To repeat, I am aware that a Jewish-American historian, Daniel Goldhagen, has written about the “exterminationist anti-Semitism” which, in his view, permeated our people from top to bottom. I wish! But it didn’t. To see real “exterminationist” anti-Semitism in action, the learned professor should have looked at some of the sickening things people did to the Jews in places such as Croatia, the Baltic, the Ukraine, and the Romanian-occupied Russian districts along the Black Sea coast. They often did so as soon as our troops arrived on the scene—and often with very little encouragement on our part. That would have taught him what real savagery means. I’m assuming, of course, that he would have come back in one piece.
The measures we took worked well enough. Within five years of our coming to power almost a third of Germany’s Jews had left the country, most of them after having been forced to leave their assets behind. A great many others, having their lives turned into ones of misery, were planning go do so at the earliest opportunity. Good riddance! At that point, however, we began our career of expansion by incorporating Austria into the Reich. That meant we were cursed with another 200,000 of these unsavory creatures. Taking the bit between their teeth, SA men forced Jews to clean the pavement of Vienna with toothbrushes. Photographs were taken and published around the world. They may have gratified the minds of some people as, up to a point, they did mine. But they damaged our image abroad and did little to solve the problem we were facing. That is why I ordered them to be brought to a halt as soon as possible.
Over the next few years this pattern was repeated over and over again. First in the Sudentenland, “home” to 120,000 Jews. Then in Bohemia and Moravia (120,000) then in Poland (3,000,000), then in the West (500,000), then in the Balkans (1,400,000), and finally in the Baltic and Russia (3,000,000). The more land we annexed or conquered, the more Jews, including some whom we ourselves had forced to flee from the Reich, came under our rule. Paradoxically, our very victories were working against us.
I became more and more frustrated. One early sign of this was my “prophecy,” made in front of the Reichstag on 30 January 1939 not long after our occupation of the Sudetenland, to the effect that a new war would lead to the “extermination of the Jewish race in Europe.” Probably no other sentence of mine has been analyzed and reanalyzed nearly as often as this one. Had the idea always been on my mind, or was it new? If it was new, when, how, and why was it born? And just what did the term “extermination” mean? What my nerdish critics overlooked, though, is the plain fact that, at that time, I had no idea that, in a little more than two years, our flag and that of our ally would be flying from the North Cape all the way down to the Pyrenees in the west, Crete in the east, and Sollum (in Egypt) in the south. Obviously, what I was saying was not that we, meaning I, would exterminate the Jews. Instead, I was saying that a new war would make people throughout Europe so furious at them that they would start doing what had to be done on their own. That, in fact, happened in many places.
It was against this background of frustration that, following the surrender of Poland, Heydrich had proposed, and I had approved, the confinement of its Jewish population in ghettoes pending deportation to some yet undetermined destination. Now, with our victory in the west a fait accompli, someone in the Jewish Department of our Foreign Ministry revived the so-called Madagascar Plan. The first to raise the idea was one of our forerunners, Paul de Lagarde, in 1878. It rested on the notion, whose roots go back to the seventeenth century, that the island’s inhabitants were somehow linked to the Jewish race. That is why, at various times, it attracted the interest not just of French and Polish politicians but of Jewish ones, too. First, we would round up the five million or so Jews in the parts of Europe that now came under our jurisdiction or that of our allies. Next, we would pack them onto ships and send them to the island. There, supervised by the SS, they would form a penal colony. This, more or less, was what the English had done when they sent shiploads of convicts to Australia and what many other countries have done when they established penal colonies for undesirables of every kind. True, the island’s French owners hated the Jews almost as much as we did. But they were in no position to object.
I personally backed the plan. Energetically carried out, it would have solved the Jewish problem in Europe within just four years. From Brest-Litovsk to Brest, so to speak. Unfortunately, it all depended on the English. They too did not like Jews any more than we did. That is proved by the fact that, for over three and a half centuries between 1290 and 1657, they were able to keep their country Judenrein. In this respect their record was much better than ours. However, this was 1940. Though we had thrown them out of the Continent, they still retained their command of the sea. And the English, we soon found out, would rather commit suicide than cooperate with us, even on a matter such as this one.
There things remained, more or less, until the summer of 1941. Proceeding from east to west, wherever we went, we identified the Jews, confiscated their property, and concentrated them in ghettoes. Some we killed, but not nearly enough to make a demographic difference. As we were making the final preparations for Barbarossa, though, we were faced with the prospect of increasing the total number of Jews under our control to between eight and a half and nine million. This time, there was no possibility of getting rid of them at all. What on earth were we to do with them? It was against this background that I concluded that they would have to be exterminated. Physically, I mean, not in any other sense. The first orders only referred to men, but very soon women and children were also included. This is nature’s way; I simply could see no other. Leaving them alive would merely result in the rise of a new generation stronger, more vengeful, and more dangerous than the previous one.
