Fateful Choices: Ten Decisions That Changed the World, 1940-1941
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Certainly by January 1941, Himmler and Heydrich knew what was in Hitler’s mind. On 21 January, Theo Dannecker, one of Eichmann’s closest colleagues, noted: ‘In accordance with the will of the Führer, the Jewish question within the part of Europe ruled or controlled by Germany is to be subjected after the war to a final solution.’ Through Himmler and Göring,
Hitler had commissioned Heydrich with submitting ‘a final solution project’. Profiting from his experience, Heydrich had been able to put together the proposal in its essentials very quickly, and it was already in the hands of Hitler and Göring. To implement it, however, would require a huge amount of work and detailed planning of both the wholesale deportations needed and also of the ‘settlement action in a territory yet to be determined’.56
The phrase had been first used in notes prepared by Eichmann for a speech on ‘settlement’ to be made by Himmler on 10 December 1940 to party leaders gathered in Berlin. Eichmann had estimated then that the deportations would encompass 5.8 million Jews–1.8 million more than had been foreseen in the intended deportations to Madagascar, since the figure now covered Jews not just in territories under direct German rule, but within the ‘European economic sphere of the German people’. The total comprised the number of Jews in continental Europe west of the German-Soviet demarcation line running through Poland.57
Himmler had explicitly referred in his speech to the ‘emigration of Jews’ from the General Government–an area previously designated to take in Jews (as well as Poles)–in order to make room for Polish workers.58 But where were the two million Jews in the General Government to be sent to? Madagascar, it was obvious, was no longer a possibility. But only a few days later Hitler would give the military directive for an attack the following spring on the Soviet Union. Himmler would certainly have known what was coming. The ‘territory yet to be determined’ could only mean some still undesignated region of the vast area expected within the coming year to fall under German control.
Since maximum secrecy surrounded the attack on the Soviet Union, no specification of the intended territory for this ‘final solution’ could be mentioned outside the circle of initiates. There was, therefore, still official talk of the General Government as the location. But those ‘in the know’ were aware that this was now mere camouflage. Eichmann acknowledged in March that the General Government was in no position to take in any more Jews.59 When Göring and Heydrich spoke of the latter’s remit having to accommodate the responsibilities of Alfred Rosenberg, earmarked to take over a Ministry for the Eastern Territories, set up to oversee the conquered Soviet lands, it was plain that the territory envisaged for the ‘final solution’, though not specified, lay farther east than the General Government.60
Hitler promised Hans Frank in March, in fact, that his province would be the first to be made free of Jews.61 Other provincial Nazi leaders, sensing what was afoot, now joined in the pressure to have their areas cleared of Jews. Goebbels gleaned misleading information that Vienna would soon be ‘free of Jews’, and that Berlin’s turn was also imminent. ‘Later,’ Goebbels noted, ‘the Jews will have to get out of Europe altogether.’62
Meanwhile, plans had to be made not only for the ‘final solution’ of the pan-European ‘Jewish Question’, but for the treatment of the Soviet Jews in the wake of the forthcoming invasion. By spring, such considerations were enmeshed in the wider designs for a war which, Hitler left none of his military leaders in any doubt, would be a far cry from what had taken place in western Europe.63 This, he declared categorically, would be a ‘war of annihilation’. The ‘Jewish-Bolshevik intelligentsia’ was to be ‘eliminated’.64 The army leadership collaborated closely with Himmler and Heydrich on methods of operation. Orders were worked out by army leaders to liquidate forthwith all political commissars who were to be captured. Göring asked Heydrich to prepare a brief guide for the army about the Soviet secret police, political commissars and Jews ‘so that they would know in practice whom they had to put up against the wall’.65 By May, Heydrich was assembling four Einsatzgruppen, each of between 600 and 1,000 men drawn mainly from the Security Police and SD, which would enter the Soviet Union in the rear of the army to deal with all ‘subversive elements’. In his briefings, Heydrich was both expansive and imprecise in designating the target groups. Jews, Gypsies, saboteurs and all Communist functionaries were a danger. He emphasized that Jewry was at the root of Bolshevism and, in accordance with the Führer’s aims, had to be eradicated.66
By the time German troops crossed the Soviet frontiers on 22 June, then, Hitler’s regime had already moved a long way in a genocidal direction. The momentum had built up sharply during a period of nearly two years since Poland had been crushed. The numbers of Jews who had fallen under Nazi rule with the conquest of Poland, the barbarous treatment of the subjugated country–in which Jews were its lowest, most despised stratum–and the impossibility of finding a solution to an invented problem, however grandiose the vistas and however brutal the methods, all forced the ever more frantic search for a way out of the impasse. The favourable fortunes of war had momentarily offered the fantasy of a rapid European-wide remedy overseas, in Madagascar. Britain’s obstinacy in insisting on fighting on swiftly ruled out that option. But the decision in late 1940 to smash the Soviet Union the following year opened a new possibility, and drove the radicalization still further. Now, the alluring prospect of a final territorial solution, where the Jews of Europe would die out in the arctic wastes of the Soviet Union, interlocked with plans for an annihilatory war in which Jews, seen as the lifeblood of Bolshevism, lay in the path of the German army and were regarded as open season for the Security Police Einsatzgruppen in the rear. The trajectory was genocidal. But the steps into all-out genocide, even in the Soviet Union, had not yet been taken.
