by Dan McMillan
Terrified that the war begun in September 1939 might turn into a repeat of World War I’s horrific slaughter, Germans were overjoyed at the swift and stunning victory over France and Britain. They marveled at what they imagined to be Hitler’s inexplicable genius. After the French surrender, the governor of the Swabia region reported that all “well-meaning” citizens saw “wholly, joyfully, and thankfully the superhuman greatness of the Leader.”23
Thanks to his undeniable successes, popular adulation of Hitler soon took on the quality of a religious faith. Hitler’s position as a kind of secular god would later convince many members of the SS, and others as well, to carry out the extermination of the Jews without feeling that they had to consider ordinary laws and morals. A minor Nazi Party official in Upper Bavaria reported, in autumn of 1935, the words of a woman who had formerly belonged to the communist party: “Look here, there’s the picture of the Leader hanging in our one-time communist hovel, and beneath the picture I’ve taught my girl the Lord’s Prayer. I, who left the Church in 1932. Every day my girl has to say the Lord’s Prayer for the Leader, because he has given us back our daily bread.” In the autumn of 1936, a Nazi Party member wrote a letter to Hitler containing this declaration of faith and love: “My Leader! . . . I feel compelled by unceasing love to thank our creator daily for, through his grace, giving us and the entire German people such a wonderful Leader. . . . It is a pleasure for me, not a compliment, not a hypocrisy, to pray for you, my Leader, that the Lord God who has created you as a tool for Germanity should keep you healthy.”24
Not only was Hitler worshipped in a quasi-religious fashion, but over time he became the sole source of legal authority in Germany. Legal scholars and jurists would outbid each other in efforts to proclaim the Leader’s unique place in legal theory and practice. “The Leader is the supreme judge of the nation,” declared Hans Frank, head of the German Academy of Law, in a 1938 speech to jurists. “Whether the Leader governs according to a formal written Constitution is not a legal question of the first importance. The legal question is only whether through his activity the Leader guarantees the existence of his people.”25
Unconditional loyalty to the Leader was a supreme value within the ranks of the SS, who oversaw the extermination of the Jews and committed most of the murders. “My honor is loyalty,” read the watchword of the SS. As Himmler explained to his men in a 1935 speech, loyalty was the SS man’s supreme virtue. This included not only loyalty to friends and family, but also “loyalty to the Leader, and thereby to the German, the Germanic people.” An SS man owed a duty of unconditional and unhesitating obedience to every order from the Leader. Himmler never tired of proclaiming his loyalty to Hitler in things both grave and trivial: “The Führer is always right, whether the subject is evening dress, bunkers, or the Reich motorways.”26
Considering Hitler’s growing status as the source of all legal authority, and the heavy emphasis within the SS on obedience to his commands, it seems plausible that Hitler’s countless accomplices, who participated in murder in varied ways, both direct and indirect, found a special kind of comfort in the myth of Hitler’s infallibility and godlike attributes. If Hitler stood above all law, whether human or divine, then so did they as instruments of his will. Acting on his orders, they operated within a space in which conventional moral principles did not apply.27
Karl Kretschmer, who served in a shooting squad in German-occupied Russia, confessed in a letter to his wife that his bloody work left him shaken. Nonetheless, he affirmed his belief that the Jews posed a mortal danger to Germany, and declared that “our faith in the Leader fulfills us and gives us strength to carry out our difficult and thankless task.” Erich Naumann commanded a shooting squad of several hundred men operating in territory that today is Belarus. At his postwar trial, he claimed to have had “misgivings” about his actions, stating that “it was contrary to my nature to kill defenseless people.” However, when asked by the judge if he had thought his actions were wrong, Naumann responded: “Not wrong, Your Honor, because I was given the authority to do so, because there was a Leader Order.”28
