The Holocaust: A New History

by Laurence Rees

  One of the SS guards at Chełmno, Kurt Möbius, described in detail after the war how the murder factory worked: ‘The Jewish people undressed [in the mansion in the village] – they were not separated into sexes – under my supervision. They had already had to give up their valuables; these were collected in baskets by the Polish workers. There was a door in the passage which led to the cellar. On it was a sign: “To the bath” … From the door in the passage a staircase led down to the cellar where there was a passage which at first went straight ahead but then, after a few metres, was cut off by another passage at right angles to it. Here the people had to turn right and go up a ramp where the gas vans parked with their doors open. The ramp was tightly enclosed with a wooden fence up to the doors of the gas van. Usually, the Jewish people went quickly and obediently into the gas van trusting the promises which had been made to them [that they were about to be “disinfected”].’14

  Sometimes, admitted Möbius, the Jews did not go ‘quickly and obediently’ into the vans. Then Polish workers, forced to work for the Germans, whipped them up the ramp and inside. Zofia Szałek, an eleven-year-old girl living in Chełmno, remembers hearing the Jews as they were shoved into the vans. ‘How terribly they were screaming – it was impossible to bear it. Once they brought children and the children shouted. My mother heard it. She said the children were calling, “Mummy, save me!” ’15

  Several of the Poles who were forced to assist the Germans in the killing process at Chełmno appear to have taken advantage of their situation in a shocking way. According to Walter Burmeister, one of the drivers of the gas van, ‘It happened sometimes that a woman was selected from the Jews delivered for gassing … probably the Poles themselves would choose her. I think that the Poles asked her if she would agree to have sexual intercourse with them. In the basement [of the mansion] there was a room set aside for this purpose where the woman stayed one night or sometimes several days and was at the disposal of these Poles. Afterwards, she would be killed in the gas vans with the others.’16 Another source suggests that there was also at least one instance of members of the SS raping a Jewish woman at Chełmno before murdering her.17

  Chełmno had been created primarily to kill selected Jews from the Łódź ghetto. But the first transport sent to Chełmno from Łódź, on 2 January 1942, contained not Jews but those the Nazis called ‘Gypsies’. These Roma had been sent to Łódź in November 1941 from Austria and had been kept in particularly horrendous conditions. Isolated by barbed wire in a special area within the ghetto, nearly 5,000 Roma had been denied sufficient food and shelter. More than 600 contracted typhus. As a result, the Nazis wanted to destroy this Gypsy camp as a matter of urgency. By 9 January nearly 4,500 Roma from Łódź had been sent to Chełmno, murdered and buried in the forest.18

  The first Jews from Łódź arrived at Chełmno on 16 January 1942. They had been selected from within the ghetto by the Jewish administration run by Mordechai Chaim Rumkowski. In a speech he gave on 20 December 1941, Rumkowski announced that ‘a special commission comprised of my most trustworthy co-workers determined the list of candidates for dispatch’19 and that priority had been given to deporting ‘undesirable elements’ who lived within the ghetto. While at this stage no one could be certain that those sent from the ghetto would be murdered, deportation was still a fate that most of the Łódź Jews feared. Better the known horror of the ghetto than the unknown terror that awaited them in German hands outside.

  At Chełmno, the gas vans did not offer a quick death. It could take many minutes before those trapped inside were finally asphyxiated, and villagers sometimes heard screams from the vans as they passed by. Once the vans reached the forest and the doors were opened, a team of Jews – made to work for the Germans or face immediate execution – had to disentangle the bodies before throwing them into mass graves. One of the Germans who supervised the Waldkommando (forest commando) was billeted in Zofia Szałek’s house, and she remembers how his shoes stank ‘terribly’20 of decomposing bodies.

  Estimates of how many died at Chełmno vary between 150,000 and 300,000 – huge numbers that represent a terrible crime, yet only a fraction of the 3 million Jews in Poland. If the Nazis really intended to kill not just the Jews of Poland but the Jews of Europe as well, they couldn’t rely solely on local initiatives like Chełmno – they needed a major coordinated action emanating from the highest reaches of the state. And on 20 January 1942, four days after the first Jews from the Łódź ghetto had arrived at Chełmno, a meeting was held at Wannsee on the outskirts of Berlin that many think was convened for just such a purpose.

