Nazi Germany and the Jews, Volume 2: The Years of Extermination

by Saul Friedlander

  The prophecy had been present, let us recall, as 1942 started and Hitler addressed his New Year’s message to the nation.6 On January 25 historical “insights” and unusually open remarks about the fate of the Jews were volunteered for the benefit of two cognoscenti, Lammers and Himmler: “It must be done quickly,” Hitler told them. “The Jew must be ousted from Europe. If not, we shall get no European cooperation. He incites everywhere. In the end I don’t know: I am so immensely humane [Ich bin so kolossal human]. At the time of papal rule in Rome, the Jews were mistreated. Until 1830 every year eight Jews were driven through the city on donkeys. I only say: he [the Jew] must go. If he is destroyed in the process, I can’t help it. I see only one thing: total extermination, if they do not leave voluntarily. Why should I look at a Jew any differently from a Russian prisoner? In the prisoners’ camps many die, because we have been pushed into this situation by the Jews. But what can I do? Why did the Jews start this war?”7

  On January 30, 1942, in the ritual yearly address to the Reichstag, this time delivered at the Berlin Sportpalast, Hitler reverted in full force to his seer’s rhetoric: “We should be in no doubt that this war can only end either with the extermination of the Aryan peoples or with the disappearance of Jewry from Europe.” And, after again reminding the audience of his prophecy, Hitler went on: “For the first time, the ancient Jewish rule will now be applied: ‘An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth!’” Thereupon messianic ardor took hold of the Nazi leader: “World Jewry should know that the more the war spreads, the more anti-Semitism will also spread. It will grow in every prisoner-of-war camp, in every family that will understand the reasons for which it has, ultimately, to make its sacrifices. And, the hour will strike when the most evil world enemy of all times will have ended his role at least for a thousand years.”8 The millennial vision of a final redemption capped off the litany of hatred.

  The Volk’s intuition was unerring. A general SD opinion report of February 2 showed how well the January 30 speech had been understood. The population interpreted Hitler’s use of “an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth” as proof that their Führer was “pursuing his campaign against Jewry with inexorable single-mindedness to its very end and that soon the last Jew would be expelled from European soil.”9 According to a February 21 report from Minden, people were saying: “When one speaks to soldiers about the East, one recognizes that here, in Germany, the Jews are treated much too humanely. The right thing would be to exterminate the entire brood” [Es wäre das richtige, die ganze Brut müsste vernichtet werden].10

  In Warsaw, Kaplan also understood the main thrust of Hitler’s speech: “The day before yesterday,” he noted on February 2, “we read the speech the Führer delivered celebrating January 30, 1933, when he boasted that his prophecy was beginning to come true. Had he not stated that if war erupted in Europe, the Jewish race would be annihilated? This process has begun and will continue until the end is achieved. For us the speech serves as proof that what we thought were rumors are in effect reports of actual occurrences. The Judenrat and the Joint have documents which confirm the new direction of Nazi policy toward the Jews in the conquered territories: death by extermination for entire Jewish communities.”11

  Hitler’s apocalyptic vision surfaced once again in his February 24 message to the “Old Fighters” assembled in Munich for the annual gathering celebrating the proclamation of the party program. The Nazi leader bandied his prophecy once more. They had been a small group of “believers,” the leader told the party inner core, who as early as in 1919 “had not only recognized the international enemy of humankind, but also fought him.” Much had changed since those heroic beginnings, and now their ideas were embraced by powerful states. The messianic incantation followed: “Whatever the present struggle may bring or whatever its duration may be, this will be its final outcome [the extermination of the Jews]. And only then, after the elimination of these parasites, the suffering world will attain a long period of understanding among nations and thus achieve true peace.”12 On the March 15, “Memorial Day for Fallen Soldiers” (Heldengedenktag), Hitler’s furious anti-Jewish campaign went on, as threatening as ever.

