The Years of Extermination: Nazi Germany and the Jews, 1939-1945 (78 page)

Back in Berlin on May 7, for the funeral of SA chief Viktor Lutze, Hitler exhorted the assembled
Gauleiter
to “set anti-Semitism again at the core of the ideological struggle, as we fostered and propagated it in the party in earlier days” [
dass der Antisemitismus, wie wir ihn früher in der Partei gepflegt und propagiert haben, auch jetzt wieder das Kernstück unserer geistiger Auseinandersetzung sein muss
].
¹³

Goebbels recorded further Hitler promptings on May 9. “The Führer attaches great importance to hard-hitting anti-Semitic propaganda. Success will be achieved by constant repetition. He is extremely pleased with our sharper anti-Semitic campaign in the press and on the radio. I tell him how important the place of anti-Semitic propaganda is in our foreign broadcasts. It amounts at times to 70 or 80 percent of our entire foreign broadcasts. The anti-Semitic bacteria are naturally present in the entire European public; we need only to make them virulent” [
Die anti-semitischen Bazillen sind natürlich in der ganzen europaischen Öffentlichkeit vorhanden; wir müssen sie nur virulent machen
].
¹⁴

To “make the bacteria virulent,” the minister turned to some basic recipes: “Once more I thoroughly study the Zionist Protocols” [
sic; The Protocols of the Elders of Zion
], he noted in his diary entry of May 13, 1943.
¹⁵
“The Zionist Protocols are as modern today as when they were published for the first time. It is amazing to see the extraordinary consistency that characterizes the Jewish striving for world domination. If the Zionist Protocols are not authentic, then they have been invented by a genius interpreter of our epoch. At noon I broach the topic with the Führer. The Führer thinks that the Zionist Protocols can be considered as absolutely authentic. Nobody would have had such an extraordinary ability to describe the Jewish striving for world domination, as the Jews themselves perceive it. The Führer is of the opinion,” Goebbels went on, “that the Jews do not need at all to follow a pre-established plan; they work according to their race instinct; it will always drive them to act as one, as they have demonstrated in the course of their entire history.”
¹⁶

The discussion of the Jewish race instinct allowed the German leader to roam far and wide. He pointed to the similarity of Jewish characteristics all over the world and to the natural causes that explained the very existence of the Jews: “The modern peoples have no option left but to eliminate the Jews,” the obsessed Führer went on. “They use all available means to defend themselves against this oncoming extermination process. One of these means is war. Thus we have to know that in this conflict between Aryan humanity and the Jewish race we still have to withstand hard battles, as Jewry has been able, consciously or unconsciously, to use large national groups of the Aryan race at its own command.”
¹⁷
And so it continued, on and on.

In the course of his monologue Hitler repeated his belief that the Jews were not, as they thought, on the eve of a “world triumph” but on the eve of a “world catastrophe.” “The peoples who were the first to recognize the Jew and the first to fight him would raise to world domination in his [the Jew’s] stead.”
¹⁸
The themes of these anti-Jewish tirades were not new, but this was no speech to the masses: Hitler was discussing the Jews with his propaganda minister, the minister who had just rediscovered the “Protocols.” The conversation had a ring of demented authenticity. And for the first time, it seems, Hitler revealed his ultimate goal: world domination.

In the meantime, of course, Goebbels was furiously mobilizing all German media outlets for the most systematic anti-Jewish campaign ever. On May 3, 1943, the minister issued a highly detailed circular (labeled confidential) to the press. After berating papers and journals for still lagging in this domain, the minister offered his own suggestions: “For example, countless sensational stories can be used, in which the Jew is the culprit. Above all, American domestic politics offers an inexhaustible reservoir. If those journals, in particular, which are geared to commenting on current affairs, apply their staff to this issue, they will be able to show the true face, the true attitude and the true aims of the Jews in a varied manner. Apart from that, of course, the Jews must now be used in the German press as a political target: the Jews are to blame; the Jews wanted the war; the Jews are making the war worse; and, again and again, the Jews are to blame.”
¹⁹

