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

by Saul Friedlander

224. Michael H. Kater, The Twisted Muse: Musicians and Their Music in the Third Reich (New York, 1997), p. 103.

  225. Renée Poznanski, “The Jews of France and the Statutes on Jews, 1940–1941,” Yad Vashem Studies 22 (1992), pp. 115–16.

  226. René Rémond, Le “Fichier juif” (Paris, 1996), pp. 67–68.

  227. Ibid., p. 68.

  228. Ibid., p. 74.

  229. Raymond-Raoul Lambert, Carnet d’un témoin: 1940–1943, ed. Richard I. Cohen (Paris, 1985), p. 105.

  230. Ibid., p. 187.

  231. Jacques Biélinky, Journal, 1940–1942: Un journaliste juif à Paris sous l’Occupation, ed. Renée Poznanski (Paris, 1992), p. 146.

  232. About the exhibition see Joseph Billig, L’Institut d’étude des questions Juives (Paris, 1974), pp. 160ff.

  233. Lucien Steinberg and Jean Marie Fitère, Les Allemands en France: 1940–1944 (Paris, 1980), pp. 75–76. Jacques Adler, The Jews of Paris and the Final Solution: Communal Response and Internal Conflicts, 1940–1944 (New York, 1987), pp. 75ff; Renée Poznanski, Être juif en France pendant la Seconde Guerre mondiale (Paris, 1994), p. 311.

  234. For a detailed history of local French life in the Nantes region during the war, see Robert Gildea, Marianne in Chains: Everyday Life in the French Heartland under the German Occupation (New York, 2003), pp. 229ff.

  235. On this issue, see in particular Philippe Burrin, Hitler und die Juden: Die Entscheidung für den Völkermord (Frankfurt am Main, 1993), pp. 144–45.

  236. Ulrich Herbert, Best: Biographische Studien über Radikalismus, Weltanschauung und Vernunft, 1903–1989 (Bonn, 1996), p. 312.

  237. Ibid.

  238. Adler, The Jews of Paris, pp. 79–80.

  239. Ibid., p. 105–6.

  240. See particularly Lambert, Carnet d’un témoin, pp. 129ff.

  241. Exact statistics are unavailable. See Rudi von Doorslaer, “Jewish Immigration and Communism in Belgium, 1925–1939,” in Belgium and the Holocaust: Jews, Belgians, Germans, ed. Dan Michman (Jerusalem, 1998), p. 63. For the early measures taken in Belgium, see Maxime Steinberg, La Persécution des Juifs en Belgique (1940–1945) (Brussels, 2004), pp. 33ff.

  242. Ibid.

  243. For the Antwerp events and the text of the “protest” see Lieven Saerens, “Antwerp’s Attitude Toward the Jews from 1918 to 1940 and Its Implications for the Period of Occupation,” in Belgium and the Holocaust: Jews, Belgians, Germans, ed. Dan Michman (Jerusalem, 1998), pp. 192–193.

  244. Berkhoff, Harvest of Despair, p. 77.

  Chapter Five: September 1941–December 1941

  1. The general description of the events follows Andrew Ezergailis, The Holocaust in Latvia, 1941–1944: The Missing Center (Riga and Washington, DC, 1996), pp. 244–50.

  2. It seems that SS architects and other experts were consulted about the disposals of the bodies of the 30,000 Riga Jews. See Konrad Kwiet, “Rehearsing for Murder: The Beginning of the Final Solution in Lithuania in June 1941,” Holocaust and Genocide Studies 12, no. 1 (1998), p. 7.

  3. Ezergailis, The Holocaust in Latvia, 1941–1944, p. 253.

  4. Ibid., p. 254.

  5. Wolfgang Benz, Konrad Kwiet, and Jürgen Matthäus, Einsatz im “Reichskommissariat Ostland”: Dokumente zum Völkermord im Baltikum und in Weissrussland, 1941–1944 (Berlin, 1998), p. 96.

  6. Sophie Dubnov-Erlich, The Life and World of S. M. Dubnov. Diaspora Nationalism and Jewish History (New York, 1991), pp. 246–47.

  7. Jürgen Matthäus, “Weltanschauliche Forschung und Auswärtung. Aus den Akten des Amtes VII im Reichssicherheitshauptamt,” Jahrbuch für Antisemitismusforschung 5 (1996), p. 316.

