Ostkrieg

by Stephen G. Fritz

  In late July, as if the Nazi leaders needed another reason to justify their anti-Semitic crusade, a curious and otherwise unimportant episode in the United States provided further “proof” of the destructive conspiracy they had warned against. On 24 July, a bloodcurdling headline, “The War Aim of Roosevelt and the Jews: Complete Extermination of the German People,” with the subtitle “A Monstrous Jewish Extermination Plan according to the Guidelines of Roosevelt,” adorned the front page of the Völkischer Beobachter, the main Nazi newspaper. From the beginning of the war in the east, the Nazi press had hammered home the importance of the Jewish dimension of the enemy, that Jews pulled the strings behind the scenes. In both public and private, Goebbels had thundered against the Jewish conspiracy of plutocrats and Bolsheviks that was determined to destroy Germany. Now, he evidently had his proof. In early 1941, Theodore Kaufman, a thirty-one-year-old Jewish businessman from New Jersey angry at the harsh treatment of Jews in Nazi-occupied Europe, self-published a small book he had written entitled Germany Must Perish! In it, he advocated the sterilization of all German men and the division of the country into five parts. The book caused a minor stir in the early spring of 1941; then Kaufman faded back into obscurity.55

  By late July, the book, “a clear prophesy of what threatens us if we lose our will and thereby throw away our victory . . . , the extermination or sterilization of the entire German people,” had come to Goebbels’s attention. He saw in it confirmation of Nazi claims of the existence of a bloodthirsty conspiracy of plutocracy and Bolshevism and further justification for harsh measures in the east. Over the next few months, the German press and radio promoted the Kaufman story in endless variations, most notably to present the war, in a perverse inversion of reality, as a Jewish attempt to exterminate Germans. “Who should die, the Germans or the Jews?” was the stark question posed as Goebbels worked tirelessly to expose the “true goals” of the nation’s enemies. “One has to imagine what the Jews would do with us if they had the power,” he noted in his diary on 20 August, “in order to know what one should do with them when we have the power.” The propaganda minister also issued a short brochure designed to create a more determined German attitude toward the war and allow “even the stupidest idiot . . . [to] figure out what threatens us” and that the only choice was victory or death. In fact, Kaufman’s book paid instant dividends, an SD report of 31 July on the German mood noting, “The situation in the United States was being followed with the greatest attention. Increasingly the view spreads that . . . this war is really a life-and-death struggle. The Kaufman plans have deeply impressed even the most obdurate skeptics.” By October, with the “book . . . devoured by all sectors of society,” Goebbels concluded, “It has been extraordinarily useful for us domestically. It is impossible to imagine a better illustration of the desires and goals of the other side.”56

  Even as the SD noted a hardening of the German public mood, on that same 31 July, Heydrich received a written authorization (actually drafted by Adolf Eichmann on instructions from Heydrich) from Goering to make “all necessary preparations with regard to organizational, technical, and material matters for bringing about a complete solution of the Jewish question within the German sphere of influence in Europe”: “I request you further to send me, in the near future, an overall plan covering the organizational, technical, and material measures necessary for the accomplishment of the final solution of the Jewish question which we desire.” Controversy still surrounds the question of whether Heydrich viewed this authorization to mean merely an extension of his earlier mandate of 24 January 1939 to organize a solution to the Jewish question based on emigration or whether he understood it as marking a significant new departure. The Führer himself, in a conversation with the Croatian field marshal Kvaternik on 22 July, indicated that he was still thinking along lines of mass deportation to an inhospitable region. Once again referring to the Jews as a bacillus of decomposition that had to be destroyed, he then remarked, “Wherever one sends the Jews, to Siberia or Madagascar, is all the same.” The key, Hitler emphasized, was to “annihilate them,” to “do away with them.” If Hitler was openly talking of annihilating the Jews in front of a Croatian field marshal, however, Christopher Browning is surely correct in arguing that Heydrich must have sensed that something radically different was brewing since he had not sought a new authorization when the earlier emigration schemes evolved into plans for mass resettlement and expulsion. At the least, he believed it necessary, at this key juncture, to have a new authorization in order to have decisive influence over the heads of rival agencies and administrations. In any case, and whatever solution emerged, Heydrich certainly understood that he was to draw up a feasibility study that would result in the mass death, one way or another, of European Jews.57

