Invitations had originally been sent in November 1941 and the meeting scheduled for 9 December, but the bombing of Pearl Harbor had resulted in its postponement. One of the unanswered questions of history is therefore what the content of the Wannsee meeting would have been had events in the Pacific not caused a delay. Certainly the intention would still have been to implement an ultimately genocidal ‘solution’ to the Nazis’ ‘Jewish problem’, but perhaps the discussion would have focused more on an eventual post-war solution or a real attempt to set up work camps for Jews deported to the East. We can only speculate. What is certain is that, whether the USA had entered the war or not, Wannsee was always going to be an important meeting for Heinrich Himmler and Reinhard Heydrich. During the autumn of 1941 a variety of killing initiatives had emerged from a number of sources within the Nazi state. For Himmler and Heydrich, Wannsee was necessary above all else to coordinate them and to establish beyond doubt that the SS were the ones in control of the whole deportation process.
The issues discussed at the Wannsee conference are known primarily because a copy of the minutes, taken by SS Obersturmbannführer (Lieutenant Colonel) Adolf Eichmann, Heydrich’s ‘Jewish expert’, survived the war. Eichmann’s record of the meeting is of great historical importance, since it is one of the few documents that shine a light directly on the thinking process behind the ‘Final Solution’.
At the start of the meeting Heydrich made reference to the administrative authority given him by Goering that allowed him to preside. Then he announced the formal change in Nazi policy that, no doubt, all the delegates would already have known. Instead of the ‘emigration’ of the Jews to countries outside Nazi control, there would now be ‘evacuation . . . to the East’ within the Nazi sphere of influence. In total 11 million Jews, a figure that included several million in countries such as Ireland and Britain that were not yet under Nazi domination, would eventually be subject to such ‘evacuation’. On arrival in the East these Jews would be separated by sex, and those who were fit and healthy employed in building roads (Heydrich was almost certainly thinking of projects such as the Durchgangsstrasse IV, a road and rail link from the Reich to the Eastern Front already under construction). Those Jews who were not selected for this work would, the implication is clear, be murdered immediately, whilst the rest faced only a stay of execution since large numbers were expected to die as a result of harsh manual labour. Heydrich went on to express particular concern about any Jews who might survive the attempt to work them into the ground: these were the very Jews that natural selection would have determined were the most dangerous to the Nazis. They, said Heydrich, must also be ‘treated accordingly’. There could have been no doubt in the minds of the other delegates just what Heydrich meant by this.
Significantly, there was no dissent at the meeting over the broad principle of killing the Jews. Instead, the greatest area of debate focused around the exact legal definition of ‘Jew’, and thus precisely who would be subject to deportation and who would not. The question of what to do with ‘half Jews’ stimulated a lively exchange of views. There was a suggestion that such people should be sterilized, or offered a choice between that operation and deportation. Alternatively they might be sent to a special ghetto – Theresienstadt, the Czech town of Terezin – where they would be housed alongside the elderly and those Jews with a high profile whose deportation directly to the East would have caused disquiet amongst the ordinary German population.
The discussion then passed to the more immediate ‘problem’ of the Jews of the General Government and the occupied Soviet Union. In the latter the Jews were being murdered by shooting, whilst in the former the death camp at Bełżec was already under construction. But millions of Jews were still alive in these areas, so Eichmann recorded in the minutes that ‘various possible solutions’ were mentioned in this context, an innocuous phrase that masked a discussion of specific methods of extermination.
The minutes of the Wannsee conference are deliberately opaque. Eichmann’s draft of them was worked on several times by Heydrich and Heinrich Müller, the head of the Gestapo, to create that exact effect. Since they were intended for wider distribution, it was necessary for them to be written in camouflage language: those who understood the context would realize exactly what was intended, whilst the lack of crude terminology meant they would not shock the uninitiated should they catch sight of them. Nonetheless, they remain the clearest evidence of the planning process behind the Nazis’ ‘Final Solution’ and the strongest evidence of widespread state complicity in the murders that were to follow.
