CHAPTER 6: FINAL SOLUTION
1 Browning and Gerlach have debated whether Hitler’s decision came in summer/autumn or in December 1941. In this chapter I am arguing that shooting Jews was the fifth version of the Final Solution, and the first one to show promise. The idea that the Jews could be removed from Europe by killing them must have been in the minds of Himmler and Hitler no later than August. It is quite possible that the two of them discussed this explicitly, although they need not have done so. Reinhard Koselleck (Futures Past, 222) cites Hitler, who is himself citing (unknowingly, I assume) Dostoevsky in Crime and Punishment: one need not admit to having plans, even to oneself, in order to have them. For my purposes, December 1941 is the more important date, since that was the time when other associates of Hitler grasped that the Final Solution meant the total mass murder of Jews rather than the murder of some and the deportation of others.
2 See however the important revisions of Speer’s role in Tooze, Wages of Destruction. The problem was posed in its classical form by Milward, German Economy, 6-7 and passim. Quotation: Longerich, Himmler, 561. The massive debate over “institutionalism” and “functionalism” cannot be presented here. This discussion began before the centrality of the eastern front to the Holocaust was understood. Like several other scholars, I am arguing that the thinkability and the possibility of a Final Solution by mass murder emerged from a combination of signals from above (for example, Hitler to Himmler, Himmler to Bach) and from below (for example, Einsatzgruppe A to Himmler, Himmler to Hitler) or indeed in both directions (the relationship between Jeckeln and Himmler). The place where murder emerged as the method of the Final Solution was the eastern front, where the main technique was shooting.
3 Quotation: Mazower, Hitler’s Empire, 368. On Wannsee, see Gerlach, “Wannsee”; and Longerich, Unwritten Order, 95. See also, generally, Roseman, Villa. The connection between Hitler and Rosenberg’s civilian administration is made in Lower, “Nazi Civilian Rulers,” 222-223.
4 Einsatzgruppe A, B, C, D respectively: 990 men, 655 men, 700 men, 600 men. See MacLean, Field Men, 13. On “numbers … too small,” see Browning, “Nazi Decision,” 473. On the importance of the Order Police, see Pohl, “Schauplatz,” 152. The
5 This is not explicitly argued in these terms in Longerich, Himmler, but I believe that the interpretation squares with the arguments presented there. Compare Gerlach, Kalkulierte Morde, 115; and Luck, “Partisanbekampfung,” 229.
6 Quotation: Wasser, “Raumplannung,” 51. See also Mazower, Hitler’s Empire, 378 and passim; and Steinberg, “Civil Administration,” 647.
7 The Romanian lands taken by Stalin were invaded by the Romanian army, not the German. They were followed by Einsatzgruppe D; see Angrick, Besatzungspolitik.
8 See Snyder, Reconstruction.
9 The deportation figures are in Angrick, Riga, 46. If conscription is included, the total rises to 34,000.
10 MacQueen, “White Terror,” 97; Angrick, Riga, 59. Among the two hundred thousand I include Jews in Vilnius and surrounding areas annexed to Lithuania.
11 Arad, Soviet Union, 144, 147; MacQueen, “White Terror,” 99-100; Angrick, Riga, 60.
12 Tomkiewicz, Ponary, 191–197.
13 Ibid., 203.
14 Angrick, Riga, 66-76. See also Arad, Soviet Union, 148.
15 Weiss-Wendt, Estonians, 39, 40, 45, 90, 94-105.
16 The 9,817 count in Verbrechen is at 93. See also Wnuk, Za pierwszego Sowieta, 371 (11,000-12,000); and Hryciuk, “Victims,” 183 (9,400).
17 On interwar anti-Jewish politics, see, generally, Polonsky, Politics; and Mendelsohn, Jews.
18 On Bialystok, see Matthaus, “Controlled Escalation,” 223; and Verbrechen der Wehrmacht, 593. Spektor (in “Zydzi wolynscy,” 575) counts thirty-eight pogroms in Volhynia; and the authors and editors of Wokol Jedwabnego, about thirty in the Bialystok region.
19 On the total number of Jews killed (19,655), see Brandon, “First Wave.” For the “Hundreds of Jews … running down the street,” see Verbrechen der Wehrmacht, 99. On the nationality of the prisoners, see Himka, “Ethnicity,” 8.
20 The idea of double collaboration as biographical self-cleansing is advanced in Gross, Neighbors. For examples from Estonia, Ukraine, and Belarus of double collaboration, see Weiss-Wendt, Estonians, 115-119; Dubno: sefer zikaron, 698 -701; Rein, “Local Collaborators,” 394; Brakel, Unter Rotem Stern, 304; Musial, Mythos, 266; and Mironowicz, Bialorus, 160. See also Snyder, “West Volhynian Jews.” A systematic study of double collaboration would be worthwhile.
21 This is the closest that I would come to an Arendtian argument about alienation. Arendt’s follower Jan Gross makes a similar argument about the privatization of violence in his study of the first Soviet occupation, Revolution from Abroad. But then in his studies of the consequences of two occupations, Neighbors and Fear, he Upiorna dekada and in a few passages in both Neighbors and Fear). But I do think it follows from his occupation studies as a whole, if they are read as studies of human behavior (rather than of Polish ethics). This line of argument is pursued in the Conclusion.
22 Westermann, “Ideological Soldiers,” 46 (30% and 66%).
23 Compare Gerlach, “Nazi Decision,” 476.
24 Longerich, Himmler, 551; Kay, Exploitation, 106. On Uman, see USHMM-SBU 4/1747/19-20.
25 Matthaus, “Controlled Escalation,” 225; Gerlach, Kalkulierte Morde, 555; Kershaw, Fateful Choices, 456, 458. Cuppers, in Wegbereiter, develops the argument about the crucial early role of the Waffen-SS.
26 Kay, Exploitation, 107; Browning, “Nazi Decision,” 474. Pohl notes that the reinforcements came first to Ukraine; see Herrschaft, 152. He specifies early August as the time when Einsatzgruppe C understood that women and children were to be killed; see “Schauplatz,” 140.
27 Mallmann, Einsatzgruppen, 97.
28 Pohl, “Schauplatz,” 142; Kruglov, “Jewish Losses,” 274-275; Verbrechen der Wehrmacht, 135.
29 Kruglov, “Jewish Losses,” 275.
30 Ru?, “Massaker,” 494, 503, 505; Berkhoff, “Records,” 294; Pohl, “Schauplatz,” 147.
31 Berkhoff, Harvest, 65-67, at 65; FVA 3267.
32 Darmstadt testimony, 29 April 1968, IfZ(M), Gd 01.54/78/1762.
