The Years of Extermination: Nazi Germany and the Jews, 1939-1945 (4 page)

No less blatant than their powerlessness was the inability of most European Jews to assess the seriousness of the threats that they faced. During the first five years of Hitler’s regime, barely one-third of German Jewry emigrated, even with the persecution and the indignities that descended on it month after month, year after year, starting in January 1933. The massive violence unleashed by the Nazis during the pogrom of November 9 and 10, 1938 (the so-called Night of Broken Glass, or Kristallnacht), became the very late moment of real awakening and led to desperate attempts to flee. Tens of thousands of Jews still managed to leave; for many, however, obtaining a visa or scraping together the necessary financial means for departure had become impossible. Hardly any Jews left Austria before the Anschluss in March 1938; nor did the Jews of Bohemia and Moravia before the German occupation in March 1939. Again, notwithstanding all starkly visible warning signals, notwithstanding Hitler’s furious anti-Jewish threats and the steep increase of local hostility, the trickle of Jewish emigration from East Central Europe did not grow significantly, nor did almost any Jews leave Western Europe, before the German onslaught.

This apparent passivity in the face of mounting danger seems hard to understand in retrospect, although, as mentioned, the growing difficulties faced by Jewish emigrants explain it in part; a deeper reason may have come into play during the immediate prewar period and also in the weeks and months that followed. In the East, and mainly in the West (apart from Germany), most Jews entirely misjudged the degree of support they could expect from surrounding society and from national or local authorities in the face of a common enemy. In Warsaw in September 1939, let us recall, Kaplan and Czerniaków were proud participants in the common struggle.

In the West the misperception was more extreme, as we shall see. Moreover, mainly in Western Europe, the Jews believed in the validity of abstract principles and universal values, “in a world inhabited by civilized Cartesian phantoms”;
¹⁷
in other words they believed in the rule of law, even in the rule of German law. Law offered a stable framework for facing ordeals and planning everyday life and long-term survival, in other words—the future. Thus the Jews were unaware that “the Jew” was outside the domain of natural and contractual ties and obligations, a situation that the German Jewish philosopher Hannah Arendt defined in her wartime essay “The Jew as Pariah” by borrowing a sentence from Franz Kafka’s
The Castle
: “You are not of the castle, you are not of the village, you are nothing.”
¹⁸

Zionism, although growing in strength in the wake of German and European anti-Semitism, still remained a comparatively minor factor on the Jewish scene on the eve of the war. In May 1939, after the failure of the St. James Conference among the British, the Arabs, and the Zionists, London published a white paper that limited Jewish immigration to Palestine to 75,000 immigrants over the next five years and practically put an end to Zionist efforts to buy land in Eretz Israel. Zionist policy had never seemed so far from achieving its goals since the Balfour Declaration.

On August 16, 1939, the Twenty-first Zionist Congress convened in Geneva but was cut short by the impending outbreak of war. In his concluding address to the assembled delegates, on August 22, Chaim Weizmann, the president of the World Zionist Organization, spoke simply, in Yiddish: “There is darkness all around us, and we cannot see through the clouds. It is with a heavy heart that I take my leave…. If, as I hope, we are spared in life and our work continues, who knows—perhaps a new light will shine upon us from the thick black gloom…. We shall meet again. We shall meet again in common labor for our land and people…. There are some things that cannot fail to come to pass, things without which the world cannot be imagined. The remnant shall work on, fight on, live on until the dawn of better days. Toward that dawn I greet you. May we meet again in peace.”
¹⁹

II

Hitler’s views about the newly conquered populations and territories in the East were tentatively outlined on September 29, in a conversation with one of his earliest companions, party chief ideologue Alfred Rosenberg: “The Poles” the Nazi leader declared “a thin Germanic layer, underneath frightful material. The Jews, the most appalling people one can imagine. The towns thick with dirt. He [Hitler] had learnt a lot in these past weeks…. What was needed now was a determined and masterful hand to rule. He wanted to split the territory into three strips: (1) Between the Vistula and the Bug: this would be for the whole of Jewry (including the Reich) as well as all other unreliable elements. Build an insuperable wall on the Vistula—even stronger than the one in the West [the Siegfried Line, which faced France]. (2) Create a broad cordon of territory along the previous frontier to be Germanized and colonized. This would be a major task for the nation: to create a German granary, a strong peasantry, to resettle good Germans from all over the world. (3) In between, a form of Polish state. The future would show whether after a few decades the cordon of settlement would have to be pushed farther forward.”
²⁰