  It is not hard to understand why the Wannsee conference is, in popular culture, considered the most important single meeting of the Holocaust – indeed, the moment at which the crime was finally decided upon. The evolution of the Holocaust is complex and occasionally counter-intuitive. How much simpler it would be if there was one key moment at which everything was resolved – if not a decision by Hitler in the autumn of 1941, then a meeting by a lake outside Berlin in January 1942. But it is a mistake to think that history happened that way. Wannsee was no more than a staging post along a journey.

  Reinhard Heydrich wrote to state secretaries, selected SS officers and other relevant functionaries and asked them to attend a conference at 56–58 Am Grossen Wannsee outside Berlin. He enclosed with his invitation a copy of Göring’s 31 July 1941 letter authorizing him to organize a Final Solution to the ‘Jewish question’. So none of the fifteen people who attended could have been in any doubt about the purpose of the gathering or Heydrich’s right to convene it. The SS officers who were invited ranged from the very senior – SS Gruppenführer (Major General) Heinrich Müller, head of the Gestapo, SS Gruppenführer (Major General) Otto Hofmann, head of the SS Race and Settlement Office, and Heydrich, who was an SS Obergruppenführer (Lieutenant General) as well as head of the Reich Security Main Office – to the relatively junior – SS Obersturmbannführer (Lieutenant Colonel) Adolf Eichmann, the SD’s so-called Jewish ‘expert’, and SS Sturmbannführer (Major) Dr Rudolf Lange. The latter was asked because of his direct, personal experience of murdering Jews in Latvia with Einsatzgruppe A. Other attendees included Martin Luther, under-secretary at the Foreign Ministry, Dr Roland Freisler of the Reich Ministry of Justice, and Hans Frank’s own state secretary from the General Government, Dr Josef Bühler. The original date for the meeting was 9 December 1941, but this was later postponed to 20 January 1942.

  The decisions taken at Wannsee had to be acted on by different departments within the government of the Reich, and so it was necessary for them to be recorded. Oral commands alone would never have sufficed. A copy of the minutes, taken by Adolf Eichmann, survived the war, and though they were written in deliberately euphemistic language, they nonetheless offer an insight into the thinking of senior figures involved in the implementation of the Final Solution.

  Heydrich announced that with Hitler’s ‘permission’ there was now the possibility of ‘evacuating’ the Jews ‘to the East’ rather than forcing their ‘emigration’.21 This would not have been new information to those present in the room. Thousands of Jews from the Old Reich had already been deported. What was new was the scale of the ‘evacuation’ that Heydrich now outlined. He said that more than 11 million Jews within Europe were potentially subject to the Final Solution including Jews in countries that the Nazis did not even control, like Spain and Britain (which was referred to as ‘England’). He outlined how the Nazis now intended to send all of these Jews – or as many as they could get their hands on – to the east to work in ‘large labour gangs’. In the course of this work, a ‘large number’ of the Jews would, said Heydrich, ‘drop out’ through ‘natural wastage’. He singled out for special mention the small number of Jews who would survive this ‘natural selection’, because they would have proved to be the ‘fittest’ and could form a ‘germ cell’ from which the Jewish race could ‘regenerate itself’. Consequently, these Jews would have to be ‘dealt with accordin
gly’ – by which he could only have meant they should be murdered.

  Heydrich was therefore announcing not a fresh strategy, but the extension of an existing one. It was the evolution of a policy that had begun with the desire to see Jews expelled from the Reich to some foreign country, had then morphed into a plan to deport the Jews to the extremity of Nazi-controlled territory once the war was over, and had now become a scheme to work the Jews to death in the Nazi east while the war was still being fought. Heydrich admitted that the ‘timing’ of each ‘large-scale evacuation’ would depend on how the war was going. There was no immediate schedule put in place to accomplish this vast task. Indeed, the Nazis would only gradually over the next six months create the killing capacity necessary to murder large numbers of Jews.

