In Europe (57 page)

I am sitting in the garden of the retired publisher Wolf Jobst Siedler (b.1926), in Berlin's old, exclusive residential district of Dahlem. Siedler still lives in the house in which he grew up, and that is plain to see: the countless prints and paintings, the books, the warm seclusion of the rooms, the restrained luxury, the quiet garden. Dahlem was once the neighbour-hood of Walter Rathenau, of the Jewish businessmen and industrialists, and of the Nazi elite, some of whom moved into abandoned Jewish mansions. Himmler, Dönitz, Ribbentrop, half the Nazi government lived here during the war, on a street where birds sang and no bomb would ever fall.

Siedler talks about how excited everyone was in May 1940. ‘Lots of the boys at school thought it would be just like the First World War. Trenches, long waits, and a battle every now and again. An old friend of the family told my father: ‘This Hitler, he has everyone mesmerised. The generals stare at him like rabbits at a snake.’ I can still hear those words, they stopped all conversation, until dinner was served. Later that same month, reports began coming in of one victory after another. Everyone cheered. Verdun was taken, Sedan, war veterans hugged each other in the streets.’

Most people in Berlin lived through summer 1940 in a state of ecstasy. There was singing and dancing in the streets with every victory in France. When the great triumphal parade came goose-stepping by on 18 July,
the cheering crowd stood twenty deep along the streets, people climbed into trees and on lamp posts, women ran out and hugged the soldiers, flowers and confetti rained down. ‘We, the boys of Berlin, thought the English were fantastic as well. The Battle of Britain was, in our eyes, a jousting match. People talked about the ‘campaign against France’ and the ‘campaign against Holland’. War, no, that wasn't a word we used.’

The first booty began pouring in: furs from Norway, art, tobacco and Bols gin from Holland, wines and perfumes from France, glass from Bohemia, vodka from Poland. In the occupied areas,
Sonderkommando
s began combing the libraries and museums in search of the best European art for the big Berlin museums, and for Hitler's planned Führer Museum and Göring's Karin-Halle.

‘An English bomb would fall now and then,’ Siedler says, ‘but that was mostly exciting to us. We would even cycle over to a house that had been hit, we wanted to see it with our own eyes. And at school we collected shrapnel from the anti-aircraft guns. We traded it back and forth.’

Around Christmas 1940, the city encountered its first shortage of coffee and chocolate. Women were no longer allowed to buy cigarettes. More and more families began raising rabbits, ‘balcony pigs’, for their own consumption. But the striptease shows went on unabated, the restaurants served oysters, lobster and the best wines, and the citizens of Berlin lived well. The weekly ration consisted of a pound of meat, a quarter-pound of butter and three pounds of bread.

In the new year, talk began of another ‘campaign’, this time against Russia. It was to be a matter of out and back again in a few months. Loudspeakers were set up all over the city to broadcast marches. Music, then a crackly voice: ‘From the Führer's headquarters’, followed by an announcement of the fall of Riga, or Minsk, or Kiev, or Odessa.

It was only in autumn 1941, when the soldiers still had not returned and winter was fast approaching, that the city grew uneasy. The loudspeakers stopped reporting victories. The shop windows were full of empty biscuit boxes and wine bottles filled with water. The enormous map of Russia in front of the Wertheim deparment store, where the progress of the German troops had been charted each day, was taken down. Gloves, wool caps and fur coats were collected for the front. By the end, at least 100,000 German soldiers literally froze to death there.

Soviet prisoners of war were brought to Berlin to work in the factories, some 300,000 in all. Before the eyes of the townspeople, they were treated like animals. Half of them died of hunger or perished in the bombardments.

Unnoticed, the city developed into a new kind of nerve centre: Berlin became the administrative heart of the German extermination industry. At the ministry of agriculture and food supply, careful calculations were made of the number of calories to be allotted to each concentration camp, taking into account the projected ‘cancellations’ due to illness and the gas chambers. At the offices of the
Reichsbahn
, the state railway, civil servants wrote thousands of invoices for the Jewish rail transports, all of them at the price of a single ticket.

Wolf Siedler was sent to boarding school, first in Weimar, then to the northern coastal island of Spiekeroog. Of the group of fourteenand fifteen-year-old boys in his class, four did not live to be eighteen. His mother had been mistaken: they were not too young for this war. Just before Siedler left for the front, in summer 1944, the family sat together in the garden of the Dahlem villa for the last time. There was homemade pie and – a rarity by then – real coffee. Suddenly it began snowing, ashes from the burning inner city floated down on the table, everyone rushed inside, poisonous yellow clouds came drifting in.

