Hitler and the Holocaust (15 page)

The soldier must show understanding for the harsh atonement of Judaism, the spiritual carrier of the Bolshevik terror.
¹³

Such ideological statements by top German field commanders, exhorting their troops to ever greater ferocity against the “racial” and political enemies of the Reich, were becoming commonplace. The military leaders spoke, like Colonel-General Hoth, commander of the Seventeenth Army, on 25 November 1941, of “our mission to save European culture from the advancing Asiatic barbarism”; of the German sense of “honor” and race when confronting the
Jewish-Bolshevik “disregard of moral values.” Not only the commanders but also the combat troops accepted this Nazified view of the war as an ideological struggle for survival against demonic Jewish-Bolshevik enemies. As Omer Bartov has pointed out, Wehrmacht soldiers serving on the Russian front were young men “who had spent their formative years under the Third Reich and were exposed to large doses of indoctrination in Nazified schools and especially in the Hitler Youth and the Reich labour service.”
¹⁴
Their education and socialization had instilled in them the mind-set requisite for a genocidal task.

More specifically, the
Vernichtungskrieg
(war of destruction) that the army waged against the Soviet Union, “Judeo-Bolshevism,” and the “Asiatic hordes” in the east provided the precondition for the “Final Solution” of the “Jewish question” in Europe. On this issue, Hitler knew that his conservative, anti-Bolshevik generals were in broad agreement with his views, just as they had no difficulties with starving or working to death Slav
Untermenschen
, or reducing them to a reservoir of slave labor for the German
Herrenvolk
(master race). Operation Barbarossa had opened up new vistas for the Nazi elite in terms of “solutions” to a series of long-range problems they had hitherto postponed or held on ice. Ever since the 1920s, Hitler had dreamed of a war against the Soviet Union, to establish
Lebensraum
to the east in a Greater German Empire. But this would have to be a
Weltanschauungskrieg
(war of ideologies) to destroy international Communism, which was itself regarded by the Nazis as the main political arm of Jewry—the expression of its will to dominate the world.
¹⁵

As the gigantic battle with the Soviet Union approached, it is striking how Hitler began to return to the language of
Mein Kampf
and the anti-Semitic racial eschatology of his early days as an agitator in Munich. At a preparatory conference on 30 March 1941, Hitler had emphatically informed his military commanders that war with the Soviet Union would be “a struggle between two opposing world outlooks” (
Kampf zweier
Weltanschauungen gegeneinander
)—a race war totally different from the confrontation in the West.
¹⁶
His guidelines for the ruthless elimination of Bolshevik commissars, partisans, and Jews were then carried out to the letter in the field.

It is important to grasp the qualitative leap that was now taking place along the continuum of murderous actions which taken together comprised the Holocaust. The period from the conquest of Poland until June 1941 can in retrospect be seen as a “testing laboratory” for Hitler’s racial and imperial ambitions. Soviet Russia, on the other hand, became the arena for the final struggle, “the prelude to the millennium,” to borrow Lucy Dawidowicz’s pregnant phrase for the Nazi apocalypse.
¹⁷
In Poland, the racial policies designed to expel Poles and Jews from areas annexed to the Reich and to replace them with “racially pure” Germans and
Volksdeutsche
had enjoyed only limited success. The civilian Governor-General in conquered Poland, Hans Frank, was constantly complaining that his fiefdom had become a vast dumping ground for Jews from Germany, Austria, and the other annexed Polish territories, overburdening his administration. In the ghettos, as a result of deliberate German cruelty, there were acute overcrowding, chronic shortages of food, and a complete absence of sanitation, leading to outbreaks of typhus and other infectious diseases. Though hundreds of thousands died in these appalling conditions or in the labor camps, and Jews were brutally and randomly killed, systematic mass murder was not yet the German policy.

