Fateful Choices: Ten Decisions That Changed the World, 1940-1941

by Ian Kershaw

  On 18 July, the day after receiving Hitler’s decree according him responsibility for security in the east, Himmler cancelled a planned journey to the General Government.83 Most likely, he was already at work in exploiting his new position. It is plausible to presume that he spoke at least by telephone with Hitler about his new tasks, and the need, if they were to be accomplished, to increase drastically the police forces in the eastern territories. He had in fact already had such ideas in mind even before the invasion took place. Hitler’s allocation of responsibilities for the east in the meeting on 16 July now gave him the chance to put the ideas into operation–and thereby substantially to extend his own powers. Between 19 and 22 July, Himmler dispatched two big SS brigades, totalling 11,000 men, to sweep through the Pripet marshes, the huge boggy region stretching over parts of southern Belorussia and northern Ukraine. With this, he had almost quadrupled the numbers of SS men behind the German lines within a week of Hitler’s meeting. This was only the start. Further huge expansion in policing followed. By the end of 1941, the numbers in police battalions in the east had reached 33,000–more than eleven times the size of the original Einsatzgruppen that had been sent in the previous June.84

  Himmler needed no specific orders from Hitler to focus the attention of the newly dispatched units on killing Jews. From the outset of the eastern campaign, Jews had been the prime target of the killing squads. Already the numbers of Jews murdered vastly outstripped those of other victims. Their alleged subversive and oppositional behaviour was used as pseudo-justification for the massacres. The new remit for the most rapid and comprehensive ‘pacification’ of the eastern territories inevitably, therefore, had the direst consequences for Jews. The Pripet marshes, the location of Himmler’s newly dispatched SS brigades, were seen as a particular trouble spot in the occupied territories.85 On 1 August the SS Cavalry-Regiment 2 circulated an explicit order from Himmler: ‘All Jews must be shot. Drive the female Jews into the swamps.’86 Commanders still managed to interpret the ‘explicit’ order in varying ways.87 But within a fortnight, they were reporting the ‘de-Jewification’ (Entjudung) of entire towns and villages in the region. Not just male Jews but women and children were now also being killed. One commander took Himmler literally and reported that the women and children had been driven into the swamps, which, however, were too shallow for drowning.88 A comment some weeks later by Hitler shows that he was aware of the Pripet action. He had just reminded his evening guests–Himmler and Heydrich–of his ‘prophecy’, and again blamed the Jews for the dead of the First World War and of the present conflict, when he said: ‘Don’t anyone tell me we can’t send them into the marshes! Who bothers, then, about our people? It’s good when the horror precedes us that we are exterminating Jewry.’89

  In his oblique comments, Hitler had linked together the Pripet action, the extermination of the Jews and his own ‘prophecy’ from 1939. As the widened assault on Jews in the east was beginning, on 1 August, the head of the Gestapo, Heinrich Müller, pointed out that Hitler wanted reports on the work of the Einsatzgruppen to be regularly sent to him.90 On the same date, Müller had ordered illustrative material on the Einsatzgruppen operations to be assembled for Hitler ‘as quickly as possible’. A fortnight later, Hitler’s cameraman, Walter Frentz, was present at the shooting of Jews in Minsk, attended by Himmler, to film the massacre. Whether Hitler or Himmler actually viewed the film cannot be proven. But, clearly, Hitler was keen to be informed about the progress in exterminating the Jews in the east, and at a crucial juncture.91 His expressed interest might fairly be taken to indicate an awareness that a new, more overtly and outrightly genocidal phase was beginning in the Soviet Union.

