The Nazi Holocaust: Volume 1 9783110970487, 9783598215537

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THE NAZI HOLOCAUST

THE NAZI HOLOCAUST Historical Articles on the Destruction of European Jews

Edited by Michael R. Marrus Series ISBN 0 - 8 8 7 3 6 - 2 6 6 - 4 1. Perspectives on the Holocaust ISBN 0-88736-252-4 2. The Origins of the Holocaust ISBN 0-88736-253-2 3. The "Final Solution": The Implementation of Mass Murder ISBN 0-88736-255-9 vol. 1 ISBN 0-88736-256-7 vol. 2 4. The "Final Solution" Outside Germany ISBN 0-88736-257-5 vol. 1 ISBN 0-88736-258-3 vol. 2 5. Public Opinion and Relations to the Jews in Nazi Europe ISBN 0-88736-259-1 vol. 1 ISBN 0-88736-254-0 vol. 2 6. The Victims of the Holocaust ISBN 0-88736-260-5 vol. 1 ISBN 0-88736-261-3 vol. 2 7. Jewish Resistance to the Holocaust ISBN 0-88736-262-1 8. Bystanders to the Holocaust ISBN 0-88736-263-X vol. 1 ISBN 0-88736-264-8 vol. 2 ISBN 0-88736-268-0 vol. 3 9. The End of the Holocaust ISBN 0-88736-265-6

THE NAZI HOLOCAUST Historical Articles on the Destruction of European Jews

The "Final Solution": The Implementation of Mass Murder Volume 1 Edited with an Introduction by

Michael R. Marrus University of Toronto

Meckler Westport • London

Publisher's Note The articles and chapters which comprise this collection originally appeared in a wide variety of publications and are reproduced here in facsimile from the highest quality offprints and photocopies available. The reader will notice some occasional marginal shading and text-curl common to photocopying from tightly bound volumes. Every attempt has been made to correct or minimize this effect The publisher wishes to acknowledge all the individuals and institutions that provided permission to reprint from their publications. Special thanks are due to the Yad Vashem Institute, Jerusalem, the YTVO Institute for Jewish Research, New York, and the Leo Baeck Institute, New York, for their untiring assistance in providing materials from their publications and collections for use in this series. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publkatlon Data The "Final solution" : the implementation of mass murder / edited by Michael R. Marrus. p. cm. — (The Nazi Holocaust; v. 3) Includes index. ISBN 0-88736-255-9 (v. 1 : alk. paper). — ISBN 0-88736-256-7 (v. 2 : alk. paper). — S (set) 1. Holocaust, Jewish (1939-1945) 2. Holocaust Jewish (1939-1945) — Causes. 3. Jews — Government policy — Germany — History — 20th century. 4. Germany — Ethnic relations. I. Marrus, Michael Robert. II. Series. D804.3.N39 vol. 3 940.53*18 s— 393. 858). Wolff's veracity on this subject was exploded as long ago as 1964, when a Munich court, which tried and convicted him for his part in the extermination of the Jews, rejected his defense plea based on a claim of ignorance of the killings. Since then, Professor Broszat has established that Wolff, in the company of Himmler and Hider's secretaries, visited Auschwitz and Lublin during the summer of 1942,53 and Gitta Sereny has produced from the Berlin Document Center a letter Wolff received in April 1942 describing in extensive detail the killing of Jews in Serbia in mobile gas vans. 54 Mr. Irving's second star witness, Ernst Kaltenbrunner, offered an account ofliis and Hitler's "discovery" of the extermination program that still strains the most generous limits of credulity. This version, which Mr. Irving accepts in full (pp. 718-19), runs as follows. In October 1944, Kaltenbrunner received a comprehensive report on corruption and the killings in the extermination complexes compiled by SS investigator Dr. Konrad Morgen. "Stunned," Kaltenbrunner sent the report immediately to Hitler and was quickly summoned to the Fuhrer's headquarters. After a long discussion of the matter, Hider, according to Kaltenbrunner and Mr. Irving, "agreed to call Himmler and Oswald P o h l . . . to account for their actions [and] . . . gave Kaltenbrunner his word, as they shook hands and parted, that he would put an immediate end to larion (Vernichtung) of the Jews. The sound film portion of this important part of the January 30, 1939, speech, taken from NA, Motion Picture Branch, RG 238.1, is included in this reviewer's documentary Adolf Hitler: ¡889-1945. 53- Broszat, pp. 766-67. 54. Sereny and Chester, London Sunday Times, July 10,1977.

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the massacre." If there is an clement of truth in this, it may relate only to Hitler's probable indignation over the revelations o f corruption, theft racketeering and black market activities the Morgen investigation had uncovered in the SS administration of the killing centers. Like Kaltenbrunner in his own defense, Mr. Irving, in defense of Hitler, has seized upon the secondary element of corruption, enlarged it to include the "discovery" of the mass murders, and taken the episode from context to support a questionable thesis. Moreover, Kaltenbrunner (and Mr. Irving) trip over themselves in this version. If Kaltenbrunner did not k n o w about the mass murders until October 1944, then how does one explain the lengthy report on the accelerated pace of the killings Mr. Irving lias him receiving from Rudolf Brandt in March 1943 (see above, and p. 867)? The reader's confidence in M r . Irving may be further shaken by close examination of his handling of other crucial aspects of Hitler's nature and policies. T w o examples, his analysis of Hitler's relationship with Heydrich and response to the latter's assassination, and his description o f the Fiihrer's reaction to the plot of July 20, should suffice to make the point. In describing Heydrich's assassination, M r . Irving writes that as Acting Reich Protector of Bohemia-Moravia "Heydrich had modeled himself on Hitler, eliminating the noisy intellectual opposition and winning the workers over. He had introduced the first social security system they had ever known, and by the time of his assassination the first twenty workers' convalescent homes had already been built. On the day he died, fifty thousand Czech workers demonstrated against the Britishinspired act in Prague" (pp. 395-96). M r . Irving then claims that "in revenge for Heydrich's death the Germans liquidated Lidice, the village found to have harbored the Czech-born assassins, and Heydrich's shortlived attempt to w o o the Czechs with socialist experiments ended. But Hitler's own aim," M r . Irving continues, " w a s clearly to present a minimal profde to the Czechs." The proof of this was an urgent circular from Bormann to all the Gauleiters forbidding discussion of the assassination, since there was a " g r o w i n g public demand for [vengeance in the form o f ] the deportation of the Czechs from Bohemia and Moravia to follow that of the J e w s " (pp. 389-90). Moreover, in a meeting with Czech President Hacha and the members of the puppet Protectorate government after Heydrich's Berlin funeral on June 9, 1942, Hitler, according to M r . Irving, only "advised

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Hacha to " k e e p the Czechs in rein" or "he w o u l d seriously consider deporting all the Czechs f r o m Bohemia and Moravia. Hacha asked permission to warn his people o f this grim prospect. Hitler recommended that he do so. A t 11:10 P.M. the Führer left for Bavaria" (p. 396). These passages b y M r . Irving are completely undocumented, 5 5 and the only elements o f indisputable accuracy they contain are the spelling of Hider's and Heydrich's names. A s has long been extensively d o c u mented in both C z e c h and German archival sources, Heydrich's policies in Prague were not intended to " w o o the C z e c h s , " but served successfully to frighten the Czech workers into passive productivity. 5 6 T h e "first social security system" and " w o r k e r s ' convalescent homes" M r . Irving has the beneficent Heydrich building amounted, in fact, to nothing more than improvements in die then-existing welfare system, and to requisitioned hotels and spas for free vacations for C z e c h armaments workers.57 T h e demonstration b y " C z e c h workers in P r a g u e " occurred before and not on the day Heydrich died, was hastily improvised b y the terrified Protectorate government, and was hardly a mass, spontaneous protest, as die Germans' o w n newsreels o f the frightened, glum crowds indicate.58 T h e assassination has not been proven a "British-inspired 55. Mr. Irving cites no archival collections or published documents as sources for this account, and his bibliography does not include either o f the studies on the subject: Vojtech Mastny, The Czechs under Nazi Rule: The Failure of National Resistance, ¡939-1942 (New York, 1971), and D e d e f Brandes, Die Tschechen unter Deutschem Protektorat, pt. 1: Besatzungspolitik, Kollaboration und Widerstand im Protektorat Böhmen u. Mähren bis Heyirichs Tod {¡939-1942) (Munich and Vienna, 1969). 56. The only reference M r . Irving offers to support his analysis o f Heydrich's policies is a brief and mysterious comment (p. 849) to the effect that " T h e transcript o f H e y drich's revealing spccch o f October 2, 1941, is in Czech state archives." T h e text o f the speech, Heydrich's inaugural address to the German officials in the Protectorate, has in fact existed in published form since i960, in Vaclav Kral, ed.. Die Vergangenheit warnt: Dokumente über die Cermanisierungs- und Austilungspolitik der Naziokkupanten in der Tschechoslowakei (Prague, i960), pp. 121-32, and in English translation in the same editor's Lesson from History: Documents concerning Nazi Policies for Germanisation and Extermination in Czechoslovakia (Prague, 1961), pp. 113-24. The text o f the speech contains nothing similar to Mr. Irving's findings on w o o i n g the Czechs and winning the workers. 57. Mastny, p. 195; Brandes, pp. 228-32. T h e details o f Heydrich's "social policies," and his own cold-blooded, cynical description o f their objectives are contained in the periodic reports he forwarded to Hitler through Bormann. A number o f these reports, contained in the records o f the Central State Archives in Prague, have been accessioned on microfilm by the National Archives, and, with other materials from Heydrich's tenure as Reichsprotektor, are on N A microfilm reel N N M G , A k t e n des Stellvertretende Reichsprotektors von Böhmen und Mähren. This writer is indebted to Robert W o l f e for ulling attention to these valuable records. 58. A composite film of the Prague crowds, Heydrich's lying-in-state in the Hradschin,

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act," but most probably was initiated and directed by the exile Czech government in London, though ccrtainly carried out widi the complete cooperation and assistance of the British. 59 The claim diat the village of Lidice had "harbored the Czech-born assassins" is a ludicrous departure from the truth. The opposite has been documented in every reputable account of the atrocity, and is most graphically proven by die Germans' inability to produce any concrete evidence linking the village to active support of Heydrich's killers. The "growing public demand" for the deportation of the Czechs came only from segments of the German minority in die Protectorate, not the German people as a whole; and the specific dircat to deport the Czechs —not die warning diat he would consider it—camc direcdy from Hitler's mouth during his meeting with Hacha after Heydrich's funeral.60 This is the same conference in which Mr. Irving has Hider "advising" Hacha and "recommending" die future good behavior of the Czechs. Moreover, Mr. Irving, who has Hider leaving for Bavaria after seeing Hacha, omits any mention of the most important conference Hider held on June 9. Immediately after browbeating Hacha, Hitler went into 3 secret meeting with Himmler, Borniann, Kurt Daluege, Heydrich's immediate successor in Prague, and Karl Hermann Frank, the State Secretary in the Protectorate officc. 61 During the discussion Hider either initiated as an order or approved as a suggestion the idea to destroy Lidice and massacre its inhabitants as a reprisal for Heydrich's death. Frank telephoned the order directly from the Chancellery to the chief of the S D in Prague at 7:45 P.M. on June 9—just as the meeting was breaking up. 62 Mr. Irving's version of Hider's role in these events is completed by three further omissions: the Führer's initial order for the immediate execution of 10,000 Czechs when he first learned of the attack on Heydrich on May 27; his approval of the extension of reprisals to the obliteration and his funeral in the Mosaiksaal of the Reich Chancellery is in the Motion Picture Branch of the National Archives in the Universal International collection of newsed prints. See also Mastny, p. 214, and Brandes, pp. 258-59. 59. See the discussion of this point in Mastny, pp. 207-10. 60. The subject of Lidice and the probable reasons why the village was chosen for the reprisal are discussed in both Mastny, pp. 214-17, and Brandes, pp. 262-64. A copy of the SD summary report on Heydrich's assassination is deposited in the YTVO Institute for Jewish Research, New York, as O C C E - 7 (a) 5, "Abschlussbericht, Attentat auf SS Obergruppenführer I'eydrich am 27.542 in Prag." 61. Brandes, pp. 260-61. 62. Ibid., pp. 262-63.

THE DECISION FOR THE FINAL SOLUTION of the village o f Le2áky and massacre o f its inhabitants on June 24,1942; and his sanction o f the eventual execution o f 1,357 Czechs in retaliation for Heydrich's killing. 6 3 Mr. Irving's analysis o f die July 20th conspiracy and those in the antiNazi resistance suffers f r o m similar problems. H e makes no effort to hide his contempt for those in 011 the plot to kill Hitler ( " T h e W o r m s Turn"), and the furdier one perseveres into the account, the more difficult it becomes to disentangle what Hitler said about the conspirators from h o w M r . Irving feels about them. For example, the lengthy quote attributed to Hitler (p. 675) 011 the subject o f the cowardice, etc., o f the conspirators, a long passage w h o s e source is not given in the footnotes, sounds more Irvingesque dian Hitleresque. This is, h o w e v e r , but a single instance in the larger effort to arouse the readers' ire against the c o w ardly, immoral blackguards w h o tried to kill the Führer and stab die German soldier in the back (pp. 669, 6 7 5 ) — a theme s o m e h o w vaguely familiar. Relying uncritically upon the Gestapo interrogation reports that K a l tenbrunner's special July 20 investigative commission sent to Hitler (p. 891), Mr. Irving paints a distasteful picture o f the moral squalor he sees as the underlying substance o f the conspiracy (pp. 704-5, 7 1 0 - 1 1 ) . G e n eral Ludwig B e c k was nothing more than " a n embittered ponderer"; Field Marshal E r w i n v o n W i t z l e b e n , a lightweight w h o read only "schoolgirl b o o k s " ; General Eduard W a g n e r , " a bureaucratic empire builder o f pathological v a n i t y " ; General Henning v o n T r e s c k o w , a conspirator only because Schmundt had rebuffed his ambitions; Stauffenberg a black-marketeer; and the rest o f the plotters a feckless lot leading "die easy lives o f grand gourmets," posting guards o n their homes, misusing cars and airplanes, and cavorting in luxury hotels. In w h a t must rank as the w h o p p e r o f the entire b o o k , M r . Irving even asserts that "in [General Friedrich] Olbricht's cellars investigators found a thousand botdes of wine. A champagne o r g y lasting far into the night had been their reaction to the news o f Hitler's 'death' " (p. 705). M r . Irving does not explain just h o w General Olbricht, in the midst o f directing an attempted coup, managed to leave the Bendlerstrasse o n the evening o f July 20 (where every reliable account o f the event places him), to e n j o y the champagne o r g y in the cellar o f his h o m e . N o r does M r . Irving answer the larger philosophical question why General Olbricht w o u l d S3. Ibid., pp. 265-66.

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leave the orgy and hasten back to the Bendlerstrasse in time to be shot by General Fromm's firing squad at 1 2 : 3 0 A . M . 6 4 Mr. Irving's attempts to discredit the resistance arc complemented bv his equally vigorous efforts to depict a calmer, more moderate and less bloodthirsty Hitler than history has come to know responding to the attempt on his life: "the sccret image of Hitler was not always what the public then believed or history has come to accept of him. The sequel to July 20 provides many examples. He was revolted by the newsreel film of the People's Court hearing against Field Marshal von Witzleben and the other putschists, and he sent a sharp rebuke to Roland Freisler over his melodramatic and insulting behavior as the judge. . . . The hangings were also filmed, but Hitler refused to see die fdms; when [Hermann] Fegelein [Himmlcr's liaison officer at the W o l f ' s Lair] produced photographs of the naked corpses, Hitler irritably tossed the pictures aside" (p. 694). " M o s t remarkable was his instruction to Himmler at the end of August to provide proper monthly subsistence payments to the next-of-kin of the hanged men" (p. 695). Whether Hider viewed the hanging films or looked at the photos of the naked corpses is perhaps a moot point. 65 The undocumented claim about payments to the conspirators' next-of-kin is at best dubious, especially since there is a mass of evidence to substantiate the incarceration of many conspirators' relatives, and even whole families, in concentration camps. That Hitler was revolted by the proceedings in the People's Court and disapproved of Freislcr's behavior are contentions that simply do not stand up against the most credible visible evidence. 66 The complaints about Freisler's behavior came not from Hider, but from Otto Georg Thierack, the Nazi Acting Minister of Justice, and were made to Bormann widi the apparent hope that Hider would tone Freisler down. 6 7 This does not appear to have happened. If Hitler had sent "a sharp rebuke" to Freisler after seeing the film of Witzleben's trial on 64. Hoffmann, pp. 507-8. It should also be noted that Mr. Irving provides no clue is to h o w all the wine was transformed into champagne for the orgy. 65. Albert Speer, Inside the Third Reich ( N e w Y o r k , 1970), p. 395, claims that Hitler did see the photographs, as Speer observed the pictures lying on Hitler's conference table on August 18, 1944. 66. Extensive excerpts from the captured film o f the People's Court trials were included in the compilation film The Nazi Plan, which was entered into evidence by the prosecution at the Nuremberg trials (Nuremberg Doc. N o . 3054-PS). Prints of this film are in N A , Motion Picture Branch, R G 238.1, with footage of the trials in reels 21 and 22. 67. Hoffmann, pp. 526-27.

THE DECISION FOR THE F I N A L SOLUTION August 7-8, as M r . Irving claims, then one would presume Freisler's behavior in court to have cliangcd immediately. This did not happen, as the sound films of the succcssivc trials unmistakably show. In die later trials—particularly that of Ulrich von Hassell in October 1944—Freisler can be seen and heard ranting in die same manner as in the opening proceedings.68 Mr. Irving also softens Hitler's tone o f savagery by deleting two key sentences in a passage quoting the Führer, two days after the bomb blast, describing his plans for the trials o f the conspirators. M r . Irving's version (p. 677) o f the vital part o f die passage runs: " T h e y will be thrown out of the Wehrmacht and tried b y the People's Court. N o r will they die honorably before the firing squad, but like common criminals in the hangman's noose. . . . A n d above all, they'll get no time to make long speeches. Freisler will see to that—lie's our Vishinsky !" 6 9 A more reliable form of the same passage reads: "These criminals . . . will be expelled f r o m the Wehrmacht and brought before the People's Court. They are not to be given a respectable bullet but will hang like common traitors! . . . And execution must take place within t w o hours of the sentence. They must hang at once without mercy. T h e important point is that they be given no rime to make long speeches. B u t Freisler will see to that. He is our Vishinsky.'" 7 0 The technique of excising damning statements and relying uncritically on dubious sources and witnesses deepens the impression that an inflexible bias is the shaky foundation o f M r . Irving's revisionist edificc. This view is reinforced by the attempts (some unintentionally humorous) to explain away or excuse well-known unattractive features of Hitler's nature and personality. Hitler's much-discussed refusal to visit or view the bomb-damaged cities o f the Reich was " a harsh but in retrospect a proper attitude, for an enraged mind cannot make sober and logical decisions." Besides, Hider's eyes hurt, and he couldn't stand the bright light of the outdoors (p. 607). Having ascribed Hider's anti-Jewish excesses to the influence of Himmler, Goebbels, and Allied bombers (pp. 509-10), M r . Irving enlarges Martin Bormann into an all-purpose 68. Mr. Irving bases his version of the Führer's alleged rebuke to Freisler on the written recollections of Hitler's personal adjutant, Julius Schaub, his own interviews with SS adjutant Otto Günsche and the servant Heinz Lorenz, and the postwar interrogation of Dr. Immanuel Schäfer of the Propaganda Ministry (p. 890). Their collective testimony limply does not alter what the evidence in the film dearly shows. 69. Mr. Irving cites no source for this quotation in his footnotes (p. 888). 70- Hoffmann, p. 717.

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scapegoat to blame for Hitler's bad taste—such as the kitschig embellishment of the Berghof (p. 251)—and for the worst examples of Hider's faithlessness and ill-temper—such as the dismissal of Drs. Brandt, Giesing, and Hasseibach in October 1944 (pp. 7 1 3 - 1 4 ) . Those who stay widi Mr. Irving through his narrative of the final collapse and Hitler's suicidc will find much that is old and nothing new. In view of his investigative and interpretive claims, it would seem that the last, most traumatic, and most revealing phase of Hitler's life would be the one area in which Mr. Irving's abilities might merge into inspired originality. This is not the case. In fact, the attentive reader who studies closely the chronicle of catastrophe and apocalypse may develop the sensation of vague familiarity; the feeling that he's seen or read this somewhere before. If lie docs, it's because he has. If the reader is old enough, he saw much of this thirty years ago in the original edition of H. R . Trevor-Roper, The Last Days of Hitler.71 If younger, the reader has seen the story in later editions. 72 In his selection and description of events, his narrative sequence, and even his use and arrangement of primary sources, Mr. Irving appears to follow Professor Trevor-Roper in many important respects—though citing only the sources and never Trevor-Roper in his footnotes. 73 Mr. Irving's account is, however, different from Professor Trevor-Roper's: it is less comprehensive, distinctly less polished and sophisticated, contrived to support the implausibiliries to the end, 74 and weakened by the inclusion of errors Trevor-Roper pointed out fifteen years ago. 7 5 71. H. R. Trevor-Roper, The Last Days of Hitler (London, 1947). 72. All references to Professor Trevor-Roper's book in the notes that follow are to the 3rd ed.. Collier Books paperback (New York, 1962). 73. The most important similarities are as follows. Irving, pp. 712-14—Trevor-Ropex, pp. 128-31; Irving, pp. 789-90—Trevor-Roper, pp. 159-63; Irving, p. 800—TrevorRoper, p. 173; Irving, pp. 804-7—Trevor-Roper, pp. 180-89; Irving. P- 809—TrevorRoper, p. 199; Irving, pp. 810-11—Trevor-Roper, pp. 200-201; Irving, pp. 817-18— Trevor-Roper, pp. 2 1 6 - 2 1 ; and Irving, pp. 819-23 seems a condensed parallel of material in Trevor-Roper, chaps. 6 and 7, pp. 225-60. Mr. Irving even has an explanatory footnote (p. 901) on Goebbels's last letter to his stepson Harald Quandt which follows a similar explanatory footnote about the same letter in Trevor-Roper, p. 24411. 74. In his description of the Allied air raids on Dresden (pp. 770-^72), Mr. Irving carries his thesis about the influence of Allied bombing on Hitler to its conclusion. Accordingly, the Fiihrer's reaction to Dresden was to cancel Ribbentrop's "peace feelers," which Mr. Irving treats as if serious enough to have compelled Allied consideration. Only when be saw the photographs of Dresden, however, was Hitler's more moderate inclination to offer peace transformed into a fanatical determination to fight on to the end. 75. In his own version of the familiar tale of Goebbels's horoscope consultations, melo-

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Mr. living's Hitler, of course, bears little resemblance to the Hitler in Trevor-Roper's pages. Mr. Irving has Hitler, as the end approaches, more than ever die victim of the trcachery and incompetence of his ministers, friends, and faithless, cowardly generals. With the entire Reich blasted to ruins, overrun and cut in half by enemy forces, with industry and armament production obliterated, and with the German Army exhausted, its ammunition spent and its fighting spirit shattered, Mr. Irving cannot understand why die ministers and generals—and even Himmler—refused to obey Hitler's orders to fight on and destroy Germany utterly. Typically, Mr. Irving is contemptuous of General Gotthard Heinrici, commander of die armies which fought unsuccessfully to save Berlin (pp. 783, 801-2, 809, 815, 817-18). On die other hand, as if their behavior would have meant victory, Mr. Irving warmly approves of the fanatic nihilism exhibited by others: "[Field Marshal Walter] Model held out widi Army Group B in the encircled Ruhr p o c k e t . . . [and] dien took his own life to cheat die enemy. This was the bold spirit which had saved Stalin's Russia in 1941 and 1942" (p. 783). Can there be any serious basis in fact for comparing the military situation o f the Soviet Union in 1942 with diat of Germany in the spring of 1945? And finally, in a last attempt to avoid compromising his Hider thesis, Mr. Irving scampers around die Fiihrer's Political Testament of April 29,1945 (pp- 819-20)—under the circumstances probably the most revealing statement of Hidcr's life. Mr. Irving offers no analysis o f its significance, splits and jumbles the passages he uses to minimize their impact, and ignores the document's most pervasive theme: the gutter anti-Semitism of Mein KampjP6 The international Jewish conspirators had started die war, and they alone were responsible for all its destruction, death, and misery. He, Hidcr, was responsible for nothing, and would kill himself rather dian be captured and exhibited as a trophy by the Jews. Mr. Irving is also unable to muster the candor to point out the importance in the fact that Adolf Hider's last official word, his final admonition to posterity in the conclusion of his testament, was the dednmatic readings from Thomas Carlyle's History of Frederick the Creat, and mutual rejoicing with Hitler over the death of Roosevelt, Mr. Irving uncritically repeats the mistakes of his source, the diary of the Reich Finance Minister, Schwerin von Krosigk (p. 789). The errors contained in the source and a more accurate version of the events are in Trevor-Roper, pp. ij9-6on. 76. Though he lists both Meirt Kampf and Hitlers Zweites Buck in his bibliography, »cither appears to have had any influence on the development o f Mr. Irviag's view of Hider.

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maud that his successors continue his mcrcilcss opposition to the poisoner of all peoples, International J e w r y . " 7 7 Mr. Irving's revisionism creates for him a bigger problem than the one he tries unsuccessfully to solve. If Hitler was not responsible for the things from which he is absolved, then what were his basic goals and policies, and how docs one—assuming the revisionist diesis—make anv sense out of Hitler's whole personal and political career prior to 1939? If we accept the argument diat Hitler was not guilty, what does that then tell us about him and his place in German and world history? Mr. Irving provides no answers to these questions because he cannot; his sources and biases are insufficient to the task. Beyond the effort to exculpate, there is no larger analysis of Hitler in his pages, no believable picture of die relationship between his personality and his policies, and no convincing three-dimensional view of him as a man or as the Fulirer. For all his self-congratulation about digging and burrowing in the sources, Mr. Irving's mining efforts have yielded more lead than gold. The collective testimony of those at Hider's court, his wartime intimates, minions, and attendants, the records of their meetings with him, and the recollections of those who dealt with Hitler singly and infrequently—however laudable Mr. Irving's efforts to find them all and induce them to talk—are simply inadequate for such a full portrait of Hitler, much less a credible revisionist argument about what he did or did not know, order, and do. 78 The implausibility of Mr. Irving's thesis is most apparent in the connection between his claim to have scaled "the mountains of records in 77. Jeremy Noakes and Geoffrey Pridham, eds.. Documents on Nazism: ¡¡9-1945 (New York, 1974), pp. 678-80, for the text of the testament in English. 78. Mr. Irving has compounded his credibility problems by resurrecting the issue of the abortive 1975 publication of the German edition of Hitler's War, which appeared briefly under the title Hitler und seine Feldherren. Shortly after the book appeared in Germany, Mr. Irving obtained an injunction against his publisher, Ullstein, to halt sale of the book. In the English edition (p. xvii) and on American radio (the Fiske Show), Mr. Irving claims that Ullstein editorially deleted, altered, or reversed many of his arguments without informing him—thus prompting him to sue. Gitta Sereny, however, has obtained and published a letter Mr. Irving received from Ullstein's Managing Editor, Wolf Jobst Siedler, a year before the German edition appeared. According to Sereny, Siedler informed Mr. Irving in detail of the proposed cuts, explained Ullstein's reasons for wanting them, and offered to dissolve the publishing contract if they proved unacceptable. Mr. Irving acknowledged Siedler's letter without objection, Sereny maintains, at a time when he had already been paid a 90,000 DM advance by Ullstein. Sereny and Chester, London Sunday Times, July 10, 1977; and Sereny, Atlantic Monthly, August 1978, pp. 10-11.

THE DECISION FOR THE FINAL SOLUTION Berlin, Munich, London, Freiburg, and Bonn" (p. x), and his conclusion that "Given die brutality o f Hitler's orders to 'dispose o f the entire male population of two major Soviet cities, his insistence on the execution of hostages on a one hundred to one basis, his demands for the liquidation o f Italian soldiers, Polish intellectuals, clergy and nobility, and captured Allied airmen and Red Army commissars, his apparent reluctance to acquiesce in die extermination o f Europe's Jews remains a mystery" (p. xv). If this is really an honest statement; and if, after all the claims and the mass of documentation and detail, Mr. Irving can offer an assessment of Hitler no more sanguine than this, then the influence of his book may not long survive the sale o f the last copy. Beyond Mr. Irving and Hitler enterprise publishing are some important questions about the future direction o f Hitler scholarship. It seems obvious that the final word on Hitler has not been said, and even more obvious that among serious students of the subject there is general disagreement on how to say it. The problem stems from the singular nature of the subject and the unprecedented volume o f sources available to study it. Hider was a unique conjunction of personal and historical forces; his sheer complexity as a historic figure, the enormity o f what he attempted and achieved, the unparalleled destruction and inhumanity he unleashed, and the range o f human experiences affected by the upheavals he created make him the dominant figure in modern history. Interest in Hider is not likely to diminish in the near future, and anything resembling a definitive biography seems a prospect even more remote. The enormous and growing mass of international monographic scholarship on Hider, the various aspects o f Nazism, and the Holocaust will have to be synthesized at some point, and that may be feasible only when the voluminous documents on both sides of the Adantic have been sifted and worked into the unwritten monographs to come. The assignment, in short, is gigantic, the mere contemplation o f it exhausting. At the moment it seems possible to make only one observation about the Fuhrcr's future: the coming biographer o f Hitler will have to possess both prodigious energy and a truly eclectic intellect, and most definitely will have to be an individual whose efforts are animated by the spirit o f enlightenment rather than the imperatives o f enterprise.

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THE "FINAL SOLUTION"

Hitler Orders the Holocaust EBERHARD JÄCKEL

The extermination of the European Jews in the Second World War, or more precisely the German attempt to kill as many of them as possible, an undertaking unique in human history that has come to be called not very appropriately the Holocaust, has in recent years become the subject of specific historical research. For a long time it was neither grasped fully in its tremendous importance nor subjected to close and detailed scrutiny. The historians, to be sure only a few of them, limited themselves to establishing the bare facts, which are now more or less well known, while the general public if interested at all looked in a sort of arresting horror at the event as something metahistorical and discussed the moral aspects of it alone. 1 This is now changing. We begin to ask more specific questions. One of them is how the decisions to carry out the extermination were made. It is just this intriguing question, which has recently become the subject of a controversy—actually the first scholarly controversy in the matter—that I shall deal with here. Perhaps for no other problem of such magnitude in modern

THE DECISION FOR THE FINAL SOLUTION Hitler Orders the Holocaust history is the documentation so poor. There are various reasons for this. The operation was ultrasecret. Consequently as little as possible was written down. Much was transacted orally, particularly on the highest level. Of the few relevant documents, many were destroyed before the war ended. And of those that survive, many contain code names and terms that further hamper the task of clearly establishing their contents. Moreover, many of the persons directly involved died before they could be interrogated. Of those who survived, most answered evasively. But even those who were ready to talk were often not questioned precisely enough, for their interrogators were not interested in the kinds of details that historians would want to clarify. Many were then executed, and their knowledge disappeared with them. Christopher Browning has aptly compared the historian of the Holocaust to the man in Plato's cave who sees only reflections and shadows, not the reality behind them. 2 He must reconstruct the reality by extrapolation from events, documents, and testimony originating outside the inner circle where the killing orders were issued. Peripheral events, documents, and testimony: such are indeed, and in order of importance, the sources of our knowledge about the unleashing of the Holocaust. To proceed on this basis requires an extraordinary degree of circumspection and precision. If we want to know how the decisions behind the Holocaust were made, we must not only ask when they were made. We must frame our questions carefully. Because the undertaking was unprecedented, we must presume that the decisions were taken in an unprecedented way. We must, in other words, not anticipate any normal procedure of decision making that we know from experience in other fields. The first question is the most fundamental: Did Hitler order the Holocaust? I shall not trouble to refute the indefensible allegation of some that Hitler did not know what happened. But did he order it? This has been denied by Martin Broszat

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THE "FINAL SOLUTION' Hitler Orders the Holocaust and other so-called functionalists, whose views I discussed in the preceding chapter/ Broszat's interpretation is that the killing program evolved gradually from a series of separate killing operations in 1 9 4 1 and 1942 and from the impossibility of further evacuation and resettlement of Jews in Europe. This is a serious proposition based on a lot of documentary evidence, or perhaps even more on the gaps in the historical record. Although I shall not accept this functionalist interpretation, I admit that it has certainly refined our question. We must ask not simply whether Hitler ordered the Holocaust but whether the Holocaust was improvised or premeditated. The clarification should prove illuminating but will have to be subjected to further scrutiny, since the improvisation may have been premeditated. Once the general question is answered, specific questions will have to be put. It can be ruled out that a single killing order was given. The extermination was divided into several phases and covered a wide variety of methods and victims. We must therefore assume a correspondingly wide variety of orders extending over a period of several months. We must ask what those orders were, to whom they were given, and how they were transmitted to those who carried them out. To begin with, I shall briefly summarize Hitler's views on what he called the Jewish question. 4 This is relevant for at least three reasons. First, he was the head of the state and the government and wielded dictatorial power in Germany at that time. Second, he was the only Nazi and as far as I know the only anti-Semite who had ever expressly advocated systematic killing by the state as a means of resolving the Jewish question. And third, what he called the Entfernung, or removal of the Jews, was of supreme importance to him. He had set himself two goals, a war of conquest and the elimination of the Jews, and regarded all other aspects of politics simply as means to achieve these goals. The first relevant document, indeed the first record of his

THE DECISION FOR THE FINAL SOLUTION Hitler Orders the Holocaust political activity, is a letter dated September 16, 1 9 1 9 , in which he wrote that the ultimate goal of anti-Semitism must unalterably be the elimination of the Jews altogether.5 The context as well as his anti-Jewish pronouncements of the following years demonstrate with sufficient clarity what he primarily meant: The Jews living in Germany were to be removed from Germany to other countries. After 1924 the term elimination sometimes took on the meaning of killing, although certain formulations of his suggest that he had had this solution in mind even before 1924. In the second volume of Mein Kampfhe wrote that the elimination could only be achieved "by the sword" and called the needful procedure "bloody." 6 He now also elaborated lit length on his belief that the Jewish question had an importance for the whole world, and he complained that the opportunity had not been taken to kill about twelve thousand Jews by poison gas at the beginning of and during World War 1 / If this is taken literally, he meant that killing a part of the Jewish community in Germany during the First World War (twelve thousand out of a total that he estimated at six hundred thousand) would have been a means to win that war. 8 There was also a vague suggestion that it was desirable that other nations eliminate their Jews as well. In his books, particularly the one written in 1928 but not published until 1 9 6 1 , Hitler explained in detail why he wanted the Jews to be eliminated.9 It must not be overlooked that his hatred was certainly irrational but specific as well. In his view, the Jews were a people or race, not a religious community. Being a people, they participated in the general struggle among peoples for power. But having no territorial state, they could not participate in the normal form of that struggle, which was the struggle for territorial living space. Thus they fought for power by other means. The adversary in their struggle was not this or that nation but all nations—the principle of nation as such, the law of nature and history. Hence the

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THE "FINAL SOLUTION" Hitler Orders the Holocaust Jews were nor an enemy of the German nation alone but of all mankind, and their elimination was not only a national but a universal task. If we pursue this reasoning a bit further we may say that the elimination of the German Jews was in the interest of Germany, since they undermined Germany's capacity to struggle for living space. Consequently, their transfer into countries that were Germany's actual or potential opponents in the struggle for living space meant a weakening of these countries and was thus an advantage to Germany. But Hitler did not say so explicitly. He wished other countries to eliminate their Jews as well. This is the basic contradiction of Hitler's anti-Semitism. As a German he wanted the elimination of the German Jews before all others. But as far as the Jews were concerned, he felt that he could not afford to be a German alone. The Jewish question was so important to him that he sought the elimination of all Jews. In July 1 9 4 1 he declared to a foreign statesman that he would confront each state with the demand to eliminate its Jews. 1 0 In October of the same decisive year he said that he was doing humanity a service by exterminating this pest. 1 1 Rudolph Binion has convincingly demonstrated that Hitler did not succeed in solving this contradiction. 1 2 Thus in principle and from the outset his racial policy was less clear than his foreign policy. As for the war of conquest, he was to pursue the interests of Germany exclusively; hence his task was easy. As for the Jews, he had to pursue the interests of both Germany and humanity at once; hence this task was difficult. At times he set his priorities, at times he did not, and this confusion marked his acts. Immediately after he came to power his task was easy. He had to remove the German Jews from political standing and if possible from Germany. His policy pursued these goals. By 1 9 3 8 approximately 150,000 Jews or almost one third of the country's total Jewish population had left Germany. But with

THE DECISION FOR THE FINAL SOLUTION Hitler Orders the Holocaust the annexation of Austria another 200.000 were added. Although a quarter of them left the country within six months, by the end of 1938 Greater Germany had once again as many tas Jews as Germany had had in 1 9 3 3 . ^ seemed unending. For whatever reasons, after the annexation of Austria and especially after the Munich Conference of September 29, 1 9 3 8 , the anti-Jewish policy became more intense. By March of that year Hitler spoke with increased furor. 1 3 In June the Nazi leader and writer Rosenberg proposed Madagascar as a country of emigration. 14 In October Goring wanted the Jews to get out of the economy and if necessary to establish ghettos. 1 5 Then approximately seventeen thousand Jews holding Polish passports were deponed from Germany to Poland. 1 6 This was a prelude to the November pogrom. A few days later Goring said that if war came, there would be a great settling of accounts with the J e w s . 1 ' On November 24 Hitler told a foreign statesman that the Jewish question was a European problem. 18 On the same day the SS newspaper demanded total destruction of the German Jews if war came. 1 9 On January 2 1 , 1 9 3 9 , Hitler told the Czech foreign minister that the Jews in Germany were going to be destroyed. 20 On January 24 Goring ordered Heydrich and Frick to prepare a solution of the Jewish question by emigration or evacuation. 21 Finally on January 30 Hitler publicly declared—or, as he put it, prophesied—that the result of another world war would be the destruction of the Jewish race in Europe. 22 What sounds so ominous in three of these proclamations is the projected relation between a war and the solution to the Jewish question. Hitler had drawn this connection in Meirt Kampf and had redrawn it since on several occasions. On February 10, 1939, he repeated to commanding officers that the next struggle was going to be a racial war. 23 When World War II broke out, there was no immediate action against the Jews. Despite Hitler's demand in 1 9 2 6 for the destruction of the Jews, there was no pogrom and no Jews

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THE "FINAL SOLUTION" Hitler Orders the Holocaust were killed. Instead, the government began killing mental patients by means of gas and deporting Jews. The main destination was occupied Poland, where the Nazis finally seemed to have found a convenient dumping ground for the Jews, whose numbers had once more increased after the recent territorial acquisitions. On September u , 1 9 3 9 , Heydrich informed his subordinates that Hitler had permitted the deportation of the German Jews and of those Jews living in the annexed parts of Poland, apparently to the region near Cracow. 2 4 One week later the Soviets ceded the province of Lublin, and Hitler told Rosenberg the next day that he wished to remove all of German-controlled Jewry into this area between the Vistula and the Bug rivers. 25 On October 7 Himmler was appointed "Reich Commissar for the strengthening of German folkdom" and was charged with the task. 26 The operation ran into countless difficulties, however, and turned out to be a failure. Hans Frank, the governor general of occupied Poland, which had been renamed the General Government, constantly complained that he could not settle those who had been or were to be deponed. 2 To be sure, about 50 percent of the Jews and 1 0 percent of the Poles in the annexed Polish territories were deported and their homes given to German resettlers, who poured in at the same time from Russia and southeast Europe after an agreement concluded with the Soviet Union. But only a few thousand Jews from Austria, Moravia, and Pomerania could be deported. In March 1 9 4 0 Goring stopped all deportations. 28 And Hitler told a Swedish visitor that a Jewish state around Lublin would never be a solution to the Jewish problem. 29 After the fall of France, new prospects opened for disposing of Europe's Jews. Already on May 25, just a fortnight after the beginning of Germany's western campaign, Himmler delivered to Hitler a lengthy memorandum envisaging the emigration of all Jews to Africa or a colony. 30 On June 24, right after the armistice, Heydrich wrote to Ribbentrop that the

THE DECISION FOR THE FINAL SOLUTION Hitler Orders the Holocaust problem—3'A million Jews under Gerrruin rale—could no longer be solved by emigration and therefore .1 territorial final solution became necessary. 31 Perhaps he wonted to induce the foreign minister to acquire such a territory rrom France during the expected peace talks. 3 2 The Madagascar plan was revived. It seems that Hitler had mentioned it to Mussolini on June 1 8 . 3 3 He certainly mentioned it when he told Frank on July 8 that there would be no more transports of Jews into the General Government. 34 German policy still appeared to be to get rid of the Jews by emigration or deportation. In July Jews from Alsace-Lorraine were deported into France proper, followed by those from southwest Germany in October. 35 But Vichy France was a limited dumping ground. And since the conclusion of a peace treaty turned out to be impossible, the Madagascar plan fell through. There is no indication that Hitler had ever intended it seriously. The decisive change of policy came with the approach of the war against Russia. Military preparations for the campaign began in August 1940. In September Frank noted in his official diary that Hitler had devoted his special attention to the General Government, that the transport system there should be brought up to the standard of that of the Reich by June 1 9 4 1 , that a huge army comprising many divisions would be stationed there, that resettlements would cease and a plan to deport more than 3 50,000 Jews from Germany had been given up. 3 6 Evidently occupied Poland was becoming the base from which German troops would invade Russia. Understandably further resettlements were incompatible with this military assignment. In November, however, Frank was told that he had to take in new settlers. 37 Hitler decided that sixty thousand Jews from Vienna were to be deported to the General Government. 38 But slightly over five thousand of them were in fact deported in February and March 1 9 4 1 . 3 9 Then the deporta-

THE "FINAL SOLUTION" Hitler Orders the Holocaust tions were interrupted again, and Hitler told Frank on March 16 that an event was approaching that would mark a great change (he was referring, of course, to the beginning of the Russian campaign), and that the General Government would be the first region to be made free of Jews (judenfrei).40 Three days before, Himmler had been given special responsibilities in the Russian campaign for which the Einsatzgruppen were established. 41 As will be seen, there is still controversy over what their orders were and when those orders were given. But it can safely be stated that one of their objectives was to kill Russian Jews. This again was inconsistent. Whereas Hider had formerly depicted the Jews as a disintegrating factor in Russia, he now presented them as the backbone of Russian resistance, which had to be broken in order to defeat Russia. It would have been more consistent of him to let them escape so that they could continue their work of disintegration. Moreover, it was to be expected that the killings would not remain secret and thus would stiffen Russian resistance, as indeed they did. The beginning of the Russian campaign marked a turning point in Germany's Jewish policy. Obviously a prior order had been given to kill Russian Jews. But the decisions concerning the Jews in the rest of Europe remain obscure. On May 20, 1 9 4 1 , Heydrich's office sent out a strange circular letter according to which the emigration of Jews from France and Belgium was to be halted. 42 That was sensational enough, since emigration had always been promoted before then. But the reasons given in this strange letter were even stranger. It was said that according to information from Goring {gemäss einer Mitteilung des Reichsmarschalls), the emigration of Jews from Germany was to be increased; emigration from France and Belgium was, therefore, to be prevented because it diminished the chances for German Jews to emigrate. It may be noted incidentally that the emigration of German Jews was not forbidden until October 1 , 1 9 4 1 . 4 3 But

THE DECISION FOR THE FINAL SOLUTION Hitler Orders the Holocaust then the letter from Heydrich's office gave a second, ominous reason for halting Jewish emigration from France and Belgium. It continued, "and in view of the undoubtedly imminent final solution of the Jewish question" {und im Hinblick auf die zweifellos kommende Endlosung der judenfrage). This is puzzling indeed. If that so-called final solution meant killing as many Jews as possible, then it was highly inconsistent to increase Jewish emigration from Germany. But perhaps the fact that Goring was mentioned as having referred to increased emigration offers a clue to an interpretation of the letter. We may tentatively hypothesize that both Goring and Heydrich had heard of Hitler's desire to proceed to the final solution now, and that Heydrich wanted to fulfill that desire while Goring wanted to obstruct it. Shortly before, Goring had been quoted as saying, "It is more important for us to win the war than to implement racial policy." 44 Certainly the competing offices of the Third Reich were also struggling against each other over the Jewish question and the priorities to be set. And another hypothesis may be derived from this letter, namely, that Hitler had not issued a formal order but had, in May 1 9 4 1 , expressed the desire to proceed to the final solution in the foreseeable future. According to Frank, Hitler declared outright on June 19, three days before the Russian campaign began, that the Jews would be removed (entfernt) from the General Government in the foreseeable future and that the General Government should become a transit camp only (nur noch gewissermassen Durchgangslager).45 This statement can be interpreted as a cynical metaphor for transit to death, and indeed the killing centers were sometimes called transit camps. 46 It can also be taken literally. On July zi Hitler dropped a hint that the Jews could be sent to Siberia. 47 It cannot be ruled out that he thought of a defeated Soviet Union, east of the prospective German line from Arkhangelsk to Astrakhan, as yet another and final dumping ground for the Jews, where Stalin would

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THE "FINAL SOLUTION" Hitler Orders the Holocaust have to accept them. It must not be forgotten that in July he expected the war in the east to be over within a few months; he would by then be far from having solved the Jewish question by mass killings, if they could be undertaken in wartime only. In any case he was fully engaged in extermination by July 1 9 4 1 , but the sequence of orders remains obscure. Alfred Streim has argued recently in a detailed study that the Einsatzgruppen commanders were ordered by Heydrich in Berlin on June 1 7 to execute all Communist commissars and Jewish party and state officials and to provoke anti-Jewish pogroms, that this order was repeated by Heydrich on July 2, and that an order by Hitler, a Fiihrerbefehl, to kill all Russian Jews including women and children was not given until some time between the end of July and the end of August 1 9 4 1 . 4 8 This corresponds largely, but not entirely, to the actual sequence of events. On July 1 0 and 2 1 , 1 9 4 1 , Himmler was in Lublin and mayhave instructed Odilo Globocnik, the higher SS and police leader there, to prepare for the extermination of the Polish Jews. 4 9 The extermination of Polish Jews began, however, at Chelmno in the annexed western Polish territories on December 8, whereas Globocnik's Operation Reinhard did not begin until February or March 1 9 4 2 . On July 22 Frank discussed preparations for the removal of the Jews from the General Government beginning with the Warsaw Ghetto. i 0 But this evacuation, to Treblinka, did not actually begin until exactly a year later, on July zz, 1 9 4 2 . 3 1 On July 3 1 , 1 9 4 1 , Heydrich went to see Goring and had him sign an authorization fully prepared in advance to make all the necessary preparations for a total solution of the Jewish question in the area of Europe under German control. 52 Goring's signature probably enabled Heydrich to initiate the deportation of the German Jews. On August 18 Hitler promised Goebbels that the Jews of Berlin would be deported to the

THE DECISION FOR THE FINAL SOLUTION Hitler Orders the Holocaust east immediately after the end of the eastern campaign/ 3 Even so, the deportations began from Germany outside Berlin on October 15 and from Berlin on October 18. The first convoys went to Lodz, Minsk, and Riga. The first German Jews were shot near Kovno on November 25. Both Rudolf Hoss, the commander of Auschwitz, and Eichmann testified after the war that they were told by Himmler in the summer of 1 9 4 1 that Hider had ordered the final solution of the Jewish question. Hoss was not pressed to be more specific. Eichmann specified that it had been about two or three months after the war against the Soviet Union had begun and that Hitler had ordered the physical liquidation of the Jews without, however, specifying which Jews were to be liquidated first. 34 Thereafter the operation was no longer kept entirely secret. On November 16, 1 9 4 1 , Goebbels wrote in a lead article in his weekly newspaper Das Reich that Hitler's prophecy on January 30, 1939, of the destruction of the Jewish race in Europe was now coming true/ 3 Two days later Rosenberg confidentially told a press conference of the biological extermination of European Jewry as a whole. 56 On December 14 Hitler agreed with Rosenberg that it was not appropriate to speak of extermination in public. 3 On November Z9 Heydrich sent out invitations to the Wannsee Conference scheduled to take place on December 9- 58 It was postponed later to January 20, 1942.. The invitations were accompanied by copies of Goring's authorization of July 3 1 , 1 9 4 1 . The importance of the Wannsee Conference should not be overrated. N o decisions were made at the conference; its purpose was the briefing of officials and coordination of government agencies. One of its objectives may have been the inclusion of West European Jews in the final solution. On March 27 the first convoy of French Jews left Drancy, France, for Auschwitz, where mass killings had begun in February 1 9 4 2 .

