Who Killed Lida's Jewish Intelligentsia, A Case Study of Wehrmacht Involvement in The Holocaust's First Hour

Who Killed Lida’s Jewish Intelligentsia?
A
Case Study of Wehrmacht Involvement
in the Holocaust’s “First Hour”
David W. Wildermuth
Shippensburg University
An investigation of the liquidation of Lida’s Jewish intelligentsia reveals

that front-line Wehrmacht troops, and not the Einsatzgruppen normally
associated with such actions, were responsible. This finding regarding the
first week of the war challenges the paradigmatic view that the Wehrmacht
requested and supported the liquidation of Soviet Jewry, while the security
apparatus—e.g. the SS, the SD, the SiPo, the OrPo, and the Einsatzgruppen—
carried out the executions. A comparison of military operations in Lida and
Grodno brings to light patterns within front-line Wehrmacht officers’ and
soldiers’ attitudes towards Soviet Jews, and allows us to place genocidal
crimes within the context of the prosecution of Operation Barbarossa.
Introduction
Despite historians’ repeated and long-standing calls for the investigation of the
Wehrmacht’s role in the Holocaust, the complicity of this organization—and espe-
cially that of its front-line troops—remains an underexplored topic.1 Images of the
National Socialist centers of mass extermination have long dominated our notions of
the Holocaust. The recent catch-phrase “Holocaust by bullets,” however, has drawn
attention to the symbiotic relationship between the Holocaust’s genesis and the inva-
sion of the Soviet Union.2 Hitler may not have trusted his army to fulfill on its own the
National Socialist goals of this invasion, but the sheer number of Holocaust victims in
the East suggests that the Wehrmacht cooperated in the selection and liquidation of
Soviet Jewry. This article will illustrate how, during the occupation of Lida, front-line
troops repeatedly persecuted the town’s Jewish population in both arbitrary and
organized Aktionen. By focusing on acts of genocide in a specific town of the
Belorussian SSR during the first week of Operation Barbarossa, we gain micro-level
insight into the involvement of the German Army (the Heer, or more loosely, the
Wehrmacht) in the Holocaust in the Soviet Union.
Given the lack of case studies, it has been difficult to break down the image of
the Wehrmacht as a monolith or to gain insight into the mechanisms of Wehrmacht
participation in genocide. Christian Gerlach has recorded many crimes committed by
front-line German troops in Belorussia against both Jewish and non-Jewish Soviet
civilians, but the lack of contextualization in his works limits our insight into their
doi:10.1093/hgs/dct011
Holocaust and Genocide Studies 27, no. 1 (Spring 2013): 1–29 1
frequency and catalysts.3 Bernhard Chiari’s work on the German occupation of the
same territory portrays the Wehrmacht as lacking initiative, and thus as a supporting
actor in the Holocaust.4 Omer Bartov points to the gradual descent of the German
Army into a brutal war of annihilation in the East, with its crimes against Jews increas-
ing in both frequency and intensity over time. Before long the Army had witnessed, if
not participated in, mass murders of Jews.5 On the other hand, Hannes Heer ques-
tions the need to differentiate between varying levels of involvement and complicity,
arguing that the Wehrmacht was the “apparatus of a violence-oriented society,” and
that war against all enemies of the Reich was a “natural expression” of this orientation.6
Important new studies by Dieter Pohl on the Wehrmacht’s occupation policies and
Johannes Hürter on its uppermost leadership examine the Wehrmacht’s involvement
in the Holocaust from a “top-down” perspective, addressing only distantly the front-
line troops’ immediate measures against the Soviet Jewish population.7 Recent
Russian-language scholarship on the Holocaust has largely overlooked the role of the
Wehrmacht, whose crimes against Jews continue to be largely subsumed under the
broader heading of occupation crimes.8
Christian Hartmann has reached some conclusions regarding the Wehrmacht
and the Holocaust that are particularly relevant to this article. Specifically, Hartmann
posits that because the NS-apparatus and its centers of mass extermination were well
behind the front lines for the majority of the German-Soviet war, there was less
opportunity for front-line troops in the East to participate in the organized persecu-
tion of Soviet Jewry.9 As regards the first weeks of the invasion, he argues that crimes
perpetrated by front-line troops were limited to isolated incidents, mainly in the
Baltic and the Ukraine.10 The Wehrmacht’s primary experience in war crimes
occurred not during the summer 1941 advance, but during the later retreats, and was
motivated not so much by ideology as by military “necessity.”11 Indeed, Hartmann
draws a distinction between the German Army in the field and other units associated
with war crimes,12 offering the possibility of an “inverse reciprocal relationship”
between the density of front-line troops and the frequency of war crimes.13
Because Holocaust survivors often were unable to identify their tormentors,
Holocaust literature has also tended to perpetuate the paradigmatic view that
although the Wehrmacht requested and supported the liquidation of Soviet Jewry, the
security apparatus—e.g. the SS, SD, SiPo, OrPo and the Einsatzgruppen—carried
out the executions.14 Indeed, witnesses themselves most often report their first con-
tacts with German forces as having been with Gestapo, SS, or Einsatzgruppen units,
perhaps because the subsequent selections and mass liquidations performed by these
organizations remained most vivid in survivors’ memories. Even when survivors have
pointed to Wehrmacht participation in genocide, their inability to identify individual
units casts a shadow of doubt on the accuracy of their reports.
Attempts to move beyond such generalizations, especially as regards the contex-
tualized analysis of individual front-line Wehrmacht units, have been largely lacking.
2 Holocaust and Genocide Studies

What distinctions can be drawn between the Einsatzgruppen, who were charged with
the destruction of Jews, Communists, and other “enemies of the Reich,” and the
Wehrmacht’s front-line troops, who were tasked with the defeat of the Red Army? In
practice, did the cooperation between the Einsatzgruppen and the Wehrmacht ever
go beyond the Wagner-Heydrich agreement that provided for Wehrmacht assistance
to Himmler’s mobile killing units, but released them from the actual killing?15 Were
front-line troops of the Eastern Army too disinterested in Soviet Jewry or too far
removed from the liquidation centers to participate in the Holocaust? And most
important, how can the contextualization of genocidal crimes lead us to a deeper
understanding of the interrelationship between war and genocide on the Eastern
Front?
With the goal of providing insights into such questions, this article investigates
the liquidation of the Jewish intelligentsia of the town of Lida at the end of June 1941.
Located in the Hrodno voblast of modern Belarus, Lida belonged to Poland in the
interwar period and at the time of the German occupation had a population of twenty
to twenty-five thousand.16 On the eve of the invasion, the long-established Jewish
community of Lida, which was first mentioned in the mid-sixteenth century, consti-
tuted approximately 8,500 of this number.17
Sources differ as to how many prominent Jewish men of Lida were executed,
when they were executed, and by whom. The yizkor (memorial) book for Lida states
that on June 28, 1941, “contingents of SS and SD stormtroopers” executed ninety-two
Jewish men of the “free professions.”18 A more recent Russian-language publication,
basing its findings on the documents of the regional commission for crimes of the
occupiers in Lida, gives July 3 as the date, placing the number of victims at 155 and
omitting any reference to the responsible party.19 The Encyclopedia Judaica gives yet
another date for the liquidations—July 5, 1941. It reduces the number to ninety-eight
victims and identifies the perpetrators only as “the Germans.”20 A leading new
Russian-language study, Kholokost na territorii SSSR, refers to a “Sonderkommando”
that selected and executed ninety-two Jewish men on July 3, 1941.21 While details
vary, the clear impression from all four sources is that the action most likely was
committed by the Einsatzgruppen during their initial sweep through the area.
A deeper analysis, however, provides compelling evidence that front-line
Wehrmacht units were directly responsible for the killing of Lida’s Jewish intelligent-
sia. By comparing this liquidation to that of the Jewish intelligentsia in Grodno—
which was committed by Teilkommando Haupt of Einsatzkommando 9—we gain
insights into the practical mechanisms of genocide, the importance of local initiative,
and the synergies between the prosecution of the war and the persecution of Soviet
Jewry.
In arguing for Wehrmacht culpability in the liquidation of Lida’s Jewish intelli-
gentsia, I have used both perpetrator and victim sources to support my findings. Of
obvious importance are the war diaries of the Wehrmacht units involved as well as the
Who Killed Lida’s Jewish Intelligentsia? 3

reports of the Einsatzgruppen for the period under study. While the war diaries of
Lida’s and Grodno’s Ortskommandanturen and the Feldkommandantur for the area
shed no light on the events in question, the detailed reports on the location of the
Wehrmacht’s 8th, 35th, and 161st Infantry Divisions, the 403rd Security Division, and
Einsatzgruppe B found in their respective war diaries help to compensate for this
absence.22 In addition to these perpetrator sources, the yizkor books for Grodno and
Lida, as well as the USC Shoah Foundation testimonies of witnesses to the events of
early summer 1941, provide a perspective on the military operations and the crimes
committed by the front-line troops that is not captured in the perpetrator sources.
These victim and witness sources clarify issues of timing and responsibility not
addressed in most recent Holocaust narratives.
Admittedly, survivor testimony presents its own challenges to any interpretation
of the events of the Holocaust, especially when, as in this article, it is used to help
establish the approximate date of a particular event. Jan Gross has argued for a para-
digm shift in the handling of survivor testimonies, calling for historians to accept them
more broadly and to use them more extensively.23 Christopher Browning cautions
that a less-than-critical reception of survivor testimony should not become the
“default position,” but argues that in the case of perpetrator testimonies, “if historians
cannot find ‘smoking pistol’ documents, they must look for pattern and fit among the
evidence that is available.”24 For the case of Wehrmacht involvement in the massacre
in Lida, I have done just that, looking for the “pattern and fit” among all the available
USC Shoah Foundation testimonies related to Grodno and Lida during the early days
of German occupation. Because the testimonies from this collection were well struc-
tured, I have also studied the sequence of events narrated. Questions such as whether
the Judenräte in Grodno and Lida were established before the Jewish intelligentsia
was liquidated provide clues as to the responsible parties. By embedding these testi-
monies in a larger narrative that includes perpetrator sources, we can establish front-
line Wehrmacht troops’ culpability for these Lida Jews’ liquidation.
Historical Background to the Liquidation of Lida’s and Grodno’s

