Hitler and the Holocaust (11 page)

Kristallnacht served another important function as a precursor for the dual war that Hitler was now feverishly planning. The conventional war for territorial hegemony and
Lebensraum
in the east and the “war against the Jews” entered a new phase of synchronization. Ever since 9 November 1918, the two themes had been closely connected in Hitler’s mind. He told the Czech foreign minister in January 1939, “With us the Jews would be destroyed [
vernichtet
]; not for nothing had the Jews made November 9, 1918: this day will be avenged.”
¹⁸
Now, on 9 November 1938, twenty years after the German surrender, the pogrom against the Jews was a means to psychologically prepare the German nation for a new European
war. It was Hitler’s way to disabuse the Germans of any idea that the Munich peace agreements two months earlier marked the end of the international political crisis.

Hitler’s infamous Reichstag speech of 30 January 1939, delivered on the sixth anniversary of his accession to power, has to be seen in the context of a self-fulfilling prophecy and of a war that would have two faces.

One thing I should like to say on this day which may be memorable for others as well as for us Germans: in the course of my life I have very often been a prophet, and have usually been ridiculed for it. During the time of my struggle for power it was in the first instance the Jewish race which only received my prophecies with laughter when I said that one day I would take over the leadership of the State, and with it that of the whole nation, and that I would then, among many other things settle the Jewish problem. Their laughter was uproarious, but I think that for some time now they have been laughing on the other side of their face. Today I will once more be a prophet: if the international Jewish financiers in and outside Europe should succeed in plunging the nations once more into a world war, then the result will not be the bolshevisation of the earth, and thus the victory of Jewry, but the annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe!
¹⁹

This was an extraordinary outburst from the leader of a great power and can hardly be reduced to a mere “metaphor” or a piece of utopian rhetoric, as the German historian Hans Mommsen has tried to do.
²⁰
The vehemence with which Hitler delivered this particular section of his speech, and the frenzied applause of the Reichstag delegates, makes it plain that it was a deadly serious threat. But it has to be analyzed at several different levels. The most immediate target was world Jewry, which Hitler typically held responsible for the mounting criticism of his regime after Kristallnacht. He was warning those who did not yet comprehend what he already knew with inner certainty because it lay at the very heart of his personality and mission—namely, his will to exterminate the
Jews. But it was also a threat against the Western democracies. Had he not repeatedly declared his willingness to collaborate with other states in seeking an “international solution” to the “Jewish question”? In return, he had heard only the sanctimonious hypocrisy of the liberal democracies, complaining of “this barbaric expulsion from Germany of such an irreplaceable and culturally eminently valuable element.”
²¹

Hitler knew that neither British nor American politicians had been willing to put their reproving speeches into practice. Did the Evian Conference not conclusively demonstrate that in the wide empty expanses of the British empire, the United States, and Latin America, no room could be found for Jewish refugees? Hitler nevertheless dispatched former Economics Minister Schacht on one last trip to England, to see if he could not reach an agreement with the American negotiator, George Rublee, to ransom German Jewry.
²²
The Nazi plan was that world Jewry and the democracies would bankroll the emigration of the German Jews through a loan of 1.5 billion Reichsmarks, to be repaid in ten years’ time through German exports. Acceding to this blackmail would in effect have meant financially rewarding the Nazis for their expropriation and expulsion of the Jews, though Hitler did not see it that way. He had no reason to keep the Jews in Germany alive except as a bargaining chip in his cat-and-mouse game of war and peace with the West.

But there was yet another, more sinister level to this “prophecy,” which can be better understood in the light of Hitler’s earlier remarks to South African Defense Minister Oswald Pirow in Berlin on 24 November 1938. He had told his pro-German guest that “world Jewry” (which in this case seemed to refer primarily to American Jews) regarded their European coreligionists as “the advance troops for the Bolshevization of the world”; he had spoken heatedly of the Jewish “invasion” from the east and declared that his mind was irrevocably made up: “One day the Jews would disappear from Europe [
Die Juden würden … aus Europa verschwinden
].”
²³

In his Reichstag speech two months later, this prospect was more specifically linked to the outbreak of a world war. The prophecy of annihilation was impersonally couched, but it clearly related to the
physical
destruction of European Jewry, especially if there should be any involvement of the United States and American Jewry (linked in Hitler’s mind to the international Jewish financiers “outside Europe”). The constant references during the war years to his January 1939 prophecy, especially after the “Final Solution” had begun, cannot be accidental. Twice in 1942 and three more times in 1943 he recalled his words, but each time he confused the date of his speech about “annihilation” (30 January) with the outbreak of war in September 1939.
²⁴
Such a compulsively repeated “mistake” is in itself remarkable. For Hitler, the world war and the “war against the Jews” seem to have been one and the same confrontation. So, too, the “prophet” and the
Realpolitiker
were one and the same person. The prophet was there to give periodic expression to the dark fantasies of
Sieg oder Untergang;
the politician proceeded more pragmatically, with the requisite tactical flexibility, adapting himself to the shifting international and diplomatic constellation.

Between 1933 and 1939, Nazi policies on the “Jewish question” had been influenced, as we have seen, by many contradictory currents within the German state and society, as well as by forces beyond it. Although the Jews were perceived in unwavering terms by the Nazi leadership as a deadly “enemy” to be isolated and removed from Germany, there was as yet no clear plan to exterminate them physically. In retrospect, one can see that the measures of economic boycott, legal exclusion, and defamation had been carried out with some caution compared to the avalanche that followed. The Nuremberg Race Laws had marked an important advance in realizing the Nazi Party program, but they had not shattered the institutions and will to live of German Jewry or the foundations of its economic existence. At the same time, despite their massively discriminatory character, the racial laws did not
encounter any significant opposition from the conservative elites, the churches, the business circles, the intellectuals, or the mass of the German population. Thus it would seem that at least until November 1938 (and possibly beyond) there was public consensus on the “Jewish question” within which the Nazi regime still operated.

