Heinrich Himmler

autonomous Jewish reserve under a German police-governor on the island, to which some four million Jews should be sent. Both Heydrich and Himmler approved the plan, but according to the Dutch edition of Kersten’s Memoirs, Hitler had already abandoned this idea shortly after the capitulation of France, and had told Himmler he would have to undertake the progressive extermination of European Jewry.²³ It was not, however, until February 1942 that what was by then the fiction of the Madagascar project was officially abandoned in a memorandum sent by Hitler to the Foreign Office.

The decision to practise organized mass extermination, a national policy of genocide, seems to have been arrived at only after secret discussions which were inevitably dominated by Hitler. According to both Wolff and Kersten, Himmler was often very disturbed during this period, as if absorbed in a problem he was unable to discuss with anyone around him.

During the summer a firm decision was reached. On 31 July 1941, Goring sent his carefully worded directive to Heydrich, who was entrusted with the administrative planning for the extermination.

‘Supplementing the task that was assigned to you on 24 January 1939, to solve the Jewish problem by means of emigration and evacuation in the best possible way according to present conditions, I herewith instruct you to make all necessary preparations as regards organizational, financial and material matters for a total solution [Gesamtlosung] of the Jewish question within the area of German influence in Europe… I instruct you further to submit to me as soon as possible a general plan showing the measure for organization and for action necessary to carry out the desired final solution [Endlosung] of the Jewish question.’²⁴

According to Lammers, Head of the Reich Chancellery, while giving evidence at the Nuremberg Trial, the nature of the final as distinct from the total solution was made known to Heydrich by Goring verbally. There can be little doubt that Heydrich knew it in any case, and he appointed Adolf Eichmann his principal deputy in the matter. Eichmann was also responsible to Himmler, who had retained his direct control over the concentration camps, some of which were to be set aside as centres for extermination. Giving evidence at his trial in Israel in 1961, Eichmann claimed that even as late as November 1941 he ‘did not know any details of the plan’, but that he ‘knew one was being drawn’.²⁵

Heydrich’s assistant, Wisliceny, gave evidence at Nuremberg in January 1946 which implied that Eichmann received definite orders from Himmler during the spring of 1942. At a meeting in Eichmann’s office at the ‘end of July or the beginning of August’, the killing of Jews in Poland was discussed:

‘Eichmann told me he could show me this order in writing if it would soothe my conscience. He took a small volume of documents from his safe, turned over the pages and showed me a letter from Himmler to the Chief of the Security Police and the S.D. The gist of the letter was something as follows: the Fuhrer had ordered the “final solution” of the Jewish question; the Chief of the Security Police and the S.D., and the Inspector of the Concentration Camps were entrusted with carrying out this so-called “final solution”. All Jewish men and women who were able to work were to be temporarily exempted from the so-called “final solution” and used for work in the concentration camps. This letter was signed by Himmler in person. I could not possibly be mistaken, since Himmler’s signature was well known to me.’²⁶

This order, said Wisliceny, was sent by Himmler to Heydrich and to the Inspector of the Concentration Camps; it was classified top secret and dated April 1942. Eichmann went on to explain that ‘the planned biological destruction of the Jewish race in the Eastern territories was disguised by the wording “final solution”…’ and that he personally ‘was entrusted with the execution of this order’.

Long after the final decision had been taken, Himmler remained deeply oppressed. During a period of treatment by Kersten in Berlin, he admitted on 11 November after considerable pressure that the destruction of the Jews was being planned. When Kersten expressed his horror, Himmler became defensive — the Jews had to be finally eradicated, he said, since they had been and would always be the cause of intolerable strife in Europe. Just as the Americans had exterminated the Indians, so the Germans must wipe out the Jews. But in spite of his arguments, Himmler could not hide the disturbance of his conscience, and a few days later he admitted that ‘the extermination of people is unGermanic’.

