The Nazis- a Warning From History

by Laurence Rees

  We put the following statement to Eugen Zielke: ‘You could say that you became rich on the backs of people in the ghetto, the misery, the poverty of the ghetto dwellers.’

  ‘You can say “Yes” in reply to that question,’ answered Herr Zielke. ‘The Poles got rich. The Germans got rich. Everyone got rich . . . some of them with gold and silver and others with food, simply to survive. I already told you. I saw it from another point of view. I saw it as a businessman.’

  By August 1940 the Jews trapped in Łódź ghetto had no money left to pay for food, so a decision was forced upon the Nazis. Should they let the Jews starve or should they feed them? The decision-making process, which took place in Łódź that autumn, once again involved minor Nazi functionaries having to thrash out policy for themselves in the face of silence from Berlin. Hans Biebow, a former coffee importer from Bremen, was the Nazi chief of ghetto administration. He came up with a solution to the problem – the Jews in the Łódź ghetto could be made to work and would thus be able to produce goods that could be sold in order to buy food. Biebow’s deputy, Alexander Palfinger, disagreed. He believed that the Jews must still be concealing money. Only by the threat of total starvation would the Jews finally reveal their last hoarded gold. If he was mistaken, and the Jews did die, then so be it. ‘A rapid dying out of the Jews is for us a matter of total indifference,’ he wrote, ‘if not to say desirable, as long as the concomitant effects leave the public interest of the German people untouched.’14

  Palfinger lost the argument. Hans Biebow’s immediate superior, Dr Karl Marder, sided with what has been termed Biebow’s ‘productionist’ argument. The Łódź ghetto was now to become a business enterprise. Palfinger left Łódź in disgust. As Professor Browning discovered, Palfinger’s ‘parting gesture, an obvious ploy to attract attention to what he considered the intolerable coddling of the Łódź Jews, was to order from Berlin 144,000 eggs per week for the ghetto, leaving the embarrassed Biebow to explain that the request had been made without his knowledge’15

  Greiser was happy with the proposal that the ghetto become a generator of wealth because he had arranged to pocket the profit from the scheme himself. ‘The Jews are going to be providing labour at a set rate,’ says Professor Browning, ‘35 per cent of that is going to go to the Jews themselves so that they can buy food, 65 per cent is going to go into a special account of Greiser’s, one that he controls, his slush fund.’

  Estera Frenkiel worked for the Jewish administration inside the ghetto and got to know Hans Biebow well. Her first meeting with him demonstrated at once the schizophrenic attitude of the well-mannered Nazi who had to deal with Polish Jews. Estera Frenkiel remembers how she was introduced to Biebow by another secretary Dora Fuchs: ‘“This is a new secretary,” said Dora. Biebow got up from his chair, came over to me and introduced himself. He shook hands with me. He immediately thought, “What have I done!” and said, “I shake hands only when first introduced.”’

  Hans Biebow was a man who ‘worked towards the Führer’ not just for the good of Nazi Germany but for the good of himself. He exploited his position of absolute power over the Jews of Łódź ghetto at every opportunity – sometimes in direct contravention of the strict Nazi rule that Germans should never be physically intimate with Jews. ‘One day a 16-year-old girl was engaged in the office,’ says Estera Frenkiel. ‘She was told to take Biebow some coffee in his office. She gave him the coffee. He saw the pretty girl and touched her up. In all her life the girl had not seen a German man. She had seen Germans from afar, but not close up. She didn’t want this. She was still an innocent girl and she fought back. Thereupon he tore off her dress. It is highly likely that nothing happened because she ran away. But he shot at her and hit her in her ear. She bled profusely. She went back to her room and lay down. It was terrible.’

  Estera Frenkiel told us this dreadful story – as she told us all her experiences in the Łódź ghetto – dry-eyed while sitting in the Jewish cemetery of Łódź, only yards away from the graves of thousands who had died of the maltreatment they had suffered in the ghetto. I remarked to her after we had filmed the interview that she was one of the toughest and most decisive people I had ever met. She looked at me for a moment and half smiled. ‘If I wasn’t tough and decisive,’ she replied, ‘I wouldn’t be standing here today.’