  In retrospect, then, the meeting of 16 July can be seen as a key point at which the mass killing of Soviet Jews, partisans, and anyone else deemed a threat to German rule became the foundation for future policy. The consequences were immediate. Most Einsatzgruppen commanders understood very well what was expected of them and set about implementing the new policy, although one SS officer complained in an 11 August report, “Driving women and children into the swamps did not have the success it was supposed to have as the swamps were not deep enough [to drown them].” Still, sufficient actions were being taken that, on that same day, Goebbels gloated, “Vengeance was being wreaked on the Jews. . . . What the Führer prophesied is taking place: that if the Jews succeeded in provoking another war, [they] would therefore lose [their] existence.”58

  Pressure, in fact, was mounting among Nazi officials to take a more radical approach to the Jews. SD reports in early August mentioned increasing hostility to Jews on the streets of western German cities subjected to British air raids, while Goebbels complained that the continued presence of “parasitical Jews” in Berlin undermined morale and outraged soldiers home on leave. In mid-August, in fact, one of his close advisers had proposed that the Berlin Jews, some seventy-six thousand, simply be “carted off to Russia. . . . Best of all actually would be to kill them.” Determined to do something about this intolerable situation, Goebbels flew to the Führer Headquarters on 18 August for discussions with Hitler. Although the Führer was ill and under acute nervous strain, Goebbels related his complaints about Jews damaging morale, a claim that fell on fertile ground. Venting his hatred for the Jews seemed to act as a tonic, in fact, as Goebbels noted,

  The Führer is convinced that his past prophecy in the Reichstag, that if the Jews succeeded in provoking a world war, it would end with the annihilation of the Jews, is being confirmed. It is coming true in these weeks and months with an almost eerie certainty. In the east the Jews must pay the bill; in Germany they have in part already paid and will in the future pay still more. . . . Jewry is an alien body among civilized nations, and their activity in the last three decades has been so devastating that the reaction of the peoples is absolutely understandable, necessary . . . , [and] urgent.

  Evidently warming to the subject, Hitler noted ominously, “In this matter a man like [the Rumanian dictator] Antonescu proceeds much more radically than we have done. But I will not rest or be idle until we too have drawn the final consequences with regard to the Jews.”59

  Hitler’s reference to his prophecy, the fact that he was ill and irritable, and the mid-August crisis in military affairs have tempted some historians, most notably Tobias Jersak, to make a connection with another key mid-August event: the issuance on 14 August of the Atlantic Charter. To Jersak, the Atlantic Charter, which indicated certain American entry into the war and pledged both the United States and Great Britain to the destruction of Nazism, along with a joint letter two days later by Roosevelt and Churchill offering support to Stalin, must have been seen by Hitler as confirmation of his worst nightmare: a global war of the Jewish conspiracy to annihilate Germany. After all, as Hitler remarked at the time to the Spanish ambassador, “The main guilty parties in this war . . . are the Americans, Roo
sevelt . . . , Jews and the entirety of Jewish Bolshevism. . . . The Americans are the greatest scoundrels. . . . America will pay a bitter price.” In consequence, with the Jews no longer possessing any preventive value as hostages, and with hopes of a blitzkrieg victory dashed, Hitler now made the decision to kill all the Jews of Europe during the war, not after it, as originally intended. Only the timing and method of killing remained to be determined.60

