Hitler and the Holocaust (17 page)

Hitler was cautious regarding such a commitment. He reminded the Mufti that he was speaking “as a rational man, and primarily as a soldier,” who believed that the fate of the Arab world would be ultimately decided by the “very severe battles
going on in the Soviet Union.” On the other hand, he was positively effusive in explaining to the Palestinian leader the rationale for the anti-Jewish crusade that he was conducting. He told the Mufti that “Germany stood for uncompromising war against the Jews [
Deutschland trete für einem kompromisslosen Kampf gegen die Juden ein
].” He was resolved, “step by step, to ask one European nation after the other to solve its Jewish problem, and at the proper time to direct a similar appeal to non-European nations as well.”
⁴²
At the same time, he spelled out the
ideological
meaning of the Second World War in terms formulated more sharply than in any other single German diplomatic document. “Germany was at the present time engaged in a life and death struggle with two citadels of Jewish power: Great Britain and Soviet Russia.” Hitler conceded that “theoretically there was a difference” between English capitalism and Soviet Communism. But in practice, he observed, “the Jews in both countries were pursuing a common goal.”
⁴³
However, the hour of “reckoning with the Jews” was now fast approaching. “This was the decisive struggle,” Hitler informed his Arab guest. Politically, the war was mainly “a conflict between Germany and England,” but ideologically “it was a battle between National Socialism and the Jews [
weltanschaulich sei es ein Kampf zwischen den Nationalsozialismus und dem Judentum
].”
⁴⁴

Hitler also asked the Mufti to lock “in the uttermost depths of his heart” the information that “he would carry on the battle to the total destruction [
Zerstörung
] of the Judeo-Communist empire in Europe.”
⁴⁵
This was a decidedly heavy hint of the massive annihilation of Jewry, which was already under way and would soon be greatly accelerated. Moreover, the war against the Jews would not be confined to the European continent, once the German armies had reached the exit of the Caucasus and stood poised on the northern edge of the Middle East. Hitler also reassured the Palestinian leader that he was actively opposed to the Jewish National Home as “a
state centre” [
ein Staatlicher Mittelpunkt
], the influence of which could be only destructive. More important still, he promised that when the hour of Arab liberation struck, the sole German objective in the Middle East would be “the destruction of the Jewish element residing in the Arab sphere under the protection of British power [
die Vernichtung des in arabischen Raum unter der Protektion der britischen Macht lebenden Judentums sein
].”
⁴⁶

Hitler had revealed the global vision behind his genocidal project, encompassing even the Middle East and “extra-European” peoples. It is not confined to European Ashkenazi Jews but also includes “the Jewish element residing in the Arab sphere.”
⁴⁷
It is directed against “Jewish” capitalism in Great Britain no less than against Judeo-Communism in the Soviet Union. The imminent entry of the United States into the war (within fewer than two weeks) was to highlight even more the globalization of the conflict and its “Judaization.”

German historian Christian Gerlach recently argued that Hitler’s decision to irrevocably destroy the Jews of Europe was made formally as late as 12 December 1941, one day after his declaration of war on the United States. His most important evidence (from Goebbels’s notes) consists of remarks made by Hitler in his private residence that very afternoon, before the assembled Nazi Party Gauleiters and Reich leaders.
⁴⁸
Hitler returned once more to his famous prophecy of destruction, uttered nearly three years earlier, about what would happen “if the Jews again provoked a world war.” He solemnly warned that these were not “vain words,” since the war had now arrived and “the destruction of the Jews must be the necessary result.” There was no room for sentimentality regarding the Jews, since the German people had “already sacrificed 160,000 dead on the Eastern front.” Hence those who were “truly responsible for this bloody war” (i.e., the Jews) should pay for it with their lives.
⁴⁹

This was open incitement to mass murder, all the more significant
in view of the forum in which it was made. Almost all the top party leadership and most of the decision makers who would have to implement the “Final Solution” in their fiefdoms were present. Moreover, with American entry into the war, the Jews of Europe had lost whatever role they might still have had (in Nazi minds) as bargaining chips with which to affect the behavior of the United States. Nazi Germany would henceforth be at war with three global powers (the United States, the Soviet Union, and the British Empire)—a fact that strengthened the Nazi vision of Germany as the protectionist guardian of the
European
continent. Jews, in this context, could be all the more easily demonized as the threatening “fifth column,” the revolutionary subversives and plotters against whom European nations had to unite under Nazi leadership.