  8. Quoted in Konrad Kwiet, “Erziehung zum Mord: Zwei Beispiele zur Kontinuität der deutschen ‘Endlösung der Judenfrage,’” in Geschichte und Emanzipation, ed. Michael Grüttner et al. (Frankfurt, 1999), p. 449.

  9. Peter Witte, “Two Decisions Concerning the “Final Solution to the Jewish Question”: Deportations to Lodz and Mass Murder in Chelmno,” Holocaust and Genocide Studies 9, no. 3 (1995), p. 330.

  10. Ibid., pp. 324–25.

  11. Ibid.

  12. Ibid.

  13. Joseph Goebbels, Die Tagebücher von Joseph Goebbels: Sämtliche Fragmente, ed. Elke Fröhlich part 2, vol. 1 (Munich, 1996), pp. 384, 388.

  14. Gerhard L. Weinberg, A World at Arms: A Global History of World War II (Cambridge, UK, 1994), pp. 243–44.

  15. This had been the pretext for the anti-Jewish boycott of April 1933 and was mentioned time and again as an effective anti-Jewish strategy from the end of 1938 to the war. See Saul Friedländer, Nazi Germany and the Jews, Volume 1: The Years of Persecution, 1933–1939 (New York, 1997), p. 316.

  16. Martin Dean, “The Development and Implementation of Nazi Denaturalization and Confiscation Policy up to the Eleventh Decree to the Reich Citizenship Law,” Holocaust and Genocide Studies 16, no. 2 (2002), p. 230.

  17. Saul Friedländer, Prelude to Downfall: Hitler and the United States, 1939–41 (New York, 1967), pp. 290ff.

  18. Ibid., p. 291.

  19. On these discussions and related issues see Heinrich Himmler, Der Dienst- kalender Heinrich Himmlers 1941/42, ed. Peter Witte et al. (Hamburg, 1999), pp. 203, 205.

  20. Ibid., p. 205 n. 19.

  21. Christopher R. Browning and Jürgen Matthäus, The Origins of the Final Solution: The Evolution of Nazi Jewish Policy, September 1939–March 1942 (Lincoln, NE, 2004), p. 328.

  22. About the exchanges between Himmler and Übelhör, then between Heydrich and Übelhör, see mainly ibid., pp. 331ff. See also, among others, H. G. Adler, Der verwaltete Mensch: Studien zur Deportation der Juden aus Deutschland (Tübingen, 1974), pp. 173ff.

  23. Henry Friedlander, “The Deportation of the German Jews: Post-War German Trials of Nazi Criminals,” in Year Book of the Leo Baeck Institute (London, 1984), vol. 29, p. 212.

  24. For the additional measures see Yaacov Lozowick, “Malice in Action,” Yad Vashem Bulletin 27 (1999), pp. 300–301.

  25. For the fate of the Reich Jews deported to Kovno see, among other publications, Dina Porat, “The Legend of the Struggle of the Jews from the Third Reich in the Ninth Fort near Kovno, 1941–1942,” Tel Aviver Jahrbuch für deutsche Geschichte 20 (1991), pp. 363ff. and particularly 375ff.

  26. Friedlander, “The Deportation of the German Jews: Post-War German Trials of Nazi Criminals,” p. 214.

  27. Himmler, Der Dienstkalender, p. 278 n. 104.

  28. Ibid.

  29. Goebbels, Tagebücher, part 2, vol. 2, pp. 49–50, 73 (for the translation see Christopher R. Browning, Nazi Policy, Jewish Workers, German Killers [Cambridge, 2000], p. 38).

  30. Willi A. Boelcke, ed., Wollt Ihr den totalen Krieg? Die geheimen Goebbels Konferenzen 1939–1943 (Herrsching, 1989), p. 246.

  31. Dawid Sierakowiak, The Diary of Dawid Sierakowiak, ed. Alan Adelson (New York, 1996), p. 136.

  32. Ibid., p. 138.

  33. Chaim Aron Kaplan, Scroll of Agony: The Warsaw Diary of Chaim A. Kaplan, ed. Abraham I. Katsh (Bloomington, 1999), p. 272.

  34. Victor Klemperer, I Will Bear Witness: A Diary of the Nazi Years, 1933–41 (New York, 1998), p. 440.

  35. Willy Cohn, Als Jude in Breslau 1941, ed. Joseph Walk (Gerlingen, 1984), p. 106.

  36. Ibid., p. 110.

  37. Mihail Sebastian, Journal, 1935–1944 (Chicago, 2000), p. 425.

  38. Jacques Biélinky, Journal, 1940–1942: Un journaliste juif à Paris sous l’Occupation, ed. Renée Poznánski (Paris, 1992), p. 156.

