However, in the late summer and early autumn of 1941 there were discussions about a change in the timetable of the Final Solution. A number of Hitler’s most loyal followers wanted the Jews deported east not after the war was over but immediately. When Goebbels met Hitler on 19 August he asked for the Jews of Berlin to be removed from the German capital. Goebbels felt it unconscionable that 70,000 Jews were still able to live in the city while German soldiers were fighting and dying on the eastern front. Hitler did not agree to deport the Berlin Jews at once, but he did accept one of Goebbels’ proposals – that German Jews should be marked. Jews in Poland had been forced to wear identification badges for some time, and now it was the turn of German Jews to be subjected to this humiliation.
From 1 September 1941, Jews over the age of six in Germany, Austria and the other incorporated territories had to wear a yellow badge in the shape of the Star of David on their clothing. The effect of this measure was not only to identify Jews and make them more liable to harassment, but to make the persecution of the Jews obvious to every non-Jewish German. Although some Germans abused the now easily identifiable Jews in the streets, there were others who were uneasy at this new development. Uwe Storjohann, for example, remembers that his mother – who, he says, ‘probably welcomed’ the idea of the deportation of the Jews – nonetheless objected to their ‘stigmatization’. Shortly after the Jews of Hamburg had been compelled to wear the yellow badge, Uwe was walking with his mother through a Jewish area of the city when they saw ‘an elderly Jew coming along wearing a very torn suit, and carrying a very old suitcase, and he carried it in such a way that his Star of David was covered up. And then he must have been taken by a human need, and he was peering around furtively, thinking whether he could enter a public toilet [which was marked “forbidden to Jews”]. Then he went in there. And my mother stopped, and I thought, why’s she stopping? And she said, “Well, have you seen him? That was a Jew, wasn’t it? He went in there, and he had his briefcase with the Jewish star hidden underneath it.” She waited until he came out. And when he saw my mother, he suddenly had a very anxious expression. I’ll never forget this panic, anxiety. He dropped his briefcase, and there you could see the Star of David. And I knew how my mother thought about these things, and I was wondering what would happen next, what she would do. And the Jew too, of course, [was thinking] if she goes to the police now, I’m done for. My mother goes towards him, she points to the Star of David, and says, “We didn’t want that.” And I said to myself, well, you never expected that. So, at that moment, she must have felt sorry for him. I’m sure she imagined that you exclude Jews from business life and let them do inferior jobs, or perhaps resettle them into towns where they can then live nicely among themselves, or something like that, or in their own state, such as Israel today … But this stigmatization, she thought that was terrible. I became very thoughtful, and thought, well, maybe she isn’t quite as keenly anti-Semitic as I thought she was. But it was also typical of a large part of the population, who said, “Well, no, that is going too far, we don’t like that.” But they wouldn’t have done anything. Nothing. They turned their ears and eyes away …’84
Erna Krantz, a Nazi supporter who lived in Munich, felt similar emotions after the Jews were forced to wear the Star of David: ‘In the street parallel to us we had a Baroness Brancka, who was married to a Baron, but was a Jewish shopkeeper’s daughter from Hamburg … and she had to wear the Jewish star. I was sorry about that, it was so terrible, because this woman was such a nice woman, that’s what you felt. But really, just like today, when you walk away from people in need, you can’t help everywhere, it was the same then.’85
As we have seen, Goebbels had asked for the Jews not just to be marked, but to be deported as well. And soon other leading Nazis also said they wanted the Jews to be sent away. On 15 September 1941, the Gauleiter of Hamburg, Karl Kaufmann, wrote to Hitler asking if the Jews of the city could be deported. Kaufmann wanted their property to house non-Jewish Germans who had suffered in the recent air attacks. Hitler now decided to reverse his previous policy and authorize the deportation of Jews from within the Reich immediately, rather than after the war was over. Why did he change his mind at this moment, when he had said to Goebbels just a few weeks before that the Jews could not be sent east? Nobody knows for certain. One possible explanation is that Hitler acted out of revenge because of Stalin’s decision in August to deport several hundred thousand ethnic Germans living in the Volga region to the wastes of Siberia and Kazakhstan. Whether or not this specific act by Stalin was the trigger for Hitler’s action, the overall context of the war against the Soviet Union would surely have played a part in his decision.
