The army did not interfere. Instead, the troops assisted in identifying and rounding up Jews, whom they turned over to the SS. The army’s policy of retribution for guerrilla actions—burning villages, arbitrarily executing whole groups of “suspects”—also contributed to the pervasive aura of unrestrained violence and murder that engulfed the war in Russia. Not surprisingly, the savagery of this mass murder took a toll on the perpetrators directly involved in them. The men who participated in these operations were not SS bureaucrats sitting comfortably behind a desk in Berlin where the deaths could be dealt with as abstractions, as numbers on the page, but men with blood on their hands, men who confronted their victims face-to-face, who watched gasoline-drenched children, not yet dead, tossed onto a flaming pyre of bodies and heard their screams long after they had moved on to another massacre.
The psychological toll on the murderers was immense and a source of concern for SS higher officials. Examining troops in the area around Bialystok, where only days before 2,600 Jews had been shot and another 6,000 were scheduled for execution in the coming days, a visiting German doctor was besieged by police officials “who were suffering from nervous breakdowns and could not participate in another killing operation.” Even the SS and police leader for central Russia had to be hospitalized with serious stomach and intestinal ailments, produced by nervous strain. The medical report indicated that the man was suffering from recurring nightmares in which he relived the killing operations with which he had been involved.
Himmler received reports of “disputes, refusals to obey orders, drunken orgies, but also serious psychological illnesses,” and was looking for a way to reduce the psychological strain on the men involved in the shootings. One possible solution to the problems involved in these mass shooting operations was to find another mode of killing, one more efficient, more secret, and less emotionally traumatic for the perpetrators. In August 1941 the euthanasia program in the Reich was closed down, and many of its personnel transferred to the East. They had experimented with mobile gas vans in the T4 program and by fall 1941 had developed a new, more powerful model. Using carbon monoxide gas, the vans could asphyxiate forty victims at a time by connecting a metal pipe to the exhaust gas hose and inserting it into a sealed van. The powerful engines then pumped the gas into the vehicle. The specially equipped vans were first introduced into Poltava in southern Ukraine in November, and within weeks these mobile gas vans circulated across German-occupied Eastern Europe.
At this point, the German public had only vague notions of what was transpiring on the Eastern Front. So tight was the security in the run-up to Barbarossa that the invasion had come as a shock, but in the heady rush of spectacular victories in June and July, the public was swept up in the euphoria of the High Command. In late June the Gestapo reported that “the military victory over Russia has in a short time become taken as a given by every racial comrade [Volksgenosse]. . . . The optimism in some circles is so strong that they no longer wager about the outcome of the war but the date of German triumph. The timing most often heard is in the neighborhood of six weeks.” The public was not informed about the casualties.
So confident was Hitler that Germany would prevail soon that in mid-July he convened a conference at his headquarters to establish the principles and organizational structure of the Nazis’ new order in the conquered Russian lands. Before the invasion, the army had made no plans for the occupation, having been instructed that administration of the newly acquired Eastern territories was to be handed over to party officials. Only now did the regime address the question directly. Present at the five-hour meeting on July 16 were Göring, Alfred Rosenberg, Bormann, Keitel, and Hans Lammers, secretary in the Reich Chancellery. Hitler explained that the German occupiers were not to reveal their larger intentions publicly; instead the regime would continue the threadbare narrative that Germany had been forced to intervene to restore order. The Russian public was not to recognize that a final settlement was under way. “All necessary measures—shootings, deportations, etc.—we will and can do anyway.” He did not want to make premature and unnecessary enemies among the indigenous population. “We will simply act, therefore, as if we wish to carry out a mandate. But it must be clear to us that we will never again leave these territories.” Germany must emphasize that “we are the liberators,” but in reality “it’s a matter of dividing up the giant cake so that we can first rule it, secondly administer it, and thirdly exploit it.”
