The Third Reich at War

by Richard J. Evans

  II

  On 20 January 1942 the meeting of senior officials called by Heydrich the previous November finally took place. The fifteen men gathered round a table in the Wannsee villa included representatives of Rosenberg’s Reich Ministry for the Occupied Eastern Territories, Frank’s Office of the General Government of Poland and the SS Security Service in Poland, Latvia and the Reich Commissariat of the Eastern Territory, all of whom would be concerned with the actual operation of the extermination programme; the Reich Ministries of the Interior and Justice, the Party Chancellery and the Reich Chancellery, covering legal and administrative questions; the Foreign Office, dealing with Jews living in nominally independent countries outside Germany, particularly in Western Europe; the Four-Year Plan, to cover economic aspects; and the SS departments of the Reich Security Head Office and the Head Office for Race and Settlement, who would be in charge of the exterminations. There had been some argument between various Nazi satraps, notably Hans Frank and Alfred Rosenberg, as to who should have control over the ‘Jewish question’ in the occupied territories, and Heydrich wanted to assert the authority of the SS. He began, therefore, by reminding the meeting that G̈ring had charged him on 31 July 1941 with making the detailed arrangements for the final solution of the European Jewish question, and that overall responsibility lay with his superior, Heinrich Himmler. After outlining the measures taken over the previous several years to get Jews to emigrate from Germany, Heydrich noted that Hitler had, more recently, approved a new policy, of deporting them to the east. This, he emphasized, was only a temporary measure, though it would provide ‘practical experience that is of great significance for the coming final solution of the Jewish question’.176

  Heydrich then went on to enumerate the Jewish population of every country in Europe, including many outside the German sphere of influence. There were, for instance, he noted, 4,000 Jews in Ireland, 3,000 in Portugal, 8,000 in Sweden and 18,000 in Switzerland. All of these were neutral countries, but their inclusion in the list strongly suggested that, at some point in the not-too-distant future, the Third Reich hoped to be in a position to put pressure on them to surrender their Jewish populations for extermination. Altogether, Heydrich reckoned, the Jewish population of Europe totalled around 11 million, though, he noted disapprovingly, these were in many cases only people who practised Judaism, ‘since some countries still do not have a definition of the term Jew according to racial principles’.177 ‘In the course of the final solution and under appropriate leadership,’ he said, ‘the Jews should be put to work in the East. In large, single-sex labour columns, Jews fit to work will work their way eastward constructing roads.’ But this was in practice to be another form of extermination, for, Heydrich continued: ‘Doubtless the large majority will be eliminated by natural causes.’ Any who survived the experience would be ‘dealt with appropriately because, by natural selection, they would form the germ cell of a new Jewish revival (see the experience of history)’. Those deemed ‘fit to work’ would in any case only be a small minority. The representative of the General Government pointed out that ‘the two and a half million Jews in the region were in any case largely unable to work’. Jews over sixty-five - nearly a third of the remaining Jewish population of Germany and Austria - and Jews with war decorations or severely wounded in the First World War were to be sent to an old-age ghetto. The meeting discussed the problems of persuading occupied or allied countries to give up their Jewish populations. An ‘adviser for Jewish questions’ would have to be forced on the Hungarian government for this purpose. Pausing to note that the ‘Jewish question’ had already been ‘solved’ in Slovakia and Croatia, the meeting then plunged into a pedantic and inconclusive discussion about what to do with people who were ‘racially mixed’ - a matter that continued to be discussed in follow-up meetings and discussions, notably on 6 March 1942. It then concluded with what the minutes coyly described as ‘various possible kinds of solution’. According to later testimony, this included the use of gassing vans.178

