The Nazis- a Warning From History

by Laurence Rees

  However, the conclusion shouldn’t be reached that this was somehow the moment that the entire Nazi ‘Final Solution’ – encompassing millions of European Jews – was decided upon. One document does perhaps suggest a connection between the two, but it is not quite as conclusive as it seems at first sight.

  On 31 July Heydrich obtained Goering’s signature on a paper that stated: ‘To supplement the task that was assigned to you on 24 January 1939, which dealt with the solution of the Jewish problem by emigration and evacuation in the most suitable way, I hereby charge you to submit a comprehensive blueprint of the organizational, subject-related and material preparatory measures for the execution of the intended Final Solution of the Jewish question.’ The timing of this document, on the face of it, is crucial: Goering signs Heydrich’s general authorization for the ‘Final Solution’ of all the Jews under German control at exactly the moment the killing squads are to be used to shoot Jewish women and children in the East.

  However, a recent discovery in the Moscow Special Archive casts doubt on the special significance of the 31 July authorization. This document contains a note from Heydrich dated 26 March 1941, which states: ‘With respect to the Jewish question I reported briefly to the Reich Marshal [Goering] and submitted to him my new blueprint, which he authorized with one modification concerning Rosenberg’s jurisdiction, and then ordered for resubmission.’13 Heydrich’s ‘new blueprint’ was most likely a response to the change in the Nazis’ anti-Jewish policy caused by the forthcoming invasion of the Soviet Union. The idea of transporting the Jews to Africa had been abandoned, and early in 1941 Hitler had ordered Heydrich to prepare a scheme to deport the Jews somewhere within German control. Since the war with the Soviet Union was expected to last only a few weeks and be over before the onset of the Russian winter, it was reasonable, Heydrich and Hitler must have felt, to plan for the Jews to be pushed further east that autumn in an internal solution to their self-created Jewish problem. In the wasteland of eastern Russia the Jews would suffer grievously.

  As the 31 July authorization makes clear, Heydrich was first assigned the task of planning the ‘solution of the Jewish problem by emigration and evacuation’ at the start of 1939, and so discussions about his jurisdiction and room for manoeuvre within the Nazi state on this issue must have been ongoing since then. Alfred Rosenberg (mentioned in the 26 March document), who was formally appointed Minister of the Occupied Eastern Territories by Hitler on 17 July 1941, was a potential threat to Heydrich’s own power in the East, and the 31 July authorization may well have been issued to help Heydrich clarify his own position.

  So on balance the new evidence does not support the once prevalent view that there was some conclusive decision taken by Hitler in the spring or summer of 1941 to order the destruction of all the Jews of Europe, of which the 31 July authorization is an important part. The more likely scenario is that as all the leading Nazis focused their attention on the war against the Soviet Union, the decision to kill the women and children in the East was seen as the practical way of solving an immediate and specific problem.

  To begin with, the Jews of western Europe and the German Reich remained relatively untouched by this slaughter. The Nazi assumption was still that they would be ‘transported East’ once the war was over, and in the optimistic minds of Hitler, Himmler and Heydrich that meant some time in the autumn of 1941. What was to happen to these Jews once they went East ‘after the war’ is unclear, since there were, as yet, no death camps waiting to receive them. Most likely they would have been sent to labour camps in the most inhospitable parts of Nazi-controlled Russia, where genocide would still have taken place, albeit a longer and more protracted one than the swift killing that was to follow in the gas chambers of Poland.

  But that August some leading Nazis grew impatient with this plan. They knew that, in the East, Soviet Jews were already being ‘dealt with’ in the most brutal ways imaginable. Why, they began to suggest, should German Jews not be sent into the epicentre of this killing operation immediately? Joseph Goebbels, the Nazi Propaganda Minister and Gauleiter of Berlin, was one of those who took the lead that summer in pushing for the Jews of Berlin to be forcibly deported East. At a meeting on 15 August Goebbels’ state secretary, Leopold Gutterer, pointed out that of the 70,000 Jews in Berlin only 19,000 were working (a situation, of course, that the Nazis had created themselves by enforcing a series of restrictive regulations against German Jews). The rest, argued Gutterer, ought to be ‘carted off to Russia . . . best of all actually would be to kill them.’14 And when Goebbels himself met Hitler on 19 August he made a similar case for the swift deportation of the Berlin Jews.

