War and Remembrance
Page 20
“By all means.” It was a way, if no very satisfying one, of taking the pious virgin in his arms.
“You’re angry at me.”
“Not in the least.”
“Can’t you guess the other bad thing that I’ve done for the first time in my life?”
“I’m afraid not.”
“All right. Then I’ll tell you. It was kissing a Gentile. I’ve not kissed many Jews, either.”
They went to a casino where two bands spelled each other. She kept stepping on his feet, turning the wrong way, holding herself a foot away from him, seeming at once confused, distraught, and delighted. Holding this slim clodhopping girl in his arms at whatever distance, and with whatever punishment to his toes, brought back wistful memories of high school proms. She kept watching a large wall clock, and precisely at a quarter past eleven, she said, “We must go now. That was very nice.”
She let him out of the Fiat at his flat without a handshake and roared off. He plodded upstairs, knowing that Selma Ascher’s image, and the remembered sensations of embracing her body and smelling her hair, would keep him awake for hours. Mixing himself a dark whiskey and water, he dropped in an armchair. His eye fell on the bed. With a sigh he got up and went for the Wannsee Protocol, thinking that translating official German prose might make him sleepy. Settling down with a yellow pad, a pencil, and the black sheets, he began to read and write.
After an hour or so, he let the sheet he was reading fall to the floor. “Jesus… Christ!” he exclaimed, more wide awake than ever, staring with horror-stricken eyes at his own dead-white face in a mirror on the wall. “Jesus… CHRIST!”
* * *
World Solocaust
by General Armin von Roon
(adapted from his Land, Sea, and Air Operations of World War II)
English Translation by
VICTOR HENRY
Zrandator’O aoreworb
(with a note on “The Wannsee Protocol”)
Time usually hangs heavy on the hands of a retired naval officer, but in recent years I have been well occupied translating General Armin von Roon’s World Empire Lost and its sequel, World Holocaust.
These strategic summaries are extracted from Roon’s massive two-volume operational analysis of World War II, written in prison while serving a sentence for war crimes. Without the battle analyses that documented these summaries, Roon’s judgments may seem sweeping. But his whole work is for military specialists, and they can read German. Other people must get Roon’s views in this short form, first compiled by a German publisher as a two-part popular history of the war.
Though much colored by Roon’s nationalism, the strategic overview in these two volumes should interest readers who want a clear and readable account of the whole war as it looked “from the other side of the hill.” Roon’s penetrating analyses of the sea battles in the Pacific, a theatre so remote from his own field, show German military professionalism at its soundest. Where I have felt compelled to dissent from Roon’s views, my comments are plainly set off in italics.
I have prefaced this book with an essay Roon wrote for a military journal shortly before his death, entitled “The Wannsee Protocol.” I believe this essay should be required reading for first-year students in all military academies.
Since the publication of World Empire Lost I have received a number of letters, some from old friends and comrades-in-arms (including a Soviet general), wondering at my willingness to spread the views of a convicted German war criminal. I hold no brief for the Germans. They started the worst war in mankind’s history and came too close to winning it, and under the cloak of wartime secrecy they committed unheard-of crimes. I believe we must study the German state of mind that generated their huge (and militarily remarkable) assault, and their persisting fealty to an insane tyrant. Without the Armin von Roons who followed him and fought for him to the last, Adolf Hitler would have lived and died an impotent fanatical loudmouth, instead of becoming the most powerful monster of history, who all but brought down the civilized world. That is why I have translated Armin von Roon; and why I think “The Wannsee Protocol” should be required reading for military men.
Victor Henry
Oakton, Virginia
12 September 1970
Note to the Third Edition
Readers continue to write and argue with me as though I shared Armin von Roon’s views; whereas I translated his books just because his views appall me.
As a professsional military analyst, Roon is often sound, sometimes brilliant. His facts are seldom wrong. Where they are, I have said so in my notes. But his interpretations of the facts tend to be twisted by the German nationalism that led to Hitler; and if I had noted all my disagreements, the books would have been twice as long. In these pages, therefore, one peers into an able but distorted mind. Readers who find themselves agreeing with Armin von Roon had better take a good hard look at themselves and their ideas; readers who disagree with him are probably in my camp.
Victor Henry
Oakton, Virginia
17 October 1973
The Bannsee protocol
BY GENERAL ARMIN VON ROON
Military writers tend to shun the topic of this paper, but the Jewish question affected the conduct of the Second World War and its outcome. The question cannot be forever ignored. Nor need one fear a frank probing of the problem, for the honor of the German soldier emerges intact.
Long before the war, the National Socialist policy on Jewry had created a military perplexity. Eleven million dispersed inhabitants of Europe had been designated as our nation’s blood enemies. In Germany the Nuremberg decrees had expelled them from civic, business, and professional life. The Third Reich, once it began its armed drive to normalize Europe, therefore had to reckon at the outset with this closely knit community branching all over the continent, with powerful connections and substantial resources overseas. The army could not dig back into the origins of the problem. It had to deal with the security situation as it existed.
