Holocaust (28 page)

Of course there has never been any doubt in anyone’s mind what a “final solution” means—although we rarely talk about it. Only fools like Hans Frank go around babbling about how they will annihilate Jews the way they would lice. But we have effectively reduced his areas of responsibility in Poland, so that he is now nothing more than a figurehead, a creature of the SS. We’ve taken over; we will fulfill the Führer’s desires, as quietly and efficiently as possible.

In any event, the events described above, and other interesting developments, such as the building of certain secret camps at Chelmno and Belzec in Poland, where unique new systems for solving the Jewish problem were being tested, led to the meeting at Gross-Wannsee on January 20.

Besides Heydrich and myself, there were thirteen men present at the meeting. It was held in the offices of the RSHA—the Reich Security Main Office—which Heydrich heads, and which deals directly with Jewish matters, in the Berlin suburb of Gross-Wannsee.

What interested me, as the men assembled and made small talk, was that not only top police and SS officials of Germany were present, but also five
civilian
Undersecretaries. It was quite clear what Heydrich had in mind. No branch of the German government, civilian, police or military, was to be kept in the dark about our plans. (I wondered as I looked at these civilian chaps what excuses they were already preparing in their crafty brains, should questions be asked at some later date.)

Eichmann was present. We are fairly good friends by now. My strained relations with some of the Einsatzgruppen chiefs—notably that boor Blobel, and the sneak Artur Nebe—make me more than willing to seek out Eichmann’s support, since I have always found him rational, gracious and of an open mind.

“Ah, Dorf,” he said, after asking about Marta and the children. “New developments in the wind. The Auschwitz business.”

“So I hear.”

“I was there recently. Himmler’s given Hoess a green light. I’m trying to coordinate train schedules and so on with Hoess.”

“Why Auschwitz?”

“Oh, it’s got a fine rail setup. Lots of space for ensuring isolation. Lots of Jews around it. Poland is our real problem. All these new places—Chelmno, Belzec, Sobibor—they’ll all be in Poland.” He bent to me and whispered. “The Führer doesn’t want the holy soil of Germany contaminated with Jewish blood, you know.”

“Understandable.”

I was surprised by my cool reaction to this information. The SS, including the RSHA, being the coiled, tangled nest of competitors that it is, Himmler sometimes goes around Heydrich, or keeps him in the dark, and although I knew of these new camps, I was not absolutely certain what is taking place there. My primary area of responsibility has remained the Russian campaign.

Hans Frank saw me entering the conference room and grabbed my arm, steering me away from Eichmann. “New camps, I heard that. Don’t look so dumb, Dorf. Try sniffing a little gas, get a taste of it.”

I shoved his hand away, and heard him mutter to one of his aides: “What a meeting—Heydrich, a part-Jew, and Dorf, a Berlin shyster.”

The conference got underway.

Heydrich made clear to everyone present—especially the civilians, who included such eminences as the Undersecretaries for Foreign Affairs and the Interior
Ministry—that he, Reinhard Heydrich, was the Führer’s chosen instrument for “the final solution of the Jewish question.”

“All areas?” someone asked.

“All.”

“Ah … that is to say, in Germany, and all conquered areas?”

Heydrich’s response was that
all
the Jews of Europe, which he estimated at eleven million—he included English and Irish Jews—were to come under our eventual jurisdiction, and would suffer the same fate.

He never defined in so many words what this “final solution” was, though not a man present at the meeting misunderstood him. We knew.

“Emigration has been a failure,” my boss went on. “No one wants these Jews, not America, nor England, nor anyone else. Besides, the logistics of getting them, especially the Eastern European Jews, out of their diseased villages and cities are too much for us, or for anyone else. So there will be a stepped-up evacuation of the Jews to the east—largely Poland.”

On a chart, Heydrich showed how all European Jews—French, Dutch, English, Italian—would be sent “east.”

“What happens then?” asked Hans Frank. “After you’ve dumped them on me?”

Heydrich ignored him. “The Jews will form labor units. Natural decline through disease, hunger, the attrition of hard work for which Jews are unsuited, will take its toll. There will be, of course, a hard core of Jewish survivors, the tenacious and strong ones.”

“And what happens to them?” Eichmann asked.

“They will be treated accordingly.”

