Ostkrieg (14 page)

Not as well understood but no less significant, the material gains secured by the seizure of Lebensraum in the east would profit not only the state and heavy industry but everyone in Germany as well. Nazi propaganda had long promoted the notion that the key to increasing the German standard of living was securing resources commensurate with the racial value of the Volk. The war for Lebensraum was, thus, not one for “throne and altar,” as Goebbels put it dismissively, but one

for grain and bread, for a well-rounded breakfast, lunch, and dinner, a war for the achievement of the material prerequisites for the solution of the social question, the question of housing and street construction, the construction of a military, commercial, and cruise fleet, the construction of automobiles and tractors, of theaters and cinemas for the people even in the tiniest village, a war for raw materials, for rubber, for iron, and ores. . . . We want finally, just once, to cash in. . . . In the immense fields of the east sways the golden grain, enough and more than enough, to nourish our people and all of Europe. . . . That is our war aim.

Goebbels expressed well the feeling, as Adam Tooze has put it, of “beleaguered poverty” that afflicted Germans in the interwar period, a fierce resentment at economic inequality and the stranglehold the “Anglo-Saxons” had on the resources of the world. Hitler had long insisted that the German people deserved better, that the principal domestic goal of National Socialism was to raise the individual's living standard. Ultimately, however, this could be accomplished, Hitler believed, only through conquest of the vast resources of European Russia. That had been the lesson of World War I. Only by securing Lebensraum within the “area of our own weapons” could Germany become economically secure and prosperous.
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At the height of his power, and in order to celebrate the eighth anniversary of his appointment as chancellor, Hitler on 30 January 1941 delivered a rousing speech in the Berlin Sportpalast, one that left him in a radiant mood. And why not? He mocked the hypocrisy of the British, noting gleefully that their empire had, in fact, been acquired and maintained through force, that Britain and not Germany controlled vast areas of the globe, and that Britain had used its power to the detriment of
Germany. The latter had been the lesson of 1918, he fumed, when Germany had been deceived and undone by both the British and the internal November criminals. That this centuries-old swindle was changing, that Germany was breaking free of the tyranny of the old order, the Führer boasted, resulted from the liberating energy and dynamism of National Socialism. The capitalist plutocrats, however, motivated by Jewish hatred, were ruthless. Not only had they intervened unnecessarily in the war, but they now also prolonged the conflict in the futile hope that Germany would somehow collapse, as in 1918. This, however, would not happen, Hitler promised, and then reminded the audience of his earlier prophecy:

And I do not want to forget the warning that I gave on 1 September 1939 [
sic
] in the German Reichstag, that if Jewry were to plunge the world into war, the role of Jewry would be finished in Europe. They may laugh about it today, as they laughed before about my prophecies. The coming months and years will prove that I prophesied rightly in this case too. . . . [Other nations] . . . will one day recognize the greater inner enemy, and they too will then enter with us into a great common front . . . against Jewish-International exploitation and destruction of nations.
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What exactly Hitler meant by this scarcely veiled threat—expulsion from Europe, confinement in ghettos, deportation across the Urals to Asia, or extermination—cannot now be determined. Perhaps he himself had no clear idea what he intended to do. Significantly, however, although unsure how the role of Jewry would be finished, he was certain that his prophesy would prove correct. Characteristically, as well, and highly revealing for a man with a photographic memory, Hitler on this and subsequent occasions recalled his original prophesy being made not on 30 January 1939 but on the day that war in Europe began, as if in his mind international Jewry had, indeed, perpetrated the conflict.

