Mogilev remained under German military rule throughout the Nazi occupation of the Soviet Union. Thousands of SS- and police units as well as top Wehrmacht commanders were stationed in the city. Mogilev hosted an important military conference and was the base of a special POW school set up to train Soviet POWs for commanding positions in the local police units. The story of the Holocaust in Mogilev is not limited to the tragic murder of the Mogilev Jews. It is also a case study in the development of the Final Solution. The city was visited by Heinrich Himmler, head of the Reich Main Security Office (RSHA, Reichssicherheitshauptamt), who closely observed the developments there and assigned Mogilev a special role in the Final Solution. Let’s examine several important occurrences in Mogilev and find out the distinct characteristics of Mogilev’s role in the development of the Final Solution.
The occupation of the Soviet Union territories during Operation Barbarossa was characterized by a wave of murders and executions of the Jews which can be viewed as a critical stage in the development of the “Final Solution of the Jewish Question.” The Germans perceived the conquest of the East as a war of survival against the “Jewish-Bolshevik” enemy that had to be defeated at any cost. The leaders of the Third Reich hoped to implement a grandiose and destructive operation (a “Master Plan for the East”) on the territories of the Soviet Union. They sought to impose it on tens of millions of people, purporting to Germanize the lands of the East so that these would secure the survival of the Reich in time of need.
Different German forces participated in the conquest of the vast eastern territories – the Wehrmacht, the SS (including the Einsatzgruppen), the police as well as reserve-duty soldiers. Various Reich agencies set up their offices on the occupied territories in order to realize the “master plan.” In compliance with the orders, German and local units brutally murdered Soviet communist functionaries and Jewish males. From early August 1941 - after Himmler had ordered the execution of Jewish women in the Pripyat swamps in Belarus - the Germans began murdering Jewish women and children. Alongside the implementation of the official policy of murder, German commanders and officers took personal initiative in murdering the Jews. Himmler’s multiple trips to the occupied territories encouraged these local initiatives and mass extermination of the Jews spread rapidly throughout the occupied Eastern territories starting from the end of summer 1941. Some 1.8 million Jews were murdered in this manner by the end of the war by the Germans and their local collaborators.
However, this method of mass shootings and disposal of bodies in shooting pits proved complicated and inefficient for the Germans. They necessitated a lot of time and a large number of guard units. Additionally, as the murders were taking place before the eyes of the local population, they could not be kept a secret. Not all of the Jews died from their wounds; some of those wounded were able to escape under the cover of darkness. Rumors about what was happening spread and the remaining Jews attempted to run off or to hide during the actions. Furthermore, the murder was executed face to face and affected the mental state of the perpetrators.
The complete equation of the Jews with the Bolsheviks was already rooted in the pre-war Nazi ideology. During the war this equation was extended to the partisans. On September 24th 1941, the Germans held a three-day military conference to discuss the partisan threat and the ways of confronting it. Although in reality partisan activities in those months were weak and posed no real threat to the German forces, the regional military commander summoned over sixty Wehrmacht commanders and officers as well as a number of SS and Einsatzgruppen officers, including Bach-Zelewski and Arthur Nebe, commander of Einsatzgruppen B. These two were known for their extreme positions and had already acquired experience in conducting executions of the Jews in the months prior to the conference. They were invited to share their experience in the partisan warfare with the Wehrmacht officers. The participants discussed possible SD units’ (Sicherheitspolizei) actions against the partisans, civil population's collaboration with the partisans as well as the "Jewish question" in the context of the anti-partisan actions. In the wake of the conference the participants set out to observe anti-partisan "live drills" in the surrounding towns and villages, targeting Jews and other suspects.
