Masters of Death (43 page)

The court further established that Filbert had ordered a man in Einsatzkommando 9 who showed consideration for his Jewish victims to be severely punished. Filbert’s history, from his childhood brutalization to his fanatic SS posturing, indicates that he was fully violently socialized. Yet he was pragmatic enough to reduce his unit’s direct participation in slaughter when he saw evidence that his men were being traumatized:

By the time the EK reached the Vitebsk area [Filbert] had delegated some of the shooting to a civilian militia recruited from among the local Jew haters and anti-Soviet members of the population, distinguished only by armbands, without even the semblance of “due legal process.” This was shown to be due to a deterioration of morale among his own men who had to be issued with increasing rations of vodka to carry out their killing orders. Rather than shoot, they would bully the victims to jump into the pit alive, so that the local irregulars should do the final shooting for them.

And just as his men had trouble killing, so also did Filbert find it impossible to sustain the hardness Himmler demanded (but did not himself display). “ ‘Well,’ ” Filbert challenged Dicks, “ ‘how does a man show he cannot stand it except by his nerves giving way?’ I asked if this was really how he reacted. ‘Yes —a complete nervous breakdown . . . to be degraded into a hangman and murderer—nobody [i.e., the court] believes I felt it.’ Myself: What were the symptoms? [Filbert:] ‘Uncontrollable trembling’ (
Schüttelfrost—
a word I translate as
rigor,
as in fever), ‘and weeping. I did not laugh any more.’ ” At another point in their long conversation Filbert said of his breakdown, “I was degraded into a hangman—I began to tremble and have weeping fits—I used to be so gay.”

Filbert supplies a clue to Nebe’s reasons for withdrawing from command of Einsatzgruppe B in November 1941. He says Nebe, the former police officer, told him “I have looked after so many criminals, and now I have become one myself.” (Nebe’s driver had committed suicide, ostensibly because he was unable to bear participating in massacres, and Nebe’s friend Hans Gisevius, who saw Nebe after he returned to Berlin, described him as “a mere shadow of his former self, nerves on edge and depressed.”) Filbert also offered a typology of the Einsatzgruppen leaders he encountered:

What about those in the service who could accept the extermination tasks [Dicks asked]—how do you think this was possible for them? [Filbert] says: “There were many of those others. The SS was full of desperate and bad characters.” . . . He lists categories: (a) There were those who said: “The Führer commands, all is in order”—the unquestioning ones; (b) another type were those whose motto was simply “In the morning we shoot . . . in the evening we feast”; (c) the third group were those, like himself, who kept aloof from these types, and he was accused of being a bad comrade . . . ; (d) yet another sort were like the young law graduate SS officer who came to him at Vilnius and said “I cannot do it” and [Filbert] had to say “Don’t say that aloud!” and put him to work in the unit office.

Perhaps surprisingly, Bach-Zelewski, the Higher SS and Police Leader responsible for Russia–Center, was among those who broke down. Sometime in February 1942 he traveled to Germany and checked into the Red Cross hospital at Hohenlychen, seventy miles north of Berlin, suffering from hemorrhoids. The chief SS physician, Ernst Robert Grawitz, personally attended his case. Grawitz wrote Himmler early in March about the bad turn Bach-Zelewski’s recuperation had taken. “Slow healing and prolonged pain are common in hemorrhoid operations,” Grawitz wrote, but Bach-Zelewski offered additional challenges:

It was especially noticeable, however, that the patient arrived from the eastern front for treatment suffering from a very serious state of general exhaustion, particularly nervous exhaustion. (He suffers especially from flashbacks connected with the shootings of Jews which he himself conducted and other difficult experiences in the East!) Because the psychological treatment of the patient is complex, I have personally extensively intervened and am working daily to restore his mental balance. Frau von dem Bach requested to live in the hospital and care for her husband and I have acceded to her request. I took this unusual step, which has led to unavoidable but not unbridgeable difficulties, because the psychological treatment of the patient is a significant factor in the total healing plan.

When Grawitz had asked Bach-Zelewski why he was so disturbed, the Obergruppenführer is supposed to have said, “Thank God, I’m through with it. Don’t you know what’s happening in Russia? The entire Jewish people . . . is being exterminated there.” He wasn’t through with it, however; within two months he was back in Russia supervising massacres.

