Nazi Germany and the Jews, Volume 2: The Years of Extermination

by Saul Friedlander

  “Unfortunately,” the propaganda minister recorded on March 24, 1945, “Führer, too, is now increasingly mentioned in critical assessments…. It seems to me disastrous that now criticism does not stop at the person of the Führer, or at the National Socialist idea or at the movement.”190 And on April 1 Goebbels recorded again (referring mainly to attitudes in the western parts of the country); “Morale has sunk extraordinarily among the soldiers and the population. People are no longer afraid even of sharply criticizing the Führer.”191

  At least he, the Reichsminister, unlike most Volksgenossen, kept the faith, but like many, nursed the rage: “The Jews speak up again,” he recorded on March 14. “Their spokesman is the well-known and notorious Leopold Schwarzschild who now pleads in the American press against any milder treatment of Germany. These Jews should be killed like rats, whenever one gets the possibility to do it. In Germany, thank god, we already took care of it quite seriously. I hope that the world will adopt this as an example.”192 The raving and ranting went on ever more furiously as the twelve-year Reich was fast approaching its end.

  XII

  After part of the Reich Chancellery had been destroyed by massive American bombings in early February 1945, Hitler retreated to the vast underground maze of living quarters, offices, conference rooms, and utilities spreading two stories deep under the building and its garden. It was there that, a few weeks later, he decided to stay as the Red Army was closing in on Berlin. Almost to the end the Nazi leader apparently believed in his star and in a last-minute miracle that would turn the utterly hopeless military situation around. It was there in his subterranean abode that he heard extraordinary tidings: On April 12 Roosevelt died.

  The enemy coalition would collapse now as, at another time, in another hopeless war, the coalition arrayed against Frederick the Great foundered with Czarina Elizabeth’s death. Great expectations surged again and Hitler shared them with the troops on the Eastern front in his April 16 proclamation: “For the last time the Jewish-Bolshevik mortal enemy has attacked…. In this hour the entire German nation looks to you, my Eastern Front warriors [meine Ostkämpfer] and only hopes that as a result of your steadfastness, your fanaticism, your weapons and your leadership, the Bolshevik assault will suffocate in a bloodbath. At the moment when fate has taken away the greatest war criminal of all times [Roosevelt], the turn of this war will be decided.”193

  On April 20, as somewhat subdued toasts were raised in Hitler’s bunker to celebrate the Führer’s fifty-sixth birthday, Dr. Alfred Trzebinski, senior physician at the Neuengamme concentration camp, received the order to dispose of twenty Jewish children who had been used as guinea pigs for SS doctor Kurt Heissmeyer’s experiments on tuberculosis.194

  About a year beforehand, Heissmeyer, assistant director of the SS sanatorium at Hohenlychen, had received Himmler’s authorization to conduct his experiments on adults and children in secluded barracks at Neuengamme. The twenty Jewish children, ten boys and ten girls, aged five to twelve, had arrived in Birkenau with their families from France, Holland, Poland, and Yugoslavia. The families disappeared in the gas chambers and, in the fall of 1944 the twenty children were sent to Neuengamme.195

  During the following months, the children, injected with Heissmeyer’s preparations, became seriously ill. On April 20, as British forces were approaching the camp, the order came. The killing would not take place in Neuengamme but at the Bullenhuser Damm school in Rothenburg-sort, near Hamburg, a subcamp of Neuengamme.

  At his postwar trial Trzebinski described the course of the events. The SS personnel arrived at Bullenhuser Damm with six Russian prisoners, two French doctors, two Dutch inmates, and the children. The children were put in a separate room, an air raid shelter: “They had all their things with them—some food, some toys they had made themselves, etc. They sat on the benches and were happy that they had gotten out. They didn’t suspect a thing.”