  39. Ian Kershaw, Hitler, 1936–45: Nemesis (New York, 2000), p. 440.

  40. Ernst Klink, “The Conduct of Operations: 1. The Army and the Navy,” in The Attack on the Soviet Union, ed. Horst Boog (Oxford, 1998), pp. 685ff, 690ff, and 701–2.

  41. Goebbels, Tagebücher, part 2, vol. 2, p. 296.

  42. Friedländer, Prelude to Downfall: Hitler and the United States, 1939–41, pp. 292ff.

  43. David M. Kennedy, Freedom from Fear: The American People in Depression and War, 1929–1945 (New Yo
rk, 1999), p. 499.

  44. Goebbels, Tagebücher, part 2, vol. 2, p. 297.

  45. Galeazzo Ciano, Diary 1937–1943: The Complete Unabridged Diaries of Count Galeazzo Ciano, Italian Minister for Foreign Affairs, 1936–1943 (London, 2002), p. 459.

  46. About the Des Moines speech, see A. Scott Berg, Lindbergh (New York, 1998), pp. 324ff.

  47. Ibid., p. 426–27.

  48. Ibid., p. 427.

  49. Goebbels, Tagebücher, part 2, vol. 1, p. 417.

  50. For the text of Hitler’s order of the day of October 2, 1941, see Adolf Hitler, Hitler: Reden und Proklamationen, 1932–1945: Kommentiert von einem deutschen Zeitgenossen, ed. Max Domarus, 4 vols. (Leonberg, 1987–88), part 2, vol. 4, pp. 1756–57.

  51. Ibid., p. 1759.

  52. Adolf Hitler, Monologe im Führer-Hauptquartier 1941–1944, ed. Werner Jochmann and Heinrich Heim (Munich, 2000), p. 78.

  53. Ibid., p. 88.

  54. Ibid., p. 90.

  55. Ibid.

  56. Ibid., p. 93.

  57. Ibid., p. 96.

  58. Ibid., pp. 96–99 (for the translation of some of the excerpts, see also Adolf Hitler, Hitler’s Table Talk, 1941–1944, ed. H. R. Trevor-Roper [London, 1953]), p. 79.

  59. Nuremberg doc. NG-287. Quoted in Josef Wulf, ed., Presse und Funk im Dritten Reich: Eine Dokumentation (Gütersloh, 1964), p. 254.

  60. Hitler, Monologue, p. 106.

  61. Ibid.

  62. Andreas Hillgruber, Staatsmänner und Diplomaten bei Hitler: Vertrauliche Aufzeichnungen über Unterredungen mit Vertretern des Auslandes (Frankfurt am Main, 1967–70), vol. 1, pp. 634–35.

  63. Hitler, Monologe, pp. 130–31.

  64. Hitler, Reden, vol. 4, p. 1772.

  65. Ibid., pp. 1772–73.

  66. Ibid., p. 1778.

  67. DGFP: Series D, vol. 13, (Washington, 1964), p. 767.

  68. Hitler, Monologe, p. 137.

  69. Ibid., p. 143.

  70. Joseph Goebbels, “Die Juden sind schuld!” in Joseph Goebbels, Das eherne Herz: Reden und Aufsätze aus den Jahren 1941/42, ed. Moritz Augustus Konstantin von Schirmeister (Munich, 1943), pp. 85ff.

  71. For an excellent analysis of Goebbels’s article in Das Reich and his lecture of December 1, see Jeffrey Herf, “The ‘Jewish War’: Goebbels and the Antisemitic Campaign of the Nazi Propaganda Ministry,” Holocaust and Genocide Studies 19, no. 1 (2005), pp. 67–68. Now, see mainly Jeffrey Herf, The Jewish Enemy: Nazi Propaganda during World War II and the Holocaust (Cambridge, Mass., 2006), pp. 122ff.