A “Leader Order” had a sacred quality, enjoyed automatic legitimacy, and justified any action. Although commands to kill were usually delivered verbally rather than in writing, every participant in the Holocaust understood that a Leader Order demanded the murders. The Auschwitz commander Rudolf Höss, who evidently accepted his impending execution and made little effort to deny his guilt, recalled that “I could not allow myself to form an opinion about whether this mass extermination was necessary or not. At the time it was beyond my frame of mind.” Since “the Leader himself had ordered ‘The Final Solution of the Jewish Question,’ there was no second-guessing for an old [Nazi], much less for an SS officer.” Höss received his orders verbally from Himmler, and for the SS, “Himmler’s person was sacred. His orders in the name of the Leader were holy.”29
On August 15, 1941, as the shooting squads raged behind the German Army’s front lines, wiping out Jewish communities day by day, Himmler visited the Byelorussian city of Minsk. Himmler asked Artur Nebe, commander of a death squad, to shoot a hundred Jews as a demonstration, so that Himmler could see how the process worked. Once the killing was done, SS General Erich von dem Bach-Zelewski commented that this grisly task was emotionally and psychologically difficult for the shooters. In response, Himmler addressed these men. Himmler assured them that their consciences should be clear because they were soldiers who had to obey every order without question. He alone had responsibility before God and Hitler for everything they had done.30
The men in the SS and other Nazi organizations who planned and carried out the murders did not just follow orders, although they did do that without fail. Frequently, they also acted on their own initiative, even pressing their superiors for permission to act with greater brutality. This phenomenon, like the tendency to unconditionally follow orders, was rooted in the central role that Hitler played in German law and politics. Because the Leader was the ultimate source of all authority, and increasingly the only source of authority for many men in the German government and Nazi Party, the legal system and traditional legal norms lost relevance over time, and government degenerated into a state of lawlessness. Hitler accelerated this process by creating administrative chaos, establishing multiple, competing governmental agencies for many areas of policy. He also undermined the legal system by giving Himmler, the SS, and secret police (which was part of the SS) free rein in combating Germany’s “enemies,” whether these were political dissidents, Jews, or “socially harmful elements,” such as homosexuals or people deemed to be “work shy.” Thus a defendant might win acquittal in court, only to have the secret police bundle him off to a concentration camp for an indefinite term of incarceration and hard labor.31
Recognizing this general lawlessness and administrative chaos, activists at all levels in the Nazi hierarchy acted on their own initiative. They found justification for their actions in the notion that their deeds were consistent with Hitler’s general statements of purpose. Such men took the position that “the Leader would approve if he knew what I was doing.” Werner Willikens, an official in the Prussian Agriculture Ministry, explained this dynamic in a routine speech. “Very often,” Willikens complained, “it has been the case that individuals . . . have waited for commands and orders.” Instead, he admonished, “it is the duty of every single person to attempt, in the spirit of the Leader, to work towards him.” An official “who works correctly towards the leader, along his lines,” would eventually enjoy the “finest reward” of “suddenly attaining the legal confirmation of his work.”32
When it came to the treatment of Jews, eager subordinates who wanted to “work towards” the Leader could point to Hitler’s many violent and threatening public statements about the Jewish people—for example, his “prophecy” of January 1939, broadcast on national radio, that a second world war would result in “the annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe.” Activists at all lev
els of government could cite such declarations by the Leader to advocate ever more violent measures, whether out of a desire to build their careers or out of genuine ideological commitment.
