Masters of Death (7 page)

Hitler’s struggle with identity and with dominance resonated with the millions of Germans, particularly ex-soldiers, who had been impoverished, humiliated and declassed by the Great War, writes sociologist Eric Wolf:

World War I brought a new kind of warfare. . . . Massed battles, fought across a labyrinth of trenches, devoured lives by the hundreds of thousands. It was for many a liminal experience [i.e., they crossed a threshold] . . . which separated them from ordinary life, shattered their customary ego structure, and reintegrated the initiates into the primary group of fellow soldiers. This sequence of breakdown and reemergence gave rise to the syndrome of the returning veteran who found himself unable to relate to the people at home. In the wake of German defeat, many continued to fight on, notably against the revolutionary Red Guards in the Baltic countries. Some 200,000 veterans joined the armed bands of the postwar Freikorps and became subsidized strong men for right-wing causes during the Weimar Republic, until they were absorbed into the [Nazi] movement. “These people told us the war was over,” said the future SA leader Friedrich Wilhelm Heinz. “That was a laugh: we ourselves were the war.”

“It is nonsense to explain Hitler’s triumph by age-old German tendencies or trends in German intellectual thought,” writes sociologist Peter Merkl, seconding Wolf. “World War I was the major turning point in German political development; its consequences doomed the Weimar Republic and set the stage for the success of Adolf Hitler.”

During the war Hitler had identified the enemy as “foreign influences” and “domestic internationalism”—that is, Marxist ideology, Communism. But even immediately after the war, though certainly a vicious anti-Semite, he still had not linked the Communists definitively with the Jews. In a guide to army instruction on “the danger of Jewry” that he wrote in September 1919, he called the Jews “a racial tuberculosis of the peoples” but argued for an “anti-Semitism of reason,” which “must lead to the systematic combatting and elimination of Jewish privileges,” with its “ultimate goal . . . the implacable removal of the Jews.”

Defeat in war was followed by widespread German suffering. “The effects of the inflation,” writes historian Anna Bramwell, “were to render fixed incomes and pensions valueless, to bankrupt many creditors, and to interfere with internal trade. This, together with the effects of the wartime blockade, had meant years of hunger and sickness. In 1919, 90 percent of all hospital beds were occupied by [tuberculosis] cases. British observers in Germany such as [John Maynard] Keynes commented on the starving children, their faces yellowed by shortages of fats. One striking feature of photographs of German crowds in the 1920s . . . is the gaunt faces.” The Depression, when seven million Germans were unemployed, finished the job. Humiliation, hyperinflation, hunger, unemployment encouraged messianic agitators such as Hitler.

Hitler “welcomed the misery,” writes one analyst, “. . . declaring the need for pride, will, defiance, and ‘hate, hate, and again hate!’ ” He soon realized, however, that his all-encompassing hatreds were confusing and began to narrow them down. He wanted to hang all the Jews in Germany, he told several interviewers fiercely, and leave them hanging until they stank, “as long as the principles of hygiene permit.” But he also talked calmly of deliberately searching for “the right kind of victim . . . especially one against whom the struggle would make sense, materially speaking,” and coming to the conclusion “that a campaign against the Jews would be as popular as it would be successful. . . . They are totally defenseless, and no one will stand up to protect them.” At another time he added, “Experience teaches us that after every catastrophe a scapegoat is found.”

As his allusion to scapegoating implies, Hitler’s dazzling rise to power, and the charismatic authority his millions of followers ceded to him, derive directly from the religion-like structure of his politics; National Socialism as Hitler organized it was essentially a religious cult. René Girard, a French anthropologist, has proposed that religions arise in times of great social conflict when the community drains its violence into a chosen scapegoat; his summary of the process could be a summary of the rise and triumph of Nazism:

Suddenly the opposition of everyone against everyone else is replaced by the opposition of all against one. Where previously there had been a chaotic ensemble of particular conflicts, there is now the simplicity of a single conflict: the entire community on one side, and on the other, the victim. The nature of this sacrificial resolution is not difficult to comprehend; the community finds itself unified once more at the expense of a victim who is not only incapable of self-defense but is also unable to provoke any reaction of vengeance; the immolation of such a victim would never create fresh conflict or augment the crisis, since the victim has unified the community in its opposition. The sacrifice is simply another act of violence, one that is added to a succession of others; but it is the final act of violence, the last word.

