War and Remembrance (27 page)

I have prefaced this book with an essay Roon wrote for a military journal shortly before his death, entitled “The Wannsee Protocol.” I believe this essay should be required reading for first-year students in all military academies.

Since the publication of
World Empire Lost
I have received a number of letters, some from old friends and comrades-in-arms (including a Soviet general), wondering at my willingness to spread the views of a convicted German war criminal. I hold no brief for the Germans. They started the worst war in mankind’s history and came too close to winning it, and under the cloak of wartime secrecy they committed unheard-of crimes. I believe we must study the German state of mind that generated their huge (and militarily remarkable) assault, and their persisting fealty to an insane tyrant. Without the Armin von Roons who followed him and fought for him to the
last, Adolf Hitler would have lived and died an impotent fanatical loudmouth, instead of becoming the most powerful monster of history, who all but brought down the civilized world. That is why I have translated Armin von Roon; and why I think “The Wannsee Protocol” should be required reading for military men.

Victor Henry

Oakton, Virginia

12 September 1970

Note to the Third Edition

Readers continue to write and argue with me as though I shared Armin von Roon’s views; whereas I translated his books just because his views appall me.

As a professsional military analyst, Roon is often sound, sometimes brilliant. His facts are seldom wrong. Where they are, I have said so in my notes. But his interpretations of the facts tend to be twisted by the German nationalism that led to Hitler; and if I had noted all my disagreements, the books would have been twice as long. In these pages, therefore, one peers into an able but distorted mind. Readers who find themselves agreeing with Armin von Roon had better take a good hard look at themselves and their ideas; readers who disagree with him are probably in my camp.

Victor Henry

Oakton, Virginia

17 October 1973

BY GENERAL ARMIN VON ROON

Military writers tend to shun the topic of this paper, but the Jewish question affected the conduct of the Second World War and its outcome. The question cannot be forever ignored. Nor need one fear a frank probing of the problem, for the honor of the German soldier emerges intact.

Long before the war, the National Socialist policy on Jewry had created a military perplexity. Eleven million dispersed inhabitants of Europe had been designated as our nation’s blood enemies. In Germany the Nuremberg decrees had expelled them from civic, business, and professional life. The Third Reich, once it began its armed drive to normalize Europe, therefore had to reckon at the outset with this closely knit community branching all over the continent, with powerful connections and substantial resources overseas. The army could not dig back into the origins of the problem. It had to deal with the security situation as it existed.

The Jews had to be classed as a potential underground, formidable in numbers, cleverness, and means. The worst enemy is always the desperate one who has nothing to lose. Partisans of other nationalities could change their allegiance and side with us. This option was not open to Jews. The army had no choice but to cooperate with the regime’s special Jewish measures.

The nature of the measures was not a responsibility of the army. Various federal police agencies shared in this task: RSHA, Gestapo, SD, regular SS, and so on, a multiple façade for the various Nazi bigwigs contending for power. These all added up to a single iron instrument of Adolf Hitler’s will, for from Adolf Hitler alone proceeded the policy regarding the Jews. The essence of this policy was the elimination of the Jewish race in Europe. It should be noted that this policy failed. Despite the regime’s grip on the continent for almost four years, approximately half of the European Jews survived. Bureaucratic botching, thoroughly unmilitary, characterized the execution of the policy from start to finish.

Indeed, of Hitler’s actual aim, the German army, from the lowest foot soldier to the highest general in Supreme Headquarters, had no knowledge whatever until the war ended and the so-called death camps were uncovered by the victorious armies.

The surviving documentation of this secret policy is naturally tenuous. The policy was carried out with circumspection. Crucial orders were given verbally, “under four eyes.” So thin is the paper record, in fact, that some authorities soberly contend that the so-called extermination never took place. In this view, all the Jews except a few hundred thousand really escaped to the Soviet Union, to the West, or to Palestine; the so-called death camps were concentration camps of undesirables, where conditions were understandably harsh; and the crematoriums were routine hygienic installations for the disposal of those who died in confinement.

Unhappily the written record, slender though it is, suggests the contrary. For instance, the camp rosters that have survived show few entries of death by execution; but several thousand prisoners often died on the same day of “heart failure.” Obviously such mass simultaneous heart failures had to be induced. To distinguish these demises from executions is to split legalistic hairs.

