Saturday, April 25, 2009

Extermination Planning and Forced Labour Needs

In the Occupied Eastern Territories, the Wehrmacht, SS and civil administration had complex relationships of co-operation and tension. They co-operated in killing actions, but also had conflicts concerning how much Jewish labour would be retained at each stage of the genocide. Below are two contemporary quotes from senior German figures in the Belorussia region that provide insights into those processes.

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The first extract comes from the KdS Minsk, Strauch, who has already been discussed in these blogs. On 8th-10th April, 1943, Strauch attended a gebietskommissars council meeting in Minsk in which he made this statement:
When the civil administration arrived it already found economic enterprises operated by the Wehrmacht aided by Jews. At a time when the Bielorussians wanted to murder the Jews, the Wehrmacht cultivated them. In that way Jews reached key positions and it is difficult today to remove them completely, for then the enterprises are liable to be destroyed, something we cannot allow ourselves. I am of the opinion that we can confidently say that of the 150,000, 130,000 have already disappeared. 22,000 are still alive in the area of the Gebietskommissariat [source: YV TR-10/808, cited by Cholawsky, p.64].
Strauch suggested that half (11,000) could be removed without causing undue difficulties:
I therefore want to request of you that, at least, the Jew disappear from any place where he is superfluous. We cannot agree to Jewish women polishing shoes...We will cut the number down to half without causing economic difficulties.
Strauch was thus frustrated by the fact that Jews could not be removed completely yet he still felt confident enough to request a 50% reduction in a population that had already been reduced from 150,000 to 22,000.

This willingness to overcome forced labour constraints was also shared by some civil leaders, who were under pressure to reduce the pressures on the food supply. There was a delicate balance between viewing Jews as essential workers and seeing them as useless eaters; and the administrators who were wedded most fanatically to Nazi antisemitic dogma were inclined to finally arrive at the latter perspective. This is most clearly apparent in the report written by the Gebeitskommissar for Slonim, Gerhard Erren, on 25th January 1942, which stated that:
[…] Upon my arrival here there were about 25,000 Jews in the Slonim area, 16,000 in the actual town itself, making up over two-thirds of the total population of the town. It was not possible to set up a ghetto as neither barbed wire nor guard manpower was available. I thus immediately began preparations for a large-scale action. First of all property was expropriated and all the German official buildings, including the Wehrmacht quarters, were equipped with the furniture and equipment that had been made available…the Jews were then registered accurately according to number, age and profession and all craftsmen and workers with qualifications were singled out and given passes and separate accommodation to distinguish them from the other Jews. The action carried out by the SD on 13 November rid me of unnecessary mouths to feed. The some 7,000 Jews now present in the town of Slonim have all been allocated jobs. They are working willingly because of the constant fear of death. Early next year they will be rigorously checked and sorted for a further reduction […]

[…] The best of the skilled workers among the Jews will be made to pass their skills on to intelligent apprentices in my craft colleges, so that Jews will finally be dispensable in the skilled craft and trade sector and can be eliminated.
Erren not only saw the need for Jewish labour as temporary, he took pro-active steps to ensure that non-Jews would be trained in the crafts currently occupied by Jews "so that Jews will finally be dispensable in the skilled craft and trade sector and can be eliminated."

In the case of Slonim, therefore, the timing of genocidal acts was very carefully planned, and could be implemented without resistance because the civil administration and SS were in accord. In the case of Minsk, by contrast, the SS (Strauch) had to negotiate with the civil administration (Kube), and the Wehrmacht, which was the main employer of Jewry in the region, and thus the pace of killing was slower.

Monday, April 06, 2009

Brest Sources - Part 3: Domachevo

Domachevo, a spa town 25 miles south of Brest, had 3,316 Jewish inhabitants in February 1942, according to a German document cited by Dean in this collection (p.259). The fate of most of these Jews was documented in a Gendarmerie report dated October 6, 1942:

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On September 19-20, 1942, an anti-Jewish Aktion was carried out in Domachevo and Tomashovka by a special commando of the SD together with the cavalry squadron of the Gendarmerie and the local police stationed in Domachevo, and in total, some 2,900 Jews were shot. The action took place without any disturbance (cited in Dean, p.259).
This massacre is especially notable in three respects. Firstly, as Browning (p.138) summarizes, the Stadtkommissar for Brest, Franz Burat, wrote a response to the massacre which indicated that he and his SS counterpart, Rohde, were still making futile attempts to retain Jews for essential work in Brest:
Burat noted that the "sudden liquidation" of the Jews of Domachevo and Tomashovka had caused "profound distress" among the Jews of Brest who strove desperately "to prove their indispensability" through "a model organization of Jewish workshops."
Burat continued:
I must unconditionally plead for the retention of the most needed artisans and manpower.
These pleadings were, of course, in vain, as Burat and Rohde would be forced to implement the killing orders for the Brest ghetto issued by their superiors in October.

