Masters of Death (18 page)

There could be no question of “fishing out the racially valuable” from the Jews, of course. Doing so among the other ethnic groups, Himmler thought, would involve banning education beyond a bare minimum of four grades of elementary school, which would teach “basic addition up to 500, how to write one’s name, the lesson that it is a divine commandment to be obedient to the Germans and to be honest, industrious and well-behaved. I do not consider reading necessary.” Parents who wanted a better education for their children would then be allowed to apply to officials appointed by the Higher SS and Police Leaders. These officials would determine whether a child was “racially pure. . . . Should we recognize such a child as being of our blood, the parents will be informed that the child will come to Germany to go to school and will remain in Germany permanently.” The parents could hand the child over or might be “required to go to Germany and become loyal citizens.” The SS would essentially hold the child hostage to the parents’ loyalty. The population remaining behind would constitute a “leaderless working class,” supplying Germany with migrant workers and common laborers.

Himmler understood that this racial fishing policy might potentially be “cruel and tragic” from the point of view of each individual involved. In a much-debated passage, however, he wrote, “If one rejects the Bolshevist method of the physical extermination of a people from inner conviction as un-Germanic and impossible,” then the method outlined in his memorandum was “the mildest and best.” Since racial fishing did not apply to the Jews, who were to be “completely erased,” the question of milder versus harsher racial fishing methods also did not apply to the Jews. Nevertheless, Himmler’s generalization that “the . . . physical extermination of a people” was “un-Germanic and impossible” strongly implies that his own “inner conviction” had not yet prepared him to countenance the physical extermination of the Jews by direct killing. So, of course, does this chronicle of his labors to find an
Endlösung—
a Final Solution—by rooting around among the methods colonial powers had used against indigenous native populations (reservations, expulsions into inhospitable regions, leadership decapitation, harsh slave labor). Not that he felt compassion toward the Jews. But as of May 1940, the Reichsführer-SS evidently did not yet have the stomach for the direct mass murder of an entire people.

“Stomach” in Himmler’s case was more than a metaphor. The stomach trouble that first appears in the record of his life in a diary entry at fifteen had continued to trouble him; it worsened as he won increasing authority. By March 1939 he suffered from abdominal spasms that came and went in response to the stresses of his work and left him writhing in pain so severe he sometimes fainted. Doctors had alleviated his pain with narcotics, but the spasms always returned. That month a masseur
-cum-
folk doctor named Felix Kersten with a gift for sympathetic intervention came to his rescue. Trained in manual therapy in Berlin by a Chinese specialist, Kersten was a ruddy, confident Buddha of Baltic German origin, a Finnish citizen (a reward for having volunteered to fight the Russians in the Finnish war of liberation of 1918) who treated the husband of Queen Wilhelmina of the Netherlands and was a member of the Dutch royal household. Upon admission to Himmler’s chambers, Kersten found “a little man who gave me an alert glance from under his pince-nez; one would almost say that there was something oriental in his broad cheekbones and round face. . . . He was very worried about the severe pains he had in the region of his stomach, which sometimes lasted as long as five days and left him so exhausted that he felt afterwards as if he were convalescing after a serious illness.” Over the next two weeks Kersten was able to relieve the Reichsführer-SS. When Germany occupied Holland in 1940 and the Dutch royal family took refuge in England, Himmler gave Kersten the choice of freedom tethered to service as his personal medical adviser or confinement in a concentration camp. Kersten chose tethered freedom and kept a diary.

He diagnosed Himmler accurately as a divided and cowardly man. His patient was completely subservient to Hitler:

An unfavorable comment by Hitler on one of his measures was enough to upset him thoroughly and produce violent reactions which took the form of severe stomach pains. Simply an indication that Hitler might have a different opinion sufficed to make Himmler hesitate and postpone a decision until he had been able to make sure of Hitler’s attitude. . . . Nobody who had not witnessed it would believe that a man with as much power at his disposal as Himmler had would be in such a state of fear when he was summoned to Hitler; nor would anybody believe how Himmler rejoiced if he came out of the interview successfully or, better still, received a word of praise. . . . Himmler had nothing in him to counterbalance the effect of Hitler’s personality. . . .

