Fateful Choices: Ten Decisions That Changed the World, 1940-1941

by Ian Kershaw

  The issue of where the Jews were to go, and what was to happen to them on arrival, now became extremely pressing. On 18 September Himmler informed Arthur Greiser, boss of the ‘Warthegau’, that he would have to accommodate 60,000 Jews in the Lo´ d$$$$ ghetto in his area for the winter, prior to further deportation ‘to the east’ the following spring. This was to meet Hitler’s wish to have the Jews removed from the Reich and the former Czech lands as soon as possible.107 But the Lo´ d$$$$ ghetto was bursting at the seams, protested the local authorities. It could take in no more Jews. Himmler insisted, though the figure was reduced to 20,000 Jews (and 5,000 Gypsies). The suggestion had already been made in July that Jews in the Lo´ d$$$$ ghetto incapable of working should be killed on the grounds that the ghetto could not sustain them.108 And now large additional numbers were being sent precisely there. The quid pro quo, almost certainly, was permission granted from Berlin to exterminate the Jews of Lo´ d$$$$ who were unable to work. The search for a suitable extermination site in the region began within weeks of the deportation order reaching Greiser. The gassing of Jews at Chelmno commenced in the first week of December.109

  The ‘Warthegau’ was only one of the regions designated for the reception of the deported Jews. Heydrich specifically mentioned Riga and Minsk, alongside the ‘Warthegau’, in early October.110 No clear blueprint for systematic mass murder had been devised by the time the first deportation trains started to rumble out of Vienna, Prague, Berlin and other cities, beginning on 15 October.111 But the message emanating from Himmler and Heydrich–themselves certainly acting in accordance with Hitler’s wish, however broadly he had couched it–was that the final hour for the Jews of Europe was about to toll.

  In the meantime, those being sent Jews should act as they saw fit and take whatever radical initiative was needed. The invitation was accepted. During October and November, killing of Jews in huge numbers was adopted in differing regions of the Nazi empire as the way out of the self-manufactured problems. German Jews transported to Kowno and Riga in November were shot immediately on arrival. By now, mass shooting had spread beyond the borders of the Soviet Union. Close collaboration between the Wehrmacht, the SS and the Foreign Ministry led to the shooting of 8,000 Jews in Serbia in October as reprisals against partisan activity. In East Galicia, incorporated since the beginning of ‘Barbarossa’ into the General Government, around 30,000 Jews were shot in the autumn, though mass shooting in this region had been a feature since June.112

  The use of poison gas was now starting to be recognized as an alternative method of killing–one which Himmler was ready to see adopted as being ‘more humane’ for the killers than shooting. In October, Heydrich commissioned the extended use of gas-vans. Reconnoitring a site for their deployment was already under way in the ‘Warthegau’. A similar method was foreseen for Riga. And a stationary gas chamber, it seems, was planned for Mogilev, to deal with the Jews being sent to Minsk. In the General Government, which was spared the intake of further Jews, the first stages of what would become Belzec extermination camp had begun in September (when the gassing experts from the ‘euthanasia action’, halted the previous month, had become available). Construction of gas chambers started at the beginning of November, by which date Hans Frank was aware that the Jews of his domain who were incapable of working were to be deported ‘over the Bug’, to their certain deaths.113

  These regional killings still fell short of a systematic, coordinated programme. The civilian authorities in the occupied territories were certainly as yet unaware of any comprehensive, central directive for genocide. In Minsk, the local Nazi leader, the General Commissar of Belorussia, Wilhelm Kube, objected to the shooting of Reich Jews–‘human beings from our cultural sphere’, whom he distinguished from the ‘native brutish hordes’–and sought clarity on the treatment of Jews with war decorations, those married to ‘aryans’, and part-Jews (Mischlinge). Hinrich Lohse, Reich Commissar for the Eastern Territory, pressed by the army to keep skilled Jewish workers, wanted to know whether economic considerations made a difference to the treatment of Jews.114 Lohse was soon told that economic criteria were irrelevant. Jews were to be eradicated whatever the economic disadvantages might be.

