Einsatzgruppen : Les commandos d'Hitler

The German advance continues inexorably. The imposing Bolshevik front is breached and annihilated. The German soldier has now proved his eternal valor, saving Europe from Bolshevism, enemy of the world.

On June 22nd, 1941, Hitler launched Operation Barbarossa, shattering the Nazi-Soviet pact signed in Berlin in 1939. The ultimate goal of the invasion of the USSR was to empty Eastern Europe of Jews and Communists, to clean out a "living space," or Lebensraum, for a Great Reich destined to rule a thousand years. This was not an ordinary war. This was supposed to be a war of annihilation. And as it was planned by Hitler since late 1940, this was a war where the enemy was not to be conquered but destroyed, annihilated.

And that led to the appointment of Himmler as a special envoy for security measures in the occupied territories. The Einsatzgruppen, 3,000 strong, were quickly trained in Pretzsch and divided into four units, corresponding to four parts of the huge territory of the USSR. They advanced in the wake of the Wehrmacht. Each Einsatzgruppe was attached to one or more military units. Einsatzgruppe A, the Army Group North unit, operated in the Baltic states, annexed by Stalin the year before. Einsatzgruppe B was to clean out Byelorussia and Central Russia. Einsatzgruppe C, northern and central Ukraine, and Einsatzgruppe D, southern Ukraine.

Divided into four battalions called Einsatzkommandos and Sonderkommandos, the Einsatzgruppen -- literally "intervention groups" -- were assigned to track down and execute the foes of Nazism, in other words, Jews and Communist partisans. Their initial task was, in terms of Himmler and the SS, kind of preventive security. Eliminate all potential enemies, all potential dangers. That’s a very broad mandate, which means that the Einsatzgruppen have lots of leeway as to how far they would carry that.

When the documents are explicit, they will talk about killing Jews in state and party positions, as well as communist leaders and communist functionaries. Elsewhere they talk about potential enemies, saboteurs, and using names that are often applied to Jews, as a kind of symbolic way. So while there wasn’t, as best we can tell, an explicit mandate to carry out a total and systematic extermination, it was clear that they were going to be aiming at all Jewish leadership, at all Jews that had any connection to the state and the party, and that they were free to expand that to any Jew that was viewed as a potential man of military age who might be involved, or thought possibly involved, in resistance.

Taken by surprise, the Red Army sustained disastrous losses. Wehrmacht troops annihilated the Soviet defense, taking hundreds of thousands of prisoners of war. The initial strategy of the Einsatzgruppen, shadowing the troops and discreetly moving into the cities, was to incite pogroms against the Jews, identified as communists in the Nazi imagination. The ties between Jews and communism, or bolshevism rather, have been established early on, as a consequence of World War I, basically, and they are not unique to the German setting. They were also developed in other countries, and in other historical circumstances.

But they really are crucial to the understanding of the ideological backdrop to what happens during Operation Barbarossa. One has to understand that the Jew is the key enemy in the minds of Germans, and particularly Nazis, and it’s very difficult to draw a line between the two, obviously. The Jew is seen as the wire puller behind all other enemy groups. And these enemy groups comprise everything from Catholicism via liberals to bolshevists.

In the prisons of the cities they conquered, the Nazis found the remains of nationalist leaders, executed by the Soviet NKVD before they fled. The NKVD, Lavrenty Beria's terrifying secret police, were hated and feared in Ukraine for having orchestrated the famine which caused the death of five million Ukrainians between 1922 and 1933. Local nationalist movements, to whom the Nazis promised independence in exchange for their collaboration, were hungry for revenge. They think, of course, that they're gonna earn their way to greater national independence, whether as Ukrainian or Lithuanian or Latvian.

The Nazis had no intention of setting up independent states, but they don’t mind giving them the illusion in that regard, that along the line they'll get some reward in that way. The Eastern European lands were pervaded with age-old anti-Semitic traditions rooted in Christian anti-Judaism, economic or ethnic competition, and the accusation that the Jews were complicit with Soviet power. Nationalist movements, informed of the German offensive before its launch, organized anti-Jewish pogroms.

At the end of June 1941, thousands of Jews were savagely murdered in the streets of Vilnius, Riga, Kaunas, and Lviv, known as Lemberg in German, the capital of District Galicia. The experience in these parts of the Soviet Union since summer 1940, with the Soviet occupation, was very negative and to a large extent traumatic. That formed a large and important backdrop to the reactions of locals on the ground towards this vacuum that was suddenly ensuing with the Soviet army retreating, and resulted in anti-Jewish actions being taken and then clearly not suppressed by the Germans.

The Einsatzgruppen were ordered by Heydrich to make use of anti-Jewish activities that were instigated by locals. In Kaunas, Lithuania, in a carriage-house courtyard, Jews were forced to use their bare hands to clean up the manure left by Soviet soldiers' horses. Lithuanians armed with clubs, wearing the white armband, a nationalist emblem, then battered the Jews to death. In Kaunas, that was fenced-off, Germans standing around and what looked like Lithuanians beating several hundred Jews to death in a public performance that, as some witnesses say, involved women standing around and having children sitting on their shoulders, some people making music while the Jews were killed in a public square.

The German role in this incident is that of an onlooker and, in fact, that of a documenter. There were Germans taking photographs. And this is why this is such a prominent case because it's one of the rare instances of documentary material being available on these pogroms. In a week or two, several thousand people had been killed in the Kaunas pogroms.

Einsatzgruppe C arrived in Lviv, now in Ukraine, on June 27th. A similar wave of violence was unleashed against a Jewish community numbering some 160,000. The Nazis publicized the discovery of Ukrainian corpses in a fortress outside the city, used as a prison by the NKVD, sparking the pogroms. The same compounds were then used to execute and beat to death hundreds of Jews. My mother told me a friend asked her to go to Brygidki Prison, to the basement, to look for the friend's husband. They went down the stairs, and when they opened the door, they saw bodies piled up to the ceiling. My mother's friend fainted because of the awful stench.

Innocent victims cruelly tortured and killed by the Bolsheviks, wielding knives, axes, grenades, and machine guns. Two or three days later, I was in our courtyard. I saw our landlord, Mr. Barzam. Suddenly, two young men burst in. One of them shoved him from behind. Barzam fell down. The other ran up and began beating him with a chair. The first struck a match and lit his beard and sidelocks. Barzam screamed. Mama came out and the men ran away.

You see, beatings of Jews started immediately. Homicidal Jewish scum, who worked hand in hand with the GPU, is given to German troops by an outraged crowd to be punished. Here is a dreadful sample of Lemberg's Soviet faces. Most of these looters and marauders are Jews. See the allies of Churchill and his plutocratic clique! In Ternopil, a unit of the SS Viking division joined forces with nationalist Stepan Bandera's henchmen to carry out similar massacres. Members of the German Totenkopf, or "Death's Head" SS, took part in the killings directly for the first time.

However, Einsatzgruppe commanders were not convinced that provoking these outbursts of violence was an efficient strategy. To this day in Kaunas, 7,800 Jews have been liquidated, partially through pogroms, and partially through shootings organized by Lithuanian commandos. Report from Einsatzgruppen #24: The inhabitants of Lemberg eliminated approximately 1,000 Jews in the GPU prison that is currently occupied by the Wehrmacht. They decided it was time to end the chaos generated by the pogroms and streamline the killing procedure. Reinhard Heydrich, head of the Reich Central Security Office, or RSHA, a huge, tentacular organization with connections to police, investigation, security, and repression, received a letter from Goering in late July 1941, ordering him to proceed with preparations for the execution of the Final Solution of the Jewish question in the German sphere of influence.

These preparations included registering Jews, segregating them from society, marking them, crowding them into ghettos, and forcing them to work as slaves. The Einsatzgruppen emerged from their relative anonymity and made their presence known. In the towns they crossed, they left grim forests of gallows. When a partisan, Jew, or Communist was executed on a public square in Kharkov or Odessa -- here, in Minsk -- a morbidly cynical sign was tied around his neck: These Jews agitated against the German Wehrmacht.

In the city of Lviv, the majority of the population was Jewish. The death commandos organized grotesque processions and passion plays leading up to the execution of the Jews. The Jews were marched to the cemetery. Behind the cemetery, there was a place where they were shot. The Nazis picked out one Jew to play Tsar. They tarred and feathered him and put him on a throne. It was a sort of armchair. Four men carried him on their shoulders, and they led a long line of Jews who sang... People said, "They're going to be shot." It was dreadful. It's hard to believe that it really happened.

The shootings were public. Terrible deeds were done. I saw it. If I hadn't seen it myself, I wouldn't believe it happened. It was an absolute horror. We're behind Janovski Cemetery. It happened on a flat piece of ground, which is secluded. That's why the Germans chose it for their dirty work. The area you see, 20 or 30 meters away, is where the Jews were shot. When Mama and I used to visit my father's grave, Mama said they would be killing Jews. We saw them from the hill. I saw it all.

