Lenin, Stalin, and Hitler

by Robert Gellately

  The army did not have to be browbeaten into enforcing anti-Semitic measures. Captain Hermann Kremp, a staff officer of a security regiment (attached to Army Group Center), wrote home in the summer of 1941. He expressed himself with an appalling crudity and in a disgustingly jovial manner: “The place is crawling with Jews. We’re rounding them all up for work, some to sweep the streets, some to mend them. We’ve got girls washing and darning and boys to clean our boots. For the last couple of days we’ve been forcing them all to wear the yellow star. Mind you, to get them to do any of this we had to set an example first, for the Jew elder had insisted the job mustn’t be rushed. He refused our demand to hurry up, so we had to shoot him. That got the bastards moving!”20

  This and other letters show that many soldiers interpreted the war in terms right out of Hitler’s speeches, which were often parroted, particularly his “prophecy” about the fate of the Jews. More than one soldier said Jews were getting what they deserved and their efforts to manipulate England, America, and the Soviet Union to help them escape would fail.21 A noncommissioned officer wrote home in July 1942, saying Bolshevism had nearly conquered Germany but the threat had been stopped: “The great task given us in the struggle against Bolshevism lies in the destruction of eternal Jewry. Once one sees what the Jew has done in Russia, one can well understand why the führer began the struggle against Jewry. What sorrows would have come to our homeland had he allowed this beast of a man to keep the upper hand?”22

  When they saw poverty and misery, many found not pity in their hearts but confirmation of Nazi propaganda. A private wrote, “If in the past I thought that our propaganda had in this respect [conditions in Russia] somewhat exaggerated, today I can say that it had rather embellished conditions, for reality here is still far worse.”23

  A lieutenant who hoped to be used as a translator wrote in February 1942 from the east, “It is simply impossible to describe what we have experienced. The most satanic and criminal system of all time is the Jewish system in the ‘Soviet Paradise’—it is a paradise for Jews.”24 A noncommissioned officer wrote in June 1942: “If one sees what the Russian has done here in Russia, only then does one rightly grasp why the führer began the struggle against the Jews.”25

  Nazi ideology, and particularly the justification for the war, infused this mentality. The Wehrmacht used savage reprisals, including destroying whole villages and killing all the inhabitants. When soldiers wrote home, they talked, as one did in July 1941, not of the horrors perpetrated by the Wehrmacht but of their shock at “evidence of Jewish, Bolshevik atrocities, the likes of which I have hardly believed possible.” Another wrote that same month that “everyone, even the last doubter, knows today that the battle against these sub-humans, who’ve been whipped into a frenzy by the Jews, was not only necessary but came in the nick of time. Our Führer has saved Europe from certain chaos.”26 There is an abundance of similar evidence.27

  A favored practice of the eastern army during 1941 was to have Jews and Communists topple the monuments of Lenin and Stalin. Heinz Backe, a gunner in the 291 Infantry Division, wrote his parents from the Baltic town of Liepaja: “All the town Jews were got together and put in a room the Bolsheviks had used for their conferences. This room was stuffed full of oversized portraits and busts of Stalin and co., and all sorts of Soviet symbols and paraphernalia. The Jews had to carry the lot out and walk in procession through the town streets to the River Windau (Venta) where a pyre was lit, and the Jews, naturally, were made to feed the flames with all the stuff they had been carting.”28

  Germans and their collaborators killed “partisans,” “bandits,” “sub-humans,” and above all Jews and Communists with a sense of fulfilling a greater mission. The Wehrmacht commandant for Byelorussia reported shooting 10,431 prisoners out of 10,940 taken in “battles with partisans” just in October 1941. That these people were powerless to resist, and no real threat at all, can be gathered from the fact that exactly two German soldiers were killed in carrying out the operation against “partisans.”29

  MASS MURDER AS REPRISAL FOR BOLSHEVIK SABOTAGE

  In Eastern as in Western Europe, in situations involving reprisals German authorities tended to favor killing Jews and Communists. On July 25, 1941, by order of the Army High Command, Soviet soldiers found behind the lines after August 8 were to be regarded as partisans, whether in uniform or not, and shot. Similar orders were issued later by various army groups. As a related but separate matter, Karl Heinrich von Stülpnagel, commander of the Seventeenth Army in Ukraine, provided guidelines for responses to passive resistance or acts of sabotage when those responsible were not captured immediately: “Collective measures not to be taken indiscriminately. Where the initial act cannot be attributed to the Ukrainian local inhabitants, the local superintendents are to be instructed to name Jewish and Communist inhabitants in the first instance. By means of such pressure, the population is forced to inform the police.” He added that Jews in the Communist Youth Organization “are in particular to be regarded as supporters of sabotage and the organization of gangs.”

