Hitler

question.”⁷⁴

Efforts at concealment characterized the operation from the start. Beginning in January, 1942, the Jews were systematically rounded up throughout Europe, but the endless stream of trains that transported them started off toward unknown destinations. Deliberately spread rumors spoke of newly built, beautiful cities in the conquered East. The killer squads were given ever-changing reasons as justifications for their activities, the Jews being alternately presented as ringleaders of resistance and carriers of plagues. Even the ideological vanguards of National Socialism seemed to be unable to face the consequences of their own doctrines.

Hitler’s own striking silence lends some support to this conjecture. For in the table talk, the speeches, the documents or the recollections of participants from all those years not a single concrete reference of his to the practice of annihilation has come down to us. No one can say how Hitler reacted to the reports of the Einsatzgruppen, whether he asked for or saw films or photos of their work, and whether he intervened with suggestions, praise, or blame. When we consider that he ordinarily transformed everything that preoccupied him into rampant speechmaking, that he never concealed his radicalism, his vulgarity, his readiness to go to extremes, this silence about the central concern of his life—involving, as it did in his mind, the salvation of the world—seems all the stranger. We can only guess about his motives: his characteristic mania for secrecy, a remnant of bourgeois morality, the desire to keep what was happening abstract and not weaken his own passion by letting himself see what it led to. Nevertheless, we are left with the disturbing picture of a savior who buries his great redeeming act deep in the charnel house of his heart. Of the entire top leadership, only Heinrich Himmler once attended a mass execution, at the end of August, 1942. He nearly fainted, and subsequently suffered a hysterical fit.⁷⁵

The SS bureaucracy ultimately invented a special terminology, full of words like “emigration,” “special treatment,” “sanitary measures,” “change of residence,” or “natural diminution.” Translated back into reality, such terms meant the following:

Moennikes and I went directly to the pits. We were not stopped. Then I heard rifle shots in quick succession behind a mound of earth. The people who had got off the trucks, men, women and children of every age, had to undress on orders from an SS man who held a riding whip or dog whip in his hand. They had to deposit their clothing, shoes, upper and underclothes separately, at certain places. I saw a heap of shoes containing at a guess eight hundred to a thousand shoes, and huge piles of underclothing and clothing. Without an outcry or weeping these people undressed, stood together in family groups, kissed and said goodbye to each other, and waited for the beckoning gesture of another SS man who stood at the pit and likewise held a whip in his hand. During a quarter of an hour that I stood by the pits I heard no laments or pleas for mercy. I observed a family of some eight persons…. An old woman with snow-white hair held a year-old baby in her arms and sang something to it and tickled it. The child crowed with pleasure. The couple looked on with tears in their eyes. The father held a boy of about ten by the hand, and spoke comfortingly to him in a low voice. The boy was fighting back his tears. The father pointed his finger up at the sky, caressed his head, and seemed to be explaining something to him. At this point the SS man by the pit called out something to his fellow. The other man divided off about twenty persons and instructed them to go behind the mound of earth. The family I have been speaking of was among them. I still remember very clearly how a girl, black-haired and slender, as she passed close by me gestured at herself and said: “Twenty-three years!” I walked around the mound of earth and stood in front of the huge grave. The people lay pressed so closely together on top of one another that only the heads could be seen. Blood was running from almost all the heads down over the shoulders. Some of those who had been shot were still moving. A few raised their arms and turned their heads to show they were still alive…. I looked around to see who was doing the shooting. It was an SS man, sitting on the ground at the rim of the narrow side of the pit, a submachine gun on his knees, and smoking a cigarette. The completely naked people walked down a flight of steps that had been cut into the earthen wall of the pit, stumbled over the heads of those who were already lying there, to the place that the SS man indicated. They lay down in front of the dead or wounded; some stroked those who were still living and murmured what seemed to be words of comfort. Then I heard a series of shots. I looked into the pit and saw the bodies twitching, or the heads already lying still on the bodies in front. Blood ran from the back of their necks.⁷⁶