Jewish Intellectuals
In 1962, the Landgericht Berlin sentenced the head of Einsatzkommando 9,
Dr. Alfred Filbert, to life imprisonment for ordering the shootings of thousands of
Jews between July and October 1941.25 One of his earliest documented orders dis-
patched a detachment, or Teilkommando, to Grodno and Lida to initiate executions
of Jews in both towns. This Teilkommando, led by an Obersturmführer by the name
of Haupt, numbered approximately twenty men and was to return, after discharging
its responsibilities, to its parent unit in Vilna. Precise dating of the order remains prob-
lematic. The court records assert that Einsatzkommando 9 arrived in the Waldlager
Varena on July 1, 1941, and that from there Teilkommando Haupt diverted course to

Grodno and Lida, but it is more likely that all of these troops arrived in Varena the
previous day.26
The creation of this Teilkommando was directly linked to Heydrich’s operational
order number 3, dated July 1, which gave voice to his frustration over the lack of initia-
tive demonstrated by his subordinates in the first week of the invasion. Arriving in
Grodno on June 30, 1941 for a meeting with Heinrich Himmler, Heydrich was struck
by the fact that none of his police security forces had visited this city—with its large
Jewish population—since the Wehrmacht had taken control of it a full week earlier.27
Irritated by this delay, Heydrich used the occasion to admonish his Einsatzgruppen to
“keep pace with military developments.” Seemingly alluding to the failure of
Einsatzgruppe B to visit Grodno, he decreed, “it will and must be possible to at least
send advance kommandos to especially important destinations at the appropriate
time.”28
The Teilkommando was only partially successful in performing its executions
under the guise of “pacifying” the towns. Although Dr. Filbert had tasked the detach-
ment with actions against the Jews in both towns, the prosecution in the postwar case
against Filbert was able to locate evidence that this order was carried out for only
one of the two: “In the execution of this directive in Grodno or Lida (more likely in
Lida), Haupt had at least 80 men arrested after locals had denounced them to
members of the commando as Jews. The men were gathered at a fairground and
driven 2 km outside of town” to a spot where they were summarily executed.29
Further evidence for the limited scope of Teilkommando Haupt’s “success” can be
found in documents dating to the time of the actions. In his report for Einsatzgruppe
B in Ereignismeldung UdSSR no. 21 of July 13, 1941, commander Arthur Nebe
laments that “only 96 Jews have been executed in Grodno and Lida . . . in the first
days. I have given the order that [efforts] here are to be greatly intensified.”30 Nebe
acknowledged that these two locations had yet to receive a thorough treatment by his
own units. In light of the relatively modest number of victims given at the postwar
trial—“at least 80”—it is probable that as of mid-July 1941, one of these locations
had not yet been purged.
In contrast to Einsatzgruppe B, the Wehrmacht could already report great suc-
cesses in its operations in the two cities under study. Grodno, a city and rayon center
of approximately 50,000 people, about half of whom were Jewish, had fallen to the
Wehrmacht’s 8th Infantry Division on the afternoon of June 23rd.31 Due to its function
as a transportation hub and its bridges over the first great natural barrier to the inva-
sion, the Neman River, the Germans considered Grodno’s seizure to be of vital impor-
tance. The Luftwaffe had bombed the city on the 22nd, and the battle in the town had
been brief: the Red Army retreated almost immediately.32 By mid-afternoon on the
23rd, a reconnaissance unit of the 8th Infantry Division had also secured the “large
food supply depot” at the train station and directed subordinate units to guard against
plundering.33 Perhaps due to the unexpectedly rapid takeover of Grodno, a battalion

of front-line soldiers and some rear-echelon troops from the division were ordered to
remain in Grodno until the requested Ortskommandant and support units of the
403rd Security Division could arrive to take over the administration of the city.34 Until
that time, division headquarters named a battalion commander Ortskommandant of
Grodno and instructed that: “[The Ortskommandant] must implement the orders for
the handling of the civilian population. Specifically, civilians caught plundering are to
be executed. As a warning [against plundering], the mayor must be contacted immedi-
ately and charged with promptly issuing the corresponding announcement.”35
Division headquarters gave no further instruction for the handling of the civilian pop-
ulation in what appears to be their first experience with an Ortskommandantur on the
Eastern Front. Considering that the German Army executed civilians for a myriad of
possible transgressions, the emphasis on warning the public of the policy against plun-
derers suggests that this problem had yet to reach threatening dimensions in Grodno,
and that the division was not intent on underscoring its authority through immediate,
arbitrary killings.
The Wehrmacht’s capture of Lida occurred later and under different circum-
stances. Farther away from the Reich’s borders, the town did not become an objective
of ground operations until June 26th; organizational delays meant the operation did
not begin until June 27th. An important rail hub, the town had already been heavily
bombed by the Luftwaffe on the second day of the war. According to witness testi-
mony, the civil administration of Lida collapsed almost immediately after the
bombing, with many Soviet functionaries fleeing to the East.36 Between the bombing
and the arrival of German troops the town suffered a rapid deterioration of living con-
ditions, as refugees from places farther west arrived in Lida, and basic services were
interrupted. Red Army troops moving through the city had to protect themselves
from the “Diversanti,” presumably Polish nationalists, who fired upon them.37
Plundering and sporadic attacks on the Jewish inhabitants of Lida soon began, leading
one Jewish witness to describe this interlude between Soviet and German rule as a
“war without a war.”38 The Wehrmacht’s 161st Division, sent to seize control of Lida,
encountered “strong resistance” by Red Army units on the approaches to the town.39
To soften up the city’s defenses, the Luftwaffe bombed it again on the evening of
June 27th.40 According to one witness testimony, the first units of the 161st Division
entered the almost completely-destroyed town soon after, and were “enthusiastically
met” by its Polish inhabitants.41 The following day, the division’s staff arrived in Lida,
an indicator that the town was by then firmly under German control. But the situation
was not yet entirely settled; the war diary noted that the division “carried out security
tasks exclusively” in Lida and its environs that day.42
Unlike in Grodno, where the Wehrmacht unit responsible for the capture of the
town administered it until the arrival of a dedicated Ortskommandantur, in Lida there
was no such continuity. By the 29th of June, the 161st Division had been redeployed
northeast of Lida and was replaced by units of the 35th Infantry Division. That

morning, the operations officer of the 161st had noted in the division war diary the
presence of “a great amount of war booty” at Lida’s main train station and airfield, but
it is unclear what measures, if any, had been taken to secure these depots. Directly
upon its arrival that afternoon, the division staff of the 35th felt obliged to introduce an
Ortskommandantur for Lida, “in order to secure the goods on hand (tea, boots, tex-
tiles) and to keep the plundering inhabitants in check.”43 Lida was administered by
the 35th Infantry Division until the arrival of the 403rd Division’s Ortskommandantur
849 and Landesschützbataillon 564 on July 2, 1941.
The establishment of Ortskommandanturen in the two locations by front-line
troops conformed to the widely declared necessity of creating “calm and order” to
facilitate the smooth flow of further military operations. To this end, the pre-invasion
“Conduct of Courts Martial in the ‘Barbarossa’ Area” decree legally empowered, even
encouraged, every soldier of the Wehrmacht to make decisions of life and death
regarding Soviet citizens. While these orders are the subject of new scholarly works,
and need not be elucidated in any great detail for purposes of this study, it is impor-
tant to note Christian Hartmann’s observation that, “generally speaking, every
Wehrmacht unit could interpret the Kriegsgerichtsbarkeitserlass [Decree on Military
Jurisdiction] as it so chose.”44 Perhaps even more central to subsequent events in
Lida, the pamphlet Richtlinien für das Verhalten der Truppen in Russland
(Guidelines on the Behavior of Troops in Russia) was distributed on June 17th by the
35th Division’s first supply officer to all its battalions, with the request that it be
opened with the order of attack on the evening of June 21st.45 The pamphlet stated in
part: “This struggle requires ruthless and energetic measures against Bolshevik agita-
tors, guerillas, saboteurs, and Jews, and the complete elimination of all active and
passive resistance.”46 Another leaflet distributed at this time to the Eastern Army did
not single out Jews for “ruthless and energetic measures,” but further blurred the line
between enemy combatant and enemy non-combatant. This flier, entitled Kennt ihr
den Feind? (Do You Know the Enemy?) led the troops to expect a confrontation with
a fanatical underground Bolshevik resistance, including Red Army parachutists in
civilian clothing. It warned: “Be hard and remorseless whenever you encounter such
tactics—it is irrelevant whether soldiers or civilians are concerned.”47
Beyond these directives sent from the Supreme Command to all Wehrmacht
units, individual field armies could and did provide their own ideological guidance. All
the divisions involved in the occupation of Grodno and Lida belonged to the
Wehrmacht’s 9th Army, which as Christian Gerlach has pointed out, was one of the
earliest to introduce measures to disenfranchise and isolate the Soviet Jewish popula-
tion.48 Proclamations “of the first hour” posted in both Lida and Grodno announced
the dissolution of all Communist and Jewish organizations, and required the registra-
tion and marking—through white armbands with the Star of David—of all Jews. The
Jews were denied freedom of movement and were forced to provide labor for work
details.49

Arbitrary and Sanctioned Violence by Front-Line Troops against
the Jews of Lida
Multiple victim and perpetrator sources point to front-line troops’ initiatives that went
beyond documented instructions. The most detailed eyewitness account is provided
by Eliahu Damesek, a worker in the Lida printing office, who later became a secretary
for the Lida Judenrat. According to Mr. Damesek, on the first Sabbath after the inva-
sion—June 28, 1941, the day the division staff of the 161st arrived in Lida—“there
arrived contingents of SS and SD stormtroopers whose task it was to liquidate the
Jewish inhabitants, especially members of the “free professions.” Immediately upon
the Germans’ arrival Jews caught in the city were taken to the main square on Suvalski
Street.” From among those rounded up, a group of ninety-two Jewish jurists, engi-
neers, teachers, and other members of the free professions were selected and
escorted outside the city limits, where they were immediately executed. As the center
was completely destroyed, the remaining Jews were concentrated in labor camps on
the outskirts of town. The first task of forced labor was to clear the streets of battle
debris.50 Given the predisposition of military commanders in the field not to allow the
Einsatzgruppen access to the battlefield while operations were continuing, and the
known location of the units subordinate to Einsatzgruppe B on this day, it is clear that
the units responsible for this Aktion were front-line troops. It could not have been the
SS and SD men of Teilkommando Haupt, which, as already noted, did not arrive at
the headquarters of the 403rd Security Division in neighboring Lithuania until two
days later.
Other witness testimony confirms that the Jewish intelligentsia of Lida was liqui-
dated immediately following the German takeover. One Jewish survivor, Elise
Barzach, 28 years old at the time, recalled that posters displayed in the first day or two
of the occupation had ordered all Jewish men to gather at a predetermined public
place; from there, 120 to 150 of these men, mostly “professionals, doctors, lawyers,”
were taken away and executed at an unknown location.51 These executions took place
even before the Jewish population had been required to register for work details. The
registration of laborers was normally one of the first measures taken in bombed-out
towns and cities such as Lida, since the restoration of transportation and communica-
tions networks was critical to the army’s operations. Bella Goldfischer, a survivor who
was 16 years old at the time of the occupation, recalled: “We had to register [for
forced labor]. They formed a Jewish council. . . . There were some prominent
[Jewish] people who were part of it, although a large number of prominent Jewish
[ people], Jews were killed as a ‘hello’ the first two, couple days that they [the
Germans] entered the city.”52 It seems, then, that only after an initial wave of execu-
tions was Lida’s Jewish council established and charged with organizing Jewish work
detachments. At that point, new posters went up around the city requiring Jewish
men and women to remove the ruins and debris from the city’s public spaces, an activ-
ity begun under the direction of front-line troops.53

