Birds of Prey

IV. A cultural synopsis of genocide

The journey from Rominten’s calm diplomacy to the genocide in Białowieźa was three short years. After the outbreak of war, Henderson reflected: ‘There is no rabid nationalism in sport [hunting], or at any rate that kind of sport, nor Socialism either, in the midst of unspoilt Nature, where all men are equal. From my host downwards everyone was simple, unaffected, and extremely friendly.’ Henderson had regaled his participation in a Nazi pseudo-pagan death ceremony. He had hoodwinked himself into treating Göring and his court as ‘gentlemen’. He could fairly argue that genocide was not explicit in 1938, but there was evidence of the mounting terror against the Jews. The ritualisation of death should have been a warning even to Henderson in 1938–39. Silence in Nazi Germany was not golden. Scherping’s December 1941 article publicly announced Nazi ambitions to the German hunt and the role of the Green in genocide. Leading officials tried to maintain tight security regarding leaks. From late August 1941 British intelligence intercepts of German police signals began to decipher messages about atrocities.82 In July police signals from Bialystok requested films to ‘assist’ in their conduct of atrocities.83 Another decrypt had identified and confirmed: ‘Pol.batl.309, based on Stozcek near Białowieźa, has had similar work in the woods around the latter.’ In the same decrypt, the British noted: ‘Pol.batl.322 is to see an evacuation of the population from Białowieźa.’84 On 17 August PB 323 arrived in Białowieźa from Tilsit in East Prussia. This concluded PB 322’s assignment in the forest. The transfer was identified in another British decrypt although incomplete it stated: ‘… both Białowieźa and Bialystok are being reinforced: Pol.Batl. 323 arrives at the former on 18 August 1941.’85 On 25 August Bach-Zelewski returned to Białowieźa ‘to meet with SS-Untersturmführer von Härtel (sic) to see for himself how the clearances were progressing.’ He also wanted all the horses taken from the locals to be led on a march to an SS domain in Minsk.86 In September 1941, a British Intelligence report summarised:

The execution of ‘Jews’ is so recurrent a feature of these reports that the figures have been omitted from the situation reports and brought under one heading … Whether all those executed as ‘Jews’ are indeed such is of course doubtful; but the figures are no less conclusive as evidence of a policy of savage intimidation if not of ultimate extermination.87

The events in Białowieźa in 1941, bisected theories of Imperial German colonialism and Nazi Lebensraum. In 1936, the amalgamation of the SS and the Police had brought about the Nazi police state. Under Kurt Daluege, the chief of the Ordnungspolizei, the beat police were radicalised through a crash course of militarisation.88 On 21 January 1941, Daluege spoke to the day of the Police inspectors conference. He discussed the Kolonialfrage (colonial question) still lodged in German thinking about empire. His speech referred to two SS-Police schools, Berlin-Oranienburg and Vienna (Austria). They both ran training programmes on behalf of the Colonial Police Department, within the Hauptamt (central offices) of the Ordnungspolizei. Daluege claimed he had stumbled across the Berlin Colonial School, which was a surprise since they trained annually: 600 policemen and 1,500 Beamten (officials).89 The training of the police, according to Daluege, was to transform them into the ‘best quality’ manpower; and to the shame of the older colonial powers like England’. The functions of these two colonial police schools, in April 1941, also pointed to the strategic thinking of the SS-Police about security and policing Hitler’s empire.90 The colonial police academies adapted to the guidelines for colonial military tactics that were placed on general distribution to police departments. In methodology, the preferred skills were simplistic—adopt silence, march with care, and attack the enemy with skill. There was a racial tone injected into colonial lectures: ‘racialism is strongly represented in Judaism’. Colonial warfare was reframed to fit Nazi war-making: ‘The aim of the fighting in this war, in the west the destruction of their [allies] abilities to continue fighting, but the war against Bolshevism is their destruction per se.’91 This chapter has shown how ‘the Green’ revelled in its invented rituals and exploited them to bamboozle foreign diplomats. The rituals emboldened the RFA to navigate genocide. ‘The Green’ killed Jews like vermin and was akin to the gamekeeper’s modus operandi. This was the end of the first stage of radicalisation, there could be no going back, and events will show how it worsened.

Image 7: Sites of memory—Located beside the railway in Zabłotczyzna (2 miles from Narewka), the memorial refers to approximately 500 Jews killed on 5 August 1941. The German records show 282 Jewish men were killed at that place on 15 August 1941.