  Stülpnagel was disappointed to report that the harsh methods against the Jews “arouse pity and sympathy” among some Ukrainians. The solution was not to stop reprisals but to step up the “enlightenment” of the population “in order to obtain a resolute and more uniform rejection” of Jews.30

  Jürgen Förster maintains that the harshness of the collective measures against certain groups “cannot be explained solely by the need of the troops for security in the rear area, or by pragmatic considerations. In truth, the ideological background to these measures is beyond question.” He shows that the cooperation between the Wehrmacht and the SS in the destruction of the Jews came down to one key point: “the acceptance by many officers and men of the propaganda image of ‘Jewish Bolshevism.’ Another was the fact that the differences between military tasks and security policing measures had deliberately been blurred, as Hitler had desired.” The Wehrmacht, therefore, became involved in the “final solution” by marking out, hunting down, and forcing Jews into ghettos, and even helping the SS carry out mass executions. The Wehrmacht also cooperated with the SS in “pacifying” areas behind the lines, which invariably led to excesses against the Jews.31

  These points hold for the three army groups but show up most graphically for the sector of Army Group South in Kiev. In September 1941 the Wehrmacht ran into stiff resistance there. The Red Army withdrew, but not before booby-trapping the center of town, and after only a few days under German occupation the timed devices began to go off. The explosions killed several hundred members of the Wehrmacht, as well as numerous civilians. A fire broke out that was fueled by Soviet partisans and raged for days.32

  Local and regional Nazi officials, including the head of Einsatzgruppe C, Otto Rasch, as well as the city commandant Kurt Eberhard, decided to launch a massive reprisal and to have a large part of Kiev’s Jews pay the price. It was easy to blame the Jews and Soviet secret agents. The Germans as well as Ukrainians lusted for revenge.

  The activities of Einsatzgruppe C were already covered in blood. They had carried out numerous executions and incited people against Jews and Communists. Occasionally local groups, delighted to see the end of Communism, acted on their own initiative. For example, as soon as the Red Army left Lvov (Lemberg), and before the German army arrived, partisans began to take out “revenge” on the Jews and Communists. A militia brought Jews to the former NKVD prison and forced them to exhume buried victims. Violence swept through the streets, but only after almost a week did the Wehrmacht put a stop to the pogrom; by that time, four to seven thousand (described as Jews and Russians) had been killed. Similar events were sparked off with every discovery of NKVD victims.33

  The pogroms might commence when local hooligans or others went on a rampage. On other occasions, as in Tarnopol, they were incited by German forces. In Tarnopol two hundred NKVD victims were uncovered when German troops entered the city on July 2. Now German security polic
e, with the assistance of a local militia, drove six hundred Jewish men into a “prayer house” and murdered them all.34

  Kiev itself became the scene of the worst mass murder by shooting committed on Soviet territory. In response to the sabotage, an order was posted. Accordingly, on September 29, the next Monday, before eight o’clock, all the Jews “of Kiev and vicinity” were to report with their documents, clothing, and money for resettlement. General Eberhard wanted the Jews killed, but their execution was left to the Einsatzgruppe. One of its special commandos under Paul Blobel carried out the “action” with the assistance of a company of Waffen-SS, two police battalions, and the Ukrainian deputy police.35

  The assembled Jews were marched to a nearby ravine. The roadway to the killing site was guarded by soldiers of the Wehrmacht. The mass murder took place in a gully called Babi Yar. By the end of the next day, the number of the murdered stood at 33,771.36

