The Holocaust: A New History

by Laurence Rees

  Still more evidence appears to come from an article in the Nazi newspaper Das Reich in November 1941, in which Goebbels publicly proclaimed that ‘The Jews wanted their war, and now they have it. But they also feel the effect of the prophecy made by the Führer in the German Reichstag on 30 January 1939, that if international financial Jewry should succeed in forcing nations once more into a world war, the result would not be the bolshevization of the earth, but the annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe … All Jews belong, due to their birth and race, to an international conspiracy against National Socialist Germany. They wish for our defeat and destruction and do everything in their power in order to help realize this. Every German soldier who is killed in this war is the responsibility of the Jews. They have him on their conscience, and that’s why they have to pay for it …’108

  However, despite all these indications, it does not necessarily follow that an absolute decision was taken in the autumn of 1941 to murder all of the Jews currently living in Nazi-occupied territory.109 A more nuanced interpretation of events in the autumn of 1941 is that Hitler authorized the sending of Jews to the east, but only as and when practicable, with priority always given to the needs of the Wehrmacht. Hitler had wanted the Jews deported from the Reich since the autumn of 1939 – it was just a question of deciding when the time was right. Now, sharing the anger of key lieutenants like Goebbels and Kaufmann at the fact that Jews remained in the Reich, and believing the war in the east was all but over, Hitler resolved to get ‘rid’ of the Jews once and for all. He was well aware that Soviet Jews were being murdered in the east, and so by sending other Jews into the killing zones he would have known what was likely to happen to them. But whether they were killed on arrival by shooting, or gassed, or starved in ghettos, or worked to death over a longer period – these were all details that could be worked out by others. What was crucial was that once expelled they should never come back. Thus while Hitler authorized the sending of the Jews east to die, he didn’t dictate a precise method of killing them or an exact timescale within which their disappearance had to occur.

  This was still, therefore, an important moment in the evolution of the Holocaust, but it does not amount to initiating the whole enterprise by one single, overarching decision. A large number of questions remained unresolved in the autumn of 1941. What about the Jews in occupied western Europe, were they also to be sent east to die? If so, when? And what about the rest of the Jews still in the Old Reich? Forty-two thousand Jews were deported from the Old Reich and the Protectorate between October and December 1941, but that still left the majority behind. What was the timetable for their destruction? Most tellingly of all, what about the nearly 3 million Jews of Poland, was this really the moment their fate was sealed? Why, if there was a decision at this point to kill all the Polish Jews, were the only two killing centres that were actually under construction in Poland on such a small scale? Could not both of them – Bełżec and Chełmno – also be explained as local initiatives created under Himmler’s aegis to deal with local ‘problems’? In short, doesn’t it appear that those on the ground were, to an extent, working out what to do without precise orders from above?

  Support for this interpretation can be found in Hitler’s own words that autumn. In mid-October 1941 he asked, ‘what would happen to me if I didn’t have around me men whom I completely trust, to do the work for which I can’t find time? Hard men, who act as energetically as I would do myself. For me the best man is the man who removes the most from my shoulders, the man who can take 95 per cent of the decisions in my place.’110 An example of how this attitude influenced actual events can be found in a note that Greiser wrote to Himmler in spring 1942 about the killing of patients with tuberculosis in the Warthegau. After Greiser’s authority to proceed with the killing had been questioned, he said to Himmler, ‘I personally don’t think we have to consult the Führer again in this matter, all the more since he told me at the last meeting concerning the Jews that I should act according to my best judgment.’111 All of which suggests that Hitler’s position that autumn about the deportation and subsequent treatment of the Jews may well have been similar to the one he took over plans for ‘Germanization’ where, as we have seen, he told his Gauleiters that he ‘would not ask questions about the methods they had used’ to make his vision a reality.112

