by Norman Lowe
Hitler had already made it clear that the war in the east was something new. As Alan Bullock puts it: it was ‘a racist–imperialist adventure … an ideological war of destruction, in which all the conventional rules of war, occupation and so on, were to be disregarded, political commissars shot out of hand and the civilian population made subject to summary execution and collective reprisals’. It was only a short step further to carry out the extermination of the Jews. In the words of Richard Overy: ‘This was consistent with the long history of his anti-Semitism, which was always expressed in the idiom of war to the death.’
It would now be possible to carry out the Final Solution in Poland and the USSR, outside Germany. Hitler would have no need to worry about German public opinion; there could be strict censorship of all news reporting in the occupied territories.
The Nazis wasted no time; as their forces advanced deeper into the USSR, communists and Jews were rounded up for slaughter both by SS units and by the regular army. For example, in two days at the end of September 1941, some 34 000 Jews were murdered in a ravine at Babi Yar, on the outskirts of Kiev in Ukraine. At Odessa in the Crimea at least 75 000 Jews were killed. Any non-Jew who tried to hide or protect Jews in any way was unceremoniously shot along with the Jews and communists.
In January 1942, soon after the first Jews had been sent to the gas chambers at Chelmno in Poland, a conference was held at Wannsee (Berlin) to discuss the logistics of how to remove up to 11 million Jews from their homes in all parts of Europe and transport them into the occupied territories. At first the general idea seemed to be to kill off the Jews by forced labour and starvation, but this soon changed to a policy of systematically destroying them before the war ended. Hitler did not attend the Wannsee Conference; he kept very much in the background as regards the Final Solution. No order for its implementation signed by Hitler was ever found. This has been taken by a few historians as evidence that Hitler ought not to be blamed for the Holocaust. But this position is difficult to sustain. Ian Kershaw, after an exhaustive consideration of the evidence, comes to this conclusion:
There can be no doubt about it: Hitler’s role had been decisive and indispensable in the road to the ‘Final Solution’. … Without Hitler and the unique regime he headed, the creation of a programme to bring about the physical extermination of the Jews would have been unthinkable.
(d) Genocide
As the extermination programme gained momentum, the Jews from eastern Europe were taken to Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka and Majdanek in eastern Poland; most of those from western Europe went to Auschwitz-Birkenau in south-west Poland (see Map 6.7). Between July and September 1942, some 300 000 Jews were transported from the Warsaw ghetto to the Treblinka extermination camp. By the end of 1942 over 4 million Jews had already been put to death. Even though the fortunes of war began to turn against the Germans during 1943, Hitler insisted that the programme should continue; and continue it did, long after it was perfectly clear to everybody that the war would be lost. In April 1943 the remaining Jews of the Warsaw ghetto rose in revolt; the rising was brutally crushed and most of the Jews were killed. Only about 10 000 were still alive when Warsaw was liberated in January 1945. In July 1944, after German forces had occupied Hungary, about 400 000 Hungarian Jews were taken to Auschwitz. As Russian forces advanced through Poland, the SS organized forced marches from the death camps into Germany; most of the prisoners either died on the way, or were shot when they arrived in Germany. On 6 August 1944, with the Russians only about a hundred miles away, the Germans moved 70 000 Jews from the Łódź ghetto, south-west of Warsaw, and took them to Auschwitz, where half of them were immediately sent to the gas chambers.
Map 6.7 The Holocaust
Alan Bullock provided this chilling description of what happened when each new batch of Jews arrived at one of the death camps:
They were put through the same ghastly routine. White-coated doctors – with a gesture of the hand – selected those fit enough to be worked to death. The rest were required to give up all their clothing and possessions and then in a terrified column of naked men and women, carrying their children or holding their hands and trying to comfort them, were herded into the gas-chambers. When the screaming died down and the doors were opened, they were still standing upright, so tightly packed that they could not fall. But where there had been human beings, there were now corpses, which were removed to the ovens for burning. This was the daily spectacle which Hitler took good care never to see and which haunts the imagination of anyone who has studied the evidence.
