The Third Reich at War

by Richard J. Evans

  Security considerations remained uppermost in the minds of the Nazi leadership.

  On 19 July 1942 Himmler ordered Friedrich Wilhelm Kr̈ger, the Chief of Police in the General Government, to ensure ‘that the resettlement of the entire Jewish population of the General Government is carried out and completed by 31 December 1942’. The ethnic reordering of Europe demanded a ‘total cleaning-out’.223 Hitler too was now determined, as he said in September 1942, that Jewish workers should as far as possible be removed from munitions factories in the Reich and that all remaining Jews in Berlin should be deported.224 He returned to his ‘prophecy’ of 30 January 1939 in a speech at the Berlin Sports Palace on 30 September 1942. He had predicted, he told his audience, ‘that if Jewry provokes an international world war for the extermination of the Aryan peoples, then it will not be the Aryan peoples who are exterminated, but Jewry.’ But now, ‘an antisemitic wave’ was going round Europe ‘from people to people’, and every state that entered the war would become an antisemitic state.225 In a private discussion with Bormann on 10 October 1942, G̈ring, it was reported, ‘believes the steps undertaken by the Reich Leader of the SS, Himmler, to be absolutely correct’, despite the fact that there had (probably for economic reasons) to be at least some exceptions.226 A few days previously, in a speech delivered at the Berlin Sports Palace, G̈ring had told his audience that Churchill and Roosevelt were ‘drunken and mentally ill people who dangle from the Jews’ wires’. The war was a ‘great race war . . . about whether the German and Aryan will survive or if the Jew will rule the world’.227 He too, therefore, presented the extermination as a necessary act of self-defence on the part of the German people. Hitler’s annual speech to the Nazi ‘Old Fighters’ at Munich on 8 November 1942, broadcast over German radio, repeated yet again his 1939 prophecy, this time saying bluntly that the war would end in their ‘extermination’. He added that the Jews who (he thought) had laughed at him then ‘are laughing no longer’.228

  Immediately after this speech, Hitler’s press chief Dietrich stepped up antisemitic propaganda once more. Over the coming months, Goebbels also returned repeatedly to this theme. A significant part of his speech in the Sports Palace in Berlin on 18 February 1943, which was broadcast on all German radio stations, was devoted to it:

  Behind the onrushing - [excited shouts of intejection] - behind the onrushing Soviet divisions we can already see the Jewish liquidation squads, which loom behind terror, the spectre of millions going hungry and total anarchy in Europe. Here international Jewry is once more proving itself to be the devilish element of decomposition . . . We have never been afraid of Jewry and we are less afraid today than ever! [shouts of ‘Hail!’, loud applause] . . . The aim of Bolshevism is the world revolution of the Jews . . . Germany at least does not intend to quail before this Jewish threat; rather, to meet it with the timely, if necessary total and most radical exter . . . [correcting himself] exclusion of Jewry! [loud applause, wild shouting, laughter].229

  Goebbels’s deliberate slip enlisted the complicity of his audience across the nation, not only in the mass murder of the Jews, but also in their understanding that euphemistic language had to be employed when referring to it. Hitler spoke, less explicitly, along the same lines on 24 February and 21 March 1943. He instructed Goebbels to intensify antisemitic propaganda in foreign broadcasts, especially to England.230 In a lengthy monologue addressed to the Propaganda Minister on 12 May 1943, after Goebbels had drawn his attention to the Tsarist forgery The Protocols of the Elders of Zion (a work that Hitler insisted was undoubtedly genuine), the Nazi Leader insisted that the Jews were everywhere working on the basis of their racial instinct to undermine civilization. ‘Modern peoples have no choice remaining but to exterminate the Jews.’ Only by fighting the Jewish race ‘with all the means at our disposal’ was victory possible. ‘The peoples who have rumbled the Jews first and fought them first will rule the world in their place.’231 The apocalyptic tone of this speech was remarkable. Hitler was now justifying the extermination of the Jews as a necessary precondition of world domination by Germans.

  On 3 May 1943, Goebbels issued a confidential circular to the German press demanding that more attention be devoted to attacks on the Jews. ‘The possibilities for exposing the true character of the Jews are endless,’ he opined. ‘The Jews must now be used in the German press as a political target: the Jews are to blame; the Jews wanted the war; the Jews are making the war worse; and, again and again, the Jews are to blame.’232 After only four front-page headlines of an antisemitic nature in the Racial Observer in the whole of 1942, there were seventeen in the first five months of 1943 alone. Altogether in 1943, indeed, the paper carried thirty-four front-page headlines referring to the Jews.233 The propaganda offensive repeated ad nauseam the now-familiar diatribes against Churchill, Roosevelt and Stalin as puppets of a Jewish world conspiracy aimed at the annihilation of the German race - a kind of projection, it has been argued, of Nazism’s own drive to annihilate the Jews.234 As the military situation worsened and Allied bombing raids on German cities began to have a serious impact, propaganda warnings that a victory for the Allies would mean a genocidal extermination of the German people became steadily more shrill. Great play was made with the discovery of the graves of Polish officers massacred by the Soviet secret police at Katy’ earlier in the war - a massacre inevitably attributed not to the Russians but to the Jews. Anti-Jewish propaganda, which had gone through its first period of concentrated intensity in the second half of 1941 as a way of launching what the Nazis called the ‘final solution of the Jewish question in Europe’, was now becoming a means of rallying the German people to continue fighting.235