Secondly, the murders included the slaughter of Jewish children from an orphanage, whose clothes were then handed to ethnic German children attending a kindergarten in Domachevo (Dean, p.259; citing Gerlach, Kalkulierte Morde, p.1,075). A monument to these children and their teacher can be seen here.

Thirdly, Domachevo was the subject of a historic British war crimes trial held in 1999, which was the first trial in British legal history during which the jury was taken overseas to the scene of the crime. The defendant, Anthony Sawoniuk, was given two life sentences, upheld on appeal, for murdering two Jewish women during a hunt for survivors of the massacre.

Friday, April 03, 2009

Brest Sources - Part 2: Perpetrator Testimonies

Many of the perpetrators of the genocide in the Brest region were never brought to justice, but there are several essential perpetrator testimonies by and about the killing actions that converge with the demographic and documentary evidence and bystander and victim statements.

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The first major Aktion in Brest, in July 1941, was described by 23 members of police battalion 307 whose testimonies are preserved in ZStL, 204 AR-Z 82/61. These are discussed by Browning, pp.121-123. One such testimony, of Heinrich M., can be viewed here.

Testimonies concerning the ghetto liquidation of 1942 can be found in two secondary sources. Firstly, Westermann describes the judicial investigation concerning a member of the Eleventh Company of Third Battalion/Regiment 15 (formerly P.B. 310), whom Westermann gives the pseudonym Hermann Schmidt:
The actions and statements of one of the Eleventh Company 's platoon sergeants, Hermann Schmidt [pseudonym], provide additional evidence for determining the influence of ideology and the effect of war on the unit's members. Schmidt was born on November 21, 1911, in Walsum am Rhein. He entered the SA and the NSDAP in 1933. He was one of the police recruits from Schneidemiihl who joined the battalion (PB 310) in September 1940. In testimony to the federal prosecutor's office in 1961, Fritz Lange [pseudonym] (Schmidt's former brother-in-law) recounted statements made by Schmidt while on leave from his unit during the war. After having had some drinks, Schmidt told Lange that he had participated in the execution of Jews in Poland.

Lange expressed disbelief, which then resulted in Schmidt's exclamation that "the Jews were not people but a danger to the German Volk."' Lange stated that Schmidt had told him of how mothers often pleaded for their children's lives. According to Lange, Schmidt described how he had first shot the chlld of one such mother so that she would see her child die. Schmidt told Lange, "We know no mercy." Lange was not the only person who provided testimony on Schmidt's activities in the East. After initially refusing to provide a statement, Schmidt's former wife subsequently agreed to speak with the prosecutor's office. She stated that her husband had told her of his "forced" participation in the execution of Jews. At one point during the war, she also overheard her husband saying that "earlier [before the war] he couldn't harm a fly, but now he could shoot a Jew in the head while eating a sandwich. The former Frau Schmidt rationalized the actions of her husband as the product of the stresses of war. She stated, "My husband was okay earlier, I mean before the war, only after the war did I recognize he had become sadistic."'It is difficult to believe that the man who had boasted of his reputation as the "Terror of Lemberg" was an unwilling tool of racial policy. Schmidt's conversion to an instrument of genocide whether "forced" or the result of the rigors of war was nonetheless complete.
The second author, Andrea Simon, cites two testimonies by members of the Schutzmannschaft. The first is by the leader of the Schutzmannschaft, Semenyuk, who admits that his company carried out the killing of "about 300" Jews in Volchin (the real figure was 497, according to the source I cited in this blog) but claims that he was absent due to being drunk and the action was overseen by his deputy, Kesarov. He states that the Germans killed 130 civilians in Lishitsi, whilst one of his deputies, Felix Zhukovski, killed about 120 people in various random killings, including sick people who had to be taken off transports, who were "killed...right on the road". He also confirms that the Jews who were forced to work on the Chernavchich highway were killed.

