Lenin, Stalin, and Hitler

by Robert Gellately

  François Furet, once a member of the French Communist Party, writes that the Communists, faced with Stalin’s directive, showed an “extraordinary discipline, unique in the history of humanity.” Once the new line was issued, there was a “sudden reorientation of such a vast army of militants toward a policy diametrically opposed to the policy of the day before.” Communists, whether in Britain, France, America, or out in the far corners of the world, who had been screaming for war against Hitler one minute, now had to come out just as enthusiastically against it.

  Mao Tse-tung, who had been instructed to oppose Japanese aggression, went so far in reverse as to see the advantages of Stalin concluding a nonaggression pact with Japan that would divide China. Mao wanted a “Polish solution” for his own country. His thinking was that the Soviets would make him head of a puppet government, and he was ready to consign half the country to the Japanese occupation. In September 1939, Mao was prepared to collaborate with the Japanese, hoping that at the very least they would strike down his nationalist enemies.44

  Most Communists fell into line with alacrity. In the United States, the Communist volunteers who dominated the Veterans of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade had fought in Spain against Franco, who was staunchly backed by Hitler and Mussolini. The Communists gave up their anti-Fascism and marched in New York in opposition to the American entry into the war.45

  23

  GERMAN RACIAL PERSECUTION BEGINS IN POLAND

  Hitler was deeply concerned that dissenters and defeatists on the home front might stab the battlefront in the back—as supposedly had happened in 1918. It was a fear shared by many leading figures in the Third Reich. In August and early September 1939, the regime took steps against a wide array of such potential “enemies.”

  In fact the coming of war led to the complete revolution of the terror system, which grew harsher by the day. Concentration camps and prisons filled, as Communists and others were arrested. The transformation of the camp system, which eventually held hundreds of thousands of prisoners, was under way.

  The regime also embarked on more radical aspects of its racist agenda in the war against Poland. Hitler saw the Polish people as consisting of “terrible material” and the Polish Jews as “the most dreadful that anyone can possibly imagine.”1

  THE NAZI INVASION

  Hitler’s decision for war was firm on August 22 when he spoke to his generals and called for “iron nerves, iron resolution.” The immediate goal was Poland, but that was merely a springboard to the USSR. The nonaggression pact with the Soviet Union did not mean he had given up his hatred of “Jewish Bolshevism.” As he said to one of his generals, it was a “pact with Satan to drive out the devil.”2

  Nevertheless, he was concerned relations with Britain were not working out as he had hoped. According to his program for action in the east, that country was to be either an ally or a neutral, but instead war was imminent.

  Despite reservations, he ordered mobilization for noon on August 25, but then delayed it to 1: 30 p.m. His uncertainty led him to postpone the attack an hour at a time until he finally canceled it. He was still hoping the British and French would agree not to back Poland. There followed some frantic meetings with Sir Nevile Henderson, the British ambassador, who was still trying to appease Hitler in hopes of avoiding the calamity of war. For his part the chancellor kept insisting that he wanted to maintain good relations, but not at the cost of German interests.3

  On August 30, he set the attack on Poland for September 1. He still left room for another postponement, but forged ahead and the next day issued directive No. 1 for the conduct of war. A surprise attack was finally planned for September 1, at 4: 45 a.m.4 Britain and France responded on September 3 and, in keeping with their treaty obligations to Poland, declared war on Germany. Hitler decided to hold off the attack in the west and go for “the speedy and victorious conclusion of operations against Poland.”5

  The Polish armies refused to retreat and were vulnerable to encirclement. General Halder noted in his diary on September 5, “Enemy practically defeated,” and on September 10 recorded that German troops were crossing the Bug and the San rivers, or what would be the eastern frontier with the Soviet Union. Thus, in barely ten days the Germans had reached their goal in eastern Poland.6

  This was the first blitzkrieg, or lightning war, with the emphasis on motorized attack, airpower, and rapid movement. The air force, after taking out strategic targets, worked in tandem with the army to compel the Polish forces to retreat. By September 17 the German High Command had set up a demarcation line. To the horror of the Poles, the Red Army attacked them from the east that very day.