  Thus the pace, justification and mode of implementation of the genocide changed repeatedly from its inception in the summer of 1941. Examining the origins of ‘the final solution’ in terms of a process rather than a single decision uncovers a variety of impulses given by the Nazi leadership in general, and Hitler and Himmler in particular, to the fight against the supposed global enemy of the Germans. Overriding all of them, however, was the memory of 1918, the belief that the Jews, wherever and whoever they might be, threatened to undermine the German war effort, by engaging in subversion, partisan activities, Communist resistance movements and much else besides. What drove the exterminatory impulses of the Nazis, at every level of the hierarchy, was not the kind of contempt that stamped millions of Slavs as dispensable subhumans, but an ideologically pervasive mixture of fear and hatred, which blamed the Jews for all of Germany’s ills, and sought their destruction as a matter of life and death, in the interests of Germany’s survival.

  ‘LIKE SHEEP TO THE SLAUGHTER’

  I

  Already some time before the Wannsee Conference, Himmler had appointed Odilo Globocnik, the SS and Police Leader in Lublin, to organize the systematic killing of all the Jews in the General Government. The ghettos would have to be emptied to make room for Jewish deportees from the west. Globocnik was to set up a series of camps to achieve this aim in the ‘Reinhard Action’.236 Globocnik was an Austrian Nazi. His deep antisemitism had brought him a conviction for murdering a Jew in 1933. He had been appointed Regional Leader of Vienna after the annexation, but in January 1939 he had been reduced to the ranks for speculating in foreign currency. Himmler, however, did not lose sight of him, and appointed him to his post in Lublin the following November. In 1940, Globocnik built up a small economic empire on the basis of Jewish slave labourers, and in July 1941 he commissioned the building of a huge labour camp at Majdanek. For the Reinhard Action, Globocnik recruited a large number of people from the former T-4 Action, including Christian Wirth. They continued to be paid by the headquarters of the euthanasia programme at the Chancellery of the Leader in Berlin, though they took orders from Globocnik. Nearly all of the twenty or thirty SS men employed in each of the camps Globocnik now began to establish to carry out his mission fell into this category. This set the camps apart from the normal run of SS establishments. All of th
e SS men were officers or NCOs. Basic manpower was provided by Ukrainian auxiliaries, many of whom had been drafted in from prisoner-of-war camps and given a brief training before being sent on to work for Globocnik.237

  The three ‘Reinhard Action’ camps set up to carry out the extermination programme were all based at remote sites to the west of the river Bug, but with good railway connections to other parts of Poland and within relatively easy reach of the major ghettos. Construction of the first of these death camps, at Belzec, began on the site of an existing labour camp on 1 November 1941. It was carried out under the supervision of a former euthanasia operative, who stayed on to assist Christian Wirth on the latter’s appointment as camp commandant in December 1941. He had a railway spur built, running into the camp from the nearby station. There were houses for the SS, barracks for a small number of longer-term prisoners such as cobblers, tailors or carpenters, who would work for the SS, and quarters for the Ukrainian auxiliaries. The gas chambers were constructed of wood but were made airtight and supplied with pipes through which petroleum exhaust from cars would be pumped, killing anyone inside. Wirth chose this procedure because pure carbon monoxide canisters such as had been used in the euthanasia action were difficult to obtain in quantity, and might arouse the suspicion of incoming victims if they saw them. By February 1942 the facilities were ready. They were tried out on small groups of Jews; then the Jewish workers who had helped build them were also gassed. On 17 March 1942 the first deportees were delivered to the camp and gassed immediately on arrival. Within four weeks, 75,000 Jews had been put to death, including 30,000 of the 37,000 inhabitants of the Lublin ghetto, and more from other regions of the General Government including Zamość and Piaski.238

  The murderous brutality of the round-ups and transports to Belzec was noted by Dr Zygmunt Klukowski, whose diary provides a graphic though not completely accurate account of their impact on local Jewish populations in Poland. On 8 April 1942 he learned

  that every day two trains, consisting of twenty cars each, come to Belzec, one from Lublin, the other from Lvov. After being unloaded on separate tracks, all Jews are forced behind the barbed-wire enclosure. Some are killed with electricity, some with poison gases, and the bodies are burned. On the way to Belzec the Jews experience many terrible things. They are aware of what will happen to them. Some try to fight back. At the railroad station in Szczebrzeszyn a young woman gave away a gold ring in exchange for a glass of water for her dying child. In Lublin people witnessed small children being thrown through the windows of speeding trains. Many people are shot before reaching Belzec.239