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THE "FINAL SOLUTION' Hitler Orders the Holocaust In four public speeches during 1942. Hitler reminded his listeners of his so-called prophecy of destruction of the Jews of Europe. Unlike Goebbels, who always dated it correctly from January 30, 1 9 3 9 , Hitler invariably misdated it to September 1 of that year. On that day, when the war against Poland began, he had also spoken in the Reichstag but he had not mentioned the Jewish question at all. There can be no doubt that the misdating, which was repeated in the printed versions of the speeches, was deliberate. Evidently he wanted the extermination of the Jews to be seen in connection with the beginning of the war. We need not enter into the later stages of the Holocaust in order to answer our questions. Apparently not just one order was given to initiate it. And apparently its beginnings involved considerable inconsistency, improvisation, and confusion. This has led some of the so-called functionalist historians to infer that the whole operation may not have been ordered or premeditated at all. In order to avoid misunderstandings it should be stressed that Martin Broszat, who has developed this thesis most explicitly, does not deny Hitler's responsibility for or approval of the killings. Broszat's thesis is only that they were proposed and initiated by others as well, that they were not planned long in advance and initiated by a single secret order. There is some evidence for such an interpretation. On July 1 6 , 1 9 4 1 , a relatively early date, officials close to the Reicbsstatthalter in Posen, in the annexed Polish territories, asked Eichmann to consider seriously whether instead of letting the Jews starve, it would not be more human to dispose of those who could not work by a rapidly effective means. J 9 Is it not logical to infer—that is the functionalists' question—that the final solution evolved gradually out of such proposals and the resulting individual killing operations? My first answer is that there is no evidence that there were many such proposals or individual killing actions, and cer-

THE DECISION FOR THE FINAL SOLUTION Hitler Orders the Holocaust tainlv not prior to the spring of 1 9 4 1 . Until that date, with the exception of the killings during the invasion of Poland in 1939, all officials in charge of the Jewish question, from Goring and Himmler to Heydrich and Eichmann, were fully involved in emigration, evacuation, or deportation, and there is no evidence that any one of them proposed or envisaged a different procedure. On the other hand, there is a great deal of evidence that at least some of them were shocked or even appalled when the final solution went into effect. To be sure, they did not disagree with it. But they agreed only reluctantly, referring time and again to an order given by Hitler. This is a strong indication that the idea did not originate with them. In his secret speeches in 1943 and 1944 Himmler lamented many times that this order had been a burden for him, the hardest challenge of his life, or even the most dreadful task, the most dreadful order that could be assigned to an organization. 60 When Goebbels learned of Globocnik's action in the death camp of Belzec near Lublin, where mass killings in gas chambers had begun shortly after March 16, 1942., Goebbels wrote in his diary on March Z7 that the procedure was barbarous, that Hitler's prophecy was coming true in the most dreadful manner, and that "the fuhrer is the unrelenting protagonist and advocate of a radical solution." 61 Rosenberg, apparently after having been briefed by Hitler on the same question, noted in his diary on April z, 1 9 4 1 , the stunted sentence: "What I do not want to write down today but will never forget." 62 Before producing further evidence that Hitler was the prime and only instigator of the Holocaust, I shall briefly return to the killings in Poland in 1939. Again there is no evidence that they were proposed or initiated locally or by subordinate agencies. On the contrary, in a note of July 2, 1940, Heydrich described them as a political operation carried out by Himmler according to instructions (Weisungen) from Hitler, and he mentioned the term order (Befehl) twice. 63

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THE "FINAL SOLUTION' Hitler Orders the Holocaust To sum up, my conclusion thar the final solution was ordered by Hitler is based on three arguments. First, nobody else had ever advocated systematic killing by the state as a way to solve the Jewish question. That Hitler had done so in the 1 9 2 0 s is not in itself proof that he acted accordingly in the 1940s. But it is a strong indication if taken together with his programmatic consistency in foreign policy and with the position of absolute authority he had acquired in Germany since 1933-

Second, all participants who expressed themselves on the subject testified both during and after the war that the killings were ordered by Hitler. Not one of them has ever suggested that somebody else proposed or initiated them. The widespread assertion that Himmler was the principal driving force is clearly refuted by contemporary evidence. Even if all the postwar testimonies are dismissed as apologetic, the wartime statements are convincing enough. Third, given the nature of the Nazi state and its ruler, it is difficult to imagine that an act of such scope with such farreaching consequences, one so compromising, moreover, to the conduct of the war and the chances for victory, should have been initiated by subordinate agencies. Since there is no other case of this kind, it can safely be ruled out. If, then, we agree that the decision was made by Hitler, we must ask how it was reached and transmitted. I have already eliminated the possibility that a single order was given at a certain date. It is strange that this should ever have been imagined. It is in clear contradiction to most comparable practice and can perhaps be explained only by an arresting horror at crimes unprecedented in human history that has, for a long time, prevented or paralyzed conventional historical research and understanding. In other words, to suppose that Hitler had one day called a conference and given an order to exterminate the Jews, and that this order had been carried

THE DECISION FOR THE FINAL SOLUTION Hitler Orders the Holocaust out, is totally unrealistic. It is as if we had forgotten everything we know about decision making. Never has an act of such magnitude as the Holocaust been decided upon in one conference and by one order alone. If we take for comparison's sake Hitler's decision to attack the Soviet Union, we can easily trace the process over many months or even years. After decades of pondering the project and of interior and exterior preparations, Hitler informed his generals on July 5 1 , 1 9 4 0 , of his resolve (Entschluss) to attack in the spring of 1 9 4 1 . Then military preparations began. A first operational draft of the general staff was ready on August 5, 1940. On November 1 2 instructions were given to continue all preparations that had been ordered orally. On December 18 the directive for Operation Barbarossa was issued. On May 1 , 1 9 4 1 , the date for launching the offensive was set for June 22. The final order to attack was given by Hitler on June 1 7 . The fact that we do not have comparable documentary evidence for the preparation of the Holocaust must not lead us to suppose that this process was shorter. But it may well have been different. Although an unprovoked war of conquest was unusual, Hitler could feel that it was justified by historical experience and assume that a suitable pretext could be found when the time came. Moreover, once he had succeeded in convincing his generals of the necessity and the feasibility of the war, the campaign was, in its military aspect, a conventional operation that could be prepared and conducted with the aid of the traditional instrument of the general staff. After all, wars had been waged since time immemorial. The mass slaughter of unarmed men, women, and children, however, was quite a different matter. Neither a convincing justification nor a pretext could be found easily. There were no preexisting organizational or technical instruments to fall back on. As Christopher Browning noted, the Nazis were venturing into uncharted territory and attempting the un-

THE "FINAL SOLUnON" Hitler Orders the Holocaust precedented; they had no maps to follow. 64 Martin Broszat pointed out that the extremely illegal character of the killings sufficed to preclude a written order by the head of state. 6 j But these were not the only difficulties. After Hitler had encountered the protest, particularly by the churches but also from within the party, against the killing of the insane he had to expect a similar protest; certainly he could not assume that almost none would arise. Still more important, he could not assume that all his supporters would follow him along the road to the Holocaust. A striking example of what he could expect came from Gauleiter Wilhelm Kube. An old hand at Jew baiting, Kube was confronted with the bloody reality at his post as commissar general in Minsk; he was appalled at such actions and protested against them. 66 Hitler knew his men well enough to fear such reactions. The next difficulty was in logistics. In this area as well, the lack of documentary evidence limits our understanding. Nevertheless, in the case of the Nisko operation of October 1 9 3 9 , when Eichmann dispatched two transports of 9 1 1 and 672 Jews from Vienna, we can follow in exceptional detail the extent of difficulties involved. 6 ' Through this case it may be easier to recognize the problems that could arise in transporting millions to places where they could be killed. The notion that even Hitler, wielding such immense power as he did, could restrict himself to issuing just one order to this effect is incomprehensible. Another difficulty was of a technical nature. There certainly was experience to be derived from the killing of the insane in gas chambers. It requires further study to test the hypothesis of some scholars that this program was perhaps devised as a preparatory stage to the final solution. They argue that this action was stopped in August 1 9 4 1 not only, as is usually believed, because of the public protest but also because the personnel and the equipment involved were to be used for the final solution. However this may have been, it can easily be

THE DECISION FOR THE FINAL SOLUTION Hitler Orders the Holocaust seen f r o m the improvisation of killing methods after June 1 9 4 1 that the technical question was far from having been solved by then. T h e enormous difficulties facing the implementation of the final solution should suffice to explain the lack of coherence in its execution. There is no need to draw the conclusion that it w a s the spontaneous result of situations that had developed. C o u l d it not have been in Hitler's interest or been his intention to create the situational confusion in order to overcome the difficulties involved? Whether this was the case or not, the difficulties suggest a departure from our conventional notions of how decisions are made and orders issued. In this respect we must n o w include in our consideration what w e said earlier about the ambiguity of Hitler's antiSemitism. T h a t was the principal and most fundamental difficulty. His desire to exterminate the J e w s was in conflict with his desire to win the war. H e was just as unable to set his priorities when preparing the Holocaust as he had been when he h a d formulated his goals in the 192.0s. As we have seen, Goring seems to have recognized the problem when he said that it was more important to win the war than to implement racial policy. Hitler was unable to understand this view and still tried to demonstrate that the Holocaust did not compromise the chances of victory. This inability also and most basically contributes to explaining the lack of coherence in his policy. There is further evidence of this in the later course of events. In 1942. Hitler's task became easier as the course of the war began to set his priorities for him. On November 8 he said in a public speech in M u n i c h : You will recall the session of the Reichstag during which I declared: If Jewry should imagine that it could bring about an international world war to exterminate the European races, the result will not be the extermination of the European races, but the extermination of Jewry in Europe. People always laughed about me as a prophet. Of

70

THE "FINAL SOLUTION' Hitler Orders the Holocaust these w h o laughed then, countless numbers no longer laugh today, a n d those w h o still laugh now will perhaps no longer laugh a short time from now. This realization will spread beyond E u r o p e t h r o u g h out the entire world. International J e w r y will be recognized in its full demonic peril; we N a t i o n a l Socialists will see to that. 6 8

It should first be noted that Hitler used the formulation "international world war" as he had earlier, on September 30 of that year. This pleonasm was, of course, ridiculous unless Hitler wanted to differentiate between a national world war for living space and an international world war against the Jews. This may indeed have been his intention. Furthermore, we must remember that in the course of that autumn of 1 9 4 2 the second assault against the Soviet Union had failed, like the first, and the American invasion of North Africa had just begun. Yet according to Hitler's earlier plans, Russia was to have been vanquished by 1 9 4 1 , before the United States was ready for war. Thus there were definite reasons for Hitler to wonder if the war perhaps could not be won. Hitler would, of course, not admit this in public. But he may have felt that if he could not acquire new living space for Germany, he might at least achieve something for humanity. As the fortunes of war turned against Germany, Hitler became more and more convinced that the destruction of the Jews was his gift to the world. This became totally clear toward the end of the war. In a dictated memoir on February 1 3 , 1 9 4 5 , Hitler said, "I have lanced the Jewish abscess, like the others. For this, the future will be eternally grateful to us." And again in his last words recorded on April z in his bunker in Berlin, "The world will be eternally grateful to National Socialism that I have eradicated the Jews in Germany and Central Europe." 69 For the last time we return to the question how and when the decision was made. There can no longer be a reasonable doubt that it was made by Hitler. But how are we to envision

THE DECISION FOR THE FINAL SOLUTION Hitler Orders the Holocaust the process by which he made it? It seems that, first of all, we have to abandon our conventional notion of orders. In view of the tremendous difficulties to be overcome, this was not an undertaking that simply could be ordered, not even within the framework of a dictatorship. Years of persistent effort were required by Hitler to bring his collaborators—more the high-ranking functionaries than the henchmen—around to his idea and to lead them patiently into carrying out his plan. He had to intensify the anti-Jewish feelings of most of his collaborators to a degree that the urge became strong enough among them to get rid of the Jews. He had then to show or to let it appear that the elimination could not be achieved by emigration, evacuation, or deportation. He had to present the Russian Jews as a potential source of resistance to German rule. After he had succeeded in this, he could suggest killing the unwanted Polish and German Jews, and after that had proved feasible he could include the West European Jews. He may have made vague suggestions here and there, both in public and within his inner circle, to various collaborators who were competing against each other for his favor. He may have held out prospects of promotion. He may have flattered or threatened, appealing to loyalty, giving or taking, playing one supporter against the other, according to the acquired art of ruling by his system of government. Viewed from this perspective, we may date certain intimations, instructions, directives, and orders if it is understood that these were not always clearly defined. For example, after the pogrom of November 1 9 3 8 , when Goebbels was criticized by Goring for the economic damage incurred, Hitler had a long conversation with Goring after which the idea permeated the inner circle that there would be a drastic solution to the Jewish problem when war came. It was first expressed by Goring on November 1 2 , a fortnight later in the SS newspaper, and finally by Hitler himself in his famous prophecy. Is it

71

THE "FINAL SOLUTION" Hitler Orders the Holocaust not reasonable to assume that Hitler had said something of the sort to Goring, then waited tor reactions and, when they proved encouraging, promoted the idea in public? Or consider this recollection by Himmler's masseur, Felix Kersten. Immediately after the French campaign Himmler was summoned by Hitler and told that he would have to carry out the extermination of the European Jews. 0 Admittedly, Kersten is unreliable. But is it not suggestive that Hitler in those days, when he was planning the war against Russia, should have thought of the final solution as well? We must regard this, not as an order, but as yet another step along the way. Certainly Hitler must have given an order in the spring of 1 9 4 1 providing Himmler with special powers to kill Russian Jews. But at first Hitler's order may well have been only to kill Jewish party and state officials in the USSR and to incite pogroms there. When this plan was well underway, with the campaign running according to plan, Hitler may have extended the order in July or August to cover all other Russian Jews and included the German Jews as well. In other words, he may have tested the ground first and then have proceeded gradually. Once more it is important to recognize that he did not assign the task to a single agency, the SS and police, but to his personal chancellery as well, which had carried out the killing of the insane. Both agencies were later to compete. This fits in perfectly with the nature of his rule: the gradual disclosure of his objectives and the competition of agencies. It has not and could not have been my aim to date the entire decision-making process. For the requisite research is in its very beginnings. But it was my aim to suggest how the orders may have been given, how we should envision the decisionmaking process, and how more confirmation can be achieved. It appears to me that our perspective must be changed. We must, above all, never isolate the Holocaust either from Hitler's thinking or from the difficult conditions under which he

THE DECISION FOR THE FINAL SOLUTION Hitler Orders the Holocaust a c t e d . We m u s t n o t o v e r l o o k , in o t h e r w o r d s , the ambiguity o f his racial p r o g r a m a n d the difficulties of its i m p l e m e n t a tion. Awareness o f t h a t a m b i g u i t y a n d t h o s e difficulties may lead n o t t o an u n d e r s t a n d i n g , w h i c h is p r o b a b l y beyond o u r reach, but at least t o a c l a r i f i c a t i o n , w h i c h in m y view we owe n o t merely t o h i s t o r i c a l s c h o l a r s h i p but a b o v e all t o the victims.

1. The two principal comprehensive works still are Gerald Reitlinger, The Final Solution (London: Valentine, 1953), and Raul Hilberg, The Destruction of the European Jews (Chicago: Quadrangle, 1961). 2. Christopher R. Browning, "The Decision concerning the Final Solution" (unpublished lecture, Paris, 1981). 3. Martin Broszat, "Hitler und die Genesis der 'Endlösung'," Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte 25 (1977): 7 3 9 - 7 7 5 . See Christopher R. Browning's reply, "Zur Genesis der 'Endlösung'," ibid. 29 (1981): 9 7 - 1 0 9 . An English translation of Broszat's article is available in Yad Vashem Studies (1979), Vol. 13, pp. 61—98. The most recent functionalist interpretation is Hans Mommsen, "Die Realisierung des Utopischen: Die 'Endlösung der Judenfrage' im 'Dritten R e i c h " ' Geschichte und Gesellschaft 9 (1983): 381-420. 4. For more details see my book Hitlers Weltanschauung. (Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 1981). 5. Eberhard Jäckel and Axel Kuhn (eds.), Hitler: Sämtliche Aufzeichnungen 1905—1924 (Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 1980), pp. 88-90. 6. Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf, vol. "i (Munich: Eher, 1927; reprint, 1930), p. 738. 7. Ibid., p. 772. 8. Jäckel and Kuhn, Hitler, p. 280. 9. Gerhard L. Weinberg (ed.), Hitlers Zweites Buch (Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 1961); English translation: Hitler's Secret Book (New York: Grove Press, 1964). 10. Akten zur deutschen auswärtigen Politik 1918-1945, Serie D: I937~I941> v °l- I2-> i > P- 838 (hereafter cited as ADAP). 11. Hugh R. Trevor-Roper (ed.), Hitler's Table Talk, 1941-1944 (London: Weidenfeld, 1953), p. 79. 12. Rudolph Binion, " ' D e r Jude ist weg': Machtpolitische Auswirkungen des Hitlerschen Rassengedankens," in Josef Becker et al. (eds.), Die Deutsche Frage im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert (Munich: Vogel, 1983), pp. 3 4 7 - 3 7 2 . See also Binion's earlier work, Hitler among the Germans (New York: Elsevier, 1976). 13. Lecture in Hamburg, March 23, 1938. Max Domarus (ed.), Hitler: Reden und Proklamationen 1932-1945, 2 vols. (Neustadt a.d. Aisch: Schmidt, 1962 and 1963), p. 839 (hereafter cited as Domarus). Footnotes

continued after page

350.

74

THE "FINAL SOLUTION"

Genocide: Was it the Nazis' Original Plan?

B y YEHUDA BAUER

ABSTRACT: Since the 1940s scholars have debated the question, Did Hitler and his henchmen plan the Final Solution decades before 1941? Many have answered in the affirmative. However, examination of those developments that led to the Final Solution raises serious questions. Although some have declared that the Nazis with Hitler at the helm did indeed plan the mass execution even before the 1930s, nowhere is there any pronouncement of this before 1939! T h e plan the Nazis did have was to evict all Jews from Germany. Although several hundred thousand did leave, those left behind as well as the millions conquered as the Nazis swept through Europe provided a dilemma. Hitler wanted them out. No one wanted them. T h e Schacht-Rublee negotiations and the Nisko/ Madagascar plans, efforts to clear Europe of Jews, had failed dismally before 1939. T h e last alternative was the Final Solution, which took form in 1941 with the adoption of the Einsatzgruppen plan for the mass murder of J e w s in Russia, mainly by machine gun, and the Wannsee plan for the mass murder o f Jews in Poland in the gas ovens and the crematoria established at six death camps.

Yehuda Bauer earned his Ph.D. from Hebrew University and has been a senior lecturer at the Institute of Contemporary Jewry and head of the Department of Holocaust Studies at Hebrew University since ¡968. Currently he is head of the institute. His work in Holocaust studies is the combination of his own experiences as a young man living in Czechoslovakia before 1939 and of his academic preparation. Living with hundreds of thousands of "refugees" pouring into Israel from death camps and hiding places throughout Europe in the 1940s; studying history, philosophy, and English; and attempting to answer the many complex questions relating to the Holocaust caused Yehuda Bauer to become a pioneer in Holocaust studies. In 1975 he was named Johnah M. Machover Professor of Holocaust Studies. Among his most recent books are The Jewish Emergence From Powerlessness, The Holocaust in Historical Perspective and From Diplomacy to Resistance.

75

THE DECISION FOR THE FINAL SOLUTION

T

HE problem of the origins of the Final Solution has been the subject of much research. One has to make the clear differentiation between the quest for the background of Nazi-type murderous antisemitism and the more immediate problem of the planning tor mass murder. T h e underlying problem of a study of Nazi antisemitism is whether it was the result of a continuity extending from Christian, traditional, or even pre-Christian anti-Judaism to which racial antisemitism added a few new ideas, or whether modern antisemitism, in its late nineteenthcentury form is a new departure, qualitatively different from, though influenced by, traditional or Christian antisemitism. My own view is close to that of Franklin H. Littell, Uriel Tal, and Shmuel Ettinggr, namely, that while modern antisemitism undoubtedly contains new elements or places new emphases on old ones and leads to consequences that are radically more extreme than those attained by its predecessors, the element of continuity is a predominant factor. Without Christian, or traditional anti-Judaism, modern, nationalistic and racial antisemitism would have been impossible. T H E JEWISH PROBLEM: H I T L E R ' S FIRST SOLUTION

However, the subject of this article is the second problem—the question of the origins of the Final Solution in Nazi theory and practice. Contrary to legend, nowhere in Hitler's writings or pronouncements before 1939 do we find a declaration in favor of the annihilation of the Jewish people. Lucy Dawidowicz, in trying to prove the contrary, argues that as early as 1919 Hitler expressed views that "prefigure the political realities of the German dictatorship . . . when the Jews

were deprived of all rights systematically and 'legally' and then 'removed altogether,' the ambiguity of the word 'removal' is now more apparent than it was in 1919." She bases her views on the first political propaganda letter written by Hitler on 16 September 1919 to Adolf Gemlich. In it Hitler, favoring what he called rational as opposed to emotional antisemitism, stated that "the final objective must unswervingly be the removal ( E n t f e r n u n g ) of the Jews altogether [überhaupt]." Dawidowicz seems to argue from that that the Final Solution in the sense of mass murder was with Hitler from the beginning. That leads her to a deterministic, or teleological, view according to which the ultimate steps unfolded necessarily from a basic Hitlerite concept which already contained mass murder and which remained constant from 1919 to the early forties. 1 This view is, I think, the popular view. Ask any number of freshmen students, and they will respond with a question, Why did not the Jews flee, or react energetically from the start, if they could have known from Hitler's writings and speeches that he intended to kill them all? But when one examines the evidence, one finds that Hitler did not say anything like that at all before 1939. Dawidowicz quotes the one and only passage in Hitler's book, Mein Kampf, in which a death wish for Jews is uttered: " I f at the beginning of the [First World] War twelve or fifteen thousand of these Hebrew corrupters of the people had been held under poison gas, as Happened to hundreds of thousands of our very best German workers in the field, the sacrifice of multitudes at the front would not have been in vain."* This, 1. Lucy S Dawidowicz, The War the Jeu* (London: 1975), p. 17. 2. Ibid., p. 3.

Against

THE "FINAL SOLUTION"

76

of course, is antisemitism at its basest, but it is hardly a blueprint for the planned mass killing of all European Jews. Worse things were said by antisemites in and out of power in various countries before Hitler. In fact, it is a solitary sentence in a thick book of turgid German prose. Was there then a plan? Of course there was, and Hitler stated it plainly on 13 November 1919 in his first public speech, also quoted by Dawidowicz: "We will carry on the struggle until the last Jew is removed from the German Reich." Or, as he said in 1920, he advocated "the removal of the Jews from our nation, not because we would begrudge them their existence—we congratulate the rest of the world on their company—but because the existence of our nation is a thousand times more important to us than that of an alien race." 3 Until the end of 1938, neither Hitler nor any of the chief propagandists of the regime suggested any other solution for what they called the Jewish problem than eviction from Germany. Why was that their solution? How did they perceive the Jew? Ideology and practice, 1928-38: The apparent contradiction In his second book, written but not published in 1928, Hitler made his view of the Jews very clear. He said that they were an antirace, formed out of a hybrid, indeterminate, mongrel core, a nomad people of eternal restlessness, incapable of independent political, territorial existence. He also noted that their religion was a cover for their lust for unlimited power and for absolute 3

Ibid., p 18.

rule over all others. Their control of the world was not based on territory, which they never had, and in this they differed fiom all the other nations; it was based, rather, on financial and other machinations. Hitler wrote that at first the Jew demanded equal rights, and then, finally, superior rights, and that his aim was to rule the world; but, as his character was parasitic and as he was incapable of separate existence, his rule would lead not only to the destruction of the nations oppressed by him, but also to his own demise. These views can be found, with some variations, in the writings of Alfred Rosenberg, Josef Goebbels, and other close collaborators of Hitler. They contain a number of crucial elements. First among these is the view of the Jew as a demonic presence in the world; the use of the generalizing singular "the J e w " already suggests that. This, of course, is taken from Christian antisemitism, which postulated that only a people possessed by the Devil would have killed the God-Messiah. T h e Jews, in the Nazi demonology, are out to rule the world, and, in fact, are already well on their way toward doing so. This again is based on Christian foundations, and we can find traces of fear of the Jewish demons controlling the world during the Middle Ages—and even earlier. In modern times, this superstition was reformulated in that famous forgery by the tsarist Soviet police, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion (1905), which forms one of the cornerstones of Nazi ideology. A second basic element in the Nazi view of the Jews is the description of the Jew as a parasite. 4 In Nazi literature Jews are described as vermin, rats, or other 4. Alex Bein, " T h e J e w i s h Parasite," in Leo Baeck Year Bonk, vol. 9 (1964), pp. 3 - 3 9 .

77

THE DECISION FOR THE FINAL SOLUTION noxious elements from the insect or animal world, as well as bacilli or viruses. In his previously mentioned second book, 5 Hitler says that in order for the Jews to exist, they use the creative faculties of other nations because they are incapable of establishing a polity of their own. They thus become parasitic, and perforce their aim must be to control as many nations as possible so as to live on their lifeblood. In this way, nazism combined with the two divergent metaphoric pictures it had created for the Jews: that of demons and that of parasites. For our purpose a third element is most important. Nazism in effect accused the Jew of vices that it was guilty of. The picture of the demonic force out to conquer the world reflects the desires of the Nazis themselves. Years before thé wish to murder the Jews became articulate in their own minds, they formulated it in obverse fashion. Thus Hitler stated, in his directives to Goering in 1936s regarding the four-year plan, that Germany must be ready for war within four years. T h e reason for the tight time schedule, according to Hitler, was that "the loss of months may cause damage that will be irreparable in hundreds of years." The reason for that rather surprising statement—in 1936!—was that international Jewry was threatening Germany's existence. The prospective victory of Jewry, said Hitler, "whose most radical expression is Bolshevism . . . will not this time lead to new Versailles treaties, but to the final destruction, that is the extermination of the German peo-

pp. 2 1 2 - 1 3

pie." This in turn will cause "the catastrophic destruction of the European nations, such as humanity has not known since the demise of the states of antiquity." I have chosen a clear statement by Hitler but one can find this idea in many places and at various levels of Nazi officialdom in the thirties: the accusation that the Jews were out to destroy Germany, Europe, and the world and that therefore all Germany could do was to fight a defensive battle against Jewry. Nazi ethics, as I have pointed out in other places, 7 are the ordinary bourgeois ethics reversed, standing very precisely on their head. They could murder because they accused the Jews of wanting to murder them. They extolled murder as a positive ethical command to save the world and white, Germanic supremacy because they accused the Jews of planning that fate for the Germans. Having described the Jews as demons and vermin, that is, as nonhumans, they could murder them, because they were no longer killing human beings, but devils, bacilli, and rats with human faces. In effect, then, they could commit mass murder because they had dehumanized themselves. In other words, they had done that of which they had accused the Jews in a true reversal of values. Das Umwerten alter Werte. It may well appear that the preceding argument ends in a contradiction. On one hand, the claim is advanced that there is no evidence of any Nazi plan to murder the Jews before the end of the thirties, and indeed there is not; on the other hand, great trouble has been taken to explain what it was that enabled the Nazis to murder the Jews as

6 V V i l h o l m T r t - n c . Hitlers Dc'tku hrift zum Yicrjiihrr^plttn IMft, vol. 3 ( Vicrteljahr c s h e f t p l i i r Z c i t g e s c - h i c h t r : 1955), p p . 1 8 4 210.

7 Y e h u d a B a u e r , The llnlmitust torirrtl Pfr\f»'< tifc (Unhfmtv i n g t o n Presv, 1978).

5 . llitler\

Sccrct

Bc>k

( N e w York:

1962).

in of

lii\Wash-

78

THE "FINAL SOLUTION'

seen from the point of view of the Nazis' ideological development. But there is really no contradiction. T h e murder of the J e w i s h people was inherent in the ideology that the Nazis took from their predecessor in the nineteenth century. It was inh e r e n t — a s a logical conclusion, not as a practical plan. T o b e c o m e a practical plan, to develop from an unarticulated wish logically embedded in their world view into mass graves and gas chambers, political and military developments had to occur that would make mass murder a practicable proposition.

Antisemitism: program

central to the Nazi

Nazi plans for J e w s b e t w e e n 1933 and 1938 were to evict them from Germany. But b e t w e e n 1933 and the end of 1937, only 1 2 9 , 0 0 0 out of a half million German J e w s left the country. In our literature, the accusation is found against German J e w s for not having read the signs on the wall and not having left early enough. T h e description of the Weiss family in the N B C Holocaust film series has made this view even more popular. That does not make it historically correct. T h e r e were, of course, large, though diminishing, numbers of German J e w s who refused to leave a country where J e w s had b e e n living before the Germans had even arrived there; J e w s had lived in the Roman towns along the Rhine which were part of the Roman world's frontier d e f e n c e against the German tribes. After the 1935 Nuremberg Laws, especially, which decreed the J e w s to be second-class subjects rather than citizens, the numbers of those wishing to hang on were growing smaller, though no poll exists which could prove this statistically.

T h e real test lies e l s e w h e r e ; it is known from historical r e s e a r c h e s that at no time in the thirties was there any lessening of J e w i s h emigration pressure on foreign consulates in G e r m a n y . T h e r e w e r e always considerably more J e w s wanting to leave than, in a world stricken by a vast e c o n o m i c crisis, there were places w i l l i n g to a c c e p t t h e m . America did not want them, and they infiltrated there in relatively small numbers. T h e n u m b e r of emigrants, both J e w s and non-Jews, from Germany was 4 , 3 9 2 in fiscal year 1933/ 3 4 ; 5,201 in 1934/35; and 6 , 3 4 6 in 1935/36. In late 1935, the intervention of some o f the so-called German-Jewish aristocracy in A m e r i c a — Felix M. Warburg and Herbert L e h m a n n — c a u s e d President Roosevelt to give more liberal directives to the State Department and the figures show 10,895 immigrants from Germany for 1936/37; 17,199 for 1937/ 3 8 ; and 19,452 for the rest of 1 9 3 8 ( J u l y - D e c e m b e r ) . 8 O f these 6 3 , 4 8 5 immigrants, probably 8 5 p e r c e n t were J e w s , or about 5 5 , 0 0 0 . Had Jewish emigration from G e r m a n y to the United States and Palestine, which absorbed a similar n u m b e r , and to other places in which J e w s could infiltrate in small n u m b e r s continued on this scale, G e r m a n Jewry would have disappeared by emigration and aging in about 15 to 2 0 years. But the whoie point was that the Nazis saw a d e m o n i c , catastrophic threat from an imaginary world Jewry to the G e r m a n i c race. War was planned to solve this problem, and if G e r m a n y planned to free itself and the world from a demonic force, it could not very well start the process while that d e m o n i c force was sitting right in its midst. 8. Yehuda Raucr, My Brother (Philadelphia: 1974), pp. 1 6 8 - 6 9

s

Keeper

THE DECISION FOR THE FINAL SOLUTION It is necessary to emphasize here the enormity of what is being said: I am indicating no more and no less than that World War II was unleashed primarily because of the Nazi desire to assert the world dominance of the Germanic peoples of Aryan race in their struggle against world Jewry and its minions, bolshevism in the East, and Western parliamentary democracy, or Anglo-Saxon plutocracy (if one prefers Goebbels' favorite phrase), in the West. Put differently, it is imperative to distill Nazi antisemitism as a major determinant of Nazi aggression culminating in World War II. If one disagrees with this statement, one will have to explain away a whole series of Nazi documents providing circumstantial or direct evidence for these statements:. Hitler's instructions for the foui-year plan; the Hossbach protocol of November 1937, in which Hitler explains the urgency of war within a short time; the report of the SS (Lagebericht) for 1939, in which the Jewish problem is defined as "the problem"* of world politics, and many others. Expulsion AH this meant that the Nazis were bent on radicalizing their anti-Jewish policies in early 1938. Expulsion of Jews was now a central German state interest and had to be achieved quickly. A series of steps in 1938 was indicative of this policy and was aimed at the expulsion of Jews from German economic life: the abolition of the right of Jewish communities to act as legal bodies, registration of Jewish properties, pressure 9. "daas es Oberhaupt das Problem der Weltpolitik im Augenblick ist" U 112: Das Judentum ah Weltprohlem, quoted in O. D. Kulka, 1:206(19 Jan. 1939).

79

for so-called Aryanization, various economic restrictions, and from June, 1938, mass arrests of Jews who until then had not populated Nazi concentration camps except insofar as Jews had belonged to the anti-Nazi opposition. Then came the Kristallnacht pogrom of November, 1938. Its purpose was to accelerate Jewish exit from Germany. Of the approximately 30 to 35 thousand internees in Nazi concentration camps taken there on Kristallnacht, most were set free in 1939 when emigration papers or opportunities were obtained for them from their frantic relatives. Illegal immigration to Palestine was organized by the Jewish Agency representatives and by Zionist Revisionist activists with the Gestapo's encouragement, as was illegal emigration to Latin America. By 1941, 450,000 central European Jews that included four-fifths of Austrian Jewry and close to that percentage of German Jewry, had left Greater Germany, though some of these were caught again later in the German conquest of other European countries. This second period of Nazi rule, 1938-41, was characterized by an attempt to evict the Jews from the Nazi sphere quickly and radically. According to a circular letter, dated 25 January 1939, of the German Foreign Office to all German representatives abroad, the expulsion of the Jews would cause greater understanding of Germany's stand by foreign powers, because the expelled Jews would cause antisemitic reactions in their new abodes, and this would help Germany! Ransom: Schacht-Rublee negotiations What is interesting is that parallel with this radicalization, Nazi Ger-

80

THE "FINAL SOLUTION'

many appears to have been willing to sell its Jews. In the so-called Schacht-Rublee negotiations of late 1938and early 1939, rlitlei agreed to release 100,000 young German Jews with part of their property, who would go to establish themselves in a new country with large additional sums to be raised by Jews abroad; their families would then join, and only the old and sick would remain in Germany, to be kept there by the rest of the Jewish capital. The Jews in the United States and elsewhere not only did not have the necessary money at that time, but it was also feared by Jews and non-Jews that this plan would increase German exports and help Nazi Germany economically. The plan was rejected by the American government, though hesitatingly accepted by the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee (JDC), which represented American Jewish philanthropy toward Jews overseas, as well as the Zionists and the American Jewish Committee. 10 In hindsight, the plan was perfectly logical from a Nazi point of view: if Jews were not really human, one could sell them rather than exorcise t h e m — i f there were someone who would buy. The tragedy was that there was no buyer. Resettlement: plans

Nisko/Madagascar

In late 1939 and 1940, two other possibilities emerged, again perfectly in line with what has been outlined: one was to expel the Jews to the Nisko area in the southeastern part of recently occupied Polish territory, with a view of possiblypushing them across the new border 10. T h e AJC. founded in 1906. represented the upper cnjst of American Jewry in their endeavor to fight antisemitism and protect the civic rights of Jews everywhere

into Soviet Russia. And the second was to ship them to the island of Madagascar of! the coast of Africa, then a French possession that would become a German colony at the ultimate peace settlement with defeated France. Both plans were very seriously considered, and in connection with the Madagascar plan, the term "territorial final solution" was used by Heydrich. As late as May, 1940, a memorandum by Himmler" rejected the idea of mass murder of peoples and advocated instead enslavement and cultural deprivation. When did mass murder appear on the scene as a viable alternative in Nazi eyes? We hear the first rumblings in November, 1938, after the Kristallnacht, in an article in Das Schwartze Korps, the SS journal that on November 24 threatened Jewry with "fire and sword." There followed Hitler's declaration on 30 January 1939, in which he threatened the destruction of the Jewish race in Europe if international Jewry were to unleash another world war. Slightly less explicit threats were uttered in two private meetings with Hitler, one with the South African minister of defence, Otto von Pirow, in November, 1938, and one with the hapless Czech foreign minister, Josef Chvalkovsky, in February, 1939. One may perhaps conclude that Hitler saw mass murder as a possibility then. But he agreed to the Schacht-Rublee plan then (January, 1939) and later supported the Madagascar plan as well. We have every evidence that these plans were meant seriously, and no evidence whatsoever that any mass murder plan exists at that stage! The establishment of ghettos and Judenraele (Jewish Councils), as in a fal l . See ichte,

Vifrteljnhrashefte

2 : 1 9 6 - 9 8 (1957).

fur

Z.eitgesch-

THE DECISION FOR THE FINAL SOLUTION

mous instruction by Reinhard Heydrich, chief of the SS security police, on 21 September 1939, at the time of the conquest of Poland, has often been interpreted as being indicative of a mass-murder plan. Close scrutiny proves the opposite: it was a brutal plan to evict a maximum of Jews, starve them as much as possible, and concentrate them so as to facilitate a later massive expulsion. With all the suffering and the massive mortality in the ghettos in Eastem Europe between 1939 and 1942, the large mass of Polish Jewry would have survived the war had the decision to mass murder them not been taken. It is therefore crucial to examine when and how this happened. THE FINAL SOLUTION

It is clear that as late as October, 1940, Hitler himself gave the order to expel the Jews of the MannheimPfalz area in western Germany to France and not to Poland, an act that made sense only if a final expulsion to Madagascar was envisaged. But in May, 1941, special Nazi murder units (Einsatzgruppen) were being trained to kill Jews and Communists in the coming campaign in Russia. It has therefore been assumed by most historians that an oral order— there never was a written one—to mass murder the Jews was given by Hitler about mid-March, 1941, together with his other commands and orders relating to the coming Russian war. The fact that such an order was given is seemingly attested to by Himmler in his speech at Poznan in October, 1943, and elsewhere. But nowhere does Himmler or anyone

81

else state exactly when the order was given or what specifically the order said. The date of March, 1941 makes sense. The Nazis expected to find more Jews in Russia—they were thinking of five million—and the idea to send them all to Madagascar was becoming impossible. The Americans had not reacted to the news about ghettos, although American newspapers in 1940 and 1941 had fully reported what was happening to the Jews in Poland and elsewhere up to that point. Therefore, there was nothing to fear from that quarter. The logical consequence of Nazi ideology could now be drawn, and it was. There followed the mass murders committed by the Etnsatzgruppen in Russia from June, 1941, when the Germans invaded that country, until late in 1942, when they practically completed the annihilation of that part of Soviet Jewry who had not fled. Rudolf Hoess, the commandant of Auschwitz, said that he received the order to prepare the camp for mass annihilation of Jews in the summer of 1941. On 3 September 1941, the first experimental gassing was done, with Soviet prisoners of war as the first victims. In December, 1941, the Nazis established the first death camp at Chelmno in western Poland, where they killed the Jews from that area, especially from the city of Lodz. In March, 1942, the systematic mass murder of the rest of Polish Jewry commenced. March, 1941 Most historians agree, then, that the decision to mass murder the Jews was made in March, 1941, and transmitted in an oral order to

82

THE "FINAL SOLUTION'

Hinnnler. H o w e v e r , a serious German historian, U w e Dietrich Adam, in his Judenpolitik im Dritten Reich (Düsseldorf, 1972), disagrees and argues that since b e t w e e n J u n e and D e c e m b e r , 1941, m u r d e r a c t i o n s took place only in t h e areas taken from t h e U.S.S.R., t h e March decision must have r e f e r r e d to t h e s e areas only, w h e r e a s a later decision, probably in N o v e m b e r , must have referred to t h e rest of E u r o p e . Another important G e r m a n historian, Martin Broszat, has since e x p r e s s e d a similar view. T h e a r g u m e n t appears s o m e w h a t problematic, because it p r e s u p p o s e s that Hitler regarded Polish J e w s differently from Russian Jews, a n d it stands to reason that t h e decision to start with Russia was part of a larger decision, i m p l e m e n t e d a few m o n t h s later, to carry on with all areas. E v e n if Adam is right, what d i f f e r e n c e does it make? We w o u l d t h e n h a v e to say that the decision was taken in t w o stages, but that t h e p r i n c i p l e of murder was a c c e p t e d in March; t h e rest f o l l o w e d logically. B e s i d e s , t h e Hoess testimony is ignored. T h e r e is no e v i d e n c e at all for a Novemb e r decision apart from p u r e conjecture and t h e fact that t h e C h e l m n o Concentration C a m p started operating on D e c e m b e r 8. T h a t fact could just as well m e a n that t h e decision was taken m o n t h s earlier and was i m p l e m e n t e d w h e n t h e staff and the technical m e a n s w e r e ready. What is important is t h e d e c i s i o n in principle. By D e c e m b e r , 1941, well over a million J e w s had b e e n killed — the Nazi machine had i n d e e d crossed the Rubicon! What followed was t h e W a n n s e e C o n f e r e n c e on 20 J a n u a r y 1942. T o p German b u r e a u c r a t s of the various ministries, of the G e r m a n occu-

pation authorities in P o l a n d a n d c o n q u e r e d Russia, a n d t h e chief SS h e n c h m e n , Heydrich a n d E i c h m a n n , were p r e s e n t . T h i s c o n f e r e n c e has b e e n r e p r e s e n t e d as t h e f o r u m at which the destruction of E u r o p e a n J e w s was d e c i d e d . N o t h i n g of t h e sort occurred. T h e d e c i s i o n , as w e have s e e n , had b e e n m a d e 10 m o n t h s b e f o r e that and h a d b e e n i m p l e m e n t e d in t h e mass e x e c u t i o n s in Russia. In January, 1942, w a y s a n d means w e r e d i s c u s s e d by w h i c h t h e various b r a n c h e s of t h e G e r m a n administration w o u l d h e l p t h e SS to i m p l e m e n t t h e d e c i s i o n in areas w h e r e their h e l p was r e q u i r e d . T h e decision of t h e W a n n s e e Conf e r e n c e was to m u r d e r t h e J e w s from West to East, a n d to carry on with t h e Nazi satellites in s o u t h e a s t E u r o p e . T h e s e c o n c l u s i o n s w e r e not i m p l e m e n t e d . T h e main effort of t h e m u r d e r e r s was in P o l a n d , not in t h e West, and then i n t e r m i t t e n t l y in o t h e r parts of E u r o p e . T h e y n e v e r m a n a g e d central R u m a n i a at all, or most of Bulgarian J e w r y . T h e y d e stroyed Saloniki J e w r y in 1943, a n d not in 1942, and so on. G e r m a n y u n d e r t h e Nazis w a s a d i c t a t o r s h i p t e m p e r e d by inefficiency a n d t h e s q u a b b l e s of s e m i - i n d e p e n d e n t "fiefd o m s " b e l o n g i n g to t h e various t o p Nazis. T h e m u r d e r of t h e J e w s was d o n e brutally, in factory' fashion, in s u d d e n twists a n d s p a s m s , d i r e c t e d by the SS and a i d e d by practically all t h e b r a n c h e s of G e r m a n officialdom. By t h e b e g i n n i n g of 1943, as t h e Nazi e m p i r e b e g a n to c r u m b l e a n d contract, t h e old idea of s e l l i n g t h e Jewish d e m o n s to a n y o n e w h o w o u l d buy t h e m for a d e s i r a b l e e q u i v a l e n t was revived. O n e m i g h t p o s t u l a t e t h e thesis that Nazi m u r d e r of J e w s was one of two p o s s i b l e Nazi m o d e s of behavior. T h e o t h e r was barter.

THE DECISION FOR THE FINAL SOLUTION or ransom. Between 1942 and 1945 the Nazis, and especially Himmler and some of his collaborators, tried to get rid of the Jews in return for a separate peace agreement with the Western Allies." What seems to be abundantly clear is that the decision to kill the Jews was one logical outcome of Nazi ideology, but not the only one. T h e trouble with the solution as proposed by Himmler in the latter part of the war was that, as in 1938 and 1939 in the case of the Schacht-Rublee plan, nobody wanted to buy Jews. T h e Nazis turned to the other alternative. Both resulted from the same premise, namely, that the Jews were not human, and that therefore they could either be killed or sold—in other words, they could be treated as nonhuman elements, as animals or goods. Definitions Was the murder of the Jews genocide? We ought perhaps to differentiate very clearly between a planned total annihilation of a national group, on one hand, and what the Nazis did in Poland, Czechoslovakia, or elsewhere on the other hand. T h e term "genocide," though invented in 1943, did not really cover the Holocaust at all. True, the first sentence of Raphael Lemkin's definition seemingly does so: " T h e practice of extermination of nations and ethnic groups as carried out by the invaders is called by the author 'genocide.' " l : l 12 1 have developed this theme in some recent publications; see fn. no. 7; see also The Jewish Emergence from Powerlessness (Toronto: 1979). 13. Raphael Lemkin. Aiis Rule in Occupied Kurrifie (New York: 1943), pp. xi-xii.

83

But when Lemkin goes on to describe the act he called "genocide," he describes fairly exactly what happened to Poles, for instance, the destruction of the "institutions of selfgovernment . . . disrupting the social cohesion of the nation involved and killing or removing elements such as the intelligentsia . . . destroying cultural institutions . . . introducing a starvation system . . . and mass killings . . . interfering with the Churches," and so forth. If the plan was to kill everyone, then the restrictions in the religious field or the curtailing of cultural activities was hardly a matter of any importance any longer. I f genocide meant mass murder, then one did not have to detail the political restrictions: dead people do not have political institutions. What happened to Lemkin in 1943 is typical of what happened then to many Jews and non-Jews: they talked about what they called "extermination" but they did not comprehend it. They talked about the brutal, murderous enslavement of European nations by the Nazis, but what we call "the Holocaust" was beyond them. T h e term genocide is appropriate, according to Lemkin's definition, for what the Americans did to the Native American population, for the attempt of the Nazis to destroy Poles and Czechs, for the fate of the Biharis in Bangladesh, perhaps, and so on. The Holocaust, however, was a total act; moreover, it was a sacral act. Hitler said that by destroying the Jew he would be doing the will of God. It was, in Nazi eyes, a fight against Satan, it had cosmic importance, it was a quasi-religious act of the first importance. Therein lies the importance of the Holo-

84 caust; it is unique it stands alone-

THE "FINAL SOLUTION" in the sense

Holocaust: logical consequence ideological antisemitism

that

of

Genocide and Holocaust are, therefore, two different concepts. Both are repeatable, and in that lies the universal importance of dealing with the subject. I f we then change the name of this article, we can ask, Was Holocaust the Nazis original plan? And our answer will be that the idea of a

mass murder of the Jews was the logical consequence of Nazi theories, but that the logical conclusion was not drawn until 1941; that even then mass murder was avoidable because there was a willingness to sell or barter Jews out of the same attitude that produced the readiness to murder them; and that the free world was not prepared to buy the Jews, because its priorities then and now fall short of its declared ethical values. Winning wars was primary; saving human lives was not.

