All Hell Let Loose (83 page)

Local authorities were generally appreciative of such cheap labour, which the Mayor of Duisburg described as ‘highly satisfactory’. But some civilians deplored alleged coddling: a road contractor wrote in March 1944, ‘We are still much too soft on PoWs and other labour squads in our streets. I say, better throw one man overboard than let us drown.’ The SS frequently used prisoners to collect loot from wrecked buildings for their own profit – in Düsseldorf two men were shot lest they reveal their jailers’ racketeering. Civilian doctors frequently signed false death certificates for prisoners shot or beaten to death; in this as in much else, the German medical profession displayed its readiness to oblige the Nazi regime. Slave labourers continued to die even after being enlisted in the service of Reich industries, partly because a tension persisted between the need for their services, and Nazi reluctance to feed them. By one calculation, 170,000 of 2.77 million Russian civilian workers perished, along with 130,000 Poles and 32,000 Italian PoWs.

From 1943 onwards, however, prisoner mortality declined sharply. Even some Jews were kept alive, notably as workers at the huge IG Farben complex beside Auschwitz-Birkenau. The major Holocaust killings, save those of Hungary’s Jews, were already completed. Foreign workers and slaves never provided a wholly satisfactory substitute labour force – they were thought to underperform their German counterparts by at least 15 per cent, perhaps as much as 30 per cent. It was a folly, as well as a barbarity, to suppose that starved and brutalised slave labourers could achieve as much useful productivity as those treated with minimal humanity. The concentration camp system, which the SS sought to make a profit centre, was inefficient even on its own terms, but slave labour alone made it possible for Germany to continue the war until 1945.

2
KILLING JEWS

The edifice of Holocaust literature is vast, yet does not satisfactorily explain why the Nazis accepted the economic cost of embarking upon the destruction of the Jewish people, diverting scarce manpower and transport to a programme of mass murder while the outcome of the war still hung in the balance. The answer must lie in the deranged centrality of Jewish persecution not merely to National Socialist ideology, but to Germany’s policies throughout the global conflict. The Nazis were always determined to exploit the licence granted to a government waging total war to fulfil objectives that otherwise posed difficulties even for a totalitarian regime. Goering asserted at a key party meeting on 12 November 1938, following
Kristallnacht
: ‘If, in the near future, the German Reich should come into conflict with foreign powers, it goes without saying that we in Germany should first of all let it come to a showdown with the Jews.’

At that time, Nazi policy still promoted the emigration of Reich Jews, but a November 1939 article in the SS journal
Schwartze Korps
asserted the commitment to ‘the actual and definitive end of Jewry in Germany, its total extermination’. Many such remarks were made openly and publicly by leading Nazis: Hitler made his notorious ‘prophecy’ in a speech to the Reichstag on 30 January 1939, asserting that war would result in ‘the annihilation of European Jewry’. He sought to make it plain that every Jew within his reach was a hostage for the ‘good behaviour’ of the Western Powers. If the British and French declined to acquiesce in his ambitions – above all if they chose to oppose these with force – the consequences would be their responsibility.

The Western Powers treated such remarks as hyperbolic. Even when Hitler embarked on his rampage of hemispheric conquest, the democracies found it difficult to conceive that the people of a highly educated and long-civilised European society could fulfil their leaders’ extravagant rhetoric and implement genocide. Despite mounting evidence of Nazi crimes, this delusion persisted in some degree until 1945, and even for a time afterwards.

The Nazi T4 euthanasia programme, which began in July 1939, killed German and Polish inmates of psychiatric units, categorised as ‘unfit for further existence’, at a rate of some 5,000 a month in 1940. Most were gassed, though some were shot, under Gestapo and SS supervision with assistance from doctors; between four and five thousand of the 70,000 victims were Jewish. The T4 programme was historically important, because at an early stage it demonstrated the German government’s willingness to undertake an annihilatory process, minutely bureaucratised from Berlin, to eliminate a sub-group surplus to the Third Reich’s requirements. Once one minority had been slaughtered wholesale, no further moral barrier stood in the path of the Holocaust: the dilemmas facing the Nazi leadership related only to timing and logistical feasibility.

