Roger Moorhouse - The Devils' Alliance - Hitler's Pact with Stalin, 1939-1941

These hideous actions were in part a way for a minority among local populations to curry favor with the incoming occupier—an attitude aptly described as “anticipatory obedience.” It has also been plausibly argued that such horrors were not as spontaneous as they might have appeared and that the incoming SS commanders actively sought to instigate pogroms and massacres but—initially at least—preferred to allow local auxiliary units to do the dirty work. As the commander of Einsatzgruppe A, Walter Stahlecker, would note, “The attempts at self-cleansing on the part of anti-Communist or anti-Semitic elements in the areas to be occupied are not to be hindered. On the contrary, they are to be encouraged, but without leaving traces, so that these local ‘vigilantes’ cannot later say that they were given orders or political concessions.” But these factors alone do not adequately explain such atrocities, as they ignore the role played by the ingrained hatred that many in the Baltic states and elsewhere had for the NKVD and the Soviet Union. Of course, most NKVD officers, Soviet administrative staff, and even Communist Party members would have already fled, but the commonly perceived association of Soviet communism with Jewry meant that local Jewish populations bore the brunt of popular anger.

As they invaded the Soviet Union, the Nazis actively sought to propagate that conflation of Jewishness and communism. Of course, it made no difference that the connection was mythical. Although some of the region’s Jews had indeed welcomed the arrival of the Red Army, they had collectively benefited little from their absorption into the Soviet Union and had suffered disproportionately from the resulting waves of arrests and deportations. In Latvia, for instance, Jews had made up around 5 percent of the total population but represented at least 12 percent of those deported by the Soviets in 1941. Nonetheless, a twisted ideology and a perception of guilt by association demanded that they be made to pay for Soviet crimes.

In many places, the new occupiers consciously sought to make the link, publicly blaming NKVD killings on the Jews, forcing Jews to carry out the exhumations of NKVD victims, and targeting recruitment efforts for local auxiliary units toward those with relatives killed or deported by the Soviets. Yet the Nazis might well have felt that they were, to some extent, pushing against an open door. Eyewitnesses said that the Kaunas “Death Dealer,” for instance, though unnamed, had lost his parents to an NKVD murder squad only two days earlier. In nearby Latvia, a policeman recalled a public exhumation, organized by the Germans: “The day was hot, the corpses had been under for at least a week and they exuded an intolerable stench. I had never seen such horror before or since; I vomited from the stench and the sight. The purpose of the display was to create hatred against the Communists, an incentive that we Latvians actually did not need.”

Latvia had scarcely any history of anti-Semitism prior to the trauma of 1939 to 1941; it had even been a destination for some Jews fleeing the Third Reich, including Russian-born scholar Simon Dubnow. Yet, in 1941 and beyond, it became the scene—like its Baltic neighbors—of some of the most hideous atrocities, in which local units, such as the infamous Arajs Kommando, played a significant role. It seems clear that the Soviet occupation—with its informers, collaborators, denunciations, and persecutions—had so poisoned already fragile community relations that, even without Nazi encouragement, some sort of bloody reckoning became inevitable. In this regard, the example of Estonia is instructive. There, the small Jewish population that remained in the country in 1941, numbering just under 1,000, was swiftly exterminated once the Germans arrived. Yet as many as 5,000 non-Jewish Estonians were also murdered by the local Self-Defense Committee for their supposed collaboration with the Soviet regime. In some places at least, anti-Soviet sentiment was as much a motivator in the horrors of that summer as anti-Semitism.

