Holocaust: The Nazi Persecution and Murder of the Jews (59 page)

Eichmann’s statements are in my view completely unsuited as evidence of a

Führerbefehl for the murder of the European Jews in the summer or late summer

of 1942.

In a critical reading, then, three of the main sources on which research into the

reconstruction of the genesis of the ‘Final Solution’ relied until a few years ago—

Goering’s empowerment of 31 July 1941 and the statements of Eichmann and

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Final Solution on a European Scale, 1941

Höß—can no longer be seen as key documents. But in the sections below we will see

that entirely different sources, neglected or even unknown in earlier research, can be

used to reconstruct the decision-making process that led to the ‘Final Solution’.

Reflections on the Fate of the Polish Jews

in the Summer of 1941

Various indications suggest that—with the beginnings of the mass murder of the

Soviet Jews fresh in their minds—during the summer of 1941 the German occu-

pying authorities in Poland were working on more radical ‘solutions’ for the

‘Jewish question’.

On 16 July the director of SD-Section Posen, Rolf Höppner, sent Eichmann a

note in which he had summed up ‘various meetings in the Reichsstatthalterei here’

(in the immediate entourage of Gauleiter Greiser).
32
In this a series of suggestions for the ‘solution of the Jewish question in the Reichsgau’ had been made, which in

Höppner’s view sounded ‘to some extent fantastical’, but which were feasible

nonetheless.

These suggestions included on the one hand the idea of building a camp for

300,000 Jews in the Warthegau. There those Jews who were fit for work were to be

put into work gangs; all Jewish women still capable of childbearing were to be

sterilized. But Höppner made one other suggestion: ‘This winter there is a danger

that it will no longer be possible to feed all the Jews. It should seriously be

considered whether it would not be the most humane solution to finish off

those Jews not fit for work by some quick-acting means. At any rate this would

be more pleasant than letting them starve to death.’

Four days later, on 20 July 1941, Himmler commissioned Globocnik, alongside

construction and settlement projects, to build a concentration camp for 20,000–

25,000 prisoners as well as the expansion of SS and police bases in the district;
33
a few days previously, on 17 July, he had made him responsible for the construction

of SS and police bases throughout the whole of the new Eastern sphere.
34

In the district of Lublin, the territory originally planned as a ‘Jewish reservation’,

Globocnik already maintained a considerable number of labour camps, and in the

spring of 1941 was busy having Jewish forced labourers carry out extensive earthworks.

Both of Himmler’s commissions to Globocnik were clearly directly connected

with the Führer’s decree of 17 July, in which Hitler transferred the ‘police security

of the newly occupied Eastern territories’ to Himmler.
35
Globocnik was accordingly the man chosen to establish the district of Lublin as a basis for the future

Eastern empire of the SS. Globocnik now had much more room to play with, and

he was to use it for the organizational preparations for mass murder.

After the start of the Russian campaign, Governor General Frank saw the

deportation of the Jews in his territory as imminent. Hitler had granted him

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265

permission for this, on 19 June,even before the start of the war. Frank, therefore,

forbade the further formation of ghettos in his territory, which would in future ‘be

more or less nothing but a transit camp’.
36

After Galicia had been allocated to the General Government by a decree from

the Führer, the following day Frank applied—unsuccessfully—to Lammers for the

annexation of the Pripet Marshes as well as the area around Bialystok. By way of

justification he said that the ‘Pripet Marshes offered the possibility of involving

workers usefully in cultivation work on a large scale. As a model for this, Frank

must have been thinking about the improvement work in the district of Lublin, for

which a large number of Jewish forced labourers had been used.
37
Quite plainly Frank was thinking of realizing the old idea of a ‘Jewish reservation’, in a territory

in which from July onwards thousands of indigenous Jews would be murdered in

large ‘cleansing actions’. On 22 July 1941 Frank once again referred to Hitler’s

approval and announced that the ‘clearance’ of the Warsaw ghetto would be

ordered in the next few days.
38

At this point the planned ‘deportation’ of the Jews to the ‘East’ was not—as it

was to become only a few months later—a metaphor for the planned mass murder

within the General Government; in October, Frank tried to win Rosenberg’s

agreement for the deportation of the Jews from the General Government.

The Deportation of the German Jews: Preparations

and Decisions

On 22 July, in a discussion with the Croatian head of state, Slavko Kwaternik,

Hitler reiterated his intention to deport the Jews from the German sphere of

influence:
39
‘If there were no Jews left in Europe the unity of the European states would no longer be disturbed. Where the Jews are to be sent, whether to Siberia or

to Madagascar, is irrelevant. He would approach every state with this demand.’