But does that mean that the Wannsee conference deserves its place in popular culture as the most significant meeting in the history of the crime? The answer must be no. The misconception in the popular consciousness rests on the belief that this was the meeting at which the Nazis decided to embark upon their ‘Final Solution’. This is simply not the case. Certainly Wannsee was important, but it was a secondtier implementation meeting, part of a process of widening out knowledge of an extermination process that had already been decided upon somewhere else. Much more important than the conversations at Wannsee were the discussions Hitler held in December 1941. If proper minutes were available of the Führer’s meetings with Himmler during that period we would truly see the bleak landscape of the mind that made all this suffering enter the world.
The practical consequences of these decisions taken at the highest level were, of course, horrendous. During the autumn of 1942, for example, in one of their most heartless acts the Nazis decided to remove children under the age of 10 from the Łódź ghetto. Parents were told to take their children to a collection point, put them on trucks and walk away. ‘The children were taken away from their parents,’ says Estera Frenkiel. ‘Their screams reached the sky . . . Every mother went with her child and put it on the cart, pressed it to them. The child screamed and cried. She pressed it to her breast and calmed it down and then went away.’ Many mothers decided to leave their husbands in the ghetto and accompany their children to share their fate. One family who had hidden their child in their ghetto flat returned to their room later, to discover the child had suffocated in the confines of his hiding-place.
Working as she did in the office of the Jewish manager of the ghetto, Estera Frenkiel had privileged access to information, some of which she would rather not have learnt. One day a letter arrived, via Biebow’s office, asking for information: ‘I request that you ascertain immediately whether there is a bone-grinder in the ghetto. Either to be electrically or manually operated.’ There was a postscript. ‘The Sonderkommando of Chełmno is interested in such a grinder.’
‘One’s heart misses a beat,’ says Estera Frenkiel talking of her reaction to reading the letter. ‘The thoughts come flooding in. What for? Why? For whom? For what purpose?’ Rather like the Jews in Samuel Willenberg’s train en route for Treblinka, even in the face of evidence to the contrary, many of the Łódź Jews simply hoped for the best. But hope on its own was no protection.
Eventually, Estera Frenkiel and her mother were sent to Ravensbrück concentration camp. ‘The ghetto was a story in its own right: that was a tale of hunger and starvation – a battle for food, avoiding deportation. But there in Ravensbrück it was hell: neither day, nor night.’ She puts her survival down to one thing above all – ‘luck’.
In 1942 extermination camps were established at Treblinka, Sobibór and Majdanek, as well as Bełżec. Auschwitz, which had existed as a concentration camp, had its massive new extension at nearby Birkenau also converted into an extermination camp.
At Auschwitz, unlike Treblinka, a systematic selection was periodically made of those inmates who were to be killed and those who were to be allowed to live, however temporarily. Nazi doctors were quick to grasp the infinite possibilities for human experimentation which this endless supply of human guinea pigs offered them. They devised a series of devilish experiments, the details of which haunt the mind of anyone who has studied the subject. The notori
ous Dr Josef Mengele systematically tortured young children, mostly twins. Another Nazi doctor, in pursuit of his own warped theory, quizzed a starving inmate about the effect of undernourishment on his metabolism before having him murdered so that he could dissect his internal organs and then judge the anatomical effects for himself.
The Nazis had now arrived at a destination no one had travelled to before – they had created killing factories where men, women and children could be disposed of in hours. The images of the gas chambers would forever shape and define Nazism. But one should not read history backwards. As we have seen, the journey to the gas chambers was not a simple one. Stages along the route included the anti-Semitism engendered in the wake of World War I defeat; the desire to exclude Jews from German life and the Nazis’ belief that Jews were both a dangerous and inferior race; the invasion of Poland, which brought 3 million Polish Jews (considered the worst inferior racial combination) under Nazi control; and finally the decision to kill Communists and Jews in the wake of Operation Barbarossa. No blueprint for the Holocaust existed before 1941: the Nazi regime was too chaotic for that.
