Ostkrieg (34 page)

By mid-September, the military situation had changed substantially for the better. German forces had cut off Leningrad early in the month, while the encirclement east of Kiev, completed on the fifteenth, promised a spectacular triumph. That same day, following an aerial bombing, the Gauleiter of Hamburg, Karl Kaufmann, urged Hitler to allow the evacuation of Jews from the city in order that their dwellings be distributed to victims of the raid. This suggestion followed by a day a proposal from Rosenberg that all Jews from Central Europe be deported to the east in retaliation for Stalin's deportation of the Volga Germans to Siberia. Although noncommittal, the Führer expressed interest in Rosenberg's “very important and urgent matter.” At the same time, Hitler was pressured by officials in France to evacuate a number of Jews to the east as part of a reprisal policy. All the while, of course, Heydrich and Goebbels had continued to push for the removal of German Jews. On 16
and 17 September, Hitler had a cluster of meetings with top officials in which he discussed the Jewish question, talked of turning the conquered eastern territories into Germany's India, and stressed the importance of resettling ethnic Germans. He also gave approval to Kaufmann on the seventeenth for the removal of Jews from Hamburg.
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The next day, clearly searching for a place to put more than a few thousand Hamburg Jews, Himmler informed Arthur Greiser in the Warthegau that he would have to accept sixty thousand Jews into the Lodz ghetto since “the Führer wishes that the Old Reich and Protectorate be emptied and freed of Jews from west to east as quickly as possible.” Hitler had, thus, not only permitted the evacuation of Hamburg's Jews, but now, in light of new military successes, also sanctioned what he had prohibited just a month before, the removal of all German Jews during the war. “The spell is broken,” Hitler told Goebbels in late September, in meetings also attended by Himmler and Heydrich. “In the next three to four weeks we must once again expect great victories.” The serious fighting, Hitler thought, would last until 15 October, after which Bolshevism would be beaten. Heydrich even delighted in pointing to the irony of his suggestion that the Jews should be “transported into camps that have been erected by the Bolsheviks. These camps were erected by the Jews, so what should be more fitting than that they now also be populated by Jews.” With this seemingly offhand mid-September decision to permit the deportation of German Jews, Hitler set in motion a process that would culminate in genocide.
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By early October, with Operation Typhoon enjoying great success, Hitler remained optimistic about the deportations, his only reservation being a possible shortage of trains. On the tenth, however, Heydrich held a conference in Prague at which he removed any further obstacles. “Because the Führer wishes that by the end of this year as many Jews as possible be removed from the German sphere,” he stressed, “all pending questions must be solved. . . . Even the transportation question must not present any problems.” Symbolically, the first deportation train left Vienna on 15 October, the date Hitler expected the defeat of Russia to be sealed and the same day panic broke out in Moscow. Although local authorities had prepared the evacuations from Vienna, Prague, and Berlin with remarkable speed, the problem of reception areas in the east remained. Greiser succeeded in getting the figure dispatched to Lodz reduced to twenty thousand, but that simply meant that larger numbers were sent further east to Kaunas, Riga, and Minsk. In those cities, in the absence of clear guidelines for what to do with the deportees, local officials, reflective of a process of cumulative radicalization that rewarded
personal initiative, largely acted as they saw fit and took whatever measures they deemed necessary.
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In practice, this meant that the Jews arriving from the old Reich were treated differently in the various reception areas. In Lodz and Minsk, German Jews were crammed into the ghettos, with the twist that, in the latter city, over eleven thousand Belorussian Jews were shot to make room for the new arrivals. The situation in Kaunas, in Lithuania, was different, however. There, the men of Karl Jäger's murderously efficient Einsatzkommando 3 were waiting as the deportation trains arrived, shooting nearly five thousand German Jews within a few days in late November. In Riga, Latvia, all the deportees on a train from Berlin were murdered on 30 November, a situation that aroused quite a stir since many of the victims were
Mischlinge
(part Jews), war veterans, or married to Aryans. Shooting Ostjuden was one thing; executing German Jews, “from our cultural sphere . . . [and not] the native bestial hordes,” as Wilhelm Kube put it, clearly presented a problem. Himmler, in fact, had telephoned that afternoon in an attempt to halt the execution but was too late. After this incident, German Jews arriving in Riga were no longer executed immediately. Instead, they were confined in temporary camps outside the city, where the atrocious conditions meant that many died within a short time. By mid-December, after some twenty-five thousand local Jews were executed, deportees from Germany were allowed into the Riga ghetto, where large numbers died of “natural causes.” Others were shot in small groups in a nearby forest, while the deportees on several trains that arrived in late December, January, and February were liquidated on arrival.