Back in 1977 David Irving, a non-academic English historian who up until then had been seen by many as the Wunderkind of the profession, came up with the idea that I had not been informed about the extermination of the Jews. Supposedly, Himmler had carried it out behind my back, at times even against my explicit wishes. In his support Irving, forgetting how good I was at keeping my own council and manipulating others, quoted various conversations I had with various people. For this offense, as well as “denying the Holocaust” in general, the champions of free speech attacked him, ostracized him, and put him on trial. He even spent some time in in an Austrian jail. Much as I commend him for combating postwar anti-German propaganda, I want to put it on the record: all of this is pure hogwash.
It is true, as Irving and others wrote, that my hold over Germany weakened after 1939. Many state prosecutors, police officers, and Gestapo personnel were called up. Their absence created a vacuum we couldn’t fill. I myself was running a world war, which was enough to keep any man busy. As Commander in Chief, I had to spend too much time in my field headquarters and not enough at the Reichskanzlei in Berlin. Disliking the latter city as I did, I avoided it whenever possible in favor of the Berghof. All this meant that some domestic problems which were brought to my attention had to be postponed until after the war. For example, my plan to prohibit civil servants from investing their money in anything but state bonds was delayed. And the question of what to do with tens of thousands of half and quarter Jews who served in the Wehrmacht, sometimes with their superiors’ knowledge, sometimes without, was put on hold as well.
Perhaps the most important issue of all was the possibility, which both Himmler and Bormann explored at various times, of reintroducing some form of polygamy. The First World War had cost the lives of two million German men. After Operation Barbarossa did not lead to the quick results we had expected, it began to look as if the second one would cost as many lives, if not more. Most of these would be in their prime, leaving open the question as to who would enable millions of German women to have children so as to make good our losses. Nor was it a question of numbers only. Throughout the ages, war has often caused the sexual mores of stay-at-home women to go downhill. Just look at ancient Sparta, where they associated with the Helots! German women were no excepti
on to the rule. The more time passed, the more of them, both married and unmarried, took up with whatever men they could find, foreigners included. Rolf Hochhuth’s 1978 novel, A Love in Germany, did not invent anything! Draconian punishments, including public humiliation and spells in a concentration camp, only had limited effect. The outcome was a real threat to the purity of our race.
Presumably there were also some other issues that my staff considered too minor to merit my attention. But the extermination of the Jews? No way. First, Himmler’s mind was much too limited to originate such a thing. Whatever his other virtues, he was totally lacking in imagination. As I said before, when you get down to it, he remained a pedantic, perfectly groomed, and splendidly uniformed head clerk. Albeit one who sometimes came up with the most bizarre ideas, such as his attempts to revive old Viking traditions and to replace Christianity with some kind of sun worship. There was also the time when he became involved with a scientific expedition to Tibet in the hope of proving some crackpot theory about the origins of Aryan man. The most he could have done was get a little ahead of himself, as happened in the case of some German Jews whom he liquidated before their proper time had come. But that was all.
Second, Himmler did not operate on his own. He needed others, including many who were not under his authority, to work with. Look at the list of those who attended the famous Wannsee Conference. They represented the Reich Party Chancellery, the Reich Ministry for the Eastern Occupied Territories, the Generalgouvernement in Poland (where the extermination camps were just starting to operate), the Reich Ministry of Justice, the Reich Ministry of the Interior, the Reich Chancellery, and the Reich Foreign Ministry. Other organizations, such as the military, which provided some of the transport, and the Reichsbahn, without which much of the operation could not have taken place, were also heavily involved. To claim that all these highly qualified officials could have worked together over a period of three years, taking millions of people from their homes, confiscating their property, concentrating them, transporting them from one end of Europe to another, and killing them without my knowledge is an insult to my intelligence. It’s particularly insulting because, as became clear after the war, both Stalin and the Western Allies were aware of the operation almost from the beginning.
It is also an insult in another sense. Solving the Jewish question had always been one of my two most important objectives if not the most important one of all. Unformed as my thoughts were, very early on I realized that, one way or another, we would have to get rid of that pack. That is why any suggestion that the idea had been planted in my mind by others—for example the Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj al Husseini, whom I briefly met in November 1941—is ridiculous. Does anyone really think I needed an Arab pithecanthropus to teach me? It is also why, overriding those who wanted to keep at least some of them alive so as to exploit them for labor, I insisted that the operation be continued might and main as fast as possible and all the way to the last days of the war. The most I allowed was for some Jews to be killed slowly by hunger and overwork rather than quickly by shooting or gas. I do not apologize for what I did. To the contrary, I took and take full responsibility for it. Indeed, the fact that I always did so was one cardinal reason why people supported and obeyed me for as long as they did. Sitting here in Hell, my only regret is that I did not quite succeed. Had my post 1945 supporters had any sense, they would have taken a similar line. Far from trying to deny “The Holocaust,” they would have confirmed it and glorified in it.
