Holocaust: The Nazi Persecution and Murder of the Jews (40 page)

ments, a note by the Gestapo official responsible for ‘Jewish affairs’ in Paris,

Theodor Dannecker, to Eichmann dated 21 January, and a minute of remarks

by Eichmann made on 20 March. Dannecker wrote to Eichmann that it was ‘the

Führer’s will . . . that after the war the Jewish question within the areas ruled or

controlled by Germany be brought to a definitive solution’. To this end Heydrich

had ‘already received a commission to present a plan for the final solution from

the Führer via the RFSS [Himmler] and the Reichsmarschall [Goering]’. In

response a project had been worked out that was currently with Hitler and

Goering. The individual preparations that had to be made would have to ‘extend

not only to preliminary work aimed at the complete expulsion of the Jews but also

to the detailed planning of a resettlement programme in a territory yet to be

determined’.
159

From a statement made by Eichmann on 20 March 1941 at a meeting in the

Ministry of Propaganda we learn in addition ‘that Party Comrade Heydrich—who

has been charged by the Führer with the definitive evacuation of the Jews—made a

suggestion to the Führer 8–10 weeks ago that has not been put into practice for

the sole reason that the General Government is at the present moment not in a

position to accept a single Jew or Pole from the Old Reich’.
160
Regarding the Deportations

175

deportation of the Berlin Jews, Eichmann expressed himself extremely carefully,

making explicit reference to war production: it might be possible to deport 15,000

people as part of the deportation programme for Viennese Jews already approved

by Hitler. This was a perspective that had a sobering effect on Goebbels, who had

believed in the imminence of the total deportation of the Jews of Berlin,
161
as emerges from his diaries: ‘The Jews can’t be evacuated from Berlin, at least not in

large numbers, because 30,000 of them are working for armament production.
’162

Despite the resolution to postpone deportations, or at least those of any magni-

tude, the Gestapo decided officially to inform the Reich Association on 17 March

that they should now prepare themselves for deportations.
163

From this information it emerges that Heydrich had received an instruction

from Hitler (via Himmler and Goering) before January 1941 to draw up a first

draft of a ‘final solution plan’ that was to be put into effect after the war and which

aimed at the complete deportation of all Jews from Europe. When this project was

ready in January 1941, the original aim (as envisaged in the version Heydrich had

in December) to direct these deportations to Madagascar had been abandoned

without a new ‘destination territory’ having been identified. But Heydrich had

already announced large-scale deportations into the General Government on 8

January, which were in fact begun a short while later, but two months after that

Eichmann was talking of how the project could not be realized because of the

situation in the General Government, apart from the smaller-scale deportations

that were part of the third short-term plan completed on 15 March.

However, the General Government was not the territory for the ‘Final Solution’

that was ‘yet to be determined’; it was only an intermediate station. General

Governor Frank said in Cracow on 26 March that Hitler had just agreed that

the ‘General Government would be the first area to be made free of Jews’. But that

was only a long-term aim, as other remarks by Frank on the same day make clear:

he spoke of Hitler being determined ‘within the next 15 or 20 years to make the

General Government a purely German land’. He also stressed the importance of

the forced labour groups of Poles and Jews.
164
Moreover, at the start of April, Frank was busy with medium-term planning for the Warsaw ghetto.
165

But what was the long-term outlook for ‘Jewish policy’ at this time? Were the

deportations into the General Government part of plans for the subsequent

physical annihilation of people in this area? The question can be answered by

drawing upon a further document first identified by Götz Aly in the Moscow

‘special archive’. It is a note made by Heydrich on 26 March 1941 of a conversation

with Goering: ‘Regarding the solution of the Jewish question, I gave the Reich

Marshal [i.e. Goering] a brief report and submitted my proposal to him, which he

approved after making a change with respect to Rosenberg’s responsibilities and

he ordered its resubmission.’
166

This note evidently refers to the draft of Goering’s well-known ‘authorization’

for Heydrich to ‘make organizational, functional and material plans for a complete

176

The Persecution of the Jews, 1939–1941

solution to the Jewish question in the areas of Europe under German rule’, dated

31 July.
167
The change made to ‘Rosenberg’s jurisdiction’ in Heydrich’s note of 26

March will refer to the passage that in the July document is formulated thus: ‘in

so far as the jurisdiction of other central authorities is affected, these are to be

involved.’ The fact that in the draft of this fundamental division of responsibility

for preparing the ‘Final Solution’ Rosenberg’s jurisdiction was to be taken into

consideration as a ‘central authority’ allows us to conclude that the area of the

Soviet Union was being identified for these ‘final solution plans’ and that Rosen-

berg was already being considered as the Director of a ‘central authority’ (what

was later to be the Ministry for the East) for the occupied Eastern territories.

What those involved understood at this point by the ‘Final Solution’ within the

Soviet Union, which was yet to be occupied, is not clear. There were no concrete

plans made either for a reservation or for mass murder. Early in 1941 Himmler was

temporarily concerned with the possibility of a mass sterilization of Jews and

asked Victor Brack, who was based in the Chancellery of the Führer and respon-

sible for overseeing ‘euthanasia’, to develop an appropriate plan. When this was

ready at the end of March 1941 he did not pursue the project any further.
168
It seems that the answer to the question of what was to happen to the people to be

deported to the ‘East’ was being postponed to a time after the planned conquest of

the Soviet Union had been achieved. The indifference to the fate of those trans-

ported that this suggests was characteristic of the early deportations into the

General Government and was commensurate with the leadership style of the

National Socialists: at the appropriate time those responsible and actually ‘on

site’ would find some ‘solution’ or other to the new problems that they were faced

with. There are concrete indications from the months before ‘Barbarossa’ that

elements within the National Socialist leadership were arriving at the conclusion

that there would be large-scale deportations ‘to the East’.