There was a big trench with two logs across it. They ordered the Jews to walk on the logs. A machine gun was set up to shoot them. Screaming and crying, they fell, right, left, into the trench. The eyewitnesses said that some of the victims weren't dead, only wounded in the arm or leg. They tried to climb out and run away. Maybe some succeeded. Who can say? I don't know. A great tragedy happened here. Many people were shot. Not just Jews. They might shoot anybody. The Germans didn't split hairs.

Although Hitler had considered resettling the German Jews in a foreign country -- Madagascar, in particular -- he now definitively abandoned the plan, opting for total extermination. In the East, the Jews were stripped of all their rights and officially ostracized. The extermination of the Jewish people, seen as revenge for Germany's humiliation after her defeat in 1918, had long been Hitler's wildest dream. In 1939, before the Reichstag, he had explicitly voiced it.

Today I shall make a prophecy. If international Jewish financiers inside and outside Europe succeed in plunging the nations into a new world war, the result will not be world Bolshevization, and thus the victory of Jewry. The result will be extermination of the Jewish race in Europe! Nonetheless, he did not order the murder of Jewish women and children -- in other words, to proceed with the extermination of every Jew -- until July-August 1941. Until then, only men old enough to bear arms were shot.

Heinrich Himmler, the highest Nazi officer in charge of the Final Solution, disseminated the extermination order in the field, in visits to the Eastern Front, where he met with Einsatzgruppe commanders. The death commandos were to take action everywhere, simultaneously, so the Jewish communities had no warning and no time to escape their fate. That really changes, I think, in late July and early August. That we know, for instance, the Pripyat marsh sweep in the first two weeks of August, Himmler says, "Kill all the Jews, drive the women into the swamps."

So again a kind of vague exhortation that, find some way to get rid of them all, and some of the commanders take that literally. They tried to chase them into the swamps, and it turns out that the swamps aren't very deep. Others simply understand, they start to shoot women. In Bialystok, Himmler ordered Erich von dem Bach-Zelewski, Supreme Commander of the Police and SS in Central Russia, to kill more Jews. His units obeyed immediately, murdering a thousand people. Next, Himmler went to Minsk, in Byelorussia, on August 15th, where he attended the killing of 100 Jews.

After each of his visits to the front, the "Juden Aktion" -- the mass murders of Jews -- intensified. That's Fegelein. Hermann Fegelein, Hitler's brother-in-law, our commander. In September 1940, I was inducted in Warsaw. I joined the cavalry, just forming. In Warsaw, I had the luck to be incorporated in the first brigade. We were drilled ruthlessly. The cavalry was on foot at the time. The commander was Fegelein. We went right into Russia and advanced to Minsk. We often dealt with snipers: Russians hiding in the forests. And we stopped in Minsk. It was early July 1941.

One day, we were told of a big parade for Himmler. He gave a speech. He said great things awaited us and we had to be fit for them, but no one told us what that meant. All he said in the speech was: "You've been brave and deserve a rest." New recruits were arriving to carry out tough missions. The officers must have sworn to him that we'd comb the swamps, looking for Jews. The regular army was not assigned to those operations, not then. Later, when the situation had evolved in Russia, I learned that even Wehrmacht units searched out hidden Jews. That sort of thing...

So that it's in this late period of late July, early August, that you begin to see this transition, what I would call a retargeting, a retargeting from selective mass murder of potential security risks -- male Jews in leadership positions, male Jews of military age -- to refocusing on women and children. Starting in August, we went into the swamps. We stayed six weeks. Then we came to a town of 3,000 or 4,000 inhabitants. We were ordered to capture Jews. The militia told us where they were. There were a few hundred. But more were arriving by train all the time. We had to keep the Jews from escaping.

Then they got to a quarry. I remember, a big pit, dug out of the rock. It was clear that once they were in the quarry, the Jews couldn't flee. It was surrounded by sheer cliffs. It was a big hole in the hill to quarry gravel, perhaps. The cliffs were steep. That's what I remember. After all, it's been 60 years! But my memory is clear. That was where we were to bring the Jews. Did you suspect what was about to happen? No. At that point, we didn't know what was brewing. It was the start. It went on through the war. The Wehrmacht hunted Jews, too. Even on the front!

So were these the "great things" Himmler had referred to? It certainly was. Himmler knew we'd be sent into the swamps. The tank units were useless there. The Einsatzgruppen were special units. They were part of the SD, or security forces. Small squads, 40, 50 men. They couldn't operate effectively in the swamps. Not enough men. Who were these men? Although the battalions of killers were chiefly made up of German police officers from a lower-class background, they were led by highly educated young men, career officers in the SS and SD.

In terms of the officers of the Einsatzgruppen, they seemed to have been fairly carefully selected. Many of them are intellectuals that were in the Heydrich brain trust, or think tank. Of the -- I think, if I have my figures right -- of the 21 first commanders of the Einsatzgruppen and Einsatzkommandos and Sonderkommandos, I think it's 10 or 11 have PhDs. Otto Rasch of the Einsatzgruppen C was Doctor Doctor Otto Rasch, to make sure that everybody knew he had two PhDs. So this was not a group of thugs. Ohlendorf was, of course, a noted economist. Others had established their record within the SS basically as part of Heydrich's talented stable of university-trained personnel.

And now they were to go out in the field and prove themselves. These men were legal experts, well-versed in criminal and racial law. And they were also zealous Nazis. Most of the Gestapo cadres were legal scholars. There were also young graduates, recruited between 1933 and 1937. Linguists, historians, economists, philosophers... Men of letters. They all came from the same social class and were the same age. Most of them were born between 1900 and 1915. They were young, quite young for the duties incumbent on them as officers in the Gestapo and SD and the Einsatzgruppen.

They only gradually convinced themselves that extermination was necessary. Then, they led their men further in the killing spirit, convincing them to kill men... They called them security threats: "troublemakers," "partisans," "conspirators," "bloodsuckers." These categorizations enabled the officers to justify, to themselves, shooting grown men. Next, when the order came in August 1941 to kill women and children... They switched from total-war, us-or-them rhetoric, to a utopian one: "They must be killed to fulfill our dream," when Einsatzgruppen officers addressed their men, who did the task.

It's not surprising that men of letters were selected. As experts in rhetoric, they were the most apt to be eloquent enough to convince men who weren't born killers to kill women and children. As they had in occupied Poland, where the first Einsatzgruppe Kommandos had operated in 1939, the Nazis assembled the Jewish population in designated areas. In every town, ghettos were created. These confined enclaves were plagued with disease and malnutrition. They gradually became overcrowded reservations of Jews, ready to be exterminated.

Vilnius, long known as "the Jerusalem of Lithuania," a center of Ashkenaz and Yiddish culture, was the home of some 80,000 Jews. The first ghetto, barely visible today, was created on September 6th, 1941. A committee drawn from the Jewish community by the SS, the Judenrat, was forced to supervise ghetto life. The first thing they did was register all the Jews. All the Jews. Every family. They had to register regularly. They were ordered to give up their gold. The Germans used their valuables for the war.

Then all of them had to sew Stars of David on their coats. The word "Jew" was written on their back. They weren't allowed to use the sidewalk, or enter shops. They had to do hard labor. That was how they were humiliated. Of course, they had no rights. They couldn't leave. They were kept in the ghetto. A few escapees told of beatings, lootings and so on. They had to give up all their belongings: rings, gold teeth... Even gold fillings. Who did this to them? Who? The Germans! The Lithuanians working for them. And Russian and Ukrainian traitors. All the rotten people who enjoyed humiliating others!

Eight kilometers south of Vilnius, a former Soviet fuel depot in Ponary Forest was chosen by Walter Stahlecker's Einsatzkommando 9 as an extermination center. It featured 20 storage pits, ready to swallow the entire Jewish population of the Lithuanian capital. The first great "Aktion" -- the euphemism used by the Nazis to designate mass killings -- took place on August 31st, 1941. 2,019 women, 864 men, and 817 children were battered by armed men drunk on alcohol and hatred, forced to strip, and then shot.

On September 12th, another 3,434 Jews were massacred in Ponary Forest. When I was 10, I used to carry our milk to town. If you met a Jew on the sidewalk, you knew by the armband, the star, or the word "Jude." That means "Jew" in Hebrew, doesn't it? Anyway, if you saw a Jew, even if you weren't a German, you could push him off the sidewalk, into the street. And people did it. Unlike the partisans, the Jews had to strip before they were killed. Halina Jankovska, whose father, a railway gateman, salvaged and sold the clothing cast off by the Jews, still lives in Ponary Forest.

