by Ian Kershaw
But it is worth noting that Weizsäcker was not imagining that Germany’s plight would have been drastically altered had Hitler not been so foolhardy in his seizure of the moment to plunge into an unnecessary declaration. Weizsäcker does not appear to have doubted that the war with the United States would now ensue. His difference from Hitler was on preferring to be the object of the declaration, rather than making it, as he thought, as an unnecessary gesture to Japan. But it was not a presumption that, by refraining from declaring war on the United States, Germany would be able to avoid that war. Weizsäcker, every bit as much as Hitler, now expected Germany to be embroiled in conflict with America.
The thinking on the other side of the Atlantic was similar. In fact, on the very evening after the dramatic events at Pearl Harbor, President Roosevelt dined with members of his Cabinet and top military advisers to discuss the action now needed. A declaration of war next morning against Japan had already been decided on, and in the meantime the Japanese had, belatedly and formally, declared war on the United States. Roosevelt and his advisers considered whether they should now declare war on other members of the Axis. ‘We assumed, however, that it was inevitable that Germany would declare war on us,’ Cordell Hull, the Secretary of State, recalled. ‘The intercepted Japanese messages passing back and forth between Berlin and Tokyo’–read by the Americans through their MAGIC codebreaker–‘had given us to understand that there was a definite undertaking on this point between the two Governments. We therefore decided to wait and let Hitler and Mussolini issue their declarations first. Meantime we would take no chances and would act, for example in the Atlantic, on the assumption that we were at war with the European section of the Axis as well.’188
In the absence of the rash German move, could the United States have sustained the status quo in the Atlantic, and avoided a declaration of her own? If he had gone to Congress to seek a declaration of war on Germany when Japan had been the aggressor against America, Roosevelt would doubtless have encountered some serious opposition.189 That in itself was a deterrent to making the attempt. He was duly cautious, and had already resisted pressure from Henry Stimson, the Secretary of War, to include Germany and Italy alongside Japan in the request to Congress immediately after Pearl Harbor.190 Hitler conveniently eliminated that problem for him.
But even had he not done so, American moves towards full involvement in the war in the near future would have been likely. The Roosevelt administration had consistently linked Germany and Italy together with Japan as a joint threat to the free world. And the Atlantic had always been the first priority. When he returned from delivering his message to Congress inviting the declaration of war on Japan, Roosevelt immediately reminded his advisers that the main target remained Germany.191 It followed that the war could not be restricted to the Pacific, despite the navy’s preference for a concentration on that theatre. Though it can only be speculation, from the tenor of Hull’s remarks it even seems at least conceivable that Roosevelt, had he not been aware of what was happening in Berlin, might have exploited the post-Pearl Harbor climate to take America into full-scale war also against Germany and Italy. Again, the logic of the Victory Program, which had been leaked in December, meant that the United States would, before too long, be sending a major land force to fight in Europe. Roosevelt’s military advisers had always insisted that this was the only way to be rid of Hitler.
Roosevelt had for his part always been adamant that only the removal of Hitler guaranteed the future safety and freedom of the United States. Backing out of the battle for the Atlantic, retreating from lend-lease supplies to Britain and leaving Hitler a free hand on the European continent in order to concentrate on the Pacific would have contradicted not only Roosevelt’s professed aims and ideals in foreign policy, as he had enunciated them since the mid-1930s, but would also have flown in the face of the consistent advice he had received from his military leaders for months, and the concrete, extensive planning that had followed from it. Roosevelt might, it is true, still not have wanted to risk proposing a formal declaration to Congress in December 1941, though the circumstances, after Pearl Harbor, were probably as propitious as could be imagined. However, it is hard to see that the shadow-fighting in the Atlantic could have continued indefinitely at the level of autumn 1941, even if Germany had not declared war.
