The Years of Extermination: Nazi Germany and the Jews, 1939-1945 (56 page)

In the crescendo of anti-Jewish abuse and threats that Hitler unceasingly spewed, his most “encompassing” speech was his Reichstag address of April 26, 1942. In a meeting with Goebbels the morning of that day, the Nazi leader once again launched into the Jewish question. “His position regarding this problem is inexorable” Goebbels noted. “The Jews have brought so much suffering to our part of the world that the hardest punishment would still remain too mild. Himmler now organizes the vast transfer of the Jews from the German cities to the eastern ghettos. I ordered that many films should record it. We will urgently need this material for the future education of our people.”
¹⁸

The “Great German Reichstag” convened at the Kroll Opera House at three p.m.; it was to be its last meeting.
¹⁹
Right from the beginning of his speech, Hitler set the “historical framework” of his entire address. This war, he proclaimed, was not an ordinary one in which nations fight each other in the pursuit of their specific interests. This was a fundamental confrontation “the like of which shakes the world once in a thousand years and ushers a new millenium.” As for the pitiless enemy confronted in this apocalyptic struggle, it had, of course, to be the Jews. Hitler reminded his audience of the Jews’ evil role in World War I and since: They pushed America into the conflict, they were behind Wilson’s “Fourteen Points” in 1918, and they brought Bolshevism to “the heart of Europe.”

But no paraphrase can render the fury of the original: “We know the theoretical principles and the horrible reality of the aims of this world plague. It is called the dictatorship of the proletariat but it is the dictatorship of Jewry!…If Bolshevik Russia is the visible product of this Jewish infection, one should not forget that democratic capitalism creates the preconditions for it,” Hitler thundered on. “Here the Jews prepare what the same Jews complete in the second act of this process. In the first phase they turned the masses in their millions into helpless slaves or—as they say themselves—into a despoiled proletariat. Afterward they incite this fanaticized mass to destroy the very foundations of its own state. The extermination of the national elites follows and, finally, so does the liquidation of all the cultural creations that, over the millennia, molded the traditions of these peoples…. What remains after all of this is the beast in humanity and a Jewish layer that reached leadership but that in the end, as the parasite, destroys the ground which nurtured it. It is against this process, which Mommsen called the decomposition of states by the Jews, that the awakening new Europe has declared war.”
²⁰

A major surprise followed the end of the speech. Göring introduced the text of a resolution granting the Führer extraordinary new powers, particularly in the judicial domain. Hitler was to be the supreme judge, the supreme source of the law and of its implementation. Why the Nazi leader felt the need for this repeat performance of the so-called
Ermächtigungsgesetz
[the Enabling Act of 1933] seemed unclear at the time, as his power was unchallenged in any case. Goebbels, like many other commentators, dwelled on this particular aspect of the meeting. “The new law,” the propaganda minister commented, “is accepted by the Reichstag with jubilant unanimity. Now the Führer has the full powers to do whatever he considers right. It has been confirmed once again by the representatives elected by the people. Thus, no judge and no general will dare to question the Führer’s full powers any longer.
²¹
Goebbels knew as well as Hitler did that the winter crisis that had barely been overcome, was the portent of increasingly difficult times…Klemperer, for one, noticed the other part of the speech, writing: “The concentration of hatred has this time turned into utter madness. Not England or the USA or Russia—
only
, in everything, nothing but
the Jew
.”
²²
Both aspects of the speech may in fact have been linked.

It could be that, as full-scale mass extermination was now starting, Hitler wanted to avoid the slightest possibility of another threat of criminal charges (as the one brandished by Bishop Galen in his sermon against the murder of the mentally ill in August 1941). The German Jews, let us remember, remained subjects of the Reich as long as they had not left German territory: Lodz and Chelmno were in newly annexed German territory—and so was Auschwitz. On May 4, just a few days after the Reichstag meeting, 10,000 Jews from the Reich and the Protectorate were transported from the Lodz ghetto to the Chelmno gas vans.

