Although local inhabitants had been encouraged to instigate pogroms, with the exception of a few areas, mostly in Lithuania, this proved much more difficult than anticipated. As a result, the Einsatzgruppen developed a more or less typical routine in which a murder squad would enter a town, assemble the intended victims, march them to a relatively remote area nearby, and shoot them. A killing operation in Lithuania in early July was characteristic of such actions across the breadth of the Soviet Union. According to an onlooker, a soldier with a motorized infantry unit, hundreds of Jews from the local village had been marched to a gravel pit, where they were sent in groups to be shot. “The firing squad,” the eyewitness recalled,
which was made up of ten men, positioned itself… about six to eight meters in front of the group [to be killed]…. The group was shot by the firing squad after the order was given. The shots were fired simultaneously so that the men fell into the pit behind them at the same time. The 400 Jews were shot in exactly the same way over a period of about an hour…. They were covered with a thin sprinkling of sand…. Parts of their bodies protruded out of the sand…. The mass shootings in Paneriai were quite horrific.
Similar scenes took place throughout the newly conquered areas. Often, little direction from above was needed. An SS officer recorded in his diary the scene in Drohobycz, in Galicia, where at the fortress “soldiers stood with fist thick clubs” and struck down the Jews, who lay about “whimpering like pigs.” When asked who led the squad, the reply was, “Nobody…. Out of rage and hatred the Jews were being struck down.” Inevitably, the killing process developed a bloody momentum, one that could be seen in the meticulously recorded figures of the reports of the various murder squads. Daily numbers in the scores rapidly escalated to the hundreds, then to the thousands, as local commanders, on their own initiative and in response to encouragement from above, broadened the scope of the killing operations. This first killing sweep, in fact, proved to be crucially important for later developments, for it illustrated that few logistic, political, or moral impediments stood in the way of mass murder. A new threshold had been crossed.35
In all this, the Wehrmacht leadership took an active role. In prewar briefings, Einsatzgruppen commanders and police leaders had been urged to observe scrupulously the agreement between the SS and the army, which suggests that Heydrich was unsure of the extent of Wehrmacht cooperation. Given the negative reaction of some army commanders in Poland in 1939, he could not be sure that they would tolerate mass executions. Despite these concerns, reports from commanders of the murder squads indicated both surprise and relief that from the beginning the army had raised no problems and that cooperation was proceeding “extremely satisfactorily and without friction.” Despite instances of hesitant implementation of the criminal orders, the army attitude was described as “generally good,” “excellent, almost cordial,” “extraordinary,” and “especially successful.” The Einsatzgruppe B leader, Arthur Nebe, in fact, praised the “excellent” cooperation with Army Group Center that had made possible the successful killing actions in Bialystok and Minsk. Similarly, Stahlecker hailed the spirit of cooperation between Einsatzgruppe A and Army Group North, even though Field Marshal Leeb had expressed initial reservations about their activities. So extensive was the collaboration that in many sectors the Einsatzgruppen, although limited by the prewar agreement only to the rear areas, were allowed to follow immediately behind the advancing troops. Sections of some commandos often advanced with the tank spearheads. Nor was there much doubt about what these special units were doing; one frontline officer noted in early December that the combat officer corps was fully informed about the execution of Jews.36
Important in these early days was the blurring of the distinction between ideologically inspired murder and the pacification operations of the rear-area security units of the army. The Army High Command consistently encouraged a harsh response to “anti-German” elements as an effective preventive measure, while the OKW had already in mid-May issued guidelines demanding “ruthless and energetic action against Bolshevik agitators, guerrillas, saboteurs, and Jews.” Some commanders had, on their personal initiative, gone even further. Colonel-General Hoepner, the commander of Panzergruppe A, asserted that the war against the Soviet Union touched on the very existence of Germany and, thus, demanded the “complete destruction of the enemy,” especially the “exponents of the present Russian-Bolshevik system.” To many officers, the political commissars, the “exponents of the Jewish-Bolshevik world outlook,” had introduced “Asiatic methods” of barbarity into the war. These “Asiatic methods,” Hitler had stressed in an earlier order, “could not be countered with western European means.” As one staff officer concluded in a mid-July report: “We have all come to know these Asiatic methods, every town, every village in the Ukraine harbors its unfortunate victims…. Our duty and our right to free the world from the Red plague are all the greater.”37
In addition, top German commanders had a visceral hatred of communism based on their traumatic experiences of the revolutionary chaos and political collapse of November 1918, for which they held the Jews primarily responsible, an attitude reinforced by the growing brutality of the war in the east. In early October, Field Marshal von Reichenau, commander of the Sixth Army, stressed to his men that the goal of the campaign was the complete destruction of the Jewish-Bolshevik system, reminding his troops, “The soldier in the east is not just a fighter according to the rules of war, but also the bearer of an implacable national idea, and the avenger of all the bestialities inflicted on the German[s]…. For that reason, the soldier must have full understanding of the need for a harsh but just punishment of Jewish subhumanity.” Nor was Reichenau’s attitude unique. Colonel-General Hoth also understood the war as an ideological struggle to the death, urging his troops to recognize, “This struggle can only end with the annihilation of one or the other; there can be no settlement.” Hoth justified this harsh attitude, and the executions being carried out by Einsatzgruppe C, by pointing to the alleged guilt of the Jews for German sufferings after World War I. Manstein, too, picked up on this theme of justified revenge, stressing to his men, “The Jewish-Bolshevik system must be wiped out once and for all…. [The German soldier must be] the bearer of a national idea, and avenger of all the atrocities inflicted on him and the German people.” The Jews, as the supporters of the partisans and the intellectual carriers of “Bolshevik terror,” Manstein stressed, had to be harshly punished. Terror had to be legitimized; mass executions were to be seen not as murder but as justifiable reprisals for atrocities against the German people as well as a preventive measure to provide security in the present.38
Nor were non-Nazi generals unaffected by the poisoned ideological climate. When General Franz von Roques, the commander of Rear Army North, complained to the commander in chief, Field Marshal Ritter von Leeb, about mass executions of Lithuanian Jews in Kaunas, Leeb, a deeply religious man, noted in his diary, “We have no influence over these measures. The only thing to do is keep clear of them. Roques is no doubt correct that the Jewish question will probably not be solved in this manner. The surest way to solve it would be through sterilization of all Jewish men.” If even Leeb, surely no friend of the Nazis, saw mass sterilization as a humane alternative to mass murder, it could surely be no surprise, then, that army personnel shot large numbers of political commissars, regarded as Jews and easily recognizable by their special uniform insignia, in the first weeks of the war.39