If in execution the German plans for the occupied east resembled the last act in the bloody history of European colonialism, in inspiration Nazi ideas actually had more in common with American Manifest Destiny. Hitler had little interest in colonies, preferring, along the lines of the American frontier myth, millions of farmers who would settle and develop the area, modernize it, and make it a realm of new beginnings. “Our Mississippi must be the Volga, not the Niger,” Hitler declared in the autumn of 1941, while emphasizing that the bloody conquest of the American West provided both historical precedent and justification. “Here in the east a similar process will repeat itself for the second time as in the conquest of America,” he exulted, whereby an allegedly superior settler population had displaced a supposedly inferior native population, thus opening unlimited economic possibilities. “Europe—and not America—will be the land of unlimited possibilities.” This was a modernizing vision, one closely tied to the Nazi promise of the 1930s that the Germans should finally achieve a quality of life commensurate with their racial value. The abundant resources of the east, combined with German expertise and capital investment, would propel a dramatic increase in the standard of living, made possible at the expense of the eastern peoples.31
The concrete expression of this program of racial reorganization, the blueprint for the social order to be erected in the east, was Generalplan Ost (General plan for the east), developed by Professor Konrad Meyer of Himmler’s Reich Commissariat for the Strengthening of the German People (RKFDV). Officially charged by Himmler just one day before the launch of Barbarossa with drawing up a blueprint for the colonization and restructuring of the eastern territories, Meyer presented a first draft of the plan just three weeks later, on 15 July, that clearly indicated that he had been working on the matter for some time. A project that envisioned extensive German settlement and exploitation of the east as well as the forced Germanization, displacement, and expulsion of millions of people, it necessitated the creation of slave labor camps whose inmates would be set to work on the enormous construction projects. Meyer himself foresaw the “resettlement” of 65–85 percent of the Baltic, Polish, Ukrainian, and Belorussian populations, with numbers thrown around ranging from 31 to 51 million people. Since the ultimate destination of those displaced remained unclear, “natural wastage” on a vast scale must have been assumed, so genocide was implicit in Generalplan Ost from the beginning. In its assumption of mass death through slave labor and the physical destruction of certain groups (Bolsheviks, Communist bureaucrats, Jews, the urban population of Russia), the plan anticipated and was directly linked to the so-called Final Solution.32
By the time German forces invaded the Soviet Union, then, a considerable murderous momentum had already been built up. Large numbers of Jews were already dying of “natural causes” in the wretchedly overcrowded ghettos of Poland, while the brutal treatment of the local population in occupied Poland as well as Hitler’s firm intention to fight a war of annihilation in Russia both lowered the threshold of genocidal violence. If the purpose of the war was threefold—to destroy the threat of Jewish-Bolshevism, to find a solution to the Jewish question, and to secure living space for Germany’s elevation to great power status—the ends would determine the means. The SS and Einsatzgruppen would implement the first two goals, while the Ostheer, in feeding itself off the land, would reduce the strain on the German home front while ensuring that malnutrition would claim the lives of millions of Soviet citizens.
Given the set of criminal orders issued to the army and the creation of the SS murder squads, it should be no surprise that killings of civilians began almost immediately after German forces crossed the Soviet frontier and quickly escalated in scope and intensity. Although Heydrich had briefed Einsatzgruppen leaders on their tasks, his early instructions had been relatively restrictive, even if imprecise. The initial killings were to target those groups listed in the Commissar Order: political officers in the army, Communist Party officials and functionaries, the Jewish-Bolshevik intelligentsia, and young male Jews (as the likely source of any partisan resistance). Still, Heydrich granted wide discretionary powers to squad leaders to interpret their instructions in a suitably radical fashion. Not atypically, then, zealous local commanders often interpreted the vague guidelines in more radical fashion in order, for example, to kill all male Jews in a village or rural area. The first killings, in fact, were perpetrated by a local Gestapo official in Tilsit, in East Prussia along the Lithuanian border, who on his own initiative but in accordance with directives issued by the leader of Einsatzgruppe A, Franz Walter Stahlecker, on 24 June ordered the shooting of two hundred male Jews in Garsden. A few days later, a police battalion slaughtered two thousand Jews in Bialystok, including women and children, many of them burned alive in a synagogue that had been set on fire. German police officials also encouraged the local population, especially in Lithuania, to foment pogroms against the Jewish population. Some, such as that in Kaunas, the Lithuanian capital, on the night of 25–26 June involved appalling brutality, with more than fifteen hundred Jews “eliminated” and several synagogues burned in a chaos of horror. In one frightful scene, a young Lithuanian with a club beat fifteen to twenty Jews to death amid a chorus of enthusiastic cheers and laughter from the onlooking crowd, which burst into the national anthem at the end. Invariably, these destructive precedents established on the local level were sanctioned by Himmler or Heydrich, thus setting new levels of acceptable violence.33
Einsatzgruppen units had also swung into deadly action by early July. On the third, the head of an Einsatzkommando in eastern Poland had 1,160 Jewish men shot. In Kaunas, Lithuania, units of Einsatzgruppe A shot almost 500 Jews on 4 July, while two days later they killed 2,514. In Bialystok, almost 1,000 Jews were murdered in the first half of the month. The other Einsatzgruppen were active as well, with shootings widespread in Belorussia and Ukraine, although the various murder squad leaders in these areas interpreted their orders differently. While Einsatzgruppe A seemed virtually unconstrained in its murderous activities, Einsatzgruppe B in Belorussia initially targeted Jewish intellectuals, while its counterpart in Ukraine, Einsatzgruppe C, indicated its intention of working Jews to death in labor projects. Himmler and Heydrich also fomented the killing process through their frequent visits to the field, appealing to their subordinates’ sense of initiative, and exhorting police and SS officials to greater efforts in killing Jews. In this initial phase of the killing process, a complex dynamic developed. Instructions issued from the center both encouraged radical action and protected individuals from any legal consequences, but, in the absence of a specific killing order, top Nazi leaders left considerable room for local initiative. As commanders on the ground began to act in an increasingly murderous fashion, encouraged by SS officials to interpret their orders liberally, news of their actions spread to other commanders, who, anxious to be seen as diligent in such an important matter, also stepped up the pace of killings. This furthered the radicalizing process while at the same time encouraging the top leadership to amend policy in a more deadly direction since little resistance to the killing had emerged. As orders and encouragement from the top mingled with murderous initiatives from below, a tornadic spiral of violence resulted, one that quickly accelerated the pace of radicalization.34