The German treatment of Poles and Jews in territories newly annexed from Poland, after Germany’s conquest of that country in October 1939, illustrates the process of working towards the Leader. Albert Forster, administrator of Danzig and West Prussia, and Arthur Greiser, who oversaw the Wartheland district, were both high-ranking Nazi Party officials. Greiser and Forster raced against each other to see who could first manage to “Germanize” his district, that is, to rid it of Polish and Jewish “influence,” and eventually to remove the Poles and Jews altogether. Whereas Forster worked toward his goal in part by reclassifying many Poles as ethnic Germans, Greiser forced the Wartheland’s Jews into cramped and unhealthy ghettos. At the same time, he subjected the Poles to a nightmarish regime of discrimination and abuse, wiping out Polish cultural institutions, arresting and murdering Catholic priests, and forcibly resettling Poles to make room for German colonists, all at the threat of summary execution. “The Pole is for us an enemy,” Greiser declared, “and I expect from every officer . . . that he acts accordingly. The Poles must feel that they do not have the right to put themselves on the same level as a people of culture.” He exhorted his subordinates to be “brutal, harsh, and again harsh” in the “ethnic struggle.”33
In late autumn of 1941, Greiser again took the initiative. When German Jews were slated to be deported to the overcrowded Lodz ghetto, located in Greiser’s territory, Greiser asked—and received—Himmler’s permission to “liquidate” some 100,000 Jews. The murder of Jews by poison gas began at Chelmno on December 8. Some months later, Greiser sought permission to murder 30,000 Poles who suffered from incurable tuberculosis. Told that Hitler would have to be consulted on this decision, Greiser exemplified the process of working towards the Leader when he replied: “I myself do not believe that the Leader needs to be asked again in this matter, especially since in our last discussion with regard to the Jews he told me that I could proceed with these according to my own judgment.”34
Such initiatives by Hitler’s subordinates did not “cause” the Holocaust, because Hitler made all of the important decisions. However, the widespread tendency to work towards the Leader helped radicalize all levels of the government and Nazi Party, ensuring that Hitler could easily find men who would carry out his criminal orders. And, to a degree that no one can measure, his subordinates’ initiatives could have radicalized Hitler’s own thinking as well, by showing him that even in his most extreme policies, he could count on active support.35
Unconditional loyalty to the Leader, as drilled into the SS, helps explain the behavior of many killers. So, too, does the widespread myth of the Leader’s infallibility and Hitler’s position as the sole source of law and political legitimacy in Nazi Germany. This “Hitler myth,” and Hitler’s role as the source of law, dissolved legal and moral norms and radicalized Hitler’s subordinates by encouraging them to take actions they thought he would approve. However, these beliefs and practices can hardly serve as a complete explanation of the Holocaust. Many men killed out of a sincere belief in Nazi racial ideology, and not only because it came from the Leader. Even more important, tens of thousands of highly educated Germans helped Hitler organize and carry out the murders, and very many of these men, perhaps most, were not Nazis. The next chapter explains why anti-Semitism played such a central role in German politics during the first four decades of the twentieth century, making Hitler’s theories about Jews acceptable to the country’s elite.
CHAPTER 9
WHY THE JEWISH PEOPLE?
If one had at the beginning and during the war held twelve or fifteen thousand of these Hebrew corrupters of the people under poison gas, as hundreds of thousands of our very best German workers from all walks of life had to endure, then the sacrifice of millions at the front would not have been in vain.
—Adolf Hitler, on the socialists, whom he blamed for Germany’s losing World War I1
Adolf Hitler ordered the murder of the Jewish people because he embraced the most extreme version of a conspiracy theory that had gained widespread support on the right wing of European politics decades before the Holocaust began. He believed that Jews everywhere were working together to dominate the world, undermining every nation by promoting socialism and communism and by manipulating the financial system. His ferocious hatred toward the Jewish people also stemmed from his belief—shared by very many Germans—that Jewish socialists had made Germany lose World War I by engineering the democratic revolution of 1918. Like many of his accomplices, Hitler believed that Jews controlled the governments that fought against Germany in World War II—Britain, the United States, and the Soviet Union. His government organized much of its propaganda around the idea that this war was actually not a war against other countries, but rather “a war against the Jews,” who supposedly started the war in the first place.2
But why the Jewish people? Various ethnic and religious minorities have faced hostility and discrimination throughout recorded history. Why, among all these minorities, were Jews singled out, greatly feared, and presented as a dangerous enemy, even as the embodiment of all evil, at this time in Germany? There is no consensus on this point, but four possible reasons stand out. One is that Jews were a minority not just in one way, but in two: ethnic and religious. Since Jews were a minority in every European country, and minorities were everywhere disliked, Jews encountered hostility throughout the continent.
