Masters of Death (17 page)

The Germans were latecomers to imperialist rationalization because they were late in acquiring colonies. The leading German authority on colonization at the end of the nineteenth century was geographer Friedrich Ratzel. In 1891 he faulted “the theory that this dying out [of Aborigines, American Indians, Africans and other groups] is predestined by the inner weakness of the individual race.” Rather, Ratzel argued, Europeans caused the depopulation by impoverishing and killing native peoples. But Ratzel changed his tune when Germany began seeking colonial possessions. After he helped found the Pan-German League in 1891, the geographer discovered that “inferior” cultures contain inner forces of destruction that colonial domination merely releases. “Those with little culture have fundamentally passive characters,” Lindqvist writes in paraphrasing Ratzel’s rationalization. “They seek to endure rather than overcome the circumstances that are reducing their numbers. Contact with Europeans simply hastens an extinction already underway.”

Ratzel found a formula for including the Jews in this victim-blaming rationalization in his 1897 book
Political Geography.
The Jews were hardly people of inferior culture, he conceded, but they and the Gypsies were condemned to extinction, along with “the stunted hunting people in the African interior” and “innumerable similar existences,” because they were “scattered people with no land.” There was no land anywhere on earth that was not occupied, Ratzel pointed out, so cultures with increasing populations that needed more land had to conquer it, turning it into uninhabited land “through killing and displacement.” Given its growing population, Europe in particular needed colonies. “But it is a mistake,” Lindqvist says, paraphrasing Ratzel, “to think that colonies have to be on the other side of the oceans. Border colonization is also colonization. Occupations near at hand are more easily defended and assimilated than distant ones.” Hitler consulted Ratzel’s
Political Geography
when he was writing
Mein Kampf.
He discusses Pan-Germanism at length in his personal and political testament; Ratzel’s doctrine of border colonization echoes in sentences such as this one: “For Germany, consequently, the only possibility for carrying out a healthy territorial policy lay in the acquisition of new land in Europe itself.” Such acquisition, Hitler adds, was no longer possible “by peaceful means.” Ratzel influenced Hitler even more directly. It was he who coined the term and formulated the concept of
Lebensraum
in a 1904 book,
Der Lebensraum.

Hitler’s anti-Semitism was more fundamental to his attitude toward the Jews than his imperialistic, exterminationist Eastern policy — he would not, after all, seek the deaths of only the Eastern Jews—but the two agendas overlapped. The Third Reich actively worked to destroy many other groups besides the Jews. The Jews were first in line, and they were subjected to direct killing rather than slow, lethally debilitative exploitation because Hitler perceived them to be the most dangerous, “the mightiest counterpart to the Aryan” who sought no less than “destruction for the inhabitants of this planet.”

Henry Friedlander, the preeminent historian of Hitler’s euthanasia murder program, argues similarly from the perspective of German eugenic policy, which was yet another overlapping agenda that rationalized mass killing:

The usual interpretation [of the Holocaust] assigns the role of racial victim exclusively to the Jews, and sees anti-Semitism as the only ideological basis for mass murder. I do not deny that anti-Semitism was a major component of Nazi ideology. I agree that the Nazis viewed the Jews as chronic enemies, and that Hitler’s preoccupation with the imagined Jewish threat placed the struggle against the Jews high on the list of priorities. But I do argue that anti-Semitism was only part of a larger worldview, which divided mankind into worthy and unworthy populations. Both Nazi ideologues and race scientists believed that German blood had been polluted, and that it was the nation’s primary task to purge the German gene pool. The enemies were (1) the handicapped, who were considered “degenerate,” and (2) “alien races,” which in Central Europe meant Jews and Gypsies, since both were considered non-European nations that could not be assimilated.

Himmler borrowed and parroted Hitler’s various rationalizations and supplemented them with grandiosities of his own — his kitsch vision of colonizing the East with
Wehrbauern,
his soldier-farmers. He commissioned an entrance-hall triptych to illustrate that vision on a visit in January 1939 to Wewelsburg, the Saxon castle he was restoring as an SS leadership retreat. Writing his architect, he described the images he wanted in the triptych:

The attack of an SS troop in war, in which I envisage the representation of a dead or mortally wounded old SS man, who is married, to show that from death itself and despite it new life springs.

