Einsatzgruppen: Jews and Partisans

How do we know the Einsatzgruppen murdered Jews because they were Jews, not because the Nazis thought they were partisans?

Holocaust deniers claim:

The Jews were murdered because they were partisans, not because they were Jews. 

Specifically, Jürgen Graf, a Swiss Holocaust denier, asserts that Jews “. . . made up a disproportionately large share of the partisans” therefore “Jewish civilians suffered in the German repression measures to a much greater degree than non-Jewish civilians.”[1] Graf does admit that “‘wild’ shootings, which is to say, shootings that were done not as a reaction to attacks by partisans, can hardly be excluded.”[2]

Arthur Butz, an American Holocaust denier, argues that the Einsatzgruppen were tasked with dealing with partisans “by all necessary means, so we need not be told much more to surmise that the Einsatzgruppen must have shot many Jews, although we do not know whether ‘many’ means 5,000, 25,000 or 100,000. Naturally, many non-Jews were also executed.”[3]

The facts are:

The Nazis’ own words and actions make it clear that the vast majority of Jews were murdered simply because they were Jews. The sheer number of Jews murdered by the Einsatzgruppen (1,150,000) does not support the idea that Jews were largely killed as partisans. Jews made up only 10 percent of all partisans in 1944. One would have had to murder all partisans, Jews and non-Jews, three times over to even get close to the number of Jews that the Einsatzgruppen murdered. Further, if Jews were actually killed in larger number because they were partisans, there is still no way to rationalize how the Einsatzgruppen murdered Jews so indiscriminately, including women, children, infants, elderly, and the infirm.

What is a partisan?

A partisan is a member of irregular military force that opposes military occupation through underground activities. In the Soviet Union, partisan units were composed of soldiers from the Soviet army, Communists, and civilians. These partisans fled to the woods and took up arms against the German occupation forces. Those Jews who managed to make it into the forest usually joined a non-Jewish unit, but there were a few entirely Jewish partisan units as well.

How many partisans were there in the Soviet Union?

The exact number of partisans (including Jews) in the occupied Soviet territories is impossible to know with any certainty. Why? By definition, partisans were underground fighters, loosely organized, fluid in their membership, and hidden. Kenneth Slepyan, a scholar of the Soviet partisan movement, informs us that, according to Soviet wartime figures, by the end of 1941 German opposition had nearly destroyed the fledgling partisan movement. However, in 1942, the movement began to recover and, as of June 1942, there were almost 70,000 partisans. By August 1942 that number had grown to 93,000; by February 1943, it had grown to over 120,000. Slepyan notes, however, that the Soviet figures are incomplete.[4]

Yitzhak Arad, a respected scholar who studies the Holocaust in the Soviet Union, estimates that there were 200,000 to 250,000 partisans by 1944 (and perhaps as many as 350,000). By this time, partisans operated in hundreds of brigades, of which about 20,000 to 25,000 partisans were Jews.[5] On the basis of these numbers—the best available at present—it appears that Jewish fighters were about 10 percent of the entire partisan movement.

The evidence proves that the Nazis and their collaborators murdered Jews because they were Jews:

First and foremost, the sheer number of Jews murdered by the Einsatzgruppen (some 1,150,000) does not support the claim Jews were killed because they were partisans. Ronald Headland, in Messages of Murder, concludes: “The statistical record of the killing rose beyond any plausible association with the norms of mere police work.”[6] Further, there is no way to rationalize the murder of Jewish women, children, and infants as partisans.

What does Jäger Report tells?

Karl Jäger wrote one of the most important documents showing that Jews were murdered as Jews, not as partisans. Jäger was the commander of Einsatzkommando 3 (attached to Einsatzgruppe A), which operated in Lithuania. This document—the so-called Jäger Report—was submitted to Berlin on December 31, 1941. It meticulously lists the mass killings of Jews performed by just one sub-unit (EK3) of one Einsatzgruppe in the Vilna area. It also documents their activities from September to November 1941. Here are three examples from that list:

 

12.9.41                       Wilna (Vilna)

993 Jews

1,670 Jewesses

771 Jewish children

Total: 3,334

 

27.9.41           Zysisky

 

989 Jews

1,636 Jewesses

821 Jewish children

Total: 3,446

 

9.10.41               Svenciany

 

1,169 Jews

1,840 Jewesses

717 Jewish children

Total: 3,726

 

These are just three examples from Jäger’s report, which listed 113 separate operations in 71 different locations. The total number of Jews “liquidated” by his unit in just five months was 137,346.[7]

In the summary of his report, Jäger makes it clear that the Jews were murdered because they were Jews not partisans: “Today I can confirm that our objective, to solve the Jewish problem for Lithuania, has been achieved by EK 3. In Lithuania, there are no more Jews, apart from Jewish workers and their families.” He did not write “there are no more partisans” but “there are no more Jews.”

Jäger’s report shows that Holocaust denier Jürgen Graf’s “wild shootings” theory is unsupported by the evidence. The murder of the Jews in the East was the state-sanctioned, systematic, and thorough destruction of every last Jew in every last community. The story is the same across the areas occupied by all four Einsatzgruppen.