THE DECISION FOR THE FINAL SOLUTION

War in the East and the Extermination of the Jews* Andreas Hillgruber

"Jewish Bolshevism": Hitler's Racial-Ideological Dogma Special units of the SS commenced the systematic extermination of the Jews in the occupied Soviet territories as soon as the attack on the Soviet Union was launched, on June 22, 1941. In order to arrive at an adequate historical explanation, we must start with the racial doctrine of radical, universal anti-Semitism as the "activating, dynamic motive.'" This was accompanied by "fixed" concepts in Hitler's mind of Bolshevism as the rule of the Jews over the Slavic masses in Soviet Russia, which tied in with the Nazi "ideology." There is a historical controversy as to whether Hitler's early antiSemitic prejudices developed gradually in "thrusts" since his youth in Linz and Vienna, toward hate and intent to exterminate beyond the cliches of the period; or whether a psychic shock caused a quantum "jump" from regular anti-Semitism to something extraordinary.2 But there is no argument about the fact that the *

1

2

This essay appeared in "Unternehmen Barbarossa" — Der deutsche Überfall auf die Sowjetunion 1941, Gerd R. Ueberschär and Wolfram Wette, eds., Paderborn, 1984, pp. 219-236. Definition by Martin Broszat, "Hitler and the Genesis of the 'Final Solution': An Assessment of David Irving's Theses," Yad Vashem Studies, 1979, vol. XIII, p. 118. Now documented in detail by the edition of Eberhard Jäckel and Axel Kuhn eds., Hitler. Sämtliche Aufzeichnungen 1905-1924, Stuttgart, 1980.

THE "FINAL SOLUTION" ANDREAS HILLGRUBER

agitation of Hitler as a politician was determined by this extraordinary anti-Semitism after 1919. In the "first document of his political career," a letter of September 16, 1919,3 Hitler differentiates his anti-Semitism, directed toward political consequences, from the general anti-Jewish emotions prevalent in postwar Germany: Anti-Semitism based on pure e m o t i o n s will find its ultimate expression in pogroms. 4 But the anti-Semitism of reason must lead to a planned legal fight and the removal of the privileges enjoyed by the Jew, in contrast to the other foreigners living a m o n g us.... But the ultimate, unshakable aim must be the complete removal of the Jews."

The letter does not specify the meaning of the last phrase. Matters were clarified in a speech which Hitler delivered on April 6, 1920:s "We do not want to be emotional anti-Semites seeking to create a pogrom mood, but we are inspired by the inexorable determination to grasp the evil at the base and exterminate it root and branch." But in this period (1920) he still spoke of "emigration" now and then, or "expulsion" of the Jews, and thus "removal" could be interpreted accordingly. In a speech of August 13, 1920,6 given verbatim in a postscript, Hitler repeats the intended aim of a "thorough solution," by the "removal of the Jews from among our people." But for the first time he now stresses the international character of Jewry. From then on "Jewish internationalism" plays a key role in his agitation. This expanded perspective moved the "defensive campaign" against the Jews beyond the national framework. In his book Mein Kampf (written in 1924),7 Hitler combined a universal, anti-Semitic, racist fanaticism with a foreign policy " p r o g r a m " (developed meanwhile) into a self-appointed, pseudoreligious historical "mission," which was to form a self' ' 5 6

'

Ibid., p. 89. In the original "Progromen." Jáckel and Kuhn, op. cii., p. 119. Ibid, p. 184. Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf, London, 1969.

THE DECISION FOR THE FINAL SOLUTION EXTERMINATION OF THE JEWS IN THE EAST contained entity 8 in his concepts from that date. He viewed the prevention of a global triumph by the Jews' as the quasi-defensive aspect of a "struggle" by the National-Socialist "movement" under his leadership: Should the Jew triumph over the nations of this world by means of his Marxist creed, his crown will be mankind's dance of death; and this planet will move through space devoid of man, as it did millions of years ago 1 0 ... thus today I believe myself to be acting in the sense of the Almighty creator: by defending myself against the Jew I fight for the Lord's work. His "decision" to "become a politician"" follows the core phrase 12 at the end of Chapter 7 in Mein Kampf: "There is no treating with the Jew, but only the hard either-or." In his b o o k , Hitler repeatedly 13 describes the Jew, with biological crudeness, as a "parasite," "sponger" and "vampire," using Bolshevik Russia as evidence: In gaining political power the Jew casts off the few cloaks that he still wears. The democratic people's Jew becomes the blood-Jew and tyrant over peoples. In a few years he tries to exterminate the national intelligentsia and by robbing the peoples of their national leadership makes them ripe for the slave's lot of permanent subjugation. The most frightful example of this kind is offered by Russia, where he killed or starved about thirty million people with positively fanatical savagery, in part amid inhuman tortures, in order to give a gang of Jewish journalists and stock exchange bandits domination over a great people. The end is not only the end of the freedom of the peoples oppressed by the Jew, but also the end of this parasite upon the nations. After the death of his victim, the vampire sooner or later dies too. 14 8

' 10 11 12 13 14

The basic reference is Eberhard Jackel, Hitlers Weltanschauung. Enrwurf einer Herrschaft, Stuttgart, 1981. Hitler, Mein Kampf, op. tit., p. 60. The 1st ed. of Mein Kampf had "millennia." Hitler, Mein Kampf, op. cit., p. 187. Ibid., p. 187. Ibid., pp. 53, 54, 113, 138, 175-176, 274-275, 277, 280-281, 295-296. Ibid., pp. 296ff.

THE "FINAL SOLUTION" ANDREAS HILLGRUBER However — and not contradictory in Hitler's view — the aim of "Jewish rule" over Russia was different: "We must regard Russian Bolshevism as Jewry's attempt to achieve world rule in the twentieth century." 15 The (derived) offensive side of his envisioned aims was revealed by Hitler in the second volume of Mein Kampf, in Chapter 14, "Eastern Orientation or Eastern Policy." 1 6 "The struggle against Jewish world-bolshevization requires a clear attitude toward Soviet Russia." Hitler's conclusion, drawn from his racist-ideological premises and his Social-Darwinist axioms, determined the external expansion of a Reich led by him: We stop the endless German movement to the south and west, and turn our gaze towards the land in the east.... If we speak of soil in Europe today, we can primarily have in mind only Russia and her vassal border states. Here Fate itself seems desirous of giving us a sign. By handing Russia to Bolshevism, it robbed the Russian nation of that intelligentsia which previously brought about and guaranteed the existence of a state ... for centuries Russia drew nourishment from this Germanic nucleus of its upper leading strata. Today it can be regarded as almost totally exterminated and extinguished. It has been replaced by the Jew. Impossible as it is for the Russian by himself to shake off the yoke of the Jew by his own resources, it is equally impossible for the Jew to maintain the mighty empire forever. He himself is no element of organisation, but a ferment of decomposition. The Persian empire in the east is ripe for collapse. And the end of Jewish rule in Russia will also be the end of Russia as a state. We have been chosen by Fate as witness of a catastrophe which will be the mightiest confirmation of the soundness of the national racial theory. 17 Hitler's vision of "removing" the Jews assumed even clearer contours in Mein Kampf. Today it is not princes and princes' mistresses who haggle and bargain over state borders; it is the inexorable Jew who struggles for his IS

Ibid., p. 604 (letter-spaced in the original).

" "

Ibid., p. 605. Ibid., pp. 598f.

THE DECISION FOR THE FINAL SOLUTION EXTERMINATION O F T H E JEWS IN THE EAST domination over the nations. No nation can remove this hand from its throat except by the sword. Only the assembled and concentrated might of a national passion rearing up in its strength can defy the international enslavement of peoples. Such a process is and remains a bloody one." ... If at the beginning of the War [1914 — A.H.] and during the War twelve or fifteen thousand of these Hebrew corrupters of the people had been held under poison gas, as happened to hundreds of thousands of our very best German workers in the field, the sacrifice of millions at the front would not have been in vain. On the contrary: twelve thousand scoundrels eliminated in time might have saved the lives of a million real Germans, valuable for the f u t u r e . " Hitler reproached the German Imperial Government for not having acted in 1914 at the start of war, "against the entire crooked association of the Jewish nation-poisoners": 2 0 It would have been the duty of a serious government, now that the German worker had found his way back to his nation, to exterminate mercilessly the agitators who were misleading the nation. If the best men were dying at the front, the least we could do was to wipe out the vermin. 2 ' In Hitler's "second b o o k " of 1928 22 (not published but edited only in 1961), foreign policy in its narrower sense formed the core. But this work also reflects Hitler's fixation upon "Jewish Bolshevism." He argued that a German-Russian pact w o u l d "result" in the total rule of Germany by the Jews ... as in Russia." 2 3 The Bolshevik Revolution gave Russia its new leaders — Jewry. With the help of Slavic racial instincts. Jewry striving for ruling 24 -class status, and therefore supreme

Ibid., p. 595 Ibid., p. 620. Ibid., p. 155. Ibid., p. 155. Hitler's Secret Book. A document from 1928. New York, 1961. Ibid.. p. 132. Hitler always wrote "Schichte" instead of "Schicht".

THE "FINAL SOLUTION" A N D R E A S HILLGRUBER control, exterminated the previous alien ruling class. If Jewry has assumed control of all spheres of Russian iife with the Bolshevik Revolution, this is a natural process, because the Slavic people lack all organizational talent, and thus also that power which forms and maintains states. 2:

Nevertheless, Hitler deemed it "conceivable, that an internal change could occur within the Bolshevik world, so that the Jewish element could possibly be displaced by a more or less Russian national one." 2 6 Indeed, he went so far as to prophesy that "the struggle of the invariably anti-state pan-Slavic idea against the Bolshevik-Jewish state idea ... would end with the extermination of Jewry." 2 7 The residue would then be a Russia of low state power and deeply rooted anti-German attitudes .... A future pact between Germany and Russia makes no sense for Germany, when viewed from a position of sober expediency. To the contrary, it is indeed fortunate that this development took place, since it broke a ban which would have prevented us from seeking the aims of German foreign policy in the only possible direction: space in the east. 28

There is no controversy 2 9 on the continuity of racist a n d geopolitical guidelines in Hitler's mind, and their transfer as central axioms to National-Socialist "ideology" — in itself highly vague and ambiguous. There are different views about the extent to which these guidelines determined practical policy in the Third Reich, a n d influenced the details of the anti-Jewish measures taken by the regime in the "peace years" from 1933 to 1939.30 During this period, ;5

" :7

,0

Hitler's Secret Book, p. 138. Ibid., p. 132. Ibid., p. 138. Ibid., p. 139. This continuity is most amply documented in the study by Hans-Adolf Jacobsen, Nationalsozialistische Aussenpolitik ¡933-1938, Frankfurt/M.Berlin, 1968, pp. 446ff., 598ff. Further documents in Helmut Krausnick, "Kommissarbcfehl und 'Gerichtsbarkeitserlass Barbarossa' in neuer Sicht," Vierteljahrshefte fur Zeitsgeschichte (henceforth VfZ), 25, (1977), pp. 718ff. Jackel, Hitlers Weltanschauung, op. cit., and Jacobsen, op. cit., as well as Lucy S. Dawidowicz. The War Against the Jews, 1933-1945, New York, 1975, all

THE DECISION FOR THE FINAL SOLUTION E X T E R M I N A T I O N O F T H E JEWS IN T H E E A S T

Hitler retained the formula "Jewish Bolshevism" in his speeches. For example, in his Reichstag speech of January 30, 1937, he called Bolshevism "a pestilence which we had to bloodily oppose in Germany," when "Jewish-international Moscow Bolshevism sought to enter Germany." 31 He had avoided "every close contact with the carriers of these poisonous bacilli." 32 On February 20,1938 he told the Reichstag: "More than ever, we regard Bolshevism as the incarnation of the human destructive impulse." 33 Until the turn of 1938/1939 the slogan of "Jewish Bolshevism" remained central in National-Socialist agitation. But then, the temporary tactical need for a rapprochement with the Soviet Union dictated the separation of anti-Semitic propaganda from anti-Bolshevik slogans for two and a half years, with the former becoming intensified. In the winter of 1938/1939 Hitler's expressions regarding his comprehensive antiJewish aims became clearer than before in his conversations with foreigners. On November 24, 1938 he told the South African Minister of Defense, Pirow, that "the Jews... would disappear from Europe one day." 34 But, he continued: "World Jewry does not wish the Jews to disappear from Europe, but regards them as the vanguard for the Bolshevization of the world. The Jews hate him [Hitler], because he prevented the Bolshevization of Europe...." He "exports only one idea, which is not National Socialism ... but he exports anti-Semitism." 35 Hitler told Czech Foreign Minister Chvalkovsky on January 21, 1939: "We shall exterminate the Jews. The Jews will not get away with their responsibility for November 9, 1918 — this day will be avenged." 36

31

32 33

" 35

"

emphasize the systematic nature of the Jewish policy, even in this period. However, Uwe Dietrich Adam, Judenpolitik im Dritten Reich, Düsseldorf, 1972, and Broszat, op. cit. take the opposite view. Max Domarus ed.. Hitler. Reden und Proklamationen 1932-1945. vol. I: Triumph (¡932-1938). Neustadt an der Aisch, 1962, p. 671. Ibid., p. 671. Ibid., p. 799. Akten zur deutschen auswärtigen Politik 1918-1945. Serie D (1937-1941), Bd.IV. Baden-Baden, 1951, p. 293. Ibid., p. 295. Ibid., p. 170.

THE "FINAL SOLUTION' ANDREAS HILLGRUBER The radical nature of his public anti-Semitic declarations made all earlier statements pale by comparison. In his Reichstag speech of January 30, 1939 Hitler "prophesied" 37 a direct connection between war and the extermination of the Jews: During my struggle for power, it was the Jewish people, primarily, who laughed at my prophecies that I would one day take over the leadership in Germany and thus of the entire nation. And that I would then, inter alia, also find a solution for the Jewish problem. I believe, that this resounding laughter of the Jews in Germany has in the meantime been choked off in their throats. I wish to be a prophet again today: If international Jewish finance in and beyond Europe should succeed once again in plunging the nations into a world war, the result will not be the Bolshevization of the earth and hence Jewry's victory, but the extermination of the Jewish race in Europe!58 During the war Hitler often reverted to this "prophecy" and — typically — invariably attached false dates to it. He "switched" this statement to his Reichstag speech at the outbreak of the war on September 1, 1939, instead of on January 30, 1939. He did this for the first time on January 30, 1941, i.e., when all preparations for attacking the Soviet Union had become accelerated, in a speech in the Berlin Sport Palace: 3 ' I do not wish to forget the hint, which I already gave in the German Reichstag on September 1,1939, namely that if the rest of the world should be thrust into a general war by Jewry, then all Jewry will have played out its role in Europe! Perhaps they are still laughing today, even as they laughed at my earlier prophecies. The coming years and months will prove that here too my prediction was correct. In his proclamation to the German people on the day of the attack upon the Soviet Union (June 22, 1941), Hitler instantly readopted the phrase "Jewish Bolshevism": "

"

Broszat, op. cil., p. 771, does not interpret this from a psychological point of view as a mere "warning," but in itself "part of the motivation."

Max Domarus, ed., Hitler Reden und Proklamationen 1932-1945, vol. II: Untergang (1939-1945), Neustadt an der Aisch, 1963, p. 1058.

"

Ibid., p. 1663.

THE DECISION FOR THE FINAL SOLUTION EXTERMINATION OF THE JEWS IN THE EAST "For more than two decades the Jewish-Bolshevik regime in Moscow has tried to set fire not merely to Germany, but to all of Europe.... The Jewish-Bolshevik rulers in Moscow have unswervingly undertaken to force their domination upon us and the other European nations, and that not merely spiritually, but also in terms of military power. 40

Hitler viewed his decision to invade the Soviet Union from the aspect of his anti-Semitic world struggle, which he had expected since the mid-1920s, and for which he had "prepared" in the broadest sense of that word. "Now ... the hour has come, in which it is necessary to confront this plot of the Jewish Anglo-Saxon warmongers, and the equally Jewish rulers of the Bolshevik center in Moscow."41 National-Socialist propaganda had thus regained its traditional racist-ideological "foe-image" of "Jewish Bolshevism,"42 which remained the central axiom throughout the war, until 1945. Now these core-theories of National-Socialist doctrine were also communicated to the three million German soldiers of the Eastern Army which attacked the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941. Directly before the assault, they had been issued 'Guidelines for the Conduct of the Troops in Russia' by their High Command (OKW): Bolshevism is the deadly enemy of the National-Socialist German people. Germany's struggle is against this disintegrative ideology and its carriers. This struggle demands ruthless and energetic action against Bolshevik agitators, partisans, saboteurs, Jews — and the radical elimination of all active and passive resistance.43

Ibid.. p. 1727. Ibid., p. 1731. Jacobsen, op. tit., p. 459, footnote 21, reproduces the secret instructions to the German press after June 22,1941 (switch to "the destruction of Bolshevism"). On July 10, 1941 an "anti-Jewish action" commenced: "... the subject Jewry and World Bolshevism must be written up (as previously)." Nuremberg-Document NOKW-1962. For general continuity, see Helmut K r a u s n i c k and H a n s - H e i n r i c h W i l h e l m , Die Truppe des Weltanschauungskrieges. Die Einsatzgruppen der Sicherheitspolizei und des SD 1938-1942, Stuttgart, 1981, pp. 107f.

THE "FINAL SOLUTION" ANDREAS H I L L G R U B E R

The Mass Murder of the Jews in the Conquered Areas of the Soviet Union The exact date on which Hitler decided 44 upon the systematic extermination of the Jews in the wake of his racist-ideological war of extirpation in the conquered areas of European Russia is controversial. Nevertheless, there are many indications that the order was given in the preparatory stages of his planned attack on the Soviet Union, at the end of June and the beginning of July 1940. The command to shoot all Jews in Russia appears to have been communicated verbally either to Himmler or Heydrich at the end of May 1941, some weeks before the attack. This order was then passed

"

The period extends from summer 1940 (Eberhard Jackel) through March 1941 (Helmut Krausnick) until the beginning of July 1941, i.e., shortly after the start of the campaign (Hans-Giinther Seraphim). Broszat. op. cit.. p. 96. footnote 26, and p. 97, doubts the existence of a "comprehensive, order for the extermination" by Hitler concerning the "Final Solution," in the sense of the physical destruction of all Jews in German-ruled Europe. However, he states that the "first extensive liquidation act, the mass execution in the summer and fall of 1941, of hundreds of thousands of Jews in the occupied Soviet territories by the Einsaizkommandos of the security police and the SD was no doubt carried out on the personal directive of Hitler " (Ibid., p. 85.) The present author claims — in opposition to the views of Martin Broszat, op. cit. and Uwe Dietrich Adam, op. cit., — that there was definitely an order by Hitler (probably verbal) already in July 1941, and that this order extended the ongoing "Final Solution" practiced in the occupied Soviet territories (since the start of the German attack upon the Soviet Union) to the areas of Western and Central Europe. This basic order by Hitler was put into action in the extermination camps in Poland, after discussion and planning of the "best" possible implementation between December 1941 and January 1942. A similar position is taken by Christopher Browning, "Eine Antwort auf Martin Broszats Thesen zur Genesis der "Endlosung,"' VfZ, vol. 29, 1981, pp. 99ff. In his memoirs, Adolf Eichmann (Ich. Adolf Eichmann. Ein hislorischer Zeugenbericht, edited by Rudolf Aschenauer. Leoni, 1980,pp. 177ff.)mentions an order by Hitler, conveyed to him verbally by Heydrich "around the turn of the year 1941/1942," as the activating factor for the "physical extermination of the Jewish foe." A recent study by Gerald Fleming, Hitler and the Final Solution, University of California. 1984, emphasizes the direct responsibility of Hitler, and seeks to establish the exact processes in the summer of 1941, which marked the path from Hitler's order to the commencement of the mass exterminations.

THE DECISION FOR THE FINAL SOLUTION EXTERMINATION OF THE JEWS IN THE EAST on verbally by Reinhard Heydrich at the Border Police School of Pretzsch near Wittenberg, to the commanders of the so-called Einsatzgruppen or Einsatzkommandos.4S At that time Heydrich headed the Main Office of Reich Security — R S H A (Reichssicherheitshauptamt), the Security Police, and the Security Service (SD). Since March 1941, Hitler had given quite unequivocal hints, in his orders to leading military commanders, and in a speech, to the effect that the coming war in the east would differ from that in the west. He personally edited subparagraph B of the "Guidelines in Special Spheres re Directive No. 21 (Operation Barbarossa)," on March 13, 1941: In the operations area of the Army, the Reichsführer SS has been given special tasks on the orders of the Führer, in order to prepare the political administration. These tasks arise from the forthcoming final struggle of two opposing political systems. Within the framework of these tasks, the Reichsfiihrer SS acts independently and on his own responsibility.44 In a speech to some 200-250 leading military commanders on March 30, 1941, Hitler became more specific. Nevertheless, the key words noted by the Chief of the General Staff, Generaloberst Franz Haider, contain no mention of Jews. The soldiers, however, had long been familiar with the catch phrase "Jewish Bolshevism," against which war was now to commence. Haider's notes read: Struggle between two ideologies. Scathing evaluation of Bolshevism, equals antisocial criminality. Communism immense future danger .... This is a fight to the finish. If we do not accept this, we shall beat the enemy, but in thirty years we shall again confront the Communist foe. We don't make war to preserve the enemy.... Struggle against Russia: Extermination of Bolshevik Commissars and of the Communist intelligentsia.... Commissars and GPU personnel are criminals and must be treated as such.... The struggle 45

46

Heinz Höhne, The Order of the Death's Head, London, 1969, pp. 358ff; Helmut Krausnick, Hans Buchheim, Martin Broszat, Hans-Adolf Jacobsen, Anatomy of the SS State, London, 1968, pp. 61-62, cite the relevant depositions by Otto Ohlendorf and Walter Blume. Nuremberg document PS-477. IMT, Nuremberg, 1949, vol. XXVI, p. 54.

THE "FINAL SOLUTION" ANDREAS HILLGRUBER will differ greatly from that in the west. In the east harshness n o w means mildness for the future. 4 "

Negotiations between Heydrich and Quartermaster General Eduard Wagner established the spheres of joint or separate action for the Army and the SS Einsatzgruppen in the fulfillment of their "special tasks." This resulted in an order issued by the Army's Commander-in-Chief, General Fieldmarshal von Brauchitsch, on April 28, 1941. Concerning the action against the Jews, practical cooperation between the Army and the Einsatzgruppen led to an order by the Army Commanders, which called for the identification and registration of Jews in their domiciles directly after the troops had occupied any area. This was effected by large posters, 48 which simplified the task of the Security Police and SD units. Unless, of course, individuals or groups of Jews fled into the forests or went "underground" — after learning of their imminent fate. Four Einsatzgruppen were raised for the prospective campaign against the Soviet Union, each consisting of 500 to 990 men, a total of some 3,000 drawn from the Gestapo, the detective force, the constabulary, foreign auxiliary police and the Waffen-SS. They were subdivided into Einsatz- and Sonderkommandos. While the systematic killing of the Jews in the operational areas of the armies and army groups was the task of the Einsatzgruppen, this task devolved upon the "Senior SS and Police chiefs" (Höhere SS — und Polizeiführer — HSSPF) — inter alia — in the occupied Soviet areas under German civil administration. At first, a written notice of July 2, 1941, issued by Heydrich to the four HSSPF, limited the killings. He instructed them in a "concise fashion" pursuant to direct, previous "basic orders" for the Einsatzgruppen and Kommandos. We read, under "4. Executions":

Generaloberst (Franz) Halder. Kriegstagebuch. Hans-Adolf Jacobsen, ed., vol. II, Stuttgart, 1963. pp. 336f. Christian Streit, Keine Kameraden. Die Wehrmacht und die sowjetischen Kriegsgefangenen 1941-1945, Stuttgart, 1978, pp. 1-13. On the Cooperation between the army and the Einsatzgruppen, see Krausnick and Wilhelm. Die Truppe des Weltanschauungskrieges, op. eil., pp. 205f.

THE DECISION FOR THE FINAL SOLUTION EXTERMINATION OF THE JEWS IN THE EAST All the following are to be executed: Officials of the Comintern (together with professional Communist politicians in general) Top and medium-level officials and radical lower-level officials of the Party, Central Committee and district and sub-district committees People's Commissars Jews in Party and State employment, and other, radical elements (saboteurs, propagandists, snipers, assassins, agitators, etc.) insofar as they are, in any particular case, required or no longer required, to supply information on political or economic matters which are of special importance for the further operations of the Security Police, or for the economic reconstruction of the Occupied Territories.... 4 '

However, in "Order No. 8" issued by Heydrich on July 17, 1941, the "elements" to be separated from the bulk of the Soviet POW's included "all Jews," 50 as well as Communist officials. On November 5, 1945, in the Nuremberg Trials of the principal war criminals, Otto Ohlendorf stated that "a secret verbal order was issued to all Einsatzgruppen commanders in May 1941." Furthermore, in the Einsatzgruppen trial on June 29,1947," Dr. Walter Blume stated the same. Both witnesses related that Heydrich, addressing "a limited circle" of Einsatzgruppen and Einsatzkommando chiefs in June 1941, declared that "Eastern Jewry is the reservoir of Bolshevism, and is thus to be exterminated, in the view of the Führer." Even if we were to question their evidence, the very large number of Jews reported killed by the Einsatzgruppen and the HSSPF in the first weeks of the campaign leaves no doubt that these actions could hardly have been limited to "only Jews in party and state positions." At the least, these figures indicate an intention to kill immediately all Jews in the German-occupied areas of the Soviet Union in the course of the campaign in the summer and fall of 1941. Due to the vast number of prospective victims, this soon led to almost insoluble problems. ** 50 51

Document no. 171 in Y, Arad, Y. Gutman, A. Margaliot eds.. Documents on the Holocaust, Jerusalem, 1981, p. 377. Nuremberg Document NO-3414. IMT, vol. XXXI, p. 39 (Otto Ohlendorf) and Nuremberg Document NO-4145 (Dr. Walter Blume), Institut für Zeitsgeschichte, München.

THE "FINAL SOLUTION' ANDREAS H I L L G R U B E R

All the killings ("liquidations") of Jews and other "enemies of the Reich and S t a t e " within the operational areas of the Einsatzgruppen, were recorded from the start of the campaign in the " R e p o r t s of Events in the U S S R " — "Ereignismeldungen UdSSR."52 These reports were initially compiled daily, and then every 2 - 4 days, starting with No. 1 of June 23, 1941, and finally ending with No. 195 of April 23, 1942. Extracted from reports to the RSHA, they were sent, at first, only to Himmler and several sections of Bureau IV, and later saw wider distribution. From May 1, 1942 they were replaced by "Reports from the Occupied Eastern Territories," 5 3 starting with No. 1 and ending with No. 55 of May 21, 1943. However, the evidence in the latter is inferior to that of the "Ereignismeldungen." From the "Ereignismeldungen" we learn that Einsatzgruppe A (behind the north section of the Eastern Front) executed 136, 421 Jews up to November 25, 1941; its victims also included 1,064 Communists, 56 partisans, 653 mentally disturbed persons, 44 Poles, 28 POW's, 5 Gypsies and 1 Armenian. 5 4 By February 1,1942 the number had risen to 229,052. 55 Einsatzgruppe B (behind Army G r o u p Center) killed 45,467 up to November 14, 1941; Einsatzgruppe C (behind Army G r o u p South) accounted f o r 95,600 up to the beginning of December 1941. Einsatzgruppe D (in the southernmost section of the Eastern Front) killed a further 92,000 Jews up to April 8, 1942.56 In a second, large " w a v e " of extermination in the Ukraine, South Russia and the Bialystok area, another 363,211 Jews were shot between August and December 1942.57 This yields a total of 824,000 u p to November 1942. We must " " " 55 56

57

Now in Bundesarchiv Koblenz. R 58/214-221. Now in Bundesarchiv Koblenz, R 58/697-699; R 58/222-224. IMT (as m footnote 46), vol. XXX, p. 72. Ibid. Raul Hilberg, The Destruction of the European Jews. Chicago, 1960, p. 256, footnote 85; Krausnick, Anatomy of the SS-State. op. cit., p. 64 (compilation based on "Ereignismeldungen UdSSR"). i Himmler's report to Hitler, December 20, 1942 (Nuremberg-Document NOSH) on "Anti-Partisan Successes" since August 1942 in "South-Russia, Ukraine, Bialystok." divided by Himmler into sub-paragraphs: "a)arrested..., b) executed..., c) Jews executed..." (this document is extensively quoted, and contradicts, due to the differentiation between killed Jews and actual partisans,

THE DECISION FOR THE FINAL SOLUTION E X T E R M I N A T I O N O F T H E J E W S IN T H E E A S T

take into account "gaps" in the available documents, as well as possible exaggerations in the reports. The first phase of mass executions ended in the winter of 1941/1942, and during the following intermediate phase (until July 1942) the surviving Jews were "concentrated" in ghettos in the larger population centers. This led to forced labor in the ghettos, labor camps and armaments plants outside the ghettos.58 The second "wave" commenced in the late summer and fall of 1942, under the inappropriate designation "gang suppression." 59 It was directed mainly at the ghettos and the number of victims reached the aforementioned high figure within a short time. On October 27, 1942, Himmler ordered the destruction of the last big ghetto, at Pinsk.60 These systematic murders in the occupied Soviet territories attained a last zenith61 in the Ukraine, after the surrender of the remnant of the German Sixth Army at Stalingrad on February 2, 1943. An orderfrom Himmler to HSSPF East,dated June21,1943, states: I order that all Jews still remaining in ghettos of the eastern area be assembled in concentration camps. A s of August 1,1943,1 forbid the exit of all Jews from these camps for work.... The m a x i m u m possible number o f male Jews are to be shifted to the concentration c a m p in the oil-shale area, for the mining of oil-shale. The unneeded Jewish ghetto-dwellers are t o be evacuated eastwards. 6 2

The "few tens of thousands" 63 still remaining in these concentration camps were shifted to camps in Germany upon the

the thesis of "Anti-Partisan Operations." Quoted in Andreas Hillgruber, "Die 'Endlösung' und das deutsche Ostimperium als Kernstück des rassenideologischen Programms des Nationalsozialismus," VfZ, vol. 20,1972, p. 148. For this phase, see Krausnick, Anatomy of the SS-State, op. cit., pp. 71-72. See pp. 20-21 in the text, concerning the link between the extermination of the Jews and anti-partisan warfare, in the versions by Hitler and Nazi propaganda. Nuremberg-Document NO-2027, Institut für Zeitgeschichte, Munich. See Martin Broszat, op. cit., p. 121, footnote 70. Nuremberg-Document NO-2403, Institut für Zeitgeschichte, Munich. Krausnick, Anatomy of the SS-State. op. cit., p. 73.

THE "FINAL SOLUTION" ANDREAS HILLGRUBER

approach of the Red Army. It is likely that many of them died in the last months of the war. To illustrate the large number of victims in these mass exterminations of Jews, we have extracted statistics from the "Ereignismeldtmgen UdSSR" for the larger Soviet towns. On November 30, 1941, in Riga alone, 10,600 Jews were killed" by Einsatzkommando 2 of Einsatzgruppe A. In the ravine of Babi-Yar near Kiev, 33,771 Jews were murdered by Einsatzkommando 4a of Einsatzgruppe C.' 5 In "special actions" carried out by Einsatzkommandos in the summer and fall of 1941,66 the following numbers of Jews were liquidated: in Kamenetz Podolsk, 23,600; in Berditchev, 1,303 (including 875 "Jewesses above the age of 12"); in Dniepropetrovsk, 10,000; in Rovno, 15,000; and in a "big action" in the ghetto of Minsk, 2,278. These mass murders were limited by the economic needs of the German occupation authorities, quite apart from such "technical problems" as "extreme cold which hampers mass executions" or the "wide dispersal" of the Jews. Thus, in the report of Einsatzgruppe A of February 1942 we read:67 "The systematic mopping-up in the east includes, according to the basic orders, the most radical elimination of Jewry which can be effected.... However, the final and basic removal of the remaining Jews in the area of Byelorussia after the German entry involves certain difficulties": some of the skilled workers are "still essential." 64

" M

67

"Ereignismeldungen UdSSR". No. 156 of January 16, 1941. Gerald Reitlingcr, The Final Solution: Hitler's Attempt to Exterminate the Jews of Europe, 19391945, Berlin, 1961, p. 246, sets the number of Jews murdered in Riga in 1941 at a minimum of 24,000. The commander of Einsatzgruppe A — Stahlecker — estimates 27,800. Reitlinger deems this exaggerated and reduces the numbers given for "Blood-Sunday" (November 30. 1941) to 4,000, basing his argument on the "Ereignismeldung" for that day. However, an action of similar scope followed in Riga on December 8, 1941. The Riga mass killing of November 30, 1941 included a transport of Jews shifted eastward from the Reich. Between the 25th and 29th of November 1941 the first 4,934 German Jews were shot in Kovno (see Martin Broszat, op. cit., p. 104, footnote 45). "Ereignismeldungen UdSSR," No. 101 of October 2, 1941 and No. 106 of October 7, 1941. Compiled from Raul Hilberg, op. cit., pp. 193fT., whose source is the "Ereignismeldungen UdSSR." IMT, vol. XXX, pp. 76ff.

THE DECISION FOR THE FINAL SOLUTION EXTERMINATION OF THE JEWS IN THE EAST

It is impossible to arrive at an accurate total for the Jews killed in Soviet territory. Apart from the aforementioned "gaps" in the available reports of the Einsatzgruppen and the HSSPF, there is the question of which of the territories newly annexed by the Soviet Union in 1939/1940 are to be included in "Poland," the "Baltic States," or Romania (as in the case of Bessarabia and north Bukovina). Furthermore, from the fall of 1941, Jews from Germany were transported to the "east" — primarily to the Baltic areas — and there subjected to extermination.68 Lastly, Soviet statistics regarding religious denomination are highly inaccurate, especially for Jews.69 Taking into account all these problems and sources of error, Hans-Heinrich Wilhelm has estimated that "a total of more than 2.2 million Jews perished as a result of the Nazi terror and the persecutions of Hitler's allies."70 The first "wave," from summer 1941 to spring 1942, comprised about a third during this period of mass shootings (i.e., approximately 700,000), with the Einsatzgruppen accounting for a mere quarter, i.e., some 500,000." At the latest from March 1941, the racist-ideological extermination of "Jewish Bolshevism" formed an integral component of the war on the Eastern Front. Some weeks before the onset of Operation Barbarossa, the Einsatzgruppen were informed of the intended "liquidations" in Soviet territory. This supports the thesis that the mass killings of the Jews had no original connection with the anti-partisan operations, which expanded rapidly behind the German front from the end of 1941. We must not overlook the immense discrepancy in the numbers of Jews and partisans killed in the so-called "anti-guerrilla warfare," as appearing in the "liquidation" reports of the Einsatzgruppen and of the SS. Stalin's appeal of July 3, 1941 for a partisan war behind the German front " "

70

71

See footnote 64 above. The estimated number of Jews in the Soviet Union in 1941 fluctuates by over 1 million. This involves primarily the unanswered — and unanswerable — question of how many Jews managed to escape from the Germans into the unoccupied territories. Calculations vary from 2.665 million to 1.6 million. For details, see Gerald Reitlinger, op. cit., pp. 558f. Helmut Krausnick and Hans-Heinrich Wilhelm, Die Truppe des

Weltanschauungskrieges. op. cit., p. 621. Ibid., p. 622.

102

THE "FINAL SOLUTION" ANDREAS HILLGRUBER

made it possible for Hitler to effect a propagandistic combination of both campaigns. This provided the German army in the east with a convincing psychological justification for the mass killings of Jews. In the circle of his intimates — Goring, Bormann, L a m m e r s , Rosenberg, K e i t e P — Hitler said on July 16, 1941: "The Russians have now issued an order for a partisan war behind our f r o n t . This partisan war has its advantage: it allows us to exterminate all w h o oppose us." The factually inaccurate combination of Jews and partisans 7 3 was obviously intended for the psychological relief of German soldiers, who witnessed the mass executions of Jews, or heard of them. In the fall of 1941, this excuse also appeared in the orders of certain a r m y commanders, such as von Reichenau, von Manstein, etc. On October 10, 1941, Reichenau stated that "the soldier must achieve full understanding of the necessity for a harsh but just vengeance against Jewish subhumanity," since "experience has proven that revolts in the rear of the army were invariably incited by the Jews. " 7 4 In an order of November 20, 1941, Manstein describes " J e w r y " as the middleman between the enemy at our rear and the still fighting remnants of the Red Army and the Red leadership: more than in Europe, it [Jewry] occupies all key posts of the political leadership and administration, of trade and crafts, and forms the nucleus for all disquiet and possible revolts. The Jewish-Bolshevist system must be exterminated once and for all. 75

Subsequently, the category of "unreliable elements" increasingly and arbitrarily comprised "partisans, saboteurs, possible enemy groups, parachutists not wearing uniforms, Jews, leading Communists, etc." 7 6 The Jews were thus placed in a category to " " " " 76

IMT, vol. XXXVIII, Nuremberg-Document L-22I. Jews who fled into the forests before the massacres of the Einsatzgruppen played only a minor role in the formation of Soviet-controlled partisan units. IMT, vol. XXXV, Nuremberg-Document D-411. IMT, vol. XX, pp. 698ff. See, for example, an operation order by the Commissioner of the Security Police and the SD, attached to the Commander of the hinterland Area South / Sonderkommando lib, of January 12, 1942 (Nuremberg-Document NOKW3453, Institut fur Zeitgeschichte, Munich.

THE DECISION FOR THE FINAL SOLUTION EXTERMINATION OF THE JEWS IN THE EAST

which they did not belong, i.e., "gang-helpers and suspects" in the ongoing partisan warfare. Consequently, this artificial connection cannot be used by historians to justify the extermination of the Jews — a goal sought and largely attained by Hitler in the occupied Soviet territories. Some contend that this occurred as a part of a partisan campaign and if, indeed, the Hague Convention for Warfare on Land was not observed, the relevant offenses can be described as "war crimes," comparable to those which also occurred in the war on land, at sea and in the air between the combatants. The excuse that the extermination of the Jews was a part of anti-partisan struggle, and the comparison with other "war crimes" cannot be accepted. The mass killings of the Jews arose directly from the extreme, antiSemitic race doctrine of Hitler and of National Socialism. This produced a "dogmatic fixation" combined with "spasmodic paranoid aggressivity." 77 The Nuremberg Trials of 1945-1946 described this as a "crime against humanity," although it would have been more accurate to term it a "crime against mankind." This crime was justified by Hitler and Himmler as part of the pseudoreligious, historical "mission" which they were forced to fulfill. The Jews were not regarded as humans to be "fought," as opponents or enemies in or out of uniform (like the partisans), involved in any way in combat against the German occupation forces. Quite the contrary: as in World War I, the German troops were initially welcomed by the Jews as their "liberators." Furthermore, the Jews could not even be regarded as specific representatives of the Red Army, such as the commissars, against whom the notorious "Commissar Order" of June 6, 1941 was issued. They could not even be rationally considered as particularly representative adherents of the "enemy" ruling system. Rather, an arbitrarily selected, large group of people had been declared to be a "deadly enemy" before the war; they were to be physically exterminated in a purely arbitrary fashion, based on the racist-ideological doctrine. This exceptional event cannot thus be compared with any other kind of "war crime," beyond the accepted international laws of war. ,T

Broszat, op. cit., p. 118.

104

THE "FINAL SOLUTION" ANDREAS HILLGRUBER

The mass murder of the Jews in the German-occupied territories of the Soviet Union between 1941 and 1944 is beyond any doubt. The "Ereignismeldungen VdSSR" and other primary evidence from SS sources from 1941-1944 constitute irrefutable testimony for the historian, both of the act itself and its magnitude. The sole "explanation" of these mass crimes ordered by Hitler and Himmler can be found in the racist-ideological frame of reference. Furthermore, the sources documenting the many general expressions by Hitler and Himmler, as well as those quite specific to the crime itself, are irrefutable. There is no room for doubt about the connection between the racist-ideological doctrine and its realization in practice. Even if we k n o w hardly anything of the way in which Hitler discussed these measures with Himmler and Heydrich, w h o bore the institutional responsibility for the liquidations carried out by the Security Police and S S - K o m m a n d o s . D u r i n g this phase both men were frequently present at the Fiihrer's headquarters. 7 8

Hitler's Open Declarations on the Extermination of the Jews in Europe It is noteworthy that in his public speeches and proclamations during 1942 and at the beginning of 1943 Hitler invariably referred to the "prophecy" in his Reichstag speech of January 30, 1939. By this means, his "prophecy" on the "solution" of the Jewish problem assumed a significance which was to be "pounded into" the heads of all who heard his speeches and read his proclamations. In his New Year's speech to the German people on January 1, 1942, he spoke of the "struggle against the Jewish-Capitalist-Bolshevik World Conspiracy": 7 ' "The Bolshevik monster to which [Churchill and "

"

Ibid., p. 98, also p. 116: In spite of the destruction of the pertinent files, mainly those of the Sicherheitspolizei (Security Police), who were primarily responsible, and the methodical removal of all traces after the actions, as well as the unclear phrasing of the documents themselves, the acts as such could not be hidden. Given the centralization of all decision-making, however, the attempts to destroy evidence were to a large extent successful. Domarus, op. cit., p. 1821.

THE DECISION FOR THE FINAL SOLUTION E X T E R M I N A T I O N O F T H E J E W S IN T H E E A S T R o o s e v e l t — A . H . ] w a n t t o deliver the E u r o p e a n n a t i o n s , will ultimately subvert them a n d their nations. H o w e v e r , the J e w will n o t e x t e r m i n a t e the E u r o p e a n n a t i o n s , but will be the victim o f h i s o w n p l o t . " In his address in the Berlin Sport Palace o n J a n u a r y 3 0 , 1942, he declared: It is clear to us that the war can only end with the extermination of the Aryan nations, or that Jewry will disappear f r o m Europe. O n September 1,19391 already stated in the G e r m a n Reichstag — a n d I avoid premature prophecies — that this war will not end as the Jews imagine, namely, that the European-Aryan nations will be exterminated. On the contrary, the result of this war will be the extermination of Jewry. For the first time, the genuine, ancient Jewish lawwill beapplied: " E y e f o r e y e . t o o t h f o r t o o t h ! " . . . . And the h o u r will come when the most evil world-enemy of all times will have played out his role for at least a thousand years. 80 On the 2 2 n d anniversary o f the Party's f o u n d a t i o n — February 2 4 , 1942 — Hitler 8 1 wrote in a " m e s s a g e " to the " v e t e r a n fighters": ...my prophecy will be fulfilled, that this war will not destroy A r y a n humanity, but will exterminate the Jew. Whatever the struggle will bring, or however long it may last, this will be its final result. A n d only then, after the removal of these parasites, will the suffering world see a long period of understanding a m o n g the nations, a n d with it true peace. On S e p t e m b e r 30, 1942 Hitler declared in the Berlin Sport Palace: 8 2 Once the Jews laughed at my prophecies in G e r m a n y , too. I d o not know whether they are still laughing today, or whether in the meantime their laughter has ceased. Even now I can declare that their laughter will cease everywhere. And these prophecies will also come true. A d d r e s s i n g the "veteran fighters" o n N o v e m b e r 8, 1942 in t h e L o w e n b r a u k e l l e r , M u n i c h , Hitler said:

" 12

Ibid., pp. 1828f. Ibid., p. 1844. Ibid., p. 1920.

106

THE "FINAL SOLUTION' ANDREAS HILLGRUBER You will remember the session of the Reichstag in which I declared: If Jewry should imagine that it can bring about an international world war for the extermination of the European races, the result will not be the extermination of the European races, but the extermination of Jewry in Europe. A s a prophet I have always been ridiculed. Of those who laughed at me then, an immense number no longer laugh today, and those who still laugh will perhaps cease to d o so in a little while. The realization of this will spread throughout the entire world. We National Socialists will ensure that international Jewry will be recognized in its entire, demonic threat. 83

And in his festive proclamation on "Party-Founding D a y , " February 24, 1943, he repeated: "This struggle will not end ... as intended, with the extermination of Aryan mankind, but with the extirpation of Jewry in Europe." 8 4 Given a most benign interpretation, these public statements could, of course, be regarded as a " m e r e " expression of demagogic " d e t e r m i n a t i o n " of racial anti-Semitism " t o carry out ruthless 'revenge' against the Jews," without indicating their actual extermination. 8 5 However, in view of our knowledge of the events occurring simultaneously in the east, this would hardly be possible. Such an interpretation is excluded when one reads Hitler's remarks in his "table talk." He often reverted to his old "biological" axioms. For instance, on July 10, 1941 he said: 86 "I feel like Robert Koch in politics. He discovered the bacillus, and led medical science into new paths. I discovered the Jew as the bacillus and the ferment in social decomposition." Goebbels recorded in his diary the gist of his talks with Hitler at his "Wolfsschanze" H.Q. in East Prussia (entry for August 18, 1941):87 The Ftihrer is convinced that his former conviction expressed in the Reichstag is being confirmed. Namely, that if Jewry were to succeed in once again provoking a war, this would end with the extermination of the Jews. This is being confirmed with well-nigh 83 84 85 84 8

"

Ibid., p. 1937. Ibid., p. 1992. See Broszat, op. cit., p. 108. The notes of W. Koeppen, quoted by Broszat, op. cit., p. 88, footnote 20. Quoted from Broszat, op. cit., pp. 88ff.

THE DECISION FOR THE FINAL SOLUTION EXTERMINATION OF THE JEWS IN THE EAST uncanny certainty in these weeks and months. In the east, the Jews must pay the bill.... In a "table talk" on October 25,1941, in the presence of Himmler and Heydrich, Hitler expressed his thoughts with special cynicism: From the rostrum of the Reichstag I prophesied to Jewry that, in the event of war's proving inevitable, the Jew would disappear from Europe. That race of criminals has on its conscience the two million dead of the First World War, and now already hundreds of thousands more. Let nobody tell me that all the same we can't park them in the marshy parts of Russia! Who's worrying about our troops? It's not a bad idea, by the way, that public rumour attributes to us a plan to exterminate the Jews. Terror is a salutary thing. The attempt to create a Jewish State will be a failure.88 After a visit to the ghetto of Vilna on November 1, 1941, Goebbels recorded the following 'impressions': 89 The picture becomes dreadful after a short trip through the ghetto. The Jews are squatting on each other, horrible figures, not to be seen, let alone to be touched ... horrible figures starve in the streets, whom I would not like to meet at night. The Jews are like the lice of civilized mankind. Somehow they must be exterminated, or they will invariably resume their tormentive and molesting role. In the presence of Himmler and Lammers on January 25, 1942, Hitler declared in one of his "table talks": 90 It must be done quickly; it is worse if I allow a tooth to be extracted gradually, a few centimeters every three months. Once pulled, the pain is gone. The Jew must get out of Europe. Otherwise we shall never havea European understanding.... I simply say, he must go. I can't help it if he is smashed in the process. I see one thing only: absolute extermination, if they don't leave of their own will. Two days later (January 27, 1942) he added: 91 " "

91

Hitler's Table Talk, ¡941-1944, London, 1973, p. 87. Quoted from Broszat, op. cit., p. 97, footnote 33. Werner Jochmann (ed.), Adolf Hitler, Monologue im 1941-1944, Hamburg, 1980, p. 106 Ibid., p. 241.

