In Europe: Travels Through the Twentieth Century

by Geert Mak

  The euthanasia specialists, wearing white coats and stethoscopes in order to mislead their victims, were extremely satisfied. Their departmental report literally read: ‘97,000 have been processed since December 1941, using three trucks, with none of the machinery showing a single defect.’

  The plans for forced emigration, deportation and national ‘cleansing’ were transformed in this way into a single giant bureaucratic project, aimed at a ‘definitive solution to the Jewish question’.

  The Wannsee meeting was held around the pivotal point in the war. The first invitation – the conference was postponed once – dates from 29 November, 1941. One week later the German troops had ground to a halt at the gates of Moscow, Japan had attacked Pearl Harbor and Hitler had declared war on the United States. This lent the campaign to exterminate the Jews of Europe a powerful political and ideological overtone. ‘The world war has arrived!’ Joseph Goebbels shouted on 12 December. ‘The destruction of the Jews must be its consequence.’

  The internal summit meeting, accompanied by a luncheon, was finally held on 20 January. The participants included the state secretary of internal affairs, Wilhelm Stuckart, the director general of the Eastern Occupied Territories, Georg Leibbrandt, SS-Oberführer Gerhard Klopfer from the party chancellery, Gestapo chief of operations Heinrich Müller, and SS Gruppenführer Otto Hofmann from the head office of race and settlement, fifteen top bureaucrats in all. The meeting was chaired by Reinhard Heydrich. Minutes were taken by SD-Obersturmbannführer Adolf Eichmann, head of the Gestapo's Jewish emigration department.

  Eichmann's minutes have been preserved: fifteen neatly typed pages of euphemistic officialese. Heydrich opened the meeting and reported that he, with the Führer's permission, had been charged with streamlining the ‘final solution to the European Jewish question’. The goal was to purify, in a ‘legal fashion’, the German Lebensraum of all Jews. The ‘evacuation of the Jews to the east’ had already begun, ‘as a possible alternative to emigration’. Carefully compiled lists were then handed out – cognac had meanwhile been served – showing the number of Jews in each country: 131,800 in the Old Empire, 165,000 in occupied France, 160,800 in the Netherlands, 3,500 in Lithuania, 0 in Estonia (‘Free of Jews’), 58,000 in Italy, 200 in Albania, 5 million in the Soviet Union, etc. A striking feature is the enormous ambition reflected in the count: European territories over which Germany as yet held no sway, such as Britain (330,000), Switzerland (18,000) and Spain (6,000), were included as a matter of course.

  The parties agreed that Europe must be ‘combed out, from west to east’. Huge columns of able-bodied Jews were to be sent east, where, as the minutes noted, ‘a great number will be reduced by natural elimination’. Those remaining were to be ‘treated in equal fashion’; experience had shown, after all, that failure to do so would leave ‘hearths of infection’ for a Jewish resurrection. A special ghetto would be formed at Theresienstadt, the old fortified city north-west of Prague, for Jewish veterans, war invalids and the aged. All complaints and questions could in this way be dealt with ‘at a single blow’.

  To sum all, what this flood of bureaucratic language was all about was that the function of the roaming death squads was to be replaced by enormous extermination plants, with fast and efficient lines of supply. Special death camps were designed, unlike normal concentration camps, with almost no cells or barracks. The entire system was intended to ‘process’ huge numbers of prisoners within several hours after they stumbled weakly from the train. Preferably without commotion.

  The Berlin bureaucrats saw to it that the entire operation took place with unprecedented speed and smoothness. Operation Reinhard, the mass murder of the Polish Jews, began in May 1942. The first trains with Slovakian Jews arrived at Auschwitz. That summer the Dutch, Belgians and French followed. By late 1942, according to SS statistics, four million of Europe's eleven million Jews had already been exterminated.

