by Kershaw, Ian
At some point, Gauleiter Greiser asked – and was given – Himmler’s permission to liquidate 100,000 Jews in his area.127 There is no direct indication that Greiser’s request went beyond Himmler. It would, of course, not have been necessary to take the request further, had it been known that Hitler had already accorded his general authorization for the mass killing of Jews in Poland. That Hitler’s approval, however broad, was essential can be read out of a further initiative coming from the head of government in the Warthegau. When, some months later, Wilhelm Koppe, Higher SS and Police Chief in the Warthegau, wrote to Himmler in support of Greiser’s request to extend the killing to 30,000 Poles suffering from incurable tuberculosis, the answer given by the Reichsführer’s personal adjutant, SS-Sturmbannführer Rudolf Brandt, was that ‘the last decision in this matter must be taken by the Führer’.128 Greiser’s own revealing comment on the need to consult Hitler was: ‘I myself do not believe that the Führer needs to be asked again in this matter, especially since at our last discussion with regard to the Jews he told me that I could proceed with these according to my own judgement.’129 Such a response would indeed have been typical of Hitler’s approach. But the episode does suggest that, if it were necessary to have Hitler’s approval for the extermination of 30,000 Poles with incurable tuberculosis, it would have been essential to have had at least his blanket authorization for the killing of 100,000 Jews. When exactly Greiser spoke to Hitler directly about the Jews in his area cannot be precisely determined. The most likely date was before the decision was taken to exterminate the 100,000 Jews referred to in the initial correspondence with Himmler. Whether Hitler was consulted on the precise developments or not, his overall approval was evidently necessary. By the first week of December 1941, Chelmno, a gas-van station in the south of the Warthegau, had become the first extermination unit to commence operations.130
The Warthegau was not the only area scheduled to receive the deportees. Shortly before the killing in Chelmno commenced, the first transports of German Jews had arrived in the Baltic. The initial intention was to send them to Riga, to be placed in a concentration camp outside the city prior to further deportation eastwards. Hitler had approved proposals from the local commander of the Security Police, SS-Sturmbannführer Dr Otto Lange, to set up the concentration camp. Lange had, however, proposed erecting a camp for Latvian Jews. This was turned, in accordance with a ‘wish’ of the Führer, into the construction of a ‘big concentration camp’ for Jews from Germany and the Protectorate. Some 25,000 were expected to be interned there, en route, it was said, for an eventual destination ‘farther east’.131 Some Nazi leaders, at least, were well aware by now what deportation to the east meant. When Goebbels, still pressing to have the Jews of Berlin deported as quickly as possible, referred in mid-December to the deportation of Jews from the occupied part of France to the east, he said it was ‘in many cases synonymous with the death penalty’.132
By the time the first Jews were due to arrive in Riga from the Reich, the building of the camp had scarcely begun. An improvised solution had to be found. Instead of heading for Riga, the trains were diverted to Kowno in Lithuania. Between 25 and 29 November, terrified and exhausted Jews were taken from five trains arriving in Kowno from Berlin, Frankfurt, Munich, Vienna, and Breslau and, without any selection on grounds of ability to work, promptly taken out and shot by members of the locally based Einsatzkommando. The same fate awaited 1,000 German Jews who then did arrive in Riga on 30 November. They were simply taken straight out into the forest and shot, along with some 14,000 Latvian Jews from the Riga ghetto. Himmler had earlier in the month told the police chief in the area, Friedrich Jeckeln, ‘that all the Jews in the Ostland down to the very last one must be exterminated (vernichtet)’.133
However certain Jeckeln was of his murderous mandate, other Nazi leaders in the east still had their doubts. Hinrich Lohse, Reich Commissar for the Eastern Region (Ostland), and Wilhelm Kube, General Commissar for Belorussia (Weißruthenien), were among those who were less sure that Reich Jews were meant to be included in the mass shootings and indiscriminately slaughtered together with the Jews from the east. They now sought urgent clarification from the Reich Ministry for the Occupied Eastern Territories and from Reich Security Head Office. Lohse, pressed by the Wehrmacht to retain Jewish skilled workers, wanted guidance on whether or not economic criteria were relevant in determining whether Jews were to be liquidated. In Minsk, where 12,000 Jews from the local ghetto had been shot by the Security Police to make way for an influx of German Jews, Kube protested that ‘people coming from our own cultural sphere’ should be differently treated than the ‘native brutish hordes (bodenständigen vertierten Horden)’.134 He wanted to know whether exceptions were to be made for part-Jews (Mischlinge), Jews with war decorations, or Jews with ‘aryan’ partners. Other protests and queries, reflecting both unease and lack of clarity over the intended fate of the Jews from the Reich, reached the Ostministerium and RSHA. These prompted Himmler to intervene on 30 November to try to prohibit the liquidation of the train-load of 1,000 German Jews – many of them elderly, some bearers of the Iron Cross First Class – sent to Riga. His telephone-call came too late. By then the Jews had already been slaughtered by Jeckeln’s killing-squads.135
The previous day, 29 November, Heydrich had sent out invitations to several State Secretaries and to selected SS representatives to a conference to take place close to the Wannsee, a beautiful lake on the western rim of Berlin, on 9 December. Heydrich wanted to inculcate relevant government ministries in the RSHA’s plans to deport to the east all the Jews within Germany’s grasp throughout Europe.136 In addition, he was keen to ensure, in line with the commission he had requested and been granted at the end of July, that his primacy in orchestrating the deportations was recognized by all parties involved.137 On 8 December, the day before the conference was scheduled to take place, Heydrich had it postponed to 20 January 1942.
