The Third Reich

by Thomas Childers

  When he had verified that the man was, indeed, Hitler’s deputy Führer, Hamilton located the prime minister at Ditchley Park in Oxfordshire, his occasional weekend retreat from the air raids of London. Churchill was hosting a dinner party at which a Marx Brothers film, Go West, was to be the evening’s entertainment when the Duke of Hamilton arrived. Hess had been positively identified. It was a coup of potentially great significance. Churchill, who initially took it for a joke, was not impressed. “Hess or no Hess,” he declared, “I am going to see the Marx Brothers.”

  For several days British interrogators had at him and quickly determined that Hess had little real information to offer. They also concluded that their prisoner was mentally unstable, possibly delusional, and that his proposal, coated now in a film of racial mysticism, merely repeated Hitler’s position, which they had already rejected. To his amazement, a bewildered Hess found himself bundled off to the Tower of London and would remain confined to a British prison for the duration of the war. In fact, he never emerged from Allied captivity, and died, at the age of ninety-three, the solitary inmate in Germany’s Spandau Prison, in 1987. The news of Hess’s misadventure struck Berlin and Berchtesgaden like a bolt from the blue. Hitler was stupefied. Could this be true? His faithful Hess, of all people! When presented with a letter Hess had left behind for him explaining his mission to Scotland, the Führer let loose an “inarticulate, almost animal outcry” that could be heard throughout the Berghof. He immediately sent for Göring, Ribbentrop, and other officials from his inner circle. Was a Putsch under way? Was the army behind this? What exactly did Hess know about Barbarossa? He dispatched Ribbentrop to Rome to reassure Mussolini that Germany was not trying to arrange a separate peace, and Goebbels was to formulate a propaganda strategy to explain Hess’s “betrayal.” When the British did not immediately acknowledge that Hess had been taken prisoner, for two days an anguished Hitler hoped that Hess’s plane had crashed in the sea. He inquired of the Luftwaffe staff about Hess’s chances of reaching Scotland. “Virtually none” was the reassuring response. But on May 13, only a month before the planned launch of Barbarossa, London reported that Hess was in British custody. “Hitler,” Goebbels recorded in his diary, “is completely shaken.”

  The regime went into damage control. Goebbels decided that Hess must be portrayed as an idealist and committed Hitler loyalist who, due to enormous physical and mental stress, had suffered a breakdown. He certainly did not speak for the Führer. Despite Goebbels’s best efforts, the Gestapo reported that domestically the Hess incident was a “complete train wreck (a Deroute). . . . Massive uneasiness dominates public opinion,” Goebbels noted ruefully in his diary. “The people wonder, with justification, how a fool could be the second man after the Führer.” The regime struggled to manage the story, and within a short time the Hess affair was overtaken by more momentous events, and the matter receded from public consciousness. Still, the Hess episode put nerves on edge as the launch date of Barbarossa drew near. With Hess removed from Hitler’s inner circle, Martin Bormann, always alert for opportunities to increase his influence with the Führer, was appointed Hitler’s secretary and head of the Party Chancellery, posts that he would gradually transform into a position of considerable power. In doing so, he would prove to be a far more malignant force within the leadership than Hess, and as the war progressed, his influence, always exercised behind the scenes, grew.

  With troops and equipment moving into their forward positions, the Wehrmacht High Command issued an order to the Eastern Army on June 6 that would pass into history as the infamous Commissar Order. The essence of that directive had been first broached in Hitler’s March 30 meeting with military leaders and now took official written form. So sensitive were its contents that only thirty copies were issued to the Wehrmacht’s top commanders, who were not to distribute it to their troops but to read it aloud to them. It was not in the strictest sense a military directive but a mission statement, offering guidelines for the conduct of the troops in Russia and an ideological justification for the war of annihilation that Hitler intended. “In the struggle against Bolshevism, we must not assume that the enemy’s conduct will be based on principles of humanity or of international law,” it read. In particular, “hateful, cruel, and inhuman treatment of our prisoners is to be expected from political commissars of all kinds as the real carriers of resistance.” As a consequence, “in this struggle consideration and respect for international law with regard to these elements are wrong. . . . The originators of barbaric Asiatic methods of warfare are the political commissars. Thus, measures must be taken against them immediately and with full severity. Accordingly, whether captured in battle or offering resistance, they are in principle to be disposed of by arms.”

