Holocaust: The Nazi Persecution and Murder of the Jews

by Peter Longerich

  postpone the conference at short notice to 20 January 1942 gave him six weeks to

  rethink his strategy for this major meeting. The change in the entire war situation

  that followed the declaration of war on the USA may also have contributed to the

  further radicalization of his attitude in the meantime.

  A day after the declaration of war on the United States, on 12 December 1942,

  Hitler made a speech to the Gauleiters and Reich leaders of the Party, in which he

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  once again returned to his ‘prophecy’ of 30 January 1939, as Goebbels’s diaries

  reveal:2

  As regards the Jewish question, the Führer is resolved to make a clean sweep. He prophesied to the Jews that if they were to bring about another world war, they would bring about their own destruction as a result. This was not empty talk. The world war is here, the destruction of the Jews must be the necessary consequence. The question must be seen without

  sentimentality. We are not here to show sympathy with the Jews, we must sympathize

  with our own German people. If the German people has once again sacrificed around

  160,000 fallen in the Eastern campaign, the authors of this bloody conflict will have to pay with their lives.

  The fact that the world war was now ‘here’ gave particular emphasis to Hitler’s

  prophecy, delivered repeatedly since early 1939, that the Jews of Europe would be

  destroyed in the event of a world war. But it seems excessive to see Hitler’s speech

  on 12 December as the announcement of a fundamental decision on Hitler’s part to

  murder the European Jews. 3 It was more like a further appeal to accelerate and radicalize the extermination policy that had already been set in motion with the

  mass executions in the Soviet Union, in Poland, and Serbia and the deportations

  from Central Europe. In its radical rhetoric, this appeal corresponds (sometimes

  literally) to Hitler’s statements of 25 October, but also to Goebbels’s article on 16

  November and Rosenberg’s press conference on 18 November. From the period

  around mid-December there are further indications that Hitler wanted to radical-

  ize the persecution of the Jews still further after the USA joined the war, although

  one could not conclusively deduce a ‘fundamental decision’ on Hitler’s part to

  murder the European Jews from all of these documents. 4 Neither can Himmler’s brief note in his office diary about a conversation with Hitler on 18 December be

  seen as additional evidence for Hitler’s ‘fundamental decision’ made a few days

  previously. 5 The words: ‘Jewish question/to be extirpated as partisans’ represent a renewed confirmation on Hitler’s part that the mass murders of the Soviet Jews

  were to be continued and intensified, albeit with the reservations already given. 6

  The minutes of the Wannsee Conference provide very little information about

  what Heydrich actually said in the SS villa on the Wannsee. 7 Its author, Eichmann, noted only the results, not the exact course of the conference. According to his

  own recollections, the participants used far more drastic language; on Heydrich’s

  instructions, he had used euphemistic language in the minutes. 8

  As we do not know the exact words used in the conference, and since

  Eichmann’s statements incriminating third parties can only be trusted with

  certain reservations, the minutes should not be used as a basis for speculations

  about what was ‘actually’ said at the conference. Instead it should be read as a

  guideline authorized by Heydrich and revealed to representatives of a number of

  authorities by the RSHA, which had been commissioned to deal with the final

  solution of the Jewish question. The starting point for an interpretation of the

  The Wannsee Conference

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  RSHA’s Judenpolitik at the beginning of 1942 should not be the conference as

  such, but rather Heydrich’s subsequent distillation of it, which he then used for

  external purposes.

  The central passage of Heydrich’s address concerning the general aims of the

  future ‘Jewish policy’ is as follows:9 ‘After appropriate prior approval by the Führer, emigration as a possible solution has been superseded by a policy of

  evacuating the Jews to the East.’ These ‘actions’ (the deportations that had

  already been begun) were to be regarded merely as ‘temporary solutions’

  (Ausweichmöglichkeiten), nonetheless ‘practical experience would be accumu-

  lated’ which would be ‘of great importance for the impending final solution of

  the Jewish Question’. The impending ‘final solution’ was envisaged as involving

  11 million Jews, a figure which was broken down by country in a statistical

  addendum to the minutes. This list not only includes Jews living in areas under

  German control, but also those of Great Britain, Ireland, Portugal, Sweden,

  Switzerland, Spain, and Turkey. Included in the 700,000 Jews for unoccupied

  France are those of the North African colonies. Heydrich thus clearly distin-

  guished the programme of deportations that had already been set in motion

  from a far more comprehensive plan, whose execution he said was ‘dependent

  on military developments’, and could therefore only be fully realized after a

  German victory. According to the minutes, Heydrich made the following

  remarks about the ‘Final Solution’ that he envisaged: ‘As part of the develop-

  ment of the final solution the Jews are now to be put to work in a suitable

  manner under the appropriate leadership. Organized into large work gangs and

  segregated according to sex, those Jews fit for work will be led into these areas as

  road-builders, in the course of which, no doubt, a large number will be lost by

  natural wastage.’ The ‘remainder who will inevitably survive’ will, ‘since they are

  the ones with the greatest powers of endurance’, ‘have to be dealt with accord-

  ingly’ to prevent their becoming ‘the germ cell of a new Jewish regeneration’.