The Jews were clearly executed by default, regardless of any actual partisan presence. Moreover, elderly people, women and children were to be killed as well since they were suspected of naturally assisting partisans without raising suspicion. Historian Waitman Wade Beorn claims that the purpose of this conference was nothing more but a means to create cooperation between Wehrmacht and different SS units in the anti-partisan warfare, thereby legitimizing and justifying the murder of civilians (Jews and others) in strategic military terms. By emphasizing the communist character of the Jews and marking them out as enemies, the German command was able to secure a greater Wehrmacht support and to legitimize the policy of murdering all the Jews as a military threat. The SS and its various agencies needed the Wehrmacht assistance to carry out the murder policy not only because of the latter's prestige and of the legitimacy that it could provide by participating in the slaughter, but mainly because they were in need of additional manpower to perpetrate their horrendous acts. The decision to exterminate all Jews regardless of their gender and age coupled with the ever growing numbers of Jews deported to the East meant that more forces were needed to be mobilized. The Wehrmacht was to fill this role.
One week after the conference participants returned to their units with the message "where there is a Jew, there is a partisan," a Wehrmacht officer, Major Commichau, ordered the murder of the Jews in the area under his command. Commichau was not alone. Even though the partisans did not constitute a high-level threat, the message sank in and anti-partisan paranoia picked up and intensified. The policy of murder became more and more acceptable among the army officers and was implemented under the pretext of warfare against civilian threats.
Mogilev played an additional significant and symbolic role in the development of the Final Solution at this stage. Historian Christopher Browning states that the first action of October 2-3rd, 1941 that had claimed the lives of 2,200 Jews, signaled the starting point of the "de-Jewification" process, i.e. the liquidation of ghettos and mass murder of Jewish men, women and children on the extensive territories of Belarus under the oversight of Bach-Zelewski. Although the mass murders were perpetrated by the units of the Einsatzgruppe B, Wehrmacht soldiers were also complicit to the murders as they moved from town to town and from village to village searching for political suspects – Bolsheviks, Jews and gypsies – and killing them almost casually while the Einsatzgruppen units were shooting the local Jews. By the end of the year there were almost no Jews in these areas. Some 190,000 (about 60%) Belarusian Jews were murdered by the end of 1941.
As more and more Jews came under German occupation following the advance of the German forces eastwards and as more and more Jews were being deported from the West (from the Reich and the Protectorate), German officials of various ranks were seeking a systemic solution that would be more effective than the mass shooting method. In the last months of 1941, the Germans carried out several gassing experiments in several places to test the effectiveness of gassing as a mass extermination method. One such place was Mogilev, which was planned as a platform for a future extermination camp. The subjects of the experiments conducted in Mogilev were not Jews but mainly inmates of a local mental hospital. It is worth mentioning that , the extermination camp was not intended for the Mogilev Jews who had been for the most part murdered in the two actions of October 1941 (as explained in the previous section).
Himmler paid a visit to Mogilev and to nearby cities on October 23-25th 1941 in order to examine and to oversee the situation there. During his visit in Mogilev, he inspected the Dimitrov camp and witnessed the murder of 279 Jewish prisoners as well as the mental difficulties experienced by the perpetrators of the executions. In the course of his stay, Himmler convened with Bach-Zelewski and other senior commanders to discuss how the morale of the Germans exposed to the face-to-face murders was affected and how to minimize the mental damage inflicted. In the course of his visit Himmler promised that "other solutions" will be found soon.
