Marching into Darkness: The Wehrmacht and the Holocaust in Belarus

333 Pages·2014·22.76 MB·English

by  Waitman Wade Beorn

MARCHING INTO DARKNESS

MARCHING INTO DARKNESS
The Wehrmacht and the Holocaust in Belarus
WAITMAN WADE BEORN
Harvard University Press
Cambridge, Massachusetts • London, England
2014
Copyright © 2014 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
Library of Congress Cataloging- in- Publication Data
Beorn, Waitman Wade, 1977–
Marching into darkness : the Wehrmacht and the Holocaust in Belarus / Waitman
Wade Beorn.
pages cm
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978- 0- 674- 72550- 8
1. Jews— Belarus—History—20th century. 2. Holocaust, Jewish
(1939–1945)—Belarus—History. 3. World War, 1939– 1945—Atrocities—Belarus.
4. Germany—Armed Forces— History—World War, 1939– 1945.
5. Belarus— Social Conditions—20th century. 6. Belarus— History—
German occupation, 1941– 1944. I. Title.
DS135.B38B46 2014
940.53'1809478—dc23 2013014774
Contents
Introduction 1
1. The Deadliest Place on Earth 27
2. A Weapon of Mass Destruction 38
3. Improvised Murder in Krupki 64
4. Mogilev and the Deliberate Targeting of Jews 92
5. An Evil Seed Is Sown 119
6. Making Genocide Routine 135
7. The Golden Pheasant and the Brewer 151
8. Hunting Jews in Szczuczyn 184
9. Endgame 206
Conclusion 234
Abbreviations 247
Notes 249
Ac know ledg ments 301
Index 305
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Introduction
On a bitterly cold morning in November 1941, Lisa and Pola
Nussbaum were brought by their mother to the barbed-w ire fence
surrounding the Slonim ghetto in western Belarus. She told them to
squeeze through and hide with a neighbor. Lisa and Pola were just four-
teen and nineteen years old, yet they had already escaped death at the
hands of the Germans several times. Born in a small Polish town on the
German border, the two girls had fl ed with their family progressively
farther east before being trapped in Slonim by the German advance in
1941.1 Rumors had fl own in the ghetto of an impending massacre. Unable
to acquire a work permit that might spare her children, Lisa and Pola’s
mother made the heart- wrenching decision to send her girls away.
Once through the fence, Lisa and Pola took off their yellow Star of
David and ran to the house of a Christian neighbor. Upon hearing that
the Nazis were preparing a mass shooting, the neighbor forced the girls
to leave. Refused refuge in the town, the two girls fl ed into the harsh
Belarusian winter and hid in the nearby woods. In the dark pine forest,
they stumbled across the meadow where the Jews of Slonim were being
murdered. There, around ten thousand Jewish men, women, and chil-
dren w ere forced to sit in groups, guarded by German soldiers. In groups
1