by Jay Winik
Ranting and raving, he remained in seclusion at his retreats with his Nazi inner circle, zealots like Martin Bormann, Joseph Goebbels, Albert Speer, and Hermann Göring. To the ordinary German, however, he had all but vanished. Once idolized by millions, he was, by his own admission, friendless except for his German shepherd, Blondi, and his mistress, Eva Braun. There was the fact that he was losing touch with reality, hoping for victory against all the evidence, and hoping for his latest weapon—thirteen-ton V-2 rockets that could reach the speed of sound just thirty seconds after liftoff and which carried a one-ton warhead—to descend from the upper reaches of the atmosphere to rain destruction on the enemy.
There were the ever-lengthening rosters of the war dead that he dismissed or outright ignored. And of course, there was always the fuel for the Nazi regime, the one thing that kept him going above all else: his hatred for the Jews. At this stage, with the Nazi empire deteriorating, only one thing seemed to work—its machine for killing these defenseless civilians. And that machine remained shrouded in as much secrecy as the Führer himself.
DESPITE OF ALL OF Hitler’s fury against the Jews, which intensified as the war ground on and the Nazis’ military fortunes ebbed, the Führer was always careful to couch what he said in vague statements. To be sure, when he was still addressing entranced, cheering crowds in Berlin, or when he spoke to intimates in the evening hours at his Wolf’s Lair tucked away in the Prussian forest, he always whipped up his audience to greater extremes of enmity against the Jews. His message was menacing, his countenance terrifying. Little by little he personally laid the groundwork for the most terrible industrialized genocide the world had ever seen. This was undeniable.
But shrewdly, he wanted it to be deniable.
So, a question: why did he bother to conceal his own deep involvement in the mass murder of Jews? Driven as much by intuition as calculation, however mad, he sensed that the German nation was unprepared to learn of such evil amid their most civilized of surroundings. True, they heard his tirades regarding the “life-and-death struggle between the Aryan race and the Jewish bacillus,” and his dark hints about the “Final Solution,” but usually he was indirect, speaking in ambiguous, sweeping generalities rather than making precise statements. In such a manner, he reasoned, the Nazis could preserve all the outward traits of a cultured people—including, so they thought, a conscience.
Even when surrounded by his henchmen at his cherished late-night tea, Hitler never actually talked about the physical extermination of the Jews. He would speak of Jews as “the scourge of mankind,” but never about the death mills at Dachau and Chelmno. He would say that if only there were no more Jews in Europe, “the unity of the European states would no longer be disturbed,” but he never spoke about Auschwitz. He would declare that “the Jews are everywhere” and that all the Jews “from Berlin and Vienna should disappear,” but never mention the millions who had actually been murdered. Thus, his terrible secret was, on the surface, maintained.
There was another, equally diabolical, reason for his secrecy. The less the horrific facts of Hitler’s program of annihilation emerged, the less likely the world community was to be aroused. Some might say this and some might say that, but for Hitler, it all amounted to empty talk. In his view, Roosevelt and Churchill from time to time mouthed humane pieties about the ill-treatment of the Jews, yet lacking firm details, these condemnations had no teeth. The same was true of any declarations of concern made by the frequently cowed Catholic Church or by the International Red Cross. And there was a third reason for the secrecy, too. The less the Jews themselves knew, the more pliant and more docile they would be as they were taken east in the slow-moving cattle cars toward their imminent slaughter.
BUT BY MAY AND certainly by June 1944, the hard questions could no longer be dodged. Particularly after D-Day, and as the Vrba-Wetzler report was about to become known, the question of the Jews would, for many, become as vexing as the war itself.
Yet this development had been a long time coming.
A long time coming, in no small measure, because of the lengthy, complicated process by which the Final Solution emerged in Nazi policy. A long time coming, also because of the too often tepid response with which each fresh report of atrocities and massacres was received in the White House and the marble corridors of decision making in Washington.
So, how to understand the enormity of the Holocaust, and the enormity of the slow response by the White House? And how to understand those who were woefully blind or purposefully blind, or who simply turned their backs on the sheer evil of the crime? It begins with understanding the history of the unfolding war, the history of the Jews in prewar Europe, and the history of Roosevelt’s presidency.