Hitler was not daunted by the vast territory and the millions of subjects the Reich would acquire. It would not be too difficult to control the peoples of this vast territory, Hitler maintained. “Let’s learn from the English, who with 250,000 men in all, including 50,000 soldiers govern four hundred million Indians. Russia must always be dominated by Germans. . . . We’ll take the southern part of the Ukraine, especially the Crimea, and make it an exclusively German colony. There’ll be no harm in pushing out the population that’s there now.” The native population would not be educated. “It is in our interest that the people should know just enough to recognize the signs on the roads. At present they can’t read and they ought to stay that way.” The German colonists would be hardy “soldier-peasants” made up of “professional soldiers,” preferably NCOs. Room would also be found for Nordic settlers from Scandinavia and the Netherlands—all Aryans—and Germany would build highways that would carry German settlers and tourists into what would ultimately be a German “garden of Eden.”
On July 17 Hitler selected Rosenberg to head an apparently all-powerful Reich Ministry for the Occupied Eastern Territories. But the office was an empty shell, a fact underscored by Hitler’s choice of the man to lead it. Rosenberg was seen by many in the party’s elite as a fuzzy-headed ideologue and propagandist with no power base in the party or state. In theory this new position placed him in charge of all matters in the Occupied Eastern Territories. But, as was the case in so many positions of ostensible power in the Third Reich, Rosenberg’s authority was a mirage, hopelessly diluted by other Nazi chieftains and their organizations.
Rosenberg hoped to co-opt the nationalities into the struggle against Moscow. Treated rather leniently but under tight German control, they could become valuable allies in the war against the Bolsheviks. Himmler, whose SS and Einsatzgruppen operated throughout Rosenberg’s realm, was disdainful of such ideas and pursued a policy of stunning brutality. To Himmler and Heydrich, the Slavs were racial enemies, inferiors fit only for extermination or ruthless exploitation. For his part, Göring was determined to exploit the economic resources of the East to the maximum, starving millions of Slavs in the process. Rather than establishing anything that remotely resembled administrative clarity or a coherent policy, it was the usual battle of all against all, as each sought to work independently toward the Führer. Hitler, who did not take Rosenberg’s ideas seriously, was, as usual, quite content with this arrangement. He had no intention of creating a series of quasi-independent Slavic satellites.
He was taken instead with Himmler’s fantastic plans for the Germanization of the East. General Plan East, Himmler boasted, would be “the greatest piece of colonization which the world has ever seen.” According to this plan, presented to Hitler in July 1942, some 45 million indigenous inhabitants in the targeted areas were to be expelled to points farther east. Thirty million of these were considered by SS demographic experts as racially undesirable. In all, 80 percent of the Polish population, 64 percent of the Belorussians, and 75 percent of the Ukrainians would be driven out; those allowed to remain would be “Germanized.” The RSHA calculated that as many as ten million Germans would be resettled across the East within thirty years. This vast agricultural region, sprinkled with modern cities connected by a vast transportation network, would meet the food needs of a vastly expanded German empire into the future.
In the meantime the German-occupied East was to be ruled with an iron fist, the Slavic peoples enslaved, their cultures suppressed, their intelligentsia annihilated. A policy o
f fear and repression was deemed more effective than cultivation and co-optation. Ironically, Rosenberg’s approach held far greater potential than the brutal policies adopted by his powerful rivals, but then, their policies were more in line with Hitler’s, and that, in the end, was what mattered.
Muddying the waters still more, Hitler appointed special Reich commissars for the different regions under German control. All were hard-liners, and each pursued his own policies, disregarding Rosenberg and his administration. Only the will of the Führer mattered, and each commissar interpreted that as he wished. All were petty tyrants, mostly incompetent, sometimes corrupt, always savage. Their policies were not coordinated, and if they were subordinate to any higher authority, it was not to Rosenberg and his administration but to Himmler’s SS.