F0irerhaupiquariier

108

THE "FINAL SOLUTION' ANDREAS HILLGRUBER The Jew must leave Europe! It's best they go to Russia. I have no mercy for the Jews. They will always remain an element which incites the nations against each other.

All this was said after the notorious Wannsee Conference on January 20, 1942, at which Heydrich informed all the representatives of the German authorities involved about the organized "Final Solution" throughout German-ruled Europe. Their various roles were d e t e r m i n e d , and the physical extermination of all Jews in Central and Western Europe was initiated. On February 14, 1942, Goebbels summed up a visit with Hitler in Berlin, in his diary: 92 The Ftihrer once again stated that he was ruthlessly determined to finish with the Jews in Europe. There is no place for sentimental impulses. The Jews have deserved the catastrophe which they now experience. They will experience their o w n destruction together with that of our enemies. We must accelerate this process with cold ruthlessness; by this we are performing an incalculable service for mankind, which has been suffering and tormented for millennia ...

Hitler openly discussed the extermination of European Jewry with certain foreign statesmen and diplomats, since he was interested in including the Jews of all European countries. On July 21, 1941 he told the Croatian Minister of Defense, Kvatemik: 9 3 ...If a single state would suffer, for whatever reasons, one Jewish family, this would become a focus of bacilli for a new decomposition. If there were no more Jews in Europe, the unity of the European nations would no longer be disturbed.

Hitler still spoke of Madagascar or Siberia as possible destinations for the expelled European Jews, although the Einsatzgruppen had already started the mass murder of Jews in Soviet Russia. But in April 1943, Hitler made himself perfectly clear 92

"

Louis P. Lochner ed„ Goebbels' Tagebucher 1942/43, Zurich, 1948, pp. 87f. Akten zur deutschen auswartigen Politik 1918-1945. Sene D, Bd. XIII Gottingen, 1970, Anhang III, p. 838.

THE DECISION FOR THE FINAL SOLUTION EXTERMINATION OF THE JEWS IN THE EAST to the Rumanian Chief of State, Marshal Antonescu, and to the Hungarian Regent, Admiral Horthy. On April 13, 1943 he told Antonescu: 94 ...the Jews are the natural allies of Bolshevism, and candidates for the places of our present intelligentsia who are to be murdered by Bolshevization. Therefore he was of the opinion — in contrast to Marshal Antonescu — that the most radical approach to the Jews was the best one. He ... prefers a sea battle of Salamis rather than an undecided engagement; this is why he prefers to burn all bridges behind him, since Jewish hatred in any case was gigantic. Due to the removal of the Jews, Germany is a united nation without opposition.... Of course, there is no return from this path. On April 16, 1943 Hitler said to Horthy: 95 Germany is morally strengthened because the Jews have been removed; in a short while the last of them will disappear eastwards. Problems created for Germany by Jewish influence in 1918 cannot occur now. If the Jews are not driven out, they will once again destroy the economy, the currency and morals ... one must not be fearful of the anti-Jewish measures. Hungary had not pursued an anti-Semitic policy and wound up with a Béla Kun just the same. Neither had the Baltic States nor Poland followed an anti-Semitic policy, but they were overrun by the Jewish Bolshevists. This implies that if one is going to experience the unpleasant aspects of a struggle in any case, there is no need to hesitate about engaging in an energetic struggle against the Jews. There can be no faltering, and anyone who believes in compromises on this question is mistaken. Besides, why should the Jews be handled with kid gloves? After all, they had instigated the [first] world war and were responsible for all the millions who died as a result. Afterwards they had caused the [Russian] revolution, and again inflicted untold harm. They are also responsible for the present war, and the forms it is assuming.... The demand to intensify anti-Semitic measures in Hungary was answered by Horthy. 96 He claimed that he had taken every possible Andreas Hillgruber ed., Staatsmänner und Diplomaten bei Hitler. Zweiter Teil: 1942-1944, Frankfurt/M., 1970, p. 233. Ibid., p. 240. Ibid., pp. 245f.

110

THE "FINAL SOLUTION' A N D R E A S HILLGRUBER

measure, within the realm of decency, against the Jews, but one could hardly murder them or otherwise deprive them of life. Hitler's reaction was a typical about-face: "This was not necessary, Hungary could accommodate the Jews in concentration camps." And "if one speaks of murdering the Jews, he must... state that only one was guilty of murder — the Jew — who instigates wars, and has given this war its present turn against civilians, women and children." When Horthy remarked that "he must blushingly admit that he had sent 36,000 Jews to the front in labor battalions, most of whom probably perished during the Russian advance," Hitler replied "that the Regent need not blush; since the Jews had instigated the war, and one need not therefore have mercy upon them, even if the war involved serious consequences for them." On the next day, in a conversation in the forenoon, Horthy reverted to the question 97 "what he should do with the Jews, after he had more or less deprived them of all means of livelihood — he could by no means kill them." Ribbentrop answered "that the Jews must either be exterminated or sent to concentration camps. There is no other possibility." Hitler added: that contrary to all fears which ... had also been voiced to him repeatedly in Germany, everything continued, even without Jews. Wherever the Jews were left to themselves, as, for example, in Poland, the most cruel misery and depravity prevailed. They are simply pure parasites. This situation has been drastically remedied in Poland. There, if the Jews refuse to work they are shot. If they cannot work they must perish. They must be treated like tuberculosis germs, which can infect a healthy body. That is by no means cruel, when one considers that even innocent creatures like hares and deer must be killed to prevent damage. Why should we show more consideration for these beasts who wished to bring us Bolshevism? Nations who do not defend themselves against the Jews perish.

One year later, on March 16, 1944, in an argument with the Bulgarian Regency Councillor, Hitler said 98

Ibid., p. 256. Ibid., p. 379.

THE DECISION FOR THE FINAL SOLUTION E X T E R M I N A T I O N O F T H E J E W S IN T H E E A S T that he had often been reproached for having made the Jews his bitter enemies by his ruthless action against them. His answer was that the Jews would have been his and Germany's enemy in any case, but that he had removed them entirely by eliminating them as a focus of danger to internal morale.

When talking to the Hungarian Prime Minister, Sztojay, on June 7, 1944, Hitler again reverted to his Reichstag declaration of January 30, 1939." He recalled that he "had declared in his Reichstag speech, that if the Jews began the war, not we, but the Jews will be exterminated.... If the Jewish race were to be victorious, at least 20 million Germans would be exterminated, and several millions would starve."

Non-public Statements of Hitler, Himmler and Goebbels Concerning the Mass-Murder of the Jews Himmler and Hitler did not mince words when talking to leaders of the Party and SS, and also top military men — and certainly not among themselves. In a speech to the SS-Korprfiihrer on April 24, 1943, Himmler declared: We were the first to really answer the race problem by action, by the race problem we naturally did not mean anti-Semitism. AntiSemitism is exactly like delousing. The removal of lice is not an ideological question, but a matter of hygiene. Thus anti-Semitism is not an ideological issue, but a matter of hygiene, which will s o o n be behind us. We are almost deloused, we have only some 20,000 lice left, and then it will be ended in all of Germany. 1 0 0

"The modern nations ... have no choice but to exterminate the Jews," as Goebbels summarized Hitler's views in his diary on May 13, 1943:101 "It is the firm conviction of the Führer that world Jewry " 100

101

Ibid., p. 474. Bradley F. Smith and Agnes F. Peterson eds., Heinrich Himmler. Geheimreden 1933 bis 1945 und andere Ansprachen, Frankfurt/M.-Berlin-Vienna, 1974, pp. 200f. Quoted from Broszat, op. eil., pp. 120f., footnote 68.

112

THE "FINAL SOLUTION" 130

ANDREAS HILLGRUBER

is facing a great fall.... The nations which have first recognized and resisted the Jew for what he is shall rule the world in his place." When Hitler received a report by Himmler 102 on June 19,1943, he asked the latter "to effect the radical evacuation of the Jews in the next three to four months, despite the resulting disquiet." When speaking to a number of SS-Gruppenfiihrer in Posen on October 4, 1943,103 Himmler said "that those participating in the mass killings of the Jews had remained decent, apart from exceptions of human weakness." He described "the evacuation of the Jews, the extermination of the Jewish people," as the "most difficult task." He thus dropped the cover name "evacuation" for the extermination. "Most of you will know what it means when 100 corpses lie side by side, when there are 500 or 1,000. To have gone through this ... is a never written and never to be written page of glory in our history...." In a speech of October 6, 1943 delivered to the Reichsleiter and Gauleiter in Posen two days later, Himmler Raid:104 The sentence "the Jews must be exterminated" with its few words ... is easily said. But for him w h o must carry out this demand it is the hardest and most difficult of all.... We faced the question: what about the women and children? I have decided to find a perfectly clear solution. I did not consider it justified to exterminate the men — that is to kill them or let them be killed — and allow the children to live as avengers, for our sons and grandchildren. For the organization which performed this task, it was the hardest ever. It has been done.... Perhaps much later we can reflect o n whether more should be told the German people about this. I think that it is preferable that we — all of us — who have done this for our people, who have taken this responsibility upon ourselves (responsibility for a deed, not for an idea), should take this secret with us to our graves.

In a speech to several Generals at Sonthofen on May 24, 1944, Himmler declared: 105 102

"» 104 105

Note by Himmler of June 1943 (Bundesarchiv Koblenz), quoted from Krausnick, Anatomy of the SS-State, op. cit., p. 128. IMT, vol. XXIX, Nuremberg Document PS-1919, p. 145. Smith and Peterson op. cit., pp. 169f. Ibid., p. 203.

THE DECISION FOR THE FINAL SOLUTION EXTERMINATION OF THE JEWS IN THE EAST Another problem, decisive for the internal security of the Reich and Europe, was the Jewish problem. This was solved as ordered, and in accordance with our national perception (applause) 104 .... I did not feel justified — and this concerns the Jewish women and children — to allow the children to grow up as avengers, who will then kill our fathers' 07 and our grandchildren. The problem was thus solved without compromise.... But I have one conviction. I would fear for the front built in the east of the General Government [Poland], if we had not solved the Jewish problem there, if the ghetto of Lublin still existed, or the giant ghetto of 500,000 people in Warsaw.... 108 Two days later, on May 26, 1944, he addressed the same subject when speaking to high-ranking officers: 109 I have thrust Jewry out of its positions ruthlessly .... I have thus deprived the broad masses of their last catalyst. By removing the Jew, I have prevented the possible formation of any revolutionary core or focus of bacilli in Germany. One can,ofcourse,askme: Yes, but could you not have solved this in a simpler way — or rather not simpler — but in a more humane fashion? Even when the final catastrophe of the Third Reich could no longer be ignored, Goebbels and Hitler repeated their anti-Semitic hate tirades. On January 21, 1945, Goebbels wrote in the weekly Das Reich: "Mankind would sink into eternal darkness and revert to a primitive and apathetic primeval age, if the Jews were to win this war." 110 On March 14, 1945 he wrote in his diary: "The Jews must be killed like rats the moment one has power. Thank G o d we have done this radically in Germany. I hope that the world will follow our example." 111

106

* Recording: cf. Smith and Peterson, op. cit., p. 305, footnote 60. Appears thus in the text. Probably an error for "sons." "" A similar speech, again to generals at Sonthofen, on June 21, 1944, condensed in Smith and Peterson, op. cit., pp. 203ff. Quoted from Broszat, op. cit., pp. 100, 121, footnote 69. The weekly Das Reich, January 21, 1945 (quoted from Walter Hegemann, Publizistik im Dritten Reich, Hamburg, 1948, p. 483). 111 Joseph Goebbels, Tagebücher ¡945. Die letzten Aufzeichnungen, Hamburg, 1977, p. 223. 107

114

THE "FINAL SOLUTION" ANDREAS HILLGRUBER In his last conversation recorded by Martin B o r m a n n o n April 2. 1945, Hitler said:" 2 In a world ever more morally polluted by Jewish poison, a nation immune to this poison must finally gain the upper hand. Seen thus. National Socialism will earn eternal gratitude for exterminating the Jews in Germany and Central Europe. O n e d a y before his suicide, on April 29, 1945, a week before the surrender of the Third Reich. Hitler ended his "political t e s t a m e n t " with a d e m a n d : 1 1 3 Above all I oblige the leadership of the nation and their adherents to scrupulously observe the racial laws, and offer merciless resistance to the world poisoner of all peoples, International Jewry.

Hitler's political testament. Die Bormann-Diklate vom Februar und April 1945. Hamburg, 1981, p. 122. Domarus, op. cit., p. 2239.

THE DECISION FOR THE FINAL SOLUTION

Hitler and the Genesis of the "Final Solution": An Assessment

of David

MARTIN

Irving's

Theses*

BROSZAT

THE ENGLISH EDITION of David Irving's Hitler book, 1 published in the spring of 1977, two years after the expurgated German edition, 2 has created a furore both in England and elsewhere. The British author, who gained a reputation as an enfant

terrible

with earlier publications on contemporary history, 3 has propounded a thesis which is embarrassing even to s o m e of his friends and admirers. 4 * For the original German version of this paper see Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte. No. 4, Stuttgart. Oktober 1977. pp. 739-775. 1 David Irving, Hitler's War, London, 1977. 2 David Irving, Hitler und seine Feldherren, Frankfurt, 1975. The German publisher (Ullstein Verlag) insisted on the omission of those theses of Irving's that were, in his opinion, untenable and irresponsible: relieving Hitler of the responsibility for the extermination of the Jews. The publishing of the German edition caused a breach between author and publisher. 3 Accident, The Death of General Sikorski, London, 1967, (German edition: Mord aus Staatsräson, Churchill und Sikorski, eine tragische Allianz, Bern, München, Wien, 1969) and The Destruction of Convoy PQ 17, London, 1968, which had sensational repercussions in court (see note 9). "PQ 17" is the story of the sinking of the British convoy, which was withheld from the public, the blame for which Irving placed on the commander of the Navy's escort flotilla. 4 See the discussion by Heinz Höhne in Der Spiegel of July 4, 1977,

116

THE "FINAL SOLUTION' MARTIN BROSZAT

Hitler, according to Irving, had pursued the aim of making Germany and Europe judenfrei, that is, clear of Jews; he had not, however, desired the mass murder of the Jews and had not ordered it; this had been instigated by Himmler, Heydrich and individual chiefs of the civilian and security police in the East. This essay endeavours to re-examine the subject beyond shedding light on David Irving's contentious arguments, an issue already treated unequivocally by internationally recognized historians and Hider researchers. 5 In view of the confusion which may be sensed by those readers of this well-written book, particularly teachers of history who are insufficiently versed in the details, it seems pertinent to combine a critical analysis of Irving's arguments and text with a documentation of the significant sources which, although known to the author and copiously cited in his work, are nonetheless frequendy obscured by him Despite their faulty reasoning Irving's theses do however afford the challenge of tracing the arguments relating to the origins of the Nazi extermination of the Jews, which remain controversial until this day; these arguments also touch on an explicit annihilation order issued by Hitler, if such ever existed. What is important, after all, is the context. The author of this treatise is not concerned solely or directly with a review of the history of the National Socialist Jewish policy; Irving is primarily engaged in a re-evaluation of Hitler himself, claiming a solid foundation on known and hitherto unknown sources.

5

pp. 71-74. One of Irving's German friends Rolf Hochhuth. who adopted Irving's thesis about Churchill's alleged assassination of Sikorski and used it as the theme of his play Soldateit, found it necessary to dissociate himself decidedly from Irving's theory, in his introduction to Goebbels' diaries of 1945, published by Hoffmann and Campe, Hamburg (introduction, p. 40). To be cited here primarily are the detailed discussions by Alan Bullock in the New York Times Book Review of May 26, 1977, of Hugh Trevor-Roper in The Sunday Times Weekly Review of June 12, 1977 and of Eberhard Jacket in the Frankfurter Altgemeine Zeitung of August 25. 1977.

THE DECISION FOR THE FINAL SOLUTION THE GENESIS OF THE FINAL SOLUTION

1. The Context: the "Normalization" of Hitler Perhaps one day after he was dead and buried, an Englishman would come and write about him in an objective manner. Hitler is said to have made this remark some time in 1944. Irving grasps at it eagerly in his Hitler book.6 He seems determined in his own way to make this apocryphal remark come true. His book would finally bring about a de-demonization of Hitler, so he asserts in his introduction with a sideswipe at Joachim Fest (p. XVII) who anticipated him, without—according to Irving— finding it necessary to comb the archives for new sources. Irving claims, on the basis of newly discovered documents, to draw Hitler as he really was, the real human being: "An ordinary, walking, talking human, weighing some 155 pounds, with graying hair, largely false teeth and chronic digestive ailments" (p. XVIII). He emphatically promises the reader to purge Hitler's image of the accumulated contamination of the legends of allied war propaganda and post-war accusations. The tone is set by compensatory overpressure on the part of the author who makes it his business to point out their omissions to his colleagues, and to overturn current concepts about Hitler. For years, according to Irving, historians had only copied from one another: "For thirty years, our knowledge of Hitler's part in the atrocities has been based on interhistorian incest" (p. XIII). The author's mastery of his sources, at least regarding the limited scope of his presentation, is incontrovertible; he has also managed to produce a number of remarkable and hitherto 6 David Irving, Hitler's War, p. 424. The abridged German edition does not carry this passage. According to Irving, this remark was made in the course of a discussion between Hitler and one of his doctors on the Englishman J. Daniel Chamier's book about Emperor Wilhelm II. Hitler had remarked on this occasion, so Irving cites (p. 424) significantly: "that a foreigner probably finds it easier to pass judgement on a statesman, provided that he is familiar with the country, its people, language and archives." Irving does not refer to the source of his quote in the notes.

117

THE "FINAL SOLUTION' MARTIN BROSZAT

unknown contemporary notebooks, diaries and letters of the National Socialist period.7 These stem mainly from Hitler's inner circle at the Führer's headquarters, and from liaison officers of the Wehrmacht as well as from individual Reich ministers, adjutants, secretaries, valets and stenographers. These documents are not of equal significance; although they contribute to a clearer understanding of the events at the Führer's headquarters (primarily the "Wolfs Lair" at Rastenburg in East Prussia) and illustrate the atmosphere in Hitler's immediate vicinity, they add hardly anything at all to our understanding of major military or political decisions and actions on Hitler's part, and hardly justify the author's exaggerated claims of innovation. The discovery and utilization of contemporary primary sources has long been a sort of adventuresome passion of Irving the historian.8 However, the unprejudiced historian and researcher is obstructed by the passionately partisan author whose insistence on primary sources lacks the control and discipline essential in the selective interpretation and evaluation of material. 7

To be noted here among others is a not very extensive notebook, of the former Ambassador Walter Hewel. Foreign Minister Ribbentrop's liaison at the Führer's headquarters (it had to be partly translated from the Indonesian and was therefore particularly attractive to Irving) and the probably more significant notes of Dr. Werner Koeppens. liaison officer to Alfred Rosenberg, the Reichsminister for the Occupied Eastern Territories, recording conversations at the Führer's headquarters. See the introductory part of Irving's book. A great part of this material has been put at the disposal of the Instituí für Zeitgeschichte (IfZ) by Irving. It is to be commended that he has not. as a rule, withheld his sources from other historians and has also made them accessible to his critics. This has allowed the author of this paper access to Irving's material and helped him to grasp how Irving made use of it. 8 Characteristic is the description of his—in this case futile—search of several weeks' duration (with a supersensitive mine-detector) in a forest in East Germany for a waterproof container with a microfilm copy of Goebbels' diaries allegedly buried there in 1945. See introduction, p. XXI.

THE DECISION FOR THE FINAL SOLUTION THE GENESIS OF THE FINAL SOLUTION

He is too eager to accept authenticity for objectivity, is overly hasty in interpreting superficial diagnoses and often seems insufficiently interested in complex historical interconnections and in structural problems that transcend the mere recording of historical facts but are essential for their evaluation. Spurred by the ambition of matching himself against professional historians in his precise knowledge of documents, he adopts the role of the terrible simplificateur as he intends to wrest fresh interpretations from historical facts and events and spring these on the public in sensational new books. Earlier theses of Irving's 9 revealed the obstinacy of which he is so proud: his Hitler book proves it anew. The perspective of the presentation, however effective it may be from a publicity point of view, shows a priori a narrowing of scope in favour of Hitler. In an attempt to illustrate as far as possible the flux of political and military events from Hitler's point of view, from "behind his desk" (p. XVI), Irving attaches exaggerated importance to the antechamber aspect of the Fiihrer's headquarters and to the testimonies of employees, in many cases subordinate officials, his new sources there. This "intimacy with Hitler" and his claims to objectivity are proved mutually contradictory from the beginning. 9

Best known is Irving's alleged proof that the fatal 1942 airplane crash involving the Polish Prime Minister in exile, General Sikorski, was caused by sabotage on Churchill's order. Irving reverts to this thesis in his Hitler book (Introduction, p. XIII) although a British court of law established its untenability. Trevor-Roper deals with it in his discussion in the Sunday Times Weekly Review on June 12, 1977 and writes: "It is well known that some years ago Mr. Irving convinced himself that General Sikorski, who died in an air crash at Gibraltar was 'assassinated' by Winston Churchill, to whom in fact his death was a political calamity. Not a shred of evidence or probability has ever been produced in support of this theory and when it was tested in the courts. Mr. Irving's only 'evidence' was shown to be a clumsy misreading of a manuscript diary (I have myself seen the diary and feel justified in using the word 'clumsy') "

120

THE "FINAL SOLUTION" MARTIN BROSZAT

The manner of their presentation lends them a particular character. Irving positions and hides himself behind Hitler; he conveys a military and political evaluation of the situation as well as the cynical utterances of the Führer concerning his opponents (Churchill and Roosevelt) and the alleged failure of his own generals and allies, mostly with no comment. Beside Hitler all other characters remain merely pale shadows. This subjective likeness of Hitler (as documented by the author) forms the skeleton of a biography and war account A great part of the apologetic tendencies of the work stems from this conceptual arrangement, in spite of its reliance on documentation. The terse chronological description erf the evershifting military and political problems which were brought before Hitler (others are not noted) causes the spotlight to fall mainly on Hitler. As a resuit, military and political developments appear incomplete since they are not presented in their true perspective. This lack of critical comment on the part of the author who pretends merely to describe events in chronological order, reveals his bias. Quite two-thirds of the book, which numbers over 800 pages, deals with Hitler's conduct of the war, with military events and problems. This is not the author's first description of World War II from the German point of view, others are yet to come.10 The struggle of the German Wehrmacht under the command of Adolf Hitler holds a spell for the author. What emerges "between the lines" of this detailed and well-documented chronicle is the fascinating story of the superior leader and general and the superior army, who could but yield, after an heroic struggle, to the overwhelming masses of men and matériel of an inferior enemy. This is a later version of Ernst Jiinger's 10

Cf. David Irving, The Destruction of Dresden, London, 1963 (German edition Gütersloh, 1964) and by the same author, Die Tragödie der deutschen Luftwaffe. Aus den Akten und Erinnerungen von Feldmarschall Milch, Frankfun. Wien 1970; The Trail of the Fox, The Life of Field Marshal Erwin Rommel, London, 1977.

THE DECISION FOR THE FINAL SOLUTION THE GENESIS OF THE FINAL SOLUTION

interpretation of World War I. David Irving, according to an English critic's pointed remark,11 has remained the schoolboy who during the war stared fascinated at the wreckage of a Heinkel bomber. As an historian he turns his "childhood war" upside down and fixes his attention on the techniques of armament and strategy and the great and heroic battles of destiny. Above all, his talents as a writer are engaged; on occasion he totally disregards reliable documents. The author is writing a war novel. He describes the Polish campaign as follows (p. 16): Hitler's positive enjoyment of the battle scenes was undeniable. He visited the front whenever he could, heedless of the risk to himself and his escort... At a divisional HQ set up in a school within range of the Polish artillery he made the acquaintance of General von Briesen, who towered head and shoulders above him. Briesen had just lost an arm leading his division in an action which warded off a desperate Polish counterattack of four divisions and cavalry on the flank of Blaskovitz's eighth army; he had lost eighty officers and 1,500 men in the fight, and now he was reporting to his Ftihrer not far from the spot where his father, a Prussian infantry general, had been killed in the Great War...

Bravery in mastering a crisis—this is the endlessly varied theme on which the author places his greatest semantic emphasis. He introduces his description of the lurking disaster in Russia in the winter of 1941 '42 with these words (p. 355): In the dark months of that winter Hitler showed his iron determination and hypnotic powers of leadership. We shall see how these qualities and the German soldier's legendary capacity for enduring hardship spared the eastern army from cruel defeat that winter.

Such inserts set the tone for the evalution of Hitler even when Irving refers back to facts and documents which also include material damaging to Hitler. The author's opinion ii Michael Radclife In The Times, June 16, 1977, p. 14.

THE "FINAL SOLUTION' MARTIN BROSZAT

of the Officers' Plot of July 20, 1944 is revealed solely by the chapter heading: "The Worms Turn." The "strategy" of de-demonization is based simply on the attempt to shunt ideological and political considerations onto the broad periphery of purely military events. For instance, actions like Hitler's secret euthanasia order just after the outbreak of the war 12 are frequently (and wrongly) connected with, or justified by military exigencies. In some cases Irving dispenses entirely with reference to documentary evidence. To this class belongs the newly revived theory (against all well-founded judgements) that Hitler's campaign in Russia forestalled a Soviet attack. Mysterious versions of aggressive speeches secretly made by Stalin to officers of the Red Army at the Kremlin on May 5, 1941, extensively quoted without any proof by Irving (p. 238ff.) are mustered in support of Irving's thesis of a preventive war. It is on such pseudo-documentation that he bases his rationale for Hitler's orders concerning the liquidation of Soviet commissars: "Now the Soviet Union began to reap the harvest she had sown" (p. 262). The shooting of the commissars, according to Irving, was Hitler's answer to the projected "eradication of the ruling classes" (p. 263) in the western countries which the communists intended to attack— an interpretation which would have been truly congenial to Hitler. Irving does not conceal isolated acts of killing or annihilation which can be traced to Hitler, but he describes them apologetically and sometimes distortedlv and obscures their basic differ12

Irving introduces the paragraph about this event (p. 20) with the remark: "The ostensible occasion for this formal decision was related to war needs. About a quarter of a million hospital beds were required for German mental institutions... They occupied bed space and the attention of skilled medical personnel which Hitler now urgently needed for the treatment of the casualties of his coming campaigns." None of the relevant documents contains this particular justification of the euthanasia programme.

THE DECISION FOR THE FINAL SOLUTION THE GENESIS OF THE FINAL SOLUTION

ences. The fanatical, destructive will to annihilate, he defines as mere brutality and he encompasses Hitler in the common brutality of warfare in which the total partisan warfare in the East and the bombing raids of the Allies in the West played equal parts. War itself, the main character in this book, becomes the great equalizer of violence. In this respect Hitler is no longer an exceptional phenomenon. The predominance of war in Irving's presentation also furnishes him with an explanation concerning the structure and the distribution of power within the National Socialist regime during the war: the "powerful military Fiihrer" played but a small part in the country's domestic policy during the war. While Hitler was conducting his war, it was Bormann, Himmler, Goebbels and others who ruled the Reich (p. 251): "Hitler was a less than omnipotent leader, and his grip on his immediate subordinates weakened as the war progressed" (p. XV). Irving himself designates this as his central theme. However, while it might not be entirely mistaken in this generalized form, it is completely erroneous when one applies it, as does the author, to Hitler's part in the annihilation of the Jews during the war. It becomes evident that the policy of the mass murder of the Jews does not fit into the picture of generalized brutality of war as drawn by Irving. Without the unreserved acquittal of Hitler on this, the greatest crime in German history, no "normalization" of Hitler could be possible. Somewhat more is involved than just Hitler and his responsibility, for otherwise we could disregard Irving's thesis or even welcome it as a necessary contribution to the controversial interpretations of German contemporary history, where Hitler's sole responsibility, if not explicitly assumed, is at least occasionally implied. Irving's thesis touches the nerve of the credibility of the recorded history of the National Socialist period. It was not with Himmler, Bormann and Heydrich, not even with the Nazi party, that the majority of the German people so whole-heartedly identified themselves, but rather with Hitler. This poses a

124

THE "FINAL SOLUTION" MARTIN

BROSZAT

particular problem for German historians in their review of the National Socialist period. To bear the burden of such a disastrous mistake and to explore the meanings without minimizing them, will remain a difficult task for German historical scholarship, but without doing so. the inherent truth would be lost. The distorted picture of Hitler as a mere madman, which Irving pretends to destroy, has long ceased to exist for serious cmtemporary historical research, if indeed it ever existed. Hitler's place in history does not admit of any such caricature. But the catastrophic influences which he set in motion and which he bequeathed to posterity also preclude any "normalization" towards which there seem to be some tendencies, mainly in the Federal Republic, using Irving as a reference.13 Hitler's power, based above all on his capacity to personify and mobilize the fears, aggressions and Utopias of his time and society as no other could—and to make this faculty appear as solid statesmanship— cannot be separated from the mediocre falsehoods, the disgusting monstrosity of the mental and spiritual makeup of this "nonperson," his totally irresponsible, self-deceiving, destructive and evilly misanthropic egocentricity and his lunatic fanaticism which confront the unbiased historian on all sides. All of this cannot be made to disappear through an appreciation of the "greatness" of his historical influence or through later "over-Machiavellization" or rationalization of Hitler and even less through "antechamber" humanization of the subject. Irving himself, near the end of his book (p. 773) cites an utterance that testifies significantly against his Hitler image. In his last address before Gauleiters of the NSDAP, on February 24, 1945. in the face of the ruins of his policy and conduct of the 13

The National-Zeitung published in Munich dedicated its front page on September 2, 1977 to "New Ideas about the Fuhrer," and exulted over Irving's book and the illustrated pocketbook of the Hitler film by Joachim Fest: "the demonization of Hitler is approaching its end" and a "normalization" of Hitler in contemporary history is slowly taking place.

THE DECISION FOR THE FINAL SOLUTION THE GENESIS OF THE FINAL SOLUTION

war, this Führer who had so long been worshipped by such a great part of his people and who was no longer prepared to make a public speech to them,14 declared that if the German people now defected to the enemy, they deserved to be annihilated. The monstrosity (not the monster of the caricature) revealed by such utterances can in no way be transformed into the image of a normal war leader. 2.

The Genesis of the Nazi Annihilation

of the Jews

Comprehensive descriptions of the "final solution of the Jewish problem" which have existed for years, may mask the fact that many aspects of the genesis of this programme are still obscure. Careful examination has been checked to a degree by the tendency to regard the extermination of the Jews as a sort of metahistoric event which could have been "logically" predicted long before 1933 on the basis of Hitler's radically dogmatic anti-Semitism and from his preformed psychological motive of destruction.15 As crucial as this point—Hitler's pathological philosophy—may be for the explanation of the whole, this does not release us from the responsibility erf clarifying the historical question of how this ideology came into being and under what conditions, and by what institutional and personal levers it was "transmitted" and possibly "distorted." Definite as our knowledge seems to be of the various phases, arenas and modes of the execution and of the act of annihilation, based on contemporary documents and later statements of the

14

See Joseph Goebbels, Tagebücher 1945, Die letzten Aufzeichnungen, Hamburg, 1977; English edition, Joseph Goebbels, The Final Entries 1945, The Diaries of Joseph Goebbels, London, 1978. The entries of March 27 and 28, 1945 show that at that time Goebbels urged Hitler in vain to broadcast to the German people. !5 Characteristic of these is one of the most recent comprehensive commentaries on the NS Jewish policy, Lucy Dawidowicz, The War Against the Jews 1933-1945, London, 1975.

126

THE "FINAL SOLUTION" MARTIN BROSZAT

perpetrators and victims, we know but little of the murderous final step towards the radicalization of Nazi policy vis-a-vis the Jews, of those who had shared in the decision-making and of the precise content of these decisions; we know equally little of the form and the manner of their transmission to the special commandos and official agencies who were charged with their execution. In spite of the destruction of the pertinent files, mainly those of the Sicherheitspolizei (Security Police) who were primarily responsible, and the methodical removal of all traces after the actions, as well as the misleading phrasing of the documents themselves, the acts as such could not be hidden. Given the centralization of all decision-making, however, the attempts to obscure evidence were to a large extent successful. It is doubtful whether the fi'es of the SD chief, who on July 31, 1941 was charged with the organization of the "final solution," the files of the Fiihrer's Chancellery, which supplied the gassing specialists (formally employed in the euthanasia programme), or Bormann's personal files at the Fiihrer's headquarters could have provided unequivocal answers to these questions even if this material had not been largely destroyed before the end of the war. It is remarkable that prominent Nazi figures who had had frequent dealings with Hitler during the war and who were connected at least partially with the Jewish question and who after the war were still available as witnesses (for instance Goring, Ribben'.rop. Hans Frank) or who left extensive notes (like the diaries of Goebbels), while obviously informed about the annihilation of the Jews, could make no statement about a specific secret order on the part of Hitler. This not only indicates that all agreements about the ultimate aim of the "final solution" were adopted and transmitted verbally16 but also shows that the physical liquidation of the Jews i s The postwar statements of persons who had been entrusted with individual acts of extermination of Jews refer to verbal instructions: see below, notes 62—65.

THE DECISION FOR THE FINAL SOLUTION THE GENESIS OF THE FINAL SOLUTION

was set in motion not through a one-time decision but rather bit by bit. The first extensive liquidation act, the mass execution in the summer and fall of 1941, of hundreds of thousands of Jews in the occupied Soviet territories by the Einsatzkommandos of the security police and the SD was no doubt carried out on the personal directive of Hitler. This, like the order to shoot all Soviet commissars, was obviously based on the fanatical determination of the National Socialist leadership to eradicate "Jewish Bolshevism" root and stem. This does not yet necessarily signify that physical liquidation, including the Jews of Germany, was the overall aim of Nazi Jewish policy, and had already been adopted at that time, nor that Goring's order to Heydrich for the preparation of a comprehensive programme for the deportation of Jews dated July 31, 1941, should be interpreted in this sense. Uwe Dietrich Adam in his study of the National Socialist Jewish policy had rejected this theory some years before, and with good cause.17 While the mass murder of Jews (including women and children) as first perpetrated in the occupied Soviet territories necessarily contributed to the adopting of this means of liquidation as the "simplest" form of the final solution, plans then being formulated for the deportation of the German Jews remained to a great extent undetermined, as was the question of their destination and treatment. All emphasis and decisions were aimed at one target: to get rid of the Jews, and above all to make the territory of the Reich judenfrei, i.e. clear of Jews, since earlier dans to deport the Jews from Germany in the winter of 1939/40 had to be postponed. When in the summer and fall of 1941 in their discussions and written communications the participants spoke only in vague

i" Uwe Dietrich Adam, Judenpolitik esp. p. 305ff.

im Dritten Reich, Düsseldorf, 1972,

128

THE "FINAL SOLUTION" MARTIN BROSZAT terms of deportation "to the East," this was not merely semantic obfuscation—it was typical of the manner in which Hitler, Himmler and Heydrich approached the problem of a "radical solution" to major racial, social and folkish-political questions. Extensive actions for the transport of masses of people were begun without any clear conception of the consequences. Regarding the deportation of Jews to the East, conceived and planned ever since the summer of 1941 and begun, in fact, in the middle of October 1941, in all probability there existed only a vague idea: to employ the Jews in the East, in ghettos and in camps, at forced hard labour. Many of them would perish; as for those incapable of work, one could always "help along" their demise, as had been done in German concentration camps and in the labour camps of Poland. They were governed by the concept that the enormous spaces to be occupied in the Soviet Union would in any case offer a possibility for getting rid of the Jews of Germany and of the allied and occupied countries, and above all, of the multitudes of Jews in the ghettos of the General Government, which since 1940 was visualized as a settlement area for the Germanization of the East. In the summer and autumn of 1941, it was clearly Hitler himself who voiced the imminent possibility of deporting Jews to the East to some of the Reich Gauleiters, to the Reich Protector of Bohemia and Moravia and to the Governor General of the occupied Polish territories, as well as to the Axis satellite governments; he himself urged its realisation and thereby in a way set off a lively competition to make their respective territories judenrein as quickly as possible. Some relevant testimonies of this phase show that in spite of the determination of the National Socialist leadership to handle the Jewish question radically, no clear aims existed with respect to the subsequent fate of the deportees. Alongside the Russian East, the old Madagascar plan still figured with Hitler and the competent officials of the SD as an alternative scheme.

THE DECISION FOR THE FINAL SOLUTION THE GENESIS OF THE FINAL SOLUTION

The diary of the Governor General (Hans Frank) notes on July 17, 1941: 18 The Governor General wishes to stop the creation of further ghettos, since according to an express declaration of the Führer of June 19, the Jews will be removed in due course from the General Government, and the General Government is to be, so to speak, only a transit area.

In conference with the Croatian Marshal Kvaternik on July 17, 1941 Hitler remarked, according to the minutes: 19 The Jews were the scourge of humanity, the Lithuanians as well as the Estonians are now taking bloody revenge on t h e m . . . When even one state, for any reason whatsoever, tolerated one single is Das Diensttagebuch des deutschen Generalgouverneurs in Polen 1939-1945, published by Werner Präg and Wolfgang Jacobmeyer, Stuttgart, 1975, p. 386 (hereafter—Diensttagebuch). That at that time (summer 1941) the authorities of the SD who were dealing with the Jewish problem, were still unaware of the general extermination order (which would have been surprising if it had already existed) is illustrated by the draft of a letter by the chief of the SD unit in Posen who was in charge of the Warthegau and was addressed to the expert on Jewish questions, Adolf Eichmann, at the RSHA on July 17. 1941. precisely because this draft deals with an independent decision on the part of the security police and the SD in Posen to kill a part of the Jews of the ghetto of Litzmannstadt. It was to be considered, so the document says, referring to a conference about "the solution of the Jewish question" which took place at the office of the district governor in Posen, that in view of the overcrowding of the Litzmannstadt ghetto it might be the most humane solution to finish off those Jews who were unable to work by some quick-acting, medium. In any case this would be more pleasant than to let them starve. "These things sound partly fantastic," writes the SD chief of Posen, "but are, in my opinion, absolutely feasible." Copy of this draft was discovered in Posen and was presented in evidence at the trial against Reichsstatthalter Greiser in Biuletyn Glöwnej Komisji Badania Zbrodni Hitlerowskich w Polsce, Vol. XIII, Cracow, 1960, doc. 27f/28. 19 See Andreas Hillgruber, Staatsmänner Vol. II. München, 1970. p. 556.

und Diplomaten

bei

Hitler,

THE "FINAL SOLUTION" MARTIN

BROSZAT

Jewish family in its midst, this would constitute a source of bacilli 2 0 touching off new infection. O n c e t h e r e were n o m o r e Jews in E u r o p e there would be nothing to interfere with the unification of the E u r o p e a n nations. It m a k e s n o difference w h e t h e r Jews a r e sent to Siberia or to M a d a g a s c a r . H e would a p p r o a c h every state with this d e m a n d . .

A certain light is also shed on the planning and thinking of this phase by some parts of Goebbels' diaries 21 which surfaced a few years ago and which have not yet been published: they contain the following remarks under the date August 8, 1941, concerning the spread of spotted typhus in the Warsaw ghetto: T h e Jews h a v e always been the carriers of infectious diseases. T h e y should either be concentrated in a ghetto and left to themselves o r b e liquidated, f o r otherwise they will infect the p o p u l a tions of t h e civilized nations.

On Aueust 19. 1941. after a visit to the Fuhrer's headquarters. Goebbels notes: T h e F i i h r e r is convinced his p r o p h e c y in t h e Reichstag is b e c o m i n g a f a c t : that should Jewry succeed in again p r o v o k i n g a new war. this would end with their a n n i h i l a t i o n . 2 2 It is coming t r u e in these weeks a n d m o n t h s with a certainty that a p p e a r s almost sinister. In t h e East the Jews a r e p a y i n g the price, in G e r m a n y they have already paid in part and they will have to pay m o r e in t h e f u t u r e . Their last r e f u g e is N o r t h America but even there they will have to pay sooner o r later. . . 20

A c c o r d i n g to a n o t e by W e r n e r K o e p p e n s . f o r which we a r e indebted to David Irving, Hitler remarked on t h e evening of July 10, 1941 at the F u h r e r ' s h e a d q u a r t e r s : " I feel like R o b e r t K o c h in politics. H e discovered t h e bacilli a n d pointed m a n y things in a n e w direction. I discovered t h e Jews and t h e bacillus a n d their f e r m e n t i n g agent of social d e c o m p o s i t i o n . . ." I f Z Archives, Irving Collection.

21

T h e s e a r e in t h e possession of t h e H o f f m a n n and C a m p e publishing house. H a m b u r g ( h e r e a f t e r quoted as G o e b b e l s ' Diary. H o f f m a n n a n d C a m p e ) . F o r permission to inspcct these closely I a m indebted mainly to t h e f o r m e r business m a n a g e r of t h e firm. Dr. K n a u s .

22

H i t l e r stated at t h e Reichstag on J a n u a r y 30, 1939: "If t h e international finance-Jewry inside and outside E u r o p e manages just once

T H E DECISION FOR T H E F I N A L S O L U T I O N THE GENESIS OF THE FINAL SOLUTION The

next day, August 20, 1941, Goebbels supplements

the

impressions he brought back with him from the Führer's headquarters : . . . even if it is not yet possible to make Berlin a city entirely free of Jews, the Jews should no longer be seen in public; the Führer has promised me. moreover, that immediately after the conclusion of the campaign in the East, I can deport the Jews of Berlin to the East. Berlin must be cleared of Jews. It is revolting and scandalous to think that seventy thousand Jews, most of them parasites, can still loiter in the capital of the German Reich. They not only spoil the general appearance of the streets, but also the atmosphere. This is going to change once they carry a badge but it can only be stopped once they are removed. We must approach this problem without any sentimentality. Other testimonies of this time also confirm that Hitler set the targets of this, by n o w accelerated, activity. O n September 18. 1941 H i m m l e r wrote to the Gauleiter Warthegau, SS-Obergruppenführer

and R e i c h Governor of the

Greiser:23

The Führer wishes that the Old Reich and the Protectorate should be emptied and freed of Jews from the West to the East as soon as possible. I shall therefore endeavour to transport the Jews of the Old Reich and the Protectorate as far as possible this year; as a first step, into the newly acquired eastern regions that were annexed by the Reich two years ago, in order to deport them further to the East in the spring. Over the winter more to precipitate the world into war, the outcome will be, not the Bolshevization of the earth and the consequent triumph of Jewry, but the annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe." During the war Hitler again and again referred to this speech in public addresses as well as in private conversation, for instance in his speeches at the Rcichsiag on January 30. 1941 and on January 30. 1942. However, he dated them incorrectly (intentionally or subconsciously) to September 1, 1939. An intentional change of date, in order to stress the connection of the military stmgcle against the Jews, it is indicated by its regular appearance and the fact that it was retained in the official publications of Hitler's speeches, for instance in the Völkischer Beobachter. Personal Staff RFSS. IfZ Archives. MA 3/9. folder 94.

THE "FINAL SOLUTION' MARTIN BROSZAT I intend to send about sixty thousand Jews of the Old Reich and the Protectorate inio the ghetto of Litansnnstadt, which, as I hear, is barely able to accommodate them. I ask you not to misunderstand this measure which will no doubt entail difficulties and troubles for your district, but to support it wholeheartedly in the interests of the whole Reich. It is possible that Himmler's communication, according to which the placing of the Jews in Litzmannstadt was intended as a temporary solution until they could be transported further to the East the following spring, was a feint while their murder in the occupied Polish areas was already planned at this p o i n t 2 4 At the beginning of October of 1941, serious controversies broke out over the possible absorption of 20,000 Jews from the territory of the Reich between the governor of Litzmannstadt, SS Brigadefiihrer Ubelhor, and Himmler, and, after deportation had started (in the middle of October), between Ubelhor and the security police, because the governor categorically refused to concede any absorptive capacity for the ghettos. 25 This would be hard to explain if the plan for the extermination of the Jews had already been decided upon. Goebbels, too, was informed by Heydrich at the Fuhrer's headquarters on September 23, 1941 that (possibly because the transport trains were required by the army and because of the limited capacity of the available 24

According to Koeppens' notes on October 7, 1941, Hitler stated on October 6, 1941 concerning the Protectorate: "All Jews have to be removed from the Protectorate, not only to the General Government but straight on to the East. Only the great shortage of transport prevents this being done at once. Together with the Jews of the Protectorate all the Jews of Vienna and Berlin must disappear." IfZ Archives, Irving Collection. 25 See a letter from Ubelhor to Himmler dated October 4, 1941. from Himmler to Obelhor on October 10, 1941 (containing the sentence: "I demand that they [the Jews} be placed in the houses that, due to the considerable decrease in the number of Jews in the last one and a half years [through mortality and deportations to the General Govemmentl have become vacant."), Personal Staff RFSS, IfZ Archives, MA 3/9, folder 94.

THE DECISION FOR THE FINAL SOLUTION THE GENESIS OF THE FINAL SOLUTION

camps and ghettos in the East) there were still temporary difficulties in the smooth deportation of the Jews of Berlin. In his notes of a discussion with Heydrich on September 23, 1941 (entry in diary 24.9.1941—partly or totally indecipherable), Goebbels states (p. 18f) : 25a This could occur as soon as we arrive at a clarification of the military situation in the East. They [the Jews] shall finally be transported into the camps which have been erected by the Bolsheviks . . . these [were erected by the Jews themselves]... [what could be more fitting t h a n ) . . . that they should now also be populated by Jews .. .

Elsewhere (September 24. 1941) in the diary (p. 35ff.). concerning his visit at the Fuhrer's headquarters, Goebbels writes: The Fiihrer is of the opinion that the Jews are to be removed from Germany step by step. The first cities that have to be cleared of Jews are Berlin, Vienna and Prague. Berlin will be the first of these and I hope that we shall manage to deport a considerable portion of the Jews of Berlin in the course of the current year.

A month later Goebbels was to learn that a rapid and wholesale deportation of the Jews of Berlin into occupied Soviet territory was not feasible. He notes in his diary on October 24, 1941: Gradually we are also beginning with the deportation of the Jews to the East. Some thousands have already been sent on their way. They will first be brought to Litzmannstadt.

On October 28, 1941 Goebbels again complained in his diary about the opposition that prevented the evacuation of Jews from Berlin in the "shortest possible time." Steps such as the evacuation had a more negative propaganda influence in the capital than in other cities since "we have here all the diplomats and the foreign press." He noted on November 18, 1941: 25a The following quotations according to Goebbels' diaries, Hoffmann and Campe (see note 21).

134

THE "FINAL SOLUTION" MARTIN

BROSZAT

Heydrich advised me of his plans concerning deportations from the area of the Reich. The problem is more difficult than w e had originally envisaged: 15.000 Jews must remain in Berlin as they are employed in the war effort and in dangerous jobs. A l s o a number of elderly Jews can no longer be deported to the East. A Jewish ghetto could be set up for them in a small town in the Protectorate. . .

