A World at Arms (61 page)

However much Hitler might press forward with mobilization of industry and manpower, and however pleased he might be with the prospect of spring coming eventually on the Eastern Front,
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the army could not do the fighting by itself. The defeat of December 1941-January 1942 only reinforced the proclivity of the Germans to use their air force primarily in ground support operations; even more drastically than before the Luftwaffe was kept from any strategic role and hitched to tactical assistance of the army.
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But even the air force would not be enough to enable the army to initiate another major offensive in the East. Germany’s allies would have to help. The Romanians were urged to maintain and expand further the substantial forces they already had in the field, while Italy and Hungary were expected to convert their contingents into corps and eventually army strength expeditionary forces. In this project Mussolini as usual displayed more enthusiasm than judgement and the Hungarians dragged their feet as best they could; but the critical point to be noted is that it was at German insistence that massive contingents of poorly equipped and trained, and often badly led, troops were collected and sent off to play vital roles in German-planned operations which were hardly likely to arouse the enthusiasm of the soldiers,
would end in death and disaster for most, and where they would thereafter provide the excuse for their own and Germany’s defeat.
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Although the German armies on the Eastern Front had by this time begun to enroll large numbers of captured Russian soldiers as auxiliaries (called
Hilfswillige,
or
Hiwis
for short), their attempts to organize armed units made up of volunteers recruited from among Soviet citizens, whether previously captured or not, were halted by Hitler’s personal order. Although a few locally activated formations existed–almost certainly without Hitler knowing about them–he prohibited the establishment of such units as a matter of principle: the Germans had come to the East to slaughter many and enslave the rest; certainly arming these people to fight alongside the Germans was not the correct way to implement such a policy.
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That policy will be examined shortly, but first the aims and plans of the Germans for 1942 must be described briefly.

The hope of reaching the oil resources of the Caucasus, or at least denying them to the Russians by cutting the routes from there to the rest of the Soviet Union, had been dashed in 1941 by the successful resistance of the Red Army.
^g
This was now to be the highest priority for 1942. The conquest of the Don basin and the Caucasus would shift the industrial and oil resources of these areas from the Russian to the German side and open up the prospect of a drive across the Caucasus into the Middle East where, perhaps assisted by other German drives through Turkey and across North Africa, they hoped to meet the Japanese advancing across the Indian Ocean from the other end. The meeting of the Axis partners, as the German and Japanese leaders assured each other, would sunder the alliance and the communications of their enemies. Here were prospects as rosy for the Germans and the Japanese as they were dangerous not only for the Russians but also for the British and the Americans.
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Only the Western Powers early recognized the immense danger threatening them, while the Russians still anticipated a German effort to seize Moscow. But with the initiative still held by Germany and Japan, it was these powers which would establish the framework for the great battles of 1942.
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BEHIND THE FRONT: GERMAN PLANS AND ACTIONS

The enormous front in the East which had been opened up by the German attack in June was, as already indicated, in many ways different from earlier fighting in the war. By German design, it was not only a
fight to the death between huge armies but a portion of a broadly conceived, even if not yet precisely detailed, project for a complete reordering of the peoples both of the areas directly affected and of Europe as a whole. The plans to kill certain categories of prisoners of war were being implemented from the first days of the campaign, and this became with a speed difficult to credit merely a small portion of a far wider horror, the deliberate starving to death–or allowing the death by exposure and disease–of hundreds of thousands of Soviet prisoners.

By February 1942, of the 3.9 million Soviet soldiers captured up to then by the Germans, the vast majority, some 2.8 million were dead. At least a quarter million had been shot; the others had died under the horrible conditions imposed on them by the Germans.
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Whatever fairy tales were put out by those involved in these horrors or apologists for them, careful scrutiny of the contemporary evidence makes it clear that this atrocity of vast proportions was carried out with the willing, even enthusiastic, participation of German army, police, and civilian authorities. There were indeed exceptional individuals who objected and in some instances tried to alleviate the situation, but their minute number only underlines the broad consensus between the civilian and military leadership.
^h

On the German side, this agreement on the rapid physical elimination of a large portion of the enemy population–a step without precedent in modern history–has to be seen as part of a consensus, at least temporarily, on a major portion of that extreme form of Social Darwinism which was central to National Socialism and which would have still other implications for the people of Europe. On the Russian side, this had two significant effects. In the first place, the shooting of some categories of prisoners–in part announced in German leaflets–as well as the rapid spread of knowledge of the fate of the rest, served to spur the officers and soldiers of the Red Army to even more determined resistance. This was so obvious that a number of German generals urged the end of the policy of shooting captured commissars, a point on which Hitler eventually agreed in May of 1942. The second effect of German treatment of the captured Red Army men was on the population of the occupied territories. The fate of the prisoners was in front of their eyes; any who did not see the enclosures and marches where they died or were shot by the thousands would either hear by word of mouth or see the wounded and disabled whom the Germans deliberately dumped on the countryside to die. Here was an enemy who made even Stalin’s labor
camps look humane–a considerable accomplishment–and one with long-term political implications.

A German policy closely related to that of killing or letting die millions of prisoners of war was the previously discussed series of decisions about the killing of Jews.
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Jewish POWs were frequently shot, and special murder squads (
Einsatzkommandos
) were attached to the German armies as they moved forward. These implemented the decision to kill all Jews in the area overrun by the advancing armies. When it became obvious that these massacres ran into little resistance from the military, and were in fact often assisted and even urged on by them, the heady days of victory of July seemed to provide the opportunity to extend this process both to the rest of the territory that would be occupied by the German army and to the whole of German-occupied and controlled Europe. Here was, or at least seemed to be, the opportunity to kill all Jews German power might reach.