Immediately before the attack on the Soviet Union General Governor Frank

explained to Goebbels that he was preparing for the removal of the Jews, as Goebbels

noted in his diary, glossing Frank thus: ‘in the General Government they are already

looking forward to being able to get rid of the Jews. The Jews in Poland are gradually

declining. This is a just punishment for having stirred the population up and for

provoking the war. The Führer has predicted this to the Jews.’
169
Remarks that he made to his colleagues on 17 July clarify the source of Frank’s confidence: according

to an assurance given to him by Hitler on 19 June, the Jews would be removed from

the General Government in the foreseeable future which would turn into ‘transit

camps’.
170
Moreover, when the Romanian Head of State, Antonescu, complained to Hitler on 16 August 1941 that German troops had turned back the Bessarabian

Jews that Romanian soldiers had just driven into the Ukraine, he reminded Hitler

that this practice was in stark contrast to ‘the guidelines about the treatment of the

Eastern Jews that the Führer had given him in Munich’.
171
This referred to the meeting of the two leaders in Munich on 13 June 1941.

PART III

MASS EXECUTIONS OF JEWS IN

THE OCCUPIED SOVIET ZONES, 1941

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chapter 10

LAYING THE GROUND FOR A WAR

OF RACIAL ANNIHILATION

From the outset the war against the Soviet Union was conceived as a campaign of

racial domination and annihilation.
1
Victory over the Soviet Union was expected to be rapid, both bringing about a turning point in the progress of the war and at

the same time establishing in Eastern Europe an imperium of living space, or

Lebensraum, for the peoples of the Reich, to be run along lines dictated by racial

ideology.

The long-term aims of the war against the Soviet Union may be summarized in

the following mutually interdependent clusters. First, for the National Socialist

regime, the conquest of the Soviet territories represented the fulfilment of the

Lebensraum programme that had originally been developed in Mein Kampf. It was

the realization of a large-scale ‘eastern settlement’ that had formed part of the

programmatic demands of the right for decades previously. The creation of

settlement space for millions of people was supposed to establish a ‘healthy’

relationship between the land at Germany’s disposal and the number of people

that needed to be accommodated; it was intended to counteract the tendency

towards deracination that Germans had suffered since industrialization and

thereby inaugurate a higher degree of social harmonization. However, the con-

quest of Lebensraum did not merely serve to alleviate the Germans’ alleged urgent

need for territory; on the contrary, it was also intended to form the basis for

180

Mass Executions in Occupied Soviet Zones, 1941

further biological expansion of the ‘Aryan race’ and in that manner to provide the

‘human resources’ for future wars of conquest.
2

The second group of war aims linked the conquest of Lebensraum from the

outset with a ‘policy of unbridled robbery and looting’.
3
It was planned right from the start to feed the troops from the very land they were invading and furthermore

to export agricultural produce back into the Reich. Industry in the Soviet Union

was to be largely closed down, maintaining production only in a series of areas of

interest to Germany, notably in the sphere of raw materials. From the standpoint

of the Nazi leadership, both the confiscation of agricultural produce and the

seizure of raw materials played an important part in securing Germany against

potential blockade and in ensuring that the war against the British Empire could

be successfully sustained over a long period.

At the same time, a third set of war aims planned to use the Eastern campaign

as a means of annihilating ‘Jewish Bolshevism’—that conglomerate, therefore, that

only existed in the distorted vision of the National Socialists, which they saw as

having been formed out of the cooperation of both of Germany’s principal

enemies. The image of ‘Bolshevism as the domination of the Slavic masses in

Soviet Russia by the Jews’ had been one of National Socialism’s ideological

constants since its very earliest days.
4
At the same time, this regime was credited with possessing an almost paradoxical combination of external aggressiveness and

internal weakness: whilst ‘Russian Bolshevism’, in Hitler’s words, represented ‘the

attempt by the Jews to achieve world domination for themselves’,
5
the regime allegedly established in Russia by ‘the Jews’ looked like a house of cards that only

needed to be nudged from the outside for it to collapse. It was precisely this

ambivalent assessment of ‘Jewish Bolshevism’—belligerent on the outside, feeble

on the inside—that offered a form of legitimation for a war in the East that

bordered on self-delusion: from this angle it appeared both as a legitimate

means of self-defence against alleged plans for world domination harboured by

the ‘Jewish Bolsheviks’ and as a historically unique opportunity to conquer a vast

empire with relatively little effort.

A fourth cluster of war aims was focused on the radicalization process that

would of necessity occur within the ‘Third Reich’ as a consequence of an ideo-

logically motivated conflict conducted with the utmost brutality and thereby far

exceeding the bounds of conventional warfare. Such a process would inevitably

shift the balance of power once and for all in favour of the National Socialist

movement and at the expense of the conservative elites. This process was realized,

for example, in the fact that in the preparatory stages before the war began the

Wehrmacht appropriated for itself the ideological material of National Socialism

and translated it into basic instructions that directly exhorted an army of several

million conscripted men to implement radical ideological aims. As this process of

radicalization progressed, the Russian campaign offered further possibilities for

finding a ‘final solution’ to the Jewish question in Europe.