This weakness of his made Himmler suffer indescribably.

Comfortable around leaders, a man of personal courage, Kersten understood Himmler well:

Fate gave him a position which he was not able to manage. There was something spasmodic in everything he did. . . . The division in his nature . . . was fundamental; his own character was weak and he preached toughness; he carried out actions which were quite foreign to his nature simply because his Führer ordered them—even the actual annihilation of human beings. . . .

His severe stomach convulsions were not, as he supposed, simply due to a poor constitution or to overwork; they were rather the expression of this psychic division which extended over his whole life. I soon realized that while I could bring him momentary relief and even help over longer periods, I could never achieve a fundamental cure. The basic cause of these convulsions was not removed, was indeed constantly being aggravated. It was inevitable that in times of psychic stress his physical pains should also increase.

In March and April 1941, Himmler’s stomach cramps drove him to bed. Kersten found him “exhausted and twisted with pain on his chaise longue. When I came into the room he just said: ‘Please help me, I can’t bear any more pain.’ ” What provoked such misery in the Reichsführer-SS, his worst attack of the entire war?

By December 1940, historian Richard Breitman comments, Madagascar was only “a fading option.” Shipping millions of Jews to the remote East African island had always depended on removing the dominant maritime power — Britain — from control of the sea lanes either by defeating the British in war or convincing them to cooperate, and neither outcome was any longer likely. When planning began for Barbarossa (which Hitler formally authorized on 18 December 1940), a new region became available to which European Jews could be evacuated. But Hitler and Himmler’s vision of
Lebensraum
and
Wehrbauern
colonization required that western Russia be cleared, not populated.

Despite this inherent conflict, in SS planning the Soviet Union became the next destination for the European Jews. Eichmann reported to Himmler on 4 December 1940 that 5.8 million Jews would have to be evacuated, including the Jews of Poland. They would be evacuated, Eichmann said in euphemistic code, to “a territory yet to be determined.” A week later Himmler also spoke of “Jewish emigration and thus yet more space for Poles.” Looking back from late January 1941, a colleague of Eichmann’s summarized what had occurred in the two preceding months:

In conformity with the will of the Führer, at the end of the war there should be brought about a final solution of the Jewish question within the European territories ruled or controlled by Germany.

The Chief of the Security Police and the Security Service [Heydrich] has already received orders from the Führer, through the Reichsführer-SS, to submit a project for a final solution. . . . The project in all its essentials has been completed. It is now with the Führer and the Reichsmarschall [Göring].

It is certain that its execution will involve a tremendous amount of work whose success can only be guaranteed through the most painstaking preparations. This will extend to the work preceding the wholesale deportation of the Jews as well as to the planning to the last detail of a settlement action in the territory yet to be determined.

The end of the war was not expected to be that far away; the Wehrmacht assumed, overoptimistically, that the Soviet Union could be crushed in a few months.

Even at this point, Himmler was still thinking in terms of attrition of the evacuated European Jews under the harsh conditions of resettlement and forced labor rather than direct killing. Early in 1941, historian Christopher Browning reports, the Reichsführer-SS asked his former driver, Viktor Brack, now working on euthanasia murder in the Führer Chancellery, to investigate methods for mass sterilization using X rays. “Through the mixing of blood in the Polish Jews with that of the Jews of western Europe,” Brack heard him say, “a much greater danger for Germany was arising than even before the war.” That is, Himmler was concerned to prevent Jewish children from being conceived after the resettlement, because these children might grow up to plague the Third Reich. “Brack submitted a preliminary report on March 28, 1941,” Browning writes, “which Himmler acknowledged positively on May 12. Thereafter, however, Himmler showed no further interest.” Browning continues:

The documentation for this last plan for expelling Jews into the Soviet Union is quite fragmentary and elusive in comparison to the Lublin and Madagascar Plans. [This may be] because their hearts were no longer in it — that in the minds of Hitler, Himmler and Heydrich the notion was beginning to take shape of another possibility in the future, if all went well with the imminent military campaign. Indeed, it was precisely in March 1941 that Hitler’s exhortations for a war of destruction against the Soviet Union . . . were setting new parameters and expectations for Nazi racial policies.