  To all appearances, a fundamental decision to exterminate Europe’s Jews had by now been taken. Conceivably, it happened the previous month, in November.115 In this month–and November was so pivotal in the Nazi calendar for its connections both with the ‘shameful’ German capitulation in 1918 and the ‘heroism’ of the failed putsch of 1923–it looks as if the calamity of 1918 and the fate of the Jews were much on Hitler’s mind in the context of the current war. At lunchtime on 5 November, with Himmler present, he had said he could not permit ‘criminals’ to stay alive while ‘the best men’ were dying at the front. ‘We experienced that in 1918,’ he said. He made no specific mention of the Jews. It is unlikely, however, that they were far from his mind. That evening, after Himmler had left, he rambled on at length about the Jews. The end of the war would bring their ruin, he declared. He ended his diatribe with the words: ‘We can live without the Jews, but they can’t live without us. If that is known in Europe, a feeling of solidarity will quickly arise. At present the Jew lives from the fact that he destroys this.’116 Three days later, in Munich, addressing the party’s putsch veterans on the eighteenth anniversary of the event, he castigated the Jews as the instigators of the war. A world coalition inspired by Jews, such was his message, would never triumph over Germany. It was the continuation of the struggle that did not end in 1918, he claimed. Germany had been cheated of victory then. Who the cheats were was unspoken but obvious. ‘But that was only the beginning, the first act of this drama,’ he stated. ‘The second and the finale will now be written. And this time we will make good what we were then cheated of.’117 It was allusive, not direct. And so were his comments to his usual entourage in his field headquarters in the early hours of the night of 1–2 December, where he said: ‘He who destroys life, exposes himself to death. And nothing other than this is happening to them.’ He meant: to the Jews.118 Within a week the gas-vans at Chelmno, the first of the death installations to begin operations, started their terrible work.

  By now, the time was ripe for general clarification. With that in mind, Heydrich had sent out invitations on 29 November to those in the civilian administration most affected by the changing policy towards the Jews–several state secretaries, and a number of SS representatives. Hans Frank, the Governor General of Poland, and the SS chief in his domain, Friedrich-Wilhelm Krüger, were swiftly added to the list, though their initial omission suggests that the General Government–not intended as the recipient for any deported German Jews–was not regarded as central to the discussion. Plainly, therefore, the participants were not about to learn of a detailed programme for gassing millions of Jews in extermination camps located in that region. Nor were precise arrangements for deportations a subject for a meeting that lacked a transport specialist. The recipients of the invitation were, in fact, largely in the dark about the aim of the meeting.

  Some divined, correctly, that the treatment of Mischlinge would figure on the agenda. But the most important clues were contained in the wording of the invitation. This began by repeating the commission, nominally from Göring, to Heydrich of 31 July, then went on to speak about the necessity ‘of achieving a common view among the central agencies involved’ in ‘the organisational and technical preparations for a comprehensive solution of the Jewish Question’, a matter of ‘extraordinary significance’.119 In other words, Heydrich’s authority had once more to be established beyond question as the organization of the ‘comprehensive solution of the Jewish Question’, already laid down in July, entered its crucial phase. Heydrich’s meeting had been scheduled to take place on 9 December. But crucial events intervened in the first days of the month, and the meeting had to be postponed.

  On the 5th the German advance ground to a halt in intense cold not far from Moscow as a huge and devastating Soviet counte
r-offensive began. Any thoughts of deporting vast numbers of Jews into the Soviet Union in the foreseeable future were now completely illusory. The deportation plans that had underpinned Nazi hopes of solving the ‘Jewish Question’ over the past year had to be abandoned. Two days later, on the 7th, the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, triggering the German declaration of war on the United States on the 11th, and confirming that the conflict had become truly global. On the 12th Hitler explained to his party leaders, as we saw, what this meant for the Jews. In his ‘prophecy’ of 30 January 1939, he had promised their destruction in the event of another world war. His terrible conclusion followed: ‘The world war is here. The annihilation of the Jews must be the necessary consequence.’120

  It was no conventional order. Nor was it an explicit decision. But it was an unmistakable signal. Those listening to Hitler were no clearer than they had been before about how the Jews were going to be destroyed. But they were left under no illusions: the destruction would take place, and now during the war rather than once victory had been won. This was the message to be relayed to subordinates in key positions in the occupied territories.