Historian Christian Gerlach claims that Himmler’s promises were given against the background of the gassing experiments conducted in the areas he visited. In the second half of August 1941, Himmler visited the psychiatric hospital Novinki adjacent to Mogilev and ordered Arthur Nebe to murder the inmates of the hospital by a more "humane method." Since Nebe was closely familiar with the Euthanasia program and with the use of gas to liquidate chronically ill patients in the Reich, he decided to invite some experts. Thus, in the second half of September 1941 two specialists arrived in the area – Albert Widmann, a chemist from the Institute of Anti-criminal Technology, and an explosives expert. The visit took place in Minsk and Mogilev and was hosted by Nebe and Bach-Zelewski. Having acquired his experience in the Euthanasia program while using carbon dioxide (CO) bottles to murder patients, Widmann brought with him blueprints of gas trucks. The visit of these two took place when Nebe himself proposed to upgrade the murder method by means of exhaust pipes after he himself had fallen asleep drunk in the garage with his car engine on and had almost lost his life. The experiment with the inmates of the Novinki hospital was conducted under Nebe's and Widmann's oversight. It included the use of explosives to blow up the building shelter into which the inmates had been forced. This method was turned down due to the undesirable collateral damage. The subsequent two experiments with the use of gas proved more successful – one was conducted on the mental patients of the Novinki hospital and the other took place in Mogilev. The experiments consisted of confining the victims to an airtight room into which gas was pumped from the trucks parked outside. Some 500 patients were murdered in this manner. The results of the experiments were reported to Reinhard Heydrich, head of the SD security police, as a "more humane execution method." The results were implemented in the development of gas trucks and in the extermination facilities of the Reinhard camps. We can learn about what happened in the gas experiments in Mogilev from Widmann's own testimony given at his trial after the war:
"Nebe ordered the window bricked in, leaving two openings for the gas hose. [...] When we arrived, one of the hoses I had brought was connected. It was fixed onto the exhhaust of a reconnaissance car. Pieces of piping stuck out of the holes made in the wall, onto which the hose could easily be fitted. [...]. After five minutes, Nebe came out and said that nothing appeared to have happened. [...]. Nebe and I reached the conclusion that the car’s engine wasn't’ strong enough. So Nebe had the second hose fitted onto a truck belonging to the Orpo. It then took only another few minutes before the people were unconscious.
Himmler’s visit in Mogilev had further implications for the development of the Final Solution expressed in the plan to set up an extermination camp at the Dimitrov labor camp. Gerlach comes to the conclusion that there is a connection between two events that occurred on October 23. While Himmler was on a visit in Mogilev, Eichman met with deportation “experts”, since 50,000 Jews were pending deportation from the Reich to Riga and Mogilev at that time. One of the plans probably included transporting the Jews to Mogilev and Riga via the rivers Bug, Pripyat and Dnieper (the same channels were to carry equipment for the army, the police and the SS units in Mogilev). As we have pointed out before, during his visit in Mogilev, Himmler promised that other solutions would be found for a more effective murder of the Jews. It turns out that in mid-November 1941, the SS ordered a huge crematorium from the company Topf and Sons which was to be installed in Mogilev. Himmler’s hand was behind a ‘most urgent’ order of 25 crematoria for the “PWO camps in the east,” indicating that a grandiose plan was underway to set up an extermination camp not only in Mogilev but also in Minsk. The first shipment arrived in Mogilev in late December and a four-cell crematorium was installed in the city. The other three crematoria assigned to Mogilev were ready in August 1942 but were eventually sent to Auschwitz (The Topf and Sons supplied crematoria to the Auschwitz-Birkenau camp). It seems likely that once the plan to deport the Jews to the East proved impractical and was discarded due to the difficulties involved in water transportation under the threat of partisan activities as well as to the army’s objections to using railways necessary for the war effort, the deportation of the Jews eastwards (to Minsk) was discontinued and the plan to set up an extermination camp in Mogilev was buried. After meeting with Himmler on October 25th Hitler wrote in his diary:
In the Reichstag I predicted to the Jews that they would disappear from Europe, if the war would not be prevented (nicht vermieden bleibt). This race of criminals is guilty of the two million dead of the World War, and for other hundreds of thousands now. Nobody should say to me: we can not send them into the mud! . . . It is good that the fact that we exterminate Jewry inspires horror in other nations.
Points for Discussion in the Classroom:
- How did the local events in Mogilev affect and were affected by the development of the Final Solution?
- How responsible are the officers of the low, middle and high ranks for the implementation of the Final Solution as can be learned from the case of Mogilev?