What sort of people could carry out such crimes against humanity? Historian Daniel Goldhagen, in his book Hitler’s Willing Executioners, published in 1997, suggests that the German people were uniquely anti-Semitic and were collectively responsible for the many atrocities committed during the Third Reich. These included not just the ‘Final Solution’ of the ‘Jewish problem’, but also the euthanasia programme in which some 70 000 people deemed to be mentally handicapped or mentally ill were killed, the cruel treatment of the Polish people during the occupation, and the appalling way in which Russian prisoners of war and the civilian populations were treated. Michael Burleigh (2010) goes along with Goldhagen, suggesting that there was a sort of inherent anti-Semitism in the German people which the Nazis had only to tap into; there was no need to stir it up.
While Goldhagen’s theory perhaps goes too far, there is no doubt that large numbers of ordinary Germans were willing to go along with Hitler and the other leading Nazis. Perhaps they were convinced by the arguments of men like Himmler, who told a group of SS commanders: ‘We had the moral right, we had the duty to destroy this people which wanted to destroy us.’ The SS, originally Hitler’s bodyguard regiments, along with the security police, camp commandants and guards, and local gauleiters (governors), were all deeply implicated, and so was much of the Wehrmacht (the German army), which became increasingly ruthless and barbaric as the war in the east progressed. Leaders of big business and factory owners were willing to take advantage of the cheap labour provided by the camp inmates; others were grateful to get their hands on confiscated Jewish property and other assets; medical experts were prepared to use Jews in experiments which caused their deaths. At all levels of German society there were people who happily took the chance to profit from the fate of the helpless Jews.
But such behaviour was not confined to the Germans: many Polish and Soviet citizens willingly collaborated in the genocide. Only three days after the invasion of the USSR began, 1500 Jews were savagely murdered in Lithuania by local militias, and soon thousands more had been killed by non-Germans in Belorussia and Ukraine. Ion Antonescu, the ruler of Romania from 1941 until 1944, was not bullied into deporting Romanian Jews: Romania was never occupied by Germans, and the initiative was taken by the Romanians themselves. However, without Hitler and the Nazis to provide the authority, the legitimacy, the backing and the drive, none of this would have been possible. Romania, though not actually occupied, was firmly within Germany’s orbit.
On the other hand it must be remembered that many Germans courageously risked their lives to help Jews, giving them shelter and organizing escape routes. But it was a very dangerous business – such people themselves often ended up in concentration camps.Similarly in Poland, there were many people who were willing to help Jewish fugitives. In a recent book, historian Gunnar Paulsson suggests that in Warsaw there was a network of perhaps 90 000 ‘decent and honest people’ – over 10 per cent of the city’s population – who were directly or indirectly involved in assisting Jews in a variety of ways. This challenges the usual view that the Poles quietly went along with the mass extermination of their Jewish compatriots.
Illustration 6.3 Bodies at the Belsen concentration camp
6.9 WHAT WERE THE EFFECTS OF THE WAR?
(a) Enormous destruction
There was enormous destruction of lives, homes, industries and communications in Europe and Asia.
Almost 40 million people were kill
ed: well over half of them were Russians, 6 million were Poles, 4 million Germans, 2 million Chinese and 2 million Japanese. Britain and the USA got off comparatively lightly (see Figure 6.1).
A further 21 million people had been uprooted from their homes: some had been taken to Germany to work as slave labourers, and around seven million of these were still in Germany; some had been put into concentration camps, and some had been forced to flee from invading armies. The victorious powers were left with the problem of how to repatriate them (arrange for them to return home).
Large parts of Germany, especially her industrial areas and many major cities, lay in ruins. Much of western Russia had been completely devastated, and some 25 million people were homeless. France had suffered badly too: taking into account the destruction of housing, factories, railways, mines and livestock, almost 50 per cent of total French wealth had been lost. In Italy, where damage was very serious in the south, the figure was over 30 per cent. Japan suffered heavy damage and a high death toll from bombings.