Auschwitz, near Cracow in Poland, became the principal centre for Himmler’s extermination plan. It had once been the site of an Austrian military encampment built on marshy ground, where winter fog rose from the damp earth. Himmler transformed this military establishment into a concentration camp for the Poles, and it was officially opened on 14 June 1940, with Lieutenant Rudolf Hoess as its first Commandant. Joseph Kramer, who later had charge of Belsen, was his adjutant.

Hoess, who became one of Himmler’s most closely trusted agents, was to survive the collapse of Germany. Although held prisoner in May 1945, his true identity was not suspected until some months after his initial release. When he was once more taken into custody, he admitted his identity and signed a statement on 16 March in which he declared: ‘I personally arranged on orders received from Himmler in May 1941 the gassing of 2 million persons between June-July 1941 and the end of 1943, during which time I was Commandant of Auschwitz.’ He was very frank and co-operative, giving his lethal evidence at Nuremberg with all the impersonal self-confidence of a good and modest steward. Later he was handed over to the Polish authorities and while waiting his trial wrote in longhand his autobiography, perhaps the most incredible document to come from any Nazi agent. While, for example, Schellenberg relishes his intricate acts of espionage for Heydrich and Himmler, writing his story as if it were a thriller, Hoess is perpetually modest, melancholy and moralizing. The spirit of his Catholic upbringing taught him the supreme virtue of obedience.

Hoess represents himself as a simple, virtuous man who liked hard work and soldiering, and felt oppressed by the criminal underworld with which he was forced to associate.²⁷ At Dachau he disliked the methods used by Eicke, and while confessing that his ‘sympathies lay too much with the prisoner’, he admits that he ‘had become too fond of the black uniform’ to admit his inadequacy and relinquish the work. ‘I wished to appear hard’, he writes, ‘lest I should appear weak.’ When he went to Sachsenhausen as an adjutant, he took charge of the execution of an S.S. officer who by an act of humanity had let a prisoner escape. ‘I was so agitated’, he recalls, ‘that I could hardly hold the pistol to his head when giving him the coup de grace.’ But executions became a matter of routine, and Hoess learned to hide his head in the sands of obedience. His exemplary conduct led to his promotion as Commandant of Auschwitz. Here, he says, ‘I lived only for my work… I was absorbed, I might say obsessed… Every fresh difficulty only increased my zeal.’ But this idealism was betrayed by the ‘general untrustworthiness that surrounded me’. His staff, he claimed, let him down, and he became powerless against the corruption and ill-will of his subordinates. He took discreetly to drink; his wife tried to help him by building up a social life in their home at the camp, but ‘all human emotions were forced into the background’.

In November 1940 Hoess reported his plans for Auschwitz to Himmler, who brushed aside his Commandant’s fears and grievances, and only became interested when the discussion turned on making Auschwitz into an agricultural research station, with laboratories, plant nurseries and facilities for stock breeding. As for the prisoners and their welfare, Hoess was left to ‘improvise’ as best he could. It was not until March the following year that Himmler paid a visit to the camp, accompanied by his officials and some ‘high executives of I.G. Farben Industrie’. Glucks, the Inspector of Concentration Camps, arrived in advance and ‘constantly warned me against reporting anything disagreeable to the Reichsfuhrer S.S.’ When Hoess tried to impress on him the desperate overcrowding and lack of drainage or water supply, Himmler merely replied that the camp was to be enlarged to take 100,000 prisoners, so as to supply labour contingents to I.G. Farben Industrie. As to Hoess, he must continue to improvise.

This was the man to whom Himmler entrusted his special confidence in June 1941 when, as Hoess put it, he ‘gave me the order to prepare installations at Auschwitz where mass exterminations could take place… By the will of the Reichsfuhrer S.S., Auschwitz became the greatest human extermination centre of all time.’

According to Hoess’s detailed account of this meeting, Himmler explained to him that he had chosen Auschwitz ‘because of its good position as regards communications and because the area can be easily isolated and camouflaged’. He told him that Eichmann would come to Auschwitz and give him secret instructions about the equipment that would have to be installed. Hoess has left a full and frank account of the experiments for which he