While arbitrary shootings at the hands of troops generally remain undocu-
mented, the case of the German Army’s occupation of Lida is an exception. The
soldier Otto W. would later recall for their exceptional brutality actions taken there by
his comrades in the 161st Division:
During the occupation of the city of Lida I was witness to the following incident: The
leader of the regiment’s mounted troops (Infantry Regiment 336, 161st Infantry
Division) had 20 Jewish locals arrested and sent off by a kommando. Among these inhabi-
tants were people from 16 to around 60 years of age. When they arrived outside the city
limits, they severely mistreated them. They were beaten with rifle butts and tortured with
bayonets; blood was flowing from both nose and mouth. Then they had to, under further
mistreatment, dig a pit. When it was finished they had to stand one after the other before
the pit and were executed in the presence of all. There was no reason for this killing.54
Otto W.’s confession is revealing on two distinct levels. First, it is notable that a front-
line unit would find the time during active military operations to identify, torture, and
execute noncombatants belonging to a particular subgroup of the general population.
Second, there appears to have been a direct connection between combat operations
and this act of genocide. According to the June 27, 1941 entry in the war diary of the
division, it was this regiment, IR336, that had to overcome “strong resistance” on the
approaches to the town.55 Given the broad age difference and size of the targeted
group, we can conclude that this was a separate incident from the execution of the
Jewish intelligentsia. Moreover, the massacre was characterized in the recent work
Kholokost na territorii SSSR as an attack on Jews suspected of being Communists.56
The organization of an execution kommando under an officer confirms, however, that
the division accepted such methods for the “pacification” of the town. A few weeks
later, the division’s war diary recorded reprisals against non-combatants for an offense
that in all likelihood was committed by Red Army soldiers: after the mutilated corpses
of five dispatch riders who had gone missing were discovered, the division commander
ordered that “collective measures be taken against the [surrounding] villages.”57
Such reprisals against civilians had been codified by the prewar directives men-
tioned above, and from time to time—though not always—were mentioned explicitly
in the Wehrmacht’s war diaries. In contrast to the witness testimonies, the war diary of
the 161st Division does not mention specifically any persecution of Lida’s Jewish pop-
ulation, but the division’s listed activities allow for the possibility. A slip of paper enti-
tled “Measures for the 28th of June” and included with transcripts of the division’s
radio transmissions records the orders that the division staff gave its subordinate units
that day. According to this record, the measures for the 28th of June, in order of
importance, were “cleansing,” then “securing” the town and its environs, and conduct-
ing “reconnaissance.”58 Unlike the instructions that accompanied the latter two activ-
ities, the task of “cleansing” contained no further details. But because, in the course
of this day, doubts arose “regarding the treatment of the prisoners-of-war and the
civilian population,” the intelligence officer (Ic) of the 161st Division issued an

extemporaneous order intended to clarify the proper handling of these groups.59
While the order is not extant, the following passage from the June 28, 1941 entry in
the Ic’s war diary provides some insight into the correlations drawn between Soviet
Jews and the “Bolshevik threat”:
The paybook of a German non-commissioned officer and coins were found with a
prisoner from the [Soviet] Rifle Regiment 55, a Jew named Viktor Israelevich K. The
German NCO was taken prisoner wounded and was executed as a wounded prisoner of
war, after he wrote a goodbye card to his mother.60
That the intelligence officer of this division thought it relevant to record this unusual
anecdote in atypical detail in his war diary, mentioning that the prisoner was a Jew and
giving his recognizably Jewish name, underscores his apparent association of Jews
with the mistreatment of German soldiers. The linking of Soviet Jewry with the Red
Army’s notorious 55th Rifle Regiment, already identified as having committed war
crimes in the region, would only have encouraged tougher measures against the
Jewish community of Lida. This regiment was first identified by German units on
June 27th as one of the Red Army units defending Lida. Two days later, the 35th
Division reported that the 55th Red Army Rifle Regiment had executed wounded
German soldiers, while prisoners from this regiment revealed under interrogation
that they had been instructed to remove all markings of military rank on their uni-
forms and to later change into civilian clothing.61 The association of Soviet Jews with
this Red Army unit and its treachery speaks to what Hannes Heer has identified as the
“transformation of the Jews as political opponents into the declared military
enemy.”62 The date of this entry agrees with the yizkor book’s date for the liquidation
of Lida’s Jewish intelligentsia, which points to a sanctioned reprisal under the mantle
of the “cleansing” and/or “security” tasks undertaken by the 161st Division.
Teilkommando Haupt had not arrived in Lida to perform its “police-security” opera-
tions by the date in question.
Multiple victim testimonies indicate that the phrase “doubts regarding the treat-
ment of the prisoners-of-war and the civilian population” referred euphemistically to
acts that included the arbitrary and wanton murder of many of Lida’s Jews by soldiers
of the 161st Division. The testimony given by Arnold Arluk-Lawit, who was 21 years
old at the time of the events he describes, is distinct in the level of detail it provides.
Arluk-Lawit is clear in his indictment of front-line Wehrmacht troops passing through
Lida during the initial phase of occupation:
The march-through lasted a few days. . . . In the meantime, on the way through, what I
have always stressed, that the Wehrmacht participated heartily, yes, already during the
march-through hundreds of Jews were murdered through the assistance of the
Wehrmacht.63

The active persecution of the Jewish population of Lida, according to Arluk-Lawit’s
testimony, did not begin or end with the selection and execution of the Jewish intelli-
gentsia of that town. Rather, it appears that in the first few days of its occupation of
Lida, the German Army did little to stem the anti-Jewish violence and plunder that
began immediately upon the disappearance of the Communist municipal officials. On
the contrary, as Arluk-Lawit attests, the Wehrmacht presence there added another
layer of terror:
The first period of the occupation [by] the Germans was very difficult. Jews could be shot
arbitrarily by various soldiers who had gone wild and were out to shoot someone, if they
wanted. Then this Feldkommandantur [sic] left for the front and a [new]
Ortskommandantur arrived. Then things changed a bit. The Ortskommandant was a
little older and brought an older [unit] with him . . . . The older men were not as wild as
the younger ones.64
The reference to the difference in average age of the men of the two
Ortskommandanturen is a crucial detail—one that is supported by the historical
record—and further underscores the veracity of Arluk-Lawit’s testimony. The first
Ortskommandantur in Lida was, as previously mentioned, established by the 35th
Infantry Division, a division created with the introduction of universal conscription in
1935, and whose personnel consisted overwhelmingly of younger recruits and career
officers. By contrast, the personnel of the 403rd Security Division consisted almost
entirely of reserve officers and soldiers drafted later and deemed too old to serve at
the front.65 With the change in Ortskommandanturen upon the arrival of the 403rd’s
Ortskommandantur 849, the change from younger to older personnel occurred
exactly as Arluk-Lawit recalled. By attributing the worst period of the occupation to
the first, younger, Ortskommandantur, the testimony makes it clear that the active
persecution of the Jews of Lida, in both its organized and spontaneous forms, was
committed by front-line troops.
The selection and liquidation of Lida’s Jews by front-line troops may well be
part of a larger phenomenon that has only recently begun to receive more scholarly
attention.66 In the case of the 35th Division, I have documented other examples of the
persecution of Jewish civilians as “reprisals” for their alleged participation in combat.
On the evening of June 28, 1941, a combat group tasked with the capture of Bielica, a
village not far from Lida with a considerable Jewish population, reported the details of
a coordinated punitive action against the civilian population: “Because civilians partici-
pated in the battle against German soldiers, 10 men were executed as hostages,
Bielica put to the torch by the 6th Company.”67 Multiple victim sources indicate that
the reprisals were directed primarily against the Jewish community: with perhaps
one exception, all the civilians executed were Jewish, and the homes torched had
been identified by collaborating locals as Jewish-owned.68 That such reprisals could
be organized through the initiative of the local commander clearly indicates that

officers of that division felt they had broad latitude to interpret the
Kriegsgerichtsbarkeitserlass. In this cursory formulation, the division’s war diary omits
any reference to reprisal: “The situation is restored, Bielica is ablaze.”69 Such obfusca-
tion raises the question of how common these acts of retribution may have been. It is
also of interest to note that one of the units involved in the “reprisals” at Bielica, the
2nd Company of the PanzerJäger Abteilung 35, would be summoned to Lida the next
day to help implement security measures there.70
Despite their varying levels of explicitness, victim and perpetrator sources
mutually reinforce each other in their account of the first phase of the German occu-
pation of Lida: approximately 100 prominent Jewish men of Lida were executed even
before the Jewish council had been organized and Jewish labor forced to clean up the
city—usually acts of the “first hour.” While survivor testimonies do not accord in every
detail, the “pattern and fit” of the testimonies support these findings. Some details,
such as Arnold Arluk-Lawit’s recollection of the difference in average age of the first
two Ortskommandanturen, have been borne out by the historical record. And while
recollecting dates is problematic, given the fallibility of human memory, the “pattern
and fit” emerge clearly: of the close to thirty interviews reviewed for this article con-
cerning Lida, only one testimony by a survivor from Lida differs substantially from the
timeline set forth here.71 Perhaps more important, none of the testimonies by survi-
vors who had left Lida before the German occupation and returned after the first
week of the occupation reference the liquidation of the Jewish intelligentsia. The
most logical explanation for this omission is that they were not there to witness it.
In the case of Lida, photographic evidence also corroborates this timeline.72
The photo accompanying this article, taken by Gerhard B., a soldier of the 35th
Division’s reconnaissance unit, gives a sense of the devastation of Lida on July 3,
1941, when his unit had been ordered by divisional headquarters to redeploy along
the paved roads usually reserved for tank and mechanized divisions. However, a photo
album assembled after the war by Officer R. of the same unit provides visual proof of
the progress of the clean-up of Lida’s streets as of that date.73 Like Gerhard B.’s
photo, the photos Officer R. took of Lida on that day show a ravaged city: the single-
family homes in what appears to be the outskirts of town are without exception
roofless, their charred gable-ends visible even in the poor black-and-white resolution.
Another picture shows the cobblestoned streets, broad sidewalks, and roofless, burnt-
out storefronts of Lida’s town center. In both images, the sidewalks and streets of
Lida are entirely clear of debris. In all the areas Officer R. photographed, the
clean-up had already been completed by the Jewish work details created by Lida’s
Judenrat after the liquidation of the Jewish intelligentsia. The inscription under the
photographs—July 3, 1941—can be confirmed by an entry in the division’s war diary
of the same date, which mentions the movement of R.’s unit through Lida. This was
also the earliest date on which Teilkommando Haupt could have arrived in Lida.74

