The Third Reich at War

by Richard J. Evans

  The matter hung fire for a few weeks while Hitler and the generals argued about whether to move on Moscow or divert the German armies further north and south; and then for much of early August Hitler was seriously ill with dysentery.102 By mid-August, however, he was well enough to launch a fresh diatribe against the Jews, recorded by Goebbels in his diary entry of 19 August 1941:

  The Leader is convinced that the prophecy he made then in the Reichstag, that if Jewry succeded again in provoking a world war, it would end with the annihilation of the Jews, is confirming itself. It is becoming true in these weeks and months with a certainty that seems almost uncanny. The Jews are having to pay the price in the east; it has to a degree already been paid in Germany, and they will have to pay it still more in future. Their last refuge remains North America, and there in the long or short run they will one day have to pay it too.103

  It was remarkable how Goebbels here let slip the global scope of Nazism’s ultimate geopolitical ambitions. More immediately these remarks coincided, not by chance, with a marked escalation in the killings carried out by the Task Forces in occupied Eastern Europe. Moreover, from February to April 1941, Hitler had sanctioned the deportation of some 7,000 Jews from Vienna to the Lublin district at the request of the Nazi Regional Leader of the former Austrian capital, Baldur von Schirach, who had come to prominence in the 1930s as the head of the Hitler Youth. Schirach’s main aim was to obtain their houses and apartments for distribution to the non-Jewish homeless. At the same time, his action stood in a continuity of ideologically driven antisemitic measures that went back to the first days of the German occupation of Vienna in March 1938.104 For some months this remained a relatively isolated action. In order to avoid any possible disturbance at home while the war was still in progress, Hitler for the time being vetoed Heydrich’s proposal to begin evacuating German Jews from Berlin as well.105

  But in mid-August Hitler once more took up the idea that he had rejected earlier in the summer of 1941, of starting to deport Germany’s remaining Jews to the east. By mid-September his wishes had become widely known in the Nazi hierarchy. On 18 September 1941, Himmler told Arthur Greiser, the Regional Leader of the Wartheland: ‘The Leader wants the old Reich and the Protectorate [of Bohemia and Moravia] to be emptied and liberated of Jews from west to east as soon as possible.’106 Hitler may have thought of the deportations, which were to be carried out openly, as a warning to ‘international Jewry’, especially in the USA, not to escalate the war any further, or worse things would happen to the Jews of Germany. He had come under pressure to take retaliatory measures against ‘Jewish-Bolshevik’ Russia following Stalin’s forcible deportation of the Volga Germans.107 Regional Leaders, notably Karl Kaufmann in Hamburg, were pressing for Jews to be evicted to make room for bombed-out German families. Joseph Goebbels, in his capacity as Regional Leader of Berlin, was determined ‘that we must evacuate the Jews from Berlin as quickly as possible’. This would be possible ‘as soon as we have cleared up the military questions in the east’.108 The fact that vast tracts of territory had already been conquered east of the General Government had already opened up the possibility of deporting Jews there from Central Europe. They would, Goebbels said after a meeting with Heydrich, be put into the labour camps already set up by the Communists. ‘What is more obvious than that they should now be peopled by the Jews?’109 Overriding all other possible motives in Hitler’s mind was that of security: in his memory of 1918, the Jews had stabbed Germany in the back, and ever since he had come to power he had been attempting by increasingly radical means to prevent this recurring by driving them out of the country. On the one hand, the threat had seemingly increased following the invasion of the Soviet Union and the growing involvement of America in the war. On the other, the opportunity for mass deportation now presented itself with the new territorial annexations in the east. The moment seemed to have come for action on a European scale.110

