The first great pogrom against Jews took place in occupied Poland. The roots of the German criminal idea, however, go back to the times when Hitler was only a teenager.
The Germans rigorously separated the supposedly better racially people from the inferior. Penalties were introduced for intimate contacts with representatives of the latter group ( Rassenschande - race disgrace). The offspring of such unions were contemptuously called "hybrids" ( Mischlinge ).
Some of the discriminated against have been given an "extermination order" ( Vernichtungsbefehl ), made with terrifying success .
It might seem that the above paragraph refers to the reality of the Second World War in Central Europe, including Poland. And yet not. These events took place even before the First World War in faraway Namibia , at that time the colony known as German South-West Africa. The indigenous people, mainly the Herero and Nama tribes, were persecuted and exterminated.
It is no coincidence that the genocide that took place at that time resembled the Holocaust so much. As Timothy Snyder writes in his book Black Earth. The Holocaust as a warning ”:
Killing "blacks" meant [for Hitler] bringing "the righteousness of the Lord" because the world belonged to the "strongest". Like most Europeans, Hitler was racist against Africans. (...) For him, "Africa" was the whole world , and he saw all people, including Europeans, mainly in racial terms.
Members of the Herero tribe chained (photo:public domain).
"Negro" helpers
It was these experiences that provided many concepts and methods of action that were then used by the Nazis in the conquered territory. The Germans placed themselves in the role of stronger colonizers who subjugated the Slavic masses considered not fully human.
However, against the Jews, supposedly controlling the whole world, they appeared as the weaker ones. They wanted to free themselves from this reign by exterminating their "oppressors" .
A very eloquent confirmation of this thought pattern was provided by Jürgen Stroop, responsible for suppressing the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. He contemptuously referred to his Lithuanian and Latvian accomplices in this crime as the "Ascaris", that is, the African raids working for the white colonizers.
The murder of millions of European Jews was also to be done with the help of such assistants. It was the eastern "subhumans" who were supposed to do the "dirty work" , so the final solution was to be made by inciting the inhabitants of the conquered territories to kill Jews themselves.
Jürgen Stroop (in the center, in a field cap) in the burning Warsaw ghetto (1943). He contemptuously called his helpers from the Baltic states "Askarys". (public domain photo).
This idea turned out to be - from the perpetrators' point of view - not effective enough. A one-sided spiral of violence and murder was to wind up by itself, one pogrom would provoke another, like dominoes hitting each other. However, that did not happen.
Bialystok pattern
The site of the first pogrom, which was to lead to the next, was Białystok. On June 27, 1941, the 329th battalion of the German order police entered there with a mission to slaughter. As described by Timothy Snyder:
Jews were ordered - to the accompaniment of Soviet music - to clean Białystok of the statues of Lenin and Stalin. German policemen (...) they arrested a certain number of women and children, and over a thousand men. Some Germans raped Jewish women. Meanwhile, other German policemen tightly circled the quarter surrounding the synagogue and placed a machine gun in front of it. Then the Germans pushed the Jews into the synagogue, poured gasoline over it and set it on fire. For about half an hour the screams were interrupted by the rattling of machine guns.
The meaning of this scene is clear: all the blame for communism was to rest symbolically on the Jews for which the highest punishment was due. The property left behind by the victims would be distributed among the murderers as a kind of compensation for previous suffering and an incentive to continue the bloodbath.
Offer for subhumans
Snyder notes that the condition for the fulfillment of the genocidal intentions was the meeting of the invader's extermination policy with the specific expectations of the local population, ready to kill their Jewish neighbors.
This article has more than one page. Select the next one below to read on. The Germans made it possible to erase the shame of cooperation with communism, because during the Soviet occupation of 1939-1941 not only Jews collaborated with the Soviets . The Nazis also made it possible to vent out frustration and anger after two years of captivity by providing a defenseless scapegoat. Part of the offer was also the takeover of the punished property.However, this was where the level of agreement ended. The Germans did not want and were unable to convincingly propose to build the Polish state, which they had just destroyed.
In Białystok, the memory of the entry into the city of Einsatzgruppe IV in September 1939 and the murder of local elites was still fresh.
Although the man in the photo looks like an ordinary old man, he was in fact a war criminal. The Lithuanian security police of Sauguma assisted in the Holocaust in Lithuania. Aleksandras Lileikis (photo:public domain) was at the head of her Vilnius circle.
Lithuanian beginning
The Baltic states provided much better ground for Nazi genocide plans. Timothy Snyder even believes that the Holocaust began in Lithuania . Inspired violence, which in the former Polish lands ended in chaotic pogrom eruptions, brought much more systematic murders in these countries.
This time, the Germans proposed not only taking over Jewish property and washing away the sin of collaboration with the Soviets, but also added a vision of a free Lithuania.
They could afford such promises, after all, they were not behind the collapse of this country the year before.
Perhaps the most glaring example of this type of "offer" was releasing members of the Lithuanian communist youth from prisons on condition that he proves his loyalty to the new authorities by ... killing a Jew .
In the new realities established by Nazi Germany, it was the Jews and only Jews who were responsible for Bolshevism. Even if they worked for the NKVD, the Lithuanians could count on good deals with new "liberators".
A burning synagogue in Lithuania (photo:public domain).
The Lithuanian did his job…
Mass shootings were carried out by Lithuanian units, supervised, of course, by appropriately educated and trained Germans. Such as Alfred Filbert, the doctoral commander of Einsatzkommando 9, who carried out the slaughter in the famous Ponary near Vilnius.
He realized that it was a lie to believe that only Jews were communists because his brother had spent the war years in concentration camps as ... a German communist .
Filbert himself was recalled to Berlin four months later due to a nervous breakdown and severe depression. He only returned to Nazi structures after two years and took a low-level anti-corruption position at the headquarters of the Kripo (criminal police).
At the same time as Filbert, Lithuanians' dreams of an independent state alongside the Third Reich also broke. It happened after the German authorities outlawed all Lithuanian organizations. The Jews in Lithuania were almost completely murdered, so there was no longer any reason to create vain hopes.
The article was based, inter alia, on the book by Timothy Snyder entitled "Black ground. The Holocaust as a warning ”(Znak Horyzont 2015).
Hitler's prophecy begins to come true
The Jews, however, were still blamed for communism, as well as capitalism (after the US entered the war) and British bombing.
In August 1941, all members of the chosen people over the age of six in Germany had to wear the stars of David. It was a symbol of "responsibility" for the slow pace of fighting in the USSR.
Soon after, Alfred Rosenberg suggested to Hitler that he would deport Jews "to the east" in retaliation for ... the deportations of the Volga Germans carried out by the Soviets just before the arrival of the Wehrmacht.
According to Hitler, the Jews were to blame for themselves and they were responsible for the Holocaust (photo:public domain).
There was no end to blaming the Jews for the failures of the Third Reich . As Peter Longerich quotes, Hitler recalled his 1939 "prophecy" after the United States entered the war, which Goebbels wrote in his notebook:
He predicted the Jews that if they lead to a world war again, this war would destroy them. These were not just words. The world war is a fact, and the annihilation of the Jews must be the necessary consequence. We have to deal with this matter without sentiment.
At that time, the refinement of the killing technology was already underway, the first extermination camps were opened, where it was possible to "deal with this matter without sentiment" felt by the people who carried out the executions in Lithuania.