by Paul Johnson
During Hitler’s twelve years in power, the dualism remained throughout. Right to the end, Jews were the victims both of sudden, individual acts of thoughtless violence, and of systematic state cruelty on a mass-industrial basis. During the first six years, in peacetime, there was a regular oscillation between the two. Once war imposed its own darkness and silence, the second gradually became predominant, on an enormous scale. It is true that Hitler was an improviser, a tactician of genius, who often reacted to events. True, also, that the scope of his persecution became so wide and varied as to develop a momentum of its own. Nevertheless, there was always a decisive degree of overall strategy and control, which came from no other mind but his, and expressed his anti-Semitic nature. The Holocaust was planned; and Hitler planned it. That is the only conclusion which makes sense of the whole horrifying process.
When Hitler first took power, his anti-Jewish policy was constrained by two factors. He needed to rebuild the German economy quickly. That meant avoiding the disruption inherent in the immediate dispossession and expulsion of the wealthy Jewish community. He wished to rearm as fast as possible. That meant reassuring international opinion by avoiding scenes of mass cruelty. Hence Hitler adopted the methods used against the Jews in fourteenth- and fifteenth-century Spain. Individual acts of violence were promoted and encouraged, then used as pretexts to introduce formal, legal measures against the Jews. Hitler had agents for his dual purpose. Josef Goebbels, his propaganda chief, was his rabble-rousing Vicente Ferrer. Heinrich Himmler, head of the SS, was his cool, implacable Torquemada. Under the impulse of Goebbels’ oratory and media, attacks on Jews by Brownshirts and party members, boycotts and terrorizing of Jewish businesses, began soon after Hitler took power. Hitler let it be known that he disapproved of these ‘individual actions’, as they were termed. But he left them unpunished, and he allowed them to build up into a climax in the summer of 1935. Then, in a major speech, he used them to justify the introduction of the Nuremberg Decrees on 15 September. These effectively carried out the original 1920 Nazi programme by stripping the Jews of their basic rights and beginning the process of separating them from the rest of the population. It was a reversion to the medieval system as its worst. But because it was a return to the odious but familiar past, it deceived most Jews (and the rest of the world) into believing that the Nuremberg system would give the Jews some kind of legal and permanent, albeit lowly, status in Nazi Germany. What they overlooked was the accompanying warning by Hitler, in the same speech, that if these arrangements for a ‘separate, secular solution’ broke down, then it might become necessary to pass a law ‘handing over the problem to the National Socialist Party for final solution’.127 In fact the instrument for this alternative was already being assembled. Himmler had opened his first concentration camp, at Dachau, only seven weeks after Hitler took over, and he had since collected into his hands control over a repressive police apparatus which had no parallel outside Stalin’s Russia.
On the plinth of the Nuremberg laws, an ever-growing superstructure of regulations restricting Jewish activity was progressively erected. By the autumn of 1938 the economic power of the Jews had been destroyed. The German economy was again strong. Germany was now rearmed. Over 200,000 Jews had fled from Germany. But the Anschluss with Austria had added as many Austrian Jews to the total. So the ‘Jewish problem’ remained unresolved, and Hitler was ready to move on to the next stage: its internationalization. If Jewish power in Germany had been destroyed, the power of the Jews abroad, and especially their power to make war upon him, became a growing theme of his speeches. The new dimension was dramatically personalized on 9 November 1938 when a Jew, Herschel Grynszpan, murdered a Nazi diplomat in Paris. This gave Hitler the pretext to move on to the next stage, using his dualist technique and both his agents. The same evening Goebbels told a meeting of Nazi leaders in Munich that anti-Jewish revenge riots had already started. On his suggestion, Hitler had decided that, if the riots spread, they were not to be discouraged. This was taken to mean that the party was to organize them. There followed the Kristallnacht. Party members smashed and looted Jewish shops. The SA sent out teams to burn down all synagogues. The SS got the news at 11.05 p.m. Himmler minuted: ‘The order was given by the propaganda directorate, and I suspect that Goebbels in his craving for power, which I noticed long ago, and also in his empty-headedness, started this action just at a time when the foreign political situation is very grave…. When I asked the Führer about it, I had the impression that he did not know anything about these events.’128 Within two hours he had ordered out all his police and SS forces to prevent large-scale looting and to take 20,000 Jews into the concentration camps.
