Final victory in Russia was still assumed to be imminent. Until this came, with a consequent liberation of resources, most of the Nazi leadership favoured deferring a ‘Final Solution’. Heinrich Himmler, however, was less patient: he saw swift eradication of Jews in the occupied territories both as a national priority and a means of extending his personal authority. He flaunted his mandate as Reichskommissar ‘for the strengthening of the German nation’, even though at that stage Hitler had made no decision about ‘Germanisation’ of occupied Soviet territory. It may sound trite to emphasise the centrality of the influence of the SS upon the Holocaust, but it is nonetheless necessary. The most powerful fiefdom in Nazi Germany pursued the extinction of the Jews almost heedless of its impact on the country’s war-making. As John Lukacs has observed, Himmler focused far more single-mindedly on this objective than did Hitler.
In September 1941, the Führer confirmed Himmler’s victory in his contest with Alfred Rosenberg for authority over eastern Europe: the Reichsführer SS was given explicit licence to conduct ethnic cleansing in the east. This decision marked the onset of the Third Reich’s systematic campaign of genocide. Amid expectations of looming victory, commitments were made that became significant impediments to Germany’s war effort when faced with the rising spectre of defeat. Yet they were never reversed: Himmler pursued the extermination of Jews with a concentration of purpose conspicuously absent from every other aspect of Nazi policy-making. Any rational assessment of Germany’s predicament in late 1941 demanded dedication to winning the war, above all against the Soviet Union. If this was achieved, the Third Reich could thereafter order its polity as it wished; if not, then National Socialism was doomed. But Himmler committed the SS to a task which could contribute nothing to German victory, and indeed diverted resources from its achievement.
Through the autumn and into the winter of 1941, the pace of slaughter accelerated: scores of towns and villages were systematically purged of Jews. In October, when a Soviet ‘stay-behind’ commando blew up the Romanian army’s newly established headquarters in Odessa, Romanian troops assisted by German SS killed some 40,000 of its Jews. On the 18th and 19th, the SS murdered all 8,000 Jewish inhabitants of Mariupol, and a week later another 1,800 in Taganrog. Week after week the process continued, in towns the world had never heard of – Skadovsk and Feodosiya, Kerch and Dzhankoy, Nikolayev and Kherson. Mental-asylum patients were killed as a matter of course, whatever their religious affiliation. The SS also shot large numbers of prisoners whom they identified as ‘of Asiatic appearance’, and began the work of murdering gypsies, which became systematic in 1942. PoW camps were combed for Russian Jews and commissars; those identified, at least 140,000 in all, were removed and shot. It seems important to emphasise that by the time the Final Solution was agreed, at least two million Soviet PoWs had already been killed or allowed to die. All moral barriers to mass murder had been broken down, ample precedent for wholesale killing established, before the major massacres of Jews were ordained.
In the winter of 1941, administrative confusion persisted about whether Jews capable of forced labour service should be kept alive. Local commanders adopted diverse policies: in Kaunas 1,608 men, women and children ‘ill or suspected of being infectious’ were murdered on 26 September, followed by a further 1,845 in a ‘punishment operation’ on 4 October, and 9,200 more after a new screening on 29 October. On 30 October, the head of the German civil administration in Slutsk in western Russia made a formal protest to the general commissioner in Minsk about the massacre of the city’s Jews. ‘One simply could not do without the Jewish craftsmen,’ he said, ‘because they were indispensable for the maintenance of the economy … All vital enterprises would be paralysed with a single blow if all Jews were liquidated.’
His complaints, he said, had been brushed aside by the commander of the police battalion carrying out the killings, who expressed astonishment ‘and explained that he had received instructions … to make the city free of Jews without exception, as they had also done in other cities. The cleansing had to take place on political grounds, and nowhere had economic factors so far played a role … During the action the city itself offered a horrible picture … The Jews, among them also craftsmen, were brutally mistreated in a frightfully barbarous way. One can no longer speak of a Jewish action, it appeared much more like a revolution.’ None of this, of course, deflected Himmler or his officers: on 29–30 November more than 10,000 inhabitants of the Riga ghetto were shot outside the city, and another 20,000 a week later. By December, most Jews in the Baltic states were dead; thousands of collaborators recruited by the Germans as ‘local voluntary troops’ participated enthusiastically in the killings. For the rest of the war, Latvians, Lithuanians, Estonians and Ukrainians played an important part in implementing Himmler’s Jewish extermination programme – over 300,000 were eventually enlisted as auxiliaries to the SS, men who might credibly otherwise have served in Hitler’s armies.