Hitler’s decision, prior to the declaration of war and not dependent upon it, to reverse previous policy and unleash his U-boats on American shipping in itself altered the uneasy stalemate that had existed in the Atlantic. In the months that followed, the German intensification of the U-boat war took hostilities deep into American coastal waters and faced Allied shipping with serious and mounting problems.192 These were compounded because of the demands of the Pacific–immediately after Pearl Harbor Roosevelt had been forced to transfer some warships from the Atlantic to counter the Japanese threat193–and plainly had to be contested with all power and urgency. The American war against Germany, in other words, even if it had stayed ‘undeclared’, could not have remained at the level of autumn 1941. An American move to full-scale, all-out conflict at some point in the coming months, if not straight away, would have been well-nigh unavoidable.194 Before much longer, it might be reasonably surmised, Roosevelt would have engaged the United States in all-out hostilities with Germany, whether through a formal declaration or, failing that, by extension of the presidential prerogative to the point where a formal declaration would merely have confirmed existing reality. Either way, Germany and the United States would soon have been at war.
Perversely, therefore, Hitler’s decision to declare war on the United States on 11 December 1941, often seen not only as baffling but as a hopelessly foolhardy choice, one which finally condemned Germany to calamity, was probably less fateful than many of the political decisions we have been considering. That is to say, it was not a deciding moment in taking Germany down the path of catastrophe when triumph might have beckoned had a declaration of war been avoided. A different, less headstrong leader might indeed have hesitated, to await developments and, in particular, see how America would react. But, assuming such a leader had taken Germany this far and was not prepared to end the war in some sort of compromise settlement at this point, such an alternative decision would in all probability not have greatly altered history.
Germany did, in fact, recover, remarkably, from the winter crisis before Moscow, and went on to attain new, and in some ways surprising, military success in the first half of 1942. A new big offensive to take the Caucasus oilfields was launched that summer, though with weaker forces than had formed the ‘Barbarossa’ attack the previous year. Only in the autumn did it become clear, as the terrible battle of Stalingrad ran its course, that Hitler’s Reich was in the throes of a cataclysmic defeat which, alongside the massive reverses in north Africa (where the American-led landing, ‘Operation Torch’, had taken place in early November), proved the unmistakable turning point of the war. Already by then, in the faraway Pacific the decisive battle of Midway in June 1942 had broken Japanese sea-power. This, followed by the hard-earned American victory at Guadalcanal in the Solomon Islands, finally sealed in January 1943, turned the tide of the Pacific War.195 There was a long, long way to go, in the Far East and in Europe. But there was no way back for either Germany or Japan. Both were now increasingly exposed to the seemingly limitless supplies of men and arms from America.
The entry into the war of the United States at the end of 1941, as it had done in 1917, massively tipped the scales. American might, added to British forces, in the west, together with the relentless steamroller of the Red Army in the east, eventually crushed Germany. But by December 1941 the German gamble for world power was in any case fundamentally lost. Churchill certainly thought so–at least, retrospectively he said he did.196 And Hitler himself fleetingly appears in autumn 1941 to have contemplated for the first time the possibility of defeat in remarking (a point to which he would return in the face of catastrophe in early 1945) that if in the en
d the German people should not prove strong enough, then Germany deserved to go under and be destroyed by the stronger power.197 It was a momentary flickering, but revealing for all that. Beneath the veneer, Hitler seems to have recognized that his chances of total victory had by now all but evaporated. The plan for the eastern campaign had collapsed. And war with the United States was now as good as inevitable.
He anticipated this inevitability by declaring war himself. It was a characteristic attempt to wrest back the initiative through a bold move. But for the first time it was a move doomed from the very outset to failure.
10
Berlin/East Prussia, Summer–Autumn 1941
Hitler Decides to Kill the Jews
They said to us in Berlin: why are you giving us all this trouble? We can’t do anything with them in the Ostland or in the Reich Commissariat [the Ukraine] either. Liquidate them yourselves!…We must destroy the Jews wherever we find them and wherever it is possible to do so.
