Birds of Prey. Philip W. Blood

18 From mid-June 1942 the destruction of the ghettos set off another wave of deportations to killing centres, but this also sparked outbursts of Jewish resistance.19 By December 1942, Hitler’s war against the Jews had escalated into a three-part process involving deportations, killing centres, and mass deaths. The evidence collected for Birds of Prey confirmed that Luftwaffe troops were assigned to this process.

There were other challenges to collecting evidence. During the period 1941–44, Białowieźa forest came within Bezirk Bialystok, a Nazi occupation zone administered from East Prussia. Göring’s ambition was to bind East Prussia and Ukraine in a common frontier with Bezirk Bialystok—a land bridge between the two. This represented a racialized colonial frontier of fewere than 3 million Germans under Erich Koch, ruling over 35 million people (Ukrainians, Belarussians, Poles, and others). This particular region was under-researched, but for Christian Gerlach’s published doctoral thesis, which is cited in the narrative of this book.20 In Hitler’s Empire (2008), Mark Mazower referred only to Ukraine and noted that the SS had difficulties working with Koch, who became virtually untouchable after turning East Prussia into a pro-Nazi state.21 Koch could rely on both Hitler and Göring to back him during internal squabbles. The greater challenge to my research, however, was the glaring absence of evidence about Bezirk Bialystok in the archives.

Before applying Historical GIS (explained in chapter 1) to the research, several attempts were made to construct a more traditional historical structure for the manuscript. The classic study of a German town, under Nazi rule, was also considered a viable option because it was compact.22 There were parallels of cultures, anthropology and localism. Allen claimed his ‘microcosm studies’ were unrepresentative of the Nazi regime but encouraged detailed analysis, which initially made it an important option. The closely relevant study was Christopher Browning’s Ordinary Men (1992), the study of a police battalion in the Holocaust.23 The book examined records from Federal German investigations, compiled from perpetrator interrogations and testimonials conducted more than twenty-five years after the war. Browning concluded the Nazis had unleashed a ‘blitzkrieg’ against the Jews, and ordinary men had carried out the killings. There were parallels of scale between police and Luftwaffe battalions, but whereas Browning could construct a case based on postwar testimonies, this was not available for a study of the Luftwaffe. Memory-based evidence has limitations, even with Federal investigations, but the greater problem was the lingering myth of the ‘clean Wehrmacht’, which included the Luftwaffe. Overcoming the myth was challenging.

The impact of the Historical GIS research is explained in detail in ‘Reading Maps Like German Soldiers’ (chapter 1), but it should be recognised that it was central to redirecting the research. The final microhistory version adapted for the book as a consequence of working with the GIS maps. Several scholars were identified as endorsing the benefits of microhistory long before its actual appearance as a specific methodology. Eric Hobsbawm defined ‘grassroots history, history from below or history of the common people’. This is referred to as Alltagsgeschichte by German historians or everyday history.24 Hosbawm’s Marxian interpretation of ‘history of the common people’ was a dialectic that might be applied to the history of the common soldier. In comparison to Hosbawm’s observations about the traditions of oral history to the working class, similar characteristics exist for the common soldier. The lowly soldier’s social structure was confined to a traditional militarised hierarchy, with orders from above forcing ‘confrontation or co-existence’ with officers and NCOs. To construct an interpretation of how the soldiery responded to Nazi dogma required a deeper understanding of the Wehrmacht beyond the battles and operations. This also involved an understanding of the cultural transformation from conventional combat to occupation, and vice versa, with some comprehension of how the soldiery survived the war beyond the usual glib interpretations of luck. Hosbawm’s ideas greatly suited the social history of the soldiery.

A wholly unexpected outcome from my research was the prominence of the German hunt in shaping events (on this see chapter 2). This coincided with a new study that advised: ‘military history, … is a promising candidate for … microhistory’, and later added ‘military history gives ample scope for the microhistorian.’25 This was a significant theoretical development, but there were no examples to support the claim. The application of microhistory in Holocaust history also illuminated how the intimate scrutiny of Nazi perpetrators could transcend everyday life and everyday killing.26 These microhistories seemed to fit the environmental and forestry conditions of Białowieźa. The conditions had formed a peculiar impression of Białowieźa on the Germans, which they dubbed Urwald Bialowies. The Mammal Institute (Białowieźa) had published several important publications, which have discussed life during the occupation.27 Historically, forestry and hunting have been dominant themes in German literature for centuries, while foreign observers have been rather whimsical about the national fixation with ‘gloomy forests’.28 The weight of forestry literature threatened to overwhelm the research for this book, but it should be recognised that the power of Białowieźa dominated the collective mindset of the Germans.29 Throughout the Luftwaffe war diaries, there were constant references to Urwald Bialowies, in almost an arena like context. Birds of Prey has attempted to reproduce that notion of an arena of killing, where the Germans imagined themselves as warriors of antiquity.

The hunting culture was politicised by Göring to serve as a code of honour, which enforced the operational dogma in Białowieźa. Senior hunt officials perpetrated genocide from their first orders for extermination, which continued for the duration of the occupation. The hunter’s mission was set by Göring, but their actions at the local level were defined by individual responsibility. Beatrice Heuser recommended pursuing a deeper examination of hunting and war through Barbara Ehrenreich’s Blood Rites.30 This ground-breaking interpretation of war and hunting led to further reading. In particular, Simon Harrison touched on much darker kinds of hunting and human behaviour in war.31 Under the Nazis, the German hunt turned into an elitist social class. One observation with hindsight, these findings could have been contextualized within Michel Foucault’s theories of power and discipline. An etiquette of power shaped the mannerisms of the hunters, especially in their relations to non-hunters. The hunt’s social elitism, in the absence of monarchy and aristocracy, was directed towards the ritualisation of professionalism. Foucault’s doctors and patients could be almost role-reversed into the hunters and non-hunters. These threads formed an image of the naked display of power and professionalism, as depicted in the symbolism of the ‘hunter-warrior’ of Luftwaffe propaganda, labouring with genocide, in the wilderness arena of Białowieźa.32

The necessity to conduct field research in Białowieźa came from reading Riding The Retreat. In the preface, Holmes discussed his ‘growing reservations with what we might term ‘arrows on maps’ military history’ and being drawn to the ‘microterrain, that tiny detail of ground and vegetation that means so much to men in battle.’33 Holmes had previously engaged with the history of memory through the anecdotes of soldiers. Both Firing Line (1985) and Dusty Warriors (2006) were influenced by memory, the ‘other soldier’ in the case of the former, and himself in the latter as an observer on the ground. Holmes