liquidation of the Jews came ‘from higher authority’.143 Himmler himself was to claim explicitly in an internal, top-secret, letter to SS-Obergruppenfuhrer Gottlob Berger, Chief of the SS Main Office, on 28 July 1942, that he was operating directly under Hitler’s authority: ‘The occupied Eastern territories are being made free of Jews. The Fuhrer has placed the implementation of this very difficult order on my shoulders.’144
How much detail Hitler asked for, or was given, cannot be known. But, one indication at the very least, that he was aware of the slaughter of huge numbers of Jews, is provided by a report which Himmler had drawn up for him at the end of 1942 providing statistics on Jews ‘executed’ in southern Russia on account of alleged connection with ‘bandit’ activity. Having ordered in mid-December that partisan ‘bands’ were to be combated ‘by the most brutal means
Four months after this, in April 1943, Himmler would have an abbreviated statistical report on ‘the Final Solution of the Jewish Question’ sent to Hitler. Aware of the taboo in Hitler’s entourage on explicit reference to the mass killing of the Jews, Himmler had the statistical report presented in camouflage language. The fiction had to be maintained. Himmler ordered the term ‘Special Treatment’ (itself a euphemism for killing) deleted from the shortened version to be sent to Hitler. His statistician, Dr Richard Korherr, was ordered simply to refer to the ‘transport of Jews’. There was reference to Jews being ‘sluiced through’ unnamed camps. The camouflage-language was there to serve a specific purpose. Hitler would understand what it meant, and recognize the Reichsfuhrer-SS’s ‘achievement’.146
When he spoke at lunchtime on 29 May 1942 to Goebbels and to his other guests at his meal-table about his preference for the ‘evacuation’ of the Jews to Central Africa, Hitler was sustaining the fiction which had to be upheld even in his ‘court circle’ that the Jews were being resettled and put to work in the east.147 Goebbels himself, in his diary entry, went along with the fiction, though he knew only too well — as an earlier explicit entry in his diary indicates — what was happening to the Jews in Poland.148 Hitler, as we noted in the previous chapter, had spoken in early 1941 of deporting the Jews to the east. The Madagascar Plan, if he had ever taken it seriously, had by then been abandoned for some time. In September 1941 he had authorized the deportation of the Jews to the east. Speaking now of sending the Jews to central Africa, when only a fortnight earlier he had once more indicated how little interest he had in overseas colonies and when, at this juncture, there was no prospect of attaining territory there, amounted to no more than a fig-leaf to cover what he knew was actually happening.149 Hitler had by now internalized his authorization of the killing of the Jews. It was typical of his way of dealing with the ‘Final Solution’ that he spoke of it either by repeating what he knew had long since ceased to be the case; or by alluding to the removal of Jews from Europe (often in the context of his ‘prophecy’) at some distant point in the future.
Hitler’s preoccupation with secrecy remained intense. Nowhere is there an explicit indication, even in discussions with adjutants or secretaries, of his knowledge of the extermination of the Jews.150 The subject was probably mentioned, if at all, only privately to Himmler and in general terms (as in their discussion on 18 December 1941), and otherwise darkly hinted at in camouflaged remarks, whose meanings were perfectly well understood by those aware of what was happening. Himmler adopted the same strategy.151
Why was Hitler so anxious to maintain the fiction of resettlement, and uphold the ‘terrible secret’ even among his inner circle? A partial explanation is doubtless to be found in Hitler’s acute personal inclination to extreme secrecy which he translated into a general mode of rule, as laid down in his ‘Basic Order’ of January 1940, that information should only be available on a ‘need-to-know’ basis.152 Knowledge of extermination could provide a propaganda gift to enemies, and perhaps stir up unrest and internal difficulties in the occupied territories, particularly in western Europe.153 And as regards public opinion in the Reich itself, the Nazi leadership believed that the German people were not ready for the gross inhumanity of the extermination of the Jews.154 Hitler had agreed with Rosenberg in mid-December 1941, directly following the declaration of war on the USA, that it would be inappropriate to speak of extermination in public.155 Late in 1942., Bormann was keen to quell rumours circulating about the ‘Final Solution’ in the east.156 Himmler would later, speaking to SS leaders, refer to it as ‘a never to be written glorious page of our history’.157 Evidently, it was a secret to be carried to the grave.
