The Third Reich at War (44 page)

The meeting was scheduled for 9 December 1941 and was to take place in a lakeside villa in the tranquil Berlin suburb of Wannsee. But the day before, on hearing of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, Heydrich’s staff telephoned all the invitees and postponed the conference, since it was likely that he and other participants would be called to the session of the Reichstag that this new development in international politics clearly warranted.
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This did not mean, however, that policy towards the Jews was to take a back seat. Speaking to a meeting of senior Party officials the day after he had declared war on the USA, Hitler, as recorded in Goebbels’s diary, repeated his sentiments of the previous August in more precise form:

As far as the Jewish question is concerned, the Leader is determined to clear the decks. He prophesied to the Jews that if they brought about another world war, they would thereby experience their own annihilation. That was not just waffle. The world war is here, the annihilation of Jewry must be the necessary consequence. This question is to be contemplated without any sentimentality. We are not here to pity the Jews but to pity our own German people. Now that the German people have lost another 160,000 dead on the Eastern Front, the originators of this bloody conflict will have to pay for it with their lives.
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On 14 December 1941 Rosenberg agreed with Hitler for reasons of international policy not to mention ‘the extermination of Jewry’ in a public speech he was about to deliver, even though, as Hitler remarked, ‘they saddled us with the war and brought destruction; it’s no wonder that they are the first to bear the consequences’.
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By this time, it had become clear to Hitler and everyone else in the Nazi hierarchy that the war was not going to come to an end as soon as they had expected. They now accepted that it would last through the winter, though they still thought that the Soviet Union would collapse some time in the summer of 1942. The deportation of European Jews to the east would now therefore take place before the end of the war. Hitler’s radical rhetoric in November and December 1941 was designed to push on the detailed planning and implementation of this policy as quickly as possible.
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Since the Jews were already being exterminated in the occupied territories of eastern Europe, including those like the Wartheland that had been incorporated into the Reich, it was clear that the earlier plans to deport them to the Reich Commissariat of the Ukraine, or to some undefined area further east, had now been abandoned. As Hans Frank told his staff in the General Government of Poland on 16 December 1941, after returning from the 12 December conference of Nazi leaders with Hitler in Berlin:

With the Jews - I want to say that to you with complete frankness - an end has to be made in one way or another . . . We were told in Berlin, why are you raising all these objections; we can’t do anything with them in the [Reich Commissariat of the] Eastern Land or in the Reich Commissariat [of the Ukraine], liquidate them yourself!! Gentlemen, I have to forearm you against any thought of pity. We must annihilate the Jews wherever we come upon them and wherever it is at all possible, in order to sustain the total structure of the Reich here.
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How was this to be done, however? The number of Jews in the General Government that Frank had been told to kill was impossibly large, some three and a half million in all according to Frank (something of an exaggeration; his staff later put the number at two and a half million): ‘We can’t shoot these 3.5 million Jews,’ complained Frank to his staff on 16 December 1941, ‘we can’t poison them, but we will be able to take measures that somehow lead to their successful annihilation, namely in connection with large-scale measures that are to be discussed from the Reich.’
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What these measures were would soon become clear.

The mass murder of Eastern European Jews that began in the summer of 1941 owed something to the ideological zeal of men such as Arthur Greiser, Regional Leader of the Wartheland, and police chiefs and Task Force Leaders who on their own initiative carried out large-scale massacres of Jews in a number of centres. At the same time, however, they were framed by an overall policy the parameters of which were set by Hitler and implemented in practical terms by Himmler. When, for example, the police chief in Riga, Friedrich Jeckeln, had a trainload of Jewish deportees from Berlin shot on their arrival, Himmler, whose order not to kill them, sent on 30 November 1941, reached Jeckeln too late, was furious. Shooting Berlin Jews would alarm those who were still in the capital. The intention was to keep them in the Riga ghetto for the time being. Himmler disciplined Jeckeln and told him not to act on his own initiative again.
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For the most part, however, local and regional initiatives fell well within the overall purposes of the regime. The general transfer of gassing technology to the east, along with the experts who knew how to set it up and operate it, and the participation of institutions like Frank’s General Government administration, the army, the Leader’s Chancellery (which supplied the gas technologists) and the Reich Security Head Office, led by Himmler, spoke of a broadly co-ordinated policy under central direction. So too did the timing of the regional killing operations, which coincided with the beginnings of the organized deportations of Jews from the Reich and the commissioning of special camps near the major ghettos in the east with the sole purpose of killing their inhabitants.

No operation of this size and scale could have taken place in the Third Reich without the knowledge of Hitler, whose position as Leader made him the person to whom all these institutions were ultimately responsible. It was Hitler’s murderous, but deliberately generalized, antisemitic rhetoric, repeated on many occasions in the second half of 1941, that gave Himmler and his subordinates the essential impulse to carry out the killings.
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On occasion, Hitler confirmed his approval of the murders directly. Meeting with Himmler on 18 December, for example, he told the SS leader, according to the latter’s notes, ‘Jewish question/to be exterminated as partisans’.
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The extermination of Soviet Jews was thus to be continued, under the pretext that they were partisans. The fruits of this policy were visible just over a year later in ‘Report number 51’, dated 29 December 1942, sent by Himmler to Hitler and, as a marginal note by Hitler’s adjutant confirms, seen and read by him. Entitled ‘the fight against bandits’, it noted under the sub-heading of ‘those assisting bandits or suspected of banditry’ that the number of ‘Jews executed’ in southern Russia, the Ukraine and the Bialystok district in the months from August to November 1942 was no less than 363,211.
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The sheer extent of the killings became a factor in itself, suggesting powerfully to leading Nazis that the mass extermination of Jews on a hitherto unimaginable scale was now a real possibility. By this time, the Nazi net had widened to encompass not only Polish and Soviet Jews, but Jews in the whole of occupied Europe as well.
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II

