by Herman Wouk
The unanimous reaction of the cabinet officials was extreme enthusiasm, and a variety of suggestions for improving or speeding up the plan. The conference ended on a note of cordial agreement, and an excellent and convivial luncheon followed in the usual high bureaucratic style.
But the scheme collapsed almost at the outset. The labor columns were never organized. The roads were never built. From 1943 on in our forced-march retreats from Russia, the army felt keenly the impact of this failure. True, the Jews were collected all over Europe and shipped eastward, to transit ghettos of Poland. But there they stayed —a colossal prison population, an immense drain on German resources, and a festering rear-area threat both to health and to security.
No subsequent SS protocol has survived to explain why Heydrich’s plan was abandoned. The territorial solution was modified in a haphazard way to become the construction of big factories near the ever-swelling transit ghettos, and the use of Jewish forced labor on the spot. The hoped-for natural diminution was sought through reduced nutrition, drastic work schedules, etc., etc. But the uprooting and resettling of a population of eleven million people proved an almost unimaginable administrative task, quite beyond the Berlin bunglers in charge of the program, with the result that half the Jews, as has been stated, escaped elimination. No more than five and a half, or by the highest estimate six, million were caught by the scheme.
The Mercy Deaths
We still do not know exactly when or how the switch to euthanasia (mercy death) in gas chambers occurred. This difficult aspect has been widely distorted and misunderstood.
Heydrich’s plan turned out to be a vast folly, projected by soft-living bureaucrats not experienced, as soldiers are, in large-scale suffering, privation, and death. The resources of the human spirit and body are remarkable. Prisoners of war endure wretched conditions for years. They learn to eat or drink almost anything. The demands of their depleted bodies shrink almost to zero, in the natural urge to live on. All these phenomena occurred in the transit ghettos. The slow rate of attrition became worrisome. Plagues broke out, and plague germs do not distinguish between captors and prisoners. The weakened Jews therefore became a standing menace to the local populations and to our armed forces.
These developments apparently brought forward the thought: since these people were in any case condemned to death, would not a quick, unexpected, painless end free them from long woes? And would it not simultaneously relieve our forces of a clogging problem, the proportions of which had not been realized in time?
Here, in these essentially humane considerations, lay the reason for the gas chambers. Rescuing the Jews was out of the question. Adolf Hitler had decreed their end, and his will was law. One could only carry it out in the most decent, practical, and civilized fashion. Much has been made of the undeniable fact that a million children were thus gassed to death, and it is an unfortunate episode to recall. Yet starvation would have been a slower, more painful demise for the children, and their parents would have endured the misery of watching them waste away.
As for the spoliation of the arriving Jews, and even of the dead bodies of these unfortunates, such practices cannot be extenuated. The SS amassed several billion marks’ worth of gold, jewelry, and goods in this fashion, but whether the German war effort benefitted remains doubtful, for the Himmler-Heydrich agency was a high-handed and corrupt one. The story of soap manufacture from the bodies was, of course, a baseless British fabrication from the First World War.
Military Effects: (1) Manpower
This was not a rear-area matter of no military weight. The territorial solution materially damaged our armed effort.
The worst damage was in.manpower. Large numbers of healthy German men were diverted from combat roles to the herding of Jews. Round-up squads, camp guards, etc., were recruited from local populations, but even so enough Germans for several divisions may have been fussing with Jews in bureaus and in camps, instead of fighting.
The manpower shortage was also chronic in our factories. The prisoners of war and the forced laborers from occupied lands gave halfhearted service at best, and they persisted in sabotage no matter how many were shot. But the Jews constituted a vast pool of clever workmen and artisans, or professional men and women quick to learn any skilled labor. They were so used, in fact, until the inexorable round-up squads came to ship them off. They committed very little sabotage. Rather, they displayed a desperate anxiety to preserve their own lives and those of their loved ones by turning in superlative work. We thus lost the labor of several million workers of high reliability, motivation, and productivity.