Visitors to the site have included relatives of victims: https://kehilalinks.jewishgen.org/Narewka/HolocaustMemorials.html

Source: Author, 2013

1 Schama, Landscape and Memory, p. 67. Detlev Peukert, Inside Nazi Germany: Conformity, Opposition, and Racism in Everyday Life, (London, 1987).

2 Simona Kossak, The Białowieźa Saga, (Warsaw, 2001), pp. 445–448.

3 Gautschi, Der Reichsjägermeister, p. 84.

4 Richard Overy, Goering, (London, 1984), p. 81, 89, 100.

5 Werner Beumelburg, Kampf um Spanien: Die Geschichte Der Legion Condor, (Berlin, 1939).

6 Peter Neville, “The Appointment of Sir Nevile Henderson, 1937—Design or Blunder?”, Journal of Contemporary History, London: Sage Publications, Vol 33(4), 1988, 609–619. Peter Neville, Appeasing Hitler: The Diplomacy of Sir Nevile Henderson, 1937–39, (London, 2000).

7 Sir Nevile Henderson, Failure of A Mission: Berlin 1937–9. (London, 1940), p. 89.

8 Ibid., p. 90–1.

9 Ibid., p. 80.

10 Halik Kochanski, The Eagle Unbowed: Poland and the Poles in the Second World War, (Cambridge, 2012), p. 59

11 BArch, Lw. Personalakte, Erich Weinreis.

12 Kossak, Białowieźa Forest Saga, p. 462.

13 Waldemar Monkiewicz, Bialowieźa w cieniu swastyki, (Bialystok, 1984), p. 36.

14 Czesław Madajczyk, Die Okkupationspolitik Nazideutschlands in Polen 1939–1945, (Berlin, 1988), p. 143.

15 Jan Tomasz Gross, Revolution from Abroad: The Soviet Conquest of Poland’s Western Ukraine and Western Belorussia, (Princeton, 2002). p. 4.

16 Ibid., p. 35–38. See also Kossak, Białowieźa Forest Saga, p. 463.

17 Ibid., pp. 50–68.

18 Ibid., pp. 126–179. Gross had originally presented figures of one million deported and 400,000 arrested.

19 Daniel Boćkowski, Białostocczyna w radzieckiej polityce okupacyjnej 1939–1944, (Lublin, 2005).

20 Kossak, Białowieźa Forest Saga, pp. 463–466. Kossak provides no record of how many people returned, although her account does include subsequent testimonies by victims.

21 The search for archival evidence included a visit to NARA’s microfilm collection of records of German field commands and corps compiled under finding guide 55 for IX Armeekoprs. Microfilm series T314/404-8 were examined but with no results to explain the Corps’ drive through the forest.

22 Horst Boog et al, trans. Ewald Osers, Germany and the Second World War: Volume IV The Attack on the Soviet Union, (Oxford, 1998), p. 528.

23 Catherine Merridale, Ivan’s War: The Red Army 1939–1945, (London, 2010), pp. 144–147.

24 Herrmann Geyer, Das IX Korps im Ostfeldzug, (Vowinckel, 1969), pp. 10–92. Wilhelm Meyer-Detring had an original draft after Geyer committed suicide in 1946 and wrote the book’s foreword. The Red Army units were the equivalent in size to a German division.

25 Wilhelm Meyer-Detring, Die 137. Infanterie-Division im Mittelabschnitt der Ostfront, (Eggolsheim, 2006), pp. 24–25. The original was published by the old comrade’s association that was called Divisionskameradschaft General Bergmann (137. I.D.). Bergmann was killed in action on 21 December 1942.

26 Heinz Guderian, Panzer Leader, trans. Constantine Fitzgibbon, (Aylesbury, 1974), pp. 152–160.

27 Boog et al, The Attack on the Soviet Union, p. 526.

28 David M. Glantz, Barbarossa Derailed: The Battle for Smolensk, the Encirclement Battle, and the First and Second Soviet Counteroffensives, 10 July–10 September 1941, (Solihull, 2010), p. 39.

29 Felber was born in July 1889 in Wiesbaden, had been a soldier since 1908. In 1940, he was promoted to General of Infantry after the French campaign. Felber took command of the corps in October 1940. He served throughout the war and died in 1962.

30 W. Borcher, ‘Der Todeswald von Bialowieza’, Der Landser, (1961). In August 2009, I received a copy of this pulp pamphlet before a visit to Białowieźa. The content traced the events and places in close detail.