Hitler’s own role in the development since September 1939 had been decisive and yet shadowy. He had at the outset laid down the ground rules for the barbarity in Poland. Of this there is no doubt.67 Had he not done so, there would surely still have been atrocities. There was too much pent-up anti-Polish as well as anti-Jewish feeling to have prevented serious outbursts of violence against the civilian population. But if Hitler had issued explicit instructions to prevent and outlaw such actions, in all probability nothing remotely on the scale of the programmed inhumanity that occurred would have taken place.
As it was, having unleashed the ruthless programme of ‘ethnic cleansing’, Hitler could leave the planning and orchestration to Himmler and Heydrich. He also gave an open licence to his provincial chieftains, the Gauleiter, in the east, saying that he would not ask about the methods they used to Germanize their regions, and that he did not care about legal niceties.68 But where key policy-decisions were necessary, resort had to be made to Hitler.
He alone could decide about the deportation of Reich Jews, for which some of his underlings were pressing. The mounting deportation problems within occupied Poland were also brought to his attention–not that he could solve them–and he was called upon on more than one occasion to placate Hans Frank about the absorption of Jews into the General Government. He certainly approved the lurch into the ill-conceived ‘Madagascar Project’. And, as we noted, Heydrich’s commission to work out a proposal to dispatch the Jews of Europe to an unspecified destination in the east, a territorial ‘final solution’, derived from Hitler. Himmler, Heydrich and Göring–nominally in charge of anti-Jewish policy since Reichskristallnacht, and up to his neck in planning for the economic exploitation of the east–were all extremely powerful figures. But their power emanated from Hitler. Without his mandate, their writ did not run. Behind the increasingly radical search for a solution to the ‘Jewish Question’ lay ultimately, therefore, the ideological imperative embodied by Hitler and by now permeating the entire regime: that another war would somehow bring about the destruction of the Jews.
On 30 January 1941, precisely as planning for a ‘final solution’ moved into a new gear with the possibility of deporting Europe’s
Jews to a dreadful, if unspecified, fate in the Soviet Union, Hitler for the first time returned, in his speech to the Reichstag commemorating the eighth anniversary of his ‘seizure of power’, to his ‘prophecy’ of January 1939.69 The timing was no accident. Hitler was obliquely signifying what was in his own mind: that the hour of the showdown with the Jews was approaching.
IV
With the crossing of the Soviet frontiers in the early hours of 22 June 1941, the ‘war of annihilation’ that Hitler had promised began. Nazi barbarism moved on to a new plane. Given the instructions to the army before the campaign began, it is hardly surprising that uncontrolled atrocities by ordinary soldiers began immediately. ‘I have observed that senseless shootings of both prisoners of war and civilians have taken place,’ commented one troop commander only three days after the attack had started. Five days later he had to repeat his order to desist from ‘irresponsible, senseless and criminal’ shootings, which he bluntly described as ‘murder’. He nevertheless reasserted the need to uphold ‘the Führer’s calls for ruthless action against Bolshevism (political commissars) and any kind of partisan’, and stated that the aim of the war was to restore peace and order to ‘this land which has suffered terribly for many years from the oppression of a Jewish and criminal group’.70
Even for a troop commander such as this one, who deplored and tried to halt arbitrary atrocities committed by his force, there was the acceptance of the need for ruthlessness towards commissars and partisans, and a belief that Jews–bracketed with criminals–were behind the Bolshevik regime. The mentality was widespread. This was a war like no other. And Jews were seen as central to it.