  The story of the persecutions varied somewhat across the five districts of the newly created Reichskommissariat Ukraine. The Nazis found it easier to incite pogroms in areas that had been former Polish lands and occupied by the Soviets for the two years prior to June 1941. The main Ukrainian collaborators were the nationalists and the auxiliary police. It was the latter, “a minority, but an influential one,” that hunted down the Jews. Nevertheless, the historical tensions between the Jews and the Ukrainians, along with an incessant barrage of anti-Semitic propaganda from the German occupation forces, “began to find wider appeal.”37

  The result in the Zhytomyr district, for example, was that between 1941 and 1943 an estimated 180,000 Jews were killed. German officials did not even find it “useful” to consolidate the rural and village Jews into ghettos in the cities, but killed men, women, and children straightaway.38

  In anticipation of this genocidal thrust to the Nazi war against the Jews, Himmler wondered on August 15, 1941, after he attended a mass execution near Minsk, whether it was now Hitler’s policy to kill all the Jews.39 Himmler was disturbed by what he saw and heard about the effects such killing was having on his men. He asked the head of Einsatzgruppe B, Arthur Nebe, who was with him, to find a “less gruesome” method than shooting. His concern was for the mental and physical well-being of the perpetrators. He gave no thought to the victims.

  Himmler visited execution sites near Minsk for the purpose of determining how to deal efficiently with the “Jewish problem.” Contrary to earlier views, most historians now agree that he did not then issue an order to murder all Jewish men, women, and children. What seems to have happened was that the killing was gradually extended by the perpetrators on the spot. Brutalized by the first weeks and months of killing, and identifying with Nazi genocidal propaganda, they shed whatever reservations they might have had and, in one place, then in another, adopted the most radical solution imaginable.

  30

  THE “FINAL SOLUTION” AND DEATH CAMPS

  There can be no doubt that the decision to kill all the Jews was Hitler’s and that he alone had the power to make it. A recent book from the Soviet archives that is based on postwar interrogations of Hitler’s aides mentions that he took a personal interest in the development of the gas chambers, but the account is otherwise silent on the mass murder of the Jews.1

  Dating the decision to kill all the Jews has been controversial and will probably never be settled.2 To understand why there likely never was a formal order from Hitler, we should bear in mind that his decision-making style was to give leaders on the spot maximum room to take action “as he would have wished.” That was how he put it in one of the long monologues at his headquarters on October 14, 1941—right around the time when, according to many historians, he likely gave Himmler the go-ahead to expand the killing of the racial “enemy” in process in the east: “What would happen to me if I didn’t have people around me, men whom I completely trust, to do the work for which I don’t have time? Hard men who act as energetically as I would do myself? For me the best man is the man who removes the most from my shoulders, the man who can take 95 percent of the decisions in my place.

  Of course, there are always cases in which I have to take the final decision myself.” Hitler said he was preoccupied with military matters ten hours a day and liked to relax by looking at art and architecture before trying to sleep. Presumably he found time to discuss key matters with Himmler, who visited that very day, but the record is silent on the topic.3

  HITLER’S “PROPHECY” AND THE DECISION TO KILL ALL THE JEWS

  Hitler gave a speech on January 30, 1941, as he usually did on the anniversary of his appointment as chancellor, and reminded the audience of his “prophecy,” initially presented on January 30, 1939. He repeated that if the “Jews of international finance” managed to bring about world war, as they allegedly did in the First World War, the result would be not the Bolshevization of the world, as the Jews supposedly wanted, but rather the “extermination of the Jewish race in Europe.”4 As he was getting ready to launch Operation Barbarossa, he said he hoped that Germany’s enemies would recognize that the Jews were the “greater” enemy of all the warring parties. These nations, he said, should join in a common front instead of fighting each other.5

  He knew that by the beginning of the war at the latest, most Germans had come to accept that there was a “Jewish question” and agreed with the exclusion of Jews from national life.6 The regime now sought broad acceptance of solutions that went far beyond legal discrimination. Reiterating in public his well-known “prophecy” of how the Jews would pay if “they” started another world war was a subtle way to educate the German people in Nazi ideology and to gain their support for, or at least acquiescence in, what was happening to the Jews, including those about to be deported from the country. Those citizens who worried about moral issues could write off the messages as typical Hitler bombast, while the genuine anti-Semites could feel elated that he was at last settling scores with what they saw as the Jewish archenemy.7

  On July 31, Heydrich sought authorization from Göring to draw up “in the near future an overall plan of the organizational, functional, and material measures to be taken in preparing for the implementation of the aspired final solution of the Jewish question.”8 The means to be used mentioned were “by emigration or evacuation,” and it envisioned a “territorial solution.” It was not yet a decision for annihilation.

