Hitler's Charisma (40 page)

Moreover, unlike the euthanasia action where Hitler had never spoken publicly about his desire to see the disabled killed, he had explicitly spoken in the Reichstag on 30 January 1939 about the fate he desired for the Jews in the event of war, saying infamously that if the “International Jewish financiers” caused a world war then the “annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe” would follow.

But Hitler had not, by the start of 1941, pursued such a policy. Jews had been mistreated, persecuted and imprisoned in ghettos in Poland. Many thousands had died, but there had been no systematic plan in place to annihilate them. One reason was because Hitler wanted, as we have seen, to make peace with Britain and in the process prevent America from interfering—as he saw it—in European affairs. A policy of mass murder of the Jews would have been an obstacle in the way of such a goal. But the prospect of the war against the Soviet Union offered new possibilities. As Professor Omar Bartov says, “the war in the Soviet Union provides the perfect cover for genocide on that scale, and I mean cover in all ways. Cover vis-à-vis the international community, cover vis-à-vis your own population, even cover vis-à-vis the people who are doing it, because then you’re involved in such a brutal war in which so many millions of people die, that killing another group doesn’t seem very different. And I have to say that if you look at genocide in the twentieth century more generally you will find that it almost always happens either at a time of war or is at least described as war, as happening within a war, and a war for existence, not just any war.”
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A meeting between Hermann Göring and Reinhard Heydrich on 26 March 1941 demonstrated the accuracy of this judgement. Here the plan
to deport the Jews to the barren reaches of the Soviet Union was discussed and endorsed. That Hitler approved of such an idea is certain, since he personally told Hans Frank on 25 March that the General Government was, over time, to become “free of Jews.”
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These Jews, it was clear, would be sent further east to languish and eventually die.

In parallel with this policy of expulsion to a wilderness within what was shortly expected to be the new Nazi sphere of influence, went a more immediate plan to kill selected Jews behind the lines as the German Army advanced into the Soviet Union. Reinhard Heydrich’s 2 July 1941 directive to the
Einsatzgruppen
demonstrates that he wanted these killings to be seen in the context of the overall war of annihilation against the Soviet Union that Hitler had declared. The action was described as an attempt to eliminate communist and “Jewish” influence and control, and as such was easier for many senior German army commanders to accept than an outright policy of mass extermination. The memory of the attempted Communist revolution in Germany after the First World War, and the perception that Jewish figures had instigated it, was still raw. For Carlheinz Behnke of the Waffen SS—someone who had joined the Hitler Youth at the age of eleven in 1933 and volunteered for an SS Panzer Division in 1940—the link between Judaism and Communism was obvious. “The Jews were simply regarded as the leadership class or as those who were firmly in control over there in the Soviet Union.” Moreover, he felt, “they were attempting to somehow gain control over the German nation … that was after all the aim of Bolshevism, to spread westwards to the Atlantic and to then spread Bolshevism throughout Europe. And I don’t think that aim can be dismissed.”
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The “solution” that Hitler then encouraged to deal with the Jewish “leadership class” in the Soviet Union might subsequently be seen as too radical or too risky by many Germans, but large numbers still accepted that some kind of action should be taken against the Jews in the Soviet Union and their unease only related to the degree of radicalism involved. The Nazi regime, after all, had been stoking hatred and fear of the Bolsheviks amongst the German population for years before the unexpected non-aggression pact of August 1939 with Stalin. However, Hitler also knew that there was bound not only to be foreign opposition to the idea of shooting Soviet Jews in cold blood, but that these killings would be something only the most extreme anti-Semite would be likely to endorse.

So just as he had with the Jewish boycott of April 1933 and in the aftermath of
Kristallnacht
in 1938, Hitler kept his own name and prestige apart from these potentially damaging actions.

Once the conflict had begun Himmler ordered several more SS units to reinforce the work of the
Einsatzgruppen
in the Soviet Union and the killing extended over the summer and early autumn of 1941 to include the murder of Jewish women and children. This all occurred after Hitler had met Himmler on 15 July at his headquarters in East Prussia. An idea of what was on Hitler’s mind at the time can be gleaned from a speech he gave to select Nazi leaders the next day. He declared that he wanted to create a “garden of Eden” in the east for Germans, and this should be achieved by “shooting everyone who even looks [at us] askance.”
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Hitler was also talking during the summer and autumn of 1941 of leaving the populations of cities like Leningrad to starve to death, so the increasing intensity of the action against the Jews of the Soviet Union can be seen as part of a wider aim of destroying millions of lives in the east.