The increasingly visible movement in 1938–1939 toward the more radical policy of expelling Jews entirely was an important qualitative change in this situation. It could doubtless be rationalized in bureaucratic logic as the next stage of squeezing the Jews out of Germany, without any clear notion of what should follow. But while the central role of the bureaucracy and of internal power struggles over the right to influence the anti-Jewish policy is apparent, one can hardly ignore the crucial part played by Hitler in providing the dynamics and the momentum. As Goering tersely put it: “In the last analysis, it is the Führer alone who decides.”
²⁵
This was especially true with regard to grave decisions, such as those of war and peace or concerning the when, where, and how of the Holocaust. Only in Hitler’s mind were war and genocide so closely related. It was his apocalyptic perspective that presupposed the globalization of the “Jewish question” in 1939, in the context of a coming world war. Once Germany was engaged, after September 1939, in a war against Poland, Great Britain, and France that it seemed to be winning, the door was open for a complete “removal” of the Jews of Europe, though not yet their complete destruction. The invasion of the USSR in June 1941 would bring in its wake a more violent and far-reaching extension toward a comprehensive “solution,” leading to the beginnings of a streamlined annihilation of European Jews. Finally, with the entry in December 1941 of the United States into the war, the last remaining constraints on the organizational coordination of this plan were removed, and it became fully operational. The conflict had truly become a
world war
, and there was no further point in holding
European Jews as potential hostages for the “good conduct” of their American coreligionists.

What linked these stages was the intense Nazi commitment to the ideological fantasy that they were fighting a “great racial war” in which either the “German-Aryans” or the Jews must prevail and eventually rule the world. The overall Nazi project remained the racial “purification” and reorganization of Europe along ethnic lines, involving the resettlement and relocation of entire populations.
²⁶
Within that overarching biological-political framework, the Jews were, however, a special case. For the “Final Solution” did indeed suggest
finality:
it was a plan to hunt down and kill every Jewish man, woman, or child from Paris to Bialystok, from Amsterdam to Rhodes. The comprehensive totality of this genocidal project is what differentiated the Holocaust from the massive Nazi violence inflicted on Poles, Russians, Ukrainians, Serbs, and Gypsies, not to mention the so-called mercy killings of ethnic Germans and the starvation of millions of Soviet POWs, or the torture of Communists and persecution of homosexuals and Jehovah’s Witnesses.
²⁷

The implacable nature of the Nazi campaign against the Jews derived from their special status as a
Weltfeind
(world-enemy). Implicit in this ideological conception was the proposition that even successfully solving the problem of German Jewry (for example by complete emigration) could never bring the “Jewish question” to a close. For at the core of the conflict was the demonic Jewish world power that would always seek to destroy Germany, National Socialism, and so-called Aryan civilization. The satanic quality of the adversary also meant that “international Jewry” would constantly seek to widen the war and intensify the struggle in order to spill ever more precious German blood on the battlefield. Within this phantasmagoric logic of racial war, the most extreme measures could therefore be justified in advance as actions of imagined self-defense. Yet the simple truth remained that
Jews as a group were weak, vulnerable, and at no time had harbored any aggressive designs against Germany.

There was, however, one empirical reality that the Nazis could not ignore. The military occupation of Poland had at one stroke added more than two million Polish Jews to the Jewish population at Hitler’s mercy. (And as a result of the Nazi-Soviet pact, just over one million Jews in eastern Poland were to fall under Russian rule from September 1939 until June 1941.) This dramatic increase bedeviled the Nazis in their frantic efforts to create territories that were
Judenrein.
Each time they annexed or conquered an area, they acquired more Jews than they were managing to remove by encouraging emigration. Thus, after the
Anschluss
of March 1938, two hundred thousand Austrian Jews had entered the Reich. Following the rape of the Czech lands a year later, another 120,000 Jews came under Nazi control. After the collapse of Poland, further victories of the Wehrmacht in the West, and then the conquest of the Baltic states, White Russia, the Ukraine, Galicia, the Crimea, and other lands to the east hugely swelled the numbers of Jews in Nazi hands. What was to be done with them? In Warsaw alone, there were as many Jews in 1939 (about 330,000) as in the whole of the Reich. As Ostjuden, they had long been objects of German fear and prejudice. Nazi propaganda now made sure that no German would ever forget that they were permanent sources of dirt, infectious disease, criminality, and Bolshevism and were the heart of the “world Jewish problem.” Goebbels, after visiting the Lódz ghetto, on 2 November 1939, wrote in his diary, “It’s indescribable. These are not human beings any more, they are animals. Therefore, we have not a humanitarian task to perform, but a surgical one. One must cut here, in a radical way. Otherwise, one day, Europe will perish of the Jewish disease.”
²⁸

Goebbels, like many radical Nazi anti-Semites, regarded the eastern Jew as the quintessential animal-like “other,” symbolizing pestilence and life-threatening disease. He had visited
the ghetto to supervise the production of the violently anti-Semitic film
The Eternal Jew
, eventually screened in 1940. In an earlier diary entry of 17 October 1939, Goebbels was even more explicit: “Pictures from the ‘Ghetto’ film. Such a thing never existed before. Scenes so dreadful and brutal in their details that one’s blood freezes. One pulls back in horror at so much brutality. This Jewry must be exterminated.”
²⁹
It is almost as if Goebbels was unconsciously offering a preview of the mind-set behind the decision to launch the Holocaust. On the same day in his diary entry for 17 October, Goebbels notes that he had mentioned the film to Hitler, who “showed great interest.”
³⁰