Hitler's Charisma (36 page)

But it was Rademacher who now brought the Madagascar idea to the fore. Rademacher was not just a career diplomat, but also a committed Nazi, and had recently been appointed head of the Jewish section (
Judenreferat
) within the German Foreign Office. He believed that the defeat of France—together with, as he supposed, the imminent capitulation of Britain and thus the end of hostilities in Europe—opened up a whole new vista of possible options. One was that “western Jews” be “removed from Europe, to Madagascar, for example.”
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Rademacher’s memo suggesting this option was written to his boss, Under Secretary Martin Luther and dated 3 June 1940. But just three weeks later Reinhard Heydrich, aware of Rademacher’s attempt to involve the Foreign Office in what he considered was his business, told Ribbentrop, German Foreign Secretary, that he wanted to be part of these discussions. As a result, six weeks later, Eichmann delivered a lengthy proposal for sending four million Jews to Madagascar where they would live—and in due course die—supervised by the SS.

That Hitler endorsed such proposals is certain. He told Mussolini that summer about the Madagascar plan and Goebbels recorded in his diary on 17 August after meeting Hitler, “We want later to transport the Jews to Madagascar.”
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The news even reached the Jews imprisoned in the Łódź ghetto. “Then there was talk about Madagascar,” says Estera Frenkiel, who by the summer of 1940 was working as a secretary within the ghetto administration. “I myself heard about this at the time, how Richter from the Gestapo said to Rumkowski [the Jewish head of the Ghetto], ‘We shall move all of you to Madagascar and there, you will be King of the Jews or the President …’ ”
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In fact, the Jews would almost certainly have suffered a catastrophic fate if they had been sent to Madagascar—the
pre-war assessment made by the Polish Lepecki commission reported that fewer than 10,000 families could be accommodated on Madagascar,
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while the Nazis planned on sending four million Jews there.

The Madagascar plan lasted little longer than Eichmann’s Nisko debacle. It had always been dependent on Britain making peace—the Jews could never be transported to Africa unless the shipping lanes were secure. But its brief history is nonetheless significant since it demonstrates the extent to which the ideological believers around Hitler were prepared to think in extreme terms about the possible fate of the Jews.

The planning for the forthcoming war against the Soviet Union was developed alongside these increasingly radical ideas about the treatment of Jews in particular and the Polish population in general. These elements all worked together to produce a remarkable outpouring of murderous—indeed genocidal—proposals. Pioneering research by German scholars over the last twenty years has demonstrated how the “state-secretaries” (officials akin to Permanent Under Secretaries in the British governmental model) in the Nazi system theorised in wild and expansive terms about the potential removal and starvation of millions of people. They were motivated, in part, by the belief that there were simply too many people in this part of the world already. Werner Conze, later a professor at the Reich University in Posen, wrote just before the war that, “In large areas of eastern Central Europe, rural overpopulation is one of the most serious social and political problems of the present day.”
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Influenced by the theories of social scientists like Paul Mombert, these Nazi planners thought that a so-called “optimum population” could be calculated for any particular territory. As a consequence they argued that there was a massive surplus population in the areas the Nazis already occupied in the east and those they sought to occupy as a result of the invasion of the Soviet Union. They were also aware, of course, of a previous dramatic reduction in the population of one region the Nazis sought to occupy. Between 1932 and 1933 Stalin had presided over a famine in Ukraine that had resulted in a death toll of at least six million.
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Scholars still debate whether Stalin wanted this number of Ukranians to die in the drive towards Soviet modernisation, but what is certain is that by the outbreak of the Second World War the Nazis had a clear example before them of how the population of Eastern Europe could be drastically reduced by famine in a short period of time.

