by Bill Yenne
Adolf Hitler, emoting dramatically during a speech. The charisma of this man was uncanny. The French writer Maximine Julia Portaz once said that he was the reincarnation of the Hindu god Vishnu, while Heinrich Himmler defined him as a creator, saying that “over the Germanic Reich, over it our Führer, who created this Reich and who still creates.” It was his spellbinding power that convinced a nation to embark on a terrible road. However, while it may have been Hitler who turned Jörg Lanz von Liebenfels’s Ariosophic nightmare into the rallying cry of a nation, it was Heinrich Himmler’s SS that coldly planned, constructed, maintained, and used the industrial-strength gas chambers and crematoria of almost unimaginable capacity, in order to make that nightmare come true. U.S. National Archives
It all started when a German-born Jew named Herschel Grünspan (Grynzspan) shot a German bureaucrat named Ernst vom Rath at the German embassy in Paris. When Rath died, on the fifteenth anniversary of the 1923 Munich putsch, the Nazi holy day, propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels announced that demonstrations of anti-Jewish outrage would not be interfered with. Tantamount to legalizing mayhem, this declaration set in motion an orgy of violence and vandalism that was called Kristallnacht (Night of Broken Glass) because of all the Jewish windows that were smashed all across Germany. The absence of a serious public outcry from non-Jews in response was an ominous turn.
After isolation came exclusion. Jewish doctors, lawyers, and professors were soon drubbed out of their professions. Formerly there had been boycotts of Jewish businesses by non-Jews. Now, Jews were forbidden to enter non-Jewish businesses and even public facilities such as swimming pools. (It should be noted that, at that same time, there were still racial restrictions on some American swimming pools.)
After exclusion came expulsion. It became the responsibility of Heinrich Himmler, as the head of the Gestapo and SS and as the Reich’s enforcer-in-chief, to kick the Jews out of Germany. He drew up plans to expel 200,000 Jews annually, although only 40,000 left in 1938 and 78,000 in 1939. Many moved elsewhere in Europe, including 30,000 to Czechoslovakia. Those who had adequate funds, or who met necessary income requirements, could find refuge in France, Britain, and the United States.
The place considered as best candidate for absorbing the lion’s share of Jewish evictees was Palestine. Since 1917, when British foreign secretary Lord Arthur Balfour first floated the idea, a plan had been on the international table to set aside Palestine as a permanent sovereign homeland for the world’s Jews. This area, part of which later became the state of Israel, had been captured by the British from the Turkish Ottoman Empire in 1917 as part of the action in World War I. In the 1930s, Palestine was managed as a mandate by the British under the League of Nations.
Within the SS, the idea was now proposed to officially relocate all of Germany’s Jews to Palestine. This idea of a government-sponsored relocation gained surprising support from the Zionists, the most politically extreme among German Jews. The SD even opened a dialog with Zionist elements and with the Haganah, the Jewish paramilitary force in Palestine that favored the establishment of a Jewish homeland. Untersturmführer Adolf Eichmann of the SD traveled to the Middle East in 1937 for secret talks in Cairo with the Haganah to facilitate the relocation. However, the British refused to let Eichmann enter Palestine and threatened a naval blockade to keep out boatloads of European Jews.
The idea of a government-sponsored relocation of Germans—even German Jews—in response to a British mandate got an icy reception from Britain. There was no love lost between the British and the Haganah, who the British perceived as a terrorist group. Though it had been Balfour who first suggested the idea two decades earlier, the British were fearful of incurring the rath of the Arabs in Palestine, who also hated the Jews. They pictured themselves walking a tightrope stretched across the ongoing feud between the Jews and Arabs within Palestine, and the last thing they wanted was for the Germans to upset the balance by adding more Jews. (This apprehension of offending Arabs who hold animosity toward Jews is obviously still a recurring theme in Middle East politics.)