And this scapegoating process not only worked for a significant part, perhaps a majority, of the German public, it also worked personally for Hitler himself. From scattershot contempt for a wide range of persons, concepts and organizations, he began to discover Jews everywhere working devilishly behind the scenes. “The revolution of 1918 and the entire Weimar Republic were Jewish,” historian Eberhard Jäckel paraphrases Hitler’s universalizing of Jewish influence: “Marxism and the Soviet ‘dictatorship of blood’ and, of course, high finance . . . were Jewish; the political parties of the Left were ‘mercenaries of Jewry’; and, finally, democracy, parliaments, majority rule and the League of Nations were all Jewish as well.”

The idea of a war of conquest against the Soviet Union surfaced in Hitler’s thinking in 1924. He linked Bolshevism with a Jewish “international conspiracy” finally definitively in
Mein Kampf,
written in Landsberg Prison between April and December 1924 and published in two volumes beginning in June 1925. Jäckel finds “four new aspects of Hitlerian antisemitism” in Hitler’s book: “its increased significance to Hitler himself; a new universalist-missionary element; its linkup with [Hitler’s] outline of foreign policy; and, finally and above all else, an enormous radicalization of the intended measures [against the Jews].”The elimination of the Jews, Jäckel adds, “had now turned into their extinction and extermination; indeed, it had become quite openly an advocacy of their physical liquidation, of murder.”

The result for the half-million Jews of Germany, once Hitler took power and installed his Third Reich, was gradually escalating oppression as the Nuremberg Laws systematically abrogated the rights of Jewish citizens and government policy drove them to emigrate (after forfeiting their assets). Paradoxically, the first mass-murder operation of the Nazi regime was the purging of Hitler’s own paramilitary army, the SA brownshirts—the Röhm Purge of June 1934, when Himmler’s SS forces hunted down and murdered more than two hundred of Hitler’s and Hermann Göring’s political enemies.

“Associates of Hitler,” Victor writes, “said the arrests after the Reichstag fire, the Röhm purge, and the anti-Semitic measures of the 1930s were experiments. They served to condition him to escalating aggression, to condition his followers and the nation for the mass destruction to come, and to find out how far he could go.” Certainly Hitler’s murderous escalations in the 1930s tested the German public’s and the world’s tolerance for Nazi violence and atrocity. “Conditioning,” however, implying that Hitler was hardening himself, is inaccurate; in fact his level of violent socialization never changed until the end of his life, when he shot his new bride Eva Braun in the last days of the war before committing suicide. “The final aim of our policy is crystal clear to all of us,” Hitler told his party leadership in 1937, speaking of his plans for the Jews. “All that concerns me is never to take a step that I might later have to retrace and never to take a step that could damage us in any way. You must understand that I always go as far as I dare and never further.” What was the final aim that was crystal clear? In 1935, in a private conversation that an adjutant wrote down — a handwritten note survives—Hitler told his closest colleagues, “Out with them from all the professions and into the ghetto with them; fence them in somewhere where they can perish as they deserve while the German people look on, the way people stare at wild animals.”

Violence begot violence. The concentration camps multiplied. When Germany absorbed Austria in March 1938, political opponents were murdered by Einsatzgruppen-like cadres and Jews were arrested en masse and deported to German concentration camps. The first synagogue was burned in Germany in June 1938, after which more than two thousand German Jewish citizens were arrested and confined. At Evian, on the French shore of Lake Geneva, in July 1938 thirty-three nations and thirty-nine private organizations gathered at President Franklin Roosevelt’s request to consider facilitating emigration of political refugees from Germany and Austria, but with the exception of Denmark and Holland, none of the nations was prepared to change its quota and accept more Jews. In October German troops invaded Czechoslovakia. That month Germany expelled twenty thousand Polish Jews as well, and Kristallnacht followed in November.

“We are going to destroy the Jews,” Hitler bluntly told the Czech Foreign Minister, Frantisek Chvalkovsky, on 21 January 1939. “They are not going to get away with what they did on 9 November 1918. The day of reckoning has come.”

And so in June 1941 the Einsatzgruppen rolled out eastward.

THREE

Barbarossa

Sunday morning, 22 June 1941, the Wehrmacht struck east, opening a war against the Soviet Union that would consume forty million lives. A German officer, Siegfried Knappe, shouting in the morning darkness, heard “the crack of rifle shots, the short bursts of machine guns and the shattering crashes of hand grenades. The rifle fire sounded like the clattering of metal-wheeled carts moving fast over cobblestone streets.” Some Wehrmacht units, surprising border garrisons that offered only confused resistance, advanced thirty miles into Soviet-occupied Polish territory on that first long day. “Polish civilians in a church service applauded us,” Knappe reported of passing through Bialystok, ninety miles northwest of Warsaw; “they were very happy because they had not been permitted to conduct church services under the Russians and they felt liberated.”