The Wehrmacht was wholly complicit in Himmler’s operations, even though the SS did most of the killing. On 10 August 1941, Sixth Army commander Walter von Reichenau cited in an order the ‘necessary execution of criminal, Bolshevist and mainly Jewish elements’ which the SS must carry out. Manstein described Jews on 20 November as ‘the middleman between the enemy at our backs and the remains of the Red Army’. Karl-Heinrich von Stülpnagel of Seventeenth Army cautioned his units on 30 July not to shoot civilians indiscriminately, but instead to concentrate upon ‘Jewish and communist inhabitants’. The Wehrmacht routinely provided logistical support for SS massacres, together with troops to cordon killing fields. On many documented occasions, army units participated in shootings, despite orders from higher commanders against such sullying of soldierly honour. Soviet partisan activity provided a pretext for ‘security operations’, such as that for which the orders issued by the Wehrmacht’s 707th Division’s commander in Belarus are preserved. ‘Jews,’ he wrote on 16 October 1941, ‘are the only support the partisans have for surviving now and over the winter. Their annihilation must therefore be carried out uncompromisingly.’ Without the Wehrmacht’s active assistance, mass murder on the scale that took place in 1941–42 would have been impossible. By the end of 1941, at least half a million east European Jews were dead.
The elimination of European Jewry assumed an ever-higher priority on the Nazis’ agenda: Hitler convinced himself that the August 1941 Atlantic Charter, together with America’s looming entry into the war, were driven by Jewish influence on the United States government. This lent a new urgency to his determination to kill their co-religionists in Europe. During the months and years that followed, Germany’s leader came to view this as an objective as important as military victory, and even as a precondition for achieving it. Attempts to discern rationality in Nazi strategy, especially from 1941 onwards, founder in the face of such a mindset.
Peter Longerich, one of the more authoritative historians of the Holocaust, has convincingly argued that the Nazi leadership’s commitment to executing the Final Solution through designated death camps was not made until the end of 1941: ‘The leadership at the centre and the executive organizations on the periphery radicalized one another through a reciprocal process.’ Construction of the first purpose-built extermination camp at Bełec near Lublin began only on 1 November 1941. Longerich cites evidence that, until very late that year, key SS officers were still talking of mass deportations rather than extermination, and were chiefly preoccupied with how best to organise and mobilise Jews for slave labour. That autumn, anti-Jewish propaganda within the Reich was sharply increased, to prepare public opinion for the deportation of German Jews to the east. If the distinction sounds arcane between shipping the condemned to a wilderness where they were expected to starve and gassing them wholesale, it was significant in the evolution of the Holocaust.
When the US commitment to the Allied cause became explicit, Hitler could no longer discern advantage in sparing Jews within his reach. ‘In autumn 1941,’ writes Longer
ich, ‘the Nazi leadership began to fight the war on all levels as a war “against the Jews”.’ The construction of gas chambers commenced at Chelmno, Bełec, Auschwitz and elsewhere. Gas trucks had already been employed for the murder of mental patients in Germany and parts of the Nazi empire. Himmler welcomed wider use of such technology, not least to ease the psychological strain which mass shootings imposed on his SS. By autumn 1941, Zyklon B was killing selected prisoners at Auschwitz and elsewhere – though at that stage, most victims were non-Jews. Local initiatives by SS officers, rather than a coherent central directive, determined who died.
