America's Nazi Secret: An Insider's History (16 page)

Dr. Six nominated teams of two of his Byelorussian collaborators to organize each city and town under military occupation.
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One was assigned to head the political administration, the other the paramilitary police. General Kraatz, the Wehrmacht counterpart to the SS in charge of rear area security for Army Group Center, was impressed by the efficiency of Six’s collaborators. Ostrowsky, for example, had commandeered a German military staff car and within a week had established a network of pro-Nazi officials throughout every county in the Minsk district.
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In Minsk itself, Ostrowsky formed a municipal government subservient to the Nazis, while Franz Kushel put together a fledgling police force to replace the Communist militia.
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The SS equipped Kushel’s men with black uniforms and red armbands labeled “Polizei.”

Within days of their arrival, the Germans ordered the entire male population of Minsk to assemble on a field south of the city known as Drozdy. Drozdy Field was bordered on three sides by the river that flows through Minsk, making a small peninsula. At the base of the peninsula, the Germans established a barrier of barbed wire and machine-gun emplacements. Every man in the area – Jews, escaped criminals, Soviet prisoners of war, and ordinary townspeople – was present, and Byelorussian collaborators moved through the mob identifying those willing to work for the SS. Many of these were funneled to Kushel for his police force, which eventually totaled 20,000 men. Others were appointed to positions in the municipal administration being set up by the collaborators.

The rest were simply left in the open field for several days without food or water. The Germans divided the plain into areas for Soviet soldiers and civilians. The civilians began to receive food from the women of Minsk, who threw it to them over the fence. At night, Soviet soldiers would crawl over to the civilians and beg for a little food. For days the Germans debated the matter of rations for the captured soldiers. Although Germany was a signatory to the Geneva Convention on the treatment of prisoners of war, Russia was not. The matter of the Soviet POW rations was resolved quite simply: there would be none. In July, all male civilians were permitted to move back to Minsk after a security check, leaving thousands of soldiers behind. As the last of the civilian columns moved back to the city, they could hear the sound of machine guns in the distance.

When the surviving citizens returned from Drozdy, they found that there had been changes in Minsk. All Jews had been ordered to resettle within a ghetto that reached eastward across half the city from the Jewish cemetery to the upper bend of the river and then southward, almost to the old insurance building and the other commercial structures where the German administration and the Byelorussian collaborators had established their offices. In the center of the ghetto was the Ubelanyie marketplace, where the Jews were made to register. Lists were compiled identifying the residents of each house in the ghetto, and Jews were ordered to wear a large yellow Star of David on the front and back of their coats. The system that had worked so efficiently in Germany and Poland had come to Byelorussia.

A few Jews attempted to avoid registration and pass as Christians. To the Germans, all Slavs appeared the same, so that the collaborators’ assistance was invaluable in detecting Jews.
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They knew the accents and physical characteristics that differentiated a Byelorussian Jew from a gentile, and they served the Nazis as enforcers of the racial laws.
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When Jews were caught outside the ghetto, the Byelorussian police beat them, if they were lucky; if not, they were shot.
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Within the ghetto, the Germans established a Jewish police force under the control of a Judenrat, or Jewish council. The Judenrat was responsible for carrying out every Nazi demand, and was subordinate to the municipal council set up by the collaborators. The first demand imposed on the Judenrat was to raise a sizable amount of money to pay for the erection of a barbed-wire fence around the ghetto, which was to be cut off from the rest of the city except for two gates where German or Byelorussian guards were always posted.

Anyone who attempted to approach was shot. On one occasion, the police gunned down Christian Byelorussians who attempted to throw food onto trucks shuttling Soviet POWs to a new concentration camp.