  II

  During this period, conditions of life deteriorated rapidly for those Jews who remained in Germany. One of them was Victor Klemperer, whose position was still to some extent protected by his marriage to a non-Jew, his wife Eva, and his record as a war veteran. Imprisoned in a police cell in Dresden on 23 June 1941 for violating blackout regulations, Klemperer found the time in jail weighed heavily on his mind. But he was not badly treated, and, despite his obsessive worry that he had been forgotten, he was released on 1 July 1941. He settled back into life in the overcrowded Jews’ House he was forced to share with his wife and other, similar, couples in Dresden.111 Soon his diary was filled with the growing difficulties he and his non-Jewish wife experienced in what he called ‘the hunt for food’. In April 1942 he recorded despairingly that ‘we are now facing complete starvation. Today even turnips were only “for registered customers”. Our potatoes are finished, our bread coupons will last for perhaps two weeks, not four.’112 They began to beg and barter.113 By the middle of 1942 Klemperer was feeling constantly hungry and had been reduced to stealing food from another inhabitant of the house (‘with a good conscience’, he confessed, ‘because she needs little, allows much to go to waste, is given many things by her aged mother - but I feel so demeaned’).114

  From 18 September 1941, following a decree issued by the Reich Ministry of Transport, German Jews were no longer allowed to use dining cars on trains, to go on excursion coaches, or to travel by public transport in the rush hour.115 As his wife sewed the Jewish star on to the left breast of his coat on 19 September 1941, Klemperer had ‘a raving fit of despair’. Like many other Jews, he felt ashamed to go out (ashamed ‘of what?’, he asked himself rhetorically). His wife began to take over the shopping.116 Klemperer’s typewriter was confiscated and from 28 October 1941 onwards he had to write his diary and the remainder of his autobiography by hand.117 More petty privations followed. Jews were denied coupons for shaving-soap (‘do they want to reintroduce the medieval Jew’s beard by force?’ Klemperer asked ironically).118 A list he compiled of all the restrictions to which they were subjected ran by this time to over thirty items, including bans on using buses, going to museums, buying flowers, owning fur coats and woollen blankets, entering railway stations, eating in restaurants, and sitting in deck chairs.119 A law issued on 4 December 1941 laid down the death penalty for virtually any offence committed by a Jew.120 On 13 March 1942 the Reich Security Head Office ordered a white paper star to be pasted on the entrance to every dwelling inhabited by Jews.121 A further blow came in May 1942 when the authorities announced that Jews would no longer be allowed to keep pets, or to give them away; with a heavy heart, Klemperer and his wife took their cat Muschel to a friendly vet and had it put to sleep illegally, to spare it the suffering they thought it would be subjected to if they handed it over in the general round-up.122 All of these measures, as their timing makes clear, were intended to prepare for the mass deportation of Germany’s Jews to the east.123

  To underline the firmness of the deportation decision, Himmler ordered on 23 October 1941 that Jews were no longer to be allowed to emigrate from the German Reich or any country occupied by it.124 The end of the Jewish community in Germany was also signalled by the Gestapo’s dissolution of the Jewish Culture League on 11 September 1941; its assets, musical instruments, possessions and property were distributed to a variety of institutions including the SS and the army.125 All remaining Jewish schools in the Reich had already been closed down.126 The round-ups and deportations got under way on 15 October 1941; according to decrees issued on 29 May and 25 November 1941 and personally approved by Hitler, the deported were deprived of their German nationality and their property was confiscated by the state. By 5 November 1941, twenty-four long trainloads of Jews - some 10,000 from the Old Reich, 5,000 from Vienna and 5,000 from the Protectorate - had been transported to L’d’, along with 5,000 Gypsies from the rural Austrian territory of the Burgenland. By 6 February 1942, a further thirty-four trainloads had taken 33,000 Jews to Riga, Kovno and Minsk.127 This still left a substanti
al number who were performing forced-labour tasks thought important to the war economy. Goebbels was disappointed and pressed for the deportations to be speeded up. On 22 November 1941 he was able to note in his diary that Hitler had agreed to further deportations on a city-by-city basis.128

  To prepare the deportations, the Gestapo would obtain lists of local Jews from the Reich Association of the Jews in Germany, pick out the names of those to be deported, give each of them a sequenced number, and inform them of the date on which they were to depart and the arrangements to be taken for the journey. Each deportee was allowed to take 50 kilos of luggage, and provisions for three to five days. They were taken by the local police to a collection centre, from where, after waiting often for many hours, they were transported to an ordinary passenger train for the journey. These measures were intended to prevent the Jews becoming alarmed about their fate. Yet the trains began their journey at night, in shunting yards instead of passenger stations, and not infrequently the deportees were roughly pushed on to the train by the police, with curses and blows. A police guard accompanied each transport on the journey. When the deportees reached their destination, their situation deteriorated radically. The first trainload to leave Munich, for instance, set out on 20 November 1941, and after being diverted from its original destination of Riga, where the ghetto was full, it arrived in Kovno three days later. Informed that the ghetto there was full too, the police took the deportees to the nearby Fort IX, where they were made to wait in the dry moat surrounding the building for two days until they were all shot.129

