The Historiography of the Holocaust

Local Collaboration in the Holocaust in Eastern Europe 127
75,000 men and formed the bulk of the available police manpower in these
regions. 41 However, it is not necessarily correct to assume that their creation
was a direct result of Nazi plans for genocide.
As Christoph Dieckmann has pointed out, the creation of auxiliary police
forces on a large scale in the occupied Soviet territories arose initially not so much
from the intention to use them for the murder of the Jews, but rather from
concerns of the Economic Staff East (Wirtschaftsstab Ost) for sufficient security
personnel to ensure the intended policy of feeding the Army off the land. The
orders issued by Himmler and Daluege at the end of July 1941 for the establishment
of Schutzmannschaft units were in response to a request from the military
high command (Oberkommando der Wehrmacht) for more security personnel. 42
Of course, this also presented Himmler with a convenient opportunity to
override Hitler’s reluctance to rely on collaborationist forces for key tasks. Yet
this implies a degree of opportunism and improvisation rather than careful
planning in the employment of collaborators to implement the Holocaust.
In practice, the role of local collaborationist forces remained largely improvised
during the mass killings of the ‘first wave’, which lasted until the winter of
1941–42, when many of the German police battalions had to be redeployed to
the front. 43 Some notorious collaborationist formations were deployed repeatedly
as mobile killing units in the massacres of the Jews, but the manpower
they represented was only a few hundred men, who could easily have been
replaced by Germans if required.
The case of the Rollkommando Hamann, which murdered some 60,000 Jews
mostly in the small towns of Lithuania between July and September 1941,
demonstrates, however, that even the mobile killing units required local assistance
to implement genocide. Hamann’s unit consisted of only a handful of
Germans and a few score of Lithuanian auxiliaries. But they relied on the local
Lithuanian police and civil administration to assist in preparing the gravesites,
rounding up the victims and escorting them to their deaths. 44 Thus hundreds
more local policemen and administrators became vital accessories to these
crimes. This still meant that only a very small percentage of the total population
actively participated in the killings, but this local support certainly made the
German task much easier.
In occupied Ukraine and Belorussia there are also numerous examples of
locally recruited ‘militia’ units participating in the murder of Jews during the
‘first wave’. For example, in the town of Mir in Belorussia it is clear that local
policemen played a key role in the shootings. 45 One Einsatzgruppen report
mentions a division of labour that assigned the killing of children to the local
Ukrainian forces. 46 As Dieter Pohl has noted for Ukraine, without local knowledge
it would have been difficult for the Germans even to identify the Jews. 47
In terms of sheer manpower, however, it was probably not until the ‘second
wave’ of mass killings, focused mainly on western Belorussia and Ukraine