Heinrich Himmler : A Life (97 page)

Gas was also the murder method that came to be used in Auschwitz concentration camp, which had been considerably enlarged since the start of
the war with the Soviet Union. Experiments were carried out with the poison gas Zyklon B, which was already used in the camp for the purposes of disinfection.
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The first of these occurred at the beginning of September, when 600 Soviet POWs and 250 sick prisoners were killed with Zyklon B in a cellar of Block 11. Later, in the middle of September, 900 Soviet POWs were murdered in the same way in the morgue of the crematorium.
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By the end of the year it can be assumed that a number of small groups of prisoners—in all likelihood exhausted Jewish forced labourers from Upper Silesia—had fallen victim to the Zyklon B experiments in Auschwitz.
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In November 1941 the SS ordered the construction of a large crematorium in Mogilev (around 150 kilometres east of Minsk), which suggests that a large extermination camp was going to be located there. During the early months of 1942, however, the SS decided to expand their extermination facilities in Poland instead. The ovens that were originally planned for Mogilev were sent to Auschwitz in 1942.
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This evidence can be summarized as follows: while experiments with Zyklon B were going on in Auschwitz, in the autumn of 1941 the SS began building installations for murdering people with gas near those ghettos that were the destinations for the initial wave of deportations from the Reich—in Riga, near Ł
ó
ódź (Chelmno), in Belzec, probably also in Mogilev, in other words, in the Minsk area. In those regions that were of central importance for the future transfers of population being planned within the context of the racial ‘New Order’, at the very least the indigenous Jewish population that was ‘incapable of work’ was to be exterminated. In addition, it was still the intention to deport the remaining Jews to the occupied Soviet territory, a ‘final solution’ plan which was also based on the physical extermination of the European Jews.

The deportations to Minsk began on 8 November. The day before, on 7 November, the German security police had murdered around 12,000 inhabitants of the Minsk ghetto with the help of indigenous auxiliaries. Eight transports with around 8,000 people arrived in Minsk before the deportations were interrupted at the end of November as a result of the poor transport situation. In view of the approaching winter Himmler had to abandon his original intention of deporting the central European Jews ‘to the east’
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before the end of the year; the plans now ran into the coming spring.
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When the deportations to Riga began on 19 November the construction of the KZ that was intended for the German Jews had not even begun.
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The first five transports intended for Riga, with around 5,000 people from the Reich, were therefore diverted to Kaunas, where all the deportees were shot by members of Einsatzkommando 3 in Fort IX of the historic fortress.
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Meanwhile more mass murders were taking place in the Riga ghetto. Between 29 November and 1 December the local HSSPF had around 4,000 Latvian Jews and, on 8 and 9 December, probably more than 20,000 inhabitants of the ghetto shot.
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While in Soviet custody, Jeckeln stated that he had received the order to liquidate the ghetto from Himmler himself.
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Moreover, during the first massacre a thousand Jews who had just been deported from Berlin were shot immediately on their arrival in the early morning of 30 November. However, after this mass murder Himmler called a halt to the murder of Jews from Reich territory for the following months; he had also attempted to prevent the shooting of the Berlin Jews. There is a relevant entry in Himmler’s office diary for 30 November which states: ‘Jewish transport from Berlin: do not liquidate.’
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The phone-call, however, came too late; the massacre had already occurred.
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Himmler then threatened Jeckeln, in a wireless telegram dated 1 December, that he would ‘punish’ ‘independent actions and contraventions’ of ‘the guidelines that I have issued or the Reich Security Main Office has given out in my name’ concerning how ‘the Jews resettled to the Ostland area’ are to ‘be treated’. At the same time, he summoned Jeckeln and discussed the ‘Jewish question’ with him on 4 December.
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The choice of words indicates that Jeckeln had not contravened an express order of Himmler’s, but rather had not correctly understood the policy contained in Himmler’s ‘guidelines’ (which we do not know). In contrast to those living in the target areas, the Jews deported from the Reich in the autumn of 1941 were not (yet) to be killed en masse.

