Hitler 1936-1945: Nemesis (Allen Lane History)
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Suddenly, in mid-September, Hitler changed his mind. There was no overt indication of the reason. But in August, Stalin had ordered the deportation of the Volga Germans – Soviet citizens of German descent who had settled in the eighteenth century along the reaches of the Volga river. At the end of the month the entire population of the region – more than 600,000 people – were forcibly uprooted and deported in cattle waggons under horrific conditions, allegedly as ‘wreckers and spies’, to western Siberia and northern Kazakhstan. In all, little short of a million Volga Germans fell victim to the deportations.88 It was the first of Stalin’s terrible moves to destroy the nationalities in the south of the Soviet Union. The news of the savage deportations had become known in Germany in early September.89 Goebbels had hinted that they could prompt a radical reaction.90 It was not long in coming. Alfred Rosenberg, the recently appointed Reich Minister for the Occupied Eastern Territories, lost little time in advocating ‘the deportation (Verschickung) of all the Jews of central Europe’ to the east in retaliation. His liaison at Army Headquarters, Otto Bräutigam, was instructed by Rosenberg on 14 September to obtain Hitler’s approval for the proposal. Bräutigam eventually succeeded in attracting the interest of Hitler’s chief Wehrmacht adjutant, Rudolf Schmundt, who recognized it as ‘a very important and urgent matter’ which would be of great interest to Hitler.91
Revenge and reprisal invariably played a large part in Hitler’s motivation. But at first he hesitated. His immediate response was to refer the matter to the Foreign Office. Ribbentrop was initially non-committal. He wanted to discuss it personally with Hitler.92 Werner Koeppen, Rosenberg’s liaison officer at FHQ, noted: ‘The Führer has so far still made no decision in the question of taking reprisals against the German Jews on account of the treatment of the Volga Germans.’ He was said to be contemplating making this move in the event of the United States entering the war.93
The remark gives a clue to Hitler’s thinking. He had continued to hold to the ‘hostage’ notion – embodied in his 1939 ‘prophecy’ and aimed at deterring the USA from entering the war through the threat of what would then happen to the Jews of Europe. In August, Roosevelt and Churchill had met for talks on warships off the coast of Newfoundland and in the ‘Atlantic Charter’ proclaimed their common principles of free and peaceful coexistence of nations in a post-Nazi world.94 Roosevelt had also declared on 11 September that the US navy would shoot on sight at Axis warships in waters essential for American defence. It seemed increasingly a matter of time before the United States became fully involved in hostilities as an ally of Britain. The deportation of the Jews at this juncture, prompted by the Soviet deportations of the Volga Germans, was Hitler’s stark reminder to the Americans of his prophecy: that European Jews would pay the price should the USA enter the war.95
With such thoughts in mind, Hitler was now ready to accept the case put by Heydrich and Himmler, reflecting demands and suggestions reaching them from their own underlings, and from the Gauleiter of the big cities, that it was urgently necessary to put the longstanding plans for a comprehensive ‘solution to the Jewish Question’ into action, and that deportation to the east was indeed feasible despite the unfinished war there. Why he was now prepared to bend to such arguments also lay partly, no doubt, in his acceptance that an early end to the Russian campaign was not in sight. It was, in fact, precisely the juncture at which he acknowledged that the war in the east would stretch into 1942.96 Tackling the ‘final solution of the Jewish Question’, he would have acknowledged, could not wait that long. If victory over Bolshevism had to be delayed, he must have concluded, the time of reckoning with his most powerful adversary, the Jews, should be postponed no longer. They had brought about the war; they would now see his ‘prophecy’ fulfilled.
It would have been remarkable, when Himmler lunched with Hitler at the ‘Wolf’s Lair’ on 16 September, had the deportation issue not been raised.97 Almost certainly, the Reichsführer-SS pressed for the Reich’s Jews to be deported. The following day, Ribbentrop met Hitler to discuss the Rosenberg proposal. That evening, 17 September, Himmler paid the Foreign Minister a visit.98 By then, Hitler must have agreed to the suggestions to start deporting German, Austrian, and Czech Jews to the east. Himmler evidently left with the authorization. He gave notification of the decision next day.
