The Holocaust: A New History

by Laurence Rees

  Most senior military commanders did not protest at Hitler’s characterization of the forthcoming conflict as a war of ‘extermination’. A small number, like Field Marshal von Bock, objected to the order to shoot Soviet political officers rather than take them prisoner – the so-called ‘Commissar Order’ – but Bock’s main concern was that these killings might have a negative effect on military discipline. Many more officers would have agreed with the views of Colonel-General Erich Hoepner who said in a directive issued on 2 May 1941, a month before the formal promulgation of the Commissar Order, that the forthcoming war would be ‘the old struggle of the Germanic people against Slavdom, the defence of European culture against Moscovite-Asiatic inundation, the repulse of Jewish Bolshevism. This struggle has to have as its aim the smashing of present-day Russia and must consequently be carried out with unprecedented severity. Every military action must in conception and execution be led by the iron will mercilessly and totally to annihilate the enemy. In particular, there is to be no sparing the upholders of the current Russian-Bolshevik system.’70

  The forthcoming war in the east also offered fresh possibilities for a solution to an existing Nazi problem: just where should the Jews be deported? As early as 21 January 1941, Theodor Dannecker, the SD officer from Eichmann’s department based in Paris, had learnt that ‘In accordance with the Führer’s wishes, after the war a final solution will be found for the Jewish question within the territories ruled and controlled by Germany.’71 Dannecker added that Reinhard Heydrich had been told to devise a plan to bring this ‘huge task’ about. One idea was to deport the Jews first to the General Government in Poland, where they would await onward transportation to a destination yet to be decided.72

  Heydrich’s commission to devise a ‘final solution’ for the ‘Jewish question’ does not mean that this was the order for the Holocaust. The words ‘final solution’ do not mean here what they came to mean later. Heydrich was working on a plan not to exterminate the Jews in gas chambers, but to deport them to somewhere under German control once the war was over. Eichmann had already attempted a similar operation at the start of the war with the Nisko plan. Now Heydrich was almost certainly planning to send the Jews even further away – to the extremity of the new Nazi empire in the conquered territory of the Soviet Union.

  At the same time as Heydrich was working on this first version of the ‘final solution’, Himmler was in discussion with Viktor Brack about another method of dealing with the ‘Jewish question’ – mass sterilization. For Himmler, the benefits of a swift method of sterilizing not just Jews but any other targeted group were considerable. Most obviously, sterilized labourers posed no ‘racial’ threat to the people around them since they could not reproduce.73 As a consequence, Brack investigated potential methods of sterilizing people – without those operated on knowing what was happening to them. In a letter dated 28 March 1941, he outlined the challenges: ‘If any persons are to be sterilized permanently, this result can only be attained by applying x-rays in a dosage high enough to produce castration with all its consequences, since high x-ray dosages destroy the internal secretion of the ovary, or of the testicles, respectively.’74 The difficulty with carrying out this procedure in secret was that unless the rest of the body was protected by a lead covering, ‘the other tissues of the body will be injured.’ Brack suggested that ‘one practical way of proceeding’ would be to tell the person to be sterilized to ‘approach a counter’ and fill in some paperwork for ‘two or three minutes’. X-rays could then be turned on while most of the victim’s body was protected by the counter. ‘With a two-valve installation,’ wrote Brack, ‘about 150–200 persons could be sterilized per day, and therefore, with twenty such installations as many as 3,000–4,000 persons per day …’75 As we have seen, sterilization of the disabled and other groups the Nazis did not wish to see procreate, including children from disturbed backgrounds,76 had been taking place since 1933, but Brack’s proposal called for a radical expansion. Subsequently, Himmler did not progress Brack’s idea – though, as we shall see, further sterilization experiments were later conducted at Auschwitz.