A field in a new land being plowed by a
Wehrbauern,
an SS man.

The newly-founded village with the families and numerous children.

But Himmler struggled to incorporate the repulsive duties of massacring unarmed civilians into the SS mystique. In that effort he had Prussian military tradition to draw on, with its inversion of morally reprehensible and psychologically difficult experience into a virtue, “hardness.”

“Hardness” was the virtue he evoked in autumn 1940 when he spoke to his SS officers about dragging away hundreds of thousands of people in Poland “in a temperature forty degrees below zero . . . where we had to have the hardness . . . to shoot thousands of leading Poles.” In other speeches during the Polish campaign he argued that the mass killings were necessary. “We must be clear about one thing,” he told the Gauleiters in February 1940. “We are firmly convinced of it. I believe it exactly as I believe in God. I believe that our blood, Nordic blood, is actually the best blood on this earth. . . . In hundreds of thousands of years this Nordic blood will always be the best. Over all others, we are superior.” It followed by his logic that any actions necessary to preserve and protect the superior Nordic bloodline were virtuous. Answering assertions such as Eastern Commander Blaskowitz’s charge that SS mass killings in Poland would result in “tremendous brutalization and moral depravity,” Himmler countered:

I can say to them: it is horrible and frightful for a German if he has to see it. That is so, and if it were not horrible and so frightful for us then, indeed, we would no longer be Germans, certainly we would not be Germans. But even though it was horrible it was necessary — and will in many cases still be necessary to carry it out. That is to say, if we now lack the nerve, then these bad nerves will affect our sons and grandsons. . . . We do not have the right to do that. . . .

An execution must always be the hardest thing for our men. And despite it, they must never become weak, but must do it with pursed lips. In the beginning it was necessary. The shock which the Poles had to have, they have had. I believe that now, for the moment, nothing will stir in West Prussia, Posen and the new provinces. It may be that the Pole is very tough in conspiracy, all Slavs can be; it may be that it has to happen again. Then it will happen again.

There are standards here that would come back to haunt Himmler as his Einsatzgruppen increased their personal participation in killing on the Eastern front after Barbarossa: that the humanity of his men (or what was equivalent in his mind, their Germanhood) could be measured by their capacity to continue feeling horror at slaughtering unarmed civilians; that such slaughters are necessary at the beginning of an invasion to shock the invaded into submission and might be necessary again, but by implication would not be the norm.

Himmler, like Hitler, cast the entire conflict in apocalyptic terms: either the enemy would be destroyed or the German people would be. “We as a
Volk
of seventy-five million are, despite our great numbers, a minority in the world,” he told a Nazi political education class in 1938. “We have very, very many against us, as you yourselves as National Socialists know very well. All capital, the whole of Jewry, the whole of freemasonry, all the democrats and philistines of the world, all the Bolshevism of the world, all the Jesuits of the world, and not least all the peoples who regret not having completely killed us off in 1918, and who make only one vow: if we once get Germany in our hands again it won’t be another 1918, it will be the end.” And similarly a few months later to his Gruppenführers, using language that anticipates the Holocaust:

These forces—of which I assume the Jews to be the driving spirit, the origin of all the negatives — are clear that if Germany and Italy are not eradicated, they will be eradicated. This is an elementary conclusion. In Germany the Jew cannot hold out. This is a question of years. We will drive them out more and more with an unexampled ruthlessness. . . .

Be clear about it, in the battle which will decide if we are defeated there will be no reservation remaining for the Germans, all will be starved out and butchered. That will face everyone, be he now an enthusiastic supporter of the Third Reich or not — it will suffice that he speaks German and has a German mother. . . .

Then it is a matter of indifference if in a town one thousand have to be put down. I would do it, and I would expect you to carry it out. About that there is no doubt.