Semenyuk is equally frank about those he killed himself - "I killed six people in Motikali and one in Sukharevichi" - but his most explicit testimony of all concerns the Jews he killed in Brest in November 1942, who had escaped the main Aktion in October:
In November 1942, when the Jews started to run away from the ghetto in Brest, I was ordered to capture them, especially women and children. Once we executed 47 Jews, of whom I personally killed eight. Before shooting them, we took away their clothing and put them into graves in rows. Each one was shot in the back of the head (Simon, p.179)
The second Schutzmannshaft perpetrator Simon cites is Joseph Pavlovich Schidlovsky, who described his participation two mass killings of the Jews of Bereza, a town in the Brest region, during which 4,000 Jews were rounded-up and sent to Bronnaia Gora and a further 3,000 sent to be killed in Smolyarka. Schidlovsky travelled to Bronnaia Gora with the victims, but did not travel to Smolyarka. The SD commander for these killings, according to the witness, was Pichmann, who also oversaw the killing of 1,450 Jews in Divin and 269 in Gorodets.

Thursday, April 02, 2009

Brest Sources - Part 1: Demographics

The effects of German policies upon the population of Brest can be seen in this table, which is drawn from several sources. Garrard & Garrard and Andrea Simon utilized archives held in the city of Brest, whilst the Bundesarchiv collection on Brest (in BAB R 94/6) was consulted by Browning. What do these figures tell us and how do we reconcile them with other sources?

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Under Soviet occupation, from September 1939 to June 1941, Brest (Polish name: Brzesc n.Bugiem) received refugees from western Poland (there were 7,916 Jewish refugees in Brest oblast as of February 1940, according to Nick's source cited here) but also lost 6,709 people who were deported to the Soviet interior (source: Gurjanov). In July 1941, the Germans documented the 'execution' of 4,435 people, of which c.4,000 were Jews, in EM 32. Browning argued that a further 4,403 people were killed by the zbV Brest in the Summer of 1941, but Browning may have overlooked the fact that these killings were carried out across the whole region in which the unit operated, not just Brest city.

The population reductions of 1942 are documented in the Brest archives. Andrea Simon examined the statistical report of the Brest town council dated 5 June 1942, showing 16,973 Jews, whilst Garrard & Garrard reproduced the ledger for 15th and 16th October, 1942, which they described as follows:
This document is one of the most horrifying discovered at Brest, for it represents the complicity in mass murder of men who sat behind their desks throughout the entire process. Across the top of each page are the names of ethnic groups in Brest. The clerk has been ordered to keep a running total for each group: he records how many had 'arrived' and how many had 'departed' for each day. The total population is given in the righthand column. As of 15 October 1942 the total population is 41,091. Of this total, 16,934 are designated in the column for Jews (Zydowsk.). But then the clerk learns that this total is wrong. He has made a mistake in writing 16,934. In fact, all the Jews in the ghetto have now 'departed'. The clerk corrects his mistake; he strikes through 16,934 and writes in '0'. He then subtracts this figure of 16,934 from 41,091 and writes in the correct number of people alive in Brest now - 24,157. It is unlikely that the clerk did not know what had happened to these thousands of people, even if he was not sure exactly when and where they had been executed. Thus, with a single stroke of a pen, 16,934 people are erased.
Furthermore, Garrard & Garrard found that the reduction of 16.934 in the ghetto liquidation corresponded to the volume of transports from Brest to the killing site:
According to documents in the Brest archives, from late June to November 1942 a total of seven trains transported Jews to be executed at Bronnaya gora. Three of these trains are said to have carried people from Brest—two trains consisting of 40 and 13 cars in July, and a third consisting of 28 cars in October. How many Jews from the Brest ghetto were transported in the three trains? If we say that close to 200 people were crushed into each car, then we arrive at a total of 8,000 people in the first train, 2,600 in the second, and 5,600 in the third. There is no way of knowing how many people had already died of starvation and sickness before July 1942, or were shot in and near Brest before October 1942. But the total number transported by this estimate (16,200) does approximate the figure given in the Brest Town Administration's 'Accounting and Control Book of Population Movement'...
Moreover, these figures were corroborated by Polish railway worker, Roman Stanislavovich Novis, the former station master at Bronnaya Gora, in testimony given to the Soviets on September 12th, 1944 (Cited in Andrea Simon, pp. 189-191). Novis counted a total of 186 railroad cars arriving at Bronnaya Gora from various locations, and claimed that his German successor as station master, Heil, had told him that 48,000 people were shot there.