It is not surprising that Jeckeln had ‘misunderstood’ Himmler. In the autumn of 1941 more and more leading Nazis could be heard talking openly about the coming ‘annihilation’ or ‘extermination’ of the Jews. At dinner on 25 October Hitler once again recalled his ‘prophecy’ of 30 January 1939, and told his guests among other things that it was ‘a good thing if people are scared by talk that we are exterminating the Jews’.
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The weekly journal
Das Reich
published a leader article by Goebbels in its issue of 16 November 1941 in which he too recalled Hitler’s prophecy of 30 January 1939, and commented: ‘We are experiencing the realization of this prophecy and the Jews are meeting a fate that, though hard, is more than merited.’ ‘World Jewry’, according to Goebbels, was now undergoing ‘a gradual process of
annihilation’. Two days later Rosenberg spoke at a press conference of the impending ‘biological elimination of the whole of European Jewry’.
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It was probably not a coincidence that this statement of Rosenberg’s was preceded by a discussion with Himmler on 15 November lasting several hours, which, among other things, was concerned with Jewish policy.
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Evidently it was the leadership’s intention to extend the ‘solution of the Jewish question’ beyond the murders that had hitherto been limited to specific areas in order to pursue a still more radical ‘final solution’, even if they were not yet clear about the ‘how’, the ‘where’, and the ‘when’ of a programme of ‘annihilation’ that was being demanded with increasing stridency. The mood within the top leadership circles can only be described as murderous.

This matched the situation in the occupied territories. It was not a coincidence that a variety of functionaries on the ‘periphery’ seized the initiative to embark on or advocate mass murders of Jews more or less simultaneously. The deportations were directed to ghettos that were already completely full up, to camps which did not yet exist (Riga, Mogilev), or to key regions that were envisaged as settlement areas for ethnic Germans. In this way ‘impossible situations’ were being brought about quite systematically.

During these months Himmler behaved as he had in July–August when it came to the inclusion of women and children in the mass murder. The initiative for the intensification of Jewish policy—in this case, the start of the deportations—once again came from Hitler, but Himmler, like other leading functionaries, intuited such a decision, felt his way forward, and acted in advance of it and took on an active role as soon as the time was ripe. The first suggestion that gas might be used as a method of murder appears to have come from him; he took advice from the experts who had acquired relevant experience in the context of the ‘Euthanasia’ programme; he made suggestions, adopted proposals such as that from Globocnik to establish an extermination camp in Belzec, gave the initiators enough space to develop their ideas, but intervened if his subordinates went too far. Thus the murder process was typically set in motion by the tension between, on the one hand, orders that had been framed in general terms and were intended to be understood intuitively, and on the other, individual initiatives on the part of those who were responsible at the local level. At the same time, the leadership—and that meant very largely Himmler himself—could intervene as required in order to speed up or slow down the process.

On the evening of 7 December Himmler dined at Hitler’s headquarters. Afterwards they discussed the most recent world political events, as is clear from Himmler’s office diary: ‘Japan’s declaration of war on America and England.’ As a result of Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor, which immediately preceded its declaration of war, the Second World War had finally become a ‘world war’.

