The Years of Extermination: Nazi Germany and the Jews, 1939-1945 (5 page)

Brought by train to Danzig-Neustadt, the Pomeranian patients were delivered to the Eimann SS Commando (named after its chief, Kurt Eimann), led to the surrounding woods, and shot. The bodies were thrown into graves previously dug by prisoners from the Stutthof concentration camp. Day in, day out, one batch of victims followed another; by midafternoon the “work” was over and the trucks that had brought the patients returned empty to the train station, except for the victims’ clothes. Soon thereafter the concentration camp inmates who had dug the graves were themselves liquidated. The number of patients killed by Kurt Eimann’s unit is not known precisely but in January 1941 its own report mentioned more than three thousand victims.
³⁶

Newborn children with serious defects had already been targeted by the eve of the war. The “euthanasia” program as such (identified by its code name, T4, in fact an acronym of Tiergartenstrasse 4, the address of the operation’s headquarters in Berlin), which also extended to the adult population, secretly started in October 1939 on Hitler’s order. It was established under the direct authority of “the Chancellory of the Führer of the National Socialist Party” (
Kanzlei des Führers der NSDAP
, or KdF), headed by Philipp Bouhler. Bouhler appointed the chief of Office II in the KdF, Viktor Brack, to be directly in charge of the killing operations. Under T4, some seventy thousand mental patients were assembled and murdered in six mental institutions between the beginning of the war and August 1941, when the framework of the extermination system changed.

From the end of the nineteenth century, eugenics had preached racial improvement by ways of various social and medical measures meant to bolster the biological health of the national community. Such theories and measures were as fashionable in the Anglo-Saxon and Scandinavian countries as they were in Germany. After the end of World War I, the view increasingly held in Weimar Germany argued that the biological depletion incurred by the Reich as a result of the war, and the economic difficulties that precluded any large-scale social policies to foster “positive” eugenic measures, reinforced the need for excluding the weak, the nonadapted, and diseased individuals from the biological pool of the
Volk
. Such notions became tenets of Nazi ideology during the “years of struggle.”

Within months of his accession to the chancellorship, Hitler initiated a new law that ordered
compulsory
sterilization of individuals suffering from certain hereditary diseases. Yet, as late as September 1935, the Nazi leader refused to take the next “logical” step: murdering those individuals “unworthy of living.” Negative reactions from the population and the churches could have been expected—a risk that Hitler was not yet prepared to take. At the end of 1938 and mainly in 1939, the Nazi leader’s readiness to move ahead in this domain—as in that of foreign aggression—grew and, once the war started, the final authorization was given;
³⁷
the crucial move from sterilization to straightforward group extermination was made.

In each of the medical institutions turned into killing centers, physicians and police officers were jointly in charge. The exterminations followed a standardized routine: The chief physician checked the paperwork; photos of the victims were taken; the inmates were then led to a gas chamber fed by containers of carbon monoxide and asphyxiated. Gold teeth were torn out and the bodies cremated.
³⁸

The killing of Jewish patients started in June 1940; they had previously been moved to a few institutions designated only for them.
³⁹
They were killed without any formalities; their medical records were of no interest. Their death was camouflaged nonetheless: The Reichsvereinigung (the representative body of Jews in Germany) had to pay the costs of the victims’ hospitalization in a fictitious institution: the “Cholm State Hospital,” near Lublin. In August 1940 identical letters were sent from Cholm to the families of the patients, informing them of the sudden death of their relatives, all on the same date. The cause of death was left unspecified.
⁴⁰

IV

As we saw in the introduction, in Hitler’s view the Jews were first and foremost an
active
(eventually deadly) threat. Yet, in the wake of the Polish campaign, the first German reactions to the sight of the
Ostjuden
(Eastern Jews) were more immediately dominated by disgust and utter contempt. On September 10 Hitler toured the Jewish quarter of Kielce; his press chief (
Reichspressechef
), Otto Dietrich, described the impression of the visit in a pamphlet published at the end of that year: “If we had once believed we knew the Jews, we were quickly taught otherwise here…. The appearance of these human beings is unimaginable…. Physical repulsion hindered us from carrying out our journalistic research…. The Jews in Poland are in no way poor, but they live in such inconceivable dirt, in huts in which no vagrant in Germany would spend the night.”
⁴¹

