Ostkrieg

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by Stephen G. Fritz


  Rearmament problems, awareness of German deficiencies in food, capital, and raw materials, irritation with the failure of Britain to act as he wanted, a growing fear of a renewed encirclement of Germany by hostile enemies: all acted to produce in Hitler a growing sense of frustration that exploded in late 1938. Since his racial obsessions infused all aspects of life and policymaking in the Third Reich, the racial-ideological dimension of policy represented the flip side of the military-strategic coin. From the beginning of his rule, Hitler faced a self-imposed “Jewish problem,” for by definition Jews were considered aliens and, thus, could not be a part of the racial community, the Volksgemeinschaft, that Hitler promised as the cornerstone of his new Germany. From the outset, as well, the solution to this Jewish problem resulted in a myriad of difficulties, ranging from the failure of the economic boycott of April 1933, to troubles associated with the emigration of German Jews, to the international condemnation of Nazi anti-Jewish actions. In all this, Hitler saw his belief confirmed that a Jewish world conspiracy actually existed and that its mission was the destruction of Germany. Typically, the more radical and aggressive Nazi policies became both at home and abroad, the more Hitler imputed hostile intentions to this alleged Jewish conspiracy. In a virtually perfect self-reinforcing spiral of paranoia, stepped-up persecution of German Jews, followed by foreign condemnation and pressure, only further convinced Hitler of the truth of his great insight about the hostility of “international Jewry.”20

  In step with foreign policy, 1938 proved to be the key year in the radicalization of racial policy as well. From 1933, Nazi policy had aimed at the emigration of all German Jews, primarily to Palestine. By 1938, however, Nazi officials regarded these efforts as a failure: fully three-quarters of the 1933 Jewish population still lived in Germany, and other countries had mounted increasing obstacles to Jewish immigration. Moreover, top Nazis themselves, influenced by Foreign Office arguments, had become more sensitive to Arab opinion and alert to the perceived danger of creating a Jewish state that would threaten Germany in the future. New ideas were mooted, including one from Reinhard Heydrich’s SD (Security Service) that the Jews be expelled to some inhospitable place such as Madagascar, an idea long circulating in European anti-Semitic circles. In any case, the final aim remained the removal of all Jews from Germany through some sort of emigration or expulsion, although Hitler, Heydrich, and others now assumed that such an action might take up to ten years. In the meantime, and characteristically, Hitler suggested to Goebbels that German Jews could be held as hostages.21

  As perhaps the most radically anti-Semitic of all the top Nazis, Joseph Goebbels seethed with impatience at the lack of progress in “cleansing” Germany, and especially Berlin, of Jews. Typically, the Nazis blamed the Jews themselves for the emigration logjam and responded in characteristic fashion: they would simply increase the incentive for the Jews to leave, through a renewed wave of physical violence and terror. The way forward had already been shown in March in Vienna, where, following the annexation of Austria, a storm of violence and popular anti-Jewish rage had been unleashed. With the tacit approval of Hitler, Goebbels had already in the summer of 1938 launched a new round of discriminatory and propagandistic assaults against the Jews of Berlin, actions that were quickly taken up in other German cities. Significantly, this radicalization of Jewish policy accompanied a sharp increase in international tensions associated with the brewing Sudeten crisis: as Hitler’s hopes for the realization of his long-anticipated alliance with Britain faded, his anger at international Jewry boiled over, for which the Jews of Germany would have to pay. Nor did the outcome of the Munich Conference at the end of September 1938 assuage the Führer. Hitler evidently had hoped to have a short war against Czechoslovakia that autumn, with the expectation that Britain and France, acquiescing once again in a fait accompli, would now grant him the desired free hand in the east. Instead, he had to be satisfied with the Sudetenland. Although foreign tensions had dissipated, the radical turn domestically had produced a menacing anti-Jewish atmosphere.22