The Jews had to be classed as a potential underground, formidable in numbers, cleverness, and means. The worst enemy is always the desperate one who has nothing to lose. Partisans of other nationalities could change their allegiance and side with us. This option was not open to Jews. The army had no choice but to cooperate with the regime’s special Jewish measures.
The nature of the measures was not a responsibility of the army. Various federal police agencies shared in this task: RSHA, Gestapo, SD, regular SS, and so on, a multiple façade for the various Nazi bigwigs contending for power. These all added up to a single iron instrument of Adolf Hitler’s will, for from Adolf Hitler alone proceeded the policy regarding the Jews. The essence of this policy was the elimination of the Jewish race in Europe. It should be noted that this policy failed. Despite the regime’s grip on the continent for almost four years, approximately half of the European Jews survived. Bureaucratic botching, thoroughly unmilitary, characterized the execution of the policy from start to finish.
Indeed, of Hitler’s actual aim, the German army, from the lowest foot soldier to the highest general in Supreme Headquarters, had no knowledge whatever until the war ended and the so-called death camps were uncovered by the victorious armies.
The surviving documentation of this secret policy is naturally tenuous. The policy was carried out with circumspection. Crucial orders were given verbally, “under four eyes.” So thin is the paper record, in fact, that some authorities soberly contend that the so-called extermination never took place. In this view, all the Jews except a few hundred thousand really escaped to the Soviet Union, to the West, or to Palestine; the so-called death camps were concentration camps of undesirables, where conditions were understandably harsh; and the crematoriums were routine hygienic installations for the disposal of those who died in confinement.
Unhappily the written record, slender though it is, suggests the contrary. For instance, the camp rosters that have survived show few entries of death by execution; b
ut several thousand prisoners often died on the same day of “heart failure.” Obviously such mass simultaneous heart failures had to be induced. To distinguish these demises from executions is to split legalistic hairs.
There are, moreover, SS documents which discuss the merits of Zyklon B gas for euthanasia purposes versus shooting and carbon monoxide asphyxiation, etc., etc., also detailed correspondence between German industrial firms and SS officials on the design and building of very large-scale crematoriums, etc., etc. All these undeniably authentic papers suggest a plan to produce and dispose of great numbers of human corpses on a systematic basis. Thus, one is forced to grant that the elimination process took place.
Of these surviving German documents, none is more instructive than the Protocol of the Wannsee Conference of January 20, 1942.
The Wannsee Protocol
The Protocol came to light because of the sudden collapse of our fronts. Many tons of our nation’s most secret papers, which by standard security practice should have been burned, fell intact into American, British, or Russian hands. Among these papers was the Wannsee Protocol.
Had Moscow suddenly fallen to our Army Group Center in December 1941, documents equally compromising would have come into our hands. Stalin was fully as ruthless a personage as Hitler. He ordered many vast secret slaughters of his own Russian people, which his minions obediently carried out. The figure has been put as high as sixty million! But no official records have been exposed to horrify the world. Consequently, nobody brands the Russian people as a nation of murderers.
Or supposing that we had taken London, in the swift cross-Channel attack which I vainly advocated in June 1940? What shameful Whitehall records might we not have uncovered of hideous episodes in India, in Egypt, in Malaya, in South Africa, in fact wherever British imperialism carried the Union Jack, and British arms brutally suppressed native populations which resisted being bled dry for Anglo-Saxon enrichment? But these things remain shrouded secrets.
Only Germany suffered the ignominy of having her records unveiled. Only Germany was stripped naked. Even the defeated Japanese were allowed to keep their emperor and their government structure, which ensured suppression of their papers on the sack of Nanking and the Bataan Death March.
“Wannsee Protocols” exist in the secret papers of every nation. Human nature is everywhere alike. Let America uncover its files about its extermination of the Red Indian, its robbery of Texas from Mexico, its oppression of the Nisei after Pearl Harbor. Then let us see how the facts compare with the disclosures in the Wannsee Protocol.
The Wannsee Conference
The Protocol, a fifteen-page mimeographed secret document, was found by American investigators digging through the vast captured files of our Foreign Ministry. A notation shows that thirty copies originally existed. Only number 16, the Foreign Ministry’s copy, survived. On such a slender thread hung world history’s insight into Hitler’s Jewish policy. The secret was almost kept!
The document describes a conference held at the International Police Building in the Gross-Wannsee section of Berlin on January 20, 1942, shortly after America entered the war. The chairman was Heydrich, a shady cashiered naval officer, who in the topsy-turvy Nazi era became chief of the Security Police and head of the Reich Security Main Office. * This Heydrich person was number two man under the unsavory Himmler in the SS. Already early in 1942 the SS had gained control over our federal security and police departments. So when Heyrdrich called this conference, undersecretaries of state came scurrying. They met for about an hour and a half with seven SS men, one of whom, Lieutenant Colonel Adolf Eichmann, kept the minutes. These minutes, edited by Heydrich, constitute the Wannsee Protocol.
