That the General Government should become the first area to implement the ‘Final Solution’ was directly requested at the conference by its representative, State Secretary Josef Buhler. He wanted the 2? million Jews in his area — most of them incapable of work, he stressed — ‘removed’ as quickly as possible. The authorities in the area would do all they could to help expedite the process.161 Buhler’s hopes would be fulfilled over the next months. The regionalized killing in the districts of Lublin and Galicia was extended by spring to the whole of the General Government, as the deportation-trains began to ferry their human cargo to the extermination camps of Belzec, Sobibor, and Treblinka. By this time, a comprehensive programme of systematic annihilation of the Jews embracing the whole of German-occupied Europe was rapidly taking shape. By early June a programme had been constructed for the deportation of Jews from western Europe.162 The transports from the west began in July. Most left for the largest of the extermination camps by this time in operation, Auschwitz-Birkenau in the annexed territory of Upper Silesia. The ‘final solution’ was under way. The industrialized mass murder would now continued unabated. By the end of 1942, according to the SS’s own calculations, 4 million Jews were already dead.163
Hitler had not been involved in the Wannsee Conference. Probably he knew it was taking place; but even this is not certain. There was no need for his involvement. He had signalled yet again in unmistakable terms in December 1941 what the fate of the Jews should be now that Germany was embroiled in another world war. By then, local and regional killing initiatives had already developed their own momentum. Heydrich was more than happy to use Hitler’s blanket authorization of deportations to the east now to expand the killing operations into an overall programme of Europe-wide genocide.
On 30 January 1942, the ninth anniversary of the ‘seizure of power’, Hitler addressed a packed Sportpalast. As he had been doing privately over the past weeks, he invoked once more — how often he repeated the emphasis in these months is striking — his ‘prophecy’ of 30 January 1939. As always, he wrongly dated it to the day of the outbreak of war with the attack on Poland. ‘We are clear,’ he declared, ‘that the war can only end either with the extermination of the aryan peoples or the disappearance of Jewry from Europe.’ He went on: ‘I already stated on 1 September 1939 in the German Reichstag — and I refrain from over-hasty prophecies — that this war will not come to an end as the Jews imagine, with the extermination of the European-Aryan peoples
The message was not lost on his audience. The SD — no doubt picking up comments made above all by avid Nazi supporters — reported that his words had been ‘interpreted to mean that the Fuhrer’s battle against the Jews would be followed through to the end with merciless consistency, and that very soon the last Jew would disappear from European soil’.165
VII
When Goebbels spoke to Hitler in March, the death-mills of Belzec had commenced their grisly operations.166 As regards the ‘Jewish Question’, Hitler remained ‘pitiless’, the Propaganda Minister recorded. ‘The Jews must get out of Europe, if need be through use of the most brutal means,’ was his view.167
A week later, Goebbels left no doubt what ‘the most brutal means’ implied. ‘From the General Government, beginning with Lublin, the Jews are now being deported to the east. A fairly barbaric procedure, not to be described in any greater detail, is being used here, and not much more remains of the Jews themselves. In general, it can probably be established that
Goebbels himself had played no small part over the years in pushing for a ‘radical solution’. He had been one of the most important and high-placed of the Party activists pressing Hitler on numerous occasions to take radical action on the ‘Jewish Question’. The Security Police — Heydrich’s role was, if anything, probably more important even than Himmler’s — had been instrumental in gradually converting an ideological imperative into an extermination plan. Many others, at different levels of the regime, had contributed in greater or lesser measure to the continuing and untrammelled process of radicalization. Complicity was massive, from the Wehrmacht leadership and captains of industry down to Party hacks, bureaucratic minions, and ordinary Germans hoping for their own material advantage through the persecution then deportation of a helpless, but unloved, minority which had been deemed to be the inexorable enemy of the new ‘people’s community’.
But Goebbels knew what he was talking about in singling out Hitler’s role. This had often been indirect, rather than overt. It had consisted of authorizing more than directing. And the hate-filled tirades, though without equal in their depth of inhumanity, remained at a level of generalities. Nevertheless, there can be no doubt about it: Hitler’s role had been decisive and indispensable in the road to the ‘Final Solution’. Had he not come to power in 1933 and a national-conservative government, perhaps a military dictatorship, had gained power instead, discriminatory legislation against Jews would in all probability still have been introduced in Germany. But without Hitler, and the unique regime he headed, the creation of a programme to bring about the physical extermination of the Jews of Europe would have been unthinkable.
11. LAST BIG THROW OF THE DICE
‘If I don’t get the oil of Maykop and Grozny, then I must finish this war.’
‘Overall picture: have we extended the risk too far?’
‘You can be sure,’ he added, ‘that nobody will get us away from this place again!’
‘How can someone be so cowardly? I don’t understand it. So many people have to die. Then such a man goes and besmirches in the last minute the heroism of so many others.’
Snow still lay on the ground at the Wolf’s Lair. An icy wind gave no respite from the cold. But, at the end of February 1942, there were the first signs that spring was not far away.1 Hitler could not wait for the awful winter to pass.2 He felt he had been let down by his military leaders, his logistical planners, his
