If resentment was felt by the existing population of the ghetto over the arrival of the German Jews, their presence also caused anger amongst the Nazi leadership of the Warthegau. Protests had begun as soon as the figure of 60,000 Jews to be deported from the “Old Reich” to Łódź had been proposed by Himmler. As a result, the number was reduced to 20,000 Jews and 5,000 gypsies. But even this influx still presented major difficulties for the Gauleiter, Arthur Greiser. Together with Wilhelm Koppe, the Higher SS and Police Leader for the region, Greiser sought a solution to the problem of overcrowding in the ghetto. It is hardly surprising, given that ever since the summer of 1941 murder had been the preferred answer in the East to this kind of crisis, that their minds turned to methods of killing. They called upon the services of SS Hauptsturmführer (Captain) Herbert Lange, who had been in command of a special unit charged with murdering the disabled in East Prussia and the surrounding area. For some of the killing he and his team had used a “gas van” with a hermetically sealed rear compartment into which bottled carbon monoxide gas was pumped, and such vans were now seen by local Nazis as the most appropriate response to the sudden overcrowding in the Łódź ghetto.
According to his SS driver, Walter Burmeister, late that autumn Lange hit upon a suitable site for his gas vans in the Warthegau. “To make it plain from the start,” Lange told his driver, “absolute secrecy is crucial. I have orders to form a special commando in Chełmno. Other staff from Posen and from the state police in Litzmannstadt [the German name for Łódź are going to join us. We have a tough but important job to do.”17 At the small village of Chełmno, some eighty kilometers northwest of Łódź, Lange and his team prepared a country house—the “Schloss”—for the “tough but important job” of mass murder. Chełmno, not Auschwitz, was about to become the first location for the killing of selected Jews from the Łódź ghetto.
Chełmno was not the only extermination facility under construction towards the end of 1941. On November 1, work began on a camp at Bełźec in the Lublin district in eastern Poland. Most of the personnel for Bełźec, including the first commandant of the camp, SS Captain Christian Wirth, were taken from the adult euthanasia program. Deep in the General Government, Bełzec seems to have been established—like Chełmno—with the intention of creating a place to kill “unproductive” Jews from the local area. But, unlike Chełmno, it was the first camp to be planned from the start to contain stationary gas chambers linked to engines producing carbon monoxide gas. As such, it was the logical conclusion of the gassing experiments conducted by Widmann in the East in September 1941.
Meanwhile, the deportation of Jews from the Old Reich continued. Between October 1941 and February 1942 a total of 58,000 Jews were sent East to a variety of destinations including the Łódź ghetto. Everywhere they were sent, the local Nazi authorities had to improvise a solution to deal with their arrival—acting sometimes on the authority of Berlin, sometimes on their own initiative. About 7,000 Jews from Hamburg were sent to Minsk, where they were found shelter in a part of the ghetto that had recently been cleared for them—by shooting the nearly 12,000 Soviet Jews who lived there. Jews from Munich, Berlin, Frankfurt, and other German cities were sent to Kaunas in Lithuania, where approximately 5,000 of them were shot dead by members of Einsatzkommando 3. They were the first German Jews to be murdered on arrival as a result of being transported East. Another transport from Berlin reached Riga in Latvia on November 30, and all aboard were also killed as soon as they arrived. But this action was against Himmler’s wishes—he had previously rung Heydrich with the message: “Jewish transport from Berlin. No liquidation.” Friedrich Jeckeln, the SS commander who had ordered the execution, was subsequently reprimanded by Himmler.