The same scenario was played out in every city and town in Byelorussia. Jews were rounded up by the collaborators and relocated to the ghettos, where, to prevent the possibility of a rebellion, the educated leadership was marked for elimination first.
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Byelorussian officials ordered the Judenrat to make lists of workers and specialists for the issuance of work passes. Those without permits would receive no food. Believing that educated people might get some special consideration, many falsely listed themselves as teachers or as possessing a college education. The collaborators would turn the lists over to the SS, who would determine which specialists, such as doctors or machinists, were temporarily necessary to the war effort and certify the rest as human surplus. The Judenrat then assembled the persons on the surplus list for a special work detail. When fewer and fewer people returned from these details, the truth began to dawn on the Jews, but the disappearances went on. By August 1941, the ghettos had been effectively purged of their educated leadership.
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Radoslaw Ostrowsky’s men ran everything for the Germans.
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The streets of Minsk were patrolled by Byelorussian police. Hundreds of people were identified by the collaborators to be sent off to concentration camps. Slave labor projects, utilizing Jews and Soviet POWs, were initiated in factories reopened by the collaborators. Bombed-out buildings were rebuilt to house German troops, and roads were repaired to carry German vehicles. The collaborators opened warehouses to collect goods seized from the Jews. With the help of the Byelorusians,
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Minsk became an important staging area for the German advance upon Moscow.

Adolf Eichmann, an SS bureaucrat who had made himself an expert on Jewish affairs (he even picked up a smattering of Hebrew), was given the assignment of devising a solution for “the Jewish problem.” To Eichmann, the only practical way to rid Germany and the rest of Western Europe of their Jewish population was to deport them eastward to the farthest reaches of Poland, Russia, Byelorussia, and the Ukraine. Eichmann planned to resettle them as slave laborers in the ghettos of the Pale, the traditional dumping ground for Europe’s unwanted Jews. There they could be worked or starved to death and no one would know or care.

The ghettos of Minsk and Baranoviche were selected as holding pens for the Jews of Western Europe who were to be shipped in by rail. Eventually all the Jews would be killed. But first the SS and their Byelorussian collaborators would have to make room for them in ghettos that were already crowded with most of the remaining Jews of the region. The Einsatzgruppen and local “demonstrations” could kill hundreds of Jews in a day, but the size of the job ahead was mind-boggling. The murder of tens of thousands of Jews was an enormous task even for the Einsatzgruppen with their special training, and the cooperation of the collaborators was required.
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In the fall of 1941 the SS selected the heavily Jewish city of Borissow as a pilot project for the impending slaughter.

Borissow was under the control of Stanislaw Stankievich, another member of the Warsaw group picked by Dr. Six to assist Einsatzgruppe B.
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Obese and jowly, he held a doctorate in humanities and belonged to an upper class Byelorussian family active in collaborationist activities. One relative served with the German paratroops that had led the invasion of the Soviet Union; another had been editor of Ranitsa, the Byelorussian-language newspaper sponsored by the SS. Immediately following the invasion, Stankievich had worked with Franz Kushel to organize the local security system in Minsk for the Nazis. Moving on to Borissow, a town of some 15,000, more than half of them Jews, he wielded power through a police force garbed in black SS-type uniforms with the white-red-white of Byelorussia on their armbands.

Stankievich ordered all Jews to resettle in the poorest part of town. Even as they were complying, his men set fire to a few homes and blamed the incident on Jewish troublemakers trying to deprive the Germans of quarters for their troops. Fearful of provoking more incidents and eager to prove their willingness to cooperate, the remainder of the Jewish population obeyed him promptly. Stalin’s censorship had effectively prevented Soviet Jews from learning about Nazi oppression. When Stankievich ordered a wall to be built around the ghetto, they accepted this as an irritating but temporary measure to ensure that there was no communication with Russian partisans operating in the countryside. Anxious to show that they were not Communist sympathizers, the Judenrat leaders insisted that Stankievich’s orders be carried out and discouraged attempts to resist.
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Following his instructions from the SS, Stankievich imposed taxes on the Jews. Initially, the levies were small, but they soon became extortionate. The Judenrat paid ransom again and again until funds were exhausted. Then came the requisitions for clothing, furniture, medicine, equipment, books, and paper – even for part of the food rations already at starvation level. The enterprising peasants demanded whatever personal belongings the Jews had left in trade for every scrap of food sold by the peasants to the Jews in the ghetto.

