Hitler's Charisma (35 page)

But Himmler was an expert at manoeuvring his way through this maze of conflicting job titles and ambitions. He knew that Hitler disliked reading memoranda and most often wanted his subordinates to anticipate his needs by listening for verbal cues. That, after all, had been how Himmler had understood what was required of both him as an individual, and the SS as a whole, at the time of the attack on Röhm and the SA leadership. But Himmler also realised that very occasionally it was beneficial to put proposals in writing before Hitler. This, he knew, should only be done when there was an express need for a clear decision from the Führer and when the moment for the approach was propitious. In May 1940 he felt both of these conditions were met when he wrote a long memorandum for Hitler called “Some Thoughts on the Treatment of the Alien Population in the East.” There was an obvious need for guidance from Hitler about how racial policy in Poland should be implemented, and the memo was timed to reach Hitler at a moment when the Germans were making progress in the Battle for France.

Himmler was not going to Hitler with problems that he wanted solved. Instead, he was offering a way of developing what he knew was
Hitler’s vision for the east. He proposed that the “non-German” population of the “eastern territories” should be kept as ignorant slaves and only be taught the following: “Simple arithmetic to no more than 500, writing of the name, a doctrine that there is a divine commandment to obey the Germans, to be honest, hardworking and virtuous. Reading, I think, is not necessary.”
⁴²
Meantime, the land was to be scoured for children of “our blood” who would be snatched and taken to be reared in Germany.

It was exactly the kind of radical and racist plan that was calculated to appeal to Hitler—and it did. He said to Himmler that he considered the memo
“gut und richtig”
(“good and correct”). “This is the way decisions are made,” says Professor Christopher Browning. “Hitler does not draw up an elaborate plan, sign it and pass it down the line. What you get is an encouragement to Himmler to fight it out with the others and the ability now to invoke Hitler’s approval if they don’t give way. And Hitler can still back out later, of course. You see, he’s reserving his options, but he’s encouraging Himmler, who has anticipated that this is really the sort of long-range thing that Hitler would like.”
⁴³

This system of a “vision from above,” which was then left to subordinates to define and put into effect, created a tendency for those subordinates to promise far more than they could ever deliver. Unlike the generals who had, for example, raised sober objections to Hitler’s plan to invade France, dedicated believers in Hitler’s charisma like Himmler and Göring sought to please their boss by offering assurances that the near impossible—sometimes the actual impossible—could be achieved. By the summer of 1940 Göring had already demonstrated this propensity many times; in the economic field by setting unrealistic targets in the Four Year Plan, and in the military arena by assuring Hitler that the Luftwaffe could destroy the Allied troops gathered on the beaches of Dunkirk. Himmler had also shown that he could not deliver his ambitious plans for racial reorganisation. Not only had the massive shifting of Poles within Poland caused administrative and economic chaos, but several hundred thousand ethnic Germans who had arrived in the new Reich full of hope for the future were now forced to live in transit camps because there was nowhere else for them to go. Yet in his 15 May memo Himmler ignored all these problems and, instead, argued for a further expansion of the racial reorganisation of the east. Himmler, like Göring, knew that above all else Hitler was attracted to plans that exuded both optimism and radicalism.

A further consequence of this aspect of Hitler’s charismatic leadership was the way his immediate subordinates came to mimic their Führer’s tendency to ignore practical problems that stood in the way of an ultimate goal. Himmler demonstrated this quality countless times, but most obviously during his first visit to Auschwitz concentration camp in the spring of 1941. Auschwitz, at this period in its development, was a concentration camp designed to strike terror into the Polish population of Upper Silesia. When the camp opened in June 1940 the first inmates were Polish political prisoners. Though many did die there as a result of appalling mistreatment, it was not yet a place of systematic extermination. Himmler decided to visit the camp because he knew that the giant chemical conglomerate I G Farben was interested in opening a new factory nearby. He hoped that Auschwitz could provide some of the workers for this proposed synthetic rubber, or “
Buna
,” complex.

