Final Solution by David Cesarani

Author:David Cesarani
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: St. Martin's Press
Published: 2016-10-03T04:00:00+00:00

The ghettos of the Ostland, Belarus and Ukraine

It was typical of the inconsistent and confused nature of Nazi anti-Jewish policy that while the Jews of the Wartheland and the General Government faced near-total extinction during 1942, the Jews penned inside the ghettos of the Baltic region and the district of Bialystok were left virtually undisturbed. There were equally sharp distinctions within the Ostland, between the northern part containing the ghettos of Vilnius and Kovno, and western Byelorussia, including the ghettos of Minsk, Novogrudok, Baranovichi, Slonim and Slutsk. In the southern portion of the Ostland, as across the Reichskommissariat Ukraine, the Germans engaged in a murderous ‘second sweep’ through Jewish population centres that had survived the first wave of mass shooting by the Einsatzgruppen, SS units, order police and auxiliaries between July and December 1942. In the far south, Einsatzgruppe D resumed its advance in the wake of Army Group South and began to perpetrate massacres on the model of the previous year. The second onslaught, like the first, was punctuated by arguments over the preservation of Jewish skilled labour. Hence the process appears erratic, with some towns being visited two or more times by killing units while, elsewhere, significant numbers were spared immediate execution. The ‘second sweep’ was generally associated with anti-partisan actions, and the resources devoted to wiping out Jewish communities cannot be disentangled easily from German efforts to suppress the escalating unrest in the occupied territories. Unlike 1941, this time the Germans and their collaborators encountered planned resistance, spontaneous opposition, carefully prepared evasion, and mass breakouts from ghettos. Sizeable groups of Jewish fugitives reached the forests and marshes in Volhynia, Polesie, Podolia and western Ukraine. Most roamed around individually or in small, disorganized clusters; few of them survived the subsequent Jew-hunts, the hostile attention of the local population, or the harsh environment. But some coalesced into partisan groups or found their way to existing guerrilla units. The Germans’ tendency to conflate Jews with partisans began to acquire a tenuous hold in reality.110

The killing began in March, once the ground had thawed sufficiently for the Germans to prepare mass graves. This was also the moment at which the Russian winter offensive petered out and the Germans were able to redeploy security troops to the rear areas. The Minsk ghetto was amongst the first communities to be struck. There were 49,000 Jews there, including deportees from the Reich. The head of the Jewish council, Ilya Mushkin, was a communist and had long presided over secret contacts between the underground in the ghetto and Soviet resistance networks in the city. In Minsk the Germans’ belief that Jews were associated with the partisans was certainly no fantasy. In February, the German civil authorities issued orders for the Jewish council to prepare the deportation of non-working inhabitants. The council refused to comply and was duly purged: Mushkin was arrested, tortured and executed. Due to this non-compliance, German security police with Latvian and Ukrainian auxiliaries had to comb through the ghetto, conducting round-ups that left hundreds dead.

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