Most likely Hitler intended this as yet another warning to the United States to stay out of the struggle since Roosevelt had just introduced his Lend-Lease bill into Congress. Still, the Jewish question was never far from Hitler's mind, and it would have been reinforced through regular contact with radical anti-Semites in the leadership such as Joseph Goebbels as well as anti-Jewish films such as the “documentary”
Der ewige Jude
, a scurrilous hate film that had premiered in Berlin just two months earlier. Thus, even as military and civilian planners, on the basis of concerns about the insufficient food supply, began to envisage the impending war
in Russia as one of annihilation, a similar radicalizing process was occurring among those responsible for solving the Jewish problem. With the Madagascar Plan a nonstarter, Hitler now authorized Heydrich to come up with a new plan for removing the Jews from German-dominated Europe. Theodore Dannecker of Eichmann's office noted on 21 January 1941, “According to the will of the Führer, after the war a final solution of the Jewish question within the parts of Europe under German rule or control will be implemented.” To this end, Dannecker wrote, Heydrich had received orders to “submit a proposal for the final solution . . . the success of which can only be guaranteed through the most careful of preparations. This preparation must include the preliminary work necessary for a general deportation of all Jews, as well as detailed plans for resettlement measures in a territory yet to be determined.” Heydrich evidently envisioned placing the Jews in the General Government area of Poland but, according to Eichmann, met fierce resistance from Hans Frank. Nonetheless, Heydrich instructed top officials in the RSHA in January 1941 to prepare for a large police action in the east. Shortly after his late January 1941 speech, Hitler also discussed the Jewish question with a group of close associates, remarking that he was thinking of new, “not exactly more friendly” schemes to replace the Madagascar project.
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With Hitler pressured both by Nazi leaders in Germany to deport Jews from the Reich and by administrators in Poland who struggled to cope with the horribly overcrowded ghettos, the glimmer of a truly radical solution to the Jewish problem began to emerge. The rapid defeat of the Soviet Union would open myriad new prospects, not least the deportation of the Jews of Europe to the harsh, inhospitable outer extremes of European Russia or even across the Ural Mountains. Such a territorial solution certainly would result in the deaths of millions of people, but Nazi planners already assumed vast numbers of “superfluous eaters” would be eliminated in any case.
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The twin wars of Hitler's ideological obsessions—for Lebensraum and to solve the Jewish question—began in spring 1941 to converge in German planning. Final victory would make possible the grand demographic projects envisioned by Hitler and to be implemented by Himmler and Heydrich, both eager in any case to expand their empire. Earlier, Hitler had thought only of solving the Jewish problem in Germany; now, once the war had been won, it could be a European-wide solution.

Although no decision had yet been made regarding the Final Solution, the extermination of the Jews of Europe, Hitler was clearly thinking in terms of a destructive racial war. The prerequisite for achieving his goals, the successful defeat of the Soviet Union, necessarily involved
the army in this war of annihilation. On 26 February, General Thomas, the Wehrmacht's economic expert, had learned from Goering that one of the first objectives of a German occupation would be “to finish off the Bolshevik leaders as soon as possible.” Less than a week later, on 3 March, Jodl, the chief of staff of the OKW, met with Hitler to discuss the guidelines for occupation policy. The Führer stressed that this was a showdown “between two world views. . . . The Jewish-Bolshevik intelligentsia, up to now the oppressor of the people, must be eliminated. . . . These tasks are so difficult that one can not burden the army with them. . . . The necessity of immediately rendering harmless all Bolshevik leaders and commissars [justified these measures].” Accordingly, on 13 March the OKW issued “Guidelines for Special Areas concerning Directive No. 21 (Operation Barbarossa),” which created a very shallow zone of army operations behind which “the Reichsführer SS [Himmler] is entrusted on behalf of the Führer with special tasks . . . that result from the necessity of finally resolving the conflict between two opposing political systems. Within the framework of these tasks, the Reichsführer SS will act independently and on his own responsibility.”
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Nor could army leaders harbor any illusion as to the nature of these tasks. At a conference on 17 March, Hitler again revealed his murderous intentions. “The intelligentsia put in by Stalin,” he emphasized, “must be exterminated. The controlling machinery of the Russian empire must be smashed. . . . Force must be used in its most brutal form. . . . The nation will break up once the functionaries are eliminated.” On 26 March, Heydrich presented Goering his proposal regarding the solution of the Jewish question, noted the Reichsmarshall's request for a manual instructing the troops on the threat posed by the political commissars and Jews, and received Goering's assurances that the army would not interfere in operations behind the front. That same day the army negotiator, Quartermaster-General Wagner, and Heydrich also agreed on a draft, issued as an order by Brauchitsch on 28 April, pertaining to the responsibilities of the Einsatzgruppen, the special commandos of the Security Police. While the murder squads were to carry out their tasks on their own responsibility, the army would furnish logistic support and also coordinate its activities with an army liaison officer. This agreement made the army command complicit in mass murder since, given their prior experience with SS killing squads in Poland, they could hardly have had any illusions about SS intentions. The day after initial agreement had been reached with the SS, in fact, Brauchitsch told senior commanders that the troops “have to realize that this struggle is being waged by one race against another, and proceed with the necessary harshness.”
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By March at the latest, then, Heydrich, with the agreement of army leaders, had begun preparing for a territorial solution of the Jewish problem that envisioned the rapid deaths of very large numbers of people.