People smiled, shifted in their seats. Two of the civilian ministers, like proper schoolboys caught smoking with the village ruffians, snickered, nudged one another.

“Could the general expand on that?” asked Gauleiter Meyer.

“Well, first let it be understood that these surviving Jews will represent a direct threat to Germany. They
can rebuild Jewish life. Natural selection will make them strong. So—they will have to be dealt with accordingly.”

“Goddammit, there are over three million Jews in Poland now,” Frank roared. “Gluttons, parasites, full of disease, leaving their shit all over Poland. Well, I can tell you, as I told my division chiefs, we can’t shoot or poison three million kikes, but we shall find some way to exterminate them.”

“May I remind the governor-general to be careful of his language?” I said.

Frank pounded the table. “Dammit. You are talking annihilation. I’m sick of these fucking code words, these substitutes for the real thing.”

Heydrich eyed him coldly, and if I were Frank, I would have feared that icy stare.

Eichmann, ever the diplomat, tried to divert the discussion. He asked whether the Einsatzgruppen would be expanded, to which Heydrich responded in the affirmative. And would new methods be considered? asked Eichmann.

“The use of gas is being considered,” Heydrich said.

A high-ranking civilian official—I forget who—acted surprised. Heydrich told him tests were being made under laboratory conditions. Behinds shifted, noses were rubbed. Men stared at the lofty ceiling.

Dr. Luther, representing the Foreign Office, pointed out that the clergy had protested some years back when the “useless” were subjected to mercy killings by gas. I made some offhand comment to the effect that that should not deter us. Luther turned on me and cited protests from the Vatican, and the Protestant churches, how the Führer himself had backed down.

“Well?” Heydrich asked.

The other civilian was equally distraught. “It can happen again. The mass shooting of people in a war, that’s one thing. There are always excuses that reasonable men, churchmen included, will accept. But gas! On women, children, the old! We can’t get the churches angry at us again. Heydrich, this bloody business is getting out of hand.”

“Calm yourself,” Heydrich said. “These are Jews we will be dealing with.”

Luther was furious. “Yes! Controlling the banks, the press, the stock exchanges, the Communist apparatus in Russia! Whispering in Roosevelt’s ear!”

Heydrich leaned forward. “Take my word for it, doctor. No one will lift a finger to protect Jews.”

Eichmann nodded his agreement.

It seemed a good point at which to support my chief. “Besides, we’ll be on firm legal ground. We will be executing—no matter what the means—enemies of the state, spies, terrorists. Such acts are permissible in a war.”

Luther, having been silenced on this subject, then raised some minor points. In some countries, notably Norway and Denmark, it was doubtful that the civilian population will co-operate in the program. The Italians aren’t very cooperative either. They shrug, make excuses. Mussolini hasn’t got his heart in it. And even Franco—of course, he’s neutral—has been hiding Jews, letting them sneak into Spain. Wherever the SS has met strong resistance from local Christian populations, they have suddenly become less than vigorous in handling the Jewish problem. Of course in the long run, Luther said placatingly, there should be no real difficulties in the Balkans and Eastern Europe, where feelings against Jews are rather strong.

Some other civilians were obviously upset; yet they remained silent. No one else seemed to have anything left to say. Frank finally blurted out that Heydrich’s theory of “working” Jews till they dropped was nonsense. Most of the Jews in Poland were so starved and diseased as to be beyond productive work.

“That is why new camps are being built,” Eichmann said gently.

“Yes, and I know what for!” Frank bellowed.

He is the same weakling I faced down in Warsaw a year and a half ago. On the one hand, he still muses over the beauty of the law, the abstract notion of justice. On the other, he is determined to prove himself as tough as any of us.

“Remember what the Führer once told a group of lawyers, and you’ll feel better,” Heydrich said and smiled.

“I don’t recall,” Frank grumbled.

Heydrich turned to me. “Dorf?”

I knew the quotation. “‘Here I stand with my bayonets and there you stand with your law, and we’ll see which prevails.’”

It was a good note on which to end the meeting at Gross-Wannsee.

Later, a select few of us sat in Heydrich’s private office, watched the flames flicker in a huge logfire, drank French cognac and smoked.

Eichmann, Heydrich and I sang old songs and proposed toasts, first standing on the floor, then on chairs, then on a table, rising higher and higher with our glasses. Heydrich said it was an old North German custom.

