Hitler. 1936-1945: Nemesis

had been able to cross the Dnieper and establish important bridgeheads on the west banks of the great river. The German bridgehead at Zaporozhye was lost in early October. By then, the Wehrmacht had been pushed back about 150 miles along the southern front. German and Romanian troops were also cut off on the Crimea, which Hitler refused to evacuate fearing, as of old, the opportunities it would give for air-attacks on Romanian oil-fields, and concerned about the message it would send to Turkey and Bulgaria. By the end of the month, the Red Army had pushed so far over the big bend of the Dnieper in the south that any notion of the Germans holding their intended defensive line was purely fanciful. To the north, the largest Soviet city in German hands, Kiev, was recaptured on 5 — 6 November. Manstein wanted to make the attempt to retake it. For Hitler, the lower Dnieper and the Crimea were more important. Control of the lower Dnieper held the key to the protection of the manganese ores of Nikopol, vital for the German steel industry. And should the Red Army again control the Crimea, the Romanian oil-fields would once more be threatened from the air.²³² But, whatever Hitler’s thirst for new military successes, the reality was that by the end of 1943, the limitless granaries of the Ukraine and the industrial heartlands of the northern Caucasus, seen by Hitler on so many occasions as vital to the war effort (as well as the source of future German prosperity in the ‘New Order’), were irredeemably lost.²³³

IV

Not lost, however, was the war against the Jews — in Hitler’s eyes, the authors of the entire world conflagration. As we noted, Hitler had agreed in June to Himmler’s wish to complete the ‘evacuation’ of the Polish Jews. By autumn 1943, ‘Aktion Reinhard’ was terminated: in the region of 1? million Jews had been killed in the gas chambers of extermination camps at Belzec, Sobibor, and Treblinka in eastern Poland.²³⁴ The SS leadership were now pressing hard for the extension of the ‘Final Solution’ to all remaining corners of the Nazi Imperium — even those where the deportations were likely to have diplomatic repercussions. Among these were Denmark and Italy.

The Nazi authorities were well aware that any move against Danish Jews was likely to result in public protests and sour relations with the occupying power. There was little antisemitism in the land. The tiny Jewish minority was fully integrated into Danish society. An attack on the Jews would be seen widely as an assault on Danish citizens. Even so, the SS leadership decided in summer that the time was ripe. Werner Best, the Reich Plenipotentiary in Denmark, pressed for action to be taken. In September, Hitler complied with his request to have the Danish Jews deported, dismissing Ribbentrop’s anxieties about a possible general strike and other civil disobedience. Though these did not materialize, the round-up of Danish Jews was a resounding failure. Several hundred — under ten per cent of the Jewish population — were captured and deported to Theresienstadt. Most escaped. Countless Danish citizens helped the overwhelming majority of their Jewish countrymen — in all 7,900 persons, including a few hundred non-Jewish marital partners — to flee across the Sound to safety in neutral Sweden in the most remarkable rescue action of the war.²³⁵

In October, Hitler accepted Ribbentrop’s recommendation to have Rome’s 8,000 Jews sent ‘as hostages’ to the Austrian concentration camp at Mauthausen. This followed moves by the Reich Security Head Office in Berlin, which wanted to deport them to Upper Italy to be ‘liquidated’. Anticipating possible problems with the Vatican, Ribbentrop appears to have modified the intentions in suggesting the deportation to Mauthausen. Again, the ‘action’ to round up the Jews misfired. Most of the Jewish community were able to avoid capture. Some were hidden by disgusted non-Jewish citizens. Thousands found shelter in Rome’s convents and monasteries, or in the Vatican itself. In return, the Papacy was prepared to maintain public silence on the outrage. A strong and unequivocal protest from the Pontiff might well have deterred the German occupiers, unsure of the reactions, and prevented the deportations of the Jews they could lay their hands upon. The Germans were expecting such a protest. It never came. Despite Hitler’s directive, following his Foreign Minister’s advice, those Jews captured were not, in fact, sent to Mauthausen. Of the 1,259 Jews who fell into German hands, the majority were taken straight to Auschwitz.²³⁶

Hitler’s compliance with SS demands to speed up and finish off the ‘Final Solution’ was unquestionably driven by his wish to complete the destruction of those he held responsible for the war. He wanted, now as before, to see the ‘prophecy’ he had declared in 1939 and repeatedly referred to, fulfilled. But, even more so than in the spring when he had encouraged Goebbels to turn up the volume of antisemitic propaganda, there was also the need, with backs to the wall, to hold together his closest followers in a sworn ‘community of fate’, bonded by their own knowledge of and implication in the extermination of the Jews.