  Tidy though this argument may be—and it has the great value of locating the Final Solution firmly within the context of the war—available evidence fails to offer much support. Both Goebbels and Hitler dismissed the Atlantic Charter at the time as a bluff, typical Wilsonian bluster that had little impact on the war, Hitler concluding that it “can do us no harm at all.” Only years later did he claim to have seen in it a Jewish threat to exterminate Germany. Further, when Goebbels and Heydrich tried to push the pace of radical anti-Jewish measures, they met with only partial success. Hitler gave the go-ahead to Goebbels’s suggestion that German Jews be required to wear an identifying mark but rebuffed the two on a more radical idea, the immediate deportation of German Jews, promising Goebbels only that evacuations would take place once transportation problems had been resolved. Since the transportation situation could not possibly improve before the end of the eastern campaign, however, Hitler in effect had postponed any action until after the war. Heydrich was allowed to prepare plans for a partial evacuation of the larger German cities, but, here again, Hitler “rejected evacuations during the war.” If Hitler had decided in mid-August to kill all the Jews of Europe, his immediate actions certainly gave no indications of it.61

  Murder, however, was clearly in the air as the destructive dynamism on the ground had gained momentum. Perhaps the best known of the carefully compiled statistical reports of an individual murder unit, that of Karl Jäger of Einsatzkommando 3 of Einsatzgruppe A, showed a sharp increase in early August, not just in the total numbers of Jews killed, but especially in the numbers of women and children.62 The verbal transmission of orders, varying interpretations of these orders, and differences in logistic and manpower capabilities meant that the timing and the escalation of the murder operations were not uniform. By mid-August, however, it seemed to be generally known among SS officials that all Soviet Jews were to be murdered.

  On 15 August, Himmler witnessed just such an execution of partisans and Jews near Minsk, at which he became nauseated. The Reichsführer-SS also found himself pressed to find an alternate method of execution. Afterward, Himmler gave a speech to SS officers that legitimized such killings as necessary for security and, according to some present, ordered the liquidation of all Jews in the east on the basis of a directive from Hitler. That afternoon he visited a hospital with mental patients and discussed the possibility of killing through methods other than shooting, such as gas vans. At roughly the same time, Himmler was pressured by several top subordinates, among them Franz Walter Stahlecker, the commander of Einsatzgruppe A, to adopt “a radical treatment of the Jewish question now possible for the first time in the east.” By late August, then, while a decision had not been taken to kill all the Jews of Europe, the factors were in place to ensure the murder of the Jews of the Soviet Union.63 Spectacular military success had created, at least temporarily in early July, a mood of unlimited possibilities, the consequences of which reverberated throughout the Soviet Union. By late summer, even as military operations slowed and showed signs of an impending crisis, the racial war increased in tempo. Barbarossa had always assumed a war of annihilation on a number of levels, so, despite the very real problems facing the fighting forces, no slowdown was apparent in the ideological war.

  Despite the impressive triumphs won by the hard-charging Wehrmacht and the sanguine assertions of top Nazi leaders, in mid-July the assured expectations of imminent success had begun to mingle with an undercurrent of doubt, not yet enough to undermine overall confidence in victory, but a nagging concern that things were not as they seemed. Both Halder and Bock, often in stunned amazement, routinely noted in their diaries instances of stubborn enemy resistance and refusal to surrender. Goebbels, too, registered the desperate Soviet resistance but hastened to emphasize that it was more “a courage of dullness than of heroism.” From the first days of the invasion, Hitler worried, as he had during the French campaign, that the deep armored thrusts had left the German flanks exposed to attack from both the north and the south. Although Halder dismissed these concerns as the “old refrain,” persistent Soviet counterattacks had, indeed, set nerves on edge and not just in the High Command.64

  One Landser, surely speaking for many, noted his shock and dismay at his first experience of a Soviet attack:

  I can never forget the first mass attack by Russian infantry. . . . The Soviet assaults . . . were carried out by masses of men who made no real attempt at concealment but trusted in sheer weight of numbers to overwhelm us. . . . The whole mass of Russian troops came tramping solidly and relentlessly forward. It was an unbelievable sight, a machine gunner’s dream. . . . At 600 meters we opened fire and whole sections of the first wave just vanished leaving here and there an odd survivor still walking stolidly forward. It was uncanny, unbelievable, inhuman. . . . Then, as if on a signal, the lines of men began running forward . . . [with] a low, rumbling “Hoooooraaay.” . . . The rush by the fourth wave came on more slowly for the men had to pick their way through a great carpet of bodies. . . .