The war still appeared to be going well for the Germans. Though the soldiers of the Wehrmacht had not – as planned – managed to defeat the Red Army in a matter of weeks, they were in the process of winning the largest battle of encirclement in history as they fought in the fields around Kiev, capital of Ukraine. On 19 September 1941, the city fell to German forces and 600,000 Soviet soldiers were captured. ‘The German soldier has again proved that he is the best soldier in the world,’ said Hitler, speaking to his close associates as he basked in triumph. ‘The operation now in progress, an encirclement with a radius of more than a thousand kilometres, has been regarded by many as impracticable. I had to throw all my authority into the scales to force it through.’ What this success demonstrated, he said, was that ‘The Slavs are a mass of born slaves in need of a master.’ Moreover, it was ‘better not to teach them to read’. Hitler didn’t believe that large numbers of German troops would be needed to occupy and administer this new territory, as the ‘Slavs’ were so clearly inferior. ‘The Russian space is our India,’ he said. ‘Like the English, we shall rule this empire with a handful of men.’86
Hitler claimed just a few weeks later, in a speech on 3 October in Berlin, that the Red Army was ‘broken’ and ‘will never rise again’.87 This belief that the war was all but won might well have played a part in his decision to bring forward the timetable for the deportation of the Jews. Instead of sending the Jews east once the war against the Soviet Union was over, why not deport them now, since Stalin was effectively vanquished? He knew that his ally, Marshal Antonescu of Romania, had been aggressively pursuing a policy of murdering Jews in the east. The centre of the killing was a region beyond the Dniester river, subsequently known as Transnistria. By September, with Transnistria occupied by Romania as an eastern province, Antonescu prepared to expel thousands of Jews from Bukovina and Bessarabia into camps in this new territory. The editor of the Romanian newspaper Porunca Vremii wrote in the summer of 1941, ‘The die has been cast … The liquidation of the Jews in Romania has entered the final, decisive phase … To the joy of our emancipation must be added the pride of [pioneering] the solution to the Jewish problem in Europe. Judging by the satisfaction with which the German press is reporting the words and decisions of Marshal Antonescu, we understand … that present-day Romania is prefiguring the decisions to be made by the Europe of tomorrow.’88
Not surprisingly, Hitler approved of Marshal Antonescu’s actions. ‘As far as the Jewish problem is concerned,’ he said to Goebbels at the end of August 1941, ‘it may be stated with certainty that a man like Antonescu is pursuing much more radical policies in this area than we have so far.’89 Hitler was still praising Antonescu six weeks later in October, ‘Apart from the Duce [Mussolini],’ he said, ‘amongst our Allies Antonescu is the man who makes the strongest impression. He’s a man on a big scale, who never lets anything throw him out of his stride …’ Moreover, the ‘first thing’ that Antonescu had to do in order to create a strong Romania, Hitler believed, was to ‘get rid of the Jew’.90
Hitler now resolved to ‘get rid’ of the Jews in the Old Reich. But while it was easy to decide to deport them, one vital practical question still remained. Where should they go? Himmler, once again, facilitated a solution. He wrote on 18 September 1941 to Arthur Greiser of the Warthegau, i
nforming him that the Führer had decided to empty the ‘Old Reich and the Protectorate’ of Jews. As a result, Himmler wanted to send 60,000 Jews to the Łódź ghetto, within Greiser’s Warthegau, where they would be accommodated before being sent to an unspecified destination ‘further east’ the following spring.91 After protests from Nazi officials in the Warthegau about the inability of the Łódź ghetto to take any more Jews, Himmler reduced the number to 20,000.
In October 1941 the first Jews left Hamburg for Poland. Lucille Eichengreen, one of the Jews sent to Łódź from Hamburg, remembers that as they were marched to the station to begin their journey to Poland a few Germans shouted anti-Semitic comments at them, but most of the non-Jewish population of the city reacted without emotion.92 Elsewhere, some Jews said that their non-Jewish neighbours expressed sympathy for them, in Frankfurt bringing them ‘cookies and other food’ and in Vienna crying ‘openly’ as they were sent away.93
The Jews from western Europe were unprepared for what awaited them in Łódź. One Polish Jew, already in the ghetto, wrote of a group of Czech deportees who arrived in October 1941: ‘it is said that they asked if it would be possible to get two-room apartments with running water.’94 But that naivety did not last long, and the western Jews soon discovered the appalling reality of life and death in the ghetto. Most had no friends among the Polish Jews, no connections that would help them get a job or a room in which to live. Many were crammed together in ghetto schools where they had nothing to do, and almost nothing to eat. ‘One’s belly becomes loose, gradually sinks in,’ wrote Oskar Rosenfeld, who was deported from Prague to Łódź. ‘Hesitantly, almost fearfully, one runs one’s hand over the restless body, bumps into bones, ribs, runs over one’s legs and finds oneself, feels suddenly that one was quite recently fatter, fleshier – and is amazed at how quickly the body deteriorates … One word, one concept, one symbol confronts everybody: bread! For bread one would be a hypocrite, a fanatic, a wretch. Give me bread and you are my friend.’95
In many cases the shock of the transition proved too much for these Jews from the west to endure. ‘They were definitely very depressed,’ says Jacob Zylberstein, a Polish Jew already in the ghetto. ‘I think because normally they [Jews from the Reich] look down on the Polish Jews – we’ve been definitely a different category than them. And all of a sudden it hit them that they’ve come to the same level or maybe lower than us because they cannot live in the conditions we did.’96 As a consequence, the Jews from the Reich and the Protectorate suffered a much higher mortality rate than the Polish Jews already living in the ghetto.97
Jews were not just sent to the Łódź ghetto. A number of transports journeyed further east into the killing zones of the Einsatzgruppen in the occupied Soviet Union. Some of these Jews were housed in camps, where many perished in the cold. Others were murdered shortly after they arrived. In late November 1941, for instance, five trains left for Lithuania from Germany and Austria. All of these Jews were murdered by killing squads after they had disembarked in Kaunas. Elsewhere, Wilhelm Kube, Nazi Commissar for Belarus, questioned in December whether Jews from ‘our own cultural sphere’ should be treated the same way as the ‘native brutish hordes’98 of the east. Just over two weeks before, at the end of November, Himmler had gone so far as to try and prevent the murder – almost certainly temporarily – of one trainload of German Jews sent to Riga while matters were clarified, but his communication arrived too late. The Jews had already been killed.99 All of which demonstrated that there was an element of uncertainty about the intended immediate fate of the Jews from the Old Reich.
