Hitler

and police would be treated as disobedience and subjected to disciplinary action.
    From letters home from the front, it is plain that many ordinary German soldiers needed little persuasion that the merciless onslaught on the Jews was justified. Subjected for years to incessant indoctrination at school and in the Hitler Youth about the Jews, and inundated since the beginning of ‘Barbarossa’ with propaganda about horrors of ‘Jewish-Bolshevism’, on the march into Russia they frequently looked to confirm their prejudices. One soldier, writing home in July, remarked on his shock at ‘evidence of Jewish, Bolshevik atrocities, the likes of which I have hardly believed possible’, and promised that he and his comrades were taking revenge. Another wrote, also in July: ‘Everyone, even the last doubter, knows today that the battle against these subhumans, who’ve been whipped into a frenzy by the Jews, was not only necessary but came in the nick of time. Our Führer has saved Europe from certain chaos.’ Given such a mentality, it was not surprising that many Wehrmacht units were themselves involved in the shooting of Jews and other atrocities from the earliest phase of ‘Barbarossa’.
    In the early weeks of ‘Barbarossa’, the ‘actions’ undertaken by the Einsatzgruppen and their sub-units mainly targeted male Jews. The killing, though horrifying, was on nothing like the scale that it reached from August onwards. One particularly murderous Einsatzkommando in Lithuania, for example, killed
nine
times as many Jews in August and
fourteen
times as many in September as it had done in July. What was regarded as a large-scale ‘action’ in the first weeks had usually involved the shooting of hundreds of Jews, in rare instances more than 1,000. But by the beginning of October Einsatzkommando 4a, attached to Einsatzgruppe C in the Ukraine, could report with cold precision: ‘In retaliation for the arson in Kiev, all Jews were arrested and on 29 and30.9 a total of 33,771 Jews were executed.’ This was the notorious massacre at Babi-Yar, outside Kiev. The Jews – many of them women, children, and old people – had been rounded up in retaliation for a series of explosions in the city, killing some hundreds of German soldiers, a few days earlier, just before Kiev had fallen to the Wehrmacht. They were marched in small groups to the outskirts of the city, forced to undress, then to stand on a mound above the ravine of Babi-Yar. As the repeated salvoes of the killing-squads rang out, the lifeless bodies of the victims fell on to the growing mound of corpses below them.
    Women and children – seen as possible ‘avengers’ of the future – were now, following verbal instructions passed down the line by Himmler, then by the commanders of the various killer squads during August, generally included in the massacres. Thus, Einsatzkommando 3 shot 135 women among 4,239 Jews ‘executed’ during July, but 26,243 women and 15,112 children in the total of 56,459 Jews murdered during September 1941. Taking the four Einsatzgruppen and their sub-units together, the Jews killed before mid-August numbered around 50,000 – a massive increase on the scale of the murders in Poland, but only a tenth of the estimated half a million who would perish in the next four months.
    The huge increase in number of victims demanded different killing techniques. At first, a semblance of martial law and ‘execution’ by firing-squad was preserved. But after a few weeks, the killers took turns with a sub-machine gun, mowing down their naked victims as they knelt at the edge of a pit.
    The actual variation in the scale of the killing operations in the first weeks, and the sharp escalation from around August onwards, strongly suggests that no general mandate to exterminate Soviet Jewry in its entirety had been issued before ‘Barbarossa’ began. The number of men – around 3,000 in all, the core drawn heavily from the Gestapo, criminal police, regular police (
Ordnungspolizei
), and SD – initially engaged in the Einsatzgruppen actions would, in any case, have been incapable of implementing a full-scale genocidal programme, and could scarcely have been assembled with one in mind. The sharp increase in their numbers through supplementary police battalions began in late July. By the end of the year, there were
eleven
times as many members of the killing units as had been present at the start of ‘Barbarossa’.
    On 15 August, immediately