  As 1940 drew to an end, the Jews in the Łódź ghetto, despite suffering hunger and abuse, had at least not been left to starve to death. From being a temporary measure the ghetto had become a mini-manufacturing camp that had effectively become self-sufficient. It is worth remembering just how the Nazis ended up in this position. For the decision-making process by which the Nazis created a ghetto that could last indefinitely demonstrates the ability individuals had not only to act opportunistically within the Nazi administrative system but in the process to create new crises that needed to be solved. Since the Nazis were operating expediently in circumstances of crisis, only short-term decisions were made. The Jews were first concentrated in ghettos, something that was intended to be only a brief incarceration, preparatory to shipping them off to the General Government. But Frank objected to large numbers of Poles being simply dumped in his area. Then came the ambitious suggestion that the Jews might be shipped not to the outer reaches of the Nazi empire but to far-flung parts of the world, such as Africa, a solution made possible by the defeat of France and by the expected imminent defeat or capitulation of Britain. This modified proposal allowed Frank to argue that it was a waste of time sending the Jews a few hundred miles down to the General Government first, so they remained even longer in ghettos that had been intended only as temporary holding pens. This allowed the local Nazi administrators to come up with another short-term idea – selling them food as a means of extorting their money. Only when the Jews’ money was exhausted did the local Nazis face a real policy decision – whether to let them all starve or not. Once that was answered in the negative, and the plan to allow the ghetto to become a manufacturing base was accepted, the relationship with the Jews changed; they had now become slave-workers employed in semi-permanent camps.

  This end result was never ‘planned’ if by a ‘plan’ we mean that someone sat down at the beginning and chose to arrive at this destination. Instead of working to a ‘plan’ the Nazis were taking short-term decisions when each mini-crisis occurred. Crucially, none of these decisions was an ‘order’ from Hitler. The Führer had communicated broad objectives but local Nazis on the ground made these life and death decisions on their own.

  The atmosphere in which the Nazis made each decision was one of contempt for the Poles and hatred for the Jews. In Poland during the early years of the war the Nazis initiated a racial policy the like of which had never been seen before. Hundreds of thousands of people were uprooted and cruelly cast to the wind. But suffering on an even greater scale was about to follow.

  5

  HIGH HOPES

  ON 22 JUNE 1941 the German Army invaded the Soviet Union. What followed was a racist war of annihilation that spawned the Holocaust and led eventually, more than any other single event, to the destruction of Germany. With hindsight, Hitler’s actions in ordering the invasion seem woefully misguided – almost crazy. Yet, at the time there were many people – and not just Germans – who thought that the decision to invade the Soviet Union was a rational act in pursuit of German self-interest and, moreover, that this was a war the Germans would win.

  In the summer of 1940 Adolf Hitler, despite his swift and dramatic victory over France, faced a major military and political problem. The British would not do what seemed logical and what the Führer expected – they would not make peace. Yet Hitler was frustrated by geography – in the shape of the English Channel – from following his immediate instincts and swiftly crushing the British just as he had the French. Hitler did order preparations to be made for an invasion of England, but he was always half-hearted in his desire to mount a large seaborne landing. Germany, unlike Britain, was not a sea power and the Chann
el was a formidable obstacle. Even if air superiority could be gained, there remained the powerful British Navy. And there was another, ideological, reason why Hitler was not fully committed to invading Britain. For him, it would have been a distraction. Britain contained neither the space, nor the raw materials, that he believed the new German Empire needed. And he admired the British – Hitler often remarked how much he envied their achievement in subjugating India (see here). Worse, if the Germans let themselves be drawn into a risky amphibious operation against a country Hitler had never wanted as an enemy, every day the potential threat from his greatest ideological opponent – the Soviet Union – would be growing stronger.

