western Belorussian massacres of Jews 1942: HUMILIATION, BULLYING, MURDER

Genocide is rooted in ugly beliefs and behaviors which condone HUMILIATION
 attention bullies of all types

if you degrade another human 

for the sake of your own 

righteousness and superiority

what you are proving is that

GENOCIDE IS ACCEPTABLE

EXCERPTED FROM THE BOOK

National Socialist Extermination Policies

edited by

Ulrich Herbert

Chapter 8

by

Christian Gerlach

German Economic Interests, Occupation Policy, and the Murder of the Jews in Belorussia, 1941/1943

The year 1942 was characterized by the implementation of campaign-style murder programs against the Jewish population of western Belorussia, above all in the Generalkommissariat White Ruthenia. On 2 and 3 March, for example, Security Police in Minsk, Baranovitchi, and Vilejka shot over 6,500 Jews, for the most part children, women, and unemployed. A crisis session of the Stadtkommisar in Minsk had earlier resulted in orders that despite the famine, the inhabitants could be "given no aid of any kind." In a hearing   after the war, Minsk Gestapo Chief Heuser remembered that "the main thing that was done in that severe winter crisis was saving lives "worth living" (lebenswertes Leben), that is, White Ruthenians, at the expense of 'unworthy or sick' lives (Jews, Gypsies, the mentally ill, and prison inmates)".

But these massacres did not seem to be sufficient for the authorities responsible for the murder campaigns. On 26 March, at a meeting in Riga (Kube was apparently present), the Generalkommissdars of Reichskommissariat Ostland stated that "even though they may create a political inconvenience for us, it is seen as regrettable that the procedures pursued up to now (i.e., the mass shootings) have for the time being once again been abandoned. The current situation, in which the Jews receive no food whatsoever, is no solution." By November 1941, the Reichskommissariat had already de facto forbidden the murder of Jews through starvation because of the high risk involved, in so far as the Reichskommissariat was responsible for the prevention of epidemics spreading from the ghettos. Negotiations now began between Kube, Zenner, (SS and Police Leader of White Ruthenia), and Strauch (commander of the Security Police and SD), resulting in the selections of Jews, district by district, in all areas. Jews who, according to the Gebietskommissare (whose officials selected the Jews), could not be used as laborers were shot or murdered in gas vans. Kube ordered the district commissars to "select out all (Jews) not absolutely necessary to the national economy (Volkswirtschaft)."  The Reichskommissariat in Riga agreed; the local "Jewish expert" noted on a similar order, "corresponds to previous arrangements." The selections first occurred in the region around Lida. In seventeen towns, between 8 and 12 May, the Security Police shot 16,000 Jews and let 7,000 live. Because of partisan attacks, mass flight of refugees and Jewish uprisings, and a lack of police manpower, the operations in the other districts took place in a somewhat less tightly organized manner. Skilled workers in the remaining ghettos were only killed in the last quarter of 1942. Nonetheless, the overwhelming majority of the estimated 112,000 Jews murdered in Generalkommissariat White Ruthenia in 1942  were victims of the campaigns between may and August. On 31 July Kube wrote a report, apparently on the request of Lohse, his Reichskommissar. Lohse immediately presented the results to Goring in Berlin, at a large conference on the food question in occupied Europe. Lohse answered a question from Goring with the remark that "now only a small part of the Jews remain alive; umpteen thousands are gone."

In May 1942, in the Generalkommissariat Volhyn-Podolia, 326,000 Jews remained alive, including over 80,000 in the Belorussian area. On the basis of postwar statements, Gerald Fleming has already established that Hitler, not Himmler, gave the order for their elimination to Erich Koch in July 1942. Various sources show that the operation, with the internal slogan "A Jew-Free Ukraine!"

(Ukraine judenfrei!), was actually controlled by Koch and the civil authorities, and that Koch had received dramatic demands for food deliveries to the Reich. The role played by these demands is also demonstrated by the acceleration of the murders in August and by the course of events, which moved from the south, where the richest agricultural areas lay, the the north. On 9 July, Himmler took over the operation to "secure the harvest" in the Reichskommisariat Ukraine. In September and October 1942, units of the Order and Security Police shot all the Jews in southwestern Belorussia, including 16,000 to 18,000 in Brest and up to 26,000 in Pinsk, the largest remaining Belorussian ghetto. The liquidation of the Pinsk ghetto has been seen as a perfect example of actions taken under a short-term order from Himmler based on ideological grounds--even though Koch had personally given the order several weeks before, and the civil authorities had already determined the course of events. 

The operation in Pinsk ended on 1 November; on the following day, almost 100,000 Jews in the Bialystok district were forced into internment centers, so they could be quickly deported to the Treblinka and Auschwitz extermination camps. The smooth cooperation between Security Police and SD and the civil authorities, here also responsible to Koch, was again evident. Technical obstructions in rail transport were the sole source of disruption. By February 1943, in the area belonging to today's Belorussia, all 60,000 to 70,000 Jews were victims of this operation.