  Brack’s note is more than a bizarre sidelight at this point in the history, because it demonstrates how the Nazis were considering a whole variety of ideas as potential ‘solutions’ to their ‘Jewish question’. It is crucial to recognize that all of them – from the Madagascar plan to ghettoization, to mass sterilization – were ultimately genocidal. Jews would not be destroyed en masse via sterilization, that’s true, but over a generation they would all disappear. In Madagascar they would have vanished over time because the territory could not support large numbers of people, and because the Jewish ‘reservation’ would have been overseen by SS fanatics. In the ghetto they would have perished eventually because the Nazis had created an environment where the death rate was higher than the birth rate and children were treated as ‘useless eaters’.

  Just suppose for a moment that circumstances had been such that the Nazis had adopted one of these methods, instead of going on as they did to create the death camps. Would the world have been so appalled? Would one of these methods of extermination still have been called a ‘Holocaust’? Perhaps not, because the factories of death the Nazis created in the east represented a particular horror – the cold, mechanistic destruction of human life in an instant, a crime that was symbolic of the worst extremes of the industrial age, somehow an even more haunting means of extermination than the mass shootings the Nazi killing squads would carry out elsewhere in the east at the same time. But we should still remember that the death camps were just one means to the same end that all of these other potential ‘solutions’ offered – the elimination of the Jews.

  Hitler’s focus on his longed-for war in the east was momentarily diverted in the spring of 1941 by events in the Balkans – and, as a consequence, many more Jews unexpectedly came under German control before the Wehrmacht crossed into the Soviet Union. The problem Hitler faced was Yugoslavia. He had believed in March 1941 that the Yugoslavs had, after considerable persuasion, decided to join the Tripartite Pact, the agreement of cooperation originally made between Germany, Italy and Japan in September 1940 and subsequently signed by other German allies such as Hungary and Romania.

  Hitler had wanted to secure the compliance of the Yugoslavs, in order both to prevent any potential problems behind the lines as his armies moved forward into the Soviet Union and to ease a planned German attack on Greece which was to be launched before the start of the war against the Soviets. Following the botched invasion of Greece by the Italians in October 1940, the Germans feared a counter-attack by the Allies through Greece once the Wehrmacht were committed in the Soviet Union. Hence Hitler’s pleasure in March 1941 that at least the non-involvement of Yugoslavia in the forthcoming conflict had been achieved.

  So it was with enormous anger that he learnt on 27 March, just two days after Yugoslavia had signed the Tripartite Pact, that a group of Serbian officers had mounted a coup and overthrown the regime of Prince Paul. In the face of what Hitler saw as a total betrayal, he ordered the immediate invasion of Yugoslavia. ‘This is no joking matter for the Führer,’ wrote Goebbels in his diary.77 But this extra military commitment meant a delay in the scheduled May launch date of the invasion of the Soviet Union.

  The Germans attacked both Greece and Yugoslavia on 6 April. The military action was an astonishing success, with Yugoslavia defeated in less than two weeks, and the Greek mainland occupied by the end of April. Suddenly, around 150,000 more Jews were under German control.

  In Yugoslavia, the Nazis fuelled the ethnic tensions that had existed for hundreds of years between the various republics that made up the country. Yugoslavia itself was a creation of the peace treaties at the end of the First World War, formed from the amalgamation of territory that had been part of the Kingdom of Serbia with land from the Austro-Hungarian Empire. The Nazis now supported the formation of an Independent State of Croatia under the leadership of Ante Pavelić, a m
an who had previously conducted terrorist actions against the Yugoslav state in an effort to force the creation of a separate Croatia. Pavelić, and the Ustaše revolutionary movement that he led, were profoundly racist. They asserted that the Croats were not ‘Slavic’ like the Serbs, but of mainly Germanic descent, and that only those of true Croat ‘blood’ could take part in the running of Croatia. They possessed an intense hatred of the nearly 2 million Orthodox Christian Serbs who lived within the boundaries of the new Croat state, and the brutal and sadistic way in which the Ustaše treated these Serbs – murdering more than 300,000 (perhaps as many as 500,000) in the course of the war – is a war crime that deserves to be better acknowledged. The 40,000 Jews living in Croatia were also at risk,78 as the Ustaše maintained that they too were not true Croats. An editorial in a Croatian newspaper in 1939 stated that ‘the Jews were not Croats, and they could never become Croatian because by nationality they are Zionists, by race they are Semites, their religion is Israelite …. I am asking the peoples of the world, how long are we going to kill each other for the interests of the Jews? … if we are to kill each other, let us first kill the Jews …’79

