until they reached the edge of the pit and saw the strew of stiffened bodies dusted with sand. “We all said to one another,” the driver concludes nervously, “what on earth would happen if we lost the war and had to pay for all this?”
“In Vilnius by 8 July,” Einsatzgruppe A reported to Berlin on 13 July 1941, “the local Einsatzkommando liquidated 321 Jews. The Lithuanian special detachment . . . was instructed to take part in the liquidation of the Jews. . . . They arrested the Jews and put them into concentration camps where they were subjected the same day to special treatment. This work has now begun, and thus about 500 Jews, saboteurs among them, are liquidated daily. About 460,000 rubles in cash, as well as many valuables belonging to Jews who were subject to special treatment, were confiscated as property belonging to enemies of the Reich.”
An Einsatzkommando “confiscated vast documentary materials in the local Jewish museum,” the report adds, “which was a branch of the central Moscow Institute for Jewish Culture.” With their haul of pinkes historical chronicles, antique Torah scrolls and letters of the very founder of Zionism, Theodor Herzl, the mythologizers of the Third Reich could further document Jewish perfidy.
Three hundred fifty miles south of Vilnius, Einsatzgruppe C 14 stabbed into Galicia, a region—fought over for centuries among Poland, Austria and the Ukraine — that was the epicenter of Hasidism, the ecstatic wing of Orthodox Judaism. Advancing through Byelorussia, Knappe may have seen, or chosen to see, an empty landscape, but an Italian war correspondent moving up through Bessarabia onto the fertile steppes of the western Ukraine later in the summer saw carnage and squander:
Dust and rain, dust and mud. Tomorrow the roads will be dry, the vast fields of sunflowers will crackle in the hot, parching wind. Then the mud will return. . . . This is the Russian war, the eternal Russian war, the Russian war of 1941. Nichts zu machen, nichts zu machen. 15 Tomorrow the roads will be dry, then the mud will return, and everywhere there will be corpses, gutted houses, hordes of ragged prisoners with the air of sick dogs, everywhere the remains of horses and vehicles, the wreckage of tanks, of airplanes, of L.K.W.s, 16 of guns, the corpses of officers, NCOs and men, of women, children, old men and dogs, the remains of houses, villages, towns, rivers and forests. Nichts zu machen, nichts zu machen.
The rolling, temperate grasslands of the western Ukraine resemble the American prairies: black or red gypsum soils; limestone bluffs penetrated with caves; crops of wheat, rye and barley, soybeans, sunflowers; orchards in the uplands. Luck (Lutsk), eighty miles east of Lublin, marks the southern edge of the vast Pripet marshes of southern Byelorussia and the northern Ukraine that extend eastward from Lublin along the drainage of the Pripet River all the way to the Pripet’s junction with the Dnieper above Kiev. One hundred twenty miles southeast of Lublin, Lvov (Lemberg), the old capital of Galicia in the foothills of the Carpathian Mountains, thrived on the historic trade route between Vienna and Kiev; its 1941 population of 370,000 included 160,000 Jews, 140,000 Poles and 70,000 Ukrainians. Eighty miles due east of Lvov on the south-flowing Seret River, Tarnopol counted 40,000 residents, including 18,000 Jews. Twenty miles farther down the Seret from Tarnopol, the small town of Trembowla, population 10,000, including 1,800 Jews, paralleled the river below an old castle ruin.
A young man in Trembowla, listening to Radio Berlin on a friend’s shortwave radio on 22 June 1941, heard an important member of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) demand “ ‘Death to Jews, death to Communists, death to Commissars,’ exactly in that sequence.” Thousands of young Ukrainian nationalists had defected to Nazi-occupied Poland after September 1939. Himmler had formed them into two
“In Vilnius by 8 July,” Einsatzgruppe A reported to Berlin on 13 July 1941, “the local Einsatzkommando liquidated 321 Jews. The Lithuanian special detachment . . . was instructed to take part in the liquidation of the Jews. . . . They arrested the Jews and put them into concentration camps where they were subjected the same day to special treatment. This work has now begun, and thus about 500 Jews, saboteurs among them, are liquidated daily. About 460,000 rubles in cash, as well as many valuables belonging to Jews who were subject to special treatment, were confiscated as property belonging to enemies of the Reich.”
An Einsatzkommando “confiscated vast documentary materials in the local Jewish museum,” the report adds, “which was a branch of the central Moscow Institute for Jewish Culture.” With their haul of pinkes historical chronicles, antique Torah scrolls and letters of the very founder of Zionism, Theodor Herzl, the mythologizers of the Third Reich could further document Jewish perfidy.
Three hundred fifty miles south of Vilnius, Einsatzgruppe C 14 stabbed into Galicia, a region—fought over for centuries among Poland, Austria and the Ukraine — that was the epicenter of Hasidism, the ecstatic wing of Orthodox Judaism. Advancing through Byelorussia, Knappe may have seen, or chosen to see, an empty landscape, but an Italian war correspondent moving up through Bessarabia onto the fertile steppes of the western Ukraine later in the summer saw carnage and squander:
Dust and rain, dust and mud. Tomorrow the roads will be dry, the vast fields of sunflowers will crackle in the hot, parching wind. Then the mud will return. . . . This is the Russian war, the eternal Russian war, the Russian war of 1941. Nichts zu machen, nichts zu machen. 15 Tomorrow the roads will be dry, then the mud will return, and everywhere there will be corpses, gutted houses, hordes of ragged prisoners with the air of sick dogs, everywhere the remains of horses and vehicles, the wreckage of tanks, of airplanes, of L.K.W.s, 16 of guns, the corpses of officers, NCOs and men, of women, children, old men and dogs, the remains of houses, villages, towns, rivers and forests. Nichts zu machen, nichts zu machen.
The rolling, temperate grasslands of the western Ukraine resemble the American prairies: black or red gypsum soils; limestone bluffs penetrated with caves; crops of wheat, rye and barley, soybeans, sunflowers; orchards in the uplands. Luck (Lutsk), eighty miles east of Lublin, marks the southern edge of the vast Pripet marshes of southern Byelorussia and the northern Ukraine that extend eastward from Lublin along the drainage of the Pripet River all the way to the Pripet’s junction with the Dnieper above Kiev. One hundred twenty miles southeast of Lublin, Lvov (Lemberg), the old capital of Galicia in the foothills of the Carpathian Mountains, thrived on the historic trade route between Vienna and Kiev; its 1941 population of 370,000 included 160,000 Jews, 140,000 Poles and 70,000 Ukrainians. Eighty miles due east of Lvov on the south-flowing Seret River, Tarnopol counted 40,000 residents, including 18,000 Jews. Twenty miles farther down the Seret from Tarnopol, the small town of Trembowla, population 10,000, including 1,800 Jews, paralleled the river below an old castle ruin.
A young man in Trembowla, listening to Radio Berlin on a friend’s shortwave radio on 22 June 1941, heard an important member of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) demand “ ‘Death to Jews, death to Communists, death to Commissars,’ exactly in that sequence.” Thousands of young Ukrainian nationalists had defected to Nazi-occupied Poland after September 1939. Himmler had formed them into two
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