It was in this ideological climate that the killing of the Jews rapidly escalated as part of an unprecedentedly murderous campaign in which untold butchery was deployed against the civilian population and prisoners of war (who by the autumn would be dying in German camps at the rate of 6,000 per day).71 Heydrich, as we have noted, had briefed the assembled Einsatzgruppen on their tasks when they entered the Soviet Union. But, contrary to what was once widely accepted, he passed on no order at these briefings for wholesale genocide against Soviet Jews. Such a directive, verbally passed on by Himmler, would come some weeks into the campaign, and as the first big leap in an escalatory process of genocide. Even then it would take the shape of an incitement to extreme murderous actions rather than a formal order.
Heydrich’s earlier instructions to the Einsatzgruppen had been more restrictive than this subsequent amplification, but, typically, imprecise. On 2 July, probably to cover the actions of the Einsatzgruppen against possible objections from army leaders, he had provided a written remit that stipulated the execution of Communist functionaries, various ‘extremist elements’ and ‘all Jews in party and state positions’.72 This probably corresponded broadly with what he had told the commanders of the killing squads in the earlier verbal briefings, except that these were evidently couched in such a way that wide discretion was conceded to the Einsatzgruppen about the definition of the target-groups, and they were plainly encouraged to interpret the remit on the Jews liberally and as they thought fit. Rather than an explicit order, Heydrich’s directions amounted to a murderous but open mandate, obviously capable of being translated into action in differing degrees since the Einsatzgruppen and their sub-units did not behave in uniform fashion during the early stages of ‘Barbarossa’.
In fact, shootings by units from the Einsatzgruppen were only part of the initial wave of killing in which a centrally directed ideological thrust interacted with ‘an incoherent, locally and regionally varied sequence of measures’ taken by those on the ground.73 Already on 24 June the head of the Gestapo office in Tilsit, in East Prussia near the Lithuanian border, gave the orders to shoot 200 local Jews, allegedly ‘for crimes against the Wehrmacht’ during the bold but futile resistance by Soviet border troops in the early hours of the invasion. The orders were taken on his own initiative, in accordance with the ‘fundamental agreement with the cleansing actions’ of the newly appointed leader of the Einsatzgruppe designated for the Baltic, Franz Walter Stahlecker.74 Three days later Police Battalion 309 slaughtered two thousand Jews in Bialystok. More than a quarter of them, including women and children, had been driven into a synagogue which was then set on fire. The ‘action’ had been initiated by a few fanaticized Nazis within the battalion’s ranks.75 But such individuals knew that such murderous brutality was now being verbally encouraged by SS leaders. Word soon passed round about what was expected.
Some units, most notably in the Baltic, were within a short time killing male Jews in very large numbers. In Kowno in Lithuania, for instance, 2,514 Jews were shot in a single day on 6 July.76 Pogroms, deliberately fomented by the German invaders, giving full licence to the vicious and widespread hatred of Jews among the local population, made their own contribution to the unfolding horror.77 In other regions, the killing was less unconstrained and largely confined to the Jewish ‘intelligentsia’.78 In this early phase after the invasion, then, there was central encouragement for the killing actions, but a good deal of room was left for local initiative. If the actions were already outrightly murderous on a large scale, there had as yet been no explicit and general genocidal order. For Soviet Jews, the stage of total genocide was, however, soon to be reached.