Figure 6.1 Second World War dead
Source: based on J. B. Watson, Success in Modern World History Since 1945, John Murray (1989), p. 3.
© Margaret Watson 1989. Reproduced by permission of Hodder Education.
Though the cost was high, it did mean that the world had been rid of Nazism, which had been responsible for terrible atrocities. The most notorious was the Holocaust – the deliberate murder in extermination camps of over five million Jews and hundreds of thousands of non-Jews, mainly in Poland and Russia (see Section 6.8).
(b) There was no all-inclusive peace settlement
This was different from the end of the First World War, when an all-inclusive settlement was negotiated at Versailles. This was mainly because the distrust which had re-emerged between the USSR and the west in the final months of the war made agreement on many points impossible.
However, a number of separate treaties were signed:
Italy lost her African colonies and gave up her claims to Albania and Abyssinia (Ethiopia).
The USSR took the eastern section of Czechoslovakia, the Petsamo district and the area round Lake Ladoga from Finland, and held on to Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia, which they had occupied in 1939.
Romania recovered northern Transylvania, which the Hungarians had occupied during the war.
Trieste, claimed by both Italy and Yugoslavia, was declared a free territory protected by the United Nations Organization.
Later, at San Francisco (1951), Japan agreed to surrender all territory acquired during the previous 90 years, which included a complete withdrawal from China.
However, the Russians refused to agree to any settlement over Germany and Austria, except that they should be occupied by Allied troops and that East Prussia should be divided between Russia and Poland.
(c) The war stimulated important social changes
In addition to the population movements during the war, once hostilities were over, many millions of people were forced to move from their homes. The worst cases were probably in the areas taken from Germany by Russia and Poland, and in the German-speaking areas in Hungary, Romania and Czechoslovakia. About ten million Germans were forced to leave and make their way to West Germany so that no future German government would be able to claim those territories. In some countries, especially the USSR and Germany, extensive urban redevelopment took place as ruined cities had to be rebuilt. In Britain the war stimulated, among other things, the Beveridge Report (1942), a plan for introducing a Welfare State.
(d) The war caused the production of nuclear weapons
The first ever use of these weapons, on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, demonstrated their horrifying powers of destruction. The world was left under the threat of a nuclear war that might well have destroyed the entire planet. Some people argue that this acted as a deterrent, making both sides in the Cold War so frightened of the consequences that they were deterred or discouraged from fighting each other.
(e) Europe’s domination of the rest of the world ended
The four western European states which had played a leading role in world affairs for most of the first half of the twentieth century were now much weaker than before. Germany was devastated and divided, France and Italy were on the verge of bankruptcy; although Britain seemed strong and victorious, with her empire intact, the cost of the war had been ruinous. The USA had helped to keep Britain going during the war by sending supplies, but these had to be paid for later. As soon as the war was over, the new US president, Truman, abruptly stopped all further help, leaving Britain in a sorry state: she had overseas debts of over £3000 million, many of her foreign investments had been sold off, and her ability to export goods had been much reduced. She was forced to ask for another loan from the USA, which was given at a high rate of interest; the country was therefore closely and uncomfortably dependent on the USA.
(f) Emergence of the superpowers
The USA and the USSR emerged as the two most powerful nations in the world, and they were no longer as isolated as they had been before the war. The USA had suffered relatively little from the war and had enjoyed great prosperity from supplying the other Allies with war materials and food. The Americans had the world’s largest navy and air force and they controlled the atomic bomb. The USSR, though severely weakened, still had the largest army in the world. Both countries were highly suspicious of each other’s intentions now that the common enemies, Germany and Japan, had been defeated. The rivalry of these two superpowers in the Cold War was the most important feature of international relations for almost half a century after 1945, and was a constant threat to world peace (see Chapter 7).