Buildings in Lida destroyed during air raids and local fighting before the German Army captured the
town on June 27, 1941. Photo taken on July 3, 1941, by a member of the 35th Infantry Division’s
reconnaissance unit. Courtesy of the Bibliothek für Zeitgeschichte, Stuttgart, collection Bopp (N06.6),
Photoalbum #4: “Vor 22.6.–7.7.41.”
Teilkommando Haupt in Grodno

While evidence indicates that Wehrmacht troops were responsible for the liquidation
in Lida, the facts in Grodno point to Teilkommando Haupt of Einsatzgruppe
B. According to Ereignismeldung (event report) no. 10, this Teilkommando had been
dispatched on June 30th to Grodno. It remained in Grodno until July 4th, at which
time it was relieved by another support unit of Einsatzgruppe B; the incoming unit
continued the persecution of the Jews there by instigating a pogrom.75 By July 7th at
the latest, Teilkommando Haupt had rejoined Einsatzkommando 9 in Vilna.76
Landgericht Berlin’s proceedings had established that Teilkommando Haupt’s return
to Vilna had taken place around July 5th; given the “extensive tasks” that, according to
Nebe, awaited Einsatzkommando 9 there, the earlier date of return for this
Teilkommando seems more than credible.77 The opening weeks of the war were so
dynamic that it was impossible to monitor the locations of all Einsatzgruppen units,
despite Himmler and Heydrich’s insistence that they remain well informed at all
times. If the Teilkommando did indeed return to Vilna on July 5th, it would have
spent approximately four days in Grodno, and perhaps not even one full day in Lida.
The most logical explanation for its quick departure from Lida is that the initial “pacifi-
cation” of Lida’s Jewish community, through the execution of its intelligentsia, had
been accomplished by other German units, namely front-line troops. At this stage the

Einsatzgruppen were instructed only to liquidate prominent male Jews. With this
liquidation already accomplished, there was no reason for Teilkommando Haupt to
stay on in Lida, especially as Dr. Filbert was impatiently awaiting the return of this
detachment to Vilna.
Yet, survivor testimony supports the conclusion that the Jewish intelligentsia of
Grodno was indeed annihilated in an Aktion by Teilkommando Haupt, reflecting
Heydrich’s stated desire for his men to perform their “security-police tasks” in this
city. The vast majority of eyewitness accounts published in Documents Concerning the
Destruction of the Jews of Grodno 1941–1944 omit mention of the liquidation of the
Jewish intelligentsia of the town, which may indicate that the measures taken there
were less public. Nonetheless, USC Shoah Foundation testimonies provide valuable
insight into the establishment of German rule and the persecution of Grodno’s Jews.
Daniil Klovskii, who was 13 years old at the time of the German occupation, recalled:
As soon as the Germans took the town, after a week, the more or less prominent repre-
sentatives of the intelligentsia were executed. Not only the Jewish intelligentsia, but also
the Polish, although there were especially a lot of Jews, well-known in the city, lawyers,
that is, all were intellectuals.78
Another survivor, Grigory Hasid, who was 17 years old at the time, does not give a
specific date for this action, but confirms Klovskii’s recollection of events:
As soon as the Germans arrived they demanded a list of prominent Jews, intellectuals. By
the way they demanded such a list of the Poles as well. They didn’t know then for what
purpose this was done. [The Germans] took these people, they were not seen further. In
fact they executed them.79
A third survivor, Martin Mordechai Bass, 29 years old at the time, reported:
Right in the beginning they picked up all the people they considered
prominent. . . . They picked up . . . some Jewish lawyers and . . . other people who had
been prominent in the city and they killed them. . . . A few days later we found
out. . . . Some Polish people living around those places came and told us.
Bass recalled the date of the liquidation as “1941, end of June or beginning of July.”80
Among all this testimony, however, another stands out for the personal freight it
carries. At the time of the event, Felix Zandman was a 14-year-old boy whose father
was selected for liquidation but ultimately spared. No doubt because this Aktion had
the most serious implications for his family, he is able to describe the event in more
detail:
It so happened that the night I returned home [to Grodno from Słonim] was a dramatic
night, very dramatic night, I didn’t know that because we slept over at the train station. It
was a curfew, and in the morning we came home, there was big turmoil . . . . The same
night the Germans have arrested a few hundred intellectuals, among them my
father. . . . They took 100 of them and shot them, and my father was . . . let go.81

The local German authorities, most likely the Ortskommandantur, required all Jews
to register by July 1, 1941. In registering, the Jews were required to report their occu-
pation along with other personal information. This step therefore seems the likely
starting point for the subsequent selection of the most prominent Jews and, to a lesser
extent, Poles.82 This approach, methodical and discrete, would seem to indicate that
this Aktion was indeed ordered from on high. As such, it was fully in keeping with the
“executive measures against the civilian population” with which the Einsatzgruppen
were tasked.83
This interpretation is also supported by the context of the Aktion. Filbert, who
was under pressure from the highest organizational levels to make good on the entire
Einsatzgruppe’s past shortcomings, had directly ordered Teilkommando Haupt to
Grodno. There can be little doubt that not only Filbert, who was known as “an ener-
getic, even very strict kommando leader,”84 but also Nebe and Heydrich would have
been extremely displeased if the Teilkommando had not undertaken an Aktion as
soon as possible after arrival in Grodno. A city much larger than Lida, Grodno had a
correspondingly larger Jewish population, and therefore, according to the racial ideol-
ogy of National Socialism, constituted a correspondingly greater security threat.
Different Micro-Level Conditions, Different Responses

Why would front-line Wehrmacht troops liquidate the Jewish intelligentsia of Lida
but not that of Grodno? I believe that micro-level conditions, such as battlefield
events and the initiative displayed by local commanders played a decisive role.
Judging by the praise their commanding general bestowed on them for having
“achieved the incredible,” the members of the 8th Division must have felt a kind of
euphoria over the ease with which Grodno was taken.85 Indeed, the evening report
for June 23, 1941 even suggested that the half-hearted defense of the city was a sign
that the Red Army’s fighting spirit “ha[d] begun to shake.”86 With Red Army units in
retreat, the division was able to quickly establish German rule in the city. A clear
example of the division’s success was its ability to secure large quantities of food sup-
plies before they could be removed by either retreating troops or the local population.
The division had foreseen this danger and posted a guard at the railyard warehouse.
An Ortskommandantur was established in Grodno on June 24th, after it became appa-
rent that the city’s permanent Ortskommandantur from the 403rd Security Division
would be late in arriving. The 8th Division left a token force in Grodno—enough to
ensure control of the city—while the bulk of the division pursued the Red Army east-
ward. While the usual anti-Jewish decrees of the 9th Army were posted, there is no evi-
dence that front-line German troops organized attacks on the Jewish community of
Grodno. The overall picture gained from the war diaries, then, is that of a German
division that had largely achieved its military objectives and was preparing for its
upcoming military tasks.

Survivor accounts from Grodno also support this view, pointing to a lack of inter-
est on the part of Army field forces in singling out Jews for arbitrary executions. Linda
Penn, who was 14 years old at the time, remembered that the atmosphere began to
change “slowly” after the Germans arrived, and marked the rounding up of Jewish
men for forced labor as the first blow to Grodno’s Jewish community.87 Liliana
Paczynski, 18 at the time, recalled that “the Germans at the start were quite decent.
Most of them, I would say, behaved properly.” Daniil Klovskii added: “In and of itself,
when the Wehrmacht arrived [in Grodno], it did not yet differentiate among the civil-
ian population—Polish and Jews and so forth.”88 Another survivor, Rubin Loren, who
was 20 at the time, had an encounter with a Wehrmacht unit that reflects the restraint
that individual Wehrmacht units could display in their interactions with Jews. Having
fled Grodno shortly after its bombardment on June 22nd, Loren’s family had taken
refuge in a barn, where a group of German soldiers came upon them. The soldiers,
apparently more concerned about Red Army soldiers in hiding, left the family alone
after determining that they were civilians. Recognizing that they had been overtaken
by the German advance, the Lorens returned to Grodno. Rubin relates that while he
had heard about atrocities “farther East,” he did not witness any himself. In Grodno,
he said, there were “no atrocities and no massacres. People were being shot, of course,
every so often.”89
Micro-level conditions in Lida were quite different from those in Grodno. Both
the 161st and the 35th Infantry Divisions had seen extensive combat in the days
leading up to the capture of Lida. At least on the part of the latter, this led to rising
bitterness over the “tactics” employed by the enemy. An entry added to the unit’s
diary just hours before the staff of the 35th Division arrived in Lida noted that Red
Army soldiers had killed and mutilated wounded German soldiers of the division’s
Vorausgruppe during a nearby battle—a discovery that “arouse[d] great bitterness.”90
The author of the division bicycle company report for the next day remarked that the
soldiers felt a need for revenge “[for] our considerable losses, the mowing down of
our wounded [by Red Army units] . . . and the treacherous tactics employed by the
enemy.”91 It appears that this attitude culminated, at least for the bicycle company
(the only unit of the Vorausgruppe that provides a record from this time), in the open
acknowledgement of a merciless mentality among its soldiers. No doubt as a result of
this attitude, only seven Soviet prisoners of war were captured in three days of
fighting. The report notes: “It can be assumed that regarding the prisoner-of-war
counts of the last days, the number of enemy dead exceeded by many times the
reported number of prisoners-of-war, because due to the cruelty of the enemy and his
ruthlessness in defense, our soldiers are now mostly giving no pardon.”92
Thus in the two days before the establishment of the Ortskommandantur in
Lida, bitterness and a “no-prisoners-taken” attitude had pervaded units of the 35th
Division. The Red Army’s 55th Rifle Regiment, which had defended the approaches
to Lida, was known for its numerous violations of battlefield conventions; the real