Above all, it was the invasion of the Soviet Union that caused a radical change in the Nazis’ approach to the Jews. Hitler wrote that he felt ‘spiritually free’ at the time of the invasion, which for a character such as his, meant feeling free to be true to his own emotional view of the world – a world in which, as he said to his generals in August 1939, a human being should strive to ‘close your heart to pity – act brutally’. Prior to Barbarossa, there are countless examples where the Nazis restrained their own brutality – the release of the Polish professors, for example – but once Barbarossa began, the Nazis were true to themselves and indifferent to the morals of the world.
They didn’t know if it was possible to murder so many people, but twentieth-century technology made it easy.
9
REAPING THE WHIRLWIND
AFTER THE BATTLE of Stalingrad in the autumn and winter of 1942–3, Hitler and the Germans experienced nothing but disaster. So why, when the war must have seemed lost, did the Germans fight on to the end? Why did Germany have to suffer so, and in her suffering inflict destruction on countless others? The answers to these questions contain fundamental truths about Nazism, for this was an ideology that, under its Führer, would sooner destroy itself than surrender. As a result, in the last months of the war, the Nazis came to reap the suffering they had sown.
Until recently historians have concentrated their efforts on examining the major strategic turning points of the war. Only lately has there been much detailed research on the final period of the war when the regime descended into destruction. Between July 1944 and May 1945 more Germans perished than in the previous four years put together; roughly 290,000 German soldiers and civilians died per month. Yet one neighbouring Fascist country in the Axis successfully managed to remove its dictator before the end of the war and so escape further involvement in the conflict.
On 25 July 1943 the Italian Fascist dictator Benito Mussolini had an audience with the king of Italy. He was told that the Grand Fascist Council had voted by nineteen votes to seven to replace him as head of state. Mussolini was arrested as he left the room; thus was the first Fascist dictator bloodlessly removed from power. This prompts the question – if the Italians were capable of seeing the way the war was inevitably going and acting accordingly, why couldn’t the Germans?
The first reason, of course, is that there was no German equivalent to the Grand Fascist Council which could collectively pass judgement upon Hitler. He had destroyed the normal apparatus of the state which would have served as a check on his absolute power. There were no cabinet meetings, no national assemblies, no party senate, no forums in which Germans could legitimately come together to question the conduct of the war. A system had evolved that protected Hitler not just from being constitutionally removed from office, but from coherent criticism of any sort.
Hitler himself would not seek surrender as the military situation grew ever more desperate. His whole character militated against such action. Consumed by hatred as he was, suicide was always his preferred escape, but only when Nazism had reached the very end of its long and bloody road. He would never capitulate. In order for Germany to be saved her suffering he would have to be removed.
If there was no prospect of removing Hitler from office constitutionally, as Mussolini had been, the only alternative was to remove him violently. Any conspirator seeking to do this would need a privilege rare and precious in those last years of the war – access to the Führer. The only people who were now admitted to Hitler’s presence were either members of the Nazi leadership or the Armed Forces. Many obstacles prevented the former from acting against their Führer. Their commitment to Nazism was based on a belief in the supreme ability of Hitler, something which had been inculcated since the Nuremberg rallies of the 1920s. To challenge Hitler meant going against nearly twenty years of subservience and belief. In addition, the Nazi leaders were hopelessly split among themselves by a series of personal enmities. (Goebbels disliked Göring, Göring hated Ribbentrop, Ribbentrop loathed Goebbels.) Finally, most, if not all, of the leadership were implicated in the crimes of the regime, as the Nuremberg trials later showed. They would have had little to gain by removing Hitler and making peace. Just as they had prospered with him, now they would suffer with him.
