Holocaust: The Nazi Persecution and Murder of the Jews
Page 48
forced Roosevelt to sign the Atlantic Charter. At the same time as its anti-Jewish
propaganda campaign, the German propaganda apparatus heightened its polemic
against Roosevelt, who was portrayed as a stooge of the Jews and the Free-
masons. 47 Hitler’s decision to mark out the German Jews in the middle of August 1941, vigorously demanded by Goebbels and other senior Nazis, must also be seen
in the context of this intensified anti-Jewish propaganda. The Jews, thus branded
as an internal enemy, should, as Goebbels wrote, ‘be forced out of the public
sphere’ and demonstratively excluded from certain goods and services. 48 During these days the general tenor of anti-Semitic propaganda consisted in portraying
the radicalization of the persecution of the Jews within the German sphere of
influence as a precautionary defensive measure against an omnipresent enemy.
When the anti-Jewish propaganda campaign reached its first climax in September,
Hitler revised his decision, only one month old, to veto the deportation of
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267
the German Jews while the war was still going on. The explanation for this
dramatic step the sources suggest in the first instance is the decision by the Soviet
leadership on 28 August 1941 to deport the Volga Germans to Siberia, which had
been announced early in September. 49
Goebbels’s diary entry for 9 September makes it clear that the Nazi leadership
saw this decision as legitimizing the further radicalization of its policy: ‘For the
Reich to win, so many countless people must make the severest sacrifices that it
should lead us to remain harsh and ruthless, take things to the extreme, and finally
erase the word “compliance” from our vocabulary.’
The idea that the long-planned deportation of the Central European Jews was
now to be undertaken as ‘retaliation’ for the Soviet step was demonstrably put
about by Rosenberg, who had a suggestion to this effect passed to Hitler on 14
September. 50
At the same time, presumably on 16 September, the German ambassador in
Paris, Otts Abetz, suggested to Himmler that the Jews living in France and the rest
of occupied Europe be deported to the occupied Eastern territories. Himmler, who
was very intensely preoccupied with the plans for the ‘Jewish question’ and
‘Eastern settlement’, responded positively. 51 On 17 September Hitler seems to have talked to Ribbentrop about Rosenberg’s suggestion, 52 and on 18 September Himmler informed the Gauleiter in the Warthegau, Greiser: ‘The Führer wants
the Old Reich and the Protectorate to be emptied and liberated of Jews from west
to east as soon as possible. As a first stage I am therefore anxious to transport the
Jews of the Old Reich and the Protectorate, if possible this year, to the Eastern
territories that have recently come into the Reich, before deporting them further
eastwards next spring. I intend to put around 60,000 Jews from the Old Reich and
the Protectorate into the Litzmannstadt ghetto—which, as I have heard, has
sufficient capacity—for the winter.’53 Heydrich, who was responsible for this
‘Jewish emigration’ would approach him at the right time.
However, this letter was preceded by enquiries on Himmler’s part concerning
possible deportation destinations, which can be traced back to the beginning of
September 1941. On the evening of 2 September, following a midday conversation
with Hitler, Himmler had talked to the Higher SS and Police Commander (HSSPF)
of the General Government, Friedrich Wilhelm Krüger, about ‘the Jewish question—
resettlements from the Reich’. After it turned out that the General Government
was not suitable for this purpose, Himmler had approached Wihelm Koppe,
the HSSPF in the Warthegau, who sent him a letter on 10 September dealing with
the deportation of 60,000 Jews to Lodz. 54 Hitler’s decision to start the deportations even before the victory in the East may in the final analysis have been influenced
by interventions by Rosenberg, Ribbentrop, and others. However, he must have
become attracted by the idea at the beginning of September, a time when he knew
nothing of the imminent deportation of the Volga Germans. It was the military
successes which began in September 1941 that made the deportations possible in
268
Final Solution on a European Scale, 1941
the first place. To that extent there really was a connection between the course of the
war and the radicalization of the persecution of the Jews, even if, in the light of closer analysis of the complex decision-making process, Browning’s assertion that in the
‘euphoria of war’ a major preliminary decision had been made about the ‘Final
Solution’ appears to over-dramatize developments. 55
After the decision had finally been made to deport the German Jews, , following
a meeting with Heydrich, in his diary entry for 24 September Goebbels confirmed
his intention to ‘evacuate the Jews from Berlin as soon as possible. That will
happen as soon as we have sorted out the military situation in the East. They are
all finally to be transported [to the] camps set up by the Bolsheviks. These camps
were built by the Jews; so what could be more appropriate than that they should
now be populated by the Jews.’56
In fact the reasons for Hitler’s decision to begin the deportation of the German
Jews were complex ones. The fate of the Volga Germans only served as a pretext to
carry out the plan of a deportation of the Jews living within the German sphere of
influence, which had been pursued for two years and had become definitely
envisaged for the end of the Eastern campaign.