(g) Decolonization
The war encouraged the movement towards decolonization. The defeats inflicted on Britain, Holland and France by Japan, and the Japanese occupation of their territories – Malaya, Singapore and Burma (British), French Indo-China and the Dutch East Indies – destroyed the tradition of European superiority and invincibility. It could hardly be expected that, having fought to get rid of the Japanese, the Asian peoples would willingly return to European rule. Gradually they achieved full independence, though not without a struggle in many cases. This in turn intensified demands for independence among the peoples of Africa and the Middle East, and in the 1960s the result was a large array of new states (see Chapters 24–5). The leaders of many of these newly emerging nations met in conference at Algiers in 1973 and made it clear that they regarded themselves as a Third World. By this they meant that they wished to remain neutral or non-aligned in the struggle between the other two worlds – communism and capitalism. Usually poor and under-developed industrially, the new nations were often intensely suspicious of the motives of both communism and capitalism, and they resented their own economic dependence on the world’s wealthy powers.
(h) The United Nations Organization (UNO)
This emerged as the successor to the League of Nations. Its main aim was to try to maintain world peace, and on the whole it has been more successful than its unfortunate predecessor (see Chapters 3 and 9).
FURTHER READING
Bankier, D., The Germans and the Final Solution: Public Opinion under Nazism (Blackwell, 1992).
Beevor, A., Stalingrad (Penguin, 1998).
Beevor, A., Berlin – The Downfall, 1945 (Penguin, 2003).
Beevor, A., D-Day: The Battle for Normandy (Viking, 2009).
Bloxham, D., The Final Solution. A Genocide (Oxford University Press, 2009).
Bracher, K. D., The German Dictatorship (Penguin, 1985 edition).
Browning, C., The Origins of the Final Solution (Heinemann, 2003)
Bullock, A., Hitler and Stalin – Parallel Lives (HarperCollins, 1991).
Burleigh, M., Moral Combat: A History of World War II (Harper, 2009).
Davies, N., Rising ’44: The Battle for Warsaw (Macmillan, 2003).
Davies, N., Europe at War 1939–1945: No Simple Victory (Pan, 2nd edition, 2007).
Friedlander, S., The Years
of Extermination: Nazi Germany and the Jews 1939–1945 (Weidenfeld & Nicholson, 2007).
Friedrich, J., The Fire: The Bombing of Germany 1940–1945, translated from the German by Allison Brown (Columbia University Press, 2007).
Gilbert, M., Second World War (Phoenix, new edition, 2000).
Goldhagen, D., Hitler’s Willing Executioners (Vintage, 1997).
Jones, M., Leningrad: State of Siege (John Murray, 2008).
Kershaw, I., Hitler, 1936–1945:Nemesis (Allen Lane/Penguin, 2000).
Kershaw, I., Hitler (Allen Lane, 2009).
Kershaw, I., The End: Hitler’s Germany, 1944–1945 (Allen Lane/Penguin, 2011).
Lindqvist, A., A History of Bombing (Granta, 2001).
Lipstadt, D., Denying the Holocaust (Plume, 1995).
Longerich, P., The Unwritten Order: Hitler’s Role in the Final Solution (Tempus, 2000).
Mazower, M., Hitler’s Empire: Nazi Rule in Occupied Europe (Allen Lane, 2008).
Merridale, C., Ivan’s War: The Red Army 1939–1945 (Faber, 2005).
Mommsen, H. (ed.), The Third Reich Between Vision and Reality (Oxford University Press, 2001).
Neillands, R., Arthur Harris and the Allied Bombing Offensive, 1939–45 (John Murray, 2001).
Overy, R. J., Russia’s War, 1941–1945 (Penguin, 1997).
Overy, R. J., The Dictators (Allen Lane, 2004).
Overy, R. J., Why the Allies Won (Pimlico, 2006).
Overy, R. J., The Third Reich: A Chronicle (Quercus, 2010).
Parker, R. A. C., The Second World War: A Short History (Oxford paperbacks, 3rd edition, 2001).
Paulsson, G. S., Secret City: The Hidden Jews of Warsaw, 1940–1945 (Yale University Press, 2002).
Rees, L., Auschwitz: The Nazis and the Final Solution (BBC Books, 2005).
Roberts, A., The Storm of War: A New History of the Second World War (Penguin, 2010).