They shot Jews. We saw everything. We watched from there. Once, this guy, Sinkewicz, picked up clothes. He got caught by the Lithuanians... the killers. They killed him, too, like a Jew. Schilnikas was in charge here. Once, a child was playing in the sand by the pit. Schilnikas whipped out his gun and killed him. A tiny little child.

In the Baltic countries, the Einsatzgruppen had no trouble hiring killers from nationalist and police ranks. The Lithuanians and Latvians did the shooting. The SD and SS men simply organized and supervised the mass executions. The largest batch of Jews they killed was 10,000. The line stretched all the way to Dobraja Rada. They had to bring in more "horse-slaughterers" to help. Why "horse-slaughterers"? They slaughtered people! That's what my mother called them. We did, too. "Horse-slaughterers." It's a butchery word for those who kill horses. But once she used the word, it stuck. We called them "horse-slaughterers" from then on. Only in our family.

A parallel economy emerged, generated by the scale of the massacres. The Jews' possessions were sold. There were job opportunities in the service sector. Just out of high school, Regina Jablonska was hired as a cook in Ponary Forest, preparing meals for the Lithuanian killers. Every day, a dozen of the gunners, Lithuanians, came to lunch. We were wondering, "What kind of job is this?" Once, this Lithuanian strutted in, in his uniform. He had rings on his fingers. He said, "It's dull today. There's nobody to shoot."

I didn't see the shootings. I just heard the screams. If they were firing during lunch, when the wind came from the west, it carried these cries. Very faintly, from far away. And gunfire, over and over. From the window of these houses, we'd see the car drive up. A German with eyeglasses named Weiss sat up front with the driver. He opened the door and took them out, herded them along, and then we heard shots. Everyone knew what was going on. The Jews didn't know they were about to die. The graves were already dug, by the other Jews.

The Germans wanted to avoid panic. They were brought up, ordered to lie down, and machine-gunned. Others came to bury them, and were killed in turn. They killed them in rows. Here in Ponary, when the bodies were unearthed after the war, it was discovered that they were stacked like logs. When he was 11 years old, Anatoli Lipinski played the accordion for the Ponary killers every day. They gave him a little money, which helped his parents survive. The killers were always boasting, especially when drunk: "Look what I got from the bodies," one would say. And he'd take a handful of gold watches out of his pocket. The other would reply, "Well, I've got plenty of rings." Another would show a little bag of gold teeth he'd ripped out. From the jaws of the corpses that had been shot. Or maybe from the living.

I'm not sure, I wasn't there. They showed each other their loot, joking, boasting... "I saw a Jew-girl, a teenager, with a cute ass. So I raped her." How did I feel around them? My soul didn't like them. But if I hadn't gone, they'd have hurt my parents, so I went. They made me play... They sat there laughing. They treated me well. They fed me and even gave me candy! Once, one of them brought me a pair of shoes. I was practically barefoot. He'd taken the shoes off a body.

While this was going on, Soviet POWs continued to pile up in the camps. The Germans, not bound by the Geneva Conventions, which the Soviets had refused to sign, decided to liquidate them instead of continuing to feed them. The Einsatzkommandos did away with 600,000. The others were killed by the process used on the Hereros of Namibia. They were starved to death. In 1904, in his ephemeral African colony, Kaiser Wilhelm's officers had massacred the rebel Herero tribe. General Lothar von Trotha's men kept the insurgents surrounded in the desert, cutting off all their supply lines. Of an overall population of 80,000 people, between 45,000 and 60,000 died of thirst and hunger.

One can draw an analogy here between other instances of genocidal measures as administered by the Germans in their brief colonial episode, and the Herero uprising is clearly an analogy that comes to mind and only works so far because clearly you have other aspects involved here. Most importantly, the image of the enemy. The Red Army soldiers were not seen as comrades. This is what Hitler said very explicitly. Early on they were seen as bolshevists, as Asians, people who were of the wrong racial background, who were not humans. In fact, one of the propaganda brochures produced by Himmler was called the "Untermenschen." So sub-humans, and that was the label attached to the Red Army soldiers.

By the end of 1941, two million Soviet prisoners had perished. To escape the gulag, the few survivors volunteered to join the units of killers. Although they had recruited death-squad reinforcements in July 1941 -- an auxiliary force of 10,000 police officers and 33,000 locals -- the Einsatzgruppen still didn't have enough personnel to wipe out all the Jews, disappearing by hundreds of thousands. Other SS units patrolled the eastern lands, carrying out the same task: the Tilsit Kommando, which had been terrorizing Poland, the many SS brigades sent to the front, the Fegelein cavalry division in the Polesian marshes, the Viking SS in Ukraine, the Totenkopf units, Reserve Police Battalion 101, and the infamous brigade of SS Storm Troopers, made up of German ex-cons, led by Oskar Dirlewanger, an ambitious psychopath and convicted child molester.

The Wehrmacht also lent a hand to extermination Aktions. In Serbia, an area of operations not covered by the Einsatzgruppen, the German army went to work murdering Jews and partisans. In a world where good and evil were reversed, where the duty of the police was mass murder, killing a Jew was quite acceptable. Local people indulged occasionally, on an individual basis, to steal a few possessions or settle old disputes. Countries allied with Hitler, like Romania under General Antonescu, volunteered to exterminate their Jewish populations without outside help.

Romania, Hungary, and Bulgaria have something in common, concerning the policy of ethnic cleansing of Jews during World War I. All three countries, which destroyed or protected Jews in different phases and rhythms, started destroying, deporting, or killing Jews in provinces that were subject to border disputes. That's what happened in Romania. In Bessarabia and Bukovina, in those two regions, and also in Iasi, the capital of Romanian Moldavia, mass exterminations of Jews started immediately after war broke out. Clear orders were given to destroy the Jewish population and prepare to deport any survivors. Survivors were deported to the eastern bank of the Dniester, or Transnistria, a region occupied by Romania, under Romanian supervision, between the Dniester and the Bug.

Sonia Palty, who came from a middle-class Jewish family in Bucharest, was deported to various Transnistrian concentration camps. She survived the cruelest of them -- Bogdanovka, where the Jews were crowded into pigsties before being murdered. When we arrived at Bogdanovka, they threw us into pigsties. On the ground. But we were glad that there was no snow on the ground around us. It wasn't too cold. It was above freezing. It had been very cold before. It just had a roof.

Everybody sat on the ground for some time -- how long, I don't know. Four hours? Six? Eight? Then people from the ghetto joined us, the few survivors of a community that had once numbered 67,000... Jews from Bukovina, Bessarabia, Odessa, Nikolayev... They had all been killed the year before. That means... the crime started... The crime was committed by Romanian police obeying orders from Modest Isopescu, a colonel in the Romanian army, and Aristide Padure, a lawyer who was vice-governor of the Golta region. They had soldiers, and every day they killed... 500 or 1,000 people... 1,500. The ones they hadn't succeeded in killing with machine guns were put in these big barns, which were then set on fire. They burned people alive.

The people from the ghetto came to see us. One of them was Esther Gelbelman. I was fourteen and a half. She was a year older, so she was fifteen and a half. She saw that I was about her age. She took my hand and said, "Come with me. Come see where my mother and brothers are." I didn't understand what she was trying to say. So I went with her, and in the terrible cold, we walked all the way to the Bug River. She pointed and said, "See the hands and feet sticking out of the snow. That grave contains a thousand, many thousands, of Jews killed by the Romanians." I can't say that it was a shock. I couldn't understand!

As we walked back home, the pigsty where we were spending the night, I mean... she told me the story of how she'd seen them kill her mother and her 22-year-old brother. She kept me company for the month and a half we stayed at Bogdanovka. One day there, I was walking across the barnyard, because it had been a farm. I stepped in some ashes. She grabbed my jacket and jerked me away, saying, "Be careful! That's my brothers and my friends. They were burned here!" I never forgot this. Fourteen and a half! A teenager. Think for just a moment what it was like for a girl... a girl... who had lived a happy life up until then!

The Romanians were exterminating their Jews near territory assigned to Einsatzgruppe D, led by Otto Ohlendorf, which caused some friction between Nazi and Romanian officials. On both sides of the River Bug, Romanians, Germans, and Ukrainian thugs engaged in mass murder actions, sometimes as partners. To destroy some of the 65,000 Jews in Odessa, they used dynamite. They also cooperated in killing Roma people in 1942.

In the carts, I saw children, women... And they stopped there. The Germans and Romanians made a bridge, a temporary one, with cables. They stretched cables across the river, laid down a plank and herded 15 or 16 people onto it. They were pulling it across the river. The Gypsy women who had babies in their arms got onto this raft. When they reached the middle of the Bug, they threw their infants into the river. And then they jumped themselves. Their men were standing on our side of the river. Brothers, fathers... They were yelling. They wanted to jump in the water and rescue anyone they could. But no. The police had started firing.

