Holocaust: The Nazi Persecution and Murder of the Jews (4 page)

to the murder of the European Jews were not usually written down; the perpet-

rators also systematically attempted to destroy documents that reflected these

decisions, and were largely successful in doing so. Documents that have nonetheless

survived are scattered between archives in several different countries. In addition,

documents relating to the murder of the Jews are written in a language designed to

veil their true purpose. And finally, bringing these fragments together is a process

that leaves plenty of room for interpretation: in my view the decisive question that

such an interpretation has to address is that of the role of Judenpolitik within the

overall political activity of the regime.

Given these difficulties with source material, a precise reconstruction of the

individual complexes of events and actions—including executions, deportations,

Introduction

9

murders in the concentration camps, and so on—that together constitute the

genocide perpetrated against the European Jews is indispensable for any analysis

of the decision-making process. The disparate nature of the sources leaves us no

alternative but to draw conclusions about decisions from a reconstruction of the

individual acts that they gave rise to. Since this study is primarily a reconstruction

of the decision-making process the account will necessarily appear somewhat

imbalanced or one-sided: whenever the Nazis’ Judenpolitik enters a new phase the

narrative will broaden out, but a policy once implemented will be described

relatively briefly. In other words, this book is designed to be an analysis of

Judenpolitik that goes back to the events themselves in the form of a schematic

narrative and where possible only summarizes them when it is necessary to do so

in order to reconstruct an aspect of Judenpolitik. The account of the gradual

radicalization of the persecution of the Jews in the occupied territories of the

Soviet Union will, for example, need considerably more space than the depiction

of the rapidly executed deportations of the Hungarian Jews in 1944. However, this

study is only one-sided in so far as it is chiefly concerned with the perpetrators

and only takes account of the reactions of the victims or of third parties when their

behaviour permits conclusions to be drawn about the perpetrators.

This book first appeared in Germany in 1998 under the title Politik der

Vernichtung. For this English edition, the whole of the original text was revised

to take account of the latest scholarship in the field of Holocaust studies: the book

has been significantly reworked, shortened in some places and extended in others.

The cuts that were made chiefly affect Part I on the persecution of the Jews in

Germany and Part III on the war against the Soviet Union. The sections that are

new to this English version are on anti-Semitism in the Weimar Republic (Intro-

duction), the removal of the Jews (Entjudung) from German society (Chapter 1),

life in the Polish ghettos (Chapter 7), the Holocaust in Eastern Europe between

1942 and 1944, and the end of the Holocaust (Part V).

HISTORICAL BACKGROUND: ANTI-SEMITISM

IN THE WEIMAR REPUBLIC

This study begins with the first anti-Semitic measures taken by the National

Socialists immediately after taking over government in 1933. These measures

represent the end of the equality of citizenship that the Jews had enjoyed

throughout Germany since 1871.

By gradually removing the citizenship rights of German Jews the Nazis were

fulfilling one of the principal demands that radical anti-Semites had been making

since the 1870s. It is possible to trace a line of development that began with anti-

Jewish agitation in the context of the so-called ‘Gründerkrach’ of 1873 (the stock-

market crash that ended the period known as the ‘Foundation Years’) and

continues in the anti-Semites’ petition of 1880/1 and in successful political candi-

datures from anti-Semitic parties from the 1890s onwards. It was also manifested

in strongly anti-Semitic agitation on the part of large professional interest groups

at that period. The line could be traced further within the right-wing, ethnic

nationalist movement known as the ‘völkische Bewegung’ that formed after the

turn of the century and was highly charged with anti-Semitic sentiments, or with

the simultaneous breakthrough of a biological-determinist concept of race in

various branches of science, which lent spurious respectability to the nonsense

talked about the Jewish ‘race’.
1
One could argue, too, that this line was continued in the anti-Semitic agitation at the end of the First World War,
2
and in the wave of anti-Semitic hate campaigns and violence in the immediate post-war period, until

it culminates in the anti-Semitism of the NSDAP. In this manner a picture could

be painted of a virtually constant stream of radical anti-Semitic movements that

led inexorably to the anti-Semitic policies of the Nazis.

However, this image of a clear, uninterrupted line of anti-Semitism in Germany

is the result only of a superficial examination of history. It is important, too, to

consider the political contexts in which such radically anti-Semitic movements

developed. Despite its prominence in Imperial Germany, radical anti-Semitism was

only a splinter-group and had no decisive influence on the political course of the

German state. In comparison with contemporary manifestations of anti-Semitism

Anti-Semitism in the Weimar Republic

11

in other European countries (such as Austria, Hungary, France, or Russia) it by no

means represented a vibrant political force. The tide of anti-Semitic action was

stemmed by the fact that whilst the political establishment—above all the power

base in the Conservative Party—certainly cultivated anti-Semitism, it also resisted the

repeal of Jewish emancipation: from a conservative perspective the emancipation of

the Jews was a component of the compromise that lay at the foundation of the Empire

and could not simply be ignored. Furthermore, the repeal of rights once granted could

not easily be reconciled with the claims of the German Empire to be a state founded

on the rule of law. Nationalist utopia and populist anti-Semitic agitation were in

contradiction to the elitist political conception of many conservatives.
3

With the end of the First World War, however, the context in which the

nationalist radical anti-Semitic movement was to operate changed fundamentally.