As these events demonstrate, during the autumn of 1941 there was little consistency of policy regarding the fate of the Reich Jews: Himmler protested at the shootings in Riga, but did not object to those in Kaunas. Nonetheless, despite these confused indicators there is plenty of evidence that the decision to send the Reich Jews to the East was a watershed moment. In October, talking after dinner, Hitler remarked, “No one can say to me we can’t send them [the Jews] into the swamp! Who then cares about our people? It is good if the fear that we are exterminating the Jews goes before us.”18
It also is clear that discussions were taking place among the Nazi leadership that autumn to send to the East all the Jews under German control. In France, Reinhard Heydrich justified the burning of Paris synagogues by saying that he had given the action his approval “only at the point where the Jews were identified on the highest authority and most vehemently as being those responsible for setting Europe alight, and who must ultimately disappear from Europe.”19 That same month, November 1941, Hitler, in a discussion with the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, who had fled to Berlin, said that he wanted all Jews, even those not under German control, “to be destroyed.”20
By deciding to deport the Reich Jews, Hitler had begun a chain of causation that would eventually lead to their extermination. In the Soviet Union, Jewish men, women, and children already were being shot by the killing squads. By sending many of the Reich Jews into this exact area, what else did Hitler think would happen to them? The line between killing local Jews to provide room for the arriving Reich Jews, and killing the arriving Reich Jews instead, was a thin one from the first—as Jeckeln’s actions in Riga demonstrate. That distinction became even more blurred for the Nazi leadership of the General Government once Galicia, in the far east of Poland and bordering the killing fields of the Soviet Union, came under its control as the war progressed. The Einsatzgruppe had been killing Galician Jews for weeks, and it would be hard for the local authorities to hold to a position that Jews could be shot in one part of the General Government but not in another.
This does not mean, however, that Hitler and the other leading Nazis made a firm decision in the autumn of 1941 to murder all the Jews under German control. In the first place, there simply was not yet the capacity to commit such a crime. The only killing installations under construction in November 1941 were a gas van facility at Chełmno and a small, fixed gas chamber installation at Bełźec. An order was also placed around this time with a German firm for a large thirty-two-chamber furnace crematorium to be built at Mogilev in Belarussia, which some see as evidence of an intention—never fulfilled—to build another extermination center far in the East.
All of these initiatives also can be explained, however, by the desire of the local authorities to have the capacity either to kill the indigenous Jews to make space for the arriving Reich Jews, or to murder those Jews in their control incapable of work whom they believed were no longer “useful” to them. Crucially, at Auschwitz in the autumn of 1941 no plans were being made to increase the killing capacity at the camp. A new crematorium was being designed, to be sure, but that was simply to replace the old one in the main camp.
This confused state of affairs was to be clarified, with disastrous consequences for the fate of the Jews, by events that took place halfway around the world. On December 7, 1941, the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor. On December 11, as allies of the Japanese, the Germans declared war on the United States. For Hitler all this was “proof” that international Jewry had orchestrated a world conflict, and in a radio broadcast to the German people immediately after the declaration of war he explicitly stated that “the Jews” were manipulating President Roosevelt just as they were his other great enemy, Josef Stalin.
Hitler went still further in a speech he gave to the Nazi leadership—both Gauleiter and Reichleiter—the following day. He now linked the outbreak of this “world war” with his prophecy uttered in the Reichstag on January 30, 1939, in which he had threatened that “if the Jews succeed in causing world war” the result would be the “extermination of the Jews of Europe.” On December 13th, Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels wrote in his diary:As far as the Jewish question is concerned, the Führer is determined to make a clean sweep. He prophesied to the Jews that if they once agai
n brought about a world war they would experience their own extermination. This was not an empty phrase. The world war is here, the extermination of the Jews must be the necessary consequence. This question must be seen without sentimentality.
Further evidence that the air was thick with talk of “extermination” that week is provided by a speech that Hans Frank, Gauleiter of the General Government, made to senior Nazi officials in Krakow on December 16:As an old National Socialist, I must state that if the Jewish clan were to survive the war in Europe, while we sacrificed our best blood in the defense of Europe, then this war would only represent a partial success. With respect to the Jews, therefore, I will only operate on the assumption that they will disappear. ... We must exterminate the Jews wherever we find them.21
Frank, who had been one of those briefed by Hitler on December 12, also added that “in Berlin” he had been told that he, and people like him, should “liquidate the Jews ... themselves.”