The Nazis made a rudimentary—and ultimately unconvincing—attempt to explain the murder of Jews:

The Nazis invented a wide variety of reasons for the murder of Jews. Many of these “reasons” had nothing to do with partisan activity. Some examples from Nazi documents are listed below:

OSR 59 (August 21, 1941). In Staro-Konstantiov: “The Jews were impertinent and even refused to work.   . . . In reprisal, the SS-Brigade carried out an action against the Jews in the course of which 300 male and 139 female Jews were shot.”[8]

OSR 88 (September 19, 1941). “On September 1 and 2, 1941, leaflets and inflammatory pamphlets were distributed by Jews in Berdichev. As the perpetrators could not be found, 1,303 Jews, among them 875 Jewesses over 12 years, were executed by a unit of the Higher SS and Police Leaders.”[9]

OSR 92 (September 23, 1941). “In the Nevel ghetto which was set up approximately 3 km outside the city and which comprised several wooden houses, scabies broke out according to the diagnosis of a German doctor. In order to prevent further contagion, 640 Jews were liquidated and the houses burned down.”[10]

OSR 124 (October 25, 1941). “In Mogilev, two more Jews were liquidated for kicking wounded German soldiers and for not wearing the [yellow] badge as ordered. . . . Four Jews were liquidated for instigating others to refuse to work. During the period covered by the report, 23 individual cases of execution of Jews took place because they did not wear the [yellow] badge while residing in the town. A rearguard squad of Einsatzkommando 8 stationed in Minsk until October 3, 1941, executed another 42 persons in Minsk. Most of them were Jews who had not moved into the ghetto or who had refused to wear the badge against orders . . . In Vitebsk, there were four more cases of liquidating Jews for loitering outside the ghetto and earning their living by begging for food; they, too, had removed their badges. One of them had also made insulting remark about members of the German Army.”[11]

Eventually, the Germans stopped bothering to give a “reason” at all.

For instance, in OSR 178 (March 9, 1942), they simply announced: “During an action against the Jews, carried out on March 2 and 3, 3,412 Jews were executed in Minsk, 302 in Vileyka, and 2,007 in Baranovichi. In all, a total of 5,721 Jews were executed.”[12]

Thus, the Nazis’ own documents often did not assert that Jews were killed because they were partisans, but reveal they were killed because they were Jews.

Conclusion:

The claim of Holocaust deniers, that the Nazis shot Jews because they were partisans, does not stand up under scrutiny. The Nazis’ own words and documents make it clear that the vast majority of Jews were murdered because they were Jews. Nor was it a matter of “wild shootings,” but the shootings were state-sanctioned, systematic, and thorough annihilation of every last Jew in every last community that the Einsatzgruppen could reach. The perpetrators include Higher SS Police Leaders and their staff, police battalions, and their local helpers.

NOTES

[1] Jürgen Graf, The Giant With Feet of Clay: Raul Hilberg and his Standard Work of the “Holocaust,” p. 36 at http://vho.org/GB/Books/Giant/Chapter5.pdf.

[2] Jürgen Graf, The Giant With Feet of Clay: Raul Hilberg and his Standard Work of the”Holocaust,” p. 36.

[3] Arthur R. Butz, The Hoax of the Twentieth Century: The Case Against the Presumed Extermination of European Jewry (“Chapter 6: Et Cetera”) at http://vho.org/GB/Books/thottc/10.html.

[4] Kenneth Slepyan, Stalin’s Guerillas: Soviet Partisans in World War II (University Press of Kansas, 2006), pp. 51-59.

[5] Yitzhak Arad, The Holocaust in the Soviet Union (University of Nebraska Press, 2009), p. 515 and Allen Levine, Fugitives of the Forest: The Heroic Story of Jewish Resistance and Survival During the Second World War (Lyons Press, 1998), p. xxi.

[6] Ronald Headland, Messages of Murder: A Study of the Reports of the Einsatzgruppen of the Security Police and the Security Service, 1941-1943 (Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1992), p. 78.

[7] You may read the “Jäger Report” at https://fcit.usf.edu/holocaust/resource/document/DocJager.htm.

[8] Yitzhak Arad, Shmuel Krakowski, and Shmuel Spector (editors), The Einsatzgruppen Reports: Selections from the Dispatches of the Nazi Death Squads’ Campaign Against the Jews in Occupied Territories of the Soviet Union, July 1941-January 1943 (Holocaust Library, 1989), p. 100.

[9] Yitzhak Arad, Shmuel Krakowski, and Shmuel Spector (editors), The Einsatzgruppen Reports: Selections from the Dispatches of the Nazi Death Squads’ Campaign Against the Jews in Occupied Territories of the Soviet Union, July 1941-January 1943 (Holocaust Library, 1989), p. 140. See also http://www.holocaustresearchproject.org/einsatz/situationreport88.html (Operational Situation Report USSR No. 88).

[10] Yitzhak Arad, Shmuel Krakowski, and Shmuel Spector (editors), The Einsatzgruppen Reports: Selections from the Dispatches of the Nazi Death Squads’ Campaign Against the Jews in Occupied Territories of the Soviet Union, July 1941-January 1943 (Holocaust Library, 1989), p. 152.

[11] Yitzhak Arad, Shmuel Krakowski, and Shmuel Spector (editors), The Einsatzgruppen Reports: Selections from the Dispatches of the Nazi Death Squads’ Campaign Against the Jews in Occupied Territories of the Soviet Union, July 1941-January 1943 (Holocaust Library, 1989), pp. 205, 206.

[12] Yitzhak Arad, Shmuel Krakowski, and Shmuel Spector (editors), The Einsatzgruppen Reports: Selections from the Dispatches of the Nazi Death Squads’ Campaign Against the Jews in Occupied Territories of the Soviet Union, July 1941-January 1943 (Holocaust Library, 1989), p. 307. See also http://www.holocaustresearchproject.org/einsatz/situationreport178.html (Operational Situation Report No. 178).