Even Jäger, a hard case, eventually broke down, Jeckeln testified during his 1945 interrogation. “Jäger told me that he had become neurotic as a result of these shootings,” Jeckeln said. “[He] was pensioned off and left his post for treatment.”

Himmler was concerned about the effect on his subordinates of direct participation in mass killing, as his 12 December 1941 letter ordering “comradely gatherings . . . in the best German domestic style” demonstrates. But he was adamant about accomplishing the Final Solution the Führer had ordered. Heinz Jost, a lawyer and SS-Brigadeführer who took command of Einsatzgruppe A after Stahlecker was killed by Estonian partisans in late March 1942, claimed at the Nuremberg Einsatzgruppen trial to have challenged successively Jeckeln, Heydrich and Himmler with the problem of psychological casualties among the SS killing squads. When he confronted Himmler, he testified, “I was asked, ‘Are you a philosopher? What is the meaning of this? What do you mean, problems? All that is concerned are our orders.’ ” Himmler offered an analogy: “I have given the
Handschuhbefehl,
the glove order.” Jost explained to the court: “Himmler had given an order that when [an SS] superior was greeted or saluted the glove had to be removed from the hand. In the Army it was the other way around, the glove had to remain on the hand.” Jost continued:

Himmler said, “I have given this glove order. There are many who believe they do not have to bother about such an order because they don’t like it. Anyone whom I meet who does not follow this order and obey it in the strictest manner, I shall punish him very severely and harshly. Even if the contents of the order are ever so ridiculous, the contents of the order don’t matter, all that matters is that it is an order, and those who don’t obey the glove order prove that they do not want to carry out orders of great importance. Orders cannot be discussed or debated. Orders have to be obeyed, and that principle you don’t seem to have realized yet. What is your age?” he asked. I replied, “I was born in 1904.” “Oh, you are one of those people who never had any military training. No one here can be an officer or a general who cannot obey, because those who don’t obey orders cannot give orders either. I must think about how I can train you to do this.”

Himmler trained Jost by breaking him to Unterscharführer—corporal—and sending him to the Eastern front. The episode supports Felix Kersten’s unsurpassed portrait of the SS-Reichsführer, whose immense and devious labor turned the “Führer’s wish” into the monstrous reality of the Holocaust:

His eyes were extraordinarily small, and the distance between them narrow, rodent-like. If you spoke to him, these eyes would never leave your face; they would rove over your countenance, fix your eyes; and in them would be an expression of waiting, watching, stealth. His manner of reacting to things which did not meet with his approval was also not quite that expected from the jovial bourgeois [he pretended to be]. Sometimes his disagreement was clothed in the form of a fatherly admonition, but this could suddenly change and his speech and actions would become ironic, caustic, cynical. But never, even in these expressions of disagreement and dislike, did the man himself seem to appear. . . .Never any indication of directness. Himmler, when fighting, intrigued; when battling for his so-called ideas used subterfuge, deceit—not dueling swords, but daggers in his opponent’s back. His ways were the ophidian ways of the coward, weak, insincere and immeasurably cruel. . . . Himmler’s mind . . . was not a twentieth century mind. His character was medieval, feudalistic, machiavellian, evil.

It bears repeating that psychological trauma incident upon carrying out criminal orders to murder large groups of unarmed noncombatants in no way mitigates the crime. Indeed, such mental conflict is indirect evidence that the men of the Einsatzgruppen were well aware that what they were doing was criminal and evil even if the highest authority of the German state had ordered it.

FIFTEEN

Final Solution

In October 1941 Stalin learned from a mole in the German Embassy in Tokyo, Richard Sorge, that the Japanese had decided to remain neutral in the German-Russian War rather than attack the Soviet Union from the east, through Mongolia, as Germany had proposed. The Japanese decided on neutrality to reserve their forces to fight the United States. Matching Sorge’s information to other corroborating evidence, Stalin decided he could rely on it. He proceeded to transfer his entire Far Eastern army—some 250,000 men deploying 1,700 tanks and 1,500 aircraft—westward across Siberia to the Moscow front.

