Hitler. 1936-1945: Nemesis

before mid-August numbered around 50,000 — a massive increase on the scale of the murders in Poland, but only a tenth of the estimated half a million who would perish in the next four months.⁴⁴

The huge increase in number of victims demanded different killing techniques. At first, a semblance of martial law and ‘execution’ by firing-squad was preserved. But after a few weeks, the killers took turns with a submachine-gun, mowing down their naked victims as they knelt at the edge of a pit. The killing had rapidly moved ‘from military procedure to mass butchery’.⁴⁵

Some Einsatzgruppen leaders claimed after the war that Heydrich had conveyed to them in his briefings the Fuhrer’s order to exterminate the Jews in the Soviet Union.⁴⁶ But the actual variation in the scale of the killing operations in the first weeks, and the sharp escalation from around August onwards, strongly suggests that, in fact, no general mandate to exterminate Soviet Jewry in its entirety had been issued before ‘Barbarossa’ began.⁴⁷ The number of men — around 3,00° in all, the core drawn heavily from the Gestapo, criminal police, regular police (Ordnungspolizei), and SD — initially engaged in the Einsatzgruppen actions would, in any case, have been incapable of implementing a full-scale genocidal programme, and could scarcely have been assembled with one in mind.⁴⁸ The sharp increase in their numbers through supplementary police battalions began in late July. By the end of the year, there were eleven times as many members of the killing units as had been present at the start of ‘Barbarossa’.⁴⁹

On 15 August, immediately after witnessing that morning an ‘execution’ of Jews near Minsk which made him feel sick, Himmler had told his men that he and Hitler would answer to history for the necessary extermination of Jews as ‘the carriers of world Bolshevism’.⁵⁰ It was during his visits to the killing units in the east that month that Himmler, as we have seen, instructed them to widen the slaughter, now to include women and children.⁵¹ Had he received explicit new authorization from Hitler? Or did he presume that the Fuhrer’s existing mandate sufficed for the massive extension of the killing operations?

What passed between the two men during the five days, from 15 to 20 July, that Himmler was staying in the Fuhrer Headquarters is not known.⁵² But while in FHQ, Himmler had received minutes of the important meeting that Hitler had had on the 16th with Goring, Bormann, Lammers, Keitel, and Rosenberg. At the meeting, as we have already noted, Hitler had stated that Germany would never leave the conquered territories. All measures necessary for a final settlement, such as shooting and deportation, ought to be taken. He had made the telling remarks that the partisan war proclaimed by Stalin provided ‘the possibility of exterminating anything opposing us (die Moglichkeit auzurotten, was sich gegen uns stellt)’ and that pacification of the conquered territory could best be achieved by shooting dead anyone ‘who even looked askance (da? man jeden, der nur schief schaut, totschie?e)’.⁵³ A day later, Hitler issued a decree giving Himmler responsibility for security in the newly established civilian regions of German rule in the east. Effectively, this placed the ‘Jewish Question’ as part of a wider policing remit directly in Himmler’s hands.⁵⁴

Within a week, Himmler had increased the ‘policing’ operations behind the front line in the east by 11,000 men, the start of the far bigger build-up that was to follow.⁵⁵ Most probably, catching Hitler’s mood at the time, Himmler had pointed out the insufficiency of the forces currently available to him for the ‘pacification’ of the east, then requested, and been granted, the authority to increase the force to an appropriate level. That the Jews, as had been the case from the beginning of the campaign, were viewed as the prime target group to be exterminated — under the pretext of offering the most dangerous opposition to the occupation — would have meant that no specific mandate about their treatment within the general ‘pacification’ remit was necessary. In dealing with the Jews in the east as he saw fit, Himmler could take it for granted that he was ‘working towards the Fuhrer’.