  Dominant in Goebbels’ mind was the Nazi fantasy of the role that German Jews had played during World War I. While German soldiers had suffered at the front line, the Jews had supposedly been profiting from the bloodshed back in the safety of the big cities (in reality, of course, German Jews had been dying at the front in proportionately the same numbers as their fellow countrymen). But now, in the summer of 1941, it was obvious that Jews remained in Berlin while the Wehrmacht were engaged in their brutal struggle in the East – what else could they do, since the Nazis had forbidden German Jews to join the armed forces? As they did so often, the Nazis had created for themselves the exact circumstances that best fitted their prejudice. But despite Goebbels’ entreaties, Hitler was still not willing to allow the Berlin Jews to be deported. He maintained that the war was still the priority and the Jewish question would have to wait. However, Hitler did grant one of Goebbels’ requests. In a significant escalation of Nazi anti-Semitic measures, he agreed that the Jews of Germany should be marked with the yellow star. In the ghettos of Poland the Jews had been marked in similar ways from the first months of the war, but their counterparts in Germany had up to now escaped such humiliation.

  That summer and early autumn Goebbels was not the only senior Nazi figure to lobby Hitler to permit the deportation of the German Jews. In the immediate aftermath of the British bombing raid on Hamburg on 15 September the Gauleiter of Hamburg, Karl Kaufmann, decided to write to Hitler, asking him to authorize the deportation of the Jews of the city in order to release housing for non-Jewish citizens who had just lost their homes. Hitler was now in receipt of proposals to send the Jews East from a whole variety of sources, including a suggestion from Alfred Rosenberg that Jews from central Europe be deported in retaliation for Stalin’s recent action in sending the Volga Germans to Siberia. Now, suddenly, just a few weeks after saying the Reich Jews could not be deported, Hitler changed his mind. That September he decided that the expulsions East could begin after all.

  However, it is important not to see in this reversal of policy a picture of an indecisive Hitler somehow bending to the will of his subordinates. He was influenced at least as much by the latest developments in the external military situation as by the pleas of his underlings. Hitler had always said that the Jews could be deported at the end of the war, and in September 1941 it seemed to the Nazi leader that there might be only a matter of a few weeks’ difference between deporting the German Jews ‘after the war was over’ and doing so now. Kiev was about to fall and Moscow seemed wide open to German assault, so Hitler still hoped that the Soviet Union would be defeated before the winter.

  There remained, of course, the question of where to send the Jews. Himmler immediately had one answer – why should the Reich Jews not join the Polish Jews in ghettos? On 18 September Himmler wrote to Arthur Greiser, Nazi Gauleiter of the Warthegau in Poland, and asked him to prepare the Łódź ghetto for the arrival of 60,000 Jews from the ‘Old Reich’.

  Protests began as soon as the figure of 60,000 Jews to be deported from the ‘Old Reich’ to Łódź had been proposed by Himmler. As a result, the number was reduced to 20,000 Jews and 5000 gypsies. But even this influx still presented major difficulties for the Gauleiter, Arthur Greiser. Together with Wilhelm Koppe, the Higher SS and Police Leader for the region, he sought a solution to the problem of ove
rcrowding in the ghetto. And it is hardly surprising, given that ever since the summer of 1941 murder had been the preferred answer in the East to this kind of crisis, that their minds turned to methods of killing. They called upon the services of SS Hauptsturmführer (Captain) Herbert Lange, who had been in command of a special unit charged with murdering the disabled in East Prussia and the surrounding area. For some of the killing he and his team had used a ‘gas van’ with a hermetically sealed rear compartment into which bottled carbon monoxide gas was pumped, and such vans were now seen by local Nazis as the most appropriate response to the sudden overcrowding in the Łódź ghetto.

  According to his SS driver, Walter Burmeister, late that autumn Lange hit upon a suitable site for his gas vans in the Warthegau. ‘To make it plain from the start,’ Lange told his driver, ‘absolute secrecy is crucial. I have orders to form a special commando in Chełmno. Other staff from Posen and from the state police in Litzmannstadt [the German name for Łódź] are going to join us. We have a tough but important job to do.’15 At the small village of Chełmno, some 50 miles northwest of Łódź, Lange and his team prepared a country house – ‘the Schloss’ – for the ‘tough but important job’ of mass murder. Chełmno, not Auschwitz, was about to become the first location for the killing of selected Jews from the Łódź ghetto.

