Modern Times: The World From the Twenties to the Nineties (81 page)

Hitler, surviving, drew the conclusions: ‘Nothing is fated to happen to me, all the more so since this isn’t the first time I’ve miraculously escaped death … I am more than ever convinced that I am destined to carry on our great common cause to a happy conclusion.’
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The plotters were mostly aristocrats, enjoying their traditional monopoly of staff jobs; as a result they had no troops. They could give orders; no one followed. Nor did they have popular support, or even contacts. Noting their narrow social base, Hitler moved emotionally, or rather returned, to the Left. In this last phase he admired Stalin more than ever. If Stalin lived ten to fifteen years he would make Russia ‘the greatest power in the world’. He was a ‘beast’, but a beast ‘on a grand scale’. Hitler added: ‘I have often bitterly regretted I did
not purge my officer corps in the way Stalin did.’ He now gave his Lenin-type ‘People’s Court’ and its radical hanging-judge, Roland Freisler, its moment of apotheosis: ‘Freisler will take care of things all right. He is our Vishinsky.’
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Hitler adopted the Leninist principle of ‘responsibility of next of kin’, while denying it was Bolshevistic – it was ‘a very old custom practised among our forefathers’. The executions of suspects (’I want them to be hanged, strung up like butchered cattle’), while on a small scale compared with Stalin’s killings in 1936–8, continued right up to the end of the regime.
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Meanwhile Goebbels, the most socialist-minded of the leading Nazis, became Hitler’s closest adviser, and was allowed to radicalize the war effort, ordering total mobilization, the conscription of women, the shutting of theatres and other long-resisted measures. The
Wehrmacht
still numbered over 9 million. While some leading Nazis now sought to do a deal with the Anglo-Saxons in the name of
antibolschevismus
, Hitler clung to the image of Frederick the Great, surviving hopeless encirclement. He and Goebbels read together Carlyle’s weird, multi-volume biography of the King, thus dealing a stunning blow to the already shaky reputation of the old Scotch sage.
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Far from seeking a common front against Russia, Hitler transferred divisions to the West to launch his last offensive in the Ardennes, in December 1944, making possible the great Russian push of January 1945, which carried Soviet power into the heart of Europe.

Hitler remained to the end a socialist, though an eccentric one. Like Stalin he lived in hideous discomfort. Ciano was horrified by his Rastenburg headquarters, calling its inhabitants troglodytes: ‘Smells of kitchens, uniforms, heavy boots’.
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It was a concentration camp-monastery – the Escoriai without its palatial splendour. Indeed, Hitler came to resemble Philip II in his isolation and remoteness, his resolution, above all in his cartomania, spending hours studying maps already rendered out of date by the march of war, and issuing orders for the taking of a tiny bridge or pillbox, often by imaginary soldiers. His closest companions were his Alsatian, Biondi, and her pup Wolf. Professor Morell, a smart Berlin doctor, gave him sulfanilamide and glandular injections; he took glucose, hormones, anti-depressant pills. One of his doctors, Karl Brandt, said that he aged ‘four or five years every year’. His hair went grey. But his capacity for work remained impressive to the end.

Hitler moved down into his bunker under the Berlin Chancellery in January 1945, taking Goebbels with him, both breathing socialist fire. ‘Under the ruins of our devastated cities,’ Goebbels exulted, ‘the last so-called achievements of our bourgeois nineteenth century have finally been buried.’
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In between incessant munching of cream cakes – Hitler became ‘a cake-gobbling human wreck’, one of his circle said
- he voiced his radical regrets: that he had not exterminated the German nobility, that he had come to power ‘too easily’, not unleashing a classical revolution ‘to destroy élite
s
and classes’, that he had supported Franco in Spain instead of the Communists, that he had failed to put himself at the head of a movement for the liberation of the colonial peoples, ‘especially the Arabs’, that he had not freed the working class from ‘the bourgeoisie of fossils’. Above all he regretted his leniency, his lack of the admirable ruthlessness Stalin had so consistently showed and which invited one’s ‘unreserved respect’ for him. One of his last recorded remarks, on 27 April 1945, three days before he killed himself (whether by bullet or poison is disputed) was: ‘Afterwards, you rue the fact that you’ve been so kind.’
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Before Hitler died, deploring his benevolence, he had largely completed the greatest single crime in history, the extermination of the European Jews. The ‘Jewish problem’ was central to his whole view of history, political philosophy and programme of action. Next to the provision of space and raw materials for the German master-race, the destruction of the Jewish ‘bacillus’ and its home in Bolshevist Russia was the primary purpose of the war. For Hitler the years of peace, 1933–9, were in Jewish policy as in everything else merely years of preparation.
It
cannot be too strongly emphasized that Hitler’s aims could not be achieved except through war and under cover of war. Like Lenin and Stalin, Hitler believed in ultimate social engineering. The notion of destroying huge categories of people whose existence imperilled his historic mission was to him, as to them, entirely acceptable. The only thing he feared was the publicity and opposition which might prevent him from carrying through his necessary task.

