Lenin, Stalin, and Hitler

by Robert Gellately

  Hitler met with Himmler and Heydrich in the evening of October 25, the day after Himmler returned from the front, where he had discussed the shooting of Jews with Field Marshal Bock and others.17 Hitler began by mentioning his notorious prophecy about what awaited the Jews should “they” start another world war. “This criminal race,” Hitler went on, “has the two million dead of the World War on its conscience, and now again still further hundreds of thousands. Let no one say to me: we cannot send them into a swamp. Who then worries about our people? It is good if the terror precedes us, that we are exterminating the Jews. The attempt to found a Jewish state would be a mistake.” The latter statement was an affirmation that the search for “territorial solutions” was over.18

  Up to that point the Nazis had been willing to consider specific areas or places where the Jews could be sent, with the clear implication they did not much care where they went as long as they disappeared from the Reich. That now changed, and on October 23 the Gestapo ordered that all further emigration of Jews from anywhere within the Reich was forbidden for the duration of the war. This secret decree can be interpreted in several ways, but strongly suggests the Nazis were determined not to let any Jews escape.

  Many developments converged at the same time. The death squads were in full swing, the great deportations from Western Europe were under way, and beginnings were made for the establishment of the death camps.19 The implications for the mass murder of the Jews were obvious, and it is hairsplitting today to persist in squabbling about when or if Hitler made the ultimate decision or whether “concrete plans” to kill all Jews existed.

  Hitler kept hitting the same notes and sending signals that were impossible to miss. He continually provided assurances for people like Himmler and Goebbels as to what his wishes were. He repeatedly made his resolve clear to the public as well. On November 8, speaking to the Party faithful in Munich, he again denounced the Jews for starting the fires of war.20 The reaction to this speech in the Nazi press highlighted his attack on the Jews. One news story carried the headline “The Jewish Enemy” and concluded that “the war against the Jewish international is a life-and-death struggle that must be ruthlessly fought to the end.”21

  The German people heard about the notorious prophecy again and again, not just from Hitler, but also from Goebbels, who referred to it in newspaper stories on several occasions, the first time on November 16, as he tried to justify the decree that Jews wear a yellow star. He mentioned the dreadful prophecy was coming true. Many Germans apparently agreed that the Jews started the war, at least if official surveys from that period can be believed.22 Goebbels repeated his message in early December 1941, and at the end of an address before distinguished guests at Berlin University he calmly spoke of “the historical guilt of the Jews,” this when trainloads of helpless German Jews were being sent to the east. He recalled for the audience Hitler’s prediction of what would come to pass should the Jews “yet again” plunge the world into war. He added, apparently without needing to be more specific, that “we are just now experiencing the realization of this prophecy.”23

  In the meantime, preparations went ahead for the genocide. By November 1, 1941, on Himmler’s orders, construction had begun at what would be the death camp at Belzec. Heydrich saw the possibilities of using gas vans to kill large numbers and in late October ordered more. They would be used in many places, as far away as Yugoslavia. In the last weeks of October, Himmler and Heydrich considered creating gassing facilities at other sites, including Mogilev, Sobibor, and Chelmno.24 Auschwitz already existed as a concentration camp, but in October a large crematorium was ordered for it. Hans Frank, head of the General Government (part of former Poland), was also making plans for the destruction of Jews. All these and other events came within such a short period that they would have been impossible without a decision from Hitler.25

  HITLER AFFIRMS GENOCIDAL RESOLVE AGAINST THE JEWS

  On December 12, the day after declaring war on the United States, Hitler held a meeting with his gauleiters, the regional Nazi Party bosses whose political loyalty he came to value more than ever. He thought it was just as well that he had decided on war with the Americans: sooner or later they would have been forced into it because the United States would have sided with Britain and interfered with the ability of German U-boat captains to torpedo ships at will. Japan’s move was fortunate, he now explained, because a declaration of war by Germany on the United States without having a friendly counterweight in the Asian conflict might have been difficult for Germans to accept.

  His goal for the next year was to “finish off” the Soviet Union “at least up to the Urals.” Thereafter Europe could exist in a “half-peaceful situation” and no longer be vulnerable to attack.

  The talk also touched on how winning booty would help finance the recovery and how the new lebensraum would one day be turned into Germany’s “future India,” a reference to Britain’s imperial reign. In three or four generations the lands conquered in the east would become the kernel of the new Reich. As Hitler saw things, if the Germans were ready to spill their blood for the New Order in Europe, then other nations should contribute their laborers.