  Similarly, at Auschwitz in the autumn of 1941, SS personnel were using their ‘best judgment’ to upgrade the improvised methods of killing they had used so far. As they discussed plans for a new crematorium to be built at the camp they decided on a series of small but significant changes that would allow the building to be turned into a killing factory. Some time between October 1941 and January 1942, the ventilation outlets in the smaller of the two mortuaries in the semi-basement of the building were set back into the concrete of the wall and the fans altered so that they could expel air quickly. The only plausible explanation for these changes in the plans was that this mortuary would now become a gas chamber, with the ducts recessed so that the dying could not wrench them from the wall, and the ventilation system altered so as to allow the poisonous gas to be expelled after the murders had taken place.113 But it is all but impossible to see how the creation of this one gas chamber at Auschwitz could have been part of a master plan already in existence to murder all the Jews of Europe. Instead, this was surely another example of a local initiative, motivated by the knowledge that gassing with Zyklon B was already taking place in the existing crematorium of the main camp. It would thus make sense, from the perspective of the SS at Auschwitz, to ensure that this new crematorium was also capable of performing the same function.

  As the SS at Auschwitz held these discussions, 750 miles away to the east the Germans were fighting arguably the most important series of battles of the whole war. These events on the battlefield – plus a dramatic decision by one of Hitler’s allies – were the background against which Nazi policy towards the Jews would harden still further.

  11. The Road to Wannsee

  (1941–1942)

  In October 1941 the Germans still appeared to be winning the war against the Soviet Union. During the giant encirclement action at Vyazma and Bryansk the Germans took 660,000 prisoners and it looked as if the road to Moscow was open. There was panic in the Soviet capital and Stalin’s train waited to take him further east to safety. ‘How are we going to defend Moscow?’ demanded Lavrenti Beria, head of the NKVD, the secret police, in the Kremlin on 19 October. ‘We have absolutely nothing at all. We have been overwhelmed …’1

  But the course of the war in the east was about to change drastically. Stalin decided to stay in Moscow and rally his troops – a decision which coincided with the winter rains that turned the landscape around the capital into a morass of mud. Suddenly it seemed unlikely that the Germans could defeat the Soviet Union before the onset of the worst of the Russian winter. This was potentially disastrous for them: German supply lines were stretched almost to the point of collapse and German soldiers possessed little winter clothing, as the war against the Soviet Union had been supposed to last only a few weeks.

  At this vital moment in the war Hitler returned from his field headquarters in East Prussia to Munich for celebrations to commemorate the anniversary of the Beer-Hall Putsch, and on 8 November 1941 he gave a speech at the Löwenbräukeller to the party faithful. He was not in the easiest of positions. Just a month before he had told his audience that the Red Army would ‘never rise again’, and yet it had appeared to do just that. Here he was, facing followers who wanted to bask in more good news, and he had no such news to offer. He could not announce that the war in the east had been won – he could not even say that Moscow had fallen, or was likely to fall in the next few days or weeks. In these difficult circumstances he needed someone to blame for what had happened. And for Hitler, of course, it was always easy to find a scapegoat – the Jews. In his speech he said that although the Jews had influence in France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Norway and Britain, the ‘biggest sla
ve’ of the Jews was the Soviet Union where ‘only stupid, forcibly proletarianized subhumans remain. Above them, there is a giant organization of Jewish commissars, who in reality are the slave-owners.’ He claimed that German forces in the east were fighting in pursuit of a noble goal: ‘in this struggle we finally want to free Europe of the danger posed by the east, and … at the same time, we [want to] prevent the east with its immense fertility, its immense richness in natural resources and ores, from being mobilized against Europe, and instead place it in Europe’s service.’ In pursuit of that objective, he said, in words tinged with menace, he would ‘make a distinction between the French and their Jews, between the Belgians and their Jews, between the Dutch and their Jews’.2

  On 15 November, the Germans continued their advance towards Moscow after the mud had frozen, but their energy was almost spent. In a final effort in early December, some forward German units managed to advance to less than 20 miles from Moscow. But this was as far as they would ever get. The whole course of the war in the east – and as a consequence the whole of the war in general – was about to change. Indeed there is a strong case for saying that the events of December 1941 were both the turning point of the Second World War and one of the most decisive periods in the evolution of the Holocaust.

