Ostkrieg

by Stephen G. Fritz

  Significantly, Adolf Eichmann, the Nazi deportation expert who later claimed that Heydrich had told him in the fall of 1941, “The Führer has ordered the physical destruction of the Jews,” also met with Wirth at Belzec. Although Eichmann’s postwar testimony was admittedly somewhat contradictory, the fact that Hitler had authorized the deportation of German Jews and the dispatch of euthanasia personnel to the east adds credence to his recollections. So does the fact that, on 17 October, Heydrich intervened to prevent the evacuation of Spanish Jews interned in France to Morocco, on the grounds that “these Jews would be . . . out of direct reach of the measures for a basic solution to the Jewish question to be enacted after the war.” The next day Himmler noted to Heydrich, “No emigration by Jews to overseas,” while on the twenty-third the emigration gates were sealed. That day, Gestapo chief Heinrich Müller circulated a Himmler order to the various police and SD agencies announcing that all Jewish emigration was to be stopped. A fateful divide had been passed; what had formerly been official Nazi policy, a Judenfrei Europe through expulsion, had been definitively altered. The Jews of Europe would now be deported to the east.73

  Nor would their eventual fate be in doubt. Talking with Fritz Sauckel and Fritz Todt on 17 October, Hitler, in an expansive mood, sketched his vision of the Germanization of the eastern territories. The Slavs, he mused, would be treated “as Indians,” with some elements “sifted.” For the rest, “We are getting rid of the destructive Jews entirely. . . . I proceed with these matters ice-cold. I feel myself to be only the executor of a will of history.” Four days later, meeting with Bormann, Hitler clearly sketched his sense of mission: “When we exterminate this plague, then we perform a deed for humanity, the significance of which our men out there can still not at all imagine.” On the night of the twenty-fifth, Hitler recalled to Himmler and Heydrich his Reichstag prophecy, then boasted, “We are writing history anew from the racial standpoint.” By that time, not only was the extermination camp at Chelmno, near Lodz, nearly completed, but plans were also set in motion to construct two other such facilities, at Mogilev (in Belorussia) and Riga. In mid-November the Topf company had been commissioned to construct a huge crematorium at Mogilev, with the first oven actually delivered in December. By then, however, military events had interceded, and the camp and gas chambers were never constructed; instead, the crematory units were sent to Auschwitz.74

  To all appearances, a fundamental decision had been taken in the early autumn to kill the Jews of Europe, a decision that even the deteriorating military situation would not reverse. In early November, a time resonant in Hitler’s mind with the shameful capitulation of 1918, events at the front seemed to harden his determination to destroy the Jews. At lunch with Himmler on 5 November, Hitler vowed that he would not allow “criminals” to stay alive while “the best men” were dying at the front. “We experienced that in 1918,” he added, with little need to expand on what he meant, given the notorious passage in Mein Kampf in which he rued the Kaiser’s failure to kill “Hebrew polluters” at the beginning of World War I. That evening, he launched a diatribe against the Jews, vowing that the war would bring their ruin. In Munich three days later to address the old comrades on the anniversary of the failed putsch, the Führer once again blamed the Jews for the war, noting that it was merely the continuation of the struggle that had not ended in 1918. Germany had been cheated of victory then, he remarked bitterly, “But that was only the beginning, the first act of this drama. The second and the finale will now be written. And this time we will make good what we were then cheated of.” Finally, at his field headquarters in the early hours of 2 December, just days before the Soviet counterattack in front of Moscow, he remarked bitingly of the Jews, “He who destroys life, exposes himself to death. And nothing other than this is happening to them.” Just a few days later, the first extermination center, at Chelmno, went into operation. The day before, however, the Japanese bombed the American naval base at Pearl Harbor. The European war was now part of a world war. On the twelfth, meeting with party leaders the day after having declared war on the United States, Hitler again referred to his prophecy, drawing the logical, if murderous, conclusion. As Goebbels noted, “He warned the Jews that if they were to cause another world war, it would lead to their own destruction. Those were not empty words. Now the world war has come. The destruction of the Jews must be the necessary consequence. We cannot be sentimental about it.” With his insistence that his prophecy be taken literally, Hitler had finally resolved any remaining ambiguity about the timing of the Final Solution: the destruction of Europe’s Jews would take place immediately and not be delayed until after the war.75

  In a strict sense, no plan yet existed for the coordinated murder of Europe’s Jews, although, since October, Heydrich had been sending reports to various ministries in the Berlin bureaucracy both to acquaint them with the ongoing annihilation of Soviet Jewry and to prepare the ground for their eventual cooperation. To that end, Heydrich had on 29 November sent out invitations to those in the civilian bureaucracies most concerned with Jewish policy for a conference to be held on 9 December to clarify matters. The worsening military situation forced a postponement of the meeting, and not until 20 January did Heydrich convene the conference, with lunch included, at a confiscated Jewish villa on the Wannsee, a large lake on the outskirts of Berlin. In the meantime, Hitler and other top Nazis had not been idle. In the two days following his speech to party leaders, Hitler and Himmler had a flurry of meetings with Philipp Bouhler and Viktor Brack, the key figures in the euthanasia organization, securing the extensive use of euthanasia personnel in the solution to the Jewish question. Himmler also expressed a new sense of urgency, stressing to Brack, “One must work as quickly as possible.” Then, in a meeting with Alfred Rosenberg on the sixteenth, Hitler remarked that the Jews “had brought the war down on us, they had started all the destruction, so it should come as no surprise if they became its first victims.” Time and again in these momentous mid-December days, Hitler referred to the retribution that would be visited on world Jewry for its alleged anti-German activities and responsibility for the war. The Jews having lost their role as hostages who might deter American entry into the war, nothing now stood in the way of their mass annihilation.76