The SS took the lead in this colossal project, obtained a legitimizing commission from Göring, and began to develop plans for its implementation.
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On the technical side, this meant increasing recourse to new methods of slaughter either already in use elsewhere or now developed. Mass shooting always remained a significant element in the process but did not work with the speed and efficiency those in charge preferred. The gas vans based on prior projects in the so-called euthanasia program had their part, along with the people who had acquired experience in their use during that program; and the construction of large special facilities for mass murder, begun in the fall of 1941, would include big gas chambers. These, first tried out on some of the Russian prisoners of war, eventually became the preferred though by no means exclusive method of murder.

From a practical point of view, it quickly appeared best to the Germans to reverse the procedure initiated in the summer of 1941; instead of bringing the murderers to the victims, they would bring the victims to the murderers. This part of the project began with large shipments of German Jews on October 15, 1941; it is not a pure coincidence that in the presence of Himmler and Heydrich on October 21, 1941, Hitler referred to the extermination of Jews, and the mayor of the city of Hamburg alluded in his diary on the same day to the taking over of Jewish homes.
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From the administrative side, it became increasingly obvious to the SS that the program could not be carried out without the cooperation and continuing involvement of many German government agencies. Representatives of these agencies were summoned to a conference, originally scheduled for December 9 and then postponed to January 20.
At this meeting, generally called the Wannsee Conference after its location, the nature and implementation of the program to kill all the Jews of Europe was reviewed at length for the benefit of the agencies to be involved. The dimensions were spelled out and they included not only all Jews in German-controlled and influenced areas, but those–like the ones in England, Spain, Sweden, and Portugal-which it was assumed would soon also be under German domination.
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Those present understood what was to happen;
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they had been reading the regular reports of the murder squads on their activities, including the one on the largest single slaughter, that of 33,000 at Babi Yar near Kiev.
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The various agencies not already participating became involved hereafter; the role of the Foreign Ministry being especially important because it had the task of obtaining the Jews from territories under German influence but not total control. It was decided to begin with France from where the first transport left for Auschwitz, one of the major centers for killing, on March 27, 1942.
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Madagascar was no longer needed, but all areas where Germany had any influence, including even Denmark, then still held up as a model of the cooperative and independent satellite, were expected to fall in line eventually.
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German arms would, Hitler hoped, extend this program beyond Europe. As he discussed the anticipated offensive across the Caucasus into the Middle East with the Mufti on November 28, 1941, he explained that Germany’s only aim in the area would be the destruction of the Jews there.
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Within the German army there was a high level of agreement on the propriety of this program. On the one hand, there were those who wanted to move it along even faster, while there were also some who objected. The former view was particularly obvious in Serbia, the portion of Yugoslavia under direct German military supervision, where the local German commanders were so enthusiastic about the program that they applied it locally on their own initiative.
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On the other hand, there was in addition to the opposition of a few German officers evidently some muttering of discontent from among the army rank and file. It is this muttering that must, in this author’s opinion, be adduced to explain the extraordinary phenomenon of generals ordering explanations and defenses of what was described as the “hard but just punishment of the Jewish sub-humans” to be read to their troops. German field marshals and generals were otherwise not in the habit of explaining themselves to the troops. A first order of October 10 by Field Marshal von Reichenau was distributed at the insistence of Field Marshal von Rundstedt to all armies in his Army Group South and then at von Brauchitsch’s order to all units in the East. Along with repeated orders to refrain from sending home pictures of mass executions–evidently a common habit
of German soldiers–these directives, which were cited in trials after the war to incriminate their authors, in addition show something of far broader significance.
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They illustrate a general recognition of the fact that the German army had embarked on an enterprise very different from the traditions and laws of earlier warfare, that all were involved in this project, that there were some in the ranks who did not approve of this new course; but that such dissenters could not count on any support from the leaders of the army who identified themselves with the program of mass slaughter for ideological reasons. The German soldier was to be, as the order put it, “the carrier of a merciless racial concept” (“Trager einer unerbittlichen volkischen Idee”), and whatever restrictions on conduct remained were designed to maintain discipline in the bloodbath, not to restrain it. No one said so in writing, but the very fact that a few brave officers did object must have shown all who did not that there was no turning back.

In the occupied areas of Eastern Europe, this program had its own set of repercussions. Some of the local people, moved by fear of the Germans, anti-Semitic sentiments, greed, sadistic feelings, hunger, or a combination of several of these factors, joined in the process, especially in Lithuania and portions of the Ukraine. Once they had joined, they quickly realized that they had burned their bridges behind them, had to stick with the Germans, and if they survived the war try to disappear, preferably as anti-Communist refugees in the West. A few brave people tried to help their neighbors, but the vast majority looked on uneasy and apprehensive: a system which acted this way against one group might well act similarly against another. The sample of the New Order, of the new cultural mission of Germanic peoples in Eastern Europe, did not look promising.

In the rest of the world, news of the project for the systematic killing of all of Europe’s Jews did not penetrate quickly. It is generally now understood that the outlines of the project and the first major stages in implementing it were known in the West in the summer of 1942.
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Before that time, however, extensive information about portions of the terrible events had reached the Allies and the neutrals. Though the relevant files remain closed, it is known that the British had broken the police cipher in which the reports of the murder squads beginning in July 1941 and the daily returns from the camps beginning in the spring of 1942 were sent to Berlin.
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At least for a time, practically nothing was done with this knowledge, though it is by no means clear what could have been done.
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Here was a problem that transcended both comprehension and remedy. At a time when the Western Allies were
being defeated by the Axis in the war at sea, in North Africa, and in the Pacific, the first priority was to hold on and pull together the home front for hard times and eventual victory (which alone could keep the Germans from killing all the other Jews on earth). Public statements and threats would have to wait until they might have some measure of credibility.