  Even now, not all Jews everywhere were immediately slaughtered. Manpower and logistics alone constituted a hindrance. And the way directives were passed down left much scope for differing interpretations and emphases. The rate and timing of escalation in the murder were, therefore, not uniform. One of the units of Einsatzgruppe A, for instance, operating with exceptional brutality in Lithuania, registered 4,239 Jews (135 of whom were women) killed in July, but 37,186 in August (most of them in the second half of the month) and 56,459 in September, the majority comprising women and children.92 On the other hand, it was the second half of September before the already high killing rate of Einsatzgruppe B, in Belorussia, sharply increased. Women and children were, even so, often, if not always, included in the shootings. But in this region, too, entire Jewish communities were now being eradicated.93

  Overall, the numbers massacred assumed dimensions far beyond those of the first weeks of the Soviet campaign. The major escalation followed Himmler’s visit to the Minsk area in mid-August, where he experienced a mass shooting of Jews (including some women), discussed gassing methods with two of his commanders and, according to some postwar testimony, spoke of the ‘total liquidation of Jews in the east’, apparently claiming to have received an order from Hitler stipulating that all Jews, including women and children, were to be exterminated.94 The testimony is not wholly reliable, and no other evidence exists for the transmission of a clear order from Hitler. Whether or not Himmler himself actually gave direct orders now that women and children were also to be killed is also less than certain.95 That is, nevertheless, what appears to have been understood. Himmler had conveyed to his leading commanders his widened security remit with its clear implication to wipe out the Jews in the occupied Soviet Union. This was not written down and transmitted in an explicit message. It was far too sensitive for that. The verbal transmission, passing down through briefings at varying levels, meant that different units heard at different times what was required of them.96 But, by word of mouth, the news still circulated rapidly. By the end of August, the genocidal attempt to wipe out Soviet Jewry was well under way.

  The escalation in the slaughter followed from a process of mutually reinforcing radicalization between those carrying out the killing and those at the regime’s heart, laying down the guidelines of a policy of annihilation. Himmler was the main carrier of the mandate, the conveyer of guidelines for action to his commanders and police chiefs in the occupied territories, who passed it down the line to their men. But there was a still higher authority.

  The huge extension of the police forces in the east arose immediately from Himmler’s remit to ‘pacify’ the occupied territories, decreed by Hitler on 17 July following the crucial meeting on laying down the political jurisdiction of Nazi bosses. And it was scarcely coincidental that Hitler showed marked interest in the killing operations at the beginning of August, precisely at the time that Himmler was about to pass on widely couched instructions about extending the murder to Jewish women and children. Hitler’s ‘green light’ to shoot anyone ‘who even looked askance’–and, very probably, other drastic comments that were not minuted–had been sufficient to instigate the genocidal radicalization. Despite the variations in the timing of implementation, the widened remit of Himmler following the meeting in Hitler’s headquarters on 16 July, and the inclusion, made known by mid-August, of Jewish women and children in the killing, amounted to a decision to eradicate the Jews of the Soviet Union.

  V

  The broader decision, to kill all the Jews of Europe, had not yet been taken. It was linked to, if separable from, the prior decision to wipe out Soviet Jewry.

  In January 1942 the numbers of Soviet Jews were still estimated at five millions, although by then hundreds of thousands had been slaughtered.97 But when around the turn of the year 1940–41 Eichmann had worked out the numbers of those from Europe west of the Soviet Union to be deported into a ‘territory yet to be determined’, he had made no reference to the millions of Jews already on Soviet soil. Excluding Soviet Jews, Eichmann reckoned the number to be deported to total almost six million (to which now several hundred thousand in the former Soviet area of Poland had to be added).98

  Plainly, by the time German troops crossed the Soviet border in June no clear and conclusive decision had been reached about an over
all policy towards Soviet Jews–whether they were to be deported further east or simply killed. But ideology and logistics combined to make the rapid emergence of total genocide in the captured Soviet territories practically inevitable.