On November 21, 1941, Hitler, who had also come to Berlin, obviously had to damp the hopes of the Minister of Propaganda and Gauleiter of Berlin regarding the pace of the deportations. Goebbels noted the following day: H e [the Führer] desires an aggressive policy towards the Jews which, however, should not create unnecessary difficulties for us.

Considerable difficulties indeed arose, mainly through the unexpectedly arduous progress and. finally, the standstill of military operations in the East and the extra burdening of the already overloaded transportation system. The situation into which the National Socialist leadership had manoeuvered itself in the planning of large-scale deportations of Jews becomes sufficiently clear through the documents already cited. As is clear from Hitler's declarations, Hitler, Himmler and Heydrich launched preparations for the wholesale deportation of Jews as a matter of ideology to be pursued with fanatical eagerness. They made this principle clear in their contacts with the Gauleiters of the cities with overwhelmingly large Jewish populations (Goebbels in Berlin, Schirach in Vienna) or the Governor General of Poland. The Chief of the Security Police (Heydrich) and his expert on Jews (Eichmann) had prepared plans for the deportation and had sent their "advisers" on Jewish questions to the southeastern satellite governments with large Jewish communities. These "experts" had been sent to Bratislava, Bucharest and Agram (Zagreb) with the objective of including Jews of these areas in the deportations to the East. Hitler obviously had no intention of halting the plan for the massive evacuation of the Jews even when the military situation

THE DECISION FOR THE FINAL SOLUTION THE GENESIS OF THE FINAL SOLUTION

in the East proved more difficult than had been assumed in the summer of 1941. It was for this reason that the original plans for deportation were curtailed on the one hand, while on the other decisions were made aimed at eventually removing at least part of the evacuated Jews "by other means," i.e. planned killing operations. It thus seems that the liquidation of the Jews began not solely as the result of an ostensible will for extermination but also as a "way out" of a blind alley into which the Nazis had manoeuvered themselves. The practice of liquidation, once initiated and established, gained predominance and evolved in the end into a comprehensive "programme." This interpretation cannot be verified with absolute certainty but in the light of circumstances, which cannot be discussed here in detail, it seems more plausible than the assumption that there was a general secret order for the extermination of the Jews in the summer of 1941.26 The first massacre of Jews deported from the Reich took place in November of 1941. The Jews of some transports that had been diverted to the Reichskommissariat Ostland, mainly to Riga, Minsk and Kovno, were not assigned to the local ghettos or camps, as were the majority of the later transports; these Jews were shot upon arrival together with the local Jews in the executions already started by the Einsatzkommandos of the Security Police and the SD. as for instance in Riga on the socalled Bloody Sunday of November 30, 1941. At about the same time (November 1941), in the Reichsgau of Wartheland the 36

Also Adam, ibid., (especially p. 312) assumes such a secret order but prefers to date it later ("between September and November 1941"). It appears to me however that no comprehensive order for the extermination existed and that the "programme" for the extermination of the Jews developed through individual actions and gradually attained its institutional and factual character by spring of 1942 after the construction of the extermination camps in Poland (between December 1941 and July 1942).

136

THE "FINAL SOLUTION" M A R T I N BROSZAT

"Lange Special Commando" arrived in Chelmno (Kulmhof) and proceeded to construct temporary extermination facilities, such as the gas vans of the type used by this commando during the euthanasia killings in the transit camp of Soldau, and as of December 1941 for the killing of Jews, mostly from the ghetto of Litzmannstadt. The action in Chelmno was obviously closely connected with the disputes that had arisen concerning the transport of German Jews to Litzmannstadt. The idea that was initiated the previous summer in Posen, 27 acording to which the situation in the ghetto could be relieved through the killing of Jews unable to work "by means of a quick-acting medium," had apparently fallen on fertile ground. The erection of Chelmno was intended mainly for this limited purpose—to create room for the second and third waves of Jewish transports from the Reich which would be "temporarily" lodged in Litzmannstadt during the winter of 1941/42. The ghetto should be cleared of those unable to work (above all women and children), who would be brought to Chelmno for gassing. This action was mainly completed by the summer of 1942 (with the annihilation of about 100,000 Jews). Its ad hoc character becomes clear from a letter by Reichstatthalter Greiser addressed to Himmler and dated May 1, 1942. With a frankness unusual in a written communication, he reports : The action f o r the special treatment of about 100,000 Jews in my province that has been approved by you in agreement with the chief of the RSHA, SS-Obergruppenführer Heydrich, will be concluded in the next two or three months. 2 «

Only relatively few transports reached Chelmno after the summer of 1942: the installations were dismantled in March 1943 and all traces of the killings were removed. (Only in the spring of 1944 were the buildings again required for further killings). 29 27 28 29

See above, note 18. Nuremberg document NO-365. Details about Chelmno are contained in documents published

by

THE DECISION FOR THE FINAL SOLUTION THE GENESIS OF THE FINAL SOLUTION

This process illustrates that the initiative for this partial action originated from the local Security Police staff and the office of the Reichsstatthalter. It was however in all probability initiated within the general context of decisions on the increased use of liquidation measures adopted after October-November 1941. An additional document shows that at that time there existed no general order for the annihilation of Jews but rather sporadic liquidation measures prompted by an inability to carry out the programme of deportations as planned. This is the draft of a letter by the expert on Jewish questions of the Reich Minister for the Occupied Eastern Territories to the Reichskommissar for Ostland, dated October 25, 1941, concerning the use of a gassing van30 for the killing of Jews; the chief of the Fiihrer's Chancellery Viktor Brack (who was responsible for gassing methods after the euthanasia action), had promised to manufacture and deliver it. He writes among other things: May I point out that Sturmbannführer Eichmann, the expert on Jewish questions at the RSHA, agrees to this process. According to reports by Stumbannführer Eichmann, camps will be erected for the Jews at Riga and Minsk which may also be used for the accommodation of Jews from the Old Reich. Jews evacuated from the area of the Old Reich will be brought to Litzmannstadt and also to other camps to be later assigned to forced labour in the East (to the extent that they are able to work). With the present state of affairs, there should be no hesitation about doing away with those Jews who are unable to work, with the aid of Brack's expedient. In this manner occurrences like those at the time of the execution of Jews at W[ilnaf, as described in a report I have before me, prompted by the fact

Adalbert Rückerl, Nationalsozialistische Vernichtungslager im Spiegel deutscher Strafprozesse—Belzec, Sobibör, Treblinka, Chelmno, Stuttgart, 1977; see also Ino Arndt-Wolf gang Scheffler, "Organisierter Massenmord an Juden in nationalsozialistischen Vernichtungslagern," in Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte, No. 4, Stuttgart, 1976, p. 116ff, (hereafter—Vierteljahrshefte). 3° Nuremberg document NO-246/247.

THE "FINAL SOLUTION MARTIN BROSZAT that the executions were carried out in public in a way that can hardly be tolerated, will no longer be possible.. .

The practice of annihilation became even more widespread and at this stage was discussed with cynical frankness at the German agencies of administration in the East. Hans Frank declared on December 16, 1941 at a government session in the office of the Governor of Cracow in connection with the imminent Wannsee Conference:31 Regarding the Jews, to start with, principally, there is one concern —that they disappear. They have to go. I have started negotiations with the aim of deporting them [the Polish Jews in the General Government) to the East. A major conference on this question will convene in Berlin in January to which I shall appoint Assistant Secretary Dr. Bühler as a delegate. The meeting will take place at the RSHA office of SS-Obergruppenführer Heydrich. Tfiis will mark the beginning of a great Jewish migration. What however shall happen to the Jews? Do you believe that they will be accommodated in settlement villages in the East? In Berlin they say. why all this bother. We have no use for them either in Ostland or in the Reichskommissariat, liquidate them yourselves. . , 3 2 In the General Government we have an estimated two and a half and. with half-Jews and their families, three and a half million Jews. These three and a half million Jews we cannot shoot, we cannot poison, yet we must take measures that will somehow result in extermination so that this will be in concert with the major campaign launched by the Reich. T h e General Government must be as iudenfrei as the Reich. . .

This additional evidence confirms the impression gained from other documents of this period: the various authorities of the National Socialist regime were ready in late autumn of 1941 for the extermination process aimed at reducing the number of Jews: there existed no real capacity to absorb the mass deportations which everybody urged and. further, the campaign in the East, which had reached a stalemate in the winter, offered no

32

See Diensttagebuch of the Governor General. . . ibid., p. 457. Omitted in the original diary-.

THE DECISION FOR THE FINAL SOLUTION THE GENESIS OF THE FINAL SOLUTION

prospect for sending the Jews "behind the Urals." There were other reasons as well: the ghettos which had been created in order to isolate and select the Jews for deportation (in occupied Poland as early as 1939-1940) spread destitution and disease, which were now regarded by those responsible as typically Jewish "sources of pestilence" that were to be wiped out.33 Epidemics and a high mortality rate suggested the possibility of "helping nature along" in a systematic fashion. The Jews had to be "exterminated somehow." This fatal expression recurs again and again in documents erf various origins at this stage (autumn 1941), revealing evidence of the "improvisation" of extermination as the "simplest" solution— one that would, with additional extermination camps in occupied Poland,34 finally generate the accumulated experience and the institutional potential for the mass murders. It could also be exploited in the course of later deportations from Germany and from occupied or allied countries in Europe. If we base our interpretation on the concept that the annihilation of the Jews was thus "improvised" rather than set off by a one-time secret order, it follows that the responsibility and 33 An illustration of this is the "report" that Goebbels wrote in his diary on November 2, 1941 about his visit to the Vilna ghetto the day before. Goebbels' Diary, Hoffman and Carrcpc p. 15fl.: "The picture becomes terrifying on a short tour of the ghetto. The Jews are squeezed together here, horrible creatures not to be looked at even less to be touched... Horrible shapes loiter in the streets whom I would not care to meet at night. The Jews are the lice of civilized humanity. They have to be exterminated somehow; otherwise they will continue to play their tormenting and troublesome role." 34 The Belzec extermination camp in the Lublin district was opened as early as March 1942: the gassings at Auschwitz-Birkenau began at about the same time, the extermination camps of Sobitor 2nd Treblinka in the Eastern part of the General Government were erected in the following month. July, where already in 1942 a great part of the Jews of the General Government perished. See AmdtScheffler, "Organisierter Massenmord...." ibid., pp. 105-135.

140

THE "FINAL SOLUTION" MARTIN BROSZAT

the initiative for the killing were not Hitler's, Himmler's or Heydrich's alone. This does not however free Hitler of responsibility. We know almost nothing about the way in which Hitler spoke about these matters with Himmler and Heydrich, who bore institutional responsibility for the acts of liquidation performed by the SD- and SS-Commandos, and who at this time trequentiy visited the Fuhrer's headquarters. We shall discuss the reasons that prompted him to hide the full truth even from high-ranking associates; we shall also examine the fact that these strictly unlawful measures could be ordered only by verbal instructions on the part of Hitler and not by way of legally binding formal directives (written communications). Hitler's responsibility for the murder of the Jews can in any case be established only indirectly: the idea that it would be possible to "prove" this by means of some document signed by Hitler as yet undiscovered or destroyed before 1945 is derived from false suppositions: Hitler, as is well known, rarely processed files himself, and his signature or handwriting on documents of the Third Reich, except in the case of laws and ordinances, is hardly ever found. Indications pointing at his responsibility are nevertheless overwhelming. A great number of documents concerning anti-Jewish legislation during the National Socialist period, as for instance the official definition of the concept "Jew" (in this case Hitler had no need to hide his participation), prove that Hitler concerned himself with numerous details of the planned anti-Jewish measures and that these were contingent on his decisions. It could not be hidden from any prominent functionary of the National Socialist regime that Hitler had the greatest interest possible in the solution of the Jewish question. To assume that such important decisions as the measures for the destruction of Jewry could be usurped by any individual in 1941-1942 without Hitler's approval is tantamount to ignoring the powerstructure and hierarchic framework of the Fuhrerstaat. It is especially baseless with respect to Himmler, whose loyalty to

THE DECISION FOR THE FINAL SOLUTION THE GENESIS OF THE FINAL SOLUTION

the Führer, especially in questions of basic ideology, was at this stage absolute. Such a concept is also untenable as the preparations for the extermination of the Jews (e.g. the question of transportation and the release of Jews from work essential to the war effort) interfered directly with the interests of the Wehrmacht (and frequently collided with it) and could not at any rate be implemented by Himmler or Heydrich, in view erf their limited competence, without the backing Hitler alone could impose. Goebbels reveals in his diaries that every important stage of the deportation of the Jews from the capital of the Reich required the approval of Hitler: at the Wann see Conference (January 20, 1942), which convened to discuss the "final solution of the Jewish question," Heydrich makes pointed reference to the necessary "previous authorization by the Führer."35 All this leads of necessity to the conclusion that the Führer specifically vested authority in the Reichsführer-SS and the Chief of the Security Police with regard to the massive actions of liquidation, regardless of who might have proposed these measures. (It is indeed possible that it was only with Himmler and Heydrich that the matter was discussed openly). That Hitler knew of this already in 1941-1942—even while trying to hide it from any wider circle of listeners—becomes clear from the notes of participants in confidential conversations with him at this time (winter 1941/42). At a "table talk" at the Führer's headquarters on October 25, 1941, in the presence of Himmler and Heydrich, Hitler remarked : 36 From the rostrum of the Reichstag I prophesied to Jewry that, in the event of w a r s proving inevitable, the Jew would disappear from Europe. That race of criminals has on its conscience the two million dead of the First World War, and now already hundreds of thousands more. Let n o b o d y tell me that all the 35 See the exact quotation below, note 49. 36 The following («translation) of Hitler's 1953, p. 87.

Table Talk 1941-44,

London,

THE "FINAL SOLUTION" M A R T I N BROSZAT same we can't park them in the marshy parts of Russia! Who's worrying about our troops' 1 It's not a bad idea, by the way, that public rumour attributes to us a plan to exterminate the Jews. Terror is a salutary thing . . . .

On January 23, 1942, three days after the Wannsee Conference, during a "table talk" at the Fiihrer's headquarters in the presence of Himmler and Lammers, Hitler again referred to the Jewish question: 37 One musi act radically. When one pulls out a tooth, one does it with a single tug, and the pain quickly goes away. The Jew must clear out of Europe. Otherwise no understanding will be possible between Europeans.

Further on in the same "table talk", after Hitler had cited the discrimination that the Roman Church State had levelled in former centuries against the Jews, he referred with a mixture of obvious cynicism and hypocritical obscurity to the current deportations and occasional acts of annihilation: For my part. I restrict myself to telling them they must go away. If they break their pipes on the journey, I can't do anything about it. But if they refuse to go voluntarily. I see no other solution but extermination. 3 8 Why should I look at a Jew through other eyes than if he were a Russian prisoner-of-war? In the p.o.w. camps, many are dying. It's not my fault. I didn't want either the war or the p.o.w. camps. Why did the Jew provoke this war?

Four days later (January 27. 1942) Hitler again said on the occasion of a "table talk" at the Fiihrer's headquarters:39 The Jews must pack up, disappear f r o m Europe. Let them go to Russia. Where the Jews are concerned, I'm devoid of all sense of pity. They'll always be the ferment that moves peoples one against the other. They sow discord everywhere, as much between individuals as between peoples. 3" Hitler's Table Talk. p. 235. 38 Ibid., pp. 235-236. 33 Ibid., p. 260.

THE DECISION FOR THE FINAL SOLUTION T H E GENESIS OF THE FINAL SOLUTION It's entirely natural that we should concern ourselves with the question on the European level. It's clearly not enough to expel them from Germany. We cannot allow them to retain bases of withdrawal at our doors. .. .

On February 24, 1942 Goebbels notes in his diary after a visit of Hitler's to Berlin: 40 The Führer again voices his determination to remorselessly cleanse Europe of its Jews. There can be no sentimental feelings here. The Jews have deserved the catastrophe that they are now experiencing. They shall experience their own annihilation together with the destruction of our enemies. We must accelerate this process with cold brutality; by doing so we are doing an inestimable service to humanity that has been tormented for thousands of years...

The accumulation of Hitler's aggressive statements and destructive will regarding the Jewish question, at this stage, as well as the allusions inherent therein to concrete measures for the Jews' expulsion and decimation, are sufficiently conclusive when interpreted within their historical context. They clearly reveal Hitler's fixation concerning the Jewish question and show his passionate interest in it. These facts preclude any possibility of his indifference to the continuing progress of the solution of the Jewish question. At a much later period, in a secret speech of Hitler's to generals and officers of the Wehrmacht41 on May 26, 1944, in which he expounded on the liquidation of the Jews which had meanwhile been largely completed, he let drop a remark which seems to confirm that the annihilation of the Jews, as it "developed" in the winter of 1941/42. was a radical "expedient" adopted as an escape from the difficulties into which the Nazis had led themselves. "If I remove the Jews," according to Hitler's •*o Goebbels—Tagebücher, published by L.P. Lochner, Zurich, 1948, p. 87. In the English edition, The Goebbels Diaries, translated and edited by Louis P. Lochner, London, 1948, this entry was omitted. 41 Personal Staff RFSS, IfZ Archives, MA 316, BL 4994ff.

144

THE "FINAL SOLUTION" MARTIN

BROSZAT

justification at a later stage of the war, "I have removed any possibility of the development of revolutionary cells or sources of infection. Someone might ask me: could this not have been achieved in a simpler manner—or. rather, not simpier, because anything else would have been more complicated42—but solved more humanely . .. ?" David Irving has correctly deduced that (p. XIV) the annihilation of the Jews was partly a solution of expedience, "the way out of an awkward dilemma." However, he finds himself on an apologetic sidepath if he concludes, contrary to all evidence, that some of the subordinate SS and party leaders had instituted the murders in cynical extrapolation of Hitler's remarks and against his will. 3.

David Irving's

"Proofs"

In his book about Hitler, David Irving has not presented in any systematic way either the factual events of the "final solution" or Hitler's manifold utterances about the treatment of the Jews during the war. His revisionist theory is not derived from any incontrovertible historical conclusion; rather the arguments mustered in its support to which he constantly refers, often arbitrarily scattered in the text and footnotes, are in the main controversial, drawn from a dozen different sources, citing only specific aspects and documents relating to "Hitler and the extermination of the Jews." He marshals inconclusive arguments to which he authoritatively appends irrelevant and erroneous inferences, presenting them as foregone conclusions or to be assumed as such. Once the author had committed himself to this theory, no shred of seeming evidence was too shabby to support it. The other Irving appears again and again behind the laboriously spliced argument of his revisionist theory, with ambition and great acrimony vaguely citing all pertinent documents even 42

Italics are the author's.

THE DECISION FOR THE FINAL SOLUTION T H E GENESIS O F T H E F I N A L SOLUTION

when these barely relate to the main argument. And within the categorical vindication of Hitler one suddenly encounters thoughtful and cautious reflections and formulations: Hitler's role in the context of the "final solution" was a "controversial issue" and "the negative is always difficult to prove" (p. XIII). In another place (p. 391): Hitler's was unquestionably the authority behind the expulsion operations; on whose initiative the grim procedures at the terminal stations of this miserable exodus were adopted, is arguable.

Irving poses the justified question (p. 270 ff.): what exactly did Hitler mean when he promised the Governor General (of Poland) in June 1941 to expel the Jews "further to the East": " . . .did Hitler now use 'East' just as a generic term, whose precise definition would be perdition, oblivion, extermination? The documents at our disposal do not help us." Unfortunately the author did not confine himself to such cautious questions. He blocked the path for new insights for himself and others by presenting false stereotypes and artificial argumentation clearing Hitler. In his introduction the author already reveals what he regards as his principal discovery (p. XIV): Hitler ordered on November 30, 1941, that there was to be "no liquidation of the Jews." In a facsimile of the original documents (p. SOS) which Irving appends to his book, the reader can see for himself: a page from Himmler's hand-written telephone notes dating from the years 1941 to 1943.43 Although nothing is found there concerning Hitler or any general prohibition of the liquidations, Irving, in his senseless yet literal interpretation of this note, would like to make us believe so in various parts of his book. This document reveals one fact only: Himmler held a telephone conversation from the Fiihrer's bunker at the Wolfs Lair with Heydrich in Prague at 13:30 hours on November 30, 1941, and as one of the subjects of the conversation he noted: "Jew transport from « Collection of copies in I f Z Archives, F 37/2.

146

THE "FINAL SOLUTION' MARTIN BROSZAT

Berlin, no liquidation." Whether Himmler had spoken to Hitler before this conversation and if its contents derived from Hitler is questionable.44 In any case, this contention cannot be substantiated, nor can it be conclusively stated that Himmler relayed an order of Hitler's to Heydrich. The contents of the note prove one thing: the words "no liquidation" are connected with "Jew transport from Berlin." This was a directive or an agreement concerning a particular situation, and not a general order. It is not possible to determine precisely the occasion and the subject of the conversation from these few words; however, what can be determined with certainty, is that they were connected with the execution of Jews from the Reich that had taken place some days before in Kovno (Kaunas). 45 The purpose of the telephone conversation between Himmler and Heydrich was evidently to forestall the liquidation of another Jewish transport from Berlin that had left for Riga on November 27, 1941, which obviously could not have been prevented. On precisely that day (November 30, 1941) an extensive mass execution took place near Riga and this was the reason that Himmler telephoned Heydrich once again on December 12, 1941.46 These semi-public executions as As can be seen from the note. Himmler had already telephoned to Berlin two hours before (11:30 hrs) from his own special train ("Sonderzug Heinrich"). He had been, as can be seen from Hitler's table talk (p. 135). among others, a guest at Hitler's table in the evening. Accordingly any long conversation with Hitler on November 30, 1941. could only have taken place on the afternoon of this day. 4 s See "Gesamtaufstellung der im Bereich der Einsatzkommaridos {Einsatzgruppe A of the Security Police and the SD] bis zum 1.12.1941 durchgeführten Exekutionen" (IfZ Archives. Fb 101/20). The documents show that on November 25, 1941, at Fort IX in Kovno, which had been used as an execution place by the Einsatzkommandos. 2.934 Jews from Munich. Berlin and Frankfurt had been shot. A further shooting on November 29, 1941 ended the lives of 2,000 Jews from Breslau and Vienna. ** See note No. 43. A telephone note of Himmler's on December 1. 1941 states: "13:15 hrs. SS Ogr. Heydrich. execution at Riga."

THE DECISION FOR THE FINAL SOLUTION T H E G E N E S I S O F T H E F I N A L SOLUTION

well as the treatment of the German Jews who had been deported to the East, had been attracting considerable attention among the German military authorities, as well as among some members of the civil administration in the Ostland. Gauleiter Kube, the Kommissar General of White Ruthenia who the day before had visited the German Jews who had newly arrived in Minsk, to the surprise of the local SS and Security Police, had remarked angrily that in his view a number of persons whose close relatives served at the front had been unjustly deported. Heydrich was forced to contend with these reproaches for months to come.47 It might have been this intervention or the particularly sensitive situation in Berlin, where American journalists had begun to evince interest in the fate of the deported Jews48—until the entry of the USA into the war even Hitler had to take this mood into consideration—that made the liquidation in Kovno or Riga of the Jews of Berlin which could not be kept secret, seem undesirable either to Hitler or to Himmler. This and no more can be inferred from the telephone note. This is additional evidence pointing to the improvisatory character of the annihilation, still typical for this phase, with all its contradictions and occasional misunderstandings between those who had been charged with the execution of the "final solution" and those who issued the orders. Even assuming that the telephone conversation between Himmler and Heydrich was based on Hitler's directive (with the aim of preventing the transport of Berlin Jews on their way to Riga from being executed upon arrival) as had been 47

See fragment of action report by SS Obersturmführer and Criminal Commissar Kurt Burkbardt, concerning this affair, dated JanuaryFebruary 1942, IfZ Archives, Fb 104. Also Helmut Heiber, "Aus den Akten des Gauleiters Kube," Vierteljahrshefte, N o . 4, 1956, pp. 6 7 92. Goebbels had already pointed out those sensibilities in his diaries (see above, p. 91). From his entries (they are missing for the month of December 1941) we can derive no clues for the interpretation of Himmler's telephone notice on November 30, 1941.

148

THE "FINAL SOLUTION" MARTIN BROSZAT done once before in Kovno), one cannot conclude, as Irving does, that Hitler was not aware of the murder of the Jews. On the contrary: the exceptional directive (in this case) would indicate that Hitler knew in principle about the practice of annihilation. Irving's interpretation, that Hitler had on November 30, 1941 issued a general prohibition against the liquidation erf the Jews which would also be binding for the years to come is, however, totally mistaken. In fact it was at this point that the more institutionalized and better "regulated" way of carrying out the "final solution" began. On January 20, 1942 the Wannsee Conference in Berlin took place, which made it clear, even in vaguely worded minutes, that those in charge intended to make sure that a great part of the deported Jews would not long survive deportation.49 The first extensive mass execution of Polish, German and Slovak Jews began in the spring of 1942 at Auschwitz and in the newly erected extermination camp of Belzec in the Eastern part of the General Government (the first of four extermination camps under the supervision of SS and Police Führer Globocnik 49

Heydrich referred at this conference particularly to "further possibilities of a solution after previous authorization by the Führer" which was the ultimate purpose of the "evacuation of the Jews to the East." He explained further: Under appropriate direction, in the course of the final solution, the Jews are now to be suitably assigned to labour in the East. In big labour gangs, with the sexes separated. Jews capable of work will be brought to these areas, employed in roadbuilding, in which task a large part will undoubtedly disappear through natural diminution. The remnant that may eventually remain, being undoubtedly the part most capable of resistance, will have to be appropriately dealt with, since it represents a natural selection and in the event of release is to be regarded as the germ cell of a new Jewish renewal. Minutes of the conference, p. 7ff., made public at the Eichmann Trial, Document of evidence N o 74.

THE DECISION FOR THE FINAL SOLUTION T H E GENESIS O F THE FINAL SOLUTION at Lublin). Goebbels notes this in his diary 5 0 on March 27, 1942: Beginning with Lublin, the Jews under the General Government are now being evacuated eastward. The procedure is pretty barbaric and is not to be described here more definitely. Not much will remain of the Jews. About 60 per cent of them will have to be liquidated; only about 40 per cent can be used for forccd labour. The former Gauleiter of Vienna, who is to carry out this measure, is doing it with considerable circumspection and in a way that does not attract too much attention. Though the judgment now being visited upon the Jews is barbaric, they fully deserve it. The prophecy which the Führer made about them for having brought on a new world war is beginning to come true in a most terrible manner. One must not be sentimental in these matters. If we did not fight the Jews, they would destroy us. It's a life-death struggle between the Aryan race and the Jewish bacillus. No other government and no other regime would have the strength for such a global solution as this. Here, once again, the Führer is the undismayed champion of a radical solution, which is made necessary by existing conditions and is therefore inexorable. Fortunately a whole series of possibilities presents itself to us in wartime which would be denied us in peace. We shall have to profit by this. The ghettos that will be emptied in the cities of the General Government will now be refilled with Jews thrown out of the Reich. This process is to be repeated from time to time. Jewry has nothing to laugh at.* O n e feels, on reading this document,

that Goebbels,

who

apparently had just heard of the new practice of murder through gassing, was talking himself out of his feeling of horror and clinging desperately to the bacillus theory of his Führer whom he calls "the spokesman of a radical solution." Irving's

interpretation

of

this

well-known

diary

entry

is

revealing. H e mentions it without citing it in detail (p. 392) and 5° This entry became known through The Goebbels Diaries, published by L. P. Lochner. that were accessible to him at the time (see above note 40). * The last sentence is missing in the English edition.

150

THE "FINAL SOLUTION' MARTIN BROSZAT

above all, conceals the explicit reference to "the Fiihrer." He even manages to indicate the reverse by his accompanying remark. Basing himself on his theory of Hitler's prohibition of the liquidation, he submits that the Minister of Propaganda as well as Himmler and Heydrich were one with the plotters whose purpose was to hide from Hitler the fact that new acts of murder had begun on the largest possible scale. Goebbels, so he writes, entrusted his diary with a frank description of the horrible events in the death camps "but he obviously kept silent when he met Hitler two days later." Further, so the author doggedly insists when writing about this conference, Goebbels had noted in his diary only the following expressions of Hitler concerning the Jewish question: "The Jews must pack up, disappear from Europe; if necessary we have to apply the most brutal means." Since there is no record of Hitler using the word gassing, he knew nothing about it; this is the manner in which Irving arrives at his "faithfully documented" deductions to prove his point, here as well as in other parts of his book. When examining Irving's thesis the historian, who is obliged to be sceptical as well as critical, might wonder why Hitler's statements concerning the Jewish problem during the war contain—contrary to Irving's statement—words like extermination and annihilation which are by no means scarce,51 and generally reveal Hitler's 51 See e.g. the above-mentioned table talk of Hitler's on January 23. 1942. Accordingly it is simply not correct when Irving states on p. 327 of his book: "All the surviving adjutants, female secretaries and staff s'enographers" had "testified unanimously" that the extermination had neveT been mentioned at the Fiihrer's headquarters. This thesis, whose confirmation Irving had obviously obtained from Bormann's assistant at the time. Heinrich Heim. is all the more misleading since Heim has recorded the above-mentioned table talk as well as other brutal utterances on the part of the Fiihrer and the records of the table talks are based mainly on Heim's notes. T o what extent Irving's still living "star witnesses" contribute to this thesis was discovered by the English writer Gitta Serenv who took the trouble to interview five of those questioned by Irving. They all

THE DECISION FOR THE FINAL SOLUTION THE GENESIS OF THE FINAL SOLUTION

murderous intentions but make hardly any direct references to various phases or specific aspects of the extermination of the Jews. The fact that no written order signed by Hitler concerning the exterminations has come down to us, cannot be recognized as a decisive factor. We have already indicated that it is quite possible that such a one-time general order to wipe out the Jews never existed. It might be added that the act of mass execution according to legislation still in force at that time made a priori a written confirmation of the order by the head of the German Reich quite unthinkable, unless Hitler was prepared to risk causing extreme embarrassment to the orderly administration and the judicial authorities of the Reich which were still fundamentally based on law and justice. This was the advantage of strict adherence to rules of semantics: the various branches of the civil administration, without whose organizational cooperation it would not have been possible to carry out the mass actions of the "final solution," were informed "officially" only about those aspects or portions of the general action which were still just permissible from a legal point of view: about "evacuations," "Jew transports," etc. Those parts of the action which were totally criminal and unlawful—the liquidations—occurred under the formal responsibility of special bodies in the Security Police and the SD who were above the law. More or less open mention of these matters was therefore acceptable on occasion, as can be seen on inspecting written communications between the SS and police authorities or between them and the heads of civil administration in the occupied areas of the East, who were outside the scope of the ordinary administration of the Reich. Hitler as Head of State had to be far more formal and punctili-

declared, as was to be expected, that Hitler never spoke about the extermination of the Jews in their presence; they could not however imagine that he had known nothing about them. A report about this is in The Sunday Times Weekly dated July 10, 1977.

THE "FINAL SOLUTION" MARTIN BROSZAT

ous than, for instance, Himmler, about the process of law and order in the regular administration of the country. He had ample reason to refrain from any explicit verbal or written reference that a third party could have interpreted as an official directive on the unlawful annihilation of the Jews. It is also known that at the time of the euthanasia programme Hitler was patently unwilling to furnish even a minimum of formal confirmation in the form of an obscure handwritten "authorization" (by no means "order"). However, confirmation was unavoidable in 1939, for with the killing of the mentally deficient being carried out within the boundaries of the German Reich, i.e. within the sphere of competence of regular civil administration and judicial authority, the euthanasia doctors and specialists had to be in a position, if necessary, to cite a formal authorization on the part of Hitler. But as far as the killing operations in the occupied territories were concerned, within the framework of the prevailing emergency situation, the manifold restrictions within the jurisdiction of the civil administration obviated this necessity. Here Hitler could content himself with verbal authorizations that were kept strictly secret. Thus, when Himmler, at a later date, for instance in his secret speeches at Posen before SS commanders and district governors on October 4, and 6, 1943, spoke openly about the annihilation of the Jews, he called this "the heaviest task" of his life;52 the reason probably was not that "faithful Heinrich" had acted behind the Fiihrer's back in the extermination of the Jews, or had voluntarily "relieved" him of this burden—as Irving claims contrary to all evidence—but obviously that Himmler could not In Himmler's address at Posen before SS commanders (October 4. 1943) he revealed in a remarkable twist the meaning of the formula that had long been used by saying: "I am referring now to the evacuation of the Jews, the extermination of the Jewish people." This "the heaviest" task as he declared in the address of October 6. 1943 had been undertaken by the SS "as an obligation towards our peop!:. o'jr racc . . . our Führer." See text in IfZ Archives. F37/3.

THE DECISION FOR THE FINAL SOLUTION THE GENESIS OF THE FINAL SOLUTION

cite any official mandate because Hitler entrusted hitn not only with the massacre of the Jews but, in addition, expected him to keep the order strictly secret. The extent to which Hitler took pains to keep that "last" truth about the fate of the Jews from the German public, is also revealed in Bormann's confidential circular addressed to Reich and district governors of the NSDAP, dated July 11, 1943.53 He prohibits "by order of the Fiihrer" any mention of a "future overall solution" in public dealings on the Jewish question and advises only mentioning "that the Jews are being employed in gangs as a labour force." It was very likely that not only formal considerations led Hitler to refrain from referring explicitly to the extermination of the Jews. With the sure instinct of the demagogue, and such he remained at his table conversations, he knew just what demands he could make on his listeners. In his official speeches during the war any declaration erf his virulent anti-Semitism— his desperate determination to take "revenge" on the Jews—was received with applause (as for instance in his speech of January 30, 1942); any description of an actual massacre of the Jews however would have (as in the case of Goebbels) aroused quite different emotions. Since our knowledge of Hitler's attitude towards the Jewish question during the war is based almost exclusively on records of his conversations and speeches, our interpretation is confined by the limits of his demagogic point of view. There is, however, some indirect evidence about Hitler's intervention in measures connected with the annihilation of the Jews. We may take as an indication the stepping-up of the killings that became operative in the summer of 1942 with the "running in" of Sobibor and Treblinka in the General Government Himmler as well as SS and Police Commander Globocnik were, for reasons of secrecy, anxious to carry out the action "as quickly 53 Part of the collection of printed matter "Vertrauliche Informationen der Parteikanzlei," IfZ Archives, Db 15.06.

154

THE "FINAL SOLUTION" MARTIN BROSZAT as possible." 54 There was some resistance on the part of the Wehrmacht, because of the need for Jewish labour (for instance regarding the c. 400,000 Warsaw Ghetto Jews) and further, due to the still chronic shortage of transport trains, for which the Wehrmacht had other priorities. For that reason Himmler required Hitler's full support. It was obviously on this subject that he conferred with Hitler at the Fiihrer's headquarters on July 16, 1942 and it was from there, on the same day, that his liaison officer to Hitler, SS-Obergruppenführer Wolff, made an urgent telephone call to the Assistant Secretary in the Ministry of Transport, concerning the availability of additional transport trains. It was three days later, only after these conditions had been met, that Himmler could, on July 19, 1942, issue the directive to the senior SS and Police Commanders that the accelerated resettlement of the entire Jewish population of the Genera! Government was to be carried out and terminated by December 31, 1942. Exempted should be solely the Jews in some of the labour camps. 53 On July 28, 1942, Assistant Secretary Ganzenmiiller issued Wolff this comforting communication: 5-» Illuminating for this is a letter by SS-Oberführer Brack (Chancellery of the Führer) to Himmler on June 23, 1942 (Nuremberg document N 0 - 2 0 5 ) in which the former reports that he had supplied further specialists upon Globocnik's request (for the gassing installations). "On this occasion Globocnik advocated finishing the whole Jewish action as quickly as possible so as not to remain stuck midway... You yourself, Reichsführer, have stated to me that one had, if only for reasons of camouflage, to work as quickly as possible." If one wanted to achieve this and on the other hand wished to employ the Jews who were able to work for the production of armaments. Brack continued, he recommended the sterilization of all the Jews who were still employed by means of "X-ray castration" which could be accomplished "in the shortest time." 55 Since it also evolved that in the district of Lublin a number of Jewish workers could not yet be spared, e.g. those employed at Beskiden Oil Co. on behalf of the Wehrmacht and thus the planned Germanization of the district with ethnic Germans (Volksdeutsche) —requiring total evacuation of the Jews—could not yet be achieved,

THE DECISION FOR THE FINAL SOLUTION T H E G E N E S I S O F T H E F I N A L SOLUTION "Since July 22, one train per day with live thousand Jews was leaving Warsaw for Treblinka, and that twice a week a train wos leaving Przemysl with five thousand Jews for Belzek [ ! ] . . . "

Wolff expressed his gratitude on August 13. 1942 for the efforts in this matter and declared that it gave him "special pleasure" to learn that "daily trainloads of five thousand members of the Chosen People are going to Treblinka and that we are thus being enabled to accelerate this migration."56 Wolff's intervention on the day of Himmler's conference with Hitler is only one of the indications that deportation and extermination activities were repeatedly granted special priority by the Fiihrer's headquarters.57 It is all the more fantastic when Irving claims (p. 327) that

56 r,T

Himmler turned to Hitler with this problem once more in the middle of September 1942. The outline of Himmler's talk with Hitler on September 17, 1942 contains, under the heading "Folkdom and Resettlement" the note "1) Deportation of Jews, how to proceed further, 2) Resettlement Lublin: Lothringians, Germans from Bosnia, Bessarabia . . . " I f Z Archives. F37/3. Nuremberg document N0-2207. Additional evidence is Himmler's draft for an address before Hitler on December 10, 1942. In that draft he noted among other things: "In France there are still 600,000-700,000 Jews and other enemies of the Reich." After the discussion Himmler noted: "To get rid of them." On the same day Himmler noted: "The Fiihrer has issued the directive that the Jews and other enemies in France are to be arrested and deported. However this is to be done only after he has discussed the matter with Lava!." (Microfilm IfZ Archives. MA 316. Bl. 615330 and Nuremberg document PS-1994). The above testimonies are all contained in the file which Irving assembled in preparation for his book, but their contents have hardly been used in his presentation. When a year later, in June 1943. Himmler was concerned with getting rid of the remaining Jews in the General Government in view of the increased danger of partisan warfare, he turned again to Hitler in an address on June 19, 1943. In a note on this address to the Fiihrer we read: "The Fiihrer in response to my address, expressed the opinion that the evacuation of the Jews had to be carried out radically in spite of the disturbances that might break out in the next 3-4 months."

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Dot only Hitler's secretaries and stenographers, but Wolff who accompanied Himmler while inspecting Auschwitz, as well as Globocnik at Lublin, in the summer of 1942 still knew nothing about the killings. It was in this vein that Wolff pleaded against charges of complicity in the killings at his trial in the Munich District Court in 1964. The court could not. as recorded in its judgement "accept the claim of the defendant since it is not in accordance with the truth." 5 8 Nevertheless, Irving treats Wolff's version as if it were a proven fact and makes no mention of the dissenting opinion of the court although he was aware of this. On the whole it seems that the author owes a great debt to Wolff. 59 It was the latter who in the early 50's was the first to propound the theory that Himmler, in his bizarre zeal for the Führer and the Fiihrer's ideology, saw it as his task to personally relieve the Commander-in-Chief, engaged in an external war with the world, and to take upon himself the anti-Semitic objectives without burdening Hitler himself. This theory of Irving's was obviously supported by the evidence of the author's witnesses of preference, Hitler's junior staff, who knew Hitler from a servant's perspective only as a more or less charming "boss." They could well imagine that " A . H . " (as they were still calling him) was once again kept in the dark, as Hitler had claimed often enough, and deceived on account of his good nature and naivete. 60 Even Hitler's valet, Krause, whose memoirs lend wholehearted support to the popular refrain "if only the Führer knew about this." has not been shunned by David Irving as a source or information. 61 On the other hand Irving often failed to take into 58 Sentence of the jury at the District Court in Munich II in the criminal action against Karl Wolff, p. 236 (Copy IfZ, Qm 07.29/2). H e adopts for example the opinion (certainly misleading and advocated by Wolff for obvious reasons) that only about 70 persons in Germany had known about the extermination of the Jews, so Notes by Karl Wolff, May 11, 1952, IfZ Archives, ZS 317. 61 Karl Wilhelm Krause, Zehn Jahre Kammerdiener bei Hitler, Hamburg. 11949J. On page 71 we find among others the following conclusion

THE DECISION FOR THE FINAL SOLUTION THE GENESIS OF THE FINAL SOLUTION consideration,

or treated with impatience, the post-war state-

ments of witnesses w h o were personally involved in the killings or w h o had had access to secret information. H e refers to the statements by Walter Blume and Otto Ohlendorf, the former commander of the Einsatzgruppen,

confirming the 1941 verbal

instructions to commanders about the killings, expressly issued under

Hitler's instructions;

although these are cited

by

the

author they are distorted in the reproduction. 62 H e completely ignores the remarkable statement of the former S D officer Wilhelm Hottl 6 3 and those of the commander of Auschwitz, Rudolf on the part of Krause: "Hitler had no perception of people... the greatest part of the responsibility for the crimes that were perpetrated in Hitler's name should rest with the Reichsleiter Martin Bormann and Himmler... Hitler had been informed about many things... either nothing at all or very little or vaguely through these two evil spirits. About the horrors in the concentration camps nothing was known in the circle surrounding Hitler. These matters weTe never discussed... I wish to state again that these matters and also the fight against the Church have their origin with Bormann and Himmler." 62

M

Ohlendorf, chief of the Einsatzgruppe D in 1941-1942, had stated on January 3, 1946 at the Nuremberg Trials: "In the late summer of 1941, Himmler was in Nikolaiev. He assembled the officers and men of the Einsatzkommando and reiterated the extermination order that had been issued to them... the responsibility was his and the Fiihrer's." Irving (p. 326) quotes the last sentence in this manner: "That he fHimmlerJ alone, in association with Hitler was responsible." The "alone" is Irving's invention. In continuation he mitigates the blame further: "Himmler's formulation was perhaps purposefully vague." Hottl stated during the Eichmann Trial in Jerusalem in June 1961: The leader of Einsatzgruppe A, Dr. Stahlecker, had explained to him during the war that the orders to the Einsatzgruppen concerning the annihilation of the Jews "came from Hitler personally and were communicated to the Einsatzgruppen by Heydrich." Hottl further stated that as witness in Nuremberg in the years 1945-1947 he spoke with former leading functionaries: "the unanimous understanding of these people" had been "that the physical annihilation of the Jewish p?«p!e should definitely be traced hack to Hitler personally."

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Höss. 64 The testimony of Adolf Eichmann, too, is passed over and declared misleading (p. 858). Irving claims that the only evidence of the fact that Hitler had ordered the annihilation of the Jews came from the former SD officer and expert on Jewish questions in Bratislava, Dieter Wisliceny, but is of no value. 65 Irving attempts to refute this testimony by citing a particularly weak parallel—"Given the powerful written evidence that Hitler again and again ordered the 'Jewish problem' set aside until the war was won" (p. 858/fn). He refers to the conversations with Bormann, Goebbels and others in the summer of 1941 concerning oppositional stirrings within the Catholic Church (Count Galen), in which Hitler opposes the tendency to apply radical measures against the opposition spokesmen of the Catholic clergy suggested by the N S D A P and particularly by Bormann in order to forestall opposition of the Church-going public. Just as in the case of the Church, Irving claims (p. 331) that Hitler sought to postpone the Jewish problem until after the war. That Irving does not hesitate to

64

65

Eichmann Trial, interrogation of Wilhelm Höttl by the District Court Bad Aussee. 19-21.6.1961. proceedings, p. 22. Kommandant in Auschwitz. Autobiographische Aufzeichnungen von Rudolf Höss, München. 1963, p. 157: English edition. Commandant of Auschwitz, The Autobiography of Rudolf Hoess, translated by Constantine FitzGibbon. London. 1959. p. 153. Wisliceny claimed after 1945 that Eichmann had shown him a written order concerning the extermination of the Jews. Eichmann denied this in his statements in Jerusalem: he confirmed however, that Hevdrich had summoned him (Eichmann) to inform him that the Führer had ordered the physical annihilation of the Jews. Irving seizes upon this contradiction between the statements of Wisliceny and Eichmann, that does not however touch upon the essence of the matter, which is their unanimous statement that the extermination programme, as they had been told, derived f r o m Hitler, as the occasion for an arrogant remark with which he tries to play down the significance of these testimonies: "This kind of evidence, of course, would not suffice in an English Magistrate's court to convict a vagabond of bicycle stealing." (Footnote p. 858).

THE DECISION FOR THE FINAL SOLUTION THE GENESIS OF THE FINAL SOLUTION manipulate his documentary evidence in order to add conviction to a thesis that is misleading ab initio,

reveals the obstinacy of

his reasoning. 66 This argument is obviously intended to support Irving's main thesis that Hitler was too busy with the conduct of the war to attend to the Jewish question himself and left Heydrich and others to deal with it. Irving's want of historical understanding and his lack of textual cohesion become especially obvious in this thesis. Even a cursory inspection of Hitler's wartime declarations concerning the Jews makes it clear that there was a widely motivated and powerful link in Hitler's thinking and will between military operations, particularly the war against the Soviet Union, and his ideological war against the Jews. It is precisely this very obvious connection that robs Irving's revisionist theses of 66

Irving refers to the note of Hitler's table talk on October 25, 1941 (this appears only in the English vcrcion. p. 91) where Hitler remarked in the presence of Himmler and Heydrich in the course of a discussion of Christianity, the Church and other subjects: "I have numerous accounts to settle, about which I cannot think today. But that does not mean I forget them. I write them down. The time will come to bring out the big book. Even with regard to the Jews, I've found myself remaining inactive. There's no sense in adding uselessly to the difficulties of the moment... When I read of the speeches of a man like Galen, I tell myself that... for the moment it is preferable to be silent..." The formulation "even with the Jews" makes it clear that Hitler viewed this question differently from the question of the Church. Irving falsifies this by omitting the word "even" in his quote of this sentence (p. 331) and inserts instead "too" which does not appear in the original version. In place of the recorded sentence ("Even with the Jews I found myself remaining inactive") Irving writes: "with the Jews too I have found myself remaining inactive." It may be that Hitler referred in this remark to the earlier enforced "inactivity" concerning the aim to make Germany judenfrei that had meanwhile been replaced by a purposeful activity. It is however possible that he was referring to the difficulties that had been set in the path of a rapid deportation of the Jews by the unexpected course of the eastern campaign; see the above remark by Hitler to Goebbels on November 21, 1941 (p. 752).

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BROSZAT

all conviction, especially since without this ideological-pathological linkage between the war and the annihilation of the Jews (in Hitler's world-view) the latter could hardly be explained. If one seeks to grasp the full significance of this philosophy as a motivating force, it does not suffice to trace it back to a paradigm of rational ideo'ogica! interactions.67 Hitler's philosophy, and especially the anti-Jewish components, had always been a non-wavering dogma, combined with sudden outbursts of paranoic aggressiveness. Anyone considering only the first portions necessarily concludes that there had been neither evolution nor radicalization. The final solution of the Jewish problem appears as a realization of a long-established programme methodically and "logically" carried out step by step. Closer inspection of the National Socialist Jewish policy shows that such a hypothesis is incorrect and does not adequately explain some important facts. The violent Reichskristallnacht which opened the door for the lawless persecution of the Jews, is a particularly telling example. Ever since, Hitler's fixation and impatience for a solution of the Jewish question were reinforced—evident from the frequency and intensity of his official utterances and the diplomatic activities with which he approached the Jewish question at the beginning of 1939—and cannot be explained on the basis of Hitler's ideology alone. Whichever explanation— with its inevitable concomitant psychological undertones—one prefers, be it the overwhelming euphoria of success to which Hitler was then subject and which drove him to exceed his still rational, political aims, means and calculations; or the later (post-winter 1941) and by no means insignificant motive of revenge and retribution for the unsuccessful conduct of the war, it is certain that Hitler's dogmatic ideological anti-Semitism was

G" This is also the weakness of Eberhard Jackal's study. Hitlers Weltanschauung, Tübingen, 1969; English edition, Hitler's Weltanschauung, A Blueprint for Power, translated by Herbert Arnold. Middletown. Connecticut. 1972.

