"The Fuhrer ordered the physical extermination of the Jews"
The execution of Soviet citizens in the Babiy Yar tract in occupied Kiev
On September 23, 1943, the Nazis began the liquidation of the Jewish ghetto of Vilnius. Prisoners were deported to concentration camps in Estonia and Latvia, shot or sent to death camps in Poland. Only a few hundred Jews managed to escape.
The Jewish Question in the Third Reich
From the very beginning, the Jewish threat was an obsession of the German Nazis. After Hitler came to power, the Jewish community in Germany began to be persecuted. The slogan “Germany without Jews” became state policy. Laws are passed restricting the rights of Jews. Jews were not allowed to obtain German citizenship, marry Germans, and were deprived of the right to vote. Heavy taxes were imposed on the Jews, and their property was confiscated.
At first, Jews were forced to emigrate from the Reich. The Nazis saw emigration as a solution to the Jewish question. Germany was supposed to be a racially pure country. But European countries accepted only rich emigrants. Therefore, the Gestapo came up with a scheme in which rich Jews financed the emigration of the poor.
After the start of the war, emigration channels were closed. In addition, the Wehrmacht captured many countries in Western Europe, where there were Jewish communities. The Jewish question again came before the Nazis. The Jewish department of the Gestapo began to make plans to deport Jews to Africa, to Madagascar. In the meantime, Reichsführer SS Himmler ordered the isolation of Jews in a ghetto in Poland, where Jews from the Reich began to be taken.
“Anti-Semitism is exactly the same as sanitization,” Himmler said. – Getting rid of lice is not a matter of ideology, it is a matter of hygiene. Soon we will get rid of lice."
When planning a war with the USSR, they decided to use the same method in the occupied Soviet territories. Adolf Rosenberg wrote:
“After Jews have been excluded from work in all civil institutions, the Jewish question will be solved by the creation of a ghetto.”
Ghettos are parts of large cities reserved for voluntary or forced residence.
Jews are driven by SS soldiers to a loading area during the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. The site was equipped on a railway ramp along Stavki Street No. 4/6. The site was used in 1942–1943 during the deportation of Jews to the Treblinka concentration camp.
Jews were equated with partisans and saboteurs
By the spring of 1941, the Nazis had not yet come to the idea of the complete extermination of all Jews in the controlled territory. Therefore, having started the war with the USSR, the Nazis initially did not intend to deliberately exterminate Jews. Terror and repression against them were not planned on a scale exceeding the destruction of the civilian population of other nations.
In the directives that were prepared in anticipation of the attack on the USSR, Jews were barely mentioned. The first mention was made in the “Directives on the conduct of German troops in Russia” published in April 1941. Jews, along with partisans and communists, are slated for extermination. This approach was the basis for a special order issued by the Chief of the Wehrmacht High Command on May 19, 1941, in which Jews were equated with partisans and saboteurs.
Almost simultaneously, the head of the Reich Security Main Office (RSHA), Heydrich, gave the command of the Einsatzgruppen (paramilitary units that carried out mass murder) a verbal order to liquidate all Jews, since Judaism had become the source of Bolshevism and therefore must be destroyed. True, in July 1941, Heydrich softened the order: not all Jews were subject to destruction, but only party members, government employees, radical elements (saboteurs, saboteurs, arsonists, propagandists, etc.). Ghettoes were intended for the remaining Jews.
Wehrmacht soldiers were legally able to kill “subhumans”, anyone and for anything. As a result of the murder of Jews, the rape of girls and their subsequent murder, various kinds of bullying and torture became common entertainment for Wehrmacht soldiers on occupied Soviet soil. Synagogues were burning, shot Jews were lying in ditches and on the streets, captured wounded Jewish Red Army soldiers were tortured and killed, girls were abused.
When the troops moved further, the occupation authorities came. Spontaneous terror turned into orderly terror. First, the Einsatzkommando SD (Security Service) got involved. They did not act for fun, not out of hatred. There was a clear program: members of the Communist Party and radical elements were subject to destruction. But in general, they destroyed everyone who seemed suspicious. It was enough for Jews to be declared a subversive element in order to be executed.
One of the first such experiments was carried out near Latvian Liepaja on July 4, 1941. First, 47 Jews and 5 Latvian communists were shot there. Three days later, the commandant increased the number of people to be shot to 100 people.
Soon executions became commonplace.
“I am now writing my first letter to my Truda, accompanied by damnably sensual music,” one of the SS men wrote in his diary. “And while I’m writing, the command is heard: “Come out and form!” Carbines, helmets, 30 rounds of ammunition... We'll be heading back soon. There were already 500 Jews lined up there, ready to be shot.”
Representatives of the Russian superethnos - Great Russians, Little Russians-Ukrainians, Belarusians - were shot in the same way. SD reports show that at first the punitive forces killed more Jews, then the ratio evened out.
A column of prisoners of the Minsk ghetto on the street. 1941
Isolation in the ghetto
When the first wave of terror subsided, the isolation of the remaining Jews began - the creation of a ghetto. Crowds of people were driven into ghettos, and those caught outside were immediately shot. City blocks were fenced with barbed wire. They were guarded by double security: Jewish “order service” inside and local police outside.