prospect of continued resistance by its soldiers, roaming Lida and environs in civilian
clothing, encouraged front-line German troops in Lida to take “ruthless and ener-
getic measures.” Such measures had been foreseen in prewar directives targeting
“Bolshevik agitators, guerillas, saboteurs, and Jews”; the latter, as we know, were
conflated with the other groups. Unlike the testimony from Grodno, where
Einsatzkommando 9 tried and failed to organize a pogrom, survivor testimony from
Lida speaks to the violent environment that had already enveloped the town before
its capture by the Wehrmacht.93 Further evidence of the chaos can be found in a
report by the 35th Division: the reason for the hurried establishment of an
Ortskommandantur was to “keep the plundering inhabitants in check.” Indeed, a few
days later, the division’s war diary records an order to arrest all Russian men of mili-
tary age, which led either to their execution or to their detention in prisoner-of-war
camps for further “processing.”94 In sum, though Lida was a smaller prize than
Grodno, it required more time and effort to seize and pacify.
Given such conditions on the ground, Otto W.’s later confession that Jews
became targets of apparently uncoordinated reprisals seems more than credible.95
One apparent motive for either the 161st or the 35th to organize the liquidation of
Lida’s Jewish intelligentsia would have been revenge against the official scapegoat for
any acts of resistance, Soviet Jewry. Commanders at the front often viewed Jews as
especially likely to participate in acts of sabotage and guerilla warfare.96 The codifica-
tion of the Jew as the center of all Soviet resistance meant that the liquidation of their
intelligentsia would help pacify the town. While this was normally considered the
work of the Einsatzgruppen or the local police, the legitimacy of the liquidations was
never seriously questioned.97
The relationship between combat and genocide also becomes apparent when
we compare the attitudes of the front-line troops who first entered Lida to those of
the 403rd Security Division’s Ortskommandantur 849, who succeeded them there.
Arluk-Lawit’s recollection that the young front-line soldiers who first passed through
Lida were more brutal than the older security troops who arrived later is substantiated
by his forced-labor experience in the summer of 1941. After the post-invasion
clean-up of the city’s streets, he was assigned to a labor detail that sorted captured
Soviet weapons. As he recalled, “occasionally there was corporal punishment from the
German officers but no forced laborers were shot.”98 Overall, he remarked, the
German officers behaved “exceptionally well.”99 This sentiment is echoed in other
survivor testimony as well. Elisa Barzach recalled that “when we were working . . . the
Army wasn’t so bad”; but he added that this was “after they killed the 120 or 150
[Jewish intellectuals].”100 Dora Fajgman, who was 21 at the time, recalled that older
German soldiers sometimes shared food with the Jewish forced laborers. “The worst
were the young German soldiers.” She went on; “They didn’t . . . beat us up, because
we worked for them. But they didn’t help us [with food].”101

Soviet Jews remained a target of the 403rd. By mid-July of 1941, the first opera-
tions officer of the division reported the seizure of “16 Russians, 66 Jews, and 18 oth-
erwise suspicious persons,” once again underscoring the association of Soviet Jewry
with the “Bolshevist threat.”102 Nonetheless, division leadership was disappointed in
the lack of enthusiasm exhibited by some of its soldiers in persecuting Jews. A week
before the first operations officer reported his figures for “suspicious persons,” he had
lamented: “The division staff observes that not every soldier has the correct attitude
towards the Jews. They do not always meet the Jews who have been impressed for
forced labor with either the desirable brutality or the distance that should be self-
apparent for National Socialist soldiers. Forceful action is being taken against such
thoughtlessness.”103 Why would a military unit charged with upholding both military
and racial law, and tasked with supporting the Einsatzgruppen, behave in a less malev-
olent way towards their victims than the front-line troops whose primary mission there
was purely military? Given the reports and the survivor testimonies quoted above, it
appears that revenge against the official scapegoat and barbaric “wire-pullers”
(Drahtzieher) of resistance, Soviet Jewry, motivated not a few officers and enlisted
men of the front-line divisions passing through Lida. We cannot determine defini-
tively whether these officers and soldiers actually believed that the liquidation of the
most prominent Jews would pacify the town, or simply used this logic as a pretext to
act on their existing antisemitic prejudices. But the mounting battlefield losses
incurred by both the 161st and 35th Divisions during the first week of the war, directly
before they seized Lida, do stand out when compared to the 8th Division’s modest
casualties before and during the capture of Grodno. At the very least, these losses
establish a motive, from the German perspective, for such an Aktion. That the 403rd
Division’s troops had seen very little combat, and according to survivor testimony
behaved with much greater restraint than the front-line divisions, also supports this
interpretation.
Conclusion
In his groundbreaking 1997 work Keine Kameraden, Christian Streit speculated that
most front-line soldiers would have found the notion of “dirtying their hands” through
participation in the execution of Jews and other undesirables paradoxical, since “the
Einsatzgruppen were pushing to do just this, in order to prove to their boss Heydrich
[their] exemplary officiousness.”104 The example of Lida shows that the Wehrmacht
could, and did, find reasons to liquidate groups of Jews.
The timeline set forth here places the liquidation of Lida’s Jewish intelligentsia in
the first or second day of the occupation by the Wehrmacht. Since the 161st Division
was soon relieved by the 35th, it is difficult to say with absolute certainty which division
was responsible for this action. This should not obscure the fact, however, that the exe-
cutions were ordered and performed by front-line troops who selected their Jewish
victims and did not leave the “dirty work” to the Einsatzgruppen.

The micro-study of Lida contrasts with some of Christian Hartmann’s broader
conclusions regarding the role of the Wehrmacht in the Holocaust. The liquidation of
Lida’s Jewish intelligentsia by front-line Wehrmacht troops illustrates that they had
the opportunity, especially during the advance of summer 1941, to become active par-
ticipants in the “Holocaust by bullets.” It is difficult to say whether the persecution of
Jews in Belorussia ran a truly different course than the persecutions in the Baltic
States and the Ukraine. But it is clear from Lida that some front-line troops exhibited
considerable enthusiasm for persecuting Jews. Additionally, events in Lida raise ques-
tions about the distinction some scholars have made between front-line troops and
the rear-echelon and security units in terms of culpability; some survivors viewed the
first Ortskommandantur, staffed by front-line troops, as significantly more dangerous
to Lida’s Jews than the subsequent one established by the 403rd Security Division.
Even in the different local contexts of Lida and Grodno, however, a wide
range of attitudes and actions are evident. Though Jews are referred to in the divi-
sion war diaries in a singularly negative light, nowhere in these sources do we find
the open exhortations for revenge on Soviet Jewry that are found elsewhere.105 Both
victim testimony and perpetrator documents illustrate the failure of prewar decrees
and propaganda to resonate with every soldier of Hitler’s Army. Nonetheless, the
common denominator for the events in the two towns appears to have been
the immediate implementation of anti-Jewish policy that had been codified by the
highest Wehrmacht levels in the run-up to Barbarossa. The realization of this
practical antisemitism began with organization of the local Jewish population into
work details for cleanup and the requisitioning of Jewish-owned property—two
measures that the Wehrmacht often carried out immediately after establishing its
rule in a captured town. The arbitrary but organized execution of the Jewish popula-
tion by the Wehrmacht’s front-line troops, as exemplified in Lida, shows that this
antisemitism-in-practice could be intensified not only as the fulfillment of the racial
ideology that accompanied Barbarossa, but as a vent for the frustrations and losses
military units experienced on the battlefield.
The use of both perpetrator and victim sources to contextualize the murder of
Lida’s Jewish intelligentsia reveals that acts of war and acts of genocide were not
mutually exclusive during Operation Barbarossa. Despite their primary mission of
defeating the Red Army, front-line troops had opportunity and motive to persecute
Jews. War diaries at the division level and below provide direct, if often veiled, refer-
ences to the interplay between war and genocide, while victim testimonies often
provide crucial details omitted from those reports. Incorporating these disparate
sources into a larger narrative of events that took place in Lida in the first week of
Barbarossa illustrates the parallel nature of war and genocide. The days before this
liquidation in Lida had witnessed determined resistance on the part of the Red Army,
and this resistance had led to both rising casualties and war crimes on the battlefield.
Shortly after Lida was captured, the purported “head” of this resistance—the Jewish

intelligentsia of the town—was liquidated by front-line German troops as a reprisal
for the casualties they had suffered, as the punctuation of German rule in Lida, and as
an attempt to incapacitate any future resistance in the town.
Events in both Lida and Grodno demonstrate that within the ranks of the
German Army, “criminal orders” were generally accepted. Likewise, many soldiers
had internalized National Socialist doctrine’s linkage of Jews with “Bolshevism.” Yet,
the two towns offer different contexts that help explain different outcomes. If a town
had been captured quickly and without great resistance, as was the case in Grodno,
security measures were more likely to proceed according to prearranged plans. But
where, as in Lida, the fight proved protracted and bitter, the conquering forces could
well have been motivated in some measure by revenge and by the perceived need to
break the spirit of resistance. Regardless of whether the Wehrmacht or the
Einsatzgruppen carried out initial security measures, the Jewish population was
always the main and immediate target. While the Einsatzgruppen, true to their
mission, would go on to become the primary agents for genocide in the East, and
while the Wehrmacht’s front-line troops would by the end of the summer of 1941
move away from areas of concentrated Jewish settlement, it is clear that from the
beginning of Barbarossa the two organizations at times employed the same means of
racial warfare.
David W. Wildermuth is an assistant professor of German at Shippensburg University in

