Second half of August, 1941
In the week when WW2 enters into its third
year, two questions are answered.
One, if you’re a Soviet citizen and follow
de-facto dictator of the USSR Jospeh Stalin’s
orders to defend your country, will that spare
you from his paranoid wrath?
Two, if the Nazis see that killing innocent
people is emo-tionally impossible, even for
many of the murderers, will that slow down
the killing?
The answer to both questions is no.
This is War Against Humanity, a sub-series
of World War Two in Real-Time.
I’m Spartacus Olsson.
In the first half of August , we saw how the
men of the SS Cavalry Brigade under command
of Hermann Fegelein killed thousands of Jews
in the Pripet Marshes, including the cities
of Chomsk and Pinsk, and how the Einzatsgruppen
continue to butcher any Jew they can get their
hands on, assisted by parts of the local population
in Belarus and Ukraine.
But the Jews are not the only ethnicity who
will now face persecution along the frontlines
in the Soviet Union.
As you might have seen in our weekly episodes,
and on our Instagram Day by Day feed, the
USSR police forces of the NKVD blow up a damm
on the Dnieper in an effort to hinder the
German advance, but also killing tens of thousands
of their own citizens.
But now in late August, the Soviet also turn
to ethnic cleansing.
In July we saw how tens of thousands Volga
Germans, Soviet citizens of German ethnicity
that make up the majority of the Volga German
Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic bor-dering
Kazakstan and Russia, joined the fight against
the Nazi German Reich as volunteer militia,
and members of the Red Army.
They are the descendants of German speaking
emigrants who settled the region at the end
of the 18th century on invitation of the Empress
of Russia, Catherine the Great, herself of
German ethnicity.
Despite their support for the war against
Germany, Stalin and his cohorts have now grown
suspi-cious that the Volga Germans will be
a liability as the Wehrmacht continues to
advance.
On August 12, the Central Committee of the
Soviet Union issues a resolution calling for
the expulsion of the entire ethnic German
citizenry of the Volga German ASSR, and all
Germans in the Stalingrad Oblast and the Saratov
Oblast, as well as any smaller groups of ethnic
Germans residing outside of these regions.
On August 17, Lavrenti Beria ,Deputy chairman
of the Council of People's Commissars and
head of the NKVD, sends out the order "On
Measures for Conducting the Operation of Resettling
the Germans from the Volga German Republic,
Saratov, and Stalingrad Oblasts.”
He assigns the deputy head of the NKVD, Ivan
Serov, to command 1,550 NKVD agents, 3,250
regular police, assisted by 12,150 soldiers
of the Red Army to carry out the transfer.
Ethnic Germans are now banned from serv-ing
in the Soviet armed forces and every single
family - according to the Soviet records that
is close to one million people, will be sent
to Siberia and Kazakstan to serve in forced
labor camps.
The eth-nic cleansing operations are to begin
on September 3, and on August 28 the Presidium
of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR approves
and publishes the upcoming measures.
The Nazi political police are also busying
themselves with ethnic cleaning.
As we have seen, in the first weeks of August
this is clearly going to be extermination
of Europe’s Jews.
On August 21 Joseph Goebbels notes in his
diary that Hitlers has now approved the eastward
deportation of all German Jews, following
a victory against the Soviet Union.
To facilitate this, the Jews must be easily
identified, and while wearing a white and
blue blue star has been obligatory for all
Jews in Poland since 1939, the yellow star
will now become ubiquitous across Europe.
Goebbels writes
‘The Jewish sign has to be a big yellow
Star of David with the word ‘Jew’ written
diagonally over it.
When this sign is worn by all the jews, we
can quickly expel them from the centres of
our cities.’
The order to implement this is signed by SS-Obergruppenführer
Reinhard Heydrich – the head of the Security
Police and the Security Service - at the end
of the months and goes into effect on September
1.
It will soon become obligatory in all of occupied
Western Europe.
But already now the Nazis and their collaborators
are starting to round up Jews for deportation.
Like in Paris, where already back in May,
3,700 Jewish refugees from Czechoslovakia,
Poland, Germany and Austria were interned
in camps outside of the city.
Now, between August 20 and 23, French Police
and German occupation authorities start a
new round of arrests, detaining 4,000 Parisian
Jews - now also of French ethnici-ty - and
intern them at a newly erected Concentration
Camp outside the city at Drancy.
In difference to the first operation, the
German and French security forces now meet
resistance.
When Germany invaded the USSR on June 22,
Stalin lifted the ban on French Communist
groups af-filiated with the Soviets to resist
the German occupation.
Young Communist activists now start to openly
defy the occupiers and their French collaborators.
They spread leaflets and organize marches
through the city wearing red, white and blue.
The Nazis immediately issue a ban on any such
activi-ties, but the protests continue.
On the 13th of August, it is made illegal
for French Jews to possess a radio set.
On the same day, close to 100 protesters march
down the Boulevard Saint-Denis brazenly displaying
the Tricolor.
French Police and German troops descend on
the manifestation, and disperse the crowd
by shooting at them randomly.
Six young Communists are arrested.