These new conditions for a breakthrough in radical anti-Semitism in Germany are

much more important than the anti-Semitic tradition that can be traced back to

the early years of the Second Empire. Two points are decisive with respect to the

changed conditions that the end of the First World War brought about.

The first is the completely new status that the radical anti-Semitic movement

gained by virtue of a need to renew the basis of nationalism in Germany after its

military defeat and the end of the Empire.
4
It was clear that the institutions of the Empire that had collapsed in 1918 (the monarchy, the Imperial government, and the

army) could not represent German nationalism any longer and the ‘kleindeutsch’,

Prussian-German interpretation of German history lost conviction with the end of

Bismarck’s Empire. It was just as obvious that the old hierarchical structures of the

Empire, the class society and the nation’s religious divide, were obstacles that would

have to be comprehensively surmounted if national regeneration were to be possible.
5

The various attempts to found a new German identity in place of imperial

nationalism and create a strong enough sense of nation to overcome the traumatic

defeat of 1918 shared one common element: a reversion to the idea of the people as

the real source of national energy—or an attempt to found a new nation by

regenerating the people and the ideas of nationhood that lay dormant in them.
6

This regeneration could be directly linked to the recent experience of war by

suggesting that it was in the trenches of the First World War that class boundaries

had been dissolved and the nation reborn.

The fact that this new attempt to found a sense of national identity from within

the people was structured in großdeutsch or ‘greater German’ terms (as opposed to

stemming from a kleindeutsch or ‘smaller German’ viewpoint) meant that it

derived particularly explosive potential from the foreign-policy situation at the

end of the war. Policy framed in großdeutsch terms effectively gave Germany a

stick of dynamite that could blow apart the new Central and Eastern European

order that the treaties signed in the suburbs of Paris had created. In concrete

terms, consideration was given to the incorporation of German-speaking

Austrians and German minorities in Czechoslovakia, Poland, and the Baltic into

12

Historical Background

a ‘greater German Reich’ which would at the same time take the German

minorities in South-Eastern Europe ‘under its wing’.

If during the years of the Weimar Republic a concept of nation based on the

common ancestry and shared culture of the German people gradually gained accept-

ance even amongst moderate right-wingers, an attitude such as this was relatively

open to the ideas represented by the nationalist völkisch movement.
7
The rediscovery of the people via the ‘everyday anti-Semitism’ of the conservatives or the moderate

right was distinct from the völkisch position largely because the latter defined the

people using racist criteria, raised the idea of the regeneration of the German people to the level of an absolute good, and linked their programme of ‘purifying’ the German

people of alien elements with visions of redemption. However, their point of reference

was essentially the same as that of more moderate nationalism: the restitution of the

‘body of the people’ to full health. Above all a concept of nation that was based on

common ancestry and shared culture remained open to the kind of radical anti-

Semitism propounded by the völkisch movement and especially to the argument that

Jews did not form a proper part of the community of the German people because of

their distinct culture and alien ancestry. Before 1918 the völkisch idea was mostly the

province of sectarians, outsiders, and nutcases, but this new context gave it the chance

to take centre stage in the process of founding a new German national identity.

The second decisive aspect of the changed conditions in Germany after the First

World War was the shift in the relationship of radical anti-Semitic groups to the

state. Before 1914 they had in principle been loyal to the system, or in other words

they reckoned that the institutions of Imperial Germany would ultimately be

amenable to their demands. If I were Kaiser was the title of one of the most

influential publications from the radical anti-Semitic camp, written in 1912 by

Heinrich Class, the President of the Pan-German League.
8
After 1918, however, confronted with the Republic, radical anti-Semitism was uncompromisingly

hostile to the new system and linked their demands for amendments to the

emancipated status of the Jews with a demand for the removal of the Republic

itself, which they claimed was dominated by Jews. Radical anti-Semitic aims were

no longer inhibited as they had been before 1914 by such considerations as loyalty

to the existing order or respect for a state governed by the rule of law. Radical

anti-Semitism became identical with the campaign against the Weimar Republic.

Far-reaching völkisch ambitions such as these did seem utopian from the per-

spective of those emerging from the First World War but their negative corollary, the

inner ‘cleansing’ of a new nation defined along nationalist lines immediately caught

on and manifested itself in the form of attacks against a Jewish minority that was

clearly visible or had been made visible and had no place in the new nation.

As a direct reaction to the revolution, and then with greater intensity in the

second half of 1919, small radical anti-Semitic groups and solo activists began to

emerge right across the country. They exploited the general paralysis that the

revolution had caused in the larger right-wing organizations, openly indulging in

Anti-Semitism in the Weimar Republic

13

propaganda in favour of the use of force as a means of solving the so-called ‘Jewish

question’ and using such sloganizing to dominate opinion formation in the radical

anti-Semitic camp. It was these forces that evidently lay behind the demands for a

‘pogrom’; at the same time there was an increase in anti-Semitic acts of violence.
9

These activities laid the groundwork for the anti-Jewish agitation of the ‘Ger-

man People’s Defence and Offence League’ (Deutschvölkischer Schutz- und

Trutzbund) that can be regarded as the parent organization of many radical

anti-Semitic activities in the Weimar Republic. It campaigned for depriving

German Jews of their citizenship.
10
In 1922 the League had more than 150,000

members and was developing a raft of anti-Semitic propaganda primarily to

attract workers from the Socialist parties.
11
Whilst this strategy was largely unsuccessful the organization’s main effect lay in a general radicalization of anti-Semitic