Hitler's Hangman (50 page)

already imply the intention to murder each and every Jew in Europe? 100

Some historians have interpreted Heydrich’s authorization of 31 July as

an order for a ‘feasibility study’ for the mass murder of European Jews.101

But there are other ways of interpreting this mandate. Clearly, Heydrich’s

mind turned from a solution primarily focused on Germany, Poland and

the Soviet Union to Nazi-controlled Europe as a whole. However, his

actions and orders over the next few months do not indicate a funda-

mental policy change. He clearly recognized that as a result of the

conquest of the Soviet Union the scope of the Jewish problem had

substantially expanded. As German armies raced eastwards, the number

of Jews that came under Nazi control multiplied daily. Yet at this point he

still believed in an overall solution that involved two components. The

systematic murder of Soviet Jews and those living in the reception areas

for German settlers and deportees from the Reich was one of them. The

second continued to be the idea of deporting the Jews from other parts of

the German sphere of influence to the Soviet Union as soon as the mili-

tary situation allowed him to do so.

If, during the first weeks of the war, there were reservations about

killing Jewish women and children in the conquered Soviet territories,

these reservations were quickly overcome, even though the point in time

at which individual task forces widened the scope of their killing varied

considerably.
Einsatzkommando
9 under Alfred Filbert was the first to

murder Jewish women and children systematically, in Belorussia from the

end of July onwards, apparently on explicit orders from Heydrich.102

The extension of mass murders in the Soviet Union followed an

inverted logic that had ripened in Heydrich’s and Himmler’s minds and

was shared by many of their officers in the field: they saw themselves as

acting in self-defence against their past (and potentially future) victim-

izers. The children, if allowed to survive, would take revenge. The women

would bear more children. The elderly would tell the tale. Germany’s past

misfortunes – allegedly created by the Jews in the first place – could end

only by means of a terrible final reckoning, a harsh but definitive solution

that would also be ‘kind’ to the next generation of Germans, who would

no longer have to deal with either the Jewish problem in its current form

or a future ‘generation of avengers’.103

Heydrich left no documents or letters indicating that he ever felt moral

ambiguity about his central role in the murderous escalation of anti-

Jewish policies. Those close to him, like Himmler or Lina, did however

suggest that he was conscious that his actions constituted a radical breach

of the norms of Western civilization and the values cultivated in his

paternal home. At Heydrich’s funeral in June 1942, Himmler insisted:

AT W A R W I T H T H E W O R L D

199

‘From my countless discussions with Heydrich I know what it cost this

man to be so hard and severe despite the softness of his heart; to make

tough decisions in order to act always in accordance with the law of the

SS which binds us to spare neither our own blood nor that of others when

the life of the nation demands it.’104 His wife, too, claimed that Heydrich

‘was fully aware of his role as hangman but knew how to justify it posi-

tively’: by convincing himself that in order to be kind to future generations

of Germans, and to bring about Hitler’s utopia, he and his men had to be

hard in the present conflict.105

The rate at which the
Einsatzgruppen
killed depended not only on

Heydrich’s orders or those of individual task-force commanders, but also

on the speed with which their army group advanced, the density of the

Jewish population they encountered, the degree of help they received from

the local population and the relevance of the local Jews as slave labourers

for the German war effort. In Lithuania, for example, where the genocide

of local Jews escalated notably earlier than in other parts of the conquered

territories, the economic concerns that long prevented the wholesale

murder of Jews in the General Government did not apply and the food

shortages that became evident in the autumn of 1941 made it even more

pressing to get rid of ‘useless mouths’.
Einsatzgruppe
A under Stahlecker,

responsible for the destruction of the sizeable Jewish communities of

Lithuania and Latvia, proved to be particularly efficient in fulfilling its

murderous brief.106

The result of the gradual increase of violence was staggering: by the end

of 1941, Germans and their local helpers had murdered between 500,000

and 800,000 Jewish men, women and children in the former Soviet terri-

tories, often between 2,700 and 4,200 per day, with most of the deaths

resulting from shootings at close quarters. Local helpers, agitated by

hatred against ‘Judaeo-Bolshevism’, sometimes resorted to clubs and pick-

axes against a largely defenceless Jewish population.107

By the late summer of 1941, both Himmler and Heydrich became

concerned that the face-to-face killings carried out by
Einsatzgruppen

threatened the mental health of their men. Ever since attending an execu-

tion of Jews in Minsk in mid-August 1941, Himmler had been worried

about creating sadistic, psychologically deranged killers who would be

difficult to reintegrate into German post-war society, a problem that was

also apparent to Heydrich who was regularly confronted with frequent

reports of alcohol abuse and mental breakdowns among the men assigned

to his task forces.108

Suggestions on how to solve these self-inflicted problems came from

different directions. One of the earliest proposals for using gas to accel-

erate and ‘humanize’ the murder of those Jews ‘incapable of work’ came

200

HITLER’S HANGMAN

from Rolf Heinz Höppner, a local official in the General Government.

