Hitler

by Peter Longerich

  A central role in this campaign was played by a booklet published in the United States by a certain Theodore N. Kaufman, in which among other things he had demanded that the German people should be sterilized.33 With Hitler’s express approval,34 the booklet was extensively quoted and commented upon in a pamphlet that was widely distributed.35 In it Kaufman, who was in fact a private individual with no connections to the American government, was described as an advisor to President Roosevelt. His booklet, which had been published at the beginning of January 1941, was claimed to be one of the ‘intellectual inspirations’ for the Atlantic Charter. In addition, propaganda tried to explain the need for the Jewish star in the light of the struggle against ‘international Jewry’, the war in the East, and the alleged Jewish atrocities committed there in Lemberg and other places.36 Similar arguments were made in particular by the Party press.37 Finally, to justify the star the Propaganda Ministry produced a leaflet (‘Recognize the real enemy!’)38 that was distributed to every household along with their food ration coupons. However, the response of the German population to the compulsory Jewish star left much to be desired. While the official announcements of victories were undoubtedly a welcome confirmation of many people’s hopes, it is clear that the propaganda accompanying the introduction of the Jewish star met with little enthusiasm.39 It was probably for this reason that a planned ‘campaign of enlightenment against the Jews’ did not take place.40

  Figure 11. The ‘Jewish star’ openly stigmatized German Jews. Contrary to the regime’s intention, the non-Jewish population did not altogether welcome this move. More people than expected made small gestures of sympathy to those forced to wear them. ‘German philistines are shits’, thundered Goebbels.

  Source: Scherl/Süddeutsche Zeitung Photo

  However, it was precisely during these days immediately before and after the introduction of the yellow star that Hitler took the decision to deport the German Jews. He had been preoccupied ever since the beginning of September with the idea of starting the deportations before the end of the war. After a meeting with the ‘Führer’, Himmler had discussed the matter on 2 September with Friedrich-Wilhelm Krüger, the Higher SS and Police Leader in the General Government, and, following his negative response, on 4 September with the Higher SS and Police Leader in the Warthegau, Wilhelm Koppe. On 10 September Koppe wrote to him referring to the deportation of 60,000 Jews to Łódz´.41 During the coming days, the idea for a project involving the mass deportation of Jews was put to Hitler on several occasions. Himmler’s soundings were evidently having an impact.

  In addition, however, there was a new development. Probably on 8 September, the German leadership learnt of the Soviet government’s decision of 28 August to deport the Volga Germans to Siberia. From the point of view of the Nazi leadership this clearly represented an example of ‘ethnic cleansing’ that demanded ‘counter measures’.42 On 11 September, Rosenberg proposed to Hitler that he ‘inform Russia, England, and the USA through a radio broadcast that if this mass murder [sic!] were carried out Germany would make the Jews of Central Europe suffer for it’.43 Probably on 16 September, at a meeting with Himmler, the German ambassador in Paris, Otto Abetz, proposed deporting the Jews living in France and in the rest of occupied Europe to the occupied eastern territories, an idea to which Himmler, who at this point was heavily preoccupied with dealing with the ‘Jewish question’ and ‘eastern settlement’, responded positively.44 The same day, Abetz spoke with Hitler, who used the opportunity for a lengthy discourse on his future eastern empire. On 17 September, Hitler met Ribbentrop, with whom he discussed the deportations, and afterwards Ribbentrop met Himmler.45

  The decision was taken the following day. Himmler informed the Gauleiter in the Warthegau, Artur Greiser, that Hitler wanted ‘the Old Reich and the Protectorate to be cleared and liberated of Jews from west to east as soon as possible. As a first stage I am, therefore, anxious to transport the Jews of the Old Reich and the Protectorate, if possible this year, to the eastern territories that came into the Reich two years ago, before deporting them further eastwards next spring. For the coming winter I intend to put around 60,000 Jews from the Old Reich and the Protectorate into the Litzmannstadt [Łódz´] ghetto, which, as I have heard, has sufficient capacity.’46 Only a few days later Hitler informed Goebbels that Berlin, Vienna, and Prague would be the first places to be made ‘free of Jews’ and the Propaganda Minister prepared to transport ‘a significant number of Berlin Jews to the East before the onset of winter’.47

