Hitler in Hell

by Martin van Creveld

  The details of the process by which the Jews were gathered, taken to the camps, made to surrender their clothes and valuables, marched into the gas chambers—disguised as shower rooms—and killed have been described countless times. I will not repeat them here except to say that, though I never went to watch the proceedings, I was kept fully informed by Himmler and others. The operation continued for about three years and went almost without a hitch. It was only here in Hell that I learned that, on occasion, it was necessary to delay some of the transports because the logistic requirements of our forces came first. At other times too many trains reached the camps at once, forcing the commanders on the spot to make the Jews wait in the open until their turn came. Here and there, a shootout occurred as a handful of prisoners stole weapons, rioted, and tried to escape. Most were caught almost immediately and executed. A few Jews managed to survive by making themselves useful and holding on until the end, especially at Auschwitz and especially toward the end of the war. But that was all.

  In the summer of 1942 a certain SS Colonel Brack suggested to Himmler that, to provide our factories with the labor they so desperately needed, instead of killing the Jews, we should give some of them a temporary reprieve by sterilizing them en masse. Some experiments in this direction were made, but the technical difficulties proved too great. So the camps proceeded with their deadly work. They provided us with mountains of personal items, from shoes to suitcases and from coats to shaving brushes. Properly sorted, cleaned, and registered, they were distributed to the poor of the Reich. Much more importantly, thinking that they would be resettled, the Jews all brought some of their most precious belongings along. We laid our hands on mountains of foreign currency, diamonds, and gold. Some of the latter was pulled out of the mouths of the dead by Sonderkommandos, special teams, made up of the Jews themselves. All this wealth went into the vaults of the Reichsbank. The latter used some of it to pay for imports of food, raw materials, and some industrial goods from countries such as Spain, Switzerland, and Sweden. Here, I should add that, although a great many people, both Germans and non-Germans, profited from the “Holocaust,” that was not why I ordered it to be carried out. But I am repeating myself.

  The most challenging part of the entire vast operation was not the logistics but the politics involved. The Russians’ retreat left what we used to call “the occupied territories in the east” without any government. So our commanders on the spot, such as Erich Koch in the Ukraine, did as they were told and shot anyone who protested. The other extreme was represented by France and Belgium. Both were under military government. The generals, including some who later took part in the abortive coup of July 1944, dragged their heels, explaining why only about one-third of the Jews in those countries were killed. The French authorities also did their best to prevent the evacuation of their own, as opposed to foreign, Jews. The Dutch, with their typical respect for authority, any authority, were easier to deal with. When it comes to obeying orders, trust the Calvinists! That fact goes a long way to account for our success in sending some 70 percent of all Dutch Jews to the camps from where few of them returned. Thanks to the stupidity of some of our people on the spot, the Danes were able to ship all their 7,000 Jews to Sweden. Many Norwegian Jews, exploiting the long border between that country and their own, also escaped.

  In Poland, Frank was always worried about possible outbreaks of starvation and disease. That is why, supported by Göring as the man responsible for the German economy, he did his best to prevent Himmler and Heydrich from using the Generalgouvernement as a Jewish dumping ground. Repeatedly, I had to order him to do as he was told, the Polish population be damned. Among our allies, Croatia and Slovakia were very happy to oblige. The rest were less conciliatory. Not, heaven knows, because they liked their Jews any better than we did ours; but solely because they did not want their miserable “sovereignty” to be infringed.

  Romania was governed by Field-Marshal Antonescu, a man whom I held in some respect. Among his entire people he was the only one, male or female, who could not be corrupted! During the first twelve months or so of Barbarossa his men did away with some 350,000 members of the chosen race, mainly in the provinces taken from Russia. Come the autumn of 1942, though, he obstinately refused to have more of “his” (i.e. Romanian) Jews taken away, allowing most of them to survive. Hungary’s “Regent” Horthy did not like Jews either but nevertheless used all sorts of excuses to delay their deportation until the spring of 1944. It was only then that a change of government, brought about with our active assistance, took place. It finally created a situation where Himmler, again working by way of the ubiquitous Eichmann, was able to take care of the 600,000 Jews in the country. By contrast, Bulgaria never allowed us to deport any of its Jews at all. Tant pis for them.