On 1 March 1941 Himmler met the commandant of Auschwitz, Rudolf Höss, together with other local Nazis including the Gauleiter of Upper Silesia, Fritz Bracht. Himmler announced that the camp would now be expanded three-fold and dismissed a series of objections to his plans—like the problem of drainage—with the words, “Gentlemen, the camp will be expanded. My reasons for it are far more important than your objections.”
⁴⁴
It was a line that could just as easily have come from Hitler, and one that is—on any reflection—nonsensical, since the practical objections to Himmler’s plans remained, no matter how much he wanted them pushed through. Later that day Rudolf Höss tried once more to convince Himmler of the seriousness of the problems he faced in trying to expand the capacity of the camp from 10,000 inmates to 30,000 inmates. “I want to hear no more about difficulties!” said Himmler in response. “For an SS officer there are no difficulties! When they come up, it’s his job to get rid of them. How you do that is your business, not mine!”

Whilst this is—it must be said—a truly bizarre system of administration, there were underlying reasons why—for longer than one might have supposed—it continued to operate. Hitler had emphasised for years that goals could be achieved primarily by willpower and by faith—and he claimed to have demonstrated that reality himself via achievements like the Nazi seizure of power and the victory over France. More significant, though, was that the people who would suffer from a failure to achieve these ambitious goals were often those the Nazis either didn’t care about
or actually wished to see suffer. In the case of the Poles, the thousands who died on the trains sent to the General Government, or who starved to death after they arrived and found nothing to eat and nowhere to stay, could be dismissed by the Nazis as an unimportant part of the “leaderless labouring class.”

This tendency to set ludicrous goals and then dismiss the consequent suffering when they were not fulfilled was most apparent in the context of Nazi policy towards the Jews. The Nazis had a large number of Polish Jews under their control by the end of September 1939—nearly two million—and Hitler’s initial “vision” for them followed naturally on from the pre-war policy goals of persecution and expulsion. Several thousand Polish Jews were shot by special task forces—
Einsatzgruppen
—but many more were ordered into ghettos prior to their deportation. And the potential for individual commanders to use their own discretion in their work was built into the plan at an early stage. Reinhard Heydrich, in a list of instructions for
Einsatzgruppen
leaders, wrote, “It is obvious that the forthcoming tasks cannot be determined from here in all their details. The following instructions and guidelines only serve the purpose of urging the leaders of the
Einsatzgruppen
to reflect for themselves on practical considerations.”
⁴⁵

On 29 September Hitler said that he wanted the Jews moved to the south-east corner of the new Nazi empire, between the Bug and Vistula rivers,
⁴⁶
a remote area near the border with the Soviet-occupied zone of Poland, where they would be forced into work camps. Adolf Eichmann, a thirty-three-year-old SS captain (
Hauptsturmführer
) who had been instrumental in organising the deportation of Jews from Austria after the
Anschluss
, heard about this idea and immediately tried to implement it. There is no evidence that Eichmann was ordered to do so. Rather he decided on his own initiative to see if he could organise the deportations that he believed his superiors desired. On October 6, Eichmann met with the chief of the Gestapo, Heinrich Müller, who was in favour of some trial deportations to see if the system worked. Over the next few days Eichmann exceeded this brief and started to plan the deportation of Jews from as far afield as Vienna. Incredibly, given the short timescale involved, the first train containing nearly a thousand Jews left for south-east Poland from what is now Ostrava in the Czech Republic on 18 October, just three
weeks after Hitler had made his wishes clear.
⁴⁷
On 20 October, a train left Vienna with around the same number of Jews.

In seeking to deport Jews from Vienna, Eichmann was also trying to solve a “problem” that the Nazis had created for themselves in the wake of the
Anschluss
and the vast Aryanisation programme that they had imposed before the war. By shutting down or appropriating Jewish businesses, the Nazis had made it impossible for many Jews to earn a living. If the Jews were not then able to emigrate, they would then become a “burden” on the Nazi state. Even before the war, one Nazi planner, Walter Rafelsberger,
⁴⁸
had proposed that the Jews who remained should be forced into camps where they would be made to work on construction projects. Now, in wartime conditions, ideas similar to Rafelsberger’s must have seemed attainable.