  All this meant that, from Hitler’s point of view, there was an alternative to invading Britain: he could invade the Soviet Union. Both Hitler and his military planners knew that Germany’s best chance of victory was for the war in Europe to be finished swiftly. Hubert Menzel was a major in the General Operations Department of the OKH (the Oberkommando des Heers, the German Army headquarters), and for him the idea of invading the Soviet Union in 1941 had the smack of cold, clear logic to it: ‘We knew that in two years’ time, that is by the end of 1942, beginning of 1943, the English would be ready, the Americans would be ready, the Russians would be ready too, and then we would have to deal with all three of them at the same time . . . We had to try to remove the greatest threat from the East . . . At the time it seemed possible.’

  Germany’s need for new ‘living space’ (Lebensraum) had been a recurring theme in Hitler’s early political testimony. And he had always been clear about where Germany should find its new empire – Russia and the border states subject to her (collectively the Soviet Union).

  Hitler was deeply prejudiced about the Soviet Union – this one country became the particular focus for his anti-Semitic, anti-Communist, anti-Slav beliefs. He would describe Moscow as the headquarters of the ‘Judaeo-Bolshevist world conspiracy’.1

  Associated with this overwhelming ideological hatred of the Soviet Union was a more concrete fear: Hitler was concerned about the higher birth-rate of the Slavs. He remarked that they were ‘an inferior race that breed like vermin’.2 Hitler foresaw grave danger if eventually the Soviet Union became a ‘modern’ nation with a vastly larger population than Germany’s. To eliminate the need for future conflict – on less advantageous terms – Germany had to act swiftly.

  None of that, however, meant that Hitler was driven to war with the Soviet Union by a kind of myopic fanaticism. He had already shown that he was perfectly prepared to put aside his deeply held beliefs when it was politically expedient. That was the reason Ribbentrop, the Nazi Foreign Minister, had flown to Moscow in August 1939 to conclude the Non-Aggression Pact with the Soviet Union.

  On 31 July 1940 it was once again pragmatic – not ideological – considerations that were voiced by Hitler at the Berghof, his mountain retreat in southern Bavaria, when he met with his military commanders. Yes, he believed that an invasion of Britain should be considered – air attacks would begin as soon as possible – but the whole enterprise remained fraught with risk. Now, logically, he was driven to another possible way of finishing the war. Hitler asserted that, since Britain’s hopes were kept alive by the thought that the Soviet Union was still out of the war and might one day come to its aid, the destruction of the Soviet Union would shatter Britain’s last reason to continue the war.

  It’s hard to accept now, given today’s relative balance of armed forces between Britain and Russia, but at the time the Germans gave every impression of being more frightened of the British – with their mighty fleet and empire – than the Soviet Union. So when, at that meeting on 31 July, Hitler voiced his intention to crush the Soviet Union, there was no evidence that his military commanders were appalled by the news. Just like Hitler, they seem to have thought at the time that a land war against the Soviet Union was preferable to a seaborne invasion of Britain.

  The context of that meeting is important. As Hitler gathered with his military leaders, they were flushed with a remarkable victory over France. In numbers there had not been much to choose between the two sides, and yet under Hitler the German Army had crushed the French in six weeks. This would have been a major achievement on its own, but set against the background of the disastrous way in which the German advance had bogged down far short of Paris in the trenches of World War I, the spring 1940 victory must have seemed phenomenal. Any war against the Red Army would be conducted using the same apparently unstoppable Blitzkrieg tactics of swift motorized attack that had just proved so successful in France; as Hitler put it, this was a new type of war that would be ‘unbelievably bloody and grim’, but it would always be ‘kindest because it will be the shortest’.3

  As the Soviet Marshal Georgy Zhukov later put it: ‘The German forces invaded the Soviet Union intoxicated by their easy victories over the armies of Western Europe . . . and firmly convinced both of the possibility of an easy victory over the Red Army and of their own superiority over all other nations.’4