Again, the Warthegau played a direct part in events. On 18 September, Arthur Greiser, Reich Governor and Gauleiter of the Warthegau, received a letter from Himmler. ‘The Führer wishes,’ ran the missive, ‘that the Old Reich and the Protectorate [Bohemia and Moravia] are emptied and freed of Jews from the west to the east as soon as possible.’ Himmler told Greiser that it was his intention to deport the Jews first into the Polish territories which had come to the Reich two years earlier, then ‘next spring to expel them still further to the east’. With this in mind, he was sending 60,000 Jews to the Lodz ghetto, in Greiser’s province, for the winter.99
Around the middle of September, then, Hitler had bowed to the pressure to deport the German and Czech Jews to the east, some of them via a temporary stay in Lodz (where the ghetto was already known to be seriously overcrowded). It was the trigger to a crucial new phase in the gradual emergence of a comprehensive programme for genocide. Initiatives would tumble out, one after the other, during the next few months in widening the scope of the killing.
The decision to begin deporting the German, Austrian, and Czech Jews to the east, while the war was still raging, was a fateful one. It brought ‘the final solution of the Jewish question’ throughout the whole of Europe a massive step closer. We can only speculate on how it was arrived at, only surmise the course of the conversation between Hitler and Himmler during or after lunch on 16 September.
It would have stayed, almost certainly, at the level of terrible generalities. A start in the full-scale resettlement programme, and, in particular, in implementing Heydrich’s plan for a ‘total solution of the Jewish Question’, Himmler perhaps argued, could be made by transporting the Reich and Protectorate Jews to the east. This would be a deserved retaliation for the Soviet deportation of the Volga Germans. It would meet the wishes of the Party. It would address the complaints of the Gauleiter by relieving the housing problems of the big cities. And it would – an argument sure to impress Hitler – prevent the seditious undermining of morale by Jews spreading disaffection on the home front. Space for the deported Jews, Himmler perhaps continued, could be found for the time being in abandoned Soviet labour camps. There, they could be put to work until they perished. Any ‘dangerous elements’ could be liquidated immediately, along with those Jews incapable of working. Perhaps acknowledging transport difficulties, Himmler would have accepted that many of the Jews could only in the first instance be sent as far as Poland, before further dispatch to Russia the following spring or summer when, it was presumed, the war there would finally be over. It is unlikely that details were discussed.
However, even when it was agreed that the Reich Jews should be deported in stages, there remained the question of what to do with the millions of Jews in eastern Europe, particularly in Poland. Hans Frank had been promised the speedy removal of the Jews from the General Government. Arthur Greiser was desperate to deport the Jews from the Warthegau. If Himmler raised these issues, he was probably given the green light to ‘solve the problem’ as best he could, within Poland itself, making a start on the Jews who were unable to work.
The question of the consumption of scarce food resources was a crucial consideration, a vital element in the gathering whirlwind of extermination.100 Feeding ‘burdensome existences (Ballastexistenzen)’ had been a central part of the thinking behind the ‘euthanasia action’ in the Reich itself. In the east, the inhumanity towards the subjugated and despised ‘inferior peoples’ meant that the most brutal stance imaginable was adopted on this issue. As the war expanded, and the problems of ensuring food supplies mounted, civilian and military authorities pressed all the harder for savings to be made at the cost of political, i
deological, and racial enemies – above all, the Jews. Hitler’s own views would have made him open to any suggestion by Himmler that Jews who could not work – the elderly, the infirm, children, for example – should be liquidated.101 In these very days, Hitler was telling Goebbels that it was necessary for Leningrad to ‘disappear completely’. It would be impossible, even on taking it, to feed its 5 million population. Where would the food supplies and transport for them come from? he asked. The town where Bolshevism began would be razed to the ground – a ‘hard but justifiable nemesis of history’, as Goebbels put it.102 Hitler’s conclusion about the necessary fate of the Jews about this time was no milder.