  Trzebinski gave the children sedatives, while, in the boiler room, all the adult inmates were put to death. “I must say,” Trzebinski went on, “that in general the children’s condition was very good, except for one twelve-year-old boy who was in bad shape; he therefore fell asleep very quickly. Six or eight of the children were still awake—the others were already sleeping…. Frahm [an orderly] lifted the twelve-year-old boy and said to the others that he was taking him to bed. He took him to a room that was maybe six or eight yards away, and there I saw a rope already attached to a hook. Frahm put the sleeping boy into the noose and with all his weight pulled down on the body of the boy so that the noose would tighten.”196 The other children followed, one by one.

  One of the most criminal political leaders in history was about to put an end to his life. There is no point in probing once more “the mind of Adolf Hitler” or the twisted emotional sources of his murderous obsessions. It has been attempted many times without much success. However, the significant and unavoidable historical question, the one that we briefly addressed in the introduction and repeatedly throughout the volume, has to be restated and considered again at the end. The major question that challenges all of us is not what personality traits allowed an “unknown corporal” of the Great War to become the all-powerful leader Adolf Hitler, but rather why tens of millions of Germans blindly followed him to the end, why many still believed in him at the end, and not a few, after the end. It is the nature of “Führer-Bindung,” this “bond to the Führer,” to use Martin Broszat’s expression, that remains historically significant.197

  Among twentieth-century leaders none but Hitler was surrounded by the frenzied devotion of so many fellow countrymen in one of the most advanced and powerful nations on earth. Roosevelt was divisive, and a large segment of the American people opposed him and at times hated him throughout his four terms in office; many Britons detested Churchill before and during his premiership; fear surrounded Stalin, the statesman most often compared to Hitler. Whereas in the Soviet Union the elite was terrorized and the population lived in a mixed atmosphere of fear and admiration for the worthy disciple of Marx and Lenin, Hitler was surrounded by the hysterical adoration and blind faith of so many, for so long, that well after Stalingrad, as we saw, countless Germans still believed in his promises of victory. Of course nothing of the kind ever applied to Mussolini, and whatever bond had existed between the Duce and his people at the onset of his regime fast vanished from the midthirties on.

  Previously we indicated how brandishing the threat represented by “the Jew” reinforced Hitler’s charismatic appeal. A metahistorical enemy demanded, when the time for the decisive struggle arrived, a metahistorical personality to lead the fight against those forces of evil. Yet we are hard put to identify the importance of charisma in a modern society functioning along the rules of instrumental rationality and bureaucratic procedures. There remains but one plausible interpretation: Modern society does remain open to—possibly in need of—the ongoing presence of religious or pseudoreligious incentives within a system otherwise dominated by thoroughly different dynamics. Above and beyond the “reactionary modernism” evoked by historian Jeffrey Herf, Nazism confronts us with some kind of “sacralized modernism.”198 Propaganda and all the trappings of mass manipulation were an essential part of the emotional-psychological mobilization that took hold of the German population. However, without Hitler’s uncanny ability to grasp and magnify the basic urges of such a mass craving for order, authority, greatness, and salvation, the techniques of propaganda alone would not have sufficed. In that sense National Socialism could not have arisen and taken hold without Adolf Hitler on the one hand, and without the Germans’ response to Hitler on the other.

  Of course, had Hitler only ranted and raved without delivering any tangible results, disenchantment would rapidly have undermined his appeal. But within a few years, despite the mobilization of sundry enemies by the “master of deceit,” he did achieve full employment and economic growth, the elimination of humiliating shackles and a new sense of national pride, social mobility for
the great number and improvement of the standards of living and the working conditions of the masses, together with hefty rewards—and the promise of much greater ones—for the leaders of business and industry. Above and beyond anything else, Hitler instilled in the majority of Germans a sense of community and purpose. Later extraordinary diplomatic success followed, capped by stunning military victories that drove German national exaltation to the rim of literal collective insanity.