The eight high officials came from the Ministry of Justice, the Ministry for the Interior, the Foreign Ministry, the Ministry for the Occupied Eastern Territories, the Government General in Poland, the Reich Chancellery, and the Plenipotentiary for the Four-year Plan — in fact, from every major government department except the armed forces. No evidence exists that any member of the armed forces ever knew the conference took place.
This is the crucial fact that emerges from the Wannsee Protocol. The honor of the German nation was entrusted to our armed forces, and the armed forces were innocent. It was a joint meeting of the secret police and the federal bureaucracy. The Eichmann-Heydrich document proves this.
TRANSLATORS NOTE:General von Roon does not usually resort to such fudging of the facts in his writings. He is not being a military historian here, however, but a special pleader. In fact, though no Wehrmacht representative attended the Wannsee Conference, the documentation of the German army’s involvement in the Jewish policy is all too real and depressing. — V.H.
Heydrich seems to have called the conference to impress his superiors. Six months earlier, on July 31, 1941, when our invasion of the Soviet Union was rolling, Reichsmarschall Hermann Goring had ordered him in a top-secret letter to organize a disposition of the Jewish problem; to bring in other government departments as needed; and to submit to Goring, “as soon as possible,” a draft showing what action had been taken, and what the further plans were. Despite the usual SS practice of not putting such things on paper, the Wannsee Protocol evidently came into existence to impress Goring with Heydrich’s diligence.
Goring’s letter used the words, “a final solution to the Jewish question.” Since the exposure of the Protocol, this expression, “The Final Solution,” * has come to take on unpleasant overtones in anti-German literature. Heydrich often used a more precise term, “the territorial solution.” This term will be used here.
The Territorial Solution
Three alternative solutions to the Jewish question had emerged in policy analyses over the years: the emigration solution, the expulsion solution, and the territorial solution.
At first the Nazis believed that once they took power, most of the Jews would emigrate. But the German Jews, as it turned out, were reluctant to abandon their homes and businesses, and the graves of their ancestors, even after Hitler’s Nuremberg laws made them pariahs. They hoped that the Nazi regime would prove a passing storm. Elsewhere in Europe few Jews seemed to believe that war would come, or that if it did, Germany would win. As a result, far more Jews remained in Germany than left. Outside our borders, Jewish emigration was insignificant.
But even for the few who wanted to leave, the emigration solution hit a snag. If Hebrews were no longer welcome in Germany, it developed that they were not much more welcome anywhere else. Year by year after Hitler took power, western Europe stiffened its restrictions against admitting Jews. The sparsely settled vast lands of the New World, led by the “haven of oppressed mankind,” the U.S.A., clanged iron doors shut in the Jews’ faces. This was a black chapter in the tale of man’s inhumanity to man.
When it became clear to the Hitler regime that the Jews would not emigrate and would find ix hard at all events to get in elsewhere, the expulsion solution came forward: i.e., forcibly removing them. The awkward question remained: where to?
Of all the expulsion ideas, the one most prominent in the surviving documents is the Madagascar Plan. The forcible resettling of Europe’s Jews on this French island of South Africa received some study. But in view of the gross difficulties — lack of shipping to transport eleven million people, enemy control of the seas, stupendous cost, offense to Vichy France whose collaboration we were seeking, and nonviability of this wild tropical island for Europeans — it is hard to say how serious this project was. When the navy indicated to Hitler that the British might one day land in Madagascar to protect their Indian Ocean sea lanes, all talk of settling the Jews there ended. The Führer declared that the British would only “let the bacillus loose again on the world.”
Thus it developed that the problem would have to be solved on European soil: hence, territorial solution. At Wannsee, Heydrich lifted the veil of secrecy, so that the federal bureaucrats would understand plainly, once for all, what the nature of their job was.
&nbs
p; The Program
This draconic program should certainly have had no place in the twentieth century. Alas! Cologne, Dresden, Katyn, and Hiroshima showed that this kind of moral failure in wartime was certainly not confined to Germany. The territorial solution of the Jewish question was a harebrained scheme dreamed up by irresponsible and inept Berlin desk officials. Administratively, it was from start to finish a mess. Like most projects dreamed up in the comfortable suites of a government building, it had about it a pecious neatness and clarity, but in the field it broke down. All too many Jews did perish in the process, but on the whole it was a monumental fiasco.
The key to the territorial solution lay in our vast 1941 conquests. The occupied eastern areas were at last the long-sought place where the Jews could be sent. For here no government had to be consulted, and no local population had to be mollified. It was a thinly settled half-continent under German guns.
Heydrich outlined a most plausible and simple plan. The Jews of Europe would be “cleaned up from west to east,” temporarily collected in transit ghettos, and then shipped to the Occupied Territories in huge labor columns, separated by sexes. There they would build roads, of which this backward region stood in great need for military purposes. In the course of this action “a great part of the Jews would undoubtedly be eliminated by natural causes,” that is, by poor conditions and debilitating labor. As for the few who survived the ordeal, Heydrich said bluntly that they would have to be “treated accordingly,” since as the tough product of natural selection they would otherwise constitute a spore for the rebirth of the Jewish people. Such was the unrelenting ideology of the government of the time.