II

Hitler’s own comments about the Jews around this time would certainly have assured Himmler of this. In the twilight hours before dawn on 10 July, Hitler had remarked: ‘“I feel like the Robert Koch of politics. He found the bacillus of tuberculosis and through that showed medical scholarship new ways. I discovered the Jews as the bacillus and ferment of all social decomposition. Their ferment. And I have proved one thing: that a state can live without Jews; that the economy, culture, art, etc. etc. can exist without Jews and indeed better. That is the worst blow I have dealt the Jews.”’⁵⁶

He retained his biological terminology when speaking — with remarkable openness — to the Defence Minister of the newly-created brutally racist state of Croatia, Marshal Sladko Kvaternik, on 22 July. He had begun with a revealing illogicality: not he, but Stalin, would this time meet with the fate of Napoleon. It was not the first time he had made a remark which hinted at a deep-lying uncertainty about his decision to invade Russia.⁵⁷ In the first weeks of the ‘war of annihilation’ that he had unleashed, Hitler’s genocidal mentality was surfacing. As in his discussions with the Japanese Ambassador Oshima a week earlier, Hitler went on to describe the Russian people as ‘bestial’. In advising Kvaternik to intervene at home with an iron fist against ‘criminals and anti-social elements’, Hitler declared that there was only one thing to be done with them: ‘annihilate (vernichten) them!’ It was necessary to ‘do away with (beseitigen) them’ or, if they were not dangerous, to lock them in concentration camps from which they must never be let out.⁵⁸ Towards the end of the talks, Hitler turned to the Jews. He called them ‘the scourge of mankind’. ‘Jewish commissars’ had wielded brutal power in the Baltic, he stated. And now the Lithuanians, Estonians, and Latvians were taking ‘bloody revenge’ against them. He went on: ‘If the Jews had free rein as in the Soviet paradise, they would put the most insane plans into effect. Thus Russia has become a plague- centre (Pestherd) for mankind… For if only one state tolerates a Jewish family among it, this would provide the core bacillus (Bazillenherd) for a new decomposition. If there were no more Jews in Europe, the unity of the European states would be no longer disturbed. Where the Jews are sent to, whether to Siberia or Madagascar, is immaterial.’⁵⁹

The frame of mind was overtly genocidal. The reference to Madagascar was meaningless. It had been ruled out as an option months earlier. But Siberia, which had in the interim come into favour, would itself have meant genocide of a kind. It was in such a frame of mind that Hitler had agreed to the big increase in the number of police units in the east, and presumably given Himmler carte blanche to operate as he should see fit in ‘cleansing’ the conquered eastern territories of Jews. And, from his comments to Kvaternik, Hitler was plainly contemplating a ‘solution to the Jewish Question’ not just in the Soviet Union, but throughout the whole of Europe.

No decision for the ‘Final Solution’ — meaning the physical extermination of the Jews throughout Europe — had yet been taken. But genocide was in the air. In the Warthegau, the biggest of the annexed areas of Poland, the Nazi authorities were still divided in July 1941 about what to do with the Jews whom they had been unable to deport to the General Government. One idea was to concentrate them in one huge camp which could easily be policed, near to the centre of coal production, and gain maximum economic benefit from their ruthless exploitation. But there was the question of what to do about those Jews incapable of working.

A memorandum sent on 16 July 1941 to Eichmann, at Reich Security Head Office, by the head of the SD in Posen, SS-Sturmbannfuhrer Rolf-Heinz Hoppner, struck an ominous note. ‘There is the danger this winter,’ his cynical report to Eichmann read, ‘that the Jews can no longer all be fed. It is to be seriously considered whether the most humane solution might not be to finish off those Jews not capable of labour by some sort of fast-working preparation.’ Asking for Eichmann’s opinion, Hoppner concluded: ‘The things sound in part fantastic, but would in my view be quite capable of implementation.’⁶⁰

On the last day of the month, Heydrich had Eichmann draft a written authorization from Goring — nominally in charge of anti-Jewish policy since January 1939 — to prepare ‘a complete solution (Gesamtlosung) of the Jewish question in the German sphere of influence in Europe’.⁶¹ The mandate was framed as a supplement to the task accorded to Heydrich on 24 January 1939, to solve the ‘Jewish problem’ through ‘emigration’ and ‘evacuation’. Heydrich was now commissioned to produce an overall plan dealing with the organizational, technical, and material measures necessary.⁶² This written mandate was an extension of the verbal one which he had already received from Goring no later than March.⁶³ It enhanced his authority in dealings with state authorities, and laid down a marker for his control over the ‘final