Hitler and the Holocaust (14 page)

HEINRICH HIMMLER,
speech to higher SS and police leaders, Poznan
, October 1943

I
t is sometimes forgotten that Jews were not the primary target of the Nazis in the first eighteen months after the invasion of Poland in September 1939. The Germans, having decided in agreement with the Soviet Union on the destruction of the Polish state, proceeded to eliminate its elites, to “transfer” parts of its population eastward, to extinguish any manifestation of its national identity, and to reduce the mass of its people to helotry. In 1939 and 1940, close to ten thousand Polish intellectuals, members of the nobility, and clergy were killed by the Einsatzgruppen in a deliberate effort to crush resistance. In the wake of the killers came German economists, technical experts, and academic planners who calculated that much of Poland’s rural population was “nothing more than dead weight,” whose continued presence was an obstacle to industrial “development” and to Germany’s economic interests. “Negative demographic policy”—a technocratic concept emanating from Goering’s Four-year Plan Agency—envisaged organizing the deaths of millions of Poles (and later Russians) as a solution to problems of food supply as the war was extended.
¹
It was no accident that two million Soviet prisoners of war were allowed to die of starvation in German camps before the end of 1941. Goering himself predicted in November 1941 that “twenty to thirty million people will starve in Russia.” Perhaps, he cynically added, that was a good thing, “since certain people will have to be decimated.” New strategies of racial reordering, in the name of “Germanization” and a settlement policy for the conquered territories, were being devised in the framework of Himmler’s Generalplan Ost, which covered the whole area between Leningrad and the Crimea.
²

During the 1939–1941 period, however, the Nazis had not worked out a clear, consistent policy with regard to Jews, Poles, or even the half-million ethnic Germans they had “repatriated” to German-annexed territory. On 25 May 1940, Himmler had submitted a secret memorandum, entitled “Reflections on the Treatment of the Peoples of Alien Race in the East,” to Hitler. With regard to the non-German population as a whole, he made it clear that the sole aim of schooling the “subhuman people of the East” must be to teach them simple arithmetic, the ability to write their own names, and the inclination “to obey the Germans.”
³
The Poles were to be treated as “a people of laborers without leaders” whose main task was to provide the Reich with migrant workers. Without any qualms, Himmler also advocated kidnapping “racially” valuable Polish “children of good blood” (blond, blue-eyed, and Nordic-looking) and sending them to the Reich to be brought up as “Aryans.” At this early stage, Himmler explicitly rejected “as un-German and impossible the Bolshevist method of physical extermination of a people.” Instead, he appeared to be relying on a mixture of “racial sifting,” resettlement, and the splitting up of the different ethnic groups in eastern Europe “into as many parts and fragments as possible.” He also hoped that “the concept of Jews will be completely extinguished through the possibility of a large emigration of all Jews to Africa or some other colony.”
⁴

Himmler was probably alluding to the idea being seriously considered in leading Nazi circles of deporting Jews en masse to the East African tropical island of Madagascar, then a French colony. In 1937, the Polish government had approached the French and British about sending a million Polish Jews either there or to southern Africa. Now, following the defeat of France, Franz Rademacher (the official responsible for Jewish affairs at the German Foreign Ministry) had drawn up a memorandum envisaging the deportation of four million Jews from Europe and their resettlement in Madagascar, once the island was transferred from French to German control.
The funds would naturally be provided by the despoiled Jews. They would supposedly enjoy nominal self-government in the administration of the law courts, culture, and economic life but would ultimately be under the “expert” control of the SS. Of course, the deported Jews would be stripped of German or any other European citizenships, becoming instead citizens of the “great ghetto” henceforth to be known as the Madagascar Mandate.
⁵
Rademacher even saw this project as a useful Nazi response to Zionist ambitions in Palestine: “This arrangement will prevent the possible establishment of a Vatican State of their own, in Palestine by the Jews, thus preventing them from using for their own purposes the symbolic value which Jerusalem has for the Christian and Mohammedan portions of the world.”
⁶

More ominously, Rademacher added that “the Jews will remain in German hands as a pledge for the future good conduct of the members of their race in America.” The Rademacher plan had the approval of Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop and was taken seriously (with some modifications) by Heydrich and his SS bureaucrats, as long as their domination of the project could be assured. But the German failure to defeat Great Britain in 1940 meant that control of sea traffic in the Atlantic, which was essential to the success of the plan, could not be assured. Although the plan was still sometimes referred to by Hitler in conversations with Benito Mussolini and other foreign leaders, the African solution was soon quietly shelved. Formally, however, it was only on 10 February 1942 that Foreign Office departments finally received an official confirmation from Rademacher of what Hitler had decided several months earlier: “The war with the Soviet Union has in the meantime created the possibility of disposing of other territories for the Final Solution. In consequence, the Führer has decided the Jews should be evacuated not to Madagascar, but to the East. Madagascar need no longer therefore be considered in connection with the Final Solution.”
⁷

The German invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941, code-named Operation Barbarossa, was indeed inextricably linked with the decision to implement a genocidal war against all the Jews of Europe. It also cost the lives of twenty million Soviet citizens (more than half of whom were civilians), including three million Red Army POWs. In this gigantic confrontation, which has been rightly called “the most savage military campaign in modern history,” all traditional conventions of behavior, let alone ethical or legal restraints, were wholly abandoned.
⁸
In the so-called Commissar Order of 6 June 1941, the German Army was specifically told by its commanders not to show any mercy or “respect for international law” in the fight against Bolshevism, especially against “political commissars of all kinds.” This Communist enemy allegedly employed “barbaric, Asiatic fighting methods” that necessitated the immediate execution of all Red Army political officers. Some six hundred thousand of these officers were summarily shot by the Wehrmacht in the first few months of fighting. Ruthless punitive action was also stipulated against partisans and anyone assisting them, as well as against Jews and members of the Communist Party. The Wehrmacht was ordered to provide close military and logistical assistance to the Einsatzgruppen of the SS, which would follow in its footsteps and the task of which was the murder of Jews and other Soviet citizens designated for elimination.