  Josef Bühler, the representative of Hans Frank, asked if the Final Solution could begin in the General Government. The Jews to be killed were already there, he said, so any ‘transport problem’ was not serious. After Bühler’s request, the meeting discussed ‘various’ possible ‘solutions’ to implement the Final Solution – an obvious euphemism for a variety of potential ways to murder the Jews. Much of the rest of the meeting was taken up with an inconclusive discussion about definitions. In particular, just what should be done with those who were considered Mischlinge – part-Jews? Heydrich also announced that a small number of Jews – such as those with war decorations – might be transported to a special ‘ghetto’ at Theresienstadt, north of Prague, rather than directly to the east. This remark confirmed, despite the euphemistic nature of the minutes, that almost all of the Jews were to be sent to a terrible fate.

  It is worth noting what was not said at the Wannsee conference. Heydrich did not say that the Jews would be taken to camps in Poland and ‘dealt with accordingly’ there. He was explicit that Jews would be sent east in order to work in labour gangs. If he had wanted to say that the Jews were to be killed in Nazi-occupied Poland then the minutes could certainly have euphemistically reflected that reality. But they didn’t. Heydrich did mention that the Jews were to be ‘initially’ sent to ‘transit ghettos’ before they were transported ‘further east’.22 So it is not hard to imagine that, in the months after Wannsee, Poland became out of practical necessity the furthest east the Jews were ever sent, and that consequently they came to be murdered on Polish soil. However, at the moment he chaired the Wannsee conference, Heydrich still appears to have believed that the Jews would eventually be deported into the occupied Soviet Union.

  The Wannsee conference was also an opportunity for the SS to assert a pre-eminent role in the Final Solution. Heydrich, for instance, would have been pleased that Josef Bühler, on behalf of Hans Frank, appeared to support the leading role that the SS would play in this vast new operation. Bühler had been a late addition to the list of those invited, after the SS representative in the General Government had warned Himmler that Hans Frank might seek to control Jewish policy in his area.23 Heydrich and Himmler would not have wanted a repeat of the conflict between Frank and the SS at the time of the deportations of Poles into the General Government. It was also important for Heydrich and Himmler to ensure that the Foreign Office – represented at the meeting by the under-secretary Martin Luther – also accepted the leading position of the SS in the Final Solution. Heydrich and Himmler would have remembered that the Foreign Office had sought at one stage in the summer of 1940 to take a proactive role on the Madagascar plan. Thus gathering all the interested parties together at Wannsee was an obvious attempt by Heydrich to clear a way through the bureaucratic jungle ahead.

  According to Eichmann, Heydrich was pleased with the way the meeting had gone: ‘After the conference … Heydrich, Müller [the head of the Gestapo] and little me sat cosily around a fireplace. I saw for the first time Heydrich smoking a cigar or cigarette, something I never saw; and he drank cognac, which I hadn’t seen for ages. Normally he didn’t drink alcohol.’24

  No wonder Heydrich was pleased. No one had raised any objection to the dominance of the SS. It appeared that there would be no infighting within the Nazi leadership over this matter of crucial policy. Nor had anyone protested at the principle of deporting the Jews of Europe to the east to be worked to death. Not that Heydrich would have expected any opposition. After all, he would have reasoned, Soviet Jews had been shot on the eastern front since June, and German and Austrian Jews had been dying in the ghettos of Poland and elsewhere since October. What remained were merely practical questions to do with the expansion of the deportations to western Europe and an intensification of the amount of killing capacity required to eliminate even more Jews than before.

  Far from being the single most significant meeting in the history of the Holocaust, the Wannsee conference was a forum for second-level functionaries to discuss ways of implementing their master’s wishes. None of the key players attended the meeting. Not Himmler, not Frank, not Goebbels – certainly not Hitler himself. Vital decisions about the fate of the Jews had been taken in the weeks and months before the Wannsee conference. Even then, there had not been one single decision – one day on which Hitler announced ‘all the Jews must die, in this way and within this timescale’ – but a series of decisions that built, one upon the other, until those around the table at Wannsee would have felt that the extermination of the Jews was inevitable. They still did not know for sure how this end could be achieved, or how long it would take. There remained, for instance, the question of the destruction of the 3 million Polish Jews – a final timetable for their murder, as we shall see, was not to be announced for many months.

