Masters of Death (45 page)

But there is another, explicit admission of “killing, elimination and annihilation” hidden in plain sight in the Wannsee Conference protocol that has been consistently overlooked in historical evaluations of the document: the table prepared by SS statisticians of the distribution of Jews in Europe and the U.S.S.R. The table asserts a total Jewish population for western and eastern Europe of “over 11,000,000.” The numbers for certain countries, however, are not original population totals but Einsatzgruppen numbers. Thus Estonia is listed as
“Judenfrei.”
Latvia’s Jewish population is counted at 3,500—in other words, the remainder of men kept alive in the Riga ghetto as “work Jews” after Rumbula. For Lithuania the number is 34,000, which corresponds closely to the 34,500 “work Jews” of Jäger’s 1 December 1941 report. Bialystok, meaning essentially western Byelorussia, is counted at 400,000 and the rest of Byelorussia at the absurdly precise figure of 446,484, both numbers reflecting Einsatzgruppen depredations up to late 1941. If the Wannsee Conference protocol outlined responsibilities for the industrialized mass-killing program of the Final Solution yet to come, it also acknowledged, by deficit, responsibility for the handcrafted murder of the Final Solution already almost complete in the Ostland and the Ukraine.

The Wannsee Conference protocol thus projects 11 million Jews yet to be murdered despite the unrelenting murder that the Einsatzgruppen and Order Police had already accomplished in the East. Where did the SS statisticians find so many Jews? They did not merely confine themselves to areas that the Germans already occupied. The distribution table, which Heydrich implicitly endorsed, seemingly so factual and quantitative, can also be read as a fantasy of Nazi ambitions, a three-level document in which two of the levels are obscured: the missing hundreds of thousands already murdered in the Ostland and the Ukraine and the millions still beyond the SS’s grasp. To arrive at the number 11 million, that is, the protocol included 700,000 Jews in “unoccupied France,” 330,000 in England, 4,000 in Ireland, 8,000 in neutral Sweden, 18,000 in neutral Switzerland, 6,000 in friendly Fascist Spain, 55,500 in Turkey, 742,800 in friendly Fascist Hungary and 5 million more in the portion of the U.S.S.R. that the Wehrmacht was just then discovering it might not succeed in conquering even if it shed whole Wannsees of German blood. The grandiosity of the Nazi plan for the Final Solution—of Hitler and Himmler’s plan—is appalling.

Much of the conference was devoted to debating the fate of special categories of Jews— “persons of mixed blood of the first degree,” “persons of mixed blood of the second degree,” marriages between “full Jews and persons of German blood” and between “persons of mixed blood and persons of German blood.” Resolving these category issues was a primary reason Heydrich had called the conference in the first place.

When it was over, Heydrich was relieved and satisfied. “Happily,” he would write a month later, “[the conference] has settled the basic outlines for the practical implementation of the Final Solution of the Jewish question.” His intention had been to establish his ultimate authority over the Final Solution. His colleagues in the government and the party had been more than willing to accede responsibility for the mass murder of eleven million people to the SS. “After the conference,” Eichmann says in his memoir, “as I recall, Heydrich, Müller and your humble servant sat cozily around a fireplace. I noticed for the first time that Heydrich was smoking. Not only that, but he had a cognac. Normally he touched nothing alcoholic. The only other time I had seen him drinking was at an office party years before. . . . [So] we sat around peacefully after our Wannsee Conference, not just talking shop but giving ourselves a rest after so many taxing hours.”

Heydrich had one other satisfying duty to perform that day: approving the awarding of a decoration, the War Service Cross Second Class, to nominees who had performed exceptional service to the state. The list included Blobel, a physician who had experimented with poison gas exterminations in Mogilev, three RSHA officials who had worked on gas-van development and a number of Einsatzgruppen officers.

Himmler rewarded himself for undertaking the Final Solution in western as well as eastern Europe by expanding his program to resettle the East with SS
Wehrbauern.
The new death camps which Globocnik was planning and constructing in eastern Poland in the winter of 1941/42— Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka—had been conceived to exterminate the Polish Jews, clearing the way for the pilot
Wehrbauern
program Himmler had assigned to Globocnik the previous summer. With an expanded Final Solution now authorized to exterminate all the Jews of both eastern and western Europe, Himmler began practical planning toward the full colonization of the East.

