Hitler. 1936-1945: Nemesis

with the Jews from the east. They now sought urgent clarification from the Reich Ministry for the Occupied Eastern Territories and from Reich Security Head Office. Lohse, pressed by the Wehrmacht to retain Jewish skilled workers, wanted guidance on whether or not economic criteria were relevant in determining whether Jews were to be liquidated. In Minsk, where 12,000 Jews from the local ghetto had been shot by the Security Police to make way for an influx of German Jews, Kube protested that ‘people coming from our own cultural sphere’ should be differently treated than the ‘native brutish hordes (bodenstandigen vertierten Horden)’.¹³⁴ He wanted to know whether exceptions were to be made for part-Jews (Mischlinge), Jews with war decorations, or Jews with ‘aryan’ partners. Other protests and queries, reflecting both unease and lack of clarity over the intended fate of the Jews from the Reich, reached the Ostministerium and RSHA. These prompted Himmler to intervene on 30 November to try to prohibit the liquidation of the train-load of 1,000 German Jews — many of them elderly, some bearers of the Iron Cross First Class — sent to Riga. His telephone-call came too late. By then the Jews had already been slaughtered by Jeckeln’s killing-squads.¹³⁵

The previous day, 29 November, Heydrich had sent out invitations to several State Secretaries and to selected SS representatives to a conference to take place close to the Wannsee, a beautiful lake on the western rim of Berlin, on 9 December. Heydrich wanted to inculcate relevant government ministries in the RSHA’s plans to deport to the east all the Jews within Germany’s grasp throughout Europe.¹³⁶ In addition, he was keen to ensure, in line with the commission he had requested and been granted at the end of July, that his primacy in orchestrating the deportations was recognized by all parties involved.¹³⁷ On 8 December, the day before the conference was scheduled to take place, Heydrich had it postponed to 20 January 1942.

The postponement was caused by the dramatic events unfolding in the Pacific and in eastern Europe. The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on 7 December would, as Heydrich knew, bring within days a German declaration of war on the USA. With that, the European war would become a world war. Meanwhile, the opening of the first major counter-offensive by the Red Army on 5 December had blocked for the forseeable future any prospect of mass deportations into Soviet territory.¹³⁸ Both developments carried important consequences for the deportation programme. Their impact soon became evident.

Plans to bring about a ‘final solution’ to the ‘Jewish Question’ were about to enter a new phase — one more murderous than ever.

VI

Hitler’s responsibility for the genocide against the Jews cannot be questioned. Yet for all his public tirades against the Jews, offering the strongest incitement to ever more radical onslaughts of extreme violence, and for all his dark hints that his ‘prophecy’ was being fulfilled, he was consistently keen to conceal the traces of his involvement in the murder of the Jews. Perhaps even at the height of his own power he feared theirs, and the possibility one day of their ‘revenge’. Perhaps, sensing that the German people were not ready to learn the deadly secret, he was determined — his own general inclination to secrecy was, as always, a marked one — not to speak of it other than in horrific, but imprecise, terms. Whatever the reasons, he could never have delivered the sort of speech which, notoriously, Himmler would give in Posen two years later when he described what it was like to see 1,000 corpses lying side by side and spoke openly of ‘the extermination (Ausrottung) of the Jewish people’ as a ‘glorious page in our history that has never been written and is never to be written’.¹³⁹ Even in his inner circle Hitler could never bring himself to speak with outright frankness about the killing of the Jews. Full knowledge of their murder was evidently not to be touched upon directly in his presence, even among the close band of criminal conspirators.

Even so, compared with the first years of the war when he had neither in public nor — to go from Goebbels’s diary accounts — in private made much mention of the Jews, Hitler did now, in the months when their fate was being determined, refer to them on numerous occasions. Invariably, whether in public speeches or during comments in his late-night monologues in his East Prussian headquarters, his remarks were confined to generalities — but with the occasional menacing allusion to what was happening.

