Auschwitz by Laurence Rees Page B

policy of starvation in the East. But that was not the only reason the decision was taken to extend the killing. In July, Hitler had announced that he wanted a German “Garden of Eden” in the East–and, by implication, there would be no place for the Jews in this new Nazi paradise. (And it can surely be no accident that Himmler ordered the extension of the killing to include women and children after attending several secret one-on-one meetings with Hitler in July—this move could not have occurred without the Führer wishing it so.) With killing units already shooting Jewish men, it must have seemed a logical step from the Nazi ideological perspective to send extra men to the murder squads in order to “cleanse” this new “Garden of Eden” completely.
    Hans Friedrich 61 was a member of one of the SS infantry units that was sent to the East to reinforce the Einsatzgruppen in the summer of 1941. His SS brigade operated primarily in the Ukraine and he says they met no resistance from the Jews they came to murder. “They [the Jews] were extremely shocked, utterly frightened and petrified, and you could do what you wanted with them. They had resigned themselves to their fate.” The SS and its Ukrainian collaborators forced the Jews out of their village and made them stand by a
    deep, broad ditch. They had to stand in such a way that when they were shot they would fall into the ditch. That then happened again and again. Someone had to go down into the ditch and check conscientiously whether they were still alive or not, because it never happened that they
were all mortally wounded at the first shot. And if somebody wasn’t dead and was lying there injured, then he was shot with a pistol.
    Friedrich admits that he himself shot Jews in these pit killings. 62 He claims that he thought of “nothing” as he saw his victims standing just a few meters in front of him: “I only thought, ‘Aim carefully so that you hit.’ That was my thought. When you’ve got to the point where you’re standing there with a gun ready to shoot ... there’s only one thing, a calm hand so that you hit well. Nothing else.” He says his conscience has never troubled him over the murders he committed; he has never had a bad dream about the subject or woken in the night and questioned what he did.
    Documents confirm that Friedrich was a member of the SS 1st Infantry Brigade which entered the Ukraine on July 23rd. Although Friedrich—either because of the distance of time or out of a desire not to incriminate himself further—is not specific about the exact places where he carried out the killings, the records point to his brigade having participated in a number of murders of Jews in several named places.
    One such action took place in the western Ukraine on August 4, 1941. More than 10,000 Jews from surrounding villages had been forced from their homes and gathered in the town of Ostrog. “Early in the morning [of 4 August] the cars and lorries came,” says Vasyl Valdeman, 63 then a twelveyear-old member of a Jewish family. “They were armed and came with dogs.” Having surrounded the town, the SS forced thousands of Jews out towards a nearby hamlet where there was an area of sandy soil. “Everyone understood that we were going to be shot,” says Vasyl Valdeman,
    but it was impossible for the SS to shoot those amounts of people. We arrived there at ten o’clock [in the morning] and everyone was ordered to sit down. It was very hot. There was no food or water; people were just pissing on the ground. It was a very hard time. Somebody said they would rather be shot than sit there in the hot weather. Someone fainted and some people just died of fear itself.
    Oleksiy Mulevych, 64 a local villager, saw what happened next. He climbed on to the roof of a nearby barn and witnessed small groups of fifty
or one hundred Jews being led away from the field and