Hitler. 1936-1945: Nemesis

to the troops on the eastern front.¹¹² At home, the article was said by the SD to have ‘found a strong echo’ in the population, though there had been criticism from churchgoers.¹¹³ Goebbels was pleased with the positive response in Party circles. The article provided, he said, ‘compelling arguments’ for the ‘little Party member’ to use ‘in his daily struggle’.¹¹⁴

The Propaganda Minister again raised the deportation of Berlin’s Jews with Hitler during their three-hour discussion a few days later, on 21 November. Hitler, as usual, was easily able to assuage Goebbels. He told him he agreed with his views on the ‘Jewish Question’. He wanted an ‘energetic policy’ against the Jews — but one which would not ‘cause unnecessary difficulties’. The ‘evacuation of the Jews’ had to take place city by city, and it was still uncertain when Berlin’s turn would come. When the time arrived, the ‘evacuation’ should be concluded as quickly as possible.¹¹⁵

Once again, as had repeatedly been the case with Frank in Cracow and Schirach in Vienna, Hitler had raised hopes which encouraged pressure for radical action from his subordinates. That the hopes could be fulfilled less easily than anticipated then simply fanned the flames, encouraging the frantic quest for an ultimate solution to the problem which nothing but the Nazis’ own ideological fanaticism had created in the first place.¹¹⁶

Both Himmler and Heydrich were still speaking in October of deporting the Jews to the east; Riga, Reval, and Minsk were all mentioned. Plans were set in train for extermination camps in Riga and, it seems, in Mogilew, some 130 miles east of Minsk. Transport difficulties and continued partisan warfare eventually caused their abandonment.¹¹⁷ But, prompted by the murderous initiatives being undertaken by their minions who had rapidly realized that they were being shown a green light and lost no time in preparing to set localized genocides in motion, the attention of the SS leaders was starting to switch to Poland, which posed fewer logistical difficulties, as an area in which a ‘final solution of the Jewish Question’ could take place.¹¹⁸

The use of poison gas had already been contemplated before the deportation order was granted. More efficient, less public, and — with characteristic Nazi cynicism — less stressful (for the murderers, that is) ways of killing than mass shootings were required. The use of gas-vans, already deployed in East Prussia in 1940 to kill ‘euthanasia’ victims, offered one alternative though, it soon proved, had its own drawbacks.¹¹⁹ Other methods, involving stationary killing installations, were considered. At the beginning of September, several hundred Russian prisoners-of-war were gassed in Auschwitz, then a concentration camp mainly for Poles, as an experiment in connection with a large crematorium that had been ordered in October from the Erfurt firm of J.A. Topf and Sons. The poison-gas Zyklon-B was used for the first time on the Soviet prisoners; it would by summer 1942 be in regular use for exterminating the Jews of Europe, ferried by the train-load to the huge killing factory of Auschwitz- Birkenau.¹²⁰

Once the decision to deport the Reich Jews to the east had been taken, things began to move rapidly. Heydrich told Gauleiter Alfred Meyer, State Secretary in Rosenberg’s Ministry for the Occupied Eastern Territories, on 4 October that attempts by industry to claim Jews as part of their workforce ‘would vitiate the plan of a total evacuation (Aussiedlung) of the Jews from the territories occupied by us’.¹²¹ Later that month, following a visit to Berlin by the Lublin Police Chief, SS-Brigadefuhrer Odilo Globocnik, evidently aimed at instigating the extermination of the Jews in his district, Polish labourers were commandeered by the SS to construct a camp at Belzec in eastern Poland. Experts on gassing techniques used on patients in the ‘euthanasia action’ followed a few weeks later, now redeployed in Poland to advise on the gas chambers being erected at Belzec.¹²² Initially, the aim was to use Belzec, whose murderous capacity was in the early months relatively small, for the gassing of Jews from the Lublin area who were incapable of work.¹²³ Only gradually did the liquidation of all Polish Jews become clarified as the goal — embodied in what, with the addition of two other camps, Sobibor and Treblinka, in spring 1942, came eventually to be known as ‘Aktion Reinhard’.¹²⁴

