The Master Plan
EXCERPT
Sitting in their orderly offices in Berlin , SS racial experts were greatly troubled by the extraordinary cultural richness of the Soviet Union. Surrounded by neatly arranged card indexes and carefully alphabetized file folders, they had never grasped before the unruly complexity of the world. They had never understood that a nation such as the Soviet Union could be so vast, so complicated, so chaotic, or that human beings could be so diverse, so exotic, so difficult to pigeonhole. More than eighty different ethnic groups resided in the country – from the Belorussians to the Moldavians, the Ossetians to the Chuvash , the Kazakhs to the Mongols, the Tungus to the Dargins, the Chechens to Kabardas, the Mordvins to the Mansi, the Nenets to the Koryaks. And this posed serious questions for the racial specialists of RuSHA. Who among all of these peoples was Aryan? And exactly who was Jewish? Each day seemed to bring new doubts.
German racial scholars, after all, had still not devised a way of identifying members of the supposed Jewish race. In their scientific papers, they struggled in vain to define the physical characteristics of Jews. More often than not, they had fallen back instead on old anti-Semitic stereotypes. They talked about the short stature of Jews; about their flat breasts and rounded backs and weak muscles; their large, fleshy ears and hooked noses and yellowish skin; about the way they shuffled when they walked and the way they mumbled when they talked; and their great susceptibility to schizophrenia, manic depression and morphine addiction. But in reality, German racial experts could not separate the fictional Jewish race from its fictional Aryan counterpart. Indeed, one famous anthropological study conducted among German schoolchildren had revealed that 11.17 percent of Jewish children possessed fair skin, blond hair and blue eyes. Nazi researchers lacked a biological equivalent of the yellow Star of David. Nothing offered itself, and this failure deeply troubled racial scholars in the SS.
Already, the uncertainty was stirring up confusion where Himmler least wanted to see it – in the minds of the SS killing squads. Just six months after the Russian campaign began, one of the Einsatzgruppen leaders, Otto Ohlendorf, had thrown up his hands in the Crimea, unable to determine what to do with two local groups – the Krimchaks and the Karaites. Reputedly, the Krimchaks descended from Jews who fled the Spanish Inquisition, but they closely resembled their Muslim neighbors, the Tatars. They spoke a variant of Tatar, lived in Tatar-style houses, married into Tatar families and followed many Muslim customs. Their women, for example, wore veils in public. The second group, the Karaites, equally confounded the SS. They were a Turkish people who spoke a Turkish language, but they practiced Judaism devoutly. Was either truly Jewish?
This conundrum seems to have sparked great anxiety in the SS headquarters in Berlin . Hitler had frequently described the Jews as dangerous bacterium that threatened the rest of humanity, and he had become increasingly incensed by the Jews of the Soviet Union. " Russia " he had observed in one venomous conversation in July 1941, "has become a plague-centre ( Pestherd ) for mankind... For if only one state tolerates a Jewish family among it, this would provide the core bacillus ( Bazillenherd ) for a new decomposition." Well aware of these views, Himmler intended to wipe out every last Jew in the German-occupied territories of the Soviet Union . He solicited the opinions of various self-proclaimed SS authorities on Judaism for their views on the Krimchaks and Karaites. He then resolved to eradicate those belonging to the fictive Jewish race in the Crimea, and turn a blind eye to those who followed the Jewish faith. He ordered Ohlendorf and his men to liquidate the Krimchaks, who followed all manner of Muslim customs, and to spare the Karaites, who were devout Jews.
Perhaps Himmler hoped he had seen the last of such troublesome problems. But the confusion had only just begun. As the murder squads moved eastward into the Caucasus – a borderland between East and West, Europe and Asia – the lines between ethnic groups and tribes became more and more blurred. SS troops stumbled upon villages of the Christian Ossetes, who physically resembled their Jewish neighbors, lived in villages with Jewish names, married their sons and daughters off in Jewish-style marriage ceremonies and buried their dead in Jewish-style funerals. And they met Mountain Jews who rode their horses superbly, bred fine cattle and seldom stirred anywhere without strapping on their daggers and guns – all qualities greatly admired by SS men.
Who was who in this great ethnic bedlam? Who was Jewish and who wasn't? All the old certainties were slipping away. At times like this, Himmler counted upon science and scholarship to show the way.