  Germany was embarking on a desperate life-and-death struggle that demanded “ruthless and energetic measures.” The troops had to understand the enormity of their mission: “Bolshevism is the mortal enemy of the National Socialist German people,” the order began. “Germany’s struggle is directed against this destructive ideology and its carriers. This struggle demands ruthless and energetic measures against Bolshevik agitators, guerillas, saboteurs, Jews, and the complete elimination of every active or passive resistance.” Bolshevik agitators, guerrillas, and saboteurs would, of course, be difficult to ferret out, but the Jews presented an invitingly easy target. And since in Nazi ideological thinking, Jews and Bolsheviks were one and the same enemies of the Reich, these directives amounted to a death sentence for the Jews of the Soviet Union.

  Some field commanders also issued orders of their own, echoing the High Command’s directive. Hitler was particularly pleased with General Walter von Reichenau’s order to his troops, which called for the German soldier to be “the bearer of an inexorable national idea and the avenger of all bestialities inflicted on the German people and its racial kin. Therefore the soldier must have full understanding for the necessity of a severe but just atonement on Jewish subhumanity. An additional aim in this is to nip in the bud any revolts in the rear of the army, which, as experience shows, have always been instigated by Jews.” The army was also to understand that in this operation the SS had orders from “the highest authority” to undertake “special tasks” in the rear of the advancing fronts and would not be subject to military command. Between March and June, Heydrich formed four task forces (Einsatzgruppen) to carry out these tasks—Einsatzgruppen A (the Baltic), B (Belorussia), C (Ukraine), and D (Romania). They ranged in size from five hundred to a thousand men and were drawn from the ranks of the SD, Gestapo, Criminal Police, and Waffen-SS; their leaders were experienced and committed Nazis. They were given special ideological training, and the leadership cadres took courses in Russian geography and other practical instruction that would help them in the execution of their mission. These forces would be augmented by units of the Order Police, an organization of all uniformed police in Germany after 1936 controlled by Himmler and the SS. Local militias as well as two brigades of SS troops under Himmler’s control also took part.

  With the invasion only five days away, Heydrich convened his leaders for a final briefing, spelling out their mission in the most straightforward terms. They would move in either alongside or just behind the army. Their task was officially described as policing the occupied territories, but their mission was murder. They were to eliminate all functionaries of the Red Army and the Soviet administration. They were also to encourage pogroms among the local population, though Heydrich emphasized that German forces should remain very much in the background of such actions. After the war, some Einsatzgruppen commanders testified that on this occasion Heydrich ordered the murder of all Jews—men, women, and children—but evidence drawn from the regular Einsatzgruppen reports and other postwar testimony by Einsatzgruppen leaders suggests that Heydrich’s initial order applied only to Jewish men in service to the Soviet regime. The indiscriminate slaughter of the entire Jewish population originated not from a single Heydrich order but developed incrementally
from the Einsatzgruppen on the ground.

  Operating in the Baltic area, Einsatzgruppe A was the first to initiate a policy of wholesale murder, slaughtering men, women, and children from virtually the outset of the campaign. Hearing no objections from Berlin—Himmler and Heydrich explicitly approved of the mass killings once they were under way—the other groups enthusiastically followed its genocidal example. Himmler’s SS brigades were, if anything, more vicious than Heydrich’s Einsatzgruppen; from the very outset of their deployment they systematically massacred Jews, killing men, women, and children. Such wanton murder would saturate German operations in the East and would only grow in intensity as the war progressed.

