Masters of Death by Richard Rhodes Page A

machine gun rattled quickly and without warning, and blew the wounded or dying men over the edge. All three eyewitnesses saw a guard with a pistol finish off the wounded with Genickschüssen. “We stayed there for about one hour,” the company clerk concludes, “and during this time some four to five groups were executed, so I myself watched the killing of about forty to fifty Jews.”
    Looking into the killing pit, one of the drivers estimated that some four hundred Jewish men “who had been shot the previous day were also there. They were covered with a thin sprinkling of sand. Right on top, on this layer of sand, there were a further three men and a woman who had been shot on the morning of the day in question.” Since the Einsatzgruppen were not yet killing women in large numbers, the dead woman may have been a special-category victim—a teacher, a doctor, a commissar—or she may have been one of the men’s wives who refused to be separated from her husband.
    The drivers spoke to the Lithuanian killers. One of them, a fellow truck driver, claimed the NKVD had suspected him of spying, had tortured him and torn out his fingernails. He said “each of the guards present had had to endure the most extreme suffering”— supporting Stahlecker’s report of how the Einsatzgruppen picked the collaborators for their execution detachments. The Lithuanian further claimed, however, that “a Jewish Commissar had broken into a flat, tied up a man and raped his wife before the man’s very eyes,” after which the commissar “had literally butchered the wife to death, cut out her heart, fried it in a pan and had then proceeded to eat it.” The Wehrmacht driver who repeated this story does not say if he believed it, but a story the other driver heard, about a man’s family having been locked up in a Siberia-bound train by the Bolsheviks and left to starve to death when the Germans invaded, seemed to him “highly improbable.” More credible to the first driver was a report he heard from Wehrmacht comrades that “a German soldier had been shot dead from a church tower” in Vilnius and “for this another three hundred to four hundred Jews were executed in the same quarry.” The retreating Soviet forces left snipers behind, which the Einsatzgruppen thought as good an excuse as any to murder Jews.
    On the last day the Wehrmacht company camped in the area, one of the drivers noticed that the shooting had stopped and went to Ponary with a friend “to look at the place again.” An SD 13 man in a gray uniform standing in the path between the two pits tried to wave the two soldiers off. “We kept going, however, and when we got close to him I said to him that there was no need to make such a fuss, as we had already seen everything.” Near the SD man “there was a coach with two horses, a landau,” and on the box of the coach another SD man:
    In the coach sat two very well-dressed elderly Jews. I had the impression that these were high-class or important people. I inferred this because they looked very well groomed and intelligent and “ordinary Jews” would certainly not have been transported in a coach. The two Jews had to climb out and I saw that both were shaking dreadfully. They apparently knew what was in store for them. The SD man who had initially gestured to us to keep away was carrying a submachine gun. He made the two Jews go and stand at the edge of the pit and shot both of them in the back of the head, so that they fell in. I can still remember that one of them was carrying a towel and a soapbox, which afterwards also lay in the trench.
    Had the victims bought a private death together, or had they expected a private “resettlement”? The towel and soap travel case, which the Germans usually advised their victims to take with them (to deceive them into cooperating), suggest that the couple believed they would be delivered to a camp in their landau, so they may not have known “what was in store for them”