  The minutes of the Wannsee meeting contain no word about the fate of the some 800,000 Roma and Sinti Gypsies. After a great deal of official discussion, it was decided in November 1943 that Gypsies with a permanent place of residence would receive the same treatment as the rest of the population, while wandering Gypsies would be allocated the same status as Jews. In fact, the rounding up of the Gypsies was much less systematic: it had no major ideological motivation, Hitler and Himmler were not interested in them, and besides, most of them were as poor as church mice. They had nothing to plunder. Nevertheless, several hundred thousand Sinti and Roma were killed during the Second World War.

  In Europe's most notorious meeting room, portraits of the fifteen participants now hang. Two of them committed suicide at the fall of the Third Reich, three died violent deaths, but only Eichmann was convicted for his part in the Holocaust. Nine of the fifteen received little or no punishment. Heinrich Müller was able to escape in 1945. He was recruited by the CIA and probably started a new life for himself in the United States. Wilhelm Stuckart was imprisoned for four years after the war, but by 1951 he had already become head of the Bund Heimatvertriebenen und Entrechteten. Georg Leibbrandt died in 1982 at the age of eighty-two, without ever being tried. Gerhard Klopfer led a normal life as a lawyer after the war. Otto Hofmann was granted a pardon in 1954. He became a merchant in Württemberg. These latter two died in their beds, like respectable citizens, in the 1980s.

  In the garden at Dahlem, Wolf Siedler talked about his family home during the first years of the war, and about the people who visited them: his best friend at school, for example, Ernstel Jünger, son of Ernst Jünger; the Hahn family, his parents’ most trusted friends and every bit as anti-Nazi as they were.‘Otto Hahn discovered the principle of nuclear reaction, but I believe he skilfully sidetracked the development of a German A-bomb.’

  And then there was Else Meyer, the elderly widow of a Jewish army officer and an old friend of Siedler's grandparents. Officially, as from summer 1941, the family was not allowed to have dealings with her. ‘My parents did anyway, of course, the maids were sent out of the house then, visits like that always caused quite a stir. In 1942 she told them she had received orders to report to the train station at Grunewald. For relocation (Umsiedlung) to the East. Before she left, she brought over a present: a teacup with a picture of the Brandenburg gate on it. She was convinced that she was only being asked to move to Lódź or something like that. “See you soon,” we shouted back and forth.’

  Around 1930 there were some 160,000 Jews living in Berlin. By 1945, there were only 6,000 left: most of those were partners in ‘privileged mixed marriages’.

  ‘My father did all he could, through his former diplomatic connections, to find out what had happened to Else Meyer,’ Siedler says.‘It turned out that, somewhere in eastern Poland, the wagons were unhitched from the engine, which was needed more urgently for troop transports. It was winter. When they opened the wagons three weeks later, everyone was dead, of course. After experiences like that, my parents no longer had any illusions about the fate of the Jews. They were being wiped out, that was clear. From soldiers back on leave we had started hearing more and more about mass executions in Poland. There were too many soldiers present at those killings, the Nazis couldn't keep it a secret. But that they would start the production-line killing of Jews in such massive numbers, that defied our imagination. In the circles I moved in, no one could believe that a place like Auschwitz or Majdanek really existed.’

  There was one isolated moment of resistance. In February 1943, the non-Jewish wives of some 2,000 Jewish workers who had been arrested attacked the improvised prison on Rosenstrasse, and the wives of other Berlin workers joined them. That unique uprising lasted several days, the SS threatened the women with machine guns, and finally the men were released. The Nazis did not want to run a risk by shooting down a few thousand German housewives in the middle of the capital.

  In Berlin, however, Jews were not taken into hiding on any significant scale. Of the four million citizens of Berlin, only a few thousand at most
offered any assistance to those Jews who had remained behind clandestinely, hiding in coal bins and forgotten attics. Siedler: ‘Mrs Hahn was part of the organisation that collected food for them, so my family became a bit involved. We helped her acquire ration booklets, and I collected groceries. I was sixteen or seventeen at the time, it was all quite exciting really, a sort of game of Cowboys and Indians.’

  In the end, about 2,000 of Berlin's ‘U-boat’ Jews survived the war.

