The Years of Extermination: Nazi Germany and the Jews, 1939-1945 (47 page)

Another lengthy sequence followed about responsibility for the war; it brought Hitler somewhat closer to the object of the Reichstag meeting. Two American presidents had caused untold misery during the past decades: Wilson and Roosevelt. Wilson, the “paralytic professor,” was merely the forerunner of Roosevelt’s policies; but to understand fully Roosevelt and his hatred of Germany, one crucial element had to be kept in mind: The American politician acceded to the presidency at precisely the time Hitler took over the leadership of Germany. A comparison between both personalities and the achievements of both regimes would inevitably demonstrate the Nazi leader’s manifest superiority. Moreover, Hitler continued: “The forces that supported Mr. Roosevelt were the forces against which I struggled, given the fate of my people and from my own innermost and holiest conviction. The ‘brain trust’ the American president relied upon included the members of the same people that we fought in Germany as a parasitical manifestation and that we started excluding from public life.” Then, after once more demonstrating how catastrophic Roosevelt’s leadership had been, Hitler reached the core of his argument: “The evolution of the United States should not be surprising once one remembered that the spirits on whom this man had called to help him or, better said, the spirits that called him, belonged to those elements who, as
Jews
[underlined in the original printed text] could only be interested in destruction and never in order.” What followed was unavoidable: To deflect attention from his failures, Roosevelt—and the Jews behind him—needed a foreign diversion.
⁸¹

At this point Hitler was ready for a full-scale anti-Jewish tirade of hate: “He [Roosevelt] was strengthened in this [political diversion] by the circle of Jews surrounding him, who, with Old Testament–like fanaticism, believe that the United States can be the instrument for preparing another Purim for the European nations that are becoming increasingly anti-Semitic. It was the Jew, in his full satanic vileness, who rallied around this man [Roosevelt], but to whom this man also reached out.”
⁸²
By formally declaring war on the United States, in accordance with the Tripartite Pact, Hitler had closed the circle of his enemies in a world war of yet-unknown fury.

On the following day, December 12, Hitler addressed the
Reichsleiter
and
Gauleiter
in a secret speech summed up by Goebbels: “In regard to the Jewish question the Führer is determined to wipe the slate clean [
reinen Tisch zu machen
]. He prophesied to the Jews that if they once more brought about a world war, they would be annihilated. These were not mere words. The world war is here, the extermination of the Jews must be its necessary consequence. This matter has to be envisaged without any sentimentality. We are not here to have compassion for the Jews, but to have compassion for our German people. As the German people has once again sacrificed some 160,000 dead in the eastern campaign, those responsible for this bloody conflict will have to pay for it with their lives.”
⁸³

Then, according to an entry in Himmler’s appointment calendar dated December 18, in a meeting that same day, the Nazi leader instructed him: “Jewish question | exterminate as partisans.”
⁸⁴
The vertical line remains unexplained. The identification of the Jews as “partisans” obviously did not refer to the Jews on Soviet territory who were being exterminated for six months already. It referred to the deadly internal enemy, the enemy fighting within the borders of one’s own territory, who, by plotting and treachery could, as in 1917–1918, stab the Reich in the back, now that a new “world war,” on all fronts, rekindled all the dangers of the previous one. Moreover, “partisans” associated maybe with the most general connotation used by Hitler in his declaration at the conference of July 16, 1941: All
potential enemies
within Germany’s reach; it was understood, as we saw, to include any civilians and entire communities at will. Thus the order was clear: Extermination without any limitation here applied to the Jews.

