The Second World War (56 page)
German soldiers sent across the Mediterranean as reinforcements were excited and proud to join ‘
the small Afrika Korps
’ in the desert. A medical Unteroffizier looked favourably on the ‘colonizing work’ of the Italians in Tripoli. ‘Also the Italian warships escorting our convoy were dashing,’ he wrote home. But many initial impressions would not last. Out in the Libyan Desert, they found ‘always the same landscape, sand and stone’. The war in North Africa was ‘quite, quite different’ to that in Russia, he emphasized. Yet they too suffered from homesickness as someone played the harmonica in the evening under the stars and they thought of the spring to come at home in Germany.
Wannsee and the SS Archipelago
JULY 1941–JANUARY 1943
H
einrich Himmler’s energetic deputy was SS Obergruppenführer Reinhard Heydrich. He led the Reich Security Head Administration (RSHA), which directed the burgeoning SS empire. Heydrich, a tall, immaculate, violin-playing anti-semite, was rumoured to have more than a trace of Jewish blood which seemed only to intensify his hatred.
In the summer of 1941, Heydrich became irritated by the messy, adhoc ways of dealing with the ‘Jewish question’ and the lack of a central programme. As well as the massacres of Jews carried out by local security officials in the eastern territories, some SS satraps began to experiment with more industrial versions of extermination. In the Warthegau, unsatisfactory tests were carried out, pumping exhaust fumes into the interiors of sealed vans. In the Generalgouvernement, SS Polizeiführer Odilo Globocnik began to construct an extermination camp at Be
ec near Lublin. Himmler, meanwhile, was impatient to resolve the problems of psychological stress which the Einsatzgruppen suffered as a result of their work.
Heydrich had instructed Adolf Eichmann to draft an authorization which Göring signed on 31 July. The document instructed Heydrich to ‘
undertake, by emigration or evacuation
, a solution of the Jewish question’, and charged him ‘with making all necessary organizational, functional, and material preparations for a complete solution of the Jewish question in the German sphere of influence in Europe’. About a month later, Eichmann was summoned to Heydrich’s office, where he was told that Himmler had received instructions from Hitler to proceed with ‘the physical annihilation of the Jews’. Although senior Nazi officials occasionally liked to take the Führer’s name in vain to advance their own policies, it would be unthinkable in this case that Himmler or Heydrich would have dared to do so on quite so important a matter.
Earlier ideas that the total annihilation of the Jews would take place only after victory had been achieved were forgotten. One senses for the first time an unspoken anxiety that the opportunities presented by the war in the east should not be missed. Pressure also grew in Germany and in occupied countries, including France, that they should send their Jews eastwards. In Paris, the SS ordered the French police to round up French and foreign Jews, an initial operation which on 10 May 1941
sent 4,323 people to two holding camps.
On 18 September, an instruction from Himmler revealed that the ghettos were now to be used as ‘storage’ camps. More than half a million Jews had died of starvation and disease in the Polish ghettos, but this was seen as far too slow a process. Further discussion showed that the plan was to put all Jews in concentration camps. But even in a totalitarian state there were legalistic problems to overcome, such as how to deal with Jews possessing foreign passports, and what to do with those married to Aryans.
On 29 November 1941, Heydrich issued an invitation to senior officials from the Ostministerium and other ministries and agencies to discuss a common policy with him and representatives of the RSHA. This was due to take place on 9 December. At the last moment, the meeting was postponed. Marshal Zhukov’s great counter-attack had been launched on 5 December, and two days later the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor. Time was needed to assess the implications of these momentous events, and then on 11 December Hitler announced to the Reichstag his declaration of war on the United States. The following day, he summoned Nazi Party leaders to a meeting in the Reich Chancellery. There, he referred to his prophecy of 30 January 1939, that if a world war ensued, ‘
the instigators of this
bloody conflict will thus have to pay for it with their lives’.
With Hitler’s declaration of war and the Japanese attacks in the Far East, the conflict had become truly global. In Hitler’s distorted logic, the Jews had to suffer for their guilt. ‘
The Führer is determined
to make a clean sweep,’ Goebbels wrote in his diary for 12 December. ‘He prophesied to the Jews that if they were once again to cause a world war, the result would be their own destruction. That was no figure of speech. The world war is here, the destruction of Jewry must be the inevitable consequence. This question is to be viewed without sentimentality.’