  Initially the Jews were to be taken to ‘transit-ghettos’, from which they were to

  be ‘transported further towards the East’.

  Heydrich thus developed the conception of a gigantic deportation programme

  which would only be fully realizable in the post-war period. Those Jews who were

  deported ‘to the East’ were to be worked to death through forced labour or, if they

  should survive these tribulations, they would be murdered. The fate of those ‘unfit

  for work’, children and mothers in particular, was not further elucidated by

  Heydrich. In the context of the speech as a whole, however, and of the murderous

  practice that had predominated for months in the occupied Soviet territories, and

  since the beginning of December in Chelmno, it is clear that they too were to be

  killed, because Heydrich wanted to prevent the survival of the ‘germ cell of a new

  Jewish regeneration’ at all costs.

  Heydrich’s statement indicates that the RSHA was at this time still proceeding

  according to the plan, followed since the beginning of 1941, of implementing the

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  ‘Final Solution’ of the Jewish question after the end of the war in the occupied

  Eastern territories. Heydrich also made it clear what was understood by the

  phrase ‘Final Solution’: the Jews were to be annihilated by a
combination of

  forced labour and mass murder. The fact that it was Jewish forced labour that

  gained importance early in 1942 suggests that Heydrich’s remarks should be taken

  literally. 10 Tellingly, only a few days before the Wannsee Conference, on 12

  January 1942, the HSSPF Ukraine instructed the Commissars General in Brest-

  Litovsk, Zhitomir, Nikolayev, Dnepropetrovsk, and Kiev to start immediately

  preparing for the establishment of ghettos so that ‘Jews from the Old Reich

  could be accommodated in the course of 1942’. 11 By contrast, there is no evidence that there was any plan at this point to deport the Jews from Central and Western

  Europe directly to extermination camps on Polish soil. On the contrary, the first

  deportations from countries outside Germany, those from Slovakia and France,

  which began in the spring of 1942, as well as the ‘third-wave’ deportations from

  the Reich, which were taking place at the same time, did not lead directly to the

  gas chambers of the extermination camps. It was not immediately before or after

  the Wannsee Conference, but in the spring of 1942 that the capacity of the

  extermination camps was hastily extended at very short notice.

  The minutes of the Wannsee Conference do, however, make it clear that, on the

  one hand, the idea of a post-war solution was being firmly adhered to, while at the

  same time there was a debate over the proposal to exempt the Jews in the General

  Government and the occupied Soviet territories from this general plan and kill

  them in the short term.

  Five weeks before the Wannsee Conference, Governor General Frank had

  already learned that the deportation of the Jews from the General Government

  could not be counted on even in the medium-to-long term. 12 He drew the conclusions from this knowledge at a meeting on 16 December:13

  In Berlin they said to us, ‘Why are people making such a fuss? We can’t do anything with

  them in the Ostland or in the Reichsommissariat either; liquidate them yourselves!’

  Gentlemen, I must ask you to resist any sense of compassion. We must annihilate the

  Jews wherever we find them and whenever this is at all possible, in order to maintain here the whole structure of the Reich.

  However, the method and time-frame for this mass murder were still undecided

  in mid-December 1941, as we can see from Frank’s further remarks:

  We can’t shoot these 3.5 million Jews, we can’t poison them, but we will be able to intervene in a way that will somehow lead to their successful extermination—in the context of the

  greater measures that are to be discussed in relation to the Reich. The General Government must become just as free of Jews [judenfrei] as the Reich. Where and how that happens is a matter for the official bodies that we must set up and deploy here, and in due course I shall let you know how effective they are being.

  The Wannsee Conference

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  The determination of the leadership of the General Government to achieve this

  ‘successful extermination’ in the short term provides the context for the remarks

  made by the State Secretary, Bühler,the representative of the government of the

  General Government, towards the end of the Wannsee Conference. Bühler stated

  that the General Government would ‘welcome it if the final solution to this

  question could begin in the General Government, because, in the first place, the

  problem of transportation does not play a decisive role here and because these

  measures will not be obstructed by issues involving labour deployment’. More-

  over, the approximately 2.5 million Jews who were to be removed from the

  General Government ‘as soon as possible’ were overwhelmingly ‘unfit for work’.