  Deportation could never have been a feasible option. Even had the eastern campaign swiftly ended in German victory, as had been presumed, the mobilization of transport to ferry millions of Jews from all over Europe to some distant destination in former Soviet territory would have been a colossal undertaking. And if the Soviet Jews were not simply to be massacred where they were, there was the additional problem of transporting these, too, to whatever immense reservations were vaguely envisaged. The difficulties would have been equally enormous. In reality, of course, these issues never arose. As the German advance slowed, a continuation of the war into the coming year became a certainty and the prospect of a territory into which to expel the non-Soviet Jews faded into a lingering fantasy, the fate of the Soviet Jews themselves was sealed. By midsummer it had become plain. The only solution was to kill them wherever they could be found. And in an already genocidal climate, but with the option of deporting the remainder of Europe’s Jews into the Soviet Union rapidly receding, the question of what should be done with them now gained intense urgency.

  At first, it had looked as if early victory over the Red Army would swiftly open up the possibility of a total solution through mass deportation. Soon after the Russian campaign had begun, Hitler had spoken more than once of Jews as a bacillus. He felt like the Robert Koch (the discoverer of the tuberculosis bacillus) of politics, he said, describing the Jews as the ‘ferment of all social decomposition’. He had proved, he went on, that a state could live without Jews.99 He repeated the bacillus analogy when meeting the visiting Croatian minister Marshal Sladko Kvaternik a few days later. ‘If there were no more Jews in Europe,’ he told Kvaternik, ‘the unity of the European states would be no longer disturbed.’ Whether they were sent to Siberia or Madagascar, he added, was a matter of indifference.100 For his foreign visitor, Hitler was holding to the fiction of overseas deportation. For Nazi leaders, however, every ‘special announcement’ by the Wehrmacht of further advances in the Soviet Union raised new expectations of the imminent deportation of the Jews to ‘the east’ or ‘Siberia’ (taken loosely to mean somewhere in the Soviet Union). Hitler’s comments offer clues to his thinking about the Jews at this juncture. At a time when massacres were crystallizing into full-scale genocide in the Soviet Union, such hints about the need for a radical solution throughout Europe would not have been lost on Himmler or Heydrich.

  In July, as German victory in the Soviet Union, to be followed by the capitulation of Great Britain and a triumphant end to the war, seemed tantalizingly close, plans were compiled in the Reich Security Headquarters for a grandiose ‘final solution of the Jewish Question’ which Heydrich had already announced in May as ‘doubtless forthcoming’.101 At the end of the month, Heydrich instructed Eichmann to draft an authorization from Göring (nominally in charge of the ‘Jewish Question’ since November 1938) to prepare ‘a complete solution of the Jewish Question in the German sphere of influence in Europe’. Heydrich, we might recall, had already provided Göring in March 1940 with a draft plan to solve the ‘Jewish Question’. What he was now seeking was formal authorization of what he had already verbally been granted–a step he evidently felt necessary at a key juncture in order to deal with heads of the civil administration and other agencies (especially Rosenberg’s ‘Eastern Ministry’) which could interfere with the implementation of his plans. With Europe seemingly at Germany’s feet, the time had arrived, it appeared, to carry out the deportation of the Continent’s Jews into the Soviet Union–and to their deaths through ‘natural wastage’ from slave labour, malnutrition and exposure to a raw climate. For Jews incapable of working–children, elderly, infirm–suggestions of liquidation as a solution were already being proposed.102

  Over the following weeks, however, as the German advance slowed and the magnitude of the misjudgement about the fighting capacity of the Red Army was glaringly revealed, the genocidal solution through deportation to the Soviet Union–the prospect which had been the dominant idea since the start of the year–rapidly became unrealistic. The last hopes of territorial ‘resettlement’ in ‘the east’, after the General Government then Madagascar had come to nothing, were postponed indefinitely. But the pressure to deport the Jews had meanwhile intensified, not lessened. There was simply no possibility of reconciling the increased pressure to deport with the insurmountable blockages on doing so. Meanwhile, mass killing of Jews had spread rapidly in the Soviet Union. And in the Reich itself, as news of the bitter fighting in the east filtered through, the public mood against the Jews, fomented by Goebbels’ propaganda, was turning extremely ugly.