  By the Law Concerning Nationality, signed on 30 April 1941, Croat Jews were deprived of their citizenship. Three weeks later, on 23 May, another law was passed that ordered all Jews to be marked with yellow patches on their clothing. Businesses belonging to Croat Jews were seized – often to the benefit of other Croats rather than the government itself – and Jewish lawyers, doctors and other professionals were sacked from their jobs. But still worse was to come in the immediate aftermath of the German invasion of the Soviet Union, when on 26 June Ante Pavelić accused the Jews of profiteering and ordered them to be imprisoned in concentration camps.

  However, Pavelić, though undoubtedly responsible for mass murder, was not as ideologically consistent as the Nazis wished. While he believed that ‘Communism and Judaism work together against the national liberation of Croatia,’80 he gave himself the power to decide who was Jewish. He created the term ‘Honorary Aryan’ in order to allow a number of Jews – including those deemed to have performed meritorious service to the Croat state – to escape persecution. Pavelić’s motivation for this act was almost certainly self-serving – his own wife was the daughter of a Jew, and the wives of a number of his colleagues were Jewish.

  In neighbouring Serbia the Germans decided to install a military administration aided and abetted by a puppet government. While the overall military command was in the hands of a German air force general, the civilian governance was administered by Harald Turner, an SS officer who would become notorious for his subsequent involvement in the extermination of Serbian Jews.

  At the time of the German invasion of Yugoslavia there were about 16,000 Jews in Serbia, the majority living in Belgrade. They were an immediate target for the occupying forces, and the Germans swiftly persecuted them in an all too familiar pattern: passing decrees identifying who was a Jew, banning the Jews from a number of professions, ordering them to wear identifying badges and drafting Jewish men as forced labour.

  Most of the rest of what had been pre-war Yugoslavia was swallowed up by a group of greedy neighbours that were already allies of the Nazis. The Italians took southern Slovenia, a section of the Croatian coast and Montenegro; Hungary annexed a chunk of Serbia including the city of Novi Sad and territory to the north; and Bulgaria snatched much of Macedonia.

  After the surrender of Greek forces and the flight of British and Greek soldiers to the island of Crete, Greece was split between Bulgaria, Germany and Italy. The Italians took the bulk of the Greek mainland as well as the Ionian and Cycladic islands, the Germans occupied Salonica, and the Bulgarians most of Thrace and another section of Macedonia. The Germans arrested a number of Jews in the wake of the occupation, but although Greek Jewish communities remained at risk, the immediate persecution in Greece was not on the same scale as that in Croatia.

  With the conquest of Greece and Yugoslavia, Hitler had secured his southern flank in preparation for the invasion of the Soviet Union. But these were countries that he would have preferred not to have had to conquer by force. Only the coup in Yugoslavia and the inept performance of the Italians in Greece, which drew Allied troops to the region, had compelled him to act.

  Now that he had control of this territory he wanted the minimum possible German military commitment consistent with the subjugation of the population. As for the Jews within Greece and Yugoslavia, they were subjected, as we have seen, to varying degrees of persecution in the spring of 1941. But in that context it is important to remember the question of scale. For while the Nazis gained about 150,000 Jews after conquering Yugoslavia and Greece, that was less than half the number that were currently incarcerated within the Warsaw ghetto alone, and a fraction of the number that were about to be encountered in the Soviet Union.

  Hitler was focused on the east. And it would be in the midst of his self-proclaimed war of ‘extermination’ on Soviet territory that the Holocaust would be born.

  10. War of Extermination

  (1941)

  On 22 June 1941 the Germans launched the largest single invasion in the history of the world. Nearly 4 million German troops and their allies crossed into the Soviet Union in three giant thrusts aimed initially at Leningrad, Smolensk and Kiev. For Adolf Hitler it was the moment he had dreamt of for nearly twenty years – the start of the fight to create a vast German empire in the east.