There are, moreover, SS documents which discuss the merits of Zyklon B gas for euthanasia purposes versus shooting and carbon monoxide asphyxiation, etc., etc., also detailed correspondence between German industrial firms and SS officials on the design and building of very large-scale crematoriums, etc., etc. All these undeniably authentic papers suggest a plan to produce and dispose of great numbers of human corpses on a systematic basis. Thus, one is forced to grant that the elimination process took place.

Of these surviving German documents, none is more instructive than the Protocol of the Wannsee Conference of January 20, 1942.

The Wannsee Protocol

The Protocol came to light because of the sudden collapse of our fronts. Many tons of our nation’s most secret papers, which by standard security practice should have been burned, fell intact into American, British, or Russian hands. Among these papers was the Wannsee Protocol.

Had Moscow suddenly fallen to our Army Group Center in December 1941, documents equally compromising would have come into our hands. Stalin was fully as ruthless a personage as Hitler. He ordered many vast secret slaughters of his own Russian people, which his minions obediently carried out. The figure has been put as high as sixty million! But no official records have been exposed to horrify the world. Consequently, nobody brands the Russian people as a nation of murderers.

Or supposing that we had taken London, in the swift cross-Channel attack which I vainly advocated in June 1940? What shameful Whitehall records might we not have uncovered of hideous episodes in India, in Egypt, in Malaya, in South Africa, in fact wherever British imperialism carried the Union Jack, and British arms brutally suppressed native populations
which resisted being bled dry for Anglo-Saxon enrichment? But these things remain shrouded secrets.

Only Germany suffered the ignominy of having her records unveiled. Only Germany was stripped naked. Even the defeated Japanese were allowed to keep their emperor and their government structure, which ensured suppression of their papers on the sack of Nanking and the Bataan Death March.

“Wannsee Protocols” exist in the secret papers of every nation. Human nature is everywhere alike. Let America uncover its files about its extermination of the Red Indian, its robbery of Texas from Mexico, its oppression of the Nisei after Pearl Harbor. Then let us see how the facts compare with the disclosures in the Wannsee Protocol.

The Wannsee Conference

The Protocol, a fifteen-page mimeographed secret document, was found by American investigators digging through the vast captured files of our Foreign Ministry. A notation shows that thirty copies originally existed. Only number 16, the Foreign Ministry’s copy, survived. On such a slender thread hung world history’s insight into Hitler’s Jewish policy. The secret was almost kept!

The document describes a conference held at the International Police Building in the Gross-Wannsee section of Berlin on January 20, 1942, shortly after America entered the war. The chairman was Heydrich, a shady cashiered naval officer, who in the topsy-turvy Nazi era became chief of the Security Police and head of the Reich Security Main Office.
^*
This Heydrich person was number two man under the unsavory Himmler in the SS. Already early in 1942 the SS had gained control over our federal security and police departments. So when Heyrdrich called this conference, undersecretaries of state came scurrying. They met for about an hour and a half with seven SS men, one of whom, Lieutenant Colonel Adolf Eichmann, kept the minutes. These minutes, edited by Heydrich, constitute the Wannsee Protocol.

The eight high officials came from the Ministry of Justice, the Ministry for the Interior, the Foreign Ministry, the Ministry for the Occupied Eastern Territories, the Government General in Poland, the Reich Chancellery, and the Plenipotentiary for the Four-year Plan — in fact, from every major government department except the armed forces.
No evidence exists that any member of the armed forces ever knew the conference took place.

This is the crucial fact that emerges from the Wannsee Protocol. The honor of the German nation was entrusted to our armed forces, and the armed forces were innocent. It was a joint meeting of the secret police and the federal bureaucracy. The Eichmann-Heydrich document proves this.

TRANSLATORS NOTE:
General von Roon does not usually resort to such fudging of the facts in his writings. He is not being a military historian here, however, but a special pleader. In fact, though no Wehrmacht representative attended the Wannsee Conference, the documentation of the German army’s involvement in the Jewish policy is all too real and depressing.
—
V.H.

Heydrich seems to have called the conference to impress his superiors. Six months earlier, on July 31, 1941, when our invasion of the Soviet Union was rolling, Reichsmarschall Hermann Goring had ordered him in a top-secret letter to organize a disposition of the Jewish problem; to bring in other government departments as needed; and to submit to Goring, “as soon as possible,” a draft showing what action had been taken, and what the further plans were. Despite the usual SS practice of not putting such things on paper, the Wannsee Protocol evidently came into existence to impress Goring with Heydrich’s diligence.