There is little doubt that Hitler, whose orders on important matters were always oral, gave contradictory ones to Goebbels and Himmler. That was very characteristic. But there was an element of confusion as well as planning in this episode. It was used, as Hitler intended, to take further measures against Jews. They were held responsible for the riot, and fined a billion marks (about $400 million). But most of the cost of the damage had to be borne by insurance companies. There were a great many legal consequences. Jewish claims for damages in the courts had to be quashed by a special Justice Ministry decree. Cases against twenty-six party members accused of murdering Jews had to be quashed too. Four others who had raped Jewish women had to be expelled, and a distinction made between ‘idealistic’ and ‘selfish’ offences.129 Most disturbing of all, from Hitler’s point of view, was that the pogrom was unpopular, not merely abroad but above all in Germany.
Hence he changed his tactics. Goebbels continued his anti-Semitic propaganda, but henceforth he was denied an executive role in anti-Jewish violence. That was now entrusted to Himmler almost entirely. As before, the ‘outrage’ was used as the pretext for a fresh campaign of legal measures against Jews. But this time the process was made highly bureaucratic. Every move was carefully thought out beforehand by experienced officials, not party theorists, and was made legal and systematic. As Raul Hilberg, the leading historian of the Holocaust, shows, it was this very bureaucratization of the policy which made possible its colossal scale and transformed a pogrom into genocide.
It also ensured that, at one time or another, almost every department of the German government, and large numbers of civilians, were involved in anti-Jewish activities. Hitler’s war against the Jews became a national effort. To carry through the policy, the Jews had first to be identified, then dispossessed, then concentrated. Identification involved both the medical profession and the churches. The Nazis found that in practice it was too difficult to define a Jew by race. They had to fall back on religious criteria. Their basic decree of 11 April 1933, needed to throw Jews out of the civil service, defined a ‘person of non-Aryan descent’ as someone with a parent or grandparent of the Jewish religion. But this led to disagreements. In 1935, a medical conference between Dr Wagner, Chief Medical Officer of the party, Dr Blome, Secretary of the German Medical Association, and Dr Gross, head of the Race Political Office, decided that quarter-Jews were Germans but half-Jews were Jews, since (said Blome) ‘among half-Jews the Jewish genes are notoriously dominant’. But the civil service would not accept this definition. They defined Jews as religious half-Jews or those married to Jews. The civil servants got their way because they actually wrote the detailed legislation, including the Reich Citizenship Law of 14 November 1935. Some twenty-seven race-decrees were written at the Interior Ministry by a former customs official, Dr Bernhard Losener, used to making fine distinctions between dutiable goods. Those applying for a wide range of jobs had to produce positive proof of Aryan descent. An SS officer had to produce proof of descent going back to 1750, but even a junior clerk in a government office needed seven authenticated documents. The churches, who had the only records of birth before 1875-6, were thus drawn in. A new profession of Sippenforscher, family researcher, was created. A third race of part-Jews, the Mischling, came into being, sub-divided into first and second degrees. Dem
ands for reclassification, or ‘liberation’ as it was termed, multiplied, and as in Tsarist Russia the system led rapidly to every kind of nepotism and corruption. An official in Hitler’s Chancellery, whom he liked but who was a second-degree Mischling, received a ‘liberation’ from the Führer, as a personal Christmas present, while he and his family were sitting round the tree on Christmas Eve 1938.130
Again, dispossession of Jews, or Aryanization as it was called, brought a large section of the business community into the system. From August 1935, a Boycott Committee, which included Himmler and Streicher, and had all the resources of the state behind it, brought pressure to bear on Jews to sell out and to reduce the sale-price so that Germans could be induced to buy quickly. The banks played a prominent part in this, making a profit at every stage and often ending up with the business themselves. This was part of the process whereby German business was corrupted into taking part in the Final Solution. It was not just a question of benefiting from evil laws. Hitler’s dualistic approach was used at every stage. Jews were stripped of their property by thuggery as well as law. IG Farben and the Deutscher Bank swallowed up the Österreichische Kreditanstalt and its industrial subsidiaries, after one of its top men was taken for a ride by the SA and thrown from a moving car, and another kicked to death by the SA during a search of his house. Baron Louis Rothschild was arrested by the police and held as a hostage until the family agreed to be dispossessed of their property at a knock-down price. Afterwards the Dresdner Bank wrote to Himmler’s chief of staff thanking the police for help in bringing down the price.131