At lunch on 6 October, conversation focused mainly on eliminating Czech resistance following Heydrich’s appointment on 27 September as Deputy Reich Protector. Hitler spoke of ways ‘to make the Czechs small’. Shooting ten hostages for every act of sabotage where the perpetrator could not be found was one method. Another — as usual, the carrot as well as the stick — was to improve food-rations in factories where there was no case of sabotage. His third means was the deportation of the Jews. He was speaking about three weeks after he had agreed to their deportation from the Reich and the Protectorate. His comments reveal at least one of the reasons why he agreed to deport them: he continued to believe in the Jews as dangerous ‘fifth- columnists’, spreading sedition among the population. It was exactly what he had thought of the role of the Jews in Germany during the First World War. ‘All Jews must be removed from the Protectorate,’ he declared around the lunch-table, ‘and not just into the General Government, but straight away further to the east. This is at present not practical merely because of the great demand of the military for means of transport. Along with the Protectorate’s Jews, all the Jews from Berlin and Vienna should disappear at the same time. The Jews are everywhere the pipeline through which all enemy news rushes with the speed of wind into all branches of the population.’¹⁴⁰

On 21 October, a month after the deportation order, as part of a diatribe comparing ‘Jewish Christianity’ with ‘Jewish Bolshevism’, he compared the fall of Rome with latter-day Bolshevization through the Jews. ‘If we eradicate (ausrotten) this plague,’ he concluded, ‘we will be carrying out a good deed for mankind, of the significance of which our men out there can have no conception.’¹⁴¹ Four days later his guests were Himmler (a frequent visitor to the Wolf’s Lair during these weeks) and Heydrich.¹⁴² The conversation again revolved mainly around the connections of Jewry and Christianity.¹⁴³ Hitler reminded his guests and his regular entourage of his ‘prophecy’. ‘This criminal race has the two million dead of the World War on its conscience,’ he went on, and ‘now again hundreds of thousands. Don’t anyone tell me we can’t send them into the marshes (Morast)! Who bothers, then, about our people? It’s good when the horror (der Schrecken) precedes us that we are exterminating Jewry. The attempt to found a Jewish state will be a failure.’¹⁴⁴ These notes of Hitler’s rantings were disjointed. But, although lacking coherence, they point to his knowledge of the attempts — eventually given up — in the summer to drown Jewish women by driving them into the Pripet marshes.¹⁴⁵ Hitler’s allocation of guilt for the dead of the First World War and the current war to the Jews, and the recourse once more to his ‘prophecy’, underline his certainty that the destruction of Jewry was imminent. But, other than the reference to the efficacy of rumours of extermination, there was no suggestion of the looming ‘Final Solution’. With Himmler and Heydrich as his guests, it was scarcely necessary to dissemble. However, no significance ought to be attached to the absence of any reference.¹⁴⁶ By mid-October the consequences flowing from the deportation order of the previous month had still to merge into the full genocidal programme.

On the evening of 5 November, remarks about the ‘racial inferiority’ of the English lower class led Hitler once more into a monologue about the Jews. As usual, he linked it to the war. This was the ‘most idiotic war’ that the British had ever begun, he ranted, and would lead in defeat to an outbreak of antisemitism in Britain which would be without parallel. The end of the war, he proclaimed, would bring ‘the fall of the Jew’.¹⁴⁷ He then unleashed an extraordinary verbal assault on the lack of ability and creativity of Jews in every walk of life but one: lying and cheating. The Jew’s ‘entire building will collapse if he is refused a following,’ he went on. ‘In one moment, it’s all over. I’ve always said the Jews are the most stupid devils that exist. They don’t have a true musician, thinker, no art, nothing, absolutely nothing. They are liars, forgers, deceivers. They’ve only got anywhere through the simple-mindedness of those around them. If the Jew were not washed by the Aryan, he wouldn’t be able to see out of his eyes for filth. We can live without the Jews. But they can’t live without us.’¹⁴⁸

The links, as he saw them, between the Jews and the war that they had allegedly inspired, now also, after years in which he had scarcely mentioned the Jews, found a prominent place in his public speeches. But, whatever the rhetorical flourishes, whatever the propaganda motive in appealing to the antisemitic instincts of his hard-core supporters in the Party, there cannot be the slightest doubt, on the basis of his private comments, that Hitler believed in what he said.