This caused a scandal that was unprecedented in the history of World War II. These 25,000 Gypsies deported to Transnistria in 1942 had sons, husbands, and other male kin who were soldiers in the Romanian Army, defending Romania, weapon in hand. When these soldiers were given leave to go home and see their families, they found they'd been deported. They went back and reported it to their superiors and were given leave to go look for their families. But they couldn't find them, they'd been deported, and sometimes killed. The cases were unbelievable. Children raped by Ukrainian police. Cannibalism.

Romanian authorities finally put an end to the operation, simply because... it created such bureaucratic snarls. The Romanian people see themselves as a humane people, hospitable and kind. And I can say to them, "Yes, we did also find people who were humane." But the majority... they were animals! They didn't look at me and see a girl... who might have been their own daughter. They saw me as a dirty Jew who had to die. The Romanian people don't want to know about the 400,000 Jews who were killed. Four hundred thousand human beings. It's not... A person who commits a murder goes to jail for 20 or 25 years.

I saw so many people killed, so many died in my arms... I cannot bring myself, even today... I can't stop talking about the ones I loved. On the Ukrainian side of the Dniester, Otto Rasch's Einsatzgruppe C was assigned to exterminate the Jews of Kamenets-Podolsky. Friedrich Jeckeln, the Higher SS and Police Leader in Ukraine, a cold-blooded killer aged 46, was the organizer of the great massacre of Jews of August 1941. Jeckeln joined the SS early and rose in rank. First, he served as SS and police leader in Western Germany. His career was typical of his generation of Nazis. He could have earned a degree, but his career was reoriented, let's say, by his political activism and the Great Depression.

He studied business. Nevertheless, he rapidly became a professional politician. He was elected to the Reichstag and was employed by the SS throughout his career. He became a mass murderer in 1941. True, his position predisposed him to duties of coordination and inspection in armed SS formations and the police. He stands out for his great brutality and organizational inventiveness in these huge massacres. Jeckeln was the vicious inventor of "Sardinenpackung," or "sardine technique," later adopted by a large number of death squads. The victims are forced to lie down, head to toe. One layer of people is killed. Then you have the next layer lie on top of those corpses.

A technique remarkable for its standardization and its resemblance to methods used to slaughter animals on an industrial scale. Jeckeln's goal was to have every German on the Eastern Front kill at least one Jew. This was a three-pronged strategy: it implicated all the soldiers in the crime, proved they had submitted to the orders the Führer had given, and spread the load of responsibility more evenly. He himself set the example at the mass killings he was assigned to supervise. In Kamenets-Podolsky, in late August of 1941, five bomb craters were selected as mass graves for the Jews of the city and many others who had been expelled from Hungary.

In all, 23,600 men, women, and children were killed in three days by the SS, the police, and their Ukrainian auxiliaries. The Wehrmacht had reached the gates of Moscow, allowing Hitler to believe that the Soviet army was nearly defeated. Meanwhile, Jeckeln was called upon to supervise an Aktion of even greater magnitude than the massacre of Kamenets-Podolsky: the annihilation of the Jews of Kiev. Paul Blobel, chief of Sonderkommando 4A, reached Kiev one day before Einsatzgruppe C and found the Ukrainian capital ravaged by fire. The fact that the NKVD had used explosives which set the city ablaze for several days was seized as a pretext for the great "Juden Aktion" which had been planned.

Babi Yar, an enormous gorge, was located on the outskirts of the capital. It was the site chosen by Blobel and Jeckeln to serve as a mass grave for the Jewish population of Kiev. The two men were assisted in their task by the German police and squads of Ukrainian auxiliaries. A Wehrmacht detachment was also present. Signs were posted ordering the Jews to assemble on Melnikov Street on the morning of September 29, 1941, the day of Yom Kippur, the highest Jewish holy day. The Jews believed they were being resettled.

We saw it all. It was awful. Horrible. A long line of people walking. Children, old men... women, young people... All the men had been drafted. They were away fighting. Only old men, women, and children remained. An immense crowd of people, impossible for me to count, was brought here. The line was endless. So was the automatic rifle fire and shots from a machine gun. When we went to bed at home, our heads were full of the sound of shooting. It's all impossible to forget. Inna Evguenieva lived at 1 Babi Yar Street. Aged 13 in 1941, she and her brothers and sister saw the two days of massacre from their attic window.

I could see everything. The ravine was by my house. We were as close to the ravine as we are to that tree. We saw it all. They were led to the ravine's sandy part, then stripped naked. For some reason, they were also beaten. They were made to lie down and beaten with whips. A rubber thing. If someone refused to undress, they'd shake him and tear off his clothes. They'd grab him and throw him in the ravine. I remember a group of four or five girls who absolutely refused to undress. The Germans pulled on their clothing. "Undress!" they shrieked. And they refused. They attacked the Germans. We could hear. The Germans cursed them and shot them then and there, fully dressed. They died with their clothes on. They were dragged to the ravine and thrown in. Others were docile. They didn't protest.

I remember, that evening, the clothing piled up. Coats, little souvenirs. It was all loaded into bins and hauled away. We could see the outlines of the bodies. At the end of the day, they built a circular sand dike. In its center, we could see a black pool of blood and fat. A lake of black liquid. So many people had been killed... The wounded bled. You could see the blood through the sand. The thing that struck me then was the excellent Ukrainian spoken by the Germans. When I went home, I asked my grandmother why. I understand all that they said. The curses, the insults... They were Ukrainians, that's why. They were horrible. Such cruelty is rare. They took babies. They didn't kill them. They shook their blankets until the babies fell into the ravine.

It turns out people could be like that. They were anti-Soviet. Later, I saw a film saying they'd been hurt and wanted revenge. Revenge against children? The women? They were innocent. They weren't the guilty ones. They took revenge on these thousands of people. 100,000 or 150,000 people died here. They could have settled the score between themselves, not by killing a peaceful people. Today, if a person takes one life, he is judged. But for taking 150,000 lives, what punishment should be found?

In two days, Einsatzgruppe C and its auxiliaries killed 33,771 people. The few survivors were held at Syrets concentration camp, with a direct path to the ravine, where killing continued until the end of the war. In the beginning, the killing was daily, but six months later, it was only twice a week. There were specific days: Tuesdays and Thursdays, or Fridays. I don't remember which. Thursdays or Fridays. On those days, we weren't allowed to walk here. We had to go all the way around, behind the concentration camp. It wasn't that big. Three rows of barbed wire. When they made the fence, the prisoners of war and the concentration camp inmates were forced to work very fast. They were digging holes and driving posts as fast as they could. They ran around with rags in their mouths. It made them gag. I remember that rag in their mouths.

After the Jews, they assembled the Gypsies and shot them, too. Men bonded by mass murder engaged in other violent pursuits -- sadism, rape, shooting the children of Bjelaja Zerkow for sport or burying them alive in this cemetery in Kamenets-Podolsky. Eastern Europe was the laboratory for endless experimentation in how to kill. In this abandoned mine pit, the entire Jewish population of Dounaevetskaya was buried alive. Cyanide poisoning, sterilization, extermination of the newborn in the Lviv ghetto clinic: the victims were spared no horror.

Partly to spare the executioners the psychological trauma of participating in extermination actions, and partly because they were consuming so much alcohol, the use of poison gas prevailed as an alternative to point-blank murder. Arthur Nebe, commander of Einsatzgruppe B in Byelorussia, had pioneered the use of the gas chamber in the T4 program, eliminating people with disabilities. This was suspended in 1941 due to public outcry in Germany. Some 70,000 patients in public hospitals had been killed.

In Konin, trials with pits, where victims had been boiled alive for two hours as their executioners looked on, had been disappointing. Another system, more hermetic and discreet, had been developed: vans were designed to gas victims with carbon monoxide. Starting in December 1941, a gas van was issued to each Einsatzkommando. Arthur Nebe immediately used the apparatus in the Minsk region.

Altogether there were more than 20 gas vans deployed along the Soviet border. In Minsk, the killing starts in early fall 1941 and goes all the way through 1942 and even 1943 and involved the killing not only of Jews in the area but also partisans who were captured by the Germans and also particularly deportees, so that means Jews deported from western Europe or Germany that arrived in this area were brought to a site and then gassed by these vans. The gas that was used was the carbon monoxide coming out of the exhaust of the trucks. So the exhaust was connected with a pipe, a flexible pipe, to the interior, the compartment of the truck. The people would be herded in there and compacted to maximum capacity, which would speed up the process, or was at least designed to speed up the process.

Again, not often did it work as planned, and that would lead to a delay in the time that people get killed, which would add to the torture involved. Now, will you tell the tribunal who furnished these vans to the Einsatzgruppe? The gas vans were not Einsatzgruppen equipment. They were issued to the Gruppe with their own staff. The builder of the vans was the officer in charge. They were issued to the Einsatzgruppen by Reich Central Security Office.