  Throughout, Hitler was loath to sacrifice standards of living to the demands of an increasingly total war, and, as was amply shown in the preceding pages, conquered peoples, and mainly the Jews, were indeed defrauded and exploited to sustain, in part, the well-being of the Volksgemeinschaft or, at least, to alleviate some of the material burdens of the war. In that sense the arguments mustered by Götz Aly in Hitlers Volkstaat cannot be dismissed out of hand. But why should the Jews have been exterminated in the face of the demands of the Wehrmacht for skilled labor and other economic arguments, unless entirely different reasons motivated the master of the Reich and the multitude of his acolytes and supporters? Unavoidably the question leads us back once again to the phantasmal role played by “the Jew” in Hitler’s Germany and the surrounding world.

  As the struggle reached its critical phase, at the height of the war, to lose faith in Hitler meant only one outcome: the prospect of horrendous retaliation at the hands of “Jewish liquidation squads,” in Goebbels’s words. Robbing the Jews contributed to the upholding of the Volkstaat; murdering them and fanning the fears of retribution became the ultimate bond of Führer and Volk in the collapsing Führerstaat.

  At the very end the “bond” snapped for many Germans. For others, however, pride in the achievements of the regime and belief in its rightful path, marred solely by minor blemishes, remained silently and anonymously alive for decades to come, as did the nostalgia for the Volksgemeinschaft.199

  On April 21, 1945, in the evening, as Soviet shells started falling near the former buildings of the Reich Chancellery, the Nazi leader thanked the Duce for his birthday greetings: “My thanks, Duce, for your wishes on my birthday. The struggle that we are leading for our sheer existence has reached its high point. With limitless supplies of war material, Bolshevism and the troops of Jewry [Bolschewismus und die Truppen des Judentums] set everything in action to unite their destructive forces in Germany and thus push our continent into chaos.”200 For the first time, it seems, the Anglo-American forces were designated as “the troops of Jewry.”

  The Nazi chief let his entourage know that he would stay in the bunker and kill himself; everybody else could leave if they wished to. Eva Braun, whom Hitler would marry on the eve of their suicide, was determined to die with him. The faithful Goebbels, his wife, Magda, and their six children were also in the bunker: They would share their leader’s fate. On April 29 the time had come: The Führer dictated his “Private Testament” and then his message to future generations, his “Political Testament.”

  In the first half of the document, the Nazi leader addressed the German people, the world, and history. “It is untrue,” he declared, “that he or anybody else in Germany had wanted the war in 1939.” And, immediately, at the very outset of the message, he turned to his main obsession: “It [the war] was exclusively willed and triggered by the international statesmen, who were either of Jewish descent or worked for Jewish interests.” After denying again any responsibility in the outbreak of the war, the Nazi leader, as was his wont, prophesied retribution: “From the ruins of our cities and our monuments hatred will arise again against the people that bears the responsibility in the end, the one to whom we have to thank for all of this: international Jewry and its acolytes!”

  After a brief but, as we shall see, essential comment on British responsibility for the outcome of the Polish crisis of September 1939, Hitler could not fail to end this short paragraph without returning to Jewish warmongering. Full-scale raving followed: “I left no doubt that if the peoples of Europe were treated again as bundles of stocks belonging to the international conspiracy of money and finance, then the culprit for this murderous struggle would have to pay: Jewry! Moreover I did not leave anybody unaware of the fact that, this time, not only millions of men would be killed, not only hundreds of thousands of women and children would be burnt and bombed to death in the cities, but those truly responsible would have to pay for his culpability, albeit by more humane methods.” The responsibility for the extermination of five to six million Jews was laid squarely upon the victims. The address then turned to Hitler’s decision to share the fate of Berlin’s inhabitants but, typically, it shifted again: “Moreover, I do not want to fall into the hands of the enemies who need a new show staged by the Jews for their excited masses.”