  The day before the invasion Hitler had written to Mussolini telling him of his plans. It was a letter full of lies and half-truths: he said, for instance, that invading the Soviet Union was the ‘hardest decision’ of his life, when it must have been one of the easiest. He also claimed, contrary to the obvious reality, that ‘England has lost this war.’ But one comment he made in the letter does ring true. He said that having decided to invade he now felt ‘spiritually free’.1 For Hitler that ‘spiritual’ freedom manifested itself in his desire to wage a war without rules and without compassion for the defeated. ‘The Führer says that we must gain the victory no matter whether we do right or wrong,’ wrote Goebbels in his diary on 16 June. ‘We have so much to answer for anyhow that we must gain the victory because otherwise our whole people … will be wiped out.’2

  Even though the German invasion plan dwarfed anything attempted before, Hitler and his commanders were so massively over-confident that they anticipated reaching the oil of the Caucasus, more than 1,500 miles east of them, in just a few months.3 Capturing the Soviet oil was just part of the plan, for vast quantities of both food and land were to be seized as well. As for the people who lived in the Soviet Union – the Nazis intended, as we have seen, to starve them to death in their tens of millions.4

  At the epicentre of the Nazis’ hatred lay, as always, the Jews. And in order to confront ‘Jewish Bolshevism’ directly, Reinhard Heydrich organized four special task units or Einsatzgruppen – a total force of 3,000 – made up of units of the SD and other security forces. These Einsatzgruppen were to follow immediately behind the army groups as they advanced into the Soviet Union. In a document dated 2 July 1941, Heydrich explicitly ordered these units to shoot ‘Jews in the service of the [Communist] Party or the State’ as well as other leading Communists. He also insisted that ‘No steps will be taken to interfere with any purges that may be initiated by anti-Communist or anti-Jewish elements in the newly occupied territories. On the contrary, these are to be secretly encouraged.’5 The Einsatzgruppen were not the only units to be involved in so-called ‘cleansing’ actions behind the front line. By an order of 21 May, Himmler outlined how special detachments of the Order Police and Waffen SS would also enter the Soviet Union in the wake of the invasion – more than 11,000 members of the Order Police alone.6 These German policemen would commit murder alongside other German security units.

  Just how Heydrich’s order that the Einsatzgruppen should not ‘interfere’ with locals who turned against the Jews worked in practice can be seen by the action
s of the Germans in Kaunas. German forces reached Kaunas, the second city in Lithuania, on 24 June, just two days after the invasion had begun. Many Lithuanians welcomed the Germans, seeing them as liberators from Stalin’s rule. The Soviets had occupied the country in June 1940, having first forced the Lithuanians to accept Red Army soldiers based on their soil the previous year. Once in control, Stalin’s forces pursued a ruthless policy of ‘Sovietization’ in Lithuania: several thousand Lithuanians were imprisoned as ‘enemies of the people’; land was nationalized and economic shortages created – in part by the Soviet occupiers buying Lithuanian goods at artificially low prices. Just before the Germans arrived, 17,000 Lithuanians had been deported to Siberia.7

  It wasn’t just the Soviet forces in general who were blamed for all this suffering, it was the Jews in particular. ‘Many Lithuanian Jews became the political leaders, joined the police,’ says Petras Zelionka, who later collaborated with the German killing squads, ‘and everyone was saying that in the security department people were mostly tortured by Jews. They used to put the screws on the head and tighten them, thus torturing the teachers and the professors.’8 While the idea that under Soviet rule Lithuanian prisoners were ‘mostly tortured by Jews’ was ludicrous, there was some basis for the belief that Lithuanian Jews were predisposed to be sympathetic to the Soviets. Many Lithuanian Jews had been pleased when the Soviets arrived – they knew, for instance, that in the Soviet Union the Communists had removed a number of the restrictions that the Jews had endured during Tsarist times. But although some Lithuanian Jews did subsequently manage to gain positions in local government and the security forces, thousands of other Jews were deported to Siberia after they had refused to accept Soviet citizenship.9 So the Jewish experience in Lithuania at the hands of the Soviets was a decidedly mixed one.