  72. Goebbels, Tagebücher, part 2, vol. 2, pp. 340–41.

  73. DGFP: Series D, vol. 13, pp. 850–51.

  74. Hillgruber, Staatsmänner, pp. 664ff.

  75. DGFP: Series D, vol. 13, p. 893.

  76. Memorandum for Ribbentrop from Schmidt, November 30, 1941, ibid., pp. 908–9.

  77. Hitler, Monologe, p. 144.

  78. Ibid., pp. 147–8.

  79. Hitler, Reden, part 2, vol. 4, p. 1794.

  80. Ibid., pp. 1794–97.

  81. Ibid., pp. 1800–1804. “The spirits this man has called” was of course a reference to Goethe’s Faust.

  82. Ibid., p. 1804.

  83. Goebbels, Tagebücher, part 2, vol. 2, pp. 498ff.

  84. Himmler, Der Dienstkalender, p. 194; Christian Gerlach, “Die Wannsee-Konferenz, das Schiksal der deutschen Juden und Hitlers politische Grundsatzentscheidung, alle Juden Europas zu ermorden,” in Christian Gerlach, Krieg, Ernährung, Völkermord: Forschungen zur deutschen Vernichtungspolitik im Zweiten Weltkrieg (Hamburg, 1998), pp. 8, 121.

  85. Goebbels, Tagebücher, part 2, vol. 2, pp. 533–34.

  86. Hitler, Monologe, p. 158.

  87. Goebbels, Tagebücher, part 2, vol. 2, p. 614.

  88. Hitler, Reden, pp. 1820–21.

  89. The killing operations in Galicia—including the mass murders in the fall of 1941—have been studied in considerable detail. See in particular Dieter Pohl, Nationalsozialistische Judenverfolgung in Ostgalizien 1941–1944: Organization und Durchführung eines staatlichen Massenverbrechens (Munich, 1996); Dieter Pohl, “Hans Krüger and the Murder of the Jews in the Stanislawow Region (Galicia),” Yad Vashem Studies 26 (1998); Thomas Sandkühler, “Endlösung” in Galizien: der Judenmord in Ostpolen und die Rettungsinitiativen von Berthold Beitz, 1941–1944 (Bonn, 1996); Browning and Matthäus, The Origins of the Final Solution: The Evolution of Nazi Jewish Policy, September 1939–March 1942, pp. 347ff.

  90. For the description of the events at the cemetery, see in particular Sandkühler, Endlösung in Galizien, pp. 151–52.

  91. Elsa Binder’s diary is quoted in Alexandra Zapruder, Salvaged Pages. Young Writers’ Diaries of the Holocaust (New Haven, 2002), pp. 301ff., particularly 315.

  92. The deportations to Minsk also led to mass executions of local Jews; the killing of local Jews to make space for the deportees from the Reich may explain the aborted plans for setting up an extermination site in Mogilev. On this issue see Christian Gerlach, “Failure of Plans for an SS Extermination Camp in Mogilev, Belorussia,” Holocaust and Genocide Studies 7, no. 1 (1997), pp. 60ff.

  93. The full text of Heydrich’s statement is quoted in H. G. Adler, Theresienstadt, 1941–1945: Das Antlitz einer Zwangsgemeinschaft. Geschichte, Soziologie, Psychologie (Tübingen, 1960), pp. 720ff. The Wannsee conference will be discussed in chapter 6.

  94. Himmler, Der Dienstkalender, pp. 233–34 n. 35.

  95. For the function of the Zamosc region as the first colonization project in the framework of General Plan East, see in particular Bruno Wasser, “Die ‘Germanisierung’ im Distrikt Lublin als Generalprobe und erste Realisierungsphase des ‘Generalplans Ost,’” in Mechtild Rössler, Sabine Schleiermacher, and Cordula Tollmien, eds., Der “Generalplan Ost”: Hauptlinien der nationalsozialistischen Planungs- und Vernichtungspolitik (Berlin, 1993), pp. 271ff.

  96. Hitler, Monologe, pp. 78ff. Hans Mommsen’s suggestion that the extermination process leading to the full-scale “Final Solution” was triggered by Globocnik’s extermination initiatives in Lublin and Katzmann’s murder operations in Galicia is hard to sustain. According to this argument it was Globocnik who convinced Himmler to send him T4 personnel to deal with the Jews unfit for work on his road-building projects (Durchgangstrasse IV ) and also to make space for ethnic Germans from the Zamosc region. Along the lines of the same interpretation, Globocnik’s initiative would have led to the construction of the other extermination camps in the General Government and started a murderous chain reaction that ultimately engulfed the whole of European Jewry. For this thesis see Hans Mommsen, Auschwitz, 17. Juli 1942: Der Weg zur europäischen “Endlösung der Judenfrage” (Munich, 2002), pp. 134ff. and 138. There is no doubt that the fanaticism and the activism of a Globocnik—or a Jeckeln or a Greiser—were highly valued by Himmler and certainly acknowledged by Hitler; yet nothing indicates that these or any other local initiatives set a course that “die höchste Instanz” then adopted as his own. The Globocniks of the system could act only within the limits set by Himmler, and when it came to the general extermination plan, the Reichsführer himself got his orders from Hitler.

