The Years of Extermination: Nazi Germany and the Jews, 1939-1945 (45 page)

Soon the Reichsführer was receiving a growing number of complaints about the inclusion of
Mischlinge
and decorated war veterans in the transports. And, as information about the Kovno massacres spread, Himmler precipitously ordered, on Sunday, November 30, that “no liquidation” of the Jews deported from Berlin to Riga “should take place.”
²⁷
The order reached Riga too late, and an irate SS chief threatened Jeckeln with “punishment” for acting on his own.
²⁸
During the following months mass executions of Jews deported from Germany stopped. It was but a brief respite.

II

Typhoon, the Wehrmacht’s offensive against Moscow, was launched on October 2; it was Germany’s last chance to win the war in the East before the onset of the winter. For a few days victory again seemed within reach. As in July, Hitler’s euphoric state of mind was shared by the OKW and also by Fedor von Bock, the commander of Army Group Center, the main force advancing on the Soviet capital. On October 4, when the Nazi chief returned to Berlin for a major speech at the Sportpalast, Goebbels noted: “He looks at his best and is in an exuberantly optimistic frame of mind. He literally exudes optimism…. The Führer is convinced that if the weather remains halfway favorable, the Soviet army will be essentially demolished in fourteen days.” And, on October 7: “It goes well on the front. The Führer continues to be extraordinarily optimistic.”
²⁹

Hitler’s mood during those days was indeed so exuberant, his declarations about the collapse of the Red Army and of the Soviet Union so peremptory, that on October 13 press chief Dietrich could announce the momentous news: “Militarily, this war has been decided. What still remains to be done is essentially of a political nature, both internally and externally. At some stage, the German armies in the East will stop their advance and a border determined by us will be drawn; it will protect the greater Europe and the European bloc community of interests led by Germany, against the East.”
³⁰
Dietrich was in fact merely repeating his Führer’s assessment and, so it seems, that of the army itself.

All over Europe, Jews were following the military news like an anxious choir, in despair at first, with hope somewhat later, then with exaltation at the end of the year. “Hitler is reported to have given a speech in which he said that he has begun a gigantic offensive in the east,” Sierakowiak noted on October 3. “I wonder how it will develop. It looks like this one will be as victorious as all the previous ones.”
³¹
And on October 10: “The Germans have supposedly broken the Russian front with their 3 million-man army and are marching on Moscow. Hitler has personally taken command on the front. So it’s to be another successful offensive. The Germans are really invincible. We’ll rot in this ghetto for sure.”
³²
A few days later Kaplan became the voice of despair: “The Nazis continue to advance on the Eastern front,” he recorded on October 18, “and have reached the gates of Moscow. The city is still fighting desperately but its fate has been decided—it will surely be captured by the Nazis…. And when Moscow falls, all the capitals of Europe will be under the Nazi rule…. A Nazi victory means complete annihilation, morally and materially, for all the Jews of Europe. The latest news has left even the most hopeful among us dejected. It seems this war will go on for years.”
³³
On October 25, Klemperer just mentioned laconically: “German advance continues in Russia, even though the winter has begun.”
³⁴

Other diarists were somewhat less pessimistic. Thus, Willy Cohn, the former high school teacher from Breslau, noted, on October 11, that all the special victory announcements of the previous day looked like “advance laurels” (
Vorschusslorbeeren
) and added: “After all, the whole world belongs to the others!”
³⁵
On October 20, Cohn mentioned the repeal of the “Neutrality Law” by Congress, and concluded, “This means, in the short as the long run, the entry of the United States in the war.”
³⁶
As for Sebastian, he noticed slight nuances in the German communiqués; after recording the news of victory in the East, as trumpeted by German and Romanian newspapers on October 10, he noted on the next day: “A slight, almost imperceptible lowering of the tone in today’s papers. ‘The Hour of Collapse Is Near,’ said one headline in
Universal
. Yesterday the collapse was already an established fact. But the fact is that fighting is still taking place.”
³⁷
Among Jews farther west, opinions may have been more starkly divided: “The events in Russia divide the Jews into two groups,” Biélinky noted on October 14. “There are those who consider Russia as already defeated and who hope for some generous gesture on the part of the victor. The others keep a robust faith in Russian resistance.”
³⁸