The postponement was caused by the dramatic events unfolding in the Pacific and in eastern Europe. The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on 7 December would, as Heydrich knew, bring within days a German declaration of war on the USA. With that, the European war would become a world war. Meanwhile, the opening of the first major counter-offensive by the Red Army on 5 December had blocked for the forseeable future any prospect of mass deportations into Soviet territory.138 Both developments carried important consequences for the deportation programme. Their impact soon became evident.
Plans to bring about a ‘final solution’ to the ‘Jewish Question’ were about to enter a new phase – one more murderous than ever.
VI
Hitler’s responsibility for the genocide against the Jews cannot be questioned. Yet for all his public tirades against the Jews, offering the strongest incitement to ever more radical onslaughts of extreme violence, and for all his dark hints that his ‘prophecy’ was being fulfilled, he was consistently keen to conceal the traces of his involvement in the murder of the Jews. Perhaps even at the height of his own power he feared theirs, and the possibility one day of their ‘revenge’. Perhaps, sensing that the German people were not ready to learn the deadly secret, he was determined – his own general inclination to secrecy was, as always, a marked one – not to speak of it other than in horrific, but imprecise, terms. Whatever the reasons, he could never have delivered the sort of speech which, notoriously, Himmler would give in Posen two years later when he described what it was like to see 1,000 corpses lying side by side and spoke openly of ‘the extermination (Ausrottung) of the Jewish people’ as a ‘glorious page in our history that has never been written and is never to be written’.139 Even in his inner circle Hitler could never bring himself to speak with outright frankness about the killing of the Jews. Full knowledge of their murder was evidently not to be touched upon directly in his presence, even among the close band of criminal conspirators.
Even so, compared with the first years of the war when he had neither in public nor – to go from Goebbels’s d
iary accounts – in private made much mention of the Jews, Hitler did now, in the months when their fate was being determined, refer to them on numerous occasions. Invariably, whether in public speeches or during comments in his late-night monologues in his East Prussian headquarters, his remarks were confined to generalities – but with the occasional menacing allusion to what was happening.
At lunch on 6 October, conversation focused mainly on eliminating Czech resistance following Heydrich’s appointment on 27 September as Deputy Reich Protector. Hitler spoke of ways ‘to make the Czechs small’. Shooting ten hostages for every act of sabotage where the perpetrator could not be found was one method. Another – as usual, the carrot as well as the stick – was to improve food-rations in factories where there was no case of sabotage. His third means was the deportation of the Jews. He was speaking about three weeks after he had agreed to their deportation from the Reich and the Protectorate. His comments reveal at least one of the reasons why he agreed to deport them: he continued to believe in the Jews as dangerous ‘fifth-columnists’, spreading sedition among the population. It was exactly what he had thought of the role of the Jews in Germany during the First World War. ‘All Jews must be removed from the Protectorate,’ he declared around the lunch-table, ‘and not just into the General Government, but straight away further to the east. This is at present not practical merely because of the great demand of the military for means of transport. Along with the Protectorate’s Jews, all the Jews from Berlin and Vienna should disappear at the same time. The Jews are everywhere the pipeline through which all enemy news rushes with the speed of wind into all branches of the population.’140
On 21 October, a month after the deportation order, as part of a diatribe comparing ‘Jewish Christianity’ with ‘Jewish Bolshevism’, he compared the fall of Rome with latter-day Bolshevization through the Jews. ‘If we eradicate (ausrotten) this plague,’ he concluded, ‘we will be carrying out a good deed for mankind, of the significance of which our men out there can have no conception.’141 Four days later his guests were Himmler (a frequent visitor to the Wolf’s Lair during these weeks) and Heydrich.142 The conversation again revolved mainly around the connections of Jewry and Christianity.143 Hitler reminded his guests and his regular entourage of his ‘prophecy’. ‘This criminal race has the two million dead of the World War on its conscience,’ he went on, and ‘now again hundreds of thousands. Don’t anyone tell me we can’t send them into the marshes (Morast)! Who bothers, then, about our people? It’s good when the horror (der Schrecken) precedes us that we are exterminating Jewry. The attempt to found a Jewish state will be a failure.’144 These notes of Hitler’s rantings were disjointed. But, although lacking coherence, they point to his knowledge of the attempts – eventually given up – in the summer to drown Jewish women by driving them into the Pripet marshes.145 Hitler’s allocation of guilt for the dead of the First World War and the current war to the Jews, and the recourse once more to his ‘prophecy’, underline his certainty that the destruction of Jewry was imminent. But, other than the reference to the efficacy of rumours of extermination, there was no suggestion of the looming ‘Final Solution’. With Himmler and Heydrich as his guests, it was scarcely necessary to dissemble. However, no significance ought to be attached to the absence of any reference.146 By mid-October the consequences flowing from the deportation order of the previous month had still to merge into the full genocidal programme.
On the evening of 5 November, remarks about the ‘racial inferiority’ of the English lower class led Hitler once more into a monologue about the Jews. As usual, he linked it to the war. This was the ‘most idiotic war’ that the British had ever begun, he ranted, and would lead in defeat to an outbreak of antisemitism in Britain which would be without parallel. The end of the war, he proclaimed, would bring ‘the fall of the Jew’.147 He then unleashed an extraordinary verbal assault on the lack of ability and creativity of Jews in every walk of life but one: lying and cheating. The Jew’s ‘entire building will collapse if he is refused a following,’ he went on. ‘In one moment, it’s all over. I’ve always said the Jews are the most stupid devils that exist. They don’t have a true musician, thinker, no art, nothing, absolutely nothing. They are liars, forgers, deceivers. They’ve only got anywhere through the simple-mindedness of those around them. If the Jew were not washed by the Aryan, he wouldn’t be able to see out of his eyes for filth. We can live without the Jews. But they can’t live without us.’148
The links, as he saw them, between the Jews and the war that they had allegedly inspired, now also, after years in which he had scarcely mentioned the Jews, found a prominent place in his public speeches. But, whatever the rhetorical flourishes, whatever the propaganda motive in appealing to the antisemitic instincts of his hard-core supporters in the Party, there cannot be the slightest doubt, on the basis of his private comments, that Hitler believed in what he said.
In his speech to the ‘Old Guard’ of veterans of the Putsch, on 8 November 1941, Hitler pressed home the theme of Jewish guilt for the war. Despite the victories of the previous year, he stated, he had still worried because of his recognition that behind the war stood ‘the international Jew’. They had poisoned the peoples through their control of the press, radio, film, and theatre; they had made sure that rearmament and war would benefit their business and financial interests; he had come to know the Jews as the instigators of world conflagration. England, under Jewish influence, had been the driving-force of the ‘world-coalition against the German people’. But it had been inevitable that the Soviet Union, ‘the greatest servant of Jewry’, would one day confront the Reich. Since then it had become plain that the Soviet state was dominated by Jewish commissars. Stalin, too, was no more than ‘an instrument in the hand of this almighty Jewry’. Behind him stood ‘all those Jews who in thousandfold ramification lead this powerful empire’. This ‘insight’, Hitler suggested, had weighed heavily upon him, and compelled him to face the danger from the east.149
Hitler returned to the alleged ‘destructive character’ of the Jews when talking again to his usual captive audience in the Wolf’s Lair in the small hours of 1–2 December. Again, there was a hint, but no more than that, of what Hitler saw as the natural justice being meted out to the Jews: ‘he who destroys life, exposes himself to death. And nothing other than this is happening to them’ – to the Jews.150 The gas-vans of Chelmno would start killing the Jews of the Warthegau in those very days.151 In Hitler’s warped mentality, such killing was natural revenge for the destruction caused by the Jews – above all in the war which he saw as their work. His ‘prophecy’ motif was evidently never far from his mind in these weeks as the winter crisis was unfolding in the east. It would be at the forefront of his thoughts in the wake of Pearl Harbor. With his declaration of war on the USA on 11 December, Germany was now engaged in a ‘world war’ – a term used up to then almost exclusively for the devastation of 1914-18. In his Reichstag speech of 30 January 1939, he had ‘prophesied’ that the destruction of the Jews would be the consequence of a new world war. That war, in his view, had now arrived.
