Hitler and the Holocaust (16 page)

Heydrich opened the meeting by referring to commissions he had received from Goering in September 1939 and July 1941 to prepare a practical organizational plan for “the final solution of the European Jewish Question.” This task demanded “prior joint consideration by all central agencies directly involved in these questions with a view to maintaining parallel policy lines.” With evident relish, he emphasized that the responsibility for handling the “Final Solution” would be
centralized in the hands of Himmler and himself. Heydrich then briefly reiterated two key elements in the struggle so far: namely, the “forcing of the Jews out of the living space (
Lebensraum
) of the German people” and out of the various areas of its life (
Lebensgebiete
).
³³
Accelerated emigration of the Jews had until recently been vigorously pursued “as the only possible provisional solution.” Heydrich recalled some of the difficulties encountered along this road, including restriction or canceling of entry permits by foreign governments, lack of shipping space, and financial obstacles. Nonetheless, in eight years of Nazi rule—from 30 January 1933 until 31 October 1941, when Himmler had banned emigration because of wartime conditions and new “possibilities in the East”—537,000 Jews had been “sent out of the country.” That total comprised 360,000 from Germany proper, 147,000 from Austria (after March 1938), and about 30,000 from Bohemia and Moravia. The wealthy Jews and major foreign Jewish organizations had been made to finance this emigration. But this was past history, a mere prelude to the great tasks ahead.

In place of emigration, there was now a new prospect, namely “the evacuation of the Jews to the East in accordance with the prior approval of the Führer [
nach entsprechender vorheriger Genehmigung durch den Führer
].” This “evacuation” was only a temporary expedient prior to “the coming final solution of the Jewish question [
die kommende Endlösung der Judenfrage
].” But to use Heydrich’s technocratic jargon, “practical experience of the greatest importance” had already been acquired. Presumably, Heydrich was referring elliptically both to organizational experience in deportations and to the lessons learned in shooting, gassing, and other killing techniques that had been tried out in the east during the preceding six months.

According to the overblown estimates of the Reich Main Security Office, the “Final Solution” of the European “Jewish question” would encompass no fewer than eleven million Jews. (Heydrich implied that even this calculation might be
on the low side, since he believed foreign countries only partially applied racial principles, thus underestimating the true number of Jews.) His target list included 330,000 English Jews, 4,000 Jews from Ireland, and Jews from neutral Sweden (8,000), Switzerland (18,000), Spain (6,000), and the European portion of Turkey (55,500), none of whom would suffer German occupation. Estonia was the one country already listed as
Judenfrei.
Particularly high population estimates were quoted for the Soviet Union (5 million Jews), the Ukraine (2.99 million), and unoccupied France (700,000). According to Heydrich, Europe was “to be combed from West to East,” with the Reich (Germany, Austria, Bohemia, and Moravia) receiving priority “because of the housing problem and the socio-political needs.” In reality, the Holocaust proceeded somewhat differently.

Heydrich envisaged some difficulties in Hungary and Romania, which he regarded as corrupt, even asserting that “in Hungary it is imperative that an advisor in Jewish questions be pressed upon the Hungarian government without too much delay.” On the other hand, in Slovakia and Croatia he believed that “the most essential problems in this field have already been brought near to a solution.” Heydrich did not expect too many difficulties “in registering Jews for evacuation” in occupied or unoccupied France; however, he spoke only of “preparatory steps to settle the question in Italy.” Chillingly deceptive was his casual mention of the “five million Jews in European Russia,” without so much as a hint that Soviet Jews in their hundreds of thousands had already been massacred. Instead, he gave a distorted occupational breakdown of Russian Jewry, adding cynically: “The influence of the Jews in all walks of life in the USSR is well known.”