Pennsylvania. He received a Doctorate of Modern Languages in German and Russian from
Middlebury College in 2010. In 2010–2011 he held the Pearl Resnick Fellowship at the Center
for Advanced Holocaust Studies of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, and in
2012 was scholar-in-residence at the Institute for Contemporary History in Munich, Germany,
through the joint Institute for Contemporary History / Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies
fellowship program. His most recent article, “Widening the Circle: General Weikersthal and the
War of Annihilation, 1941–42,” appeared in Central European History in June 2012.
Notes
I would like to thank the staff of the Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies at United States
Holocaust Memorial Museum for their support during the research and writing of this article. I
also thank Kirsten Götze of the Zentrale Stelle der Landesjustizverwaltungen zur Aufklärung
nationalsozialistischer Verbrechen; Karel Berkhoff of the NIOD Institute for War, Holocaust,
and Genocide Studies; Martin Dean and Geoffrey Megargee of the Center for Advanced
Holocaust Studies and the two anonymous reviewers engaged by Holocaust and Genocide
Studies for their generous assistance and comments on earlier versions of this work.
1. In 1999 Christian Gerlach wrote that “the crimes of German front units in the Second
World War have hardly been systematically investigated, indeed the research has hardly even
considered this question.” Christian Gerlach, “Verbrechen deutscher Fronttruppen in
Weißrußland 1941–1944,” in Wehrmacht und Vernichtungspolitik: Militär im nationalsozialisti-
schen System, ed. Karl-Heinrich Pohl (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1999), 89; five

years later, Rolf-Dieter Müller could still refer to the front as “one of the least researched
topics of the Second World War.” In his “Der Zweite Weltkrieg 1939–1945,” in Gebhardt:
Handbuch der deutschen Geschichte 21 (2004): 39; Jürgen Matthäus writes: “Just as the
decision-making process cannot be properly studied by focusing solely on Hitler and the
central authorities, likewise the initiation and implementation of evolving Nazi policy cannot be
studied by focusing solely on the SS.” Matthäus cautions that without the investigation of “the
military, the civil administration, the ministerial bureaucracy, the economic planners, and local
collaborators and police auxiliaries,” the picture of the Holocaust remains “incomplete.” See
Christopher R. Browning, with contributions by Jürgen Matthäus, The Origins of the Final
Solution (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2004). In 2007, Johannes Hürter could still
write that “a comprehensive study of the participation of the Wehrmacht in general or the
eastern army in particular in the Holocaust is still lacking.” See his Hitlers Heerführer (Munich:
R. Oldenbourg, 2007), 531.
2. See Patrick Desbois’ book of the same name, Holocaust by Bullets: A Priest’s Journey to
Uncover the Truth Behind the Murder of 1.5 Million Jews (New York: Palgrave Macmillan,
2008).
3. See Christian Gerlach, “Verbrechen”; and Gerlach, Kalkulierte Morde: Die deutsche
Wirtschafts- und Vernichtungspolitik in Weißrußland 1941 bis 1944 (Hamburg: Hamburger
Edition, 1999), chapter 7, “Die Ermordung der weißrußischen Juden.”
4. Bernhard Chiari, Alltag hinter der Front: Besatzung, Kollaboration und Widerstand in
Weißrußland, 1941–1944 (Düsseldorf: Droste Verlag, 1998). Chiari writes: “In some places
during the first days of the German occupation, the worst fears of the Jewish villagers did not
appear to be borne out. The general thesis of Hannes Heer, documented by individual cases,
that the Wehrmacht fought a comprehensive Blitzkrieg in order to begin with the elimination of
the Jews immediately after reaching its military objectives, can be contested in its validity by
means of other individual cases. What is correct is that the Wehrmacht did not hamper the sub-
sequent, ubiquitous mass murders of which very many soldiers must have known, and in many
cases also actively supported” (237).
5. Omer Bartov, Hitler’s Army: Soldiers, Nazis, and War in the Third Reich (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1991), 159.
6. Hannes Heer, “Killing Fields: The Wehrmacht and the Holocaust in Belorussia, 1941–42,”
in War of Extermination: The German Military in World War II, 1941–1944, ed. Hannes Heer
and Klaus Naumann (New York: Berghahn Books, 2004), 73.
7. See Hürter, Hitlers Heerführer, 532f, which limits the analysis to the most common forms of
cooperation at the lower levels but recognizes that the first measures against the Soviet Jewish
population were often taken by front-line troops. Dieter Pohl’s Die Herrschaft der Wehrmacht:
Deutsche Militärbesatzung und einheimische Bevölkerung in der Sowjetunion 1941–1944
(Munich: R. Oldenbourg, 2008) also mentions participation of the Wehrmacht in some early
mass shootings (247) but concedes: “Individual acts of murder of Jews by soldiers directly after
the occupation of a town are little known. . . . No precise details can be given about the extent
and breadth of this crime” (243).
8. See for instance Gabriele Gorzka and Knut Stang, eds., Der Vernichtungskrieg im Osten:
Verbrechen der Wehrmacht in der Sowjetunion—aus Sicht rußicher Historiker (Kassel,
Germany: Kassel University Press, 1999). See also Gennadii Bordiugov, “Voina vse spishet?

Vermakht i Krasnaia Armiia: K voprosu o prirode prestuplenii protiv grazhdanskogo naseleniia”
( paper given at the international scholarly conference “Opyt mirovykh voin v istorii Rossii,”
September 11, 2005, Chelyabinsk), http://www.airo-xxi.ru/doklady/doklad01.htm (accessed
January 6, 2011; the site seems to have been taken down since).
9. Christian Hartmann, Wehrmacht im Ostkrieg: Front und Militärisches Hinterland 1941/42
(Munich: R. Oldenbourg, 2009), 664.
10. Christian Hartmann, “Verbrecherischer Krieg—Verbrecherische Wehrmacht?” in Der

deutsche Krieg im Osten 1941–1944: Facetten einer Grenzüberschreitung, ed. Christian
Hartmann, Johannes Hürter, Peter Lieb, and Dieter Pohl (Munich: R. Oldenburg Verlag,
2009), 49: “All in all the terror of the first few weeks was limited to individual places, especially
in the Baltic and the Ukraine, so that the number of participating front soldiers most likely
remained for this reason limited.”
11. Ibid., 56: “There was probably no crime with which the front soldiers of the Wehrmacht
came into such close contact as those perpetrated during the German withdrawal.”
12. Ibid., 31: “Thus (the Ereignismeldungen document it again and again) only certain units of
the Eastern Army—the Geheime Feldpolizei, Feldgendarmerie, Orts- und Feldkommandaturen
or individual security units—systematically cooperated in the practice of murder with Himmler’s
people. Neither from their size nor from their institutional importance were they representative
of the Eastern Army!”
13. Ibid., 67: “It almost gives the impression as if the density of the German deployment and
the frequency of crimes stood in an inverse reciprocal relationship.”
14. Rolf-Dieter Müller, Der letzte deutsche Krieg 1939–1945 (Stuttgart: Klett-Kotta, 2005), 97.
15. Noteworthy in this regard is Arthur Nebe’s statement, made in the first month of the war,
that while transgressions by his Einsatzgruppe B units against the Wagner-Heydrich agreement
had led “now and again” to complaints by Wehrmacht units, the leadership of Army Group
Center shared his own view that the agreement had only “formal significance.” See
“Tätigkeitsbericht des Chefs der Einsatzgruppe B für die Zeit vom 23.6.1941 bis zum
13.7.1941,” reproduced in Peter Klein, ed., Die Einsatzgruppen in der besetzten Sowjetunion
1941/42: Die Tätigkeits- und Lageberichte des Chefs der Sicherheitspoizei und des SD (Berlin:
Edition Hentrich, 1997), 380.
16. T.G. Vershitskaia, “Lida,” Kholokost’ na territorii SSSR (Moscow: ROSSPEN, 2009).
17. Aharon Weiss, “Lida,” in Encyclopedia Judaica, 2nd ed., ed. Fred Skolnik and Michael
Berenbaum (Farmington Hills, MI: Macmillan Reference USA, 2007).
18. Eliahu Damesek, “The German Occupation” in Sepher Lida, ed. Alexander Manor (Tel
Aviv: Irgun yotse Lida be-Yisrael u-Va’ad ha-ezrah li-Yehude Lida ba-Artsot ha-Brit, 1970).
19. E.G. Joffe, G.D. Knatko, and V.D. Selemenev, eds., Holokost v Belarusi, 1941–1944:
Dokimenty i Matiriali (Minsk: NARB, 2002).
20. Weiss, “Lida.”

21. Vershitskaia, “Lida.”

22. The State Archives of the Grodno Region contain documents from Feldkommandantur
815, the Gendarmerie in Grodno, and the Ortskommandantur I/815 active in Grodno and the
surrounding region. However, the earliest date found in these collections, which focus on non-
military criminal investigations, is July 9, 1941. See The State Archives of the Grodno Region,
fond 8, opis 1, dela 1, 2, 3, and 15; and fond 1115, opis 1, delo 2.
23. Jan T. Gross, Neighbors: The Destruction of the Jewish Community in Jedwabne, Poland
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), 91–94.
24. Christopher R. Browing, Collected Memories: Holocaust History and Postwar Testimony
(Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2003), 36.
25. C.F. Rüter and D.W. de Mildt, eds., Justiz und NS-Verbrechen: Sammlung deutscher
Strafurteile wegen nationalsozialistischer Tötungsverbrechen 1945–1966 (Amsterdam: The
Institute of Criminal Law of the University of Amsterdam, 1968–), vol. 18, case no. 540,
pp. 601–51.
26. On June 30, 1941, the war diary of the 403rd Security Division recorded the arrival of the
Sonderkommando of the Security Police, and noted its intended deployment to Grodno, Lida,
and Vilna. National Archives and Records Administration (NARA), T315/Roll 2206, p. 403.
Sicherungsdivision, Eintrag 30.6.41.
27. In his Order no. 3 of July 1, 1941, Heydrich claims that Grodno had been occupied four
days earlier by the Wehrmacht, but this is incorrect. By the afternoon of June 23, 1941, Grodno
was effectively under German control. See note 19 above. Compare also below the details of
the capture of this city by the Wehrmacht.
28. “Heydrichs Einsatzbefehl Nr. 3 vom 1.7.1941,” in Einsatzgruppen, 321–22.