  * * *

  Shortly after 3 a.m. in the darkness of June 22, German artillery opened fire along a thousand-mile front and launched what was to become the most ferocious and deadly war in the dark annals of human conflict. More people would fight and die on the Eastern Front than on all other areas of combat around the globe combined. Twenty-seven million Soviet citizens and more than four million German soldiers would perish, and the Holocaust, the systematic extermination of the Jews of Europe, would be unleashed under the deadly cover of this conflict. It was a struggle of such barbarism and cruelty, such savage, remorseless killing that even decades after its conclusion the sheer magnitude of its horror defies comprehension.

  On that June morning, the Germans achieved complete tactical surprise. Despite warnings from Britain, the United States, and Soviet agents in Japan and Germany, Stalin chose to believe that Britain and the U.S. were merely trying to sow discord between Moscow and Berlin and draw the Soviet Union into the war against Germany. Determined not to incite a German assault, Stalin scrupulously fulfilled all the economic clauses of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact and was at pains to avoid any sort of political friction with Berlin. Trainloads of raw materials and finished goods were still rolling across the frontier into German-occupied Poland as the Wehrmacht launched its offensive. Russian forces were completely unprepared for the onslaught. Stalin had chosen to position his forces far forward on the border in a thin line of defense and had not informed those forces of a possible German attack.

  In the opening phase of the assault the panzers roared forward, carving up unprepared Russian units, while overhead the Luftwaffe bore down mercilessly on Russian positions. Within forty-eight hours, the Russians lost more than two thousand aircraft, mostly in their hangars and on their hardstands, and when the Red bomber force did get aloft, five hundred were shot down on June 23 alone. The world’s largest air force was decimated in a mere two days. By the first days of July, all three German army groups were hurtling forward, gobbling up vast territories at a breakneck pace, inflicting staggering casualties on panicked Russian forces, and taking hundreds of thousands of prisoners. All along the front, German armored divisions broke through Russian lines, pushed on, then swung into huge enveloping movements. While the Luftwaffe provided close air support, the infantry would then close on the surrounded enemy, engaging them and clearing the area. Meanwhile, the panzers would be off again, thrusting deeper into enemy territory. It was Blitzkrieg at its most dazzling.

  In June and July all three army groups made spectacular gains. At Hitler’s eastern headquarters, the Wolf’s Lair, concealed in a dark, mosquito-infested forest of East Prussia, a sense of euphoria prevailed. Day after day, at his military briefings Hitler watched the flag-shaped markers on the situation map press deeper and deeper into the Soviet Union. There was dramatic progress on all fronts. Army Group North drove 155 miles through Lithuania and into Latvia in five days; by July 10, German armor stood eighty miles from Leningrad and was closing fast. Army Group Center carried out gigantic encirclements of large Russian forces at Minsk and another near Smolensk some 200 miles farther east. Bock’s forces had covered 440 miles in twenty-three days and were only 200 miles from Moscow. On July 3, Halder wrote in his diary: “On the whole one can say that the task of smashing the mass of the Russian army . . . has been fulfilled. . . . It is probably not too much to say when I assert that the campaign against Russia has been won within two weeks.” This did not, however, mean that the battle was over. There was still much fighting to be done, Halder warned. “The sheer geographic vastness of the country and the stubbornness of the resistance, which is carried on with all means, will claim our effort for many more weeks to come.”

  Advancing just behind the army, the Einsatzgruppen and attached units of the Order Police conducted a bloodbath of unimaginable savagery all across the western Soviet Union. They did not operate as complete units but broke into special commando elements, often of company or even platoon size, which acted independently. They butchered tens of thousands of Jews and other “undesirables” and submitted regular reports on their murderous achievements to Berlin, where they were evaluated in the Reich Security Main Office (RSHA) and made available to a number of other Nazi officials. Altogether Einsatzgruppe A slaughtered 229,052 Jews in the late summer and fall; Einsatzgruppe B reported that it had killed 45,467 Jews; and Einsatzgruppe C claimed 95,000 victims by December 1.