And it ends with the long, tortuous road that stretched to the spring of 1944.
Hitler in the map room with his generals.
Part Two
The Road to 1944
7
Beginnings
TO LATER GENERATIONS, THE full dimensions of the Final Solution are clear. But in the swirl of the early days of World War II, the information available to the Allies was haphazard, frequently baffling, and prone to being misunderstood. The popular concept is that the Final Solution began solely with the death camps. This is untrue. To be sure, its sordid beginning lay in Hitler’s early pronouncements. But the Final Solution was at first less a policy than a process, influenced by the vicissitudes of the battlefield and the whims and vagaries of the Nazis’ henchmen in the newly conquered territories. Only in time would it take on the fully industrialized character that we know of today. And only late in the war, after Roosevelt died, would there be the images captured permanently by the camera’s unblinking lens: The pictures of bodies, some bloated, some barely there at all, some so skeletal that all that remained were white, shrunken torsos in which every rib could be counted and the last remnants of skin were pathetically stretched over feeble bones. The pictures in which starvation had reduced bodies nearly to the point of nothingness. The pictures of hollow eyes frozen in horror, eyes that pleaded, if not for help, then at least for mercy.
But by the time these pictures were taken, it was too late. And once again, the question would loom: how did it happen?
The seeds of genocide had been planted for some time. On January 30, 1939, the sixth anniversary of his takeover of power, a sweating, ebullient Hitler appeared before the Reichstag to deliver one of his most significant speeches, a speech he would return to time and again. Every seat was taken. “I have very often in my lifetime been a prophet,” he boasted, “and was mostly derided.” There was wild cheering. He continued: “[In] my struggle for power it was in the first instance the Jewish people who received only with laughter my prophecies that I would . . . take over the leadership” and then also “bring the Jewish problem to its solution.” There was more cheering. His voice rising, his hands thrusting into the air, he declared, “I want today to be a prophet again.” And what was his terrible prophecy? If “Jewry inside and outside Europe should succeed in plunging the nations once more into a world war, the result will not be the bolshevization of the earth and thereby the victory of Jewry, but the annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe!”
Here was his cherished word—Vernichtung (annihilation)—one that he would use again and again. Actually, just nine days before, meeting privately with the Czechoslovak foreign minister, Hitler had boldly insisted that “the Jews here will be annihilated.” Who could not believe him? For here, experience told the tale. Promptly on becoming chancellor in 1933—the same year Franklin Roosevelt took office—Hitler systematically started to rob German Jews of their basic rights, rights that were formally stripped away by the infamous Nuremberg laws of 1935. In every way imaginable, Jews were being hounded out of public life. By order of the state, Jewish retail establishments were closed. Jews were barred from schools, concerts, and theaters, and even prohibited from driving automobiles. Jewish lawyers and doctors were forbidden to practice. Jewish ped
dlers were outlawed. Jewish banks were subjected to moblike shakedowns. And the stench of anti-Semitism was pervasive. So were torment and distress. Nazi storm troopers, or sometimes simply brown shirted hooligans, vandalized private Jewish homes and smashed Jewish businesses. The main synagogue in Munich, a gorgeous old building, was torched, while vandals desecrated Jewish cemeteries. And this was just the beginning. Male Jews with Aryan-sounding names were required to add “Israel” to their name; females had to add the name “Sara.” Jews were required to have “J” embossed on their passports. Far from condemning such actions, Hitler rarely wasted an opportunity to egg on the anti-Semites: Jews were, he insisted, “lice,” “vermin,” “parasites.” A Jew was, in a familiar Nazi saying, a “bacillus.” Jews were “vampires,” corrupting everything that was noble and good and bleeding “all nations to death.”