  This tension exploded in early November. On the morning of 7 November, a seventeen-year-old Polish Jew, Herschel Grynszpan, entered the German embassy in Paris and shot Ernst vom Rath, the third legation secretary, in an act of revenge for the recent deportation of his parents. As vom Rath lingered between life and death, Goebbels orchestrated wild attacks in the German press that, much to his satisfaction, resulted on the evening of 8 November in outbreaks of anti-Jewish violence organized by local party leaders. By chance, vom Rath died on the ninth, the same day that the Nazi old guard had gathered in Munich for the annual memorial of the failed 1923 putsch. From Goebbels’s perspective, the time for action had come. That evening, following an animated conversation with the Führer, after which Hitler left the gathering unusually early, Goebbels gave a blistering anti-Jewish speech, during which he announced vom Rath’s death, noted with approval the “retaliatory” actions of the day before, and made it clear that the party should organize further anti-Jewish “demonstrations.” He then enunciated detailed instructions for what should be done as well as pressuring and prodding occasionally reluctant officials into action. The result of his efforts has come to be known as Reichskristallnacht (Night of broken glass), a shocking outburst of physical violence, destruction of property, burning of synagogues, and mass arrests of Jewish men that left the world, and many Germans, stunned.23

  Kristallnacht, and the conclusions Hitler drew from it, marked a significant turning point in Nazi policy and thinking. Although emotionally satisfying for Goebbels and other party radicals, the pogrom was a political disaster both domestically and abroad. Harsh international condemnation of Nazi actions might have been expected, but the clear lack of domestic approval for this outburst of public violence raised new obstacles to solving the Jewish question. The reaction to Kristallnacht, and its meaning, clearly troubled Hitler. Not only did he see the international response, especially that of the United States, as yet more evidence of the hostility of world Jewry toward Germany, but the disappointing reaction of the German public also seemed to reinforce once again his fear of the power of the Jews to subvert even popular governments. In Mein Kampf, Hitler had explicitly linked German defeat in war with the destructive influence of the Jews; with the prospect of a new war ever present, the threat of the Jews took center stage in his thoughts. A remark made on 12 November, at the conclusion of a high-level conference to deal with the fallout from Kristallnacht, perhaps provided an indication of Hitler’s thinking as well. “If the German Reich comes into foreign-political conflict in the foreseeable future,” Goering threatened, “it can be taken for granted that we in Germany will think . . . of bringing about a great showdown with the Jews.”24

  Over the next two months, in a variety of forums, Hitler and other top Nazis expressed more or less the same sentiment. The use of German Jews as hostages in the event of a conflict was openly discussed in the German press, while Goebbels unleashed a blistering anti-Jewish and anti-American propaganda campaign that depicted New York as the center of world Jewry and President Roosevelt as the stooge of the Jewish conspiracy. The threat was clear: if a new conflict erupted in Europe, one that could only result as a consequence of Jewish manipulation, German Jews would be held responsible for the harm that world Jewry inflicted on Germany. The SS organ, Das schwarze Korps, thundered in late November 1938: “We would therefore [in the event of war] be faced with the hard necessity of eradicating the Jewish underworld. . . . The result would be the actual and final end of Jewry in Germany, its complete annihilation.” Certainly, this should not be construed as evidence for an already existing plan for the Holocaust, but it does indicate the clear emergence of a murderous mentality. Hitler himself revealed such an attitude in a remarkably menacing comment to the Czech foreign minister in late January 1939: “The Jews here [in Germany] will be annihilated. The Jews had not brought about the 9 November 1918 for nothing. This day will be avenged.”25 Not for the first nor for the
last time, Hitler vowed to gain retribution for the German defeat in World War I; indeed, the theme “never again another November 1918” ran as a leitmotif through his actions until the end of his life.

  Anger, frustration, resentment, willingness to lash out violently at those perceived to be threatening Germany with destruction—these emotions formed the backdrop to Hitler’s speech of 30 January 1939. Ostensibly given to mark the sixth anniversary of the Nazi ascension to power, it served primarily as a recitation of the alleged evils done to Germany by the Jewish conspiracy and a reply to the overt economic and military challenges that Hitler saw emanating from Britain and America. Denied access to vital economic resources, at a disadvantage in the global trading system, and held in debt bondage by the Jewish plutocrats, Hitler raised once again the familiar theme of Lebensraum as the only solution to Germany’s existential dilemma. The Western democracies, however, blocked Germany’s expansion to the east, meddling in an area “in which the English, or any other Western nation have no business at all.” The Germans, Hitler asserted, “in the future will not accept the attempt of Western states to meddle at will in certain issues which are solely our business in order to prevent through their interference natural and rational solutions.” He explicitly linked this obstructionism with the Jewish question, mocking ostensible Western concern but refusal to accept Jewish refugees, and then outlined a possible territorial solution: “I think that the sooner this problem is solved the better. For Europe cannot find rest until the Jewish Question is cleared up. It may well be possible that . . . an agreement on this problem may be reached in Europe. . . . The world has sufficient space for settlements.”26