“A proper understanding of Jews and Judaism cannot but demand their total annihilation,”
Volk und Rasse
proclaimed in May 1942.
²³
In
Der Angriff
of that same month, Ley’s threats competed with his master’s prophecies: “The war will end,” the labor minister announced to the 300,000 readers of the weekly magazine, “with the extermination of the Jewish race.”
²⁴
A few days later the same minister spelled out his threats once more: “The Jews will pay with the extermination of their race in Europe,” he clamored in
Das Reich
of June 6, 1942.
²⁵

The Kaufman story seems to have kept its hold on the
Volk
’s imagination. Thus a March 15, 1942, SD report from Bielefeld about the general attitude of the population to the war emphasized that “thanks in particular to the extraordinarily effective influence of propaganda, it has become clear to all that the Jew is the instigator of this war and bears the responsibility for the endless misery that it causes to so many Volksgenossen. The acceptance of this view by such wide parts of the population is due in no small measure to the propagation of the text of the American Jew Kaufmann [
sic
].”
²⁶

The upsurge in anti-Jewish hatred noted in Bielefeld probably explains why the
Völkischer Beobachter
of April 30, 1942, could, without qualms, carry a detailed article (thinly veiled as rumor) by its war correspondent Schaal about SD operations in the East: “The rumor has spread among the population that it is the task of the Security Police to exterminate the Jews in the occupied territories. The Jews were assembled in the thousands and shot; beforehand they had to dig their own graves. At times the execution of the Jews reached such proportions that even members of the Einsatzkommandos suffered nervous breakdowns.”
²⁷

On May 8 School Councillor Dr. Borchers lectured to an assembly of school directors in Erfurt; the topic: “What do we need to know about bolshevism to be able to teach it to the children?” The lecture on bolshevism dealt with the Jews, starting with Abraham, continuing with Moses, and onward with the penetration of Jewry into all civilized nations, infecting them with its pestilential breath. Step by step the lecturer moved from one deadly Jewish conspiracy to the next until he reached bolshevism, the ultimate means to subvert all states. Borchers’s finale was of course a hymn to the Führer, who had been the first to recognize the spiritual link between Jewry and bolshevism, who exposed it ruthlessly, and who knew in time how to adapt his policy to these findings.
²⁸
This was the message that school directors were asked to impart to their students.

The all-pervasive anti-Jewish hate campaign found a typical expression in the letter addressed on January 20, 1942, by one Karl Gross, party district chief of the small town of Immenhausen, to his boss in Hofgeismar (near Kassel): “Further to your communication dated January 17, 1942, regarding privileged mixed marriages, I hereby inform you that the local inhabitants have taken great exception to the fact that the local woman doctor (a full-blooded Jewess) is not required to wear a Jewish star. The Jewess takes full advantage of this in that she often goes to Kassel by train, second class, and can travel free from interference without the star. The entire population would welcome it if this state of affairs could be remedied in some way. I inform you at the same time that consideration might be given to deporting the local Jewess because her husband (a doctor) is having an affair with an Aryan woman doctor, who is expecting a child by him in the next few weeks. If the Jewess were deported, the Aryan woman doctor could continue to run Dr. Jahn’s household. It might be appropriate to discuss the said circumstances [with him] in person. This could bring about the disappearance of the only Jewess still resident here.”
²⁹

We shall come back to the story of Lilly Jahn, born Schlüchterer, to a well-to-do Jewish family from Cologne, herself a successful practicing physician, married to an Aryan colleague, Ernst Jahn. The couple had five children, which indeed put them in the category of a privileged mixed marriage and exempted Lilli from wearing the star. As Gross correctly indicated, at that time Ernst Jahn was openly having an affair with a German woman physician, Rita Schmidt, and the marriage was about to fall apart.

II

Initially scheduled for December 9, 1941, the high-level meeting convened by Heydrich in Berlin, at the guesthouse of the Security Police, 56-58, Strasse Am Grossen Wannsee, opened at noon on January 20, 1942. It assembled fourteen people: several state secretaries or other high-ranking officials and a few SS officers, including Adolf Eichmann, who had sent the invitations (in Heydrich’s name) and who drew up the minutes of the meeting.
³⁰
Some of the invitations pointed to the main purpose of the conference even before it started.