Approximately 20,000 Belorussian Jews remained in Minsk, Lida, and Glebokie. They were shot or deported at the latest in the summer and autumn of 1943. The head of the finance branch in the Reichskommissariat Ostland, Vialon, had obtained a promise from the SS that skilled Jewish workers could remain employed, but the authorities in Generalkommissariat White Ruthenia did not allow this, because they could replace Jews with Belorussians, with evacuees forced away from the front, and with new machinery. In the end only several hundred Belorussian Jews were able to survive as forced laborers in the camps in Poland. In addition, about about 30,000 to 50,000 Jews escaped from the Belorussian ghettos. However, fewer than half of them survived the so-called "Jew hunts" by Germans until liberation.

1. The majority of Belorussian Jews were killed in regional murder campaigns. People were shot close to where they lived; relatively few were suffocated in gas vans. thus the start, duration, and size of these programs was not determined by the distribution of rail transport or by the liquidation capacity of the death camps under the leadership of the Reichssicherheitshauptamt or the "Action Reinhard."

2. Economic interests and crises were far more important influences on the tempo of the liquidation of the Jews, especially in the phases of acceleration. The various liquidation problems in Belorussia, particularly those against non-Jewish population groups, were in large part responses to pressures related to food economics. This was the main interest of the occupying powers; on the central or regional levels, demanding food-delivery goals and local emergencies in the meager deliveries to non-Jewish urban populations produced decisions to murder either unemployed Jews, or all of them. Antisemitism and anti-Bolshevism were necessary preconditions for these murders, helping to establish the possibility of such ideas n the first place--but only economic pressure led to the massive killing campaigns, to the horrible dynamics of mass murder.
3. Thus the liquidation of the Jews was directly connected with the progress of the war. This was a concrete, palpable connection that cannot be explained by overly simple conceptual models of euphoria versus defeatism. Though the National Socialists were prepared in advance to commit crimes, at the beginning of 1941, the starvation program was necessary for both the collective strategic situation of Germany and for the supply problems related to the new military campaign. In the fall of 1941, both problems were greatly intensified: by developments at the front, in the transportation sector; through the newly developed war food plan necessary for supplying the Reich; and in the race for time in the battle for Moscow. Simplistic conceptions of the starvation policy now collapsed. In order to keep the situation in control, the burdens that emerged from the general intensification of the war were passed on more sharply to the inhabitants of the occupied territories, above all to specific, delimited, stigmatized population groups. The undisguised mass murder of Jews and Soviet prisoners of war was the result. In spring and summer 1942, the new deliveries demanded by the Reich Food Ministry from the occupied areas to improve food supplies in the Reich were at the very least decisive for the acceleration of new murder programs against the Belorussian Jews.

4. The participating institutions--the military and civil authorities--did not act with restraint, nor did they simply give their consent. They were one of the driving forces behind the destruction of the Jews. The murder of the Jews and other population groups in Belorussia was hardly an exception in German occupation policies, but rather its means, and an essential part of its organization. As the liquidation of the Jews increasingly became a key part of the general strategy of occupation policies, the role of the SS and police declined in importance; they rarely determined the course of these policies. They did repeatedly seize the initiative in the mass murder of the Jews, their killing was unbelievably gruesome and hateful (which cannot be described here), and they at times exceeded the measures asked for by the authorities. But the massive liquidation campaigns took place only when they accorded with combined interests of the administrative authorities. For example, in autumn 1941` Eisatzgruppe C did not succeed in carrying out their original goal of immediately killing all Jews in Volhyn-Podolia for political reasons, because the civil authorities still wanted to keep reserves of Jewish skilled laborers. The well-known conflicts between Kube and the SS dealt only with how to proceed with the murders and was in any case limited to a personal level.

5. In the search for explanations, above all for the events of 1941, the orders giving the commands for mass murder have up to now been represented somewhat too simply and directly, almost theatrically in the case of Minsk in August 1941. The expansion of the murders was a result of taactics, a response to regional possibilities for killing and so-caled "killing requirements". The mass murder was carried out in a cold and calculated fashion, as the great majority of statements by perpetrators show, although few witnesses could clearly comprehend  all the economic calculations that lay behind these actions. One single general order to kill all Jews was not enough to set the liquidation everywhere in motion. Mass murder always required supplementary local or regional planning, and it required interest, consensus, and initiative to ensure that the far-reaching destruction became a reality.      

The analysis of events is not intended to disregard and certainly not to disdain the victims of German murder campaigns in Belorussia. It is vital to uncover the accurate reasons for why they were killed, whether because of racial insanity or murderous economic rationality. In occupied Belorussia both racist attitudes and brutal, goal-oriented calculation smoothed the way for ideas of liquidation; these motives rarely contradicted each other, and then only in limited ways. Following economic or partly national economic motives does not exonerate or excuse those who planned, initiated, or gave orders--rather the opposite, because this provides irrefutable proof of their intentions. Claims that they, at least, acted out of some sort of madness or insanity are indefensible.




Christian Gerlach was born in 1963. He studied history, German language and literature, sociology, and pedagogy at Technological University in Berlin, and earned his Ph.D. doing research on German occupation policy in White Russia. Publications include: "Manner des 20, Juli und der Kreig gegen die Sowjetunion" in Hannes Heer and Klaus Naumann (eds.), Vernichtungskrieg: Verbrechen der Wehrmacht 1941-1944