Lenin, Stalin, and Hitler

by Robert Gellately

  The strategic plan was presented on October 9, 1939, by Viktor Brack, one of the main leaders of the T-4 operation. He calculated how many should be killed across the Reich by the formula 1,000: 10: 5: 1. That meant that for every 1,000 people, 10 would need psychiatric care at some time in their lives, of whom 5 would be hospitalized; and of those, 1 patient would be killed. Given the German population of sixty-five to seventy million, the result would mean that between sixty-five and seventy thousand would be eliminated.30

  The operation soon grew too big, and organizers moved into new headquarters at Tiergartenstrasse 4—with T-4 as the code name for their program. The public began to learn what was happening, and some family members went to hospitals and asylums to remove kin. Concerned relatives sent letters to the authorities in search of information about the program and the process. One woman whose two siblings died within a few days of each other wrote that she accepted the Third Reich but worried whether what was happening was legal. She wanted to know if there was some kind of law that made it possible to “relieve people from their chronic suffering.”31

  The program carried on until 70,273 people were killed, just beyond the target figure calculated by Brack before it began. This number does not include those murdered in operations in the newly annexed areas. Hitler called a temporary halt on August 24, 1941.32 He did so, according to some accounts, because of public disquiet and condemnation of it by the Catholic bishop Clemens August von Galen, who spoke on the topic in his sermon on August 3.33 The bishop suggested that the murder would spread to include invalids, the incurably sick, injured soldiers, or merely the unproductive. Although that sermon and isolated individual complaints may have played some role in halting the operation, they were not decisive. In fact, the T-4 personnel were needed in the east, where their expertise would be used in the mass murder of the Jews.34

  The campaign against infirm children did not stop, and a second phase of the program began in places like Hadamar in August 1942.35 Chronically ill patients were killed, and in isolated instances handicapped or even socially unruly people were murdered.

  The operation shifted away from hospitals and asylums to concentration camps. Himmler had approached Bouhler in early 1941 to use T-4 gassing facilities to get rid of the “human ballast” in concentration camps.36 By September 1941, SS doctors and the Gestapo in camps such as Dachau, Mauthausen, Ravensbrück, Buchenwald, Flossenbürg, and Neuengamme made preliminary selections of prisoners, and panels of visiting T-4 physicians picked the victims for gassing in an operation code-named Action 14f 13. The first group selected were asocials, but any Jews in the camps were especially vulnerable.37 Up to twenty thousand were gassed in T-4 facilities at Bernburg, Hartheim, and Sonnenstein in this action alone.38 On March 26, 1942, as more people were needed to work, Himmler reminded camp authorities to pay attention to labor needs before sending prisoners to their deaths, and on April 27, 1943, he restricted the killing to the mentally ill who could not work.39

  The organizers of the program told justice officials in April 1941 that 80 percent of the relatives of those killed “agreed” with what happened, 10 percent “protested,” and the other 10 percent were “indifferent.”40Subsequent historical research supports that conclusion.

  NEW VISIONS OF THE FATE OF THE JEWS AND POLES

  Nazi radicalism against the Jews kept escalating as Hitler or his henchmen altered their aims as they went. On September 14, 1939, Heydrich informed the relevant authorities in the secret police and SD that Himmler had made suggestions to Hitler on the “Jewish problem in Poland.” The top brass confronted new issues with the conquest of that country. On September 19, in a meeting in Berlin of the Ministerial Defense Council, mention was made of possibly moving Germany’s Jews to some place in Poland.41

  Another meeting that day between Quartermaster General Eduard Wagner and Heydrich referred chillingly to what should happen to the Jews and Poles: “complete cleansing: Jewry, intelligentsia, spiritual leaders, nobility.” Wagner did not object in principle, but said the operation should take place after the army withdrew from Poland.42 He reported to Brauchitsch to prepare him for a meeting the next day with Hitler. The führer presented his expanding plans to the heads of the German military on the “resettlement” of the area. Poles and Jews would be driven from the western zones of Poland, and the Jews put into ghettos.