I was told that the commandos didn't like to use the gas vans. Uh, why not? Because the burial of the people who died in the vans was too difficult a task. Extermination centers were set up, prisons where the victims were subjected to hard labor before being killed. The Ninth Fort in Kaunas, Kaiserwald in Riga, and Yanovska in Lviv. The frequent riots were ruthlessly quelled. Leon Wells, whose family was wiped out, miraculously survived Yanovska, after having been forced to dig his own grave.

When we got to the sands, we found that there was no grave prepared for us. We got undressed, again registered every name so to know for sure that nobody disappeared on the marching road. Everybody got a shovel and we started to dig our own grave. When the grave was finished, they started to read from these registration lists and by two walked down the grave, had to lay down side by side with their faces down and were shot. The next two had to cover a little sand over the first two and lay down in the other direction, line by line, and were shot again, and so it went ahead.

My dream at the moment was, as I was standing, to get my blood out, to have something to drink, because of my thirst due to the high fever in pneumonia and typhus. To drink my own blood, that was my realization, what I was looking forward to. When nearby was a bigger group working on the building of this camp, building barracks, and I disappeared between these people. It seems that he, the SS man, was afraid that he lost me for his superiors, too. Because according to the law, anybody that was already once at the sands can never return anymore to the concentration camp.

To get out from the concentration camp at this time, to escape from the concentration camp, was no problem at all. One could escape easily. The only thing that was a problem was that, if one escaped, they shot ten people from your brigade and they brought all your family and relatives and hanged them in the streets. So, at this time still, most of us had family in the city.

In November 1941, Friedrich Jeckeln, the butcher of Babi Yar and Kamenets-Podolsky, was assigned to the Baltic countries. He immediately went to Riga to liquidate the ghetto. Jeckeln and Stahlecker, of Einsatzgruppe A, chose Rumbula Forest, bordering the city, as their killing field. At work, we saw Soviet POWs. Often, we worked together. We were building railroads or unloading ships in the harbor. We were forbidden to speak to them, but we would do it anyway. They told us, "We're digging graves for you." The news spread quickly in the ghetto.

We said, "The POWs don't understand the graves are for them!" They warned us, but we couldn't believe it. Jeckeln had already elaborated the plan. He had calculated that it took an hour to kill 1,000 people. To bring them in, have them undress, funnel them through this corridor called a "schlauch." People had to run between two lines of police, who were clubbing them. And at the end was a big pit, dug for them.

Can a person believe that killers will force their victims to lie down on the still-warm, bloody corpses of others? Face down, with killers walking on their backs, shooting them dead, one after another? Try to imagine the scene. "Apocalyptic" may be too weak a term. The Arajs commando took orders directly from the German SD. It was a Latvian SD division. The Germans used them, of course, but they weren't the main gunners. They only shot the people who tried to escape, or who resisted going through the schlauch.

After the first extermination action in Ludzas Street, there were piles of corpses, many were children and elderly people. On November 30th, in the evening, they said that anyone who volunteered to haul them away would be permitted to visit his family in the big ghetto. A friend from school, Juze Goldberg, and I volunteered. My parents and sister were still in the ghetto. It was already dusk. Night falls quickly on the 30th of November. Some people had carts; others, big sleighs. We were given children's sleds and tied two together to carry the bodies. It would have been hard to carry adults on them. They weren't big enough, but we picked up kids' bodies.

They were wearing several layers of clothing. And the blood wasn't always visible because of the layers. The children's eyes were wide open. They seemed to look straight at you. There were orders from Himmler that he wanted drastically to reduce the number of Jews, and so in Riga, of course, there was a notorious Rumbula massacre, two massacres. And in the middle of December, it was the turn of Liepaja. They had killed a little less than half of the Jews by November. And then they rounded up another 2,700 or so in December and shot them also. And that left about a thousand. And after some further killings, there were 800 left that went in the ghetto. And this time in December it was also my turn.

Edward Anders was caught on Skede Beach the day the Jews of Liepaja were liquidated. Thanks to the courage of Latvian friends and that of his mother, who bribed a Nazi officer to give him a false certificate of Aryan descent, he escaped death. They had three execution squads: one German, two Latvian. One of the Latvians was in the Latvian SD unit. The other ones were just ordinary police that had been ordered to escort the Jews to this place, Schtit. But then when they arrived there, their lieutenant told them, "You'll have to shoot."

So they had rifles and then they counted out groups of ten Jews, and there were 20 marksmen. Each of them had to... each of the victims got two bullets. And then there came the next group. It was all quite efficiently organized. And there exists a dozen pictures of those executions, which a German SS man had photographed and a Jew working in the security police as an electrician... noticed that roll of film in this SS man’s room when he was supposed to do some electrical work there.

And so he quickly arranged to have the film copied and then put it back. And then he hid these pictures. And after the war, when Liepaja was occupied by the Red Army, he immediately contacted the Russian counterintelligence, SMERSH, and told them, "We have pictures showing the executions," and they were flown to Moscow the next day and they were used in war crimes trials. The first picture shows a number of Latvian policemen. The one on the left wears a fur hat. It's a cold day and unfortunately most of the Jewish victims had to undress before being shot.

So the policemen, at least, were comfortable. He’s guarding a number of Jewish women. They’re all wearing yellow stars on their chest and their backs. And you can see that they are sitting there quietly. None of them are tearing their hair out or crying or anything. They’re very stoic. And at the front right, there’s a German military car, sitting on the background here. So it’s clear that the Germans were involved. They supervised the whole operation.

The rule seems to have been that young women had to undress completely. Older women and children and old men could keep, at least, their underwear on. The outer clothes were taken for reuse by other people. And here is a scene where a number of Jewish girls, with one exception, they're all stark naked. They're running past the gauntlet of Latvian policemen. There were some executions in the countryside where some orgies took place and girls were raped and so on, but nothing of the sort seems to have happened this time.

But, as far as I know, they really wanted only to look at these naked girls. There's a group of three to the left. The one in the middle is being held by her neighbors. We can see that her head is quite low. She seems to be close to fainting. The others are holding her, probably to prevent her from falling over. Here we see the Epstein family. Emma Epstein is on the far left. She is bent down. She is dressed in white. But you can see her head and her arm. And next to her is her 18-year-old daughter, Mia, who already had been forced to undress completely, and is trying to cover herself as much as possible.

And her younger brother is undressing himself, standing in front of her. And in the background, one sees a number of Latvian policemen, quite a few of them. I think this Epstein family is a particularly sad example of what happened to the local Jews. The husband of Emma Epstein, Haim Epstein, was a banker, was arrested by the Russians in early 1941. He was in some gulag camp and he died about four or five months after his family did. Of course, he didn't know that they were all dead.

This picture shows a group, including several children, with the sea in the background. There's a boy in a dark shirt leading the group. He's looking to the right and he's grimacing. He seems to be upset at what he's seeing. Right behind him is a little girl who is not going forward. She's turned around and holding onto her mother, who's apparently trying to calm her down. Behind them is a young boy who's not looking to the right. And finally, the next one is a woman who's also not looking to the right.

And she has a little baby on her shoulder. The baby's putting its head on the mother's shoulder. Not a care in the world. Doesn't know it's going to be killed in the next couple of minutes or so. What they were seeing is shown in the next picture. There were ten women lined up on the far side of the ditch ready to be shot by the execution squad standing on the other side of the ditch, which was about eight meters wide. The third woman from the left seems to be quite upset, and she's leaning against the woman next to her, knowing that the last seconds of her life have come.

They're all facing the sea, which, of course, all of them loved. This was one of the nice things about Liepaja, the beach. And, in a way, it may have been reassuring to them that the last sight they got of this earth was the sea. So that was the picture that the young boy in the dark shirt saw. He sees women standing at the ditch ready to be shot. And in the next picture, it's the turn of the boy in the dark shirt and the rest of the group. Now they're standing, lined up there. There are quite a few bodies that have fallen into the ditch. The ditch was about 3 meters deep, so there were quite a few layers of bodies.

And in the far right, one can see there is a man with some object, which turns out to be a rifle. He is pushing the bodies lying on the edge of the ditch down into the ditch. And the little girl that you saw before that was facing her mother, she's again standing next to the mother. The rule at these executions was that when children were old enough to stand, they were treated like adults. Each of them got two bullets. But if a child couldn't stand, if it was too small, then the mother was supposed to hold it up high and one bullet went to the child, one to the mother.

This picture was taken probably a few seconds after the previous one. The Jews have now been shot. The boy in the dark shirt is lying on the ledge and is about to be pushed down into the ditch. One can also see there is a small flag between the policeman and the bodies. They would generally move this flag to tell the victims where they were supposed to stand. It was all well thought out and organized.