For more than two years after war came, the priority of securing victory was held to require postponement of an absolute elimination of European Jewry. Between August 1939 and the summer of 1942, when the death camp programme achieved full capacity, the Nazis contented themselves with killing large numbers of people in many countries on an arbitrary and opportunistic basis. During the first months after German troops entered Poland, some 10,000 Poles were murdered – a mixture of Jews and non-Jews deemed inimical to German interests. Five designated SS Einsatzgruppen – death squads – followed the armoured spearheads. Their commanders were granted generous discretion about selecting victims, which some exploited to eliminate prostitutes, gypsies and the mentally ill. Around 60,000 Polish Jewish soldiers were segregated from their fellow PoWs and earmarked for later disposal; all Poland’s 1.7 million Jews were designated for resettlement in ghettos. Early in 1940, the Nazis embarked on the enforced removal of 600,000 Jews from areas of the country now incorporated in the Greater Reich; the deportees were transferred to the ‘General Government’ rump, administered separately. Large numbers, displaced without provision for their shelter or feeding, perished within months.

At this stage, Nazi policy was still incoherent. There was much discussion about deportation: in May 1940 Himmler presented a memorandum to Hitler about the possibility of shipping Europe’s Jews to Africa or Madagascar. The Reichsführer SS mentioned the radical alternative of the ‘Bolshevist method of the physical extermination of a people’, but rejected this as ‘un-Germanic and impossible’. It was agreed that as many Jews as possible should perish in the course of the normal business of administering occupation; but there was no commitment to their systematic slaughter.

During the next two years, and especially after the invasion of Russia, Germans killed Jews at whim, on a scale largely determined by availability of manpower and resources. A German ordnance sergeant from a bakery company recalled: ‘I saw these people being rounded up and then just had to look away, as they were clubbed to death right before our eyes … A great many German soldiers, as well as Lithuanians, stood there watching. They did not express either assent or disapproval – they just stood, totally indifferent.’ A handful of German officers displayed the courage to protest. Col. Walter Bruns, an engineer who chanced upon a massacre of Jews while out riding near the Rumbuli forest in Latvia on 30 November 1941, submitted a formal report to Army Group North. He also made a personal visit to army headquarters at Angerburg to deliver a further copy. No formal response was forthcoming, save that the chief of staff urged that in future such killing ‘must be done with greater caution’.

The Einsatzgruppen were relatively few and small; they achieved some impressive massacres, notably in Ukraine, but their victims were still numbered only in tens of thousands. Energetic efforts by the SS Mounted Brigade in the Pripet marshes during early August 1941 accounted for 6,504 Jewish victims. The unit’s final report for the month cited 15,878 killings, though the real total was probably over 25,000. The logistical difficulties of wholesale murder proved immense, even when labour-saving expedients were adopted, such as herding victims into mass graves before shooting them. At such a sluggish pace, the process of ‘solving Europe’s Jewish problem’ would require decades, and in the late summer of 1941 SS commanders began to demand a much more radical and comprehensive approach. In September, Einsatzgruppe C proposed working the Jews to death: ‘If we entirely dispense with the Jewish labour force, then the economic rebuilding of Ukrainian industry … is virtually impossible. There is only one possibility … the solution of the Jewish problem via the full-scale deployment of the Jewish labour force. That would bring with it the gradual liquidation of Jewry.’

Late in July 1941, a new policy was adopted: confinement of east European Jews to ghettos, where they became easier to control and deploy for labour service, while freeing up outside accommodation. The Wehrmacht strongly supported this measure, because it resolved administrative difficulties in its rear areas. The SS extended the range of Jewish murder victims to include many more women and children, but after experiencing the practical difficulties of industrial killing, few SS officers yet felt able to accept a challenge as ambitious as exterminating the entire race. Through the winter of 1941–42 they focused upon packing the ghettos, then completing regional cleansing processes by killing all those Jews found outside them, most in rural areas. Ghetto living conditions were unspeakable: from August 1941 onwards, 5,500 Jews died each month from starvation and disease out of Warsaw’s total ghetto population of 338,000, and mortality was comparable elsewhere.