  Hindsight allows us to condemn the military judgement of these men who so fatally underestimated the warlike capacity and will to fight of the Soviet Union. The war on the Eastern Front has come to seem uniquely insane; the act of a single power-crazed individual who held his generals in thrall. What act could be more guaranteed to fuel the unquenchable fire of the dictator’s ambition and more certain to destroy his nation in the end? That is certainly the easy explanation that Franz Halder, one of the military commanders closest to Hitler, gave after the war. Halder, who was Chief of the Army General Staff between 1938 and 1942, spoke during his de-Nazification (and in an interview in the 1960s) of a meeting he had had with the Commander-in-Chief of the German Army, Walter von Brauchitsch, at the end of July 1940. Halder described how Brauchitsch asked him, ‘Have you ever thought about [attacking] the East?’ Halder said he replied, ‘That fool [Hitler]. I honestly believe he will even get Russia on to us. I won’t even think of preparing anything for it.’ What could be more understandable than this response? By telling this story, Halder positions himself as just another of the mad Führer’s victims.5

  But there’s a problem with Halder’s convenient version of history – it doesn’t stand up to scrutiny. On 3 July, weeks before the meeting with Brauchitsch, Halder revealed in his private war diary that he had already floated with his planners the idea of a campaign against the Soviet Union, a ‘military intervention’ that would ‘compel Russia to recognize Germany’s dominant position in Europe’.6 Halder had decided on this action himself, without any direct order from Hitler. Like all of those who wished to survive and prosper in the high reaches of the Nazi state, Halder had learnt that it wasn’t sufficient simply to follow orders – they had to be anticipated.

  Nor are Halder’s actions in the early days of the German campaign in the East those of a sceptic. On 3 July 1941, just 12 days into the war, Halder wrote in his diary: ‘It is thus probably no overstatement to say that the Russian campaign has been won in the space of two weeks.’7 That same day he wrote to one of his colleagues, Luise von Benda (who later married General Alfred von Jodl, see here), also voicing the view that the Soviet Union had all but lost the war; he added that Hitler had come round to his quarters to chat and congratulate him on his birthday, and had stayed for an hour at teatime. ‘I will keep this day as precious in my memory,’ writes the clearly euphoric Halder.8

  The temptation to alter the past must have been overwhelming for Halder – after all, no general wishes to go down in history as playing a significant part in the greatest defeat his country has ever suffered. It is this all too human desire to rewrite history that has fuelled over the years the popular myth that the only proponent of the German invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941 was one power-crazed lunatic. It was simply not so.

  Part of the reason for the Germans’ over-confidence was contemptible then and is still so now. The Nazis believed that the inhabitants of the Soviet Union were racially inferior – from
its planning stage this was to be no ordinary war, but a racial war of annihilation against a ‘sub-human’ people. They also thought that the whole Jewish/Bolshevik system they saw in place in the Soviet Union was rotten and would crumble in the face of the expected early military losses of the Red Army. But there were other, more rational, reasons why they (and many of the western Allies) thought that the Soviet Union was scarcely capable of putting up a fight.

  Along with the rest of the world, Hitler and his military commanders had watched the effect of Communist rule on the Soviet Union’s military capacity. And the Germans were encouraged by what they saw, for they believed that the Soviet leader Josef Stalin had, during the 1930s, substantially weakened the Red Army. Stalin’s character, which would help shape and define the course of the forthcoming war in the East, was, in the eyes of the Nazis, devastatingly flawed.

  Unlike Hitler, who had essentially created the Nazi Party, Stalin had not been the vital driving force behind Soviet Communism – that role had fallen to Lenin. Hitler’s charismatic authority was irreplaceable in the Nazi Party – he never had a serious rival. Stalin was a black hole of charisma, a fixer, a praktik, a ‘man who got things done’, the silent figure at the back of the room who waited, listened and was underestimated until the moment came.9 Amongst the leading Communists he had seemed least likely to succeed Lenin in 1924; Zinoviev and Trotsky were more gifted speakers, Bukharin more engaging. Even after he became leader of the Soviet Union, Stalin remained a man of the shadows. He made but a small fraction of the number of personal appearances that Hitler did during the 1930s. Paradoxically, this worked in Stalin’s favour – the image was created that he was always working for the Soviet Union, hidden but watchful. Yet at the annual parade in Red Square Stalin looked out not just on his own portrait but on Lenin’s as well. Stalin was constantly reminded that he was the follower – and followers can be replaced. As Bukharin once said: Stalin ‘is unhappy because he cannot convince everyone, even himself, that he is greater than everyone, and this is his unhappiness . . .’10