On 20 January 1942 the meeting of senior officials called by Heydrich the previous November finally took place. The fifteen men gathered round a table in the Wannsee villa included representatives of Rosenberg’s Reich Ministry for the Occupied Eastern Territories, Frank’s Office of the General Government of Poland and the SS Security Service in Poland, Latvia and the Reich Commissariat of the Eastern Territory, all of whom would be concerned with the actual operation of the extermination programme; the Reich Ministries of the Interior and Justice, the Party Chancellery and the Reich Chancellery, covering legal and administrative questions; the Foreign Office, dealing with Jews living in nominally independent countries outside Germany, particularly in Western Europe; the Four-Year Plan, to cover economic aspects; and the SS departments of the Reich Security Head Office and the Head Office for Race and Settlement, who would be in charge of the exterminations. There had been some argument between various Nazi satraps, notably Hans Frank and Alfred Rosenberg, as to who should have control over the ‘Jewish question’ in the occupied territories, and Heydrich wanted to assert the authority of the SS. He began, therefore, by reminding the meeting that G̈ring had charged him on 31 July 1941 with making the detailed arrangements for the final solution of the European Jewish question, and that overall responsibility lay with his superior, Heinrich Himmler. After outlining the measures taken over the previous several years to get Jews to emigrate from Germany, Heydrich noted that Hitler had, more recently, approved a new policy, of deporting them to the east. This, he emphasized, was only a temporary measure, though it would provide ‘practical experience that is of great significance for the coming final solution of the Jewish question’.
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Heydrich then went on to enumerate the Jewish population of every country in Europe, including many outside the German sphere of influence. There were, for instance, he noted, 4,000 Jews in Ireland, 3,000 in Portugal, 8,000 in Sweden and 18,000 in Switzerland. All of these were neutral countries, but their inclusion in the list strongly suggested that, at some point in the not-too-distant future, the Third Reich hoped to be in a position to put pressure on them to surrender their Jewish populations for extermination. Altogether, Heydrich reckoned, the Jewish population of Europe totalled around 11 million, though, he noted disapprovingly, these were in many cases only people who practised Judaism, ‘since some countries still do not have a definition of the term
Jew
according to racial principles’.
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‘In the course of the final solution and under appropriate leadership,’ he said, ‘the Jews should be put to work in the East. In large, single-sex labour columns, Jews fit to work will work their way eastward constructing roads.’ But this was in practice to be another form of extermination, for, Heydrich continued: ‘Doubtless the large majority will be eliminated by natural causes.’ Any who survived the experience would be ‘dealt with appropriately because, by natural selection, they would form the germ cell of a new Jewish revival (see the experience of history)’. Those deemed ‘fit to work’ would in any case only be a small minority. The representative of the General Government pointed out that ‘the two and a half million Jews in the region were in any case largely unable to work’. Jews over sixty-five - nearly a third of the remaining Jewish population of Germany and Austria - and Jews with war decorations or severely wounded in the First World War were to be sent to an old-age ghetto. The meeting discussed the problems of persuading occupied or allied countries to give up their Jewish populations. An ‘adviser for Jewish questions’ would have to be forced on the Hungarian government for this purpose. Pausing to note that the ‘Jewish question’ had already been ‘solved’ in Slovakia and Croatia, the meeting then plunged into a pedantic and inconclusive discussion about what to do with people who were ‘racially mixed’ - a matter that continued to be discussed in follow-up meetings and discussions, notably on 6 March 1942. It then concluded with what the minutes coyly described as ‘various possible kinds of solution’. According to later testimony, this included the use of gassing vans.
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It has been argued that the main concern of the conference was to organize the provision of labour for the huge road-building schemes envisioned by the General Plan for the East. Thus it was not really about mass murder.
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But in fact, Task Force C had already some months before recommended the drafting of Jews into labour projects and commented that this would ‘result in a gradual liquidation of Jewry’. Jewish slave labourers would be deprived of adequate rations and worked till they dropped. Given the labour shortage under which the German war economy was increasingly suffering, using Jewish workers seemed unavoidable; but this was not in the end an alternative to killing them, merely a different way of doing it. The almost parenthetical reference to the fact that the Jews of the General Government were mostly unable to work, along with the statement that those who survived the labour columns would be killed, meant that the major purpose of the meeting was to discuss the logistics of extermination. The men sitting round the table in the Wannsee villa were well aware of this.
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The stress laid in the conference on ‘extermination through labour’ had significant administrative consequences over the following weeks. In February 1942 the administration of all the concentration camps was restructured, with the economic, construction and internal administrative divisions being merged into the new SS Economy and Administration Head Office under Oswald Pohl. Group D of Pohl’s Head Office, under Richard Gl̈cks, was now in charge of the whole system of concentration camps. These changes marked the fact that the camps were now being seen as a significant source of labour to be supplied to Germany’s war industries. This had in fact already begun before the war, but it was now to become far more systematic. Nevertheless, the SS did not approach the need to utilize prisoner labour for the war economy in a rational manner. Getting the most out of such men was not, for them, a matter of improving their conditions or paying them wages. Instead, they were to be forced to increase their labour input by violence and terror. The prisoners were regarded by the SS not just as expendable, but in the medium to long term as obstacles to the racial reordering of Eastern Europe. Hence they were subjected to ‘extermination through labour’. Those who became unproductive would be killed, and replaced by fresh slave labourers. This was what the SS also envisaged would happen to millions of Slavs once the war was over. The selection of able-bodied Jews for work duties provided a convenient justification for the mass killing of the millions not deemed fit to work.
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