  97. Philippe Burrin, Hitler and the Jews: The Genesis of the Holocaust (London, 1994), p. 127.

  98. To make sense of Eichmann’s story, Christopher Browning, who uses the testimony as an indication that Hitler gave the go-ahead for the “Final Solution” sometime in September, when the order to deport the Jews from Germany was issued, has to assume that the head of IVB4 was sent to Lublin before the construction of the camp, and that the use of existing huts was at first considered sufficient for gassing purposes. No documents indicate that this may have been the case. See Browning and Matthäus, The Origins of the Final Solution, pp. 362ff.

  99. The limited gassing capacity of Belzec at this initial stage has been pointed out in Dieter Pohl, Von der “Judenpolitik” zum Judenmord: Der District Lublin des Generalgouvernements, 1933–1941, vol. 3 (Frankfurt am Main, 1993). For Greiser’s notorious letter to Himmle
r, see Tatiana Berenstein, ed., Faschismus, Getto, Massenmord: Dokumentation über Ausrottung und Widerstand der Juden in Polen während des zweiten Weltkrieges (East Berlin, 1961), p. 278.

  100. For Heydrich’s response to the Spanish offer, see Bernd Rother, “Franco und die deutsche Judenverfolgung,” Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte 46, no. 2 (1998), pp. 189ff. and particularly p. 195. See also Bernd Rother, Spanien und der Holocaust (Tübingen, 2001).

  101. Trials of war criminals before the Nuremberg Military Tribunals, 15 vols., vol. 13, U.S. v. von Weizsaecker: The Ministries Case (Washington, DC: U.S. GPO, 1952), Nuremberg doc. NG-5095, p. 174 [emphasis added].

  102. Quoted in full in Peter Longerich, Politik der Vernichtung: Eine Gesamtdarstellung der nationalsozialistischen Judenverfolgung (Munich, 1998), p. 443.

  103. On December 12, as mentioned, Hitler told his old-time party companions that the Jews of Europe were to be exterminated. On the sixteenth of that month, Hans Frank, having heard Hitler’s address, parroted his Führer in a speech to his top administrators in Kraków. Could not a comparison be made between Frank’s reaction to Hitler’s speech and a secret Rosenberg address to the German press, on November 18, after a lengthy meeting with Himmler three days beforehand?

  According to this interpretation, Rosenberg probably had been told by Himmler of the decision, and he echoed the newly acquired information in his speech to the press, as Frank was to echo Hitler a month later. “This Eastern territory,” Rosenberg declared, “is called upon to solve a question which is posed to the peoples of Europe; that is the Jewish Question. In the East, some 6 million Jews still live, and this question can only be solved in the biological eradication of the entire Jewry of Europe. The Jewish Question is only solved for Germany when the last Jew has left German territory, and for Europe when not a single Jew lives on the European continent up to the Urals. That is the task that fate had posed to us…. It is necessary to expel them over the Urals or eradicate them in some other way.” (Quoted in Browning and Matthäus, The Origins of the Final Solution: The Evolution of Nazi Jewish policy, September 1939–March 1942, p. 404.)

  Rosenberg’s meeting with Himmler was in fact primarily intended to establish some clear rules regarding the division of tasks in the occupied Eastern territories between SS and police leaders on the one hand, and Reich or Gebietskommissare on the other. It is in this context that the Jewish issue was discussed, and we do not know whether on that occasion Himmler imparted any further information—if any decision was to be imparted at all—to a rival whom he despised. On the next day, Himmler and Rosenberg were both Hitler’s guests at dinner. Were the Jews discussed on that occasion? We do not know either. (For the Himmler-Rosenberg meeting, see Himmler, Der Dienstkalender, p. 262, n. 46; for the dinner with Hitler, see Ibid., p. 264.) The “table-talk” records for that day indicate no allusion to the Jewish issue. (Hitler, Monologe, p. 140–42.)