At the same time as these Jews from western Europe were being murdered in the occupied Soviet Union, preparations were under way for two killing installations in Poland. The first, at Chełmno, 40 miles north-west of Łódź, was primarily created in order to murder Jews from the Łódź ghetto selected as unfit to work. From the perspective of Arthur Greiser, ruler of the Warthegau, the immediate need for such a murder facility was obvious. He needed a way of easing the intense overcrowding in the Łódź ghetto, a situation that had worsened since the arrival of the Jews from the west. But even as far back as July 1941, as we have seen, Rolf-Heinz Höppner, the SS head of the Emigration Central Office in Posen in the Warthegau, had written that the question of the fate of the Jews in the Gau had been the subject of much ‘discussion’. He had asked whether – since there was a danger that all of the Jews could not be fed that winter – it might not be more ‘humane’ to ‘finish off’ Jews who could not work ‘through some fast-acting means’.100
Just such a ‘fast-acting means’ – in the form of a gas van – was already operating in the Warthegau, touring around hospitals and murdering the disabled. Now, in the autumn of 1941, a plan was put in place to use gas vans to kill Jews from Łódź. Herbert Lange, who commanded the unit responsible for killing the disabled, searched for a suitable location to base the vans. His driver, Walter Burmeister, later confirmed that Lange told him that autumn that ‘we’ve got a tough but important job to do.’101 The village of Chełmno was eventually chosen as the location for the vans, with the Jews subsequently buried in a forest near by.
The second killing installation under construction in Poland during November 1941 was at the village of Bełżec, 75 miles south-east of Lublin in the General Government. Before the invasion of the Soviet Union, the Germans had established a labour camp at Bełżec in order to house Jews who were working on border fortifications between the German and Soviet zones of Poland, but that camp had closed by the end of 1940. This new camp at Bełżec would become the first static, as opposed to mobile, killing facility, purpose-built to murder Jews. Bełżec’s location was advantageous to the Nazis in a number of ways. It was relatively remote, away from major centres of population, yet it was next to the main railway line and within easy reach of three cities – Lublin, Kraków and Lwów – each of which contained a large number of Jews.
As well as these two installations under construction in Poland, there is also evidence that discussions were held at the same time about the possibility of building other fixed killing factories in Riga and Mogilev in the occupied Soviet Union.102 Himmler visited Mogilev in Belarus in October, and the following month a large order was placed with Topf and Söhne to construct a massive cremation installation at Mogilev with thirty-two incinerator chambers.103 It is possible that this huge crematorium – which was never ultimately built – would have been the centrepiece of a camp which combined the functions of a murder facility with a more conventional concentration camp.104 Clearly a step change in the way the Nazis were approaching the ‘Jewish question’ was under way.
But does all this mean that Hitler made a decision in autumn 1941 to exterminate the Jews? Is this when the Holocaust as we know it began? A number of new initiatives certainly came together at this time, including not only the decision to deport Jews from the Old Reich and Protectorate to the east, and the construction of killing installations at Chełmno and Bełżec in Poland, but also Hitler’s own comments in private that October about the Jews. Ominously, he quoted from the ‘extermination’ speech he had given in January 1939. ‘From the rostrum of the Reichstag,’ he said on 25 October 1941, ‘I prophesied to Jewry that, in the event of war’s proving inevitable, the Jew would disappear from Europe. That race of criminals has on its conscience the two million dead of the First World War, and now already hundreds of thousands more … It’s not a bad idea, by the way, that public rumour attributes to us a plan to exterminate the Jews.’105
In addition, according to the post-war testimony of Adolf Eichmann, Heydrich told him in the autumn of 1941, ‘The Führer has ordered the physical destruction of the Jews.’106 And Kurt Möbius, one of the SS guards who worked at Chełmno in the early days of the camp, said under interrogation after Germany’s defeat, ‘We were told by Captain Lange that the order for the extermination of the Jews came from Hitler and Himmler. And as police officers we were drilled to regard any order from the government as
lawful and correct … At the time I believed the Jews were not innocent but guilty. The propaganda had drummed it into us again and again that all Jews are criminals and sub-humans who were the cause of Germany’s decline after the First World War.’107
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