Thus Hitler is extremely unlikely to have gone any further than issuing the kind of statements which he repeatedly made from the middle of 1941 onwards in respect of the Jews, backed up by virulently antisemitic propaganda from Goebbels and his co-ordinated mass media. Such statements were often widely broadcast and publicized, and those made in public at least would have been familiar to virtually every member of the Party, the SS and similar organizations. When added to the explicit orders given in advance of Barbarossa to kill Soviet commissars and Jews, and the murderous policies already implemented in Poland since September 1939, they created a genocidal mentality in which Himmler in Berlin and his senior officers on the ground in the east competed to see how thoroughly and how radically they could put Hitler’s repeated promise, or threat, to annihilate the Jews of Europe into effect. Often they were faced with severe food shortages, and, as in Poland, they established a hierarchy of food rationing in which the Jews were inevitably bottom of the heap. From here to active extermination was but a short step for many zealous local and regional commanders, who - as in Belarus - also ordered the killing of other people seen as unable to work and therefore ‘useless eaters’, as the phrase had it. Among these were the mentally ill and the handicapped. They were murdered not for racial reasons, though the German ‘euthanasia’ campaign had provided an important precedent, but for economic ones. The SS did not object to ‘degenerative’ influences on Slavic heredity; they simply considered the mentally ill and handicapped in these areas surplus to requirements.148
The concrete results of such a mentality were evident by the middle of October 1941 at the latest. By this time, Jews from the Greater German Reich and the Protectorate were being deported to the east, and Jews from the rest of German-occupied Europe were to follow. No Jews were allowed to emigrate. There are numerous statements from this time at various levels of the Nazi hierarchy testifying that there was common agreement that all Europe’s Jews were to be deported to the east. Task Forces were indiscriminately shooting huge numbers of Jews all across occupied Eastern Europe. In a lecture delivered to senior military, police, Party, Labour Front, academic, cultural and other figures at the German Academy on 1 December 1941, Goebbels reported that Hitler’s prophecy of 30 January 1939 was now being fulfilled.
Sympathy or even regret is wholly out of place. World Jewry in unleashing this war made a completely false assessment of the forces at its disposal. It is now suffering a gradual process of annihilation that it intended for us and that it would without question have carried out if it had the power to do so. It is now perishing as a result of Jewry’s own law: ‘An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth’.149
Although the mass murder, as Goebbels hinted, was, for obvious reasons of practicality, to be carried out in stages, there was now no doubt that, as Alfred Rosenberg put it, speaking at a press conference on 18 November 1941, that the aim was the ‘biological extermination of the whole of Jewry in Europe’.150
By this time, it was clear that military authorities, police units, SS and civil administrators were co-operating without difficulty in the implementation of the extermination programme. According to a report compiled by the Arms Inspectorate of the Armed Forces, Ukrainian militia, ‘in many places, regrettably, with the voluntary participation of members of the German armed forces’, had been shooting Jewish men, women and children in a ‘horrible’ manner. Up to 200,000 had been killed already in the Reich Commissariat of the Ukraine, and in the end the total would reach nearly half a million.151 But already it was becoming clear that mass shooting could not achieve the scale of extermination that Himmler was demanding. Moreover, complaints were coming in from Task Force leaders that continual mass shootings of defenceless women and children were placing an intolerable strain on their men. As Rudolf Höss, a senior SS officer, later recalled, ‘I always shuddered at the prospect of carrying out exterminations by shooting, when I thought of the vast numbers concerned, and of the women and children.’ Many members of the Task Forces, ‘unable to endure wading through blood any longer, had committed suicide. Some had even gone mad. Most . . . had to rely on alcohol when carrying out their horrible work.’152 The numbers of Jews to be shot were so great that one Task Force report concluded on 3 November 1941: ‘Despite the fact that up to now a total of some 75,000 Jews have been liquidated in this way, it has nevertheless become apparent that this method will not provide a solution to the Jewish problem.’153
IV