In December '41, after six months of massacre, the Baltic Jews were wiped out. In a series of reports tinged with macabre sarcasm, Karl Jäger, the Nazi officer in charge of Einsatzkommando 3, informed his superiors that the Baltic lands were now "Judenfrei" -- free of Jews. January 1942. Just when a German victory seemed imminent, the terrible Russian winter, with its near-Arctic cold and winds, set in. This, and the 250,000 men Stalin sent in as reinforcements, slowly reversed the balance of power. The Wehrmacht made no headway, and sometimes even had to retreat.

Over the months, the destruction of the European Jews had become Adolf Hitler’s top priority. Even as Germany lost ground to the Soviets, the genocide intensified. In Byelorussia, a hotbed of resistance to Nazism, Einsatzgruppe B had trouble meeting its weekly quota of dead Jews and Communists. Small groups of partisans hiding in the forests harassed German troops. In retaliation, the villages were systematically razed and their inhabitants exterminated. To aid the death squads, new contingents of Lithuanian, Latvian, and Ukrainian killers were sent to Byelorussia.

Nobody told us what our duties would be. They just trucked us out one morning. We only knew our destination when we got there. It was a military secret. The German soldiers and Lithuanian volunteers were sent to Minsk. That's where the Jewish genocide started. Where did you shoot Jews for the first time? In some little town. I forget the name. The Nazis killed defenseless people. All the Jewish men were off at war. Only old folks, women, and children remained. They were the main people we were ordered to kill.

Did you kill children? Yes, we shot the children who were in the pit. We had to shoot them dead, or they'd have died by suffocation. Since they had to die anyway, it was more merciful to kill them quickly. We used incendiary bullets. They burnt the clothes. The burnt smell was everywhere. When the mothers tried to protect their children, who did you aim at first? First we shot the parents, then the children. So the parents wouldn't have to see their kids die.

The little ones... It's monstrous! The older children knew their fate. They lay down in the pit. But the little ones tried to crawl over to their dead parents. They crawled on all fours. Starting in 1942, and 1943, although auxiliaries were recruited as before, on the ideological basis of common ground with Nazism, economic calculations, social ascendancy factors, and functional strategies also played a role.

Most of them were farmers, but they were motivated by the fact that working for the police is much less hard than working on a farm. If you're a young man at that time, you would probably be otherwise sent to forced labor. Certainly, from the spring of '42, this was happening on a large scale. And the rewards in the police were definitely better than the other possibilities they might have. These people were often committed nationalists.

But one must realize that joining these militias was, for certain POWs, the only way to escape death, or to obtain food rations slightly less miserable than those the authorities allotted to civilians. First, the Jews were forced to lie down in the pit. Gunners were posted all around. They'd shoot two or three victims already lying down, aiming at their shoulders or ribs. We didn't shoot them on the edges of the pit. We killed them in the pit, after they'd gone in and lain down.

They never screamed or begged. They went in bravely. They knew death was inescapable. To avoid being beaten, they didn't resist. They lay down, ready to die. We'd shoot the nearest victim. We barely moved the rifle; the person was so close. It was easy to know how many to kill. During the execution, the Germans kept the pits surrounded. They simply supervised. It was the Lithuanian soldiers who had to shoot the Jews.

During the shooting, the German soldiers took photos. They didn't shoot. Exactly how many Jews did you have to kill? The gunners were side by side along the pits with the Jews in it. We fired two or three bullets. We tried to aim as accurately as possible. One Jewish man pointed to his chest so we'd aim at it. They all had the Star of David on their backs. I shot him in the chest. I pitied him.

If I'd only wounded him, he'd have suffocated under the others. I killed him instantly. I didn't want to give him a non-fatal wound leading to a slow death. The Germans often brought POWs from the camps nearby. The POWs poured disinfectant on the bodies and then shoveled the earth over them. Did German officers also kill Jews? No. After the execution, they made sure they were all dead. If they found any alive, they killed them with a pistol.

I remember they walked on the bodies and shot the ones still alive. What would you say to a child whose parents you'd killed? I don't know. I'd ask for forgiveness. Although the ration of vodka given to the killers before each extermination Aktion was doubled, more and more yielded to sadism, insanity or depression. The psychological impact of so much violence was an issue that was fundamental, and the top Nazi officials had been aware of it since the campaign started.

The first report to mention these "psychic tensions" was filed by Einsatzgruppe A chief Walter Stahlecker, and dates from mid-July 1941. It almost portrays an epidemic of nervous breakdowns, widespread alcoholism -- that is, addiction to alcohol... and also strategies for dodging the violence of the genocide, by getting sick leave, finding excuses, refusing certain duties, etc. These avoidance strategies were quite prevalent.

It also was the fact, we know from many people who we have been able to get testimony from, that an alarming number of people, even if it was stressful in the beginning, eventually become so numb and so inured to what they're doing, it becomes a casual routine. Uh, helped by copious amounts of alcohol. But they do become literally numb to what's happening, and some people got used to it. Other people actually learned to enjoy it. This is why you get, I think, part of some of the sadism.

Inventing even ways to amuse themselves in what they're doing, to constantly kind of reinvent the thrill of what's happening. Sort of almost a kind of transgressive thrill, as they invent new forms of degradation in what they're doing. Seeing the punitive detachment, they all started screaming. It was a huge crowd of people. Not a dozen or so, but 7,500. They started screaming. There weren't many Germans. They were Ukrainian policemen. But not many Germans.

A girl, probably about 6, got away from the group. Crawling through the clover. She got as far as my cart. A policeman saw her and ran over to tell a German. And the German came and shot her right beside my cart. You see what a terrible tragedy it was. Kazymyr Vychnevsky, a farmer from Orynyn in the Ukraine, was requisitioned in July 1942. He used his plow to push the corpses of those Jews who had tried to flee into the pit.

I was by the pit, and the Germans called me, the riflemen. They beckoned to me to come. I went. I said, "Guten Tag." They were totally drunk, sitting by the machine guns. They gave me a shot of schnapps and I drank it. Another brought two young girls. He'd caught them somewhere. He led them by the road. He stood the girls by the pit. They were young, about 16 or 18. They were white as a sheet. They stood while the German went to see the gunners and had a few shots of vodka and schnapps.

The two girls stayed by the pit. There was no place for them to run. It wasn't the same back then. There were no hiding places. The poor things just stood there, waiting. Then the German remembered them. He sent one of the others over. That guy took his gun and walked to the pit, totally drunk. Forgive me for saying it, but he gave the girl a kick in the ass. She fell in the water and swam. He shot at her, in the water. But he couldn't hit her. He was too drunk. He kept missing.

Arthur Nebe, commander of Einsatzgruppe B in Byelorussia, whose chauffeur committed suicide because he couldn’t handle participating in large-scale massacres, asked to be relieved of his functions in November 1941. Karl Jäger, author of the cynical 1942 report declaring the Baltic States free of Jews, soon required treatment for depression. Even Bach-Zelewski, the Supreme Group Leader of the SS and SD in central Russia, lost his nerve. He was swimming in a sea of blood. Hundreds of thousands were killed during the searches of the Byelorussian forests. A single raid might lead to tens of thousands of deaths.

He was one of the most ruthless Nazi criminals. And yet he was one of those who was debilitated by a nervous breakdown in 1942. He was in recovery and therefore absent for almost a year. This double characteristic of the blood-thirsty brute tortured by conscience would also decide his fate, in the sense that, having emerged unscathed from the Nuremberg trials, and the first trials held by the Germans, in the late 1950s, Bach-Zelewski turned himself in for his crimes and was sentenced to 15 years in prison in Hamburg. In 1963 or '64, I think. And he died in prison.

Himmler was concerned about the psychological toll the killings were taking on his troops. Many had to be sent back to Berlin. By the end of 1942, there was only one German for every 10 local auxiliaries. The extermination planners sought more efficient ways to kill masses of Jews, which would also spare their men from direct participation in the genocide. Despite these difficulties, 1942, when most of the ghettos were brutally liquidated, was the deadliest year for Eastern European Jews.

In the summer of 1942, what Raul Hilberg calls "the second wave" of genocide began. This was a rigorously methodical genocide, that followed a plan clearly visible on the map from top to bottom, north to south. The ghettos were systematically liquidated. The inhabitants were put through a selection process. Certain men were sent to concentration camps to work. But about 90% of the population in the ghettos was exterminated in mass shootings.

This all happened from mid-'42 to mid-'43. It seems likely that the Jewish communities had been wiped out by mid-1943. From this time on, the range of victims of German military groups was mostly non-Jewish Soviet civilians. Hitler wanted to continue the annihilation of the Jews in Western Europe. He knew he wouldn’t be able to use the same methods. The Western Europeans would be outraged if they witnessed such bloodshed.