31 Ludwig Merker, Die 78. Infanterie- und Sturm-Division 1938–1945, (Berlin, 1981). Gallenkamp (1890–1958) received the Knight’s Cross of the Iron Cross. After the war, he was found guilty of war crimes against British and American servicemen. He was released from prison in 1952.

32 Samuel W. Mitcham, Hitler’s Legions, (London, 1985), p. 96.

33 Fritz Vetter, Die 78. Infanterie und Sturm-Division 1938–1945: Eine Dokumentation in Bildern, (Bad Nauheim, 1981), p. 37.

34 Generalkommando des XIII. Armeekorps, An Der Mittleren Ostfront: Ein Deutsches Korps im Kampf gegen die Sowjets, (Nürnberg, 1942), pp. 25–8.

35 Ibid.

36 Vetter, Die 78. Infanterie, p. 37.

37 Ibid.

38 Ibid., Armeekorps, p. 26.

39 Ibid., Armeekorps, p. 27.

40 Ibid., p. 28.

41 Scherping, ‘Bialowies wieder in Deutscher Verwaltung’, pp. 317–325. See also Gautschi, Frevert, p. 78.

42 Thaddeus Sunseri, ‘Exploiting the Urwald: German Post-Colonial Forestry in Poland and Central Africa, 1900–1960,’ Past & Present, Vol.214, Issue 1, February 2012, pp. 305–342, and in particular p. 336.

43 Christopher Browning, ‘A reply to Martin Broszat Regarding the Origins of the Final Solution, in Michael Marrus (ed), The Nazi Holocaust: Historical Articles on the Destruction of the European Jews, vol.3, (Meckler, 1989), pp. 168–87; see also the original “Zur Genesis der Endlösung.’ Eine Antwort an Martin Broszat.” Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte, 25(4), 1984, pp. 739–775.

44 Heinrich Rubner, Deutsche Forstgeschichte 1933–1945. Forstwirtschaft, Jagd und Umwelt im NS-Staat, (St.Katharinen, 1997), p. 193.

45 Scherping, ‘Bialowies wieder in Deutscher Verwaltung’, pp. 317–325.

46 Ibid., pp. 317–325.

47 Ibid.

48 Ben Shepherd, War In The Wild East: The German Army and Soviet Partisans, (Cambridge Mass., 2004), p. 61.

49 Hannes Heer & Klaus Naumann, War of Extermination: The German Military in World War II 1941–1945, (Oxford, 1995), p. 65.

50 Ibid., pp. 65–66.

51 Ibid., p. 65.

52 BArch, R 20/45b Kriegstagebuch von dem Bach, 14 July 1941, p 4. Bach-Zelewski changed his name many times during his lifetime, mostly to fit the governing political situation. During Barbarossa, he was known as Erich von dem Bach having dropped the ‘Zelewski’ part to suit SS sensitivities over his Slavic heritage.

53 Anthony Clayton, Warfare in Woods and Forests, (Bloomington, 2012), pp. 102–3.

54 Małgorzata Krasińska & Zbignew A. Krasińska, European Bison: The Nature Monograph, (Białowieźa, 2004), p. 68.

55 Andrej Angrick, Martina Voigt, Silke Ammerschubert, Peter Klein, ‘Da hätte man schon ein Tagebuch führen müssen: Das Polizeibataillon 322 und die Judenmorde im Bereich der Heeresgruppe Mitte während des Sommers und Herbstes 1941’, in Helge Grabitz, Klaus Bästlein, Johannes Tuchel, Die Normalität des Verbrechens: Bilanz und Perspectiven der Forschung zu den nationalsozialistischen Gewaltverbrechen, (Berlin, 1994), pp. 332–333.

56 Philippe Burrin, Hitler and the Jews: The Genesis of the Holocaust, (London, 1994). Browning, Ordinary Men, pp. 437–8. This police regiment was assigned to Bach-Zelewski as part of the pre-Barbarossa preparations.

57 AA, 1.2.7.6. 9038100 Incarceration Documents, Notices and reports o Pol. Batl.322 Operation against Jews in Białowieźa, Bialystok, Narewka Mala.

58 Peter Longerich, Holocaust: The Nazi Persecution and Murder of the Jews, (Oxford, 2010), p. 203, Emil Ditlev Ingeman Kjerte, ‘A Comparative Study of the My Lai and Bialystok Massacres: The Social Mechanismsof Perpetration and their Casual Determinants’, MA Thesis, Uppsala Universitet, 2015.