  There is only an indirect record of Hitler’s decision to start the deportations after all, before achieving victory in the East, namely through Himmler’s letter to Greiser. The reasons prompting him to make this decision must be deduced from the regime’s assessment of the overall situation in which it found itself at this stage. The fact that within the occupied eastern territories, the ‘final destination’ for the deportations, SS, civil administration, and Wehrmacht had in the meantime expanded the mass murder of Jewish civilians into a comprehensive genocide was a fundamental precondition for Hitler’s decision to begin deporting the Jews from Germany and the rest of Europe. The racial war of extermination being pursued in the East – in the regime’s view, a fight for Germany’s very existence – inevitably resulted in a radicalization of the whole conduct of the war. After Himmler, on Hitler’s initiative, had started at the beginning of September to sound out the feasibility of deportations, the Soviet decision to deport the Volga Germans provided the opportunity to justify them as retaliation, to accelerate the whole process, and to exploit them for foreign policy purposes.

  For Hitler clearly saw the chance of using the deportations as a means of threatening the United States and as a clear warning – only comprehensible in terms of his radical anti-Semitic tunnel vision – that the threatened entry of the United States into the war would have consequences for the European Jews. Since 1939 he had after all been announcing repeatedly ‘the annihilation’ of the Jews in Europe in the event of a ‘world war’. On 21 September, he threatened ‘in the event of America’s entry into the war’ to impose further ‘repressive measures on the German Jews because of the treatment of the Volga Germans’.48 The Nazi leadership had been using ‘repressive measures’ against the German and European Jews as a means of putting pressure on the United States ever since the 1933 ‘Jewish boycott’. The November 1938 pogrom had been designed to increase the willingness of the United States and other nations to accept Jewish emigrants, and the Madagascar project was very likely aimed at blackmailing the United States with mass deportations.

  The deportations were intended mostly to take place in daylight and in the public eye,49 to become known through the neutral and American media, and so to provide a ‘warning’ to the United States.50 Goebbels himself was responsible for ensuring that foreign correspondents were given access to information.51 Domestic propaganda, on the other hand, was not to deal directly with the deportations of Jews, taking place in broad daylight, from the biggest cities in the Reich,52 but rather emphasize the ‘guilt of the Jews for the war’ in general. It was, however, inevitable that the deportations, officially ‘non-events’, would provoke discussion.53

  This leads us on to the domestic motives that lay behind Hitler’s decision to deport the Jews. In general, as already outlined, the intention was to gear the German population to their involvement in an ‘ideologically’ based struggle for existence. In addition, however, the propaganda machine subtly used the growing intensity of the British air raids since autumn 1941 to portray Jews as the alleged string pullers behind the bombing war and the deportations as retaliation. The air war also helped the regime to justify the speeding up of the eviction of Jews from their homes, which had already begun in a number of cities during the summer of 1941.54 This local policy of displacement, the repeated appeals from Goebbels and various Gauleiters to Hitler finally to make their areas ‘free of Jews’, will certainly also have influenced Hitler’s decision to begin the deportatio
ns.55 At the same time, tens of thousands of inhabitants of the big cities were moving into the ‘Jewish homes’ that had been vacated and securing household goods at favourable prices, and so had become beneficiaries of the deportations and complicit in the injustice inflicted on the Jews.

  With his decision to begin the deportation of Jews from the Reich, Hitler had prompted preparations for the deportation of Jews from the occupied territories. This was motivated by the increasing tension in the occupied territories during autumn 1941. Following the attack on the Soviet Union, resistance movements began to form throughout Europe, often led by communists. The German occupation authorities generally responded by shooting hostages, in July in Serbia, in September in France, Belgium, and Norway, and, from the end of September, in the Protectorate. Here, Reinhard Heydrich, who had been recently appointed as Deputy Reich Protector, immediately declared martial law and, during the following two months had over 400 men and women shot for alleged resistance activities on the basis of sentences pronounced by summary court martials.56