The process of concentrating the Jews, cutting them off from the rest of the population and subjecting them to a completely different regime, also involved the nation as a whole. It was a very complicated and difficult process and demanded a degree of cold-blooded cruelty on the part of scores of thousands of bureaucrats which was almost as pitiless as the eventual killing process itself. Moreover, all Germans were aware of it. Some anti-Jewish regulations were not published in the press. But everyone could see that Jews got different and inferior treatment in every aspect of life. After the Kristallnacht the sex and marriage laws became increasingly severe and were savagely enforced. A Jew caught ‘fraternizing’ with an Aryan was automatically sent to a concentration camp. The Aryan might be sent there too, for three months’ ‘re-education’. At the same time, November 1938, Jews were expelled from all schools, and trains, waiting-rooms and restaurants were segregated. The shifting of Jews into segregated housing-blocks also began. Some of these actions were in accordance with elaborate decrees. Others had no legal basis at all. From start to finish, Hitler’s war against the Jews was a bewildering mixture of law and lawlessness, system and sheer violence. From December 1938, for instance, Himmler reduced Jewish mobility, to assist the concentration process, simply by revoking all Jewish driving licences on his own authority. As the Jews were stripped of their property, they flocked into the big cities. The Jewish relief agencies, similarly impoverished, could not cope. So, under a decree of March 1939, unemployed Jews were pushed into forced labour.
Hence, by the opening of the war in September 1939, many of the eventual horrors had already been foreshadowed, and the system to carry them out was already in embryonic existence. Nevertheless, the war made a difference in two essential ways. First, it changed the emphasis of the moral justification for persecuting Jews which Hitler produced. This moral reasoning, crude though it might be, was an important element in the Holocaust because it was used publicly by Goebbels to secure the acquiescence or indifference of the German people, and by Himmler to promote the enthusiasm of those who manned the repressive machine itself. Until the outbreak of war, the argument ran that, since the Jews had been engaged for generations in defrauding the German people, they had no moral right to their property, and the measures to strip them of it were merely an act of simple restitution, their wealth going back whence it came—to the Reich. With the war, a new argument was added. Hitler had always insisted that, if a war came, it would be the work of the Jews, acting on the international stage; and when it did come, he held the Jews responsible for all the deaths that ensued. The conclusion implicit in this argument was that the Jews had no moral right to their lives either. Indeed, he said on a number of occasions that war would precipitate a ‘final solution’ of the ‘Jewish problem’.
This brings us to the second consequence of war. The experience of government, 1933-9, had led Hitler to modify his views on the popularity of anti-Semitism. It was useful to focus hatred, in the abstract, but he had learned that open, widespread, physical violence against the Jews as a whole was not acceptable to the German people, at any rate in peacetime. War, however, brought its own exigencies, and it also drew a veil over many activities. It was the necessary context in which genocide could be committed. So far from the Jews creating the war, then, it was rather Hitler who willed the war in order to destroy the Jews. Not just German Jews either, but all European Jews, thus providing an international and final solution to what he had always claimed was an international problem. Not only was war necessary, to provide the pretext and concealment the act required; it had to include war against Poland and Russia, to give Hitler access to the principal source of European Jewry.
Hence with the opening of the first phase of the war, pressure on the Jews was rapidly increased. From September 1939 they had to be off the streets by 8 p.m. Then their movements were restricted in all areas at certain times, and in some areas at all times. They were banned from many forms of public transport except at certain inconvenient hours, or at any time. They were deprived of telephones, then forbidden to use them: phone booths were marked ‘Use by Jews Forbidden’. Special Jewish identity papers went back to August 1938 and with the coming of war were made the basis for new systems of deprivation. Ration cards were stamped ‘J’ for deprivation-use in all kinds of ways. From December 1939 Jewish rations were cut, and at the same time Jews were restricted to certain shopping hours. One of Hitler’s obsessions was that the First World War had been lost on the Home Front by food shortages often caused by Jewish rackets. He was determined that, this time, no Jew should eat a mouthful of food more than was necessary, and the Ministry of Food played a major part in his anti-Jewish policy. Indeed the bureaucrats there took progressively more severe measures designed, in effect, to starve the Jews to death.