  Finally, there was Italy, our most important ally. In 1937-38 Mussolini introduced a series of anti-Semitic laws, not because we pressed him to but because he was developing an inferiority complex and wanted to prove that Italians, too, were a pure race. But the laws did not go nearly far enough. As a result, most of Italy’s Jews remained, if not unmolested, alive and kicking. Italian officers and officials in southeastern France, Yugoslavia, and Greece also provided the Jews with some protection. Partly because they did not like what we were doing, and partly because the Duce told them to do so or at any rate did not object. It was only after the Fascist regime collapsed in July 1943 and we occupied most of the country that we were finally able to make real headway in the direction we wished. Even so, most Italian Jews, forming just one tenth of one percent of the population and being thoroughly assimilated, managed to survive.

  Confronted with the facts, the attitudes of our enemies varied. Stalin, of course, could not have cared less. Shortly before his death, he himself started moving in the same direction, executing some Jews and removing others from positions of power. Brought into the secret, Roosevelt, knowing that his countrymen would never agree to go to war on behalf of the Jews, kept his cards close to his chest. Later, both he and Churchill worried that, had the full truth become known, public pressure would force them to change their strategy. Not only would their impotence to do anything have been exposed, but the outcome would have been conflict between them and their senior commanders, who did not want their troops to be diverted from their main mission. Caught between these millstones, they preferred to downplay the issue as much as they could until practically the end of the war.

  Both Himmler and Heydrich were aware that, when it came to our treatment of the Jews, there were limits to what German public opinion would stand. That was why, throughout the 1930s, they did their best to steer the persecution of the Jews into bureaucratic channels. When we started evacuating German Jews in 1941-42, many of their Aryan neighbors expressed sympathy with them. Nevertheless, in the end the war facilitated our task. On the one hand, people had more important things to worry about than the fate of the Jews. On the other, it made secrecy easier to impose and maintain than before.

  To be sure, completely concealing what was going on was impossible. In the whole of Europe there was hardly a single town that was entirely Judenrein. People were bound to see deportations and the like. Very often they were repelled by what they saw. One or two even had the gall to tell me that. The inevitable outcome of secrecy was that there were lots of rumors floating about. Everyone and his neighbor had seen or heard something. Everyone and his neighbor knew things were going badly for the Jews and that a great many of them were being taken away and killed. Had they wanted to, they could have known a great deal more. But they did not. As a result of all this, very few people had any idea of the full scope of the operation. That even applied to the leaders of the “opposition.” Take that arch-traitor, Colonel Henning von Tresckow. No one had less sympathy for what we were trying to do and tried harder to get me killed. Yet in a letter to a friend and fellow conspirator he only mentioned “tens of thousands” of Jews being liquidated, not millions.

  And how about the Jews themse
lves? Many, especially in the West, could not imagine what we had in store for them. When we told them that they were going to be “resettled” in the east, they believed us, more or less. They took it for granted that life would be hard but hoped they would survive. They often kept their illusions down to the very last moment. After they had been unloaded from the trains. After they had been separated from their families. After they had been ordered to strip naked. Right until the moment when, packed into the “shower rooms,” the valves were opened and the gas began having its effect. As the ancient Greeks used to say, hope dies last. In this way the sheer “impossibility” of the task we had set ourselves made its execution much easier than it would otherwise have been.

  But even that was not the end of the matter. Yes, I succeeded, more than anyone else in the history of the world, in doing away with lots of Jews. But I was not nearly successful enough, as the future was to show. One reason for this was that the remaining Jews profited enormously from their brethren’s fate. The profited so much, in fact, that they have been able to establish and maintain an entire “industry” whose sole purpose is to extract reparations from every European country. Another outcome was the state of Israel. Not only did I force hundreds of thousands to emigrate, but I provided it with its raison d’etre. Seen from this point of view, I must have done more to help establish it than all Zionist leaders combined.