  There is another aspect of this history that the conference illustrates. The word ‘Holocaust’ leads us to think that there was one single plan to murder the Jews. But that was not how the Nazis looked at this issue at Wannsee. From their perspective, there were a number of different ‘solutions’ to their ‘Jewish problem’. There was one overall vision, that is true, one that emanated from Hitler – the desire to eliminate the Jews. But how that task was achieved could take many forms. At Wannsee, Heydrich talked first of one ‘solution’ – the removal of the Jews of Europe to the wastes of the Soviet Union where they would build roads in terrible conditions and perish eventually over a period of time. This idea was not so very far from the Madagascar plan – send the Jews away and let them wither and die over years if necessary. Then there was another sort of ‘solution’, also discussed at Wannsee, which was the more immediate problem, for the Nazis, of the enormous number of Jews in the General Government. They would potentially be murdered over a shorter timescale and in a different way – though that issue was not finally resolved at the meeting. All this was set against the background of another ‘solution’, one that already existed – the murder by shooting of the Jews in the Soviet Union. Today, all of these separate Nazi killing actions have been given the collective name ‘Holocaust’. But they were not treated as one entity at the time. They were all evolving at different speeds.

  And yet – even knowing all this – there is still something about the Wannsee conference that gives it an immense emotional significance. Surely it is this. Those who attended were not mad. They were not deranged. They were all successful men, holding down tough and difficult jobs. Most were highly educated – of the fifteen who sat round the table at Wannsee, eight held academic doctorates. They discussed the extermination of the Jews in elegant and convivial surroundings. The invitation that Heydrich sent out for the meeting had mentioned that lunch would be provided and during the discussions cognac was served. The building they sat in was a stylish villa, with a terrace overlooking the lake – one of the most beautiful and popular recreation spots for Berliners.

  It’s not just the obvious contrast between the circumstances of these men at Wannsee and the horror experienced by Jews who were simultaneously living and dying in the Łódź ghetto. It’s not only that as these men sat in luxurious surroundings and sipped their brandy their victims were choking to death in the back of a gas van at Chełmno. It’s tha
t this meeting seems to represent what sophisticated, elegant and knowing human beings are capable of. Not many of them, perhaps, could kill a Jew personally – Eichmann claimed he had a ‘sensitive nature’ and was ‘revolted’ at the sight of blood25 – but they could enthusiastically endorse a policy to remove 11 million people from this world. If human beings can do this, what else can they do?

  Finally, it is important to understand the Wannsee conference in the context of the war. As Heydrich and his colleagues met on the outskirts of Berlin, the German Army was struggling to survive west of Moscow. Deprived of warm clothes and equipment capable of working properly in freezing temperatures, and fighting fresh troops from Siberia, the German soldiers only narrowly prevented a breakthrough by the Red Army. The myth of the invincibility of the Wehrmacht had been destroyed.

  ‘The German Army near Moscow was a very miserable sight,’ says Fyodor Sverdlov, a company commander fighting the Wehrmacht on the eastern front that winter. ‘I remember very well the Germans in July 1941. They were confident, strong, tall guys. They marched ahead with their sleeves rolled up and carrying their machine guns. But later on they became miserable, crooked, snotty guys wrapped in woollen kerchiefs stolen from old women in villages … Of course, they were still firing and defending themselves, but they weren’t the Germans we knew earlier in 1941.’26

  Against this background, it might seem surprising that the Nazi leadership spent time planning the deportation of millions of Jews. Would it not have made more sense for them to devote all their time to winning the war? Why tie up any resources in an ambitious plan for the mass deportation of civilians at the same moment that the German Army was fighting to avoid catastrophe?