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Authors: Richard Rhodes
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of Denmark and Holland, none of the nations was prepared to change its quota and accept more Jews. In October German troops invaded Czechoslovakia. That month Germany expelled twenty thousand Polish Jews as well, and Kristallnacht followed in November.
“We are going to destroy the Jews,” Hitler bluntly told the Czech Foreign Minister, Frantisek Chvalkovsky, on 21 January 1939. “They are not going to get away with what they did on 9 November 1918. The day of reckoning has come.”
And so in June 1941 the Einsatzgruppen rolled out eastward.
THREE
Barbarossa
Sunday morning, 22 June 1941, the Wehrmacht struck east, opening a war against the Soviet Union that would consume forty million lives. A German officer, Siegfried Knappe, shouting in the morning darkness, heard “the crack of rifle shots, the short bursts of machine guns and the shattering crashes of hand grenades. The rifle fire sounded like the clattering of metal-wheeled carts moving fast over cobblestone streets.” Some Wehrmacht units, surprising border garrisons that offered only confused resistance, advanced thirty miles into Soviet-occupied Polish territory on that first long day. “Polish civilians in a church service applauded us,” Knappe reported of passing through Bialystok, ninety miles northwest of Warsaw; “they were very happy because they had not been permitted to conduct church services under the Russians and they felt liberated.”
In the next days the Einsatzgruppen followed. Bristling with Mausers and machine pistols in their trucks and cars, they fanned out across Poland northeastward toward the Latvian port city of Riga on the Baltic and the old Lithuanian cities of Kaunas and Vilnius, eastward into Byelorussia toward Minsk on the post road to Moscow, southeastward toward Rovno and Lvov, Tarnopol and Kamenets-Podolsky in the western Ukraine. Ahead of the German forces, an eyewitness on the highway to Minsk recalls, “people were fleeing eastward in panic, on foot, to look for a place to hide from the onrushing enemy. The highway was jammed with demolished trucks, smashed cannon, discarded machine guns. Now and again, aircraft with the Nazi emblem swooped over this pile of assorted weapons. They flew so low that we could see the mocking, contemptuous faces of the flying German thugs. They made one foray after another, ‘playfully’ firing their machine guns into groups of terror-stricken people on the road, mostly women holding children by the hand or in their arms.” Already in the border towns local squads of police and SS were rounding up people to be shot on orders from the Gestapo in Berlin.
When forward units of the German Army occupied Kaunas in central Lithuania on 23 June 1941, a small advance detachment of Einsatzgruppe A entered the city with them and set to work immediately organizing “spontaneous” attacks against Jews. The town of stone buildings and chinked-log wooden houses at the junction of the Neris and Nemunas Rivers counted 35,000 Jews among its population of 120,000 people. Also known as Kovno, Kaunas had served as the Lithuanian capital under Soviet domination, and the occupying forces found four large groups of armed Lithuanian nationalists competing to help them harry the retreating Soviet garrison.
Within a day or two of the occupation, several enlisted men in a bakers’ company of the Wehrmacht Sixteenth Army encountered what was probably the first pogrom in Kaunas when they joined “a crowd of people gathered in a square somewhere in the center of the town.”
“We were quartered in an old Russian barracks,” a sergeant recalled, “and immediately started to make bread for the troops. I think it must have been one day after we had arrived in Kovno that I was informed by a driver in my unit that Jews were being beaten to death in a nearby square. Upon hearing this I went to the said square [with] other members of our unit.” On the cobbled square, lined with houses and opening onto a park, the
“We are going to destroy the Jews,” Hitler bluntly told the Czech Foreign Minister, Frantisek Chvalkovsky, on 21 January 1939. “They are not going to get away with what they did on 9 November 1918. The day of reckoning has come.”
And so in June 1941 the Einsatzgruppen rolled out eastward.
THREE
Barbarossa
Sunday morning, 22 June 1941, the Wehrmacht struck east, opening a war against the Soviet Union that would consume forty million lives. A German officer, Siegfried Knappe, shouting in the morning darkness, heard “the crack of rifle shots, the short bursts of machine guns and the shattering crashes of hand grenades. The rifle fire sounded like the clattering of metal-wheeled carts moving fast over cobblestone streets.” Some Wehrmacht units, surprising border garrisons that offered only confused resistance, advanced thirty miles into Soviet-occupied Polish territory on that first long day. “Polish civilians in a church service applauded us,” Knappe reported of passing through Bialystok, ninety miles northwest of Warsaw; “they were very happy because they had not been permitted to conduct church services under the Russians and they felt liberated.”
In the next days the Einsatzgruppen followed. Bristling with Mausers and machine pistols in their trucks and cars, they fanned out across Poland northeastward toward the Latvian port city of Riga on the Baltic and the old Lithuanian cities of Kaunas and Vilnius, eastward into Byelorussia toward Minsk on the post road to Moscow, southeastward toward Rovno and Lvov, Tarnopol and Kamenets-Podolsky in the western Ukraine. Ahead of the German forces, an eyewitness on the highway to Minsk recalls, “people were fleeing eastward in panic, on foot, to look for a place to hide from the onrushing enemy. The highway was jammed with demolished trucks, smashed cannon, discarded machine guns. Now and again, aircraft with the Nazi emblem swooped over this pile of assorted weapons. They flew so low that we could see the mocking, contemptuous faces of the flying German thugs. They made one foray after another, ‘playfully’ firing their machine guns into groups of terror-stricken people on the road, mostly women holding children by the hand or in their arms.” Already in the border towns local squads of police and SS were rounding up people to be shot on orders from the Gestapo in Berlin.
When forward units of the German Army occupied Kaunas in central Lithuania on 23 June 1941, a small advance detachment of Einsatzgruppe A entered the city with them and set to work immediately organizing “spontaneous” attacks against Jews. The town of stone buildings and chinked-log wooden houses at the junction of the Neris and Nemunas Rivers counted 35,000 Jews among its population of 120,000 people. Also known as Kovno, Kaunas had served as the Lithuanian capital under Soviet domination, and the occupying forces found four large groups of armed Lithuanian nationalists competing to help them harry the retreating Soviet garrison.
Within a day or two of the occupation, several enlisted men in a bakers’ company of the Wehrmacht Sixteenth Army encountered what was probably the first pogrom in Kaunas when they joined “a crowd of people gathered in a square somewhere in the center of the town.”
“We were quartered in an old Russian barracks,” a sergeant recalled, “and immediately started to make bread for the troops. I think it must have been one day after we had arrived in Kovno that I was informed by a driver in my unit that Jews were being beaten to death in a nearby square. Upon hearing this I went to the said square [with] other members of our unit.” On the cobbled square, lined with houses and opening onto a park, the
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