The enemy, the Jewish enemy first and foremost, was to be destroyed. How would the enemy be destroyed? They would be removed to a reservation. They would be driven into the swamps. They would be worked to death in vast projects:

30 January 1939: Hitler prophesies before the Reichstag:

And there is one thing that I should like to say on this memorable day—memorable, perhaps, to others beside ourselves. During my lifetime I have often made prophecies, and more often than not people have laughed at me. In my struggle for power the Jews always laughed louder when I prophesied that, one day, I should be the leader of the German State, that I should be in full control of the nation, and that then, among other things, I should find the solution to the Jewish problem. I imagine that the Jews in Germany who laughed most heartily then are now finding themselves choking on their laughter. Today I am going to make another prophecy: If the Jewish international financiers inside and outside Europe succeed in plunging the nations into another world war, the result will not be the Bolshevization of the world and thus a victory for Judaism. The result will be the extermination of the Jewish race in Europe.

4 September 1939: Heydrich announces to department heads that the Reichsführer-SS would soon be submitting certain proposals to the Führer that he alone could rule on because they might have international repercussions. A week later, referring to these proposals, Heydrich announces the Führer’s approval to deport German Jews to Poland and farther eastward.

7 October 1939: Hitler appoints Himmler head of the newly formed Reich Commissariat for the Consolidation of German Nationhood, charged to create German colonies in areas from which Jews and other non-Aryan occupants (“Jews, Polacks and rabble,” Hitler specifies on 18 October) have been expelled.

30 October 1939: Himmler promulgates a plan for a Jewish reservation eastward of Lublin into which all Jews from the formerly Polish territories incorporated into the Reich are to be expelled within four months. The area is a swamp—the western reach of the Pripet marshes — and is essentially uninhabitable. The plan fails when the large-scale transfer of populations founders that winter.

February 1940: Himmler proposes a vast Jewish labor project. Historian Raul Hilberg: “He suggested to commander in chief of the army von Brauchitsch the construction of an enormous antitank ditch along the newly formed frontiers of the east, facing the Red Army. With the building of this line Himmler dreamed of using all the Polish Jews.”

May 1940: Himmler presents Hitler with a memorandum, “Some Thoughts Concerning the Treatment of the Foreign Peoples in the East,” which he notes afterward the Führer found “very good and correct.” Hitler wanted it classified Top Secret and its distribution limited. It was important enough “as a guideline,” Himmler added, that the Führer wanted General Government head Hans Frank to travel from his headquarters in Krakow to Berlin to be briefed on its contents.

What were Himmler’s thoughts? Significantly, they were categorically less extreme than the reality that would follow Barbarossa. He thought the “foreign peoples,” among whom he included the Jews, should be handled as individual groups, not as an undifferentiated mass, so that they could be separated “into as many parts and splinters as possible.” Their leaders could be used as police officials and mayors, but in no higher positions of authority, because it was only by splitting up “this entire porridge of peoples of the General Government of fifteen million and the eight million of the East Provinces” that the SS could “fish out the racially valuable from this porridge.”

By fracturing and sorting the ethnic groups, Himmler thought, by “break[ing] them down into innumerable small splinters and particles,” the identity of the smaller groups could be destroyed within four to five years. Even the identity of the Ukrainians, a much larger body of people, could be erased “over a somewhat longer period of time,” and “that which has been said about these splinter groups applies in the correspondingly larger framework to the Poles.”

The Jews were a special case. “I hope to see the concept of the Jews completely erased, possibly by means of a large emigration of the collected Jews to Africa or else to a colony.” If a reservation east of Lublin had proven infeasible, then perhaps the Jews could be shipped off to Africa; as Hitler would comment much later, “it is much more correct to transport [the Jews]— whom the Arabs won’t have in Palestine— to Africa and thus expose them to a climate which diminishes every person’s ability to offer resistance to us.” With Hitler’s approval of this memorandum, “Africa” came to mean the island of Madagascar off the East African coast; and as Hitler’s later comment indicates, the emigration was no more perceived to be benign than the Lublin reservation had been.