the holocaust and colonialism in ukraine - Apple

6 • THE HOLOCAUST AND COLONIALISM IN UKRAINE
firing squad. A platoon of Waffen-SS men shot them with rifles. But according to the
SS and army participants, this method was ineffective; not every victim who fell into
the pit was dead. So an impromptu meeting was held between members of SK4a
(including the trained architect and SD careerist SS-Colonel Blobel) and two officials of
the Sixth Army—a judge, Dr. Arthur Neumann, and a Prussian doctor specializing in
forensics, Dr. Gerhart Panning. 22 (Panning was in the area conducting medical
“research”—testing the effects of dumdum bullets on Jewish POWs.) 23 Together they
decided that each victim should be shot in the head, but then this approach also proved
inadequate because it was, as one SS official described it, too “messy.” 24 The army
doctor and SS officials looked into the pit to make sure all were dead. According to one
eyewitness who testified after the war, as many as twenty-five percent were not, but the
killings continued, and many of the half-dead victims were covered with more bodies
and soil. Later that evening the SS-Police and army officials convened again to discuss
the type of shooting; at least one person present complained that it was “intolerable for
both victims and firing squad members.” 25
To be sure, preinvasion agreements (such as the Heydrich-Wagner agreement
of March 1941) had already established that the security police and the army would
share the task of securing the conquered territory. However, this incident illustrates
the significance of ad hoc collaboration that developed across agencies in the field as
the war unfolded. 26 To a large extent, the networks of persecution that formed among
regional leaders, especially within the army and security police, made the genocide
possible. There is scant evidence of lower-level German officials in the military and
SS-Police who resisted outright the order to kill Jews. After all, implementing the
Final Solution to the Jewish Question seemed to be one of the few things on which the
Einsatzgruppen, Wehrmacht, Order Police, civil administration, and non-Jewish
indigenous population could all agree. Instead, individuals including the seasoned
killer and head of Einsatzgruppe C, Dr. Rasch (Blobel’s boss), voiced concern about
the economic results and political backlashes of the policy. He critiqued the Nazi
approach on paper but in no way took action to slow the escalation of the mass
murder. In analyzing the mass murder that had just occurred in the Zhytomyr region
in early September 1941, Rasch made some relatively bold statements about where
the genocidal policy was headed:
Even if it were possible to carry out the immediate, 100 percent
elimination of the Jews, with that we would still not have done away with