The Years of Extermination: Nazi Germany and the Jews, 1939-1945 (24 page)

All the terror operations and the ideologically dictated tasks would be in the hands of Hitler’s chief party henchmen: Himmler, Göring, and, to a certain degree, Rosenberg. By granting the responsibility for the security of the occupied Soviet territories behind the front to the SS Reichsführer, Hitler was putting him in charge of the complete subjugation of the local populations, the struggle against ideological and partisanlike enemies, and the implementation of whatever decisions would be taken in regard to the Jews. But, as already indicated, not much is recorded about what Hitler may have eventually mentioned concerning specific anti-Jewish measures.

The orders regarding the Jews that we know of were issued by Heydrich to the
Einsatzgruppen
during these same weeks, on two different occasions: at a meeting in Berlin with the unit commanders, probably on June 17, and at another meeting, shortly thereafter, in the small town of Pretzsch, the staging area of the
Einsatzgruppen
. Here again we do not know exactly what was said. For a long time it remained unclear whether Heydrich had given the order to exterminate the Jewish population of the USSR or whether the initial orders were more restrictive. As we shall see in the next chapter, Heydrich himself summed up the orders he had given to the
Einsatzgruppen
in a message of July 2 to the Höhere SS und Polizeiführer (Higher SS and Police leaders); further orders were directly conveyed to the SS units on July 17. These various instructions indeed seem to have targeted only specific categories of Jewish
men
, but they were also open-ended enough in their formulation to have allowed for a rapid expansion of the murder campaign.
²¹

Simultaneously, as preparations for the attack went ahead full force, a new “territorial plan” regarding the Jews surfaced as a potential outcome. In his address to the
Gauleiter
and
Reichsleiter
on December 10, 1940 (alluded to in the previous chapter), Himmler had remained vague about the final destination of the two million Jews who, according to him, would be evacuated from the General Government.
²²
In the meantime, however, Nazi plans in this regard had become more concrete. On March 26, 1941, Heydrich met with Göring (immediately after signing the agreement with Wagner): “In regard to the solution of the Jewish Question,” Heydrich noted on that same day, “I briefly reported to the Reichsmarschall [Göring] and submitted my proposal to him; he agreed after making a change regarding Rosenberg’s responsibilities and ordered its [the proposal’s] resubmission.”
²³

By the end of March 1941 Rosenberg had already been chosen as “special adviser” for the occupied territories in the East. Thus, in view of Göring’s mention of Rosenberg, the RSHA chief ’s proposal was clearly related to Russia and meant the deportation of the Jews of Europe to the conquered Soviet territories, probably to the Russian Far North, instead of Madagascar. Rosenberg himself mentioned as much in a speech on March 28, in which he alluded to the deportation of the Jews of Europe “under police surveillance” to a territory outside Europe “that could not be mentioned for the time being.”
²⁴

On June 20, two days before the attack, an entry in Goebbels’s diary confirmed these plans in a somewhat cryptic way. The propaganda minister reported a meeting with Hitler regarding the coming campaign, also attended by Hans Frank: “Dr. Franck [
sic
] tells about the General Government. One already rejoices there that the Jews will be packed off. Polish Jewry will gradually disintegrate [
Das Judentum in Polen verkommt allmählich
].” For Goebbels it was a just punishment for Jewish warmongering; the Führer had prophesied that this would be Jewry’s fate.
²⁵

After the beginning of the campaign, Hitler repeatedly mentioned the new territorial plan.
²⁶
Yet beforehand, on June 2, 1941, during a meeting with Mussolini at the Brenner Pass, the Nazi leader, after excluding the possibility of a Lublin reservation (“they [the Jews] could not remain there for hygienic reasons, as, due to their dirtiness, they became a source of disease”) again mentioned Madagascar as a concrete option.
²⁷
It appears almost certain that Hitler was awaiting the completion of the eastern campaign before making a final decision. In the meantime emigration of Jews from the Reich was still allowed, but, on May 20, 1941, the RSHA, following an order from Göring, forbade any such emigration from Belgium and France “in view of the undoubtedly forthcoming final solution of the Jewish question.”
²⁸