  Beside the former art academy, close to Wilhelmstrasse and the place where the Wall once stood, is a little, weed-covered mound. Beneath it are the remains of the former Gestapo headquarters at Prinz-Albrecht-Strasse. The building survived the war, but was finally demolished in 1949. A road was built over it, the rest remained a vacant lot. In May 1985 a team of young researchers began excavations there. They soon hit upon a network of ruins, part of the cellars and kitchens of the former Gestapo headquarters. Ever since 1987 it has served as an austere memorial, with a path along the stone foundations and what is left of the old plumbing and doors, a kind of modern archaeological site. On and beside the old walls, photographs and documents tell the story of what happened here. No more, and no less.

  There are more remains of the Nazi era to be found beneath the surface of Berlin, and excursions are even organised for those who wish to visit these forms of ‘historical soil pollution’. But the Topographie des Terrors is, in all its simplicity, the most terrifying by far. The stones are authentic, as are the lengths of pipe, the chunks of concrete, the wood, the documents, nothing here is a replica. The only thing one wonders is: did the Nazi regime really use that much terror against its own people?

  One is struck again and again, in all the historical documents, by how small the Gestapo organisation really was, by how the Nazis repressed the entire German population with such a relatively small apparatus – particularly compared to, for example, the East German Stasi later in the same century. The Stasi employed more than 100,000 people to keep an eye on 17 million East Germans, while the Gestapo apparently needed no more than 40–60,000 for an empire of some 80 million inhabitants. While resistance groups in other parts of Europe could count on the silent acquiescence of the rest of the population, Hitler's regime maintained its generally accepted authority in Germany almost until the bitter end. In fact, large parts of the population supported that regime enthusiastically. Resistance was so uncommon that it could easily be nipped in the bud. Propaganda was readily believed, repression was a matter of loving one's country, obedience was the rule, informing on neighbours a patriotic duty.

  In his reconstruction of the workings of Nazi terror, Eric Johnson – using recovered Gestapo dossiers – described the sophistication of the system of informing in a town like Krefeld, close to the Dutch border: a sixteen-year-old Jewish girl was turned in for having a relationship with an Aryan worker; a Jewish housepainter who made jokes about Hitler was informed on by his neighbour; a chauffeur sent a letter to the authorities saying his Jewish boss had smuggled illegal publications into the country from the Netherlands. Of all the Gestapo cases against Jews, Johnson's research showed that no less than 41 per cent started with an informant or a complaint. Only 19 per cent were uncovered by the activities of the Gestapo itself, and 8 per cent came from other Nazi organisations. (Similar research into dossiers in Würzburg showed that no fewer than 57 per cent of the Jews arrested had been turned in by German citizens.)

  Wolf Siedler still has a cheerful group photo of his class at the boarding school on Spiekeroog, probably taken in winter 1943–4. The boys are wearing navy uniforms, one of them is having his head chopped off with an axe by Ernstel Jünger, Wolf himself is standing to the left of these two while the rest look on in amusement. Most of the boys in this picture were naval assistants, Flakhelfer, as people called them. ‘That meant we had to do general chores around an anti-aircraft position, and that we wore uniforms. The rest of the time we spent in class, but when the air-raid siren went off we would jump up from our desks – eagerly, because of the break it provided – and race off to our positions to help with the shooting.’

  In early January 1944, two men suddenly appeared and arrested Siedler and Jünger. Along with a few other comrades, they were brought before a navy tribunal.

  ‘In those days, we talked about it openly among ourselves: about how the war had already been lost, about the horrendous crimes committed by the SS, and about how Hitler should be hanged from the yardarm.’ For weeks, it seems, one of their classmates had been reporting those conversations almost verbatim to the Gestapo. ‘Whenever I would deny something, they would say: ‘Oh, but at 3 p.m. on 17 November, outside the gym, didn't you say such and such?’ That was typical of the situation. There's no truth in the idea that the Germans had closed ranks, or that they were terrorised by the SS and the Gestapo. Not at all: 60 per cent of the people were Nazis themselves.’