As an ally of Japan, Hitler was determined to declare war on the United States. From his point of view this was a relatively risk-free undertaking, as America’s armed forces would be tied down in the Pacific for years, while in the meantime he could bring his European war to a successful conclusion and in any case could attack American transports to Europe by sea at will. On 12 December, at a special session of the Reichstag, Hitler officially declared war as an ally of Japan, a decision that was enthusiastically received by the Nazi members of parliament, among whom was Reichstag deputy Himmler.
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On the following day Himmler took part in a meeting of the Gauleiters and Reich leaders which was held in Hitler’s private rooms in the Reich Chancellery. Hitler made some observations about the critical situation on the eastern front, as well as about the situation created by the declaration of war on the United States. As Goebbels noted, he referred once more to his ‘prophecy’ of 30 January 1939: ‘As far as the Jewish question is concerned, the Führer is determined to sort things out. He prophesied to the Jews that if they once more brought about a world war they would bring about their own annihilation. That wasn’t just words. The world war has happened; the annihilation of the Jews must be the necessary consequence. We must treat this question without any sentimentality.’ To feel any compassion was inappropriate. ‘Those responsible for this bloody conflict [ . . . ] will have to pay with their lives’ for the German losses.
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However radical these statements were, they did not differ in tone from the earlier threats of annihilation that Hitler, Rosenberg, and Goebbels had been making during the previous months. Thus they represent neither a change of policy nor a ‘fundamental decision’ in Jewish policy.
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They were simply a further demand to extend and speed up the mass murder of the Jews that had been in progress for months. When Himmler had a lengthy meeting with Hitler on 18 December his notepad contained numerous points for discussion, which in the first instance referred to the organization, equipment, deployment, and appointments of the armed SS, but also issues concerning the order police. However, he had noted the ‘Jewish question’
as the first point, and wrote next to it, evidently as a result of this meeting: ‘to be exterminated as partisans.’ In fact, since the summer Jews were being murdered en masse in connection with the combating of partisans or, to put it more accurately, under this pretext. It appears that Himmler simply wanted this practice (or this use of words) once again to be confirmed by the highest authority in the regime.
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Himmler spent Christmas 1941 on the eastern front. On 23 December he set off from Rastenburg for Poltava in the Ukraine to meet Walter von Reichenau, the commander of Army Group South. On the following day he flew to Mariupol, where he visited Colonel-General Ewald von Kleist, the commander of the 1st Panzer Army. From there he continued his journey to Taganrog on Lake Asov to spend Christmas Eve with wounded members of the ‘Leibstandarte’. The next day he travelled to the divisional HQ of the ‘Leibstandarte’ in Nikolajevka to meet the divisional commander, Sepp Dietrich; on 26 December he inspected the front-line positions of the ‘Viking’ division and met the divisional commander, Felix Steiner. On the following day he flew back to Poltava, stayed there overnight, and next day attended a briefing at the HQ of Army Group South.

On 3 January 1942, six days after his return to headquarters, he embarked on another trip to the front, this time to the northern sector of the eastern front, where he visited the other two Waffen-SS divisions that were in action, the Death’s Head and the police division. He returned on 6 January, and during the following days concentrated on dealing with matters that had arisen as a result of his trips to the front: promotions, the setting up of hospitals for the Waffen-SS in the east, improvements to the combating of lice infestation, ‘warm things’ for the police deployed in the east. He even had time to watch the film
Request Concert
. On 14 and 15 January the heads of the SS Main Offices met under his chairmanship to discuss a redistribution of responsibilities. On 17 January Himmler took part in a hunting party which the East Prussian Gauleiter Erich Koch had organized in Leissienen, and on the eighteenth as well as the twentieth he had lunch with Hitler.
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On 21 January his routine was broken by a phone-call from Heydrich concerned, among other things, as he noted, with the ‘Jewish question. Meeting in Berlin’. The head of the Reich Security Main Office informed him about the results of a conference that had taken place the day before at the SS’s guest-house on the Wannsee. Referring to his assignment from Göring ‘to make all the preparations necessary [ . . . ] for an overall solution to the Jewish question in Europe’, Heydrich had invited all the important agencies involved—SS and police, Party and Reich Chancelleries, the Ministry of the Eastern Territories, the government of the General Government, the Reich Justice, Interior, and Foreign Ministries, Göring’s Four-Year Plan agency—to a ‘general discussion’, ‘in the interests of achieving a common viewpoint’. Originally scheduled for 9 December 1941, the conference was postponed at short notice because of America’s entry into the war, as some of those invited would have been unable to attend.
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The participants focused above all on the question of whether or not the ‘half-castes’ (
Mischlinge
) and those living in ‘mixed marriages’ should be included in the ‘final solution’. Discussion of this issue took up most of the conference, without resolving it.
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Before Heydrich opened the discussion he gave a general overview of the state of Jewish persecution throughout Europe. We do not have a verbatim account of his statement; we have only the minutes prepared by Eichmann at Heydrich’s request, subsequently revised in accordance with instructions from the Gestapo chief Müller, and then sent to the participants.
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