On October 7, referring to Hitler’s description of his impressions from Poland, Joseph Goebbels, the propaganda minister, added: “The Jewish problem will be the most difficult to solve. These Jews are not human beings anymore. [They are] predators equipped with a cold intellect which have to be rendered harmless.”
⁴²
On November 2 Goebbels reported to Hitler about his own trip to Poland. “Above all,” Goebbels recorded in his diary, “my description of the Jewish problem gets his [Hitler’s] full approval. The Jew is a waste product. It is a clinical issue more than a social one.”
⁴³

In Nazi parlance “to render harmless” meant killing. There was no such concrete plan in the fall of 1939, but murderous thoughts regarding the Jews were certainly swirling around. The harshest measures were not necessarily backed by all members of the Nazi elite, however: “Frick [the minister of the interior] reports about the Jewish question in Poland,” Goebbels recorded on November 8. “He is in favor of somewhat milder methods. I protest and so does Ley” [Robert Ley, the labor minister and head of the “German Labor Front”].
⁴⁴
At times Hitler’s musings about Jewry took off, as they did from the outset of his career, into loftier spheres: “We touch again upon religious issues,” Goebbels noted on December 29. “The Führer is profoundly religious but totally antichristian. He considers Christianity as a symptom of decline. Rightly so. It is a deposit [
Ablagerung
] of the Jewish race. One also notices it in the similarity of religious rituals. Both have no relation to animals and this will destroy them in the end.”
⁴⁵

While Hitler’s anti-Semitic harangues went on unabated in his conversations with Goebbels, Rosenberg, and other party subordinates, his only
public
anti-Jewish outbursts throughout a period of several months came at the beginning of the war, on the day Great Britain and France joined the conflict. On September 3, in the afternoon, German radio broadcast four proclamations by Adolf Hitler: the first to the German people, the second and third to the armed forces on the Eastern and Western Fronts, the last and most important one to the National Socialist Party. In the first proclamation the Nazi leader lashed out at those who had initiated this war; it was not the British people who were responsible, but “that Jewish-plutocratic and democratic ruling class that wanted to turn all the nations of the earth into its obedient slaves.”
⁴⁶
Whereas in the proclamation to the German people the attack against “Jewish plutocracy” came only in the middle of the address, it opened the proclamation to the party: “Our Jewish-democratic world enemy has succeeded in pulling the English people into a state of war with Germany.”
⁴⁷
The real “world enemy” was clearly identified once again: party and state would have to act. “This time,” Hitler warned darkly, “those who hoped to sabotage the common effort would be exterminated without any pity.”
⁴⁸

Whether these dire threats were signals of steps to come or, at this point, merely ritualized outbursts remains an open question. Hitler’s subsequent public restraint derived from obvious political reasons (first the hope of an arrangement with France and Great Britain, then with Great Britain alone). Nothing was said about the Jews either in the annual address to the party “Old Fighters” on November 8, 1939, or in the official announcement that followed an attempt by a single assassin on Hitler’s life that same evening.

In his 1940 New Year’s message to the party, Hitler merely hinted that the Jews had not been forgotten: “Jewish-international capitalism, in alliance with reactionary forces, incited the democracies against Germany”; the same “Jewish-capitalist world enemy” had only one goal, “to destroy the German people,” but, Hitler announced, “the Jewish capitalist world would not survive the twentieth century.”
⁴⁹
And, in the annual speech commemorating the
Machtergreifung
, on January 30, that restraint would be even more noticeable. A year earlier, on the same occasion, Hitler had proclaimed that a world war would bring about the extermination of the Jews of Europe, and a year later, on January 30, 1941, he would renew his threat. On January 30, 1940, however, the Jews were not mentioned at all.