  About an hour later a further five lines of men came on in a second attack. We smashed this and then crushed a third and fourth assault. The numbers of the enemy seemed endless and new waves of men advanced across their own dead without hesitation. . . . The number, duration, and fury of those attacks had exhausted and numbed us completely. Not to hide the truth, they had frightened us. Our advance had been no great strategic drive but an ordinary move . . . and yet they had contested it for day after day and with masses of men. If the Soviets could waste men on our small move . . . , how often, we asked ourselves, would they attack and in what numbers if the objective was really a supremely important one? . . . Some of us began to realize for the first time that the war against the Soviet Union was going to be bigger than we had thought it would be and a sense of depression, brought about by a fear of the unknown, settled upon us. That we would win, we had no doubt, but what we were now engaged in would be a long, bitter and hard fought war.65

  In truth, despite Halder’s frustration at Hitler’s worries, both the Führer and the anonymous Landser had valid grounds for concern and for the same reason: it had become increasingly clear that, despite the rosy projections of the Barbarossa planners, the German army lacked the ability to accomplish all the objectives set for it. The assumption had been that the Red Army would collapse at the initial blow; if it survived, as it now showed signs of having done, the Wehrmacht had insufficient strength to finish the task. The growing tension between Hitler and the OKH reflected this problem. Hitler’s operational directive of December 1940 had stressed the importance, after the initial victories on the central front, of shifting forces to the north to seize Leningrad and the Baltic coast as well as to the south to secure the economic resources of Ukraine. Although Halder and the Army General Staff acknowledged the significance of capturing these regions, they had always favored a direct thrust on Moscow, itself an important industrial and communications center, as the best way to lure the Red Army into a destructive trap. In agreeing to the Barbarossa plan, Halder had intended from the beginning to develop an attack in the center with such momentum that Hitler would be forced to concede to OKH wishes. In the first two weeks of the campaign, then, even as Hitler expressed concern that Bock’s units were overreaching themselves and allowing the formation of loose pockets from which the enemy might escape, Halder issued orders and guidelines that ignored or undermined the Führer’s instructions. Halder’s obstructionism, however, only angered Hitler and intensified his suspicions, dating to the French campaign, of the Army General Staff.66

  Si
nce the Wehrmacht lacked the necessary resources to execute both operational conceptions, a decision had to be made, and soon, as to whether to sustain the drive of Army Group Center toward Moscow or to adhere to the original plan and turn forces to the flanks. “Turn to the north or south?” Hitler puzzled on 4 July. “It will perhaps be the most difficult decision of this war.” The next day, Hitler again grappled with the issue of the future direction of operations, recognizing not only that the moment had come to make a choice but also that it might be the most decisive of the war, indeed, “perhaps in general the only critical decision in this war.” Still, the Führer hesitated three more days, on 8 July finally picking the strategy favored by Halder: Army Group Center would press ahead toward Smolensk with the aim of destroying Red Army forces west of Moscow, while Army Group North would continue the operation toward Leningrad with its own forces. Significantly, what Hitler termed his ideal solution also entailed leveling Moscow and Leningrad to the ground and making them uninhabitable, thus relieving the Germans of the necessity of feeding the civilian populations through the winter. In this instance, the perfect military solution dovetailed nicely with the requirements of the hunger policy: “useless eaters” would be left to starve. More importantly, Hitler had, at least temporarily, also abandoned the Barbarossa plan, an implicit admission that it had failed to accomplish its original goals. Nor had he really made a decisive choice, for, in the following weeks, he and the OKH would continually reopen the festering dispute over the focal point of operations.67