In addition, to avoid demoralizing the SS, it would be necessary to use a method that would minimize contact between killer and victim. On January 20th, 1942, in a villa on Lake Wannsee, not far from Berlin, Heydrich, Eichmann, and the other architects of the Final Solution held a conference. After a review of the Einsatzgruppen reports declaring almost all of Eastern Europe "free of Jews," they sealed a plan to eliminate Western European Jews by deporting them to extermination camps equipped with gas chambers.

Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka, and Auschwitz-Birkenau would become the instruments for murder on a truly massive scale, death factories far more efficient than the mobile killing commandos. The technicians of genocide added up the figures, arriving at an overall total of 11 million Jewish victims. In honor of RSHA commander Reinhard Heydrich, assassinated by members of the Czech resistance five months after the conference, the plan to industrialize the genocide was dubbed “Operation Reinhard."

Tested successfully on Soviet prisoners in the cellars of Block 11 at the Auschwitz Camp on September 3rd, 1941, the gas chamber became the standard death-dealing implement. Most of the extermination camps were built in Poland, under the authority of the general government of Ostland, the heads of which were Globocnik and Frank, Hitler’s former lawyer. These hook-nosed predators, these messengers of destruction, these pitiful pipsqueaks and buffoons of darkness, these accursed scum! Germans don't like Jews, Jews don't like Germans. So the Jew must disappear.

But the tide was turning and time was running out. After Rommel was defeated on the Tunisian front, a plan to send Einsatzgruppen commandos to North Africa had to be abandoned. In the Soviet Union, after bitter fighting, the German defeat at Stalingrad irreversibly changed the course of the war. In the spring of 1943, 4,500 corpses were discovered in Katyn Forest. They were the bodies of Polish military officers and intellectuals killed three years earlier. The event hit the headlines. Stalin and Hitler blamed each other for the massacre.

Although the Soviet NKVD was behind it, for Hitler, faced with possible defeat, it was a sign that it was now urgent to erase all evidence of the genocide he had perpetrated. Hence Operation 1005. The Germans actually made a demonstration about Katyn, but this also alerted them to the need to keep their own activities secret, and the contrast against putting propaganda against Katyn and what they're doing themselves.

So it's only by 1943, Sonderkommando 1005 had been established, and they used the information from the Einsatzgruppen to try to go back and uncover as many of the mass graves that they had created and to destroy whatever evidence there was there, everything from grinding bones to burning the corpses. And it was quite a large operation. They didn't go to every site, but they made quite an intensive effort, and it's very clearly to cover their traces, to make it, in case there is some sort of peace, that these massacres should not become known and should not be used against them to punish them.

So it's Sonderkommando 1005 that is under the command of Paul Blobel, who was a former Einsatzgruppen officer. And he then creates a whole group of different subcommandos who are assigned to different regions, and they're to go out and, usually using Jewish slave labor, exhume all these graves, burn the bodies, and then kill all the witnesses. So, it was a massive operation. And they even sent a detachment down to Serbia to destroy the graves there. But most of the time, they're operating in the Soviet areas where all these countless massacres had taken place.

I reached Kaiserwald camp in July 1943. That coincided with the battle of Kursk, a huge defeat for Germany. The defeat at Stalingrad had a limited impact, whereas the one in Kursk was much more important, in my opinion. The first to understand that the war was lost, according to my own theory, were the SS. That's why it was imperative for them to destroy the evidence. Not just the bodies of Jews and the others, but also the evidence.

Before, they hadn't bothered. Hitler had promised a thousand-year Reich. If the Jews disappeared, they'd be forgotten in a few generations. Who remembers the Crusades today? We study them in history, but no one thinks of them as a tragedy. So they created a commando just to destroy the evidence. This commando had a code name that I can't recall. In German, "Stützpunkt" means "stronghold," or something like that. And who would dig up the bodies? The Jews, of course.

Hence, a new chapter in horror. It was like Russian roulette. Being assigned to one of those squads meant you were as good as dead. You'd be sent to Rumbula Forest. You'd spend a week or 10 days digging up bodies, and then they'd kill and burn you. A new squad would be drafted to continue the work. When the front started moving west, they brought in another group of Jews. They were surrounded by barbed wire. A hut was built for them. And they dug up bodies and burned them. This was between autumn 1943 and early 1944.

In this forest, 59 pits had been dug. Later, they opened them, to burn the corpses. That lasted almost six months. Meanwhile, people were still being brought in and shot but less often. Dr. Wells, please. What did you have to do? We used to uncover all the graves that were people killed during the last three years. And uncover, take out the bodies. Make up pyres. And burn these bodies. And grind the bones. Pick out all the valuables in the ashes, like gold teeth, rings, and so on. Separate them.

After grinding the bones, we used to put all the ashes in the air so they disappear. Plant over the graves' backs, seed back plants, so nobody can recognize wherever it was their grave. In addition to it, they used to bring new people, new victims. They were shot there. They got undressed there, they were shot there. And we had to burn these new bodies, too. They knew -- it wasn't that we found -- they knew, here a grave, here a grave, and we went, uncovered the grave, took out the corpses, and we took out about a thousand corpses a day.

And every night, the SS came from the bank, the SS men, and took and was given to them the gold and all the stuff that had to be given to them, and they took it and went away into the night, the evening. It was awful. Passing a place where people are murdered... A slaughterhouse is bad enough. Here, people were being killed! How could we possibly bear it? We were afraid they'd kill us all because we had witnessed it all. We lived in suspense.

And when the bodies were burning... what a stench! They'd been there for two or three years. The stinking smoke filled the skies. They poured something on it. We ran to the fields to escape it. In Kaunas, Lithuania, Operation 1005 focused on Fort 9, where the remains of 80,000 Jews lay. It was one of the forts surrounding Kaunas. They were built by the czars to defend Kaunas from the Germans. It had been turned into a prison.

When the Germans came, they sent Jews to their death from Fort 9. With the help of the Lithuanians, over 90% of the Lithuanian Jews were massacred. In October 1943, as a resistance fighter, I was sent with a large group to set up a base outside Kaunas, near the Byelorussian border. On the way, we were arrested by Lithuanian police. I was handed over to the Gestapo and tortured. Then, on November 18, 1943, I was transferred to Fort 9, known as the "Death Fort."

I was in the group that dug up and burned the bodies. Opening the pits, among the victims, we found mothers and their babies. The Germans called them "dolls." It was impossible to recognize them. One night, a friend of mine showed me an ID card he'd found. It was his uncle's. He said to me, "Today, I burned my uncle." I imagined I must have burned my parents, unknowingly, without recognizing them.

Each member of the commandos who exhumed and burnt the corpses was assigned a precise task. The Brandmeister had to stoke the flames. The Zahler, or counter, was in charge of keeping a tally of the corpses that were methodically stacked on the logs and doused with some inflammable substance, which differed depending on the region. As prime witnesses of the genocide, the work commandos were routinely killed and replaced. At every Operation 1005 site, the Jewish laborers, who no longer had families to protect, attempted insurrection or escape.

How to escape? We drilled holes in the door at the end of the tunnel to unhinge it. We got away with it. Then we needed to escape from the compound, surrounded by six-meter walls. We needed a way to scale that. One of my friends made a ladder in three segments, each two meters long. When everything was set, we picked a place. One of my men ran up and told me, "Anatoli wants to know if he can hang up this picture." I didn't know he was so talented! He gave us two drawings. He was arrested and interrogated.

And before he was killed, he made four more drawings, which were rather extraordinary. In the first, he drew an SS officer losing control of his bowels. The second showed a day at work. The escape was an hour away. The Germans still hadn't noticed anything. The night of the escape, I got a message that the partisans had been captured. We could have fled without our comrades, but our conscience wouldn't let us. I decided to wait a few more days.

Two or three days later, it started to snow. The snow hadn't melted, but we couldn't wait any

Homeland with forests of gallows. Now is the time for the executioners to hang. The death knell of their vile acts has sounded. May the brown fascist plague be forever eradicated. May it never more be a threat to freedom-loving Soviet peoples.

He wanted to live! His conduct at the trial attested to his will to live. He even filed a plea for amnesty. It should be published. He wanted to live, "to make amends." But he had hundreds of thousands of lives to pay for. I don't see how he could have done it. To me, the fact that Jeckeln wrote to the Soviet Supreme Court to plead for his life was Nazism's greatest ideological failure.

About 2,300 youths were made harmless in a similar way. And from the last... In Western Europe, Nazi criminals were judged at the Nuremberg trials. After he had condemned Goering and the top leaders of the regime, Benjamin Ferencz, the young American prosecutor who found the Einsatzgruppen reports in Berlin, convinced the tribunal to add a trial dedicated to the crimes of the death commandos on the Eastern Front. It opened on September 15, 1947.

...to hear these charges of international crimes and to adjudge them in the name of civilization. We had the list. I knew who they were. We captured their roster. We immediately sent the information out to all of the POW camps. "Anybody who's on this list, please report to headquarters." Some of the men we already had in custody for the international military tribunal trial.