  Thus Bühler was clearly proposing that the majority of the Jews in the General

  Government should be murdered within the General Government itself, and that

  they should no longer be used, as Heydrich had suggested, ‘to build roads’ in the

  occupied Eastern territories.

  Then the conference participants went a step further, and discussed the

  question of how the Jews in the General Government and the occupied Soviet

  territories were actually to be ‘removed’—in other words they talked in concrete

  terms about the method for murder: ‘In the concluding stages different possible

  solutions were discussed. Both Gauleiter Dr Meyer [the representative of the

  Eastern Ministry] and State Secretary Dr Bühler argued that certain preliminary

  measures for the final solution should immediately be taken in the relevant area

  itself, although in such a way as to avoid causing disquiet among the local

  population.’

  These ‘preliminary measures’, however, can only have meant one thing: the

  construction of extermination camps in the district of Lublin: Belzec was already

  under construction, while Sobibor may have been at the planning stage. However,

  the minutes do not provide any evidence that any decision was taken on the

  proposals of Meyer and Bühler at the conference itself.

  In fact the Wannsee Conference took place at a watershed. The original plan,

  for which concrete steps had already been taken, for the comprehensive deport-

  ation and annihilation of the Jews in camps in the occupied Soviet territories

  (‘road-building’ as a synonym for forced labour in inadequate conditions) was still

  being adhered to. However, at the same time it had become clear that the

  precondition for this, an impending victory, could not be expected at least in

  the short term, while in the meantime hundreds of thousands of people had been

  killed in the occupied Polish territories, in Serbia, and the Soviet Union, and there

  were plans to extend these massacres.

  Thus, the Wannsee minutes that have survived provide a snapshot of a stage

  reached in a process in the course of which the SS leadership had shifted its

  perspective away from the idea of a post-war ‘final solution’ to the new aim of

  implementing ever more stages of the ‘Final Solution’ during the war, in other

  words to ‘anticipate’ it, while at the same time this new perspective still included

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  the post-war period. During this critical period, the deportation to the occupied

  Soviet territories increasingly became a fiction, while mass murder in the

  General Government increasingly became reality. During the greatest crisis of

  the war so far, the ‘Final Solution’ of the ‘Jewish question’ that had originally

  been intended, namely the mass deportations to the occupied Soviet territories,

  was becoming increasingly illusory. In this context Heydrich wished to convey

  the impression to those responsible for the persecution of the Jews that the

  RSHA had a plan whereby the mass murders which had begun in different ways

  in various occupied territories, which represented a hitherto unimaginable

  realization of state terror, could lead to a ‘total solution’ that could be imple-

  mented in the long term.

  While Heydrich adhered to the scheme of deportations to the occupied Eastern

  territories and allowed no doubts that the deportees would be violently killed

  there, the minutes of the discussion make it clear that other solutions had already

  been considered, namely the possibility of murdering all the Jews in the General

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sp; Government in situ. This idea was plainly accepted after the Wannsee Conference,

  and it also became gradually accepted that the deportations from the rest of

  Europe, originally planned for the occupied Soviet territories, were to be diverted

  to the extermination sites under construction in the General Government. On 20

  January 1942, Heydrich had two chief concerns: the deportations had to be

  accepted (everything that happened after the deportations was an internal SS

  matter, and no longer had to be agreed with other institutions). Secondly, the

  category of those to be deported had to be established: the status of Mischlinge and

  those married to non-Jews had to be clarified.

  This latter issue was dealt with in the second part of the conference. Heydrich

  suggested that ‘Mischlinge of the first degree’ who were married to ‘Aryans’ were

  as a rule to be deported or dispatched to a ‘ghetto for the aged’. Heydrich pointed

  out that the complicated classification of Mischlinge by the Nazi racial laws would

  have required numerous individual decisions. The State Secretary in the Reich

  Ministry of the Interior, Wilhelm Stuckart, objected to the ‘endless administrative

  work’ that this would inevitably produce, and suggested ‘a move to compulsory

  sterilization’. This disagreement could not be settled at the conference, and was

  thus to be addressed in several subsequent meetings, albeit without any conclusive

  results. 14

  However, by being included in the detailed discussion of the problems sur-

  rounding Mischlinge and ‘mixed marriages’, the representatives of the ministerial

  bureaucracy came to share both knowledge of and responsibility for the ‘Final

  Solution’. For, with the concerns they raised against the inclusion of marginal

  groups in the deportations, the representatives of the ministerial bureaucracy had

  made it plain that they had no concerns about the principle of deportation per se.

  This was indeed the crucial result of the meeting and the main reason why

  Heydrich had detailed minutes prepared and widely circulated.

  Part V

  THE EXTERMINATION OF THE EUROPEAN

  JEW, 1942–1945