boundaries’ in order to underline that neither Rosenberg as minister for the
occupied Eastern territories nor the General Governor, Hans Frank, would
be able to make independent decisions regarding Jewish policy in their
respective fiefdoms. This was by no means uncontroversial. The matter of
AT W A R W I T H T H E W O R L D
211
whether the Jewish question should be treated as a ‘policing issue’, thus
fal ing into Heydrich’s area of responsibility, or a political issue, thus
remaining within Rosenberg’s jurisdiction, remained highly contested. In the
winter of 1941, Rosenberg had repeatedly tried to impose tighter control
over SS representatives in the former Soviet Union, causing Heydrich to
insist in a letter to him of 10 January 1942 that Nazi Jewish policies in the
East were a policing matter outside Rosenberg’s jurisdiction.161
Heydrich’s words were also aimed at Bühler, Hans Frank’s deputy,
whose relationship with Heydrich had been overshadowed by a conflict
over executive competences in the General Government ever since the
autumn of 1939.162 In the months and weeks before the Wannsee
Conference, Himmler and Heydrich had repeatedly clashed with civilian
agencies in Poland over issues of competence in relation to Jewish
matters.163 In late November 1941, for example, Himmler’s representative
in the General Government complained to Heydrich that Frank wished
to take control of the ‘handling of the Jewish problem’ in the General
Government himself. Shortly after this meeting, Bühler was added to the
list of invitees, presumably to settle the matter of competences over Jewish
policies once and for all.164
After reasserting his unquestionable authority in all matters concerning
the Jewish question, Heydrich recapitulated the previous stages and past
achievements in the Nazis’ struggle against Jewry. The principal aim since
1933 had been to remove the Jews from all sectors of German society and
then from German soil. The only solution available at that time had been
to accelerate Jewish emigration, a policy that had led to the creation of the
Reich Central Office for Jewish Emigration. The disadvantages of the
policy of emigration were clear to all those involved, but in the absence of
alternatives the policy was tolerated, at least initially. With pride, Heydrich
recalled that between January 1933 and 31 October 1941, a total of
537,000 Jews had been ‘induced to emigrate’ from Germany, Austria and
the Protectorate.
Since the outbreak of war with the Soviet Union, however, the situation
had changed entirely. Emigration from Germany was no longer an option
and had indeed been forbidden altogether by Himmler in the autumn of
1941. Instead, Heydrich suggested, ‘new possibilities in the East’ offered ‘a
further possible solution’ which had recently been approved by Hitler: ‘the
evacuation of the Jews to the East’. The small-scale deportations from the
Reich and the Protectorate to Łódź, Minsk and Riga that had commenced
in October 1941 had provided important ‘practical experiences’, which
would be ‘of great significance for the coming final solution to the Jewish
question’. Unfortunately, he continued, regional discrepancies in the treat-
ment of Jews persisted. Inconsistencies regarding the destination of the
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HITLER’S HANGMAN
transports and the fate of the deportees made it clear that the central
agencies involved were struggling to adopt a coherent approach regarding
the Jews to be deported from the Reich. These were the persisting
problems that Heydrich hoped to resolve at the Wannsee Conference.165
Following his brief general introduction, Heydrich outlined the scale
of the task that lay ahead of them. Roughly 11 million Jews – including
those living under German occupation, the Jews of neutral European
states such as Turkey, Ireland and Sweden and those living in states still
at war with Nazi Germany, such as Great Britain – would be affected
by the final solution. This figure, Heydrich added disapprovingly, was an
estimate based on statistics of religious rather than racial affiliation ‘since
some countries still do not have a definition of the Jew according to
racial principles’.166 The full implementation of the final solution
could thus occur only after a victorious conclusion of the war, but
Heydrich was confident that Germany would soon be in a position to put
sufficient pressure on the neutral countries to surrender their Jews to the
Nazis.
Heydrich then informed his guests of the fate he envisaged for those
Jews already under German control: ‘Under appropriate leadership,
the Jews should be put to work in the East in the context of the final solu-
tion. In large, single-sex labour columns, Jews fit to work will work their
way eastwards constructing roads. Doubtless the large majority will be
eliminated by natural causes.’ Any ‘final remnants that survive will no
doubt consist of the most resistant elements’. These ‘elements’ would ‘have
to be dealt with appropriately’ in order to avoid, as the ‘experience of
history’ confirmed, the formation of ‘the germ cell [
Keimzelle
] of a new
Jewish revival’. The fate of the millions of Jews deemed unable to work in
the first place, most notably the elderly and the sick, was much more
straightforward. It was so obvious that it did not even need to be
discussed.167
Heydrich’s reference to Jewish slave labour in the East has generated
considerable debate among historians of the Holocaust. Spurred on by
Eichmann’s admission during his trial in Jerusalem, some scholars have
argued that the coded language used at the Wannsee Conference ulti-
mately concealed a coherent plan to murder systematically all Jews in the
German sphere of influence. Others, however, have suggested that
Heydrich’s forced-labour programme was not pure camouflage but rather
one of many elements making up his plan for the final solution. Since the
construction of the extermination camps in the Warthegau and in
the General Government was only progressing slowly and as Jewish
forced labour had great significance for the German war economy,
the latter argument appears to be more plausible.168
AT W A R W I T H T H E W O R L D
213
Germany and the Protectorate, Heydrich said, would be cleared of Jews
first. Only then would Europe be combed from west to east. The Jews
would be brought to ‘transit ghettos’ and then sent further east, although
he conceded that Jews should not be removed from essential enterprises
in the wartime economy unless foreign replacement labour could be
provided. Even Heydrich could not ignore wartime economic needs at a
time when Nazi Germany was confronted with manpower shortages on a
dangerous scale. He attempted to balance recognition of current labour
scarcities with a desire to eliminate all Jews, although his determination
to kill all ‘resilient’ surviving Jewish labourers shows that he privileged
ideology over economic concerns and military necessities.169
Heydrich then identified some key prerequisites for the deportations.