Rosenberg was Hitler’s candidate for heading the civilian administration of the newly conquered areas. In April and May the
Reichsleiter
produced a series of “plans” regarding the future of the eastern territories. In the latest of these outlines, on May 7, 1941, the chief ideologue stated that “after the customary removal of Jews from all public offices, the Jewish question will have to undergo a decisive solution through the institution of ghettos or labor battalions. Forced labor is to be introduced.”
²⁹

The future minister for the occupied eastern territories may have believed for a while that as Hitler had decisively taken up the anti-Bolshevik policy he, Rosenberg, had preached from the earliest days of the party, he would now come into his own. However, the chief ideologue was underestimating Hitler’s craftiness or overestimating the Führer’s assessment of his own (Rosenberg’s) ability. In a letter to Martin Bormann, dated May 25, 1941, Himmler informed the
Reichsleiter
that before departing for his headquarters, Hitler had confirmed to him that, regarding his tasks, he would not be subordinated to Rosenberg. The SS chief added: “Working with or under Rosenberg was certainly the most difficult thing there was in the NSDAP.”
³⁰

Himmler’s sarcastic comment to Bormann points to the tacit alliance between two masters of intrigue (who were both highly capable organizers) in their quest for ever greater power. Bormann had just been appointed head of the party chancellery, following Rudolf Hess’s flight to Scotland, and a Himmler-Bormann front could withstand any possible interference from state agencies or from the military. Both Himmler and Bormann were subservient only to one higher authority, that of Adolf Hitler.

Apart from the authority of the military commanders over the future combat zones and the millions of men who would soon be moving eastward, that of the SS Reichsführer over his own SS and police units (including local auxiliary forces), and that of Rosenberg’s civilian administration, a fourth agency would come to play an essential role in the intricate and increasingly chaotic system established to dominate the conquered territories: Economic Staff East. Although subject to Göring’s supreme authority, the Economic Staff East was de facto headed by Gen. Georg Thomas, chief of the War Economy and Armaments Bureau (
Wehrwirtschafts-und Rüstungsamt
, or WiRüAmt), whose function would be the seizure and exploitation of Soviet war industries and raw materials. Strongly supported by Hitler, whose own strategic conception did put particular emphasis on the control of economic resources, Thomas planned his economic exploitation and looting campaign in cooperation with Quartermaster General Wagner and State Secretary Herbert Backe, the strongman in the Ministry for Food Supply.
³¹
It was Backe who added the final touch to economic planning of Barbarossa: the “hunger plans.”

The hunger plans (drafted by Backe), intended to facilitate the food supply for the
Ostheer
(Eastern Army) and even for the German population, had been endorsed by Hitler and Göring as early as January 1941; they were then elaborated by the Wehrmacht from February 1941 on. These plans envisioned the possibility of starving the urban population of the western Soviet Union and the Ukraine, including first and foremost the Jews.
³²

The mass starvation idea was also leisurely discussed among Himmler and his top lieutenants during the Reichsführer’s stay at his castle in Saxony, the Wewelsburg, between June 12 and 15.
³³
On this occasion Himmler hosted SS lieutenant generals Kurt Daluege, Bach (Erich von dem Bach-Zalewski), Karl Wolff, Heydrich, Rudolf Brandt, Werner Lorenz, Friedrich Jeckeln, Hans Adolf Prützmann, and probably also the writer Hanns Johst. In the evenings, they sat by the fireside (
am Kamin gesessen
) and, according to Bach’s Nuremberg testimony, the Reichsführer held forth about his vision of the future. The Russian campaign would determine Germany’s fate: a great power for all time or annihilation. A leader of Hitler’s stature appeared in history only once in a thousand years; the challenge had to be met by this generation. After the conquest of the European part of the Soviet Union, all the Jews of the Continent would be in German hands: They would be removed from Europe. As for the Slav population, it would have to be reduced by some twenty to thirty million people.
³⁴

II

While at the center of the regime, long-range anti-Jewish plans had not yet been finalized in the spring of 1941, more limited initiatives kept swirling. In January 1941 Heydrich again took up formerly stalled projects and informed Hans Frank that about one million Poles and Jews would have to be moved from the annexed territories into the General Government, in order to resettle ethnic Germans and vacate training areas for the Wehrmacht.
³⁵