However, not surprisingly, Eichmann’s plan collapsed into chaos, creating appalling suffering once the Jews arrived at the town of Nisko in the Lublin region of Poland. There was no accommodation for them—they were ordered to build their own huts—and many of them were taken towards the border with Soviet-occupied Poland and told to go away and never come back. In November 1939 further transports of Jews were banned and the scheme abandoned, though some Jews continued to languish in the makeshift camp in Nisko until spring 1940.

It had been Himmler who had ordered Eichmann’s initiative to be cancelled—not because of the suffering of the Jews who had been caught up in this venture, but because his current priority was organising the transportation of the incoming ethnic Germans from Soviet territory, and Eichmann’s Nisko project was diverting resources. Himmler also had his own plans for deporting the Polish Jews down into the General Government. It was the huge administrative problems caused by this improvised scheme that had led to complaints being made to Göring and Himmler’s subsequent memo to Hitler in May 1940.

However, short-lived as the Nisko scheme was, it is nonetheless revealing of the nature of the Nazi system of leadership—particularly as it related to the Jewish question. Hitler was scarcely involved, yet his own imprimatur was crucial. Such was the nature of his leadership that a mere indication that he favoured a particular course of action—regardless of the practical difficulties of implementation—was enough to provoke one
of his underlings to act, even one as junior as Adolf Eichmann. Indeed, as subsequent developments in the Nazis’ anti-Semitic policy demonstrated, so strong was the sense emanating from Hitler that wild dreams could be considered practical possibilities, that the Führer did not have to initiate all of the visions himself—others, knowing the kind of world he wanted, could do the work for him. Hitler had created an atmosphere in which, as Himmler said in his speech in February 1940, the Nazis could be “liberated from inhibitions and restraints.”

By the summer of 1940, not only had Eichmann’s Nisko plan proved impossible to implement, but so had Himmler’s idea of shipping the Polish Jews to the General Government. Meanwhile, Polish Jews had been confined in ghettos in the larger cities like Warsaw, Łódź and Krakow where many were already dying of disease and malnutrition. Estera Frankiel, for instance, who with her family had been imprisoned in the Łódź ghetto in the spring of 1940, says that conditions were so bad that “one only thought about how one could survive this [single] day.”
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Ghettos, which had originally been intended only as a temporary measure before the Jews could be deported, were now acting as long-term prisons. The suffering was immense. One Pole who saw conditions in the Warsaw ghetto in 1941 wrote in his diary, “The majority are nightmare figures, ghosts of former human beings, miserable destitutes, pathetic remains of humanity … On the streets children are crying in vain, children who are dying of hunger. They howl, beg, sing, moan, shiver with cold, without underwear, without clothing, without shoes, in rags, sacks, flannel which are bound in strips round the emaciated skeletons, children swollen with hunger, disfigured, half conscious, already completely grown-up at the age of five, gloomy and weary of life.”
⁵⁰

Senior Nazis like Heinrich Himmler and Hans Frank were not only indifferent to this suffering, they actually wanted something like it to occur. “Give the Jews short shrift. A joy to finally tackle the Jewish race physically. The more that die the better,”
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Hans Frank had said in November 1939 in the context of the doomed plan to send the Jews east of the river Vistula.

It was in an attempt to pursue the original idea of the expulsion of the Jews that an official in the German Foreign Office, Franz Rademacher, proposed in the summer of 1940 the strange and radical solution of sending the Jews to the French colony of Madagascar, an island off
the south-eastern coast of Africa. The idea of expelling the Jews to somewhere far away from Europe was not new. Paul de Lagarde, a nineteenth-century German anti-Semite,
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had first proposed sending the Jews to Madagascar—not, of course, for their welfare, since he favoured their destruction in one way or another.
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(Lagarde also espoused many other ideas long before the Nazis adopted them—like hatred of liberalism and a desire for Germany to gain additional territory.) More recently, Himmler had also mentioned in his May 1940 memo that he hoped “to see the term ‘Jews’ completely eliminated through the possibility of large-scale migration of all Jews to Africa or some other colony.”