  Hitler then turned to his obsession with Lebensraum. Significantly, he linked Western obstruction in solving this issue, the Jewish conspiracy, and his new fixation on Jews as hostages. If he were to be thwarted in achieving Lebensraum, he now outlined a radical alternative, one that eventually became a self-fulfilling prophecy:

  And one more thing I would like to state on this day memorable perhaps not only for us Germans. I have often been a prophet in my life and was generally laughed at. During my struggle for power, the Jews primarily received with laughter my prophecies that I would someday assume the leadership of the state . . . and then, among other things, achieve a solution of the Jewish problem. I suppose that the laughter of Jewry in Germany is now choking in their throats.

  Today I will be a prophet again: if the international finance Jewry within Europe and abroad should succeed once more in plunging the peoples into a world war, then the consequence will not be the Bolshevization of the world and a victory of Jewry, but on the contrary, the annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe.27

  Again, this statement should be seen not as a blueprint for the Holocaust but as a warning, especially to America: stay out of European affairs, and refrain from interfering in matters important to German existence. To reinforce his threat, Hitler demonstrated his awareness of his options and his willingness to use them: the Jews under German control should be regarded as hostages. If the Jewish conspiracy plunged the world into another global war, he warned, he would not hesitate to deal harshly with the Jews under his control. The time for decisions was approaching. Hitler was going to gain living space for the German people; the choice for the Western powers was acceptance or opposition.

  Nazism and war were inseparable. Born of a lost war, energized by the desire to gain redemption for the stain of defeat, determined to achieve Lebensraum in Europe as the key to survival in a world of enemies, preoccupied with solving a self-imposed Jewish problem, the National Socialist regime had, from the time it assumed power, set in motion a process of building a “new man and new society” in order to prepare for war. The key to this much-vaunted Volksgemeinschaft was, as Ian Kershaw has stressed, “an attempt at a perpetual re-creation of the ‘spirit of 1914,’ ” a “true socialism” that would unite all racially valuable Germans and prepare them for the struggle ahead. Nor had Hitler left any doubt about the inevitability of conflict: the German future could be assured only by gaining living space, and it could be won only through force.28

  Hitler’s conception of Lebensraum had been informed and influenced not only by notions of social Darwinism but also by nineteenth-century European colonial and imperialistic practices. The European scramble for colonies in Africa and Asia had been justified not only by economic necessity but also by reference to the alleged racial inferiority of the “backward” and “uncivilized” peoples of those continents. European domination thus seemed a natural and logical consequence, as did the brutalities inflicted on the native peoples. Since Hitler looked to Eastern Europe as the natural sphere of German expansion, and since he viewed the Slavic and Jewish inhabitants of the region as either inferior or threatening, his notion of Lebensraum harbored from the beginning murderous impulses. What had hitherto been done only to conquered populations overseas Hitler now stood ready to inflict on a European population.29 In some respects, then, Lebensraum could be seen as merely a belated continuation of the nineteenth-century Western policy of imperialism, with Eastern Europeans substituting for Africans or Native Americans. At its heart, however, Hitler’s program would prove far more radical and far-reaching, a racialist and exterminationist scheme of limitless aims and brutality.

  Poland would be the first country to experience the full harshness of this policy, a sort of dress rehearsal for what would come later in the Soviet Union. From the beginning, Hitler had done little to hide his radical notions regarding the treatment of Poland from his top generals. A 31 July agreement between the army and the SS gave its killing units, the Einsatzgruppen, special tasks for combating anti-German activities behind the front lines, which in practice meant a license to murder. Meeting with his top commanders at the Berghof on 22 August, Hitler stressed, according to the notes of one present, the “destruction of Poland in the foreground. The aim is elimination of living forces, not the arrival at a certain line. . . . Have no pity. Brutal attitude. Eighty million people shall get what is their right. Their existence has to be secured. The strongest has the right. Greatest severity.”30 In part, army leaders raised no objections because they too longed for the destruction of Poland, that hated product of Versailles, and regarded Poles as racially and culturally inferior. Then, too, many likely regarded Hitler’s rhetoric as mere hyperbole.