To manage the ghetto, “self-government bodies” – Judenrats – were formed. The Jewish Council was fully responsible for the behavior of the Jewish community, collected indemnities, was responsible for supplying labor for the needs of the occupiers, and resolved all community issues. Labor service was imposed on all Jews of both sexes between the ages of 14 and 60.
People lived in crowded conditions, lack of any goods and food. Getting a job was considered profitable. The workers were fed, taken to work, and could even be allowed to live outside the ghetto.
There was no talk yet of the wholesale extermination of Jews. The Nazis were rational: they needed labor. Another thing is that the Nazis considered it useful to reduce the population of “subhumans.” This task was primarily assigned to local undead nationalists, who emerged from underground with the advent of the Wehrmacht. In the Baltic states and Ukraine, local nationalists willingly exterminated the “Jewish Bolsheviks” - Russians and Jews.
As soon as the Germans set foot on the territory of the Baltic republics, bloody pogroms against Jews began there. Most of the dead were killed not by the Germans, but by local nationalists, who, due to old traditions, showed exceptional cruelty, sparing neither women, nor the elderly, nor children.
In one night on June 26, 1941, more than 1 people were massacred in Kaunas by brutal nationalists. The streets of the city were filled with blood. A few days later, the number of killed Jews was brought to 500. In Riga, by the beginning of July, according to the report of the chief of the security police and the SD, all synagogues were destroyed and 4 Jews were shot.
On July 4, members of the nationalist Perkonkrusta burned 500 Jews who fled from the Lithuanian city of Siauliai in the Riga choral synagogue. On the same day, Latvian nationalists burned and destroyed more than 20 synagogues and houses of worship. In the summer and autumn of 1941, local nationalists regularly traveled to the provinces on special buses painted blue, searching for and killing Jews.
The cruelty of the local Nazis was horrifying. Jews were burned in synagogues, beaten to death with crowbars, drowned, tortured and raped in their own homes. The Nazis quickly formed auxiliary police units from local punitive forces, which operated not only in the Baltic states, but also in Russia, Belarus and Ukraine.
Jews of the Vilnius ghetto form a column to be sent to forced labor
Policy of total destruction
The actions of the Baltic and Ukrainian nationalists, who exterminated Jews not selectively, but en masse, showed the Nazis that a solution to the Jewish question could be achieved not by evicting them from the country or imprisoning them in a ghetto, but by completely exterminating them. The Einsatzkommandos gradually move on to the wholesale execution of Jews.
So, in August 1941, the Sonderkommando 4 of Standartenführer Paul Blombel came to the city of Bila Tserkva. Residents of the city recalled these events with horror:
“All the Jewish residents of the city, their families... were herded into the camp courtyard. Then, stripped naked, they drove him to the ditch, forced him to his knees and shot him. There was a heartbreaking cry and scream. People said goodbye, hid their children, tried to escape, but they were shot. We were powerless to do anything to help."
The SS killed all the adults. The children were finished off by the Ukrainian auxiliary police.
The Nazis also realized that local punitive units were very beneficial for the Third Reich. Auxiliary police help pacify an occupied area because the locals know their area better. Nationalists easily take on the very bloody work of exterminating “subhumans,” which German soldiers often refused. Local police battalions freed up Wehrmacht units for the front, which had to be kept in the rear to maintain order.
Thus, the Nazis decided to completely exterminate Soviet Jews. The chief of the RSHA, Heydrich, told the head of the “Jewish department” of the Gestapo, Adolf Eichmann:
"The Fuhrer ordered the physical extermination of the Jews."
At the same time, European Jews were still going to be evicted, and Soviet Jews were going to be exterminated.
Bila Tserkva became a test campaign of this type. Its organizer, SS Standartenführer Blombel, distinguished himself after some time in Kyiv - at Babi Yar. Such bloody actions swept across all the occupied territories of the USSR. They had already killed everyone: women, children, old people, mixed families, half-breeds.
So, on November 7, 1941, the Nazis staged a pogrom and massacre in the Minsk ghetto: 15 thousand men, women, old people and children were driven to the Tuchinka area and shot. The executions continued for several days. The Minsk ghetto was finally destroyed in October 1943, when 22 thousand people were killed there. In total, more than 100 thousand people were exterminated in the ghetto.
The Vilnius ghetto had a similar fate. It was created on August 31, 1941 and existed until September 23, 1943. Moreover, before the formation of the ghetto, the Germans, Lithuanian police and nationalists exterminated about 30 thousand residents of Vilnius of Jewish origin. During the two years of its existence, its population of about 40 thousand people was almost completely exterminated. Only a few hundred ghetto prisoners managed to escape by escaping into the forests and joining Soviet partisans or hiding with sympathetic local residents.
2013 was declared the Year of Remembrance of the Vilnius Ghetto in Lithuania. The date September 23 is celebrated as Genocide Remembrance Day in Lithuania.
Thus, the final solution to the Jewish question was a direct consequence of the war of extermination against the USSR. Without the original intention of completely liquidating the Jews, the Nazis came to this decision, guided by the logic of a total war of extermination. At first, Jews were killed as Soviet citizens, “Jewish Bolsheviks,” partisans and saboteurs, then simply for being Jews.
A memorial plaque on the house at 3 Gaono Street in Vilnius marks the place where, from September 6 to October 29, 1941, there were the gates of the “Small Ghetto,” through which over 11 thousand Jews were sent to their deaths. On the slab below is a plan of two Vilnius ghettos
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