  This policy of massive repression had Hitler’s full backing. In September he not only advocated ‘draconian punishments, but in more serious cases . . . shootings’ and, at the beginning of October, contemplated replacing the military commander in Belgium, Alexander von Falkenhausen, whom he considered too soft, with someone who would act more ruthlessly.57 He also intervened personally, for example giving instructions to extend the shootings in France.58 At this point the military had already developed a systematic basis for the radicalization of hostage-taking in Europe. The OKW Order of 16 September ‘Concerning the Communist Resistance Movement in the Occupied Territories’ decreed that, as atonement for the killing of one German soldier, the execution of 50–100 communist hostages should be considered ‘appropriate’.59

  As far as the Nazi leadership was concerned, communists and Jews were more or less identical. In the increasingly brutal war against ‘Jewish Bolshevism’ it was thus only logical to act ever more ruthlessly against Jewish minorities. And so the phantom of a Europe-wide Jewish–communist resistance movement soon had repercussions: in October 1941 the Wehrmacht in Serbia began systematically shooting all male Jews as ‘retaliation’ for attacks.60 As far as the various occupation authorities were concerned, the complete removal of the Jews came to be regarded as an essential prerequisite for the restoration of internal ‘security’ in their area. Hitler himself had confirmed this policy, when, at the beginning of October, he explained to his dinner guests how he envisaged ‘sorting out the Czechs’, namely by shooting hostages among the rebellious work forces, while at the same time allocating food to peaceful work forces – above all, however, by the deportation of all Jews from the Protectorate to the occupied eastern territories. For in the final analysis the Jews were ‘everywhere the link through which all enemy news reports spread like wildfire into every corner of the nation’.61 On 20 October Himmler offered the Slovakian government the opportunity of deporting the Slovakian Jews to a specially allocated part of the General Government.62 In France at the end of the year the military authorities stopped shooting Jewish and communist hostages and began plans to deport them ‘to the East’.63

  The various motives that lay behind the decision no longer to postpone the deportations until the end of the war had one thing in common: in the autumn of 1941 Hitler and the Nazi leadership began to conduct the war on all levels as a war ‘against the Jews’. The deportation of the German Jews – a project that had been pursued since the autumn of 1939 – was intended to emphasize this commitment and to underline to the German people, to the populations in the occupied territories, and to international public opinion the seriousness with which the Germans regarded their racial war aims. The concept of a war of racial extermination, introduced in the Russian campaign, was now being transferred to the conduct of the whole war and focused particularly on the Jews. The decision in September to begin the deportations should not, therefore, be attributed primarily to the ‘euphoria of victory’ as in Christopher Browning’s influential interpretation, but rather to the fact, that under the impression of the events of summer 1941, Hitler and the Nazi leadership had revised their whole concept of the war.64 ‘That race of criminals’, Hitler told his guests, Himmler and Heydrich, at a meal on 25 October, ‘has the two million dead of the First World War on its conscience, and now already hundreds of thousands more. Let nobody tell me: We can’t send them into the swamps [of Russia]! Who’s worrying about our own people. It’s a good thing if the fear that we’re exterminating the Jews goes before us.’65

  At this time the first deportation trains were already on their way. At the beginning of October, following objections from the regional authorities to the originally planned transfer of 60,000 Jews to the Łódz´ ghetto,66 the RSHA had modified the plans: now 20,000 Jews and 3,000 Gypsies were to be deported to Łódz´ and 25,000 each to the ghettos in Riga and Minsk.67

  In fact, the first wave of deportations began on 15 October. By 9 November, around 20,000 Jews from Reich territory and 5,000 Gypsies (Sinti and Roma) from the Burgenland had been deported to Łódz´,68 between 8 November 1941 and 6 February 1942 a total of almost 25,000 people to Riga69 and Kovno (as a substitute for Riga)70, and by December almost 8,000 people to Minsk (where winter weather caused a halt to the deportations).71 Already in November 1941 the RSHA was acting on the assumption that the deportations would continue in the spring in a third wave. In fact, those trains were to go to the Lublin area, in other words to the district in the General Government where already in 1939 there had been a plan to establish a Jewish reservation [the Nisko project]. The deportations were then intended to occur ‘city by city’, a procedure to which Hitler had given express approval.72 Following his fundamental decision of mid-September 1941 to begin the deportations, the ‘Führer’ continued to concern himself with the concrete details of the ‘evacuations’.

