Auschwitz by Laurence Rees Page A

that we shall be victorious in Russia.” By mid-July, Panzer units were 600 kilometers inside the Soviet Union and by the end of the month a Soviet intelligence officer—on the orders of Beria, Goebbels’ Soviet counterpart—was approaching the Bulgarian ambassador in Moscow to see if he would act as an intermediary with the Germans and sue for peace. 59
    But on the ground the situation was more complex. The policy of starvation which had been such a central part of the invasion strategy meant that, for example, Vilnius, the capital of Lithuania, had by the start of July food supplies for only two weeks. Goering stated clear Nazi policy when he said that the only people who were entitled to be fed by the invading force were those “performing important tasks for Germany.” 60 There was also
the unresolved question of the dependants of those Jewish men who had been shot by the Einsatzgruppen. These women and children, having in most cases lost their breadwinners, were liable to starve especially swiftly; they were certainly not “performing important tasks for Germany.”
    Meanwhile, a crisis over food supply was predicted, not just on the Eastern Front but back in Poland in the Łódź ghetto. In July 1941, Rolf-Heinz Hoeppner of the SS wrote to Adolf Eichmann, who was in charge of the section dealing with Jewish affairs in the Reich Security Main Office:
    This winter there is a danger that not all the Jews can be fed any more. One should weigh honestly, if the most humane solution might not be to finish off those of the Jews who are not fit for work by means of some quick-working device. At any rate, that would be more pleasant than to let them starve to death.
    It is significant that Hoeppner writes of the potential need to kill those Jews “not fit to work”—not all the Jews. Increasingly, from the spring of 1941, the Nazis were making a distinction between Jews who were useful to the Germans and those who were not—a distinction that would later become crystallized in the infamous “selections” of Auschwitz.
    At the end of July Himmler issued orders that were to resolve the question of those Jews who were considered “useless eaters” by the Nazis—at least as far as the Eastern Front was concerned. He reinforced the Einsatzgruppen with units of the SS cavalry and police battalions. Eventually about 40,000 men would be involved in the killing—a ten-fold increase in the initial complement of the Einsatzgruppen. This massive increase in manpower was for a reason—the policy of killing in the East was to be extended to include Jewish women and children. The order for this action reached different Einsatzgruppe commanders at different times over the next few weeks, often given by Himmler personally as he went on a tour of the killing fields. But by mid-August all the commanders of the murder squads knew of the expansion of their task.
    This moment marks a turning point in the killing process. Once women and children were to be shot, the Nazi persecution of the Jews entered an entirely different conceptual phase. Almost all the Nazi anti-Jewish policies
during the war so far had been potentially genocidal, and Jewish women and children had already died in the ghettos or during the failed Nisko emigration. But this was different. Now the Nazis had decided to gather together women and children, make them strip, line them up next to an open pit, and shoot them. There could be no pretence that a baby was an immediate threat to the German war effort, but a German soldier would now look at that little child and pull the trigger.
    Many factors came together at this crucial time to cause the change in policy. One important precondition was, of course, that the Jewish women and children in the Soviet Union now presented a “problem” for the Nazis—one the Nazis had created themselves by a combination of shooting male Jews and instigating a