Authors: Malcolm MacDonald
The Dower House (37 page)
He pointed out that the goods wagons that brought food and requisitioned machinery from the occupied land to the Fatherland would return to the east filled with Jews who had no more need of either.
The meeting dissolved in happy laughter. It was by no means the end of the conference but they were now to enjoy a buffet. But Felix was riveted by what he read next.
[Fragments of simultaneous conversations during this interval]
F
REISLER
[to L
UTHER
]: I've been admiring this painting. It's the Wannsee as seen from the lawns outside, I imagine . . . somewhere near here, anyway.
L
UTHER
: It's by Billy Breit. Admiring it, you say?
F
REISLER
: Very much. It's surely in the approved style?
L
UTHER
: You should be careful. It shouldn't be hanging here at all, especially in the German headquarters of Interpol! Our dearly beloved Obergruppenführer obviously doesn't know that old Billy Breit was a Jew!
F
REISLER
: Really? No â surely you're mistaken? He was a famous anti-Semite.
L
UTHER
: Of a Jewish mother and a Jewish father â Hannah and Benjamin Breit. He was baptized Solomon.
F
REISLER
: Du liebe Zeit! I never heard that.
L
UTHER
: Nor had I â until Gestapo D4 sent a list of French Jews and decadent intellectuals, communists, and so on that they intended rounding up on the twentieth of . . . my God! Today! That's what Müller was talking about of course. Anyway, there were some German émigrés among the decadents and they were asking the Reich Main Security Office to run a check on their racial history. I was kept informed because there will certainly be international repercussions.
F
REISLER
: But . . . Billy Breit? I mean, he's not still alive, surely?
L
UTHER
: No, but his grandson is. [laughs] I wonder if he even knows he's quarter-Jewish? Almost certainly not, I'd say. Well! He's in for a big shock today!
F
REISLER
: You mean Felix Breit? The sculptor? There'll be quite an outcry if they arrest him.
L
UTHER
: I certainly hope so! My advice to D4 was to let the protest run for twenty-four . . . forty-eight hours and then release him with a great fanfare as a gesture of goodwill â him and a couple of other scribblers â the French love their scribblers. Meanwhile it will have taken the limelight off the arrest of the others, rich nonentities, mostly. The usual parasites.
F
REISLER
: We can always pick him up later, I suppose.
L
UTHER
: From the Foreign Ministry's perspective, I'd prefer it if someone helped him escape to Switzerland. He's less than a half-Jew and these highly publicized arrests of distinguished people do not help the cause of the Reich among neutral nations and the churches. Some of our best people never raise their eyes to look beyond their own immediate occupations. This pâté is superb.
He set himself to read the rest of the protocol but again and again it dissolved into a blur as his mind kept returning to that exchange. They had played god with his life! Of course, they had played god with every single life in Europe â and he had been part of that, too â but they had done it with him in particular, by name, ordaining his release even before his arrest! He could not explain, even to himself, why it rankled so much but it made him impatient with the rest of the protocol, with Stuckart banging on about half-Jews and Kritzinger tut-tutting about the lack of bureaucratic rigour and Hofmann pointing out that the Jews were no longer useful as bargaining tools now that America had joined the war at last, and everyone worried about the Red Cross and Eichmann assuring them that Theresienstadt â the âholiday camp'
KL
â would take care of them . . . and Liebbrandt teasing the
SS
, pointing out that once the whole of Europe was judenrein, it might be expedient for the rest of the Reich to make them scapegoats and have them all liquidated, too, to appease foreign criticism . . . and â good heavens! â here were the first inklings of a rift between Luther and his boss, von Ribbentrop, which ended in Luther being sentenced to a
KL
himself!
This surely had to be the genuine protocol of that meeting? Either that or Angela was an unsung giant of German literature.
