Holocaust: The Nazi Persecution and Murder of the Jews (68 page)

demanded of them, while at the same time various institutions (the Institute of

Criminal Technology, the T4 organization, the Lange gas-van unit and Auschwitz

camp leadership) offered different variants of one such radical solution; the mass

murder of people with poison gas.

304

Final Solution on a European Scale, 1941

What were the crucial impulses behind this process of radicalization? Was it

primarily the policy from the centre—in other words from Hitler’s manic obses-

sion, increased in various ways by the course of the war, to create a Europe free of

Jews—or was it above all independent initiatives on the part of the various power

holders that advanced the radicalization process, as a series of major studies of the

Holocaust in various Eastern European regions suggest?
167

The independent initiatives on the part of figures on the periphery—Greiser in

the Warthegau, Globocnik in Lublin, Jeckeln and Lange in the Ostland, the

Security Police in Galicia, the Wehrmacht in Serbia and others—should not be

underestimated. However, if we see the simultaneous activities of these various

agents in context, it becomes clear that they were acting within the framework of

an overall policy that was always directed from the centre. The initiatives eman-

ating from them, which led either to shootings or to the provision of gas vans or

the construction of extermination camps to murder a large number of Jews, were

responses to a policy dictated by the centre, and the centre was always in a

position to prevent too great an escalation of this policy, as the suspension of

the murders of Reich German Jews in the Ostland by Himmler at the end of

November 1941 demonstrates.

Thus, it would seem pointless to try to debate whether the policies of the centre

and the initiatives of the periphery were crucial for the unleashing of the Holo-

caust. It would be more true to say that they stood in a dialectical relationship to

one another, that is, that the centre could only act because it knew that its

impulses would fall on fertile ground at the periphery, and the decision makers

at the periphery based their own actions on the assumption that they were in

harmony with the policy pursued by the centre.

In other words: just as the extension of the shootings to women and children in

the Soviet Union from the summer of 1941 onwards could not simply have been

ordered, the extension of mass murders to particular regions of occupied Europe

in the autumn of 1941 required a very complicated interaction between headquar-

ters and the executive organizations, a mélange of orders and intentions on the

part of the central authorities and independent initiatives and intuition on the part

of the regional powerholders, which could finally be channelled and rendered

uniform by the centre, albeit at a far higher level of radicalization. However, we

have been familiar with the essential elements of this radicalization process,

particularly the interaction between the centre and the executive organizations,

since the beginning of National Socialist policy towards the Jews in the 1930s.

In late 1941, once again, it was the centre that began to combine the various

approaches into an extension of the murders and draw up a unified programme

for the destruction of all European Jews which was to assume form in the spring

and summer of 1942.

chapter 16

THE WANNSEE CONFERENCE

On 29 November, when Heydrich invited a number of state secretaries, senior

officials, and SS officers to a meeting on 9 December,
1
at which he wished to discuss the planned ‘overall solution of the Jewish question in Europe’, the original

intention of the Nazi leadership to undertake the ‘Final Solution’ of the ‘Jewish

question’ after the end of the war had already been superseded: the Nazi regime

had by then killed several hundred thousand people, although in official parlance

Judenpolitik had not reached the stage of the ‘Final Solution’.

With the conference Heydrich plainly intended to outline the mass murders in

the various occupied territories to a number of senior officials of the Party and the

SS as well as leading civil servants as part of a ‘solution to the European Jewish

question’ ordered by Hitler and directed by the RSHA, and to ensure that they,

and especially the ministerial bureaucracy, would share both knowledge of and

responsibility for this policy.

The fact that on 8 December Heydrich was forced by the events of the war to

postpone the conference at short notice to 20 January 1942 gave him six weeks to

rethink his strategy for this major meeting. The change in the entire war situation

that followed the declaration of war on the USA may also have contributed to the

further radicalization of his attitude in the meantime.

A day after the declaration of war on the United States, on 12 December 1942,

Hitler made a speech to the Gauleiters and Reich leaders of the Party, in which he

306

Final Solution on a European Scale, 1941

once again returned to his ‘prophecy’ of 30 January 1939, as Goebbels’s diaries

reveal:
2

As regards the Jewish question, the Führer is resolved to make a clean sweep. He prophesied to the Jews that if they were to bring about another world war, they would bring about their own destruction as a result. This was not empty talk. The world war is here, the destruction of the Jews must be the necessary consequence. The question must be seen without

sentimentality. We are not here to show sympathy with the Jews, we must sympathize

with our own German people. If the German people has once again sacrificed around

160,000 fallen in the Eastern campaign, the authors of this bloody conflict will have to pay with their lives.

The fact that the world war was now ‘here’ gave particular emphasis to Hitler’s

prophecy, delivered repeatedly since early 1939, that the Jews of Europe would be

destroyed in the event of a world war. But it seems excessive to see Hitler’s speech

on 12 December as the announcement of a fundamental decision on Hitler’s part to

murder the European Jews.
3
It was more like a further appeal to accelerate and radicalize the extermination policy that had already been set in motion with the

mass executions in the Soviet Union, in Poland, and Serbia and the deportations

from Central Europe. In its radical rhetoric, this appeal corresponds (sometimes

literally) to Hitler’s statements of 25 October, but also to Goebbels’s article on 16