Today, on this warm July afternoon, the cafés along the shores of the Wannsee are full and the water is covered in pretty sailboats. I ask the bus driver about the monument.‘What monument?’‘For the Wannsee meeting.’ ‘What meeting?’ He drops me off at Biergarten Sanssouci, where the Detlev Becker Trio is playing this weekend – a spectacle he says I must not miss.

Am Grossen Wannsee 56/58: it was in this villa, with its civilised Prussian arches and its tranquil view of the water, that a meeting of top government officials seemingly like any other was held on 20 January, 1942; one of those informal brainstorming sessions to be followed, as the invitation has it, by a light dinner. The conference room is now a museum, and the most important documents of that meeting are displayed on its walls. Visitors file quietly by, everything is neat and tidy, no scream is heard, no tear is shed.

The topic of the meeting was the ‘Jewish question’. Some historians have claimed that the mass murder of the Jews was part of Hitler's master plan from the very start, that it was part of a clear and conscious strategy. In reality, the road that ultimately led to the Holocaust was far more circuitous than that.

‘The essence of Europe is not geographical,’ Hitler once said, ‘but racial.’ In other words: the Nazis did not think in terms of nations, but of peoples, and Europe was to be reorganised according to that principle. Legal borders, international agreements concerning minorities, the equality of states, the League of Nations, none of that mattered to them: nation and people had to coincide.

While, for example, the French, English, Belgian, Dutch and Scandinavian concepts of the state were based on the will of every citizen, the German concept of state was based on blood, descent, race. ‘Blood is stronger than any passport’ was the core of their ideology. The German minorities in Poland, Czechoslovakia, the Ukraine and elsewhere were ‘the racial friends’ of the Third Reich, badly in need of ‘liberation’ by their ‘fellow people’.

At the same time, the importance of racial doctrine among the Nazis was reinforced by a notion of ‘purity’ with which all European culture had been imbued since 1900. Bacteria as the source of countless ills, the importance of hygiene, freshness and purity; all these new discoveries had left their mark on the thinking of innumerable intellectuals since the turn of the century. Yet the notion of purity had an impact that went much further than medical science alone. No citizen of the eighteenth or nineteenth centuries would ever had raised ‘clean’ or ‘dirty’, ‘healthy’ or ‘ill’ to the status of creeds applicable to the whole of social life. But in many circles during the first half of the twentieth century this contradistinction became the hub around which all the rest revolved. ‘Purity’ evolved into a concept that dominated discussions everywhere, not only among rabid racists, but among anthroposophists, politicians and artists as well. Half of Europe suddenly seemed afflicted with a morbid dread of sickness. It is almost impossible to find a cultural essay from the 1930s in which terms such as ‘pure’ and ‘healthy’ do not appear. It was the leitmotif of the modern age.

For the Nazis, this notion of purity meant they had to make their empire ‘healthy’ by, among other things, ‘cleansing’ it of ‘non-national’ taints. Hence their attempts to reorganise nations, to ‘
entjuden
’ the occupied territories, and to herd millions of
Untermenschen
into the part of Poland which became known as the General Government, and other outlying areas of their empire. These
hinausgesauberten
Jews, Poles and Gypsies could then serve as a ‘reservoir’ of cheap labour.

This was, in rough outline, the system the Nazis had in mind until 1940. At first they had hoped to send the Jews to Palestine. In the 1930s that was still an isolated area, economically unimportant, run by the British and far from Europe. In summer 1933, they even signed an agreement with the German Zionist Federation. Approximately 60,000 Jews took advantage of it, until the British put a stop to all Jewish immigration.

After 1939, the Nazis ran the General Government of Poland as a reserve for the Jews, until it quickly proved too small. Then the SS commander Heinrich Himmler proposed a solution to the ‘Jewish question’ in the form of ‘mass emigration to a colony in Africa or elsewhere’. The French colony of Madagascar seemed particularly interesting to him. In his policy paper ‘Some Thoughts on the Treatment of Foreign Peoples in the East’ (May 1940), he touched upon the idea of ‘physical extermination’, only to reject it immediately.

