Warsaw 1944: Hitler, Himmler and the Crushing of a City. Alexandra Richie

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СКАЧАТЬ the Pripyat marshes for ‘partisans’. Himmler’s oral instructions had left no doubt: ‘All Jews must be shot. Drive the females into the swamps.’ This Aktion lasted from 2 to 12 August, with 15,878 people killed and 830 prisoners captured. One of the most vicious and efficient officers in the Aktion was Himmler’s protégé and Bach’s friend Hermann Fegelein, who worked closely with von dem Bach throughout. His cavalry brigade were ruthless when it came to rounding up and shooting civilians: they reported killing 699 Red Army soldiers, 1,100 partisans and 14,178 Jews in one sweep alone. The women and children who did not drown in the shallow waters of the marshes were shot. At Nuremberg Bach claimed that he had ‘personally saved … 10,000 Jewish lives by telling them to hide in the Pripyat marshes’. The reality had been quite different.

      Von dem Bach saw Himmler in Byelorussia on 15 August 1941. Film footage of this visit gives a hint of the power that Himmler must have felt in those heady, victorious days. He and von dem Bach were joined by Karl Wolff, chief of his personal staff, Otto Bradfisch, leader of Einsatzkommando 8 of Einsatzgruppe B, and Hermann Fegelein. Himmler, tanned and relaxed, processed through the streets of Minsk in an open Mercedes like a famous film star, every inch the conquering hero. On his arrival at the tall, white, modernist SS headquarters, with its enormous flag curling over the roof, he waved to the adoring employees who had lined up, cheering and smiling, on the balconies to greet their boss.

      Von dem Bach took Himmler to a Soviet PoW camp on the outskirts of Minsk. Some of the emaciated prisoners tried to catch a glimpse of Himmler, while others lay on the ground, unable or unwilling to move. The Reichsführer SS started a conversation through the wire with a tall, handsome young man, but then, as if suddenly realizing that he was talking to a ‘sub-human’, turned quickly away, rubbing his nose with the back of his gloved hand.

      The brutal treatment of Soviet PoWs is one of the least-known, and most terrible, crimes of the Second World War. Once captured, the prisoners were marched or forced to run to gathering points, or were transported in open freight wagons, 150 at a time; the wounded who could not keep up were shot immediately. ‘What do you do with 90,000 prisoners?’ asked one Wehrmacht soldier who filmed such a group. ‘The majority were badly wounded, in a bad state, half-dead with thirst, resigned to their fate. Worst was the lack of water … Many many soldiers, what became of them? I don’t know and it is better not to know.’¹² His amateur footage shows column after column of men, most of whom were destined to die of starvation or disease, trudging in columns stretching for kilometres in the hot, dusty landscape. ‘Many of those without caps wore wisps of straw or rags tied to their close-cropped heads as protection against the burning sun, and some were barefooted and half-dressed … a long column of misery,’ remembered one Wehrmacht soldier.¹³

      Upon arrival the prisoners were herded into barbed-wire enclosures like the one Himmler visited with von dem Bach, perhaps with a few wooden huts or old barns as shelter from the extreme heat and cold. Sometimes, as in Stalag 352 near Minsk, they were crushed together so tightly that they simply could not move. There were no latrines, so they had to scoop up their own excrement and put it into barrels. Over 100,000 died there, their bodies dumped into pits. The Dulags, Stalags and Oflags of Byelorussia were centres of slow, agonizing death for hundreds of thousands of human beings who were essentially left in the open with no medical care, no protection and hardly any food. At Dulag 131 at Bobruisk, thousands of prisoners burned to death when one of the outbuildings caught fire; those who tried to escape were mown down. The guards tortured and humiliated the men, sometimes beating and shooting them for fun. At times they would throw a dead dog into the compound: ‘Yelling like mad the Russians would fall on the animal and tear it to pieces with their bare hands. The intestines they’d stuff in their pockets – a sort of iron ration.’¹⁴ Often fed only the entrails of horses, the starving men ate grass down to the earth, and chewed on wood. Some were reduced to ‘lyudoedstvo’ – cannibalism. One German soldier wrote that the Russians ‘whined and grovelled before us. They were human beings in whom there was no longer a trace of anything human.’ But dehumanizing the victims was, of course, the point.