At this stage Hitler’s plans included only half of former Poland, up to the Vistula and the Bug Rivers; the eastern part of the country had been invaded by the Soviet Union on September 17 in accordance with one of the main provisions of the secret protocol added to the German-Soviet pact of August 23, 1939. Moreover, the Germans had recognized Soviet “special interests” in the Baltic countries, Finland, and Bulgaria, and with regard to two Romanian provinces. For both sides the August treaty and a further secret arrangement signed on September 27 were tactical moves. Both Hitler and Stalin knew that a confrontation would ultimately come.
²¹
How long, though, the “truce” between National Socialism and Bolshevism would last was something that in September 1939 nobody could tell.

In a so-called peace offer during a festive Reichstag speech on October 6, Hitler indeed spoke of a territorial reorganization of those areas of Eastern Europe lying between the German border and the Soviet-German demarcation line. His settlement idea was to be based on the principle of nationalities and solve the problem of national minorities, including “in this context, the attempt to solve the Jewish problem.”
²²

Reestablishing a Polish state was mentioned as a possibility. By then, however, Great Britain and France had become familiar with Hitler’s tactics; the “peace offer” was rejected. The idea of some form of Polish sovereignty disappeared, and German-occupied Poland was further divided. The Reich annexed several areas along its eastern borders: a large region along the river Warthe (Reichsgau Wartheland, or Warthegau
²³
), Eastern Upper Silesia (eventually part of Gau Upper Silesia), the Polish corridor with the city of Danzig (Gau Danzig–West Prussia) and a small stretch of territory south of East Prussia. A population of 16 million people was thus added to Germany, around 7.5 million of whom were Germans. After a brief interim plan to establish an autonomous “
Rest-Polen
” (rump Poland), the remaining Polish territory, which included the cities of Warsaw, Kraków, and Lublin, became the “General Government,” an administrative unit of around 12 million people, governed by German officials and occupied by German troops. The General Government itself was subdivided into four districts: Warsaw, Radom, Kraków, and Lublin. The district of Galicia would be added in August 1941, after the German attack on the Soviet Union.

On October 17, freed from the peace proposal gimmick, the Nazi leader was back on track. One of the officers present at a meeting between Hitler and a group of military commanders and some high-ranking party members recorded his remarks about what was to be achieved in Poland: “The hard struggle of nationalities (
Volkstumskampf
) does not allow for any legal constraints. The methods will be incompatible with our principles…. Prevent Polish intelligentsia from becoming a leadership group…the old and the new territory should be cleansed of Jews, Polacks and rabble.”
²⁴

The core notion was that of
Volkstumskampf
, the ethnic-racial struggle. It would be unhampered by “legal constraints,” and the methods used would be “incompatible with our principles.” On that essential point Hitler’s policy departed radically from the goals of pan-German expansionism, widely accepted during the later years of the Wilhelmine empire.
Volkstumskampf
did not mean mere military victory and political domination; it aimed at the destruction of the vital sinews of the enemy national-racial community; in other words it implied mass murder.
²⁵
Murder of well-defined groups for the sake of the racial supremacy of Germandom became a legitimate instrument of policy. In occupied Poland two groups in particular would be targeted: Jews and “Polish elites”: The murder of Jews was haphazard at this stage, that of Polish elites more systematic.