The four Einsatzgruppen battalions that operated on the vast Russian front from the Baltic to the Black Sea would, with the help of the Wehrmacht and Nazi police units, murder more than one million Jewish men, women, and children in the first eighteen months of the Russian campaign. In the Ukraine, beginning in Lvov, they found willing collaborators among local nationalists. A report for the period of 1–31 October 1941 dealt with the extermination in the Ukraine, including the notorious Babi Yar massacres of Jews just outside the capital city, Kiev.
⁹
The report noted cryptically:

The bitter hostility of the Ukrainian population against the Jews is extremely great, because it is thought that they were responsible for the explosions in Kiev. They are also seen as NKVD [Soviet secret police] informers and agents, who unleashed the terror against the Ukrainian people. All Jews were arrested in retaliation for the arson in Kiev, and altogether 33,771 Jews were executed on September 29th and 30th. Gold, valuables and clothing were collected and put at the disposal of the National Socialist Welfare Association (NSV), for the equipment of the
Volksdeutsche
, and part given to the appointed city administration for distribution to the needy population.
¹⁰

The indescribable horror of this bloodbath against defenseless and wholly innocent men, women, and children is never, of course, remotely glimpsed in this sterilized accounting or in other German documents.

Some of the earliest massacres took place in the Baltic states, where the Einsatzgruppen were aided enthusiastically, especially by Lithuanians. Here is a typically stone-cold extract from a report by Karl Jäger, commander of Einsatzgruppe 3, on the extermination of Lithuanian Jews, dated Kovno, 1 December 1941:

I can confirm today that
Einsatz Kommando
3 has achieved the goal of solving the Jewish problem in Lithuania. There are no more Jews in Lithuania, apart from working Jews and their families. These number: in Shavli about 4,500, in Kovno about 15,000, in Vilna about 15,000.

I wanted to eliminate the working Jews and their families as well, but the Civil Administration [
Reichskommissar
] and the Wehrmacht attacked me most sharply and issued a prohibition against having these Jews and their families shot. The goal of clearing Lithuania of Jews could be achieved only through the establishment of a specially selected Mobile Commando under the command of SS
Obersturmführer
Hamann, who adopted my aims fully and who was able to ensure the cooperation of the Lithuanian Partisans and the Civil Authorities concerned. The carrying out of such
Aktionen
is first of all an organisational problem. The decision to clear each sub-district systematically of Jews called for a thorough preparation for each
Aktion
and the study of local conditions. The Jews had to be concentrated in one or more localities and, in accordance with their numbers, a site had to be selected and pits dug.… The Jews are brought to the place of execution in groups of 500, with at least 2 kms distance between groups … All the officers and men of my command in Kovno took active part in the
Grossaktionen
in Kovno. Only one official of the intelligence corps was released from participation on account of illness.

I consider the
Aktionen
against the Jews to be virtually completed. The remaining working Jews and Jewesses are urgently needed, and I can imagine that this manpower will continue to be needed urgently after the winter has ended. I am of the opinion that the male working Jews should be sterilised immediately to prevent reproduction. Should any Jewess nevertheless become pregnant, she is to be liquidated.
¹¹

The pattern described here was typical for the eastern front and a faithful reflection of the “ideological war” of extermination and enslavement that Hitler had ordered. The Wehrmacht, which objected in Poland and Lithuania to murdering valuable Jewish workers, did, however, actively participate in the killings of Jews in the Soviet Union. The commander of the Sixth Army, Field Marshal Walter von Reichenau, explained to his troops in an order issued on 10 October 1941 what the rationale for their conduct in the war against Bolshevism had to be:

The essential goal of the campaign against the Jewish-Bolshevik system is the complete destruction of its power instruments and the eradication of the Asiatic influence on the European cultural Sphere.… In the East the soldier is not only a fighter according to the rules of warfare, but also a carrier of an inexorable racial concept [
völkischen Idee
] and the avenger of all the bestialities which have been committed against the Germans and related races.

Therefore the soldier must have
complete
understanding for the necessity of the harsh, but just atonement of Jewish subhumanity. This has the further goal of nipping in the bud rebellions in the rear of the Wehrmacht which, as experience shows, are always plotted by the Jews.
¹²

On 20 November 1941, General Erich von Manstein, commander of the Eleventh Army and one of Germany’s most brilliant generals, elaborated on this theme.

Since 22 June the German
Volk
is in the midst of a battle for life and death against the Bolshevik system. This battle is conducted against the Soviet army not only in a conventional manner ac cording to the rules of European warfare.… Jewry constitutes the mediator between the enemy in the rear and the still fighting remnants of the Red Army and the Red leadership. It has a stronger hold than in Europe on all key positions of the political leadership and administration, it occupies commerce and trade and further forms cells for all the disturbance and possible rebellions.

The Jewish-Bolshevik system must be eradicated once and for all. Never again may it interfere in our European living space. The German soldier is therefore not only charged with the task of destroying the power instrument of this system. He marches forth also as a carrier of a racial conception and as an avenger of all the atrocities which have been committed against him and the German people.