Hitler's Hangman (46 page)

Madagascar project to Ribbentrop. The entire project, from the logistical

planning stage to the management of a police state on the island, was to

be the responsibility of Heydrich, whose empowerment in matters of

Jewish emigration by Göring was once more reiterated.31

AT W A R W I T H T H E W O R L D

181

Although much more detailed than Rademacher’s original plan, it devi-

ated from it in only a few important respects: the RSHA plan contained

no vacuous rhetoric about demonstrating Germany’s ‘generosity’ to the

world by granting Jewish autonomy. Heydrich and his advisers envisaged

that after the war had been brought to a triumphant conclusion, several

million Jews were to be shipped off to Madagascar within the next five

years. The first shipments of Jewish deportees would mainly consist of

farmers, builders, craftsmen, workers and doctors up to the age of forty-

five, who would immediately begin to make the inhospitable areas of the

island habitable. Unlike Rademacher, Heydrich envisaged a much more

limited form of Jewish self-government, confined to the creation of special

Jewish organizations for carrying out selected tasks that would be given to

them by the SS.32

The notion that millions of European Jews could be transported to the

inhospitable island of Madagascar testifies to a further radicalization in

Heydrich’s inner circle. As Peter Longerich has argued convincingly, the

project clearly anticipated a huge death toll among the deportees and

possibly even entailed a conscious attempt at physical extermination, even

if such an outcome could theoretically be prevented by ‘good behaviour’ on

the part of the United States. The planning for the final solution within

the RSHA was gradually evolving toward the ‘eradication’ – if still ‘only’

through neglect – that Himmler had rejected only three months earlier.33

The Madagascar plan remained on Heydrich’s mind over the following

weeks. In a circular to all Security Police headquarters in Germany on

30 October 1940, he described the ‘plans for the resettlement’ of all Jews

within the German sphere of influence that would be implemented ‘after

the conclusion of peace’ as an ‘evacuation overseas’.34 Even more than a

month later, in December 1940, Eichmann told the Interior Ministry’s

racial expert, Bernhard Lösener, that the Madagascar plan was still sitting

on Heydrich’s desk, awaiting his approval.35 By that stage, however, it had

become highly unlikely that the plan would be implemented in the near

future. From the start, its implementation had depended not only on the

defeat of France, but also on an expected peace settlement with Britain,

which would have enabled the Germans to use the British merchant fleet

for the envisaged deportations. After the failure of the Luftwaffe to secure

victory over the RAF in the Battle of Britain and the abandonment of the

German invasion plan, the Madagascar plan was dropped, primarily

because the sea routes from Europe to the Indian Ocean could not

be secured.

Heydrich’s frustration grew immeasurably in the autumn of 1940. After

the Nisko disaster, the Madagascar plan was the second major territorial

solution that had been devised and abandoned within only a few months.

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HITLER’S HANGMAN

Yet, despite the failure of the plan, Heydrich remained firmly committed

to the idea of expelling the Jews to the furthest extremity of the German

sphere of influence. If Madagascar was no longer an option, another terri-

tory would have to be found. ‘Decimation’ of the deported in significant

numbers had been part of Heydrich’s thinking ever since the invasion of

Poland, but there is no evidence or indication that he had yet developed

any comprehensive plan for the systematic mass murder of all Jews within

the German sphere of influence.

Throughout the autumn of 1940 and the spring of 1941, piecemeal

deportations of Jews and other undesirables from the borderlands of the

Reich into the General Government continued. Following the French

defeat and the annexation of Alsace-Lorraine, the SS immediately began

to expel the region’s Jews, Gypsies, asocials and French nationalists.

Between the summer and winter of 1940, the Germans had deported

more than 47,000 people from Lorraine and another 24,000 from Alsace.

A further 71,000 people who had fled the region during the invasion were

barred from returning.36

In the neighbouring German
Gaue
of Baden and Saarpfalz, local

authorities used the opportunity to rid themselves of ‘their’ Jews, proposing

to Himmler and Heydrich that they could be deported to unoccupied

Vichy France. Heydrich jumped at the opportunity and on 22 October

police squads descended upon the Jews in every village in Baden and

Saarpfalz. With merely two hours’ notice, the deportees were ordered to

pack no more than fifty kilograms of luggage before being put on trains

to France. On 22 and 23 October, nine trains, two from Saarpfalz and

seven from Baden, departed with more than 6,000 German Jews for

Vichy France. To Heydrich’s satisfaction, the round-ups proceeded

‘without friction or incident’ and were ‘barely noticed by the population’.37

However, the Vichy authorities, having no desire to be treated as a

dumping ground for German Jews, interned them on the French–Spanish

border and complained to the Foreign Office, which was unaware of the

deportations. Heydrich conceded to Luther that the deportations had

been carried out without prior consultation. However, he emphasized that

he had acted on the basis of a Führer order. Ribbentrop fell into line and

ordered that the French complaint be treated ‘dilatorily’.38 From Heydrich’s

point of view (and that of many regional Nazi Gauleiters in the Reich),

these small-scale successes and deportations were hardly satisfying. A

‘total solution’ of the Jewish question had yet to be found.

In November or December 1940, roughly at the same time that Hitler

made a decision in principle to attack the Soviet Union the following year,

Heydrich received the order from Hitler (via Göring) to prepare a first

draft for a ‘final solution project’ to be implemented after the war’s end.