Some sixty thousand Poles whose names had been collected over the prewar years were to be eliminated;
²⁶
the operation was partly camouflaged under directives for ensuring the security of the troops and, more generally, of the occupied territory. SS chief Heinrich Himmler chose the code name Tannenberg for the terror campaign; it evoked the victory of the German armies over the Russian forces at Tannenberg in East Prussia in 1914, and represented a symbolic retaliation against the Poles for the resounding defeat they had inflicted upon the Teutonic Knights at that same place in the early fifteenth century.
²⁷

Of course the basic order stemmed from Hitler. In July 1940 Reinhard Heydrich, since mid-September 1939 chief of the SS Main Office for the Security of the Reich (Reichssicherheitshauptamt, or RSHA), wrote to his SS colleague Kurt Daluege, the chief of the Order Police (Ordnungspolizei, or ORPO), that at the onset of the Polish campaign Hitler had given him an “extraordinarily radical…order for the liquidation of various circles of the Polish leadership, [killings] that ran into the thousands.”
²⁸
The same order was well known to the supreme command of the Wehrmacht (Oberkommando der Wehrmacht, or OKW), as confirmed by its chief, Gen. Wilhelm Keitel, to the head of military intelligence, Adm. Wilhelm Canaris, on September 12: “The matter [of the executions of Polish elites] had already been decided by the Führer; the commander of the Army [meant as “ground force”] had been informed that if the Wehrmacht refused to be involved, it had to accept the pressure of the SS and the Gestapo. Therefore, in each military district, civilian commanders would be appointed who would carry the responsibility for ethnic extermination” [added in pencil: political cleansing].
²⁹

In concrete terms Heydrich was in charge of Tannenberg, although several SS “Death’s Head” units, under the command of the inspector of concentration camps, Theodor Eicke, independently took part in the “antiterror” campaign. Initially Heydrich had set up five “operational groups” (
Einsatzgruppen
) and one “special purpose operational group” for the murder campaign; ultimately seven
Einsatzgruppen
were involved. Some basic briefings took place on the eve of the attack. Then, on two occasions following the beginning of the campaign, Heydrich clearly defined the goals of the operation. “The leading strata of the population should be rendered harmless,” he declared to his unit commanders, on September 7.
³⁰
In another meeting, on September 27, he stated that merely 3 percent of the Polish elite still remained and that “they too should be rendered harmless.”
³¹
Sometimes authorization for specific murder operations was requested in Berlin. Thus, at the end of 1939, for example, SS Brigadeführer Dr. Dr. Otto Rasch, commander of the Security Police and Security Service in Königsberg, inquired whether the Poles concentrated in the East Prussian camp of Soldau—mainly academics, businesspeople, teachers, and priests—could be “liquidated” on the spot instead of being deported. Heydrich agreed.
³²

On-the-spot executions were the most common practice, in retaliation against Polish civilians for attacks against German troops and as a revenge for Polish murders of
Volksdeutsche
(ethnic Germans) in the initial stages of the war—in Bromberg, for example; for the elimination of the local elites, however, other methods were also used. Thus, on November 3, 1939, 183 faculty members of the Jagellonian University in Kraków were summoned by the Gestapo, arrested, and deported to the Sachsenhausen concentration camp near Berlin. A few months later the older scholars were released and the younger ones sent to Dachau. By that time 13 of the imprisoned scholars had already died; none of the Jews was set free.
³³

III

Victory in the
Volkstumskampf
would be achieved by unbridled ruthlessness against non-Germanic races mainly in the East, and simultaneously, by an equally ruthless cleansing of the
Volksgemeinschaft
(racial community) inside the Germanic space. In line for eradication were the mentally ill, the Gypsies, and various other “racially foreign” elements still mingling with the
Volk
, although many of them had already been shipped to concentration camps.

Thousands of mental patients from asylums in Pomerania, East Prussia, and the Posen region in the Warthegau were eliminated soon after the German attack on Poland.
³⁴
They were murdered without any medical coverup, independent of the “euthanasia” operation. On orders from Himmler these patients were to be killed so that the buildings they lived in could be used for billeting Waffen SS soldiers and accommodating military casualties, possibly also in order to help in the resettlement of ethnic Germans from neighboring Eastern countries.
³⁵