All of this swiftly changed after the invasion of Soviet Russia. On 31 July 1941, almost six weeks after the invasion began, Heydrich received an order from Goering “to carry out all preparations with regard to the organisation, the material side and financial viewpoints for a total solution (
Gesamtlösung
) of the Jewish question in those territories of Europe which are under German influence.” He was further instructed to submit a draft “showing the administrative, material and financial measures already taken for the execution
of the intended final solution (
Endlösung
) of the Jewish question.”
¹⁸
In mid-June 1941, Heydrich had given the higher SS and police leaders in the east open-ended orders about killing Jews, saboteurs, subversives, and Comintern officials. His instructions did not, however, go much beyond the Commissar Order that had preceded the invasion. But under the cover of protective security measures against partisans in the occupied territories, it was easier—as Hitler himself pointed out in a planning conference on 16 July 1941—“to wipe out anyone who gets in our way.”
¹⁹
Eichmann himself during his interrogation by the Israeli police in 1960 affirmed categorically that in August 1941 he had heard point-blank from Heydrich, “The Führer has ordered physical extermination.”
²⁰
He assumed that the order must have come down through Himmler and would never have been put into writing, on which point he was probably correct.

In September 1941, as German forces became increasingly bogged down in their military campaign, the killing of Soviet Jews increased greatly. Significantly, Hitler had indicated on the evening of 2 October 1941 that these accelerating massacres in the east enjoyed his full approval. Recalling yet again his Reichstag prophecy of January 1939 that “the Jew would disappear from Europe,” he cynically told Himmler and Heydrich, “It’s not a bad idea, by the way, that public rumour attributes to us a plan to exterminate the Jews. Terror is a salutary thing.”
²¹
This statement occurred just over a month after Himmler had informed the Gauleiter of the Wartheland, Arthur Greiser, that it was “the Führer’s wish that the Altreich and the Protectorates [Bohemia and Moravia] should be cleared of Jews from west to east. I am therefore doing all I can to see that the deportation of the Jews … into the territories assimilated into the Reich during the past two years is completed during this year as a first stage, preparatory to their being sent further east early in the new year.”
²²

Hitler’s September 1941 order for the “removal” of Jews from the Reich to the east went beyond the geographically
limited killing of Soviet Jews toward a pan-European solution of the “Jewish question.” Heydrich, at a conference in Prague on 10 October 1941, spoke of “the Führer’s wish that German Jews be deported to Lódz, Riga, and Minsk by the end of the year, if possible.”
²³
This formula of “the Führer’s wish” (
des Führers Wunsch
), deployed by both Himmler and Heydrich, came to assume a life of its own during the Holocaust, as one of those key code terms (like
evacuation, resettlement, transport to the east
) that covered or disguised the horrible reality of mass murder. The circular of 23 October 1941 from Gestapo chief Heinrich Müller (issued in Himmler’s name) banning “all further Jewish emigration, with immediate effect,” was one more decisive pointer to the emergence of a new phase.
²⁴
For where would the Jews go if they could no longer emigrate or stay where they were? This question was all the more acute as the Russian winter set in and heavy German losses were for the first time being sustained at the hands of the “Jewish-Bolshevik” enemy.

There were also other significant indicators regarding a decision for genocide around September and October 1941. The brutality of face-to-face mass shootings on the eastern front were beginning to take their psychological toll on the Einsatzgruppen, and Himmler (after witnessing one such execution) had become more “sensitized” to the needs of his troops and the desirability of a so-called humane method of killing. By September 1941, Einsatzgruppe C was in possession of a truck that used exhaust gases to kill trapped Jewish victims. In October 1941, plans for the construction of gassing apparatus had been discussed by Adolf Eichmann, Alfred Wetzel (the Jewish expert of the Ostministerium), and Viktor Brack, the supervisor of the euthanasia program in the Führer Chancellery.
²⁵
They agreed that “there is no reason why those Jews who are not fit for work should not be removed by the Brack method [i.e., gassing].… The work-worthy on the other hand will be transported to the East for labour.”
²⁶