For a time, the Nazis actively sought out another place to which the German Jews could be exiled. If plans to move them to Palestine were stymied by His Majesty’s government, then where else could the Jews go? Surprisingly, the leading alternative candidate, discussed at length inside Number 8 Prinz Albrechtstrasse, was the Indian Ocean island of Madagascar, which would be made a German colony. Amazingly, Adolf Eichmann later testified that he had imagined himself as the German governor-general of Jewish Madagascar. However, this project was shelved by the SS as impractical after the start of World War II.
For Hitler, the theoretician, and Himmler, the man who would have to carry out the eventual solution, the so-called Jewish problem got much worse in September 1939. When the Reich swallowed Poland, it swallowed a much larger number of Jews than had lived within Germany’s prewar borders. The interim solution in Poland was to consolidate the Polish Jews into a “ghetto,” a term that had originated in sixteenth-century Venice when Jews were compelled by decree to live in a specific area of the city. In Poland, the Germans now concentrated Jews into ghettos in Warsaw and other major cities, in the same way that Himmler had already concentrated his enemies into his prototype “concentration camp” at Dachau.
The Final Solution as an articulated policy was not mapped out until 1941 and not implemented until 1942, although Hitler had provided the world with a clear preview three years earlier. “I have very often been a prophet, and have usually been ridiculed for it,” Hitler said in a speech on January 30, 1939. He continued:
During the time of my struggle for power it was in the first instance the Jewish race which only received my prophecies with laughter when I said that I would one day take over the leadership of the State, and with it that of the whole nation, and that I would then among many other things settle the Jewish problem. Their laughter was uproarious, but I think that for some time now they have been laughing on the other side of their face. Today I will once more be a prophet: If the international Jewish financiers in and outside Europe should succeed in plunging the nations once more into a world war, then the result will not be the Bolshevization of the earth, and thus the victory of Jewry, but the annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe!
Hitler’s words, though more conceptual than a precise directive, are nevertheless straightforward. If Hitler ever issued a direct order authorizing the Final Solution, it has never been found. However, it is evident in the documents that have survived that those around him had a clear understanding of what was expected.
Perhaps the first known mention of the Final Solution is in a July 31, 1941, memo from Hermann Göring to Reinhard Heydrich requesting “details of the preliminary measures taken in the organizational, technical and material fields for the achievement of the final solution which we seek.”
In a January 9, 1998, article in the Hamburg-based national German newspaper Die Zeit, German historian Christian Gerlach quotes a recently discovered diary entry in which Joseph Goebbels writes that “with respect of the Jewish Question, the Führer has decided to make a clean sweep. He prophesied to the Jews that if they again brought about a world war, they would live to see their annihilation in it. That wasn’t just a catch-word. The world war is here, and the annihilation of the Jews must be the necessary consequence.”
This entry was written on December 12, 1941, the day after the Third Reich declared war on the United States and the same day that Goebbels met with Hitler at his office in the Reich Chancellory. Heinrich Himmler was present at this meeting, as were Hitler’s personal assistant, Martin Bormann, and Hans Frank, a longtime NSDAP attorney who was now governor-general of occupied Poland. Hermann Göring and Reinhard Heydrich were, apparently, not present. According to Gerlach, just six days later, Himmler met with Hitler at the Führer’s field headquarters in East Prussia. That evening, he penned a marginal note in his diary that read “Judenfrage—als Partisanen auszurotten” (“Jewish question—like
partisans to be exterminated”).
In other words, Himmler and Hitler had discussed the SS Einsatzgruppen operations in the Soviet Union, which had by that time killed around a half million “partisans.” Furthermore, if he hadn’t already, the Führer gave the Reichsführer the green light to apply the Final Solution of mass murder to the Jews within Germany itself.
SS Obergruppenführer und General der Polizei Reinhard Heydrich, with his chiseled face and cold serpentine eyes was Director of the Reich Main Security Office Reichssicherheitshauptamt (RSHA) and one of the most feared men in Europe. National Archives
The direct order had already been given at some time earlier, as Goebbels and Himmler certainly understood the parameters of the Final Solution. In fact, Himmler’s sinister dark prince, Reinhard Heydrich, had already gotten the ball rolling on implementing the scheme. In November, he had planned a meeting of senior midlevel management within the SS, Gestapo, and Reich government to discuss details. Some have suggested that he did so under the authority of Göring’s July 31 memo directing him to take “preliminary measures … in the organizational, technical and material fields.” However, Heydrich was under Himmler’s chain of command, not in Göring’s.