On 16 July, Höppner wrote to Eichmann suggesting that a ‘quick-acting

agent’ should be used to rid Łódź of useless Jewish mouths. On the central

Russian front, too,
Einsatzgruppe
commander Arthur Nebe explored the

possibility of gassing in meetings with chemical experts from Berlin in

mid-September.109

Inspired by these suggestions and experiments, Heydrich instructed the

head of his office for technical affairs within the RSHA, Walter Rauff, to

investigate new means of mass murder. Rauff, whose jurisdiction included

the 4,000 motor vehicles of the Security Police, turned to his staff to

develop a ‘more humane method of execution’ for the
Einsatzgruppen
on

the Eastern Front.110

In late October, the proposed solution – in the form of mobile gas vans

– was first tested in Sachsenhausen concentration camp near Berlin,

where forty naked Russian POWs were killed in the back of a van with

exhaust gas. Thirty more of these gas vans were ordered and sent to the

East, where they were used in Minsk and Mogilev, then in the Warthegau

and in Serbia. Heydrich considered this means of killing more humane for

the perpetrators, but the gas vans never really caught on. Asphyxiation by

carbon monoxide in medium-sized vans was simply too slow and ulti-

mately no less disturbing than the shootings. The perpetrators had to wait

for their screaming victims to die inside the vans, which often took more

than fifteen minutes, before removing the bodies from the vehicles. While

experiments with more ‘efficient’ stationary gassing facilities began in

Poland, notably in Belzec, execution by hand continued to be the domi-

nant practice in the German-occupied territories of the Soviet Union.111

Simultaneously, experiments with Zyklon B, a powerful chemical fumi-

gant, began in Auschwitz in September when Russian POWs were gassed

in a series of test runs. Neither Heydrich’s vans nor the Zyklon B experi-

ments in Auschwitz were initially intended to be used for the systematic

murder of all of Europe’s Jews. They were conceived first and foremost to

facilitate the killing operations on the Eastern Front and in order to create

space in the General Government for incoming deportees from the Reich.

Word of the massacres on the Russian front quickly filtered through

German society. Soldiers in the East who had witnessed, participated in

or merely heard of mass executions relayed the information back to their

friends and relatives at home. A future member of the military resistance

against Hitler, Philipp von Boeselager, for example, heard about the mass

executions of Jews from a fellow officer who had shared a railway carriage

with some drunken SD men, who had boasted that they had murdered

250,000 Jews in the rear areas of Army Group South in 1941. Such

incidents were no exception, and by September 1941 rumours about

AT W A R W I T H T H E W O R L D

201

large-scale atrocities on the Eastern Front were recorded by the SD in

nearly every German city.112

The rumours created anxiety and caused Heydrich to urge his men to

exercise greater caution and secrecy in carrying out their tasks. ‘The

Führer’, he explained to his subordinates in early September, ‘has repeat-

edly stressed that all enemies of the Reich use – just like during the [First]

World War – every opportunity to sow disunity among the German

people. It is thus urgently necessary to abstain from all measures that can

affect the uniform mood of the people.’ Presumably in order to avoid both

unnecessary rumours in Germany and further tensions between SS units

in the field and the civilian administration, Heydrich ordered that his

personal approval be sought ‘before taking any especially drastic meas-

ures’, but left a loophole in cases of ‘imminent danger’.113

No such caution or secrecy was necessary vis-à-vis the Nazi leadership.

The regular reports from the
Einsatzgruppen
were edited in Heydrich’s

RSHA and distributed to other government agencies in order to inform

them about – and adapt them to – the course of events in the occupied

East. The number of recipients of these reports constantly increased and

by late October Heydrich was flooding the German bureaucracy with

Einsatzgruppen
reports. SS officers at the periphery could thus expect

their reports to be read by a large and influential circle of Nazi officials.

For the purpose of presenting it to Hitler, the RSHA also gathered ‘illus-

trative material’, notably photographs, which documented the murderous

work of the task forces in the East.114

The gradual expansion of the mass executions in the Soviet Union and

the constant inclusion of new victim groups in the mass shootings were

unlikely to attract any criticism from the top Nazi leadership. Quite the

opposite. Heydrich’s orders merely anticipated what Hitler had already

intended for the period following the end of the war: the physical destruc-

tion of the Soviet Jews, regardless of the form that it might take.

Hitler was more cautious when it came to the German Jews. When, in

late July or early August 1941, Heydrich proposed the complete and

immediate evacuation of German Jews from the Reich, Hitler was hesi-

tant and rejected the idea.115 Murdering Soviet Jews hundreds of kilome-

tres away from the home front was one thing, but removing German Jews,

including decorated war veterans, from their homes was quite another

matter. Public opinion mattered and was not to be unnecessarily antago-

nized at a decisive moment of the war. However, when US involvement

in the Allied war effort – allegedly the result of Jewish propaganda –

became increasingly likely from mid-August onwards, Hitler changed his

mind. Germany was now no longer engaged in a struggle merely against

Jewish Bolshevism, embodied by the Soviet Union, but also against an

202

HITLER’S HANGMAN

all-encompassing ‘Jewish world conspiracy’, which bound the emerging

coalition of Communism and capitalism together.

In this context, the regime further intensified the persecution of German

Jews. Not only did German Jews have to endure new discriminatory

measures from September onwards, but following a decision by Hitler on

18 August they were also subject to mandatory identification through the

wearing of the yellow star (which had already been compulsory in the

General Government and the Warthegau for two years), thus making them

visible as ‘internal enemies’ and further facilitating their envisaged future

deportation to the East, which Hitler continued to refuse to authorize.116

Heydrich was delighted by Hitler’s decision to mark the Jews, having

already made a similar proposal after the November pogroms of 1938. Back