Klemperer soon became aware of the systematic aspect of the new propaganda frenzy, and his diary entries show that Goebbels’s directives were being faithfully applied: “The last few days have been dominated by the river dam business,” he recorded on May 21, 1943. “First the English have ‘criminally’ bombed two dams (location not stated); very many civilian casualties. Then: It has been proven, proven by an English newspaper article, that the criminal plan was hatched by a Jew…. The river dam business—it has superseded the 10,000 officers’ corpses at Katyn—is reinforced by the American child murder in Italy: There the Americans dropped toys filled with explosives (also similarly prepared ladies’ gloves). A ‘Serbian newspaper’ writes, this murder of children is a Jewish invention. No news-hour without such reports.”
²⁰
On May 29 Klemperer noted that one of his coworkers at the Zeiss factory brought a newspaper article from the
Freiheitskampf,
“The Jew is to blame” by Professor Dr. Johann von Leers:…‘If the Jews are victorious our whole nation will be slaughtered like the Polish officers in the forest of Katyn…. The Jewish question became the core and central question of our nation once it had let the Jews loose.’”
²¹

A few days later Klemperer once again turned to the unceasing anti-Jewish blasts: “On the radio, on Friday evening, Goebbels’s editorial from
Das Reich
on the dissolution of the Comintern [the Communist International had been dissolved by Stalin]. The Jewish
race
always master of camouflage. They adopt every political position that can benefit them, according to country and circumstance. Bolshevism, plutocracy—behind Roosevelt, behind Stalin there are Jews, their goal, the goal of this war is Jewish world dominion. But our propaganda is gradually having an effect, even in the enemy camp. The victory of our ideas is certain.”
²²

“Katyn” had some effect on anti-Bolshevik hatred and fear among the German population; yet comparison of these Soviet atrocities with German atrocities against the Poles and Jews came up quite frequently, according to SD reports. A typical reaction of this kind was overheard in mid-April: “If I did not know that in our people’s struggle for existence every method is right, the hypocrisy shown in the pity for the murdered Polish officers would be unbearable.”
²³
The report drew the conclusion that even among “positively attuned Volksgenossen, superficial comparisons were made which allowed for easy exploitation by hostile circles.”
²⁴

Yet almost a year later, in March 1944, Klemperer recorded that the relentless anti-Jewish propaganda had its effect. He mentioned a conversation with a good-natured foreman at the Zeiss factory. They came to speak of cities both of them knew, also about Hamburg; this led to a discussion of the bombing, and, for this mild fellow, the Americans, whom Europe had never threatened, were in the war because “a few billionaires” pushed them into it. “Behind the couple of billionaires,” Klemperer noted, “I heard ‘a couple of Jews’ and felt the belief in Nazi propaganda. This man, who is undoubtedly not a Nazi, most certainly believes that Germany is acting in self-defense, is completely in the right, and that the war was forced upon it; most certainly he believes, at least in large part, in the guilt of ‘world Jewry’ etc., etc. The National Socialists may have miscalculated in the conduct of the war, but certainly not in their propaganda. I always have to remind myself of Hitler’s words, that he is not making speeches for professors.”
²⁵

From mid-1942 on the continent-wide murder campaign ran as an administrative bureaucratic system in all its basic operations. However, had these operations unfolded only according to bureaucratic norms of instrumental rationality, they would increasingly have adapted, mainly after Stalingrad and Kursk, to the worsening military situation. A whole array of activities of no use to the war effort, such as transporting the Jews to their death despite growing logistic problems or exterminating Jewish workers—although, of course, the argument of the Jewish threat could always be brandished—would have probably slowed down. Yet the contrary was happening: Anti-Jewish propaganda became more pervasive than ever and the danger represented by every single Jew turned into a generalized ideological obsession.