A December 1, 1941, exchange between HSSPF Krüger and the chief of the RSHA had indicated that Hans Frank was manuevering for control of Jewish matters in the General Government.
³¹
As for Rosenberg’s ambition to lord over the Jews in the newly conquered eastern territories, it was notorious, as we saw. Thus the invitations extended to Frank’s second-in-command, Secretary of State Josef Bühler and to Rosenberg’s own number two, Secretary of State Alfred Meyer, were clearly meant to convey to them who would be in charge of the ‘Final Solution.’ To a lesser degree, a similar affirmation of authority may have been intended for State Secretaries Wilhelm Stuckart and Roland Freisler from the Interior and Justice Ministries, whose institutions had an important say in the fate of mixed breeds and mixed marriages and did not automatically follow suggestions from the RSHA.
³²

Heydrich opened the meeting by reminding the participants of the task Göring had delegated to him in July 1941 and of the ultimate authority of the SS Reichsführer in this matter. The RSHA chief then presented a brief historical survey of the measures already taken to segregate the Jews of the Reich and force them to emigrate. After further emigration had been forbidden in October 1941, given the danger it represented during wartime, Heydrich went on, another solution had been authorized by the Führer: the evacuation of the Jews of Europe to the East. Some 11 million persons would be included, and Heydrich listed this Jewish population, country by country, including all Jews living in the enemy and neutral countries of Europe (Great Britain, the Soviet Union, Spain, Portugal, Switzerland, and Sweden).

The evacuated Jews would be assigned to heavy forced labor (like the building of roads) which naturally would greatly reduce their numbers. The remnants, “the strongest elements of the race and the nucleus of its revival,” would have to be “treated accordingly.” To implement the operation Europe would be “combed from West to East,” whereby the Reich would be given priority “because of the housing problem and other sociopolitical considerations.” Jews over sixty-five, war invalids, or Jews decorated with the Iron Cross would be evacuated to the newly established “old people’s ghetto,” Theresienstadt: “This adequate solution would put an end in one stroke to the many interventions.” The beginning of major evacuations would greatly depend on the evolution of the military situation.

The statement regarding the latter was strange and has to be understood in relation to the formula “evacuation to the East,” used from then on to mean extermination. To maintain the linguistic fiction, a general comment about the war was necessary given the impossibility of actual deportations “to the East” in January 1942.

In regard to the extension of the “Final Solution” to occupied or satellite countries, the Foreign Ministry, in cooperation with the representatives of the Security Police and the SD, would negotiate with the appropriate local authorities. Heydrich did not foresee any difficulties in Slovakia or Croatia, where preparations had already begun; an adviser on Jewish affairs needed to be sent to Hungary; as for Italy the RSHA chief deemed it necessary to get in touch with the head of the Italian police. Regarding France, Heydrich, in his initial listing, had mentioned 700,000 Jews from the Vichy zone, which probably meant the inclusion of the Jews of French North Africa. Heydrich expected considerable problems in getting hold of this Jewish population. Undersecretary Martin Luther, the Foreign Ministry delegate, set him straight: No problems were foreseen in Vichy France. On the other hand Luther pointed out (quite correctly) that difficulties would be encountered in the Nordic states; thus, given the small number of Jews involved, the deportations there should be left for a later phase. No potential reaction of any of the Christian churches or of public opinion in general (except, as we shall see, in the neighborhood of the camps) was mentioned.

Up to that point Heydrich’s survey presented both an overly detailed statement on one issue and an obvious gap regarding another. The country-by-country listing of the Jews who would be targeted in the “Final Solution,” including the Jews of Great Britain, the Soviet Union, Switzerland, and so on, was of course unnecessary in itself; yet the enumeration had a purpose, nonetheless: It conveyed that every Jew in Europe, wherever that Jew might be living, would eventually be caught. None would escape or be allowed to survive. Moreover, all Jews, everywhere, even in countries or areas still outside Germany’s reach, were and would be subjected to Himmler and Heydrich’s authority.