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These gruesome activities confirmed a pattern of confused local reactions but also a sinister long-term trend. Local objections forced a reduction in the number of deportation trains leaving Germany in the late autumn, but the transports themselves could not be stopped entirely, despite the fact that they contributed to a severe shortage of railcars and bottlenecks in the transportation system crippling the German advance toward Moscow. Bock protested the continuing presence of “Jew trains,” fearing that the “arrival of these trains must result in the loss of an equal number of trains vital to supplying the attack,” but to little avail. Once the Jewish deportations had begun, Himmler and Heydrich refused to halt them. Clearly, no blueprint for systematic mass murder had been devised and no general order issued when the deportations began to execute German Jews on arrival in the east, but chaotic conditions in the ghettos in Poland, the public nature of mass shootings, the drain on German manpower, and the psychological burden on the perpetrators
all demanded a more discrete, efficient, and orderly process of killing the Jews. Bolstered by his authorization of 31 July to prepare some sort of final solution for European Jewry for implementation after the Russian campaign, which now seemed to be in its concluding stages, Heydrich began to bring together elements from three existing programs: the concentration camp, the euthanasia program, and the resettlement program. Out of this fluid process of experimentation would come perhaps the most sinister invention of the twentieth century: the extermination camp (
Vernichtungslager
).
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In July and August, even before the euthanasia killings had spread to the concentration camps, Nazi authorities had been searching for a more humane way—more humane for the killers, not the victims—to dispose of large numbers of people. As Walter Rauff, an official of the Criminal Technical Institute of the RSHA, explained to an aide, a “more humane method of execution” was needed for the Einsatzgruppen since members of the firing squads suffered from frequent nervous breakdowns. Out of this necessity came a number of proposals, some disastrous, such as a test using explosives on mental patients that left body parts strewn about, and others more promising. By mid-September, a number of officials were exploring the possibilities of using poison gas. Hitler had suspended the adult euthanasia program on 24 August, which meant that trained killing experts were available to lend their expertise. Rauff himself charged his technicians with constructing a gas van that would channel engine exhaust into a sealed compartment, thus killing the victims by carbon monoxide poisoning. In September and October, experiments using Zyklon-B, a common agent used in the pest extermination business in Germany, were undertaken at the concentration and prisoner-of-war camp at Auschwitz. Although many of these trials were clearly associated with the expansion of the euthanasia program into the concentration camps, Nazi officials were quick to see the broader implications. That fall, for example, a gassing facility at Chelmno, originally conceived by local officials for the Wartheland, was accelerated to completion since it now fit well with broader goals at the center. By early October, plans had been made for the construction of a second large camp at Birkenau, adjacent to Auschwitz, complete with underground cellar rooms with large forced air ventilation systems attached to crematories. At roughly the same time, near Lublin, under the supervision of Christian Wirth, a leading functionary of the euthanasia program, construction began on a facility at Belzec that would use exhaust gas from engines channeled into sealed rooms to kill Jews. The Nazis also began preliminary work on another camp near Lublin, at Sobibor, that autumn.