THE DECISION FOR THE FINAL SOLUTION THE GENESIS OF THE FINAL SOLUTION

not independent of factors of time and events. Its development was not merely programmatic but rather pathological and was weakened or intensified by current events; these fluctuations were at least as important a motive for decision and action as was a fixation on a specific dogma. This is mirrored in the alternately spontaneous or constrained nature of actions relating to the Jewish policy and the killings, which did not proceed smoothly and according to plan but rather in an improvised and jerky fashion. From this angle the interdependence between the war and the Jewish question gains even greater importance. The war did not only offer—as noted cynically by Goebbels in his diary on March 27, 1942—opportunities for violent procedures that did not exist in peacetime, but was welcomed (and not only risked for political imperialist reasons). Hitler's prophesied destruction of Jewry, made on January 30, 1939, in the event of a new world war which has subsequently been cited so frequently, was from a psychological point of view not only a "warning" but in itself part of the motivation. The war, however, in its further course, offered ideal fuel for the constant "recharging" of a manic-aggressive anti-Semitism, and not to Hitler alone. The confrontation with the masses of Ostjuden in occupied Poland, in the Baltic states and in Russia, provided emotional nourishment and confirmation for an imperialist racial ideology that had until then been propagated only in the abstract; there now existed a concrete picture of an inferior race which had to be eradicated. The psychologically cheapest and most primitive form of self-confirmation and selffulfilling prophecy could now be set in motion: the discriminated against, crowded, tormented and frightened Jews in the East finally looked the way they were caricatured in the anti-Semitic periodicals. Epidemics in the ghettos made them a threat to the health of the general population; their terrified flight into the forest created the danger of "Jewish gangs" that one pretended to remove prophylactically just as one had to eradicate their

162

THE "FINAL SOLUTION" M A R T I N BROSZAT

expected propagation of defeatist ideas and plots in the occupied or allied neighbouring countries. All this and other motives were exploited not only by Hitler and Himmler but also by Goebbels and Ribbentrop and by the district military and civil administration chiefs. They were also employed by diplomats charged with the pressuring of the Allies into further intensification of the final solution in Europe, and were used and produced especially in the last stages of the deportations and exterminations in 19431944. These motives can be understood not only as semantic rules for the accomplishment of real ideological objectives, but rather as a conglomeration of various factors stemming from ideology, propaganda and, first and foremost, unexpected reactions of the individual which exceeded objectives set forth by racist ideology and brought into play so many "accomplices" and "assistants." With Hitler, too. the assessment of the motives mirrored in his remarks on the Jewish question during the second half of the war is of major significance. As the military struggle appeared to become hopeless, the "war of fate" against Jewry was promoted as the real war (which would be won). 68 The death of hundreds of thousands of German soldiers had to be expiated and biologically revenged through the liquidation of an even greater number of Jews. Also with Hitler the "security" problem came to the fore; Jews had to be eliminated, otherwise he feared 68 Indicative of this are Hitler's detailed utterances regarding the Jewish Question, recorded in Goebbels' diary on Mav 13. 1943: "Therefore the m o d e m nations have no other choice than to exterminate the Jews. They will resist this gradual extermination campaign with all the means at their disposal. One of these means is war. We have to realize that in this confrontation between Aryan humanity and the Jewish race, we shall have to endure many hard battles, because Jewry has managed to bring great population groups of the Aryan race, knowingly or unknowingly, into its service.. . It is the firm conviction of the Fiihrer that world Jewry is facing a great fall. . the nations which have first recognized and resisted the Jew for what he is shall rule the world in his place."

THE DECISION FOR THE FINAL SOLUTION THE GENESIS OF THE FINAL SOLUTION

that there could be internal unrest69 due to increased partisan warfare in the rear, defeatism and defection of Axis countries. It was for that reason the final intensification of radicalism took place in Hitler after Stalingrad, and seems to be one of the motives for the intensified measures that aimed to encompass, if possible, all the Jews within the German sphere of influence into the extermination programme.70 Hitler's numerous references to the interrelation of the war and the Jewish question show with sufficient clarity how untenable Irving's argument is. One example erf Hitler's increased intervention in the final solution after Stalingrad is his discussions with the Rumanian head of state, Marshal Antonescu, and with the Hungarian Regent Admiral Horthy in April 1943.71 We 69 I n his secret address to officers and generals at Obersalzberg o n M a y 26, 1944 (see above, note 4 1 ) Hitler declared atrong other things: "I have squeezed Jewry out of its positions, without consideration. . . with this I h a v e removed the last catalyst f r o m the masses. B y removing the Jews, I have removed any possibility f o r the f o r m a t i o n of a revolutionary i n f e c t i o n . . . " 70

T h e intensification of the deportations f r o m France beginning in the spring of 1943, the simultaneously increased pressure o n Hungary vis-ä-vis the Jews, the annihilation of the Jews in the Ukraine (spring 1943) and other evidence point to the fact that the w a r of extermination against the Jews was again w a g e d with the greatest intensity, after the military struggle was already, more or less, lost. Eichmann too, during his trial in Jerusalem, testified on June 21, 1961 that after "Stalingrad" a "considerable effort on the part of the Reich leadership" could b e noted "in order to intensify t h e deportations Tof the Jews]." T h e first "high point" of the intensification had been in the spring of 1942, the second after the death of Heydrich, the third fell in the phase after Stalingrad.

71

S e e the minutes of Hitler's c o n f e r e n c e with A n t o n e s c u and H o r t h y according to the G e r m a n records in Hillgruber, Staatsmänner und Diplomaten bei Hitler, V o l . II, 1970. On Hitler's utterances concerning the Jewish policy (p. 322fT) e.g. the following sentences: ' T o r this reason, it was the Führer's opinion, in contrast t o Marshal Antonescu, that the more radically the Jews were dealt with, the b e t t e r . . . h e [the Führer}. w o u l d rather b u m all bridges behind him, since the

164

THE "FINAL SOLUTION" MARTIN BROSZAT

shall examine these records in more detail at the close of this discussion, since not only do they once more document Hitler s intransigence and his way of thinking, but also 2ive us an opportunity to demonstrate how the author of the Hitler book manipulates such documents. By describing the anti-Jewish measures in Germany (in the area of the Reich there remained only a few thousand Jews), Hitler attempted to persuade both heads of state to adopt a similar radical line towards the Jews of their respective countries. He bluntly expressed himself to Horthy on April 16-17, 1943. It had aroused his particular dissatisfaction that Hungary's 800,000 Jews could, in spite of some anti-Jewish laws that were promulgated in 1938, still move about with relative freedom. On April 16, 194372 Horthy answered the reproaches levelled against him on this matter by enumerating the manifold measures that had been taken by his government to restrict the Jewish influence; he closed his remarks with a clear allusion to the reports known to him about the German measures for the liquidation of the Jews: "He had done everything that could decently be done against the Jews, but it was after all impossible to murder them or otherwise eliminate them." Hitler, who was obviously embarrassed by this hint, declared, according to the records: ".. .there is no need for that; Hungary could put the Jews into concentration camps just as had been done in Slovakia.. ." He continued by counter-attacking while twisting the argument in his typical manner: "When there was talk of murdering the Jews, he [the Fiihrer] had to state that there was only one murderer, namely the Jew who had provoked this war..." Hitler and Ribbentrop did not give up

72

Jewish hatred was in any case enormous. In Germany one had, due to the solving of the Jewish question, a unified nation without opposition at one's displosal. However, there was no turning back once this path had been taken." Although Irving mentions the conference (p. 508) he omits Hitler's remark about the Jewish question. Minutes see Hillgnibir. op. cit.. Vol. II. p. 245ff. and 256ff.

THE DECISION FOR THE FINAL SOLUTION THE GENESIS OF THE FINAL SOLUTION and on the next day (April 17) brought up the subject again. T h e most important parts of the record read: In reply to Horthy's question, what should be done with the Jews after he had deprived them of almost any means of existence— to murder them is not possible—the Foreign Minister answered that the Jews must either be destroyed or put in concentration camps—there is no other way. Hitler complemented the straightforward speech of his Foreign Minister first by a long-winded dissertation on the decay that the Jews caused wherever they were found and, with a typical mixture of openness and obscurity, arrived at the heart of the matter: the massacre of the Jews in the concentration camps, as Horthy had alluded. They [the Jews) are just parasites. This state of affairs had not been tolerated in Poland; if the Jews there refused to work, they were shot. Those who could not work just wasted away. They had to be treated as tuberculosis bacilli which could infcct a healthy organism. This was by no means cruel when one considered that even innocent creatures like hares and deer had to be put down to prevent damage. Why should the beasts that had brought Bolshevism down on us, command more pity. These documented statements on the part of Hitler could not be ignored even by Irving. H e reproduces some passages (p. 509) but attempts to modify their significance methodically by a number of manoeuvers:

Ribbentrop's declaration in the

presence of Hitler (that the Jews must either be destroyed or put in concentration camps) is concealed in a footnote to the appendix of the book. 7 3 Hitler's o w n remark (in Poland the 73 P. 872 (note on p. 509). Horthy had correctly interpreted Hitler's remark as a request for the annihilation of the Jews. This is confirmed by the draft of a letter from Horthy to Hitler regarding the conference at Klessheim, which was prepared by the Hungarian Foreign Ministry and which reads: "Your Excellency further reproached me that my government does not proceed with stamping out Jewry with the same radicalism as is practiced in Germany." (In

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BROSZAT

Jews who refused to work were shot and those who could not work perished) Irving introduces with the reference to the Warsaw Ghetto Revolt which had been suppressed shortly before (and that had not even been mentioned in the conference with Horthy); he thus makes it falsely appear as only referring to an action that was limited in scope and carried out for a specific reason. In order to completely obscure the impression that the Fiihrer's utterances, which could hardly be misunderstood, were indeed a confirmation of this policy of annihilation, Irving allows the discussion with Horthy to terminate, contrary to the documented facts, with Hitler's evasive remark of the previous day (April 16, 1943) in reply to Horthy's direct question if he should murder the Jews ("there is no need for that"). Irving cites these words at the end of his quotation and they are the only ones he cites verbatim and stresses with quotation marks. Irving finally ends the thoroughly manipulated course and content of the conference with some further remarks that are intended to relieve Hitler of responsibility and are typical foi Irving's apologetic interpretation (p. 509). As an illustration we shall quote them verbatim: What had prompted the earthier [!] language now emploved? It is possible to recognize the association in his mind of certain illogical ideas', half were unconscious or the result of his own muddled beliefs, but half had deliberately been implanted bytrusted advisers like Himmler and Goebbels: the Jews had started the war; the enemy was the international Jew; the most deadly of the Bolsheviks, like Stalin's propagandist Ilya Ehrenburg, were Jews: Ehrenburg and the Jews behind Roosevelt were preaching the total extermination of »he German race. T h e saturation

Horthy's actual letter to Hitler, dated May 7. 1943 this passage had been omitted; see The Confidential Papers of Admiral Horthy, Budapest. 1965). However, ir his footnote Irving "coyly" cites the term Ausrottung as "extirpation": whereas in the text of the book he uses the vague "stamping out" (not as he did originally in the handwritten translation in the margin of the copy of the Horthy letter used by him. IfZ. Irving Collection).

THE DECISION FOR THE FINAL SOLUTION THE GENESIS OF THE FINAL SOLUTION bombing of German cities, their blasting and burning, were just the beginning. In his warning to Horthy that the "Jewish Bolsheviks" would liquidate all Europe's intelligentsia, we can identify the influence of the Katyn episode... But the most poisonous and persuasive argument used to reconcile (!) Hitler to a harsher treatment of the Jews was the bombing war. From documents and target maps recently found in crashed bombers he knew that the British aircrews were instructed to aim only at the residential areas now and to disregard the industrial targets proper. Only one race murdered, he told the quailing Horthy, and that was the Jews, who had provoked this war and given it its present character against civilians, women and children. He returned repeatedly to this theme as 1943 progressed; in 1944 it became more insistent; and in 1945 he embodied it in his Political Testament, as though to appease his own conscience and justify his country's actions.

With these "explanations" our author has done it again: without the British bombing war that had been initiated by Churchill, Hitler would not have been such a hater of the Jews. The prejudice of the author, transforming his hatred of Churchill into an apology for Hitler, is apparent in this passage, and indeed, characterizes the whole book. It is not possible, and indeed it is quite unnecessary to delve into Irving's distorting interpretation. Over and above our criticism, it is a point in the author's favour that we are provided an opportunity to re-examine the subject. In spite of his mistaken conclusions Irving has drawn our attention to some of the hitherto inadequate information and existing interpretations.

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A REPLY TO MARTIN BROSZAT REGARDING THE ORIGINS OF THE FINAL SOLUTION

CHRISTOPHER R. BROWNING

MARTIN BROSZAT'S article " H i t l e r und die Genesis der 'Endlosung.' Aus Anlass der Thesen von David Irving," 1 (Hitler and the Genesis of the Final Solution, in response to David Irving's theses) has been justly praised as the most comprehensive refutation of Irving's claim that the Final Solution was implemented without the Fiihrer's approval. 2 In addition, however, Broszat develops his own thesis on the origins of the Final Solution. Although he is undismayed by the absence of any document signed by Hitler explicitly ordering the extermination of the Jews (for such orders would have been given orally), 3 Broszat is disturbed by the absence of any reference in postwar interrogations or surviving diaries by close associates like Goring, Ribbentrop, Frank, or Goebbels, to a specific verbal order by

THE DECISION FOR THE FINAL SOLUTION Hitler for total extermination. 4 Broszat then offers the intriguing possibility that there was no single comprehensive decision to kill, but rather the destruction program developed gradually (stuckund schubweise) out of a series of separate killing actions in late 1941 and early 1942. These local massacres were the improvised responses to a situation created by two factors: ideological and political pressures for a judenrein Europe (exerted above all by Hitler himself) and the military failure on the eastern front which caused a lack of both rail transportation and reception areas for the Jews who were to be uprooted. Once underway, the killing program gradually became institutionalized and, having proved itself logistically the simplest solution, finally grew into a comprehensive and distinctive program. 5 Broszat's demolition of Irving merits praise, but this provocative and stimulating thesis deserves critical examination. Broszat admits that the origins of the Final Solution, particularly the central decision-making process, remain shrouded in darkness. Conceding that his interpretation cannot be definitively proved, he nonetheless maintains that it has " a far greater probability than the assumption of a comprehensive secret order for the destruction of the Jews in the summer of 1941. " 6 The question then is whether the evidence Broszat marshalls on behalf of this thesis, together with that which he omits, constitutes a persuasive case for " f a r greater probability." My conclusion is that, on the contrary, Hider ordered, or to be more precise, incited or solicited, the preparation of an extermination plan in the summer of 1941. Henceforth, Goring, Himmler, and Heydrich (and gradually others also) were conscious of this as a goal they were striving to achieve. T h e "industrial revolution" in mass murder was not instantaneous, however. Time was required to make decisions on the basic questions concerning the technology, organization, logistics, location, and inclusiveness of the extermination program. Though not all of these questions were resolved within a few months, the basic outline of the extermination plan resulting from Hitler's order of the previous summer was approved by the Fiihrer in October or November of 1941. Let us examine more closely the evidence, argument, and probability of Broszat's thesis. In Broszat's view, Goring's authorization to Heydrich of July 31, 1941, to prepare a "total solution"

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of the Jewish question in those territories of Europe u n d e r G e r m a n influence and to coordinate the participation of those organizations whose jurisdiction was involved, did not signify a decision to kill the E u r o p e a n J e w s . 7 G o r i n g ' s letter initiated extensive activities for massive resetdement "without at the same time being clear about the consequences." In Broszat's mind, " t h e determined will of the Nazi leadership now radically to solve the Jewish question did not as yet correspond to any equally clear goal regarding the f u r t h e r fate of those to be d e p o r t e d . " 8 T o support this contention, Broszat relies in part on citations f r o m yet unpublished fragments of G o e b b e l s ' s diaries from the last half of 1941. T h e s e sources reveal H i t l e r ' s August pledge to deport the Berlin J e w s to the East as soon as the R u s s i a n campaign was over, along with the increasing difficulties that the promised deportations encountered in the fall of 1941 because of the stalled military offensive and the transportation shortage. Nowhere, as yet, did Goebbels make reference to plans for systematic extermination. Broszat concludes that Hitler's fanatical determination to create a judenrein Europe had led him into a " b l i n d a l l e y " by November, and that as a " w a y o u t , " minor extermination actions that were not part of any comprehensive plan b e g a n to take place to reduce the n u m b e r of J e w s who had eventually to be deported to Russia. Broszat's reliance on Goebbels is problematic, for the Propag a n d a Minister simply is not an accurate b a r o m e t e r for m e a s u r ing changes in Nazi policy toward the J e w s . After the Kristallnacht confrontation between Goebbels and the t r i u m v i r a t e of GoringH i m m l e r - H e y d r i c h , the latter did not share its hard-won control over J e w i s h policy with Goebbels. Goebbels m a y have been a constant inciter of more radical J e w i s h policies, b u t he was neither the designer nor executor of those policies. If, in the s u m m e r of 1941, Hitler had urged Goring, H i m m l e r , a n d Heydrich to prepare a feasible program for the extermination of the J e w s , they need not have shared such information with Goebbels. Indeed, Goebbels's isolation from the main currents of Jewish policy is demonstrated in his diary entry of M a r c h 7, 1942, six weeks after the Wannsee Conference (to which no representative of Goebbels's ministry was invited) and about which he seems to have received only an expurgated and belated report:

THE DECISION FOR THE FINAL SOLUTION I read a detailed report from the SD and police regarding the final solution of the Jewish question. Any final solution involves a tremendous number of new viewpoints. The Jewish question must be solved within a pan-European frame. There are 11,000,000 Jews still in Europe. They will have to be concentrated later, to begin with, in the East; possibly an island, such as Madagascar, can be assigned to them after the war. In any case there can be no peace in Europe until the last Jews are eliminated from the continent. That, of course, raises a large number of exceedingly delicate questions. What is to be done with the half-Jews? What with those related to Jews? In-laws of Jews? Persons married to Jews? Evidendy we still have quite a lot to do . . . Presumably the Propaganda Ministry received this report in connection with the Mischlinge conference of March 6, 1942, which one of Goebbels's men attended. The Foreign Office, in contrast, received its copy of the unexpurgated Wannsee Conference protocol (one of thirty) on J a n u a r y 26, and even the low-echelon officials of the Colonial Desk were informed by February 10 that the Madagascar Plan was defunct. 10 Clearly, much about Nazi Jewish policy already shared with the ministerial bureaucracy was still being kept from Goebbels. His first awareness of the Final Solution is recorded only on March 27, 1942, several weeks after Belzec began operating. 1 1 T h e absence of specific testimony by either Goring or Ribbentrop about an extermination order coming directly from Hitler should also not be taken too seriously. Goring, on trial for his life, obviously had a personal interest in denying that his authorization to Heydrich on July 31, 1941, referred to such an order. Ribbentrop was not a confidant of Hitler on Jewish policy, and Foreign Office participation in the Final Solution was initiated by his ambitious Undersecretary, Martin Luther. The Foreign Minister remained generally oblivious, even in August 1942, to the importance which Hitler attached to the Final Solution. When piqued by SS encroachments on his jurisdiction, he ordered his Foreign Office to cease temporarily pressing Germany's allies on the deportation question. It was not until early 1943 that Ribbentrop perceived the political expediency of engaging in personal diplomacy on behalf of the Final Solution. 12

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If Broszat relies too much on Goebbels, he completely ignores the testimony of SS personnel who were in charge of devising and carrying out the extermination plan. Himmler and Heydrich did not live to testify, but Adolf Eichmann and Rudolf Höss did. While the testimony of each man is not without inconsistencies, a common picture does emerge. In his early testimony before the International Military Tribunal, Höss was clearly confused and ran together events of 1941 and 1942. However, his 1946 testimony before the Polish interrogators in Cracow and his 1947 autobiography present a relatively coherent account. In Berlin, in the summer of 1941, Himmler told Höss of the Führer's order to exterminate all the European Jews. Höss was then visited by Eichm a n n , who discussed the inadequacies of shooting and gas vans as a means of extermination but could not yet give him details about the starting date of the exterminations or the gassing technology to be employed. These questions were still unanswered when Höss attended a conference of Eichmann's men in Berlin in November. That same fall, Cyclon B gassing was carried out on Russian prisoners in Auschwitz, and then this gas was selected for the Jewish extermination that began with the arrival of Jews from Upper Silesia early in 1942. 13 In general, Eichmann's various accounts are more consistent than those of Höss. 14 Eichmann testified that Heydrich informed him late in the summer of 1941 that the Fuhrer had ordered the physical destruction of the Jews. He was then assigned to report on various preparations and killing-actions in the East. First, Heydrich sent him to the already informed Odilo Globocnik in Poland, who showed him the early construction of one camp designed to use exhaust gas from a captured Russian U-boat engine. Eichmann remembered the bright fall colors there. He was then sent by Heinrich Müller to Minsk to witness Einsatzgruppen activities. The weather had already turned cold, for he was wearing a long leather coat that got splashed with the brains of a baby held up to him by a desperate mother. Finally, Müller sent him to Chelmno in late December or early J a n u a r y to report on the gas van killings that had just begun there. Upon his return, he was chided by Müller for not having noted with precision the timing involved in the killing operation. T h e one event in the sequence that Eichmann did not relate with consistency was his first

THE DECISION FOR THE FINAL SOLUTION visit to Auschwitz. While in his court testimony he denied the Hoss account of a fall visit to Auschwitz, in earlier interrogations he admitted having been sent by Miiller to Auschwitz " a t the beginning," where he discussed gassing methods with Hoss and was shown the small hut in which Cyclon B pellets had been tested on prisoners. The use of Cyclon B pellets, he noted, was the major difference between Auschwitz and the other camp he had seen. This discrepancy in Eichmann's account does not, however, alter the general thrust of his testimony: that he was informed in the late summer of 1941 of the Fiihrer's decision physically to exterminate the Jews and was sent by his superiors in the SS to report on the experiences gained from various killing operations in the East. 1 5 Does any documentary evidence survive to indicate that planning activities within the SS during the fall of 1941 focused on the difficulties of extermination, not merely on deportation? O n August 28, 1941, Eichmann wrote the Foreign Office and added to the old formulation " i n view of the imminent final solution" the ominous phrase "now in preparation." 1 6 Although this was not a document of decisive importance, the timing of the change in phraseology is important because it coincides with Eichmann's own account of learning about the extermination order in late summer. That the Nazis no longer considered mere deportation a satisfactory solution to the Jewish question is reflected in several memoranda of Undersecretary Martin Luther of the Foreign Office in mid-October 1941.17 A number of Spanish Jews had been arrested and interned in France, which led Spain to suggest the possibility of evacuating all Spanish Jews in France (some 2,000) to Spanish Morocco. On October 13, Luther urged negotiations in that direction—a position fully in line with the hitherto prevailing policy of achieving a judenrein Europe through the expulsion of the Jews. Four days later, however, Heydrich's Reich Security Main Office (RSHA) informed Luther by telephone of its opposition to the Spanish proposal, as the Spanish government had neither the will nor the experience to guard the Jews effectively in Morocco. " I n addition these Jews would also be all too much out of the direct reach of the measures for a basic solution to the Jewish question to be enacted after the war" [italics added]. T h e rejection of

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d e p o r t a t i o n to M o r o c c o c o m b i n e d with the m e n t i o n of m e a s u r e s for a basic solution to be e n a c t e d a f t e r the w a x (which otherwise w o u l d h a v e b e e n avoided) indicates that a f u n d a m e n t a l shift in N a z i J e w i s h policy h a d o c c u r r e d a n d that t h e Nazis h a d m o r e t h a n a " v a g u e n o t i o n " of w h a t c o n s t i t u t e d this basic solution. Also in O c t o b e r 1941, E i c h m a n n ' s associate, Friedrich S u h r , accompanied the Foreign Office J e w i s h expert, F r a n z R a d e m a c h e r , to B e l g r a d e to deal with the J e w i s h q u e s t i o n in Serbia. A f t e r the fate of the a d u l t male J e w s w a s settled (they w e r e shot by a r m y firing s q u a d s in reprisal for casualties suffered f r o m partisan attacks), R a d e m a c h e r reported o n the w o m e n , children, a n d elderly: " T h e n as soon as t h e technical possibility exists w i t h i n the f r a m e w o r k of a total solution of the J e w i s h q u e s t i o n , the J e w s will be d e p o r t e d by w a t e r w a y to the reception c a m p in the E a s t . " 1 8 J u s t after learning at a c o n f e r e n c e a t t e n d e d by o n e of E i c h m a n n ' s m e n of plans for a r e c e p t i o n c a m p in the E a s t , R a d e m a c h e r received a letter f r o m P a u l W u r m , foreign editor of Der Stürmer. Dear Party Comrade Rademacher! O n my return trip from Berlin I met an old party comrade who works in the East on the settlement of the Jewish question. In the near future many of the Jewish vermin will be exterminated through special measures." T a k e n t o g e t h e r , these d o c u m e n t s indicate t h a t experts on the J e w i s h q u e s t i o n c o m i n g to a n d f r o m Berlin in t h e m o n t h of O c t o b e r w e r e a w a r e of p l a n s for a " r e c e p t i o n c a m p " in the East to receive J e w s i n c a p a b l e of h e a v y l a b o r a n d " s p e c i a l m e a s u r e s " being a r r a n g e d for their e x t e r m i n a t i o n . T h e exact location of the p l a n n e d reception c a m p was not clear, t h o u g h the reference to t r a n s p o r t by w a t e r w a y would suggest that a D a n u b e - B l a c k Sea r o u t e to R u s s i a was b e i n g c o n s i d e r e d . Discussion of b o t h gassing a n d the c r e a t i o n of new c a m p s for J e w s in R u s s i a was recorded o n yet a n o t h e r occasion in O c t o b e r by Ostministerium J e w i s h expert A l f r e d W e t z e l , w h o met with Eichmann and euthanasia supervisor Viktor Brack. Brack of the Führer Chancellery has declared himself prepared to take part in the construction of the necessary shelters as well as the gassing apparatus. At the moment the apparatus under

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consideration are not available in sufficient quantity but must first be manufactured. Because in Brack's view the manufacture of the apparatus in the Reich will cause greater difficulties than their manufacture on the spot, he considers it most expedient immediately to send his people, especially his chemist, Dr. Kallmeyer, to Riga, who will take care of everything on the spot. . . . Sturmbannftihrer Eichmann, the expert for the Jewish question in the RSHA, has agreed to this procedure. According to Sturmbannführer Eichmann, Jewish camps are about to be set up in Riga and Minsk, to which Jews from the Old Reich will also possibly come. At the moment Jews evacuated from the Old Reich are to come to Lodz, but also to other camps, so that later, insofar as they are capable of labor, they will be put to work in the East. As things stand there is no reason why those Jews who are not fit forwork should not be removed by the Brack method. . . . The workworthy on the other hand will be transported to the East for labor. Obviously, among the Jews capable of labor, men and women must be separated.20

O n October 10, at a conference in Prague chaired by Heydrich, Riga and Minsk were also mentioned as destinations for deported J e w s . At this same conference, Heydrich noted that " N e b e a n d Rasch could take in Jews in the camps for communist prisoners in the theater of o p e r a t i o n s . " Perhaps Heydrich m e a n t Stahlecker and Nebe, the respective Einsatzgruppen c o m m a n d e r s in Riga a n d Minsk. In any case, the fact that deported J e w s were to be t u r n e d over to Einsatzgruppen commanders, who were supervising the killing of J e w s and communists, does not support the conclusion that even in early October Heydrich was in doubt about the specific fate of these deportees. 2 1 These October documents do not yet portray the Final Solution in its definitive form, but they do suggest that frenetic planning was u n d e r way and that key ingredients of the Final Solution—special reception camps for the d e p o n e d J e w s a n d gassing—were being discussed a m o n g the experts on Jewish matters, not only in the SS but also in the Fiihrer's Chancellery, the Foreign Office, a n d the Ostministerium. T h e s e documents enhance the credibility of Eichmann and Höss, not the contention of Broszat that even after the deportations f r o m G e r m a n y began in

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O c t o b e r , the Nazis still had only a vague notion or general conception (allgemeine Vorstellung) of the fate of the deportees. If concrete steps were being taken in p l a n n i n g the fate of the deportees, as E i c h m a n n a n d Hóss testified, then Broszat's own persuasive a r g u m e n t s vis-á-vis Irving, that such steps were inconceivable without H i t l e r ' s knowledge and approved, 2 2 strengthen the case for a H i t l e r destruction order in the s u m m e r of 1941. I n addition to relying on the absence of a n y reference to an explicit Hitler destruction order by high-ranking Nazis, Broszat also c o u n t s u p o n the improvised n a t u r e of the fail deportations from G e r m a n y to support his contention that no comprehensive e x t e r m i n a t i o n order was issued a n d that initially the Nazis were unclear as to the fate of the deportees. Broszat notes H i m m l e r ' s s t a t e m e n t in a letter to Gauleiter Greiser of the Wartheland dated S e p t e m b e r 18, 1941, that 60,000 G e r m a n J e w s would be sent to Lodz to await f u r t h e r deportation east the next spring, and argues that H i m m l e r ' s ensuing quarrel with U e b e l h o e r over the reception capacity of Lodz was inexplicable if a destruction plan already existed. 2 3 Broszat concludes that the stalled R u s s i a n campaign required use of Polish territory as a winter way station for the deported J e w s , and that the inability of the Polish ghettos to absorb more deportees from G e r m a n y threatened to thwart the entire deportation p r o g r a m . T h e pressure could only be relieved by sporadic executions (such as those at Riga a n d K o v n o and in the " a d h o c " extermination c a m p at C h e l m n o ) . H o w e v e r , it is important to note that the improvised nature of the fall deportations from G e r m a n y is not incompatible with systematic plans for extermination s t e m m i n g f r o m a Hitler order of the previous s u m m e r . G ó r i n g ' s J u l y authorization referred to a plan for the entire G e r m a n sphere of influence in Europe, not just for G e r m a n y and the Protectorate. In August, before such a plan could be devised, Hitler resisted pressure f r o m Heydrich a n d Goebbels for immediate deportations f r o m G e r m a n y . 2 4 As of S e p t e m b e r 13, Eichmann also told the Foreign Office that no deportation of Serbian J e w s to the G e n e r a l G o v e r n m e n t or Russia was possible, for not even G e r m a n J e w s could be lodged there. 2 5 O n S e p t e m b e r 14, however, R o s e n b e r g urged Hitler to approve the immediate deportation of G e r m a n J e w s in retaliation for the R u s s i a n deportation of Volga G e r m a n s to Siberia. Four

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days later, Himmler informed Greiser of interim deportations to Lodz because the Fiihrer wished to make the Old Reich and the Protectorate judenfrei as soon as possible, if possible by the end of the year. In Prague, shortly thereafter, Heydrich likewise announced the Fiihrer's wish that, insofar as possible, the German Jews were to be deported to Lodz, Riga, and Minsk by the end of the year. 26 Both Himmler and Eichmann (later in his conversation with Wetzel) definitely treated the fall deportations as temporary. The Jews would be sent " t o the East" in the spring, by which time preparations for a "total solution" to the Jewish question would be complete. The fall deportations were indeed improvised, because they originated in a snap decision by Hitler in mid-September to seek an interim solution for Germany even before the "total solution" for all of Europe could be designed and implemented. If the July authorization and the fall deportations stemmed from two different decisions, the improvised nature of the latter does not exclude the comprehensive intentions of the former. In addition to the scant documentary evidence and the testimony of Eichmann and Hoss, circumstantial evidence should be considered as well. Is Broszat's contention that the Nazis were so obsessed with deportation that in October 1941, after the deportations from Germany had already begun, they still had only a "general conception" of the fate of the Jews—even plausible? When Broszat does attempt to describe more specifically the Nazis' perception of this fate, the result is scarcely distinguishable from the plan for systematic extermination he elsewhere denies. Of this general conception he writes, " T h e Jews would be put to hard labor in ghettos and camps in the East, whereby many would soon die, and as for those incapable of work one could help to liquidate useless prisoners, similar to what was then being done in the concentration camps in Germany and the work camps in Poland." 2 7 Since the vast majority of Jews to be deported to the East would be women, children, elderly, or sick, and the work-worthy would be a distinct minority put to exhausting labor that would soon render them likewise "useless," the Nazi deportation program implied systematic extermination even in Broszat's own terms. It is unlikely that the Nazis were acting blindly and did not perceive these implications. The SS had already been forced to

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call off deportations to the Lublin Reservation in the spring of 1940 because limited but indiscriminate deportation of Jews without careful preparation had proved chaotic a n d unfeasible. There was no desire for a repetition of that fiasco, yet the attempt to resetde Europe's entire Jewish population in Russia would have had far graver consequences. G e r m a n planners acknowledged openly and frequendy that exploitation of Russian food supplies was going to entail the mass starvation of native inhabitants. In a meeting of state secretaries on M a y 2, 1941, it was noted that " . . . umpteen million people will doubtless starve to death when we extract what is necessary for us from the c o u n t r y . " 2 8 T h e Wirtschaflsstab Ost report of M a y 23, 1941, stated: The population of this area [the forest regions], especially the urban population, will inevitably face a great famine. . . . Many tens of millions of people will be superfluous in this area and will die or have to emigrate to Siberia.29 Attempts to rescue the population there from famine by drawing upon surplusses from the black earth region can only be at the expense of provisioning Europe. They endanger Germany's capacity to hold out in war, they endanger Germany's resistance to blockade. Absolute clarity must prevail in this regard. 30 And in August, Goring "reckoned with great loss of life on grounds of nutrition . . . . " 3 1 Was anyone seriously considering a massive influx of additional people into Russia under these circumstances without being clear about the consequences? When in the summer of 1940 SS experts in Jewish matters began seriously to plan for the Madagascar resettlement, they produced within two months a neatly printed brochure, complete with table of contents and maps, outlining the future governance and economy of the "superghetto. " 3 2 However fantastic the Madagascar Plan may have been, the planners were men who clearly thought beyond the initial stage of deportation. By 1941 they could have had few illusions about the practical difficulties of solving the Jewish question. It is inconceivable that they spent the a u t u m n of 1941 wrestling with the obstacles to deportation while resting content with nothing more than a vague notion of how to cope with the most important problem of all—the disposition of the deportees.

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If Broszat's thesis is not accepted as one of " f a r greater probability," it is incumbent upon the critic (unless, of course, he is David Irving) to provide a scenario that is at least as feasible. T h e decision to launch the Einsatzgruppen massacres of the Russian Jews was a q u a n t u m leap in Nazi Jewish policy and should not be seen (as Broszat seems to see it) merely in the context of a Vernichtungskrieg (war of destruction) in the East, unconnected with the Nazis' treatment of the total European Jewish question. 3 3 Nazi Jewish policy had already reached a blind alley when Hitler's decision to invade Russia posed the old dilemma that further military success would burden the expanding G e r m a n empire with millions more Jews. T h e decision to kill the Russian Jews solved this dilemma and henceforth beckoned as a solution for the European Jews as well. In such a context, what constituted a Hitler destruction order? When Goring authorized Heydrich to make plans for a total solution to the Jewish question, the extermination of the Russian Jews was already in full swing. We do not know if Hider gave a more explicit verbal order to Himmler and Heydrich, but such an order would scarcely have been necessary. Given the political structure of the Third Reich, in which rival paladins vied for Hitler's favor and were successful in the degree to which they anticipated and realized his desires, Himmler and Heydrich needed little more than a nod from Hitler to perceive that the time had come to extend the killing process to the European Jews. The Goring authorization in this context was, at the very least, sufficient incitement to prepare a program for systematic extermination. Given the already apparent inadequacies of the Einsatzgruppen operations and their even greater unsuitability for nonRussian Jews, Himmler and Heydrich faced a number of problems: What preparatory measures were necessary? How and where were the Jews to be killed? How was the needed cooperation of other institutions and countries to be achieved? What about the utilization of Jewish labor? Which J e w s might have to be exempted for other reasons? T h e Nazis were venturing into uncharted territory and attempting the unprecedented; they had no maps to follow. Preparatory measures were least difficult in Germany. In September, the G e r m a n J e w s were marked. In October, further emigration was forbidden, and Slovakia, Croatia, and R u m a n i a

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were asked to permit the inclusion of J e w s of their citizenship residing in Germany in the deportations from the Reich. In November, the 11th Decree to the Reich Citizenship Law provided for the loss of citizenship and the forfeit of property by Jews residing outside G e r m a n borders. Admittedly, such preparatory measures would have been necessary whether the German Jews were destined merely for deportation or for extermination as well. Such preparations, however, fail to support the picture of a bureaucracy incapable of analyzing the consequences of its actions. M o r e difficult were the questions of how and where to carry out the killings. T h e organizational problem was overcome by merging three already existing programs with which the Nazis had prior experience: the concentration c a m p system, euthanasia gassing, a n d E i c h m a n n ' s specialty—forced emigration and population resettlement. Auschwitz, because of its rail connections, was chosen as one site for a killing center. T h e possibility of other sites in Russia may have been weighed until the military and transportation situation made this impracticable. Poland then became the chief center of the extermination camps. T h e exact type of gas to be used remained unresolved; in the end, the Polish camps, m a n n e d by euthanasia experts, retained carbon monoxide, while Auschwitz and Maidanek adopted Cyclon B. 34 Presumably Hitler approved these plans before construction of the extermination camps commenced, but the dates are difficult to ascertain precisely. T h e Polish investigating committee concluded that work on Chelmno and Belzec m a y have begun as early as O c t o b e r 1941. 35 Arndt and Scheffler estimate October or N o v e m b e r for Chelmno and an even vaguer ' ' winter 1941 / 2 " for Belzec. 36 T h e judgment of the Chelmno trial in Bonn likewise estimated O c t o b e r or November, while the M u n i c h state court concluded that Belzec construction began in the late fall of 1941. 37 Hilberg dates the beginning of the construction of the special Birkenau c a m p at Auschwitz at " t h e end of 1941. " 3 8 O n e surviving d o c u m e n t dates a design change (from two to five crematory ovens) to February 27, 1942, which clearly indicates that design and construction were already u n d e r way before this. 39 Arndt and Scheffler accept J a n u a r y 1942 for the first gassings of J e w s in makeshift facilities at Auschwitz. 4 0 It is probable, then, that construction of the major extermination camps at Belzec and Ausch-

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witz began in November or December 1941, roughly at the same time that German Jews were first massacred at Kovno—November 25—and Riga—November 30—and that gassing operations began at Chelmno—December 8. Reassignment of the euthanasia personnel (Sonderkommando Lange) to Chelmno by Brack in the Fiihrer's Chancellery and the construction of the technologically less sophisticated extermination camp there must have been slighdy earlier. This cluster of events suggests a late October or November approval by Hider of the extermination plan he had solicited the previous summer. The behavior of Heydrich and Himmler at that time is compatible with this hypothesis. O n October 30, Heydrich sent the first five "Activity and Situation Reports of the EinscUzgruppen of the Sipo-SD in Russia" to the Foreign Office. These reports detailed the massacres that had taken place the previous summer. As the Foreign Office copy was often only one of as many as 100 copies, it is evident that such information was being widely circulated. 41 Perhaps Heydrich's timing was fortuitous. O r perhaps he was attuning recipients to the " n e w realities," preparing them psychologically for participation in the Final Solution. On November 11, Himmler told Kersten that " t h e destruction of the Jews is being planned. . . . Now the destruction of the Jews is imminent." 4 2 And on November 29, Heydrich issued his invitations to the Wannsee Conference, originally scheduled for December 9 but postponed until J a n u a r y 20, 1942. For many who had been waiting anxiously for direction from Berlin on the Jewish question, December was a month of resolution. An inquiry of the Reichskommissariat Ostland as to whether all Jews should be liquidated regardless of age, sex, and economic interest was answered from Berlin on December 18: " I n the meantime clarity on the Jewish question has been achieved through oral discussions: economic interests are to be disregarded on principle in the setdement of this problem." 4 3 O n December 16, H a n s Frank, who had sent his State Secretary Buhler to Berlin to f m d out what was behind the Wannsee invitation, reported to his followers in the General Government that the Polish Jews could not be deported; thus they would have to liquidate these Jews themselves. He did not know exacdy how, but measures would be taken " i n connection with the great measures to be discussed in the

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R e i c h " to accomplish this task. If unsure of the method, Frank had no doubt of the goal: " WIT mussen die Juden vernichten."** Frank's comments foreclose the possibility that the agenda of the Wannsee Conference changed radically between the initial invitation and the eventual meeting. Heydrich clearly had approval for the destruction plan by the end of November. At the Wannsee Conference, Heydrich announced a comprehensive, Europe-wide program and unmistakably asserted that no Jews were to survive " a s a germ cell of a new Jewish reconstruction." 4 5 This was no vague conception, but rather a firm commitment. Similarly, there was nothing improvised about the purpose of the conference; it was to organize the participation of the ministries in an already decided Jewish policy, not to debate that policy. While the goal and scope of German Jewish policy were no longer in doubt, some aspects of the Final Solution were still unsettled. Various "possible solutions" were discussed at the Wannsee Conference, which Eichmann confirmed to have been a discussion of "killing possibilities." 46 Though the Chelmno gas vans were already operating and the makeshift facilities at Auschwitz were just being put into operation, apparently it was not until mid-March, with the opening of Belzec, that the gas chamber passed the final test. Much of the Wannsee Conference was spent discussing the treatment of Mischlinge and German Jews in mixed marriages, issues that would never be definitely resolved. Thus, the July 31 authorization of Goring to Heydrich should not be seen as the Hitler order from which the Final Solution sprang full-blown. It was rather a commission to draw up a destruction plan, the completion of which inevitably involved the exploration of various alternatives, false starts, and much delay. It was this seeming ambivalence and confusion surrounding German Jewish policy in the late summer and early autumn of 1941, aggravated by the decision in mid-September to deport German Jews before the new killing facilities had been devised, that led Broszat and Uwe Dietrich Adam before him to deny the crucial significance of the July 31 authorization. 4 7 By late October or November, however, the pieces were falling into place, a plan was ready for Hitler's approval, and the first concrete steps for implementing the Final Solution were taken. Given the state of the evidence, this interpretation cannot

THE DECISION FOR THE FINAL SOLUTION be definitively proved any more than can Martin Broszat's. It is, as he states, a question of probability. This scenario, however, is a more likely one than Broszat's tour de force, because the latter would require us to disregard the historical context of the Russian massacres (within which the July authorization for the total solution to the Jewish question was given), to assume that references in the fall of 1941 to shipping the deported German Jews (and surviving Serbian Jews) further east the following spring are to be interpreted literally rather than as code words for extermination, to ignore the explicit testimony of Eichmann and Hoss (while accepting arguments from silence based on Goebbels's diaries), and to overlook the implications and timing of the Wannsee Conference.

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NOTES T h e original G e r m a n version of this paper was published in the Vierteljahrsheftefür Zeitgeschichte (29/1 J a n u a r y 1981), to whose editors I am grateful for permission to publish this revised version in English. The revisions were made possible through research supported by the Alexander von H u m b o l d t Foundation. 1. Martin-Broszat, "Hitler und die Genesis der 'Endlösung.' Aus Anlass der Thesen von David Irving,'' Vierteljahrsheftefür Zeitgeschichte 25, no. 4 (1977): 739-75. 2. Bradley Smith, " T w o Alibis for the Inhumanities: A . R . Butz, The Hoax of the Twentieth Century and David Irving, Hitter's War," German Studies Review 1, no. 3 (1978): 333; Henry Friedlander, " T o w a r d a Methodology of Teaching about the Holocaust," Teachers College Record 80, no. 3 (1979): 526; Charles Sydnor, " T h e Selling of Adolf Hider: David Irving's Hitler's War, " Central European History 21, no. 2 (1979): 182-85. 3. Broszat, " G e n e s i s , " 756. 4. Ibid., 747. Broszat states his viewpoint succinctly: " I t appears to me quite the opposite, that there was no comprehensive general destruction order at all, [that] the program of destruction developed little by little institutionally and de facto out of numerous individual actions u p to the spring of 1942 and attained definitive character after the erection of the death camps in Poland (between December 1941 and July 1942)." 5. Ibid., n. 26 on p. 753. 6. Ibid., 753. 7. Nuremberg Document 710-PS, in Trial of the Major War Criminals before the International Military Tribunal [Blue Series] (42 vols.; Nuremberg, 1947-49) [hereafter cited as T M W ] 26: 266-67. Broszat accepts the arguments of Uwe Dietrich Adam, Judenpolitik im Dritten Reich (Düsseldorf, 1972), 308-14, concerning the significance, or more precisely the insignificance, of this document, but not A d a m ' s subsequent conclusion that a definitive decision was reached between September and December. 8. Broszat, " G e n e s i s , " 748. 9. The Goebbels Diaries 1942-1943, New York, 1948), 115-16.

ed. Louis Lochner (Garden City,

THE DECISION FOR THE FINAL SOLUTION 10. Christopher R. Browning, The Final Solution and the German Foreign Office (New York, 1978), 79-81. 11. Goebbels Diaries, 147-48. 12. Browning, Final Solution, 174-75. 13. Rudolf Höss, Commandant of Auschwitz (New York, 1959), 135-38, 173-76, 197, as opposed to his earlier testimony in T M W C 11: 396 ff., and Nuremberg Document 3868-PS, in T M W C 38: 275-79. 14. "Eichmann Tells His Own Damning Story," Life Magazine 49/22 (November 28, 1960); transcript of Eichmann's interrogations by the Israeli police, Bundesarchiv, All. Proz. 6/1-6; Eichmann's handwritten "Meine Memoiren," Bundesarchiv, All. Proz. 6/119; Eichmann's handwritten notes to his attorney, Bundesarchiv, All. Proz. 6/169; Eichmann, Adolf, defendant. In the District Court of Jerusalem, Criminal Case No. 40/61; Bernd Nellessen, Der Prozess von Jerusalem (Düsseldorf, 1964). 15. The motivation for Eichmann's change of testimony is highly suspect in any case. In the Life magazine account he said he had visited Auschwitz "repeatedly," though he did not specify the time of his first visit. He characterized Höss then as "an excellent comrade and a very proper fellow. . . . I was on close, comradely terms with Hbss . . . I liked to visit him." After excerpts of Höss's autobiography were read to Eichmann by the Israeli police interrogators, which in Eichmann's mind attempted to shift too much responsibility from the WVHA (Economic and Administrative Main Office of Oswald Pohl, in charge of the camps) to the RSHA (Reich Security Main Office of Heydrich, including the Gestapo) and to Eichmann personally, both his account and his opinion of Höss changed. He now claimed he had not visited Auschwitz until the spring or summer of 1942. He provided his defense attorney with many notes to support this contention, "because," he admitted candidly, "I must prove Höss the archliar," that I have had nothing at all to do with him and his gas chambers and his death camp . . . . " 16. Politisches Archiv des Auswärtigen Amtes [hereafter cited as PA], Inland II A/B 47/1, Eichmann to D III, August 28, 1941. 17. PA, Pol. Abt. III 246, Luther memoranda of October 13 and 17, 1941. 18. Akten zur deutschen Aussenpolitik, 1918-1945 [hereafter cited as ADAP], Series D, vol. 13, p a n 2 (Göttingen, 1970), 570-72. 19. PA, Inland II A / B 59/3, Wurm to Rademacher, October 23, 1941.