  Brauchitsch raised no objections but wanted to delay implementation until military operations ended. In the meantime, so General Halder said, the situation would be studied to decide “which population groups must be resettled and where.”43

  In a follow-up meeting of his own on September 21, Heydrich called together the heads of the Einsatzgruppen and others, including Adolf Eichmann, the specialist in forced deportations of Jews in Austria and Czechoslovakia. The plan was to Germanize those provinces that had been formerly Germany but part of Poland since 1919 and to set aside a district farther east for non-Germans. Heydrich said the “problem of the Poles” was to be solved by “neutralizing” (unschädlich machen) the leadership class or by sending them to concentration camps. “The primitive Poles” who remained should be integrated into the labor process but eventually removed from the German-speaking area. He kept changing his mind about what should happen to these “primitive Poles.” Should they be sent into an eastern area, as would the Jews, or brought to Germany as slaves? In no case, however, was a recognizable Polish state or a Polish nation—that is, a culturally identifiable entity—to exist.

  Heydrich said Hitler authorized the deportation of the Jews to the same dumping ground in the east. Inside conquered Poland the Jews were to be forced into ghettos in larger cities as quickly as possible. Heydrich said the Jews in the Reich would also be sent to Poland, together with the remaining thirty thousand or so Gypsies. What Heydrich called the “final aim” (Endziel) of anti-Jewish policies was at this stage a territorial solution of some kind. The future fate of the Jews, Gypsies, and others was still up in the air.44

  This meeting was significant because it revealed a shift of emphasis in anti-Jewish policy from what had been ordained by Hitler after the “night of broken glass.” Earlier he had said he was aiming at eliminating the Jews from Germany by deporting them out of the country, and preferably out of Europe. Under the conditions of war, deportation by ship was impossible as most ports of exit were closed. The new “final aim” formally approved by Hitler and mentioned by Heydrich on September 21—was to send the Jews, including those from Germany, to a “Jewish reservation” in the east. They would be joined there by other “unreliable elements,” but no timetable was mentioned.

  A particularly diabolical aspect to the plans Heydrich mentioned on this day pertained to the formation of “Jewish councils” (Judenältestenräte) in Poland. Every Jewish community was to form a council of twenty-four members or so, drawn from among the rabbis and other important personalities. Instead of the Germans passing orders directly to the Jews, all instructions were to be channeled through these councils, whose members were to be held “fully responsible” for carrying them out. They were to begin with a census, convey all instructions to the Jews on resettlement, including the times and places of departure, take responsibility for the housing and feeding of the population, and generally see to it that all German orders were obeyed.45

  Heydrich met with Brauchitsch and Quartermaster Eduard Wagner on September 22 to smooth out ruffles in the relationship between the Einsatzgruppen and the military. The Wehrmacht was the only institution left in Germany that could have raised objections about the ethnic cleansing in Poland. The single reservation was that the resettlement plans ought not to hinder the movement of the military.

  By the end of September 1939, Hitler had made up his mind that former Poland was to be divided into three zones. “All the Jews (also those from the Reich) as well as unreliable elements”—including the latter from Germany—were to be deported to the most easterly zone. According to notes taken by Goebbels, they were to be given
a chance to see if they could construct anything there. The zone closest to Germany was to be Germanized and colonized and made the new breadbasket for the nation. Between these two zones there would be a third, something not quite a state and not simply a dependency, a territory whose very existence was to mark the physical separation of Germany from Russia. It would be called the General Government (Generalgouvernement).46

  Fresh from his victory parade in Warsaw, Hitler told the Reichstag in Berlin of the “aims and tasks” resulting from the collapse of the Polish state. The entire area had to be secured and restored. The “most important task” was to create “a new order of ethnographic relations,” and that meant “a resettlement of the nationalities.” This was a problem of concern to the entire east and southeast of Europe, where German minorities were scattered. “It was utopian to think that in an age of the nationality principle and of racial thought, one could leave these representatives of a higher-valued race simply to be assimilated.” There would be population transfers of ethnic Germans back to the fatherland. Germany would never permit, he said, “what remained of Poland” to disturb the peace with the Soviet Union.

