Read Online The Years of Extermination: Nazi Germany and the Jews, 1939-1945 by Saul Friedländer - Free Book Online Page B

Einsatzgruppen I, IV, V, and mainly Obergruppenführer Udo von Woyrsch’s “Special Purpose Operational Group” were in charge of terrorizing the Jewish populations. The wanton murder and destruction campaign launched against the Jews did not have the systematic goal of liquidating a specific segment of the Jewish population, as was the case with the Polish elites, but it was both a manifestation of generalized Nazi anti-Jewish hatred and a show of violence that would incite the Jewish populations to flee from some of the regions about to be incorporated into the Reich, such as eastern Upper Silesia. 89 More generally the Einsatzgruppen had probably received instructions to drive as many Jews as possible beyond the San River to what was to become the Soviet-occupied area of Poland. 90
    The men of Woyrsch’s mixed Einsatzgruppe of SD and Order Police excelled. In Dynow, near the San, Order Police detachments belonging to the group burned a dozen Jews in the local synagogue, then shot another sixty of them in the nearby forest. Such murder operations were repeated in several neighboring villages and towns (on September 19, more than one hundred Jewish men were killed in Przekopana). Overall, the unit had murdered some five hundred to six hundred Jews by September 20. 91
    For the Wehrmacht, Woyrsch had transgressed all tolerable limits. Fourteenth Army commanding officers demanded the withdrawal of the Einsatzgruppe and, atypically, Gestapo headquarters immediately complied. On September 22 the group was pulled back to Katowice. 92 Woyrsch’s case, however, was extreme, and more generally the tension between the Wehrmacht and the SS did not lead to any measures against the SS units as such but rather to army complaints about the lack of discipline of Heydrich’s men: “An SS artillery unit of the armored corps has herded Jews into a church and massacred them,” Gen. Franz Halder, chief of the Army (OKH) General Staff, noted in his service diary. “The court-martial has sentenced them to one year in jail. Küchler [Gen. Georg von, commander in chief of Armies Three and Eighteen] has not confirmed the sentence, because more severe punishment is due .” 93 Again, on October 10: “Massacres of Jews—discipline!” 94
    The Wehrmacht may have considered massacring Jews as something demanding disciplinary action, but torturing them offered welcome enjoyment to both soldiers and SS personnel. The choice victims were Orthodox Jews, given their distinctive looks and attire. They were shot at; they were compelled to smear feces on each other; they had to jump, crawl, sing, clean excrement with prayer shawls, dance around the bonfires of burning Torah scrolls. They were whipped, forced to eat pork, or had Jewish stars carved on their foreheads. The “beard game” was the most popular entertainment of all: Beards and sidelocks were shorn, plucked, torn, set afire, hacked off with or without parts of skin, cheeks, or jaws, to the amusement of a usually large audience of cheering soldiers. On Yom Kippur 1939 such entertainment for the troops was particularly lively.
    Part of the invasion army was strongly ideologized, even at that early stage of the war. In a “Leaflet for the Conduct of German Soldiers in the Occupied Territory of Poland,” issued by the commander-in-chief of the army, General Walther von Brauchitsch, on September 19, 1939, the soldiers were warned of the “inner enmity” of “all civilians that were not ‘members of the German race.’” Furthermore, Brauchitsch’s “leaflet” stated: “The behavior toward Jews needs no special mention for the soldiers of the National-Socialist Reich.” 95 It was therefore within the range of accepted thinking that a soldier noted in his diary, during these same days: “Here we recognize the necessity for a radical solution to the Jewish question. Here one sees houses occupied by beasts in human form. In their beards and kaftans, with their devilishly grotesque