Second, not only were Jews a religious minority on an overwhelmingly Christian continent, but their faith was both the parent and the rival of the Christian tradition. Consequently, Judaism played an important role in Christian theology, and it became over the centuries the focus of an obsession among the leadership of the Christian churches. In the eyes of millions of devout Christians, the Jews became traitors to their own tradition when, having prophesied the coming of a messiah, they rejected him when he appeared, supposedly causing his death. Today the notion of Jews as “the killers of Christ” seems so ridiculous as to be almost quaint, but not until 1965 did the Catholic Church officially renounce this accusation against the Jewish people. In earlier centuries, including much of the twentieth, this hateful belief was alive and well among numberless millions of practicing Christians. Beginning in the Middle Ages, even more destructive ideas about the Jewish people took root in Europe. Clergy and laity alike sometimes came to see Jews as the offspring of Satan, or even as the embodiment of Satan and all evil. One often spoke of them not as a group of individuals, but as “the Jew,” a frightening abstraction suggesting an impersonal and evil force.3
This demonization of the Jewish people paved the way for the secular theories of an international Jewish conspiracy, theories that first emerged in the 1860s and became widely accepted after World War I. Although Hitler, many of his top aides, and the upper ranks of his SS were vehemently hostile to Christianity, the traditional Christian image of “the Jew” as the ultimate enemy, the embodiment of all evil, was echoed in their belief that exterminating the Jews would usher in a better future for humanity.4
Jews also differed from other minorities in that they were truly an international minority: almost every European country, and many nations outside of Europe, had Jewish populations. This fact nourished suspicions that French or German or Polish Jews might feel loyalty primarily to Jews in other countries, rather than to the countries of which they were citizens. From such suspicions it was only a short step to theories of an international conspiracy.
Jews also differed from other minorities, and from the majority populations of the countries where they lived, in another crucially important way: by being extraordinarily successful in many occupations. In 1933, the year Hitler took power, Germany’s 503,000 Jews represented only 0.76 percent of the population, yet they constituted over 16 percent of Germany’s lawyers and notaries public and nearly 11 percent of the do
ctors. German Jews’ contributions to scholarship are harder to quantify, but may have been even more impressive in comparison to their limited numbers. Among the Jewish scientists who left Germany after Hitler took power, six already held the Nobel Prize in their fields, and another sixteen would earn the prize during their later careers. Of the four most important thinkers who emerged in Western civilization during the nineteenth century, one was English: Charles Darwin. The other three—Karl Marx, Sigmund Freud, and Albert Einstein—were German speakers of Jewish ancestry.5
Jewish success is important for two reasons. First, it necessarily inspired envy and hatred born from feelings of inferiority. Adolf Hitler might be the most important example of a person whose hatred was nourished by envy of Jewish success, although the documentary record is too thin to properly test this theory. However, his deep-seated (and thoroughly justified) feelings of inferiority are well understood, as is his humiliating failure to make a career as an artist, which might have been all the more galling given the success of many Jewish painters, in numbers far out of proportion to the percentage of Jews in the German population.6
Jewish success was also central to anti-Semitism because it nourished theories of a Jewish conspiracy by creating the illusion of “Jewish influence.” The prominent Jewish role in newspaper and book publishing was of crucial importance here, since it encouraged the belief that Jews could shape intellectual life and control the political agenda. On the eve of World War I, of the three most important publishers of Germany’s national press, two—Mosse and Ullstein—were Jewish. Many editors in chief and leading editorial writers were also Jewish, including Theodor Wolff, editor of the Berliner Tageblatt; Georg Bernhard, editor of the renowned Vossische Zeitung; and dozens of other political opinion makers and cultural critics. Mosse and Ullstein also played a major role in book publishing, as did Samuel Fischer, whose role in publishing German literature has been compared to that of Random House and Scribner’s in the United States.7