  He was feeling strong, in fighting spirit, convinced of his ability to conquer the east and daring to anticipate the fulfillment of his dream to dictate the future direction of a new Europe. He then turned to the “Jewish question.” The following day Goebbels recorded his impressions of Hitler’s message:

  With regard to the Jewish question, the führer has made up his mind [ist entschlossen] to make a clean sweep. He prophesied to the Jews that if they once more brought about another world war, they would experience their extermination. That is no mere talk. The World War is here, the extermination of the Jews must be the necessary consequence. This question is to be regarded without any sentimentality. We are not here to pity the Jews, but to have pity for our German people. If the German people in the eastern campaign had lost close to 160,000 dead, so the originators of this bloody conflict will have to pay with their lives.26

  Hitler also blamed the Jews for the anti-German attitude of the U.S. government and for engineering a situation in which the two countries found themselves at war. Himmler noted cryptically in his desk calendar after a meeting with Hitler on December 18:“Jewish question: to be exterminated as partisans.”27

  Early in the New Year, Hitler signaled his wishes yet again when talking to Himmler and other guests at his headquarters: “If I remove the Jew, then our bourgeoisie will be happy.” He likened the coming operation to extracting a bad tooth: better to do the job quickly than to try to pull it out a little bit over several months. “When it is removed, the pain is over. The Jew must be removed from Europe,” he said, otherwise there would be no peace. Soviet prisoners of war were dying in Nazi camps, but he claimed it was the Jews who had brought about the situation. He asked rhetorically why he should regard the Jews any differently than Soviet prisoners: “I see only one thing: the absolute eradication, if they do not go freely.” Of course by then he and Himmler knew full well that the Jews were forbidden to leave the Third Reich. Even so, he ruminated two days later that it would be best if the Jews went off to Russia.28 However we interpret this kind of talk, Hitler was no longer offering a serious proposal for a “territorial solution,” and it was a cruel jest to suggest that the Jews, who were being rounded up and murdered, were free to leave Europe.

  Throughout 1942, Hitler repeated his prophecy on three major occasions and several minor ones.29 The threats were invariably phrased in terms of future events. On January 30, he stated that “the war can only end when either the Aryan peoples are exterminated or the Jews disappear from Europe.”30 Official surveys of popular reaction to the speech showed there was more concern about other issues raised in it. Nevertheless, the opinion survey said candidly that the people apparently interpreted the threat “to mean that the führer’s battle against the Jews would be followed through to the end with merciless consistency, and that v
ery soon the last Jew would be driven from European soil.”31 “The Jew will be exterminated [ausgerottet],” ran the headline story in a newspaper account of another “prophecy” speech written by Hitler and read by Gauleiter Wagner on February 26, on the anniversary of the founding of the Nazi Party. The paper reported Hitler’s threat would be fulfilled “at the end of this war.”32

  Germans who might be alarmed by this harsh assessment could look the other way and comfort themselves by pointing to more ambiguous press reports, even denials of wrongdoing. In March, a paper alleged that Jews, in an effort to win public sympathy in Germany, “were threatened by the worst of fates in being sent to a secretive swamp area,” which sounded like Auschwitz. This rumor was denied. “Such a danger does not threaten the Jews,” the story said, adding the misinformation that “they would [merely] have to work.”33 Some pictures were occasionally published of Jews “as leaders of the partisans” and of alleged “Jewish criminal types” who were said to be the “instigators of a war of shooting people in the back” behind the lines.34

  But news of the genocide was filtering back to Germany. Victor Klemperer learned about Auschwitz and its reputation in March 1942.35 He had heard rumors of a mass murder near Kiev by April 1942, although the massacre of the Jews at Babi Yar took place at the end of September the year before.36 In the summer and early autumn of 1942, the White Rose resistance students in Munich made mention of the fate of the Jews in one of their leaflets. They guessed that as many as 300,000 Jews had been murdered in Poland, when the figure was far higher.37 Knowledge of what was happening, therefore, got through in bits and pieces.

  The Holocaust, under way since the beginning of Operation Barbarossa, was a genocide that was compressed into a remarkably short period. Notwithstanding the killings carried out by the Einsatzgruppen and others, as well as the beginning of the use of gas facilities and gas vans, in March 1942 75 to 80 percent of the victims of the Holocaust were still alive. The greatest period of killing was in the year from March 1942 to March 1943, by the end of which only 20 to 25 percent of those who were to be murdered in the Holocaust were still living.38

  The genocide proceeded along two tracks. The first was the continuation of execution by shooting, carried out not only by groups associated with the SS but by reserve police battalions and occasionally also the Wehrmacht. In addition, by mid-1942 thirty gas vans were operating. The other method of killing was by the use of gas inside specific camps.

  DEATH CAMP TRAGEDY

  In the Soviet Union, under Lenin’s and Stalin’s orders, there was mass murder greater in quantitative terms than in Nazi Germany. However, the Holocaust was a social and a human catastrophe the likes of which had never been seen before. While Lenin and Stalin created more concentration camps, the Communists did not create killing centers. The Soviets sometimes used a gas van (dushegubka), as in Moscow during the 1930s, but how extensive that was needs further investigation.39 They used crematoriums to dispose of thousands of bodies, but had no gas chambers.

  The Nazi death camps were designed for mass murder that required little hands-on effort. In the words of Omer Bartov: “What was—and remains—unprecedented about the Holocaust [was]… the industrial killing of millions of human beings in factories of death, ordered by a modern state, organized by a conscientious bureaucracy, and supported by a law-abiding, patriotic, ‘civilized’ society.”40

  There were six main sites for the systematic murder; all of them used gas, sometimes carbon monoxide, but at Auschwitz people were murdered with Zyklon B. In addition to the Jews, other groups were killed in large numbers as well, including Soviet prisoners of war and the Sinti and Roma, or Gypsies.