Less than a week later, Hitler had a meeting with Himmler to discuss the ‘Jewish question’. Yet despite a heightened, even feverish, atmosphere, when Hitler frequently referred back to his pre-war prediction that the Jews were bringing their own destruction upon themselves, he still does not appear to have made an irrevocable decision on a ‘Final Solution’. Despite his apocalyptic diatribes against the Jews, he does seem to have been remarkably reluctant to hear details of mass killings, rather as he shied away from any image of suffering in battle or from bombing. His desire to keep violence abstract was a significant psychological paradox in one who had done more than almost anyone else in history to promote it.
After the delay, Heydrich’s conference finally took place on 20 January 1942, in offices of the RSHA in a large villa on the shore of the Wannsee on the south-western edge of Berlin. SS Obergruppenführer Heydrich
presided, and SS Obersturmbannführer Eichmann took notes. Apart from other members of the RSHA, most of those present were senior representatives from the occupied territories, the Reichschancellery, and four
Staatssekretäre
, the head officials of key ministries. They included Dr Roland Freisler of the justice ministry, who later became notorious as the persecutor of the July plotters. The foreign ministry was represented by Unterstaatssekretär
Martin Luther
, the namesake of a far more famous and influential anti-semite. He arrived with a carefully prepared memorandum entitled ‘Requests and Ideas of the Foreign Ministry in Connection with the Intended Final Solution of the Jewish Question in Europe’. Just over half of those present had doctorates, and a significant minority were lawyers.
Heydrich began by asserting his powers for the preparation of the Final Solution over all territories and official functions. He presented statistics on all Jewish communities throughout Europe, including even British Jews, who would be ‘evacuated to the east’. Their numbers–his estimated total was eleven million–would first be whittled down through hard labour, then the survivors would be ‘treated accordingly’. Elderly Jews and those who had fought for the Kaiser would be sent to the show camp of Theresienstadt in Bohemia.
Luther, on behalf of the foreign ministry, urged caution and delay in the rounding up of Jews in countries such as Denmark and Norway, where this might provoke an international reaction. Much time was then spent arguing over the complicated question of those of partial Jewish descent–the so-called
Mischlinge
–and those married to Aryans. Perhaps predictably, the representative of the Generalgouvernement urged that its Jews should be dealt with first. Finally, while they drank brandy after lunch, the participants discussed the various methods available of achieving their objective. But the minutes of the meeting retained the usual euphemisms, such as ‘evacuation’ and ‘resettlement’.
One thing, however, was clear to everyone involved. All ideas of a ‘territorial solution’ had come to nothing. With Stalin’s erratic general offensive following the Battle of Moscow, there was no suitable area of the occupied Soviet territories where the Jews could be dumped to starve. The only certain solution now seemed to be industrialized slaughter.
A great impatience to get on with tackling the task permeated the Nazi administration, both in Berlin and, especially, in Frank’s fiefdom of the Generalgouvernement. And Gauleiter Arthur Greiser wanted to eliminate 35,000 Poles suffering from tuberculosis in the Warthegau. SS lawyers even discussed the possibility of killing German and other prisoners who had the misfortune to look ‘
like the miscarriages of hell
’. During the ‘Shoah by bullets’, ‘
the killers in the occupied USSR
moved to [find] the victims’,
but in the ‘Shoah by gas’ ‘the victims were brought to the killers’. This process began to be put into effect initially in the extermination camps of Chemno (or Kulmhof, due west of Warsaw) where gas vans were used, and continued in Beec, Treblinka and Sobibór (all in the eastern part of the Generalgouvernement), and then Auschwitz-Birkenau (southwest of Kraków) in the summer.
A formidable administrative apparatus was set up to cope with the Jews who had not yet died in the ghettos or been shot. Eichmann, who was responsible for rounding up all the Jewish populations outside Poland, worked closely with Gruppenführer Heinrich Müller, the head of the Gestapo. Eichmann, another who loved the violin, played chess with Müller once a week while they continued to mull over their immense task. The most essential element in the operation was transport.