  Back from Berlin, Hans Frank on 16 December conveyed to his subordinates in the General Government the attitude at the top: “The Jews will disappear. . . . We must destroy the Jews wherever we find them. . . . But what is going to happen to these Jews? Do you imagine there will be settlement villages for them . . . ? In Berlin we were told . . . : Liquidate them yourselves!” As if to confirm Frank’s assessment, in a reply on 18 December to an official inquiry from Reichskommissariat Ostland asking whether all Jews were to be liquidated, Berlin indicated: “Clarity on the Jewish question has been achieved through oral discussion: economic interests are to be disregarded . . . in the settlement of this problem.” That same day, Himmler, following a meeting with Hitler, expressed clearly in his appointment book what that meant: “Jewish question/to be exterminated as partisans.”77

  By the time of the Wannsee Conference, then, none of the participants harbored any doubts about the fate of the Jews: what they were to organize and prepare was not a resettlement operation but the deportation and systematic destruction of Europe’s Jews. Although Heydrich referred to using Jewish labor to build roads in the east, during which project a large number would die from overwork and starvation (which, in fact, was already occurring in Polish Galicia), the idea of annihilating Jews through forced labor after a victorious war had given way to the recognition that the Jews would be destroyed during the war, and not in the Soviet Union but in the newly created death camps in Poland. “Practical experiences,” Heydrich mentioned cryptically, were being gathered that would be of great significance for the “imminent” Final Solution. Heydrich had been quite pleased at the outcome of the meeting. He had anticipated difficulties, but, instead, his authority had been recognized, no objections had be
en raised to the extermination of the Jews, the state secretaries of the relevant bureaucracies were enthusiastic about doing their part, and the basic outline for the practical implementation of the Final Solution had been agreed on. Not all the details had been settled, and the methods and techniques being experimented with were still untried on a large scale, but no one at the conference could doubt the ultimate goal: every Jew in Europe was to be killed.78

  The gas chambers at Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka, and Auschwitz did not begin operation until March 1942, and not until July would large-scale deportations from Western Europe begin, but the key decision about the fate of the Jews had been taken. Until the summer of 1941, the Nazi leadership had envisioned the solution to its self-imposed Jewish problem through emigration, expulsion, and resettlement, only to be frustrated at every turn. With the magnitude of the problem increased through territorial conquest in Russia, military success itself led to a further radicalization: the Jews of the Soviet Union would be shot where they were found, with the fate of the remainder of the European Jews left hanging. By mid-October, the expectation of imminent victory led to the ultimate radicalization: no European Jews were to be allowed to escape what would now not be a slow death through hunger, disease, and harsh labor. Instead, the goal would be the immediate physical destruction of the Jews even as the war continued, as the regional killing operations were merged into a comprehensive program of systematic mass murder. The decision was not made all at once but instead reflected a process of incremental radicalization within which Hitler often responded to, and approved, the initiatives of his subordinates. But, for the ultimate step to mass murder, both Hitler’s authorization and the context of the war were vital. On 30 January 1942, just ten days after the Wannsee Conference, Hitler spoke before a packed house at the Sportpalast, where he once again referred to his prophecy. The war, he declared, “can only end either with the extermination of the Aryan peoples or the disappearance of Jewry from Europe.” He thought, however, that the war would not end as the Jews imagined: “The result of this war will be the annihilation of Jewry. For the first time the old Jewish law will now be applied: an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth. . . . And the hour will come when the most evil world-enemy of all time will have played out its role.”79 The Wehrmacht had invaded the Soviet Union as the vanguard of a regime with murderous intentions; Barbarossa had now become a war of annihilation in the fullest sense.

  The genocidal process now set in motion came, ironically, just at the moment the German attack passed the culmination point, the crucial stage at which an offensive degenerates into nothing more than a dangerous gamble vulnerable to enemy counterattack. In late October, the OKW estimated the actual fighting power of the 136 divisions in the Ostheer to be the equivalent of only 83 divisions; moreover, the morale and combat strength of individual soldiers and units had also declined perceptibly. Having already conceded that the war against the Soviet Union would continue into 1942, the Germans now sought primarily to weaken the enemy to such an extent that he could not recover and to gain favorable jumping-off positions for the spring offensive. In order to weaken the enemy decisively, however, the Germans had to capture key railway lines and armament centers, which meant that even the minimum goals—reaching Voroshilovgrad, Ivanov, Yaroslavl, and Rybinsk—were ambitious, if not completely unattainable given the parlous state of the Ostheer. The maximum goals set by Halder—advancing to Maikop, Stalingrad, Gorky, and Vologda in order to seize the oil fields of the Caucasus and the armaments centers of the interior while cutting the transport routes for Lend-Lease supplies—were so utterly unrealistic that they bordered on the delusional.80