Possibly no less significant was the fact that in his speech of February 24, 1940, the twentieth anniversary of the proclamation of the party program (a program in which the “Jewish question” had loomed large), Hitler referred specifically to the Jews only once, telling the party members assembled in the Hofbraühaus in Munich that when the Jews insulted him, he considered it an honor. Furthermore, in the same speech, he alluded to the people whom everyone knew, the people who had lived among them up to the last eight years, a group whose jargon no German could understand and whose presence no German could bear, a people who knew only how to lie. Even the dumbest party member understood whom Hitler meant, but, contrary to the Nazi leader’s rhetorical habits, the word “Jews” was not mentioned.
⁵⁰

V

Although at this stage most Nazi anti-Jewish propaganda was aimed at the German public, Goebbels never forgot its potential impact beyond the Reich’s borders, mainly among Germany’s enemies. By endlessly repeating that the war was a “Jewish war,” prepared and instigated by the Jews for their own profit and their ultimate goal, world domination, Goebbels hoped to weaken enemy resolve and foster a growing demand for an arrangement with Germany.

On November 2, during the conversation in which the propaganda minister told Hitler of his Polish trip and described the Jews as a “waste product,” as a “clinical issue more than a social one,” both concluded that anti-Jewish propaganda aimed toward the outside world ought to be substantially reinforced: “We consider,” the minister noted, “whether we shouldn’t stress the Zionist Protocols [
sic
] (
The Protocols of the Elders of Zion
) in our propaganda in France.”
⁵¹
The use of the “Protocols” was to reappear in Goebbels’s plans throughout the war, mainly toward the end. More than once he would discuss the issue with his Führer. Incidentally, the dual and contradictory aspect of the Nazi myth of the Jew was strikingly illustrated on this occasion: the Jews were “a waste product” and “a clinical issue” on the one hand and, on the other, Aryan humanity faced the mortal danger of a Jewish domination of the world….

Immediately after the beginning of the war, Goebbels ordered the production of three major anti-Jewish films:
Die Rothschilds
(
The Rothschilds
),
Jud Süss
(
Jew Süss
) and
Der Ewige Jude
(
The Eternal Jew
). The Rothschild project was submitted to the minister by the board of UFA film studios in September 1939; he gave his permission to go ahead with the production.
⁵²
Der Ewige Jude
was Goebbels’s own idea and between October 1939 and September 1940, it became his most consuming anti-Jewish propaganda project. In October, Fritz Hippler, the head of the film section of the propaganda Ministry, was put in charge of the film; in November, Veit Harlan was chosen as director of
Jud Süss
.

The three Nazi film projects had a strange prehistory. All three topics—all three titles, in fact—had probably been chosen by Goebbels to offer violently anti-Semitic versions of identically named films produced in 1933 and 1934 in Great Britain and in the United States, each of which carried a message stigmatizing the persecution of the Jews through history. Of course in the three films of the early 1930s the Jewish figures were presented in a highly favorable light.
⁵³
The House of Rothschild
was produced by Twentieth-Century Pictures in 1933;
The Eternal Jew
came from the studios of Gaumont-Twickenham in 1934 and, in the same year Gaumont-British produced
Jew Süss
with the German refugee actor Conrad Veidt in the main role (Veidt had left Germany in 1933; his wife was half Jewish).
⁵⁴
Both
The House of Rothschild
and
Jew Süss
were relatively successful in the United States, in Great Britain, and in several European countries. Needless to say, neither film was shown in Germany, and
Jew Süss
was banned in Austria after a brief run in Vienna.
⁵⁵
In Britain itself
Jew Süss
received mostly positive reviews, although it garnered some strongly anti-Semitic articles as well.
Punch
, for example, warned the Tivoli theater (where the film had opened): “It must begin to Aryanize itself or it will be too much thought of as the abode of Hebraic eminence and idiosyncrasy…. A little Gentile leaven in the Tivoli pogroms—I mean programme—would not be unwelcome.”
⁵⁶
I will return to Goebbels’s
Jud Süss
.