      After the PoW camp Himmler was taken to see an Aktion for himself. Einsatzgruppe B commander Artur Nebe had organized a small execution of ninety-eight men and two women for Himmler’s personal viewing. An open grave had been prepared, and the victims were forced to lie in it in rows. When one group had been shot, the next had to climb down on top of those already killed. Von dem Bach recalled Himmler asking to talk to one of the prisoners, ‘a young Jewish boy of twenty who had a Nordic appearance, with blue eyes and blond hair. Himmler called that boy aside from the pit where he was to be shot and asked him if he were Jewish.’ When it became clear that the boy’s entire family was Jewish, Himmler said, ‘In that case I cannot help you.’ The boy was executed along with the others. ‘You could see,’ von dem Bach added, ‘how Himmler tried to save the boy’s life … he was undoubtedly soft and cowardly.’¹⁵

      Karl Wolff would claim that Himmler had been spattered by the brains of one of the victims of this Aktion, and had nearly fainted, but von dem Bach later denied this story. Even so, Himmler, having spent so much time in the distant luxury of Berlin, was clearly shaken by this encounter with actual killing. Von dem Bach pointed out to him that he had witnessed a ‘mere hundred people’ die, and that he had to try to imagine the pressures on those who had to kill thousands. When Himmler had collected himself he gave a speech to the executioners, praising their courage and appealing to their sense of patriotism in carrying out the hard tasks required of them. Although he had been touched by what he had seen, the action had been ‘necessary’ for Germany’s future. The men should turn to the natural world for their model. Bedbugs and rats were living creatures, after all, but human beings had the right to defend themselves against such ‘vermin’. The metaphor was obvious.

      Von dem Bach was right to fear for the mental health of his murderers: he himself would have to undergo treatment for the psychological trauma he suffered after witnessing so much killing. In Byelorussia the extermination of the Jews was done in broad daylight, and often in sight of the local population. In one of many reports, a District Commissar in Slutsk described how a police battalion had ‘fetched and carted off all the Jews … With indescribable brutality on the part of the German policemen as well as Lithuanian partisans (under the SS) the Jewish people, including Byelorussians, too, were brought together from their apartments. There was shooting all over town, and corpses of dead Jews piled up in several streets.’ People had been ‘buried alive’, and the police had looted the town. ‘The Byelorussian people, who had gained confidence in us, have been stupefied.’ The SD complained that the Byelorussians were ‘passive and stupid’, so that it was ‘virtually impossible’ to persuade them ‘to stage pogroms against the Jews’. In Minsk in 1942, Einsatzgruppe B decided to give Hitler a present by killing all the Jews in the city by his birthday, 20 April. The plan was stymied by the civilian occupation authorities under Wilhelm Kube, who wanted to save some Jews to be used as forced labour. On 1 March the Germans ordered the Judenrat – one of the councils which Jews were forced to set up in the occupied territories – to provide a quota of 5,000 Jews by the following day; when they did not, the Germans stabbed the children in the Jewish orphanage to death.¹⁶

      Gerhard Bast, a member of Sonderkommando B, took part in the murder of Jews in and around Minsk. One eyewitness testified after the war how Bast’s group had brought a group of Jews and gypsies in lorries and unloaded them near a freshly dug trench. ‘It was mainly women and children who were shot, some of them with babies.’ He could still picture the women ‘nursing their children on the way to the pit to calm them down. At the pit the children were torn from their mothers and were generally shot first, in front of their mothers. Very small children were held up by one arm by the SD men, shot in the head, and then carelessly tossed into the pit like a log.’¹⁷ Bast was one of the many from Sonderkommando B who under Artur Nebe had worked closely with von dem Bach, and who would flee Byelorussia in the face of the advancing Red Army in 1944. He ended up in Warsaw in August, just in time for the uprising.

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