Hitler. 1936-1945: Nemesis

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Hitler spoke a good deal during the summer and autumn of 1941 to his close entourage in the most brutal terms imaginable about his ideological aims in crushing the Soviet Union. During the same months, he also spoke on numerous occasions in his monologues in the Fuhrer Headquarters — though invariably in barbaric generalizations — about the Jews. These were the months in which, out of the contradictions and lack of clarity of anti-Jewish policy, a programme to kill all the Jews in Nazi-occupied Europe began to take concrete shape.

In contrast to military affairs, where his repeated interference reflected his constant preoccupation with tactical minutiae and his distrust of the army professionals, Hitler’s involvement in ideological matters was less frequent and less direct. Hitler had laid down the guidelines in March 1941. He needed to do little more. Self- combustion would see to it that, once lit, the genocidal fires would rage into a mighty conflagration amid the barbarism of the war to destroy ‘Jewish-Bolshevism’. When it came to ideological aims, in contrast to military matters, Hitler had no need to worry that the ‘professionals’ would let him down. He could rest assured that Himmler and Heydrich, above all, would leave no stone unturned in eliminating the ideological enemy once and for all. And he could be equally certain that they would find willing helpers at all levels among the masters of the new Imperium in the east, whether these belonged to the Party, the police, or the civilian bureaucracy.

Just as, from autumn 1939 onwards until his ‘halt order’ of August 1941, he had seen no need to involve himself in the ‘euthanasia action’ any further, once he had authorized its commencement, so now he would see no cause to participate in the daily business of the dirty work of genocide. That was neither his style, nor his inclination.¹ Organization, planning, and execution could confidently be left to others. There was no shortage of those keen to ‘carry out practical work for our Fuhrer’.² It was sufficient that his authorization for the major steps was provided; and that he could take for granted that, with regard to the ‘Jewish Question’, his ‘prophecy’ of 1939 was being fulfilled.

I

On the eve of ‘Barbarossa’, Hitler had assured Hans Frank that the Jews would be ‘removed’ from the General Government ‘in the foreseeable future’. Frank’s province could therefore be regarded merely as a type of ‘transit camp’ (Durchgangslager).³ Frank registered the pleasure at being able to ‘get rid’ of the Jews from the General Government, and remarked that Jewry was ‘gradually perishing’ in Poland. ‘The Fuhrer had indeed prophesied that for the Jews,’ commented Goebbels.⁴ From early in the year the intention had been, as we have already noted, to deport the Jews from Frank’s domain to the east, following the victory over the Soviet Union — expected by the autumn.⁵ The Jews from Poland, then from the rest of Europe, would be wiped out in the east within a few years by starvation and being worked to death in the icy wastes of an arctic climate. For those incapable of work, the intended fate, if not spelled out, was not difficult to imagine.

The 5–6 million Jews of the USSR were included in the wholesale resettlement scheme for the racial reordering of eastern Europe, the ‘General Plan for the East’ which Himmler, two days after the launch of ‘Barbarossa’, had commissioned his settlement planners to prepare. The Plan envisaged the deportation over the subsequent thirty years of 31 million persons, mainly Slavs, beyond the Urals and into western Siberia.⁶ Without doubt, the Jews would have been the first ethnic group to perish in a territorial solution which, for them, was tantamount to their death warrant. What was intended was in itself plainly genocidal. The ‘territorial solution’ could, therefore, be seen as a type of intended ‘final solution’. But shooting or gassing to death all the Jews of Europe — the full-scale industrialized killing programme that evolved over the following months into what would then be a differently defined ‘final solution’ — was at this stage not in mind.

Reinhard Heydrich had already in March received the green light from Hitler to send the Einsatzgruppen into the Soviet Union in the wake of the Wehrmacht to ‘pacify’ the conquered areas by eradicating ‘subversive elements’. Hitler had specified in March that ‘the Bolshevist-Jewish intelligentsia must be eliminated’.⁷ Heydrich had been more than ready to apply a most liberal interpretation to this mandate in his briefings to the Einsatzgruppen in Pretzsch and Berlin in the weeks before the campaign.