In mid-October 1941, mass deportations of Jews from the Reich began, with thousands being dispatched variously to Łód, Riga, Kaunas and Minsk. Among the designated victims there were more than a few suicides, and in the light of events it is hard to suggest that those who took this course were ill-advised. Hans Michaelis was a retired lawyer in Charlottenburg. Just before being transported, he sent for his niece. ‘Maria,’ he said, ‘I don’t have much time. What should I do? What is easiest, what’s the most dignified? To live or to die? To suffer a terrible fate or to end one’s own life?’ His niece wrote: ‘We speak. We examine both possibilities. We ask ourselves what his late wife … would have advised. Again he grabs the clock.’ Then he said, ‘I have 50 hours left here, at most! … Thank God that my Gertrud died a normal death, before Hitler. What would I give for that! … Maria, see how time flies!’ As at last they parted, she said, ‘Uncle Hans, you will know the right thing to do. Farewell.’ Hans Michaelis took poison.
A Berliner named Hilde Meikley watched the removal of local Jews: ‘Sadly I have to say that many people stood in the doorways voicing their pleasure as the wretched column went by. “Just look at those cheeky Jews!” someone shouted. “They’re laughing now, but their last hour has come.”’ The victims were permitted to carry fifty kilograms of baggage apiece. All their valuables were seized at the departure stations, where body searches were conducted and passengers were required to pay fares. Luggage was loaded onto freight wagons, never to be seen again by its owners. Local authorities took possession of vacated housing, which was reallocated to eager new tenants. The rhetoric of Rosenberg and Goebbels, acknowledging the fact of the deportations to the world, was uncompromising. Rosenberg told a November 1941 press conference: ‘Some six million Jews still live in the east, and this question can only be solved by a biological extermination of the whole of Jewry in Europe. The Jewish question will only be solved for Germany when the last Jew has left German territory, and for Europe when not a single Jew stands on the European continent as far as the Urals.’
If the Nazis bore responsibility for the Holocaust, they were assisted in their crimes by some, if not most, of the regimes of occupied Europe. Anti-Semitism, albeit less homicidal than in Germany, was commonplace. Mihail Sebastian, a Jewish writer briefly conscripted into the Romanian army, noted the attitude of many of his fellow soldiers, which contributed to their acquiescence in Nazi dominance of Romania’s polity: ‘Voichita Aurel, my comrade in the Twenty-First Infantry, said something yesterday about Captain Capsuneanu, something that sums up a whole Romanian style of politics: “He’s a real mean bastard who’ll beat you and swear at you. But there’s one good thing about him: he can’t stand yids and lets us have a go at them too.”’ Sebastian wrote: ‘That is precisely the consolation that the Germans offer the Czechs and Poles, and which they are prepared to offer the Romanians.’ The German occupation of France institutionalised a French anti-Semitism which was already widespread, and which the Vichy government was happy to make explicit.
So many prominent Nazis spoke openly about their intentions towards the Jews that it remains remarkable that the Allied national leaderships were reluctant to accept their words at face value. Informed citizens in both Britain and America drew appropriate conclusions about what was happening, reinforced by eyewitness testimony from eastern Europe. Mrs Blanche Dugdale, a passionate British crusader for Jewish interests, wrote a letter published in the Spectator: ‘In March 1942, Himmler visited Poland, and decreed that by the end of the year 50 per cent of the Jewish population should be “exterminated” … and the pace seems to have been hastened since. Now the German programme demands the disappearance of all Jews … Mass-murders on a scale unheard-of since the dawn of civilization began immediately after the order was issued.’ Mrs Dugdale gave an account of the deportations, identifying Bełec, Sobibór and Treblinka as death camps. ‘Certain it seems that Polish Jewry will be beyond help if the murder-campaign cannot be stopped before the war ends.’ Helmuth von Moltke of the Abwehr informed the British by secret letter via Stockholm in March 1943: ‘At least nine-tenths of the [German] population do not know that we have killed hundreds of thousands of Jews. They go on believing they have just been segregated … farther to the east … If you told these people what has really happened they would answer, “You are just a victim of British propaganda.”’