  The objective was to capture Warsaw, which was pounded by the Luftwaffe on September 25. Three days later Poland sued for peace, and on October 4 Hitler issued an amnesty to any of his troops who had committed indictable offenses in the fighting up to that point “out of bitterness against the Poles’ atrocities.” The cynical basis for freeing Germans held in prison or before the courts and dismissing the charges—the supposed cruelties committed by Poles against Germans, not the other way round—revealed that he did not mean for his troops to be hemmed in by the conventions of war.7

  The short conflict was terrible enough. Some 70,000 Poles were killed, 133,000 wounded, and 700,000 captured. Germany suffered 11,000 dead, 30,000 wounded, and 3,400 missing in action. The Red Army, which attacked the Poles when they were already on the edge of defeat, killed 50,000 and took 300,000 prisoners, at a cost of far fewer casualties. It was an uneven fight.8

  Soldiers of the Wehrmacht became involved in war crimes, such as happened on September 9 near the town of Ciepielów. Germans in the Fifteenth Motorized Infantry Regiment came under fire and suffered fourteen casualties before the Polish troops surrendered. A Colonel Wessel of the Wehrmacht was infuriated and, according to the diary of a German eyewitness, ranted about the dead and the “partisans,” even though his three hundred Polish prisoners were in uniform. He ordered them moved down the road, and all were shot, their fate even caught on camera. Subsequent investigations showed a minimum of sixty-four additional occasions when German soldiers—not the SS or security police—shot Polish prisoners of war, sometimes en masse.9

  The total number of German-ordered executions in September has been estimated at sixteen thousand, but the exact figure remains unknown.10 Reprisal policy was: if locals shot at the Germans, the invaders would select intellectuals, politicians, and other notables for execution.

  ETHNIC CLEANSING IN WESTERN POLAND

  On September 7 in conversation with Walther von Brauchitsch, commander in chief of the army, Hitler called for a “völkisch-politische Flurbereinigung,” or “ethnic cleansing,” of the conquered area. Admiral Wilhelm Canaris of military intelligence (Abwehr) soon learned of this and on September 12 mentioned his concerns about the “extermination of the nobility and clergy” to Wilhelm Keitel, the head of the Wehrmacht High Command. Keitel said the “matter has already been decided by the führer.” If the army chose not to participate, it would have to tolerate the “ethnic extermination” (volkstümliche Ausrottung) going on around them.11

  Jews were singled out from the start, with looting, burning of synagogues, and public humiliations all part of the routine. In reprisal for resistance of any kind, or simply on a whim, troops lashed out, and in some localities they clearly preferred to kill Jewish Poles.12

  Halder confided in his diary on September 10 how an SS artillery unit “herded Jews into a church and massacred them.” The men were court-martialed and some given a year’s sentence. They were almost certainly freed by Hitler’s amnesty in early October.13 The main killers of the Jews were the Einsatzgruppen of the security police and SD. The twenty-seven hundred men in these groups were under the command of Reinhard Heydrich. On September 3, Heinrich Himmler gave them shoot-to-kill orders that concluded: “In every area where insurgents are encountered, leading figures from the local Polish political administration are to be taken as hostages. If i
t becomes necessary to shoot hostages in order to prevent attacks by insurgents, it is to be reported to me immediately so that I may render a decision.”14

  More was involved than dealing with insurgents and hostages, as Heydrich made clear on September 7. He told the heads of the Gestapo, Kripo, and SD that Poland would be wiped out and what remained administered by Germany: “The leading population groups in Poland will be neutralized [unschädlich gemacht] as much as possible. The remaining, lower population will not retain any of their own schools, but be repressed one way or another.” Under no circumstances was the ruling

  class to be allowed to remain in Poland, but sent to German concentration camps, whereas the “humbler” classes should be sent to provisional camps on the border. “Polish plunderers” were to be shot on the spot.15