  But Chełmno was not the only extermination facility under construction towards the end of 1941. On 1 November work began on a camp at Bełżec in the Lublin district in eastern Poland. Most of the personnel for Bełżec, including the first commandant of the camp, SS Hauptsturmführer (Captain) Christian Wirth, were taken from the adult euthanasia programme. Deep in the General Government, Bełżec seems to have been established, like Chełmno, with the intention of creating a place to kill ‘unproductive’ Jews from the local area. But unlike Chełmno it was the first camp to be planned from the start to contain stationary gas chambers linked to engines producing carbon monoxide gas.

  Meantime, the deportation of Jews from the Old Reich continued. Between October 1941 and February 1942 a total of 58,000 Jews were sent East to a variety of destinations, including the Łódź ghetto. Everywhere they were sent, the local Nazi authorities had to improvise a solution to deal with their arrival, acting sometimes on the authority of Berlin, sometimes on their own initiative. Around 7000 Jews from Hamburg were sent to Minsk, where they were found shelter in a part of the ghetto that had recently been cleared for them by shooting the nearly 12,000 Soviet Jews who lived there. Jews from Munich, Berlin, Frankfurt and other German cities were sent to Kaunas in Lithuania, where around 5000 of them were shot dead by members of Einsatzkommando 3. They were the first German Jews to be murdered on arrival as a result of being transported East. Another transport from Berlin reached Riga in Latvia on 30 November, and all aboard were also killed as soon as they arrived. But this action was against Himmler’s wishes; he had previously rung Heydrich with the message: ‘Jewish transport from Berlin. No liquidation.’ Friedrich Jeckeln, the SS commander who had ordered the execution, was subsequently reprimanded by Himmler.

  As these events demonstrate, during the autumn of 1941 there was little consistency of policy regarding the fate of the Reich Jews: Himmler protested at the shootings in Riga, but did not object to those in Kaunas. Nonetheless, despite these confused indicators, there is plenty of evidence that the decision to send the Reich Jews to the East was a watershed moment. In October, talking after dinner, Hitler remarked, ‘No one can say to me we can’t send them [the Jews] into the swamp! Who then cares about our people? It is good if the fear that we are exterminating the Jews goes before us.’16 And it is clear that discussions were also taking place amongst the Nazi leadership that autumn to send to the East all the Jews under German control. In France, Reinhard Heydrich justified the burning of Paris synagogues by saying that he had given the action his approval ‘only at the point where the Jews were identified on the highest authority and most vehemently as being those responsible for setting Europe alight, and who must ultimately disappear from Europe.’17 That same month, November 1941, Hitler, in a discussion with the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, who had fled to Berlin, said that he wanted all Jews, even those not under German control, ‘to be destroyed’.18

  By deciding to deport the Reich Jews, Hitler had begun a chain of causation that would eventually lead to their extermination. In the Soviet Union Jewish men, women and children were already being shot by the killing squads. By sending many of the Reich Jews into this exact area, what else did Hitler think would happen to them? The line between killing local Jews to provide room for the arriving Reich Jews, and killing the arriving Reich Jews instead, was a thin one from the first – as Jeckeln’s actions in Riga demonstrate. That distinction became even more blurred for the Nazi leadership of the General Government once Galicia, in the far east of Poland and bordering the killing fields of the Soviet Union, came under their control as the war progressed. The Einsatzgruppe had been killing Galician Jews for weeks, and it would be hard for the local authorities to hold to a position that Jews could be shot in one part of the General Government but not in another.

  But this does not mean that Hitler and the other leading Nazis took a firm decision in the autumn of 1941 to murder all the Jews under German control. In the first place, there simply was not yet the capacity to commit such a crime. The only killing installations under construction in November 1941 were a gas van facility at Chełmno and a small fixed gas chamber installation at Bełżec. An order was also placed around this time with a German firm for a large 32-chamber furnace crematorium to be built at Mogilev in Belorussia, which some see as evidence of an intention, never fulfilled, to build another extermination centre far in the East. But all of these initiatives can also be explained by the desire of the local authorities to have the capacity either to kill the indigenous Jews in order to make space for the arriving Reich Jews, or to murder those Jews in their control incapable of work whom they believed were no longer ‘useful’ to them.