The timing of each “evacuation” project would, he claimed, be “determined chiefly by the military developments.” In territories or areas influenced by the Reich, competent Foreign Office people were expected to confer with the relevant SD officials. The zealous Foreign Office representative, Martin
Luther, a relentless bloodhound in “Jewish affairs,” drew attention to likely problems with the Scandinavian countries, but, given the small number of resident Jews there, he suggested deferring the “evacuations” there.
³⁴

Heydrich then briefly detailed the “special administrative and executive measures” that were to apply to the conscription of Jews for labor (
Arbeitseinsatz
) in the eastern territories. Despite Heydrich’s laborious euphemisms, it must have been clear to all present that most of the deported Jews would certainly be “unfit for labor” and therefore could expect to be disposed of immediately. For those who were fit, he envisaged large gangs (with the sexes separated) used for road building “in which task a large part of them will undoubtedly fall out through natural elimination [
durch natürliche Verminderung ausfallen wird
].” Those Jews who survived this nightmare scenario would not, of course, be allowed to go free. They would have to receive “special treatment [
Sonderbehandlung
],” since they represented the most physically resistant, “a natural selection of the fittest,” a “germ-cell [
Keimzelle
] of a new Jewish revival.” This, according to Heydrich’s way of thinking, was proven by “the experience of history.”
³⁵
These work projects, similar to those in the Stalinist gulags, never came to fruition, apparently vetoed by Hitler, who temporarily preferred at this point to use the available manpower for other ends.

Finally, the Wannsee meeting devoted considerable time to the question of
Mischlinge
and mixed marriages, a fact that has puzzled some historians—especially since the lengthy and abstruse discussions did not seem to produce any conclusive result. For the Nazis, however, this was an issue of real importance and conceptual difficulty.
³⁶
No fewer than seventy-five thousand persons had been defined as first-degree
Mischlinge
(two Jewish grandparents) and between 125,000 and 130,000 as second degree (one Jewish grandparent). It was crucial for German officials to know who should be treated as a Jew, since the Nuremberg Race Laws in principle remained valid for the implementation of the “Final Solution.”
Mischlinge
of
the first degree were, as before, to be treated as Jews, and those of the second degree as Germans. But there were some exemptions. For instance, the children of a first-degree “mixed blood” in a marriage with a “person of German blood” were regarded “essentially as Germans.” Their “mixed blood” parent would also be exempt from “evacuation.” Similarly privileged would be those cases of
“personal
merit” involving a first-degree
Mischling
previously exempted by the highest party or state authorities. But even the exceptions would have to undergo “voluntary” sterilization if they wished to stay in the Reich. It was a hopelessly entangled bureaucratic thicket of racist insanity, but for the Nazis these were deadly serious issues. Heydrich and the Reich Main Security Office could be well satisfied with their results in most areas. They failed, however, to stiffen and unify the convoluted legislation on half and quarter Jews. Partly they were blocked by bureaucrats like Stuckhart, by the Führer Chancellery, and possibly by Hitler himself, until he reversed his position in 1944.

In the concluding session of the Wannsee Conference, it was notable that Undersecretary of State Bühler insisted that the “Final Solution” should first of all be implemented in the General Government, where he claimed that “the Jews represented an immense danger as carriers of epidemics” and were permanently undermining the economic system through black-market operations. Echoing the demands of the absent Hans Frank, he declared that the majority of the 2.5 million Jews were
“unfit for work”-
—tantamount to passing a collective death sentence on them in this context. The protocol states laconically: “He had this one request only, namely that the Jewish question in this territory be solved as quickly as possible.” In fact, with the exception of Galicia, where German massacres of Jews had already started in October 1941, no systematic extermination in the General Government began until the spring of 1942.
³⁷

The historic significance of the Wannsee Conference is clear. Despite its sanitized language, the record of it does reveal
a general and centrally organized plan for the massacre of European Jewry in its entirety, and it is the only surviving official document that does so in such detail. It is the text that definitively revealed the fates of western and central European Jews, as well as those of the millions of Polish and Russian Jews, whose murder was already under way. The Wannsee gathering also demonstrated that the German state bureaucracy had no serious objections to the genocidal plans of Heydrich’s Reich Main Security Office, with the exception of some anticipated difficulties and reservations concerning
Mischlinge.
By implication, it was also evident that the vast majority of German Jews (except for certain carefully defined categories) were doomed to suffer the rigors of the “Final Solution.”