  When Heydrich found out that two hundred executions were taking place each day, he complained that the responsible military courts were working “far too slowly.” He wanted the accused shot or hanged immediately. He agreed to spare “the little people,” but the nobility, the heads of the Church, and Jews “must be killed.”16

  A particularly gruesome atrocity began on September 7 when Lothar Beutel of Einsatzgruppe IV reported that eighteen ethnic Germans were killed by Poles in the town of Bromberg (Bydgoszcz). There was a rumor that many ethnic Germans who had lived in the town had been killed on September 3. With each retelling, the number in this “Bromberg massacre”—sometimes also called “Bloody Sunday”—grew exponentially. When word reached Hitler, he flew into a rage and instructed Himmler to order a large-scale reprisal. Beutel’s men executed five hundred known Communists or members of the intelligentsia, and the military or police killed almost as many. Far from standing in the way, the local military commander aided and abetted the killing and ordered additional executions when several more of his men were shot. The action continued over the next several days, and ultimately the security police and Wehrmacht murdered an estimated one thousand Polish civilians in revenge for Bloody Sunday. Nearly half were also involved in some form of resistance and, from the army’s point of view, were killed as part of the “pacification policy.”17

  What the Germans did in western Poland was nearly as horrendous as what the Soviets were doing at the same time in eastern Poland. Jan Gross estimates that in the two years of occupation the Germans killed around 120,000—notably before the mass murder of the Jews began. In that short time, Gross claims that the Soviets “killed or drove to their deaths three or four times as many people as the Nazis from a population half the size of that under German jurisdiction.” Many Jews who left for the east when the Germans arrived began to “vote with their feet” when they experienced Soviet occupation and went back to the western zone.18

  MASS MURDER AND EUTHANASIA

  Hitler had long believed that the coming war would provide an opportunity to “cleanse the body politic” with complete disregard for legal conventions and public opinion. From 1933 onward, he told confidants that he favored “euthanasia,” in the sense of killing the chronically ill and certain kinds of asocials.19

  The decision to launch euthanasia in Germany with children came about following a chance petition to Hitler in the winter of 1938–39 from a man named Knauer, who wanted his severely retarded child to be granted a “mercy death.” This was but one of many requests from parents to have their “idiotic children” put to death. The letter ended up on the desk of the impressive-sounding Chancellery of the Führer (KdF)—which had little real power and was seeking a mission. The letter was shown to Hitler, who ordered an investigation by his physician Karl Brandt and eventually granted the Knauer family’s wish. Indeed, the killing of such children began several months before Hitler gave euthanasia his official authorization.

  In May 1939 he had ordered the creation of the Reich Committee for the Scientific Registration of Serious Hereditarily and Congenitally Based Illnesses. His resolve was strengthened by advice from his personal physician Theo Morell, whose investigations of public attitudes in the summer of 1939 concluded that few close relatives would be opposed to the “mercy killing” of their chronically ill children.20 By August 18 the Reich committee prepared circulars and sent them to regional authorities in search of information on “deformed births etc.”21Those children were eventually transferred to one of thirty or so special clinics, where they were starved to death, given lethal injections, or murdered in some way. Altogether, some fifty-two hundred had been killed under this program by the end of the war.

  Hitler’s aims went well beyond dealing with malformed or mentally ill children, for in June or July 1939 he told Dr. Leonardo Conti (the new Reich health leader), among other top officials, that he wished to get rid of adult psychiatric patients who were seriously ill during the coming war. His attitude was firmed up by another report that he interpreted as concluding that “unequivocal opposition from the Churches was not to be expected.”22 Hitler put the euthanasia program under one of his own offices, the KdF, with Philipp Bouhler and Viktor Brack taking the leading parts.

  Sometime in October 1939, Hitler issued an authorization to empower certain doctors to give a “mercy death” to those whom they regarded as incurably ill. He backdated the short note to the first day of the war in 1939. Together with other decisions we have already seen, this timing suggests that the coming of the war represented a significant turning point in Hitler’s mind.

