Hitler. 1936-1945: Nemesis

In his speech to the ‘Old Guard’ of veterans of the Putsch, on 8 November 1941, Hitler pressed home the theme of Jewish guilt for the war. Despite the victories of the previous year, he stated, he had still worried because of his recognition that behind the war stood ‘the international Jew’. They had poisoned the peoples through their control of the press, radio, film, and theatre; they had made sure that rearmament and war would benefit their business and financial interests; he had come to know the Jews as the instigators of world conflagration. England, under Jewish influence, had been the driving-force of the ‘world-coalition against the German people’. But it had been inevitable that the Soviet Union, ‘the greatest servant of Jewry’, would one day confront the Reich. Since then it had become plain that the Soviet state was dominated by Jewish commissars. Stalin, too, was no more than ‘an instrument in the hand of this almighty Jewry’. Behind him stood ‘all those Jews who in thousandfold ramification lead this powerful empire’. This ‘insight’, Hitler suggested, had weighed heavily upon him, and compelled him to face the danger from the east.¹⁴⁹

Hitler returned to the alleged ‘destructive character’ of the Jews when talking again to his usual captive audience in the Wolf’s Lair in the small hours of 1–2 December. Again, there was a hint, but no more than that, of what Hitler saw as the natural justice being meted out to the Jews: ‘he who destroys life, exposes himself to death. And nothing other than this is happening to them’ — to the Jews.¹⁵⁰ The gas-vans of Chelmno would start killing the Jews of the Warthegau in those very days.¹⁵¹ In Hitler’s warped mentality, such killing was natural revenge for the destruction caused by the Jews — above all in the war which he saw as their work. His ‘prophecy’ motif was evidently never far from his mind in these weeks as the winter crisis was unfolding in the east. It would be at the forefront of his thoughts in the wake of Pearl Harbor. With his declaration of war on the USA on 11 December, Germany was now engaged in a ‘world war’ — a term used up to then almost exclusively for the devastation of 1914-18. In his Reichstag speech of 30 January 1939, he had ‘prophesied’ that the destruction of the Jews would be the consequence of a new world war. That war, in his view, had now arrived.

On 12 December, the day after he had announced Germany’s declaration of war on the USA, Hitler addressed the Reichsleiter and Gauleiter — an audience of around fifty persons — in his rooms in the Reich Chancellery. Much of his talk ranged over the consequences of Pearl Harbor, the war in the east, and the glorious future awaiting Germany after final victory. He also spoke of the Jews. And once more he evoked his ‘prophecy’.

‘With regard to the Jewish Question,’ Goebbels recorded, summarizing Hitler’s comments, ‘the Fuhrer is determined to make a clear sweep of it (reinen Tisch zu machen). He prophesied that, if they brought about another world war, they would experience their annihilation (Vernichtung). That was no empty talk (keine Phrase). The world war is there. The annihilation of Jewry must be the necessary consequence. This question is to be viewed without any sentimentality. We’re not there to have sympathy with the Jews, but only sympathy with our German people. If the German people has again now sacrificed around 160,000 dead in the eastern campaign, the originators of this bloody conflict will have to pay for it with their own lives.’¹⁵²

The tone was more menacing and vengeful than ever. The original ‘prophecy’ had been a warning. Despite the warning, the Jews — in Hitler’s view — had unleashed the world war. They would now pay the price.

Hitler still had his ‘prophecy’ in mind when he spoke privately to Alfred Rosenberg, Reich Minister for the Eastern Territories, on 14 December, two days after his address to the Gauleiter. Referring to the text of a forthcoming speech, on which he wanted Hitler’s advice, Rosenberg remarked that his ‘standpoint was not to speak of the extermination (Ausrottung) of Jewry. The Fuhrer approved this stance and said they had burdened us with the war and brought about the destruction so it was no wonder if they would be the first to feel the consequences.’¹⁵³