  It has been argued that the main concern of the conference was to organize the provision of labour for the huge road-building schemes envisioned by the General Plan for the East. Thus it was not really about mass murder.179 But in fact, Task Force C had already some months before recommended the drafting of Jews into labour projects and commented that this would ‘result in a gradual liquidation of Jewry’. Jewish slave labourers would be deprived of adequate rations and worked till they dropped. Given the labour shortage under which the German war economy was increasingly suffering, using Jewish workers seemed unavoidable; but this was not in the end an alternative to killing them, merely a different way of doing it. The almost parenthetical reference to the fact that the Jews of the General Government were mostly unable to work, along with the statement that those who survived the labour columns would be killed, meant that the major purpose of the meeting was to discuss the logistics of extermination. The men sitting round the table in the Wannsee villa were well aware of this.180

  The stress laid in the conference on ‘extermination through labour’ had significant administrative consequences over the following weeks. In February 1942 the administration of all the concentration camps was restructured, with the economic, construction and internal administrative divisions being merged into the new SS Economy and Administration Head Office under Oswald Pohl. Group D of Pohl’s Head Office, under Richard Gl̈cks, was now in charge of the whole system of concentration camps. These changes marked the fact that the camps were now being seen as a significant source of labour to be supplied to Germany’s war industries. This had in fact already begun before the war, but it was now to become far more systematic. Nevertheless, the SS did not approach the need to utilize prisoner labour for the war economy in a rational manner. Getting the most out of such men was not, for them, a matter of improving their conditions or paying them wages. Instead, they were to be forced to increase their labour input by violence and terror. The prisoners were regarded by the SS not just as expendable, but in the medium to long term as obstacles to the racial reordering of Eastern Europe. Hence they were subjected to ‘extermination through labour’. Those who became unproductive would be killed, and replaced by fresh slave labourers. This was what the SS also envisaged would happen to millions of Slavs once the war was over. The selection of able-bodied Jews for work duties provided a convenient justification for the mass killing of the millions not deemed fit to work.181

  The talk at the Wannsee Conference, as Eichmann, who took the minutes, later admitted, had been of killing, often expressed ‘in very blunt words . . . totally out of keeping with legal language’.182 The minutes had played this down, but at key points they made it clear that all the Jews of Europe would perish in one way or another. Almost all of the men round the table had at some time either given direct orders for Jews to be killed - four of them had ordered or directed the mass killings carried out by the SS Security Service Task Forces, both Eichmann and Martin Luther of the Foreign Office had explicitly called for all the Jews of Serbia to be shot, a number of participants, including the representatives of the Party Chancellery and the Foreign Office, had most probably seen the murder statistics compiled by the Task Forces and sent back to Berlin, and the officials sent to Wannsee from the General Government and the Ministry for the Occupied Eastern Territories had already sanctioned the murder of Jews deemed unfit for work - or created conditions in the ghettos that they knew to be fatal to many of their inhabitants.183 So they had no problems in planning genocide.

  At the end of the meeting, the participants stood around for a while, drinking brandy and congratulating themselves on a successful day’s work. Heydrich sat down by the fireplace with Eichmann and with Heinrich M̈ller, the Gestapo chief, all three of them from the Reich Security Head Office. Heydrich started smoking and drank a cognac, something which, Eichmann later said, he had not seen him do before, or at least not for many years. The Ministry of the Interior and the General Government had both come into l
ine, and Heydrich’s overall authority in the ‘final solution’ had been unambiguously affirmed. Sending out thirty copies of the minutes to a variety of officials, Heydrich noted that ‘happily the basic line’ had been set down ‘as regards the practical execution of the final solution of the Jewish question’.184 On reading his copy of the minutes, Joseph Goebbels noted: ‘The Jewish Question must now be solved on a pan-European scale.’ On 31 January 1942, Eichmann sent out new deportation orders. Transport problems delayed matters for some weeks, so he ordered a fresh series of deportations of German Jews in March.185 They were taken, not to extermination camps, but to ghettos in the east. Here they would be confined for a while, possibly until the end of the war, before being killed. In the meantime, those who were capable of it would be used as labour. To make room for them, the Polish and East European Jews in the ghettos would have to be taken out and exterminated in the nearby camps that were already being prepared for this purpose.186