Within some Allied nations there was ambivalence, or worse, in defining attitudes to the greatest of all Nazi persecutions. Anti-Semitism was etched deep into Russian history and attitudes: in Moscow at Easter 1942, for instance, one of countless rumours sweeping the city asserted that Jews had been committing ritual murders of Orthodox children – the ghastly old east European ‘blood libel’ against the Jewish people. In 1944, the NKVD reported hearing people assert that ‘Hitler did a good job, beating up the Jews.’ The revelation of the death camps posed a dilemma for Moscow, which the Soviet authorities never entirely resolved. They could not applaud the Nazis’ slaughter of the Jews, but one historian has called the Holocaust ‘an indigestible lump in the belly of the Soviet triumph’. To acknowledge its enormity was to require a sharing of the Russian people’s overpowering sense of victimhood, which they were most unwilling to concede. In Soviet correspondents’ wartime dispatches, all references to explicitly Jewish suffering were excised by the censor. In 1945, when Russians heaped abuse on their defeated enemies, observant Germans noticed that almost the only charge not laid at their door was that of persecuting the Jews.
In Poland, where anti-Semitism was widespread, some people cited reports that Jews had welcomed the Red Army in September 1939 as evidence of their perfidy. When Jews in the Warsaw ghetto staged a brief and doomed revolt in 1943, a Polish nationalist underground paper wrote on 5 May: ‘During the Soviet occupation … Jews regularly stripped our soldiers of their arms, killed them, betrayed our community leaders, and openly crossed to the side of the occupier. [In one small town] which in 1939 was momentarily in the hands of the Soviets … Jews erected a triumphal arch for the Soviet troops to pass through and all wore red armbands and cockades. That was, and is, their attitude to Poland. Everyone in Poland should remember this.’ In the spring of 1944 some Jewish soldiers deserted from the Polish corps based in Scotland, citing disgust at anti-Semitism, which they said was no less apparent in the exile army than in their homeland.
Anglo-Saxons were not immune from such sentiments. British soldier Len England expressed shock at the attitudes of many of his barrack-room comrades, of a kind later vividly portrayed in Irwin Shaw’s description of US Army service in his novel The Young Lions. England wrote: ‘Two of the most intelligent people I have yet met are confirmed Jew-baiters. The argument usually runs like this: where are the Jews in the army? There are none because they all have managed to get the soft jobs and have wangled out of conscription. In just the same way, the Jews were always the first to leave danger areas. The Jews hold the purse-strings, the country has been taken over by them. Individual Jews may be pleasant enough, but as a race they are the root of all evil.’
Murray Mendelsohn, a US Army engineer who had emigrated from Warsaw as a child with his family, was conscious of latent, if not active, anti-Semitism in his barrack room. His education and intelligence incurred the suspicion of his comrades, many of them former miners and construction workers. They nicknamed him ‘brain’ without admiration, ‘Not because I was
that smart, but by comparison. I learned to be very inconspicuous.’ When the men of Easy Company 506th Airborne cursed their hated first commander, Lt. Sobel, they did so as the ‘fucking Jew’. Even in June 1945, when the concentration camps had been exposed to the world, an increasingly deranged Gen. George Patton denounced liberals who ‘believe that the displaced person is a human being, which he is not, and this applied particularly to the Jews, who are lower than animals’.
Though Churchill decried in the most passionate terms reports of the Nazi extermination programme, his government – like that of Franklin Roosevelt – was unwilling to accept large numbers of Jewish refugees, even if the Germans could be persuaded to release or trade them. When Americans were polled in November 1938 about whether they believed Jewish fugitives from Hitler should be granted special immigration rights to enter the US, 23 per cent said yes, 77 per cent no. In August 1944 some 44 per cent of Australians who were asked if they would accept a settlement of Jewish refugees in the empty north of their country rejected the notion, against 37 per cent in favour. As late as December 1944, another survey of American opinion on the admission of Jews to the US showed that 61 per cent thought they should be given no greater priority than other applicants. A British Colonial Office official commented cynically on a December 1942 report about the death camps: ‘Familiar stuff. The Jews have spoilt their case by laying it on too thick for years past.’ A Foreign Office official likewise deplored special pleading by ‘these wailing Jews’.
All Hell Let Loose Page 69