  In January 1942 the order came for the Jews of Dresden to be deported to the east. Victor Klemperer’s relief was palpable, therefore, when he learned that holders of the Iron Cross, First Class, who lived in ‘mixed marriages’, such as himself, were exempt.130 For those who remained, life became still harder. On 14 February 1942 Klemperer, aged sixty and in less than perfect health, was ordered to report for work clearing snow off the streets. Arriving at the venue, he discovered that he was the youngest of the twelve Jewish men on the site. Fortunately, he reported, the overseers from the municipal cleansing department were decent and polite, allowed the men to stand around chatting, and told Klemperer: ‘You must not over-exert yourself, the state does not require it.’131 They were paid the meagre sum of just over 70 Reichsmarks a week after tax.132 When this service was no longer required, Klemperer was sent to work in a packing factory.133 The Gestapo became ever more brutal and abusive, and Jews came to dread house-searches by the authorities. When Klemperer’s own Jews’ House was searched, he was fortuitously out visiting a friend. He returned to find the house had been turned over. All the food and wine had been stolen, along with some money and some medication. The contents of cupboards, drawers and shelves had been emptied on to the floor and stamped on. Anything they wanted to steal, including bed-linen, the Gestapo men had stowed into four suitcases and a large trunk, which they ordered the inhabitants to take to the police station the following day. Eva Klemperer had been insulted (‘You Jew’s whore, why did you marry the Jew?’) and repeatedly spat at in the face. ‘What an unthinkable disgrace for Germany,’ was Victor Klemperer’s reaction.134 ‘These are no longer house searches,’ his wife commented, ‘they’re pogroms.’135 Desperately worried that the Gestapo would find his diaries (‘one is murdered for lesser misdemeanours’), Klemperer started to get his wife to take them at more frequent intervals to his non-Jewish friend, the doctor Annemarie Köhler, for safe keeping. ‘But I shall go on writing,’ he declared in May 1942. ‘This is my heroism. I intend to bear witness, precise witness!’136

  In Hamburg, thankful that his privileged status as the war-decorated husband of a non-Jew and bringing up a daughter as a Christian meant that her Jewish husband Friedrich did not have to wear the yellow star, Luise Solmitz recorded bitterly on 13 September 1941: ‘Our luck is now negative - everything that doesn’t affect us.’ The Solmitzes secured a ruling from the Gestapo that people in privileged mixed marriages such as theirs were not obliged to accommodate Jews in their houses. Cuts in pensions, benefits and rations they shared with other Germans. Otherwise they lived much as they had done before, though necessarily more privately, since Friedrich was effectively barred from taking part in the social life of the non-Jewish circles in which they had previously moved. Luise Solmitz and her husband steadily lost weight as food supplies became shorter in the course of 1941. By 21 December 1942 she weighed 96 pounds. Yet her principal worry about changes in rationing arrangements was not so much that their diet would become even more restricted, but that she would be banned from collecting the family’s ration cards, and Friedrich would have to go to the ration office himself as a Jew, with his ‘evil, impossible epithet’ imposed by the government (‘Israel’) and queue ‘amidst all the people who one has never had anything to do with’, or in other words Hamburg’s remaining population of Jews. Her concern for the safety of her half-Jewish daughter Gisela grew as rumours circulated that people classified as mixed-race were to be deported. ‘We are already the playthings of dark and malicious powers,’ she recorded gloomily in her diary on 24 November 1942.137