  This decision also involved the idea of deporting those who had already been ‘evacuated’ that autumn ‘further east’ in the coming spring. Thus, with the aid of the local civilian authorities, the SS immediately began preparations for the reception of the deportees at their intended destinations. The intention now was to begin by murdering the indigenous Jews in those localities. Himmler had given a clear signal for this at an early stage. The relevant documents suggest that Reich Governor Greiser’s ‘agreement’ to receive 25,000 deportees in the Łódz´ ghetto had been secured in exchange for Himmler’s permitting him to murder 100,000 local Jews.73 This programme of mass murder was to be carried out by gas, which had been used in the T4 ‘euthanasia’ programme, halted in August 1941. Hence there was considerable experience of this method. The gas wagons of the ‘Special Commando Lange’, which had murdered Polish mental patients in the Warthegau during 1940, were now deployed in the Łódz´ district to murder the existing ghetto inhabitants.74

  Considering the various developments as a whole, it is clear that, after Hitler’s September decision to deport the German Jews, the SS worked out a comprehensive deportation and murder plan. The mass murder of Jews, already under way in the Soviet Union, was now to be extended to particular key districts in Poland. As in the case of the murders in the Soviet Union, Himmler was the decisive figure, issuing the necessary orders in the areas involved and pulling everything together.75 In the middle of October he assigned the SS and Police Leader in the Lublin district, Odilo Globocnik, the task of building an extermination camp (Bełz˙ec).76 In December he met Viktor Brack, one of the key figures in the ‘euthanasia’ programme, who shortly afterwards dispatched his murder experts to Globocnik.77 In October preparations began for the construction of extermination camps in Riga,78 and apparently also in the Minsk district (Mogilev).79 In other words, preparations were being made for the murder by means of gas of the local Jews at all four of the planned destinations for the deportees from Germany: in Łódz´, Riga, Minsk, as well as the district of Lublin (Bełz˙ec).

  In addition, at the beginni
ng of October, the security police in the district of Galicia began to shoot large numbers of Jewish men, women, and children. This new district had been created on 1 August from Soviet-occupied Polish territory and was attached to the General Government. The security police engaged here in the same murderous activity as in the other German-occupied Soviet territories.80

  The parallel with Serbia, where also in October the Wehrmacht was extending its repressive measures into a comprehensive campaign of extermination aimed at the Jewish population, is evident. And it was doubtless no coincidence that, shortly afterwards, the German military administration in France began directing its reprisals for resistance activities against Jews (in addition to communists), with the aim of deporting them as hostages to the East.

  There is no written record of the ‘decision’ to embark on this programme of deportations and murder; it is an assumption based on a reconstruction of a series of events. The programme was developed by Himmler directly after Hitler’s order for the deportation of the German Jews, issued in the middle of September, and then subsequently carried out. Hitler provided the impulse and initiative and the backing and confirmation for it, as is clear from his recorded table talk of 25 October. To what extent he became involved in issuing detailed orders for it, and how far he arranged for Himmler, who was a regular visitor to his headquarters, to report to him on its progress is unclear. However, this circumstance is of no significance in evaluating the assertion that has sometimes been made that Hitler’s henchmen carried out the murder of the Jews without his knowledge, or even against his will. For if one considers Hitler’s treatment of the ‘Jewish question’ over a lengthy period, it is clear that it was always he who set the agenda for the various stages of radicalization and controlled developments. With his unchallengeable authority he ensured that the SS could rely on the cooperation of the various administrative agencies (civilian occupation authorities, local government in the deportation cities, the Reich railways, the finance administration, and numerous other agencies), which were involved in this comprehensive deportation and murder programme. Himmler, Heydrich, and the SS leadership focused on its actual implementation, but the final responsibility lay with the ‘Führer’.