The war, therefore, had the great convenience of plunging Germany into silence and darkness. On 1 September 1939 he sent a note to Philip Bouhler, head of his Chancellery, ordering the extermination of the chronically insane and incurable. The work was done by ss doctors, who thus acquired experience of selecting and gassing large numbers. This programme, in which about 70,000 Germans were murdered, could not be kept completely secret. Two prominent German ecclesiastics, Bishop Wurm of Württemburg and Bishop-Count Galen of Munster, protested – the only time the German hierarchy successfully raised angry voices against Nazi crimes – and at the end of August 1941 a telephone call from Hitler ended the programme.
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But the ‘euthanasia centres’ were not closed down. They continued to be used to kill insane cases from the concentration camps. In retrospect, this programme appears to have been a pilot for the larger genocide to follow.

For Hitler the war really began on 22 June 1941. That was when he could begin not only his eastern clearance programme for German expansion but large-scale genocide. There is confusion both about the sequence of events and the object of policy, reflecting the ever-changing chaos of Hitler’s mind and the anarchy of Nazi administration. As early as 7 October 1939, by a secret decree, Hitler appointed Himmler to a new post as Reich Commissioner for Consolidation of German Nationhood, with instructions to undertake a ‘racial clean-up’ in the east, and to prepare the way for the resettlement programme. Many murders of Polish Jews were already taking place. It is not known precisely when Hitler ordered the ‘final solution’ to begin or exactly how he defined its scope: all his orders were verbal. In March 1941 Himmler called the first genocide conference, announcing that one of the aims of the coming Russian campaign was ‘to decimate the Slav population by thirty million’.
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At the end of the same month Hitler himself told his senior officers about the
Einsatzgruppen
extermination units which would follow in the wake of the German armies. Two days later, on 2 April, Alfred Rosenberg, after a two-hour talk with Hitler, wrote in his diary: ‘Which I do not want to write down, but will never forget.’
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The s s extermination units began their work immediately the invasion started and by the end of 1941 had murdered about 500,000 Russian Jews (as well as other Russians), chiefly by shooting. However, the key document in the genocide programmes appears to be an order issued (on the Führer’s authority) by Goering on 31 July 1941 to Himmler’s deputy and
SD
Chief, Reinhard Heydrich, whom Hitler called ‘the man with an iron heart’. This spoke of a total solution,
Gesamtlösung
, and a final solution,
Endlösung
, ‘to solve the Jewish problem’. Goering defined ‘final’ to Heydrich verbally, repeating Hitler’s own verbal orders: according to the evidence given at his trial in 1961 by Adolf Eichmann, whom Heydrich appointed his deputy, it meant ‘the planned biological destruction of the Jewish race in the Eastern territories’. The operative date for the programme was April 1942, to give time for preparation.
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The executive conference, which settled the details, was organized by Eichmann and chaired by Heydrich at Wannsee on 20 January 1942. By now much evidence had been accumulated about killing methods. Since June 1941, on Himmler’s instructions, Rudolf Hoess, commandant of Camp ‘A’ at Auschwitz-Birkenau, had been experimenting. Shooting was too slow and messy. Carbon monoxide gas was found too slow also. Then in August 1941, using 500 Soviet
POWS
as guinea-pigs, Hoess conducted a mass-killing with Zyklon-B. This was made by a pest-control firm, Degesch, the vermin combatting corporation, a satellite of I.G.Farben. Discovering Zyklon-B, said Hoess, ‘set my mind at rest’.
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A huge s s order went out for the gas, with instructions to omit the ‘indicator’ component, which
warned human beings of the danger. I.G.Farben’s dividends from Degesch doubled, 1942–4, and at least one director knew of the use being made of the gas: the only protest from Degesch was that omitting the ‘indicator’ might endanger their patent.
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The final solution became fact from the spring of 1942. The first mass-gassings began at Belzec on 17 March 1942. This camp had the capacity to kill 15,000 a day. The next month came Sobibor (20,000 a day), Treblinka and Maidanek (25,000) and Auschwitz, which Hoess called ‘the greatest institution for human annihilation of all time’. The documentation on the genocide is enormous.
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The figures almost defy belief. By December 1941 Hitler had about 8,700,000 Jews under his rule. Of these he had by early 1945 murdered at least 5,800,000: 2,600,00 from Poland, 750,000 from Russia, 750,000 from Romania, 402,000 from Hungary, 277,000 from Czechoslovakia, 180,000 from Germany, 104,000 from Lithuania, 106,000 from the Netherlands, 83,000 from France, 70,000 from Latvia, 65,000 each from Greece and Austria, 60,000 from Yugoslavia, 40,000 from Bulgaria, 28,000 from Belgium and 9,000 from Italy. At Auschwitz, where 2 million were murdered, the process was run like a large-scale industrial operation. German firms submitted competitive tenders for the ‘processing unit’, which had to possess ‘capacity to dispose of 2,000 bodies every twelve hours’. The five furnaces were supplied by the German firm of Topt & Co of Erfurt. The gas chambers, described as ‘corpse cellars’, were designed by German Armaments Incorporated, to a specification requiring ‘gas-proof doors with rubber surround and observation post of double 8-millimetre glass, type 100/192’.
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The ground over the gassing-cellars was a well-kept lawn, broken by concrete mushrooms, covering shafts through which the ‘sanitary orderlies’ pushed the amethyst-blue crystals of Zyklon-B. The victims marched into the cellars, which they were told were baths, and did not at first notice the gas coming from perforations in metal columns:

