return for being spared from deportation, the first-degree
Mischling
would
have to submit to ‘voluntary’ sterilization if he or she was to remain in the
Reich. A second-degree
Mischling
or quarter-Jew was to be considered a
Jew if any of the following three criteria applied: if both parents were
Mischlinge
; if he or she had an ‘exceptionally poor racial appearance’ that
distinguished him or her as a Jew; or if he or she ‘feels and behaves like a
Jew’.177
Heydrich’s proposals did not encounter much opposition from the
other delegates. Stuckart’s only concern was that the proposed measures
involved ‘endless administrative work’. He therefore suggested as an alter-
native the complete sterilization of the
Mischlinge
population, a suggestion
supported by the director of the Race and Settlement Office, Otto
Hofmann.178
As far as German Jews in mixed marriages were concerned, of which
there were fewer than 20,000 at this point, Heydrich also suggested a radical
solution: al ful y Jewish partners of German spouses should be deported.
The primary decision that remained to be made was whether the Jewish
partner should be evacuated to the East (that is, murdered) or, in view of the
psychological impact of such measures on German relatives, be sent to an
old-age ghetto. The only exception to this rule, Heydrich believed, should be
cases where there were children deemed to be second-degree
Mischlinge
. In
these cases the Jewish parent could stay for the foreseeable future.179
Once again, the purpose of Heydrich’s suggestion seems to have been
to assert the SS’s total definitional power in all aspects of the Jewish ques-
tion. The Nuremberg Laws, though banning future unions between Jews
and non-Jews, had little to say about existing mixed marriages. At the end
of 1938, after consulting Hitler, Göring drew up guidelines distinguishing
between so-called privileged mixed marriages and others. The privileged
marriages were those where the man was non-Jewish, with the exception
of marriages where there were ‘Jewishly educated’ children. Marriages in
which the husband was Jewish were not privileged, with the exception of
those marriages in which there were Christian children. At Wannsee, it
was once again Stuckart who made a radical suggestion for how to solve
the issue of mixed marriages. He called for a straightforward legislative act
that would dissolve all existing mixed marriages, paving the way for the
deportation of the Jewish spouses.180
No consensus on this issue was reached at Wannsee, but it was agreed
that SS racial experts and other Nazi officials should discuss the fate of the
216
HITLER’S HANGMAN
Mischlinge
and of Jews in mixed marriages at the mid-level conferences
and meetings that would follow the Wannsee Conference in the summer
and autumn of 1942.181
After a further request for future co-operation in carrying out the final
solution, Heydrich closed the meeting. Al in al , it had lasted no longer
than an hour and a half. If Heydrich had expected ‘considerable stumbling
blocks and difficulties’ prior to the meeting, he must have been pleasantly
surprised by the amicable nature of the negotiations. According to Eichmann,
Heydrich was visibly satisfied with the results of the meeting, and invited
him and Mül er to stay behind for ‘a glass or two or three of cognac’.182
Heydrich’s satisfaction was not unfounded. He had hoped to achieve
three things at the gathering. First, he sought official endorsement from
civil authorities of the deportation process, as well as of the extent of the
planned comprehensive solution to the Jewish question. Secondly, he
wanted to emphasize his sole responsibility for the solution of the Jewish
question against all resistance from those civilian authorities, which, over
the previous months, had sought to protect their waning influence from
further incursions by the RSHA. Thirdly, he wanted to reach a consensus
on the groups of people that were to be deported.
At least two of these aims were fulfil ed. Wannsee had unambiguously
affirmed Heydrich’s overal authority in relation to the final solution. The
Ministry of the Interior, the General Government and the Ministry for the
Occupied Eastern Territories had al fal en into line, and had even occa-
sional y proposed more radical solutions than Heydrich had initial y
deemed acceptable. The long-standing conflict with the civil authorities in
the General Government also seemed to be resolved. Reducing the number
of Jews in the General Government, rather than dumping them on the
region, was something on which Heydrich and Frank’s representative at
Wannsee could agree. Disputes would continue after January 1942, but the
‘basic line’, Heydrich confidently stated in a letter to Luther, had been
established.183
However, if Heydrich believed that he had carried the day on the
Mischling
question, he was soon to be disappointed. If, as original y planned,
the Wannsee Conference had taken place after a successful capture of
Moscow, it is not unlikely that his attempt to include the
Mischlinge
in the
deportations would have succeeded. Nazi racial policy usual y radicalized at
times of German military success, as the euphoria of victory tempted an
elated Hitler to dare ever more drastic policies.184 But there were no military
successes in the winter of 1941–2 and, even in the fol owing months, the SS
leadership found it difficult to push its line on the
Mischlinge
. During the
mid-level fol ow-up meetings to Wannsee in 1942, Eichmann pressed for
radical solutions along the lines of Stuckart’s or Heydrich’s suggestions, but
AT W A R W I T H T H E W O R L D
217
such policies were never implemented. Both the Ministry of Propaganda
and the Justice Ministry were concerned about the implications of compul-
sory divorce. In October 1943, Justice Minister Otto Georg Thierack and
Himmler agreed not to deport
Mischlinge
for the duration of the war.185
Similar obstacles remained with respect to mixed marriages. The regime
feared the effects on public morale if the partners of Aryan men and
women were deported. When, in the spring of 1943, for example, hundreds
of non-Jewish women in Berlin publicly protested against the threatened