  The tribunal's written verdict is still kept in a drawer at the house in Dahlem. In it one reads that Jünger, during an air battle between a few German interceptors and hundreds of British bombers, had said that the German air war looked more like a clay-pigeon contest. During an alarm in the barracks, Siedler had claimed that the ‘evacuation’ of the Jews amounted to nothing more than extermination. ‘And Jünger added: “And if Hitler is to be hanged, then I'll tighten the noose for him! If it comes down to that, I'll walk barefoot from Berlin to Potsdam to bring him the noose!”’

  Fortunately for them, the rest of the class was unanimous about the accusations: none of them had heard a word of it. Siedler: ‘That saved my life. It's actually a wonder how the naval court in the field was able to keep Jünger and myself out of the hands of the Nazi courts, and let us get away with only a few months in jail.’

  That miracle perhaps had something to do with the fact that Jünger's father had a legendary reputation within the Wehrmacht. ‘Old Ernst Jünger, the writer, the First World War hero, came to visit us in the cell, wearing his uniform. When someone commented on this, he said: ‘The only occasion on which one can wear one's decorations with honour these days is when one visits one's son in prison.”’

  In the end, the two boys were sent to the Italian Front with a so-called Himmelfahrtkommando in autumn 1944. Siedler was soon wounded. That saved his life. Jünger was killed the first day out, his parents heard about it only weeks later. On 11 January, 1945, Ernst Jünger wrote in his diary: ‘Ernstel is dead, killed in combat, my dear child, dead ever since 29 November last year!’

  Siedler would never forget those long months in the naval brig at Wilhelmshaven. During air raids, all the condemned men were put together in the same bomb shelter: it was the only time when the prisoners saw each other. Every Tuesday and Thursday, between 3 a.m. and 4 a.m., the boys would hear a couple of their companions in misfortune being taken from their cells, hear their footsteps going down the stone corridor. They heard one of them say: ‘You can hang me today, but in six months’ time Germany will have lost the war and then it will be your turn to be hanged.’ One boy screamed: ‘Let me live! I haven't done anything!’ A blond sailor, a baby-faced boy with freckles, had told his fellow seamen that the ‘bigwigs’ had ‘villas in Switzerland’ they could flee to if things went wrong. That was why he was on death row, only for having said that. ‘When they dragged him away, we heard him beg them in desperation whether they couldn't give him another chance: “Why don't you send me to the front, instead of hanging me?”’

  Almost all these men were killed for having made a few comments. They had said that the war was lost anyway, they had talked about the crimes of the SS, or they may have simply listened to the BBC, the Feindsender. At the end of the war, things like that were enough to be sentenced to death for ‘defeatism’. None of them had committed any act of actual resistance. And they had all been informed on by their friends or neigh-bours.

  Siedler: ‘I remember talking to this young officer whose only concern was whether he would be shot or hanged. The noose, he considered that a dis
honourable death, that was something for traitors. During one of those air raids – we were sitting around in a little group – he told us that unimaginable atrocities were being carried out in the East. People there were being clubbed to death, hanged, tortured, burned alive, horrible things, for no good reason. “But,” that officer said, “those stories about the death factories, that's nothing but English propaganda.” That's what that officer said, with the deepest conviction, one week before he was executed.’

  Chapter THIRTY-ONE

  Himmlerstadt

  EARLY IN THE MORNING OF TUESDAY, 25 FEBRUARY, 1941, A WILDCAT strike broke out in Amsterdam and the towns along the River Zaan. Tram drivers occupied the garages, stevedores in Amsterdam North blocked the ports, factories along the Zaan remained closed. In the course of the morning the strike spread to the offices and businesses in the centre of Amsterdam. It was a sunny day. Ferries loaded with cheering workers crossed the River IJ from Amsterdam North to the city centre. The ‘Internationale’ was sung, boys picked up the factory girls and spun them around while the crowds laughed.