However, because of the military situation the Nazi leadership was forced to

postpone its original intention of implementing large-scale deportations to the

newly occupied territories after the expected victory in the East. On 15 August, at a

meeting in the Ministry of Propaganda, which was actually supposed to concern

the introduction of a special marking for Jews, Eichmann announced the current

state of the deportation plans that he had already talked about in the same place in

March.
40
According to this, Hitler had rejected Heydrich’s suggestion to carry out evacuations from the Reich during the war; as an alternative, Heydrich now

initiated a proposal ‘aimed at the partial evacuations of the larger cities’.
41

On 18 August, Hitler confirmed this information in conversation with Goeb-

bels. The ‘Führer’ had agreed, Goebbels recorded in his diaries, that the Jews of

Berlin should be deported to the East as quickly as possible, as soon as the first

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Final Solution on a European Scale, 1941

transport opportunity presented itself. ‘There, in the harsher climate, they will be

worked over.’ This would happen ‘immediately after the ending of the Eastern

campaign’, so that Berlin will become a ‘city free of Jews [judenfrei]’.
42
Thus the general prohibition on deportation for the duration of the war—or at least for the

duration of the war in the East—was maintained. At the same meeting, however,

Hitler had agreed to the introduction of a ‘Jewish badge’ in the Reich, and with the

idea that non-working Jews would henceforth receive reduced rations, because, as

Goebbels put it, ‘he who does not work, shall not eat’.
43

Immediately after his conversation with Hitler, Goebbels once more began an

anti-Semitic propaganda campaign, in which he pursued the goal above all of

preparing Party activists for a further radicalization of the persecution of the Jews,

and demonstrating to the general population that they were in a global conflict

with ‘the Jews’. Thus, a circular from the Reich Ring for National Socialist

Propaganda (an internal instruction for Party propagandists) of 21 August 1941

stated: ‘Since the start of the Eastern campaign it has been plainly apparent that a

large proportion of the population has once more become more interested in and

aware of the significance of the Jewish question than in the previous months.

None the less it is important that we should draw the attention of the German

people still more to the guilt of the Jews.’
44

The ‘weekly slogan’ of the Reich propaganda headquarters of the NSDAP for 7

September 1939, a poster that was hung in many Party display cases, contained

Hitler’s prophecy of 30 January 1939 that the result of a new world war would ‘not

be the Bolshevization of the earth and thus the victory of Jewry’ but ‘the exter-

mination of the Jewish race in Europe’.
45

One central point in this campaign was the polemic against a brochure printed

privately in the United States,
46
in which an author by the name of Kaufman had, amongst other things, demanded the sterilization of the German people. Kaufman

was now presented as a close adviser of Roosevelt (which was pure invention); the

brochure, it was argued, showed the true plans of the American Jews, who had

forced Roosevelt to sign the Atlantic Charter. At the same time as its anti-Jewish

propaganda campaign, the German propaganda apparatus heightened its polemic

against Roosevelt, who was portrayed as a stooge of the Jews and the Free-

masons.
47
Hitler’s decision to mark out the German Jews in the middle of August 1941, vigorously demanded by Goebbels and other senior Nazis, must also be seen

in the context of this intensified anti-Jewish propaganda. The Jews, thus branded

as an internal enemy, should, as Goebbels wrote, ‘be forced out of the public

sphere’ and demonstratively excluded from certain goods and services.
48
During these days the general tenor of anti-Semitic propaganda consisted in portraying

the radicalization of the persecution of the Jews within the German sphere of

influence as a precautionary defensive measure against an omnipresent enemy.

When the anti-Jewish propaganda campaign reached its first climax in September,

Hitler revised his decision, only one month old, to veto the deportation of

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267

the German Jews while the war was still going on. The explanation for this

dramatic step the sources suggest in the first instance is the decision by the Soviet

leadership on 28 August 1941 to deport the Volga Germans to Siberia, which had

been announced early in September.
49

Goebbels’s diary entry for 9 September makes it clear that the Nazi leadership

saw this decision as legitimizing the further radicalization of its policy: ‘For the

Reich to win, so many countless people must make the severest sacrifices that it

should lead us to remain harsh and ruthless, take things to the extreme, and finally

erase the word “compliance” from our vocabulary.’

The idea that the long-planned deportation of the Central European Jews was

now to be undertaken as ‘retaliation’ for the Soviet step was demonstrably put

about by Rosenberg, who had a suggestion to this effect passed to Hitler on 14

September.
50

At the same time, presumably on 16 September, the German ambassador in

Paris, Otts Abetz, suggested to Himmler that the Jews living in France and the rest

of occupied Europe be deported to the occupied Eastern territories. Himmler, who

was very intensely preoccupied with the plans for the ‘Jewish question’ and

‘Eastern settlement’, responded positively.
51
On 17 September Hitler seems to have talked to Ribbentrop about Rosenberg’s suggestion,
52
and on 18 September Himmler informed the Gauleiter in the Warthegau, Greiser: ‘The Führer wants

the Old Reich and the Protectorate to be emptied and liberated of Jews from west

to east as soon as possible. As a first stage I am therefore anxious to transport the

Jews of the Old Reich and the Protectorate, if possible this year, to the Eastern

territories that have recently come into the Reich, before deporting them further

eastwards next spring. I intend to put around 60,000 Jews from the Old Reich and

the Protectorate into the Litzmannstadt ghetto—which, as I have heard, has

sufficient capacity—for the winter.’
53
Heydrich, who was responsible for this

‘Jewish emigration’ would approach him at the right time.