For these Nazi planners the war was most certainly a liberation. As Dr. Dietrich Troschke, a young economist who worked in the General Government, wrote in his diary in April 1940, “Those who are on service in the east find themselves in a unique situation. Every individual is confronted with extraordinary opportunities. Nobody could ever have imagined a posting that offers so much more in the way of challenges, responsibility and scope for initiative than anything else they have done in their entire lives.”
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As Professor Christopher Browning puts it, Nazi planners felt “a certain intoxication in making history … People get high on the notion that they are going beyond what anybody else has done before, that they’re going to make history in an exhilarating way that has no precedent. What you get is this strange mixture of people with great technocratic abilities and expertise in planning that also have these utopian visions, and these utopian visions are very intoxicating. And it’s that combination of utopian intoxication and technocratic expertise that the Nazis blend in ways that produce this extraordinary destructiveness or, in this case, plans for extraordinary destructiveness.”
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As we have seen, for Hitler the war was “ideological” from the moment German troops entered Poland in September 1939, but the consequences of this ideological thinking were now about to be seen with more intensity and on a greater scale in the war against the Soviet Union. Hitler made this desire explicit in an infamous speech he gave to senior German officers on 10 March 1941, when he stated that the forthcoming war against the Soviet Union was a “war of annihilation.”
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Specifically he called for the “annihilation of the Bolshevist commissars and of the Communist intelligentsia.”

One junior German army officer, who knew of the decision to kill Soviet political officers (the “commissars”) before the invasion of the Soviet Union and accepted it, later recalled his thinking at the time: “The difference [between fighting the Soviets and fighting on the Western Front] was that the Russian people or the Red Army soldier was considered an inferior person and that it was a mass action, that is, there were masses of Russian soldiers. And this strength, this quantitative superiority of people had to be changed … They [the Nazi leaders] said there is no time left, we have to fight, we have to press on and it doesn’t matter whether a few more Russian people die on the way. It is an inferior group
of people … these were inferior people who in fact gave us the moral right to destroy them, to exterminate them in part, so they would no longer be a danger for us … The Bolshevik was always portrayed with a bloody knife between his teeth, as someone who only ever destroys, shoots people, and batters them to death and tortures and deports to the camps in Siberia … These were Bolsheviks who were capable of any atrocity and violence, they must never play any leading role in the world.”
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It was against this background of Hitler’s desire to fight a “war of annihilation” against an “inferior group of people” that a group of state secretaries, army officers and other officials met on 2 May 1941. The view they formed at the meeting was expressed in the first two points of their concluding memorandum: “1. The war can only continue to be waged if the entire Wehrmacht is fed from Russia during the third year of the war. 2. As a result, x million people will doubtless starve, if that which is necessary for us is extracted from the land.”
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By the “third year of the war” these officials meant the period from September 1941 to August 1942. And the figure of “x” million was later revealed to be “30 million.”
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This extraordinary “starvation plan” document—one that, in the context of the subsequent understandable focus on the horrors of the Holocaust, has not received the attention it should—did not appear by chance at this meeting, but was rather the result of a chain of causation that led to Hitler. The only senior government figure attending the meeting, Alfred Rosenberg, had a discussion planned with Hitler later that day to discuss “the questions of the East in more detail,”
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and no doubt wanted to be able to make concrete proposals that would appeal to his Führer. Then there was the structural consequence of Hitler not wanting his senior ministers to meet together to discuss policy—the last Cabinet meeting had been held in 1938—which meant that meetings at the level
below
Cabinet ministers, the level of the state secretaries, became crucial.
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(It was no accident that one of the most infamous meetings of the entire war—the discussion at the Wannsee conference in January 1942 about the fate of the Jews—was also conducted, like the 2 May “starvation” meeting, at this state secretary level.) There was also the important way Hitler’s leadership, both in content and form, influenced the men who on 2 May proposed starving millions of people to death. Not only had Hitler already announced that this was to be a war of “annihilation,”
but he had demonstrated countless times before how he wished his followers to pursue “radical” solutions.