The first set of reasons is identified in a note by the Eastern Ministry’s liaison
in Hitler’s headquarters, Werner Koeppen, 57 dated 21 September: ‘The Führer has so far made no decision as regards reprisals against the German Jews
because of the treatment of the Volga Germans. As Ambassador von Steen-
gracht told me, the Führer is considering suspending this measure pending the
possibility of America joining the war.’ It is not impossible that Koeppen’s note
reflects the state of the information available to Steengracht, the representative
of the Foreign Ministry in the Führer’s headquarters, before he learned of the
deportation order on 18 September. In that case, Hitler would have decided at
short notice to implement the ‘reprisal’, the deportation, before the USA entered
the war. But if we assume that, on 20 September, Steengracht was already aware
of the deportation order, then the ‘reprisal’ could be taken to mean more than
the deportation itself.
At any rate, Koeppen’s note is a very important indication that the attitude of
the United States played an important part in the decision to deport the German
Jews. The increasing rapprochement between the United States and Great Britain
had reached a crucial stage with the passing of the Land-Lease Act by Congress on
11 March 1941, and in the summer of 1941 signs were accumulating that the USA
would soon enter the war: the landing of American troops in Iceland on 7 July, the
announcement of the Atlantic Charter by Roosevelt and Churchill during their
conference in Placentia Bay (Newfoundland) between 9 and 12 August, followed
&n
bsp; very attentively by the Germans, and, finally, Roosevelt’s declaration, delivered
after a further contretemps on the high seas, that the American navy would
henceforth fight any warship belonging to the Axis powers that entered waters
essential for American defence (‘Shoot on sight order’). 58
Europe-Wide Deportation after Barbarossa
269
The tenor of the anti-Jewish propaganda campaign, in which Roosevelt was
depicted as a stooge of ‘world Jewry’, which planned to exterminate the German
people, suggests that the Nazi regime established a connection between America’s
threatened entry into the war and the fate of the Jews under its control. From the
very first the regime had seen the Jews within its sphere of influence as potential
hostages for the good conduct of the Western powers, an attitude that Hitler had
summed up in the ‘prophecy’ of 30 January 1939 with his threat of extermination.
It is also clear that in the summer of 1940 they contemplated the idea of using the
Jews, due for deportation to Madagascar, as hostages in order to guarantee the
good conduct of the United States. 59
The argument that the deportations which were now beginning on a larger scale
also represented a threatening gesture towards the Western Allies is also sup-
ported by the fact that not only was no effort made to keep the deportations secret,
but that in fact they were generally implemented in the public eye. Goebbels, who
was unhappy with this procedure, 60 issued a directive that foreign correspondents seeking information should be told that the Jews were being sent to the East for
‘work deployment’; in internal propaganda, on the other hand, no further infor-
mation was to be provided about the deportations. 61 The coverage in the international press, which had been reporting these procedures in detail since the start
of the deportations, corresponded to Hitler’s intention to exert pressure on the
United States. 62
The second set of reasons behind the decision to start the deportations con-
cerned the internal political situation. As a result of the deportations of the Jews
from the largest cities of the Reich, which was accompanied by a further intensi-
fied anti-Jewish propaganda campaign63, ‘the Jews’ were to be named and shamed to the general population as the ‘wire-pullers’ behind the bombing raids on the
German cities. They were to be demonstratively punished for that, while at the
same time the inhabitants of those cities immediately benefited from that pun-
ishment through the ‘liberation’ of Jewish apartments. 64 Admittedly the bombing raids in the autumn of 1941 were still—compared with later raids—on a relatively
small scale, 65 but in view of the lack of military success in the East they were a major source of unease; and that unease was to to be discharged in anti-Jewish
emotions as a form of psychological unburdening. As a result of this, a particular
situation came about, whereby, on the one hand, the perception of the public was
to be specially directed by anti-Semitic propaganda to the openly implemented
deportations, while, on the other hand the propaganda concerning the deport-
ations themselves, their goal, and the fate of the deportees was kept completely
silent.
The aerial war gave the regime the excuse to speed up the process of evicting the
Jews from their apartments, which had already been intensified in the summer of
1941.66 It is quite possible that this local policy of displacement had an additional influence on the central decision-making process. 67 But it was only through the 270
Final Solution on a European Scale, 1941
specifically National Socialist linking of a housing shortage with ‘Jewish policy’
(and not, for example, the absence of housing itself), that an ‘inherent necessity’
(Sachzwang) had been created which triggered the displacement policy in the
cities.
