Holocaust Perpetrators of the German Police Battalions by Ian Rich

Author:Ian Rich
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury UK

5

Police Battalion 304 and the Large-Scale Massacres of Autumn 1941

During August 1941 there was a dramatic increase in the numbers of Jews killed in Ukraine by the SS and police forces under Jeckeln’s command. In contrast to the earlier, relatively smaller-scale massacres of June, July and August discussed in the previous chapter, which targeted overwhelmingly Jewish men of ‘military’ or ‘reproductive’ age, between 27 August and 30 September over 100,000 Jews were killed and the elderly, women and children made up the majority of the victims. However, the precise source of this dramatic shift in killing remains unclear.1 The massacre of 23,600 Jews near Kamenets-Podolsk at the end of August 1941 was by far the largest massacre of the war to that point. Jeckeln was present during the massacre carried out by his staff and Police Battalion 320 with the assistance of the local Ukrainian militia and Hungarian soldiers.2 Longerich has described the massacre at Kamenets-Podolsk as the ‘initial spark’ that ignited the shift to systematic genocide in the areas under Jeckeln’s command.3 From mid-September 1941 there followed a high increase in the numbers of victims murdered including a number of massacres perpetrated by SS and police forces under Jeckeln in the major cities that exceeded 10,000, overwhelmingly Jewish victims in each case.

These large-scale massacres tended to follow approximately the same process. Upon arrival in a city the Sipo and SD would shoot hundreds of Jewish men and the military administration would register the remaining Jewish occupants. Following negotiations between the HSSPF or Einsatzgruppe commander and the army field administration or high command, the majority of the registered Jews would be shot, often with Wehrmacht support.4 In contrast to some of the earlier massacres perpetrated on a smaller scale by the same SS and police units in July and August such as those by Battalion 314 as discussed in the previous chapter, there was clearly less scope for initiative below the senior leadership levels as far as the authorship for and carrying out of these larger-scale massacres, which involved the planned coordination of a number of different units, were concerned. However, for most of the units involved on the ground, the massacres after mid-September represented a shift not only in the sheer numbers of victims, but in the fact that for the first time they were being called on to perpetrate the murder in large numbers of civilians that were not men or women of military or reproductive age; victim groups now included the elderly, infirm and small children. This level of coordination of targeted victim groups did not happen immediately following Kamenets-Podolsk or at the same time across the SS and police units.

On 12 August Himmler met with Jeckeln, apparently dissatisfied with the inadequate reports of the 1. SS Brigade and urged him to act more aggressively.5 During the first weeks of August, the Einsatzgruppe C leadership were told that, in principle, Jewish women and children were to be shot as well as some men.6 In the weeks following

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