Riga and Minsk were mentioned as destinations for deported German Jews. The Germans had, of course, no intention of feeding the new mass influx; and once they were incapable of hard labor, these Jews had few prospects of survival. Moreover, now that a technology (the “gas vans”) had been decided upon, it remained only to find the sites and construct the “annihilation camps” (
Vernichtungslager).
The first death camp was built at Chelmno (Kulmhof) in Poland, where the gassing of Jews began on 8 December 1941.
²⁷
It appears that Himmler had been given a special authorization to have one hundred thousand Jews killed there. (About this time, gas trucks were also being used by the Germans to kill Jews in Semlin, Serbia.)
²⁸
This was followed in March 1942 by Belzec in eastern Poland (near the former Soviet border), the first extermination camp equipped with permanent gas chambers. By then, Auschwitz-Birkenau in Silesia, which became the biggest of all the death camps (though it was a concentration and industrial labor camp as well), was also operational, though the gassing of Jews did not begin until two months later.
²⁹
Sitting astride the major railway artery from Vienna to Cracow, this huge complex of camps—known commonly as Auschwitz (Oswiecim in Polish)—ultimately became the most notorious embodiment of the Holocaust as an assembly-line process of mass murder. It is estimated that 1.2 million Jews died in the gas chambers of Auschwitz-Birkenau, along with a much smaller number of Poles, Gypsies, and Soviet POWs. Similar killing facilities were constructed at other death camps in Poland—Sobibór (May 1942), Treblinka (July 1942), and Majdanek (autumn 1942)—the sole purpose and product of which was mass murder.

Toward the end of 1941, pressures for the physical elimination of the Jews were building from many sides, especially in that strange no-man’s-land known as the Polish General Government. Governor-General Hans Frank, in a notorious speech of 16 December 1941 in Cracow, could not have been
more explicit about his intentions: “One way or another—I will tell you that quite openly—we must finish off the Jews. The Führer put it into words once: should united Jewry again succeed in setting off a world war, then a blood sacrifice shall not be made only by the peoples driven into war, but then the Jew of Europe will have met his end.”
³⁰
Hitler’s
so oder so
(“one way or the other”), mimicked here by Frank, was becoming the Nazi signature tune for the Holocaust.

Frank then referred dismissively to “criticism” of the cruelty and harshness of measures “now applied to Jews in the Reich.” In language that was again unmistakably reminiscent of Hitler, he ranted that one could have pity “only for the German people and for nobody else in the world.” If European Jewry survived the war, he declared, while Germans had sacrificed “the best of our blood” for Europe, this would be at most a half success. His confident expectation was, however, that “the Jews will disappear,” and hence he intended to send a representative to Reinhard Heydrich’s upcoming January 1942 Wannsee Conference in Berlin. Frank then reported to his audience what he had been told on a recent visit to Berlin: instead of making trouble by refusing to have more Jews thrown into his territory, he would do better to “liquidate” them himself. There was no room for sentimentality or compassion, he concluded.

We must destroy the Jews wherever we meet them and whenever the opportunity offers so that we can maintain the whole struc ture of the Reich here.… The Jews batten on to us to an exceptionally damaging extent. At a rough estimate we have in the Generalgouvernement about 2.5 million people [Jews]—now perhaps 3.5 million who have Jewish connections and so on. We cannot shoot these 3.5 million Jews, we cannot poison them, but we can take measures that will, one way or the another [
so oder so
], lead to extermination, in conjunction with the large-scale measures under discussion in the Reich.
³¹

The measures to which Frank so vilely alluded were to be spelled out in some detail at the notorious ninety-minute Wannsee Conference of 20 January 1942, held in the serenity of an elegant suburban villa in Berlin. It was organized by Reinhard Heydrich in his capacity as chief of the security police and the SD but, more important, as the designated “Plenipotentiary for the Preparation of the Final Solution of the Jewish Question.” Heydrich, the most “Aryan”-looking of the Nazi leadership and a fanatical anti-Semite (despite misleading rumors about his partly Jewish ancestry), was determined to push the meeting forward in brisk and businesslike fashion.
³²
The conference was to have been held originally on 8 December 1941 and had already been delayed for six weeks. Its ostensible purpose was to coordinate a general plan among the various Reich ministries and service chiefs to exterminate (though the word was naturally avoided)
all
of European Jewry. There were five representatives of the SS and police present, including Gestapo chief Heinrich Müller and the conscientious Adolf Eichmann (from the Reich Main Security Office), who took the minutes. The nine civilians represented the Ministry of the Interior (Dr. Wilhelm Stuckart), the Ministry of Justice (Dr. Roland Freisler), the Reich Chancellery (Wilhelm Kritzinger), the Ministry of the Occupied Eastern Territories (Drs. Meyer and Georg Leibbrandt), the office of the Four-year Plan (Erich Neumann), the office of the Governor-General (Dr. Bühler), the Party Chancellery (Gerhard Klopfer), and the Foreign Ministry (Dr. Martin Luther).