Strangely enough the misperception of the military situation on the German side went on, particularly at army headquarters, until early November. Halder, the cool planner, envisioned an advance of 200 kilometers east of Moscow, the conquest of Stalingrad, and the capture of the Maykop oil fields, no less. It was actually Hitler who brought his generals’ fantasies down to earth and back to the more modest goal of taking Moscow.
³⁹
On November 1, the Nazi leader ordered the resumption of the offensive against the Soviet capital.
⁴⁰
By then, however, stiffening Soviet resistance, lack of winter equipment, subzero temperatures, and sheer exhaustion of the troops brought the Wehrmacht to a halt. By the end of November the Red Army had recaptured Rostov-on-Don, which the Germans had occupied a few days earlier; it was the first major Soviet military success since the beginning of the campaign. On December 1, the German offensive was definitively halted. On December 4, fresh Soviet divisions transferred from the Far East counterattacked before Moscow: The first German retreat of the war started.

Goebbels’s diary reflected growing pessimism: “A detailed OKW report about the communications and food supply situation in the East reveals considerable difficulties,” he wrote on November 16. “The weather conditions compel us to take constantly new and unplanned measures. And, as the weather situation is so exceptionally unstable, the measures sometimes have to be changed from one day to the next. Our troops are confronted with unprecedented difficulties.”
⁴¹

While the Wehrmacht faced a perilous situation on the Eastern Front, the United States further inched toward war. On October 17 a German submarine attacked the US destroyer
Kearney
, killing eleven sailors; an American merchant ship, the
Lehigh
, was torpedoed off the African coast a few days later; and on October 31, the destroyer
Reuben James
was sunk, and more than one hundred American sailors perished. In the midst of this undeclared naval war (in which, apparently, German submarines did not identify the nationality of the vessels in time),
⁴²
the American president announced, on October 27, that he was in possession of documents showing Hitler’s intention to abolish all religions, and of maps indicating German plans to divide Latin America into five Nazi-controlled states.
⁴³
Roosevelt’s allegations were false, but his intentions were clear enough. Congress—and public opinion—did not remain indifferent: On November 13, the Neutrality Act, which considerably hampered the delivery of American aid to Britain and the Soviet Union, was repealed. On November 16 Goebbels commented: “The political situation is essentially determined by the course of events in the United States. The American press makes no secret anymore of what Roosevelt’s aims are. He wants to join the war at the end of next year at the latest.”
⁴⁴

For Berlin, Roosevelt’s moves were of course the result of a Jewish plot. “Roosevelt’s speech [of October 27] made a big impression,” Italian foreign minister Galeazzo Ciano noted in his diary on the twenty-ninth. “The Germans have firmly decided to do nothing that will accelerate or cause America’s entry into the war. Ribbentrop, during a long lunch, attacked Roosevelt. ‘I have given orders to the press to always write: “Roosevelt, the Jew”; I wish to make a prophecy: that man will be stoned in the Capitol by his own people.’ I personally believe that Roosevelt will die of old age, because experience teaches me not to give much credit to Ribbentrop’s prophecies.”
⁴⁵

Besides the pressure Hitler may have hoped to put on “the Jewish clique” around Roosevelt by deporting the Jews of Germany, the best chance of avoiding the American entry into the war rested on the success of the isolationist campaign. The antiwar agitation was led, at this stage, by the America First Committee and its star speaker, Charles A. Lindbergh, the world-famous pilot and tragic father of a kidnapped and murdered son.

On September 11, following Roosevelt’s “active defense” speech, Lindbergh delivered his most aggressive address yet, entitled “Who Are the War Agitators?” before some eight thousand Iowans packed into the Des Moines Coliseum. Lindbergh indicted the administration, the British, and the Jews.
⁴⁶
Regarding the Jews, he began by expressing compassion for and understanding of their plight and for their reasons to wish the overthrow of the regime in Germany. “But no person of honesty and vision,” he added, “can look on their pro-war policy here today without seeing the dangers involved in such a policy, both for us and for them.”

Lindbergh’s second point in no way mitigated the impact of the first: “Instead of agitating for war, the Jewish groups in this country should be opposing it in every possible way, for they will be among the first to feel its consequences. Tolerance is a virtue that depends upon peace and strength.” After mentioning that a few Jews understood the threat that war could mean for them, Lindbergh continued: “But the majority still do not. Their greatest danger to this country lies in their large ownership and influence in our motion pictures, our press, our radio and our Government.” Probably without sensing it, Lindbergh had sunk at that stage to the level of a notorious American anti-Semitic rabble-rouser, the radio preacher Father Charles Coughlin, or, for that matter, to the level of Goebbels’s arguments.