In January 1942 he instructed the chief of his settlement-planning department to enlarge his work from Poland alone to include the occupied territories of the East. On 31 January 1942 he wrote Oswald Pohl, who operated the SS’s Economic and Administration Main Office, about the “absolutely huge buildings we wish to provide for the
Waffen-SS,
General SS and police.” He estimated that the concentration camp system then just coming under Pohl’s authority would have to produce eighty percent of the materials and construction for postwar SS needs, or else it would not be possible to provide “either decent barracks, schools, office buildings, nor houses for our SS men in the old Reich, nor will I as
Reichskommissar
for the Consolidation of German Nationhood be able to provide the giant settlements with which we make the East German.”

Separate but parallel conferences in Berlin and in Prague on 4 February 1942 attempted to sort out the complicated logistics of Germanizing the occupied territories. In Berlin Rosenberg’s and Himmler’s representatives agreed that most of the Eastern peoples were unsuitable for
Eindeutschung
and would have to be expelled, voluntarily or forcibly, into western Siberia. The representative from Himmler’s Consolidation office drew on his (or Himmler’s) classical education to compare the situation to the Spartan occupation of the Peloponnesus in the eighth century B.C.: the Germans were like the Spartans; the existing middle classes in the Ostland were like the Perioeci, a Peloponnesian middle class with no voting rights; and the Russians were like the helots, indigenous peoples whom the Spartans put to work on the land as slaves. Racial sorting, the conference participants concluded, could be disguised as physical examination for a health survey. In Prague Heydrich continued the discussions he had begun in October about the
Eindeutschung
of the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia. Mass deportations, he told his subordinates, would also be necessary; racial sorting could be disguised as a nationwide survey for tuberculosis.

By March 1942, Hitler could tell a group of officers who had gathered to be awarded Iron Crosses, “I know exactly how far I have to go . . . so that the whole East becomes and remains German—ur-German. . . . We don’t need to express our ideas about that now, and I will not speak about it. That [task] I have given to my Himmler and he is already accomplishing it.”

What the task Hitler had given to Himmler would mean in human terms became evident when Himmler issued his master plan for the East, Plan Ost, on 27 April 1942. In anthropologist Eric Wolf’s summary:

All Jews and Gypsies were to be eliminated, together with a quarter of the Russians. Thirty-one million inhabitants of Poland and the western Soviet Union were to be moved either to the General Government or to Siberia; 14 million of these were slated for eventual Germanization, while the rest were to serve the incoming ethnic German settlers from Eastern Europe and the South Tyrol. The General Government was to become a “gigantic Polish work camp,” populated by [in Himmler’s words] a “reservoir of manpower for unskilled labor.” A document issued at the same time by the colonization division of the Ostministeriumraised the number of people slated for removal to about 50 million but suggested that it was not enough to think in demographic and ethnic terms alone. It was important “to destroy the Russians as a people, separate and alienate them. It is essential that the majority of the people remaining on Russian territory be of a primitive, semi-European type.”

The Final Solution—the systematic murder of the Jews of Europe and the Soviet Union—was intended to be only the first phase of a vast, megalomaniacal project of privation, enslavement, mass murder and colonization modeled on the historic colonization of North and South America and on nineteenth-century imperialism but modernized with pseudoscientific theories of eugenic restoration. The Einsatzgruppen and the Order Police had already far advanced the Final Solution in the East. After Hitler ordered the second phase of the Final Solution in December 1941, Western Jews began to be moved East in increasing numbers and murdered as well.

SIXTEEN

Judenfrei

While the leaders of the Third Reich debated how to organize the second phase of the Final Solution, their allies in Romania had been busy slaughtering Jewish victims in the military regions they controlled in the southwestern Ukraine. Raul Hilberg summarizes the massacres perpetrated there in late 1941 and early 1942:

In the Golta prefecture the killings were carried out by the Romanians themselves. . . . Three primitive enclosures were organized in the district. . . . These hastily assembled concentration camps, which consisted of half-destroyed houses, stables and pigpens, held a total of 70,000 Jews, most of them from towns and hamlets, some from Odessa. Disease, especially typhus, was rampant, and food was scarce. . . .