That was the reality. Gradually, however, by the establishment of a string of highly organized murder factories the work of annihilation was removed from the eyes of the populace, rationalized, and changed over to poison gas. On March 17, 1942, the camp of Belzec, with a daily kill capacity of 15,000 persons, began functioning. It was followed in April by Sobinor, close to the Ukrainian border, capacity 20,000; then Treblinka and Maidanek, with approximately 25,000, and above all Auschwitz, which became “the greatest institution for human annihilation of all times,” as its commandant, Rudolf Hoss, boasted at his trial with a note of crazed pride. Here the entire killing process, from the selection of the new arrivals and the gassing of them to the elimination of the corpses and the exploitation of whatever remained, had been elaborated into a smooth system of interlocking procedures. The annihilation was carried out hastily, with increasing acceleration “so that we don’t find ourselves stuck in the middle of it some day,” as the SS chief of Lublin, Odilo Globocnik, explained. Many eyewitnesses have described the resignation with which people went to their deaths: in Kulmhof more than 152,000 Jews; in Belzec 600,000; in Sobinor 250,000; in Treblinka 700,000; in Maidanek 200,000; and in Auschwitz more than 1 million. And the shootings continued alongside the mass gassings. According to the exaggerated estimate of the Reichssicherheitshauptamt,[16] annihilation was to be extended to approximately 11 million Jews.⁷⁷ More than 5 million were murdered.

Hitler and his Lebensraum commissioners regarded the Eastern part of Europe as vacant territory without a history. Its Slavic inhabitants were to be in part exterminated, in part retained to serve the German master race as a helot population. One hundred million persons were eventually to be transplanted to the Eastern plains; millions must be brought there, Hitler explained, until “our settlers are numerically far superior to the natives.” European emigration must no longer go to America, but only to the East. “In ten years at the latest,” he wanted to receive a report of “at least twenty million Germans living in the Eastern territories.”⁷⁸

The “gigantic cake” was to be divided into four Reich commissariats (Eastland, Ukraine, Caucasia, and Moscovia). Alfred Rosenberg, the former leading ideologue of the party, who in recent years had been repeatedly outmaneuvered and who had been knocking around without employment before his significant appointment as Reich Minister for the Occupied Eastern Territories, vainly urged partitioning of the Soviet Union into politically autonomous nationalities. Hitler rejected the concept because he considered it dangerous to shape new political units on an ethnic or historical basis. Everything depended, he said, on “avoiding any political organization and thus keeping the members of these nationalities on the lowest possible cultural level.” He was even prepared, he declared, to grant these peoples a certain degree of individual liberty, because all liberty had a reactionary effect, since it negated the supreme form of human organization, the state.

With unflagging enthusiasm, he drafted the details of his imperial daydream: Germanic masters and Slavic serfs together filling the vast Eastern spaces with bustling activity, though with the racially based class distinctions emphasized vividly in every conceivable way. Before his mind’s eye arose German cities with gleaming governors’ palaces, towering cultural and administrative structures, while the settlements of the native population would deliberately be kept inconspicuous. These were by no means to be “in any way refurbished let alone embellished.” Even the “mud stucco” or the thatched roofs would not be permitted to show uniformity, he said.

He insisted on a low educational standard for the Slavic populace. They would be allowed to learn the meaning of traffic signs, the name of the capital of the Reich, and a few words of German, but no arithmetic, for example. General Jodi, he added on one occasion, had quite rightly objected to a poster in Ukrainian forbidding crossing of a railroad embankment, for “it can well be a matter of indifference to us whether a native more or less is run over.” In that facetious Machiavellianism that he fell into in relaxed moments, he added that it would be best to teach the Slavic nationals “nothing but a sign language” and use the radio to present them with “what they can digest: music without limit…. For gay music promotes joy in labor.” He regarded all concern for the health of the subject populations, all hygiene, as “sheer madness,” and recommended spreading the superstition “that inoculation and so on is a very dangerous business.” When he discovered in a memorandum a proposal to ban the sale and use of abortifacients in the occupied eastern territories, he became wildly excited and declared that he