The most interesting part â especially for a quarter-Jew like Felix â was where Stuckart defended the rights of the
Mischlinge
. The
SS
tried to suggest he was only half-hearted in his support of the Final Solution but he pointed out that if Germany lost the military war, it would automatically fail to achieve the Final Solution, too â so it was the
SS
who were risking both failures, by their insistence on diverting resources and men to promote their own glory. It did not go down well. Heydrich's only answer was that the Führer had decreed it â at which Kritzinger leaped in with a demand to see that in writing in the Führer's own hand. Heydrich answered that adroitly:
H
EYDRICH
: I'd like to quote from a speech he made as long ago as the twelfth of April, 1922. âMy feeling as a Christian,' the Führer says, âpoints me to my Lord and Saviour as a fighter. It points me to a man who once in loneliness, surrounded by a handful of followers, recognized these Jews for what they were and deputized men to fight them.' Remember, Adolf Hitler himself had only a âhandful of followers' at that time, so the parallel does not escape us. He goes on: âIn God's truth, He was greatest not as suffering Jesus but as warrior Jesus. It filled me with boundless love, both as a man and as a Christian, to read how He at last rose in all His might and, whip in hand, drove that race of vipers out of God's Temple. How inspiring is His struggle against that Jewish poison, a struggle on behalf of us all! Today, two thousand years later, I am most profoundly moved to recognize that it was for this God-ordained struggle that He had to shed His blood at Calvary.' And so on. There is much more in the same vein â all of which proves, if anyone here still needs such proof, that the Führer has not cooled in his desire to drive out this race of vipers. On the contrary â if he wants to hear no more about the Jewish Question, it is because he trusts us to get on with it. And let me assure you that I heard as much from his own lips only last year.
After that, Neumann flexed his muscles and demanded that all his Privileged Jews should be exempt from the Final Solution. âThis is not a request,' he said. âReichsmarschall Göring has authorized me to make clear that this is a condition of our cooperation.'
Heydrich and Eichmann caved in at once, which gave Stuckart the chance, once again, to make the case for partial Jews.
S
TUCKART
: The half-Jew is also a half-German. He has as many Aryan relations as Jewish ones. The quarter-Jew is a three-quarters-German. He has three times as many Aryan relations as Jewish ones. It is one thing to arrest a Jewish family. No German will worry about that. Other Jews will worry, of course, but they will soon take the same road east. But if you were to arrest all of the Mischlinge and deport them and process them, you will leave behind several million Aryan Germans who have lost a relative â a husband, wife, son-in-law, daughter-in-law, aunt, uncle, cousin. They will talk to other Germans . . . who will talk to others . . . and soon the whole country will know what we have been told here today. Is that the will of the Führer, too â that all the world should know what âResettlement in the east' really means? If so, why not simplify matters and just publish a verbatim transcript of this meeting?
And it all turned to farce when Heydrich mused that if two half-Jews marry, they produce a full Jew.
S
TUCKART
: Not necessarily.
H
EYDRICH
: I beg your pardon?
S
TUCKART
: They have only a twenty-five percent chance of producing a full Jew â and, equally, a twenty-five percent chance of producing a full Aryan.
K
LOPFER
: Impossible!
S
TUCKART
: Not at all. It's simple science. Genetics.
H
OFMANN
: It is impossible . . . it is repugnant for a pair of half-Jews to produce a full Aryan.
S
TUCKART
: Nonetheless it is the case, believe me.
From that point the discussion veered back to the well known arguments for sterilization of the
Mischlinge
by radiation â which was also a feature of the âofficial' protocol. Mixed-race Jews could be invited into a special room to fill out a form that would keep them busy for twenty minutes or so, during which time a secret dose of gamma-rays would do the trick. They might have tummy upsets for a day or two but Stuckart put it all into its historical context:
S
TUCKART
: Ha! So we go right back to Athens and the birth of democracy!
H
EYDRICH
: Really? How?
S
TUCKART
: Slaves. They castrated all their male slaves. They were afraid they would breed and outnumber the Athenians. Democracy was only for them, not for the slaves.
H
EYDRICH
: So! A noble precedent. [to Eichmann] Make a note of that. It sounds feasible.
Then, after Neumann yet again staked the claim for his Privileged Jews and all their relations, Heydrich brought the conference to a rousing conclusion:
H
EYDRICH
: Thank you Herr State Secretary. It is clear that we have started as we mean to continue â united in purpose, strong in our determination, and steadfast in our desire to see Europe cleansed of this filth once and for all. It has been our Führer's most heartfelt desire ever since he returned from the battlefield to a Fatherland defeated and bankrupted by home-grown Jewish traitors and the international Jewish conspiracy. And now â working together with the will, the vision, and the spirit that only National Socialism can supply â and only German National Socialism, at that â working together under the cloak of war, we can turn that long-held desire of his into a reality. We on this side of the table are merely the agents of that transformation. The driving force lies elsewhere â on your side of this same table, gentlemen, for you represent every important branch of the party, the government, and the Reich. If you falter, if you take your eye off this great objective, then we cannot make up the difference. So I ask you all now to stand â and take the man on either side of you by the hand â and say with me that one word our great Führer most longs to hear in all this world: judenrein!
A
LL
: Judenrein!