On 12 December, the day after he had announced Germany’s declaration of war on the USA, Hitler addressed the Reichsleiter and Gauleiter – an audience of around fifty persons – in his rooms in the Reich Chancellery. Much of his talk ranged over the consequences of Pearl Harbor, the war in the east, and the glorious future awaiting Germany after final victory. He also spoke of the Jews. And once more he evoked his ‘prophecy’.
‘With regard to the Jewish Question,’ Goebbels recorded, summarizing Hitler’s comments, ‘the Führer is determined to make a clear sweep of it (reinen Tisch zu machen). He prophesied that, if they brought about another world war, they would experience their annihilation (Vernichtung). That was no empty talk (keine Phrase). The world war is there. The annihilation of Jewry must be the necessary consequence. This question is to be viewed without any sentimentality. We’re not there to have sympathy with the Jews, but only s
ympathy with our German people. If the German people has again now sacrificed around 160,000 dead in the eastern campaign, the originators of this bloody conflict will have to pay for it with their own lives.’152
The tone was more menacing and vengeful than ever. The original ‘prophecy’ had been a warning. Despite the warning, the Jews – in Hitler’s view – had unleashed the world war. They would now pay the price.
Hitler still had his ‘prophecy’ in mind when he spoke privately to Alfred Rosenberg, Reich Minister for the Eastern Territories, on 14 December, two days after his address to the Gauleiter. Referring to the text of a forthcoming speech, on which he wanted Hitler’s advice, Rosenberg remarked that his ‘standpoint was not to speak of the extermination (Ausrottung) of Jewry. The Führer approved this stance and said they had burdened us with the war and brought about the destruction so it was no wonder if they would be the first to feel the consequences.’153
The party chieftains who had heard Hitler speak on 12 December in the dramatic context of war now against the USA and unfolding crisis on the eastern front understood the message. No order or directive was necessary. They readily grasped that the time of reckoning had come. On 16 December, Hans Frank reported back to leading figures in the administration of the General Government. ‘As regards the Jews,’ he began, ‘I’ll tell you quite openly: an end has to be made one way or another.’ He referred explicitly to Hitler’s ‘prophecy’ about their destruction in the event of another world war. He repeated Hitler’s expression in his address to the Gauleiter that sympathy with the Jews would be wholly misplaced. The war would prove to be only a partial success should the Jews in Europe survive it, Frank went on. ‘I will therefore proceed in principle regarding the Jews that they will disappear. They must go,’ he declared. He said he was still negotiating about deporting them to the east. He referred to the rescheduled Wannsee Conference in January, where the issue of deportation would be discussed. ‘At any event,’ he commented, ‘a great Jewish migration will commence.’ ‘But,’ he asked: ‘what is to happen to the Jews? Do you believe they’ll be accommodated in village settlements in the Ostland? They said to us in Berlin: why are you giving us all this trouble? We can’t do anything with them in the Ostland or in the Reich Commissariat [Ukraine] either. Liquidate them yourselves!… We must destroy (vernichten) the Jews wherever we find them and wherever it is possible to do so…’ A programme for bringing this about was evidently, however, still unknown to Frank. He did not know how it was to happen. ‘The Jews are also extraordinarily harmful to us through their gluttony,’ he continued. ‘We have in the General Government an estimated 2.5 million – perhaps with those closely related to Jews and what goes with it, now 3.5 million Jews. We can’t shoot these 3.5 million Jews, we can’t poison them, but we must be able to take steps leading somehow to a success in extermination (Vernichtungserfolg)…’154 The ‘Final Solution’ – meaning the physical extermination of the Jews of Europe – was still emerging. The ideology of total annihilation was now taking over from any lingering economic rationale of working the Jews to death. ‘Economic considerations should remain fundamentally out of consideration in dealing with the problem’ was the answer finally given on 18 December to Lohse’s inquiry about using skilled Jewish workers from the Baltic in the armaments industry.155 On the same day, in a private discussion with Himmler, Hitler confirmed that in the east the partisan war, which had expanded sharply in the autumn, provided a useful framework for destroying the Jews. They were ‘to be exterminated as partisans (Als Partisanen auszurotten)’, Himmler noted as the outcome of their discussion.156 The separate strands of genocide were rapidly being pulled together.