At the same time Jews were being worked to death. They were excluded from the protective provisions of German labour laws. German employers took advantage of this, abolishing holiday pay for Jews. In early 1940 all allowances for Jews were abolished by law. On October 1941 a separate labour code for Jews allowed employers, for instance, to work fourteen-year-old Jewish boys for unlimited hours. Jews were deprived of protective clothing, welders of goggles and gloves. From September 1941 all Jews aged six or over had to wear a Star of David, black with a yellow background, as large as the palm of the hand, with the word Jude in the middle. This was an identification system which made it much easier to detect Jews breaking the countless regulations, turned the entire German nation into a police force and participants in the persecution, and demoralized the Jews themselves.
The opening of the war also brought Hitler half Poland and over two million Polish Jews. Moreover, Poland was an occupied country and he could do more or less what he liked there. Again, Hitlerian dualism was applied. First there were ‘spontaneous’ individual attacks, though on a much larger and more brutal scale than in Germany. Thus over fifty Jews were shot to death in a Polish synagogue. The SS held whipping orgies: at Nasielsky, early in 1940, 1,600 Jews were flogged throughout the night. The German army, which disliked the SS, kept records of these incidents, and some have survived.132 These violent incidents led to demands for ‘orderly’ solutions, and these in turn to systematic persecution.
Hence on 19 September 1939, Hitler decided to incorporate much of Poland in Germany proper, move 600,000 Jews from there into a Polish rump called the ‘General Government’,
and ghetto all Jews within it at convenient points along the railways. For good measure he gave orders to shift all Germany’s Jews there too. This brought into play the German railway system, the Reichsbahn, with its 500,000 clerical and 900,000 manual workers. Without the railways, the Holocaust would not have been possible. With their deportation trains called Sonderzüge, and their special staff, the Sonderzuggruppe, which co-ordinated the deportation schedules with the rest of the war timetables, the railways made prodigious efforts to get the Jews exactly where the SS wanted them. These trains carrying Jews were given priority over everything else. When a ban on all other uses of railways was imposed in July 1942, during the 266-division offensive in Russia, the SS still ran a daily train carrying 5,000 Jews to Treblinka and a twice-weekly one of 5,000 to Belzec. Even at the height of the Stalingrad panic, Himmler wrote to the Transport Minister: ‘If I am to wind up things quickly, I must have more trains for transport…. Help me get more trains!’ The minister obliged him. Study of the train factor indicates, perhaps better than anything else, the importance of his Jewish policy in Hitler’s overall scheme, and the extent to which ordinary Germans helped him to push it to its conclusion.133
Once Jews were separated, mobilized and concentrated in the General Government, what Hitler called (2 October 1940) ein grosses polnisches Arbeitslager, ‘a huge Polish labour-camp’, the forced-labour programme could begin in earnest. This was the first part of the Final Solution, of the Holocaust itself, because working to death was the basis on which the system operated. Fritz Saukel, the head of the Allocation of Labour Office, ordered that Jews were to be exploited ‘to the highest possible extent at the lowest conceivable degree of expenditure’.134 The labourers were worked from dawn till dusk seven days a week, dressed in rags and fed on bread, watery soup, potatoes and sometimes meat scraps. The first major slave-labour operation was in February 1940, the construction of a vast anti-tank ditch along the new eastern frontier.135 Thereafter the system spread to every area of industry. Workers could be ‘ordered’ by phone and shipped by freight-car just like raw materials. Thus IG Farben got 250 Dutch women Jews freighted from Ravensbrück to Dachau, the same freight-cars taking back 200 Polish women to Dachau.136 Slave workers were usually forced to move at the double, the ‘Auschwitz Trot’, even when carrying, for example, bags of concrete weighing 100 lb. At Mauthausen, near Hitler’s home town of Linz, where Himmler built a work-camp near the municipal quarry, labourers had only picks and axes, and they had to carry heavy chunks of granite up 186 steep and narrow steps from the quarry to the camp. They had a life expectancy of between six weeks and three months, and this did not include death by accident, suicide or punishment.137
