History of the Jews

by Paul Johnson

  There is no doubt at all that forced labour was a form of murder and regarded as such by the Nazi authorities. The words Vernichtung durch Arbeit, ‘destruction through work’, were used repeatedly in discussions which Dr Georg Thierack, the Minister of Justice, had with Goebbels and Himmler on 14 and 18 September 1942.138 Rudolf Höss, the commandant at Auschwitz May 1940-December 1943, and afterwards office chief at the Main Security Headquarters from which the entire anti-Jewish programme was directed, testified that by the end of 1944 400,000 slaves were working in the German armaments industry. ‘In enterprises with particularly severe working conditions’, he said, ‘every month one-fifth died or were, because of inability to work, sent back by the enterprises to the camps in order to be exterminated.’ So German industry was a willing participant in this aspect of the Final Solution. The labourers had no names—just numbers, tattooed on their bodies. If one died, the factory manager did not have to state the cause of death: he merely asked for a replacement. Höss testified that the initiative in securing Jewish slave labour always came from the firm: ‘The concentration camps have at no time offered labour to the industry. On the contrary, prisoners were sent to firms only after the firms had made a request for [such] prisoners.’139 All the companies concerned knew exactly what was happening. Nor was the knowledge confined to very senior managers and those involved in the actual slave-labour operations. There were innumerable visits to the camps. In a few cases written reactions have been preserved. Thus one IG Farben employee, visiting the Auschwitz slave-labour operation, 30 July 1942, wrote to a colleague in Frankfurt, using the tone of joking irony which many Germans adopted: ‘That the Jewish race is playing a special part here you can well imagine. The diet and treatment of this sort of people is in accordance with our aim. Evidently an increase of weight is hardly ever recorded for them. That bullets start whizzing at the slightest attempt of a “change of air” is also certain, as well as the fact that many have already disappeared as a result of a “sunstroke”.’140

  Yet starving and working the Jews to death was not quick enough for Hitler. He determined on mass killing too, in the spirit with which he had discussed it with Major Hell. Signed orders from Hitler of any kind are rare; and rarest of all are those dealing with the Jews. The longest letter Hitler ever wrote about Jewish policy goes back to spring 1933, in reply to a request from Hindenberg to exempt war veterans from anti-Jewish decrees.141 The absence of written orders led to the claim that the Final Solution was Himmler’s work and that Hitler not only did not order it but did not even know it was happening.142 But this argument will not stand up.143 The administration of the Third Reich was often chaotic but its central principle was clear enough: all key decisions emanated from Hitler. This applied particularly to Jewish policy, which was the centre of his preoccupations and the dynamic of his entire career. He was by far the most obsessively and fundamentally anti-Semitic of all the Nazi leaders. Even Streicher, in his view, was taken in by the Jews: ‘He idealized the Jew,’ Hitler insisted in December 1941. ‘The Jew is baser, fiercer, more diabolical than Streicher depicted him.’144 Hitler accepted anti-Semitic conspiracy theory in its most extreme form, believing that the Jew was wicked by nature, was indeed the very incarnation and symbol of evil.145 Throughout his career he saw the ‘Jewish problem’ in apocalyptic terms and the Holocaust was the logical outcome of his views. His orders to set it in motion were oral but were invariably invoked by Himmler and others as their compelling authority, according to regular formulae: ‘the Führer’s wish’, ‘the Führer’s will’, ‘with the Führer’s agreement’, ‘this is my order which is also the Führer’s wish’.

  The decisive date for the Final Solution was almost certainly 1 September 1939, when hostilities began. Hitler had stated plainly, on 30 January that year, what his reaction to war would be: ‘if international-finance Jewry inside and outside Europe should succeed once more in plunging the nations into yet another world war, the consequences will not be the Bolshevization of the earth and thereby the victory of Jewry, but the annihilation [Vernichtung] of the Jewish race in Europe.’ He regarded the war as his licence for genocide and he set the scientific process in motion the very day war broke out. The first programme, of experimental murder, was conceived in Hitler’s Chancellery and the original order went out on Hitler’s personal stationery on 1 September 1939: this authorized the murder of the incurably insane. The programme was code-named T-4 after the Chancellery address, Tiergartenstrasse 4, and from the start it had the characteristics of the genocide programme: SS involvement, euphemism, deception. It is significant that the first man appointed to head the euthanasia programme, SS Obergruppenführer Dr Leonard Contin, was sacked when he asked for written orders from Hitler. He was replaced by another SS doctor, Philip Boyhaler, who accepted oral orders.146