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20. N u r e m b e r g Document 365-NO. 21. H.G. Acfler, Theresienstadl 1941-1945 (2nd ed.; Tübingen, 1960), 720-22. T h e day following Heydrich's meeting in Prague, Stahlecker informed the Generalkommissar of Latvia, Dr. Drechsler, that a concentration camp near Riga was to be set up for Jews from the Reich and the Protectorate. O n November 8, Sturmbannfiihrer Otto Lange of Einsatzgruppe A confirmed that 25,000 Jews were coming to the new camp at Salspils near Riga and another 25,000 to Minsk. When Dr. Trampedach of the R K Ostland wrote to Berlin to urge that the transports be stopped, D r . Leibbrandt of the Ostministerium replied that there was no cause for worry since the J e w s would be sent " f u r t h e r e a s t . " Raul Hilberg, The Destruction of the European Jews (Chicago, 1961), 232. 22. Broszat, " G e n e s i s , " 756-57. 23. Ibid., 750-51. 24. Bernhard Loesener, "Als Rassereferent im Reichsministerium des I n n e r n , " Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte 9, no. .3 (1961): 303; Broszat, " G e n e s i s , " 750. 25. PA, Inland II g 194, Rademacher marginalia of September 13 on Benzler letter of September 12, 1941. 26. Adler, Theresienstadt, 720-22. 27. Broszat, " G e n e s i s , " 748. 28. N u r e m b e r g Document 2718-PS, in T M W C 31: 84. 29. "Because rail transportation was out of the q u e s t i o n , " the report noted earlier, " t h i s problem [of emigration to Siberia] will also be an extremely difficult o n e . " 30. N u r e m b e r g Document 126-EC, in T M W C 36: 141, 145. 31. National Archives, W i / I D 1420, "Anlage zu: Verb. St. d. O K W / W i Rü Amt beim Reichsmarschall v. 14.8.41." In the same document, " t h e Reichsmarschall opined that the Jews in the territories dominated by G e r m a n y had nothing more to seek." I am grateful to Prof. Dr. Helmut Krausnick for sending me a copy of this d o c u m e n t . 32. PA, Inland II g 177, Reichssicherheitshauptamt Madagaskar Projekt. 33. Broszat, " G e n e s i s , " 747. Broszat does concede that the Einsatzgruppen massacres provided a lesson that liquidation was the simplest and quickest solution to the Jewish question, but he makes it clear that in his

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opinion this was a lesson that was not learned or applied to the European Jews until much later. 34. Gerald Reidinger, The Final Solution (New York, 1961), 145-54; Ino Arndt and Wolfgang Scheffler, "Organisierter Massenmord an Juden in nationalsozialistischen Vernichtungslagern," VierteljahrshefiefiirZeitgeschichte 24, no. 2 (1976): 122-35. 35. Reidinger, Final Solution, 244. 36. Arndt and Scheffler, "Massenmord," 116, 118. 37. Adalbert Rückerl, NS- Vernichtungslager im Spiegel deutscher Strafprozesse (Munich, 1977), 262, 132. 38. Hilberg, Destruction, 565. 39. Nuremberg Document 4472-NO. 40. Arndt and Scheffler, "Massenmord," 130. 41. Browning, Final Solution, 72-76. 42. Felix Kersten, The Kersten Memoirs 1940-1945 (New York, 1957), 119. In addition to Heydrich and Himmler, Rosenberg also was aware by November 18, 1941, that the Jewish question could be solved "only in a biological eradication of all Jews in Europe." Cited in Christian Streit, Keine Kameraden: Die Wehrmacht und die sowjetischen Kriegsgefangenen 19411945 (Stuttgart, 1978), n. 274 on p. 355, from: PA, Pol. XIII, "Berichte der VAA beim O K W und den AOKs 1941-42." 43. Nuremberg Document 3666-PS, in T M W C 32: 437. 44. Das Diensttagebuch des deutschen GeneralgouverneuTs in Polen 1939-1945, eds. Werner Praeg and Wolfgang Jacobmeyer (Stuttgart, 1975), 457-58; T M W C 12: 68-69; Hilberg, Destruction, 263. 45. AD AP, E, 1 (1969), 206. 46. Neilessen, Prozess, 206. 47. While I differ with Adam on the significance of the July 31 authorization, in contrast to Broszat, Adam and I are in full accord that November 1941 is the latest plausible date for Hitler's approval of the Final Solution. Adam, Judenpolitik, 312.

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The Decision Concerning the Final Solution CHRISTOPHER R. BROWNING

T h e decision concerning the Final Solution has been the subject of a wide variety of historical interpretations. T h e major differences emerge over two related questions: first, the nature of the decision-making process, with particular focus on the role of Hitler and his ideology; and second, the timing of the decision. Such a variety of interpretations warns us, as Martin Broszat has correctly pointed out, that any thesis concerning the origins of the Final Solution is a matter of probability, not certainty.' In this light 1 present the following thesis. T h e intention of systematically murdering the European jews was not fixed in Hitler's mind before the war, but crystallized in 1941 after previous solutions proved unworkable and the imminent attack upon Russia raised the prospect of yet another vast increase in the number of Jews within the growing G e r m a n empire. T h e Final Solution emerged out of a series of decisions taken that year. In the spring Hitler ordered preparations for the murder of the Russian Jews who would fall into German hands during the coming invasion. T h a t summer, confident of military victory, Hitler instigated the preparation of a plan to extend the killing process to European Jews. In October, although military expectations had not been Research for this paper was made possible in part by a grant from the A l e x a n d e r von Humboldt Foundation.

THE DECISION FOR THE FINAL SOLUTION realized, Hitler approved the rough outline of that plan, involving deportation to killing centers that used poison gas. While I wish to give special attention to the arguments and evidence concerning the course of events in the summer and fall of 1941 that I consider so crucial, let us first briefly review the historiography of the issue. In recent years interpretations of National Socialism have increasingly polarized into two groups aptly designated by Tim Mason as the "intentionalists" and the "functionalists." 2 T h e former explain the course of Nazi Germany in terms of Hitler's intentions derived from a coherent and consistent ideology and implemented through an all-powerful totalitarian dictatorship. T h e latter emphasize the anarchical nature of the Nazi state, its internal competition, and the chaotic decision-making process which resulted in continuous improvisation and radicalization. T h e intentionalists do not deny the polycratic nature of the Nazi state but portray it as the conscious product of Hitler's Machiavellian cunning, cleverly manipulated to realize his fixed intentions. The functionalists do not deny that Hitler played a central role but see this role as a mobilizing and integrating agent. Thus, for them Hitler's limitless hatred of the Jews and his aggressive and destructive impulses gave an overarching unity of purpose and direction to the chaotic Nazi state but only at the cost of constant radicalization culminating in a Vernichtungskrieg (war of annihilation) in the east, genocide of the European Jews, and ultimately overwhelming defeat. 3 These two modes of historical explanation are useful in analyzing the vastly differing interpretations concerning German Jewish policy in general and the decision for the Final Solution in particular. At one extreme the ultraintentionalist Lucy Dawidowicz has argued that as early as 1919 Hitler decided to exterminate the European Jews. Moreover, he knew when the murderous plan would be implemented. The Second World War was to be both the means and the occasion intended by Hitler to carry out his premeditated, genocidal "war against the Jews." While Hitler awaited the predetermined moment to carry out his "grand design," however, he tolerated a meaningless and irrelevant pluralism in Jewish policy in the lower echelons of the state and party. 4 If Dawidowicz emphasizes the element of Hitler's premeditation and "grand design," Martin Broszat's ultrafunctionalist view of Hitler's role, particularly concerning the decision for the Final Solution, stresses the opposite. In his view Hitler made no ultimate decision and issued no comprehensive order for the Final Solution. Rather, the program of destruction evolved gradually out of a series of separate killing actions in

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late 1941 and 1942. These local massacres were improvised responses to an impossible situation created by two factors: first, the ideological and political pressure for a judenrein Europe, exerted above all by Hitler; and second, the military failure on the eastern front thar caused a lack of both rail transport and reception areas for the Jews who were to be uprooted. Once underway, the killing program gradually became institutionalized and, having proved itself logistically the simplest solution, grew finally into a comprehensive and distinctive program. In this view Hitler was a catalyst but not the decision-maker. 5 According to Dawidowicz, conception of the Final Solution preceded implementation by twenty-two years; according to Broszat, conception emerged from practice—the act of sporadically killing groups of Jews gave birth to the idea of systematically killing all Jews. A wide variety of interpretations flourishes between these distant poles. For example, Eberhard Jackel argues that the idea of murdering the Jews crystallized in Hitler's mind around 1924. 6 Emphasizing Hitler's threatening statements of the late 1930s, Karl Dietrich Bracher assumes that the intention was there by then. 7 Andreas Hillgruber and Klaus Hildebrand assert the primacy of ideological causation but do not offer a specific date. 8 Others, not all of them functionalists, have focused on 1941, though within that year a number of possible turning points have been suggested. Léon Poliakov has urged early 1941 as most plausible, and Robert Kempner and Helmut Krausnick have argued for a Hitler decision in the spring, connected with preparations for the invasion of Russia.9 Raul Hilberg has argued for a summer date, when the mass murder put into practice in Russia beckoned as a European-wide solution available to victorious Germany. 10 Uwe Dietrich Adam supports a fall decision, when the stalled military offensive precluded a "territorial solution" through mass expulsion into Russia. 11 And Sebastian Haffner, certainly no functionalist, argues for early December, when the first premonition of eventual military defeat caused Hitler to seek an irreversible victory over the Jews. 12 Why can such diversity of interpretation over the nature and timing of the decision for the Final Solution flourish? I would suggest two reasons. T h e first is one of definition. What is meant by a decision for the Final Solution? For the intentionalist, there were in fact two decisions. T h e first decision was the point at which the concept of the mass murder of the European Jews took form in Hitler's mind as a fixed goal—the point at which it became a part of his "unalterable program." T h e second decision was the point at which Hitler considered it opportune and possible to realize this goal. The former was determinative, the latter rela-

THE DECISION FOR THE FINAL SOLUTION lively incidental, for once the intention was fixed, Hitler had the power and cunning to realize it eventually. T h e functionalist makes no such clear distinction between conceptualization and implementation of the Final Solution. Instead, the conception of systematic mass murder and the decision to implement it emerged simultaneously, products of a conjuncture of factors, of which Hitler's vicious anti-Semitism was but one. His ominous and threatening statements were not evidence of clearly held intentions but of an unquenchable hatred of the Jews that would spur a continuing radicalization of Jewish policy through a search and competition for final solutions of the Jewish problem, until the "most final" of all—extermination—emerged. According to the functionalists, Hitler's ideological fixation assured that a "final solution of the Jewish problem" would be sought, but not what specific form it would take. A second reason for such diversity of interpretation is the lack of documentation. There are no written records of what transpired among Hitler, Himmler, and Heydrich concerning the Final Solution, and n o n e of them survived to testify after the war. Therefore, the decision-making process at the center must be reconstructed by the historian, who extrapolates from events, documents, and testimony originating outside the inner circle. Like the man in Plato's cave, he sees only the reflection and shadows, but not reality. This hazardous process of extrapolation and reconstruction inevitably invites a wide variety of conclusions. Likewise, Hitler's consciousness remains elusive. We cannot know precisely what was in his mind and again must reconstruct from recorded statements. This poses significant problems for the historian dealing with such a conscious political actor—one who could publicly threaten the Jews with destruction in 1939 and privately mention expulsion as late as January 1942. 13 T h e historian can avail himself of at least three approaches. First, he can through hindsight judge certain of Hitler's statements to be literal and dismiss the rest as conscious duplicity, thus assuring a coherent ideology and consistent but all too clever pattern of behavior on Hitler's part. Second he can interpret many of Hitler's statements more figuratively, as "symbols of struggle" mobilizing and inciting his followers. 14 Finally, he can accept that Hitler experienced uncertainty and changes of mind and mood, and that contradictory statements are evidence of his own confusion. 15 Each of the above three approaches is valid at least in some cases, and thus the scope of possible interpretations is once again very wide. Within the broad spectrum of interpretation, my thesis might be termed "moderate functionalist." I do not accept the intentionalists' view

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that the key d e c i s i o n — t h e c o n c e p t i o n of the Final S o l u t i o n as a fixed g o a l — h a d already been taken long before the war and merely awaited the o p p o r t u n e m o m e n t for i m p l e m e n t a t i o n . My position does not deny the s i g n i f i c a n c e of Hitler's a n t i - S e m i t i s m , only that the intention

to

murder t h e Jews had b e e n consciously derived from it well in a d v a n c e . C o n c e r n i n g Hitler's a n t i - S e m i t i s m , the following seems n o longer in dispute. Psychologically, it was a deeply held obsession. Ideologically, it was t h e k e y s t o n e of his Weltanschauung.

W i t h o u t his u n d e r s t a n d i n g of

politics in terms of a " J e w i s h - B o l s h e v i k " conspiracy and his understanding of h i s t o r y in terms of a social Darwinist struggle of races (in which the J e w s played the most diabolical role), the whole edifice would collapse. Finally, Hitler gave expression to this a n t i - S e m i t i s m in violent threats a n d fantasies of mass murder. 1 6 Indeed, for a m a n w h o s e social D a r w i n i s m implied the final resolution of any conflict in terms of the survival of o n e adversary through the " d e s t r u c t i o n " of the other, a n d w h o s e a n t i - S e m i t i s m was u n d e r s t o o d in terms of race, mass murder of the J e w s was a " l o g i c a l " d e d u c t i o n . G r a n t e d all this, the relationship b e t w e e n Hitler's a n t i - S e m i t i s m a n d the origin of the Final S o l u t i o n still r e m a i n s controversial. E v e n if the Final S o l u t i o n c a n be "logically" deduced from Hitler's Weltanschauung, it is improbable that Hitler m a d e that d e d u c t i o n before 1941 a n d consciously pursued the systematic murder of the E u r o p e a n Jews as a long-held goal. T h e a s s u m p t i o n of Nazi Jewish policy as the p r e m e d i t a t e d and logical c o n s e q u e n c e of Hitler's a n t i - S e m i t i s m c a n n o t be easily reconciled with his actual behavior in the years before 1 9 4 1 . For e x a m p l e , Hitler's views of the Jews as the " N o v e m b e r c r i m i n a l s " w h o c a u s e d G e r m a n y ' s defeat in World War I was as fervently held as any of his anti-Jewish allegations. Indeed, the oft-cited passage from M e m Kampf l a m e n t i n g that twelve or fifteen t h o u s a n d Jews had not b e e n gassed d u r i n g the war m a k e s far more sense in the c o n t e x t of the stabi n - t h e - b a c k legend than as a prophecy or i n t i m a t i o n of the Final S o l u tion. T h e " l o g i c a l " c o n s e q u e n c e of the thesis of the Jew as wartime traitor s h o u l d have been a "preventive" massacre of G e r m a n Jewry before the western offensive or at least before the attack o n Russia. In a c t u a l practice Nazi Jewish policy sought a judenrein

G e r m a n y by

f a c i l i t a t i n g and often coercing Jewish emigration. In order to reserve the limited e m i g r a t i o n opportunities for G e r m a n Jews, the Nazis o p p o s e d Jewish e m i g r a t i o n from elsewhere o n the c o n t i n e n t . T h i s policy continued until t h e fall of 1941, when t h e Nazis prohibited Jewish e m i g r a t i o n f r o m G e r m a n y and for the first time justified the blocking of Jewish em-

THE DECISION FOR THE FINAL SOLUTION igration from other countries in terms of preventing their escape from the German grasp. The efforts of the Nazi Jewish experts to facilitate Jewish emigration both before and during the war, as well as their plans for massive resettlement, were not merely tolerated but encouraged by Hitler. 17 It is difficult to reconcile the assumption of a long-held intention to murder the Jews with this behavior. If Hitler knew he was going to murder the Jews, then he was supporting a policy that "favored" German Jews over other European Jews and "rescued" from death many of those he held most responsible for Germany's earlier defeat. It has been argued that Hitler was merely awaiting the opportune moment to realize his murderous intentions. 1 8 Not only does that not explain the pursuit of a contradictory policy of emigration in the meantime, it also does not explain the long delay. If Hitler was merely awaiting the outbreak of conflict to pursue his "war against the Jews," why were the millions of Polish Jews in his hands since the fall of 1939 granted a thirty-month "stay of execution"? They were subjected to sporadic massacre and murderous living condiitons but not to systematic extermination until 1942. If Hitler could kill 70,000 to 80,000 Germans through the euthanasia program between 1939 and 1941, why was it not "opportune" to murder several hundred thousand German Jews who constituted an "internal menace" in wartime? It certainly would have occasioned far less opposition than euthanasia. Why was this period n o t . a t least used to make preparations and plans for mass extermination, avoiding the clumsy improvisations of 1941? In short, the practice of Nazi Jewish policy until 1941 does not support the thesis of a long-held, fixed intention to murder the European Jews. Hitler's anti-Semitism is more plausibly seen as the stimulant or spur to a continuous search for an increasingly radical solution to the Jewish question rather than as the source of a logically deduced and longestablished "blueprint" for extermination. As the "satanic" figure for Hitler behind all other problems, "the Jew" was the ultimate problem and required an ultimate or final solution. Hitler's anti-Semitism thus constituted an ideological imperative which, given the competitive nature of the Nazi state, played a central role in the evolution of Nazi Jewish policy. T h e rival Nazi chieftains constantly sought to expand their private empires and vied for Hitler's favor through anticipating and pursuing Hitler's desires. In his function as arbiter, Hitler in turn sought to avoid totally antagonizing or alienating any of his close followers, even the most incompetent among them, such as Rosenberg and Ribbentrop. Thus, when competing Nazis advocated conflicting policies, all plausibly

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justified in Nazi terminology, Hitler had great difficulty resolving differences. Paralysis a n d indecision were often the result. W h e n , however, t h e c o m p e t i t i o n was carried out at the expense of helpless third parties, such as jews and populations of occupied territories, protected by n o c o u n t e r v a i l i n g force, radicalization rather t h a n paralysis followed. H e n c e , it was t h e c o n j u n c t u r e of Hitler's anti-Semitic obsession, t h e a n a r c h i c a l and competitive n a t u r e of t h e Nazi state, the vulnerable status of t h e E u r o p e a n Jews, and t h e war t h a t resulted in the Final S o l u t i o n . By 1941 Nazi Jewish policy had reached an impasse. Military a n d d i p l o m a t i c success brought millions of Jews into the G e r m a n sphere, while t h e already limited possibilities for Jewish emigration were c o n stricted f u r t h e r by t h e outbreak of war. Germany's self-imposed "Jewish p r o b l e m " m u s h r o o m e d while t h e traditional solution collapsed. I n t e r i m solutions of massive r e s e t t l e m e n t — i n Lublin a n d Madagascar—likewise were n o t viable. T h e i m m i n e n t invasion of Russia posed the same dil e m m a o n c e a g a i n — f u r t h e r territorial conquest meant more Jews. A t some p o i n t in t h e spring of 1941, Hitler decided to break this vicious circle. O v e r w h e l m i n g d o c u m e n t a t i o n exists to show that Germany, u n d e r Hitler's prodding, p l a n n e d and prepared for a Vernichtungskrieg—a war of d e s t r u c t i o n , n o t a conventional w a r — i n Russia. It would be a clash of ideologies a n d races, n o t of nation-states. 1 9 Detailed negotiations bet w e e n t h e army a n d t h e SS ended in an agreement with the army p r o m ising logistical support and conceding freedom of action to small m o b i l e S S u n i t s — E i n s a t z g r u p p e n — c h a r g e d with "special tasks" b e h i n d G e r m a n lines. A l l customs and international law concerning war and occup a t i o n were to be disregarded. Political commissars were to be executed. G e r m a n soldiers were n o t to be held juridically responsible for a c t i o n s against t h e civilian population, which was stripped of any shred of legal p r o t e c t i o n and subject to summary execution and collective reprisal. Mass starvation of millions was the anticipated result of i n t e n d e d econ o m i c e x p l o i t a t i o n . Preparation for responsible care of prisoners of war was totally i n a d e q u a t e . Despite all t h a t is k n o w n of G e r m a n preparations for t h e invasion of Russia, however, specific d o c u m e n t a t i o n c o n c e r n i n g t h e i n t e n d e d fate of t h e Russian Jews is lacking. Conclusions must be drawn f r o m postwar testimony, circumstantial evidence, and scattered references in later documents. T h e weight of this evidence supports t h e c o n c l u s i o n t h a t t h e decision to e x t e r m i n a t e t h e Russian Jews was t a k e n before t h e invasion r a t h e r t h a n after. It was part of Germany's preinvasion p l a n n i n g , n o t a policy that emerged only subsequently. 2 0

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Despite minor differences in their accounts, a convincing number of Einsatzgruppe officers testified after the war that they were informed by mid-June, shortly before the invasion, of the extermination task before them. This testimony is confirmed by both the subsequent behavior of the Einsatzgruppen and later documents. They did proceed to murder all Jews—men, women, and children—though initial reports often attempted to portray these massacres as reprisals for partisan activities. Some documents were, however, more blunt. "Specific orders of the Reichsfiihrer-SS" to the Second Cavalry Regiment of the Waffen-SS on August 1, 1941, stated that "all Jews must be shot; Jewish females (Judenweiber) driven into the swamps."21 Walter Stahlecker, the commander of Einsatzgruppe A, submitted a summary report of events through October 15, 1941, which stated: It was expected from the start that the Jewish problem in the Ostland would not be solved solely through pogroms. On the other hand the security-police cleansing work had according to basic orders [italics mine] the goal of the most complete removal as possible of the Jews [moegiic/iit umfassende Beseitigung], Extensive executions in the cities and flat lands were therefore carried out through special units. By mid-October Stahlecker's "extensive executions" had accounted for the killing of 118,430 Jews!22 T h e last shred of ambiguity is dropped in a report of Sturmbannführer Dr. Rudolf Lange of January 1942: "The goal that Einsatzkommando 2 had in mind from the beginning [italics mine] was a radical solution to the Jewish problem through the execution of all Jews." 23 If the decision to murder the Jews of Russia had been taken before the invasion, precisely how and when this decision was reached remains obscure. It is not possible to determine if the initiative was Hitler's or came from someone else, such as Heydrich. Moreover, it is not possible to determine if Hitler's mind was already set by March, when he made clear to the military that the Russian war would not be a conventional war, or if the degree of military compliance tempted him subsequently to expand the circle of intended victims beyond the "Jewish-Bolshevik intelligentsia." 24 T h e scant documentation does not permit a definitive answer to these questions, merely informed speculation. Several factors suggest a March date, however. When a late-March draft from the negotiations over the Einsatzgruppen in Russia was suddenly pressed into service to cover the jurisdiction of Einsatzgruppen accompanying the German invasion of Yugoslavia and Greece, "Jews and Communists" had

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to be specifically added to the list of categories of individuals to be "secured." Helmut Krausnick has plausibly argued that the absence of these categories for Russia would indicate that a different fate had already been decided upon for the Russian Jews analogous to the "Commissar Order" being prepared for Russian Communists. 25 Also, after a conference with Hitler on April 2, 1941, Rosenberg ominously noted: "What I do not want to write down today, I will nonetheless never forget." 26 With the decision to murder the Russian Jews, Hitler broke out of the vicious circle in which each military success brought more Jews under German control. This did not, however, immediately alter German policy toward the Jews on the rest of the continent. Emigration, expulsion, and plans for future resettlement still held sway. In the fall of 1940 Jews from Baden, the Palatinate, and Luxembourg were expelled to unoccupied France, as were Jews from Vienna to Poland in early 1941. In February 1941, Heydrich was still speaking of "sending them [the Jews] off to whatever country will be chosen later on." 27 And the Foreign Office continued to cooperate with the RSHA (Reich Main Security Office) to block Jewish emigration from other countries, so as to monopolize the limited emigration possibilities for Jews from Germany. This policy was reaffirmed as late as May 20, 1941, in a circular signed by Walter Schellenberg, chief of security in the occupied territories, forbidding Jewish emigration from Belgium and France. The old policy of emigration, expulsion, and postwar resettlement was officially dismantled only gradually. In July 1941 the RSHA informed the Foreign Office that no further expulsions to France were intended. 28 In October Jewish emigration from Germany was forbidden. In February 1942 the Foreign Office formally cancelled the Madagascar Plan. Thus, the preparations for the murderous assault upon the Russian Jews did not have immediate repercussions on Nazi Jewish policy elsewhere. The emergence of the Final Solution for the European Jews was a separate process resulting from a separate decision. This two-decision thesis, postulating a determination for the Final Solution in Europe only after the Einsatzgruppen were already in action in Russia, was first articulated by Raul Hilberg in 1961. 29 If the twodecision thesis has received increasing acceptance among historians (including the intentionalists, although for them simply in terms of a decision for implementation), the debate over the exact date and nature of that second decision has in contrast become increasingly heated. Thus, the remainder of this paper will be devoted to this particular controversy.

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197

Hilberg opted for a date no later than July 1941; Uwe Dietrich Adam has argued for a point between September and November; Sebastian Haffner has suggested December; and Martin Broszat has challenged the whole notion of a comprehensive decision on a particular date, and has argued instead for a gradual and unconscious process of escalation. In my opinion the July date of Hilberg is still the most probable, provided that one understands it as merely the point at which Hitler set in motion the planning and preparation which resulted in the Final Solution. On July 31, 1941, Heydrich received Goring's authorization to prepare a "total solution" (Gesamtldsung) of the Jewish question in those territories of Europe under German influence and to coordinate the participation of those organizations whose jurisdictions were touched. 30 T h e significance of this document is open to debate. Most historians have assumed that it refers to an extermination program. But some have interpreted it in terms of a "comprehensive program for the deportation of the Jews" to Russia and an attempt by Heydrich to strengthen his jurisdictional position to carry out this task. 31 Indeed, the circumstances surrounding the origins of this document are uncertain. In one account Eichmann claimed that he drafted it on Heydrich's instructions, and it was then submitted for Goring's signature. In another account, however, while still assuming that the initiative came from Heydrich, Eichmann admitted: "In any case, how Heydrich received this authorization I do not know." 32 However uncertain the origins of the July authorization and however vague the phraseology about the fate intended for the Jews, this much is known. It was signed by Goring, who two weeks later expressed the opinion that "the Jews in the territories dominated by Germany had nothing more to seek." Goring did not spell out their fate further, except to say that where Jews had to be allowed to work, it could only be in closely guarded labor camps, and that he preferred that Jews be hung rather than shot, as the latter was too honorable a death. The impending mass resettlement of Jews in Russia was neither mentioned nor implied. 33 The authorization was received by Heydrich, who already had an authorization signed by Goring for coordinating Jewish emigration, dating from January 1939. W h e n Jewish emigration gave way to plans for massive resettlement, Heydrich had felt no need for a new "charter" and cited the older one when asserting jurisdiction over the emerging Madagascar Plan in 1940. 3 4 Moreover, Heydrich had just spent the previous months organizing the Einsatzgruppen for the extermination of the Russian Jews, and that murder campaign was now in full swing. The histor-

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ical c o n t e x t would thus suggest that if indeed Heydrich was the initiator of t h e July authonzation, he did not need it to continue emigration and resettlement activities over which he had long established unchallenged jurisdiction, but rather because he now faced a new and awesome task that dwarfed even the systematic murder campaign of the Einsatzgruppen. Precisely how and when Heydrich and his immediate superior, Himmler, became aware of their new task, is not and probably never will be known. But given the political structure of the Third Reich, in which rival paladins vied for Hitler's favor and were successful in the degree to which they anticipated and realized his desires, and given the extermination program already underway in Russia, Himmler and Heydrich surely needed little more than a nod from Hitler to perceive that the time had come to extend the killing process to the European Jews. T h a t such a Hitlerian incitement lay behind the July authorization cannot be definitively proven. But the testimony of Rudolph Hoss and Adolf Eichm a n n indicates that at some point in the summer of 1941—whether in July or shortly thereafter is unclear—Himmler and Heydrich began to act o n the assumption that Hitler had given them the "green light" 10 prepare an extermination program. Hoss testified that he was summoned to Berlin in the summer of 1941, where Himmler told him of the fiihrer's order to exterminate all the European Jews. Hoss was then visited by Eichmann, who discussed the inadequacies of existing killing methods but could not give him details about the starting date of the exterminations or the gassing technology to be employed. These questions were still unanswered when Hoss attended a conference of Eichmann's men in Berlin in November. T h a t same fall Zyklon B gas was used to kill Russian prisoners in Auschwitz, and this gas was selected for the Jewish exterminations that began in early 1942. 35 Eichmann testified that Heydrich informed him in the late summer of 1941 that the fiihrer had ordered the physical destruction of the Jews. He was then assigned to report on various preparations and killing actions in the east. First, Heydrich sent him to the already informed SS and Police Leader Odilo Globocnik in Poland, who showed him the early construction of one camp (presumably Belzec) where it was intended to use carbon monoxide from engine exhaust gas. Eichmann remembered the bright fall colors there. He was then sent by Heinrich Miiller to Minsk to witness Einsatzgruppe activities. T h e weather had already turned cold, for he was wearing a long leather coat which was splashed

THE DECISION FOR THE FINAL SOLUTION with the brains of a baby held up to him by a desperate mother. Returning through Lemburg (Lvov), Eichmann saw other mass graves from which blood spouted in little geysers. Finally, Müller sent him to Cheimno in late December or early January to report on the gas-van killings that had just begun there. Upon his return he was chided by Müller for not having precisely timed the killing operation. Though in court Eichmann denied the Höss account of a fall visit to Auschwitz, in earlier testimony he admitted to having been sent by Müller to Auschwitz "at the beginning," where he discussed gassing methods and was shown the small hut in which Zyklon B pellets had been tested on prisoners.36 In September the German Jews were marked. In October further emigration was forbidden; the first deportations of German Jews to Lodz occurred; and Slovakia, Croatia, and Rumania were asked to permit the inclusion of Jews of their citizenship residing in Germany in these deportations just getting underway. In November the 11th Decree of the Reich Citizenship Law provided for the loss of citizenship and forfeit of property of Jews residing outside German borders. Such preparatory measures would admittedly have been necessary whether the German Jews were fated at this time merely for deportation or extermination. However, a few documents survive in support of the testimony of Eichmann and Höss that planning activities in the fall of 1941 now focused on the ultimate goal of extermination, not just deportation. On August 28, 1941, Eichmann wrote the Foreign Office and added to the old formulation "in view of the imminent final solution" the ominous phrase "now in preparation." 37 The timing of the change in phraseology coincides with Eichmanrfs own account of learning about the extermination order in late summer. More explicit documents date from October. A number of Spanish Jews had been arrested and interned in France, which led the Spanish to suggest the possibility of evacuating all Spanish Jews in France (some 2,000) to Spanish Morocco. On October 13, Foreign Office Under Secretary Martin Luther urged negotiations in that direction—a position fully in line with the prevailing policy of achieving a judenrein Europe through the expulsion of the Jews. Four days later, however, Heydrich's RSHA informed Luther by telephone of its opposition to the Spanish proposal, as the Spanish government had neither the will nor the experience effectively to guard the Jews in Morocco. "In addition these Jews would also be too much out of the direct reach of the measures for a basic solution to the Jewish question to be enacted after the war [italics mine]." 38 The rejection of deportation to Morocco, combined with the mention of a basic solution to be enacted

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after the war which prior removal of the Jews would thwart, indicated that a fundamental shift in Nazi Jewish policy had occurred. Within the S S a judenfrei Europe was no longer being pursued through expulsion. Also in October 1941 Eichmanns associate, Friedrich Suhr, accompanied the Foreign Office Jewish expert, Franz Rademacher, to Belgrade to deal with the Jewish question in Serbia. After the fate of the adult male Jews was settled (they were shot by army firing squad in reprisal for casualties suffered from partisan attacks), Rademacher reported on the women, children, and elderly: "Then as soon as the technical possibility exists within the framework of a total solution of the Jewish question, the Jews will be deported by waterway to the reception camp in the east." 39 Just after learning of plans for a reception camp in the east at a conference attended by one of Eichmann's closest associates, Rademacher received a letter from Paul Wurm, foreign editor of Der Stürmer. Dear Party C o m r a d e Rademacher! O n my return trip from Berlin I met an old party comrade who works in the east o n the settlement of the Jewish question. In the near future many of the Jewish vermin will be exterminated through special measures. 4 0

Together these documents would indicate that the Jewish experts coming to and from Berlin in the month of October were aware of plans for a "reception camp" in the east to receive Jews incapable of heavy labor and for "special measures" for extermination. The exact location of the planned reception camp was not clear, though the reference to transport by waterway would suggest that a Danube-Black Sea route to Russia was being considered. Discussion of both gassing and the creation of new camps for Jews in Russia was recorded on yet another occasion in October by Ostministerium expert on the Jewish question Alfred Wetzel, who met with Eichmann and euthanasia supervisor Viktor Brack. 41 Brack advised the construction of gassing apparatus, presumably gas vans, on the spot because they were not in sufficient supply in the Reich. 42 Brack offered to send his chemist, Dr. Helmut Kallmeyer, to help out. Eichmann confirmed that Jewish camps were about to be set up in Riga and Minsk to receive German Jews. Those capable of labor would be sent "to the east" later, but he saw no reason "why those Jews who are not fit for work should not be removed by the Brack method" in the meantime. Riga and Minsk were also mentioned as destinations for deported Jews at an October 10 conference in Prague chaired by Heydrich. At this

THE DECISION FOR THE FINAL SOLUTION same conference Heydrich noted that "Nebe and Rasch could take in Jews in the camps for Communist prisoners in the theater of operations." Perhaps Heydrich meant Stahlecker and Nebe, the respective Einsatzgruppe commanders in Riga and Minsk. In any case, the fact that deported Jews were to be turned over to the Einsatzgruppe commanders, who were supervising the killing of Jews and Communists, indicates t h a t even in early October Heydrich was not in doubt about the specific fate of these deportees. 4 3 These October documents do not yet portray the Final Solution in its definitive form, but they do suggest that frenetic planning was underway and that key ingredients of the Final Solution—special reception camps for the deported Jews, and gassing—were being discussed among the "Jewish experts" not only in the SS but also in the fiihrer's Chancellery, the Foreign Office, and the Ostministerium. These documents thus enhance the credibility of Eichmann and Hoss and the contention t h a t a gradually widening circle of Nazi Jewish experts was becoming conscious that the ultimate goal was no longer resettlement but rather extermination. In addition to documentary evidence and the testimony of Hoss and Eichmann, circumstantial evidence should be considered as well. Is it plausible that in October the Nazis were setting in motion a vast program of deportation while still unaware of its implications and undecided about the ultimate fate of the deportees? T h e SS had already been forced to call off deportations to the Lublin Reservation in the spring of 1940 because limited but indiscriminate deportation of Jews without careful preparation had proved chaotic and unfeasible. There was n o desire for a repetition of that fiasco, yet the attempt to resettle Europe's entire Jewish population in Russia would have had far graver consequences. German planners acknowledged openly and frequently that exploitation of Russian food supplies was going to entail the mass starvation of native inhabitants. A meeting of state secretaries on May 2, 1941, noted t h a t "umpteen million people will doubtless starve to death, when we extract what is necessary for us from the country." 44 T h e Wirtschaftsstab Ost (Economic Headquarters for the East) report of May 23, 1941, stated that the population of the northern forest region, especially the urban population, will inevitably face a great famine. . . . Many tens of millions of people will be superfluous in this area and will die or have to emigrate to Siberia. Attempts to rescue the population there from famine by drawing upon surpluses from the black earth

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THE "FINAL SOLUTION" region can only be a : the expense of provisioning Europe. They endanger Germany's capacity to hold out in the war, they endanger Germany's resistance to blockade. Absolute clarity must prevail in this regard. 4 5

The report also noted that the problem of emigration to Siberia would be "extremely difficult" because "rail transportation was out of the question." And in August, Goring "reckoned with great loss of life on nutritional grounds." 46 Was anyone seriously considering a massive influx of additional people into Russia under these circumstances without being clear about the consequences? When the S S "Jewish experts" began seriously to consider the Madagascar resettlement in the summer of 1940, they produced within two months a neatly printed brochure, complete with table of contents and maps, outlining the future governance and economy of the "superghetto." 4 7 However fantastic the Madagascar Plan may have been, the planners were men who clearly thought beyond the initial stage of deportation. By 1941 they could have had few illusions about the practical difficulties of solving the Jewish question. It is inconceivable that they spent the autumn of 1941 wrestling with the obstacles to deportation while undecided about the most important problem of all—the disposition of the deportees. Given the already apparent inadequacies of the Einsatzgruppe operations—their inefficiency, lack of secrecy, and psychological burden on the executioners—and their even greater unsuitability for use outside Russia, the most important problem Himmler and Heydrich faced was how and where to kill the Jews. Ultimately, the Nazi planners solved this problem by merging three already existing programs with which they had prior experience: the concentration-camp system, euthanasia gassing, and Eichmann's speciality of forced emigration and population resettlement. Auschwitz, because of its rail connections, was chosen as one site for a killing center. The possibility of other sites in Russia may have been weighed until the military and transportation situation made this unfeasible. The exact type of gas to be used remained undetermined; in the end, the Polish camps manned by euthanasia personnel retained carbon monoxide while Auschwitz and Maidanek adopted Zyklon B. When was this solution—deportation to camps equipped with gassing facilities—finally approved? The answer lies in another question: when did the construction of the first death camps and the initial shifting of euthanasia personnel begin? Sonderkommando Lange, headquartered in Posen (Poznan), had been carrying out euthanasia in the incorporated

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territories in 1940 and 1941. According to the testimony of Lange's chauffeur, in the fall of 1941 Lange drove around t h e Warthegau in search of a suitable location and t h e n to Berlin. He returned to C h e i m n o in late O c t o b e r or early November to assemble contingents of SS m e n and police from Lodz and Posen and to carry out preparatory work o n the buildings to be used before the first transport of Jews arrived in December. 4 8 Testimony of ethnic G e r m a n inhabitants of C h e f r n n o confirms that in t h e fall of 1941 SS m e n came to inspect the town and returned some days later to confiscate many buildings and evict the Polish owners. Some Poles remained to work o n renovating "the castle," where t h e gas vans would be loaded. Several more groups of SS and police also came. "Some weeks" or "one m o n t h " later, the first Jewish transports arrived. 4 9 Since t h e first transport of Jews was gassed at C h e i m n o on December 8, the decision to build a death camp near Lodz c a n n o t date beyond mid or late October. T h e evidence indicates that a decision concerning Belzec came at least as early, even though the camp did not become operational until March 1942. E i c h m a n n reported n o activity there w h e n h e visited in mid-October. Accounts of subsequent events once again confirm t h e plausibility of his story. According to Polish testimony, three SS m e n arrived in Beizec in O c t o b e r and demanded a draft of twenty Polish workmen. T h e y began work on November 1 under the direction of a young e t h n i c G e r m a n Baumeister from Kattowitz (Katowice), w h o supervised t h e construction according to a set of plans. After putting up two barracks and the future gas chamber near the railway siding, the Polish workers were dismissed on December 23. By then, black-uniformed former prisoners-of-war from the Russian army had arrived to carry o n t h e work and t o guard seventy Jewish laborers from Lubycza Krolewska a n d Mosty Male. T h e latter were subsequently killed in the first test of t h e gassing facilities in February. 50 SS Second Lieutenant Josef Oberhauser, initially an employee of t h e euthanasia program and subsequently adjutant to the inspector of t h e Polish d e a t h camps (Christian W i r t h ) , testified to a similar chronology. H e was reassigned to Lublin in October 1941 and arrived in November. His first job consisted of bringing to Beizec building materials as well as U k r a i n i a n guardsmen from their training camp at Trawniki. He was in n o doubt as to what was intended in Beizec, as the construction supervisor showed him t h e plans for t h e gas chamber. By Christmas the initial construction was finished, and Oberhauser became Wirth's liaison t o G l o b o c n i k . A f t e r t h e first gassing test killed fifty Jewish workers, W i r t h

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went to Berlin for six weeks. Upon his return in March, transports began to arrive. 51 While many euthanasia personnel were sent from Germany to Russia in the winter of 1941-42 and were not reassigned to the death camps until the spring of 1942, some key personnel were already involved earlier. Not only had Wirth and Oberhauser been sent from Berlin in the fall of 1941, but Brack also dispatched to Lublin his chemist, Dr. Kailmeyer, the man he had unsuccessfully tried to send to Riga in late October. Kallmeyer admitted being sent to Lublin after Christmas, but said no one had had any use for him and he had been quickly ordered back. 52 S S Second Lieutenant Dr. August Becker, on loan from the SS to the euthanasia program since January 1940 for the purpose of delivering bottled carbon monoxide to the euthanasia institutes, testified frankly (when terminally ill and no longer facing trial): "Himmler wanted to use the people released from euthanasia who were experts in gassing, such as myself, in the great gassing program getting underway in the east." Before being assigned in December 1941 to supervise gas vans operating with the Einsatzgruppen in Russia, Becker had already heard talk in Berlin that other members of the euthanasia program were being sent to Lublin to start "something similar," only this time, according to rumor, it would be the Jews. 53 If the plans for Beizec were being drawn up by mid-October and work began on November 1, and if Lange was in Berlin making final arrangements for Cheimno in late October and work began there by early November, it is very difficult to avoid the conclusion that sometime in October Hitler had approved the extermination plan he had solicited the previous summer. Certainly, the subsequent behavior of Himmler, Heydrich, and Rosenberg is compatible with this hypothesis. On October 30, Heydrich sent to the Foreign Office the first five "Activity and Situation Reports on the Einsatzgruppen of the Sipo-SD in Russia," which detailed the massacres that had taken place the previous summer. As the Foreign Office copy was often only one of as many as a hundred copies, such information was being widely circulated. 54 Perhaps Heydrich's timing was fortuitous. Or perhaps he was attuning recipients to the "new realities," psychologically preparing them for participation in the Final Solution. On November 11 Himmler told Kersten that "the destruction of the Jews is being planned. . . . Now the destruction of the Jews is imminent." 5 5 On November 18 Rosenberg gave a "confidential" background report to the German Press and asserted that the Jewish question "can only be solved in a biological extermination (Ausmerzung) of all

THE DECISION FOR THE FINAL SOLUTION Jews in Europe." 56 On November 25 in Kovno and November 30 in Riga, deported German Jews were massacred for the first time. On November 29, Heydrich issued his invitations to the Wannsee Conference, originally scheduled for December 9 but postponed until January 20, 1942. And on December 14, Rosenberg recorded a conversation with Hitler: "1 took the viewpoint not to speak of the extermination (Ausrottung) of the Jews. T h e Führer approved this attitude. . . ." 5 7 For many who had been waiting anxiously for direction from Berlin on the Jewish question, December was a month of resolution. An inquiry from the Reichskommissariat Ostland as to whether all Jews should be liquidated regardless of age, sex, and economic interest was answered from Berlin on December 18: "In the meantime clarity on the Jewish question has been achieved through oral discussion: economic interests are to be disregarded on principle in the settlement of this problem." 58 O n December 16 Hans Frank, who had sent his state secretary, Joseph Bühler, to Berlin to find out what was behind the Wannsee invitation, reported to his followers in the General Government that the Polish Jews could not be deported; thus, they would have to liquidate these Jews themselves. He did not know exactly how, but measures should be taken "in connection with the great measures to be discussed in the Reich" to accomplish this task. If unsure of the method, Frank had no doubt of the goal: "Wir müssen die Juden vernichten."59 Heydrich's Wannsee Conference invitation of November 29, 1941, contained a copy of Göring's July 31 authorization. 60 At the conference Heydrich invoked not only it but also "previous approval through the Führer." 61 All Jews, Heydrich announced, would be deported to the east for labor. Most would disappear through "natural diminution." The survivors, the hardiest, would be "treated accordingly," for no Jews were to survive "as a germ cell of a new Jewish reconstruction." That the participants were clear that the real goal of the vast deportation program was extermination, not labor, can be seen from the request of State Secretary Bühler of the General Government that the Final Solution begin in Poland because most of the Jews there were already incapable of work. If the goal and scope of Nazi Jewish policy were no longer in doubt, some aspects of the Final Solution were still unsettled. "Practical experience" of significance to the Final Solution was being gathered, and "possible solutions" were discussed, which Eichmann confirmed to have been a discussion of "killing possibilities." 62 Though the Chehnno gas vans were already operating, and the makeshift facilities at Auschwitz were just being put into operation, apparently it was not until mid-

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M a r c h , with the opening of Beizec, that the gas chamber passed the final test. T h e proportion of those to be worked to death and those killed immediately was left open and remained a source of c o n t e n t i o n throughout. T h e issues of Mischlinge

(those who are half-Aryan,

half-Jewish)

and G e r m a n Jews in mixed marriages, which took up much of the conference, would never be definitively resolved. Nevertheless, despite these unanswered questions, the extermination of the European Jews as the ultimate goal of Nazi Jewish policy had been revealed to a significantly wider circle in order to assure needed cooperation. O n e must not, however, overemphasize the degree of coherency and clarity in the G e r m a n policy regarding the Jews in this crucial period from t h e summer of 1941 to the spring of 1942. In addition to the issues still unresolved at the time of the Wannsee Conference, two further factors confused the situation: (1) Hitler's decision to deport G e r m a n Jews in the fall of 1941 superimposed upon the planners an additional task before the plan for a European-wide solution to the Jewish question and the means of implementing that plan were ready; and ( 2 ) the method of transmitting information about policy changes within the Third Reich was very unsystematic, and the process by which people and institutions were initiated into the policy was gradual and irregular. H e n c e , considerable uncertainty, confusion, and ignorance surrounded the Nazis' Jewish policy in the fall of 1941. This has led some historians to argue that t h e ultimate aim of that policy was still very much undecided. Consider, first, the fall deportations from Germany. Goring's July authorization referred to a plan for the entire German sphere of influence in Europe and came at a time when rapid German victory over Russia was still assumed. In August, before such a plan could be devised and expectations of imminent victory were still alive, Hitler resisted pressure from Heydrich and Goebbels and rejected deportations from Germany "during t h e war." 6 3 As late as September 13, Eichmann likewise told the Foreign Office that n o deportation of Serbian Jews to the General Gove r n m e n t or Russia was possible, for not even G e r m a n Jews could be lodged there. 6 4 By then, however, prospects of total G e r m a n victory that fall were fast dimming, and Hitler appears to have made a snap decision reversing himself. O n September 14 Rosenberg urged Hitler to approve the immediate deportation of German Jews in retaliation for the Russian deportation of Volga Germans to Siberia. Four days later Himmler informed A r t h u r Greiser, gauleiter of the Wartheland (Warthegau), of interim deportations to Lodz, because the fiihrer wished to make the Old R e i c h and the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia judenfrei

as soon as

THE DECISION FOR THE FINAL SOLUTION possible, hopefully by the end of the year.65 Shortly thereafter, Heydrich likewise announced in Prague the fuhrer's wish that insofar as possible the G e r m a n Jews were to be deported to Lodz, Riga, and Minsk by the end of the year. 66 Thus, in addition to their efforts to devise a Final Solution to the Jewish question in all Europe, the planners suddenly had to improvise immediate deportations as an interim solution for the Reich. T h e attempt to carry out these deportations before the death camps now being conceived were built caused difficulties and confusion. German authorities in the reception areas resisted the unwelcome influx, despite assurances that it was all temporary and the Jews would be sent "to the east" in the spring, 67 because these intended way stations did not have the capacity to take on such numbers even for a half year. T h e improvised nature and ultimate failure of the fall deportations from Germany have led Martin Broszat and Uwe Adam to conclude that it was precisely this failure that paved the way for the Final Solution. Hitherto, the Germans had thought only of dumping the European Jews into the vast areas to be made accessible by the conquest of Russia. T h e stalled military campaign blocked this prospect, and deportations backed up as reception capacity in the "transit ghettos" was quickly saturated. With a resettlement program in motion but no place to go, killing emerged as the only alternative. This thesis is attractive and plausible, but the testimony of Hoss and Eichmann and the events of October show that the Germans were working on the extermination program even while the deportations were just beginning. Their plans were not the result of the subsequent failure of these deportations. T h e chronology of events provides even less support for Sebastian Haffner's contention that the Russian winter offensive, beginning on December 5, 1941, convinced Hitler that the war against Russia was lost, and that he thereupon sought at least to win the war against the Jews. His argument that the Wannsee Conference of January 20, 1942, followed directly from the Russian counteroffensive of December ignores the fact that invitations to the Wannsee Conference had already been issued and several death camps were already under construction in November. Consider next the issue of the flow of information within the Third Reich. Broszat has argued that the absence of any reference to a specific Hitler order for the Final Solution in the postwar testimony or the surviving diaries of leading Nazis casts doubt upon the existence of a definitive Hitler decision for the Final Solution. T h e unsystematic and