Though we had about 10 million Nazi party files that we captured, we just selected a few sample cases to prove to the world beyond doubt what had happened and to hold accountable a few of the leaders who were responsible for those crimes. Most of them had doctor degrees. Many of them were lawyers. Some of them – one of them in particular – had two doctor degrees: Doctor Doctor Rasch. I had a special affection to put him on trial.

His lawyer came to see me. He was, of course, indicted for that crime without reference to Babi Yar. We just knew it was an area of Kiev from his report. His lawyer came to see me. And he said, "We have to drop the case against Rasch." And I said, "Why?" He said, "Because he's sick. He can't stand trial." I said, "What does he have?" He said, "He has Parkinson's disease." I said, "What's Parkinson's disease?" He said, "He's shaking all the time." I said, "If I killed that many people, I'd be shaking, too."

He died. I don't know in which direction he moved, but, uh... I think it was a just result. Immediate justice. Blobel was his chief, a general, SS. But Blobel, by the time he got around to it, after Stalingrad, and they thought, "Hey, there may be a day of reckoning," he tried to conceal the evidence of his crimes by digging them up and blowing them up so there would be no evidence available. It didn't help him.

How do you plead to this indictment, guilty or not guilty? Not guilty. You may be seated. Judge Speight will now question the following defendant. And then, for the ridiculous reason, we limited the number of defendants to 24 – in fact, two of them dropped out, one for death and one for suicide. We had 22. And the reason it was limited for 22 or 24, out of 3,000 mass murderers, was we didn't have any more seats in the courtroom.

The psychological profile was probably very much the same, but the argumentation in the courtroom was different. Some of them lied outrageously. Outrageously. Which meant, "I hear now for the first time that Jews were killed." Some said, "We were only obeying superior orders." This was standard. Others said, "I wasn't there." I could play one against the other, and the evidence given in court was mostly a pack of lies. But the mentality was all the same.

These were loyal German Nazi fanatics who believed in what they were doing, who thought what they were doing was right. The best explanation for the justification for what they did was given by Otto Ohlendorf. Ohlendorf was an intelligent man. Dr. Otto Ohlendorf. Father of five children. General in the SS and a fairly honest man. He explained why he did this.

And it's important to know the mentality of mass murderers. If you want to stop mass murderers, you must know what motivates them. How do their minds work? And Ohlendorf was the perfect man to explain that to me, and I drew it out of him, the judges drew it out of him as well.

From June 1941 until Heydrich's death in June 1942, I led Einsatzgruppen D and was deputy chief of security police and the 11th Army Intelligence Service. To which army was Group D attached? Group D was not attached to an Army corps, but directly attributed to the 11th Army. Where did Group D operate? Group D operated in the southern Ukraine.

And he said, "We did it in self-defense." I said, "What do you mean, self-defense? Nobody attacked Germany. Germany attacked Poland, Russia, France, Belgium, Holland, Sweden, Norway. Where is your self-defense?" "Aha," he said, "but I knew, we knew, that the Soviet Union intended to attack us, and therefore we had to attack them first to preempt an attack against us."

And why did you kill all the Jews? "Well, everybody knows the Jews were sympathetic to the Bolsheviks. And so you had to kill them, too." And why did you kill all the children? "Well, if we eliminated the parents, the children would grow up and they would be enemies of the Reich as well, so we were interested in the long-term security of our country and therefore we had to kill the children, too." As if to say, it's perfectly logical to kill thousands of little children.

Otto Ohlendorf states that his estimate of the number killed by the Einsatzgruppe D during the time that he was in charge was 90,000. And he comes to that conclusion from the reports. And that is what I understand he says today. Correct. I do not agree with this answer, Your Honor. For this reason: as I said, it may have reported that 90,000 people had been killed, but I cannot confirm that 90,000 really were killed, still less that they were killed by the Einsatzgruppe, because the Einsatzgruppe, or rather the Einsatzkommandos, also reported external events. Therefore, I can only repeat, that 90,000 were reported.

Ohlendorf was a good example of the type of man who would do that. And he explained that he would have done it again, he would do it again. He believed that the Fuhrer knew more than he did, and if it was necessary for the protection of Germany, he would do it again. And he was the father of five children.

And because he was honest, I thought, well, I didn't want him to have the feeling that my personal intervention was vengeance as a Jew and glorifying, you know, getting even with this Major General in the SS who killed 90,000 Jews. I thought, well, he's a human being. He's got a family. He's got five children. Maybe he wants me to take some message to his wife or something like that.

So I went down to the death house, which is right below the courtroom. There's a little lift that goes down and there are the various cells. And they brought him out in a little cell with a heavy glass in between. A few holes in it. And I said, "Hey, Ohlendorf..." I spoke to him in German. Uh, he has been sentenced to death. We both knew he was a dead man. Uh, "Is there anything I can do for you?"

And, uh... It was a human gesture. I didn't think in terms of clemency. It was just a human gesture. I thought he might say, "Well, tell my wife, my children I love them, I'm sorry," something. He said, "The Jews in America will suffer for this." He was threatening me. I said, "Goodbye, Mr. Ohlendorf" in English. I turned around and walked away.

The next time I saw Ohlendorf was on a photograph of him dropping in the gallows and lying there dead in a coffin. Those were the only words I ever exchanged with Ohlendorf or with any of the defendants. The only words I ever wanted to exchange.

Of the 24 Einsatzgruppe officers judged at Nuremberg, two were sentenced to jail for life, six to shorter terms, and 14 to death by hanging. Only four of them were actually executed. The ten other death sentences were commuted to life imprisonment. And in 1958, all the prisoners were freed.

Why were the death sentences commuted? They were commuted because, starting in 1947-'48, the Americans were well aware of their need for a strong, stable West Germany, firmly allied with the West, in the face of the looming Cold War. But German opinion was very touchy on the question of justice and trials by victors. There was a strong resemblance between public perceptions of the ends of the two World Wars.

War criminals had been tried in Leipzig after World War I. German opinion was strongly affected by conservative trends. They saw these Nuremberg Trials as victor-run trials, trials that were just going to be about German culpability. The Americans sought to avoid a 1918-style end-of-war. As a result, their policy on enforcing the sentences was extremely liberal, indeed.

Sandberger, for example, had his death sentence commuted to life imprisonment, then five years. He was freed in 1954, I think. Instead of hanging, he served six years. Nothing happened to the thousands of shooters. Nothing happened to commanders that we didn't have in custody. Because, as a practical matter, if we didn't have them, we couldn't stay on in Germany and continue to search for them.

Years later, the Germans, as the result of some provocation – I won't go into the detail – set up its Zentrale Stelle, or central office, for the prosecution of Nazi criminals. And I knew the people who were in charge of that, and they were good people. And they got dossiers of all of these Einsatzgruppen files that we had. We turned our files over to them and also to the state prosecution authorities, and they began a number of prosecutions.

Later, the lower-ranking officers were tracked down, questioned, and sometimes indicted. But it's not surprising that relatively few investigations led to trials. The Germans made the fundamental choice to reduce the prosecutors' scope by setting a statute of limitations. The only charges were murder and complicity in murder. German law had no definition of crimes against humanity until later, so they could not be charged.

Most of the thousands of German killers returned to jobs with the police, their pre-war occupation. Men who had operated at the heart of the Nazi death squads could be found directing traffic, investigating crimes, or writing reports in the offices of the West German Interior Ministry, after the war. They were never bothered.

Sixty-five years after the perpetration of the crimes against humanity on their soil, two decades after the collapse of the Soviet empire, the countries of Eastern Europe seem to have come back to life. The devastation left by World War II, then the Soviet dictatorship, have nonetheless left indelible traces. The killers and their collaborators have done their time at the gulag – at least, those who were sent there.

I swear by God that I will fight Bolshevism until my last breath! Freed only recently from Communism, the Eastern European countries needed to regain their national pride, identified with nationalist movements for whom Russia was the first enemy. Some of these nationalists were the murderers who helped commit the genocide in the first years of the war.

Today, the Galicia SS lie in sparkling new mausoleums, while most of the mass graves where thousands of Jews were murdered are in a state of total neglect. This gathering in modern-day Lviv honors both the UPA, a Ukrainian nationalist militia, and the Galicia SS, both of which lent armed thugs to the pogroms of June 1941.

Lithuania has no intention of trying its elderly citizens for crimes against humanity. The implosion of Soviet power has led to such lawlessness and humiliation in Russia that neo-Nazi groups have sprung up. They randomly seize and kill people from ethnic minorities, using methods similar to those of the Einsatzgruppen.

But the Jewish communities who lived for centuries on the Ukrainian plains, in the Baltic cities, and in the Byelorussian countryside, their Yiddish culture, rich and lively until the cataclysm of June 1941, all the farmers, tailors, factory workers, and poets... they have disappeared forever.