  When the Jews were still scattered in the so-called Diaspora, they gave the world endless trouble. And now that about half of them are concentrated in a single country, Israel, they give it even more! Citing the very nonexistent moral principles they themselves had never respected, they demanded “reparations.” So strong was their grip on Washington that they were able to block anyone who wanted to do business there without their consent! As a result, starting in 1953, all Bundesrepublik governments without exception have been bending backward to meet Israel’s insatiable demands for money, weapons, and diplomatic support. Ask the people in Kiel. In 2016 they finished building the last of six super-sophisticated submarines for Israel, two of them at the German taxpayers’ expense. And there are several more naval vessels on order.

  One final point. Yes, I did unleash a world war, easily the largest and deadliest in history. Yes, I did kill masses of people both in the course of my military operations and when policing the occupied territories. Or simply because, as in the case of the Jews, I was convinced that they did not deserve to live and had to be exterminated like vermin. Tempus vincet omnia, they say. For everything else I did, people have, or would have, forgiven me. But not for this.

  Good!

  26. The Hinge of Fate

  History, they say, is written by the victors. Not so mine which, strange as it sounds, was written very largely by the losers: meaning, my generals. No sooner had the war ended than the U.S. Army started interrogating them about their experiences, particularly, but not exclusively, when facing the Russians. These were the early years of the so-called Cold War. And who had more experience fighting the Reds than we did? Several hundred former Wehrmacht officers joined the project, ultimately producing no fewer than 250 “studies” about various aspects of the war. And subsequent historians have not been shy about using them.

  On the German side, the man who headed the effort was my old acquaintance Halder. Halder, it turns out, had long been involved with the opposition to the regime. In the summer of 1938 he and some others, including both officers and foreign office officials, were planning a coup. They even sent a representative to London to see whether they could gather support! My triumph at Munich convinced him and his fellow idiots that the German people would never follow them. As a result, from that point on he concentrated on his proper job, more or less. Always noted more for his meticulous attention to detail than for his strategic imagination and boldness, he became increasingly fussy until, in 1942, shortly before the Russians started their great offensive at Stalingrad, I decided to get rid of him. In his place I put Kurt Zeitzler, a less opinionated officer who was more prepared to do as I told him. It worked. His optimistic, at times almost clownish, spirit infected the General Staff, at least for the coming months. Later he abandoned me, but that that is a different story.

  Once a traitor, always a traitor. The fact that Halder was now ausser Dienst (retired) did not prevent him from staying in touch with the group of conspirators who ultimately tried to blow me up and seize power for themselves on 20 July 1944. Thereupon, I had him imprisoned at the Dachau concentration camp, where he spent the last months of the war until the Americans “liberated” him. Looking back, my only regret is that I did not order him to be executed as his fellow traitor, Abwehr-boss Wilhelm Canaris, was. The war having ended, Halder agreed to work for the U.S. Army Historical Section. In this capacity he commissioned over a hundred former Wehrmacht officers to write “studies” about their experiences. The outcome was predictable. The officers in question were determined to “rehabilitate” themselves. They also wanted, if possible, to snuggle up to the victors upon whom their future careers depended. They did whatever they could to discredit me and to blame their own defeats on me. Halder himself set the example. In his aforementioned book he disputed my military abilities, claiming that I was basically an amateur. Albeit one, as he generously admitted, who was not without some natural aptitude for the business at hand.

  Each of our victories, he wrote, was due to him and his super-competent, super-honorable, super-courageous fellow generals. Each of our setbacks was due to my obstinate, often ignorant, interference with their brilliant plans and my refusal to accept their suggestions. Others, Manstein above all, echoed his phrases. Particularly irksome was the latter’s claim that I, being who I was and not knowing how to run a staff, based my relations with my subordinates on fear rather than on trust. I wish that, as the author of this particular piece of egregious nonsense, he would have spent one day working for Comrade Stalin in Moscow or, more recently Kim Il-sung in Pyongyang. Just one day! Doing so would have cured him of his illusions soon enough, assuming, of course, that he lived to tell the tale.