At Bogdanovca, the largest and most lethal camp, killings began on December 21. At first, 4,000 to 5,000 sick and infirm Jews were placed in several stables, which were covered with straw, sprinkled with gasoline, and torched. While the stables were still burning, about 43,000 Jews were marched through the woods in groups of 300 to 400 to be shot, kneeling completely naked in the icy weather on the rim of a precipice. This operation continued until December 30, with an interruption for the celebration of Christmas. During January and February 1942, about 18,000 Jews were killed in [one of the smaller enclosures]. At [the smallest enclosure] where [Lieutenant Colonel Modest Isopescu] took pleasure in tormenting and photographing his victims, 4,000 were killed.
⁴⁸

By January 1942 as well, some 2 million Russian prisoners of war were dead, 600,000 of whom had been shot outright, 140,000 of those by Einsatzkommandos. (By the end of the war, of more than 5.7 million Russian combatants captured, 3.3 million would be dead, most of them victims of starvation and exposure in open enclosures that the Wehrmacht murderously surrounded with electrified barbed wire while denying the enclosed prisoners food, water or shelter of any kind.) In advance and in retreat the Wehrmacht also devastated civilian communities. “Reeling under the weight of the first Soviet counteroffensive,” historian Omer Bartov writes of one such episode in the winter of 1941–42, “the 18th Panzer burned all the villages it was forced to evacuate, destroyed or consumed their entire livestock, arrested and sent to the rear their adult male population, and drove the women and children out into the snow. This was common practice on the other sectors of the front as well. . . . Thus on 1 January 1942 no less than 48 villages were ordered evacuated and destroyed.” In the Ukraine, in the course of the war, 230 villages would be burned to the ground and all their inhabitants murdered; in Byelorussia, 187.

Gassing of large transports of Jewish victims began in a converted farmhouse at Auschwitz-Birkenau in late January 1942. “At first, from Poland,” Höss writes, recalling the origination points of the transports in postwar testimony; “that is, the General Government; from Germany; and I believe from Greece or Holland.” Having seen the effects of shooting on his men (and on himself), Himmler had come to prefer gassing to other methods of mass killing, especially for women and children. Jeckeln examined the problem with him in a meeting at the end of January 1942:

I visited Himmler in Lötzen to discuss matters to do with the organization of the Latvian SS legion. There Himmler told me that further transports would arrive in the Salaspils concentration camp [southeast of Riga beyond Rumbula] from the Reich and other countries. Himmler said that he had not yet decided how they were to be exterminated, whether to shoot them in Salaspils or to chase them off into the marshes somewhere.

I pointed out that from my point of view shooting would be a simpler and quicker form of death. Himmler said he would think about it and give me orders later via Heydrich.

(Continuing his testimony, Jeckeln estimated the number of victims at Salaspils; in the end, those who did not die of disease or starvation were shot:

Jews were brought to the Salaspils camp from Germany, France, Belgium, Holland, Czechoslovakia and other occupied countries. . . .

I can give you a rough estimate. The first Jewish transports [from western Europe] arrived in Salaspils already in November 1941. In the first half of 1942 the transports came in regular succession. I think no more than three transports arrived in November 1941 but during the next seven months, from December 1941 to June 1942, eight to twelve transports arrived each month. If one reckons on 1,000 persons for each transport, then 55,000–87,000 Jews were exterminated who had come to Salaspils from the Reich and other countries.)

Himmler made gas vans available to the Einsatzgruppen at this time. Jeckeln continued to use shooting. In February and March 1942, for example, he employed the Arajs commando to shoot some ten thousand Reich Jews into killing pits in Bikernieki Forest, about three miles due east of Riga. The Einsatzgruppen generally resisted switching to the van system, historian Ronald Headland reports:

According to eyewitnesses, the first use of gas vans for killing Jews took place in Poltava [in the Ukraine] by Sonderkommando 4a in November 1941. It is also known that Einsatzkommando 5 received a gas van shortly before Christmas 1941 and that the other Einsatzgruppen received vans after the New Year.... The gas vans do not seem to have been used with the enthusiasm hoped for originally. They were introduced, apparently on Himmler’s order, for the killing of women and children in “a more humane” fashion. In general the vans were not popular with the Einsatzgruppen. According to the testimony of Erich Naumann, the leader of Einsatzgruppe B, his Einsatzgruppe did not use the vans, but forwarded them on to Einsatzgruppen C and D. The vans kept breaking down and were not always reliable. The poor state of the roads [in the Soviet Union] limited their use and the unloading of the corpses at the burial pits presented too great a mental strain on the members of the Einsatzkommandos.