  This confused state of affairs was to be clarified, with disastrous consequences for the fate of the Jews, by events that took place halfway round the world. On 7 December 1941 the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor. On 11 December, as allies of the Japanese, the Germans declared war on the United States. For Hitler all this was ‘proof’ that international Jewry had orchestrated a world conflict, and in a radio broadcast to the German people immediately after the declaration of war he explicitly stated that ‘the Jews’ were manipulating President Roosevelt just as they were his other great enemy, Josef Stalin.

  Hitler went still further in a speech he gave to the Nazi leadership, both Gauleiter and Reichleiter, the following day. He now linked the outbreak of this ‘world war’ with his prophecy uttered in the Reichstag on 30 January 1939 in which he had threatened that ‘if the Jews succeed in causing world war’ the result would be the ‘extermination of the Jews of Europe’. On 13 December, Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels wrote in his diary: ‘As far as the Jewish question is concerned, the Führer is determined to make a clean sweep. He prophesied to the Jews that if they once again brought about a world war they would experience their own extermination. This was not an empty phrase. The world war is here, the extermination of the Jews must be the necessary consequence. This question must be seen without sentimentality.’

  Further evidence that the air was thick with talk of ‘extermination’ that week is provided by a speech that Hans Frank, ruler of the General Government, made to senior Nazi officials in Krakow on 16 December: ‘As an old National Socialist, I must state that if the Jewish clan were to survive the war in Europe, while we sacrificed our best blood in the defence of Europe, then this war would only represent a partial success. With respect to the Jews, therefore, I will only operate on the assumption that they will disappear . . . We must exterminate the Jews wherever we find them.’19 Frank, who had been one of those briefed by Hitler on 12 December, also added that ‘in Berlin’ he had been told that he, and people like him,
should ‘liquidate the Jews . . . themselves’.

  The discovery of Himmler’s complete desk diary in the 1990s also provides one tantalizing further link with Hitler during this most crucial period. On 18 December, after a one-to-one meeting with Hitler, Himmler notes: ‘Jewish question – to be exterminated [auszurotten] as partisans.’ The reference to ‘partisans’ is part of the camouflage language that allowed the murder of the Jews to be concealed as necessary security work in the East.20

  Although no document written by Hitler linking him with a direct order to pursue the ‘Final Solution’ has ever been found, this body of evidence does demonstrate beyond reasonable doubt that he was encouraging and directing an intensification of anti-Jewish actions that December. It is likely that, even without the catalyst of US entry into the war, the deportations of the Reich Jews to the East, directly ordered by Hitler, would eventually have led to their deaths. The anger and frustration Hitler felt at the launch of the Red Army’s counterattack at the gates of Moscow on 5 December had already probably predisposed him to vent his rage further upon the Jews. But what happened at Pearl Harbor brought a murderous clarity to Hitler’s thinking. All pretence amongst leading Nazis that the Jews would simply be deported and kept in camps in the East was dropped. One way or another, they now faced ‘extermination’.

  On 20 January a meeting was held at an SS villa on the shores of the Wannsee, a lake outside Berlin. This gathering has become infamous as the single most important event in the history of the Nazis’ ‘Final Solution’, an epithet it does not quite merit. The meeting was called by Reinhard Heydrich, who invited the relevant government state secretaries to take part in a discussion about the Jewish question. Included with each invitation was a copy of the authorization that Goering had given Heydrich on 31 July 1941 to pursue the ‘Final Solution’ (although, it is highly unlikely that the phrase ‘Final Solution’ had the same meaning in July 1941 that it had acquired by January 1942). Notoriously, because the meeting was due to begin at midday, the invitation also mentioned that ‘refreshments’ would be provided. The address at which the meeting was held was Am Grossen Wannsee 56–58, a villa once used by Interpol, the organization that coordinated international police activity. It is a useful reminder that the individuals who sat round the table at the Wannsee conference were salaried functionaries from one of Europe’s great nations, not back-street terrorists, though their crimes were to be greater than any conventional ‘criminal’ act in the history of the world. Equally instructive, when today some still refer to an ill-educated ‘criminal underclass’, is that of the fifteen people around the table eight held academic doctorates.