Holocaust: The Nazi Persecution and Murder of the Jews

by Peter Longerich

  European Jews in direct response to the Atlantic Charter can be seen as specula-

  tive and relatively easy to refute. 16

  The statements of two major perpetrators, Adolf Eichmann and Rudolf Höß,

  referring to a ‘decision by the Führer’ concerning the murder of the European

  Jews in the summer of 1941, are also highly questionable. Höß made the following

  statement on the subject in a memorandum he wrote in Cracow prison in

  November 1946:17 ‘In the summer of 1941, I cannot at present give the precise moment, I suddenly received an order to see the Reichsführer-SS in Berlin, issued

  by his adjutant’s office. Contrary to his usual custom, he revealed to me, without

  the presence of an adjutant, in broad terms the following: the Führer had ordered

  the Final Solution of the Jewish question, we—the SS—were to implement this

  order. The existing extermination sites in the East are not capable of carrying out

  the intended major actions. I have therefore selected Auschwitz for this purpose,

  firstly because of its favourable location in terms of transport requirements,

  secondly the area selected there is easy to close off and disguise. I had at first

  sought a senior SS-Führer for this task; but in order to avoid difficulties of

  competence from the outset, this won’t happen, and you will perform this task’

  In fact the time mentioned, ‘summer 1941’ cannot be accurate, because the

  ‘existing extermination sites in the East’ did not yet exist at that point. 18

  Höß’s further statements, that ‘shortly afterwards’ or, as he stated in April in

  Nuremberg, ‘around 4 weeks later’19 Eichmann visited him in Auschwitz, are plainly false. Some further particulars of that visit as described by Höß indicate the

  spring of 1942; possibly Höß is also conflating memories of various visits by

  Eichmann to Auschwitz. There are also indications that Höß is confusing the

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  summer of 1941 with events in the summer of the following year. 20 But if we must assume such confusion in Höß’s memory, he ceases to be a reliable witness for a

  ‘Führerbefehl’ issued in summer or autumn 1941. 21

  Eichmann in turn said under questioning in Jerusalem: ‘In June, I think, it was

  the start of the war, June or July, let’s say July, the start of the war. And it might

  well have been two months later, it could also have been three months later. At

  any rate it was late summer. I’ll tell you why I know it was late summer when

  Heydrich summoned me to him. Called me, and he said to me: the Führer, all

  those things about emigration and so on and so on, with a little speech before-

  hand: “The Führer has ordered the physical extermination of the Jews.” . . . And

  then he said to me, Eichmann, go and see Globocnik, Lublin . . . The Reichsführer

  has already given Globocnik the relevant instructions, and take a look at how far

  he has got with his plans. I think he’s using the Russian tank trenches here for the

  extermination of the Jews.’22

  He had then, Eichmann continued, gone to Lublin and travelled on from there

  with Globocnik’s Jewish expert, Hans Höfle, to look at the construction of an

  extermination camp in wooded grounds, the name of which he was unable to

  remember. The construction was explained to him by a captain in the Schutzpo-

  lizei, who can be unambiguously identified as Christian Wirth, the first camp

  commandant of Belzec and later inspector of ‘Aktion Reinhard’: they visited two

  to three wooden cottages still under construction, and Wirth explained that the

  plan was to kill people with exhaust fumes from a submarine engine. Eichmann

  told this story over the course of the years in various and slightly differing

  versions. 23

  Christopher Browning above all has relied on this statement, which he sees as

  confirmation that in mid-September 1941, along with the decision to deport the

  German Jews, Hitler had given the order to murder the deportees in principle, but

  still with reservations.

  But for two reasons Eichmann’s statement does not usefully support the thesis

  of an order from the Führer for the murder of the European Jews in the summer of

  1941. For one thing, his chronology of events is incorrect. He reports that he had

  seen the extermination camp under construction at a time when the trees ‘were

  still in the full glory of their leaves’, which indicates a time no later than October; 24

  we know, however, that the construction of the first extermination camp at Belzec

  (in the district of Lublin) did not begin until 1 November, and most importantly

  Wirth was only transferred to Globocnik in December. 25 The minutes of the interrogation show that Eichmann himself was unsure about the date and place

  of the meeting. In the course of his questioning he concedes that it might have

  been Treblinka, and later he is even certain of it. That would mean that the

  journey did not take place until the spring of 1942 or, which is more likely, that he

  was transferring impressions of a later journey to Treblinka to his visit to Lublin. 26