  III

  It is clear that by October 1941 the deportation idea encompassed in principle the whole of Europe, and was intended to begin almost immediately.138 On 4 October 1941 Heydrich referred to ‘the plan of a total evacuation of the Jews from the territories occupied by us’.139 In early November 1941, he defended his approval of antisemitic attacks on Parisian synagogues that had taken place four days earlier in view of the fact that ‘Jewry has been identified at the highest level with the greatest clarity as the fire-raiser responsible for what has happened in Europe, and must finally disappear from Europe.’140 Hitler himself sharply increased his rhetorical attacks on the Jews once more, not just in the Soviet Union and the USA but also in Europe as a whole. On 28 November 1941, meeting the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin al-Husseini, Hitler declared: ‘Germany is determined to press one European nation after the other to solve the Jewish problem.’ In Palestine too, he assured the Mufti, the Jews would be dealt with once Germany gained control of the area.141

  By this time, the surviving Jews in the regions conquered by the German forces in Eastern Europe were being rounded up and confined in ghettos in the principal towns. At Vilna (Vilnius), beginning on 6 September 1941, 29,000 Jews were crammed into an area formerly housing only 4,000 people. Visiting the Vilna ghetto at the beginning of November 1941, Goebbels noted that ‘the Jews are squatting amongst one another, horrible forms, not to be seen, let alone to be touched . . . The Jews are the lice of civilized humanity. They have to be exterminated somehow . . . Wherever you spare them, you later become their victim. ’142 Another ghetto was set up at Kovno on 10 July 1941, where a Jewish population of 18,000 was subjected to frequent, violent raids by German and Lithuanian forces searching for valuables.143 Smaller ghettos were established around the same time in other towns in the Baltic states in the wake of major massacres of the local Jewish population. Since these massacres had mainly, at least in the initial phase, been directed against men, these ghettos often had a preponderance of women and children: in Riga, for example, where the ghetto was set up towards the end of October 1941, there were nearly 19,000 women compared to just over 11,000 men when the ghetto was closed just over a month later. 24,000 were taken out and shot on 30 November and 8 December 1941, the remainder, mostly men, being sent off to Germany as industrial labourers. A similar mass killing happened on a larger scale in Kovno on 28 October 1941, when Helmut Rauca, head of the Jewish Department of the Gestapo in the town, ordered its 27,000 Jewish inhabitants to assemble at six in the morning on the main square. All day long, Rauca and his men separated those who could work from those who could not. By dusk, 10,000 Jews had been sorted into the latter category. The rest were sent home. The next morning, the 10,000 were marched out of the city on foot to Fort IX and shot in batches.144

  Almost all of the ghettos created in occupied Eastern Eur
ope following the invasion of the Soviet Union were improvised and relatively short-lived, designed as little more than holding areas for Jews destined for death in the very near future. In Yalta, a ghetto was created on 5 December 1941 by partitioning off an area on the edge of the city: on 17 December 1941, less than two weeks later, it was shut down and its inhabitants killed. A similar pattern could be observed in other centres too.145 Clearly, the Jews of Eastern Europe were not expected to live much longer. The ghettos were to be cleared in order to make way for the Jews whose expulsion Hitler was now repeatedly urging from the ‘Old Reich’ and the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, and following this from the rest of German-occupied Europe. Some historians have tried to identify a precise date on which Hitler ordered the expulsion and extermination of Europe’s Jews. Yet the evidence for this is unpersuasive. Much has been made of the fact that, long after the war, Adolf Eichmann recalled that Heydrich had summoned him in late September or early October to tell him that ‘The Leader has ordered the physical extermination of the Jews.’ Himmler was also to refer to such a command on more than one occasion in the future. But it is extremely doubtful whether it was given to Himmler or Heydrich or indeed anyone else in so many words. Hitler’s statements, recorded in a number of sources, most notably the public record of his speeches and the private notes of his conversations in Goebbels’s diary and the Table Talk, represent both the style and the substance of what he had to say on this issue. It is a mistake to look for, or imagine, an order, whether written or spoken, of the kind issued by Hitler in the case of the compulsory euthanasia programme, where it was required to give legitimacy to the actions of professional doctors rather than committed SS men, who scarcely needed it anyway.146 As the Nazi Party’s Supreme Court had noted early in 1939, under the Weimar Republic, Party leaders had become accustomed to evading legal responsibility by ensuring ‘that actions . . . are not ordered with absolute clarity or in every detail’. Correspondingly, Party members had become accustomed ‘to read more out of such a command than it says in words, just as it has become a widespread custom on the part of the people issuing the command . . . not to say everything’ and ‘only to hint’ at the purpose of an order.147