59 Ibid., p. 198.

60 Kriegstagebuch Pol.Btl.322, Stichwortartiger Bericht über Einsatz des Batl. In Bialowieza, pp. 1–2. There are multiple copies of the war diary of Police Battalion 322 in circulation that have been collected by several national archives and then variously cited by scholars. For example, Ernst Klee, Willi Dressen and Volke Riess (ed), ‘The Good Old Days’: The Holocaust Through the Eyes of the Perpetrators and Bystanders, (London, 1991) referred to the BArch Ludwigsburg reference: CSSR 1, Ordner 147, whereas Christian Gerlach, in Kalkulierte Morde, referred to BA F56753 (a former Bundesarchiv reference); and Yad Vashem (Jerusalem) the reference is: 0.53—Ludwigsburg, USSR Collection, file number 86 or 127. All sources have been scrutinised in this research but for simplification and to avoid confusion the shortened German document title is adopted in this section of the book.

61 Kossak, Białowieźa Forest Saga, p. 462.

62 War diary Pol.Btl.322, Einsatz der Pol.-Batl.322 in Białowieźa Forst.

63 War diary Pol.Btl.322, Stichwortartiger Bericht über Einsatz des Batl. In Białowieźa, pp. 1–2.

64 J. Noakes & G. Pridham, (ed), Nazism 1919–1945, A Documentary Reader: 3. Foreign Policy, War and Racial Extermination, (Exeter, 1995), p. 1104, document 825. See also the Notizen: ‘Die Aufzeichnungen Herman Göring’s Im Institut Zeitgeschichte’, Vierteljahreshefte für Zeitgeschichte, Jahrgang 31, (1983) Heft 2.

65 Raul Hilberg, The Destruction of the European Jews, (New York, 1985), p. 163.

66 Raul Hilberg, Sources of Holocaust Research: An Analysis, (Chicago, 2001), p. 153.

67 Longerich, Holocaust, pp. 175–6.

68 Saul Friedländer, The Years of Extermination: Nazi Germany and the Jews, 1939–1945, (London, 2007), pp. 237–8.

69 Mark Roseman, The Villa, The Lake, The Meeting: Wannsee and the Final Solution, (London, 2002), p. 15.

70 Christopher Browning, Nazi Policy, Jewish Workers, German Killers, (Cambridge, 2002), pp. 20–21

71 Christopher Browning, The Origins of the Final Solution: The Evolution of Nazi Jewish Policy 1939–1942, (London, 2004), p. 353.

72 War diary Pol.Btl.322, Stichwortartiger Bericht über Einsatz des Batl. In Bialowieza, p. 2.

73 War diary, Pol.Btl.322, Tagesmeldung an Pol. Btl.322, 2 August 1941.

74 Kossak, Białowieźa Forest Saga, p. 466.

75 War diary, Pol.Btl.322, Einsatz der Pol.-Batl.322 in Bialowieza Forst.

76 War diary, Pol.Btl.322, Tagesmeldung an Pol.Btl.322, 14 August 1941.

77 On this see, Browning, ‘A reply to Martin Broszat Regarding the Origins of the Final Solution’.

78 Browning, Ordinary Men, pp. 78–87.

79 War diary, Pol.Btl.322, Tagesmeldung an Pol.Btl.322, 14 August 1941. p. 4.

80 War diary, Pol.Btl.322, Stichwortartiger Bericht über Einsatz des Batl. In Bialowies, pp. 8–9, Gerlach, Kalkulierte Morde, p. 562.

81 War diary, Pol.Btl.322, Tagesmeldung an Pöl. Bl. 322, 19 August 1941.

82 Richard Breitman, Official Secrets: What the Nazis Planned, What the British and American Knew, (New York, 1998).

83 TNA, HW 16/6, part one, MSGP 27, 21 August 1941, p. 2.

84 Ibid.

85 TNA, HW 16/6, part one, MSGP 28, 12 September 1941, p. 6.

86 BArch, R 20/45b Kriegstagebuch von dem Bach, 25 August 1941, p. 10. Bach-Zelewski misspelt von Hertel’s name. Hertel was the commander of the third company.

87 TNA, HW 16/6, part one, British decrypts of German police signals covering period 15–31 August 1941 General situation assessment.