However, there are solid grounds on which to believe that the “Final Solution” was decided upon well before December 1941. Plans for gassing Polish Jews were already under way by then, and earlier statements by Goebbels, Rosenberg, Heydrich, and Hitler himself had clearly pointed in the direction of genocide. For instance, in a letter of 6 November 1941, Heydrich had written to Otto von Stülpnagel of the German High Command in Paris explaining why he had authorized the bombings of seven Parisian synagogues on 2 October.
⁵⁰
Heydrich said that he had acted only “from the moment when, at the highest level, Jewry had been forcefully designated as the culpable incendiary in Europe, one which must definitively disappear from Europe.”
⁵¹
Presumably the explosions of 2 October had already been organized in September. Since Heydrich could have meant only the Führer as the authority “at the highest level,” this statement implies that the decision to exterminate the Jews was already known to Heydrich in September 1941, if not earlier.

On 30 January 1942 at the Berlin Sportpalast, Hitler wrapped his prophecy of “complete annihilation” in Old Testament
language, declaring that henceforth the philosophy of “an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth” would be applied to “the most evil world-enemy of all times.”
⁵²
It is significant that Hitler’s rambling table talks from the end of January 1942 were now increasingly fixated on the responsibility of the Jews for the world war and their role as a “perpetual ferment.” The need for a “radical solution” and for comprehensive measures at a European level were asserted as if the process were not yet in full swing but somehow still imminent. Yet we know from various sources, including Goebbels’s diaries, that Hitler was indeed the driving force of the genocide and followed it closely. On 6 March 1942, Goebbels noted the Führer’s conviction that “the greater the number of Jews liquidated, the more consolidated will be the situation in Europe after this war.”
⁵³
Two weeks later, the propaganda minister wrote with obvious satisfaction that “the Führer is as uncompromising as ever” about ridding Europe of the Jews, “if necessary by applying the most brutal methods.”
⁵⁴
On 27 March 1942, he described the deportation of Jews from the General Government to the east as “a pretty barbarous business.”
⁵⁵
Goebbels estimated that about 60 percent of these Jews had already been liquidated and another 40 percent were being taken for forced labor. “The former Gauleiter of Vienna (Globocnik), who is in charge of the operation, is carrying it out with a good deal of circumspection, and his methods do not seem to be attracting much publicity. The Führer is the moving spirit of this radical solution both in word and deed.”
⁵⁶

For Hitler, the struggle against the Jews was indeed far more than a mere instrument of propaganda or a political means to achieve other ends. In his vocabulary, the Jews were constantly likened to vermin, to “propagators of infection,” to the germs of a deadly plague, to bacteria or malignant disease—or, as he had called them back in 1919, a “racial tuberculosis of the peoples [
Rassentuberkulose der Völker
].” At
dinner on the evening of 22 February 1942, Hitler exclaimed, “How many diseases must owe their origins to the Jewish virus! Only when we have eliminated the Jews will we regain our health.” This obsessive linkage between Jews and deadly disease was one that he was constantly seeking to impress upon visiting foreign statesmen, allies, and collaborators. On 21 July 1941, he told the Croatian foreign minister that because of the Jews, Russia had become “a plague centre [
Pestherd
] for humanity.”
⁵⁷
During his meeting with the Hungarian ruler, Admiral Horthy, at Klessheim Castle on 17 April 1943, he warned his unreliable ally that nations “which did not rid themselves of the Jews perished.” Referring to the Jews of Poland, Hitler denied that the mass killings were cruel: “If they could not work, they had to succumb. They had to be treated like tuberculosis bacilli with which a healthy body may become infected.”
⁵⁸

Heinrich Himmler, the architect and organizer of the “Final Solution” as an administrative task, certainly shared this view. In his speech before senior SS officers in Poznan on 4 October 1943, Himmler spoke openly of the “Final Solution” as a hygienic measure (
eine Reinlichkeitsangelegenheit):
“We have exterminated a bacterium because we do not want in the end to be infected by the bacterium and die of it.… Wherever it may form, we will cauterise it.”
⁵⁹
Himmler’s concern for Jewish “contagion” extended to women and children: “I did not consider that I should be justified in getting rid of the men—in having them put to death, in other words—only to allow their children to grow up to avenge themselves on our sons and grandsons. We have to make up our minds, hard though it may be, that this race must be wiped off the face of the earth.”
⁶⁰