  Again and again the Nazi leader announced the extermination of the Jews, and each time many Germans understood perfectly well that he meant it. Thus, after reading the February 24 speech in the next day’s Niedersächsische Tages Zeitung (NTZ), Karl Dürkefälden, an employee in an industrial enterprise near Hannover, noted Hitler’s threats in his diary; in his view the threats had to be taken seriously, and he quoted the title given to the Nazi leader’s speech in the NTZ: “The Jew will be exterminated” (Der Jude wird ausgerottet).13 A few days beforehand Dürkefälden had listened to a speech by Thomas Mann, broadcast on the BBC, in which the writer had mentioned the gassing of 400 young Dutch Jews. Dürkefälden commented that such gassings were entirely credible given Hitler’s constant harangues against the Jews.14 In other words, as early as during the first months of 1942, even “ordinary Germans” knew that the Jews were being pitilessly murdered.

  As usual Goebbels was his master’s voice, but he was also the scribe of his master’s private tirades and, at times, a keen observer on his own. On January 13, for example, he noted that a people was defenseless against the Jewish threat if it lacked the right “anti-Semitic instinct”: “That,” he added, “cannot be said of the German people.”15 At each of his meetings with Hitler, the minister was invariably told that the Jews had to be eradicated: “Together with Bolshevism,” Hitler declared to his minister on February 14, “Jewry will undoubtedly experience its great catastrophe. The Führer declares once again that he has decided to do away ruthlessly with the Jews in Europe. In this matter one should not have any sentimental impulses. The Jews have deserved the catastrophe that they are now experiencing. We must accelerate this process with cold determination, as in so doing we render a priceless service to humanity, which for millennia was tortured by Jewry. This clear-cut anti-Jewish position must also be impressed upon one’s own people against all willfully opposed groups. The Führer repeated this explicitly, somewhat later, to a gathering of officers.”16

  On March 7 the minister alluded for the first time to the Wannsee conference. Twenty days later he recorded the sequence of the extermination process: “Starting with Lublin, the Jews are now being deported from the General Government to the East. The procedure used is quite barbaric and should not be described in any further detail. Not much remains anymore of the Jews themselves. In general terms one has to admit that some 60 percent have to be liquidated, whereas only 40 percent can be used for work. The former Gauleiter of Vienna [Globocnik], who is in charge of this operation, proceeds quite cautiously and in a way that does not draw much attention. The Jews are being subjected to a sentence that is barbaric, but they have fully deserved it. The prophecy that the Führer made to them for provoking a new world war starts to come true in the most terrible way. In these things no sentimentality should be allowed. If we didn’t defend ourselves, the Jews would exterminate us. It is a life-or-death struggle between the Aryan race and the Jewish microbe. No other government and no other regime would have been able to muster the strength to find a general solution to this issue. Here too the Führer is the unswerving pioneer and spokesman of a radical solution, which the state of things requires and which appears, therefore, as unavoidable. Thank God, during the war we now have a whole range of possibilities that we couldn’t use in peacetime; we have to exploit them. The ghettos of the General Government that are being liberated will now be filled with Jews deported from the Reich and, after a certain time, the same process will take place again. Jewry has nothing to laugh about and the fact that its representatives in England and America organize and propagate the war against Germany must be paid for very dearly by its representatives in Europe; this also is justified.”17

  In the crescendo of anti-Jewish abuse and threats that Hitler unceasingly spewed, his most “encompassing” speech was his Reichstag address of April
26, 1942. In a meeting with Goebbels the morning of that day, the Nazi leader once again launched into the Jewish question. “His position regarding this problem is inexorable” Goebbels noted. “The Jews have brought so much suffering to our part of the world that the hardest punishment would still remain too mild. Himmler now organizes the vast transfer of the Jews from the German cities to the eastern ghettos. I ordered that many films should record it. We will urgently need this material for the future education of our people.”18

  The “Great German Reichstag” convened at the Kroll Opera House at three p.m.; it was to be its last meeting.19 Right from the beginning of his speech, Hitler set the “historical framework” of his entire address. This war, he proclaimed, was not an ordinary one in which nations fight each other in the pursuit of their specific interests. This was a fundamental confrontation “the like of which shakes the world once in a thousand years and ushers a new millenium.” As for the pitiless enemy confronted in this apocalyptic struggle, it had, of course, to be the Jews. Hitler reminded his audience of the Jews’ evil role in World War I and since: They pushed America into the conflict, they were behind Wilson’s “Fourteen Points” in 1918, and they brought Bolshevism to “the heart of Europe.”