Only the leaders of the Armed Forces, who came into regular contact with Hitler, could hope to topple him. For many, however, the oath of allegiance they had sworn to the Führer proved too much to overcome. ‘It was simply understood,’ says Bernd Linn, an officer who served in the east, ‘that the soldier has sworn an oath and stood by his oath.’ Then there was Hitler’s ability to change minds by the power of his own conviction, the effects of which Karl Boehm-Tettelbach, a Luftwaffe staff officer, regularly witnessed at the Wolf’s Lair. On one occasion he drove to a local airfield to collect a field marshal who had just flown in from Paris to brief Hitler on the war on the Western Front. On the drive back to the Wolf’s Lair, the field marshal asked Boehm-Tettelbach what mood Hitler was in because, he said, ‘I’m going to give him hell. He should know what’s going on in France.’ On the return journey to the airfield the field marshal said, ‘Boehm, excuse me, I was mad today but I made a mistake. Hitler convinced me that it was justified and I’m wrong. I didn’t know what he knows. So therefore I feel very sorry.’ As Boehm-Tettelbach says today, ‘The flair Hitler had was unusual. He could take somebody who was almost ready for suicide, he could revive him and make him feel that he should carry the flag and die in battle. Very strange.’
It wasn’t just Hitler’s powers of persuasion, or the oath of allegiance, that kept many of the army in line: it was the often unspoken knowledge of what was happening in the east. And the horror intensified as the German Army retreated, step by bloody step.
Walter Mauth, a German infantryman with the 30th Division, took part in the scorched earth retreat from the Soviet Union in 1944: ‘I never noticed anybody bothering to have a look inside the house to see whether there was a sick woman or anybody else in there. The houses were simply brutally shot at and burnt down. That’s just the way it was. Nobody cared. There was no consideration – they were “sub-human creatures” after all, weren’t they?’ As part of the rearguard of his unit, Mauth watched as his comrades committed murder. ‘I witnessed how they shot into the houses . . . But since they were Russian, it did not matter. On the contrary, you were even decorated – the more people you shot, the higher was the decoration you received. That’s the truth.’
He confesses that ‘personally, I consider the acts that have been committed a crime, then and now – in retrospect I consider it a damn scandal! I would like to pass on my experience, as far as I am able, to ensure that everybody knows what they will let themselves in for [in war]. They will become a criminal.’
Walter Fernau had reason to be grateful to the Russians because for a short period he was quartered with a Sovi
et family who were friendly and hospitable towards him. ‘They even let me sleep together with the grandfather on the top of their oven,’ he says today. But another NCO from his regiment, billeted with Russians nearby, was not so grateful to the civilians who gave him shelter, as Walter Fernau witnessed. ‘All of a sudden I heard two salvoes from a sub-machine-gun firing out and I imagined it was partisans or something, so I went into the house with my sub-machine-gun. And then I saw that for no reason at all, this NCO had shot the two old Russians who lived in the house with his sub-machine-gun. I had a go at him, I said, “How can you do something like that?” Well, and then he said, and he’d certainly had too much to drink, “The only good Russian is a dead Russian!” I said, “But surely not these poor old people, you know!” But he just wouldn’t go into it. Well, it was a sad business of course.’
Knowledge that Germans were committing atrocities in the East could provoke one of a number of responses within the army elite: officers could genuinely believe in the Nazi propaganda that they were fighting a nation of sub-humans who deserved all they got; or such knowledge could make officers more frightened of defeat and more desperate to keep fighting so that the crime could be hidden; more rarely, it could provoke a desire to see such crimes stopped and the chief criminal, Hitler, brought swiftly to account. Hans von Herwarth fell into the last group and was unique among all the German soldiers we talked to. Not only did he admit to knowing about the abuses being committed in the east, but he actually resolved, along with his friend Count Klaus Schenk von Stauffenberg, to do something about it.
The Nazis- a Warning From History Page 32