  Volk and soldiers got their share of praise: The seeds had been sown, Hitler declared, that would lead to the rebirth of National Socialism. Then he settled accounts with Göring and Himmler, whom he demoted and expelled from the party for their dealings with the Western Powers, nominated Grand Adm. Karl Dönitz as the new head of state (“president,” not “Führer,” of course) and chief of the armed forces, Goebbels as chancellor, and designated the new ministers. Hitler reached the inevitable final exhortation: “Most of all, I commit the leadership of the nation and its followers to the strictest keeping of the race laws and the merciless struggle against the universal poisoner of all people, international Jewry.”201

  The wording of such a document, dictated in the direst of circumstances, cannot be taken in the same way as if it had been carefully prepared at the height of the Nazi leader’s power. And yet isn’t it plausible that precisely the historical importance (in Hitler’s eyes) of this last message would bring forth only the essentials, the barest tenets, of Hitler’s faith?

  That “Providence” or “fate”—still invoked less than two weeks earlier—had disappeared from the Nazi leader’s rhetoric needs no explanation. That the “Reich” and the “party” also remained unmentioned (except for “Berlin, the capital of the Reich”) is not surprising either. The Reich was in ruins and the party replete with traitors. Not only were Göring and Himmler negotiating with the enemy but, in the West, the Gauleiter were surrendering one after another, and SS generals were sending false reports on the military situation. The party, whose members should have been ready to die for the Reich and their leader, had ceased to exist.

  All this was in line with Hitler’s usual reactions toward anyone daring to wander off the path he alone was allowed to dictate. But besides such foreseeable reactions, one aspect of the testament was utterly unexpected: In Hitler’s final message there was no trace of Bolshevism.

  Hitler had probably decided to concentrate his entire apologia on demonstrating that neither Germany’s catastrophic end nor the murder of the Jews was his responsibility. The responsibility was laid squarely upon those who, in September 1939, pushed for war, whereas he sought only compromise: the Western plutocrats and the warmongering Jews. Stalin, his ally at the time, was better left unmentioned as the partition of Poland within days of the invasion showed that the Reich and the Soviet Union had decided to share the Polish spoils in a pact that considerably facilitated the German attack and proved that Hitler was intent on launching the war.

  On April 30, shortly after 3:00 p.m., Hitler and Eva Braun committed suicide. On Dönitz’s order, German radio broadcast the following announcement on May 1 at 10:26 p.m.: “The Führer’s headquarters announce that this afternoon, our Führer, Adolf Hitler, fell at his command post in the Reich Chancellery, in fighting against Bolshevism to his last breath.”202 Seven days later Germany surrendered.

  Either on May 1 or 2, as he was informed of Hitler’s death, Cardinal Bertram—who in the meantime had left Breslau for safer surroundings—requested, in a handwritten letter addressed to all the parish priests of his diocese, that they “hold a solemn requiem mass in memory of the Führer.”203

  Before continuing their trek to the West the Klemperers, as mentioned, stayed
briefly in an acquaintances’ house near Dresden. On the night of March 21, all the inhabitants huddled in the corridor during an air raid warning. The Klemperers struck up a conversation with one Fräulein Dumpier: “She cautiously began to come out of her shell,” Victor later noted. “She gradually came out with strong doubts on National Socialist teaching…. She turned the conversation toward the Jewish question. I side-stepped carefully…. I went through quite a few contortions. The girl’s last words were amusing…she believed in the rights of nations, she found the arrogance and brutalization in Germany repugnant—‘It’s only the Jews I hate. I think I have been influenced a bit in that.’ I would have liked to ask her how many Jews she knew, but swallowed it down and merely smiled. And noted for myself, how demagogically justified National Socialism was in putting anti-Semitism at the center.”204

  Two weeks later the Klemperers, now ordinary German refugees, reached Upper Bavaria; their identity had not been discovered: They were saved. And so were some other diarists: Mihail Sebastian, in Bucharest (who soon after the Russian takeover was killed in an accident); Abraham Tory, from Kovno; Hersch Wasser, from Warsaw. So also were the dazed survivors who had been left behind in the camps, those who remained alive during the death marches, those who emerged from their hiding places in Christian institutions, in “Aryan” families, in mountains or forests, among partisans or in Resistance movements, those who lived in the open under false identities, those who had fled in time from German-dominated areas, those who kept their new identities, and those, known or unknown, who had betrayed and collaborated for the sake of survival.