War and Remembrance (28 page)

Goring’s letter used the words, “a final solution to the Jewish question.” Since the exposure of the Protocol, this expression, “The Final Solution,”
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has come to take on unpleasant overtones in anti-German literature. Heydrich often used a more precise term, “the territorial solution.” This term will be used here.

The Territorial Solution

Three alternative solutions to the Jewish question had emerged in policy analyses over the years: the
emigration
solution, the
expulsion
solution, and the
territorial
solution.

At first the Nazis believed that once they took power, most of the Jews would emigrate. But the German Jews, as it turned out, were reluctant to abandon their homes and businesses, and the graves of their ancestors, even after Hitler’s Nuremberg laws made them pariahs. They hoped that the Nazi regime would prove a passing storm. Elsewhere in Europe few Jews seemed to believe that war would come, or that if it did, Germany would win. As a result, far more Jews remained in Germany than left. Outside our borders, Jewish emigration was insignificant.

But even for the few who wanted to leave, the emigration solution hit a snag. If Hebrews were no longer welcome in Germany, it developed that they were not much more welcome anywhere else. Year by year after Hitler took power, western Europe stiffened its restrictions against admitting
Jews. The sparsely settled vast lands of the New World, led by the “haven of oppressed mankind,” the U.S.A., clanged iron doors shut in the Jews’ faces. This was a black chapter in the tale of man’s inhumanity to man.

When it became clear to the Hitler regime that the Jews would not emigrate and would find
ix
hard at all events to get in elsewhere, the
expulsion
solution came forward: i.e., forcibly removing them. The awkward question remained: where to?

Of all the expulsion ideas, the one most prominent in the surviving documents is the
Madagascar Plan.
The forcible resettling of Europe’s Jews on this French island of South Africa received some study. But in view of the gross difficulties — lack of shipping to transport eleven million people, enemy control of the seas, stupendous cost, offense to Vichy France whose collaboration we were seeking, and nonviability of this wild tropical island for Europeans — it is hard to say how serious this project was. When the navy indicated to Hitler that the British might one day land in Madagascar to protect their Indian Ocean sea lanes, all talk of settling the Jews there ended. The Führer declared that the British would only “let the bacillus loose again on the world.”

Thus it developed that the problem would have to be solved on European soil: hence,
territorial solution.
At Wannsee, Heydrich lifted the veil of secrecy, so that the federal bureaucrats would understand plainly, once for all, what the nature of their job was.

The Program

This draconic program should certainly have had no place in the twentieth century. Alas! Cologne, Dresden, Katyn, and Hiroshima showed that this kind of moral failure in wartime was certainly not confined to Germany. The territorial solution of the Jewish question was a harebrained scheme dreamed up by irresponsible and inept Berlin desk officials. Administratively, it was from start to finish a mess. Like most projects dreamed up in the comfortable suites of a government building, it had about it a pecious neatness and clarity, but in the field it broke down. All too many Jews did perish in the process, but on the whole it was a monumental fiasco.

The key to the territorial solution lay in our vast 1941 conquests.
The occupied eastern areas were at last the long-sought place where the Jews could be sent.
For here no government had to be consulted, and no local population had to be mollified. It was a thinly settled half-continent under German guns.

Heydrich outlined a most plausible and simple plan. The Jews of Europe would be “cleaned up from west to east,” temporarily collected in transit ghettos, and then shipped to the Occupied Territories in huge labor columns, separated by sexes. There they would build roads, of which this
backward region stood in great need for military purposes. In the course of this action “a great part of the Jews would undoubtedly be eliminated by natural causes,” that is, by poor conditions and debilitating labor. As for the few who survived the ordeal, Heydrich said bluntly that they would have to be “treated accordingly,” since as the tough product of natural selection they would otherwise constitute a spore for the rebirth of the Jewish people. Such was the unrelenting ideology of the government of the time.

The unanimous reaction of the cabinet officials was extreme enthusiasm, and a variety of suggestions for improving or speeding up the plan. The conference ended on a note of cordial agreement, and an excellent and convivial luncheon followed in the usual high bureaucratic style.

But the scheme collapsed almost at the outset. The labor columns were never organized. The roads were never built. From 1943 on in our forced-march retreats from Russia, the army felt keenly the impact of this failure. True, the Jews were collected all over Europe and shipped eastward, to transit ghettos of Poland. But there they stayed —a colossal prison population, an immense drain on German resources, and a festering rear-area threat both to health and to security.

No subsequent SS protocol has survived to explain why Heydrich’s plan was abandoned. The territorial solution was modified in a haphazard way to become the construction of big factories near the ever-swelling transit ghettos, and the use of Jewish forced labor on the spot. The hoped-for natural diminution was sought through reduced nutrition, drastic work schedules, etc., etc. But the uprooting and resettling of a population of eleven million people proved an almost unimaginable administrative task, quite beyond the Berlin bunglers in charge of the program, with the result that half the Jews, as has been stated, escaped elimination. No more than five and a half, or by the highest estimate six, million were caught by the scheme.

The Mercy Deaths

We still do not know exactly when or how the switch to euthanasia (mercy death) in gas chambers occurred. This difficult aspect has been widely distorted and misunderstood.

Heydrich’s plan turned out to be a vast folly, projected by soft-living bureaucrats not experienced, as soldiers are, in large-scale suffering, privation, and death. The resources of the human spirit and body are remarkable. Prisoners of war endure wretched conditions for years. They learn to eat or drink almost anything. The demands of their depleted bodies shrink almost to zero, in the natural urge to live on. All these phenomena occurred in the transit ghettos. The slow rate of attrition became worrisome. Plagues broke out, and plague germs do not distinguish between captors and prisoners.
The weakened Jews therefore became a standing menace to the local populations and to our armed forces.