  On 5 December the Red Army counter-attacked. Vasily Borisov, a soldier with one of the Siberian divisions now thrown fresh into the battle for Moscow, remembers that ‘When they [the Germans] saw Siberians fighting man-to-man they felt frightened. Siberians were very fit guys … They [the Germans] had been raised in a gentle way. They were not as strong as the Siberians. So they panicked more in this kind of fighting. Siberians don’t feel any panic. The Germans were weaker people. They didn’t like the cold much and they were physically weaker too.’3

  Just as Hitler was absorbing the news of the fight-back of the Red Army, he learnt of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on 7 December. Four days later, on 11 December, Germany declared war on America. At first sight this seems a puzzling decision. Why bring into the war a powerful new enemy several thousand miles away across the Atlantic? But Hitler felt he was merely recognizing the inevitable. Ever since the Atlantic conference in the summer of 1941, when President Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill had met off the coast of Newfoundland and signed the Atlantic Charter, America’s commitment to aiding the British war effort had been obvious. In his November speech, a month before declaring war on America, Hitler was already accusing Roosevelt of taking sides against Germany. He claimed that Roosevelt had been ‘responsible’ for Poland entering the war and that he had also been behind France’s decision to take part in the conflict.4

  Crucially, Hitler thought that Roosevelt was controlled by the Jews. In his speech to the Reichstag on 11 December 1941, he said that behind Roosevelt’s decision to support Britain and oppose Germany was ‘the Eternal Jew’. Surrounding Roosevelt, he asserted, were a ‘circle of Jews’ who were ‘driven by Old Testament greediness’. It was the ‘satanic perfidy’ of the Jews which was responsible for the current state of affairs.5 As Hitler saw it, the Jews had finally achieved their secret objective – they had created a worldwide conflict from which they hoped to benefit.

  On 12 December, the day after his Reichstag speech and Germany’s declaration of war on America, Hitler talked to fifty or so leading Nazis in the Reich Chancellery in Berlin. Goebbels recorded what he said in his diary: ‘As regards the Jewish question, the Führer is resolved to clear the air. He prophesied to the Jews that if they were to bring about another world war, they would experience their own extermination. This was not a hollow phrase. The world war is here, the destruction of the Jews must be the inevitable consequence. The question must be seen without sentimentality. We are not here to take pity on the Jews, but only to feel sympathy with our own German people. Since the German people has once again sacrificed around 160,000 fallen in the eastern campaign, those who initiated this bloody conflict will have to pay with their lives.’6 Goebbels could scarcely have been more explicit. Since ‘now’ there was a ‘world war’ – with the entry of America into the conflict – ‘the destruction of the Jews’ was ‘inevitable’. This was thus a pivotal moment. There was no ambiguity in Hitler’s words.

  Hans Frank, ruler of the General Government, was another of the senior Nazis who listened to Hitler’s talk in the Reich Chancellery. Four days later, on 16 December, he spoke to key figures in the General Government about the forthcoming fate of the Jews. ‘As for the Jews,’ he said, ‘I will be quite blunt with you, they will have to be finished off one way or the other. The Führer said once: if the united Jewry once again succeeds in unleashing a world war, then the blood sacrifices will not only be made by the peoples who have been hounded into this war. But the Jews in Europe will [also] meet their end … As an old National Socialist, I have to say that if the Jewish rabble were to survive the war in Europe, while we had sacrificed our best blood for the preservation of Europe, then this war would only represent a partial success. With respect to the Jews, therefore, I will operate on the assumption that they will disappear.’7

  As well as outlining the ideological reason why the Jews should ‘disappear’, Frank also mentioned a practical motive for their destruction. ‘The Jews’, he said, ‘are also tremendously harmful to us through the amount of food they gorge.’ Once again, the notion that the Jews were endangering the lives of ‘Aryan’ Germans simply by drawing breath played a part in explaining why they had to die. If, as a Nazi, you had any difficulty believing that the Jews had via some international conspiracy caused the war – an idea which might stretch the imagination of some, given the real circumstances behind the outbreak of hostilities – then there remained the justification that they were consuming food that otherwise would be eaten by non-Jewish Germans. It was a case, as Hitler always liked to put it, of either/or. If the Jews didn’t starve, then the Germans did.