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Significantly, Adolf Eichmann, the Nazi deportation expert who later claimed that Heydrich had told him in the fall of 1941, “The Führer has ordered the physical destruction of the Jews,” also met with Wirth at Belzec. Although Eichmann's postwar testimony was admittedly somewhat contradictory, the fact that Hitler had authorized the deportation of German Jews and the dispatch of euthanasia personnel to the east adds credence to his recollections. So does the fact that, on 17 October, Heydrich intervened to prevent the evacuation of Spanish Jews interned in France to Morocco, on the grounds that “these Jews would be . . . out of direct reach of the measures for a basic solution to the Jewish question to be enacted after the war.” The next day Himmler noted to Heydrich, “No emigration by Jews to overseas,” while on the twenty-third the emigration gates were sealed. That day, Gestapo chief Heinrich Müller circulated a Himmler order to the various police and SD agencies announcing that all Jewish emigration was to be stopped. A fateful divide had been passed; what had formerly been official Nazi policy, a
Judenfrei
Europe through expulsion, had been definitively altered. The Jews of Europe would now be deported to the east.
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Nor would their eventual fate be in doubt. Talking with Fritz Sauckel and Fritz Todt on 17 October, Hitler, in an expansive mood, sketched his vision of the Germanization of the eastern territories. The Slavs, he mused, would be treated “as Indians,” with some elements “sifted.” For the rest, “We are getting rid of the destructive Jews entirely. . . . I proceed with these matters ice-cold. I feel myself to be only the executor of a will of history.” Four days later, meeting with Bormann, Hitler clearly sketched his sense of mission: “When we exterminate this plague, then we perform a deed for humanity, the significance of which our men out there can still not at all imagine.” On the night of the twenty-fifth, Hitler recalled to Himmler and Heydrich his Reichstag prophecy, then boasted, “We are writing history anew from the racial standpoint.” By that time, not only was the extermination camp at Chelmno, near Lodz, nearly completed, but plans were also set in motion to construct two other such facilities, at Mogilev (in Belorussia) and Riga. In mid-November the Topf company had been commissioned to construct a huge crematorium at Mogilev, with the first oven actually delivered in December. By then, however, military events had interceded, and the camp and gas chambers were never constructed; instead, the crematory units were sent to Auschwitz.
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To all appearances, a fundamental decision had been taken in the early autumn to kill the Jews of Europe, a decision that even the deteriorating military situation would not reverse. In early November, a time
resonant in Hitler's mind with the shameful capitulation of 1918, events at the front seemed to harden his determination to destroy the Jews. At lunch with Himmler on 5 November, Hitler vowed that he would not allow “criminals” to stay alive while “the best men” were dying at the front. “We experienced that in 1918,” he added, with little need to expand on what he meant, given the notorious passage in
Mein Kampf
in which he rued the Kaiser's failure to kill “Hebrew polluters” at the beginning of World War I. That evening, he launched a diatribe against the Jews, vowing that the war would bring their ruin. In Munich three days later to address the old comrades on the anniversary of the failed putsch, the Führer once again blamed the Jews for the war, noting that it was merely the continuation of the struggle that had not ended in 1918. Germany had been cheated of victory then, he remarked bitterly, “But that was only the beginning, the first act of this drama. The second and the finale will now be written. And this time we will make good what we were then cheated of.” Finally, at his field headquarters in the early hours of 2 December, just days before the Soviet counterattack in front of Moscow, he remarked bitingly of the Jews, “He who destroys life, exposes himself to death. And nothing other than this is happening to them.” Just a few days later, the first extermination center, at Chelmno, went into operation. The day before, however, the Japanese bombed the American naval base at Pearl Harbor. The European war was now part of a world war. On the twelfth, meeting with party leaders the day after having declared war on the United States, Hitler again referred to his prophecy, drawing the logical, if murderous, conclusion. As Goebbels noted, “He warned the Jews that if they were to cause another world war, it would lead to their own destruction. Those were not empty words. Now the world war has come. The destruction of the Jews must be the necessary consequence. We cannot be sentimental about it.” With his insistence that his prophecy be taken literally, Hitler had finally resolved any remaining ambiguity about the timing of the Final Solution: the destruction of Europe's Jews would take place immediately and not be delayed until after the war.
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