As the campaign in Russia gathered steam, Hitler’s public speeches and his addresses to party and state officials grew more extreme, more apocalyptic. He made repeated references to his prophecy of 1939 that if the Jews once again pushed the peoples of Europe into a world war, “it would not end in the defeat of those nations but the annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe.” He ranted against the “Jewish global conspiracy,” and that obsessive hatred resonated throughout the Nazi regime. In speeches on October 19 and 25, and December 12 and 18, Hitler explicitly mentioned the extermination of the Jews and spoke openly about it with foreign statesmen. Goebbels and Otto Dietrich, Hitler’s press chief, were instructed to emphasize “the Jewish world enemy” in Nazi propaganda—which they did with a single-minded vehemence. Germany was not fighting England and Russia, but the Jewish plutocrats and Bolsheviks who controlled both.
In this atmosphere of paranoia and loathing, Hitler did not need to give a direct order for mass murder. Genocide was in the air. After July 1941, Himmler and Heydrich certainly proceeded as if the Führer had delivered a direct order to them—a verbal order, as was his practice—and everyone throughout the Nazi system understood his meaning and endeavored to, as Ian Kershaw has put it, “work toward the Führer.” There may have been no single Führer order but instead an accretion of murderous initiatives from Hitler, the Einsatzgruppen, the political commissars, the SS, the Wehrmacht, all pushing in one deadly direction, a direction derived from Nazi ideology and Hitler’s own ferocious obsessions.
Hitler probably had no clear idea of how his radical Judeo-phobia could be translated into action on the ground. That the Jews must leave all of Europe—still official Nazi policy in the summer and early fall of 1941—was clear, but how would this actually be accomplished? Solving that problem fell to the leadership of the SS. In October 1939 Hitler had appointed Himmler Reich commissar for The Strengthening of German Folkdom in the occupied areas and in September 1941 expanded his Reich Führer SS’s authority to the whole of occupied Russia. As previously mentioned Himmler delegated much of that authority to Heydrich in the Reich Security Main Office, where SS specialists were already at work finding a solution to the “Jewish question.”
On July 31, Heydrich met with Göring, who was still ostensibly in charge of Jewish policy. That authority was based on Göring’s assertion of leadership in Jewish policy dating from the aftermath of Kristallnacht and, typically, had never been officially superseded. Heydrich drafted a letter and obtained Göring’s signature to it that formally transferred to him the authority to “make all necessary preparations” for a “total solution of the Jewish question in the German sphere of influence in Europe.” He was to produce a comprehensive plan for a “final solution to the Jewish question” and to coordinate the participation of all organizations of party and state whose jurisdiction would be affected.
At that time, a final solution as envisioned by most within the Nazi leadership remained deportation: all Jews would be removed from the German sphere of influence and transported to the frozen wastes of Siberia, where, it was assumed, they would surely perish. But Hitler and the SS leadership assumed that this would come only after the defeat of the Soviet Union, and in the summer and fall of 1941 that had not yet happened. Meanwhile, Nazi officials in the East were complaining to Himmler that they were unable to cope with more transports of Jews for “resettlement.” The ghettos were overflowing, and the special camps constructed by the SS to serve as temporary reception areas were already inundated. With the Nazis now in control of the largest Jewish populations in Europe and a Soviet collapse not yet in sight, some solution to these mounting problems would have to be found. There are no indications that genocide, that is, the systematic mass murder of all European Jews, was considered a possible solution at this time. That hundreds of thousands of Jews, perhaps millions, would die—were dying!—was not seen as a prelude to a more comprehensive killing program. But that was about to change.
In the late summer, Hitler was coming under mounting pressure from regional leaders in the Reich to fulfill his promise to remove all Jews from Germany and the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia. Nazi chieftains within the Reich were also calling for an order compelling Jews to wear some sort of distinguishing form of identification—a yellow star of David—as they did in the East, so that they could be easily recognized by the public. Goebbels was particularly vehement in his pleas to Hitler on both scores. As Gauleiter of Berlin, he hoped to see the Reich capital become the first German city to be declared “free of Jews.” He also led the chorus of those Nazi officials demanding that German Jews be compelled to wear some sort of badge. The Jews, he argued, were responsible for deteriorating morale at home by spreading defeatist rumors and acting as “mood spoilers.” A yellow star with the word “Jude” in black at its center would allow every German to recognize these rumormongers and defeatists. In September Hitler at last agreed to both the star and to a limited deportation program from the Reich and the protectorate. German Jews would be rounded up, and deportations to the East would begin immediately. As he told Heydrich in early October, he wanted “all Jews removed from German space by the end of the year.”