The pedantic and methodical Himmler also made much of the imagined “security threat” in justifying the Holocaust to the assembled audience of eminent SS and police officials, “for we know how difficult we should have made it for ourselves if, with the bombing raids, the burdens and deprivations
of war, we still had the Jews today in every town as secret saboteurs, agitators and trouble-makers. We would probably have reached the 1916–17 stage when the Jews were still part of the body of the German nation.”
⁶¹

The Reichsführer SS and chief of the German police also addressed the “ethical” dilemmas and “idealism” required for carrying out such a gigantic task. His speech was full of memorable clichés about “honor,” “loyalty,” and “decency” in the face of mountains of corpses. “To have stuck it out and at the same time—apart from exceptions caused by human weakness—to have remained decent men [
anständig geblieben zu sein
], that is what has made us hard. This is a page of glory in our history, which has never been written and never is to be written.”
⁶²
Himmler did not hide the fact that the “Final Solution” was a “grave matter.” He was even frank enough to speak about it publicly as “the extermination [
Ausrottung
] of the Jewish race” and to admit that this was one of “the most frightening orders an organisation could ever receive.”
⁶³
In his quietly sinister way, he managed to convey to his men the sense that they were engaged not so much in murder as in a sacred mission through which the SS elite would forge a new race of blond, blue-eyed, Germanic heroes. Precisely because they were a
Herrenvolk
, however, the Germans had to be pure and “decent,” incapable of theft or graft. Mass murder was permissible and even admirable in an “idealistic” cause like National Socialism, but misdemeanors that infringed Himmler’s petit-bourgeois moral code were not tolerable. This did not prevent him from proposing deals to the West at the end of the war that involved trading or selling Jews for military, monetary, or political advantage. In November 1944, on his own initiative, Himmler ordered a halt to the gassing of Jews, in the vain hope that he could thereby achieve a secret arrangement with the Western Allies to join forces against the Soviet Union.
⁶⁴

On the other hand, Hitler remained totally uncompromising to the bitter end, convinced that he had rendered a great
service to humanity by opening the eyes of the whole world to the “Jewish peril.” On 13 February 1945, he boasted that National Socialism had truly “lanced the Jewish abscess,” predicting that “the world of the future will be eternally grateful to us.”
⁶⁵
Hitler’s so-called political testament was dictated on the morning of 29 April 1945 (the day before his suicide), as Soviet artillery fire bombarded the Reich Chancellery in Berlin. The document recorded his “love and loyalty” to the German people, who had given him the strength to make decisions of unprecedented difficulty. Not for the first time, he affirmed that he had never sought war against England and America. He held the Jews exclusively responsible “for this murderous struggle” and especially for the many victims of massive aerial bombing, prophesying that “out of the ruins of our towns and monuments” the hatred against “international Jewry and its helpers” would grow inexorably.
⁶⁶
He had fairly warned the Jews (“these international conspirators in money and finance”) that they would have to pay the price for initiating the world war. This time, however, it was not only to be the “millions of Europe’s Aryan people” who would starve or “be burned and bombed to death in the cities.” The Jewish warmongers would also “atone for their crime, even if by more
humane
means.”
⁶⁷
Hitler’s last testament was both a justification for mass murder and the first act of Holocaust denial. His war against the Jews had by his own reckoning been an act of self-defense “against the poisoners of all the peoples of the world.” He always sought nothing but peace. It was the “international financiers” who had forced him into war. Gassing and shooting the Jews had been his “humane” response to the Allied bombing raids on Germany, which according to the Nazi worldview were an act of “Jewish” aggression against “Aryan” humanity. This was the strange, shadowy world that the Führer inhabited. The Holocaust was indeed a logical culmination of Hitler’s messianic megalomania and the perverted religiosity that had animated his politics. In its self-enclosed “finality,” it resonated with
sinister echoes of the last judgment, the final destruction of the Jews heralding the dawn of a new millennium, the redemption of the end of days. Hitler’s apocalyptic perspective cannibalized and radicalized a long tradition of Christian and anti-Christian Judeophobia in the West, even as it destroyed the moral foundations of the European civilization that it so falsely claimed to defend. As Lucy Dawidowicz eloquently pointed out a quarter of a century ago, the Holocaust was not just another anti-Semitic undertaking: “It was part of a salvational ideology that envisaged the attainment of Heaven by bringing Hell on earth.”
⁶⁸