The party chieftains who had heard Hitler speak on 12 December in the dramatic context of war now against the USA and unfolding crisis on the eastern front understood the message. No order or directive was necessary. They readily grasped that the time of reckoning had come. On 16 December, Hans Frank reported back to leading figures in the administration of the General Government. ‘As regards the Jews,’ he began, ‘I’ll tell you quite openly: an end has to be made one way or another.’ He referred explicitly to Hitler’s ‘prophecy’ about their destruction in the event of another world war. He repeated Hitler’s expression in his address to the Gauleiter that sympathy with the Jews would be wholly misplaced. The war would prove to be only a partial success should the Jews in Europe survive it, Frank went on. ‘I will therefore proceed in principle regarding the Jews that they will disappear. They must go,’ he declared. He said he was still negotiating about deporting them to the east. He referred to the rescheduled Wannsee Conference in January, where the issue of deportation would be discussed. ‘At any event,’ he commented, ‘a great Jewish migration will commence.’ ‘But,’ he asked: ‘what is to happen to the Jews? Do you believe they’ll be accommodated in village settlements in the Ostland? They said to us in Berlin: why are you giving us all this trouble? We can’t do anything with them in the Ostland or in the Reich Commissariat [Ukraine] either. Liquidate them yourselves!… We must destroy (vernichten) the Jews wherever we find them and wherever it is possible to do so…’ A programme for bringing this about was evidently, however, still unknown to Frank. He did not know how it was to happen. ‘The Jews are also extraordinarily harmful to us through their gluttony,’ he continued. ‘We have in the General Government an estimated 2.5 million — perhaps with those closely related to Jews and what goes with it, now 3.5 million Jews. We can’t shoot these 3.5 million Jews, we can’t poison them, but we must be able to take steps leading somehow to a success in extermination (Vernichtungserfolg) …’¹⁵⁴ The ‘Final Solution’ — meaning the physical extermination of the Jews of Europe — was still emerging. The ideology of total annihilation was now taking over from any lingering economic rationale of working the Jews to death. ‘Economic considerations should remain fundamentally out of consideration in dealing with the problem’ was the answer finally given on 18 December to Lohse’s inquiry about using skilled Jewish workers from the Baltic in the armaments industry.¹⁵⁵ On the same day, in a private discussion with Himmler, Hitler confirmed that in the east the partisan war, which had expanded sharply in the autumn, provided a useful framework for destroying the Jews. They were ‘to be exterminated as partisans (Als Partisanen auszurotten)’, Himmler noted as the outcome of their discussion.¹⁵⁶ The separate strands of genocide were rapidly being pulled together.

On 20 January 1942, the conference on the ‘final solution’, postponed from 9 December, eventually took place in a large villa by the Wannsee. Alongside representatives from the Reich ministries of the Interior, Justice, and Eastern Territories, the Foreign Office, from the office of the Four-Year Plan, and from the General Government, sat Gestapo chief SS-Gruppenfuhrer Heinrich Muller, the commanders of the Security Police in the General Government and Latvia, Karl Schoengarth and Otto Lange, together with Adolf Eichmann (the RSHA’s deportation expert, who had the task of producing a written record of the meeting).¹⁵⁷

Heydrich opened the meeting by recapitulating that Goring had given him responsibility — a reference to the mandate of the previous July — for preparing ‘the final solution of the European Jewish question’. The meeting aimed to clarify and coordinate organizational arrangements. (Later in the meeting an inconclusive attempt was made to define the status of part-Jews (Mischlinge) in the framework of deportation plans.)¹⁵⁸ Heydrich surveyed the course of anti-Jewish policy, then declared that ‘the evacuation of the Jews to the east has now emerged, with the prior permission of the Fuhrer, as a further possible solution instead of emigration’. He spoke of gathering ‘practical experience’ in the process for ‘the coming final solution of the Jewish question’, which would embrace as many as 11 million Jews across Europe (stretching, outside German current territorial control, as far as Britain and Ireland, Switzerland, Spain, Turkey, and French north African colonies). In the gigantic deportation programme, the German-occupied territories would be combed from west to east. The deported Jews would be put to work in large labour gangs. Many — perhaps most — would die in the process. The particularly strong and hardy types who survived would have ‘to be dealt with accordingly’.

Though there was, as Eichmann later testified, explicit talk at the conference — not reflected in the minutes — of ‘killing and eliminating and exterminating (Toten und Eliminieren und Vernichten)’,¹⁵⁹ Heydrich was not orchestrating an existing and finalized programme of mass extermination in death-camps. But the Wannsee Conference was a key stepping-stone on the path to that terrible genocidal finality. A deportation programme aimed at the annihilation of the Jews through forced labour and starvation in occupied Soviet territory following the end of a victorious war was rapidly giving way to the realization that the Jews would have to be systematically destroyed before the war ended — and that the main locus of their destruction would no longer be the Soviet Union, but the territory of the General Government.¹⁶⁰