By now there was also another plan for the radical ethnic re-ordering of the Nazi empire in the east under active consideration. On 15 July 1941, less than a month after the invasion had been launched, Himmler received a draft of
Generalplan Ost
(General Plan East), a wide-ranging vision for the settlement of the eastern territories that imagined the disappearance of large numbers of the indigenous population. Professor Konrad Meyer-Hetling, an academic expert in rural and town planning—as well as an SS colonel—played a crucial part in the construction of the document. As the plan subsequently proceeded through various drafts it became clear that the number of people to be removed would almost certainly have been higher than 40 million.
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It was never specified explicitly where these people were to be removed to, or if and how they were to be murdered. Most likely, they too were to be shipped to the wilds of the occupied far eastern Soviet Union and simply left to die. Since the Germans did not conquer the Soviet Union as they had planned, the
Generalplan Ost
was never implemented in full, but it does show the context in which the fate of the Jews was considered in the summer and autumn of 1941. It is also another example of how highly intelligent people like Meyer-Hetling felt liberated by the regime to dream up fantastical quasi-utopian plans that would result in unimaginable suffering for millions of people. (After the war, and a short period of imprisonment, Meyer-Hetling
resumed his academic career as a Professor at Hanover Technical University.)

The shooting of Jews in the Soviet Union also provided the background against which decisions about the fate of Jews in Poland, Germany and other Nazi-occupied territories were about to be taken. The original idea had been to deport these Jews into the Soviet Union once the war was over. But now several leading Nazis, like Joseph Goebbels, Gauleiter of Berlin as well as Propaganda Minister, and Karl Kaufmann, the Gauleiter of Hamburg, asked Hitler to consider bringing forward that plan and deport German Jews almost immediately. Everyone involved in this process knew that a move of this significance could only be taken with Hitler’s approval. In response, Hitler told Goebbels in August 1941 that his “prophecy” made in the Reichstag in January 1939 to destroy the Jews if they “provoked” another world war was coming true. “In the East the Jews have had to settle their account; in Germany they have partly settled and will have to pay even more in future.”
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In September 1941, Hitler agreed to deport the German Jews, and just a few weeks later the Jews of Hamburg were sent east. One non-Jewish German who watched a column of Jews trail by on the way to Hamburg railway station recalls that around a fifth of people welcomed their departure, saying “Thank goodness these useless eaters are vanishing”
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but most just looked on in silence.

The Jews from Hamburg were not sent directly into the occupied Soviet Union but were transported to the already overcrowded Łódź ghetto in Poland. Their arrival created a crisis that by December 1941 led to a plan to murder selected Jews from the ghetto in gas vans based at an extermination centre at Chelmno, 120 miles north of Łódź. But most of the 60,000 Jews deported from the “Old Reich” between October 1941 and February 1942 were sent directly into the area of the Soviet Union in which the
Einsatzgruppen
operated. Some were shot immediately on arrival, whilst others were housed in ghettos—and Soviet Jews were murdered to make space for them.

The fact that the Jews were “sent away” from the Reich undoubtedly helped ordinary Germans not to think about their possible fate. From September 1941 German Jews had been forced to wear a yellow star to mark them out, and this caused even some supporters of the regime to feel “sorry”
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for their Jewish neighbours. But once these same Jewish
neighbours were transported to the east then many people simply banished them from their minds.

Hitler seems to have been acting that autumn and winter out of his visceral feelings of hatred for the Jews rather than any carefully thought through strategy. As we’ve seen, whilst he’d decided in September 1941 that German Jews should be deported east, there was no detailed plan in place about exactly where they should go—Himmler had to improvise a solution. All that was certain was that the future for these Jews was extremely bleak.

By the end of 1941 several different techniques of murder were in development or operation: gas vans—in which victims were forced into the back of a sealed van and then carbon monoxide gas from the exhaust was used to kill them—were at work, particularly at Chelmno; the
Einsatzgruppen
continued mass shooting behind the lines in the Soviet Union; the building of the first fixed extermination camp started at Belzec in south-east Poland—Belzec was to use the exhaust from powerful diesel engines to kill, to begin with, “unproductive” Jews from nearby ghettos; and at Auschwitz main camp in Upper Silesia the deputy commandant was experimenting with the use of a powerful insecticide called Zyklon B to kill Soviet prisoners of war and the sick. Within a few months this technique would also be used to kill Jews from the surrounding area.