  His description of the places in dense woodland also seems rather to indicate

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  Treblinka. While in his interrogation he described the construction of wooden

  barracks, he later remembered ‘cottages’ like the ones used in Auschwitz for the

  first gas chambers. 27 He always described—also on another occasion—his meeting with Wirth in the context of other visits to other concentration camps and murder

  centres, but was uncertain about the dating and sequence of those journeys. Thus

  he remembered visiting Chelmno after his meeting with Wirth, saying it had been

  cold but no longer winter. As the first murders in Chelmno took place in

  December 1941, that visit cannot have been in 1941, but must have taken place in

  the spring of 1942 at the earliest, as Eichmann himself concedes. 28 His subsequent visit to Minsk, where he witnessed a shooting, would then have occurred in the

  spring of 1942, as Christian Gerlach has suggested. 29 His account of being sent to Auschwitz by Heydrich around four weeks after the issuing of the Führer command, where he visited the gas chambers in the so-called ‘bunkers’ (converted

  farmhouses), 30 also shows how confused his memory of the chronology was.

  These gas chambers were similarly only finished in the spring of 1942. His

  memories of these journeys are thus not only unclear, but it is possible that he

  has conflated various different journeys.

  There is also a second argument for mistrusting Eichmann’s statements.

  Eichmann had a fundamental reason for providing the earliest possible date for

  the journey, and representing it as the consequence of an unambiguous decision

  on the part of the Führer to murder all European Jews, but at the same time

  making it appear purely a matter of information.

  There is in fact much to suggest that Eichmann was sent to the extermination

  sites, the destinations of the deportations that he had organized, in order to assess

  the murder capacity of the camps and then to establish the pace and extent of the

  deportation. It is also conceivable that the result of his inspection trips was itself

  the precondition for the decision to begin the deportations on a European scale.

&n
bsp; At any rate, after the war one would have been able to draw the conclusion from

  his travels that he played a far more active part in the ‘Final Solution’ than he,

  always presenting himself as a subordinate receiver of orders, was prepared to

  admit. Thus, Eichmann placed great emphasis on representing his journeys as the

  consequence of an order from the Führer that had already been made. He had to

  make them appear to have taken place in 1941 and he had to stress that they were

  not connected to any concrete commissions. But there is much to suggest that he

  made these journeys predominantly at a later point in time, in the spring of 1942,

  when the deportations were initiated on a larger scale. 31

  Eichmann’s statements are in my view completely unsuited as evidence of a

  Führerbefehl for the murder of the European Jews in the summer or late summer

  of 1942.

  In a critical reading, then, three of the main sources on which research into the

  reconstruction of the genesis of the ‘Final Solution’ relied until a few years ago—

  Goering’s empowerment of 31 July 1941 and the statements of Eichmann and

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  Höß—can no longer be seen as key documents. But in the sections below we will see

  that entirely different sources, neglected or even unknown in earlier research, can be

  used to reconstruct the decision-making process that led to the ‘Final Solution’.

  Reflections on the Fate of the Polish Jews

  in the Summer of 1941

  Various indications suggest that—with the beginnings of the mass murder of the

  Soviet Jews fresh in their minds—during the summer of 1941 the German occu-

  pying authorities in Poland were working on more radical ‘solutions’ for the

  ‘Jewish question’.

  On 16 July the director of SD-Section Posen, Rolf Höppner, sent Eichmann a

  note in which he had summed up ‘various meetings in the Reichsstatthalterei here’

  (in the immediate entourage of Gauleiter Greiser). 32 In this a series of suggestions for the ‘solution of the Jewish question in the Reichsgau’ had been made, which in

  Höppner’s view sounded ‘to some extent fantastical’, but which were feasible

  nonetheless.

  These suggestions included on the one hand the idea of building a camp for

  300,000 Jews in the Warthegau. There those Jews who were fit for work were to be

  put into work gangs; all Jewish women still capable of childbearing were to be

  sterilized. But Höppner made one other suggestion: ‘This winter there is a danger

  that it will no longer be possible to feed all the Jews. It should seriously be

  considered whether it would not be the most humane solution to finish off

  those Jews not fit for work by some quick-acting means. At any rate this would

  be more pleasant than letting them starve to death.’

  Four days later, on 20 July 1941, Himmler commissioned Globocnik, alongside

  construction and settlement projects, to build a concentration camp for 20,000–

  25,000 prisoners as well as the expansion of SS and police bases in the district; 33 a few days previously, on 17 July, he had made him responsible for the construction

  of SS and police bases throughout the whole of the new Eastern sphere. 34

  In the district of Lublin, the territory originally planned as a ‘Jewish reservation’,

  Globocnik already maintained a considerable number of labour camps, and in the

  spring of 1941 was busy having Jewish forced labourers carry out extensive earthworks.

  Both of Himmler’s commissions to Globocnik were clearly directly connected

  with the Führer’s decree of 17 July, in which Hitler transferred the ‘police security

  of the newly occupied Eastern territories’ to Himmler. 35 Globocnik was accordingly the man chosen to establish the district of Lublin as a basis for the future

  Eastern empire of the SS. Globocnik now had much more room to play with, and

  he was to use it for the organizational preparations for mass murder.