The first deportations of German Jews in mid-October 1941 had not always resulted in instant death. An element of uncertainty about how to deal with them is suggested by a letter in December 1941 from Wilhelm Kube (General Kommissar of Byelorussia and a longtime party member) to Heinrich Lohse, Reich Commissar for Ostland, describing the condition of German Jews who had been sent to Minsk and asking for clear directives. Kube observed that these Jews included First World War heroes decorated with the Iron Cross, war invalids, and half and even three-quarter “Aryans.” He asserted that they differed sharply from Russian Jews in their skills, productivity, and “personal cleanliness.” These German Jews were “people who came from our own cultural sphere,” not at all like “the brutish hordes in this place.” Kube asked if the proposed slaughter was to be carried out by Lithuanians and Latvians, “themselves rejected by the population here,” and respectfully requested that “the necessary action be taken in the most humane manner.”
³⁸
He did not want, however, to give an order for liquidation on his own responsibility.

Kube’s misgivings make it clear that the application of the genocidal plan to German Jews was not immediately self-evident,
even for some hardened party members. This fact was reflected in the delay—until late 1941—in requiring Jews of the Reich (Germany, Austria, and the Czech Protecktorat) to wear the yellow star or in finally completing the deportations from Germany. Indeed, the German Reich was not declared
Judenrein
until June 1943. The Nazi regime proceeded more cautiously in this area, since the forcible removal of German Jews could not be concealed from the population and might provoke uncomfortable questions.

An even more serious potential obstacle to a speedy and comprehensive elimination of the Jews arose from the usefulness to the German military machine of industrious Jewish workers in the eastern territories. The SS was determined to overrule, wherever possible, such pragmatic considerations. This would be made crystal clear in reply to the important query raised on 15 November 1941 by Lohse, who had written to the Ministry of Occupied Eastern Territories concerning Jewish workers. He wished to know if there was “a directive to liquidate all the Jews in
Ostland
.”
³⁹
Was this to be done “regardless of age, sex, and economic requirements (for instance, the Wehrmacht’s demand for skilled workers in the armament industry)?” Lohse was all in favor of “the cleansing of
Ostland
of Jews,” but he was also sensitive to the needs of the armament plants and repair workshops. In the Baltic states, as in Poland and the western lands but unlike in the Soviet Union or Yugoslavia, the army did not see itself as engaged in the murder of Jews. To deprive the factories of Jewish workers “through their liquidation” when they could not yet be replaced by local personnel did not seem sensible to Lohse. The reply he received, signed by liaison officer Otto Bräutigam, was significant: “The Jewish question has presumably been clarified meanwhile by means of verbal discussion. In principle, economic considerations are not to be taken into account in the settlement of the problem. It is further requested that any questions that arise be settled directly with the Higher SS and Police Leader.”
⁴⁰

It is evident from such correspondence that the implications of the “Final Solution” were not always apparent to those in the field who were expected to implement it. Undoubtedly, there was much chaos and administrative confusion, and many clashing interests and logistical problems that needed improvised solutions. But that does not mean that the mass murder of European Jewry was something that the Nazis simply stumbled into, without any centralized control or ideological guidelines. Undoubtedly, for Hitler, the
Endlösung
was a matter of grand policy, though he left the execution of its details to trusted subordinates such as Himmler and Heydrich.

An illuminating example of Hitler’s vision of the “Final Solution,” not long before the Wannsee Conference, is revealed in his conversation of 28 November 1941 with the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin el-Husseini—the exiled leader of the Palestinian Arabs, then living in Berlin. Ever since 1933, Haj Amin had eagerly sought to win Nazi support for his Palestinian nationalist and pan-Arab aims, with somewhat mixed results. Like many Arab nationalists in the 1930s, he ardently admired the order and discipline of the Reich, looking to Hitler to overthrow British imperialism in the Middle East and to help him destroy the “Jewish National Home” in Palestine.
⁴¹
At their meeting in Berlin, the Mufti emphasized that the Arabs had the same enemies as Nazi Germany, “namely the English, the Jews, and the Communists.” The Arab world, he declared, was ready to cooperate with the Reich by acts of sabotage and revolt, as well as by raising a Muslim Arab legion to fight in the Balkans. In exchange, the Mufti desired a public declaration by Hitler in favor of Arab national goals and the liberation of Palestine from the Zionist Jews.