  The procedures varied only slightly from one killing action to another. Describing the liquidation of the ghetto in Borisov in October 1941, its SS organizer explained the procedures in terms that were both strikingly mundane and unimaginably macabre. For two days and nights before the action the policemen who were to carry out the action were “placed under the influence of alcohol and ideologically prepared to inflict atrocities on innocent people.” The commander even held a banquet in a local restaurant for them during which “the policemen had the opportunity of imbibing alcoholic drinks to excess.” At the banquet the leader of the action gave a speech in an attempt “to stimulate the Nazi policy of exterminating the Jews . . . and urged the policemen not to express any feelings of compassion and humanity towards either the adult Jews or the children.”

  Two hundred policemen, mostly Latvians, carried out the action. Under the supervision of the German Secret Field Police they ordered Russian prisoners of war to dig three large pits about two kilometers from the town. These pits or trenches were about four hundred meters long, three meters wide, and up to two meters deep. During the night before the killing (October 8–9) the ghetto was sealed off, and at daybreak the police units swarmed over their unsuspecting victims. They stormed into Jewish homes, driving men, women, and children into the town square, where trucks waited to carry them to “the place of execution.” Those who could not be crammed into the trucks were marched to the trenches in groups of seventy or eighty and were beaten pitilessly all along the way. “There was no mercy shown to old people, children, pregnant women or the sick. Anyone who offered resistance was shot on the spot . . . or beaten half to death . . . on my order,” the commander proudly reported.

  The doomed Jews were positioned about fifty meters from the trenches and guarded until it was their turn to be shot. Twenty Jews at a time were stripped naked, then led into the trenches, where they were forced to lie facedown. They were shot in the back of the head, execution style; in a matter of minutes another group of victims followed them into the pit, where they lay facedown on top of the first group and were shot. Wave after monstrous wave. Throughout the day the pits were “filled with groans and cries and the continual shrieks of horror of the women and children,” while the murderers ate snacks and drank schnapps in the intervals between the shootings. Many were drunk. In Berlin the action was deemed a great success: seven thousand Jews were shot in a single day.

  Describing the scene of another massacre in Ukraine, a German engineer from a private firm recalled watching the arrival and execution of several hundred Jews. As the victims tumbled out of the trucks, an SS man wielding a horse whip ordered them to undress and to place their clothing on separate piles for shoes, clothing, and underwear. One pile of shoes contained approximately eight hundred to a thousand pairs, and great heaps of trousers, shirts, blouses, dresses, sweaters, and stockings rose nearby. “Without weeping or cr
ying out these people undressed and stood together in family groups, embracing each other and saying good-bye while waiting for a sign from another SS man who stood on the edge of the ditch and also carried a whip. During the quarter of an hour in which I stood near the ditch, I did not hear a single complaint or plea for mercy.” One batch of victims after another was ordered into the ditch where “the bodies were lying so tightly packed together that only their heads showed, from almost all of which blood ran down over their shoulders. Some were still moving. Others raised their hands and turned their heads to show that they were still alive. The ditch was already three quarters full. I estimate that it already held about a thousand bodies. . . . The people, completely naked, climbed down steps which had been cut into the clay wall of the ditch, stumbled over the heads of those lying there and stopped at the spot indicated by the SS man. They lay down on top of the dead or wounded; some stroked those still living and spoke quietly to them.” Then he heard a series of rifle shots and “looked into the ditch and saw the bodies contorting or, the heads of the already inert, sinking on the corpses.” Stunned, he turned his eyes toward the man doing the shooting. “He was an SS man; he sat, legs swinging, on the edge of the ditch. He had an automatic rifle resting on his knees and was smoking a cigarette.” While he relaxed for a moment, another batch of the doomed were already descending into the pit.

  The rising tide of mass murder washed across the entire front, not receding even when the German advance ebbed in late summer. In the first nine months of the Eastern Campaign the Einsatzgruppen carried out two major sweeps; the first followed the rapid advance of the army in June and July, but many Jews were left behind. During the second sweep, commencing in October, the Einsatzgruppen were reinforced by personnel from the Order Police and conducted massacres on an even grander scale. These operations reached their grisly apogee in September at a large ravine just outside Kiev called Babi Yar. There the SS shot 33,771 Jews during a three-day period. By the turn of the year the Nazi annihilation plan had already resulted in the murder of 700,000 Jews.