This meeting, known to history as the Wannsee Conference, as it was held in the Berlin suburb of Wannsee, took place on January 20, 1942. While no record exists of the December 12 meeting in Hitler’s office—aside from Goebbels’s recollection—the minutes of the Wannsee Conference survived the war. They were translated by the International Military Tribunal and are the “smoking gun” of the Final Solution. The minutes say the meeting’s participants calmly discussed the practical details of the mass murder of millions. In his opening remarks, Heydrich explained that the Third Reich had expelled 530,000 Jews from the Third Reich since taking power. He went on to say that there were then 11 million Jews left in Europe and the European parts of the Soviet Union, adding that 95.5 percent of these “untermenschen” were living within areas then controlled by the Third Reich or its allies.
“Under proper guidance, in the course of the final solution the Jews are to be allocated for appropriate labor in the East,” Heydrich said, continuing:
Able-bodied Jews, separated according to sex, will be taken in large work columns to these areas for work on roads, in the course of which action doubtless a large portion will be eliminated by natural causes. The possible final remnant will, since it will undoubtedly consist of the most resistant portion, have to be treated accordingly, because it is the product of natural selection and would, if released, act as the seed of a new Jewish revival. In the course of the practical execution of the final solution, Europe will be combed through from west to east. Germany proper, including the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, will have to be handled first due to the housing problem and additional social and political necessities.
How could a roomful of well-educated professionals discuss such things in such a composed, detached manner?
The blind obedience to a party that had morphed into a state was a symptom of how Nazism was not so much an ideology as it was a mesmerizing religion. As Christopher Browning observed in The Origins of the Final Solution, published in 2004, this scheme was being planned by those who seem to have had no conscience whatsoever. Browning wrote that among this group “no less than eight of the fifteen participants held the doctorate. Thus it was not a dimwitted crowd unable to grasp what was going to be said to them. Nor were they going to be overcome with surprise or shock, for Heydrich was not talking to the uninitiated or squeamish.”
The key word is “initiated.” After nearly a decade in power, the government of the Third Reich had almost completely initiated its population, and certainly its bureaucracy, into a pious acceptance of a pagan state religion whose belief system was truly beyond belief.
Beginning with Dachau in Bavaria, the SS already had established a number of concentration camps and forced-labor camps in Germany and all across occupied Europe. Hundreds of thousands of people were shoved into these camps and forced to work in slave-labor conditions on starvation-level rations. To this expanding network of camps were added a half dozen facilities in Poland called Vernichtungslager (destruction camps), whose only purpose was to exterminate men, women, and children. The largest of these—actually a complex of three major separate camps and numerous subcamps—was located near the town of Oswiecim, which had been renamed with its former German name, Auschwitz. The original camp had been set up in June 1940 as a concentration camp to house 100,000 slave laborers for nearby factories. A second such labor camp was added in 1942. Also opened in 1942 was the Auschwitz extermination camp at nearby Birkenau (Brzezinka in Polish), which was expanded throughout World War II. It is estimated that at least 1.4 million people were murdered at Auschwitz-Birkenau alone, although the former camp commandant bragged that three million were killed. The second largest of the Vernichtungslager, Treblinka, near Warsaw, saw the murder of around 850,000 people.
The total number of people killed in the extermination camps numbers around 4.5 million. In addition, others died of disease, starvation, or outright murder at other concentration and labor camps, or as they were being transported to the camps in forced marches or squeezed into cattle cars.