  One officer who worked for Halder was the aforementioned Kurt Hesse. He, however, differed from the rest by daring to criticize the behavior of U.S. soldiers during the war, saying that many of them were little better than hooligans. For this, the Americans fired him. Many other senior (and not so senior, but that is another matter) commanders also published their memoirs. Among them were Walter Warlimont, Rundstedt’s chief of staff Günter Blumentritt, and Rommel’s chief of staff, Hans Speidel. So successful was the last-named one at ingratiating himself—in other words, denouncing me and everything National Socialist Germany stood for—that he made quite a career for himself. He even served as Commander in Chief of the NATO ground forces in Central Europe. Yet he was a pure staff officer and never once commanded a major formation in war! Quite a few of the works in question were translated into English. Guderian’s Panzer Leader, armed with a foreword by some English military scribbler whose name I had never heard, became a bestseller. And all were lapped up by a great many people eager to accuse me of every deed and misdeed under the sun. Studying my career, they based entire chapters on this junk.

  Some of the problems we were facing were structural. The army’s mental horizon still remained stuck in 1914 or, at best, 1918. Many of its officers seem to have thought that the air force, let alone the navy, did not exist. As a result, it did not have a single commander capable of coordinating joint operations. That is why I set up so many so-called OKW theaters for which the latter assumed responsibility. However, OKW, partly because it was younger than the other principal headquarters, never succeeded in establishing its authority either over the army or over the other two services. The fact that Jodl had been Halder’s student at the disguised Kriegsakademie during the Weimar years did not help. Such was the tug of war between the various headquarters that a number of formations—not always the same ones, obviously—were permanently lost because they were being shuttled to and from o
ne theater and another.

  Göring, too, created problems. Göring was a Renaissance man who was transported into the twentieth century, exchanging his horse for a fighter aircraft on the way. His physical courage was unquestioned. Unlike me, he could and did kill without either compunction or remorse. No one was better than him at empire building. So long was the list of titles he carried that not even he could remember them all! He obstinately kept control over hundreds of thousands of men over and above those “his” Luftwaffe could effectively use, refusing to release them for more important duties. It was only my personal intervention which, in the end, forced him to arm them, form them into so-called Luftwaffe Field-Divisions, and send them to the front, which desperately needed them. Even so, they remained part of the Luftwaffe, not of the ground forces where they belonged. As a result, badly trained and badly commanded by unqualified officers, they suffered heavier casualties for fewer gains than they should have.

  Another failure that must be laid at Göring’s door was the fact that our navy had no air arm. The outcome was that our submarines, ably commanded by Admiral Dönitz and in some ways the most cost-effective force of the entire Wehrmacht, had to operate without its aid. Twice, in early 1942 and in early 1943, the submarines came within weeks of forcing England to surrender. Had they enjoyed proper support, they might very well have done exactly that.

  Some historians have taken me to task for these problems and others like them. Lacking political experience, as most of them do, they erroneously assume that a “dictator” can simply order his commanders to do as he pleases. They overlook the fact that similar ones plagued the armed forces of every single belligerent during the war. David Irving, the historian who claimed I had not known about the extermination of the Jews, even wrote an entire book on the subject. Its title? The War between the [Allied] Generals. And don’t forget about the rivalry between the Japanese army and navy. Nor was the situation after 1945 any different. When the German Kriegsmarine was reestablished in the 1950s, its commanders ordered English-built aircraft specifically in order to prevent the Luftwaffe, whose equipment was American built, from taking them away! To this day, making the services work together instead of at cross purposes represents a major problem for every country that has them. Just spend a couple of days at the Pentagon, and you will see what I mean.