The Third Reich at War (45 page)

The talk at the Wannsee Conference, as Eichmann, who took the minutes, later admitted, had been of killing, often expressed ‘in very blunt words . . . totally out of keeping with legal language’.
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The minutes had played this down, but at key points they made it clear that all the Jews of Europe would perish in one way or another. Almost all of the men round the table had at some time either given direct orders for Jews to be killed - four of them had ordered or directed the mass killings carried out by the SS Security Service Task Forces, both Eichmann and Martin Luther of the Foreign Office had explicitly called for all the Jews of Serbia to be shot, a number of participants, including the representatives of the Party Chancellery and the Foreign Office, had most probably seen the murder statistics compiled by the Task Forces and sent back to Berlin, and the officials sent to Wannsee from the General Government and the Ministry for the Occupied Eastern Territories had already sanctioned the murder of Jews deemed unfit for work - or created conditions in the ghettos that they knew to be fatal to many of their inhabitants.
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So they had no problems in planning genocide.

At the end of the meeting, the participants stood around for a while, drinking brandy and congratulating themselves on a successful day’s work. Heydrich sat down by the fireplace with Eichmann and with Heinrich M̈ller, the Gestapo chief, all three of them from the Reich Security Head Office. Heydrich started smoking and drank a cognac, something which, Eichmann later said, he had not seen him do before, or at least not for many years. The Ministry of the Interior and the General Government had both come into line, and Heydrich’s overall authority in the ‘final solution’ had been unambiguously affirmed. Sending out thirty copies of the minutes to a variety of officials, Heydrich noted that ‘happily the basic line’ had been set down ‘as regards the practical execution of the final solution of the Jewish question’.
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On reading his copy of the minutes, Joseph Goebbels noted: ‘The Jewish Question must now be solved on a pan-European scale.’ On 31 January 1942, Eichmann sent out new deportation orders. Transport problems delayed matters for some weeks, so he ordered a fresh series of deportations of German Jews in March.
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They were taken, not to extermination camps, but to ghettos in the east. Here they would be confined for a while, possibly until the end of the war, before being killed. In the meantime, those who were capable of it would be used as labour. To make room for them, the Polish and East European Jews in the ghettos would have to be taken out and exterminated in the nearby camps that were already being prepared for this purpose.
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III

The Wannsee Conference and its aftermath took place in an atmosphere of violent antisemitic propaganda, led by Hitler himself. On 30 January 1942, in his traditional speech marking the anniversary of his appointment as Reich Chancellor in 1933, Hitler reminded his audience at the Sports Palace in Berlin that he had prophesied in 1939 that if the Jews started a world war, they would be annihilated: ‘We are . . . clear that the war can only end either by the Aryan peoples being exterminated or by Jewry disappearing from Europe . . . This time the true old Jewish law “an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth” is being applied for the first time!’
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Privately, Hitler assured Himmler and Lammers that the Jews would have to leave Europe altogether. ‘I don’t know,’ he told them on 25 January 1942,

I’m colossally humane. In the days of Papal rule in Rome the Jews were badly treated. Every year up to 1830, eight Jews were driven through the city with donkeys. I’m only saying, they have to go. If they perish in the process, I can’t do anything about it. I only see total extermination if they don’t leave of their own free will. Why should I regard a Jew any differently from a Russian prisoner? Many are dying in the prison camps because we have been driven into this situation by the Jews. But what can I do about it? Why then did the Jews provoke the war?
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Here was a moment in which Hitler admitted the killing of large numbers of Soviet prisoners of war, declaring that the same fate was befalling the Jews of Europe, while at the same time verbally washing his hands of responsibility for both acts of mass murder: in his own imagination, it was the Jews who were responsible.