However, this letter was preceded by enquiries on Himmler’s part concerning

possible deportation destinations, which can be traced back to the beginning of

September 1941. On the evening of 2 September, following a midday conversation

with Hitler, Himmler had talked to the Higher SS and Police Commander (HSSPF)

of the General Government, Friedrich Wilhelm Krüger, about ‘the Jewish question—

resettlements from the Reich’. After it turned out that the General Government

was not suitable for this purpose, Himmler had approached Wihelm Koppe,

the HSSPF in the Warthegau, who sent him a letter on 10 September dealing with

the deportation of 60,000 Jews to Lodz.
54
Hitler’s decision to start the deportations even before the victory in the East may in the final analysis have been influenced

by interventions by Rosenberg, Ribbentrop, and others. However, he must have

become attracted by the idea at the beginning of September, a time when he knew

nothing of the imminent deportation of the Volga Germans. It was the military

successes which began in September 1941 that made the deportations possible in

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Final Solution on a European Scale, 1941

the first place. To that extent there really was a connection between the course of the

war and the radicalization of the persecution of the Jews, even if, in the light of closer analysis of the complex decision-making process, Browning’s assertion that in the

‘euphoria of war’ a major preliminary decision had been made about the ‘Final

Solution’ appears to over-dramatize developments.
55

After the decision had finally been made to deport the German Jews, , following

a meeting with Heydrich, in his diary entry for 24 September Goebbels confirmed

his intention to ‘evacuate the Jews from Berlin as soon as possible. That will

happen as soon as we have sorted out the military situation in the East. They are

all finally to be transported [to the] camps set up by the Bolsheviks. These camps

were built by the Jews; so what could be more appropriate than that they should

now be populated by the Jews.’
56

In fact the reasons for Hitler’s decision to begin the deportation of the German

Jews were complex ones. The fate of the Volga Germans only served as a pretext to

carry out the plan of a deportation of the Jews living within the German sphere of

influence, which had been pursued for two years and had become definitely

envisaged for the end of the Eastern campaign.

The first set of reasons is identified in a note by the Eastern Ministry’s liaison

in Hitler’s headquarters, Werner Koeppen,
57
dated 21 September: ‘The Führer has so far made no decision as regards reprisals against the German Jews

because of the treatment of the Volga Germans. As Ambassador von Steen-

gracht told me, the Führer is considering suspending this measure pending the

possibility of America joining the war.’ It is not impossible that Koeppen’s note

reflects the state of the information available to Steengracht, the representative

of the Foreign Ministry in the Führer’s headquarters, before he learned of the

deportation order on 18 September. In that case, Hitler would have decided at

short notice to implement the ‘reprisal’, the deportation, before the USA entered

the war. But if we assume that, on 20 September, Steengracht was already aware

of the deportation order, then the ‘reprisal’ could be taken to mean more than

the deportation itself.

At any rate, Koeppen’s note is a very important indication that the attitude of

the United States played an important part in the decision to deport the German

Jews. The increasing rapprochement between the United States and Great Britain

had reached a crucial stage with the passing of the Land-Lease Act by Congress on

11 March 1941, and in the summer of 1941 signs were accumulating that the USA

would soon enter the war: the landing of American troops in Iceland on 7 July, the

announcement of the Atlantic Charter by Roosevelt and Churchill during their

conference in Placentia Bay (Newfoundland) between 9 and 12 August, followed

very attentively by the Germans, and, finally, Roosevelt’s declaration, delivered

after a further contretemps on the high seas, that the American navy would

henceforth fight any warship belonging to the Axis powers that entered waters

essential for American defence (‘Shoot on sight order’).
58

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269

The tenor of the anti-Jewish propaganda campaign, in which Roosevelt was

depicted as a stooge of ‘world Jewry’, which planned to exterminate the German

people, suggests that the Nazi regime established a connection between America’s

threatened entry into the war and the fate of the Jews under its control. From the

very first the regime had seen the Jews within its sphere of influence as potential

hostages for the good conduct of the Western powers, an attitude that Hitler had

summed up in the ‘prophecy’ of 30 January 1939 with his threat of extermination.

It is also clear that in the summer of 1940 they contemplated the idea of using the

Jews, due for deportation to Madagascar, as hostages in order to guarantee the

good conduct of the United States.
59

The argument that the deportations which were now beginning on a larger scale

also represented a threatening gesture towards the Western Allies is also sup-

ported by the fact that not only was no effort made to keep the deportations secret,