This period when Hitler, Himmler and their subordinates wrestled with the question of what to do about the European Jews was the period of Himmler’s worst attack of stomach trouble. He was sufficiently intelligent to see that the plans and conflicts were leading toward an increasingly radical program. The Führer would require the SS to carry out that program. In 1943, speaking to his Gruppenführers at Posen, he would compare the assignment—“the evacuation of the Jews,” he called it, “the extermination of the Jewish people”—to another grisly assignment the Führer had laid upon the SS, the Röhm Purge:

Just as little as we hesitated to do our duty as ordered on 30 June 1934, and place comrades who had failed us against the wall and shoot them, just as little did we ever speak of it, and we shall never speak of it. It was a matter of course, of tact, for us, thank God, never to speak of it, never to talk of it. It made everybody shudder; yet everyone was clear in his mind that he would do it again if ordered to do so, and if it was necessary.

“It made everybody shudder”: in spring 1941 Himmler was shuddering again at the thought of what his Führer was asking him and his legions to do.

Yet he would do it; he had long ago pawned his conscience at the Führer’s pawnshop and he had no personal resources to redeem it. Talking to Kersten one day in late December 1940 about his
Wehrbauern
project, he said his
Wehrbauern
settlements were necessary to assure the existence of a thousand-year Reich. “We must lay the foundations for that,” he went on enthusiastically, “and not allow ourselves to be put off by the difficulties which are to be encountered at the commencement of every great undertaking. Above all we must, in this as in other matters, make a start first and then see how things are going, advance step by step, do what we must, correct our mistakes and not move on to new objectives until we are quite convinced that we have found the right way.”

In the summer of 1941, from Riga to Odessa, Himmler’s Einsatzgruppen and Order Police had made a start; it was time to move on to new objectives.

SEVEN

Extermination

The surprise of Barbarossa devastated Josef Stalin. By 28 June 1941, after a week of continuous meetings, the Soviet dictator had succumbed to deep depression. Leaving the defense commissariat the next day with several Politburo members, he had burst out loudly, “Lenin left us a great inheritance and we, his heirs, have fucked it all up!” A Politburo delegation that tracked him down at his dacha at the beginning of July found him sitting in an armchair staring, with a strange look on his face. By the time he rallied, the Luftwaffe was bombing Moscow. Vyacheslav Molotov and Anastas Mikoyan wrote the first war speech Stalin delivered by radio to the Soviet people, on 3 July 1941. “Comrades, citizens, brothers and sisters, fighters of our Army and Navy!” he began. “I am speaking to you, my friends!” He had never spoken that way before.

Stalin described a “life-and-death struggle against [our] most perfidious enemy. . . . The enemy is cruel and merciless. He aims at grabbing our land, our wheat and oil. He wants to . . . destroy the national culture of the peoples of the Soviet Union . . . and turn them into the slaves of German princes and barons.” The Soviet dictator spoke of “putting our whole production on a war footing.” He called for scorched-earth withdrawals: “The enemy must not be left a single engine or a single boxcar, and not a pound of bread nor a pint of oil. The collective farms must drive away all their livestock, hand their grain reserves to the state agencies for evacuation to the rear. . . . All valuable property which cannot be evacuated, whether grain, fuel or non-ferrous metals, must be destroyed.” And then he unwittingly played into Hitler’s hands:

In the occupied territories partisan units must be formed. . . . There must be diversionist groups for fighting enemy units, for spreading the partisan war everywhere, for blowing up and destroying roads and bridges and telephone and telegraph wires; for setting fire to forests, enemy stores and road convoys. In the occupied areas intolerable conditions must be created for the enemy and his accomplices, who must be persecuted and destroyed at every step.