According to a letter which Heydrich sent on 2 July to the four newly appointed Higher SS and Police Leaders for the conquered areas of the Soviet Union, the Einsatzgruppen had been instructed to liquidate, alongside Communist functionaries and an array of ‘extremist elements’, ‘all Jews in the service of the Party and state’.⁸ Heydrich’s verbal briefings must have made clear that the widest interpretation was to be placed on such an instruction.

From the beginning, the killings were far from confined to Jews who were Communist Party or State functionaries. Already on 3 July, for instance, the chief of the Einsatzkommando in Luzk in eastern Poland had some 1,160 Jewish men shot. He said he wanted to put his stamp on the town.⁹ In Kaunas (Kowno) in Lithuania as many as 2,514 Jews were shot on 6 July.¹⁰ Shootings were carried out by Einsatzkommando 3, based in this area, on twenty days in July. Of the ‘executions’, totalling 4,400 (according to a meticulous listing), the vast majority were Jews.¹¹ But the briefings had evidently not been unambiguous.¹² They were capable of being interpreted in different ways. Whereas Einsatzgruppe A, in the Baltic, was almost unconstrained in its killing, Einsatzgruppe ? in White Russia initially targeted, in the main, the Jewish ‘intelligentsia’, while Einsatzgruppe C spoke of working the Jews to death in reclaiming the Pripet Marshes.¹³ While some Einsatzkommandos were slaughtering Jews more or less indiscriminately, one killer squad in Chotin on the Dniester confined its murderous action in early July to Communist and Jewish ‘intellectuals’ (apart from doctors).¹⁴

In the Baltic, the butchery of Einsatzgruppe A was especially ferocious. The first massacre of Jews took place on 24 June, only two days after the beginning of ‘Barbarossa’, in the small Lithuanian township of Gargzdai, lying just behind the border. Men from the Security Police and a police unit from Memel shot dead 201 Jews that afternoon. By 18 July, the killing squads had claimed 3,300 victims; by August the death-toll had reached between 10,000 and 12,000 mainly male Jews together with Communists.¹⁵

The killing units were assisted in the early stages by Lithuanian nationalists who were prompted into savage pogroms against the Jews.¹⁶ In Kowno, Jews were clubbed to death one by one by a local enthusiast while crowds of onlookers — women holding their children up to see — clapped and cheered. One eyewitness recalled that around forty-five to fifty Jews were killed in this way within three-quarters of an hour. When the butcher had finished his slaughter, he climbed on to the heap of corpses and played the Lithuanian national anthem on an accordion. German soldiers stood by impassively, some of them taking photographs.¹⁷ The Wehrmacht commander in the area, General-Colonel Ernst Busch, took the view, on hearing reports of the atrocities, that it was a matter of internal Lithuanian disputes, and that he had no authority to intervene. It was seen as exclusively a matter for the security police.¹⁸

Hitler was keen to keep abreast of the killing operations in the Soviet Union. On 1 August SS-Brigadefuhrer Heinrich Muller, head of the Gestapo, had passed an encyphered message to the commanders of the four Einsatzgruppen: ‘Continual reports from here on the work of the Einsatzgruppen in the east are to be presented to the Fuhrer.’¹⁹

Goebbels registered his satisfaction, when he received a detailed report in mid-August, at the information that ‘vengeance was being wreaked on the Jews in the big towns’ of the Baltic, and that they were ‘being slain in their masses on the streets by the self-protection organizations’. He connected the killing directly with Hitler’s ‘prophecy’ of January 1939. ‘What the Fuhrer prophesied is now taking place,’ he wrote, ‘that if Jewry succeeded in provoking another war, it would lose its existence.’²⁰ Three months later, when he visited Vilna, Goebbels spoke again of the ‘horrible (grauenhaft)’ ‘revenge’ of the local population against the Jews, who had been ‘shot down in their thousands’ and were still being ‘executed’ by the hundred. The rest had been impressed into ghettos and worked for the benefit of the local economy. The ghetto inhabitants, he commented, were ‘vile figures (scheu?liche Gestalten)’. He described the Jews as ‘the lice of civilized mankind. They had to be somehow eradicated (ausrotten), otherwise they would always again play their torturing (peinigende) and burdensome role. The only way to cope with them is to treat them with the necessary brutality. If you spare them, you’ll later be their