The third and final part regarding the Jews was, implicitly, the most provocative of all: “I am not attacking either the Jewish or British people,” he declared. “Both races, I admire. But I am saying that the leaders of both the British and Jewish races, for reasons which are understandable from their viewpoint as they are inadvisable from ours, for reasons which are not American, wish to involve us in the war. We cannot blame them for looking out for what they believe to be their own interests, but we must also look out for ours. We cannot allow the natural passions and prejudices of other peoples to lead our country to destruction.”
⁴⁷

“Lindbergh,” one of his biographers commented, “had bent over backward to be kind about the Jews; but in suggesting the American Jews were ‘other’ people and that their interests were ‘not American,’ he implied exclusion, thus undermining the very foundation of the United States.”
⁴⁸
The widespread outrage raised by his speech not only put an end to Lindbergh’s political activity but also demonstrated that, despite strong anti-Semitic feelings among segments of American society, the great majority would not admit any exclusionary talk, even if presented in “reasonable terms.” Goebbels missed neither the speech nor the reactions to it.

“During the day,” the minister recorded on September 14, “the original text of Colonel Lindbergh’s speech arrives. He has launched a sharp attack against the Jews but of course was caught as a result in a wasps’ nest. The New York press howls as if stung by a tarantula. One cannot but admire Lindbergh: relying just on himself he has dared to face this association of business manipulators, Jews, plutocrats and capitalists.”
⁴⁹

On December 7, the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor. On December 11, preempting the inevitable, the Nazi leader declared war on the United States.

III

Hitler’s prolonged low-key rhetorical stance regarding the Jews came to an abrupt end in the fall of 1941: The restraint of the previous months gave way to an explosion of the vilest anti-Jewish invectives and threats. This sharp reversal closely followed the decision to deport the Jews of Germany; it was inaugurated by what must have been the most bizarre “order of the day” in modern times.

On the eve of Typhoon, on October 2, addressing the millions of soldiers poised for what was to be “the last of the great decisive battles of the year…the last powerful blow that will shatter this enemy before the onset of the winter,” Hitler left no doubt about the true identity of the “horrendous, beast-like” foe that had been about to “annihilate not only Germany, but the whole of Europe.” Those who upheld the system in which Bolshevism was but the other face of the vilest capitalism, he proclaimed, were in both cases the same: “Jews and only Jews!” (
Juden und nur Juden
!).
⁵⁰
The next day, in his Sportpalast speech to mark the opening of the annual Winter-Relief campaign, Hitler designated the Jews as “the world enemy.”
⁵¹
From then on his anti-Jewish diatribes became torrential.

On October 13, the Nazi leader attributed the catastrophic state of U.S. economic policies to “Jewish thinking.”
⁵²
The next day he again attacked Jewish business thinking and practices.
⁵³
On the seventeenth the Jews came up twice in conversation, at noon and in the evening. During lunch Hitler discussed the situation of Romania and its notoriously corrupt officials: “The precondition [for change] is the elimination of the Jews; otherwise a state cannot be freed [of corruption].”
⁵⁴
After dinner, in the presence of Fritz Sauckel and Fritz Todt, the discussion turned to the future German settlement of Belorussia and the Ukraine: The “destructive Jews” would be gone, the Nazi leader promised.
⁵⁵
On the eighteenth Hitler’s anti-Jewish obsession turned to the Jews’ role in England’s path to war.
⁵⁶
On the nineteenth he brought up the Christian “pre-Bolshevik” mobilization of the slaves in the Roman Empire, manipulated by the Jews to destroy the structure of the state.
⁵⁷
Two days later, on October 21, Hitler unleashed a more extensive attack: Jesus was not a Jew; the Jew Paul falsified Jesus’ teaching in order to undermine the Roman Empire. The Jews’ aim was to destroy the nations by undermining their racial core. In Russia, the Nazi leader declared, the Jews deported hundreds of thousands of men in order to leave the abandoned women to males imported from other regions. They organized miscegenation on a grand scale. The Jews continued to torture people in the name of Bolshevism, just as Christianity, the offshoot of Judaism, had tortured its opponents in the Middle Ages. “Saul became Saint Paul; Mordechai became Karl Marx.” Then came the notorious finale:
“By exterminating this pest, we shall do humanity a service of which our soldiers can have no idea.”
58 The most rabid themes of the early speeches, of the dialogue with Dietrich Eckart, and especially of
Mein Kampf
, were back, sometimes in almost identical words.