ALTHOUGH BARBAROSSA TRANSFORMED LARGE SWATHES OF EASTERN Europe into a vision of the lowest circles of hell, in Germany it ushered in the return of something like normality. It was understandable, perhaps, that Hitler and Goebbels felt relieved by the outbreak of war with Stalin’s Soviet Union, but strangely many ordinary Germans, evidently tired of the political machinations and the oppressive rumor-laden atmosphere, seem to share the sentiment. As the CBS radio correspondent in Berlin, Henry Flannery, explained, “The war against Russia was the first popular campaign that had been launched. None of the Germans had been able to understand why a treaty should have been made with the Soviets, after they had been the main object of denunciation since 1933. Now they had a sense of relief, a feeling of final understanding. I listened to their conversations around the news-stands and on the subways. I talked with a number of them. For the first time, they were excited about the war. ‘Now,’ they said, ‘we are fighting our real enemy.’” The diarist Victor Klemperer would have concurred. Walking in Dresden on the evening of June 22, he noted the “general cheerfulness” and “triumphant mood” of the populace. “They were dancing in the Toll House,” he wrote, “cheerful faces everywhere. A new entertainment, a prospect of new sensations, the Russian war is a source of new pride for the people, their grumbling of yesterday is forgotten.”

Behind the facade, of course, there were concerns. Many were simply shocked by the news, particularly those who had believed the rumors of the previous week that Stalin was on his way to Berlin for talks. “We knew it was coming,” Berlin diarist Missie Vassiltchikov wrote. “And yet we are thunderstruck.” Others entertained dark fears about the sheer scale of the new adventure. One Berliner noted glumly that “Russia has never been suited to lightning wars,” adding, “What’s the use of our being in the Urals? They’ll just go on fighting beyond the Urals. No, that mouthful is one we can’t chew.” Even Heinrich Himmler’s own twelve-year-old daughter, Gudrun, struck a pessimistic tone. Writing to her father on June 22, she chided, “It is terrible that we’re at war with Russia—they were our allies. Still Russia is sooo big, if we take the whole of Russia, the battle will become very difficult.”

Beyond such concerns, however, there was a sense of business as usual. The German Cup Final, for instance, scheduled for the afternoon of June 22 in Berlin, went ahead as planned, with the stadium announcer making only the briefest mention of the titanic struggle then being waged seven hundred kilometers to the east. As Rapid Vienna midfielder Leopold Gernhardt would later recall, none of the players gave much thought to Barbarossa that day; they were too focused on the match. Those spectators distracted by events elsewhere were at least treated to a classic, with Rapid coming from behind to defeat Schalke 4–3.

For many Germans, there was little sense at the time that the invasion of the Soviet Union had any transcendent significance, marking the crossing of a Rubicon. Although almost all of them would have known someone involved in the invasion—a brother, son, father, or neighbor—they had already accepted war as the bloody backdrop against which their everyday lives were being played out. Thus, the invasion of Stalin’s USSR was just another act in the ongoing drama. Indeed, as Ruth Andreas-Friedrich noted in her diary, there was a distinct sense of continuity: “Our propaganda can pick up where it had to leave off so suddenly in September of 1939,” she wrote mockingly. “United against Bolshevism! Guard Europe from the Soviet menace!”

Germany’s communists, meanwhile, felt a profound sense of relief. Barbarossa brought an end to the ideological gymnastics they had been obliged to perform for so long, as well as to the enforced suspension of their activities. With the Nazi invasion of the bastion of proletarian revolution, they could once again take sides to defend Stalin and world communism, as was their duty. To this end, dormant cells across the country would be revitalized and long-silent agitators would rejoin the fight. The hated “imperialist war” that Britain and France had waged was transformed, overnight, into a principled crusade against “fascist aggression.” From that summer, the German Communist Party (KPD) began publishing its “Informationsdienst” (Information Service), providing tips on how best to disrupt the Nazi war effort, and walls in the big cities were soon defaced with scrawled slogans and crude, handprinted posters. In July 1941 alone, the number of illegal KPD leaflets confiscated by the Gestapo across Germany rose to almost 4,000, a tenfold increase from the previous month. The unofficial truce observed by Germany’s domestic communists had come to an end. Battle had finally been joined.