88 Philip W. Blood, ’Kurt Daluege and the Militarisation of the Ordnungspolizei’, in Gerard Oram, Conflict and Legality: Policing Mid-Twentieth Century Europe, (London, 2003), pp. 95–120.

89 NARA, T580/216/0473. Ansprache des Chefs der Ordnungspolizei anläßlich der Tagung der Inspekteure der Ordunungspolizei am 21. Januar 1941, 24.

90 NARA, T175/13/2515813-2515890, Die Völker der Erde.

91 NARA, T175/13/2515813-2515890, Richtlinien für die kolonialtaktische Ausbildung an den Kolonialpolizei-Schulen (n.d.).

3. Grossdeutschland

By July 1942, Białowieźa could no longer be regarded as a Green colony. In the summer of 1941, Ulrich Scherping saw the realisation of his Urwald Bialowies, through deportation and genocide; one year later that political initiative was squandered to his rivals. Göring’s ambitions, regardless of his hunting-forestry interests, remained fixated on the geopolitical priorities. Under Göring’s nationalist umbrella, the full administrative bureaucracy had descended on Bezirk Bialystok. The entire retinue of strategic, political, and cultural offices took over Białowieźa, Bialystok and East Prussia. There were also those historical echoes of former borders, which Erich Koch was determined to exploit. The Third Partition of Poland in 1795, led to Prussia’s territorial acquisition of the area around Bialystok which was briefly known as New East Prussia (1795–1806).1 During the Great War, Imperial Germany had expectations of reconstituting New East Prussia out of the occupation in which Koch had served as a soldier.2 Koch had no interest in restoring the old monarchy, but his greed was fuelled by the recent rapid growth of East Prussia. There had been a twenty-five per cent increase in East Prussia’s territorial expansion from the war including Bezirk Bialystok.3 This was largely due to his special relationship, even friendship, with Göring.

On 16 July 1941, a Hitler conference was convened to discuss the administration of the conquered territories in the east. Martin Bormann kept the minutes and wrote, ‘The Reich Marshal [Göring] thinks it was right to incorporate into East Prussia several parts of the Baltic country, e.g., the Forest of Bialystok.’4 Hitler agreed to assign Bezirk Bialystok (district of Bialystok), including Białowieźa to East Prussia. It is probable Koch, Göring and Hitler had come to a pre-conference arrangement. After the conference, Göring returned to his field headquarters in Johannisburger Heide. Lw.General Ramcke and Lw.General Student was present when Göring was greeted by Koch brandishing a map of the Bialystok region, claiming it had once belonged to East Prussia. Koch pointed to Białowieźa and Göring said, “of course East Prussia gets that too.”5 Hitler later confirmed Koch’s acquisitions in the ‘Führer decree on the Provisional Administration of Bialystok district’, which included the Ukraine.6 According to a British intelligence report, Bezirk Bialystok was placed under Koch by decree on 1 August 1941.7 Alexander Dallin thought, ‘The Bialystok district of Belorussia, Polish until 1939, was attached to East Prussia as of 15 August 1941, thus linking the latter with Ukraine.’8 Bezirk Bialystok, including Urwald Bialowies (part of the incorporation renaming of Białowieźa into German officialdom), had joined Koch’s fiefdom, stretching his geopolitical landmass from the Baltic to the Black Sea.9

German soldiers had fought and died in the East Prussia-Bialystok-Białowieźa, and this led to the assignment of military cemeteries as honoured ground. The Wehrmacht war graves commission, designated the occupied east the Wehrmacht-Gräbenoffiziere im Osten (WGO) and graves in Bezirk Bialystok became listed as WGO-36. Captain Plaumann, the local WGO officer, routinely referred to the Greater German Reich on cemetery location maps, and in all official correspondence.10 This both symbolized and confirmed the centrality of Göring’s nation-building. The defeated region had been administered by the Poles and Soviets within less than three years. There were traces of both still in the system. The prevailing jurisdiction in the Bialystok region, after the Nazi occupation, was skewed by confusion. East Prussia was the German state or Nazi Gau, but each national institution claimed self-regulation. Bezirk Bialystok came within German national laws and codes, but there were multiple interpretations of jurisdiction. There were layers of civilian administration competing with military, political and ideological organisations. Within in each organization, there were layers of bureaus, management departments or field offices. Officials were paid home salaries and received foreign service subsidies. Soldiers in the field faced dual reporting structures divided between occupation and homeland authorities.