  III

  The Wannsee Conference and its aftermath took place in an atmosphere of violent antisemitic propaganda, led by Hitler himself. On 30 January 1942, in his traditional speech marking the anniversary of his appointment as Reich Chancellor in 1933, Hitler reminded his audience at the Sports Palace in Berlin that he had prophesied in 1939 that if the Jews started a world war, they would be annihilated: ‘We are . . . clear that the war can only end either by the Aryan peoples being exterminated or by Jewry disappearing from Europe . . . This time the true old Jewish law “an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth” is being applied for the first time!’187 Privately, Hitler assured Himmler and Lammers that the Jews would have to leave Europe altogether. ‘I don’t know,’ he told them on 25 January 1942,

  I’m colossally humane. In the days of Papal rule in Rome the Jews were badly treated. Every year up to 1830, eight Jews were driven through the city with donkeys. I’m only saying, they have to go. If they perish in the process, I can’t do anything about it. I only see total extermination if they don’t leave of their own free will. Why should I regard a Jew any differently from a Russian prisoner? Many are dying in the prison camps because we have been driven into this situation by the Jews. But what can I do about it? Why then did the Jews provoke the war?188

  Here was a moment in which Hitler admitted the killing of large numbers of Soviet prisoners of war, declaring that the same fate was befalling the Jews of Europe, while at the same time verbally washing his hands of responsibility for both acts of mass murder: in his own imagination, it was the Jews who were responsible.

  Hitler’s justification of the genocide continued through the early months of 1942, couched in terms that wanted for nothing in clarity. His repeated insistence on the need to destroy, remove, annihilate, exterminate the Jews of Europe constituted a series of impulses to his subordinates, headed by Himmler, to press on with the extermination of the Jews even before the war was over.189 On 14 February 1942 Hitler told Goebbels

  that he is determined to clear up the Jews in Europe without compunction. It is impermissible to have any kind of sentimental emotions here. The Jews have deserved the catastrophe they are experiencing today. As our enemies are annihilated so they will experience their own annihilation too. We must accelerate this process with cold ruthlessness, and in so doing we are rendering an incalculable service to a human race that has been tormented by Jewry for millennia.190

  Goebbels himself was well aware of the process by which the killing programme was being implemented. On 27 March 1942 he confided to his diary the details he had learned - or at least some of them; even Goebbels was too cautious to put everything down on paper. The passage is a crucial one, for Hitler’s views as much as for those of his Propaganda Minister, and deserves to be quoted at length:

  The Jews are now being pushed out of the General Government, beginning in Lublin, to the east. A pretty barbaric procedure is being applied here, and it is not to be described in any more detail, and not much is left of the Jews themselves. In general one may conclude that 60% of them must be liquidated, while only 40% can be put to work. The former Regional Leader of Vienna [Globocnik], who is carrying out this action, is doing it pretty prudently and with a procedure that doesn’t work too conspicuously. The Jews are being punished barbarically, to be sure, but they have fully deserved it. The prophecy that the Leader issued to them on the way, for the eventuality that they started a new world war, is beginning to realize itself in the most terrible manner. One must not allow any sentimentalities to rule in these matters. If we did not defend ourselves against them, the Jews would annihilate us. It is a struggle for life and death between the Aryan race and the Jewish bacillus. No other government and no other regime could muster the strength for a general solution of the question. Here too the Leader is the persistent pioneer and spokesman of a radical solution, which is demanded by the way things are and thus appears to be unavoidable.191

  The ghettos in the General Government, he went on, would be filled by Jews from the Reich as they became free (in other words, when their inhabitants had been killed), and then the process would repeat itself.192 His insistence that the Jews were hell-bent on the extermination of the German race provided an implicit justification for killing them en masse.