We, or rather Himmler, started by expanding our so-called Einsatzgruppen. We first used them in 1939-40 in Poland to avenge our Volksgenossen, whom the Poles had murdered, to exterminate tens of thousands of members of the local intelligentsia, and, yes, to kill some Jews. You should have seen the glee on the faces of our Polish prisoners of war when they watched their Jewish “comrades” being treated as they deserved to be! Next, we unleashed them in Russia. They and their cousins, the special police battalions, were a mixed lot. Most of the men were working class—sailors, dock, warehouse, and construction workers, truck drivers, waiters, and the like. They had never served and had only received a modicum of military training. After all, how much skill does shooting someone in the back require? Others, including many officers, were too old for front service. The fact that the killer units operated in the rear did not endear them to our fighting troops. But they systematically moved from one township to the next, rounded up the Jews, women and children included, took them to some more or less secluded spot, and shot them after making them dig their own graves.
Neither the Jews nor the local population mounted any resistance to speak of. The former were too stunned and handicapped by the need to look after their families to do so. Many members of the latter were only too happy to see the Jews go. Nor was there any shortage of Ukrainians, Byelorussians, and Balts who voluntarily offered their support to our men and carried out their assigned tasks with considerable enthusiasm. The Latvians in particular were a great help. Explaining why, before our coming, Stalin employed so many of them in the NKVD. That’s to say nothing of the civilians who first pointed out the Jews and then used the opportunity to plunder whatever property they had left behind. Much as they tried to deny it later on, most of our senior commanders on the spot also did what I expected of them. No more, perhaps, but certainly not less.
A few months having passed, though, problems emerged. First, the number of Jews was too large, and the distances between their settlements were too great, for our operations to be as effective as they should have been. Rumor preceded the Gruppen wherever they went; this enabled many Jews to escape into the forests. Some had to be hunted down one by one, a wasteful use of our scarce manpower. Others formed bands or joined the “partisans” and became positively dangerous. Second, the grisly task got on our men’s nerves. It caused many of them to turn to drink or worse. Even Bach-Zelewsky at one point suffered from psychosomatic symptoms sufficiently severe to require medical leave. Himmler, who always insisted on doing, or at least witnessing, everything he ordered his men to do and who in the summer of 1941 made a point of watching an “action,” had first-hand experience with these problems. So shocked was he that he started looking for another solution—a final one, as the phrase went.
The idea of using special death camps as an alternative to these methods seems to have originated with Himmler and Heydrich. It first arose as a partial solution and then as a complete and “final” one. The day-to-day execution of the task was the responsibility of the camp commanders. The first appointment was that of Colonel Rudolf Höss of Auschwitz. Höss had spent his career serving on the staffs of various concentration camps, which made him well suited for the job. He also had a criminal record dating back to the French invasion of the Ruhr, when he had been convicted of murder. As a result, he was in no position to disobey any orders he was given. After having tried various means, including the exhaust of diesel engines, someone at the headquarters of Operation T-4 advised him to use cyanide gas. Construction of the camps started in the autumn of 1941. By early next year a number of them were ready to receive their first clients.
Like the personnel of the Einsatzgruppen and security battalions, those who staffed the camps were a mixed lot. Most were men, but about ten percent were women. Some of the men were young members of the SS, including the Waffen SS, who had been convicted of relatively trivial offenses. Next, they were offered a chance to redeem themselves, and that was that. Others were German civilians who answered ads the SD put in the papers without, of course, saying a word about the nature of the work they were going to do “in the east.” When they found out, it was already too late. Others still were local volunteers, who could be found in every nation in Eastern Europe. They cost us little, and there were always more than enough of them.
Looking back, indeed one of the most surprising things about the so-called “Holocaust” was not how much effort and how many resources it required but how little. Far less than deportation and resettlement w
ould have. For example, the excellent Captain Stangl at Treblinka did away with close to a million people over a period of some fifteen months. Hardly any of those who entered the camp survived, yet never at any one time did he employ more than 40 SS men. That is what I call efficiency! The Einsatzgruppen and police battalions combined never took up more than three quarters of one percent of our forces in the east. On any average day, out of some 30,000 trains run by the Reichsbahn, no more than two carried Jews.
As late as December 1941, Frank in Poland “quite openly” told his men, “We cannot shoot these 3.5 million Jews; we cannot poison them.” Now, however, what had previously been inconceivable was turned into a horrible, but absolutely necessary, reality. It was against this background that the aforementioned Wannsee Conference was held in January 1942. It was not, as has so often been written, held in order to extend the “Holocaust” from Eastern to Central and Western Europe. That was something I had already decided to do the previous October, just as our victories in the east were approaching their peak and the Russians were preparing to evacuate Moscow. Instead, the purpose of the meeting was to make detailed arrangements for the way the Final Solution was going to be carried out from that point on. The importance—or, rather, the lack of importance—of the conference was obvious just by seeing the relatively low ranks of the participants. The most senior one was Heydrich, who had received his orders from Göring. As I said before, Heydrich was an excellent police officer who distinguished himself by his ruthlessness and contempt for bureaucratic formalities. He was also ambitious; rumor had it that he saw himself as my eventual successor. But to succeed me, he would have to kill Himmler first. That was something, I believe, of which the man with the iron heart, as I called him when I spoke at his funeral, was fully capable.
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