On August 18, two of them, selected by the
Nazis to be the ring leaders of the protest,
appear in court to face charges of resisting
the German occupation.
They are Smulz ‘Titi’ Tizselman and Henri
Gautherot, both 17 years old.
Eyewitnesses at the trial report that the
teenagers appear to have been badly beaten,
and a short process finds them guilty, condemning
them to death.
They are executed the next day.
Two days later, a young communist militant
named Pierre Georges a.k.a Fabien shoots a
German officer in the back at the Barbés-Rochechouart
Métro Station, fatally wounding him.
On the 22nd, in a direct response to the assassination
Otto von Stülpnagel Military Commander in
Occu-pied France issues the following order:
“Starting August 23, any current and future
French detained by the German authorities,
or their affil-iates, regardless of reason
for the arrest, shall be considered hostages.
In case of another act, a number of them,
corresponding to the gravity of the act, will
be shot.”
It is not an empty threat as we will see.
In Germany proper, on the other hand, the
Nazi authorities make an appearance of responding
with moderation to public outrage.
As you might have seen in previous months,
the T4 program has been killing tens of thousands
of children and adults with disabilities and
mental illness inside the Reich and in Poland.
By now the program has cost around 80,000
lives but has until now been a secret from
the public.
However, within the Catholic clergy it is
known, since they run several psychiatric
care institutions and have in some cases been
complicit in the program.
But on August 3 the Bishop of Münster Clemens
Au-gust Graf von Galen publicly condemns the
T4 program in a sermon, and there is outrage
among sections of the German public.
On the 24th German Führer Adolf Hitler orders
the cancellation of the Aktion T4 program.
But this is a lie, the killing of psychiatric
patients will continue until the end of the
war under a new name, the 14f13 Program.
The execution of victims will decrease, instead
they will deliberately mis-treat the patients,
often denying them food and simply letting
them starve to death.
In any case, since 1939, Nazi doctors within
the T4 program have been experimenting, searching
for more efficient ways to kill their patients.
They quickly abort their tests with injections
of morphine and scopolamine as the limited
supply of morphine Germany has access to is
needed at the front.
After concluding that shooting is both inefficient
and messy, they start experimenting with gas
chambers, first at the Brandenburg an der
Havel State Welfare Institute.
What they are looking for is a quiet way of
killing large numbers of patients at once.
The room is disguised as a shower, and the
gas they use is odorless but lethal carbon
monoxide.
The witness reports vary, some say that the
victims simply fall asleep, some say that
they die only after suffering shortness of
breath, cramps, and seizures.
Whichever the case it takes time - several
minutes - which is a problem, especially when
the victims are fully conscious and cogent
- which almost all of them are - as they soon
sus-pect that something is wrong and desperately
try to escape the hermitically sealed chamber.
At the end of August SS-Hauptsturmführer
Karl Fritzsch, carries out an experiment with
another gas in the basement of Block 11 at
the concentration camp Auschwitz- it is the
equally odorless gas, hydrogen cyanide, the
active.
component of the pesticide Zyklon B..
The first victims are a dozen Soviet PoWs.
The experiment is successful in as much as
it kills the victims quickly, if they get
a lethal dose immediately that is - but Fritzsch
is using cells as gas chambers that are not
hermitical-ly sealed, and many of the victims
only get the lethal dose slowly, leaving them
gasping for breath and cramping as they die
slowly.
When his boss, camp commander Rudolf Höss
returns from a trip to Berlin a few days later
Fritzsch reports on his success and they schedule
a new, bigger test for early September.
But further East, the German forces are carrying
out something even more sinister than tests,
There, the SS Cavalry Brigade and the Einzatsgruppen,
continue their mass mass murder of Jews, but
also other ethnicities like Poles and Byelorussians
fall victim to the Nazi juggernaut.
Paradoxi-cally with the aid of other sections
of the local population.
Now, the Einzatsgruppen are SS-death squads,
specifically designed as task-forces to kill
the non-military enemies of the National Socialists.
They fall under the direct command of Reinhard
Heydrich, and go wherever ‘Berlin’ orders
them to go.
However, operationally their units are not
made up mainly by regular SS men, mostly they
rely on a motley crew of volunteers, militia,
Waffen SS, and Wehrmacht personnel.
In August 1941, they have twelve battalions
of the Orpo (Order Police) at their disposal.
They were intended to be spread out over the
occupied territories, but as the Germans conquered
less territory than anticipated, they are
now operating in higher concentrations.
East of the Molotov-Ribbentrop line, there
are now 20.000 available troops to commit
mass-murder under the flag of the Einzatsgruppen.
As per Himmlers orders, they are also already
widely recruiting Lithuanians, Latvi-ans and
Estonians, Ukrainians and Belorussians.
The SS Cavalry Brigade is however not under
the control of Heydrich’s Einsatzgruppen.
This was originally a Waffen SS ‘Security
Force’, without much of an ideological purpose.
But Reichsführer SS, Heinrich Himmler is
now increasingly using the Waffen SS to ‘Pacify’
occupied territories.