In the next days the Einsatzgruppen followed. Bristling with Mausers and machine pistols in their trucks and cars, they fanned out across Poland northeastward toward the Latvian port city of Riga on the Baltic and the old Lithuanian cities of Kaunas and Vilnius, eastward into Byelorussia toward Minsk on the post road to Moscow, southeastward toward Rovno and Lvov, Tarnopol and Kamenets-Podolsky in the western Ukraine. Ahead of the German forces, an eyewitness on the highway to Minsk recalls, “people were fleeing eastward in panic, on foot, to look for a place to hide from the onrushing enemy. The highway was jammed with demolished trucks, smashed cannon, discarded machine guns. Now and again, aircraft with the Nazi emblem swooped over this pile of assorted weapons. They flew so low that we could see the mocking, contemptuous faces of the flying German thugs. They made one foray after another, ‘playfully’ firing their machine guns into groups of terror-stricken people on the road, mostly women holding children by the hand or in their arms.” Already in the border towns local squads of police and SS were rounding up people to be shot on orders from the Gestapo in Berlin.

When forward units of the German Army occupied Kaunas in central Lithuania on 23 June 1941, a small advance detachment of Einsatzgruppe A entered the city with them and set to work immediately organizing “spontaneous” attacks against Jews. The town of stone buildings and chinked-log wooden houses at the junction of the Neris and Nemunas Rivers counted 35,000 Jews among its population of 120,000 people. Also known as Kovno, Kaunas had served as the Lithuanian capital under Soviet domination, and the occupying forces found four large groups of armed Lithuanian nationalists competing to help them harry the retreating Soviet garrison.

Within a day or two of the occupation, several enlisted men in a bakers’ company of the Wehrmacht Sixteenth Army encountered what was probably the first pogrom in Kaunas when they joined “a crowd of people gathered in a square somewhere in the center of the town.”

“We were quartered in an old Russian barracks,” a sergeant recalled, “and immediately started to make bread for the troops. I think it must have been one day after we had arrived in Kovno that I was informed by a driver in my unit that Jews were being beaten to death in a nearby square. Upon hearing this I went to the said square [with] other members of our unit.” On the cobbled square, lined with houses and opening onto a park, the sergeant “saw civilians, some in shirtsleeves . . . beating other civilians to death with iron bars.” He heard someone say that “these were Jews who had swindled the Lithuanians before the Germans had arrived.” The bystanders were mostly German soldiers. The sergeant questioned those nearest him, who told him that “the victims were being beaten to satisfy a personal desire for vengeance.” His account continues:

When I reached the square there were about fifteen to twenty bodies lying there. These were then cleared away by the Lithuanians and the pools of blood were washed away with water from a hose. . . . I saw the Lithuanians take hold of the bodies by their hands and legs and drag them away. Afterwards another group of offenders was herded and pushed onto the square and without further ado simply beaten to death by the civilians armed with iron bars. I watched as a group of offenders were beaten to death and then had to look away because I could not watch any longer. These actions seemed extremely cruel and brutal. . . . The Lithuanian civilians could be heard shouting out their approval and goading the men on.

A bakers’ company grenadier remembered asking a medical-corps sergeant beside him “why these people were being beaten to death in such a cruel manner.” The sergeant told him that they “were all Jews who had been apprehended by Lithuanians in the city and had been brought to this square. The killings were carried out by recently released Lithuanian convicts.” The SS had released violent criminals from prison, that is, and put them to work murdering Jewish victims to make the “pogrom” look spontaneous. The corporal counted five men wielding crowbars and “about fifteen dead or seriously injured people” collapsed on the cobblestones. Another enlisted man noticed that there were men guarding the square “wearing armbands and [carrying] carbines,” and the grenadier identified them as “some members of the Lithuanian ‘Freikorps’ ”—that is, irregulars. The irregulars were feeding victims to the killers, moving in and out of the square “with more Jews who were likewise beaten to death by the convicts.” In the ten minutes the grenadier could bear to watch he “witnessed the beating to death of some ten to fifteen Jews.” All the victims were men.