Finally, it was fashionable under National Socialism to sneer at the fighting capacity of the Jews. Indeed, under SS handling they appeared a docile and vulnerable lot. But that this was a condition capable of startling reversal has been shown by postwar events in Palestine. How well we could have used on the eastern front one or two million fighters of the calibre of the present-day Jewish armies! At the time the idea would have seemed a joke. Today, when it is too late, we can only wonder.
Military Effects: (2) Supplies and Services
The railroading burden was oppressive and continuous. No matter how tightly the trains were packed — and that this was carried to excess is common knowledge —the tying up of rolling stock remained a grave problem. There never were sufficient trains and locomotives for the fighting fronts. Combat divisions sat shivering at rear depots while trains devoted to shuttling the Jews rolled eastward jam-packed and went back empty, cut off from use for any other purpose. This noncombat usage had a secret overriding priority such as in America was given only to making the atomic bomb.
Military Effects: (3) Morale
While the ultimate intent of the policy remained secret, many German army formations did see the process in action. That is a matter of record. Regrettably, some units were also coopted to assist not only in transporting or guarding the Jews, but in the liquidation process.
Local army commanders sometimes supplied and transported the mobile execution squads, since they were on government business. These SS squads, called Einsatzgruppen (Special Action Units), had entered Russia close behind our advancing armies. They had orders to shoot political commissars without trial, in order to nip partisan activity in the bud; this was the well-known “Commissar Order” of March 1941. They also were instructed to liquidate forthwith, as a prime menace to German security, all the Jews they could round up. Local populations gladly volunteered to join the Einsatzgruppen against their Jews, with episodes of frightfulness resulting, especially in Lithuania, Rumania, and Hungary. By the more orderly German squads themselves, hundreds of thousands of Jews were systematically shot within areas of army cognizance.
German soldiers could not always avert their eyes from these happenings. Isolated instances occurred of misguided local army commanders allowing or even ordering their units to take part. Thus authentic photographs exist of men in Wehrmacht uniform, shooting Jewish women holding babes in their arms. Such occurrences unquestionably spread in our ranks a certain demoralization, and a questioning of our aims in fighting the war. When this happens in an army, its fighting spirit has been injured. Like so many aspects of the territorial solution, one cannot state this morale damage in our army in percentage points, or other meaningful figures. It was, however, a real factor on the eastern front. Like defeatism, self-doubt is an invisible but heavy weight on a war effort.
A soldier is trained to the job of killing. It is his life against the enemy’s; that is soldiering at its cleanest. Soldiers sometimes have to do sadder, dirtier jobs. They must shoot spies and partisans who are standing blindfolded and helpless. On orders, they must sometimes hang boys, girls, and women, who make good partisan fighters. But that does not mean that the soldier — especially a German soldier, trained to decency and honor, as much as to hardness in the field — can always stomach such work. What the Nazis did, in this regard, to our German youth is hard to forget or to excuse.
The N
ature of the Enemy
We come therefore to the heart of the whole matter: was the solution, with all these drawbacks, nevertheless an imperative wartime security measure? Were the Jews the ultimate security menace to the Reich that Hitler postulated? Within this question lies another question — “Which Reich?”
Ever since the French Revolution two irreconcilable Reich concepts had emerged in our philosophy and in our politics:
(a) The liberal concept: a peaceful Reich universalist in culture, with freedom for the Jews, the establishment of bourgeois democracy in imitation of France and England, and a subordinate military position for Germany.
(b) The nationalist concept: the Reich as a rising world force, the natural successor to the British Empire; a German culture purged of foreign strains; armed forces on the Bonapartist basis of “the nation in arms”; a hard mystical loyalty to king, to soil, and to old Christian virtues.
Cutting across both ideas came socialism, with its sentimental and poisonous farrago of world brotherhood, egalitarianism, and the abolition of private property. But nationalism was the truly German essence. Whenever the nationalist Reich prevailed — in 1866, in 1870-71, in 1914, in 1917 —we were strong and victorious. Whenever the liberal and socialist elements surfaced, Germany suffered.