Meanwhile the deportations continued. The General Government became overpopulated with the huge influx of Poles and Jews, the economies of the surrounding towns and villages were destroyed and huge problems arose with regard to the region's food supply, making the settlement of new German colonists almost impossible. Within the Nazi command, conflicts were soon raging between the ‘ideologists’ and the ‘technologists’. Himmler's
Blut und Boden
(Blood and Soil) routine, after all, was turning the General Government into a kind of ethnic storehouse, while Göring and governor general Hans Frank hoped to make of it a well organised slave state.

In autumn 1941, however, it became obvious that the quick conquest of the east was not going according to plan. There are clear indications that, as early as October 1941, Hitler, Himmler and Reinhard Heydrich, head
of the
Sicherheitsdienst
and later Reich governor of Bohemia and Moravia, had arrived at the conclusion that none of the deportation schemes were working, and that mass extermination was the only answer. The first experiments with poison gas date from this period. Himmler, who had personally attended a mass execution by
Einsatzgruppe B
in Minsk, felt that the shootings by roaming Eastern European commandos – in which hundreds of thousands of Jews had already been killed in 1940 and 1941 – were far too time-consuming. They also generated too much emotion, an undesirable side effect. He went looking for a faster and better alternative. Equipment and personnel from the T-4 euthanasia programme were quickly sent east. On 3 September, 1941, at Auschwitz, Zyklon B was first tried out on 600 Soviet prisoners of war. Soon afterwards, the experimental process was speeded up on a large scale with two mobile gas chambers – converted trucks, one for thirty persons, the other for sixty.

The euthanasia specialists, wearing white coats and stethoscopes in order to mislead their victims, were extremely satisfied. Their departmental report literally read: ‘97,000 have been processed since December 1941, using three trucks, with none of the machinery showing a single defect.’

The plans for forced emigration, deportation and national ‘cleansing’ were transformed in this way into a single giant bureaucratic project, aimed at a ‘definitive solution to the Jewish question’.

The Wannsee meeting was held around the pivotal point in the war. The first invitation – the conference was postponed once – dates from 29 November, 1941. One week later the German troops had ground to a halt at the gates of Moscow, Japan had attacked Pearl Harbor and Hitler had declared war on the United States. This lent the campaign to exterminate the Jews of Europe a powerful political and ideological overtone. ‘The world war has arrived!’ Joseph Goebbels shouted on 12 December. ‘The destruction of the Jews must be its consequence.’

The internal summit meeting, accompanied by a luncheon, was finally held on 20 January. The participants included the state secretary of internal affairs, Wilhelm Stuckart, the director general of the Eastern Occupied Territories, Georg Leibbrandt, SS-Oberführer Gerhard Klopfer from the party chancellery, Gestapo chief of operations Heinrich Müller, and SS
Gruppenführer Otto Hofmann from the head office of race and settlement, fifteen top bureaucrats in all. The meeting was chaired by Reinhard Heydrich. Minutes were taken by SD-Obersturmbannführer Adolf Eichmann, head of the Gestapo's Jewish emigration department.

Eichmann's minutes have been preserved: fifteen neatly typed pages of euphemistic officialese. Heydrich opened the meeting and reported that he, with the Führer's permission, had been charged with streamlining the ‘final solution to the European Jewish question’. The goal was to purify, in a ‘legal fashion’, the German
Lebensraum
of all Jews. The ‘evacuation of the Jews to the east’ had already begun, ‘as a possible alternative to emigration’. Carefully compiled lists were then handed out – cognac had meanwhile been served – showing the number of Jews in each country: 131,800 in the Old Empire, 165,000 in occupied France, 160,800 in the Netherlands, 3,500 in Lithuania, 0 in Estonia (‘Free of Jews’), 58,000 in Italy, 200 in Albania, 5 million in the Soviet Union, etc. A striking feature is the enormous ambition reflected in the count: European territories over which Germany as yet held no sway, such as Britain (330,000), Switzerland (18,000) and Spain (6,000), were included as a matter of course.

The parties agreed that Europe must be ‘combed out, from west to east’. Huge columns of able-bodied Jews were to be sent east, where, as the minutes noted, ‘a great number will be reduced by natural elimination’. Those remaining were to be ‘treated in equal fashion’; experience had shown, after all, that failure to do so would leave ‘hearths of infection’ for a Jewish resurrection. A special ghetto would be formed at Theresienstadt, the old fortified city north-west of Prague, for Jewish veterans, war invalids and the aged. All complaints and questions could in this way be dealt with ‘at a single blow’.