  The SS experimented with various gases, including carbon monoxide and the cyanide-based pesticide trade-named Zyklon-B. The first gas chamber was set up at a killing centre in Brandenburg in late 1939, Hitler’s doctor, Karl Brandt, witnessing a test killing of four insane men. He reported back to Hitler, who ordered only carbon monoxide to be used. Five other killing centres were then equipped. The gas chamber was called a ‘shower-room’ and the victims, taken in groups of twenty or thirty, were told they were to have a shower. They were sealed in, then the doctor on duty gassed them. This was the same basic procedure later used at the mass-extermination camps. The programme murdered 80,000-100,000 people, but was stopped in August 1941 following protests by the churches—the only occasion when they prevented Hitler from killing people. But by this time it was also being used to kill Jews from concentration camps who were too sick to work. So the euthanasia programme merged into the Final Solution, and there were continuities camps who were too sick to work. So the euthanasia programme merged into the Final Solution, and there were continuities in methods, equipment and expert personnel.147

  It should be emphasized that the killing of large numbers of Jews continued in Poland throughout 1940 and the spring of 1941, but the mass-extermination phase did not really begin until Hitler’s invasion of Russia, 22 June 1941. This was designed to destroy the centre of the Jewish-Bolshevik conspiracy and to give Hitler access to the five million Jews then under Soviet control. Killing was done by two methods: mobile killing units, and fixed centres or death camps. The mobile killing system dates back to 22 July 1940 when Hitler’s idea of total war, involving mass extermination, was first presented to the army. Indeed, the army was heavily involved in the Final Solution since the SS killing units came under its command for tactical purposes. An entry on 3 March 1941 in General Jodl’s War Diary records Hitler’s decision that, in the coming Russian campaign, SS-Police units would have to be brought right up to front-line army areas in order to ‘eliminate’ the ‘Jewish-Bolshevik intelligentsia’.148

  This was the origin of the Einsatzgruppen, the mobile killing battalions. They were directed from the Reich Security Main Office (RHSA) under Reinhard Heydrich, the chain of command going Hitler-Himmler-Heydrich. There were four such battalions, A, B, C and D, each 500-900 strong, assigned to each of the four army groups invading Russia. They had a high proportion of high-ranking officers drawn from the SS, Gestapo and police, and included many intellectuals and lawyers. Otto Ohlendorf, who commanded D, had degrees from three universities and a doctorate in jurisprudence. Ernst Biberstein, one of the commanders in C, was a Protestant pastor, theologian and church official.

  Of the Jews in Soviet territory, four million lived in areas overrun by the German army 1941-2. Of these two and a half million fled before the Germans arrived. The rest was 90 per cent concentrated in the cities, making it easier for the Einsatzgruppen to kill them. The murder battalions moved directly behind the army units, rounding up Jews before the city populations knew what was in store. In the initial killing sweep, the four groups reported at various dates between mid-October and early December 1941 that they had killed 125,000, 45,000, 75,000 and 55,000 respectively.
But many Jews were left behind in the rear areas, so killing teams were sent to catch and murder them. The army co-operated in handing them over, salving its conscience by referring to Jews as ‘partisans’ or ‘superfluous eaters’. Sometimes the army killed Jews themselves. Both they and the SS incited pogroms, to save themselves trouble. There was little resistance from the Jews. Russian civilians were co-operative, though there is one recorded act of a local mayor shot for trying ‘to help the Jews’.149 Quite small groups of killers disposed of enormous numbers. In Riga, one officer and twenty-one men killed 10,600 Jews. In Kiev, two small detachments of C killed over 30,000. A second sweep began at the end of 1941 and lasted throughout 1942. This killed over 900,000. Most Jews were murdered by shooting, outside the towns, at ditches turned into graves. During the second sweep, mass graves were dug first. The killers shot the Jews in the back of the neck, the method used by the Soviet secret police, or by the ‘sardine method’. Under this, the first layer stretched themselves at the bottom of the grave and were killed from above. The next layer lay down on top of the first bodies, heads facing the feet. There were five or six layers, then the grave was filled in.

