already imply the intention to murder each and every Jew in Europe? 100
Some historians have interpreted Heydrich’s authorization of 31 July as
an order for a ‘feasibility study’ for the mass murder of European Jews.101
But there are other ways of interpreting this mandate. Clearly, Heydrich’s
mind turned from a solution primarily focused on Germany, Poland and
the Soviet Union to Nazi-controlled Europe as a whole. However, his
actions and orders over the next few months do not indicate a funda-
mental policy change. He clearly recognized that as a result of the
conquest of the Soviet Union the scope of the Jewish problem had
substantially expanded. As German armies raced eastwards, the number
of Jews that came under Nazi control multiplied daily. Yet at this point he
still believed in an overall solution that involved two components. The
systematic murder of Soviet Jews and those living in the reception areas
for German settlers and deportees from the Reich was one of them. The
second continued to be the idea of deporting the Jews from other parts of
the German sphere of influence to the Soviet Union as soon as the mili-
tary situation allowed him to do so.
If, during the first weeks of the war, there were reservations about
killing Jewish women and children in the conquered Soviet territories,
these reservations were quickly overcome, even though the point in time
at which individual task forces widened the scope of their killing varied
considerably.
Einsatzkommando
9 under Alfred Filbert was the first to
murder Jewish women and children systematically, in Belorussia from the
end of July onwards, apparently on explicit orders from Heydrich.102
The extension of mass murders in the Soviet Union followed an
inverted logic that had ripened in Heydrich’s and Himmler’s minds and
was shared by many of their officers in the field: they saw themselves as
acting in self-defence against their past (and potentially future) victim-
izers. The children, if allowed to survive, would take revenge. The women
would bear more children. The elderly would tell the tale. Germany’s past
misfortunes – allegedly created by the Jews in the first place – could end
only by means of a terrible final reckoning, a harsh but definitive solution
that would also be ‘kind’ to the next generation of Germans, who would
no longer have to deal with either the Jewish problem in its current form
or a future ‘generation of avengers’.103
Heydrich left no documents or letters indicating that he ever felt moral
ambiguity about his central role in the murderous escalation of anti-
Jewish policies. Those close to him, like Himmler or Lina, did however
suggest that he was conscious that his actions constituted a radical breach
of the norms of Western civilization and the values cultivated in his
paternal home. At Heydrich’s funeral in June 1942, Himmler insisted:
AT W A R W I T H T H E W O R L D
199
‘From my countless discussions with Heydrich I know what it cost this
man to be so hard and severe despite the softness of his heart; to make
tough decisions in order to act always in accordance with the law of the
SS which binds us to spare neither our own blood nor that of others when
the life of the nation demands it.’104 His wife, too, claimed that Heydrich
‘was fully aware of his role as hangman but knew how to justify it posi-
tively’: by convincing himself that in order to be kind to future generations
of Germans, and to bring about Hitler’s utopia, he and his men had to be
hard in the present conflict.105
The rate at which the
Einsatzgruppen
killed depended not only on
Heydrich’s orders or those of individual task-force commanders, but also
on the speed with which their army group advanced, the density of the
Jewish population they encountered, the degree of help they received from
the local population and the relevance of the local Jews as slave labourers
for the German war effort. In Lithuania, for example, where the genocide
of local Jews escalated notably earlier than in other parts of the conquered
territories, the economic concerns that long prevented the wholesale
murder of Jews in the General Government did not apply and the food
shortages that became evident in the autumn of 1941 made it even more
pressing to get rid of ‘useless mouths’.
Einsatzgruppe
A under Stahlecker,
responsible for the destruction of the sizeable Jewish communities of
Lithuania and Latvia, proved to be particularly efficient in fulfilling its
murderous brief.106
The result of the gradual increase of violence was staggering: by the end
of 1941, Germans and their local helpers had murdered between 500,000
and 800,000 Jewish men, women and children in the former Soviet terri-
tories, often between 2,700 and 4,200 per day, with most of the deaths
resulting from shootings at close quarters. Local helpers, agitated by
hatred against ‘Judaeo-Bolshevism’, sometimes resorted to clubs and pick-
axes against a largely defenceless Jewish population.107
By the late summer of 1941, both Himmler and Heydrich became
concerned that the face-to-face killings carried out by
Einsatzgruppen
threatened the mental health of their men. Ever since attending an execu-
tion of Jews in Minsk in mid-August 1941, Himmler had been worried
about creating sadistic, psychologically deranged killers who would be
difficult to reintegrate into German post-war society, a problem that was
also apparent to Heydrich who was regularly confronted with frequent
reports of alcohol abuse and mental breakdowns among the men assigned
to his task forces.108
Suggestions on how to solve these self-inflicted problems came from
different directions. One of the earliest proposals for using gas to accel-
erate and ‘humanize’ the murder of those Jews ‘incapable of work’ came
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HITLER’S HANGMAN
from Rolf Heinz Höppner, a local official in the General Government.