If there was any doubt about the growing savagery of the Nazi regime, it was dispelled on November 9–10, 1938, the infamous “night of broken glass.” Kristallnacht was a descent into barbarism believed unthinkable in the heart of a supposedly civilized state. Under Hitler’s reign, the tinder had been there, awaiting a match. It came by happenstance when a seventeen-year-old Polish Jew, driven mad by the forced deportation of his family, not to mention the summary expulsion from Germany of eighteen thousand Polish Jews, calmly shot a low-level German diplomat in Paris. The next morning, the Nazi press in Germany whipped party fanatics into a frenzy, calling for retaliatory violence against all Jews. Local party leaders soon followed suit. On November 8, the Nazi SS chief Heinrich Himmler acidly declared, “We will drive [the Jews] out more and more with an unprecedented ruthlessness.” With that, the furies were unleashed.
Goebbels commented in his diary, “If only the anger of the people could now be let loose!” When he conferred with Hitler at a reception that evening, the Führer evidently agreed, muttering that the Nazi storm troopers—the SA—should “have a fling.” While Hitler quietly retreated to his Munich apartment, Goebbels, having been given the green light, joined the fray; at 10 p.m. he made a speech calling for riots against the Jews. At 1:20 a.m. all police chiefs were instructed by the SS, by telex, to arrest as many male Jews as possible and not to hinder the destruction of synagogues.
Within hours angry demonstrators massed in the roadways, and the sky was lit up by the flames of burning synagogues. All across the country, Nazi mobs, drunk with power, rampaged, smashing windows of shops belonging to Jews. Party activists scrawled anti-Semitic slogans on the walls of stores and private homes. Some SS men donned civilian clothes and joined the rioting. At the same time, assault squads, the dreaded Stosstrupp Hitler, began marching up and down the streets of Munich, chanting and punching their fists in the air, and hunting down and murdering Jews; all told, about a hundred were killed. In Berlin, fifteen magnificent synagogues were torched; by the end of the evening, hundreds across the country were destroyed. Fire brigades were pointedly instructed to stand aside and let the synagogues smolder. Back in his hotel room, Goebbels rejoiced as he listened to the crackling fires and the shattering glass echoing in the night—they were from shop windows being smashed and heavy chandeliers crashing down. “Bravo,” he thought to himself. “Bravo!”
More than eight thousand Jewish-owned shops were pillaged. No one managed to count exactly how many apartments were broken into and left a shambles. Looting was rampant; but often merchandise was simply hurled into the streets for the sheer delight of it. Gilt-framed mirrors were wrecked, oil paintings were cut up, heirlooms and antiques were mutilated. Clothing—girls’ dresses, boys’ school clothes—was scattered about. Individual Nazis made off with their victims’ cash and savings, and seized radios, books, pianos, medical supplies, toys, and anything else of value.
Nor did the mobs stop there.
Nothing seemed to satiate them. Anguished women were roughed up, slapped, and molested. So were the elderly. Even children, hiding in cellars and attics and whimpering uncontrollably, were not exempt. They too were manhandled, or simply hung upside down and punched, while SS hooligans clapped and laughed. Meanwhile, in Berlin and all across Germany, crowds watched as fires burned and millions of pieces of broken glass were strewn everywhere, littering the streets and sidewalks.
Thirty thousand Jews were arbitrarily rounded up and arrested; the next step for them was a concentration camp. In the meantime, their businesses were simply expropriated by the state. Thus German Jews began a frightful existence: living from day to day, wondering what horrors the next day would bring. “How can this barbarity be happening in the 20th century?” one Jewish woman asked herself. In Washington, President Roosevelt agreed, saying, “I myself could scarcely believe that such things could occur in the 20th century.”
For the Nazis, this was another step on their road to genocide. One German official—the governor of Berlin, Hans Frank—trenchantly put it, “I ask nothing of the Jews except that they disappear.”