A solution to the problem, however, presented itself immediately. After the enforced termination of the T-4 ‘euthanasia’ action on 24 August 1941, following its denunciation by Bishop Clemens von Galen, its lethal gas technicians became available for redeployment in the east.154 Specialists from the T-4 unit visited Lublin in September; so too did Viktor Brack and Philipp Bouhler, its two leading administrators. Dr August Becker, who described himself as ‘a specialist in the gassing processes involved in exterminating the mentally sick’, later remembered:
I was transferred to the Reich Security Head Office in Berlin as a result of a private conversation between Reich Leader SS Himmler and Senior Service Leader Brack. Himmler wanted to deploy people who had become available as a result of the suspension of the euthanasia programme and who, like me, were specialists in extermination by gassing, for the large-scale gassing operations in the east which were just beginning.155
In addition, Albert Widmann, who had devised the standard gas chamber used in the ‘euthanasia’ programme, visited Minsk and Mogilev, where Task Force B had requested technical assistance in killing the patients of the local mental hospitals. Such murders were a standard part of Task Force activities in the east, as they had been in Poland in 1939-40, and several thousand mental patients fell victim to them. After a number of patients had been killed by carbon monoxide gases from car exhaust fumes being pumped into a sealed room, Arthur Nebe, the head of the Task Force, conceived the idea of killing people by putting them in an airtight van and piping the exhaust fumes into it. Heydrich gave his approval.156
On 13 October 1941, Himmler met regional police chiefs Globocnik and Krüger in the early evening and agreed that a camp should be built at Belzec, to serve as a base for the gas vans. It was, in other words, to be a camp created for the sole purpose of killing people.157 Construction began on 1 November 1941, and specialists from the T-4 operation were sent there the following month.158 The inhabitants of the Polish ghettos were now being systematically killed to make space for the Jews who were to be taken there from other parts of Europe. A similar centre was set up at Chelmno in the Wartheland, from where Jewish prisoners, transported from the Lo’dz’ ghetto, would be taken out in the vans to be gassed. The three gas vans based at Chelmno could kill fifty people each at a time, driving them out from the camp to woods about 16 kilometres distant, asphyxiating the people inside along the way. There they halted to unload their grisly cargo into ditches dug by other Jewish inmates of the camp. Occasionally a mother inside the van managed to wrap up her baby tightly enough to keep it from breathing in the deadly fumes. Jakow Grojanowski, one of the gravediggers employed by the SS, reported how German guards picked up any babies who had survived the journey and smashed their heads against nearby trees. Up to 1,000 were killed every day; 4,400 Gypsies from the L’d’ ghetto were also murdered. Altogether, 145,000 Jews were put to death in the first period of Chelmo’s existence; more followed, and another 7,000 were murdered when the camp briefly reopened in the spring of 1944; the total killed in the camp exceeded 360,000.159
These gas wagons were among thirty built by a small vehicle manufacturer in Berlin. The first four were delivered to the Task Forces in November-December 1941; all four Task Forces were using them by the end of the year.160 The van operators later described how up to sixty Jews, often in a poor physical state, hungry, thirsty and weak, were herded into the back of each van, fully clothed. ‘It did not seem as if the Jews knew that they were about to be gassed,’ one later said. ‘The exhaust gases were fe
d into the inside of the van,’ remembered Anton Lauer, a member of Police Reserve Battalion number 9. ‘I can still today hear the Jews knocking and shouting, “Dear Germans, let us out.” ’ ‘When the doors were opened,’ another operator recalled, ‘a cloud of smoke wafted out. After the smoke had cleared we could start our foul work. It was frightful. You could see that they had fought terribly for their lives. Some of them were holding their noses. The dead had to be dragged apart.’161