  These death camps were Belzec, Treblinka, Sobibor, Chelmno, Auschwitz-Birkenau, and Majdanek. Each of these, and other sites that were used as well, has its unique story to tell, all of them horrific. They originated from a combination of regional initiatives, with support or orders from Berlin. Tracing how each camp was created, and who was responsible, has been complicated because much of the documentation was destroyed.

  An example of how events unfolded can be seen with Gauleiter Arthur Greiser in the Warthegau. He asked Himmler’s permission to remove 100,000 and make his district “free from Jews.” This request was granted at some point in October 1941, and execution by shooting was stepped up. In addition, Special Commando Herbert Lange was put to work. Lange had already used a gas van in 1939–40 to kill thousands of chronically ill patients in the parts of Poland to be incorporated into the Reich. He now sought out a fixed place to use these vans and opted for the village of Chelmno, northwest of Lodz. The site was quickly readied, and the killing began on December 8. Estimates of the victims are usually set at around 150,000.41

  To the east of the Warthegau in the former Poland was the new district the Nazis called the General Government, under the leadership of Hans Frank. It was regarded as a holding ground for Jews and Poles. According to Frank, the area contained 3.5 million Jews, but other German estimates were lower. Jews in small towns and villages who were not shot immediately were forced to the cities, where large ghettos were established. People tried to carry on a normal life and hoped for the best. The letters and diaries that survive, particularly those of young people, tell the heartrending stories of what happened.42

  Once more the turning point was the autumn of 1941. In October, Odilo Globocnik was given the task of creating a camp at Belzec, and work began in early November. The limited capacity of the camp and its unhurried construction might be interpreted to mean Globocnik had not yet been ordered to kill all the Jews in the General Government. However, it was not long before that became his assignment, and along with it came the decision to build other camps with greater killing capacities.43

  Some of the men who established Belzec had been involved in the German euthanasia program and had expertise with gassing facilities. The installation was ready by the end of February, and experimental killings began by means of bottled carbon monoxide, soon replaced by an internal combustion engine that piped deadly fumes into the chamber.44

  SS officers sought another place in the General Government and selected Sobibor, where construction only began in March 1942; it was also under Globocnik, as the SS and police leader in Lublin. Franz Stangl, who was given oversight of the construction, traveled to Belzec to see how that camp functioned. He increased the scale of the operation. Sobibor used an internal combustion engine, with fumes piped into hermetically sealed rooms, each with a capacity to hold two hundred people. Experimental killings began in April 1942.45

  The third camp in Globocnik’s jurisdiction was Treblinka, located in the far north of the General Government, and its ten gas chambers were eventually able to take up to thirty-eight hundred people, beginning on July 23. The camp became a killing machine. No attempt was even made to exploit Jewish labor, apart from the people in a “special commando” selected to bury the dead.46

  Belzec, Sobibor, and Treblinka were given the mission to kill all the Jews in the General Government. The Nazis later called the campaign—in “honor” of Reinhard Heydrich, who was assassinated and died on June 4, 1942—Operation Reinhard.

  These camps lasted only a short time. Belzec ceased operations in December 1942. Transports continued to Treblinka until April 1943, after which the pace slowed. In August 1943 the Jewish “special commando” there decided they had nothing to lose and killed as many camp guards as they could before they were overwhelmed. The camp was closed, and the Nazis finished their efforts to cover up their crimes.

  In October 1943 a similar uprising took place in Sobibor, after which it, too, was dismantled. There were few survivors from any of these camps, which is one of the reasons they remain less known than other such places. Nearly all the victims were Jews. The death toll is astounding: Belzec murdered at least 550,000; Sobibor 200,000–250,000; and Treblinka, 750,000–900,000.47

  Rudolf Reder was one of only two survivors of Belzec, but no women lived through the experie
nce at all.48 Dov Freiberg, a survivor from Sobibor, remembered the sight, sound, and hopelessness of the victims transported there:

  The people who arrived from the last ghettos and labor camps of Poland had already passed through the seven circles of hell before they reached Sobibor. They were in despair; they already knew what awaited them; and there was no need to tell them stories. The Germans did not even address them. They shouted at them to take off their clothes quickly, maltreated and struck them until the last moment. The deportees asked whether it would take much time until the gas chambers. There were among them people who had escaped from the Aktionen, who had jumped from the trains, who had been in the forests, who had gone into hiding, but did not manage to find refuge and had returned to the ghettos knowing exactly what awaited them.49

  One of the most horrific of all the camps was Majdanek. Himmler ordered Globocnik on July 20, 1941, to construct a “regular” concentration camp there during a visit.50 The work began in October, and the camp was used initially for Soviet prisoners of war. The plan was to have 25,000 prisoners in the camp, but that was doubled almost immediately, and by year’s end it had reached 150,000, an expression of the “giganto-mania” of those heady times when the Nazis were winning the war.