The chief dozed at the fireplace, and Eichmann and I discussed the decisions made that day.

“Momentous, truly momentous,” Eichmann said. “The world really doesn’t understand our aims.”

“Maybe they don’t want to,” I said.

“Oh, we’ve done a superb job of camouflage. No one believes us, and many don’t want to believe. Not even the Jews.”

I leaned forward. “Tell me, Eichmann, as an old friend, do you ever have second thoughts? Ever?”

“Of course not.” He didn’t even hesitate. “We’re obeying the Führer’s will. We’re soldiers. Soldiers obey.”

“But the way the Führer himself never appears at these meetings … the way his orders to Himmler and Heydrich seem to, well, waltz around the heart of the matter.”

“Means nothing. He’s said it over and over. He’d hang every Jew in Munich, he said in 1922, then start on the other cities. Remember, Dorf, our only law, our only constitution, is the will of our Führer.”

He was right, of course. “I suppose he’ll know about this new program.”

Eichmann drained his cognac. “The details won’t interest him. He’s running a two-front war. But he’ll want the job done. And he’ll approve. You know what he said years ago—‘Nothing happens in my movement without my knowledge and approval.’”

I rather admire Eichmann. He has a clear if relatively untrained mind, and he has a way of putting things in order, like a good office manager. He has told me over and over that he bears no malice toward Jews. Indeed, from a historic viewpoint Eichmann finds them fascinating—the founders of the world’s great religions, eminent in science, art, all forms of scholarship. He boasted again about his time in Palestine as an agent, his familiarity with Hebrew. (“A difficult tongue, Dorf,” he said, “an absolutely staggering grammatical system.”)

With his usual charm, Eichmann then changed the subject to my wife and children, whom he remembered from that lovely day when he hosted us in Vienna. His own family was thriving, he said, in spite of annoying wartime shortages, occasional acts of sabotage.

I felt mellow, fulfilled, and I said, “No question, Eichmann, it is for our wonderful families, our wives and children, we perform these hard jobs. They give us courage and determination.”

He agreed.

“We owe something to the next generation of Germans. The decisions we made today—terrible as they may seem—are an absolute necessity to preserve the purity of our race, the survival of Western civilization.”

Later generations may not have the strength or will to finish the task. Or the opportunity. I think of my home, my family, and I know we are doing the right thing.

In the office, we drank, silently, and Heydrich slept, weary from his long, tiring day.

More wandering. We had been told, after our escape from Babi Yar, that there were bands of partisans wandering in the forests of the Ukraine. We wanted to join one.

Of Babi Yar, we heard little. The Ukrainian farmers—not all of them as brutal and cowardly as their compatriots who joined in the massacre in the ravine—shrugged their shoulders when we asked about it.

But it was no secret. One old farm woman, her toothless gums working away, informed Helena that 140 carloads of clothing had been distributed to the poor Christians of Kiev and the countryside around it. “From the Jews,” she kept saying, “from the Jews.”

One cold morning, Helena began to shiver. She was sleeping in my arms in a ruined peasant hut, abandoned by a farmer gone to God knew where, perhaps drafted into the Red Army, perhaps a prisoner. It was cold and damp. I had stolen some blankets and we slept together, trying to absorb warmth from each other’s bodies.

“I’m cold,” she said. Her poor teeth chattered.

“Come closer.”

“It won’t help, Rudi. I’ll never be warm again.”

I rubbed her hands and wrists, but she would not be cheered, or warmed. “I can’t run any more,” she wept. “I’m cold. I’m hungry.”

“You think we should have stayed in Prague.”

“I don’t know … I don’t know. At least we could get food there. I had my apartment, friends …”

“Your friends are all in concentration camps.”

“I am a burden to you,” she said. “I cry too much.”

I looked at our few crude utensils on the table—metal cup, metal plate, spoons. Then I picked up the cup and hurled it against the fireplace. “Dammit. Dammit.”

She sat up in bed, weeping loudly now. “Rudi, it is hopeless.”

I grabbed her, lifted her from the straw mattress. “No. No. You gave me those lectures about that Zionist homeland you and your parents want to build in Palestine, out in some desert surrounded by Arabs. You think you’ll get that by sitting back and crying? By giving in to anyone who threatens you? That guy with the whiskers who talked about it—what’s his name—”