Hitler's Hangman (52 page)

The most pressing issue for the moment remained the question of

reception areas for the Jews from the Reich. On the one hand, there was

mounting pressure for the complete removal of all Jews from the Reich

and Protectorate. On the other hand, there was no obvious viable destina-

tion for them. A radical solution was put forward by Himmler’s SS and

Police Leader in the Lublin district, Odilo Globocnik, a notoriously

fanatical and abrasive Austrian bound to Himmler in unswerving loyalty

for rescuing his career after being sacked as Gauleiter of Vienna on

charges of corruption in 1939. In a meeting with Himmler on 13 October,

‘Globus’ – as he was affectionately known in the SS – proposed the

construction of a gas chamber at Belzec, originally intended ‘only’ for the

murder of non-able-bodied Jews living in the Lublin district.141 Himmler

was very receptive to the idea, and construction works in Belzec, the first

purpose-built extermination camp, began two weeks later on 1 November,

the day Heydrich and Lina set off for their holiday lodge near Nauen for

a pleasant long weekend of deer-hunting.142

Heydrich and Himmler were increasingly determined to mitigate the

overcrowding of reception areas by substantially reducing the existing

Jewish population in the ghettos of occupied Poland through systematic

mass murder.143 It was around the same time, in October or November

AT W A R W I T H T H E W O R L D

207

1941, that they opened negotiations with Gauleiter Arthur Greiser

regarding the possibility of sending large numbers of German Jews into

the Warthegau. Greiser declared his willingness to accept deportations

from the Reich. In return, Heydrich and Himmler promised to have no

fewer than 100,000 Jews from Greiser’s Warthegau murdered within a

few months.144 The site chosen was a deserted manor house surrounded

by a fence and trees outside the village of Chelmno, about fifty-five kilo-

metres from Łódź, where ultimately 150,000 Jews would be murdered.

While authorization for this mass murder came from the centre, the

initiative came from the local authorities: the goal was the solution of a

local ‘problem’ rather than a comprehensive programme.145

Only one day after Globocnik’s visit to Berlin, on 14 October, Heydrich

and Himmler had a five-hour meeting, presumably to discuss both the

imminent first wave of deportations of Jews from the Reich to Łódź, Riga

and Minsk and Globocnik’s proposal to create space in the reception areas

by murdering the Jews currently living there. Two further opportunities to

exchange ideas on these issues arose in late October, first on the occasion

of a joint visit to Hitler on 25 October, and again four days later during

Himmler’s visit to Prague.146

Some historians have argued that by late October 1941 the Nazi regime

had moved away from its previous anti-Jewish policy of violent expulsions

and piecemeal murder to the systematic physical destruction of the entire

European Jewry.147 In recent years, a new consensus has emerged to view

the plan to construct extermination camps in Belzec and Mogilev as local-

ized solutions, designed to create space for the large numbers of deportees

from the Reich rather than the beginning of the systematic mass murder

of every Jew in Europe. As Peter Longerich has convincingly argued, ‘a

concrete plan for the short-term, systematic murder’ of all Jews living in

the German sphere of influence did not exist in the autumn of 1941 when

‘the murder of hundreds of thousands, but not millions of human beings

was being prepared’.148

In the euphoria of imminent victory and under increasing pressure

from various German Gauleiters to deport ‘their’ Jews, Hitler had made

the fateful decision to al ow for a limited deportation programme from

the Reich and the Protectorate, while simultaneously extending Himmler’s

jurisdiction as Reich commissioner for the strengthening of Germandom

to the Soviet territories and appointing Heydrich as acting Reich Protector

of Bohemia and Moravia, one of the areas for which deportations had

been approved. At the same time, scarce food supplies and a rise in resist-

ance activities in the conquered territories led to an intensification of mass

murder of Soviet Jews and the spatial expansion of the extermination

campaign beyond the occupied Soviet territories (to encompass certain

208

HITLER’S HANGMAN

regions of Eastern and Central Europe, particularly Serbia). Final y, the

problem of reception areas for Jewish deportees from the Reich led to the

planning and construction of mass extermination centres near the target

areas for deportees. In the autumn of 1941, the SS had begun constructing

stationary gassing facilities with the purpose of kil ing Jews ‘incapable of

working’ near the target ghettos for the first waves of deportees from the

Reich: Riga, Łódź (Chelmno), Lublin (Belzec) and Minsk (Mogilev). The

deportation of Central European Jews into these areas was stil considered

to be a temporary solution, leading to deportations further east the

fol owing spring. This latter plan was genocidal in nature, as anticipated

survival rates among the deportees would be very low. Yet there was no

plan as yet to solve the Jewish question by systematical y shooting or

gassing every single Jew on the European continent. 149

Impulses for mass murder came from both the centre and the peripheries

of the Nazi empire. In the newly occupied Eastern territories, local civilian

authorities, military commanders and SS
Einsatzgruppen
leaders searched

for their own solutions to the Jewish problem, partly in response to the

‘impossible situations’ that had been created by the Nazis in the first place:

deportees were sent to ghettos in the General Government that were

already overcrowded, to camps that did not yet exist and to areas that had

actual y been intended for the resettlement of ethnic Germans from the

East. Heydrich’s role in the deliberate creation of these ‘impossible situa-

tions’ cal ing for ‘radical solutions’ is difficult to overestimate: he encouraged

task-force commanders to compete for radical solutions; his office oversaw

many of the expulsions and resettlements; and his team of Jewish experts

co-ordinated the deportations.150

It was at this critical juncture that military fortunes began to turn

against Nazi Germany. The second week of December was one of the

most dramatic of the entire war. On 7 December, Pearl Harbor was

attacked by Japanese forces. Four days later, Germany declared war on the

United States. Hitler regarded this undertaking as risk-free since the

American armed forces would be tied up in the Pacific for at least another

year, during which time he would be able to end his European war victo-

riously and simultaneously attack American maritime transports to

Europe without any restrictions. At a special session of the Reichstag on

11 December, he formally announced Germany’s entry into the war on

the side of Japan. The members of the Reichstag, with Heydrich among

them, greeted this announcement with frenetic applause.151

On 12 December, one day after his Reichstag speech, Hitler invited

various Nazi dignitaries to his private quarters in the Reich Chancellery.