  The terror unleashed on the Polish population from the first days of the invasion left no doubt, however, that Hitler’s intentions matched his venomous words. Even as local militias composed of ethnic Germans (Volksdeutsche) began vigilante actions against Poles who had committed outrages against the German minority, Heydrich’s units swept into action, armed with lists of perhaps thirty thousand people to be arrested or executed. On 9 September, Franz Halder confided to Major Helmuth Groscurth the chilling news that “it was the intention of the Führer and Goering to destroy and exterminate the Polish people.” Apart from a few mild and scattered protests, however, the army leadership accommodated itself to the new reality. Rather than object in principle to this planned, wholesale murder, Brauchitsch, the army commander in chief, blandly informed his subordinates that the Einsatzgruppen had received orders from Hitler to carry out “certain ethnic tasks” that “lay outside the responsibility” of the army. Indeed, despite occasional mild protests about “excesses” committed by the Einsatzgruppen, most army commanders welcomed them as protection against presumed security threats. Although this campaign of ethnic cleansing had clearly been authorized by Hitler, it was Himmler and Heydrich, the ambitious leaders of the SS, as well as party radicals such as Hans Frank, Arthur Greiser, and Albert Forster, who grabbed the opportunity to expand their power. Hitler now made it clear that a “harsh racial struggle” would be carried out in Poland, the essence of which, as Groscurth succinctly noted, was to “exterminate.” Within days of the outbreak of war, the initiative had passed to Nazi radicals who now sought, in the words of Hans Mommsen, the “realization of Utopia.”31


  Although Hitler’s fixation on Lebensraum and intention to promote a “harsh racial struggle” in Poland had set the general direction of Nazi policy, surprisingly little practical consideration had been given to how to implement a comprehensive racial policy or to how best to “Germanize” this new Lebensraum. Such discussions began only in early September, with the resulting plans largely a consequence of two factors. The first was Hitler’s characteristic method of ruling, in which he would set broad goals or the direction of policy and then allow his subordinates to compete among each other by submitting proposals for turning policy into reality, a process that quickly produced a manic dynamism as eager Nazis sought to prove themselves and gain a step up the career ladder. Moreover, these schemes tended to be highly ambitious, radical projects since no one was going to be punished for being too ruthless. The second key factor involved ongoing discussions with Soviet officials on a final delimitation of the spheres of interest in the Baltic region agreed on in the Nazi-Soviet Pact.32

  As a result of the interplay of these two factors, by the end of September 1939 the Nazis had formulated a stunningly ambitious demographic scheme of racial reordering that involved millions of people. Though improvised at the time, these policies were fully consistent with Hitler’s underlying ideological assumptions of the need to secure living space, life as a Darwinian struggle, the unequal racial value of ethnic populations, and a determination to solve the rapidly expanding Jewish problem. While, ultimately, the last of these obsessions came to dominate Nazi policy, in the autumn of 1939 securing and Germanizing the newly won living space clearly took precedence. Moreover, an agreement on 28 September between German and Soviet officials on a revision of their respective spheres of influence in the Baltic meant that Lithuania would now fall into the Soviet orbit. In exchange, however, the Germans secured the right to repatriate Volksdeutsche from the Soviet sphere. Nazi leaders now envisioned a comprehensive racial restructuring of Eastern Europe in which Germans would be consolidated in the newly annexed territories of formerly western Poland, Poles would be concentrated in a vassal state to the east, and Jews would be shoved to the outer reaches of the German domain. In order to make room for the resettlement of hundreds of thousands of ethnic Germans in West Prussia and the Wartheland, both former Polish provinces, the Nazis needed to clear the areas of their Polish and Jewish inhabitants. What had begun at the beginning of September as the intended liquidation of the Polish intelligentsia had now grown into a plan for the dispossession of millions of Poles. As Goebbels noted in his diary on 10 October, “The Führer’s verdict on the Poles is devastating. More like animals than human beings.”33

 

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