It cannot be traced to a single order on a specific day. This is not how Nazi genocidal policy worked. Exactly how and when the key steps into genocide were taken and authorized rests upon the assembly of difficult evidence.79 Hitler’s utterly unbureaucratic style of rule, his emphasis upon secrecy and his characteristic usage of camouflage language and signals for action rather than unequivocal orders drape a veil over his interventions. At the next level down, whatever files Himmler and Heydrich kept on the ‘final solution’ were doubtless incinerated as the Reich fell into ruins. At any rate, they have not survived. And the later testimony of Nazi leaders, leaders of the death squads and middle-managers of mass murder has often proved fallible, at times also contradictory, on matters of detail. It was often, of course, also self-servingly mendacious. Even so, surviving documentation and later testimony permit a highly plausible reconstruction of the main stages of the unfolding genocide.
These did not follow explicit orders descending from the apex to the base of a pyramid. Rather, there was a complex interrelationship of ‘green lights’ for action coming from above and initiatives taken from below, combining to produce a spiral of radicalization. Through their own initiative in interpreting how they imagined they were expected to act, those directly involved in the killing forced the pace of rapid radicalization on the ground, in turn affecting the way the leadership itself reacted and amended policy. But the operations at the ‘periphery’, though they developed their own dynamic, were not independent of central instigation and control. They had been unleashed, fomented and sanctioned by ‘guidelines for action’ emanating from the ‘centre’. That is, the key steps of the escalation into total genocide followed some form of central directive. This was invariably transmitted through verbal indications of what was required or ‘encouragement’ for action passed on by Heydrich or, more often, Himmler. These were in the main broadly couched imperatives rather than clearly defined instructions. This mirrored, it seems most likely, the way in which Hitler himself indicated his ‘wishes’ in confidential meetings ‘under four eyes’ with Himmler.
Such secret meetings, with no minutes taken and no one else present (except, on occasion, Heydrich), started a dialectical process. The expressed ‘wishes of the Führer’ would find immediate executive action through Himmler. Through the medium of Himmler, then of lower-level leaders of the Security Police, they would percolate down, at different times and in varied formulations, to those carrying out the killing operations. Given a broad mandate which they could interpret in their own way, as long as this matched the imperative of intensified severity, the local leaders would then act as they saw fit, use their own initiative and deploy the invited extrem
e measures. These would in turn find sanction on high, and result in yet a further upwards ratchet of radicalization. Just such a process occurred in mid-summer 1941. It converted partial into total genocide in the Soviet Union.
On 15 July Himmler returned to the Führer Headquarters in East Prussia, where he had mainly been based since the start of the Russian campaign, after a brief trip to Berlin. Probably, he was expecting to attend an important meeting which Hitler was holding the following afternoon to lay out the framework of the future control and exploitation of the occupied territories of the Soviet Union after a war which was presumed to be as good as won. In the event, Himmler did not attend the meeting, possibly because he was diverted through the need to deal with the capture of an important prisoner of war taken that day–Stalin’s son. Whether he saw or spoke by telephone with Hitler before the meeting cannot be established. But if he was away during the time of the meeting, he was soon back at headquarters, where the following day he had a lengthy lunchtime discussion about the previous day’s deliberations. Hans Heinrich Lammers, the head of the Reich Chancellery, was present and explained Hitler’s orders about the distribution of powers in the occupied east.80 The outcome was that Himmler had been given overall responsibility for policing and security in the east.81
It was practically an open-ended mandate, only nominally restricted by the exhortation to respect the jurisdiction of the newly appointed Minister for the Occupied Eastern Territories, Alfred Rosenberg. Himmler received the minutes of the meeting shortly afterwards. He would have seen there–and doubtless heard much more about it verbally–that Hitler had spoken of ‘exterminating anything opposing us’ and pacifying the newly subjugated territory by shooting dead anyone ‘who even looked askance’.82 Such draconian sentiments framed Himmler’s new security remit, offering the widest scope for extension of his powers. But to take full advantage of this, he needed far larger police forces in the east than were currently available. And, given the mass shootings of Jews that had already taken place and the equation in the Nazi mindset of Jews with subversion and partisan activity (which Stalin had encouraged in his first speech to the people of the Soviet Union since the German invasion, on 3 July), it was obvious that more police meant more killing–an intensification of the aim to ‘cleanse’ the newly occupied areas of Jews and thereby, in Nazi thinking, to ‘secure’ them.