Hitler's Hangman (53 page)

boundaries’ in order to underline that neither Rosenberg as minister for the

occupied Eastern territories nor the General Governor, Hans Frank, would

be able to make independent decisions regarding Jewish policy in their

respective fiefdoms. This was by no means uncontroversial. The matter of

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

211

whether the Jewish question should be treated as a ‘policing issue’, thus

fal ing into Heydrich’s area of responsibility, or a political issue, thus

remaining within Rosenberg’s jurisdiction, remained highly contested. In the

winter of 1941, Rosenberg had repeatedly tried to impose tighter control

over SS representatives in the former Soviet Union, causing Heydrich to

insist in a letter to him of 10 January 1942 that Nazi Jewish policies in the

East were a policing matter outside Rosenberg’s jurisdiction.161

Heydrich’s words were also aimed at Bühler, Hans Frank’s deputy,

whose relationship with Heydrich had been overshadowed by a conflict

over executive competences in the General Government ever since the

autumn of 1939.162 In the months and weeks before the Wannsee

Conference, Himmler and Heydrich had repeatedly clashed with civilian

agencies in Poland over issues of competence in relation to Jewish

matters.163 In late November 1941, for example, Himmler’s representative

in the General Government complained to Heydrich that Frank wished

to take control of the ‘handling of the Jewish problem’ in the General

Government himself. Shortly after this meeting, Bühler was added to the

list of invitees, presumably to settle the matter of competences over Jewish

policies once and for all.164

After reasserting his unquestionable authority in all matters concerning

the Jewish question, Heydrich recapitulated the previous stages and past

achievements in the Nazis’ struggle against Jewry. The principal aim since

1933 had been to remove the Jews from all sectors of German society and

then from German soil. The only solution available at that time had been

to accelerate Jewish emigration, a policy that had led to the creation of the

Reich Central Office for Jewish Emigration. The disadvantages of the

policy of emigration were clear to all those involved, but in the absence of

alternatives the policy was tolerated, at least initially. With pride, Heydrich

recalled that between January 1933 and 31 October 1941, a total of

537,000 Jews had been ‘induced to emigrate’ from Germany, Austria and

the Protectorate.

Since the outbreak of war with the Soviet Union, however, the situation

had changed entirely. Emigration from Germany was no longer an option

and had indeed been forbidden altogether by Himmler in the autumn of

1941. Instead, Heydrich suggested, ‘new possibilities in the East’ offered ‘a

further possible solution’ which had recently been approved by Hitler: ‘the

evacuation of the Jews to the East’. The small-scale deportations from the

Reich and the Protectorate to Łódź, Minsk and Riga that had commenced

in October 1941 had provided important ‘practical experiences’, which

would be ‘of great significance for the coming final solution to the Jewish

question’. Unfortunately, he continued, regional discrepancies in the treat-

ment of Jews persisted. Inconsistencies regarding the destination of the

212

HITLER’S HANGMAN

transports and the fate of the deportees made it clear that the central

agencies involved were struggling to adopt a coherent approach regarding

the Jews to be deported from the Reich. These were the persisting

problems that Heydrich hoped to resolve at the Wannsee Conference.165

Following his brief general introduction, Heydrich outlined the scale

of the task that lay ahead of them. Roughly 11 million Jews – including

those living under German occupation, the Jews of neutral European

states such as Turkey, Ireland and Sweden and those living in states still

at war with Nazi Germany, such as Great Britain – would be affected

by the final solution. This figure, Heydrich added disapprovingly, was an

estimate based on statistics of religious rather than racial affiliation ‘since

some countries still do not have a definition of the Jew according to

racial principles’.166 The full implementation of the final solution

could thus occur only after a victorious conclusion of the war, but

Heydrich was confident that Germany would soon be in a position to put

sufficient pressure on the neutral countries to surrender their Jews to the

Nazis.

Heydrich then informed his guests of the fate he envisaged for those

Jews already under German control: ‘Under appropriate leadership,

the Jews should be put to work in the East in the context of the final solu-

tion. In large, single-sex labour columns, Jews fit to work will work their

way eastwards constructing roads. Doubtless the large majority will be

eliminated by natural causes.’ Any ‘final remnants that survive will no

doubt consist of the most resistant elements’. These ‘elements’ would ‘have

to be dealt with appropriately’ in order to avoid, as the ‘experience of

history’ confirmed, the formation of ‘the germ cell [
Keimzelle
] of a new

Jewish revival’. The fate of the millions of Jews deemed unable to work in

the first place, most notably the elderly and the sick, was much more

straightforward. It was so obvious that it did not even need to be

discussed.167

Heydrich’s reference to Jewish slave labour in the East has generated

considerable debate among historians of the Holocaust. Spurred on by

Eichmann’s admission during his trial in Jerusalem, some scholars have

argued that the coded language used at the Wannsee Conference ulti-

mately concealed a coherent plan to murder systematically all Jews in the

German sphere of influence. Others, however, have suggested that

Heydrich’s forced-labour programme was not pure camouflage but rather

one of many elements making up his plan for the final solution. Since the

construction of the extermination camps in the Warthegau and in

the General Government was only progressing slowly and as Jewish

forced labour had great significance for the German war economy,

the latter argument appears to be more plausible.168

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

213

Germany and the Protectorate, Heydrich said, would be cleared of Jews

first. Only then would Europe be combed from west to east. The Jews

would be brought to ‘transit ghettos’ and then sent further east, although

he conceded that Jews should not be removed from essential enterprises

in the wartime economy unless foreign replacement labour could be

provided. Even Heydrich could not ignore wartime economic needs at a

time when Nazi Germany was confronted with manpower shortages on a

dangerous scale. He attempted to balance recognition of current labour

scarcities with a desire to eliminate all Jews, although his determination

to kill all ‘resilient’ surviving Jewish labourers shows that he privileged

ideology over economic concerns and military necessities.169

Heydrich then identified some key prerequisites for the deportations.

