A strange book review

German Einsatzgruppen massacre of Jews in the USSR, 1941

The headline on this book review is an eye-catcher: Timothy Snyder on the Forgotten Holocaust Truthdig.com 02/15/08.

But as soon as I saw the title of the book being reviewed, The Unknown Black Book: The Holocaust in the German-Occupied Soviet Territories (2007). I immediately wondered who had forgotten about this portion of the Holocaust, since it was a major part of it. Snyder writes:

Some 2.2 million Soviet Jews were killed by shooting; 350,000 more were asphyxiated in mobile gas vans. Compare this to the 1.1 million deaths at Auschwitz, or the approximately 800,000 deaths at Treblinka. Even had the death camps never existed, this eastern Holocaust would have to be regarded as the most horrible of atrocities. Yet we have all but forgotten it. (my emphasis)

"We" must not include any of the historians of the Holocaust of which I'm familiar. This is not some obscure part of the story.

The numbers as cited by Snyder appear to be on the high side of estimates specifically for Soviet Jews. The 1993 German edition of Raul Hilberg's The Destruction of the European Jews, cites figures by country for Jews murdered in the Holocaust. He cites 700,000 in the USSR, 3 million in Poland, and of course many more in other countries. Michael Shermer in Denying History (2000) cites a 2.1 million figure from Wolfgang Benz for Soviet Jews killed. It's not the point of this post to analyze the numbers. Although it's important to get the numbers right for more than one reason, not least of which is that the Holocaust-denier sleaze-bags seize on careless estimates and then debunk them to show the alleged deviousness of those writing about the Holocaust. On the face of it, Benz seems to be counting a higher percentage of the dead as Soviet and a smaller percentage as Polish compared to Hilberg's figures.

(Hilberg puts the clearly documentable number of Jews Holocaust deaths at 5.1 million, though he explains that the famous six million number is credible. He also explains that the six million figure originated from Adolf Eichmann, who was in a good position to make such an estimate. Benz places the total at 6.3 million.)

But it's clear that the deaths of Soviet Jews are very much a part of the story. Here are a few other examples that might it strange to me that someone would claim this part of the Shoah was somehow nearly forgotten.

Christopher Browning in The Path to Genocide (1992) has an essay called "Beyond 'Intentionalism' and 'Functionalism': The Decision for the Final Solution Reconsidered", which walks through some of the key points historians have used to determine when Hitler made the operative decision to start mass killing of Jews. It deals extensively with the systematic killing of Soviet Jews. Because, as Browning puts it:

In July 1941, with the stupendous early victories of the Russian campaign, [Hitler] accelerated the Einsatzgruppen [special death squads devoted to murdering Jews] campaign and solicited the Final Solution. In late Spetember and early October 1941, with the capture of Kiev and the great encirclement victory of Vyazma and Bryansk, he approved deportations [of Jews] from the Third Reich. At the same time death camp construction commenced. It would appear that the euphoria of victory emboldened and tempted an elated Hitler to dare ever more drastic policies.

Robert Wistrich in Hitler and the Holocaust (2001) uses a higher number than Hilberg does for Soviet Jewish deaths. But there's nothing hidden about the Soviet portion of the actions in his account, either:

The four Einsatzgruppen battalions that operated on the vast Russian front from the Baltic to the Black Sea would, with the help of the Wehrmacht and Nazi police units, murder more than one million Jewish men, women, and children in the first eighteen months of the Russian campaign. In the Ukraine, beginning in Lvov, they found willing collaborators among local nationalists.

The Web site of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum includes an article on the Einsatzgruppen, which says:

Einsatzgruppen (in this context, mobile killing units) were squads composed primarily of German SS and police personnel. Under the command of the German Security Police (Sicherheitspolizei; Sipo) and Security Service (Sicherheitsdienst; SD) officers, the Einsatzgruppen had among their tasks the murder of those perceived to be racial or political enemies found behind German combat lines in the occupied Soviet Union.

These victims included Jews, Roma (Gypsies), and officials of the Soviet state and the Soviet Communist party. The Einsatzgruppen also murdered thousands of residents of institutions for the mentally and physically disabled. Many scholars believe that the systematic killing of Jews in the occupied Soviet Union by Einsatzgruppen and Order Police (Ordnungspolizei) battalions was the first step of the "Final Solution," the Nazi program to murder all European Jews.

This map, Einsatzgruppen massacres in eastern Europe, shows places where such actions occurred.

The 1941 massacre of Jews in Babi Yar is a particularly notorious incident. Harrison Salisburg in his 1978 book The Unknown War (whose title might give some credence to Snyder's argument) includes a chapter titled "Babi Yar". He wrote:

As the German occupation went on other victims were shot and buried at Babi Yar, possibly 100,000 in all - more Jews, Soviet POWs, partisans, Communists. According to a postwar commission under [Nikita] Khrushchev's charmanship, about 195,000 persons were executed byt he Nazis in the Kiev area.

Before the German pullout the Sondercommando had another task - to try to conceal the extent of their crimes. Slave labor excavated the site and burned the remains of the bodies in a pyre over a period of six weeks.

Babi Yar in the post-Stalin years became a symbol of German atrocities in Russia, particularly against the Jews...

Yehuda Bauer in Rethinking the Holocaust (2001) writes in discussing a key meeting between Hitler and Heinrich Himmler in December 1941: "In the occupied Soviet areas extermination [of Jews] had been going on for months already, and Hitler had been receiving the detailed reports of the Einsatzgruppen (murder squads)."

The point of listing several examples is to say that to the extent that the Holocaust is remembered - and it's actually far better known to people today than it was in the 1950s or 1960s - the fate of Soviet Jews is a major part of the story. How Timothy Snyder thinks that "we have all but forgotten it" is hard to imagine.

Here's a weird example of Snyder's argument:

Hitler was planning some kind of Final Solution throughout the war, but until 1941 this meant exile rather than murder. It can be uncomfortable to be reminded that the German decision to kill all the Jews of Europe was taken quite late, in summer or autumn 1941, and that this decision was taken in a certain context.

So far, that description is fine. But then he continues directly:

That this context was the German invasion of the Soviet Union also introduces a certain awkwardness. Hitler connected the Jews to Soviet power, and therefore some students of modern Jewish history, particularly in the United States, treat the issue of Jewish communists as taboo. This would have made no sense to the survivors whose memories are recorded in this volume, many of whom saw themselves precisely as both communists and Jews.

What?! Whatever there may be to that comment - and I doubt there's much - it certainly hasn't stopped historians of the Holocaust to writing extensively on the deaths of Soviet Jews.

Tags: holocaust, shoah