It was Adolf Hitler’s political genius to weld the mystique of the nationalist Reich to the rabble-rousing appeal of socialism. National Socialism resulted, an explosive mass movement. The modified socialism of Hitler was unobjectionable to the army. It amounted to spartan economic controls, and basic employment, health, and welfare measures for all the people except the Jews.
But the Jews were the backbone of German liberalism. Liberalism had given them the rights and privileges of citizens. Liberalism had turned them loose to use their energy and cleverness in finance, the professions, and the arts. These people who had been kept apart were now to be seen everywhere — prosperous, exotic, holding high places, and indiscreetly displaying their new-won gains. To the Jews, liberalism was their salvation. Therefore, to a dedicated nationalist like Adolf Hitler, the Jews appeared as ultimate enemies.
Tragically, it all depended on the point of view.
The Actual Power of the Jews
Yet all attempts to justify the territorial solution finally fall before one practical historical truth. The Jews proved unable to save themselves, or to influence anybody else to save them; and self-preservation is the test of a nation’s true power.
The Jews beyond Hitler’s reach looked on helplessly while their European blood brothers were going to an obscure but grim fate. Where then was their political stranglehold on the West, that Hitler took as an article of faith? Where was their boundless wealth, when they could not induce or bribe a single country — not even one small South American republic —to open its doors? In 1944, where was their all-penetrating influence, when the secret began to leak out, and they in vain implored the Anglo-Americans to bomb Auschwitz?
These things speak for themselves. Hitler exaggerated the threat of the Jews, and badly led astray the well-meaning German people. The Jews would have served us well. Their weight in manpower, skill, and international influence, added on our side instead of subtracted from it, would have been most welcome. Perhaps the war might even have ended differently!
For if the Jews outside Europe lacked the power to command deliverance, they did have a strong voice. Their outcries lent credence to Roosevelt’s and Churchill’s unfair portrayal of our folk as Huns and savages, even while we were fighting the battle of Christendom against the Red hordes. And so arose the two policies fatal to our cause —“Germany First,” and “unconditional surrender”—which ranged the two powerful plutocracies irrevocably on the side of Eurasian Bolshevism.
Had the Nazi regime handled the millions of Jews under our rule with wisdom, none of this need have happened. This is the tragic military paradox of the territorial solution. The Jews were not strong enemies; but they might have been strong friends. Seen in this light, the Nazi policy toward the Jews must be called a costly military blunder. But the armed forces were not consulted and cannot be blamed. This is the inescapable conclusion from the prime surviving document of the matter, the Wannsee Protocol.
TRANSLATORS NOTE:When I first submitted this article in translation to the U.S. Naval Institute Proceedings, the editor, Vice Admiral Turnbull C. “Buck” Fuller, USN, returned it with a large red-ink scrawl, “Just what is the purpose of offering to the Proceedings this obtuse, cold-blooded, sickening drivel?” He was an old salt and a good friend. I wrote under his words, “To show ourselves what we might be capable of,” and sent the piece back. Six months later the article appeared in the Proceedings. / met Buck Fuller on many occasions thereafter. He never once referred to Armin von Roon’s essay. He still has not. — V.H.
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15
U.S.S. NORTHAMPTON
Plan of the Day, i February 1942
Commencing at sunrise, Task Group 8.1 (this vessel with Salt Lake City and Dunlap) will bombard Wotje atoll in the northern Marshall Islands.
a. Air strikes from Enterprise will neutralize enemy air strength and shore batteries before bombardment commences.
b. Charts of these enemy waters being old and unreliable, and hazards from coral reefs abounding, condition Zed will be set at 0000 hours.
Northampton is proud to be flagship of Bombardment Group North, under Vice Admiral Halsey’s Task Force 8, as the Pacific Fleet at last hits back at the treacherous Nips throughout the Marshall and Gilbert island groups.
“This is It.” All hands govern themselves accordingly.
JAMES C. GRIGG
EXECUTIVE OFFICER
“Commence firing!”