29. Rüter and de Mildt, Justiz und NS-Verbrechen, 18: 616.
30. Ereignismeldung UdSSR No. 21 vom 13.7.1941, Bundesarchiv Berlin-Lichterfelde (here-

after: BA/BL), R58/214.
31. 8th Infantry Division Anlageband 1 zu Kriegstagebuch 7, Divisionsbefehl für die
Verfolgung (23.6.41, 15.30 Uhr), NARA, T315/Roll 458. The document states: “Grodno is in
the hands of the division.”
32. See ibid., which goes on to speculate that “because the Red Army rear guard did not offer
much resistance,” and the demolition of the bridges over the Nemen had been executed “in the
greatest rush and incompletely,” the morale of the retreating Red Army had already begun to
“buckle.” See also USC Shoah Foundation Institute for Visual History and Education (USC
Shoah Visual History) testimony of Boris Gindin, a Red Army lieutenant stationed in Grodno
during its defense. Gindin states that on the afternoon of June 23, 1941, his unit was ordered to
retreat from Grodno.
33. Infanteriedivision, Funkspruch Nr. 21 von A.A.8 an 8.I.D., 23.6.41, 14.00 Uhr, NARA,
T315/Roll 458, p. 8.
34. They appear to have arrived by June 26, 1941. See Sicherungsdivision, 26.6.41, NARA,
T315/Roll 2206, p. 403.
35. Infanteriedivision, Abt. Ia, Div.Gef.Stand Lososna Ostrand, 24.6.41, 8.00 Uhr, NARA,
T315/Roll 458, p. 8.

36. USC Shoah Visual History testimony of Ruth Sokolowski, segment 19.
37. Letters of witnesses Staff Sergeant Boris Nikolaevich Smirnov, 229th Independent A.A.
Brigade, and commander Ivan Semenovich Strelbitskii, 8th Independent Anti-tank Brigade,
submitted to Valeri Slivkin, Lida Historical Museum; copies provided to author.
38. USC Shoah Visual History testimony of Ruth Sokolowski, segment 20.
39. War diary report, 161st Infanteriedivision, 28.6.41, NARA, T315/Roll 1444, Entry 12. Uhr:
“Regiment 336 with second battalion on the right and first battalion on the left has reached the
forest edge by Myto, strong resistance at the Dziwa [river].”
40. War diary report, 161st Infanteriedivision, 28.6.41, NARA, T315/Roll 1444, Entry 19.15.
Uhr: “40 Stukas attack Lida.”
41. USC Shoah Visual History testimony of Elise Barzach, segment 51.
42. War diary report, 161st Infanteriedivision, 28.6.41, NARA, T315/Roll 1445.
43. War diary of the 35th Infantry Division, Bundesarchiv Militärarchiv Freiburg (BA/MA),
RH26 35, 29.6.41, 13.00.
44. Hartmann, “Verbrecherischer Krieg, Verbrecherische Wehrmacht?” 54.

45. War diary of the 35th Infantry Division, BA/MA RH26 35 139, Entry 17.6.41.
46. Richtlinien für das Verhalten der Truppen in Russland, cited from Norbert Müller, ed.,
Deutsche Besatzungspolitik in der UdSSR (Cologne: Pahl-Rugenstein, 1980), 53.
47. Handbill Kennt Ihr den Feind? BA/MA, RH39 377, available online at http://www.
museum-karlshorst.de/de/vorkrieg/19.html (accessed February 21, 2013).
48. See Gerlach, Kalkulierte Morde, 515: “In parts of White Russia, a decree announced the
marking of Jews through white armbands with the star of David and the requisitioning of [their]
radios. Additionally, they were confined to their domiciles and required to register their address
with the appropriate municipal authority. These municipalities had at their disposal male and
female Jews between 16 and 50 years old for forced labor. This decree was signed ‘the Supreme
Commander of the German Army.’ It was circulated in the areas of the commander of the
Ninth Army, Generaloberst Adolf Strauß, Panzer Group 3, Generaloberst Hermann Hoth, and
Fourth Army, Generalfeldmarschall Günther von Kluge. The date of the decree is unclear, but
from the content it concerns decrees of the first hour.”
49. The implementation of these measures in the cases of Grodno and Lida has been
confirmed by multiple survivors. For Lida, see the USC Shoah Visual History testimonies of
Arnold Arluk-Lawit, Elise Barzach, Ruth Lapidus, and Ruth Sokolowski. For Grodno, see the
USC Shoah Visual History testimonies of Harold Gordon, Rita Kesselman, and Linda Penn. In
Kalkulierte Morde, Gerlach writes, “In Lida during the first days [of occupation], the
Wehrmacht gathered all Jews between 15 and 60 years of age and then let them go” (511). This
account does not convey the extent of the anti-Jewish persecution. According to the testimony
of one survivor, the Jews of Lida were kept in the town jail and subjected daily to forced labor.
Only after two weeks were they released and allowed to return home. See testimony of Eliahu
Damesek, Zentrale Stelle der Landesjustizverwaltung Ludwigsburg, 2 ARZ 94/59.

50. Eliahu Damesek, “The German Occupation,” Sefer Lida, ix. His account can also be found
in a Russian-language source given to the author by Valeri Slivkin of the Lida historical
museum. Damesek had previously stated in 1963 that it was in fact the “highest units of the
Wehrmacht” in Lida who organized and carried out the executions. See testimony of Eliahu
Damesek, Zentrale Stelle der Landesjustizverwaltung Ludwigsburg, 2 ARZ 94/59.
51. USC Shoah Visual History testimony of Elise Barzach, segment 51. In her testimony,
Barzach dates the start of the war at June 21, 1941, and recalls that Lida was occupied “about
five or six days later.” This would date the hanging of the posters to June 28, 1941, plus or minus
a day.
52. USC Shoah Visual History testimony of Bella Goldfischer, segment 17.
53. USC Shoah Visual History testimony of Elise Barzach, segment 54. This was “mostly still
the [German] Army.”
54. See Otto Wormuth, Außerordentliche Staatliche Kommission für die Feststellung und
Untersuchung der Gräueltaten der deutsch-faschistischen Eindringlinge und ihrer Komplizen,
und des Schadens, den sie den Bürgern, Kolchosen, öffentlichen Organisationen, staatlichen
Betrieben und Einrichtungen der UdSSR zugefügt haben (quoted in Hannes Heer, Stets zu
erschießen sind Frauen, die in der Roten Armee dienen [Hamburg: Hamburger Edition, 1995],
18). Wormuth’s report gives July 17, 1941 as the date for this atrocity, but the clear association
of the atrocity with the capture of Lida (in the German original: “Bei der Besetzung der Stadt
Lida . . .”) and the correspondence of the age of the victims to the ages of those Jews required
for the formation of work detachments as announced on a poster of late June 1941 indicate that
this atrocity occurred in Lida during the first days of the occupation. The 161st Infantry Division
was near Molodechno, Belorussia, on July 17, 1941, but did not participate in its capture.
55. 161st Infanteriedivision, Ia/Führungsabteilung, 27.6.41, NARA, T315/Roll 1444.
56. T.G. Vershitskaia, “Lida.”

57. 161st Infanteriedivision, Ic/Feindnachrichten und Abwehr, 28.7.41, NARA, T315/Roll
1445.
58. 161st Infanteriedivision, Massnahmen für den 28.6., NARA, T315/Roll 1445, image #354.
59. 161st Infanteriedivision, Ic/Feindnachrichten und Abwehr, 28.6.41, NARA, T315/Roll
1445.
60. Ibid.
61. Ic/Feindnachrichten V.A.K., Entry 29.6.41, BA/MA, RH24-5 104.

62. See Hannes Heer, “How Amorality Became Normality: Reflections on the Mentality of
German Soldiers on the Eastern Front,” in War of Extermination: The German Military
in World War II, 1941–1944, ed. Hannes Heer and Klaus Naumann (New York: Berghahn,
2000), 335.
63. USC Shoah Visual History testimony of Arnold Arluk-Lawit, segment 40.

65. Compare Burkhart Müller-Hillebrand, Das Heer bis zum Kriegsbeginn, vol. 1 (Darmstadt:
E.S. Mittler & Sohn, 1954). For an overview on security divisions, see James Lucas, Die
Wehrmacht von 1939–1945: Zahlen, Daten, Fakten (Vienna: Tosa, 2004), 68.
66. See also Waitman Beorn, “Negotiating Murder: A Panzer Signal Company and the
Destruction of the Jews of Peregruznoe, 1942,” Holocaust and Genocide Studies 23, no. 2
(2009): 185–213.
67. Einsatz der 14./IR111 bei der Gruppe Mandelsloh vom 28.6.—3.7.1941, BA/MA RH26/
35, diary 41.
68. For details of the selection of Jewish victims and the burning of the Jewish houses by
members of the 35th Infantry Division, see USC Shoah Visual History testimonies of Robert
Lesser (segment 38), Philip Lazowski (segment 9f ), Chaim Yoselewitz (segment 54), and
Moshe Yoselevich (segment 61). Also see testimony of Rachel Shkop (minutes 01:00—03:00),
United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM) Oral History Collection RG
50.1200144.
69. Entry 28.6.41, 16.45, BA/MA RH26/35, diary 35.

70. Entry 29.6.41, 13.00, BA/MA RH26/35, diary 35.
71. Regarding Lida, see USC Shoah Visual History testimony of Ruth Lapidus, who states that
“after two weeks [of the occupation] they killed the intellectuals” (segment 48). Regarding
Grodno, see “Eidesstaatliche Versicherung von Ely und Zelda Gordon, 10.21.60,” in
Documents Concerning the Destruction of the Jews of Grodno 1941–1944, vol. 1, ed. Serge
Klarsfeld (New York: Beate Klarsfeld Foundation, 1985?), 79. This statement puts the date of
the liquidation “in the first days” of the occupation.
72. See photographs entitled “Lida 3.7.41,” BA/MA Msg 1/3192, p. 71.
73. Due to the intricacies of German copyright law, permission to reproduce the photos in
the album could not be obtained. The album is located in the Bundesarchiv, Freiburg (MSG
2/13830, photo on p. 71).
74. Ereignismeldung no. 11 of July 3, 1941 stated: “Advance Kommando on the way to Lida”
(Ereignismeldung UdSSR No. 11, 3. Juli 1941, BA/BL R58/214). But in Nebe’s subsequent
activity report of July 14, 1941, he states that this troop left Grodno for Lida on July 4, 1941.
(“Tätigkeitsbericht des Chefs der Einsatzgruppe B für die Zeit vom 23.6.1941 bis zum
13.7.1941,” Einsatzgruppen, 378.)
75. See Ereignismeldung UdSSR No. 13, 5. Juli 1941, BA/BL R58/214, which stated: “E
[insatz] K[ommando] 9. Base Grodno. . . . Pogroms initiated.”
76. See “Tätigkeitsbericht des Chefs der Einsatzgruppe B für die Zeit vom 23.6.1941 bis zum
13.7.1941,” Einsatzgruppen, 378.
77. Ibid.
78. USC Shoah Visual History testimony of Daniil Klovskii, segment 118.
79. USC Shoah Visual History testimony of Grigory Hasid, segment 26.
80. USC Shoah Visual History testimony of Mordechai Bass, segment 8.