deportation of their Jewish husbands, the Nazis backed off and released
the men. These so-cal ed Rosenstrasse protests of 1943 demonstrated that
the regime was prepared to revise its policies when it encountered deter-
mined popular resistance.186 For the most part, however, Jews in privileged
mixed marriages would be saved. Only after the death of their Aryan
husbands were some Jewish widows in formerly privileged marriages
deported after December 1943. Wannsee had thus failed to provide the
decisive breakthrough on this issue for which Heydrich had hoped.187
Nor was Wannsee the moment at which a fundamental decision was
made to turn the already murderous anti-Jewish policies in the East into
an all-encompassing genocide of all European Jews. Nobody at the
conference, not even Heydrich, was able to make that decision without
Hitler’s explicit consent. The discussions at Wannsee rather testified to the
gradually increasing radicalism with which the central authorities of Nazi
Germany viewed the Jewish question. Decisions that would turn 1942
into the most astounding year of murder in the Holocaust, indeed one of
the most horrifying years of systematic mass killings in the history of
mankind, were yet to follow.188
The day after the Wannsee Conference, Heydrich telephoned Himmler
to inform him of the meeting’s results, before boarding a plane that would
bring him back to Prague, where, in his capacity as acting Reich Protector
of Bohemia and Moravia, he had spent the past three months installing a
regime based uncompromisingly on terror.189
C H A P T ER V I I I
✦
Reich Protector
The Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia
Of the numerous territories occupied and administered by Nazi
Germany over the course of the Second World War, the Protectorate of
Bohemia and Moravia was one of the more curious. With a size of
roughly 49,000 square kilometres and an overall population of 7.5 million
inhabitants (245,000 of whom were ethnic Germans), the Protectorate
was by no means the largest of the Nazi-occupied territories. However, it
played a special role in occupied Europe, both because the Nazis perceived
Bohemia and Moravia as an integral part of the future Greater German
Reich, and because of its crucial geo-strategic location and economic
importance for Germany’s war effort.1
Established on 16 March 1939, the day after the German occupation
of the western half of Czechoslovakia, the Protectorate was to become
a German colony presided over by an appointed Reich Protector, a
viceroy directly responsible to Hitler. Yet while the colonial rhetoric
employed by leading Nazis in order to describe the future of the
Protectorate was striking, it concealed more than it revealed: the new
constitutional structure imposed on the country was merely a wartime
solution which would eventually give way to the full political, economic
and racial integration of Bohemia and Moravia into the Greater German
Reich. After Germany’s victory in the Second World War, the Czechs
would either become Germans or they would have to disappear in one
way or another.2
For the time being, however, the Czech inhabitants of the Protectorate
retained their own autonomous government (at least in theory), while the
Sudeten Germans were granted full citizenship of the Reich. All demo-
cratic remnants of the Czechoslovak Republic, including the parliament,
were abolished. Existing political parties were dissolved and reorganized
R E I C H P R OT E C TO R
219
under the umbrella of the so-called National Solidarity Movement. All
that remained of the once thriving democratic system was a nominal
Czech administration, headed by Emil Hácha as president, with an
appointed fifty-member Committee of National Solidarity chaired
by Prime Minister Alois Eliáš. Some 400,000 Czech state employees
and civil servants remained in their posts after 1939, alongside, or rather
subordinate to, some 11,000 German civilian administrators. This
peculiar form of administration imposed on the Protectorate differed
significantly from those introduced elsewhere in Nazi-occupied
Europe and it reflected the Nazi leadership’s recognition that the
Protectorate’s advanced economy was too precious to be upset by a
brutal occupation regime of the sort inflicted on Poland, Belorussia and
Ukraine.3
With a major armaments industry in Brünn (Brno) and other
Protectorate cities, including one of Europe’s leading arms manufacturers,
the Škoda works in Pilsen (Plzeň), as well as a large number of skilled
labourers, the Protectorate’s importance for Hitler’s war is difficult to
overestimate. From the beginning of the occupation, German special units
had seized huge quantities of military equipment, arms and ammunition,
and Jewish assets were transferred to the German authorities.4 Native
industry, however, was left to get on with things under nominal German
direction. Czech-owned international companies such as the Bata shoe
empire brought in valuable profits and high tax returns, and were not seri-
ously restricted by the German occupiers.5
Until the outbreak of the Second World War, the first Reich Protector,
Konstantin von Neurath, ran a remarkably lenient regime compared to
that in occupied Poland. An old-fashioned conservative rather than a
radical Nazi, Neurath had spent more than twenty years in the diplomatic
service, crowning his career by becoming the first Foreign Minister in
Hitler’s coalition government of 1933, before being assigned to Bohemia
and Moravia in 1938. Compared to his successor, Neurath was not a man
of heavy-handed occupation policies. Although he had enthusiastically
supported the remilitarization of the Rhineland in 1939 and the annexa-
tion of Austria in 1938, he was privately dismissive of Hitler’s ideas about
German
Lebensraum
in the East. He was also, however, respected abroad
for being well mannered and cultured, which was the key reason why
Hitler appointed him Reich Protector in the spring of 1939 against objec-
tions from other senior Nazis.6
The priority of the German occupiers was initially to gain control over
the country’s resources and to suppress any open resistance to German
rule. After the outbreak of the Second World War on 1 September 1939