  The attack on the Soviet Union had opened a new stage in the genocide. The most compelling recent account suggests it is “most probable that in mid-September Hitler tentatively approved not only the deportations” of Jews out of Germany “but also at least in principle the ‘eradication’ of the deportees.”9 He must have decided sometime between late September and mid-October 1941 to follow through on the murderous logic of the anti-Semitism he had long espoused. The basis for this conclusion about the timing of the decision is that in those months there was “a qualitative and quantitative jump” into mass murder.10 Hitler may have communicated his wish directly to Himmler, who was in charge of carrying out the extermination. They met at Hitler’s headquarters on numerous occasions at that very time, discussing the Jews, among other issues.11

  Himmler repeatedly claimed that the annihilation was authorized by a führer order. This was his response, for example, when questioned by Bruno Streckenbach, of the Reich Main Security Office, and by Gottlob Berger, chief of the SS Main Administrative Office.12 He had responsibility, he would say to Berger in July 1942, for implementing the “very difficult order” that Hitler had placed on his shoulders.13

  Hitler most likely came to his decision to kill all the Jews at a time, according to Goebbels’s diary, when he was in an “extremely optimistic” mood. At Hitler’s headquarters on September 24, for instance, Goebbels saw a parade of prominent figures presenting themselves to the “extraordinarily happy” Hitler. While waiting his turn for an audience, Goebbels exchanged views with Heydrich. German Jews had been forced to wear the yellow star from September 15, and Goebbels, as gauleiter of Berli
n, said he wanted them “evacuated as quickly as possible” from the city. He expected to be able to do that “as soon as we have cleared up the military questions in the east. They should ultimately all be transported to camps created by the Bolsheviks. These camps were built by the Jews, and what could be more appropriate than that they should now populate them.” That sounded ominous, but nothing Goebbels recorded of Heydrich’s remarks indicates that anything like a final decision had yet been taken.

  Goebbels then spoke with Hitler and noted his leader’s high spirits. Hitler wanted Bolshevism, born in Leningrad, to die with the city: “Bolshevism began with hunger, blood, and tears” and would end the same way. When Leningrad was leveled, the “Asiatic Slavs” would no longer have a door to Europe. In the city’s place fields would be planted, as would be the case also for Moscow. Most of the fighting would be over by mid-October, after which some German troops could be withdrawn. Hitler thought that when Bolshevism was broken, it would retreat to Asia. He believed Stalin, by then over sixty, might sue for peace, since at such an old age he would not be able to stand the pressure.14

  For Hitler, the defeat of Bolshevism would be the last card Britain had to play. He did not worry about America, he said, because once the Soviet Union was defeated, “hardly anything can still happen to us.” He agreed with Goebbels that the Jews had to be “removed from all of Germany.” Goebbels wrote enthusiastically that the first cities to be free from Jews would be Berlin, Vienna, and Prague. He hoped that by year’s end most Jews would be gone.

  Apart from this conversation, Hitler said little about the Jews in the early autumn at his headquarters. However, on October 17, two weeks after talking to Goebbels, when discussing the need to “sift through” the native inhabitants in Eastern Europe, he brought up the topic. “The destructive Jews” were to be eliminated, and on that score there was a consensus among top Nazi leaders.15 In conversation with Bormann on October 21, Hitler talked about Christianity and Bolshevism but reserved his harshest words for the Jews—seen as being identical with the leadership of the Soviet Union. He went through the usual list of “Jewish-Bolshevik” crimes and ended by saying that “if we exterminate these pests”—presumably the Jews, Bolshevism, and Christianity—“then we perform an act for humanity, the significance of which our men out there can still not imagine.”16