Then they would feel the gas and crowd together away from the menacing columns and finally stampede towards the huge metal door with its little window, where they piled up in one blue clammy blood-spattered pyramid, clawing and mauling at each other even in death. Twenty-five minutes later the ‘exhauster’ electric pumps removed the gas-laden air, the great metal door slid open, and the men of the Jewish
Sonderkommando
entered, wearing gas-masks and gumboots and carrying hoses, for their first task was to remove the blood and defecations before dragging the clawing dead apart with nooses and hooks, the prelude to the ghastly search for gold and the removal of the teeth and hair which were regarded by the Germans as strategic materials. Then the journey by lift or rail-waggon to the furnaces, the mill that ground the clinker to fine ash, and the lorry that scattered the ashes in the stream of the Sola.
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In fact, to save money inadequate quantities of the expensive gas were often used, so the healthy victims were merely stunned and were then burned alive.
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The ‘final solution’, like most Nazi schemes, degenerated into administrative muddle and cross-purposes. As in the Soviet camps, internal discipline fell into the hands of professional criminals, the dreaded
Kapos.
Eichmann and Hoess gradually lost effective control. There was a fundamental conflict of aims in concentration camp policy. Hitler wanted all the Jews (and many other groups) murdered at any cost. He rejected savagely military complaints that supplies for the desperate battles on the eastern front were being held up by the need to transport millions of victims all across Europe (often in packed trains of up to one hundred trucks or carnages, holding tens of thousands). Himmler, on the other hand, wanted to expand his ss ‘state within a state’ into a huge industrial and construction empire, which during the war would provide an increasing proportion of Germany’s military supplies, and after it would build the infrastructure of Hitler’s planned eastern settlements, with their population of 150 million. The latter task would take twenty years and require 14,450,000 slave labourers, allowing for an annual death-rate of 10 per cent.
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