Finally, these demographics are supported by the Brest Ghetto Passport Archive, which was a list of
Jews of 14 years of age and above living in the Brest Ghetto were required to obtain and sign for identity papers, which included their names, ages, and the names and dates of birth of their parents. A photo of each person was taken and all those receiving these internal passports were required to sign for them.
The list contains 12,258 names. When the omitted children are added to this total, we have a baseline figure for the number of Brest Jews murdered in the second half of 1942.

More Mass Graves in the Polesie

Further to Nick's earlier blog, I present below a number of extracts from Soviet Extraordinary Commission reports that were collated and translated from the Brest archives by Louis Pozez and published by Andrea Simon in her genealogical investigation, Bashert. These describe mass graves exhumations at four locations: Bronnaia Gora, Smolyarka, Malorita and Volchin.

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Simon met Pozez [who subsequently helped finance the processing of the Brest Ghetto Passport Archive] in 1997 when she went on a mission to Brest, organised by Pozez, which included a visit to her ancestral home in Volchin (various spellings; 21 miles south-east of Brest). On page 91, she introduces summaries of translations of mass graves documents sent to her by Pozez:
Louis Pozez sends me one section from the report, entitled "Act" and dated October 5, 1944. It's from the Brest Regional Assistance Committee, attached to the Extraordinary State Commission.
The report discusses three major locations. Firstly:
In Brona Gora, 117 kilometers from Brest, five pit graves were found, camouflaged with young, newly planted trees. Some of the graves were as long as 63 meters and as wide as 6.5 meters. Three of the graves were opened. At the depth of 2.5 meters, human bones and ashes were found; at 3.5 meters deep, there was a second layer of ashes and bones, inside of which were locks of hair, and handkerchief and some hair pins. Under the layer of ash was dark, red-brown liquid.

Near the pits the Committee found six areas for burning bodies. Around these areas, the Committee located many fragments of small human bones, including a child's shoulder bone, and other items, such as watches and coins.
We therefore have confirmation that the Soviets found human bones as well as ashes. Simon discusses the next two sites on p.268n.:
In the second area of mass graves, near Smolyarka, the committee found three pit graves. This section estimates that 3,000 "peaceful Soviet citizens" from Brest and nearby villages were killed in this area. The forensic evidence indicated that most of the victims were shot from a short distance. The third area, a kilometer northwest of the settlement of Malorita, contained nine mass graves. The committee opened two and determined that most of the victims were shot; some were buried alive. The number of "peaceful Soviet citizens" killed here was also estimated at 3,000. Besides these burial sites, the committee uncovered graves in the Brest prison yard, the Brest fortress, and in other locations in Brest.
Smolyarka was also the site of exhumations of four mass graves in 2006. A memorial is being erected.

The final Soviet site report of 1944, for Volchin, was sent to Simon by Yad Vashem via Simon's associates, Dov Bar and Shmuel Englender, and is titled Document Number 8:
On September 22, 1942, a group of nine Germans, with the help of 20 [local] police, organised a mass killing by shooting of Volchin's Jews and some of Chernavchich's Jews. [They were brought to the Volchin ghetto.] The total killed by shooting on that day was 497 people.

When we opened the big pit, we found many bodies. Most were naked and were thrown on top of each other. Bodies of men, women, children and babies.
To corroborate this evidence, the general prosecutor in Visoke interviewed witnesses on September 28, 1944, who confirmed that:

1. The policemen had been brought from the village of Motikali, where the population was reputed to be antisemitic.

2. The Jews had been deceived into believing that they were being relocated to the Visoke ghetto.

3. A road-building project was in progress at Chernavchich, from which unfit Jews had been sent. The road workers were killed upon completion of the project.

4. 500 escapees from the Brest ghetto were later killed in Motikali.

The murders were also corroborated by the leader of the Schutzmannschaft, Semenyuk, in his Soviet interrogation, and by witnesses who gave taped interviews in Volchin in 1993 and 1997, cited in detail by Simon.

Wednesday, April 01, 2009

New evidence shows resettlement transports

New evidence found in the GARF in Moscow shows that transports carrying Jewish deportees left Treblinka in late 1942 and arrived some days later in Minsk, said German historian Wolfram Witte.

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You didn't believe this, did you?