  After the start of the Russian campaign, Governor General Frank saw the

  deportation of the Jews in his territory as imminent. Hitler had granted him

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  permission for this, on 19 June,even before the start of the war. Frank, therefore,

  forbade the further formation of ghettos in his territory, which would in future ‘be

  more or less nothing but a transit camp’. 36

  After Galicia had been allocated to the General Government by a decree from

  the Führer, the following day Frank applied—unsuccessfully—to Lammers for the

  annexation of the Pripet Marshes as well as the area around Bialystok. By way of

  justification he said that the ‘Pripet Marshes offered the possibility of involving

  workers usefully in cultivation work on a large scale. As a model for this, Frank

  must have been thinking about the improvement work in the district of Lublin, for

  which a large number of Jewish forced labourers had been used. 37 Quite plainly Frank was thinking of realizing the old idea of a ‘Jewish reservation’, in a territory

  in which from July onwards thousands of indigenous Jews would be murdered in

  large ‘cleansing actions’. On 22 July 1941 Frank once again referred to Hitler’s

  approval and announced that the ‘clearance’ of the Warsaw ghetto would be

  ordered in the next few days. 38

  At this point the planned ‘deportation’ of the Jews to the ‘East’ was not—as it

  was to become only a few months later—a metaphor for the planned mass murder

  within the General Government; in October, Frank tried to win Rosenberg’s

  agreement for the deportation of the Jews from the General Government.

  The Deportation of the German Jews: Preparations

  and Decisions

  On 22 July, in a discussion with the Croatian head of state, Slavko Kwaternik,

  Hitler reiterated his intention to deport the Jews from the German sphere of

  influence:39 ‘If there were no Jews left in Europe the unity of the European states would no longer be disturbed. Where the Jews are to be sent, whether to Siberia or

  to Madagascar, is irrelevant. He would approach every state with this demand.’

  However, because of the military situation the Nazi leadership was forced to

  postpone its original intention of implementing large-scale deportations to the

  newly occupied territories after the expected victory in the East. On 15 August, at a

  meeting in the Ministry of Propaganda, which was actually supposed to concern

  the introduction of a special marking for Jews, Eichmann announced the current

  state of the deportation plans that he had already talked about in the same place in

  March. 40 According to this, Hitler had rejected Heydrich’s suggestion to carry out evacuations from the Reich during the war; as an alternative, Heydrich now

  initiated a proposal ‘aimed at the partial evacuations of the larger cities’. 41

  On 18 August, Hitler confirmed this information in conversation with Goeb-

  bels. The ‘Führer’ had agreed, Goebbels recorded in his diaries, that the Jews of

  Berlin should be deported to the East as quickly as possible, as soon as the first

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  transport opportunity presented itself. ‘There, in the harsher climate, they will be

  worked over.’ This would happen ‘immediately after the e
nding of the Eastern

  campaign’, so that Berlin will become a ‘city free of Jews [judenfrei]’. 42 Thus the general prohibition on deportation for the duration of the war—or at least for the

  duration of the war in the East—was maintained. At the same meeting, however,

  Hitler had agreed to the introduction of a ‘Jewish badge’ in the Reich, and with the

  idea that non-working Jews would henceforth receive reduced rations, because, as

  Goebbels put it, ‘he who does not work, shall not eat’. 43

  Immediately after his conversation with Hitler, Goebbels once more began an

  anti-Semitic propaganda campaign, in which he pursued the goal above all of

  preparing Party activists for a further radicalization of the persecution of the Jews,

  and demonstrating to the general population that they were in a global conflict

  with ‘the Jews’. Thus, a circular from the Reich Ring for National Socialist

  Propaganda (an internal instruction for Party propagandists) of 21 August 1941

  stated: ‘Since the start of the Eastern campaign it has been plainly apparent that a

  large proportion of the population has once more become more interested in and

  aware of the significance of the Jewish question than in the previous months.

  None the less it is important that we should draw the attention of the German

  people still more to the guilt of the Jews.’44

  The ‘weekly slogan’ of the Reich propaganda headquarters of the NSDAP for 7

  September 1939, a poster that was hung in many Party display cases, contained

  Hitler’s prophecy of 30 January 1939 that the result of a new world war would ‘not

  be the Bolshevization of the earth and thus the victory of Jewry’ but ‘the exter-

  mination of the Jewish race in Europe’. 45

  One central point in this campaign was the polemic against a brochure printed

  privately in the United States, 46 in which an author by the name of Kaufman had, amongst other things, demanded the sterilization of the German people. Kaufman

  was now presented as a close adviser of Roosevelt (which was pure invention); the

  brochure, it was argued, showed the true plans of the American Jews, who had