  Among those in Hitler’s audience on 12 December had been Hans Frank. He returned to the General Government and, four days later, repeated what he had heard to his own underlings in his domain. He even used some of Hitler’s own phrases. Notably, he cited the ‘prophecy’. The war would be only a partial success if Europe’s Jews were to survive it, he remarked. They had to disappear. He said he had entered negotiations about deporting the Jews to the east, and referred to a large meeting which would take place in Berlin about this–a reference to Heydrich’s meeting, postponed because of the events of early December. ‘In any event,’ Frank went on, ‘a great Jewish migration will commence.’ He came to the murderous consequences–the aim horribly clear, if the method of attainment was not. ‘But what is to happen to the Jews?’ he asked. ‘Do you believe they’ll be accommodated in village settlements in the Ostland? They said to us in Berlin: why are you giving us all this trouble? We can’t do anything with them in the Ostland or in the Reich Commissariat [the Ukraine] either. Liquidate them yourselves!…We must destroy the Jews wherever we find them and wherever it is possible to do so.’ Though Frank was still anticipating the deportation of the Jews of the General Government to the east, he was being told that it was pointless to send them there and encouraged to resort to mass killing on his own territory. He had as yet no clear notion of how this was to be carried out. He estimated the number of Jews in his region at 3.5 million (including half-Jews). ‘We can’t shoot these 3.5 million Jews,’ he said, ‘we can’t poison them, but we must be able to take steps that will somehow lead to success in extermination.’121 At this stage, Frank evidently knew nothing of a programme to carry out the ‘final solution of the Jewish Question’ on the territory of the General Government itself, instead of further east, and through gas chambers installed in a number of extermination camps. Yet with the exclusion for the indefinite future of Soviet territory as a deportation venue, precisely this new extermination strategy started to take shape in the weeks to come.

  Heydrich’s meeting was reconvened for 20 January 1942 at a different venue close to the Wannsee, a beautiful large lake on the outskirts of Berlin. The participants differed slightly from those scheduled for the original meeting. But they represented similar interests. Much had happened since the Göring mandate had been signed, back in July. And there had been major developments even since the initial invitations had been sent out. What was now being organizationally and technically prepared was no longer a deportation plan for territorial settlement in the east, however murderous that would have been in practice, but a coherent genocidal programme to kill eleven million European Jews in ways and by means still to be fully established, but in need of Continental coordination. Eichmann later doctored the minutes of the meeting to eliminate ‘certain over-plain talk’.122 But probably Heydrich did not go into detail about the methods of killing. No one doubted what was intended. When Hans Frank’s representative at the meeting, Dr Josef Bühler, his State Secretary, asked for the ‘final solution’ to start by removing the Jews of the General Government (who, he said, were mainly unable to work) since transport and manpower posed no great problem, he plainly grasped the new possibilities of mass killing, and closer to hand than the territory of the Soviet Union.123 Since Hans Frank had been aware in the autumn of discussions about the construction of Belzec,124 there was presumably some notion of what those possibilities might entail. There was no need for Heydrich to elaborate.

  It would be some weeks after the Wannsee Conference, in March 1942, that the gas chambers of Belzec, then Sobibor and Treblinka started their grisly operations in the General Government. The largest death camp, Auschwitz-Birkenau, in Upper Silesia, would also begin killing Jews in March. And only by the spring would the deportations of Jews from western Europe to the death camps in occupied Poland commence.125 The Wannsee Conference was still an interim stage in the emergence of the ‘final solution’. But if the arrangements in January 1942 were still in an embryonic stage, by this time the decision to kill the Jews of Europe had already been taken.