Final victory in Russia was still assumed to be imminent. Until this came, with a consequent liberation of resources, most of the Nazi leadership favoured deferring a ‘Final Solution’. Heinrich Himmler, however, was less patient: he saw swift eradication of Jews in the occupied territories both as a national priority and a means of extending his personal authority. He flaunted his mandate as Reichskommissar ‘for the strengthening of the German nation’, even though at that stage Hitler had made no decision about ‘Germanisation’ of occupied Soviet territory. It may sound trite to emphasise the centrality of the influence of the SS upon the Holocaust, but it is nonetheless necessary. The most powerful fiefdom in Nazi Germany pursued the extinction of the Jews almost heedless of its impact on the country’s war-making. As John Lukacs has observed, Himmler focused far more single-mindedly on this objective than did Hitler.

In September 1941, the Führer confirmed Himmler’s victory in his contest with Alfred Rosenberg for authority over eastern Europe: the Reichsführer SS was given explicit licence to conduct ethnic cleansing in the east. This decision marked the onset of the Third Reich’s systematic campaign of genocide. Amid expectations of looming victory, commitments were made that became significant impediments to Germany’s war effort when faced with the rising spectre of defeat. Yet they were never reversed: Himmler pursued the extermination of Jews with a concentration of purpose conspicuously absent from every other aspect of Nazi policy-making. Any rational assessment of Germany’s predicament in late 1941 demanded dedication to winning the war, above all against the Soviet Union. If this was achieved, the Third Reich could thereafter order its polity as it wished; if not, then National Socialism was doomed. But Himmler committed the SS to a task which could contribute nothing to German victory, and indeed diverted resources from its achievement.

Through the autumn and into the winter of 1941, the pace of slaughter accelerated: scores of towns and villages were systematically purged of Jews. In October, when a Soviet ‘stay-behind’ commando blew up the Romanian army’s newly established headquarters in Odessa, Romanian troops assisted by German SS killed some 40,000 of its Jews. On the 18th and 19th, the SS murdered all 8,000 Jewish inhabitants of Mariupol, and a week later another 1,800 in Taganrog. Week after week the process continued, in towns the world had never heard of – Skadovsk and Feodosiya, Kerch and Dzhankoy, Nikolayev and Kherson. Mental-asylum patients were killed as a matter of course, whatever their religious affiliation. The SS also shot large numbers of prisoners whom they identified as ‘of Asiatic appearance’, and began the work of murdering gypsies, which became systematic in 1942. PoW camps were combed for Russian Jews and commissars; those identified, at least 140,000 in all, were removed and shot. It seems important to emphasise that by the time the Final Solution was agreed, at least two million Soviet PoWs had already been killed or allowed to die. All moral barriers to mass murder had been broken down, ample precedent for wholesale killing established, before the major massacres of Jews were ordained.

In the winter of 1941, administrative confusion persisted about whether Jews capable of forced labour service should be kept alive. Local commanders adopted diverse policies: in Kaunas 1,608 men, women and children ‘ill or suspected of being infectious’ were murdered on 26 September, followed by a further 1,845 in a ‘punishment operation’ on 4 October, and 9,200 more after a new screening on 29 October. On 30 October, the head of the German civil administration in Slutsk in western Russia made a formal protest to the general commissioner in Minsk about the massacre of the city’s Jews. ‘One simply could not do without the Jewish craftsmen,’ he said, ‘because they were indispensable for the maintenance of the economy … All vital enterprises would be paralysed with a single blow if all Jews were liquidated.’

His complaints, he said, had been brushed aside by the commander of the police battalion carrying out the killings, who expressed astonishment ‘and explained that he had received instructions … to make the city free of Jews without exception, as they had also done in other cities. The cleansing had to take place on political grounds, and nowhere had economic factors so far played a role … During the action the city itself offered a horrible picture … The Jews, among them also craftsmen, were brutally mistreated in a frightfully barbarous way. One can no longer speak of a Jewish action, it appeared much more like a revolution.’ None of this, of course, deflected Himmler or his officers: on 29–30 November more than 10,000 inhabitants of the Riga ghetto were shot outside the city, and another 20,000 a week later. By December, most Jews in the Baltic states were dead; thousands of collaborators recruited by the Germans as ‘local voluntary troops’ participated enthusiastically in the killings. For the rest of the war, Latvians, Lithuanians, Estonians and Ukrainians played an important part in implementing Himmler’s Jewish extermination programme – over 300,000 were eventually enlisted as auxiliaries to the SS, men who might credibly otherwise have served in Hitler’s armies.