  On 7 December 1941 – the day of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor and nine days before Frank gave this speech in Kraków – the first fixed-location killing facility built primarily in order to kill Jews began work in Poland. The site was at Chełmno, in the Warthegau, 160 miles to the north-west of Kraków. Greiser, ruler of the Warthegau, had moved ahead more quickly with plans to murder the Jews than his neighbouring Nazi baron Hans Frank. While Frank was just talking about ‘finishing off’ the Jews en masse, Greiser had actually made a start. A large part of Greiser’s motivation in establishing the murder facility at Chełmno was, as he saw it, practical necessity. As we have seen, the Łódź ghetto was enormously overcrowded, in large part because Himmler had decided in September to send tens of thousands of extra Jews from the Old Reich to the ghetto as well as thousands of Sinti and Roma. Chełmno was Greiser’s way out of the self-created Nazi ‘problem’ of ghetto overcrowding.

  Greiser realized that he already had at his disposal a murder machine that could swiftly be diverted to kill Jews – the gas van. On 7 December 1939, two years before the same machine was based at Chełmno, the gas van operated by Sonderkommando Lange had begun work murdering mentally disabled Poles at the Dziekanka Psychiatric Hospital in Gniezno in western Poland.8 Now with the approval of Himmler and Greiser, Lange and his gas van would be set to work killing Polish Jews. In the weeks before the facilities at Chełmno were made ready, Lange’s van had already started murdering Jews by taking them from the institutions in which they lived. At the end of October 1941, Lange’s van had driven up to a Jewish old people’s home near Kalisz, 60 miles west of Łódź, and removed the patients, fifty or so at a time, to be gassed.9 The following month the van was used to kill several hundred Jews from Bornhagen (Koźminek) labour camp near by.10

  From the Nazis’ perspective, extending the work of the gas van to fulfil the task Greiser now required created several challenges. The first was obvious – a question of capacity. Lange had only one gas van, a large truck with the words ‘Kaiser’s Kaffee-Geschäft’ (Kaiser’s Coffee Company) emblazoned on the s
ide. This was the same van that had driven around Poland for nearly two years killing the disabled. So, to increase the number of people Chełmno could murder, Lange was promised several more gas vans.11 They would finally arrive and be operational at the camp early in 1942. These vehicles, unlike the first van, which used bottled carbon monoxide to gas those trapped inside, murdered by directing the carbon monoxide from the exhaust gases of the engine into the rear compartment. This development in the method of murder used by the gas vans mimicked the evolution of the fixed gas chambers, which had also moved from bottled carbon monoxide to exhaust gas.

  But increasing the capacity to kill via the addition of more gas vans did not solve a more fundamental problem the Nazis faced if they wished to use this method of killing to murder the ‘unproductive’ Jews of Łódź. Lange’s original van had travelled around Poland, bringing the gas chamber to where the victims lived, but that was clearly impracticable if the intention now was to kill Jews from the Łódź ghetto. Problems of body disposal and secrecy would arise if the vans were to drive up to the ghetto every day and take Jews away. Hence the selection of Chełmno as a base for the gas vans. The village was in the countryside, far away from any major city and yet with good transport connections to the rest of Poland, and just 40 miles north-west of Łódź. A run-down mansion across from the village church could be converted as a base for the gas-van operation, and the bodies of the murdered Jews could be buried in a nearby forest. The central benefit of the gas vans in the killing process – the mobility of the murder machine – was thus negated. But in exchange the Nazis believed they had gained another, more important advantage – secrecy.

  After four to six weeks’ preparation, the killing facility at Chełmno was ready for work. The first Jews to be killed were from the surrounding villages, with around 700 Jews transported to Chełmno on 7 December 1941.12 They were imprisoned in the mansion overnight, having been told that they needed to be disinfected before travelling on to work in Germany.13 Starting the next day, they were forced in groups into the gas van, killed and their bodies buried in the forest a few miles away.