The linking of deportation and housing must also be seen as an attempt on the
part of the regime to popularize the evictions from which many people immediately
profited or hoped to profit by means of a certain complicity. The situation was
similar with regard to the utilization of household goods from the former Jewish
households to the advantage of those who had been bombed out of their houses.
The third collection of motives has to do with the difficulties with which the
German occupying authorities in various European countries found themselves
confronted in the late summer of 1941. Three months after the start of the war
against the Soviet Union the primarily Communist resistance movement began to
form and become active against the occupying power. The occupying authorities
generally reacted by shooting hostages.
The military commander in Serbia had already begun shooting hostages on a
large scale since July. 68 Shootings as reprisals for attacks by the resistance first occurred in France on 6 September, in Belgium on 15 and 26 September, and in
Norway also in mid-September. 69 Heydrich, who had been deputy Reich Protector in Prague since late September, even declared a civil state of emergency after
taking office, and set up summary courts martial. During the emergency, between
27 September and 29 November, 404 people (men and women) were shot. 70 In Greece the resistance movement also carried out a series of attacks at the end of
August and in September. 71
The escalation of the German hostage policy was expressed in the order
issued by the OKW on 16 September concerning the ‘Communist resistance
movement in the occupied territories’. This decreed that as atonement for one
German soldier killed the death penalty for 50–100 Communists must be seen
‘as appropriate’. 72
However, since the National Socialist leadership largely assumed an identity
between Communism and Jewry, from their point of view in an increasingly
brutal war it was entirely consistent to act more harshly against the Jewish
minorities even outside Eastern Europe, if it was assumed that they were primarily
the ones offering support to the resistance movement. That the Nazi leadership
proved so determined to start the deportations of European Jews in late summer
1941 must, therefore, also be due to the phantom of a Europe-wide Jewish-
Communist resistance movement. As we shall see, in the autumn of 1941 various
occupying authorities were independently to concentrate the policy of reprisals
for attacks by the resistance movement on the Jewish minority: in October 1941 in
Serbia, the Wehrmacht began systematically shooting the male Jewish population
in ‘retaliation’ for attacks, and in November in France the military authorities
began primarily arresting Jews and Communists rather than shooting hostages.
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271
If the various motives behind the decision to start the deportations are so
extraordinarily complex, one thing connected them: in autumn 1941 the Nazi
leadership began to fight the war on all levels as a war ‘against the Jews’. Above all
the leadership proved determined not to be diverted by the course of the war from
their original intention, pursued since autumn 1939, to deport the Jews in their
sphere of influence to the East and leave them there to their fate.
The implementation of the deporta
tions at first encountered great difficulties.
Early in October, the plan to send 60,000 people to the Lodz ghetto met with massive
resistance from the head of the Wehrmacht Armaments Office, Georg Thomas73 and the responsible District President Friedrich Uebelhör, an attitude that was to provoke
Himmler’s anger. 74 The Lodz ghetto, according to Uebelhör, was not a ‘decimation ghetto’ into which more people could be crammed, but a ‘work ghetto’. 75
The office of the Reich governor in the Warthegau, Artur Greiser, after negoti-
ations with Eichmann, managed to limit the originally planned number of 60,000
deportees to Lodz to 25,000 Jews and Gypsies. Early in October 1941, the RSHA
agreed to deport a further 50,000 people to the ghettos of Riga and Minsk. 76
On 6 October Hitler announced over lunch that all Jews were to be ‘removed’
from the Protectorate, not only to the General Government, but ‘immediately
further eastwards’. At the time, however, this was not possible because of the lack
of transport space. At the same time as the ‘Protectorate Jews’, the Jews were to
‘disappear’ from Vienna and Berlin. 77
In Prague four days later, on 10 October, Heydrich announced—in Eichmann’s
presence—the deportation of the first 5,000 Jews from Prague, and spoke in
general terms about the deportations:78 ‘SS Brigadeführer Nebe and Rasch could also take Jews into the camps for Communist prisoners within the area of military
operations. 79 This has already been introduced according to SS-Stubaf. [Sturmbannführer] Eichmann. . . . The Gypsies due for evacuation could be brought to Stahlecker
in Riga, whose camp is set up on the pattern of Sachsenhausen.’ Hitler wanted ‘the
Jews to be removed from German space if possible by the end of the year’.
Preparations for Deportations from France and Other
Territories under German Control
The example of occupied France makes it clear that the deportation measures
resumed in September 1941 very quickly acquired a Europe-wide dimension, that
in the wake of these preparations the initiative of the occupying authorities was
awakened, and the entire Judenpolitik was radicalized in this way. 80
The number of Jews living in France had increased, particularly through the