All Hell Let Loose (84 page)

The Wehrmacht was wholly complicit in Himmler’s operations, even though the SS did most of the killing. On 10 August 1941, Sixth Army commander Walter von Reichenau cited in an order the ‘necessary execution of criminal, Bolshevist and mainly Jewish elements’ which the SS must carry out. Manstein described Jews on 20 November as ‘the middleman between the enemy at our backs and the remains of the Red Army’. Karl-Heinrich von Stülpnagel of Seventeenth Army cautioned his units on 30 July not to shoot civilians indiscriminately, but instead to concentrate upon ‘Jewish and communist inhabitants’. The Wehrmacht routinely provided logistical support for SS massacres, together with troops to cordon killing fields. On many documented occasions, army units participated in shootings, despite orders from higher commanders against such sullying of soldierly honour. Soviet partisan activity provided a pretext for ‘security operations’, such as that for which the orders issued by the Wehrmacht’s 707th Division’s commander in Belarus are preserved. ‘Jews,’ he wrote on 16 October 1941, ‘are the only support the partisans have for surviving now and over the winter. Their annihilation must therefore be carried out uncompromisingly.’ Without the Wehrmacht’s active assistance, mass murder on the scale that took place in 1941–42 would have been impossible. By the end of 1941, at least half a million east European Jews were dead.

The elimination of European Jewry assumed an ever-higher priority on the Nazis’ agenda: Hitler convinced himself that the August 1941 Atlantic Charter, together with America’s looming entry into the war, were driven by Jewish influence on the United States government. This lent a new urgency to his determination to kill their co-religionists in Europe. During the months and years that followed, Germany’s leader came to view this as an objective as important as military victory, and even as a precondition for achieving it. Attempts to discern rationality in Nazi strategy, especially from 1941 onwards, founder in the face of such a mindset.

Peter Longerich, one of the more authoritative historians of the Holocaust, has convincingly argued that the Nazi leadership’s commitment to executing the Final Solution through designated death camps was not made until the end of 1941: ‘The leadership at the centre and the executive organizations on the periphery radicalized one another through a reciprocal process.’ Construction of the first purpose-built extermination camp at Beł
ec near Lublin began only on 1 November 1941. Longerich cites evidence that, until very late that year, key SS officers were still talking of mass deportations rather than extermination, and were chiefly preoccupied with how best to organise and mobilise Jews for slave labour. That autumn, anti-Jewish propaganda within the Reich was sharply increased, to prepare public opinion for the deportation of German Jews to the east. If the distinction sounds arcane between shipping the condemned to a wilderness where they were expected to starve and gassing them wholesale, it was significant in the evolution of the Holocaust.

When the US commitment to the Allied cause became explicit, Hitler could no longer discern advantage in sparing Jews within his reach. ‘In autumn 1941,’ writes Longerich, ‘the Nazi leadership began to fight the war on all levels as a war “against the Jews”.’ The construction of gas chambers commenced at Chelmno, Beł
ec, Auschwitz and elsewhere. Gas trucks had already been employed for the murder of mental patients in Germany and parts of the Nazi empire. Himmler welcomed wider use of such technology, not least to ease the psychological strain which mass shootings imposed on his SS. By autumn 1941, Zyklon B was killing selected prisoners at Auschwitz and elsewhere – though at that stage, most victims were non-Jews. Local initiatives by SS officers, rather than a coherent central directive, determined who died.

In mid-October 1941, mass deportations of Jews from the Reich began, with thousands being dispatched variously to Łód
, Riga, Kaunas and Minsk. Among the designated victims there were more than a few suicides, and in the light of events it is hard to suggest that those who took this course were ill-advised. Hans Michaelis was a retired lawyer in Charlottenburg. Just before being transported, he sent for his niece. ‘Maria,’ he said, ‘I don’t have much time. What should I do? What is easiest, what’s the most dignified? To live or to die? To suffer a terrible fate or to end one’s own life?’ His niece wrote: ‘We speak. We examine both possibilities. We ask ourselves what his late wife … would have advised. Again he grabs the clock.’ Then he said, ‘I have 50 hours left here, at most! … Thank God that my Gertrud died a normal death, before Hitler. What would I give for that! … Maria, see how time flies!’ As at last they parted, she said, ‘Uncle Hans, you will know the right thing to do. Farewell.’ Hans Michaelis took poison.