  Some Jews hid under floorboards and in cellars. They were blasted out with grenades or burned alive. Some Jewish girls offered themselves to stay alive; they were used during the night but killed all the same the next morning. Some Jews were only wounded and lived hours, even days. There were many sadistic acts. There was reluctance too, even among these picked killers, to slaughter so many people who put up no resistance—not a single member of any of the groups died during an actual killing operation. Himmler paid only one visit to see the work, witnessing 100 Jews shot in mid-August 1941. There is a record of it. Himmler found himself unable to look as each volley rang out. The commander reproached him: ‘Reichsführer, those were only a hundred.’ Himmler: ‘What do you mean by that?’ ‘Look at the eyes of the men in this Kommando. How deeply shaken they are! These men are finished for the rest of their lives. What kind of followers are we training here? Either neurotics or savages.’ Himmler then made a speech to the men, calling on them to obey ‘the Highest Moral Law of the Party’.150

  To escape from the degree of personal contact between killers and killed involved in shooting, the groups tried other methods. The use of dynamite proved disastrous. Then they introduced mobile gas vans, and soon two were sent to each battalion. Meanwhile, these mobile killing operations were being supplemented by the use of fixed centres, the death camps. Six of these were built and equipped: at Chelmno and Auschwitz in the Polish territories incorporated in the Reich; and at Treblinka, Sobibor, Majdanek and Belzec in the Polish General Government. In a sense, the term ‘death camp’ as a special category is misleading. There were 1,634 concentration camps and their satellites and more than 900 labour camps.151 All were death camps, in that enormous numbers of Jews died there, by starvation and overwork, or by execution for trivial offences or often for no reason at all. But these six camps were deliberately planned or extended for mass slaughter on an industrial scale.

  Hitler seems to have given the orders for mass extermination in fixed centres in June 1941, at the same time as the mobile killing units went into action. But as we have seen, large-scale killing by gas was already taking place; and in March 1941 Himmler had already instructed Höss, commandant at Auschwitz, to enlarge it for this purpose. It had been chosen, Himmler told him, because of its easy rail access and isolation from centres of population. Shortly afterwards, Himmler instructed Odilo Globocnik, SS-Police head in Lublin, to build Majdanek, and this official became head of a killing network which included two other death camps, Belzec and Sobibor. The chain of command was as follows. Hitler’s orders went through Himmler, and from him to individual camp commanders. But Hermann Göring, as boss of the Four-Year Plan, was involved administratively in arranging the co-operation of various state bureaucracies. This is an important point, showing that, while the executive agent of the Holocaust was the SS, the crime as a whole was a national effort involving all the hierarchies of the German government, its armed forces, its industry and its party. As Hilberg put it, ‘The co-operation of these hierarchies was so complete that we may truly speak of their fusion into a machinery of destruction.’152

  Göring delegated the co-ordinating role to Heydrich, who as head of the RSHA and Chief of Security Police was the junction of state and party, and sent him a written order, 31 July 1941:

  As supplement to the task that was entrusted to you in the decree dated 24 January 1939, namely to solve the Jewish question by emigration and evacuation in the most favourable way possible, given present conditions, I herewith commission you to carry out all necessary preparations with regard to the organizational, substantive and financial viewpoints, for a total solution of the Jewish question in the German sphere of influence in Europe. In so far as the competences of other central organizations are hereby affected, these are to be involved.153

  Heydrich, in turn, gave orders to Adolf Eichmann, his RSHA official in charge of ‘Jewish Affairs and Evacuation Affairs’. He had administrative responsibility for the Holocaust as a whole, though Himmler exercised operational responsibility through his camp commanders. It was Eichmann who actually drafted the 31 July 1941 order signed by Göring. But at the same time an additional oral order was given by Hitler to Heydrich and transmitted to Eichmann: ‘I have just come from the Reichsführer: the Führer has now ordered the physical annihilation of the Jews.’154