As a result, there is every reason to suppose that the men around the conference table on 2 May 1941 believed that they were serving the interests both of their leader and of their country by planning for 30 million people to starve to death. In particular, they remembered how the Allies had blockaded Germany in the First World War in an attempt to starve the country into submission. As a consequence, says Professor Adam Tooze, “what you see in the rhetoric of 1940–42 is this sort of inverting move where they say ‘somebody’s going to starve, but it isn’t going to be us this time.’ ” And unlike the decisions about the Holocaust which were most often communicated in euphemistic terms (people to be killed, for instance, were said to be subject to
Sonderbehandlung
, or “special treatment”), the Hunger Plan was “explicitly documented in instructions issued to the German occupying forces. So commanders of German garrisons in the rear areas have explicit instructions which say should you feel minded to distribute food to starving Russians, remind yourself and your subordinates that what is at stake here is nothing less than the survival of the Reich and the continuation of the war into its second, third, fourth year.”
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This kind of logic, of course, is an application of Hitler’s own way of looking at the world in “either/or” terms—“either we annihilate the enemy or we are annihilated instead.” This simple, emotion-based way of reducing complex questions to absolute alternatives had been a key component of Hitler’s charismatic leadership from his earliest beer hall speeches. It was no surprise, therefore, that just days before the invasion of the Soviet Union Hitler spoke in similar terms to Joseph Goebbels: “The Führer says that we must gain the victory no matter whether we do right or wrong. We have so much to answer for anyhow that we must gain the victory because otherwise our whole people … will be wiped out.”
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The starvation plan, like a whole host of Nazi plans before it, ultimately proved unworkable on the scale envisaged—German forces lacked the resources to imprison millions of people in every Soviet city and leave them to starve to death. But there were a number of places where the underlying thinking behind the plan was put into effect. The German army, for instance, laid siege to Leningrad (today’s St. Petersburg) between September 1941 and January 1944 with the result that over 600,000 civilians died—many from lack of food. And the desire not to “waste” valuable
food on the enemy was one of the key reasons for the death of more than three million Soviet prisoners of war in German captivity. There were also individual cities, like Kharkov in the east of Ukraine, where the German authorities did try and impose a starvation policy. Kharkov was the most populous Soviet city the German army occupied during the war. It was clear from the moment they arrived in October 1941 until they were finally expelled by the Red Army in August 1943
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that seizing food from the locals was very much on their minds. “One soldier rushed into our room,” says Inna Gavrilchenko, then a fifteen-year-old Ukrainian schoolgirl, “and started searching. He rushed behind the bookcases and started searching there and throwing out some things, throwing out books … Then he found some sugar, we had some sugar.”
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Having stolen supplies from the inhabitants of Kharkov, the Germans sealed the city as best they could to stop the locals leaving, and then only offered food to the few Soviet people who helped them run the city. The rest—around 100,000 citizens—were left to starve to death. Inna Gavrilchenko watched as her own father died of hunger—and she came to know the signs of starvation well. “First of all, when you are starving, your body lacks proteins. And your body starts swelling. But it doesn’t swell all over the body. It begins with your hands, or your feet. So, if you look at an arm, it looks like a stick with a boxer’s glove on. And you can’t clench your fist, make a fist, because your fingers wouldn’t bend. They are so swollen. And the same with your legs—your legs are like sticks—your feet are swollen. Then the belly is swollen and there’s a very special swelling on your face. It is just parts of the face that get swollen. And it disfigures faces. And one more thing, in the final stages of starvation, your lips get somehow stretched, and it’s what they call a hungry grin. You don’t know whether a person is grinning or crying. But the teeth are bare. Then, diarrhoea, the so called hungry diarrhoea. And then comes a bitter taste in the mouth. And some rash. On your tongue and then the mouth—a red rash.”
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Some Germans relished the destruction of the people of Kharkov. When, for example, Anatoly Reva, then a small boy, approached a group of German soldiers and begged for some food, he was handed a bag full of human excrement. “They didn’t have any kind of human feelings,” he says. “They didn’t feel sorry for the children.”
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But other Germans did show some compassion, as Inna Gavrilchenko recalls: “I was going
along the street and it was already rather late in the afternoon—it was past three, I think, and it was growing dark. And I knew that after four I could be shot [for being out on the street], but I couldn’t walk any faster and I had a long way to go home. And I saw a small German soldier, I remember that he was very small, and I stopped him and asked him what time it was. And I remember that it was past three, well past three. And he asked me, ‘Where are you going?’ I said, ‘Home.’ And he said, ‘Is it far from here?’ I said, ‘Rather.’ And he said, ‘Oh right, I’ll walk you there.’ And he walked me up, nearly up to my place and then he looked at me and I remember he had something—a bag or something—and he looked at me. I stood silent for a minute and then he produced a piece of sausage. And gave it to me. I was quite at a loss, and he ran away … so the Germans were different. Germans were different and you can’t possibly say that those who were SS were all bad, and those who were not SS were good. You can’t say so. They were different.”
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