A Berliner named Hilde Meikley watched the removal of local Jews: ‘Sadly I have to say that many people stood in the doorways voicing their pleasure as the wretched column went by. “Just look at those cheeky Jews!” someone shouted. “They’re laughing now, but their last hour has come.”’ The victims were permitted to carry fifty kilograms of baggage apiece. All their valuables were seized at the departure stations, where body searches were conducted and passengers were required to pay fares. Luggage was loaded onto freight wagons, never to be seen again by its owners. Local authorities took possession of vacated housing, which was reallocated to eager new tenants. The rhetoric of Rosenberg and Goebbels, acknowledging the fact of the deportations to the world, was uncompromising. Rosenberg told a November 1941 press conference: ‘Some six million Jews still live in the east, and this question can only be solved by a biological extermination of the whole of Jewry in Europe. The Jewish question will only be solved for Germany when the last Jew has left German territory, and for Europe when not a single Jew stands on the European continent as far as the Urals.’

If the Nazis bore responsibility for the Holocaust, they were assisted in their crimes by some, if not most, of the regimes of occupied Europe. Anti-Semitism, albeit less homicidal than in Germany, was commonplace. Mihail Sebastian, a Jewish writer briefly conscripted into the Romanian army, noted the attitude of many of his fellow soldiers, which contributed to their acquiescence in Nazi dominance of Romania’s polity: ‘Voichita Aurel, my comrade in the Twenty-First Infantry, said something yesterday about Captain Capsuneanu, something that sums up a whole Romanian style of politics: “He’s a real mean bastard who’ll beat you and swear at you. But there’s one good thing about him: he can’t stand yids and lets us have a go at them too.”’ Sebastian wrote: ‘That is precisely the consolation that the Germans offer the Czechs and Poles, and which they are prepared to offer the Romanians.’ The German occupation of France institutionalised a French anti-Semitism which was already widespread, and which the Vichy government was happy to make explicit.

So many prominent Nazis spoke openly about their intentions towards the Jews that it remains remarkable that the Allied national leaderships were reluctant to accept their words at face value. Informed citizens in both Britain and America drew appropriate conclusions about what was happening, reinforced by eyewitness testimony from eastern Europe. Mrs Blanche Dugdale, a passionate British crusader for Jewish interests, wrote a letter published in the
Spectator
: ‘In March 1942, Himmler visited Poland, and decreed that by the end of the year 50 per cent of the Jewish population should be “exterminated” … and the pace seems to have been hastened since. Now the German programme demands the disappearance of all Jews … Mass-murders on a scale unheard-of since the dawn of civilization began immediately after the order was issued.’ Mrs Dugdale gave an account of the deportations, identifying Beł
ec, Sobibór and Treblinka as death camps. ‘Certain it seems that Polish Jewry will be beyond help if the murder-campaign cannot be stopped before the war ends.’ Helmuth von Moltke of the Abwehr informed the British by secret letter via Stockholm in March 1943: ‘At least nine-tenths of the [German] population do not know that we have killed hundreds of thousands of Jews. They go on believing they have just been segregated … farther to the east … If you told these people what has really happened they would answer, “You are just a victim of British propaganda.”’

Within some Allied nations there was ambivalence, or worse, in defining attitudes to the greatest of all Nazi persecutions. Anti-Semitism was etched deep into Russian history and attitudes: in Moscow at Easter 1942, for instance, one of countless rumours sweeping the city asserted that Jews had been committing ritual murders of Orthodox children – the ghastly old east European ‘blood libel’ against the Jewish people. In 1944, the NKVD reported hearing people assert that ‘Hitler did a good job, beating up the Jews.’ The revelation of the death camps posed a dilemma for Moscow, which the Soviet authorities never entirely resolved. They could not applaud the Nazis’ slaughter of the Jews, but one historian has called the Holocaust ‘an indigestible lump in the belly of the Soviet triumph’. To acknowledge its enormity was to require a sharing of the Russian people’s overpowering sense of victimhood, which they were most unwilling to concede. In Soviet correspondents’ wartime dispatches, all references to explicitly Jewish suffering were excised by the censor. In 1945, when Russians heaped abuse on their defeated enemies, observant Germans noticed that almost the only charge not laid at their door was that of persecuting the Jews.

In Poland, where anti-Semitism was widespread, some people cited reports that Jews had welcomed the Red Army in September 1939 as evidence of their perfidy. When Jews in the Warsaw ghetto staged a brief and doomed revolt in 1943, a Polish nationalist underground paper wrote on 5 May: ‘During the Soviet occupation … Jews regularly stripped our soldiers of their arms, killed them, betrayed our community leaders, and openly crossed to the side of the occupier. [In one small town] which in 1939 was momentarily in the hands of the Soviets … Jews erected a triumphal arch for the Soviet troops to pass through and all wore red armbands and cockades. That was, and is, their attitude to Poland. Everyone in Poland should remember this.’ In the spring of 1944 some Jewish soldiers deserted from the Polish corps based in Scotland, citing disgust at anti-Semitism, which they said was no less apparent in the exile army than in their homeland.