Hans Frank, Governor General of Poland, 16 December 1941
On 12 December 1941, the day after he had announced Germany’s declaration of war on the United States of America, Hitler addressed his party leaders in the Reich Chancellery in Berlin. After a lengthy survey of the state of the war, he turned to the position of the Jews. His Propaganda Minister, Joseph Goebbels, recorded what he had to say: ‘With regard to the Jewish Question, the Führer is determined to make a clean sweep. He prophesied that if they brought about another world war, they would experience their annihilation. This was no empty talk. The world war is here. The annihilation of the Jews must be the necessary consequence. This question is to be viewed without sentimentality. We’re not to have sympathy with the Jews, but only sympathy with our German people. If the German people has again now sacrificed around 160,000 dead in the eastern campaign, the instigators of this bloody conflict will have to pay for it with their own lives.’1
By this time the Jews had been ‘paying with their own lives’, as Hitler saw it, for almost six months. Across the whole of the summer, since the invasion of the Soviet Union on 22 June, killing units of the German Security Police had slaughtered Jews in their tens of thousands, starting mainly with the men but before long including women and children. Just one of the four Einsatzgruppen or task forces, sent in behind the rapidly advancing Wehrmacht to wipe out ‘subversive elements’, rampaging through the Baltic, had murdered a precisely calculated 229,052 Jews by the end of the year.2 That was the first horrific phase of genocide. But by the autumn the genocide had extended beyond the occupied parts of the Soviet Union and was rapidly entering a second, wider and ultimately comprehensive phase. This aimed at nothing less than the physical extermination of the Jews of the whole of German-occupied Europe–what the Nazis would label the ‘Final Solution of the Jewish Question’.
The full implementation of the extermination programme would not get under way until the spring and summer of 1942, when the death-mills in the killing centres of occupied Poland commenced their industrial-style gassing operations and the dragnet became gradually stretched across the whole of Europe, east to west, north to south. The last ghastly stage of the mass transports and immense production-line gassings would not take place until the summer of 1944, when, with Germany forced ever closer to inexorable defeat, almost half a million Hungarian Jews were murdered in the gas chambers of Auschwitz-Birkenau. Even then, the torment of the Jews was far from over. Tens of thousands were still to die in the horrors of the ‘death marches’ from east to west as the death camps in occupied Poland were closed down in the face of the rapid advance of the Red Army and surviving prisoners forced back into already disastrously overfilled labour or concentration camps (such as Bergen-Belsen) inside the Reich.
This untold misery, suffering and death followed from two crucial decisions–or, better, sets of decisions–in 1941. The first of these, in the summer, was to kill the Jews of the Soviet Union. The second, in the autumn, was to extend the killing to the whole of Nazi-occupied Europe. By the time Hitler’s Reich collapsed, the death toll lay, by the most reliable accounts, between 5.29 and just over 6 million Jews.3 The target was, however, close to double this figure. As laid down in January 1942, a total of no fewer than 11 million Jews were envisaged as falling within the ‘Final Solution’.4
The decision to kill the Jews of Europe had no precedent. It was a decision like no other in history. The nearest parallel had been the killing of between a million and a million and a half Armenians by the Turks in 1915 (some two-thirds of those living in Turkey at that time). There were some similarities. There had been a lengthy prehistory of Turkish hostility towards the Armenians, punctuated with outbreaks of terrible violence and massacres. There were ideological imperatives driving along radicalization. And the emergence of full-scale genocide took place in the context of an immensely brutal war. The murderous programme was then carried out with the backing of the Turkish government.5 But there were also important differences.6 Biological racism did not drive this genocide. Possibly as many as 20,000 Armenians avoided slaughter by converting to Islam.7 Conversion to Christianity could, of course, offer no protection to Jews in Nazi Germany. No existing policy of physical destruction of the Armenian community lay behind this earlier genocide. It had not been bureaucratically planned and was initially disorganized, arising from increasingly vicious, cruel responses to unforeseen crises in 1914–15.8 The Nazi genocide, though initiated only in 1941, was a logical–indeed, in certain respects inexorable–development from the premisses of Nazi power. From 1933 onwards its quasi-intellectual underpinnings in uncompromising biological antisemitism became enshrined in state ideology (given embodiment in the highest authority in the land). This then impelled systematic, increasingly radical persecution, efficiently implemented by modern bureaucratic machinery, culminating in meticulously planned extermination carried out by new, industrial-style technology, and aimed at the eventual total eradication of every Jew in Europe.