THEREAFTER, THE FULL FORCE of the racist Nazi laws intensified. A Department of Racial Purity was created, which initiated a detailed census of the Jewish population. And the daily humiliations were endless. Jews were no longer able to enter parks—signs announced, “Dogs and Jews Not Allowed”—go to restaurants, or even use public toilets. For that matter, city benches were forbidden as well. Jewish musicians were not allowed to perform works by non-Jewish composers. With no warning or pension, Jewish civil servants were dismissed. The same for Jewish teachers and travel agents. Jews were even forbidden to create art. Jews could no longer marry Aryans, have sexual intercourse with Aryans, or work with Aryans. And virulently anti-Semitic children’s books were widely disseminated; Ernst Heimer’s The Poison Mushroom, for example, depicted Jews as disgusting, repugnant swindlers with “criminal eyes,” “infested” beards, “filthy” ears, and noses bent “like the number six.” The message was straightforward: Jews were poison for the German people, the cause of all misery and distress. Unsurprisingly in this atmosphere, there were some twenty suicides a day among Jews.
Before the Final Solution, Hitler had first busied himself devising an economic solution. On the day after Kristallnacht, he dined with Joseph Goebbels at a popular Munich restaurant, the Osteria Bavaria, where he sketched out a program of oppressive economic measures against the Jews. It was not enough that the Jews had been terrorized or that some had been murdered. Now, he decreed with a straight face, they would be responsible for repairing the damage to their homes and their stores without any assistance from German insurance firms. Actually, the insurance companies would make payments—Hitler saw to that—but these would be to the state, not to the Jews. This ruling was onerous in the extreme, for the damage done on Kristallnacht was estimated to be several hundred million marks. Quickly thereafter, ubiquitous signs proclaimed, “BEWARE—DO NOT SHOP IN JEWISH STORES.”
But removing the Jews from the economy was not enough. Soon, the Nazis began considering ghettos, and whether all Jews should wear special badges.
AFTER KRISTALLNACHT, GERMAN JEWS were desperate. Much as they had loved their native land, Germany, tens of thousands began to flee. The problem, however, was where to go. During the tense days of July 6–14, 1938—Hitler had already annexed Austria—President Roosevelt convened the Évian Conference. Thirty-two countries sent representatives to Évian, Lake Geneva. The delegates stayed at Hotel Royal, a luxurious French resort, and discussed whether they could increase immigration quotas for Jews. But despite daily reports of Nazi outrages against the Jews, despite the brutalities perpetrated on innocents by Nazi thugs, the participating nations remained unmoved at the bargaining table. At the conference there were rare disclaimers and expressions of sympathy, but with Europe blundering toward war, the delegates did little more than gaze into foggy crystal balls. They made no decisions of any consequence; instead, it seemed they spent most of their time gambling at casinos, getting massages, taking mineral baths, riding, and playing golf. Their indifference was striking. According to his supporters,
Roosevelt had the best intentions—the lead U.S. delegate was not a professional diplomat but his good friend and confidant Myron C. Taylor—yet the outcome of the conference was a disaster. Rather than helping the Jews, the civilized nations had ratified their reluctance to open their arms. They offered only veiled remarks and vague promises.
Despite being hampered by isolationist sentiment, America struggled to do more. Roosevelt at least recommended that his consular service remove unnecessary red tape from visa applications by those wishing to come from Germany. And by some measures, he did successfully raise the refugee issue as an international humanitarian concern; indeed, Newsweek went as far as to claim that the administration had signaled “active opposition to international gangsters.”
But the help stopped there. The U.S. quota for German immigrants remained unchanged at just under twenty-five thousand annually. Even in 1938, despite its claims, the administration admitted ten thousand fewer immigrants than the legal limit. To the Jews, a closed border was frequently, in effect, a death sentence. And the message from the United States seemed to be this: although it was a nation mainly of European immigrants, America wanted little part of the increasingly desperate refugees. Roosevelt himself, when questioned if he had considered where Jewish refugees from Nazi Germany might go, and whether he would contemplate a relaxation of immigration restrictions, flatly said: “That is not in contemplation; we have the quota system.” One participant at the conference, the future Israeli prime minister Golda Meir, wrote about her mixture of “rage, frustration, and horror.” For his part, Chaim Weizmann pointedly warned Britain’s Anthony Eden that “the fire from the synagogues may easily spread from there to Westminster Abbey and the other great English cathedrals,” adding that failure to rebuke the Nazis would mean “the beginning of anarchy and the destruction of the basis of civilization.” He was of course right.