On December 17, on the eve of the meeting with the SS Reichsführer, Hitler once more raised the Jewish issue with Goebbels. “The Führer is determined to proceed consistently in this matter [the ‘Jewish question’],” the propaganda minister recorded, “and not be stopped by bourgeois sentimentality.” Hitler and his minister discussed the evacuation of the Jews from the Reich, but it seems that subsequently the Jewish issue in general was addressed: “All the Jews have to be transferred to the East. What happens to them there cannot be of great interest to us. They have asked for this fate; they brought about the war, now they must also foot the bill.” Then Goebbels added: “It is comforting that despite the burden of military responsibility the Führer still finds the time…for these matters and mainly has a clear view about them. He alone is in the position to solve this problem definitively, with the necessary toughness.”
⁸⁵

In the course of two months the Nazi leader had explicitly mentioned
the extermination of the Jews
on October 19, October 25, December 12, December 17, and December 18, and was indirectly quoted to that effect by Goebbels, Rosenberg, and Frank between December 12 and 16. Nothing of the kind had ever happened before in Hitler’s declarations. Indeed, the fact that five out of seven of these exterminatory statements were made within a few days of December 11, could be seen as a thinly veiled message conveying that a final decision had been made as a result of American entry into the war. On the night of December 28–29, Hitler came to speak of the arch-anti-Semite, Julius Streicher: “What Streicher did in
Der Stürmer
: He drew an idealized portrait of the Jews. The Jew is much meaner, much more bloodthirsty than Streicher described him.”
⁸⁶

For good measure the Nazi leader added a strong dose of anti-Jewish threats and insults in his last public message of the year. According to Goebbels, he dictated it on December 31 to have it read by his minister on the radio that same evening.
⁸⁷
The general tone of the address was unusually defensive and insecure—understandably so. Those who forced the war on the Reich, the German chief declared, carried the responsibility for having deflected Hitler from forging ahead with the grand internal changes he had launched. But victory would be achieved with the help of Providence (invoked any number of times in this short message). The archvillains, the Jews, were mentioned no fewer than four times. At first they were merely designated as an element, though prime one, in the foes’ “Jewish-capitalist-Bolshevik world conspiracy”; they reappeared shortly thereafter, when the Nazi leader told his people—and all of Europe—what a horrendous fate would have befallen them if “Jewish Bolshevism in alliance with Roosevelt and Churchill had achieved victory”; then part of the notorious prophecy surfaced: “The Jew will not eradicate the European nations, but will be the victim of his own attack” [
Der Jude aber wird nicht die europäischen Völker ausrotten, sondern er wird das Opfer seines eigenen Anschlages sein
]; finally, in the closing part of the exhortation, after the savior of Germany and of Europe had once more invoked “the Almighty,” he brought in the Jews for the fourth time as the very root of evil: “If all of us together faithfully accomplish our duty, our fate will fulfill itself as Providence willed it. Those who fight for the life of their people, for its daily bread and for its future will win! But those who, in their Jewish hatred, attempt to exterminate the peoples in this war will be hurled down!” A further appeal to God ended the message.
⁸⁸
Thus the year 1941 closed: It should have been, in Hitler’s own words, the year of “the greatest victory in world history.”

IV

As the deadly threats spewed by “the highest authority” became one continuous rant, the ever more murderous campaign developed apace. From midsummer 1941 on, the massacres of Jews throughout the German- and Romanian-occupied Soviet territories had reached colossal proportions. In Kamenets-Podolsky, Kiev, Kovno, Minsk, Riga, the towns of eastern Galicia—now part of the General Government—and in Odessa, among other killing fields, the Jews were murdered by the thousands, sometimes by the
tens of thousands
, in each
Aktion
. Some of the local commanders excelled at their task.

In Stanislawów, for example, in southern Galicia, the local Security Police commander, Hans Krüger, resolutely took things in hand after Friedrich Katzmann, the SSPF in Galicia, and Karl Eberhard Schöngarth, head of the Security Police in the General Government, had given him free rein.
⁸⁹
On the morning of October 12, 1941, the Jews of the town were driven in groups to the local cemetery. The first batch of 1,000 Jews was then led through the gates, ordered to undress, and the shooting into the open pits started. Next to the mass graves, Krüger had had tables set with food and vodka for the killing commandos (German police units, Ukrainian auxiliaries, and groups of ethnic German volunteers). Krüger himself oversaw the increasingly chaotic murder scene as the line of Jews moved from the town to the cemetery; at times the SD chief made the rounds of his men with a salami sandwich in one hand and a bottle of schnapps in the other. Panic drove entire families to jump together into the pits, where they were either shot or buried alive; others tried to climb the walls of the cemetery until they were mowed down. With the onset of darkness, Krüger announced to the remaining Jews that the Führer had granted them a reprieve; the stampede toward the gates left further victims on the grounds: 10,000 to 12,000 of the Jews of Stanisławów had been murdered that day.
⁹⁰
The remnant was driven into a ghetto.