Hitler’s justification of the genocide continued through the early months of 1942, couched in terms that wanted for nothing in clarity. His repeated insistence on the need to destroy, remove, annihilate, exterminate the Jews of Europe constituted a series of impulses to his subordinates, headed by Himmler, to press on with the extermination of the Jews even before the war was over.
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On 14 February 1942 Hitler told Goebbels

that he is determined to clear up the Jews in Europe without compunction. It is impermissible to have any kind of sentimental emotions here. The Jews have deserved the catastrophe they are experiencing today. As our enemies are annihilated so they will experience their own annihilation too. We must accelerate this process with cold ruthlessness, and in so doing we are rendering an incalculable service to a human race that has been tormented by Jewry for millennia.
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Goebbels himself was well aware of the process by which the killing programme was being implemented. On 27 March 1942 he confided to his diary the details he had learned - or at least some of them; even Goebbels was too cautious to put everything down on paper. The passage is a crucial one, for Hitler’s views as much as for those of his Propaganda Minister, and deserves to be quoted at length:

The Jews are now being pushed out of the General Government, beginning in Lublin, to the east. A pretty barbaric procedure is being applied here, and it is not to be described in any more detail, and not much is left of the Jews themselves. In general one may conclude that 60% of them must be liquidated, while only 40% can be put to work. The former Regional Leader of Vienna [Globocnik], who is carrying out this action, is doing it pretty prudently and with a procedure that doesn’t work too conspicuously. The Jews are being punished barbarically, to be sure, but they have fully deserved it. The prophecy that the Leader issued to them on the way, for the eventuality that they started a new world war, is beginning to realize itself in the most terrible manner. One must not allow any sentimentalities to rule in these matters. If we did not defend ourselves against them, the Jews would annihilate us. It is a struggle for life and death between the Aryan race and the Jewish bacillus. No other government and no other regime could muster the strength for a general solution of the question. Here too the Leader is the persistent pioneer and spokesman of a radical solution, which is demanded by the way things are and thus appears to be unavoidable.
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The ghettos in the General Government, he went on, would be filled by Jews from the Reich as they became free (in other words, when their inhabitants had been killed), and then the process would repeat itself.
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His insistence that the Jews were hell-bent on the extermination of the German race provided an implicit justification for killing them en masse.

