Birds of Prey, by Philip W. Blood
The Bialowieźa forest, in Poland and Belarus, is now a UNESCO World Heritage site. The forest is full of interesting plant life and a wide range of wildlife including wolves, wild boar, deer and European bison. No wonder then, that when the Germans invaded the area in 1941, following Operation Barbarossa, Herman Göring and other prominent Nazis with an obsession for hunting, found the place to be an Aladdin’s Cave of opportunity.
However, during that time it was not only animals that roamed the trees, marshes and swamplands of the forest, and it was not just this wildlife that was to be hunted. Sheltering within its huge expanse were partisans, determined to fight back against the Nazis, and Jews, hiding out after escaping from nearby ghettoes. These people were to be tracked down and either killed or deported to the Nazi concentration and death camps in Poland and Germany.
Using modern GIS mapping technology and extensive research, utilising documents from the national archives of Britain, America and, significantly, Germany, Philip Blood is able to paint a full and comprehensive picture of what took place in the forest during the Second World War – from the point of German invasion, to their full retreat in late 1944, when the Red Army was advancing towards Berlin. He is able to show dispositions of troops, patrol areas and partisan hideout locations, describing in great detail what happened, including the murders of many innocent people and the destruction of villages, including the reprisal attack at the village of Laski in May 1943, where over two hundred civilians were massacred.
This book puts to bed the myth that those involved in the hunting down and murdering of Jews, partisans and civilians was done only by the SS and ardent Nazis. Through piecing together the extensive research Blood has carried out for this book, he is able to prove that the Luftwaffe – the German Air Force – also willingly bloodied their hands during the Holocaust.
What strikes the reader is the sheer ordinariness of the airmen involved in these killings. The author goes into great detail about some of these men to display that ordinariness, the war having ripped them from their somewhat mundane and nondescript existences and throwing them to the very forefront of Nazi atrocities. It is frightening to see how easily this was achieved. Blood argues that the Germans used the round-ups and killings within the forest as something of a training exercise against what they considered ‘soft targets’, to prepare the troops for the inevitable fierce fighting that was surely to come later – in a way ‘blooding’ them, to get them used to killing.
The research into this book is intense, the work gone into putting it all together is to be hugely congratulated. Backing up the narrative with maps, tables and casualty numbers, ‘Birds of Prey’ shows the full history of the Bialoweźa forest during the war years and the Luftwaffe’s part in what took place there.
However, this is a book about the perpetrators of those crimes and not the victims. There is no great detail about the partisans and Jews who were hunted down and murdered, other than lists of names and numbers of those killed. This is probably due to there being limited, if any, documentation about exactly who these people were. Nevertheless, the book is the book is an important insight into a little known history and can finally put to bed the assumption that it was only fervent Nazis who carried out the killings during the Holocaust.
John R. McKay is the author of Arctic Convoy PQ18: 25 Days That Changed the Course of the War.