Hitler’s agreement to the deportation of the German Jews was not tantamount to a decision for the ‘Final Solution’.103 It is doubtful whether a single, comprehensive decision of such a kind was ever made. But Hitler’s authorization of the deportations opened the door widely to a whole range of new initiatives from numerous local and regional Nazi leaders who seized on the opportunity now to rid themselves of their own ‘Jewish problem’, to start killing Jews in their own areas. There was a perceptible quickening of the genocidal tempo over the next few weeks. The speed and scale of the escalation in killing point to an authorization by Hitler to liquidate the hundreds of thousands of Jews in various parts of the east who were incapable of work.104 But there was as yet no coordinated, comprehensive programme of total genocide. This would still take some months to emerge.
V
Within a few days of the decision to deport the Reich Jews, Goebbels was back at FHQ, seizing the opportunity to press once more for the removal of the Jews from Berlin. Before his audience with Hitler, he had the chance to speak with Reinhard Heydrich. Himmler, Neurath, and a number of other leading figures were also in the Wolf’s Lair. The occasion for the assembly of notables was Hitler’s decision to ‘retire’ Neurath as Reich Protector in Prague, following intrigues against him by radicals within the Nazi administration in the former Czech capital, able to exploit reports of a mounting incidence of strikes and sabotage. Levels of repression had been relatively constrained under Neurath.105 But the growing disturbances now prompted Hitler to put in a hard man, Security Police Chief Heydrich – nominally as Deputy Reich Protector – with a mandate to crush with an iron fist all forms of resistance.
Goebbels lost no time in reminding Heydrich of his wish to ‘evacuate’ the Jews from Berlin as soon as possible. Heydrich evidently told the Propaganda Minister that this would be the case ‘as soon as we have reached a clarification of the military question in the east. They [the Jews] should all in the end be transported into the camps established by the Bolsheviks. These camps had been set up by the Jews. What was more fitting, then, than that they should now also be populated by the Jews.’106
During his two-hour meeting alone with Hitler, Goebbels had no trouble in eliciting the assurance he wanted, that Berlin would soon be rid of its Jews. ‘The Führer is of the opinion,’ Goebbels noted down next day, ‘that the Jews have eventually to be removed from the whole of Germany. The first cities to be made Jew-free are Berlin, Vienna, and Prague. Berlin is first in the queue, and I have the hope that we’ll succeed in the course of this year in transporting a substantial portion of the Berlin Jews away to the east.’107
He was in the event to be left less than wholly satisfied. He noted towards the end of October that a beginning had been made with deporting Berlin’s Jews. Several thousand had been sent in the first place to Litzmannstadt (as Lodz was now officially called).108 But he was soon complaining about obstacles to their rapid ‘evacuation’.109 And in November he learnt from Heydrich that the deportations had raised more difficulties than foreseen.110
Goebbels kept up the pressure with a hate-filled tirade in Das Reich – a ‘quality’ newspaper reaching over 1½ million homes – on 16 November, entitled ‘The Jews are Guilty’. He explicitly cited Hitler’s ‘prophecy’ of the ‘annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe’, stating: ‘We are experiencing right now the fulfilment of this prophecy.’ The fate of the Jews, he declared, was ‘hard, but more than justified’, and any sympathy or regret was entirely misplaced.111 Goebbels ordered the widest circulation of the article to the troops on the eastern front.112 At home, the article was said by the SD to have ‘found a strong echo’ in the population, though there had been criticism from churchgoers.113 Goebbels was pleased with the positive response in Party circles. The article provided, he said, ‘compelling arguments’ for the ‘little Party member’ to use ‘in his daily struggle’.114
The Propaganda Minister again raised the deportation of Berlin’s Jews with Hitler during their three-hour discussion a few days later, on 21 November. Hitler, as usual, was easily able to assuage Goebbels. He told him he agreed with his views on the ‘Jewish Question’. He wanted an ‘energetic policy’ against the Jews – but one which would not ‘cause unnecessary difficulties’. The ‘evacuation of the Jews’ had to take place city by city, and it was still uncertain when Berlin’s turn would come. When the time arrived, the ‘evacuation’ should be concluded as quickly as possible.115