It is probably during a conversation with Hitler on March 17 that Frank managed once more to deflect the new deportation plans. On the same occasion the Nazi leader fantasized about the germanization of the General Government within the next fifteen to twenty years and promised that after the end of the war Frank’s kingdom would be the first occupied area to be emptied of its Jewish population.
³⁶

Yet, “small-scale” deportations into the General Government could not, in the meantime, be avoided. The Nazi leadership in Vienna had repeatedly tried to get hold of as many remaining Jewish homes as possible (some 12,000 to 14,000 out of 70,000 in March 1938), either by systematically forcing their inhabitants to move into Jews’ houses or by having most of the 60,000 elderly and impoverished Jews still living in the city deported. On October 2, 1940, Vienna’s
Gauleiter, Reichsleiter
Baldur von Schirach, personally presented the request to Hitler.
³⁷

Three months later, Hans-Heinrich Lammers, the chief of the Reich Chancellery, informed Schirach of the decision: “The Führer decided that the deportation of the 60,000 Jews still living in Vienna into the General Government should be accelerated and take place even during the war, because of the housing crisis. I have informed the General Governor in Kraków, as well as the SS Reichsführer, of the Führer’s decision, and I hereby wish to inform you about it as well.”
³⁸
The deportations started at the beginning of February 1941, and within two months some 7,000 Viennese Jews were shipped off to the General Government, mainly to the Lublin district. By mid-March 1941, however, growing military traffic linked to the buildup for Barbarossa put an end to these deportations, as had already been the case in October 1939.

A simpler method of confiscating Jewish homes was developed in the Bavarian capital; it originated in the Munich
Gauleiter
’s “Aryanization office,” in coordination with the municipal authorities. In the spring of 1941 a barracks camp was built by the city’s Jews, at their own expense, in the Milbertshofen suburb. Some eleven hundred Jews were relocated to the camp, where, from then until their deportation to the East in November of that year, they lived under the guard of the local police. Their former houses were allocated to party members and other “deserving” Germans.
³⁹

In February 1941 the Klemperers were ordered to sell the car they had managed to acquire in the midthirties, although they had not been permitted to drive it since the end of 1938 (in December of that year the drivers’ licenses of Jews had been revoked). “The next blow to be expected,” Klemperer wrote, “is the confiscation of the typewriter. There is one way of safeguarding it. It would have to be lent to me by an Aryan owner.” There were some possible “lenders,” but they were afraid. “Everyone is afraid of arousing the least suspicion of being friendly to Jews, the fear seems to grow all the time.”
⁴⁰

At all levels of the system the stream of deliberations, meetings, and decisions regarding the Jews never stopped. While several ministries were involved in an endless debate about which categories of foreign Jews should be reimbursed for war related damages, while, at the same level, an eleventh ordinance to the citizenship law was being drafted and redrafted, some more down-to-earth measures were decided upon without too many hesitations: In Berlin in January 1941, Jews were excluded from the clients’ lists of all shoemakers, with the exception of one company and its local branches:
Alsi-Schuhreparaturen
(Alsi-Cobblers).
⁴¹
In February and March, 1,000 out of 2,700 employees belonging to the Berlin Jewish community and to the Reichsvereinigung were transferred to compulsory labor.
⁴²
At the end of March, on orders of General Construction Inspector Albert Speer, Jewish tenants had to vacate their homes to be replaced by Aryans whose own homes were being torn down as a result of the major construction projects started in the capital.
⁴³
In April the Jewish community of Berlin had to change its name to “Jewish Religious Association in Berlin.”
⁴⁴

A decree ordered all Aryanized firms and businesses to de-Judaize their names (
Entjudung von Firmennamen
). Usually such a measure caused no problems. However, in the case of the world-famous Rosenthal-Porzellan, the new Aryan owners demurred: A lengthy exchange ensued involving the company, the Ministry of Justice, the Ministry of Propaganda, and the Party Chancellery. On June 7, 1941, the company could prove that the number of Jews on its board had steadily diminished (in 1931 there had been three Jews on a seven-members board; in 1932, two out of five; in 1933, one out of eight). The Propaganda Ministry saw the importance of keeping the name “Rosenthal,” the Justice Ministry concurred, and so did the Party Chancellery: In August 1941 the matter was settled.
⁴⁵