In the autumn, too, Eichmann was sent to Auschwitz for discussions with Rudolf Ho?, the commandant there, about gassing installations.¹²⁵ Mass-killing operations at Belzec began in the spring of 1942, in Auschwitz in the summer. They had been preceded by developments in the Warthegau. There, the first of twenty transports in autumn 1941 bringing German Jews to Lodz had arrived on 16 October. The authorities in Lodz had at first objected vehemently to the order in September to take in more Jews. Himmler was implacable. He sharply reprimanded the Government President of Lodz, Friedrich Uebelhoer, himself the bearer of an honorary SS rank. But alongside the reprimand, the Lodz authorities had evidently been assuaged by being told that those Jews incapable of working would soon be liquidated. Mass killings by shooting and gassing (in gas-vans) were already taking place in the autumn weeks. At the same time, Herbert Lange, head of a Special Command which had earlier been deployed at Soldau in East Prussia to gas the inmates of mental asylums, began looking for a suitable location to set up operations for the systematic extermination of the Jews of the Warthegau.¹²⁶

At some point, Gauleiter Greiser asked — and was given — Himmler’s permission to liquidate 100,000 Jews in his area.¹²⁷ There is no direct indication that Greiser’s request went beyond Himmler. It would, of course, not have been necessary to take the request further, had it been known that Hitler had already accorded his general authorization for the mass killing of Jews in Poland. That Hitler’s approval, however broad, was essential can be read out of a further initiative coming from the head of government in the Warthegau. When, some months later, Wilhelm Koppe, Higher SS and Police Chief in the Warthegau, wrote to Himmler in support of Greiser’s request to extend the killing to 30,000 Poles suffering from incurable tuberculosis, the answer given by the Reichsfuhrer’s personal adjutant, SS-Sturmbannfuhrer Rudolf Brandt, was that ‘the last decision in this matter must be taken by the Fuhrer’.¹²⁸ Greiser’s own revealing comment on the need to consult Hitler was: ‘I myself do not believe that the Fuhrer needs to be asked again in this matter, especially since at our last discussion with regard to the Jews he told me that I could proceed with these according to my own judgement.’¹²⁹ Such a response would indeed have been typical of Hitler’s approach. But the episode does suggest that, if it were necessary to have Hitler’s approval for the extermination of 30,000 Poles with incurable tuberculosis, it would have been essential to have had at least his blanket authorization for the killing of 100,000 Jews. When exactly Greiser spoke to Hitler directly about the Jews in his area cannot be precisely determined. The most likely date was before the decision was taken to exterminate the 100,000 Jews referred to in the initial correspondence with Himmler. Whether Hitler was consulted on the precise developments or not, his overall approval was evidently necessary. By the first week of December 1941, Chelmno, a gas-van station in the south of the Warthegau, had become the first extermination unit to commence operations.¹³⁰

The Warthegau was not the only area scheduled to receive the deportees. Shortly before the killing in Chelmno commenced, the first transports of German Jews had arrived in the Baltic. The initial intention was to send them to Riga, to be placed in a concentration camp outside the city prior to further deportation eastwards. Hitler had approved proposals from the local commander of the Security Police, SS-Sturmbannfuhrer Dr Otto Lange, to set up the concentration camp. Lange had, however, proposed erecting a camp for Latvian Jews. This was turned, in accordance with a ‘wish’ of the Fuhrer, into the construction of a ‘big concentration camp’ for Jews from Germany and the Protectorate. Some 25,000 were expected to be interned there, en route, it was said, for an eventual destination ‘farther east’.¹³¹ Some Nazi leaders, at least, were well aware by now what deportation to the east meant. When Goebbels, still pressing to have the Jews of Berlin deported as quickly as possible, referred in mid-December to the deportation of Jews from the occupied part of France to the east, he said it was ‘in many cases synonymous with the death penalty’.¹³²

By the time the first Jews were due to arrive in Riga from the Reich, the building of the camp had scarcely begun. An improvised solution had to be found. Instead of heading for Riga, the trains were diverted to Kowno in Lithuania. Between 25 and 29 November, terrified and exhausted Jews were taken from five trains arriving in Kowno from Berlin, Frankfurt, Munich, Vienna, and Breslau and, without any selection on grounds of ability to work, promptly taken out and shot by members of the locally based Einsatzkommando. The same fate awaited 1,000 German Jews who then did arrive in Riga on 30 November. They were simply taken straight out into the forest and shot, along with some 14,000 Latvian Jews from the Riga ghetto. Himmler had earlier in the month told the police chief in the area, Friedrich Jeckeln, ‘that all the Jews in the Ostland down to the very last one must be exterminated (vernichtet)’.¹³³

However certain Jeckeln was of his murderous mandate, other Nazi leaders in the east still had their doubts. Hinrich Lohse, Reich Commissar for the Eastern Region (Ostland), and Wilhelm Kube, General Commissar for Belorussia (Wei?ruthenien), were among those who were less sure that Reich Jews were meant to be included in the mass shootings and indiscriminately slaughtered together