Siberian divisions began probing German forces south of Moscow as early as 18 November 1941, but the full-scale Soviet counterattack came on the night of 4–5 December 1941 all along the front. Russian winter and German overconfidence had left the Third Reich’s armies ill-prepared, Panzer Group commander Heinz Guderian would argue to justify the heavy German losses that followed:

Only he who saw the endless expanse of Russian snow during this winter of our misery, and felt the icy wind that blew across it, burying in snow every object in its path; who drove for hour after hour through that no man’s land only at last to find too thin shelter, with insufficiently clothed half-starved men; and who also saw by contrast the well-fed, warmly clad and fresh Siberians, fully equipped for winter fighting; only a man who knew all that can truly judge the events which now occurred.

(A few days later Guderian recorded an outside temperature of −63°F; “many men died while performing their natural functions,” he wrote gruesomely, “as a result of a congelation of the anus.”)

But even with fresh divisions, Soviet strength no more than matched German numbers. “The Red Army,” writes Alan Clark, “. . . had no power to achieve, nor did the weather permit, a deep penetration in the manner of the summer battles. In the few cases where the Russians succeeded in surrounding their enemy they had neither the artillery to reduce them nor sufficient strength in the air to prevent their revictualing by the Luftwaffe.” Clark believes Hitler saved the day by taking personal command and refusing to allow his forces to withdraw. Moscow was spared invasion, however, and the Wehrmacht remained stalled before the Soviet capital in the worst winter in one hundred forty years.

In Hawaii the U.S. Pacific fleet lay unsuspecting at anchor in Pearl Harbor when Japanese carrier-based aircraft attacked on the morning of 7 December 1941. In two successive raids of 183 and 167 aircraft, the Japanese sank, capsized or damaged eight battleships, three light cruisers, three destroyers and four other ships, damaged or wrecked 292 aircraft and killed 2,403 American military and civilians. When President Franklin D. Roosevelt declared war on 11 December 1941 he did so against not only Japan but Germany and Italy as well.

Hitler responded the same day with a declaration of war against the United States. War against the United States as well as Great Britain and the Soviet Union meant world war to Hitler, war now enlarged to the scale of the conflict that had confirmed his anti-Semitic worldview. And world war was the catapult that would launch the consequences he had “prophesied” in his Reichstag speech of 30 January 1939:

If the Jewish international financiers inside and outside Europe succeed in plunging the nations into another world war, the result will not be the Bolshevization of the world and thus a victory for Judaism. The result will be the extermination of the Jewish race in Europe.

What to do with the Jews in Europe—and especially in the Greater Reich itself—was the question that was supposed to be discussed at a conference of SS leaders and government ministers on the Final Solution scheduled for 9 December 1941. When Heydrich had sent out invitations on 29 November 1941 he had emphasized the importance of the conference “particularly because Jews from the Reich territory, including the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, have been evacuated to the East in ongoing transports since 15 October 1941.” Eichmann had organized it. “It was I who had to bustle over to Heydrich with the portfolio of invitations,” he would brag in a memoir dictated from hiding in Argentina after the war. Abruptly on 8 December 1941 the conference was indefinitely postponed. New invitations went out on 8 January 1942 (Eichmann bustling over to Heydrich again), setting a new date of 20 January 1942 and explaining that the original meeting had been canceled “because of events that were announced suddenly, requiring the attention of some of the invited participants.”

What were those events? The historian Christian Gerlach points to crucial meetings Hitler held in the wake of his declaration of war, meetings that appear to mark Hitler’s decision to have the European Jews directly murdered rather than annihilate them through attrition in camps and ghettos in the East.

Hitler met with his Reichsleiters and Gauleiters—the leaders of National Socialism, some fifty men—in his private residence in the Führer Chancellery on 12 December 1941, the day after his declaration of war in the Reichstag. Gauleiter Josef Goebbels paraphrased in his diary part of what Hitler told his oldest and closest comrades:

Regarding the Jewish question, the Führer is determined to clear the table. He warned the Jews that if they were to cause another world war, it would lead to their own destruction. Those were not empty words. Now the world war has come. The destruction of the Jews must be its necessary consequence. We cannot be sentimental about it. It is not for us to feel sympathy for the Jews. We should have sympathy rather with our own German people. If the German people have to sacrifice 160,000 victims in yet another campaign in the East, then those responsible for this bloody conflict will have to pay for it with their lives.