  In the context of solving minority problems in the new German lebensraum, Hitler mentioned the Jews briefly. He said only that there would be an effort to bring “order to and regulation of the Jewish problem.”47

  Goebbels’s notes behind the scenes provide an invaluable record. The propaganda minister deduced from what Hitler said that the Jews were “not people anymore.” They were rather like “beasts of prey equipped with a cold intellect.” He admitted the “Jewish problem will likely be the most difficult to solve.” He wrote that Hitler’s assessment of the Poles was not to assimilate them with the German people. Poles were “more animals than people.” He went to Poland to see for himself, and his film crew came up with material for anti-Polish and anti-Jewish campaigns. After viewing the film later, Goebbels confided to his diary: “This Jewry must be destroyed.” His impression was that the occupation administration was “too German. We do not want to put the Polish house in order.”48

  Goebbels visited the Lodz ghetto, where everything he saw reinforced his prejudices: “They are not people but animals. And for that reason, they are not a humanitarian but a surgical task. We have to take steps here, and quite radical ones. Otherwise Europe will go to its doom on the Jewish disease.” He said his conclusions won Hitler’s “full support. The Jews are trash.”49 At the end of November he visited Posen and had equally harsh things to say.50

  Hitler needed no coaching. In discussions with the head of the OKW, Keitel, on October 17, he had explained what he had in mind. Poland was not to be “a model province or model state along the lines of German order.” Rather, it was to remain leaderless and be allowed to deteriorate into chaos, its living standard kept low. Its people were to become a source of slave labor for Germany. Carrying out this program, Hitler said, would require “a hard ethnic struggle, which follows no legal norms. The methods will have nothing to do with our usual legal principles.” Any hope of Poland reemerging “must be eliminated.” He added that “the leadership in this area must make it possible to clean out the Jews and the Polacks from the Reich proper.”51

  GERMANY’S DEPORTATIONS FROM NEWLY INCORPORATED AREAS OF POLAND

  The “cleansing” of western Poland was to take place by deporting Jews and Poles to the General Government, but the operation proceeded by fits and starts. Eichmann met with Heinrich Müller, the head of the Gestapo, on October 6 and received the mission to deport around 70,000 Jews from the annexed Polish territories. The experimental deportation, involving only males of working age, took on a momentum of its own. Soon the program aimed to expel 300,000 Jews over perhaps a nine-month period from nearly all areas conquered by the Wehrmacht, including the “old” Reich (that is, Germany), as well as Austria (the Ostmark) and the newly created Warthegau (that is, the northwest part of the former Poland that bordered on Germany). At a meeting with Arthur Nebe, the head of the Kripo, on October 12, Eichmann was asked when it would be possible to send east at least the “Berlin Gypsies” as well. Nebe was told they might be able to attach one wagon for Gypsies to each of the deportation trains. Eichmann opted for the Nisko, across the San River, as the place where the Jews would be dropped off.

  This project was barely under way one week before it was stopped on orders originating from Himmler, mainly because the trains were needed for the resettlement of ethnic Germans coming, as per agreement with Stalin, from the Soviet zones of occupation in the east. Tens of thousands were brought west beginning on October 18, and Himmler, who was in charge of this operation, gave it priority over deporting Jews and Poles. Eventually to be moved from the Baltic States were around 110,000 re-settlers; close to 77,000 from Romania; and some 140,000 from various areas of the Soviet Union. These ethnic Germans were to be settled in the western areas of occupied Poland and sometimes brought to Germany proper.52

  On November 28, 1939, Heydrich informed police leaders in Cracow, Breslau, Posen, and Danzig about another “short-term plan” (Nahplan) and a “long-term plan” (Fernplan). The need was to make room for incoming ethnic Germans, especially in the Warthegau, by moving out eighty thousand Poles and Jews. The long-term plan, which has never been found, apparently involved “removing the Jews and the Poles from the eastern provinces” to the General Government.

  What was new in the plan was the proposal to use some Poles, those who could be termed “racially good,” as slave labor in Germany rather than send them to the east. No mention was made of the Jews in Germany and Austria.