AT W A R W I T H T H E W O R L D

183

Although the exact wording of Heydrich’s proposal – presented to Göring

during a two-hour meeting on 24 January 1941 – is unknown, it is

possible to reconstruct its content.39 An Eichmann memorandum of

4 December sheds some light on how Heydrich and his inner circle saw

the ‘solution to the Jewish question’ at this time. Madagascar was no

longer mentioned. Instead Eichmann referred to the ‘resettlement of

the Jews’ from German-controlled Europe into a ‘territory yet to be

determined’. Eichmann calculated that this project would affect ‘some

5.8 million Jews’, a significant increase when compared to the figure of

4 million Jews cited in the RSHA’s Madagascar plan of the previous

summer. The Jews targeted for deportation now included those of

Germany’s South-east European allies and puppet states as well as those

living in the French colonies.40

A second memorandum, written by Heydrich’s Jewish expert in Paris,

Theodor Dannecker, in January 1941, likewise indicates how far plans had

developed since the summer of 1940:

In accordance with the will of the Führer, the Jewish question within the

German-dominated or -controlled part of Europe must be brought to a

final solution after the war’s end. The head of the Security Police and the

SD [Heydrich] has already received . . . orders from the Führer to

prepare a plan for the final solution project. – Thanks to the extensive

existing experiences of the Sipo and the SD in the treatment of Jews and

the long-standing preparatory works in this area the main points of the

project have already been mapped out. It has been presented to the

Führer and the Reichsmarschall [Göring] . . . [The plan entails] total

expulsion of the Jews on the basis of previous plans and a detailed settle-

ment programme in a territory yet to be determined.41

The question remained as to where the Jews were going to be deported.

Given that Hitler had by now made a decision to attack the Soviet Union,

it is almost certain that Heydrich began to view the General Government

as merely a collection point for large-scale deportations into the soon-to-

be conquered areas of the Soviet Union. Since Hitler’s plan to invade the

Soviet Union the following summer could not be mentioned openly

without compromising the secrecy surrounding the preparations for

Operation Barbarossa, Heydrich’s correspondence with other decision-

makers in the Nazi bureaucracy during these months referred to a ‘terri-

tory yet to be determined’ or ‘the country that will be chosen later’.42

When, on 26 March, Heydrich met Göring to discuss both his

proposals of January 1941 and his future jurisdiction in the yet to be

conquered Soviet territories, Göring approved his suggestions ‘with one

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amendment concerning the jurisdiction of Rosenberg’. The reference to

Alfred Rosenberg – the designated Minister for the Occupied Eastern

Territories – indicates yet again that the ‘territory yet to be determined’

was the Soviet Union.43 Heydrich resubmitted his revised draft on the

solution of the Jewish question on 31 July 1941 when Göring formally

entrusted him with the task of undertaking ‘preparations in organiza-

tional, technical and material respects for the complete solution to the

Jewish question in the German area of influence in Europe’.44

So far as the Nazi solution to the Jewish question was concerned, the

era of mass expulsions ended when military preparations for Operation

Barbarossa brought the last deportation transports to Poland to a halt in

mid-March 1941. Still, in the summer of 1941, Heydrich continued to

envisage the final solution in terms of forced resettlement to the furthest

extremity of the German sphere of influence. In the context of these

forced resettlements, countless expellees would die of thirst, hunger and

exhaustion – a side-effect to which Heydrich was largely indifferent. His

task, as he understood it, was to remove the Jews to the furthest part of

the German sphere of influence, not to murder them, but if some of them

died in the course of these expulsions, then it was no concern of his.

Although inherently destructive and murderous, he had not, as yet, begun

to think of the final solution in terms of the systematic murder of every

Jew in Europe, irrespective of age and gender.45

Between 1939 and 1941, Heydrich primarily advocated two anti-

Jewish policies: ghettoization and expulsion, with the former intended as

a short-term measure to facilitate the latter, longer-term goal. Expulsion

to the furthest extremity of the German Empire, not systematic, indis-

criminate murder, was Heydrich’s solution to the Jewish problem in this

period. The relentless search for a reception area – first east of Kraków,

then around Lublin, in Madagascar and then again in the General

Government – characterized Heydrich’s anti-Jewish thinking in these

months. The gradual transition to genocide would follow only after the

German attack on the Soviet Union in 1941.

Preparing for Total War

Fol owing his swift rise in the SS hierarchy after 1931, Heydrich had

experienced a number of serious setbacks since the outbreak of war in

September 1939. The atrocities committed by his
Einsatzgruppen
in

Poland had greatly strained relations with the Wehrmacht to the extent

that the Sipo and the SD were granted scarcely any role in the occupation

of Western Europe. Moreover, both Himmler’s ambitious settlement plans

and Heydrich’s own proposals for a territorial solution to the Jewish ques-

AT W A R W I T H T H E W O R L D

185

tion had not achieved any great success. It was in these circumstances that

a new opportunity arose fol owing Hitler’s decision to attack the Soviet

Union. Heydrich was determined not let this opportunity pass him by.

In the spring of 1941, Hitler’s plans for a military confrontation with the

Soviet Union took firm shape and Heydrich was wel aware that Operation

Barbarossa was to be fought as a war of destruction. When, on 30 March,

Hitler assembled the supreme commanders of the armed forces in the New

Reich Chancel ery, he emphasized that the impending war with the Soviet

Union would be a fight to the death between two irreconcilable ideologies,

a war that left no room for outdated notions of chivalry. The supporters

of the Bolshevik cause, including members of the secret police and