On 4 October, Reichsfuhrer-SS Heinrich Himmler spoke openly and frankly about the killing of the Jews to SS leaders gathered in the town hall in Posen, the capital of the Warthegau. He said he was ‘referring to the Jewish evacuation programme, the extermination of the Jewish people’. It was, he went on, ‘a glorious page in our history, and one that has never been written and never can be written. For we know how difficult we would have made it for ourselves if, on top of the bombing raids, the burdens and the deprivations of war, we still had Jews today in every town as secret saboteurs, agitators, and troublemakers. We would now probably have reached the 1916 — 17 stage when the Jews were still part of the body of the German people (Volkskorper).’ The mentality was identical with Hitler’s. ‘We had the moral right, we had the duty to our people,’ Himmler concluded, ‘to destroy this people which wanted to destroy us… We do not want in the end, because we have exterminated a bacillus, to become ill through the bacillus and die.’²³⁷ The vocabulary, too, was redolent of Hitler’s own. Himmler did not refer to Hitler. There was no need to do so. The key point for the Reichsfuhrer-SS was not to assign responsibility to a single person. The crucial purpose of his speech was to stress their joint responsibility, that they were all in it together.²³⁸

Two days later, in the same Golden Hall in Posen, Himmler addressed the Reichs — and Gauleiter of the Party. The theme was the same one. He gave, as Goebbels recorded, an ‘unvarnished and candid picture’ of the treatment of the Jews.²³⁹ Himmler declared: ‘We faced the question: what should we do with the women and children? I decided here too to find a completely clear solution. I did not regard myself as justified in exterminating the men — that is to say, to kill them or have them killed — and to allow the avengers in the shape of the children to grow up for our sons and grandchildren. The difficult decision had to be taken to have this people disappear from the earth.’ Himmler seemed to be indicating that the extension of the killing to women and children had been his initiative. He immediately, however, associated himself and the SS with a ‘commission’ (Auftrag) — ‘the most difficult which we have had so far.’²⁴⁰ The Gauleiter, among them Goebbels who had spoken directly with Hitler on the subject so many times, would have had no difficulty in presuming whose authority lay behind the ‘commission’. Again, the purpose of the remarkably frank disclosures on the taboo subject was plain. Himmler marked on a list those who had not attended his speech or noted its contents.²⁴¹

Himmler’s speeches, ensuring that his own subordinates and the Party leadership were fully in the picture about the extermination of the Jews, had been — there can be no doubt about it — carried out with Hitler’s approval. The very next day after listening to Himmler, the Gauleiter were ordered to attend the Wolf’s Lair to hear Hitler himself give an account of the state of the war. That the Fuhrer would speak explicitly on the ‘Final Solution’ was axiomatically ruled out. But he could now take it for granted that they understood that there was no way out. Their knowledge underlined their complicity. Unusually, Goebbels made no diary entry that day. Only the published communique on the meeting survives. But it is not unenlightening. ‘The entire German people know,’ Hitler had told the Reichs — and Gauleiter, ‘that it is a matter of whether they exist or do not exist. The bridges have been destroyed behind them. Only the way forward remains.’²⁴²

When (for the last time, as it turned out) Hitler addressed the Party’s ‘Old Guard’ in Munich’s Lowenbraukeller on the Putsch anniversary, 8 November, he was as defiant as ever.²⁴³ According to SD reports, the speech, broadcast on the radio, went down well — though in the main only among Party fanatics and fervent believers. Their morale was again temporarily lifted, especially by the strong hints of imminent retaliation against Britain for the bombing terror — to be unleashed during the second half of November in five major raids on Berlin itself.²⁴⁴ Few others could find in the empty bombast any consolation for lives of loved ones sacrificed in vain, homes destroyed, cities laid waste, hardship and misery, and a war which they recognized as to all intents and purposes lost.²⁴⁵ But those careless enough to voice such sentiments had to reckon with swift retribution. Their fate had been expressly indicated in Hitler’s speech. There