  Jews in German towns and cities, hounded and persecuted at every turn, were depicted by vicious propaganda as subversives, agitators and troublemakers. They were portrayed as idlers who ought to be ‘carted off’ to Russia or, better still (it was ominously suggested), simply killed.103 In the middle of August Goebbels put the case for compelling the Jews to wear an identifying badge to a fractious and ailing Hitler, and was given the green light. The wearing of the ‘Yellow Star’ by all Jews was introduced on 1 September. The Jews in Germany were now a marked minority–clearly visible, openly exposed to their persecutors, totally defenceless. The move was accompanied by the circulation to all Nazi Party offices of Hitler’s ‘prophecy’ of 1939, that another war would result in the destruction of the Jews.104

  Heydrich had been less successful with a proposal in August to deport Germany’s Jews. Hitler had turned down the suggestion of ‘evacuations during the war’. But he gave permission for a ‘partial evacuation of the larger cities’.105 Perhaps the old notion that the Jews were ‘hostages’ or ‘pawns’ whose presence in German hands might help to fend off an entry into the war by the supposedly Jewish-dominated United States still influenced him. More likely, he held to the view that there was simply nowhere to send the Jews to as long as the war in the east was unfinished. Poland, it had long been accepted, could take in no more Jews. But deporting the Jews into the Soviet Union at this juncture was not practicable. All available transport was needed for the front. This was for the time being a more urgent cause than using trains to ferry German Jews into Russia. Moreover, since Hitler viewed the Jews as a treacherous ‘fifth column’, deporting them to the Soviet Union while a bitter war against the ‘Jewish-Bolshevik’ enemy was still raging would in his eyes have been a dangerous move. The areas behind the battle-lines, where Soviet Jews were being slaughtered in their tens of thousands, were in any case scarcely fitted to accommodate a mass import of Jews from the Reich. And if the Jews were simply to be deported there in order to be shot, then the existing killing-units, though expanded since the outset of the eastern campaign, would need to be much enlarged. The ‘final solution of the Jewish Question’, Hitler presumably told Heydrich, would have to wait a little longer, until the war was over.

  Nevertheless, within the upper echelons of the SS and Security Police preparations for the ‘coming final solution’ continued. And the question was now posed about the fate of the deportees. Were they to be given ‘a certain form of existence’; or were they to be ‘completely eradicated’?106 The question gained immediate urgency when, in the middle of September, Hitler changed his mind on the deportation of the Reich Jews. Stalin’s brutal deportation of hundreds of thousands of ethnic Germans, for centuries settled along the Volga, appears to have prompted the volte-face. The pressure from within Germany and in some occupied countries, most notably at this time France, to ‘evacuate’ the Jews to the east had become intense. Vengeance for the fate of the Volga Germans, an argument pressed on Hitler by a number of Nazi leaders, placated his underlings in opening the previously closed door to deportation from the Reich. This was the decision, unquestionably Hitler’s, which initiated the emergence over the coming weeks of the culminating phase o
f the genocidal process.

  Within the following three months, what the ‘final solution’ meant would become clarified for those directly involved in its planning and organization. No longer did it refer to a territorial settlement on former Soviet territory (with the unspoken implication that the Jews would gradually die out). It now meant the physical annihilation of Jews throughout Europe. And since the prospect of deportation into the Soviet Union was rapidly receding, this would have to take place closer to home. Parts of occupied Poland were now starting to come under consideration as the location of the extermination programme. This most closely guarded secret was, in autumn 1941, in its full ramifications still confined to the leadership of the SS and Security Police. The civil authorities were as yet not fully initiated into what was planned. The uncertainties and confusion that prevailed that autumn reflected both the level of secrecy attached to the ‘final solution’, and the fact that it was still in its planning stage; imminent, rather than fully developed. But, triggered by Hitler’s agreement in September to the deportation of the Reich Jews, the steps into total genocide now followed rapidly.