On 16 July, Höppner wrote to Eichmann suggesting that a ‘quick-acting
agent’ should be used to rid Łódź of useless Jewish mouths. On the central
Russian front, too,
Einsatzgruppe
commander Arthur Nebe explored the
possibility of gassing in meetings with chemical experts from Berlin in
mid-September.109
Inspired by these suggestions and experiments, Heydrich instructed the
head of his office for technical affairs within the RSHA, Walter Rauff, to
investigate new means of mass murder. Rauff, whose jurisdiction included
the 4,000 motor vehicles of the Security Police, turned to his staff to
develop a ‘more humane method of execution’ for the
Einsatzgruppen
on
the Eastern Front.110
In late October, the proposed solution – in the form of mobile gas vans
– was first tested in Sachsenhausen concentration camp near Berlin,
where forty naked Russian POWs were killed in the back of a van with
exhaust gas. Thirty more of these gas vans were ordered and sent to the
East, where they were used in Minsk and Mogilev, then in the Warthegau
and in Serbia. Heydrich considered this means of killing more humane for
the perpetrators, but the gas vans never really caught on. Asphyxiation by
carbon monoxide in medium-sized vans was simply too slow and ulti-
mately no less disturbing than the shootings. The perpetrators had to wait
for their screaming victims to die inside the vans, which often took more
than fifteen minutes, before removing the bodies from the vehicles. While
experiments with more ‘efficient’ stationary gassing facilities began in
Poland, notably in Belzec, execution by hand continued to be the domi-
nant practice in the German-occupied territories of the Soviet Union.111
Simultaneously, experiments with Zyklon B, a powerful chemical fumi-
gant, began in Auschwitz in September when Russian POWs were gassed
in a series of test runs. Neither Heydrich’s vans nor the Zyklon B experi-
ments in Auschwitz were initially intended to be used for the systematic
murder of all of Europe’s Jews. They were conceived first and foremost to
facilitate the killing operations on the Eastern Front and in order to create
space in the General Government for incoming deportees from the Reich.
Word of the massacres on the Russian front quickly filtered through
German society. Soldiers in the East who had witnessed, participated in
or merely heard of mass executions relayed the information back to their
friends and relatives at home. A future member of the military resistance
against Hitler, Philipp von Boeselager, for example, heard about the mass
executions of Jews from a fellow officer who had shared a railway carriage
with some drunken SD men, who had boasted that they had murdered
250,000 Jews in the rear areas of Army Group South in 1941. Such
incidents were no exception, and by September 1941 rumours about
AT W A R W I T H T H E W O R L D
201
large-scale atrocities on the Eastern Front were recorded by the SD in
nearly every German city.112
The rumours created anxiety and caused Heydrich to urge his men to
exercise greater caution and secrecy in carrying out their tasks. ‘The
Führer’, he explained to his subordinates in early September, ‘has repeat-
edly stressed that all enemies of the Reich use – just like during the [First]
World War – every opportunity to sow disunity among the German
people. It is thus urgently necessary to abstain from all measures that can
affect the uniform mood of the people.’ Presumably in order to avoid both
unnecessary rumours in Germany and further tensions between SS units
in the field and the civilian administration, Heydrich ordered that his
personal approval be sought ‘before taking any especially drastic meas-
ures’, but left a loophole in cases of ‘imminent danger’.113
No such caution or secrecy was necessary vis-à-vis the Nazi leadership.
The regular reports from the
Einsatzgruppen
were edited in Heydrich’s
RSHA and distributed to other government agencies in order to inform
them about – and adapt them to – the course of events in the occupied
East. The number of recipients of these reports constantly increased and
by late October Heydrich was flooding the German bureaucracy with
Einsatzgruppen
reports. SS officers at the periphery could thus expect
their reports to be read by a large and influential circle of Nazi officials.
For the purpose of presenting it to Hitler, the RSHA also gathered ‘illus-
trative material’, notably photographs, which documented the murderous
work of the task forces in the East.114
The gradual expansion of the mass executions in the Soviet Union and
the constant inclusion of new victim groups in the mass shootings were
unlikely to attract any criticism from the top Nazi leadership. Quite the
opposite. Heydrich’s orders merely anticipated what Hitler had already
intended for the period following the end of the war: the physical destruc-
tion of the Soviet Jews, regardless of the form that it might take.
Hitler was more cautious when it came to the German Jews. When, in
late July or early August 1941, Heydrich proposed the complete and
immediate evacuation of German Jews from the Reich, Hitler was hesi-
tant and rejected the idea.115 Murdering Soviet Jews hundreds of kilome-
tres away from the home front was one thing, but removing German Jews,
including decorated war veterans, from their homes was quite another
matter. Public opinion mattered and was not to be unnecessarily antago-
nized at a decisive moment of the war. However, when US involvement
in the Allied war effort – allegedly the result of Jewish propaganda –
became increasingly likely from mid-August onwards, Hitler changed his
mind. Germany was now no longer engaged in a struggle merely against
Jewish Bolshevism, embodied by the Soviet Union, but also against an
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HITLER’S HANGMAN
all-encompassing ‘Jewish world conspiracy’, which bound the emerging
coalition of Communism and capitalism together.
In this context, the regime further intensified the persecution of German
Jews. Not only did German Jews have to endure new discriminatory
measures from September onwards, but following a decision by Hitler on
18 August they were also subject to mandatory identification through the
wearing of the yellow star (which had already been compulsory in the
General Government and the Warthegau for two years), thus making them
visible as ‘internal enemies’ and further facilitating their envisaged future
deportation to the East, which Hitler continued to refuse to authorize.116
Heydrich was delighted by Hitler’s decision to mark the Jews, having
already made a similar proposal after the November pogroms of 1938. Back