  The plan was partially implemented between December 1 and 17, 1939. The authorities exceeded their quota, sending eighty-seven thousand Poles and Jews to the east. The broad nature of the racist agenda can be seen from the fact that these deportees included “politically dubious Poles, Jews, Polish members of the intelligentsia, and criminal and asocial elements.” The unfortunates were transported in freight cars at a time of year when it was already bitterly cold.53

  “The final solution of the German Jewish problem” was the subject of another plan, this time formulated by the Jewish affairs specialists of the SD in Berlin. On December 19, 1939, they used the concept of the “final solution” (Endlösung) for one of the first times. The document indicates that this term did not yet mean mass murder. The goal at this point was some kind of “reservation.” Confusion and lack of certainty prevailed, however, and the approach to Jewish policy was haphazard and meandering.54

  Heydrich revised plans yet again at the end of the year and made them known on January 30, 1940. The underlying principle was the same, namely to get rid of as many Jews and Poles from the newly incorporated areas as possible and replace them with ethnic Germans. He brought out a point Hitler had signaled earlier. Instead of sending the Poles in the new German areas to the east, he now proposed importing between 800,000 and 1 million of them into Germany, where they would be used as slave labor. Some Jews (40,000) and more Poles (120,000) would be sent to the General Government to make room for incoming ethnic Germans. After that he foresaw moving the remaining Jews from the eastern districts, along with 30,000 Gypsies from Germany and 1,000 Jews from Germany. All would be sent to the General Government. These plans were modified again, with the search still on for some kind of territorial solution to the “Jewish question.”55

  24

  HITLER AND WESTERN EUROPE

  Always one to be on to the next target, Hitler called a conference on September 27, 1939, the day Warsaw surrendered, to demand the immediate preparation of plans for an attack on France. General Halder was struck that Hitler underlined how time “will, in general, work against us if we do not use it wisely. The economic resources of the other side are stronger. The enemy can purchase and transport. Nor is time working for us in the military sense.” The most likely option was that the war would continue, and the implications were obvious: “The goal is to bring England to its knees, to demolish France.”1<
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  DOUBTERS AND ASSASSINATION ATTEMPT

  Hitler ordered preparations for an early attack in the west, notwithstanding the peace offer of sorts he made on October 6 in a speech to the Reichstag. British Prime Minister Chamberlain dismissed the halfhearted overtures, and within days Hitler informed his military leaders of his decision to go ahead. On October 16 he said the strike would likely come between November 15 and 20.2

  Behind Hitler’s back more cautious military leaders, particularly the High Command of the Army (OKH), began wondering aloud about the wisdom of their leader. Several groups started to hatch a conspiracy, even raising the possibility of deposing Hitler. They were not yet prepared to assassinate him.

  Brauchitsch and Halder both had doubts about the west offensive but shied away from confronting Hitler. Brauchitsch made one attempt on November 5 to dissuade Hitler, who did not back down but angrily browbeat him into silence before storming out. Halder got cold feet waiting in the adjoining room. The army was divided, and on balance Hitler had far more support than any opponents among the leading officers. On November 12 he issued the order for the attack—code-named Case Yellow.3

  This process was rudely interrupted by an assassination attempt. There was shock across the country on November 8, when a bomb went off in the Bürgerbräukeller, narrowly missing Hitler. This was the beer hall where the Nazis annually celebrated their attempted coup of 1923. Georg Elser, the man who planted the explosive device, hollowed out the stone pillar next to where the führer was to speak. Elser timed the bomb to go off at 9: 20 p.m., in the middle of Hitler’s speech, which usually ran from 8: 30 to 10: 00. Because of the wartime situation, Hitler decided to leave early and narrowly missed the explosion, which killed eight and injured sixty-three more, some of them seriously.4 Newspapers spoke of the “spiritual” links to the event of both England and the Jews, although, as it turned out, Elser worked alone and was not Jewish.5 He had been a member of the Communist Party, however, and, obsessed with trying to stop the war, he finally opted for an assassination of the Nazi leader.6