No written order from Hitler to kill the Jews that autumn has ever been found. Instead, his rhetoric continued to set the broad and murderous goals whilst the system did the rest. That December, in the wake of both the Red Army’s counter-offensive and the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, Hitler’s vision for the fate of the Jews grew still more apocalyptic. In his speech to the Reichstag on 11 December, Hitler claimed the “sheer, satanic malice” of the Jews was behind Roosevelt’s decision to embark on a “foreign policy diversion”—by which he meant military support for Britain. Hitler, just as he had in his speeches in the early 1920s, thus claimed that the Jews were behind the policies of both the Communist Soviet Union and the capitalist United States.

The next day, 12 December, Hitler spoke to Reich leaders and, as recorded by Goebbels, said that since the Jews had brought about a world war then “they would experience their own extermination.”
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Four days later on 16 December, Hans Frank, who had just heard Hitler speak, said at a meeting in Krakow that “we must exterminate the Jews wherever we
find them.” In Berlin, said Frank, he had been told to “liquidate” the Jews.
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A month later, on 20 January 1942, the infamous Wannsee conference took place just outside Berlin. Here Reinhard Heydrich discussed various issues related to the fate of the Jews, including the definition of just who should be considered a “Jew” in the context of the deportations.

It is tempting to see all this as a relatively straightforward chain of causation. Hitler announces a decision to exterminate the Jews on 12 December 1941 and then the various bodies charged with implementing this decision move into operation. But this would be wrong. Hitler’s comments on 12 December did not amount to an announcement of an all-encompassing Europe-wide extermination programme, and contrary to popular belief the question of murdering all the Jews by gassing them was
not
raised at the Wannsee conference. Whilst there was discussion of a plan to kill the Jews in the General Government more quickly (these Jews were the ones Hans Frank had referred to in his “liquidate them yourselves” speech of 16 December) Heydrich wanted other Jews who were fit enough to be sent to the east to build giant roads. Here large numbers were still expected to die, but this was not the master plan for the Holocaust as we know it. It wouldn’t be until spring 1942, two months after Wannsee, that the first foreign Jews—from Slovakia—arrived at Auschwitz–Birkenau. Many of them were subsequently murdered, though not immediately on arrival, in improvised gas chambers converted from peasant cottages. The death camps of Sobibor and Belzec also started killing around the same time—but the majority of people killed here were Polish Jews, indeed, Jews from the General Government. It was not until early summer that foreign Jews began arriving.

Only by the summer of 1942 was it clear that the “Final Solution” meant absolute “extermination” of all the Jews under Nazi control and that this policy was to be put into practice here and now, not at some point “after” the war had been won. By August, Jews from Western Europe were no longer sent to ghettos in Poland but direct to extermination camps—only one of which, Auschwitz, had the capacity to “select” any appreciable number of Jews from arriving transports and put them to work, before the rest were murdered. Belzec, Sobibor and Treblinka were all solely death camps, where arriving Jews had a more than 99 per cent chance of being murdered by gassing within a few hours of arrival. The practical and emotional reality of that bare statistic is recalled by Toivi
Blatt, a Polish Jew sent to Sobibor in 1943. He was one of the tiny number of Jews selected by the Nazis to work in the camp and thus temporarily able to postpone their own deaths. He remembers the arrival of “a Dutch transport of about 3,000 Jews” into Sobibor, “… we helped them with their heavy luggage and later we were told to divide women and children one side, men the other side … I was with another few young men standing, yelling. I asked them to leave their luggage—women were told to leave their handbags, just throw them on the side. At that point I noticed their eyes—in the women’s eyes some kind of anxiety, they were afraid. Because what do you have in a handbag—the most important stuff. One woman didn’t want to leave it and the German hit her with a whip … They didn’t know they will die in a few minutes. Once their hair was cut, they were told to go further up from the barracks just a few minutes to the gas chamber. And I’m sure that this trap was so perfect, I’m sure when they were in the gas chambers and gas came out of the shower heads instead of water, probably they were thinking that it was some kind of malfunction. I remember once [another] transport from Holland, it came in the middle of the night. Three thousand people arrived and when they were already taken out of the gas chambers to be burnt I remember thinking it was a beautiful night, the stars—and 3,000 people died. Nothing happened. The stars are in the same place.”
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