  Bock, in fact, vigorously opposed Halder’s aims, telling the latter, “The objectives . . . surely cannot be reached before winter, because we no longer have the required forces and because it is impossible to supply those forces.” To Bock, the only realistic remaining operational goal was a line along the Moskva River and the Moscow-Volga Canal (i.e., the western outskirts of Moscow) since the reduced strength of the army group made any encirclement of the city unlikely. Moreover, the supply situation necessitated a staggered advance of individual armies rather than a unified strike against the capital, even though Bock knew that the only chance for success lay in a concentrated thrust. More worrisome, if anything went amiss, Bock did not believe that the front as it then stood could be defended. His doubts, in fact, highlighted the key question of how to proceed: whether it was best to stop early, conserve strength, and rebuild for the following spring or press ahead in an attempt to achieve the maximum disruptive effect in the time left for campaigning.81

  In order to discuss these options, Halder convened a conference of chiefs of staff of the army groups and armies at Orsha on 13 November. Desperately hoping for six more weeks of suitable weather that would allow major operations to be carried out, he posed the question of the extent to which the next year’s offensive could be prepared through further winter advances. Like Hitler, he clearly intended one last great effort to achieve the maximum possible effect. He found himself opposed virtually across the board by staff officers who, concerned about the sheer survival of the Ostheer, stressed that the serious deficiencies in manpower and supplies, the imminent physical and psychological collapse of the troops, and the lack of winter clothing and equipment ruled out any further large-scale offensives. Even the limited attack on Moscow proposed by Bock’s chief of staff, a direct thrust without any broad envelopment of the city, involved major risks that made success highly unlikely. Despite this uniformly bleak picture, however, Halder demanded that the attack on Moscow proceed and that all the army groups push on until mid-December. When pressed a few days later by a member of the quartermaster-general’s office who pointed out that it would be impossible to supply Army Group Center even as far as the Moskva River, Halder replied, “Your calculations are certainly correct, but we should not like to stand in Bock’s way if he thinks he can succeed; you also need a little bit of luck in war.”82 Amazingly, German operational assessments had been reduced to the hope for a streak of gambler’s good fortune, hardly an adequate response at such a critical moment, especially in view of the condition of German forces.

  Having from the outset of planning argued for the key importance of Moscow, and having done everything he could operationally to force a decision there, Halder now seemed compelled to push on, despite all available information indicating that the attack would miscarry. In spite of the failure of earlier encirclement battles to cripple the Red Army, he still sought to destroy its vital fighting strength at Moscow. Perhaps one more tactical success, the capture of the enemy’s capital, would produce a Soviet collapse, just as a little over a year earlier the fall of Paris had achieved just such decisive results. The conviction was general, after all, that the Soviets were making a last effort and that the stronger will would prevail. “We are not doing too well,” Halder summed up the situation, “but the Russians are doing far worse!” This attitude meant that the OKH did not attach much importance to reports indicating the transfer of fresh Soviet units from the Far East to Moscow. Instead, it simply placed its hopes in the superiority of its own soldiers. This inaccurate assessment of Soviet strength fueled a further consideration, one replete with historical significance. The Army High Command feared a repeat of the battle at the Marne in September 1914, when the fight was prematurely abandoned and an imminent strategic victory thrown away. A final effort seemed mandatory in view of the proximity of the enemy’s capital and the presumed weakness of his forces; having squandered possible victory in an earlier war through a failure of will, army commanders would not now repeat the same mistake. After all, aid from the Anglo-Americans might enable Stalin to recoup his losses, just as France had recovered in 1914. A final effort thus seemed mandatory, even though Bock was ambivalent (as were others) and displayed little optimism about a possible triumph.83

  Political calculations also played a role, for the mood in Germany had darkened considerably since
the heady days of early October when Hitler had confidently predicted imminent victory. By November, people had begun to wonder whether it would be possible to end the war at all; a peace with Stalin seemed hardly possible, nor could Germany, in view of its limited manpower, reasonably expect to occupy all of the Soviet Union. Moreover, the lack of official announcements was disturbing. After hearing that the bulk of the Red Army had been destroyed and that German troops had advanced to within forty miles of Moscow, the German people found that reports suddenly stopped. Goebbels, in fact, had already begun shifting German propaganda from an emphasis on when Germany would win to the more important topic of how the war would end: “If we win, then we have won everything. . . . If we lose . . . we have lost all.” A triumph at Moscow was necessary to restore optimism at home and the old conviction that the Wehrmacht was invincible. As a result, the OKH ignored warnings from the front such as that from General Sodenstern, the chief of staff of Army Group South, who cautioned at the end of October: “It is no longer possible to mitigate the situation by saying: ‘It will be all right, it has always been all right up to now despite frequent reports that the troops cannot go on any longer.’ There comes a time when—physically—they really cannot go on any longer. . . . I believe that this point has now . . . been reached.”84