  This series of antisemitic tirades culminated in a speech delivered by Hitler to the last-ever meeting of the Reichstag, on the afternoon of 26 April 1942. The Jews, he said, had destroyed the cultural traditions of human society. ‘What then remains is the animal part of the human being and a Jewish stratum that, having been brought to leadership, in the end parasitically destroys its own source of nourishment.’ Only now was the new Europe declaring war on this process of the decomposition of its peoples by the Jews.193 On the same day, Goebbels noted in his diary: ‘Once more I talk through the Jewish question with the Leader, at length. His position with regard to this problem is unrelenting. He wishes to expel the Jews from Europe absolutely.’194 Hitler’s speeches in these months were accompanied by a swelling chorus of antisemitic addresses by other Nazi leaders and anti-Jewish diatribes in the press. In a speech delivered in the Sports Palace in Berlin on 2 February 1942, German Labour Front Leader Robert Ley declared that ‘Jewry will and must be exterminated. That is our holy mission. That is what this war is about.’195 Crucial here were the Nazi leaders’ ideologically driven anxieties about the security threat that Jews were believed to pose. These were dramatically illustrated by a bomb attack, organized by a group of Communist resisters under the leadership of Herbert Baum, on an anti-Soviet exhibition in Berlin on 18 May 1942. Little damage was done and nobody was hurt. But the action made a considerable impression on the Nazi leadership. The Gestapo succeeded in tracking down and arresting the perpetrators, among whom, Goebbels wrote on 24 May 1942, there were five Jews and three half-Jews as well as four non-Jews. ‘One sees from this composition how correct our Jewish policy is,’ he noted. Goebbels thought this showed that all remaining Jews had to be removed from Berlin as a security measure. ‘Of course, liquidation would be the best thing.’196 Baum committed suicide after being tortured, the other members of the group were executed, and 250 Jewish men incarcerated in Sachsenhausen were shot as a ‘reprisal’, to be replaced by another 250 Jewish men from Berlin taken there as hostages. On 23 May 1942 Hitler told Nazi leaders assembled in the Reich Chancellery that the bomb attack demonstrated ‘that the Jews are determined to bring this war to a victorious conclusion for themselves under all circumstances, since they know that defeat also means personal liquidation for them.’197 In conversation with the Propaganda Minister on 29 May 1942, Hitler agreed to override objections to the deportation of Jewish forced labourers from Berlin. They could be replaced by foreign workers. ‘I see a great danger,’ said Goebbels, ‘in the fact that 40,000 Jews who have nothing more to lose are at large in the capital of the Reich.’ The experience of the First World War, Hitler added, showed that Germans would only take part in subversive movements when persuaded to do so by Jews. ‘In any case,’ wrote Goebb
els, ‘it is the Leader’s aim to make the whole of Western Europe Jew-free.’198

  These radical diatribes against the Jews were translated into action by Heinrich Himmler, who met Hitler on a number of occasions in these months for confidential discussions. In the late winter and early spring of 1942, following the Wannsee Conference, Himmler repeatedly pushed on the killing programme. He visited Cracow and Lublin on 13- 14 March, when the programme of mass killings by poison gas began. A month later, on 17 April 1942, a day after talking with Hitler, he was in Warsaw, where he ordered the murder of the Western European Jews who had arrived in the L’d’ ghetto. After further consultation with Hitler on 14 July 1942, Himmler travelled eastwards again to accelerate the killing programme. At Lublin, he sent an order to Kr̈ger, the Chief of Police in the General Government, to organize the killing of the remaining Jews in the General Government by the end of the year. Himmler even issued a written order for the extermination of the last Ukrainian Jews, which began in May 1942. As in the previous autumn and winter, Himmler, busily travelling around the occupied areas of Poland, pushed on the killings time and again. The Wannsee Conference had made the process easier to co-ordinate and implement, but it had neither inaugurated it nor made it into an automatic sequence of events.199 Himmler’s restless activity ensured that it was put into effect. As he noted on 26 July 1942, in response to an attempt by Rosenberg to interfere, as he saw it, in policy towards the Jews: ‘The occupied eastern territories will be Jew-free. The Leader has laid the implementation of this very difficult order on my shoulders. Therefore I forbid anyone else to have a say in it.’200