These developments apparently brought forward the thought: since these people were in any case condemned to death, would not a quick, unexpected, painless end free them from long woes? And would it not simultaneously relieve our forces of a clogging problem, the proportions of which had not been realized in time?

Here, in these essentially humane considerations, lay the reason for the gas chambers. Rescuing the Jews was out of the question. Adolf Hitler had decreed their end, and his will was law. One could only carry it out in the most decent, practical, and civilized fashion. Much has been made of the undeniable fact that a million children were thus gassed to death, and it is an unfortunate episode to recall. Yet starvation would have been a slower, more painful demise for the children, and their parents would have endured the misery of watching them waste away.

As for the spoliation of the arriving Jews, and even of the dead bodies of these unfortunates, such practices cannot be extenuated. The SS amassed several billion marks’ worth of gold, jewelry, and goods in this fashion, but whether the German war effort benefitted remains doubtful, for the Himmler-Heydrich agency was a high-handed and corrupt one. The story of soap manufacture from the bodies was, of course, a baseless British fabrication from the First World War.

Military Effects: (1) Manpower

This was not a rear-area matter of no military weight. The territorial solution materially damaged our armed effort.

The worst damage was
in.manpower.
Large numbers of healthy German men were diverted from combat roles to the herding of Jews. Round-up squads, camp guards, etc., were recruited from local populations, but even so enough Germans for several divisions may have been fussing with Jews in bureaus and in camps, instead of fighting.

The manpower shortage was also chronic in our factories. The prisoners of war and the forced laborers from occupied lands gave halfhearted service at best, and they persisted in sabotage no matter how many were shot. But the Jews constituted a vast pool of clever workmen and artisans, or professional men and women quick to learn any skilled labor. They were so used, in fact, until the inexorable round-up squads came to ship them off. They committed very little sabotage. Rather, they displayed a desperate anxiety to preserve their own lives and those of their loved ones by turning in superlative work. We thus lost the labor of several million workers of high reliability, motivation, and productivity.

Finally, it was fashionable under National Socialism to sneer at the
fighting capacity of the Jews. Indeed, under SS handling they appeared a docile and vulnerable lot. But that this was a condition capable of startling reversal has been shown by postwar events in Palestine. How well we could have used on the eastern front one or two million fighters of the calibre of the present-day Jewish armies! At the time the idea would have seemed a joke. Today, when it is too late, we can only wonder.

Military Effects:
(2)
Supplies and Services

The railroading burden was oppressive and continuous. No matter how tightly the trains were packed — and that this was carried to excess is common knowledge —the tying up of rolling stock remained a grave problem. There never were sufficient trains and locomotives for the fighting fronts. Combat divisions sat shivering at rear depots while trains devoted to shuttling the Jews rolled eastward jam-packed and went back empty, cut off from use for any other purpose. This noncombat usage had a secret overriding priority such as in America was given only to making the atomic bomb.

Military Effects: (3) Morale

While the ultimate intent of the policy remained secret, many German army formations did see the process in action. That is a matter of record. Regrettably, some units were also coopted to assist not only in transporting or guarding the Jews, but in the liquidation process.

Local army commanders sometimes supplied and transported the mobile execution squads, since they were on government business. These SS squads, called
Einsatzgruppen
(Special Action Units), had entered Russia close behind our advancing armies. They had orders to shoot political commissars without trial, in order to nip partisan activity in the bud; this was the well-known “Commissar Order” of March 1941. They also were instructed to liquidate forthwith, as a prime menace to German security, all the Jews they could round up. Local populations gladly volunteered to join the
Einsatzgruppen
against their Jews, with episodes of frightfulness resulting, especially in Lithuania, Rumania, and Hungary. By the more orderly German squads themselves, hundreds of thousands of Jews were systematically shot within areas of army cognizance.

German soldiers could not always avert their eyes from these happenings. Isolated instances occurred of misguided local army commanders allowing or even ordering their units to take part. Thus authentic photographs exist of men in Wehrmacht uniform, shooting Jewish women holding babes in their arms. Such occurrences unquestionably spread in our ranks a certain demoralization, and a questioning of our aims in fighting the war. When this happens in an army, its fighting spirit has been injured. Like so many aspects of the territorial solution, one cannot state this morale
damage in our army in percentage points, or other meaningful figures. It was, however, a real factor on the eastern front. Like defeatism, self-doubt is an invisible but heavy weight on a war effort.

A soldier is trained to the job of killing. It is his life against the enemy’s; that is soldiering at its cleanest. Soldiers sometimes have to do sadder, dirtier jobs. They must shoot spies and partisans who are standing blindfolded and helpless. On orders, they must sometimes hang boys, girls, and women, who make good partisan fighters. But that does not mean that the soldier — especially a German soldier, trained to decency and honor, as much as to hardness in the field — can always stomach such work. What the Nazis did, in this regard, to our German youth is hard to forget or to excuse.

The Nature of the Enemy

We come therefore to the heart of the whole matter: was the solution, with all these drawbacks, nevertheless an imperative wartime security measure? Were the Jews the ultimate security menace to the Reich that Hitler postulated? Within this question lies another question —
“Which Reich?”

Ever since the French Revolution two irreconcilable Reich concepts had emerged in our philosophy and in our politics:

(a) The
liberal
concept: a peaceful Reich universalist in culture, with freedom for the Jews, the establishment of bourgeois democracy in imitation of France and England, and a subordinate military position for Germany.