  But no paraphrase can render the fury of the original: “We know the theoretical principles and the horrible reality of the aims of this world plague. It is called the dictatorship of the proletariat but it is the dictatorship of Jewry!…If Bolshevik Russia is the visible product of this Jewish infection, one should not forget that democratic capitalism creates the preconditions for it,” Hitler thundered on. “Here the Jews prepare what the same Jews complete in the second act of this process. In the first phase they turned the masses in their millions into helpless slaves or—as they say themselves—into a despoiled proletariat. Afterward they incite this fanaticized mass to destroy the very foundations of its own state. The extermination of the national elites follows and, finally, so does the liquidation of all the cultural creations that, over the millennia, molded the traditions of these peoples…. What remains after all of this is the beast in humanity and a Jewish layer that reached leadership but that in the end, as the parasite, destroys the ground which nurtured it. It is against this process, which Mommsen called the decomposition of states by the Jews, that the awakening new Europe has declared war.”20

  A major surprise followed the end of the speech. Göring introduced the text of a resolution granting the Führer extraordinary new powers, particularly in the judicial domain. Hitler was to be the supreme judge, the supreme source of the law and of its implementation. Why the Nazi leader felt the need for this repeat performance of the so-called Ermächtigungsgesetz [the Enabling Act of 1933] seemed unclear at the time, as his power was unchallenged in any case. Goebbels, like many other commentators, dwelled on this particular aspect of the meeting. “The new law,” the propaganda minister commented, “is accepted by the Reichstag with jubilant unanimity. Now the Führer has the full powers to do whatever he considers right. It has been confirmed once again by the representatives elected by the people. Thus, no judge and no general will dare to question the Führer’s full powers any longer.21 Goebbels knew as well as Hitler did that the winter crisis that had barely been overcome, was the portent of increasingly difficult times…Klemperer, for one, noticed the other part of the speech, writing: “The concentration of hatred has this time turned into utter madness. Not England or the USA or Russia—only, in everything, nothing but the Jew.”22 Both aspects of the speech may in fact have been linked.

  It could be that, as full-scale mass extermination was now starting, Hitler wanted to avoid the slightest possibility of another threat of criminal charges (as the one brandished by Bishop Galen in his sermon against the murder of the mentally ill in August 1941). The German Jews, let us remember, remained subjects of the Reich as long as they had not left German territory: Lodz and Chelmno were in newly annexed German territory—and so was Auschwitz. On May 4, just a few days after the Reichstag meeting, 10,000 Jews from the Reich and the Protectorate were transported from the Lodz ghetto to the Chelmno gas vans.

  “A proper understanding of Jews and Judaism cannot but demand their total annihilation,” Volk und Rasse proclaimed in May 1942.23 In Der Angriff of that same month, Ley’s threats competed with his master’s prophecies: “The war will end,” the labor minister announced to the 300,000 readers of the weekly magazine, “with the extermination of the Jewish race.”24 A few days later the same minister spelled out his threats once more: “The Jews will pay with the extermination of their race in Europe,” he clamored in Das Reich of June 6, 1942.25

  The Kaufman story seems to have kept its hold on the Volk’s imagination. Thus a March 15, 1942, SD report from Bielefeld about the general attitude of the population to the war emphasized that “thanks in particular to the extraordinarily effective influence of propaganda, it has become clear to all that the Jew is the instigator of this war and bears the responsibility for the endless misery that it causes to so many Volksgenossen. The acceptance of this view by such wide parts of the population is due in no small measure to the propagation of the text of the American Jew Kaufmann [sic].”26

  The upsurge in anti-Jewish hatred noted in Bielefeld probably explains why the Völkischer Beobachter of April 30, 1942, could, without qualms, carry a detailed article (thinly veiled as rumor) by its war correspondent Schaal about SD operations in the East: “The rumor has spread among the population that it is the task of the Security Police to exterminate the Jews in the occupied territories. The Jews were assembled in the thousands and shot; beforehand they had to dig their own graves. At times the execution of the Jews reached such proportions that even members of the Einsatzkommandos suffered nervous breakdowns.”27

  On May 8 School Councillor Dr. Borchers lectured to an assembly of school directors in Erfurt; the topic: “What do we need to know about bolshevism to be able to teach it to the children?” The lecture on bolshevism dealt with the Jews, starting with Abraham, continuing with Moses, and onward with the penetration of Jewry into all civilized nations, infecting them with its pestilential breath. Step by step the lecturer moved from one deadly Jewish conspiracy to the next until he reached bolshevism, the ultimate means to subvert all states. Borchers’s finale was of course a hymn to the Führer, who had been the first to recognize the spiritual link between Jewry and bolshevism, who exposed it ruthlessly, and who knew in time how to adapt his policy to these findings.28 This was the message that school directors were asked to impart to their students.

  The all-pervasive anti-Jewish hate campaign found a typical expression in the letter addressed on January 20, 1942, by one Karl Gross, party district chief of the small town of Immenhausen, to his boss in Hofgeismar (near Kassel): “Further to your communication dated January 17, 1942, regarding privileged mixed marriages, I hereby inform you that the local inhabitants have taken great exception to the fact that the local woman doctor (a full-blooded Jewess) is not required to wear a Jewish star. The Jewess takes full advantage of this in that she often goes to Kassel by train, second class, and can travel free from interference without the star. The entire population would welcome it if this state of affairs could be remedied in some way. I inform you at the same time that consideration might be given to deporting the local Jewess because her husband (a doctor) is having an affair with an Aryan woman doctor, who is expecting a child by him in the next few weeks. If the Jewess were deported, the Aryan woman doctor could continue to run Dr. Jahn’s household. It might be appropriate to discuss the said circumstances [with him] in person. This could bring about the disappearance of the only Jewess still resident here.”29

  We shall come back to the story of Lilly Jahn, born Schlüchterer, to a well-to-do Jewish family from Cologne, herself a successful practicing physician, married to an Aryan colleague, Ernst Jahn. The couple had five children, which indeed put them in the category of a privileged mixed marriage and exempted Lilli from wearing the star. As G
ross correctly indicated, at that time Ernst Jahn was openly having an affair with a German woman physician, Rita Schmidt, and the marriage was about to fall apart.

  II

  Initially scheduled for December 9, 1941, the high-level meeting convened by Heydrich in Berlin, at the guesthouse of the Security Police, 56-58, Strasse Am Grossen Wannsee, opened at noon on January 20, 1942. It assembled fourteen people: several state secretaries or other high-ranking officials and a few SS officers, including Adolf Eichmann, who had sent the invitations (in Heydrich’s name) and who drew up the minutes of the meeting.30 Some of the invitations pointed to the main purpose of the conference even before it started.

  A December 1, 1941, exchange between HSSPF Krüger and the chief of the RSHA had indicated that Hans Frank was manuevering for control of Jewish matters in the General Government.31 As for Rosenberg’s ambition to lord over the Jews in the newly conquered eastern territories, it was notorious, as we saw. Thus the invitations extended to Frank’s second-in-command, Secretary of State Josef Bühler and to Rosenberg’s own number two, Secretary of State Alfred Meyer, were clearly meant to convey to them who would be in charge of the ‘Final Solution.’ To a lesser degree, a similar affirmation of authority may have been intended for State Secretaries Wilhelm Stuckart and Roland Freisler from the Interior and Justice Ministries, whose institutions had an important say in the fate of mixed breeds and mixed marriages and did not automatically follow suggestions from the RSHA.32