In the Reich capital these first deportations were carried out in an orderly fashion. Officials of Berlin’s Jewish community were required to help compile lists of those to be deported, and notifications, on the letterhead stationery of the Berlin Jewish Organization, were sent to those scheduled for “emigration.” These Jewish officials cooperated in the belief that those chosen were not being sent to their death but were being resettled in the East. In unthreatening language, the letters advised the terrified recipients of the date scheduled for their departure and outlined the procedures to be followed. Baggage, carefully labeled with names, address, and transport number, could be deposited at the collection point, often a synagogue, two days before their emigration. On the day of their departure their apartment would be sealed by the Gestapo, and the Jewish men, women, and children would proceed directly to the collection point. A leaflet was enclosed detailing items the deportees were permitted to bring along—medicines, warm clothing, underwear, umbrellas, and bedding, along with shaving utensils—everything to suggest that “resettlement” was just that. All personal documents—birth, marriage, and death certificates—were to be presented to the authorities as were all cash, jewelry, savings books, bonds, and financial papers. They were also to compile an inventory of all those possessions and household items—furniture, fittings, kitchenware, and other belongings that were to be left behind. The proceeds, minus payment of outstanding bills to utility companies, would ultimately be turned over to the state. In this process, the Gestapo remained as much as possible in the background, and representatives—auxiliaries, they were called—of the Jewish community carried out this initial stage of the evacuation. The superficial civility of the process was intended to allay fears and ensure calm among the anxious and fearful, all of whom were doomed to a short, hopeless future.
While this evacuation plan appealed to Nazi officials in the Reich, leaders in the East protested that they were already swamped with Jews and other “undesirables.” There was simply no room for new arrivals. They were not to
worry, Himmler and Heydrich reassured them, the overcrowding in the ghettos and reception areas would be resolved. Those Jews already held in the collection areas would be shot to make room for the German Jews. The Lodz ghetto was to be the main reception center, but it could accept no more than twenty thousand Jews. Other ghettos, especially in the East, were added as reception centers to handle the anticipated influx. The first transports from Vienna bound for Lodz left the city on October 15; a day later transports from Prague and Luxembourg headed east, and on the 18th the first transport of Berlin Jews followed. To make room for the German Jews, approximately ten thousand inhabitants of the Kovno ghetto were murdered on October 28. In the first week of November, twenty transports carrying 19,593 Jews to Riga, Kovno, and Minsk—major collection areas—set off. Many of the arrivals never entered the ghettos; upon detraining they were marched into nearby woods and shot.
Still searching for an effective solution, Himmler in mid-October met with Odilo Globocnik, SS and police leader in the Lublin district, who made a radical proposal. A fanatical Austrian Nazi who had served as the top Nazi police official in Poland since 1939, Globocnik suggested that a stationary gas chamber be constructed at Belzec, an SS camp in the Lublin district of the General Government. He had consulted with personnel from the recently suspended euthanasia program, who suggested that rather than carbon monoxide a much stronger gas, Zyklon B, a deadly, fast-acting pesticide, could be used in permanently installed gas chambers. The killing would be much more efficient, and SS personnel would be liberated from the psychological stress involved in the mass shootings. Himmler was taken with the idea, and a first test was conducted at Auschwitz, not yet a major killing center, where six hundred Soviet POWs were gassed. It was deemed a success, and construction of the Belzec camp began in November 1941. It would become operational in March of the following year. Belzec would be the first installation in a new concentration camp system, distinct from the seven camps operating inside Germany. Its function was not the collection and incarceration of political prisoners but physical extermination.
The Third Reich Page 62