Three months later a young female diarist, Elisheva, to whom we shall return, commented on the death of two women friends, Tamarczyk and Esterka, during the killings in the cemetery on October 12. “I hope,” Elisheva wrote, “that death was kind to [Tamarczyk] and took her right away. And that she didn’t have to suffer like her companion, Esterka, who was seen being strangled.”
⁹¹

Even before the departure of the first transport from the Reich, Heydrich convened a meeting in Prague on October 10, attended by the highest local SS commanders and by Eichmann. Fifty thousand deportees, the RSHA chief told his acolytes, would be sent to the Ostland (Riga, Minsk); Kovno was added somewhat later.
⁹²
Regarding the Jews of the Protectorate, Heydrich planned the establishment of two transit camps (he spoke of “assembly camps”), one in Moravia and one in Bohemia, from which the Jews would leave eastward after being already “heavily decimated.” The “decimation” was not further explained; it may have been an improvised statement (like the identically worded forecast Heydrich would make at the Wannsee conference in January 1942 regarding the fate of Jewish slave labor building roads on Soviet territory).

Heydrich’s final sentence, according to the protocol of the meeting, echoed Himmler’s opening statement in his September 18 letter to Greiser: “The Führer wishes,” the Reichsführer had written, “the Altreich and the Protectorate to be cleared and freed of Jews.” Heydrich closed the October 10 meeting by reminding those present of the Führer’s wish: “As the Führer wishes that possibly even by the end of this year the Jews should be evacuated from German space, all outstanding issues have to be solved immediately. The transportation problem should not create any difficulty either.”
⁹³

On October 13 the Reichsführer met Globocnik and Krüger. It was probably at this meeting that the SS chief ordered Globocnik to start building the Belzec extermination camp.
⁹⁴
We do not know with any certainty whether the camp was being set up “only” to exterminate Jews of the Lublin district in order to make space for Jewish deportees from the Reich or whether the killing of all Jews in the district was also linked to colonization plans in the area (particularly in the Zamóść region), as a first step of the constantly reworked “General Plan East.”
⁹⁵
It may have been intended for both objectives.
⁹⁶

On the other hand we may surmise that it was essentially in order to deal with the influx of deportees from the Reich to Lodz that preparations for mass murder were initiated in the Warthegau. A euthanasia specialist, Herbert Lange, began searching for an appropriate killing site sometime in mid-October 1941. The extermination sites planned for the Ostland (Riga, Mogilev) were most probably also part of the same immediate murder projects regarding the local ghetto populations.

With Himmler’s agreement a few euthanasia experts had already been sent to Lublin in early September. If Hitler’s order about the deportation from the Reich had been conveyed to the Reichsführer at the beginning of September, the arrival of euthanasia experts at that time meant that the elimination of part of the ghetto populations was considered from the outset as the best solution to the overcrowding issue. A visit by Brack, and then by Bouhler himself, followed, and on November 1 the construction of Belzec started.
⁹⁷
The killing installation Lange set up in Chelmno near Lodz was much simpler: Three gas vans were delivered by the RSHA sometime in November, and by early December everything was ready for the first batch of victims.

In regard to this sequence of events, Eichmann’s testimony at his Jerusalem trial was confusing. According to Eichmann, Heydrich sent him on an inspection visit to Lublin after telling him that Hitler had decided to exterminate all the Jews of Europe. When he arrived in Lublin the trees still had their autumn foliage, and at Belzec (Eichmann did not remember the name) he saw only two small huts being prepared for the gassing. This does not fit, of course, with the fact that the construction of Belzec started only in early November (when the trees would already have lost their autumn colors) and that the first barracks were ready in December. It seems that Eichmann did not remember precisely when Heydrich told him about the “final order” and which inspection tour took place in early autumn in the Lublin area.
⁹⁸