An estimated six million Jews died. The calculations are based on SS records that were pieced together after the war and on correlations of prewar and postwar censuses. The estimates vary, based on accounting methods and which countries are included. In the 1988 Atlas of the Holocaust, Martin Gilbert puts the number at about 5.7 million, or 78 percent of the 7.3 million Jews that lived in occupied Europe. Yisrael Gutman and Robert Rozett, in the Encyclopedia of the Holocaust, estimate up to 5.86 million, and Wolfgang Benz of the Technical University of Berlin suggests that there were as many as 6.2 million.
In her 1986 book, The War Against the Jews, Lucy Dawidowicz includes more of the Soviet Union in her prewar totals, estimating that 5,933,900 out of a Jewish population of 8,861,800 were killed, or 67 percent of that total. Going into detail, she notes that 90 percent of Poland’s 3.3 million Jews died, along with 90 percent of the 253,000 Jews in the Baltic countries and 90 percent of the 240,000 Jews who were left in Germany and Austria by 1942. The percentage in Ukraine was just 60 percent, but the number killed was 900,000 by her calculation, a total second only to the number of Jews killed Poland.
In the Columbia Guide to the Holocaust, published in 2000, Donald Niewyk and Francis Nicosia add that between five million and 11 million non-Jewish civilians were also murdered, mainly outside the camps. In addition to the Soviet Slavs killed by the Einsatzgruppen after June 1941, these included non-Jewish Poles, as well as the Romani people (called Gypsies), another group targeted by the Nazis for eradication. Sizable numbers of others, from Catholics to Jehovah’s Witnesses, were murdered because of their religion.
Those who ran the camps were members of the SS Totenkopfverbände, which had been formed in 1935 to staff Dachau and other concentration camps in Germany, such as Buchenwald, Ravensbrück, and Sachsenhausen. The Totenkopfverbände remained as an independent component within the SS until 1942, although personnel rotated between it and the Waffen SS. After 1942, the Totenkopfverbände was placed under the Waffen SS chain of command.
The man Himmler installed to run the Totenkopfverbände during its formative years was SS Brigadeführer Theodor Eicke. As directed by Himmler, Eicke’s method of training produced men with blind loyalty to the SS, while at the same time erasing their ability to perceive the suffering of others. Himmler recognized that desensitizing the Totenkopfverbände men was essential. They had to be hard, tough, and unsympathetic to the screams and the horrible pain endured by the untermenschen.
In evidence gathered at the International Military Tribunal, Heinrich Himmler is quoted as having told his Black Knights:
Most of you will know what it means to see a hundred corpses, five hundred, a thousand, lying there. But seeing this thing through and nevertheless apart from certain
exceptions due to human infirmity remaining decent, that is what has made us hard. This is a never-recorded and never-to-be-recorded page of glory in our history…. I can tell you that it is hideous and frightful for a German to have to see such things. It is so, and if we had not felt it to be hideous and frightful, we should not have been Germans. However hideous it may be, it has been necessary for us to do it and it will be necessary in many other cases.
While the emotionless Totenkopfverbände may have been able to accept what they saw, Himmler was obviously nervous about public opinion outside the wire. Most Germans were unaware of exactly what was happening in the concentration camps. The stench of bodies being burned by the ton hung not over Germany itself, but over Polish towns far from the prewar borders of the Reich. They knew that Jews had been rounded up and put into labor camps, but for the most part, the gruesome details of camp life, now so painfully clear, went unseen.
As we have seen in films such as Schindler’s List, there were numerous Germans—perhaps not a majority, but nevertheless numerous—who helped or tried to help Jews from being rounded up. Often, they whispered their concerns to someone in power whom they could trust, occasionally even someone with the SS runes on his collar. A few times, these pleas even reached the Reichsführer himself.
“Remember,” Himmler complained to Felix Kersten, “how many people, Party members included, send their precious plea for clemency to me or some other authority; they invariably say that all Jews are, of course, swine, but that Mr. So-and-so is the exception, a decent Jew who should not be touched. I have no hesitation in saying that the number of these requests and the number of differing opinions in Germany, leads one to conclude that there are more decent Jews than all the rest put together.”