Once again, as had repeatedly been the case with Frank in Cracow and Schirach in Vienna, Hitler had raised hopes which encouraged pressure for radical action from his subordinates. That the hopes could be fulfilled less easily than anticipated then simply fanned the flames, encouraging the frantic quest for an ultimate solution to the problem which nothing but the Nazis’ own ideological fanaticism had created in the first place.116
Both Himmler and Heydrich were still speaking in October of deporting the Jews to the east; Riga, Reval, and Minsk were all mentioned. Plans were set in train for extermination camps in Riga and, it seems, in Mogilew, some 130 miles east of Minsk. Transport difficulties and continued partisan warfare eventually caused their abandonment.117 But, prompted by the murderous initiatives being undertaken by their minions who had rapidly realized that they were being shown a green light and lost no time in preparing to set localized genocides in motion, the attention of the SS leaders was starting to switch to Poland, which posed fewer logistical difficulties, as an area in which a ‘final solution of the Jewish Question’ could take place.118
The use of poison gas had already been contemplated before the deportation order was granted. More efficient, less public, and – with characteristic Nazi cynicism – less stressful (for the murderers, that is) ways of killing than mass shootings were required. The use of gas-vans, already deployed in East Prussia in 1940 to kill ‘euthanasia’ victims, offered one alternative though, it soon proved, had its own drawbacks.119 Other methods, involving stationary killing installations, were considered. At the beginning of September, several hundred Russian prisoners-of-war were gassed in Auschwitz, then a concentration camp mainly for Poles, as an experiment in connection with a large crematorium that had been ordered in October from the Erfurt firm of J.A. Topf and Sons. The poison-gas Zyklon-B was used for the first time on the Soviet prisoners; it would by summer 1942 be in regular use for exterminating the Jews of Europe, ferried by the train-load to the huge killing factory of Auschwitz-Birkenau.120
Once the decision to deport the Reich Jews to the east had been taken, things began to move rapidly. Heydrich told Gauleiter Alfred Meyer, State Secretary in Rosenberg’s Ministry for the Occupied Eastern Territories, on 4 October that attempts by industry to claim Jews as part of their workforce ‘would vitiate the plan of a total evacuation (Aussiedlung) of the Jews from the territories occupied by us’.121 Later that month, following a visit to Berlin by the Lublin Police Chief, SS-Brigadeführer Odilo Globocnik, evidently aimed at instigating the extermination of the Jews in his district, Polish labourers were commandeered by the SS to construct a camp at Belzec in eastern Poland. Experts on gassing techniques used on patients in the ‘euthanasia action’ followed a few weeks later, now redeployed in Poland to advise on the gas chambers being erected at Belzec.122 Initially, the aim was to use Belzec, whose murderous capacity was in the earl
y months relatively small, for the gassing of Jews from the Lublin area who were incapable of work.123 Only gradually did the liquidation of all Polish Jews become clarified as the goal – embodied in what, with the addition of two other camps, Sobibor and Treblinka, in spring 1942, came eventually to be known as ‘Aktion Reinhard’.124
In the autumn, too, Eichmann was sent to Auschwitz for discussions with Rudolf Höß, the commandant there, about gassing installations.125 Mass-killing operations at Belzec began in the spring of 1942, in Auschwitz in the summer. They had been preceded by developments in the Warthegau. There, the first of twenty transports in autumn 1941 bringing German Jews to Lodz had arrived on 16 October. The authorities in Lodz had at first objected vehemently to the order in September to take in more Jews. Himmler was implacable. He sharply reprimanded the Government President of Lodz, Friedrich Uebelhoer, himself the bearer of an honorary SS rank. But alongside the reprimand, the Lodz authorities had evidently been assuaged by being told that those Jews incapable of working would soon be liquidated. Mass killings by shooting and gassing (in gas-vans) were already taking place in the autumn weeks. At the same time, Herbert Lange, head of a Special Command which had earlier been deployed at Soldau in East Prussia to gas the inmates of mental asylums, began looking for a suitable location to set up operations for the systematic extermination of the Jews of the Warthegau.126