At first his orders are about crushing resistance,
but gradually they switch to outright orders
to kill Jews.
In difference to the Einsatzgruppen, the Waffen
SS lower commanders hold more autonomy, and
see themselves in competition for glory and
position.
Many of them, like Florian Geyer, who we saw
last episode, try to outdo their colleagues
in murderousness, and as Timothy Snyder puts
it:
‘They understood that to kill Jews was to
fulfil [Himmler’s] desires’.
Even the decoders at Bletchley Park came to
the conclusion that the HSSPF officials, and
I quote ‘stand somewhat in competition with
each other as to their “scores”.’
Scores that are intercepted by same said decoders.
Despite this organizational patchwork, all
together they make up a well oiled killing
machine.
Historian Henning Pieper describes it like
this:
‘Different units pursued different routes;
Security divisions of the Wehrmacht were allocated
specific areas, police battalions searched
and ‘pacified’ villages and towns along
the major thoroughfares, subunits of Einsatzgruppe
B committed massacres in larger towns, the
SS Cavalry Brigade ‘combed’ rural as well
as built-up areas, and all of these formations
cooperated in huge massacres’.
Snyder adds that the Wehrmacht and SS worked
together like two peas in a pod, with the
former registering how many Jews are present
in every newly occupied town.
The SS, Police and Wehrmacht then debate how
many Jews are needed for forced labour, and
how many can be killed.
The Einzatsgruppen then murder the required
amount - or the Wehrmacht locks them up in
a Ghetto until the Order Police can do the
killing later.
The efficiency shows in the Operational Reports
for August.
Einzatsgruppe B raids the Minsk Ghetto, claiming
the lives of 5000 Jews interned there between
Au-gust 14 and September 1.
In the areas around Antopol and Bereza-kartuska,
1,170 Jews are reported to be killed in the
final week of August under command of the
SS and Police Leader of Russland Zentrum,
Erich von dem Bach-Zelewski.
Einzatskommando 12 of EG D under command of
SS-Obersturmbannführer Gustav Adolf Nosske
kills several hundred women and children as
they are driving a convoy of 11,000 people
over the Dniester bridge into Romanian-occupied
territory.
And there are many more similar reports, but
the largest massacre of the month unfolds
in Kami-anets-Podilskyi in South-Western Ukraine,
when SS-Obergruppenführer and commandeer
of teh SS and police forces of Russland Süd,
Friedrich Jeckeln and the Orpo Battatlion
320 murder 23,600 Jews in less than four days
from the 26th to the 29.
For the month of August, the combined SS and
police forces alone report that they have
murdered ‘44,125 persons, mostly Jews.
But, as impossible as it is to empathize with
the perpetrators, these are not robots that
are doing the killing.
Historian Henning Pieper writes how the increasing
massacres in August show the com-manders in
the field that the task of kill masses of
other people can quickly lead to mental distress.
The victims beg for their lives, try to run
away.
Unarmed women, pregnant women, children, and
infants.
That are then shot by the hundreds from a
distance of 5 to 6 meters, either with a carbine
or with a machine gun.
Aiming for the necks of their victims, blood
flows and remnants of brains splatter.
Some don’t die immediately and lay screaming
in terror and pain as they land in the mass
grave.
The troops are given Pervitin, meth-amphetiamin
to take them though the killing days and in
the evenings, copious rations of alcohol to
drown their nightmares.
Burnout and disobedience are commonplace,
and already now suicide rates among the troops
are increasing.
The concern expressed for the men doing the
killing stands in horrifying contrast to the
lack of em-pathy with the victims.
In steel hearted determination the Nazi leadership
presses on.
They are driv-en by an utter conviction that
this must be done, and refusing to do so is
a sign of pathetic weak-ness.
This is how Hummer will expressed it on October
4 1943, when addressing the SS men in a speech:
“Most of you must know what it means to
see a hundred corpses lie side by side, or
five hundred, or a thousand.
To have stuck this out and—excepting cases
of human weakness—to have kept our integrity,
that is what has made us hard.”
And it is indeed hardness, and pragmatic disregard
of all humanity, - what can only be described
a complete lack of integrity that is the daily
reality in much of the world at the end of
August 1941.
Stalin continues to persecute sections his
own people, now the Volga Germans.
In France and many other places resistance
is growing, as are the brutal counter measures
by the Nazis.
While the Nazi methods face backlashes in
Germany when publicized, Heydrich is already
making preparations to deport all the Jews
of Europe eastward, where Himmler is driving
the murder rate of the Jews harder and harder.
The murderers themselves are already starting
to buckle under the task, while their col-leagues
in Germany and Auschwitz are looking for more
efficient ways to kill.
To liquidate the most innocent fellow human
beings.
Even killing babies by shooting them point
blank.
It’s so inhuman that not even the most brutal
hatred will let the most seasoned killers
do it without at least some mental backlash.
If only that backlash would make the Nazis
slow down.
Instead they simply look for a more efficient,
more systematic, less direct way to massacre,
to turn a loud orgy of massive blood baths
into a gargantuan, hissing industry of suffocation
Never Forget.