  11. Extermination Camps, 1941-5

  Shortly afterwards, 2,500 Jews were taken from Zamość; several hundred were shot on the streets. The Jewish inhabitants of Szczebrzeszyn were in a state of complete panic, sending their children to live with Poles in Warsaw, and bribing Poles to keep them in hiding. Crowds were gathering in order to loot their homes when they were deported.240 On 8 May 1942, reported Klukowski, a German police unit arrived in Szczebrzeszyn and started shooting Jews ‘like ducks, killing them not only on the streets but also in their own houses - men, women, and children, indiscriminately’. Klukowski began to organize help for the wounded, but then he was told he was not allowed to give help to Jews, so, reluctantly, he posted people outside the hospital to turn them away. ‘I was lucky that I did so,’ he noted later: soon afterwards the police arrived at the hospital, carrying machine-guns, and went through the wards looking for Jews: had there been any, Klukowski and probably some of his staff would almost certainly have been shot. The whole massacre left him deeply upset, as he recorded in his diary:

  I am saddened that I had to refuse to give any help at all. I did this only because of strict orders by the Germans. This was against my own feeling and against a physician’s duties. With my eyes I can still see the wagons filled with the dead, one Jewish woman walking along with her dead child in her arms, and many wounded lying on the sidewalks across from my hospital, where I was forbidden to give them any help.241

  He was appalled by the behaviour of some Poles, who looted the houses of the victims, and even laughed as they saw them being shot. Later, too, the German police ordered the local Jewish council to pay for the ammunition used in the massacre.242

  Wirth tried to design the camp at Belzec in such a way as to allay the suspicions of the Jews arriving there. They were told it was a transit centre and that they would be disinfected before receiving clean clothes and getting their valuables returned to them. The gas chambers themselves were designed to look like showers. All this followed the original pattern devised for the euthanasia gassings, though on a much larger scale. But the ruses were little more than gestures. The very brutality with which they were rounded up must have left the Jews with few illusions as to the fate in store for them. Another Austrian SS officer, Franz Stangl, described what he saw at Belzec in the spring of 1942:

  I went there by car. As one arrived, one first reached Belzec railway station, on the left side of the road. The camp was on the same side, but up a hill. The commandant’s office was 200 metres away, on the other side of the road. It was a one-storey building. The smell . . . Oh God, the smell. It was everywhere. Wirth wasn’t in his office. I remember, they took me to him . . . He was standing on a hill, next to the pits . . . the pits . . . full, they were full. I can’t tell you; not hundreds, thousands, thousands of corpses . . . One of the pits had overflowed. They had put too many corpses in it and putrefaction had progressed too fast, so that the liquid underneath had pushed the bodies on top up and over and the corpses had rolled down the hill. I saw some of them . . . oh God, it was awful.243

  Stangl himself was subsequently to play a central role in the Reinhard Action. Born in 1908, the son of a brutal ex-soldier, he had grown up in small-town poverty, and trained as a weaver. In 1931 he had joined the police, undergoing a tough training before being involved in pursuing and arresting members of the illegal socialist opposition during the Schuschnigg dictatorship. At some point he had become an active, secret member of the Nazi Party, and after the absorption of Austria into the Reich in 1938 he was promoted, before being transferred to work in the central administration of the ‘euthanasia’ murder programme in Berlin in 1940. Here he had got to know Christian Wirth, who summoned him to Belzec to get him acquainted with the Reinhard Action on the ground.244 Stangl thought the programme was operating with lamentable inefficiency. The gas chambers at Belzec were crude constructions. They were constantly breaking down, leaving deportees waiting for days without food or water; many died. Eventually this was too much even for Wirth. In June 1942, he temporarily halted the transports and dismantled the wooden gas chambers, replacing them with a concrete construction containing six gas chambers with a total capacity at any one time of 2,000 people. They came into operation in mid-July; transports continued arriving until mid-December. By the end of 1942 some 414,000 Jews from occupied Poland had been killed in the camp, and more from other parts of Central Europe who had been taken to the ghettos in the Lublin district; the total may have been as high as 600,000.245

  The second of the Reinhard Action camps was constructed near the village of Sobibor, where up to this point there was nothing but a small labour camp for Jewish women. Construction began in March 1942, but fell behind schedule, so Wirth appointed Franz Stangl camp commandant with the initial brief of finishing the building on time. By the middle of May 1942 the gas chambers were ready. They were housed in a brick building and could each hold 100 people, who were killed by engine exhaust fumes piped in from outside. The camp was built in imitation of Belzec, with administration and reception areas near the railway spur and the extermination area some distance away, out of sight and reached through a narrow passage 150 metres long known as the ‘tube’. Behind the gas chamber building were burial pits. A narrow-gauge tramway went from the railway to the pits with the bodies of people who had died on the journey. The usual gestures were made to reassure the arriving victims, but
, as in Belzec, they were often ineffective, since the SS and particularly the Ukrainian guards shouted at the victims and beat them as they ran through the ‘tube’. Some SS men trained a dog to bite the naked Jews, increasing their panic. Stangl ran the camp efficiently according to his lights, and it was not overwhelmed by vast numbers of transports as Belzec had been. Nevertheless, within the first three months of the camp’s operation, nearly 100,000 Jews from Lublin, Austria, the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, and the Old Reich had been killed there.246