It was a decision, too, wholly unlike in its nature those which we have been following in previous chapters. Those, including Hitler’s, possessed (in varying degrees) a recognizable rationality–given the starting premisses–in terms of the politics behind military strategy. This was certainly the case from the viewpoint of those taking the decisions. And a certain logic behind them–if warped in some cases–can be perceived even today, however disastrous the decisions turned out to be. The decision to kill the Jews was of an entirely different kind. However logical the path to genocide might have been, given the course of Nazi persecution of the Jews, the pathology of demonic antisemitism that lay at its roots defies rationality. And yet this decision, too, was, in a different but most fundamental sense, a war decision. The decision to wage war to the death against the Jews was in Nazi thinking part of and intrinsic to, not separate from, the vast military war in which they were engaged.
I
Hitler’s address to his party leaders on 12 December 1941 made this clear. The Jews, he believed, had caused the war. They would now have to pay for it by forfeiting their own lives. He had, he said, prophesied this. It was a reference to the passage in his speech to the Reichstag on 30 January 1939, the sixth anniversary of his ‘seizure of power’, in which he had declared: ‘In the course of my life I have very often been a prophet, and have usually been ridiculed for it…Today I will once more be a prophet: if the international Jewish financiers in and outside Europe should succeed in plunging the nations once more into a world war, then the result will not be the Bolshevizing of the earth, and thus the victory of Jewry, but the annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe!’9 This was no inauguration of the extermination programme. But it reflected a genocidal mentality, a certainty in Hitler’s mind that Jews would carry the blame for another war–as, in his perverted psychology, they had done for the First World War–and that as a consequence they would somehow perish.
It was a ‘prophecy’ that never left him. He referred to it more than a dozen times, both privately and
in public, during precisely the years when the ‘final solution’ was in full swing. And he always deliberately misdated his ‘prophecy’ to 1 September 1939, the day the European war began with the German invasion of Poland–when, in fact, in his Reichstag speech that day he never mentioned the Jews at all. The connection between the Jews and the war was, then, implanted in his mind from the beginning of the conflict. It was still there at the very end, when, dictating his ‘Political Testament’ on the eve of his suicide in the Berlin bunker, he once more held the Jews responsible for the war, but stated that this time the ‘real culprit’ had been forced ‘to atone for his guilt’.10
This was Hitler’s mentality: the war could never be won unless the Jews were to be destroyed. It was a mentality that had lingered with him since the First World War had ended in what for him was untold catastrophe, cowardly capitulation, detested revolution and national humiliation. Like many others on the Right in Germany at the time, he held the Jews responsible. As the misery, suffering and losses had mounted, the spotlight in the search for scapegoats had been turned, in a ceaseless barrage of propaganda by pro-war lobbies, relentlessly–and utterly unjustifiably–on Jews. They were blamed as war-profiteers, as shirkers avoiding military service and as fomenters of internal unrest that undermined the military effort. Hitler’s own existing deep-seated antisemitism fed on these base calumnies. The part played by key figures such as Leon Trotsky in the Russian Revolution, and at home the fact that prominent leaders of the hated socialist upheavals–most plainly in the short-lived Bavarian experiment with a Soviet-style government in April 1919–had been Jewish offered further rich sustenance to the vicious hatred of Jews which was by now rampant on the nationalist Right. Hitler sucked all this in, his own profound prejudices cemented into the pathological fixation that would never leave him: that the Jews were responsible for all Germany’s ills.