In mid-October 1941, a Wehrmacht sergeant named Soennecken brought his boots to a Jewish cobbler for repair and found the Jews in a panic. Soennecken, assigned to military intelligence because he could speak Russian, had been detailed to Borissow to inspect defense measures against the partisans, and to observe the SS and its allies. The cobbler told him of the ghetto rumor that the local German military commander had ordered every Jew in the city rounded up the following night and executed. The Judenrat had sent a delegation to Stankievich begging him to intercede, pointing out that Jewish tradesmen and skilled workers were necessary to the war effort. The mayor had assured them that the fears were groundless, and promised that he would remind the military how cooperative the Judenrat had been in the collection of taxes.

Nevertheless, said the cobbler, the Jews were anxious. Borissow had undergone pogroms before, but on those occasions only a few had been killed; now the entire ghetto was threatened. Soennecken tried to reassure the cobbler, but he immediately went to the collaborators’ headquarters to speak with David Ehoff, the police chief.
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Soennecken knew that anti-Jewish measures were usually the responsibility of the SS and the local authorities, not the military. Further, he was convinced that no German general would be stupid enough to order a public slaughter where there was not even a pretext of combat operations to fall back on.

Ehoff told Soennecken that the rumor was quite true. By sunrise on October 20 all the Jews, save for a handful who were temporarily essential, were to be killed. Stankievich had given him orders to murder about 7,000 men, women, and children. Soennecken was horrified, but he suppressed his outrage and merely replied that as a practical matter it seemed impossible to dispatch that many victims in a single night. Ehoff said that he had some experience in these matters. He also pointed out that liquidating the Jewish population was essential to the military security of the area. If the Jews were allowed to live, they would help the partisans attack German supply lines.

Soennecken spoke to some of the gentile citizens and learned that most knew about the planned executions. “It does no good to talk about the dead,” they said, as if the ghetto were already destroyed. For them, the impending death of the Jews meant a windfall of free housing. Previously, Stankievich had divided a portion of the seized Jewish property among the Christian citizens to guarantee their continued support. Few, if any, objected to the persecution of the Jews. Centuries of religious prejudice and local superstition had left them with little love for the “Christ-killers” who owned most of the shops and businesses of Borissow.

On the evening of October 19 Soennecken attended a party at which Stankievich and his police and their wives and girlfriends were present. Most of the guests listened with minimal politeness to the mayor’s platitudes about the Jewish-Bolshevik menace and the role that the Byelorussian people would play in ridding their country of these vermin. Speeches done, they turned to the refreshments. The younger men quickly became drunk and raucous. Most of the German officers left after a brief, obligatory visit. They planned to be out of town the next day. Stankievich himself did not have the nerve to witness the consequences of his orders. He took a ride out into the country, far away from Borissow.

The roundup of Jews began at 3 a.m. The local police, bolstered by reinforcements from the neighboring town of Zembin, surrounded the ghetto. Entire families were routed out at gunpoint and forced into cars and trucks that took them out the Poletzala Ulitsa road leading to the airport, where mass graves had already been dug by Soviet prisoners of war. Soennecken watched the columns shuttle back and forth, but he could not bring himself to go to the execution ground, from which he could clearly hear the gunfire. From time to time he stopped some young policemen or German reinforcements and questioned them about what was going on at the pits. He later filed a report that eventually was entered in evidence at the Nuremberg war crimes trials.

The first contingent, about 20 men, was made to jump into the pits after taking off all but their underwear. They were then shot from above. Of course these dead and half-dead people were lying pell-mell. The next victims had to line them up so as to gain as much space as possible. Then it continued as above. When the bottom row of the mass grave was full, the Jews had to put a layer of sand over the bodies. The most horrible scenes are said to have taken place in these mass graves…. The Russian policemen were given a great deal of liquor….
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