November and Rosenberg’s press conference on 18 November. From the period

around mid-December there are further indications that Hitler wanted to radical-

ize the persecution of the Jews still further after the USA joined the war, although

one could not conclusively deduce a ‘fundamental decision’ on Hitler’s part to

murder the European Jews from all of these documents.
4
Neither can Himmler’s brief note in his office diary about a conversation with Hitler on 18 December be

seen as additional evidence for Hitler’s ‘fundamental decision’ made a few days

previously.
5
The words: ‘Jewish question/to be extirpated as partisans’ represent a renewed confirmation on Hitler’s part that the mass murders of the Soviet Jews

were to be continued and intensified, albeit with the reservations already given.
6

The minutes of the Wannsee Conference provide very little information about

what Heydrich actually said in the SS villa on the Wannsee.
7
Its author, Eichmann, noted only the results, not the exact course of the conference. According to his

own recollections, the participants used far more drastic language; on Heydrich’s

instructions, he had used euphemistic language in the minutes.
8

As we do not know the exact words used in the conference, and since

Eichmann’s statements incriminating third parties can only be trusted with

certain reservations, the minutes should not be used as a basis for speculations

about what was ‘actually’ said at the conference. Instead it should be read as a

guideline authorized by Heydrich and revealed to representatives of a number of

authorities by the RSHA, which had been commissioned to deal with the final

solution of the Jewish question. The starting point for an interpretation of the

The Wannsee Conference

307

RSHA’s Judenpolitik at the beginning of 1942 should not be the conference as

such, but rather Heydrich’s subsequent distillation of it, which he then used for

external purposes.

The central passage of Heydrich’s address concerning the general aims of the

future ‘Jewish policy’ is as follows:
9
‘After appropriate prior approval by the Führer, emigration as a possible solution has been superseded by a policy of

evacuating the Jews to the East.’ These ‘actions’ (the deportations that had

already been begun) were to be regarded merely as ‘temporary solutions’

(Ausweichmöglichkeiten), nonetheless ‘practical experience would be accumu-

lated’ which would be ‘of great importance for the impending final solution of

the Jewish Question’. The impending ‘final solution’ was envisaged as involving

11 million Jews, a figure which was broken down by country in a statistical

addendum to the minutes. This list not only includes Jews living in areas under

German control, but also those of Great Britain, Ireland, Portugal, Sweden,

Switzerland, Spain, and Turkey. Included in the 700,000 Jews for unoccupied

France are those of the North African colonies. Heydrich thus clearly distin-

guished the programme of deportations that had already been set in motion

from a far more comprehensive plan, whose execution he said was ‘dependent

on military developments’, and could therefore only be fully realized after a

German victory. According to the minutes, Heydrich made the following

remarks about the ‘Final Solution’ that he envisaged: ‘As part of the develop-

ment of the final solution the Jews are now to be put to work in a suitable

manner under the appropriate leadership. Organized into large work gangs and

segregated according to sex, those Jews fit for work will be led into these areas as

road-builders, in the course of which, no doubt, a large number will be lost by

natural wastage.’ The ‘remainder who will inevitably survive’ will, ‘since they are

the ones with the greatest powers of endurance’, ‘have to be dealt with accord-

ingly’ to prevent their becoming ‘the germ cell of a new Jewish regeneration’.

Initially the Jews were to be taken to ‘transit-ghettos’, from which they were to

be ‘transported further towards the East’.

Heydrich thus developed the conception of a gigantic deportation programme

which would only be fully realizable in the post-war period. Those Jews who were

deported ‘to the East’ were to be worked to death through forced labour or, if they

should survive these tribulations, they would be murdered. The fate of those ‘unfit

for work’, children and mothers in particular, was not further elucidated by

Heydrich. In the context of the speech as a whole, however, and of the murderous

practice that had predominated for months in the occupied Soviet territories, and

since the beginning of December in Chelmno, it is clear that they too were to be

killed, because Heydrich wanted to prevent the survival of the ‘germ cell of a new

Jewish regeneration’ at all costs.

Heydrich’s statement indicates that the RSHA was at this time still proceeding

according to the plan, followed since the beginning of 1941, of implementing the

308

Final Solution on a European Scale, 1941

‘Final Solution’ of the Jewish question after the end of the war in the occupied

Eastern territories. Heydrich also made it clear what was understood by the

phrase ‘Final Solution’: the Jews were to be annihilated by a combination of

forced labour and mass murder. The fact that it was Jewish forced labour that

gained importance early in 1942 suggests that Heydrich’s remarks should be taken

literally.
10
Tellingly, only a few days before the Wannsee Conference, on 12

January 1942, the HSSPF Ukraine instructed the Commissars General in Brest-

Litovsk, Zhitomir, Nikolayev, Dnepropetrovsk, and Kiev to start immediately

preparing for the establishment of ghettos so that ‘Jews from the Old Reich

could be accommodated in the course of 1942’.
11
By contrast, there is no evidence that there was any plan at this point to deport the Jews from Central and Western

Europe directly to extermination camps on Polish soil. On the contrary, the first

deportations from countries outside Germany, those from Slovakia and France,

which began in the spring of 1942, as well as the ‘third-wave’ deportations from

the Reich, which were taking place at the same time, did not lead directly to the

gas chambers of the extermination camps. It was not immediately before or after

the Wannsee Conference, but in the spring of 1942 that the capacity of the

extermination camps was hastily extended at very short notice.

The minutes of the Wannsee Conference do, however, make it clear that, on the

one hand, the idea of a post-war solution was being firmly adhered to, while at the

same time there was a debate over the proposal to exempt the Jews in the General