S. Ratner's farewell letter, Witebsk (Wizebsk), 6 September 1941
Farewell letter
Audio Text
When Sofija Ratner from Belarus wrote this farewell letter in September 1941, the German Armed Forces had advanced further east. A few months before on 22 June, Germany had launched a surprise invasion of the Soviet Union – and with that, also started campaigns of mass murder in the invaded territory. Ever since early 1941, the German occupiers had thoroughly prepared the ground for these crimes, known as ‘Aktionen’ - literally, ‘actions’. Many of these instructions were not just the equivalent of giving the soldiers carte blanche to mishandle and summarily execute civilians at will, but also an incitement to the murder squads to use their own decisions and ideas to drive forward the massacres and mass murders. From then on, murders were no longer carried out solely on orders from military headquarters. Instead, in many cases, they were the result of individual decisions taken locally on the ground. The soldiers were not forced to shoot. There were enough ready and willing to join in. It often took remarkably little for them to overcome their inhibitions to kill civilians.
As the soldiers became increasingly brutalised, civilian executions often deviated from the plan envisaged by those in charge. There were many cases of soldiers drinking heavily and of sexual assault. The use of gas was introduced to make it easier for the soldiers to carry out the murders. This method had already been used in what was called the T4 Action – the mass murder of people categorised as mentally and physically disabled. Initially at various locations in the occupied territories, the victims were locked into converted trucks known as ‘gas vans’ – essentially mobile gas chambers – and murdered with carbon monoxide or exhaust fumes. From December 1941, these ‘gas vans’ were used in a new death camp established near the Polish village of Chelmno. In the concentration camp Auschwitz experiments were carried out on killing people with a hydrogen cyanide gas – originally intended as a pesticide.