Emphasizing that the world war now upon Germany was a struggle of life

and death in which all means were justified, the Führer returned to his

AT W A R W I T H T H E W O R L D

209

‘prophecy’ of 30 January 1939. ‘As regards the Jewish question’, Goebbels

noted in his diary,

the Führer has decided to make a clean sweep. He prophesied to the Jews

that, if they ever started a world war again, it would mean their annihila-

tion. This was not mere phrasemaking. The world war is upon us; the

extermination of the Jews must be the necessary consequence. This ques-

tion should be regarded without any sentimentality. We are not here to

sympathize with the Jews but to sympathize with our German people.

With the German people having once more sacrificed 160,000 dead in the

campaign in the East, the original agents of this bloody conflict must pay

for it with their lives.152

As radical as these statements appear, they were not fundamental y

different in tone and substance from similar threats made previously by

Hitler and Goebbels.153 Hitler’s statement of 12 December was indicative

not so much of a fundamental radicalization of Nazi policies towards

the Jews than as an of intensification and extension of the process of

mass murder that was already wel on its way.154 When Himmler met with

Hitler on 18 December, his diary contained an ominous reference to

the ‘Jewish question’. Next to these words, apparently as a result of

his meeting with Hitler, he noted: ‘to be eliminated as partisans’.155 Given

that Jews had been murdered on a massive scale since the summer under

the pretext of anti-partisan activities, it is likely, as Peter Longerich has

suggested, that Himmler merely wanted to have this practice endorsed by

Nazi Germany’s supreme authority.156

Since the summer and autumn of 1941 the challenges involved in

finding a comprehensive solution to the Jewish question had multiplied.

The simultaneous implementation of the murder of the Jews in the occu-

pied Soviet Union and the deportation of the Jews from the Reich neces-

sitated further co-ordination between Heydrich’s RSHA and other

ministerial authorities with vested interests in the Jewish question. For

this purpose, Heydrich ordered Eichmann to convene a meeting at the

state secretary level, a meeting that had originally been planned for mid-

December but, due to Germany’s declaration of war on the United States,

was postponed to January 1942: the Wannsee Conference.

Wannsee

On 20 January 1942, a snowy Tuesday morning, Heydrich gathered four-

teen senior Nazi civil servants, party officials and high-ranking SS officers

in a former industrialist’s villa on the shores of Berlin’s Lake Wannsee.157

210

HITLER’S HANGMAN

As Heydrich indicated in his invitation letter of late November 1941,

the purpose of the meeting was to establish ‘a common position among

the central authorities’ in regard to the final solution. Heydrich even

referred to the eastward ‘evacuation’ of Jews from the Reich and the

Protectorate as the reason why co-ordination with other central agencies

of Nazi Germany had become necessary.158

Heydrich’s guests were important and, for the most part, well-educated

men (over half of them had a doctorate, mainly in law). Many of them were

of equivalent status to Heydrich, although none had equivalent powers.

The largest group around the table comprised the representatives of minis-

tries with responsibilities for the Jewish question: Dr Wilhelm Stuckart

(Interior), Dr Roland Freisler (Justice), Erich Neumann (Four-Year Plan

Organization), Friedrich-Wilhelm Kritzinger (Reich Chancellery) and

Dr Martin Luther (Foreign Ministry). The two representatives of the

Ministry for the Occupied Eastern Territories, Dr Alfred Meyer and Dr

Georg Leibbrandt, fell into this category, but, together with Hans Frank’s

State Secretary in the General Government, Dr Josef Bühler, they formed

a second group, namely German agencies with responsibilities for the

civilian administration of occupied territories in the East. Then there were

the officials from the SS and party with a special interest in race questions:

Gerhard Klopfer (Party Chancellery) and Otto Hofmann (director of the

SS Race and Settlement Office). In addition, Heydrich had instructed

officials from his own apparatus to attend. The most senior of them was

Heinrich Mül er, head of the Gestapo, and, below him, Adolf Eichmann,

Heydrich’s Jewish expert. From the field there was Dr Karl Eberhard

Schöngarth, head of the Security Police and SD in the General Government,

and Dr Rudolf Lange, the regional Security Police chief in Latvia, where

he had been responsible for the mass shootings of Jews in Riga at the end

of November 1941.159

Heydrich opened the meeting by reminding his guests that Göring had

entrusted
him
with the task of resolving the Jewish question in Europe.

The purpose of the present meeting, he declared, was therefore only to

establish clarity on fundamental questions and to co-ordinate a ‘paralleli-

zation of policies’. What followed was directed against the representatives

of the General Government and the Ministry for the Occupied Eastern

Territories: ‘Centralized control in the handling of the final solution’ now

lay ‘irrespective of geographical boundaries’, with the SS.160

Heydrich deliberately chose the words ‘irrespective of geographical