant more women raped, towns destroyed, and fellow citizens humiliated and murdered', soldiers felt a mandate to move westward quickly, in order to 26
save lives.
Red Army soldiers who observed the effects of Nazi occupation corresponded with Ehrenburg, feeding him with evidence that they knew he needed for his editorials. Twelve days after the liberation of Liady, formerly a Jewish town on the border of Russia and Belorussia, soldier V. Izvekov wrote to Ehrenburg sharing stark impressions: ‘How many corpses of children with faces distorted by pain? Among the murdered there is even a six- month-old child with a pacifier in its mouth, apparently buried alive, as there are no traces of murder.' Izvekov's letter ended like a ritualised ‘meeting of vengeance', with a description of his unit marching ‘forward to the West, past the martyrs' grave', his fellow soldiers' eyes filled with ‘tears of rage, such rage that no one has previously experienced'.[505] [506] Izvekov's letter was a single sheet in a huge dossier of personal documentation about the nature and effects of German rule that was produced in the immediate aftermath of Soviet liberation. Everywhere in the liberated areas, a wartime correspondent noted, ‘people were seized with the spontaneous need to write, to testify. Stacks upon stacks of testimonies piled up in the political sections of regiments and divisions. They were written on scraps of Gestapo forms, on the backs of idiotic Goebbels posters, and more frequently in school notebooks. There is no statute of limitations for what was written in them.'[507] Visiting Kharkov in February 1943, days after the Red Army had retaken the city, British correspondent Alexander Werth was struck by the urge of residents to tell their stories. Invariably, these testimonies would centre on hangings: ‘public hangings. It was that which seemed to have left the deepest impression of all.'[508] This is confirmed in hundreds of testimonies that the Moscow historical commission collected from witnesses of German occupation throughout the liberated areas of Russia, Ukraine and Belorussia.
Violence figures at the centre of these testimonies, not only and not primarily because the historians asked the witnesses specifically to talk about enemy atrocities, but because the German style of violence had etched itself in witnesses' minds as the most harrowing thing they had ever experienced. Etta Maizles, a Jewish survivor of the Minsk ghetto, used drastic words when she talked about the series of mass killings in the ghetto that also claimed the lives of two of her own children: ‘He [the German] is a beast, worse than a tiger, worse than anything in the world. You cannot imagine what kind of beasts they are, bloodthirsty to no end, unless you come into their way.' One of the many German ‘actions' in the ghetto disturbed Maizles in particular - the systematic killing in March 1942 of300 children who lived in an orphanage in the Minsk ghetto after their parents had died:
What happened to the children was unbearably sad. They were innocent victims of these monsters. By then I'd seen so many horrors, but when I saw them massacre those children, I just couldn't take it. I was beside myself. If you'd seen that pile of children, those bodies with broken legs. They'd pick them up by the legs and smash them on the corners and walls of the buildings. You can understand how such horror could make you lose your mind. I couldn't live, couldn't work. For days on end I didn't say a word. Everything inside me went numb.[509]
Witnesses referred to the inhuman and debasing style of German violence as the defining characteristic of the occupation regime. A Belorussian partisan who was interviewed as early as December 1942 (he and others had been flown to Moscow to update communist officials about the state of partisan warfare in the swamps and forests of Belorussia) remarked on the gallows that the Germans had set up ‘on squares, in parks and in front of theatres. Lately gallows were put up in every village district. They string them up with hooks in their jaws, like fish.'[510] The defiling of culturally sacred places (theatres and city parks) and the inhuman methods of killing are crucial markers in this testimony. Partisans noted that the Germans deliberately placed the gallows in public places, ‘for everyone to see'.[511] Nazi violence, along with the German denigration of Soviet culture and the fact that the Germans only barked orders at Soviet civilians but did not address them as citizens, challenged survivors' self-understanding as Soviet people.
At least some Soviet citizens who had previously called out the communist regime for its repressive policies came to espouse a novel understanding of Soviet power in the light of Nazi violence. Lev Nikolaev, a professor of medicine in Kharkov, had kept a secret diary since 1936, in which he compared Stalinism and Nazi Germany as two similarly blood-drenched dictatorships. Nikolaev kept his diary through the war. His first-hand experience of the Germans' ‘cunning cruelty' clarified his moral horizons, making him long, like many other Soviet citizens, for ‘liberation' by ‘our' Red Army soldiers.[512]
After liberation, one of the first things Soviet officials did in liberated cities and towns was to assemble the entire local population for political meetings. Their purpose was to reinforce the antithesis of fascist inhumanity and Soviet humanity, a central trope in the ongoing Soviet ideological battle against fascism. Similar to the Meetings of Vengeance practised in the Red Army, these gatherings were typically held in front of gallows - sometimes with corpses of Soviet partisans still hanging from them. A Melitopol official who was interviewed by the Moscow historians described the overwhelming effect of a meeting that he convened six days after the city's liberation. He was the first to speak, followed by priests and a few Red Army officers. The last speakers were four partisans - ‘two comrades [i.e. party members] and two girls, all of them from Melitopol'. They joined the partisans after the Germans had shot their families and parents. ‘What we witnessed was not a regular meeting - it was a single roaring and howling. The stories were so horrible, we all stood there, unable to move.'[513]
Such meetings were held everywhere on liberated soil, including in the Baltic republics and the western regions of Ukraine and Belorussia, which the Soviet Union had annexed in the wake of the Hitler-Stalin Pact. In these areas, where memories of Soviet occupation and violence in the early phases of the Second World War were fresh, stories of individual survival of Nazi terror were particularly important to buttress Soviet claims of ‘liberation'. Significantly, the Germans never contemplated a comparable interview project during the period of their rule over Soviet lands, as its civic potential contravened their colonial ambitions. Soviet civilians, Reichenau's order declared, were to be motivated by fear of German reprisals, not to be addressed as citizens.
Soviet photographers and film crews played a crucial role in weaving evidence of atrocities into the moral tale of Soviet humanism battling fascist inhumanity, and disseminating this story to broad audiences. Camera teams recording the westward advance of the Red Army were under specific instructions to ‘Record the atrocities and trail of destruction caused by the Germans, record the most horrific and painful scenes, without any regard to aesthetic concerns. Cameramen shooting this material should be directed by no other concern than the obligation to fixate the Germans' plunder and infamy on our soil, for which they will have pay one day.'[514] A well-known documentary made from this footage was Aleksandr Dovzhenko's Battle for Our Soviet Ukraine, which the director had initially titled Ukraine in Flames. The film's principal subject is Ukraine's and Ukrainians' unspeakable suffering at the hands of the Germans. The camera pans over an opened mass grave in Kharkov containing the remains of 14,000 victims of Nazi terror, to the voice of a speaker: ‘You who are alive, look at us! Don't turn away from our terrible trenches. We cannot be forgotten or ignored. There are many of us. We are a great multitude in Ukraine. Do not forget us! Take revenge on Germany for our suffering!' The film also showed footage of public meetings in the wake of liberation, and it featured surviving witnesses, including Lev Nikolaev who showed effects of famine and torture on his body to the camera, standing in front of Kharkhov's ransacked medical institute, his former workplace that, he explained, had been torched by the Germans.