81. USC Shoah Visual History testimony of Felix Zandman, segment 14. Zandman’s USC
Shoah Foundation testimony yields inconsistencies in respect to the dating of the Aktion that
require further explanation. He relates that he was in Słonim when the war broke out, having
arrived there “two weeks before the war started.” He remained there “probably two weeks after
the war started.” He also relates that in Słonim he witnessed the Germans’ selection of Jewish
men for execution; in the interview he puts the number of men at approximately 2,000. He asso-
ciates this selection with the Einsatzgruppe Aktion of July 17, 1941, although he did not witness
the execution, but only heard about it later. He remembers the SS as being responsible for this
action and recalls seeing the SS and skull and crossbones insignia on the uniform of one officer.
If he did indeed witness this event, his account of the selection of the Jewish intelligentsia of
Grodno, including his father, upon his return, could not have taken place before mid-July.
However, in his book Never the Last Journey, Zandman offers a different, more plausible time-
line. According to the account laid out in this source, approximately eight days elapsed between
the removal of the Jewish men of Słonim and his arrival in Grodno. He also mentions that this
removal of the Słonim Jews took place on the first day the Germans reached the town, a fact
that points to the involvement of the German Army, in this case either the 17th or 18th Panzer
Divisions or 29th Motorized Divisions, which had all passed through Słonim by June 25, 1941.
Panzer troops wore black uniforms with the skull and crossbones insignia on their collars.
In his article “Verbrechen deutscher Fronttruppen in Weißrußland 1941–1944,” Christian
Gerlach refers to two separate incidents that occurred directly after the German Army’s occupa-
tion of Słonim and that go far to explain what Felix Zandman most likely witnessed: after the
battle for the town was over, Jews were forced to remove the Soviet dead, and 100–200 Jewish
men were selected for execution as a reprisal for the presumed death of two German soldiers.
However, this execution was not carried out, since the two missing soldiers returned. Nachum
Alpert corroborates this account in The Destruction of Slonim Jewry (New York: Holocaust
Library, 1989), in which he describes at great length the anti-Jewish measures immediately put
in place by “the advance army . . . their helmets decorated with death’s-heads” (28–29). The
capture of Słonim on June 25th by the Wehrmacht, and the addition of eight days puts
Zandman’s arrival in Grodno on July 2nd or 3rd, when the liquidation of the Grodno Jewish intel-
ligentsia most likely took place. His reference to the order that all Jews wear a white armband
with a blue Star of David, issued in Grodno a few days before his arrival there, is further proof
of the early date of these actions. See Zandman, Never the Last Journey (New York: Schocken
Books, 1995), 37–41.
82. According to the USC Shoah Visual History testimony of Harold Gordon, posters requiring
all residents to register with the German authority went up all over Grodno by July 1st.
83. Quoted in Browning, Origins, 224.

84. Rüter and de Mildt, Justiz und NS-Verbrechen, 625.
85. 8th Infanteriedivision, Korpsbefehl Nr. 2 vom Generalkommando VIII.A.K., 23.6.41,

NARA T315/Roll 458.
86. 8th Infanteriedivision, Tagesmeldung an Generalkommando VIII. Armeekorps, 23.6.41,
22.00 Uhr, NARA T315/Roll 458.
87. USC Shoah Visual History testimony of Linda Penn, segment 3: “In the beginning, [condi-
tions changed] slowly. They started to . . . pick up some men to go to work, and they never
came back, but I don’t remember exactly.”

88. USC Shoah Visual History testimony of Daniil Klovskii, segment 107.
89. USC Shoah Visual History testimony of Rubin Loren, segment 35.
90. Entry 29.6.41 6.30, BA/MA, RH26/35 35.

91. War diary of the bicycle battalion 35, entry June 30, 1941. BA/MA, RH39/375.
92. Entry 30.6.41. BA/MA, RH39/375.

93. See the USC Shoah Visual History testimony of Ruth Sokolowski, segment 20, who recalls
attacks on Jews carried out by some of Lida’s Polish inhabitants.
94. See BA/MA RH26 35, 2.7.1941. The war diary describes these men as “mostly soldiers in
civilian clothing.”
95. See Otto Wormuth, Report. Another account by a soldier of the 161st Infantry Division
from the same source states that some time before September 1941, all the Jews living in an
unnamed city were brought to a barn, where twenty-five were selected and executed (see state-
ment of Fritz K., 371st Infantry Regiment, 161st Infantry Division, USHMM, RG-22.014M).
Interestingly, confessions found in the same source from seven different soldiers of the 35th
Infantry Division taken prisoner by the Red Army failed to mention any crimes committed
against Jews by this front-line unit (see ibid., statements of Waldemar Hermann, Karl Jenne,
Fritz Seemann, Josef Binn, August Kamps, Artur Lattenstein, and Wolfgang Kern). But atroc-
ities against Jews did occur, as survivors attest. Bella Goldfischer recalled that when her family
returned to Lida after the bombing, they encountered a group of distraught Jewish women who
told them of the murder of all the males in their group—including a nine-month-old infant—by
a German Army patrol (USC Shoah Visual History testimony of Bella Goldfischer, segment 15).
96. See Pohl, Herrschaft, 243–44.

97. Ibid., 247.
99. Ibid.
100. USC Shoah Visual History testimony of Elise Barzach, segment 56.
101. USC Shoah Visual History testimony of Dora Fajgman, segment 11.
102. KTB der 403 Sicherungsdivision, entry July 14, 1941, NARA T315/Roll 2206.
103. Ibid, Tätigkeitsbericht Ic/Juli 1941.
104. Christian Streit, Keine Kameraden: Die Wehrmacht und die sowjetischen Kriegsgefangenen
1941–1945 (Bonn: J.H.W. Dietz, 1997 [1978]), 103.
105. Compare Stephen G. Fritz, Frontsoldaten: The German Soldier in World War II
(Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1995), chap. 8: “Trying to Change the World,” which
reproduces excerpts from numerous letters written at the front by German soldiers of various
units. The letters reveal a very active desire on the part of German soldiers to take action against
Soviet Jewry. Typical for this source: “You see evidence of Jewish, Bolshevik cruelties which I
can hardly believe possible. . . . You can imagine that this cries out for revenge, which will also
be carried out” (196). Conversely, the letters written by members of the 35th Division and
reviewed by the author at the Bibliothek für Zeitgeschichte, Stuttgart, contain no references to

Jews for the duration of Barbarossa. A report written by the Group Mandelsloh of the 35th
Division for the time period June 28–July 3, 1941 describes the “nauseating friendliness” with
which Jewish women in the small village of Zoludek approached them, offering them milk. The
report mentions that in Iwie two days later, “the population greets us warmly, but we don’t
return the sentiment, for there are a lot of Jew vermin roaming around here whose oily friendli-
ness repulses us” (Einsatz der 14./I.R.111 bei der Gruppe Mandelsloh vom 28.6.–3.7.1941,
BA/MA RH26 35/41).

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Who Killed Lida’s Jewish Intelligentsia?

An investigation of the liquidation of Lida’s Jewish intelligentsia reveals

2 Holocaust and Genocide Studies

Who Killed Lida’s Jewish Intelligentsia? 3

Historical Background to the Liquidation of Lida’s and Grodno’s

4 Holocaust and Genocide Studies

Who Killed Lida’s Jewish Intelligentsia? 5

6 Holocaust and Genocide Studies

Who Killed Lida’s Jewish Intelligentsia? 7

8 Holocaust and Genocide Studies

Who Killed Lida’s Jewish Intelligentsia? 9

10 Holocaust and Genocide Studies

Who Killed Lida’s Jewish Intelligentsia? 11

12 Holocaust and Genocide Studies

Teilkommando Haupt in Grodno

Who Killed Lida’s Jewish Intelligentsia? 13

14 Holocaust and Genocide Studies

Different Micro-Level Conditions, Different Responses

Who Killed Lida’s Jewish Intelligentsia? 15

16 Holocaust and Genocide Studies

Who Killed Lida’s Jewish Intelligentsia? 17

18 Holocaust and Genocide Studies

Who Killed Lida’s Jewish Intelligentsia? 19

David W. Wildermuth is an assistant professor of German at Shippensburg University in

20 Holocaust and Genocide Studies

Who Killed Lida’s Jewish Intelligentsia? 21

10. Christian Hartmann, “Verbrecherischer Krieg—Verbrecherische Wehrmacht?” in Der

20. Weiss, “Lida.”

22 Holocaust and Genocide Studies

28. “Heydrichs Einsatzbefehl Nr. 3 vom 1.7.1941,” in Einsatzgruppen, 321–22.

30. Ereignismeldung UdSSR No. 21 vom 13.7.1941, Bundesarchiv Berlin-Lichterfelde (here-

Who Killed Lida’s Jewish Intelligentsia? 23

44. Hartmann, “Verbrecherischer Krieg, Verbrecherische Wehrmacht?” 54.

24 Holocaust and Genocide Studies

56. T.G. Vershitskaia, “Lida.”

61. Ic/Feindnachrichten V.A.K., Entry 29.6.41, BA/MA, RH24-5 104.

Who Killed Lida’s Jewish Intelligentsia? 25

69. Entry 28.6.41, 16.45, BA/MA RH26/35, diary 35.

80. USC Shoah Visual History testimony of Mordechai Bass, segment 8.

26 Holocaust and Genocide Studies

83. Quoted in Browning, Origins, 224.

85. 8th Infanteriedivision, Korpsbefehl Nr. 2 vom Generalkommando VIII.A.K., 23.6.41,

Who Killed Lida’s Jewish Intelligentsia? 27

90. Entry 29.6.41 6.30, BA/MA, RH26/35 35.

92. Entry 30.6.41. BA/MA, RH39/375.

96. See Pohl, Herrschaft, 243–44.

28 Holocaust and Genocide Studies

Who Killed Lida’s Jewish Intelligentsia? 29

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