This series of antisemitic tirades culminated in a speech delivered by Hitler to the last-ever meeting of the Reichstag, on the afternoon of 26 April 1942. The Jews, he said, had destroyed the cultural traditions of human society. ‘What then remains is the animal part of the human being and a Jewish stratum that, having been brought to leadership, in the end parasitically destroys its own source of nourishment.’ Only now was the new Europe declaring war on this process of the decomposition of its peoples by the Jews.
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On the same day, Goebbels noted in his diary: ‘Once more I talk through the Jewish question with the Leader, at length. His position with regard to this problem is unrelenting. He wishes to expel the Jews from Europe absolutely.’
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Hitler’s speeches in these months were accompanied by a swelling chorus of antisemitic addresses by other Nazi leaders and anti-Jewish diatribes in the press. In a speech delivered in the Sports Palace in Berlin on 2 February 1942, German Labour Front Leader Robert Ley declared that ‘Jewry will and must be exterminated. That is our holy mission. That is what this war is about.’
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Crucial here were the Nazi leaders’ ideologically driven anxieties about the security threat that Jews were believed to pose. These were dramatically illustrated by a bomb attack, organized by a group of Communist resisters under the leadership of Herbert Baum, on an anti-Soviet exhibition in Berlin on 18 May 1942. Little damage was done and nobody was hurt. But the action made a considerable impression on the Nazi leadership. The Gestapo succeeded in tracking down and arresting the perpetrators, among whom, Goebbels wrote on 24 May 1942, there were five Jews and three half-Jews as well as four non-Jews. ‘One sees from this composition how correct our Jewish policy is,’ he noted. Goebbels thought this showed that all remaining Jews had to be removed from Berlin as a security measure. ‘Of course, liquidation would be the best thing.’
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Baum committed suicide after being tortured, the other members of the group were executed, and 250 Jewish men incarcerated in Sachsenhausen were shot as a ‘reprisal’, to be replaced by another 250 Jewish men from Berlin taken there as hostages. On 23 May 1942 Hitler told Nazi leaders assembled in the Reich Chancellery that the bomb attack demonstrated ‘that the Jews are determined to bring this war to a victorious conclusion for themselves under all circumstances, since they know that defeat also means personal liquidation for them.’
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In conversation with the Propaganda Minister on 29 May 1942, Hitler agreed to override objections to the deportation of Jewish forced labourers from Berlin. They could be replaced by foreign workers. ‘I see a great danger,’ said Goebbels, ‘in the fact that 40,000 Jews who have nothing more to lose are at large in the capital of the Reich.’ The experience of the First World War, Hitler added, showed that Germans would only take part in subversive movements when persuaded to do so by Jews. ‘In any case,’ wrote Goebbels, ‘it is the Leader’s aim to make the whole of Western Europe Jew-free.’
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These radical diatribes against the Jews were translated into action by Heinrich Himmler, who met Hitler on a number of occasions in these months for confidential discussions. In the late winter and early spring of 1942, following the Wannsee Conference, Himmler repeatedly pushed on the killing programme. He visited Cracow and Lublin on 13- 14 March, when the programme of mass killings by poison gas began. A month later, on 17 April 1942, a day after talking with Hitler, he was in Warsaw, where he ordered the murder of the Western European Jews who had arrived in the L’d’ ghetto. After further consultation with Hitler on 14 July 1942, Himmler travelled eastwards again to accelerate the killing programme. At Lublin, he sent an order to Kr̈ger, the Chief of Police in the General Government, to organize the killing of the remaining Jews in the General Government by the end of the year. Himmler even issued a written order for the extermination of the last Ukrainian Jews, which began in May 1942. As in the previous autumn and winter, Himmler, busily travelling around the occupied areas of Poland, pushed on the killings time and again. The Wannsee Conference had made the process easier to co-ordinate and implement, but it had neither inaugurated it nor made it into an automatic sequence of events.
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Himmler’s restless activity ensured that it was put into effect. As he noted on 26 July 1942, in response to an attempt by Rosenberg to interfere, as he saw it, in policy towards the Jews: ‘The occupied eastern territories will be Jew-free. The Leader has laid the implementation of this very difficult order on my shoulders. Therefore I forbid anyone else to have a say in it.’
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At the same time, in the Reich Security Head Office, Adolf Eichmann was following up the Wannsee Conference by issuing a stream of orders intended to set the trains rolling to the ghettos of Eastern Europe once more. On 6 March 1942 he told Gestapo chiefs that 55,000 more Jews would have to be deported from the ‘Old Reich’, the Protectorate and the ‘Eastern March’ (i.e., the former Austria). Some sixty trains, each loaded with up to 1,000 deportees, made their way to the ghettos during the following weeks. The removal of most of the employees of the remaining Jewish institutions began, with the first trainload going on 20 October 1942, to be followed by Jewish inmates of concentration camps in the Reich. Following the decision to begin deporting Jewish munitions workers in Germany and replace them with Poles, the police began rounding up the remaining ‘full Jews’ and their families in Germany on 27 February 1943. The first trainload left on 1 March 1943 and by the end of the first week of the action nearly 11,000 Jews had been transported, including 7,000 from Berlin, where most remaining German Jews now lived. Between 1,500 and 2,000 Berlin Jews who had been arrested had been able to show the police that they were exempted from deportation, mostly because they were married to non-Jewish partners. While the authorities worked out the details of where they were to be sent to work - not in munitions factories any more, for security reasons, but in the few remaining Jewish institutions in the capital, such as hospitals - the internees’ wives, relatives and friends gathered on the pavement across from the building at Rosenstrasse 2- 4 where they had been detained, waiting for the decision, calling out to them, and occasionally trying to get food parcels into the building. By 8 March 1943 most of the internees had been reassigned to new jobs; the rest followed. The small crowd dispersed. Subsequent legend elevated this incident into a rare public protest that had secured the internees’ release; but there had never been any intention of sending these particular Jews east for extermination, and the crowd had not engaged in any kind of explicit protest.
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By this time, the last remnants of Jewish community organizations in Germany had finally been destroyed; the only Jews left were those in a privileged position (mostly through marriage to non-Jews) or those who had gone underground.