There had to be clarity about who was going to be deported. Jews over

sixty-five and decorated war veterans would be sent to the ‘old-age

ghetto’ of Theresienstadt, primarily to obviate the numerous predictable

interventions from German neighbours or friends on their behalf. In

relation to other considerations, Heydrich remained notably vague about

how he hoped to implement his murderous concept of deportation,

extermination and annihilation through labour. After emphasizing once

more that the speed of the deportations would largely depend on the mili-

tary situation over the next few months, he suggested that concrete imple-

mentation plans would be discussed at a follow-up conference of

middle-rank experts from the ministries and agencies involved in anti-

Jewish policies.170

Heydrich’s position on the Jewish question at Wannsee was not entirely

new. As in early 1941, he continued to assume that the comprehensive

solution to the Jewish question would take place
after
the end of the war

through a combination of forced labour and mass murder. More immedi-

ately, the systematic mass killing of Jews that had already begun in the

Soviet Union during the previous summer could be intensified and

extended to occupied Poland.171

Frank’s deputy, Bühler, accordingly suggested to Heydrich that the final

solution should begin in the General Government since ‘the transport

problem does not play a significant role here’ and most of the Jews living

in this area were already incapable of working anyway. The solution of the

Jewish question in the General Government could and should therefore

begin as quickly as possible. The representative of the Ministry for the

Occupied Eastern Territories, Meyer, also pleaded that ‘certain prepara-

tory measures in the context of the final solution’ should be conducted

immediately. Given that ‘various types of solution possibilities’ (in other

words, different means of mass murder) were discussed at Wannsee,

Meyer’s reference to ‘preparatory measures’ can only have meant one

214

HITLER’S HANGMAN

thing: the creation of further extermination camps based on the model of

the Belzec camp, which was already under construction.172

Bühler and Meyer thus placed an alternative on the table that rendered

Heydrich’s envisaged deportation programme largely superfluous. It was a

surprising turn of events, but a proposal that Heydrich endorsed because

it promised a speedy solution of the Jewish problem in the General

Government, a territory with the largest concentration of Jews in

German-occupied Europe. Himmler and Heydrich would take up Bühler’s

suggestion in the ensuing months and develop it further, as the focal point

of the Europe-wide final solution shifted from the formerly Soviet terri-

tories to occupied Poland.173

The remainder of the Wannsee Conference was devoted to a lengthy

discussion of whether half-Jews and Jews in ‘privileged’ mixed marriages

should be included in the final solution, an issue of high priority for

Heydrich. Ever since the Nuremberg Laws of 1935, SS racial experts had

demanded further measures to address the alleged threat of racial decom-

position of the German
Volk
posed by the so-called
Mischlinge
or mixed

breeds.174 They had been bitterly disappointed by the second Nuremberg

Law of 1935, the Law for the Protection of German Blood, which treated

as Jews only persons with three or four Jewish grandparents, thus allowing

most people with two or fewer Jewish ancestors to be considered as

Germans. Although Hitler favoured a more radical stance, he hesitated to

impose laws that would antagonize the countless German relatives of the

half-Jews in question. The compromise solution was a new legal category,

the
Mischling
, defined by a disparate muddle of religious and racial

criteria. Quarter-Jews were termed
Mischlinge
but were allowed to marry

other Germans, although not other
Mischlinge
or Jews. Half-Jews were

also considered
Mischlinge
unless they were members of a synagogue or

had married a Jew, in which case they were considered full Jews (the

so-called
Geltungsjuden
).175

In 1941 party radicals renewed efforts to extend their definitional

power, remove the protected categories and have the
Mischlinge
legally

equated with full Jews. Heydrich, too, began to take a more active interest

in the question, particularly once it became important to define which

groups should be deported from the Reich. By the summer of 1941, he

decided that the time had come to revise the protection of the
Mischlinge

and to mount a frontal attack on the compromises established by the

Nuremberg Laws.176

The numbers at stake were comparatively small. In 1939, there were

64,000 first-degree and around 43,000 second-degree
Mischlinge
in the

Old Reich, Austria and the Protectorate. Nonetheless, Heydrich spent

considerable time outlining his own narrow definition of the
Mischlinge
.

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

215

First-degree
Mischlinge
or half-Jews, he suggested, should be considered

Jews (and consequently be deported) unless they were either married to

‘persons of German blood’
and
the marriage had resulted in children
or
if

they had received an exemption permit from a top Nazi authority. In