  VI

  Heinrich Himmler, the head of the SS, has been described as ‘the architect’ of the ‘final solution’.126 So has his immediate subordinate, Reinhard Heydrich, head of the Security Police.127 But ultimate authority rested with neither of them. Nor was the mind behind what was to emerge as the ‘final solution’ that of either Himmler or Heydrich. Indeed, if the construction metaphor is to be retained, Himmler might be described as the architect of the murderous edifice, and Heydrich as the master-builder. But the person who commissioned the project, the inspiration behind the design, had mandated both of them. This was Hitler.

  Of course, the complex ‘politics of annihilation’ can by no means be reduced simply to an expression of Hitler’s will. Many agencies throughout the Nazi regime, not just the top echelons of the SS, were necessary for total genocide to emerge over time as the ‘final solution of the Jewish Question’. Complicity was widely shared. Hitler was no ‘micro-manager’. That was not his style. In any case, he did not need to be. There was no shortage of those endeavouring to the best of their ability to put into practice what they took to be his wishes. No regular flow of edicts or decrees from Hitler was required to push along the radicalization.

  Even so, at all crucial junctures of policy-making even in the 1930s–for example, the boycott of April 1933, the Nuremberg Laws of September 1935, the pogrom of November 1938 and its aftermath–Hitler’s authorization had been needed. This continued during the war. The decision to impose on Jews the wearing of the ‘Yellow Star’ from September 1941 onwards, all subordinate leaders accepted, could only be taken by Hitler. So could the decision later that month to deport the Reich Jews–a decision which practically overnight enormously intensified the genocidal pressures. It is inconceivable that the decision to move to all-out physical extermination did not also require Hitler’s authorization.

  Himmler, Heydrich and others directly involved in the ‘final solution’ indicated that they were acting in accordance with Hitler’s wishes, or with his approval. With the extermination programme moving towards its climacteric in summer 1942, Himmler declared: ‘The occupied eastern territories are being made free of Jews. The Führer has placed the implementation of this very difficult order on my shoulders.’128 Subordinate SS leaders were repeatedly informed, and were in no doubt, that in implementing the ‘final solution’ they were fulfilling ‘the wish of the Führer’.129 Unquestionably, they were correct.

  Hitler’s ‘wish’ may never have been expressed, even to Himmler, as a precise, unequivocal directive, given on a specific occasion, to kill the European Jews. It would have sufficed to give blanket authorization to the Reichsführer-SS to proceed with the ‘final solution’. But both key stages in the autumn directly involved Hitler. The first was the decision in September to deport the Reich Jews at a tim
e when there was nowhere to send them. Genocidal impulses in a number of different regions followed rapidly, one after the other, from this decision. They did not yet amount to a programme. But the direction was plain, and the momentum building. The second was the new impetus given to finding a comprehensive ‘final solution’ that followed the declaration of war on the United States and the beginning of a prolonged global conflict in December. Deportation into Soviet territory, it was obvious, could not now be carried out for many months, if at all. But the ‘final solution’ could not wait. By the time Heydrich was able to convene the previously postponed Wannsee Conference, no further fundamental decision was needed. The task had become one of organization and implementation.

  As the most terrible war in history, which Hitler more than any other single individual was responsible for unleashing, drew to its horrific close, the German dictator sought to justify the conflict to his own entourage–and to posterity. Once again, he resorted to his ‘prophecy’: ‘I have fought openly against the Jews,’ he stated. ‘I gave them a last warning at the outbreak of war’–as always a misdating of his ‘prophecy’ to the date that war began. ‘I never left them in uncertainty’, he continued, ‘that if they were to plunge the world into war again they would this time not be spared–that the vermin in Europe would be finally eradicated.’ He was proud of what he had done. ‘I have lanced the Jewish boil,’ he declared. ‘Posterity will be eternally grateful to us.’130

  Of all the fateful decisions we have considered in preceding chapters, the decision to kill the Jews, unfolding over the summer and autumn of 1941, is the one where it is least possible to conceive of alternatives. Had the invasion of the Soviet Union proceeded as the German leadership hoped it would, the ‘final solution’ known to history would not have taken that particular form. The killing fields would, in all probability, then have been mainly in the Soviet Union, not in Poland. But as long as the Nazi regime was in power and engaged in the war, the Jews would have perished in one way or another. Only the method and timing would have differed.