In his public statements referring to his 1939 ‘prophecy’, Hitler could now lay claim to his place in ‘the glorious secret of our history’ while still detaching himself from the sordid and horrific realities of mass killing.158 Beyond that, a further incentive to secrecy was that Hitler wanted no bureaucratic and legal interference. He had experienced this in the ‘euthanasia action’, necessitating his unique written authorization, and the problems which subsequently arose from it. His tirades about the judicial system and bureaucracy in the spring of 1942 were a further indicator of his sensitivity towards such interference. To avoid any legalistic meddling, Himmler explicitly refused in the summer of 1942 to entertain attempts to define ‘a Jew’.159
In addition, there was probably, however, a deep psychological underlay to Hitler’s obsessive secretiveness about the fate of the Jews. The Third Reich was mighty, but even now perhaps, so his warped thinking must have run, not so mighty as the power of the Jews — the ‘world conspiracy’ in which he still fervently believed. He still had no means of tackling the Jews whom he believed to be behind the war with Britain and, above all, with the USA. Whatever his public optimism, there is the occasional veiled hint that he entertained the thought, in the darkness of his insomniac nights, that he might lose the war, that his enemies might prevail.160 Some ordinary Germans, swallowing Nazi propaganda and betraying their ingrained prejudices, voiced their worries by the middle of the war of the ‘revenge of the Jews’ if Germany were to lose its struggle.161 It seems hardly conceivable that Hitler did not also entertain such a concern in the recesses of his mind. Withholding his knowledge of the ‘Final Solution’, even from his close associates, would ensure that such information could not reach his archenemies.
IV
Manstein’s difficulties in taking Sevastopol held up the start of ‘Operation Blue’ — the push to the Caucasus — until the end of June.162 But at this point, Hitler need have no doubts that the war was going well. In the Atlantic, the U-boats had met with unprecedented success. In the first six months of 1942, they had sunk almost a third more shipping tonnage than during the whole of 1941, and far fewer U-boats had been lost in the process.163 And on the evening of 21 June came the stunning news that Rommel had taken Tobruk. Through brilliant tactical manoeuvring during the previous three weeks, Rommel had outwitted the ineffectively led and poorly equipped British 8th Army and was then able to inflict a serious defeat on the Allied cause by seizing the stronghold of Tobruk, on the Libyan coast, capturing 33,000 British and Allied prisoners-of-war (many of them South African) and a huge amount of booty.164 It was a spectacular German victory and a disaster for the British. The doorway to German dominance of Egypt was wide open. All at once there was a glimmering prospect in view of an enormous pincer of Rommel’s troops pushing eastwards through Egypt and the Caucasus army sweeping down through the Middle East linking forces to wipe out the British presence in this crucial region.165 Hitler, overjoyed, immediately promoted Rommel to Field-Marshal. Italian hopes of German support for an invasion of Malta were now finally shelved until later in the year. Hitler backed instead Rommel’s plans to advance to the Nile. Within days, German troops were in striking distance of Alexandria.166
One dark cloud on an otherwise sunny horizon was, however, the damage being caused to towns in western Germany by British bombing raids. On 30 May, Hitler had said that he did not think much of the RAF’s threats of heavy air-raids. Precautions, he claimed, had been taken. The Luftwaffe had so many squadrons stationed in the west that destruction from the air would be doubly repaid.167 That very night, the city centre of Cologne was devastated by the first 1,000-bomber raid. The Luftwaffe’s own claims that only seventy British bombers were involved, of which forty-four had been shot down, were regarded even by the Nazi leadership as absurd. Hitler believed the more realistic reports from the Party regional office in Cologne. Goebbels had himself