  Construction of the mass-killing machinery went on throughout the summer and autumn of 1941. Two civilians from Hamburg came to Auschwitz to teach the staff how to handle Zyklon-B, which was the preferred killing method there. In September, the first gassing was carried out, in Auschwitz Block II, on 250 Jewish hospital patients and 600 Russian prisoners. Then work began on Birkenau, the main Auschwitz killing-centre. The first death camp to be completed was Chelmno, near Lodz, which started functioning on 8 December 1941, using exhaust gases from mobile vans. An RSHA conference on the killing had been planned for the next day, at a villa in the Berlin suburb of Wannsee. But it was postponed because of Pearl Harbor, and did not take place until 20 January 1942. By then there was a certain note of anxiety among the top Nazis. The survival of Russia, and the entrance of America into the war, must have convinced many of them that Germany was unlikely to win it. The conference was to reaffirm the object of the Final Solution and to co-ordinate means to carry it through. There was lunch, and while waiters handed round brandy, several present urged the need for speed. It was from this point on that the exigencies of the Holocaust were given priority even over the war effort itself, reflecting Hitler’s resolve that, whatever the outcome of the war, the European Jews would not survive it.

  Wannsee was followed by rapid action. Belzec became operational the next month. The building of Sobibor began in March. At the same time Majdanek and Treblinka were transformed into death centres. Goebbels, after a briefing by Globocnik, in charge of the General Government camps, noted (27 March 1942): ‘A judgment is being visited on the Jews [which is] barbaric…. The prophecy which the Führer made about them for having brought on a new world war is beginning to come true in a most terrible manner.’155

  Goebbels, however, was confiding to his diary. In actual orders, even for very limited circulation, the genocide was invariably described in euphemistic code. Even at the Wannsee conference, Heydrich used code. All Jews, he said, were to be ‘evacuated to the East’ and formed into labour columns. Most would ‘fall away through natural decline’ but the hard core, capable of rebuilding Jewry, would be ‘treated accordingly’. This last phrase, meaning ‘killed’, was already familiar from Einsatzgruppen reports. There were many official euphemisms for murder, used by those within the operations and well understood by countless thousands outside them: Security Police measures, worked over in the Security Police manner, actions, special actions, special treatment, moved East, resettlement, appropriate treatment, cleansing, major cleansin
g actions, conveyed to special measures, elimination, solution, cleaning up, making free, finished, migration, wandering, wandered off, disappeared.

  The euphemisms were considered necessary, even among the professional mass-killers, to minimize any brooding on the sheer enormity of what they were doing. There were about 8,861,800 Jews in the countries of Europe directly or indirectly under Nazi control. Of these it is calculated that the Nazis killed 5,933,900, or 67 per cent. In Poland, which had by far the largest number, 3,300,000, over 90 per cent, were killed. The same percentage was reached in the Baltic States, Germany and Austria, and over 70 per cent were killed in the Bohemian Protectorate, Slovakia, Greece and the Netherlands. More than 50 per cent of the Jews were killed in White Russia, the Ukraine, Belgium, Yugoslavia, Rumania and Norway.156 The six big death camps formed the main killing areas, murdering over two million at Auschwitz, 1,380,000 at Majdanek, 800,000 at Treblinka, 600,000 at Belzec, 340,000 at Chelmno and 250,000 at Sobibor. The speed with which their gas chambers worked was awesome. Treblinka had ten of them, each accommodating 200 people at a time. It was Höss’s boast that at Auschwitz each of his gas chambers could take 2,000. Using Zyklon-B gas crystals, the five Auschwitz chambers could murder 60,000 men, women and children every twenty-four hours. Höss said that he murdered 400,000 Hungarian Jews alone (as well as other groups) during the summer of 1944, and that in total ‘at least’ 2,500,000 humans (Jews and non-Jews) were gassed and incinerated at Auschwitz, plus another half-million who died of starvation and disease. For many months in 1942, 1943 and 1944, the Nazis were each week killing in cold blood over 100,000 people, mainly Jews.157