One gas van was also sent to Serbia, where General Franz B̈hme, busily exterminating Jews in reprisal for what he supposed was their part in the Chetnik uprising in progress since the previous July, reported in December 1941 that 160 German soldiers killed and 278 wounded had been avenged by the killing of between 20,000 and 30,000 Serbian civilians, including all adult male Jews and Gypsies. Up to this point the murders had encompassed only men; B̈hme envisaged that the remaining 10,000 Jewish women, children and old people, as well as any surviving Jewish men, would be rounded up and put into a ghetto. Over 7,000 Jewish women and children, 500 Jewish men and 292 Gypsy women and children were herded by the SS into a camp at Sajmiste, across the river from Belgrade, where they were kept in insanitary conditions in unheated barracks while the SS arranged for a mobile gassing unit to be sent from Berlin. While the Gypsies were released, the Jews were told that they were being transferred to another camp where better conditions prevailed. No sooner had the first batch of sixty-four climbed into the lorry than the doors were sealed and the exhaust pipe swung round to pump its deadly fumes into the interior. As the lorry drove through the centre of Belgrade, past the unsuspecting crowds of pedestrians and through the daily traffic, to the firing-range at Avela on the other side of the capital, the Jews inside were all being gassed to death. A police unit at Avela removed them and threw them into an already excavated mass grave. By the beginning of May 1942 all the camp’s 7,500 Jewish inmates had been killed in this way, along with the inmates and staff of the Jewish hospital in Belgrade and Jewish prisoners from another, nearby camp. Serbia, the leading SS officer in the country, Harald Turner, declared with pride in August 1942, was the only country in which the Jewish question had so far been completely ‘solved’.162
THE WANNSEE CONFERENCE
I
On 29 November 1941 Reinhard Heydrich ordered Adolf Eichmann to draft an invitation to a variety of senior civil servants from ministries with responsibilities of one kind or another for the Jewish question, together with representatives of key SS and Nazi Party departments involved in the area. ‘On 31 July 1941,’ the invitation began, ‘the Reich Marshal of the Greater German Reich commissioned me, with the assistance of the other central authorities, to make all necessary organizational and technical preparations for a comprehensive solution of the Jewish question and to present him with a comprehensive proposal at an early opportunity.’163 In order to finalize the details of such a proposal, all the interested agencies needed to meet. Heydrich was particularly concerned to include representatives of institutions and departments with which the SS had experienced some problems. The Foreign Office was asked to send a senior official, belying later claims that the conference was intended only to deal with German Jews; indeed, although Heydrich did not go into any details about what exactly the conference would be discussing, the Foreign Office assumed that it would focus on arranging the round-up and deportation of Jews in every country in Europe under German occupation.164
The meeting was scheduled for 9 December 1941 and was to take place in a lakeside villa in the tranquil Berlin suburb of Wannsee. But the day before, on hearing of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, Heydrich’s staff telephoned all the invitees and postponed the conference, since it was likely that he and other participants would be called to the session of the Reichstag that this new development in international politics clearly warranted.165 This did not mean, however, that policy towards the Jews was to take a back seat. Speaking to a meeting of senior Party officials the day after he had declared war on the USA, Hitler, as recorded in Goebbels’s diary, repeated his sentiments of the previous August in more precise form:
As far as the Jewish question is concerned, the Leader is determined to clear the decks. He prophesied to the Jews that if they brought about another world war, they would thereby experience their own annihilation. That was not just waffle. The world war is here, the annihilation of Jewry must be the necessary consequence. This question is to be contemplated without any sentimentality. We are not here to pity the Jews but to pity our own German people. Now that the German people have lost another 160,000 dead on the Eastern Front, the originators of this bloody conflict will have to pay for it with their lives.166
On 14 December 1941 Rosenberg agreed with Hitler for reasons of international policy not to mention ‘the extermination of Jewry’ in a public speech he was about to deliver, even though, as Hitler remarked, ‘they saddled us with the war and brought destruction; it’s no wonder that they are the first to bear the consequences’.167
By this time, it had become clear to Hitler and everyone else in the Nazi hierarchy that the war was not going to come to an end as soon as they had expected. They now accepted that it would last through the winter, though they still thought that the Soviet Union would collapse some time in the summer of 1942. The deportation of European Jews to the east would now therefore take place before the end of the war. Hitler’s radical rhetoric in November and December 1941 was designed to push on the detailed planning and implementation of this policy as quickly as possible.168 Since the Jews were already being exterminated in the occupied territories of eastern Europe, including those like the Wartheland that had been incorporated into the Reich, it was clear that the earlier plans to deport them to the Reich Commissariat of the Ukraine, or to some undefined area further east, had now been abandoned. As Hans Frank told his staff in the General Government of Poland on 16 December 1941, after returning from the 12 December conference of Nazi leaders with Hitler in Berlin:
With the Jews - I want to say that to you with complete frankness - an end has to be made in one way or another . . . We were told in Berlin, why are you raising all these objections; we can’t do anything with them in the [Reich Commissariat of the] Eastern Land or in the Reich Commissariat [of the Ukraine], liquidate them yourself!! Gentlemen, I have to forearm you against any thought of pity. We must annihilate the Jews wherever we come upon them and wherever it is at all possible, in order to sustain the total structure of the Reich here.169
How was this to be done, however? The number of Jews in the General Government that Frank had been told to kill was impossibly large, some three and a half million in all according to Frank (something of an exaggeration; his staff later put the number at two and a half million): ‘We can’t shoot these 3.5 million Jews,’ complained Frank to his staff on 16 December 1941, ‘we can’t poison them, but we will be able to take measures that somehow lead to their successful annihilation, namely in connection with large-scale measures that are to be discussed from the Reich.’170 What these measures were would soon become clear.
The mass murder of Eastern European Jews that began in the summer of 1941 owed something to the ideological zeal of men such as Arthur Greiser, Regional Leader of the Wartheland, and police chiefs and Task Force Leaders who on their own initiative carried out large-scale massacres of Jews in a number of centres. At the same time, however, they were framed by an overall policy the parameters of which were set by Hitler and implemented in practical terms by Himmler. When, for example, the police chief in Riga, Friedrich Jeckeln, had a trainload of Jewish deportees from Berlin shot on their arrival, Himmler, whose order not to kill them, sent on 30 November 1941, reached Jeckeln too late, was furious. Shooting Berlin Jews would alarm those who were still in the capital. The intention was to keep them in the Riga ghetto for the time being. Himmler disciplined Jeckeln and told him not to act on his own initiative again.171 For the most part, however, local and regional initiatives fell well within the overall purposes
of the regime. The general transfer of gassing technology to the east, along with the experts who knew how to set it up and operate it, and the participation of institutions like Frank’s General Government administration, the army, the Leader’s Chancellery (which supplied the gas technologists) and the Reich Security Head Office, led by Himmler, spoke of a broadly co-ordinated policy under central direction. So too did the timing of the regional killing operations, which coincided with the beginnings of the organized deportations of Jews from the Reich and the commissioning of special camps near the major ghettos in the east with the sole purpose of killing their inhabitants.
No operation of this size and scale could have taken place in the Third Reich without the knowledge of Hitler, whose position as Leader made him the person to whom all these institutions were ultimately responsible. It was Hitler’s murderous, but deliberately generalized, antisemitic rhetoric, repeated on many occasions in the second half of 1941, that gave Himmler and his subordinates the essential impulse to carry out the killings.172 On occasion, Hitler confirmed his approval of the murders directly. Meeting with Himmler on 18 December, for example, he told the SS leader, according to the latter’s notes, ‘Jewish question/to be exterminated as partisans’.173 The extermination of Soviet Jews was thus to be continued, under the pretext that they were partisans. The fruits of this policy were visible just over a year later in ‘Report number 51’, dated 29 December 1942, sent by Himmler to Hitler and, as a marginal note by Hitler’s adjutant confirms, seen and read by him. Entitled ‘the fight against bandits’, it noted under the sub-heading of ‘those assisting bandits or suspected of banditry’ that the number of ‘Jews executed’ in southern Russia, the Ukraine and the Bialystok district in the months from August to November 1942 was no less than 363,211.174 The sheer extent of the killings became a factor in itself, suggesting powerfully to leading Nazis that the mass extermination of Jews on a hitherto unimaginable scale was now a real possibility. By this time, the Nazi net had widened to encompass not only Polish and Soviet Jews, but Jews in the whole of occupied Europe as well.175
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