  He may have been slow to start this program in Germany, but he quickly determined that people in chronic care in Poland would be murdered. Even so, orders did not always descend from Hitler or Berlin, for the zealots in the provinces were given free rein and did not wait for instructions once they became aware of what was expected.

  On September 19, Hitler paid a victory visit to Danzig and came close to offering peace to Britain and France. Claiming to have no war aims against either, he said they should not be deluded by reports that the German people were not as enthusiastic as in 1914. To the contrary, he said, they were behind him and totally determined.23

  To Danzig, Hitler took along the euthanasia advocates Bouhler, Brandt, and Conti, as well as other top Nazi officials like Himmler and Martin Bormann. He held discussions with Gauleiter Albert Forster, and the Berlin killing experts conferred with the Danzig specialists. Three days later a special commando under SS Major Kurt Eimann (which had already been formed) began clearing the mental hospital at Conradstein (Kocborowo), south of Danzig. In fact, mass graves had been dug even before Hitler arrived, so the decision to kill must have already been taken. Most patients were brought to a forest and shot, after which new patients were then escorted to Conradstein; the process continued into December, and by that time seven thousand had been killed.24

  The same procedure took place near Gdynia (Gotenhafen), north of Danzig. In total, ten thousand were shot there by members of Einsatzkommando 16 in an operation that ran to December 1939. The well-organized campaign killed another two thousand at a site near Konitz (Chojnice). In late October 1939, the war on the chronic-care patients spilled over into Pomerania. Gauleiter Franz Schwede-Coburg wanted to capitalize on the mood and came to arrangements with Himmler; an estimated fourteen hundred hospital patients were shot by Kurt Eimann’s SS commando.25

  In October and November the killing of hospital patients continued in the Warthegau, likely at the request of Gauleiter Arthur Greiser. The recently created district, Reichsgau Wartheland, usually called the Warthegau, had a population of 5.9 million at the start of the war, and was to be cleansed of all Jews and Poles and incorporated into the Reich. Poles made up over 80 percent of the people, and Greiser wanted them removed. His special wrath was directed at the 385,000 Jews. Turning this area into a Germanic paradise was going to involve wholesale ethnic cleansing and mass murder.26

  Part of this transformation entailed a euthanasia program. A new concentration camp in Posen (Poznan) used old Fort VII, as it was known. Its gas chamber was built and operating in mid-to late November 1939 and used carb
on monoxide to kill. Himmler himself witnessed one of these gassings on December 13. Far from being sickened, as was claimed after the war by members of the SS, he regarded such events as the “high point” of his inspection tours.27

  The killers sought and found a still more efficient and secretive killing process; they invented the first gas van, which began operations in the Warthegau on January 15, 1940, under Herbert Lange. The mobile killing machine made its rounds in the Warthegau and Pomerania and executed thousands of Polish and German patients as it went. It continued its grim work into West and East Prussia. The first wave in the euthanasia program was designed as part of the overall ethnic cleansing of these areas as laid down by Hitler, Himmler, and Heydrich. The slaughter in these eastern borderlands was not as systematic and “tidy” as the program under the KdF in “old” Germany, but was also not the random murders sometimes pictured in the literature.28

  Most of the hospitals and clinics, once rid of their patients, were used by the Wehrmacht and SS, not the incoming ethnic German settlers from the east. Contrary to the claims made by some, the object of the killing was not to free up needed beds but to pursue the ideological and racist goal that Hitler had long preached of “cleansing the body politic.”29

  Inside Germany the euthanasia program moved ahead as well. Some time before July 1939, a meeting of experts led by Bouhler and Brandt concluded that 20 percent of the 300,000 or so of Germany’s “chronically ill” patients should be disposed of. They expected some “difficulties” with public opinion but ruled out eliminating one person at a time. By early October they had decided to create killing centers.