The discovery of Himmler’s complete desk diary in the 1990s also provides one tantalizing further link with Hitler during this most crucial period. On December 18, after a one-on-one meeting with Hitler, Himmler notes: “Jewish question—to be exterminated [auszurotten] as partisans.”22 The reference to “partisans” is part of the camouflage language that allowed the murder of the Jews to be concealed as necessary security work in the East.
Although no document written by Hitler linking him with a direct order to pursue the “Final Solution” has ever been found, this body of evidence does demonstrate beyond reasonable doubt that he was encouraging and directing an intensification of anti-Jewish actions that December. It is likely that, even without the catalyst of U.S. entry into the war, the deportations of the Reich Jews to the East, directly ordered by Hitler, would eventually have led to their deaths. The anger and frustration Hitler felt at the launch of the Red Army’s counterattack at the gates of Moscow on December 5, had already probably predisposed him further to vent his rage upon the Jews. But what happened at Pearl Harbor brought a murderous clarity to Hitler’s thinking. All pretence among leading Nazis that the Jews would simply be deported and kept in camps in the East was dropped. One way or another, they now faced “extermination.”
The day after Pearl Harbor marked another watershed in the practical implementation of the “Final Solution,” for on December 8, the first transports arrived at Chełmno to be gassed. Jews from Koło, Dabie, Kłodawa, and other towns and villages in the immediate area were brought to the camp by truck (later, Jews would arrive by train at Powiercie station nearby). They were taken up to the large house—the Schloss—in the center of the small village and ordered to undress prior to “disinfection.” Then they were taken down to the basement and forced along a passage and up a wooden ramp until they found themselves in what appeared to be an enclosed dark room. They were in fact locked in the back of a van.
Initially, the gas vans at Chełmno were identical to the ones used in the adult euthanasia actions the previous year, and relied on bottled carbon monoxide to kill the people locked in the sealed rear compartment. But, a few weeks into Chełmno’s operation, new gas vans arrived that used their own exhaust gases to murder those inside. The gassing was taking place in the village, with the vans stationary in the courtyard of the Schloss, so it was impossible to keep knowledge of the murders a secret. Zofia Szałek,23 who as an eleven-year-old girl worked and played just a few meters from the site of the murders, witnessed some of the first arrivals.
They [the Jews] were terribly beaten. It was winter when they came, they wore wooden clogs.... Here they used to undress. There was an enormous pile of those clothes.... Those who were already undressed were herded into the lorries. What screaming was going on! 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!”
After the Jews had been gassed at the Schloss, the vans drove just over three kilometers into the nearby Rzuchowski forest. “When I saw it moving I said, ‘Hell is going!’” says Zofia Szałek. “I was tending cows by the side of the road—how could I not see it going by?” Once in the forest, the vans were unloaded by Jews who were then forced to bury the bodies. Each evening these Jews were transported back to the Schloss and kept locked up overnight. Every few weeks they too were murdered and other Jews selected for this task from the new arrivals.
Physical conditions in the forest soon became appalling, as Zofia learned first-hand from one of the Germans in the Waldkommando (forest commando) charged with supervising the disposal of the bodies:He was billeted in our house and he always called me and said, “Clean my shoes!” And then he would say, “Does it stink?” And I would say, “Yes.” Because the smell was powerful—human bodies were decomposing. It stank terribly. They had buried the bodies in pits, but then it got hot and the bodies started to ferment.
Kurt Moebius was one of the German guards at Chełmno, and was later tried for war crimes. During his interrogation in Aachen prison in November 1961 he gave an insight into the mentality of the Nazi perpetrators as they participated in the killing process.