H
EYDRICH
: And again!
A
LL
: Judenrein!
H
EYDRICH
: And again!
A
LL
: Judenrein!
H
EYDRICH
: One more time!
A
LL
: Judenrein!
[applause]
H
EYDRICH
: -Obersturmbannführer Eichmann will now collect up all the notes you have been taking during this meeting. [protests] In the next week or so his office will circulate a very partial version of our discussions to all departments that request it. But in general we think you will agree â when you think about it â that a verbal report by you to your various departments and ministries (or, in fact, to those who wish to know) is far preferable to a verbatim protocol. Heil Hitler!
A
LL
: Heil Hitler!
But Angela's transcript did not end there for she had also recorded some conversations among the delegates as they dispersed â one of which almost made him vomit:
K
RITZINGER
[to S
TUCKART
]: I didn't want to point this out at the meeting but when you spoke of the âbar-mitzvah Jew' and the âcircumcised Jew' you were straying from strictly racial criteria into religious ones â despite the fact that you and your office have always said that the Jew's crime is racial not religious.
S
TUCKART
: It's a little bit more subtle than that, Herr Ministerialdirektor. The Mischling is a fundamentally ambiguous creature, half pulling toward the Aryan, half toward the Semite. So the question becomes, âWhich half is pulling the harder?' This Mischling is an atheist . . . loves Wagner . . . so the Aryan is pulling harder. But this Mischling loves Mendelssohn and won't light a fire on Saturdays . . . well â he selects himself as a Jew. And the consequences follow as night follows day. He is not being liquidated for practising religion but because his practice reveals which side, Jew or Aryan, is the stronger in him.
K
RITZINGER
: Elegant!
H
EYDRICH
[to M
EYER
, L
IEBBRANDT
, and B
üHLER
]: Gentlemen! You cannot come all this way, here, to the very heart of the Reich, without taking back some happy memories.
M
EYER
: Today's decisions have been the happiest of myâ
H
EYDRICH
: I mean happy in a more personal sense.
B
üHLER
: The house in Giesebrechtstrasse!
H
EYDRICH
: Just so! Unfortunately I have to return to Prague this afternoon, but I'm sure -Gruppenführer Müller will be happy to take you to dinner and then onward to that delightful rendezvous!
L
IEBBRANDT
: Talking of which â I didn't think it correct to bring this up in the meeting â but many young Jewesses are extremely . . . what shall I say . . .
M
EYER
: Voluptuous.
L
IEBBRANDT
: Yes. So, just as fit young Jewish males can be temporarily spared for unpaid work in our factories, surely voluptuous young Jewesses could be put to unpaid work in brothels for . . .
H
EYDRICH
: It's already happening.
L
IEBBRANDT
: Ah!
M
EYER
: Men in uniform needn't pay, I presume?
E
ICHMANN
: A token. To cover the running costs. And there will be no Mischlinge as a result. The girls are sterilized first.
H
EYDRICH
: Before taking up their positions, one might say. [laughter]
L
ANGE
[to Heydrich, on the doorstep]: Maybe I ought to have told Kritzinger we don't waste bullets on the children â or maybe not?
H
EYDRICH
: How do you process them, then?
L
ANGE
: So! [makes some gesture] Up to about eight, one good shake just snaps their necks. Older than that, strangling is easier â with bare hands or a garrotte. But we don't waste bullets on them until they're thirteen . . . fourteen.
[A dog barks]
H
EYDRICH
: You actually brought your dog!
L
ANGE
: Max. Here boy! Let him loose. Here! Catch! This is the sort of meat they have in the kitchens here.
H
EYDRICH
: What teeth!
L
ANGE
: Wasn't there some sort of decoration for dogs in the last war? I thought I read that. If not, we should start one. I tell you â this dog's hatred of Jews is even stronger than the Führer's.
H
EYDRICH
: Careful!
L
ANGE
: It's true, though. I can give you an example. About ten days ago we were processing the Jews in a little village in . . . no matter. It was well below zero â below minus thirty â and the ground was almost impossible to dig and everything got out of synchronization and the women and the children had to be kept waiting back in the forest a bit. They were already naked so they huddled together really tight and did their pathetic best to keep the little children warm. But some of the children's feet froze to the ground so that when we drove them on . . . well, you know how frozen flesh just comes away? Bits of their feet were left behind, frozen to the ground. But that didn't please my Max! He ate every last bit of that flesh. He couldn't stand the thought that even those small morsels had escaped justice! Good boy! Good boy!
H
EYDRICH
: [undecipherable]
