Anatomy of a Genocide by Omer Bartov

Author:Omer Bartov
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Simon & Schuster

Pahl was also, by his own account, a friend of the Jews, among whom he was “well known and respected.” Described by one witness as the bloodthirsty terror of Buczacz, Pahl responded that if that were the case, the Judenrat “would not have regularly come to see me,” along with “other Jews, who came to me whenever they were desperate.” For instance, on his birthday in April 1942 Baruch Kramer and another Judenrat member brought him a cake: “We celebrated my birthday together in my room.” Pahl also regularly visited Dr. Seifer’s home, where he was “a welcome guest.” The doctor’s wife “would always offer me Portuguese red wine and sardines in oil, that is, things that at the time could hardly be found.” No wonder he responded with righteous indignation when the former Buczacz Landkommissar (county administrator), Walter Hoffer, stated that Pahl “did not have a good name in Buczacz regarding the handling of the Jewish population,” and one of his own colleagues depicted him as a “Jew-hater.” “That is incorrect,” Pahl insisted. “I had very good acquaintances among the Jews.” Why would a local Jewish shoemaker have made him “a pair of long sheepskin boots . . . as a present” if the man did not consider him a friend? The very notion that “the Jews feared” him was preposterous. After all, he had actually informed the Judenrat chairman about an impending roundup, and “in gratitude for my warning” the man “brought me at midnight a black garment cloth.”

Pahl did concede that during that roundup of April 1943 he and the other gendarmes escorted the victims up Fedor Hill; they stopped about three hundred feet from the execution site in order to secure the area from “curious onlookers.” This, he argued, proved that he “did not cooperate actively with the execution.” In fact when he saw “the Jewish woman Helene,” the gendarmerie station’s own housemaid, “being led to the execution,” he said, “I thought to myself, ‘How vile.’ ” But despite the pleas of the gendarmerie commander, Lieutenant Johann Horak, the SS would not release her. “Inwardly,” insisted Pahl, “I was very much against this. I believe that no member of the gendarmerie post would have gone along voluntarily.” But although “it was entirely clear to me at the time that everything happening there was unjust,” he reasoned, “had we declined to take part in an execution action ordered from above, the whole gendarmerie station would have been liquidated.”

Despite such threats, Pahl declared, he tried to save Jewish lives. During the action of February 1943 he allegedly hid thirteen Jews in his room, and even served them soup prepared by the soon-to-be-murdered Helene. And although “the story leaked” and Squad Commander Willy Kießling “reproached me about it,” Pahl hid yet another group of eleven Jews in his room during the next execution action. As he saw it, he had behaved much better than the Jewish policemen, who guarded the ghetto armed with wooden clubs, “beat the Jews the most,” and “hauled the Jews out of their houses.

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