We were told by Captain Lange that the orders for the extermination of the Jews came from Hitler and Himmler. And as police officers we were drilled to regard any order from the government as lawful and correct.... At the time I believed that the Jews were not innocent but guilty. The propaganda had drummed it into us again and again that all Jews are criminals and subhumans who were the cause of Germany’s decline after the First World War.24
The main reason for the setting up of Chełmno was to murder the Jews from the Łódź ghetto who were no longer thought productive, and the first transport left the city for the new extermination center on January 16, 1942. Lucille Eichengreen, who had now lived in the Łódź ghetto for three months, sums up the mood by saying, “We didn’t want to go. We figured the misery we knew was better than the misery we didn’t know.” Now, with the added stress and pressure of “selections” for deportations, life in the ghetto, already bad, was set to become worse.
Chełmno was a landmark along the road to the “Final Solution,” the first center for the extermination of Jews established anywhere in the Nazi state. But the facility was able to become operational so quickly only because it relied on the hurried conversion of a large house as a base for the killing and on the existing technology of the gas vans. From the perspective of the Nazi murderers it was therefore inherently inefficient. Secrecy could not be maintained, nor could the bodies be disposed of adequately—“faults” that would be addressed when the new death camp of Bełźec, already under construction, was eventually finished.
In the meantime, on January 20th, four days after the first transport of Łódź ghetto Jews to Chełmno, a meeting was held at an SS villa on the shores of the Wannsee, a lake outside Berlin. This gathering has become infamous as the single most important event in the history of the Nazis’ “Final Solution”—an epithet it does not quite merit.
The meeting was called by Reinhard Heydrich, who invited the relevant government state secretaries to take part in a discussion about the Jewish question. Included with each invitation was a copy of the authorization that Goering had given Heydrich on July 31, 1941, to pursue the “Final Solution” (although, as discussed in Chapter 1, it is highly unlikely that the phrase “Final Solution” had the same meaning in July 1941 that it had acquired by January 1942). Notoriously, because the meeting was due to begin at midday, the invitation also mentioned that “refreshments” would be provided.
The address at which the meeting was held was Am Grossen Wannsee 56–58, a villa once used by Interpol, the organization that coordinated international police activity. It is a useful reminder that the individuals who sat round the table at the Wannsee conference were salaried functionaries from one of Europe’s great nations, not back-street terrorists, although their crimes were to be greater than any conventional “criminal” act in the histor
y of the world. Equally instructive, when today some still refer to an ill-educated “criminal underclass,” is that, of the fifteen people around the table, eight held academic doctorates.
Invitations had originally been sent in November 1941 and the meeting scheduled for December 9, but the bombing of Pearl Harbor had resulted in its postponement. One of the unanswered questions of history is therefore what the content of the Wannsee meeting would have been had events in the Pacific not caused a delay. Certainly the intention would still have been to implement an ultimately genocidal “solution” to the Nazis’ “Jewish problem,” but perhaps the discussion would have focused more on an eventual post-war solution or a real attempt to set up work camps for Jews deported to the East—we can only speculate. What is certain is that, regardless of whether the United States had entered the war, Wannsee was always going to be an important meeting for Heinrich Himmler and Reinhard Heydrich. During the autumn of 1941 a variety of killing initiatives had emerged from a number of sources within the Nazi state. For Himmler and Heydrich, Wannsee was necessary, above all else, to coordinate them and to establish beyond doubt that the SS was in control of the whole deportation process.
The issues discussed at the Wannsee conference are known primarily because a copy of the minutes, taken by SS Obersturmbannführer (Lieutenant Colonel) Adolf Eichmann, Heydrich’s “Jewish expert,” survived the war. Eichmann’s record of the meeting is of great historical importance, as it is one of the few documents that shine a light directly on the thinking process behind the “Final Solution.” At the start of the meeting, Heydrich made reference to the administrative authority given him by Goering that allowed him to preside. Then he announced the formal change in Nazi policy that, no doubt, all the delegates would already have known. Instead of the “emigration” of the Jews to countries outside Nazi control, there would now be “evacuation ... to the East” within the Nazi sphere of influence.
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