In order to be effective, however, the ideological impetus had to emanate not only from the top but also be fanatically adopted and enforced at intermediate levels of the system by the technocrats, organizers, and direct implementers of the extermination—by those, in short, who made the system work, several levels below the main political leadership. Key figures in the agencies involved—particularly some of the best organizers and technocrats among them—were motivated by anti-Jewish fanaticism.
²⁶

In the face of such ruthless German determination, the absence of major opposition or protest from the surrounding world did not change significantly. As before, hundreds of thousands (possibly millions) of Germans and other Europeans continued tacitly to support the extermination campaign, both for profit and on ideological grounds (that, in occupied countries, did not exclude the simultaneous hatred of Germans, particularly among many Poles). The determining factors in the passivity of most remained fear, of course, the absence of any sense of identification with Jews, and the lack of decided and sustained encouragement to help the victims from the leaders of Christian churches or the political leadership of resistance movements.

Among the Jews—the majority of whom had already been murdered by mid-1943—the two contrary trends that have already been mentioned became ever more noticeable: increasing passivity and lack of solidarity with fellow sufferers among the mass of terrorized and physically weakened victims (mainly in the camps) on the one hand, and on the other the tightening bonds within small, usually politically homogeneous groups that, as we shall see, would rise in some places in desperate armed revolts.

II

On January 11, 1943, Hermann Höfle sent a radiogram from Lublin to SS Obersturmbannführer Franz Heim, the deputy commander of the Security Police and the SD in the General Government; a few minutes later he sent a second, most probably identical one to Eichmann. Whereas the radiogram from Höfle to Heim was partially decoded by the British and distributed on January 15 (to the small group of recipients of these decodes), the second message was either not fully intercepted or not decoded except for the indication of the source and of the addressee.
²⁷

Höfle’s message to Heim was, in its main part, a computation of the number of Jews exterminated in the camps of “Aktion Reinhardt” up to December 31, 1942. After listing the number of Jews who had arrived in the four camps during the third and fourth weeks of December, Höfle gave the following overall results of the extermination for each camp:

L [Lublin-Majdanek]: 24,733.

B [Belzec]: 434,508.

S [Sobibor]: 101,370.

T [Treblinka]: 71,355 (read: 713,555).

TOTAL: 1,274,166.
²⁸

Höfle’s report was probably related to a more encompassing set of results being put together at the same time. According to his postwar declarations, Eichmann had given Himmler a first progress report at the SS leader’s headquarters near Zhitomir, on August 11, 1942 (although Himmler’s calendar indicates that the meeting dealt essentially with the planned deportations from Romania).
²⁹
A second report, this time a written one, was prepared by Eichmann’s IV B 4 department and sent to Himmler on December 15, 1942, under the title “Operations and Situation Report 1942 on the Final Solution of the European Jewish Question.”
³⁰
Though the report is considered lost, it is known to have displeased the SS chief intensely.

In a letter of January 18, 1943, addressed to Müller, the irate Reichsführer did not mince words: “The Reich Main Security Office is hereby relieved of its statistical responsibilities in this area, since the statistical materials submitted to date have consistently fallen short of professional standards of precision.”
³¹
On the same day the Reichsführer put the SS chief statistician, Richard Korherr, in charge of the report: “The Reich Security Main Office,” Himmler wrote Korherr, “is to put at your disposal whatever materials you request or need for this purpose.”
³²

An initial Korherr report, sixteen pages long, establishing the total of Jews killed by December 31, 1942, was submitted to Himmler on March 23, 1943: The number of Jews “evacuated” was estimated at 1,873,539. On Himmler’s demand an abridged estimate, updated to March 31, 1943, was prepared for Hitler; it was six and a half pages long. In this second version, Korherr was ordered to replace the words “special treatment” (of the Jews) by “transport of Jews from the eastern provinces to the Russian East: passed through camps in the General Government…through camps in the Warthegau.
³³
We do not know the total number that could have been alluded to or deduced from the second version, but it must have been close to 2.5 million. Korherr titled his report “The Final Solution of the European Jewish Question.”
³⁴