There had to be clarity about who was going to be deported. Jews over
sixty-five and decorated war veterans would be sent to the ‘old-age
ghetto’ of Theresienstadt, primarily to obviate the numerous predictable
interventions from German neighbours or friends on their behalf. In
relation to other considerations, Heydrich remained notably vague about
how he hoped to implement his murderous concept of deportation,
extermination and annihilation through labour. After emphasizing once
more that the speed of the deportations would largely depend on the mili-
tary situation over the next few months, he suggested that concrete imple-
mentation plans would be discussed at a follow-up conference of
middle-rank experts from the ministries and agencies involved in anti-
Jewish policies.170
Heydrich’s position on the Jewish question at Wannsee was not entirely
new. As in early 1941, he continued to assume that the comprehensive
solution to the Jewish question would take place
after
the end of the war
through a combination of forced labour and mass murder. More immedi-
ately, the systematic mass killing of Jews that had already begun in the
Soviet Union during the previous summer could be intensified and
extended to occupied Poland.171
Frank’s deputy, Bühler, accordingly suggested to Heydrich that the final
solution should begin in the General Government since ‘the transport
problem does not play a significant role here’ and most of the Jews living
in this area were already incapable of working anyway. The solution of the
Jewish question in the General Government could and should therefore
begin as quickly as possible. The representative of the Ministry for the
Occupied Eastern Territories, Meyer, also pleaded that ‘certain prepara-
tory measures in the context of the final solution’ should be conducted
immediately. Given that ‘various types of solution possibilities’ (in other
words, different means of mass murder) were discussed at Wannsee,
Meyer’s reference to ‘preparatory measures’ can only have meant one
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HITLER’S HANGMAN
thing: the creation of further extermination camps based on the model of
the Belzec camp, which was already under construction.172
Bühler and Meyer thus placed an alternative on the table that rendered
Heydrich’s envisaged deportation programme largely superfluous. It was a
surprising turn of events, but a proposal that Heydrich endorsed because
it promised a speedy solution of the Jewish problem in the General
Government, a territory with the largest concentration of Jews in
German-occupied Europe. Himmler and Heydrich would take up Bühler’s
suggestion in the ensuing months and develop it further, as the focal point
of the Europe-wide final solution shifted from the formerly Soviet terri-
tories to occupied Poland.173
The remainder of the Wannsee Conference was devoted to a lengthy
discussion of whether half-Jews and Jews in ‘privileged’ mixed marriages
should be included in the final solution, an issue of high priority for
Heydrich. Ever since the Nuremberg Laws of 1935, SS racial experts had
demanded further measures to address the alleged threat of racial decom-
position of the German
Volk
posed by the so-called
Mischlinge
or mixed
breeds.174 They had been bitterly disappointed by the second Nuremberg
Law of 1935, the Law for the Protection of German Blood, which treated
as Jews only persons with three or four Jewish grandparents, thus allowing
most people with two or fewer Jewish ancestors to be considered as
Germans. Although Hitler favoured a more radical stance, he hesitated to
impose laws that would antagonize the countless German relatives of the
half-Jews in question. The compromise solution was a new legal category,
the
Mischling
, defined by a disparate muddle of religious and racial
criteria. Quarter-Jews were termed
Mischlinge
but were allowed to marry
other Germans, although not other
Mischlinge
or Jews. Half-Jews were
also considered
Mischlinge
unless they were members of a synagogue or
had married a Jew, in which case they were considered full Jews (the
so-called
Geltungsjuden
).175
In 1941 party radicals renewed efforts to extend their definitional
power, remove the protected categories and have the
Mischlinge
legally
equated with full Jews. Heydrich, too, began to take a more active interest
in the question, particularly once it became important to define which
groups should be deported from the Reich. By the summer of 1941, he
decided that the time had come to revise the protection of the
Mischlinge
and to mount a frontal attack on the compromises established by the
Nuremberg Laws.176
The numbers at stake were comparatively small. In 1939, there were
64,000 first-degree and around 43,000 second-degree
Mischlinge
in the
Old Reich, Austria and the Protectorate. Nonetheless, Heydrich spent
considerable time outlining his own narrow definition of the
Mischlinge
.
AT W A R W I T H T H E W O R L D
215
First-degree
Mischlinge
or half-Jews, he suggested, should be considered
Jews (and consequently be deported) unless they were either married to
‘persons of German blood’
and
the marriage had resulted in children
or
if
they had received an exemption permit from a top Nazi authority. In