If some in the army leadership still failed to get the message, Hitler made it crystal clear on 30 March when he addressed a gathering of some two hundred officers for over two hours. Halder's notes indicated that no one in attendance could doubt the Führer's aims or what was expected of the army. After beginning with the familiar strategic justification of the invasion and stressing the economic importance of securing the resources of Russia, Hitler then bluntly laid out the ideological aims of the war:

Clash of two ideologies
. Crushing denunciation of Bolshevism, identified with a social criminality. Communism is an enormous danger for our future. We must forget the concept of comradeship between soldiers. . . . This is a war of extermination. . . . We do not wage war to preserve the enemy. . . .

War against Russia:
Extermination of the Bolshevist commissars and of the Communist intelligentsia. . . . This is no job for military courts. The individual troop commanders must know the issues at stake. They must be leaders in this fight. The troops must fight back with the methods with which they are attacked. Commissars and GPU [secret police] men are criminals and must be dealt with as such. . . .

This war will be different from the war in the west. In the east, harshness today means lenience in the future. Commanders must make the sacrifice of overcoming their personal scruples.

Although some generals later claimed that they expressed shock and outrage at the lunch that followed, General Warlimont admitted after the war that, far from protesting to Hitler, no one even mentioned his demands during the meal.
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So little shocked were the generals, in fact, that the next day preparation began on guidelines, in accordance with Hitler's demands, for the treatment of political functionaries and commissars. Over the next two months, Hitler's intentions for the conduct of the war in the east were given shape in a series of orders that formalized the army's acceptance of mass murder. In late April, a draft order authorized troops to combat guerrilla activity through “all means at their disposal,” while commanders were freed from any obligation to prosecute troops for criminal actions against civilians, except when necessary to maintain order. “In
judging such deeds,” the draft noted, “it had to be taken into consideration that the collapse of 1918, the later suffering of the German people, and the struggle against National Socialism with the countless blood sacrifices of the movement were clearly traced back to the influence of Bolshevism.” This draft, modified on 6 May and signed by Keitel on 13 May, explicitly granted German troops the right to use any and all measures against Soviet citizens, including collective reprisals, while prohibiting the prosecution of soldiers for offenses committed “out of bitterness over the atrocities . . . of the carriers of the Jewish-Bolshevik system.”
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Murderous actions against Russian civilians, then, were to be seen as just retribution for earlier misdeeds allegedly committed against Germans or understandable outrage at the excesses of a criminal element.

At the same time, another draft circulated that sought to define the army's role in the treatment of political leaders and commissars. The OKW issued a first draft, “Guidelines for the Behavior of the Troops in Russia,” on 19 May that again emphasized, “Bolshevism is the deadly enemy of the National Socialist German people. Germany's struggle is directed against this subversive ideology and its functionaries . . . [and] requires ruthless and energetic action against Bolshevik agitators, guerrillas, saboteurs, and Jews, and the total elimination of all active or passive resistance.” Keitel then signed the final version of the notorious “Commissar Order” on 6 June. Typically, it began with a justificatory statement: “In the struggle against Bolshevism, we cannot count on the enemy acting according to the principles of humanity or international law. In particular the political commissars at all levels, as the real leaders of resistance, can be expected to treat prisoners of war in a hate-filled, cruel, and inhuman manner.” Having attributed to the enemy the very treatment the Germans themselves planned to inflict, the directive went on: