[BroJoeK]

August 1941:

"Following the German slaughter of Jews at Cesis, Latvia, German troops and security police celebrate with a Totenmahl (“death banquet”).

"In Belgium, a collaborationist military organization, Legion Wallonie (Wallonian Legion), is established.

"German troops in Slobodka, Ukraine, fill the local synagogue with dead cats and force Jews to tear up the Torah scrolls and scatter the pieces atop the dead animals. The Nazi troops then set fire to the building.

"Father Bernhard Lichtenberg, dean of St. Hedwig’s Cathedral in Berlin, denounces the so-called euthanasia program.
In late October he declares that he wants to share the Jews’ fate of deportation to the East so that he can continue to pray for them there.
He is subsequently denounced to the Gestapo and arrested.

"United States Senator Gerald Nye denounces the “Yiddish controllers” of American theater and movies.
U.S. Senator Burton Wheeler attacks Jews in the movie business as “Hollywood Hitlers.”
U.S. Senator Champ Clark sponsors an investigation into Hollywood’s “unpatriotic” Jewish filmmakers. (Unpatriotic because their films advocate involvement in the European war.)
Other congressmen express antisemitism.
Many Americans agree with these sentiments.
Many Americans also believe that should the United States go to war, it must be against the Soviet Union, not against Germany.

"Hundreds of Jews die during death marches from Bessarukiato, Bessarabia, to the Dniester River.

August 1:

"Ghettos established in Bialystok and Lvov.

"More than 1,000 Jews are killed by an Einsatzkommando at Kishinev, Romania.

"Shmuel Verble, chairman of the Jewish Council in the Ukrainian village of Kamien Koszyrski, volunteers for death after discovering an execution list with the names of 80 ghetto residents."

This photo scanned from page 240 of the Holocaust Chronicle book.
If this procedure works well, I'll select more.

[CougarGA7]

It is also important to note that many of the initial slaughters, especially in the Baltics were not only committed by the Germans. The Germans set up pogroms recruiting willing accomplices to commit some of the atrocities. Many of these recruits were violent criminals released from the prisons as the Germans occupied these areas.

As an example of this there was the man called the "Death-dealer of Kovno" which I mentioned last month. He was Lithuanian who it is reported had lost both of his parents, killed by the NKVD only days before. A German colonel who was a adjutant to the staff for Army Group North witnessed this man at work on 27 June 1941:

On the concrete forecourt of the petrol station a blond man of medium height, aged about twenty-five, stood leaning on a wooden club, resting. The club was as thick as his arm and came up to his chest. At his feet lay about fifteen to twenty dead or dying people. Water flowed continuously from a hose washing blood away into the drainage gully. Just a few steps behind this man some twenty men guarded by armed civilians, stood waiting for their cruel execution in silent submission. In response to a cursory wave the next man stepped forward silently and was then beaten to death with the wooden club in the most bestial manner, each blow accompanied by enthusiastic shouts from the audience.

This is just one example, but there were many. It is important to understand that the Germans didn't come across their anti-Semitic ways strange. The Jews had been driven East for hundreds of years. The English expelled the Jews from the islands in 1290 marking the first such expulsion. The French expelled Jews in 1306 followed by the Spanish in 1492. Western European countries continually forced Jewish populations east. There were also expulsions by the Russians over a period of history that basically compressed the bulk of European Jewry into the areas of the Baltic states, Poland (with the largest number), and other countries in that region. Unfortunately, even where the bulk of the Jews ended up concentrated, Antisemitism was still prevalent which is why the Germans found it so easy to round up willing accomplices among the local gentry to have "spontaneous actions" against the Jews in the newly occupied territories.