The Northampton’s three turrets thundered out white smoke and pale fire. The deck jerked and shuddered. Though plugged with cotton, Victor Henry’s ears rang. The flash, the roar, the smell of gunpowder from this first salvo at the enemy that had wrecked Pearl Harbor and the California, filled him with exultation. Astern, at the same moment, the Salt Lake Citys main battery blasted and flamed, and the two clusters of eight-inch projectiles, plain to see with binoculars, arched off toward the vessels anchored in the lagoon.
Off the port quarter, the rim of the sun was blazing up over a sharp horizon. The two cruisers and the destroyer Dunlap, flying huge battle flags, were steaming in column at full speed, broadside to the smoking green lump on the sea that was Wotje Island. The Enterprise planes, mere specks in the sky (Warren’s no doubt among them), were heading back to the carrier, barely visible to the north. They had struck the island at dawn, on schedule.
Pug was still seething over the messy catapulting of his own four spotter planes. One craft had just missed going into the sea. Another had been twenty minutes loading on the catapult, for the crane had jammed. Damned bad start! Admiral Spruance, standing beside him on the bridge in the brightening dawn, had said not a word, but disappointment at the performance had radiated from him. He was clearly disappointed too at the lack of targets in Wotje. There were no warships, only a scattering of merchantmen. Halsey’s first hit-and-run raid against the Japs would not amount to much if the pickings were no better at the other atolls.
But even this minor gunnery action began badly. The enemy ships weighed anchor made smoke, and dodged and twisted in the lagoon, hard to see and harder to hit. Not one visibly sank or even flamed under continuous heavy gunfire. The spotter planes reported splashes as hits, then corrected themselves. A nervy little minesweeper sortied from the lagoon, shooting its popguns and zigzagging. The destroyer Dunlap engaged it at point-blank range, with five-inch salvos that kept churning up futile splashes in the sea. Lookouts on all three ships next began sighting periscopes, in a hysterical wave of reports. Neither Pug Henry nor the admiral could see the periscopes, but Spruance had little choice. He ordered an emergency turn. The attack fell apart. The three warships milled about on the quiet sunny sea off the smoking island, preoccupied with dodging reporte
d torpedo tracks and avoiding collisions. At last Pug Henry resolved to ignore periscopes and torpedo wakes he couldn’t see. Heading into Wotje on a firing course, he blasted away at the elusive merchant vessels, lavishing the costly shells to give his crew at least the experience of failure, the exposure to the thumping shore batteries, the practice of rushing shells from magazine to gun breech, the smell and the sound and the fear of combat; and to force into the open the humiliating realities of a warship system still clogged with peacetime fat.
Rear Admiral Spruance, issuing order after order on the TBS, finally regained a semblance of control. The Dunlap sank the minesweeper. The three ships formed up, moved in close to shore, and set ablaze most of the island’s rickety buildings. But the shore batteries found the range, and colored splashes began howling up around the attackers. When Spruance saw the Salt Lake City straddled twice, he called a cease-fire. Ordering Captain Henry to lead Task Group 8.1 back to the Enterprise screen, the admiral left the bridge frozen-faced. The action had lasted an hour and a half.
“Meeting of all officers not on watch in the wardroom,” Pug said to Jim Grigg.
“Aye aye, sir,” said the exec, his countenance under the new blue-painted helmet as fallen as Spruance’s.
A subdued crowd of young men in khaki got to their feet as the captain came into the long narrow room. He kept them standing for his short talk. They had just taken part in a nuisance raid, he said. They had failed to be much of a nuisance. A long war lay ahead. The Northampton would commence improving its combat readiness. Dismissed.
All day, all evening, past midnight, department heads were summoned to the captain’s quarters, where, speaking without notes, he ticked off weak points and ordered remedial action. The Northampton’s poor showing had not greatly surprised Pug Henry. In his first month or so as captain, sizing up his ship, he had kept his eyes and ears open and his mouth more or less shut. There were too many raw recruits and draftees aboard; the experienced personnel, enlisted and officers alike, were a sparse lot. Ship routine went well, spit-and-polish was adequate, but everything was slack, grooved, comfortable, and faintly civilian. Still, the men looked good to Pug, and he had been waiting for just such a crisis to show his hand.