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irregular flow of information was, however, a pervasive feature of the political system of the Third Reich. Ignorance about current Jewish policy among some high-ranking Nazis in no way precludes a clear understanding of Hitler's desires among others. The examples of Joseph Goebbels and Joachim von Ribbentrop, the ministers of propaganda and foreign affairs, are most illustrative in this regard. Goebbels had long attempted to play a role in Jewish affairs. His instigation of the Kristallnacht pogrom had led, however, to the centralization of Jewish policy under the rival triumvirate of Göring, Himmler, and Heydrich. In the summer of 1941 Goebbels again sought a role. On August 15 he addressed a meeting at the Propaganda Ministry on the question of marking. After blaming the Jews for everything from the lack of housing to the strawberry shortage in Berlin, he suggested a series of measures: sending the nonworking Jews to Russia, cutting their rations, or, best of all, killing them (am besten wäre es, diese überhaupt totzuschlagen)! Basic to any measures, however, was the marking of the Jews, Goebbels argued, and by August 20, he had secured Hitler's agreement to this preparatory measure. Goebbels's attempted power grab was only partially successful, for despite his initiative in this matter, the SS retained jurisdiction over the marking decree that ensued.68 While Goebbels may have constantly agitated for a more radical Jewish policy, he was seldom the designer or executor of these policies. Heydrich jealously guarded his prerogatives, and no representative from the Ministry of Propaganda was invited to the Wannsee Conference. Only six weeks later, presumably in connection with the Mischlinge conference of March 6 (which one of Goebbels's men did attend), did the Propaganda Ministry receive a report and an expurgated one at that. On March 7, 1942, Goebbels noted in his diary: I read a detailed report from the S D and police regarding the final solution of the Jewish question. Any final solution involves a tremendous number of new viewpoints. T h e Jewish question must be solved within a pan-European frame. There are 1 1 , 0 0 0 , 0 0 0 Jews still in Europe. They will have to be concentrated later, to begin with, in the East; possibly an island, such as Madagascar, can be assigned to them after the war. 69

In contrast, the Foreign Office received its copy of the unexpurgated Wannsee Conference protocol (one of thirty) on January 26, and even the low-echelon officials of the Colonial Desk were informed by February 10 that the Madagascar Plan was defunct. 70 Clearly, much about Nazi

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Jewish policy was being kept from Goebbels, and his first awareness of the Final Solution was recorded only on March 27, 1942, several weeks after Beizec began operating. 7 1 If the intense competition of the Nazi political system caused a very uneven flow of information through the government, as rivals deliberately withheld information from one another, Hitler's informal and irregular manner of governing contributed to the same result. There was no written order for the Final Solution nor any explicit reference to a verbal order other t h a n the assertions of Himmler and Heydrich that they were acting with the fuhrer's approval. Participation in the Final Solution did not result so much from explicit orders systematically disseminated, as through self-recruitment by the zealous and ambitious servants of the Third Reich in response to the impulses and hints they perceived emanating from the centers of power. If a nod from Hitler could set Himmler and Heydrich in motion, others eagerly looked for similar signs. A classic example of self-recruitment by the clever and ambitious coexisting with enduring ignorance on the part of the obtuse is provided by Under Secretary Martin Luther and his boss, Foreign Minister Ribbentrop. Luther was a man with a sensitive hand on the political pulse of the Third Reich. Keenly aware of the signs of change in Nazi Jewish policy in the fall of 1941, Luther quickly closed ranks with his old antagonist, Heydrich, to secure a role for the Foreign Office and prevent a further diminution of its dwindling influence. Invited to the Wannsee Conference, Luther did not inform Ribbentrop of this until the following summer. Even then the foreign minister, though certainly aware of large numbers of Jews being killed (he had received summaries of the Einsatzgruppe reports from Luther), seemed unable to perceive the scope of the Final Solution and the importance Hitler attached to it. Piqued by SS encroachments on his jurisdiction, Ribbentrop temporarily ordered his Foreign Office to cease pressing Germany's allies on the deportation question. Only Hitler's vehemence on the Jewish question during backto-back visits in September 1942 by the Croatian head of state, A n t e Pavelic, and the Romanian deputy prime minister, Mihai Antonescu, sent the obsequious Ribbentrop scurrying to the telephone to cancel this order. However, it was not until the misfired Luther Putsch in February 1943, when Himmler backed Ribbentrop instead of his under secretary, that Ribbentrop finally perceived the political expediency of engaging in personal diplomacy on behalf of the Final Solution. 72 Thus, the circle of initiates widened in a very unsystematic manner. T h e cleverest perceived the signs of change and recruited themselves to

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the new policy. O t h e r s were brought in as their services were needed, such as at t h e Wannsee C o n f e r e n c e . Some appear to have been deliberately excluded. A n d some were simply too stupid or blind to see what was going o n . T h e bizarre result was that lower-ranking officials in certain areas of the government knew more than some top-ranking Nazis elsewhere. T h u s , different Nazis, loyal to Hitler, anti-Semitic to the core, could pursue different policies and make contradictory statements regarding t h e Jews with the full conviction that they acted with the fuhrer's blessing. T h i s was not a state of affairs Hitler sought to correct. Indeed, given his cynical tongue-in-cheek comments during this period, he set the t o n e and deliberately encouraged a policy of m a x i m u m ambiguity. 73 S u c h confusion has obscured t h e origins of the Final Solution but ultimately c a n n o t disguise the fact t h a t , from the summer of 1941, Hitler, G o r i n g , Himmler, and Heydrich knew what they were trying to do. T h e circle of initiates widened steadily if irregularly thereafter. In conclusion, there was no Hitler order from w h i c h t h e Final Solution sprang full-grown like A t h e n a from the head of Zeus. But sometime in the s u m m e r of 1941, probably before Goring's July 31 authorization, Hitler gave H i m m l e r and Heydrich the signal to draw up a destruction plan, t h e completion of which inevitably involved the exploration of various alternatives, several false starts, and m u c h delay. Considerable "lead time" was needed, for the Nazis were venturing into uncharted territory a n d a t t e m p t i n g the unprecedented; they had n o maps to follow. H e n c e , a seeming ambivalence surrounded Nazi Jewish policy in the late summer and a u t u m n of 1941, which was aggravated by two factors. T h e first was t h e decision in mid-September to deport G e r m a n Jews before t h e new killing facilities had been devised. T h e second was t h e Byzantine style of g o v e r n m e n t in which initiative from above was informal, inform a t i o n was shared irregularly, and uncertainty was o f t e n deliberately cultivated. By October, a n o t unreasonable two or three m o n t h s after Hitler had given t h e "green light" to proceed, the pieces were falling together. Many outside t h e SS were now involved, and the rough outline of a plan involving mass deportation to killing centers using poison gas had emerged. T h e first concrete steps for implementing this p l a n — t h e start of c o n s t r u c t i o n of the earliest death camps at Beizec a n d C h e i m n o and the first transfer of euthanasia personnel, both inconceivable without Hitler's approval—were taken by the end of the m o n t h . T h e decision for the Final S o l u t i o n had been confirmed.

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NOTES 1. Martin Broszat, "Hitler und die Genesis der 'Endlösung': Aus Anlass der Thesen von David Irving," Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte (hereafter Vß) 25, no. 4 (1977), p. 753. 2. Tim Mason, "Intention and Explanation: A Current Controversy about the Interpretation of National Socialism," in Der Führerstaat: Mythos und Realität, ed. Gerhard Hirschfeld and Lothar Kettenacker (Stuttgart, 1981), pp. 21-40. 3. For the intentionalist view, see Karl Dietrich Bracher, "Tradition und Revolution in Nationalsozialismus," in Hitler, Deutschland und die Mächte, ed. Manfred Funke (Duesseldorf, 1978), pp. 17-29; and T h e Role of Hitler: Perspectives of Interpretation," in Fascism: A Reader's Guide, ed. Walter Laqueur (Berkeley, 1976), pp. 211-28. Klaus Hildebrand, "Monokratie oder Polykratie? Hitlers Herrschaft und das Dritte Reich," in Der Führerstaat, pp. 43-70; and Das Dritt« Reich (Munich, 1979). For the functionalists, see Martin Broszat, "Soziale Motivation und Führer-Bindung des Nationalsozialismus," Vß 18, no. 4 (1970), pp. 392-409; and The Hitler State: The Foundation and Development of the Internal Structure of the Third Reich (London, 1981); Hans Mommsen, "National Socialism," in Marxism, Communism, and Western Society, vol. VI, ed. C. D. Kemig (New York, 1973), pp. 65-74; "Hitlers Stellung im nationalsozialistischen Herrschaftssystem," Der Führerstaat, pp. 43-70; and "National Socialism—Continuity and Change," Fascism: A Reader's Guide, pp. 179-210. 4. Lucy Dawidowicz, The War Against the Jews (New York, 1975), esp. pp. 150— 63. The psychohistorians also support the 1919 date. See Robert Waite, The Psychopathic God (New York: Signet, 1978), and Rudolph Binion, Hitler and the Germans (New York, 1976). 5. Martin Broszat, "Hitler und die Genesis der 'Endlösung,'" pp. 740-75. 6. Eberhard Jacket, Hitler's Weltanschauung (Middletown, Conn., 1972), p. 57. 7. Karl Dietrich Bracher, The German Dictatorship (New York, 1970), pp. 366-68. 8. Klaus Hildebrand, Das Dritte Reich, pp. 83, 178. Andreas Hillgruber, "Die Endlösung und das deutsche Ostimperium als Kernstück des rassenideologischen Programmes des Nationalsozialismus," Vß 20, no. 2 (1972), pp. 133-53; and "Die ideologisch-

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dogmatische Grundlage der nationalsozialistischen Politik der Ausrottung der Juden in den besetzten Gebieten der Sowjetunion und ihre Durchführung 1941-1944," German Studies Review II, no. 3 (1979), pp. 263-96. Gerald Reitlinger, The Final Solution (New York, Perpetua, 1961), and Nora Levin, The Holocaust (New York, Schocken: 1973), are not explicit but also imply a prewar date. 9. Leon Poliakov, Harvest of Hate (London, 1958), p. 110; Roben Kempner, Eichmann und Komplizen (Zurich, 1961), pp. 96-97; Helmut Krausnick, "The Persecution of the Jews," in Anatomy of the SS Suite (New York, 1968), p. 67. 10. Raul Hilberg, The Destruction of the European Jews (Chicago, 1961), pp. 177, 262. Hilberg argued for this date only against the then prevailing presumption of an earlier date. Since then, arguments for a later date emerged. I have supported the Hilberg date against the thesis of a later date in my "Zur Genesis der 'Endlösung': Eine Antwort an Martin Broszat," V/Z 29, no. 1 (1981), pp. 97-109. 11. Uwe Dietrich Adam, Judenpolitik im Dritten Reich (Düsseldorf, 1972), pp. 303-316. 12. Sebastian Haffner. The Meaning of Hitler (New York, 1979), pp. 142-43. 13. H. R. Trevor-Roper, ed., Hitlers Secret Conversations (New York: Signet, 1961), pp. 238, 260. Entries of January 23 and 28, 1942. 14. Broszat, "Soziale Motivation und Führer-Bindung des Nationalsozialismus," loc. cit. 15. Mason, "Intention and Explanation," p. 33. 16. For psychological assessments of Hitler's anti-Semitism, see Robert Waite, The Psychopathic God, and Rudolph Binion, Hitler and the Germans. For anti-Semitism and Hitler's ideology, sec Jacket, Hitler's Weltanschauung, and the articles of Andreas Hillgruber, n. 8 above. T h e most graphic of Hitler's murderous fantasies is cited in Waite, p. 440: "As soon as I have the power, I shall have gallows after gallows erected, for example in Munich or. the Marienplacz. . . . T h e n the Jews will be hanged one after another, and they will stay hanging until they stink. They will stay hanging as long as hygienically possible. As soon as thev are untied, then the next group will follow and that will continue until the last Jew in Munich is exterminated. Exactly the same procedure will be followed in other cities untii Germany is cleansed of Jews!" This dates from 1922. 17. See for instance Hitler's support for continuing the Haavara agreement despite considerable internal opposition and his support of Schachts negotiations over Ribbentrop's objections, as well as his backing of Goring, Himmler, and Heydrich over Goebbels and his encouragement to the Madagascar planners. Christopher R. Browning, The Final Solution and the German Foreign Office (New York, 1978), pp. 14, 17-18, 38, 41. 18. Dawidowicz, The War Against the Jews, pp. 93, 158. Bracher, The German Dictatorship, p. 366. Bracher declares that the Final Solution "was merely a matter of time and opportunity." 19. Helmut Krausnick and Hans-Heinrich Wilhelm, Die Truppe des Weltanschauungskrieges (Stuttgart, 1981); Christian Streit, Keine Kameraden (Stuttgart, 1978); Andreas Hillgruber, Hitlers Strategie: Politik und Knegsfuehrung 1940-1 (Frankfurt, 1965); Hans-Adolf Jacobsen, "The Kommissarbefehl and Mass Executions of Soviet Prisoners of War," in Anatomy of the SS State, pp. 505-35; Helmut Krausnick, "Kommissarbefehl and 'Gerichtsbarkeitserlass Barbarossa' in neuer Sicht," V/Z 25, no. 4 (1977), pp. 682-738; Jürgen Förster, "The Wehrmacht and the War or Extermination Against the Soviet Union," Yad Vashem Studies XIV (1981), pp. 7-34. 20. I am persuaded by the conclusions of Krausnick and Wilhelm, Die Truppe des Weltanschauunskrieges, pp. 159-64, 533-39, rather than Christian Streit. Keine Kameraden, pp. 127 and 356, that the extermination order was made known to the Einsatzgruppen before the invasion. Streit s attempt to make a major distinction between the

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destruction of "all" Jews and the "as complete as possible" (möglichst umfassende) destruction of Jews in Russia strikes me as specious. 21. Cited in Norman Rich, Hitler's War Aims: The Establishment of the New Order (New York, 1974), p. 6. 22. L-180 (Stahlecker report) in Trials of the Major War Criminals Before the International Military Tribunal (Nuremburg, 1947-49), vol. XXVII, pp. 687, 702. Hereafter cited as 1MT. 23. Cited in Krausnick and Wilhelm, Die Truppe des Weltanschauungskrieges, p. 534. "Das Ziel, das dem Einsatzkommando 2 von Anfang an vorschwebte, war eine radikale Lösung des Judenproblems durch die Exekution aller Juden." 24. Streit has argued for the latter interpretation, i.e., the readiness of the army to cooperate in Hitler's Ausrottungspolitik in itself contributed to radicalizing this policy. Kein« Kameraden, p. 126. Hillgruber, on the other hand, has argued that the attacks upon Russia, bolshevism, and the Jews were inseparable in Hitler's mind. 25. Krausnick and Wilhelm, Die Truppe des Weltanschauungskrieges, p. 137. 26. Cited in Kempner, Eichmann und Komplizen, p. 97. "Was ich heute nicht niederschreiben will, aber nie vergessen werde." 27. Cited in Michael Marrus and Robert Paxton, Vichy France and the Jews (New York, 1981), p. 10. 28. Browning, The Final Solution and the German Foreign Office, pp. 43—44, 46. 29. Hilberg, The Destruction of the European Jews, p. 177. 30. 710-PS, in IMT, vol. XXVI, pp. 266-67. 31. Broszat, "Hitler und die Genesis der 'Endlösung,'" p. 747; Adam, Judenpolitik im Dritten Reich, 308-9. 32. Adoph Eichmann, Ich, Adolf Eichmann: Ein historischer Zeugenbericht, ed. Dr. Rudolf Aschenauer (Leoni am Starnberger See: Druffel-Verlag, 1980), p. 479. "Meine Memoiren," manuscript, Bundesarchiv Koblenz, All. Proz. 6/199, pp. 112-3. 33. National Archives, Wi/ID 1420 (old Wi/ID 2.139), "Anlage zu: Verb. St. D. OKW/Wi Ru Amt beim Reichsmarschall v. 14.8.41," I am grateful to Prof. Dr. Helmut Krausnick for sending me a copy of this document. 34. Politisches Archiv des Auswärtigen Amtes (hereafter PA), Inland Ilg 177, Heydrich to Ribbentrop, June 24, 1940 (NG-25886-J). Browning, The Final Solution and the German Foreign Office, p. 38. 35. -Rudolf Höss, Commandant of Auschwitz (New York, 1959), pp. 135-38, 17336, 197. Höss's earlier testimony before the International Military Tribunal was clearly confused and ran together events of 1941 and 1942. See IMT, vol. XI, pp. 396 ff., and vol. XXXIII, pp. 275-79. 36. "Eichmann Tells His Own Damning Story," Life magazine (November 28, 1960); Eichmann, Ich, Adolf Eichmann; transcripts of Eichmann's interrogations by the Israeli police, Bundesarchiv Koblenz (hereafter BA), All. Proz. 6/1-6; Eichmann's handwritten "Meine Memoiren," BA, All. Proz. 6/119; Eichmann's handwritten notes to his attorney, BA, All. Proz. 6/169; Eichmann, Adolf, defendant, in the District Court of Jerusalem, Criminal Case No. 40/61; Bernd Neilessen, Der Prozess von Jerusalem (Düsseldorf, 1964). As in the case with Höss, Eichmann's testimony is not without contradictions. His recollections in Argentina dating from the late 1950s are the basis of the Life magazine account and the recent memoirs edited by Rudolf Aschenauer. In the former, Eichmann states that he learned of the Fiihrerbefehl in 1941 at a time when the Russian campaign was not going as quickly as planned and that he first saw actual preparations for the annihilation program in the "latter part of 1941." The memoirs refer consistently—indeed, all too consistently for anyone who has tried to follow all of Eichmann's accounts—to Eichmann's initiation into the Final Solution at "year's end 1941/

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4 2 . " T h a t such a dating occurs in no other account, including the Life article based on the same notes and tapes, leads to the strong suspicion that Aschenauer has resolved the many ambiguities of Eichmann's testimony in a way that is comforting to his own thesis (which he ceaselessly intrudes upon the reader) bur is of little use for the historian. Eichmann's various accounts while in Israeli custody (interrogation, court testimony, handwritten memoirs, and notes to his defense attorney) all place his meeting with Heydrich in the late summer of 1941. In the same meeting, according to Eichmann, Heydrich also informed him that Globocnik was going to use "antitank ditches" (Panzergräben) and that Eichmann was to go to Poland and report on the preparations. However, according to Eichmann, he passed through Prague on his way, where he informed Hans Günther, and he vividly remembered the bright fall colors during his visit to the camp (he could not remember the name, though it must have been Be^ec). As Eichmann was in Prague on October 10 and the peak of fall colors would be expected at this time, the dating of Eichmann's trip to Bcliec to mid-October seems reasonably certain. If Aschenauer's version is dismissed (and I think it should be), the major contradiction is not between Eichmann's accounts, but within them. If his first meeting with Heydrich took place in late summer, he was not immediately sent to BejSec. If he was immediately sent to Bejzec, the Heydrich meeting did not take place in late summer but presumably in late September or early October. Several factors argue for the former interpretation, i.e., that considerable time passed between Eichmann's meeting with Heydrich and the Bejiec trip. At that meeting Heydrich spoke of Globocnik's plans to use antitank ditches, and Eichmann was clearly under the impression that the Einsatzgruppen method of firingsquad execution at the edge of mass graves was intended. This would have made Belzec a iogical site; located on the Ribbentrop-Molotov line, it had earlier been die site of a Jewish labor camp for digging antitank ditches. (Zentrale Stelle der Landesjustizverwaltungen, Ludwigsburg, 8 AR-Z 252/59, vols. I, pp. 2 4 - 3 1 , and II, pp. 200.) But when Eichmann arrived in BejSec, he learned for the first time of plans to use gas chambers instead of shooting. That such a fundamental change in German planning could have taken place between Eichmann's meeting with Heydrich in Berlin and an immediate trip to Poland, or that Globocnik had decided upon gas chambers without Heydrich's knowledge, seems highly unlikely. That Eichmann learned of Hitler's order for the destruction of the Jews in late August, that is, one and one-half months before the Bejiec trip, is also suggested by Eichmann's letter of August 28, 1941, which speaks for the first time of an "imminent final solution now in preparation." (Emphasis mine.) (See n. 37 below.) In conclusion, the Eichmann testimony cannot exactly date the point at which Himmler and Heydrich were fully conscious of their mission to murder the European Jews, but like that of Höss it strongly suggests the summer of 1941. Eichmann's own awareness cannot be postponed beyond the end of September or the beginning of October, and probably dates from late August. T h e change in Eichmann's testimony regarding his visit to Auschwitz is less problematic, for the motivation behind his courtroom denial of a fall visit to Auschwitz is highly suspect. In the Life account Eichmann said that he had visited Auschwitz "repeatedly," though he did not specify the time of his first visit. He characterized Höss then as "an excellent comrade and a very proper fellow. . . . I was on close comradely terms with Höss. . . . I liked to visit him." He subsequently told the Israeli interrogator of his visit to Auschwitz "at the beginning," where Höss showed him the hut in which Zyklon B pellets had been tested on Russian prisoners. After excerpts of Höss's autobiography were read by the Israeli police interrogators to Eichmann, passages which in the latter's mind attempted to shift too much responsibility from the W V H A to the R S H A and to Eichmann personally, both his account and his opinion of Höss changed. He now claimed that he had not visited Auschwitz until the spring or summer of 1942. He

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provided his defense attorney with many notes to support this contention, "because," he frankly admitted, "I must prove Höss the arch-liar, that I have had nothing to do with him and his gas chambers and his death camp. . . ." 37. PA, Inland II A/B 47/1, Eichmann to D III, August 28, 1941: "Im Hinblick auf die kommende und in Vorbereitung befindliche Endlösung. ..." 38. PA, Pol. Abt. III 246, Luther memoranda of October 13 and 17, 1941. 39. Akten zur Deutschen Aussenpolitik, 1918-1945 (hereafter ADAP), series D, XIII, pt. 2 (Göttingen, 1970), pp. 570-72. 40. PA, Inland II A/B 59/3, Wurm to Rademacher, October 23, 1941. 41. NO-365, NO-996, and NO-997. 42. The difficulty in procurement and production of gas vans in the desired numbers is confirmed by testimony in the gas-van trial (Landgericht Hannover 2 Ks 2/65: Strafsache gegen Pradel und Wentritt) and by surviving documents of the automotive section (II D 3) of the RSHA (BA, R 58/871). 43. H. G. Adler, Theresienstadt 1941-1945. 2nd ed. (Tübingen, 1960), pp. 72022. The day following Heydrich's meeting in Prague, Stahlecker informed the Generalkommissar of Latvia, Dr. Drechsler, that a concentration camp near Riga was to be set up for Jews from the Reich and Protectorate. On November 8 SS Captain Lange of Einsatzgruppe A confirmed that 25,000 Jews were coming to the new camp at Salspils near Riga and another 25,000 to Minsk. When Dr. Trempedach of the RK Ostland wrote to Berlin to urge that the transports be stopped. Dr. Leibbrandt of the Ostministerium replied that there was no cause for worry since the Jews would be sent "further east." Hilberg, Destruction of the European Jews, p. 232. 44. 2718-PS, in JMT, vol XXXI, p. 84. 45. 126-EC, in IMT, vol. XXXVI, pp. 141, 145. 46. National Archives, Wi/ID 1420 (old Wi/ID 2.139), "Anlage zu: Verb. St. D. OKW/Wi RU Amt beim Reichsmarschall, v. 14.8.41." 47. PA, Inland II g 177, Reichssicherheitshauptamt Madagaskar Projekt. 48. Zentrale Stelle der Landesjustizverwaltungen Ludwigsburg (hereafter ZStL): V 203 AR-Z 69/59 (Urteil der Landgericht Bonn 8 Ks 3/63 gegen Gustav L. u. 11 a.), pp. 24, 28, 92; 203 AR-Z 69/59, vol. IV, pp. 624-43 (testimony of Walter B.). 49. ZStL, 203 AR-Z 69/59, vol. 7a, pp. 1262-65 (testimony of Nelli L.), 126669 (Else S.), 1270-77 (Herbert W.), 1281-86 (Erhard M.) and 1288-93 (Konrad S.). 50. ZStL, 8 AR-Z 252/59, vol. VI, pp 1117-20 (testimony of Eustachy U.), 112930 (Stanislaw K.), 1150 (Michael K.), 1156 (Jan G.), and 1222 (Edward F.). 51. ZStL, 8 AR-Z 252/59, vol. I, p. 133, and vol. IX, p. 1680-85. 52. ZStL, 8 AR-Z 252/59, vol. V, pp. 974-75. 53. Landgericht Hannover 2 Ks 2/65, vol. III, pp. 64-68. ZStL, 8 AR-Z 252/59, vol. V, pp. 981-89. 54. Browning, The Final Solution and the German Foreign Office, pp. 72-76. 55. Felix Kersten, The Kersten Memoirs 1940-45 (New York, 1957), p. 119. 56. PA, Pol. XIII, VAA Berichte, text of Rosenberg speech of 18.11.41. T 120/ 270/339/198808-21. 57. 1517-PS, in IMT, vol. XXVII, p. 270. 58. 3666-PS, in IMT, vol. XXXII, p. 437. 59. Werner Präg and Wolfgang Jacobmayer, eds., Das Diensttägebuch des deutschen Generalgouvemeurs in Polen 1939-1945 (Stuttgart, 1975), pp. 457-58; JMT, vol. XII, pp. 68-69; Hilberg, The Destruction of the European Jews, p. 263. 60. NG-2586 C. Photocopy in Kempner, Eichmann und Komplizen, pp. 127-28. 61. ADAP, E, vol. I, pp. 267-76. Photocopy in Kempner, Eichmann und Komplizen, pp. 133-47. 62. Neilessen, Der Prozess von Jerusalem, p. 206.

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63. Bernhard Lösener, "Ab Rassereferent im Reichsministerium des Innern," V/Z 9, no. 3 (1961), p. 303; Broszat, "Hitler und die Genesis der "F.ndlösung,"' p. 750. 64. PA, Inland II g 194, Rademacher marginalia of September 13 on Bender letter of September 12, 1941. 65. H. G. Adler, Der Verwaltete Mensch: Studien zur Deportation der Juden aus Deutschland (Tübingen, 1974), pp. 173-77. 66. Adler, Theresienstadt, pp. 720-22. 67. In addition to Himmlers assurances to Greiser and Eichmann's statement to that effect recorded by Wetzel (NO-365), see n. 43 above. 68. Losener, "Ab Rassereferent im Reichsministerium des Innern," pp. 303-5; Adam, Judenpolitik im Dritten Reich, p. 337. 69. Louis Lochner, ed., The Goebbels Diaries 1942-43, (Garden City, N.Y., 1948), pp. 115-16. 70. Browning, The Final Solution and the German Foreign Office, pp. 79-81. 71. Lochner, ed., The Goebbeh Diaries 1942-43, pp. 147-48. 72. Browning, The Final Solution and the German Foreign Office, loc. cit. 73. See n. 13 above. See also the entry for October 25, 1941, pp. 108-9.

THE DECISION FOR THE FINAL SOLUTION

The Realization of the Unthinkable: the (Final Solution of the Jewish Question* in the Third HANS MOMMSEN

The history of the Holocaust defies simple explanations. Since the pioneering account by Gerald Reitlinger, which appeared in English in 1953,1 researchers from many countries have produced detailed analyses of the persecution and liquidation of European Jewry. 2 The actual course of events has now been largely established, and the description of the deportations and exterminations is not subject to dispute among serious researchers; 3 at most, there is marginal controversy about the exact number of victims, 4 although this does not affect the overall assessment. Nevertheless, the horror of that culmination of inhumanity outstrips the capacity of historians to imagine and describe it. How could the unimaginable Utopian dream, the extermination of more than 5 million European Jews, become unspeakable reality, 5 and with such appalling efficiency? Propaganda alone - the savage tirades of hate directed against Jewish fellow citizens and minority groups by Hitler, Goebbels, Streicher, the SS paper Schwarze Korps and the press - cannot explain why the many people who were directly or indirectly involved in the destruction of the Jews did not find some way to withhold their co-operation. References to manipulation by terror or to the compulsion to obey orders are also inadequate. The real problem in providing a historical explanation of the Holocaust lies in understanding the overall political and psychological structure that gave rise to it. Human nature shrinks from the depiction of the immeasurable barbarity that attended the activities of the SS Eirtsatzgruppert and the use of factory methods to destroy human life in Auschwitz, •Translated by Alan Kramer and Louise Willmot.

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C h e l m n o , Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka and Majdanek. This is also true in an objective sense. When the subjugation and ill-treatment of h u m a n beings drives them to the edge of existence, reducing them to naked and hopeless desperation, then the last quasi-moral mechanisms governing human relations collapse in ruins. T o the liquidators, but also to those w h o merely happened to come into contact with the business of murder, the victims had ceased to be h u m a n beings; they were classed lower than the most c o m m o n criminals, whose individual identity was still recognized. 6 In the immediate post-war years it was widely believed that the Final Solution was carried out by a very limited circle - by the s w o r n order of the SS, or indeed by an even smaller g r o u p consisting of the Death's Head Divisions, w h o provided the guards for the concentration camps. 7 However, recent research has tended to contradict this theory. Although the 'technical' implementation of the Final Solution was carried out by relatively small staffs, it w o u l d not have been possible without the co-operation of relatively large g r o u p s of officials. T h e claim that the Wehrmacht was entirely or even largely uninvolved has been exposed as untrue. It has been established that the O K W (Armed Forces High C o m m a n d ) and the O K H ( A r m y High C o m m a n d ) actively participated in the preparation of criminal orders, and that A r m y units repeatedly provided essential support in the Soviet U n i o n and other occupied countries in Eastern, South-eastern and Western Europe. Officials of the Reich railways and the Reichsbank, the diplomatic service, the civilian administrations in the occupied territories, the German and n o n - G e r m a n police forces - all these contributed actively to the Holocaust in some form. T h e crucial question is w h y they were not aware of what they were doing, or w h y they were able to suppress with such strange consistency such knowledge as dawned upon them.8 An essential element in the explanation of the Holocaust was the removal of the inhibitions of the Einsatzgruppen, of the concentration c a m p guards involved in the extermination process, and indeed of all those w h o implemented the Final Solution. This loss of inhibition is not necessarily linked to anti-semitic and racialbiological indoctrination of the persecutors and the onlookers; we k n o w , for example, that many of the officials responsible for the Final Solution were not primarily anti-semitic. Technocratic and subordinate attitudes could be as important as blind racialism or the mere parroting of national socialist anti-Jewish clichés. T h e m o t i vation of each individual must therefore be assessed separately. In this connection, Hannah Arendt has spoken o f ' t h e banality of evil'; 9

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Unthinkable

at a certain level, the destruction of human life - under orders to do so - was perceived as a skilled job like any other. It lay below the threshhold of social and, ultimately, moral behaviour towards individual human beings. The example of Rudolf Hoss (camp commandant of Auschwitz) has frequently been used to illustrate the divided morality of the SS thugs: he was able to combine the everyday business of organizing mass murder with scrupulous respect in the private sphere for all those secondary virtues incorporated in the apparently moral concepts of'German order' and hygiene. 10 The speeches of Heinrich Himmler in October 1943 and January, May and June 1944 also contain the double standard that maintains that adherence to 'decent' practices - the forbidding of sadism, the avoidance of personal gain and the acceptance of 'personal responsibility' — can be used to justify criminal deeds. This dichotomy between criminal acts and hypocritical and frequently cynical pseudo-morality was fundamental to the entire system, not just to Heinrich Himmler and the SS. True responsibility based upon ethics was eliminated, being replaced by a formalized canon of values devoid of any real content. Traditional concepts such as 'doing one's duty', 'loyalty', 'honour' and 'serving one's country' withered into execrable phrases, used repeatedly to justify the actions of the regime, as self-justification by its representatives, and to compel loyalty. 11 There is no doubt that the liquidations that followed the deportation of the Jews were implemented with the utmost secrecy; Himmler, Heydrich and the other participants in the planning and realization of the programme knew full well why they kept any knowledge about the annihilation of the Jews from the German population, or more precisely from the pseudo 'public opinion' of the Third Reich.12 On the one hand, the destruction of the Jews was described as a vital task in world history; on the other, it was to be kept secret from the world. The idea that traces of these crimes could be obliterated by opening up the mass graves and attempting to bum the bodies before the arrival of the Red Army was both absurd and utterly grotesque. This psychological reaction reveals that the veneer of ideological bigotry that covered the awareness of guilt was really very thin. 13 The victories of the Red Army and the looming prospect of military defeat began to destroy the Nazi dream world of cynical power politics and megalomaniac schemes for the future. At the same time, pangs of remorse over the crimes they had committed, or something approaching a moral conscience, began to be felt.

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H i m m l e r ' s speech in Poznari on 13 O c t o b e r 1943, and his subsequent attempts to spread knowledge of the Final Solution - and thus the burden of responsibility for it - m o r e widely, were symptomatic of this. 14 However, the diffused nature of decisionmaking in the Third Reich made it impossible to say afterwards that responsibilities had been delegated according to a set plan. The accused at the Nuremberg Trial of M a j o r War Criminals were often not even willing to admit their knowledge. In m a n y cases they shifted responsibility to the Fuhrer and, except f o r Goering and perhaps Speer, 15 argued that they were merely carrying out orders. T h e flight from responsibility and the suppression o f knowledge of criminal actions did not begin in 1945, however. Despite a considerable degree of agreement a m o n g historians about the deportation and extermination process, opinions differ in analysing the causes of the Holocaust and are sometimes diametrically opposed to one another. In view of the vital importance of the subject in world history, this is not surprising. Many historians still believe that Hitler had envisaged the actual physical extermination of the Jews from the beginning and had set himself to achieve this as a long-term objective. 1 6 H o w e v e r , the carefully recorded statements of the future dictator on the subject do not provide conclusive proof of such an intention. M o r e o v e r , verbal expressions of this nature are not u n c o m m o n , being typical of radical anti-semitic wishful thinking since the late nineteenth century. 1 7 In fact. Hitler's actual instructions for action during the 1920s are rather more restrained. Hatred of the Jews was indisputably fundamental to Hitler's Weltanschauung; opinions conflict, however, about h o w much influence he exerted on the detailed moves to force Jews out of German social and economic life and to deprive t h e m of legal rights. There is a consensus of opinion that Hitler approved the cumulative intensification of persecution and that his attitude served as its legitimating authority. This does not mean that he actually initiated each step. As in many other aspects of domestic policy, he intervened only in isolated instances, frequently after receiving information from unofficial sources. 18 This is illustrated by his criticism of the sentence passed on one Markus Luftgas, which he thought too lenient; on Hitler's intervention, the sentence of imprisonment for hoarding food was replaced by the death penalty. H o w e v e r , there was a series of cases that demanded that he decide between rival, competing strategies. In these, he shrank away f r o m making definitive, unambiguous commitments, and proved to be dependent on changing personal influences. Whenever he was confronted

THE DECISION FOR THE FINAL SOLUTION The Realization of the Unthinkable

with a choice between two courses of action, he would favour the less extreme solution rather than play the part of revolutionary agitator. 19 The development of the Nuremberg Laws, for example, reveals that in the sections relating to 'Aryans' Hitler did not follow the party radicals but tended to support compromises, even if his attitude did not always remain firm. From the intentionalist point of view there appears to have been an escalation in the measures of persecution against the jews consistent with the interplay between the pressures of extremist groups in the Nazi Party (NSDAP) and the subsequent moves of the regime. However, it cannot be said that the illegal 'spontaneous' attacks on Jewish citizens, and the subsequent judicial measures to destroy the social and professional position of the Jewish community, were co-ordinated. The party had made extremely radical legislative proposals in spring 1933, but its initiatives were largely blocked by bureaucrats in the higher civil service (although those involved in the administration of justice were more prepared to conform). External economic and foreign policy considerations played a significant, but not decisive, role. The friction between the ministerial bureaucracy and the lower and middle-ranking party apparatus also slowed the pace of persecution. Thus, even those measures that satisfied the conventional demands of conservative groups for racial separation were considerably delayed and were mostly put into effect only after November 1938. Many ordinary Germans gained the impression that the antisemi tic outrages that had accompanied the process o(Gleichschaltung (Nazification of state and society) after March 1933 were declining, and that calm would return once the government took vigorous action to prevent 'spontaneous' attacks. This was certainly an illusion. The rabble-rousing tirades of the NSDAP, led by Julius Streicher's semi-pornographic paper Der Stürmer, influenced the political climate sufficiently to make people refrain from public contacts with Jews. They did not, however, generate the desired pogrom atmosphere, as was clearly proved in. 1938. Radical antisemitism gained its real political impact from the fact that die Political Organization of the NSDAP, which had previously been restricted more or less to welfare work, was increasingly diverted into the political arena. The higher civil service, still predominantly conservative despite efforts to Nazify it, endeavoured to make concessions to the NSDAP in the sphere of anti-semitism whilst evading party claims to control the administration, except in the municipal sector. It failed to perceive that it thereby opened the door to the abandonment of legal moderation in the conduct of state

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affairs and of the principle that the state should be under the rule of law. In Jewish affairs in particular, policy was set on a twisted road, which had no limits and no end. After the Nazi seizure of power, those groups in the N S D A P that originated m the extreme völkisch movement - including the vast majority of the 'Alte Kämpfer' - did not become socially integrated. Many of them remained unemployed, while others failed to obtain posts commensurate with the services they believed they had rendered the movement. The social advancement that they had hoped for usually failed to materialize. This potential for protest was increasingly diverted into the sphere of Jewish policy. Many extremists in the N S D A P , influenced by envy and greed as well as by a feeling that they had been excluded from attractive positions within the higher civil service, grew even more determined to act decisively and independently in the 'Jewish question'. T h e pressures exerted by the militant wing of the party on the state apparatus were most effective when they were in harmony with the official ideology. It was against Hitler's mentality openly to oppose these endeavours - with which he was in any case instinctively in sympathy - although he privately agreed to measures that counteracted them. Hitler was thus decisively responsible for the escalation of persecution. The initiative rarely came directly f r o m him, however. He was not concerned with detailed moves to achieve the desired 'solution of the Jewish question'. This was connected not least with his visionary concept of politics, in which anti-semitism was less a question of concrete political measures than of a fanatical ideological approach. Consequently, the regime failed to develop a coherent strategy until Heydrich took control of Jewish policy into his o w n hands. The genesis of the 'Nuremberg Laws' reveals the mixture of improvization and programmatic commitments that guided the policies of National Socialism. The militant wing of the N S D A P had long demanded a general ban on mixed marriages as well as the dissolution of existing ones. Preparations for legislation of this kind had begun immediately after the seizure of power, although the various departments concerned had not progressed beyond drafting various legislative proposals, for fear that anything more might undermine the legalist course. T h e same fate befell the plans announced by Secretary of State Pfundtner, which envisaged the creation of a special right of citizenship linked with the requirement to document 'Aryan' descent. In this case, the scheme was shelved partly because of the extreme demands of the N S D A P , which was pressing for the general adoption of its o w n much stricter rules on

THE DECISION FOR THE FINAL SOLUTION The Realization of the Unthinkable

'Aryan' descent; these excluded persons with one Jewish greatgrandparent from membership of the party. The Reich Ministry of the Interior was also anxious to avoid serious repercussions for the German minorities in Poland, especially in Upper Silesia. In the summer of 1935 there emerged the beginnings of a compromise between radical party circles and civil servants in the Ministry of the Interior, at least to the extent that the civil servants agreed to make certain concessions on the issues of mixed marriages and the restriction of the Jews' right to citizenship, on condition that attacks on Jewish businesses ceased and that there should be no compulsory confiscation of Jewish property. This compromise provided the background to Hitler's decision, on the occasion of the Nuremberg party rally, to use legislation to regularize the 'Jewish question' as a 'unique secular solution'. Hitler had originally summoned the Reichstag and the diplomatic corps to Nuremberg in order to make a solemn government declaration, using the Abyssinian conflict to announce Germany's own revisionist demands in foreign affairs. O n the recommendation of Baron von Neurath, this plan was dropped on the evening of 13 September. As the passing of the Reich Flag Law was hardly sufficient to justify the special session of the Reichstag, the inner circle of party leaders decided to introduce a Judengesetz (Jewish law) to the Reichstag instead, mainly in the hope of improving the acutely strained relations between the party and the ministerial bureaucracy. There were no concrete suggestions about the substance of this legislation, and, in the night-long deliberations that followed, Hitler vacillated over which precise policy he should propose. O n the same night, the experts on Jewish affairs and citizenship in the Reich Ministry of the Interior were ordered to Nuremberg and instructed there and then to submit drafts for a Reich citizenship law and a law on mixed marriages. They were therefore unable to refer to the preliminary work that had been done within the various government departments. This explains why Gurtner, the Reich Minister of Justice, first learned about the 'Nuremberg Laws' only when they were announced. In the main, the'laws did not really represent a qualitatively new stage of National Socialist Jewish policy. They contained little more than sweeping stipulations that could be interpreted in various ways. In the prescribed language of the regime, the laws offered German Jewry the opportunity to establish itself as a 'national minority'. Despite their discriminatory language, they did not go beyond a programme of segregating the Jews from the rest of the population, and were actually regarded as an acceptable 'legal solution' by many of those people most affected

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by them. Only after the issue of provisions for the precise application of the laws, which mostly occurred at a much later stage, were they used as an instrument for the further, systematic persecution of the Jewish people. The Reich Citizenship Law excludedjews from the right to Reich citizenship, which was due to be created as an addition to mere nationality status. Loss of Reich citizenship had no concrete significance, apart from the loss of the right to vote; the issue of whether the Jews should be deprived of German nationality and placed under Alien Law, as the NSDAP had intended, was thus sidestepped. Furthermore, the experts in the Reich Ministry of the Interior succeeded in making both the Reich Citizenship Law and the Law for the Protection of German Blood and German Honour applicable only to full Jews and to those half-Jews who belonged to the Jewish religious community and did not live in mixed marriages. They thus did not fulfil the more extreme proposals of the N S D A P to include 'Grade 1 and Grade 2 persons of mixed descent'. O n the other hand, the First Ordinance to the Reich Citizenship Law prohibited Jews from holding public posts, replacing the emergency regulations on the civil service which had been in force since 7 April 1933. In fact, the new Reich Citizenship Law never had any practical significance. Certainly, Hitler did approve the Law on Provisional Citizenship in March 1938 after the Anschluss (annexation of Austria), thereby granting the population of Austria the right to vote. However, he forbade further preliminary work on the implementation of the law when serious disagreements arose between the Ministry of the Interior and the Office of the Fuhrer's Deputy over the racial and political criteria to be applied to each citizen. The idea of submitting every German to a formal 'tribunal' hearing before an official Reichsburgerbrief (Deed of Reich Citizenship) could be issued actually raised serious doubts about Wilhelm Frick's grasp on reality. The Law for the Protection of German Blood and German Honour was seen as particularly odious outside Germany because of its discrimination against the Jews. On closer inspection, however, it cannot be regarded as a victory by the NSDAP over the more moderate ministerial bureaucracy. The Jews were prohibited from raising the Reich flag, but this only confirmed the status quo and at least protected them from being attacked for failing to honour the swastika. The law contained the ban on mixed marriages that was already de facto in effect, but refrained from decreeing that all existing mixed marriages were automatically dissolved, as party militants had demanded. It also made Rassenschande (sexual inter-

THE DECISION FOR THE FINAL SOLUTION The Realization of the Unthinkable

course between 'Aryans' and 'non-Aryans'), a category of offence developed by Nazi lawyers, into an offence punishable by law. Although in early summer 1935 Hitler had suspended the ban on the employment of 'Aryan' domestic servants under the age of 45 by Jews, he now gave in to pressure from high-ranking party officials and permitted the inclusion of this provision. In an attempt to find a precedent for it, Gerhard Wagner, the head of the Reich Medical Association and one of the leading rabble-rousers, had gone back to fifteenth-century regulations governing the employment of domestic servants; copies of these regulations were preserved in the NSDAP central archive. O n the issue of the legal definition of the status o f j e w s , on the other hand. Hitler inclined towards accommodating the concern of the jurists in the Ministry of the Interior about the introduction of legislative measures that they regarded as too extreme. Although the provision stipulating that the law should apply only to full Jews was deleted, Hitler proposed that a press notice should be issued that would make this limited application clear. It is therefore not surprising that the Nuremberg Laws produced an angry response from the NSDAP. Goebbels had the radio broadcast of the Reichstag session cut short before the bills were read out and instructed the party's press and officials not to discuss the laws until the provisions for their implementation had been decided upon. At a secret Fuhrer conference in Munich on 24 September, Hitler adopted the position of the experts from the Ministry of the Interior: using the argument of Bemhard Losener, the official responsible for racial affairs in the ministry, he spoke in favour of a more restricted legal definition of Jewishness and warned against creating a group of people w h o had nothing to lose. This meant that half-Jews who were not members of the Jewish religious community, and 'Grade 2 persons of mixed descent', would not be affected by the law. However, Martin Bormann persuaded Hitler to issue secret instructions that paragraph 6 of the First Ordinance to the Reich Citizenship Law, which would have ruled out any introduction of more sweeping regulations governing entry to public institutions, including the German Labour Front, and which he had just signed, was not to be applied. Bormann was thus compensated for his defeat over the actual drafting of the Reich Citizenship Law. He also got his way on another issue later. The draft Law on the Acquisition and Loss of German Nationality, which had been prepared in early 1939 with the assistance of Hans Globke, contained a provision to strip the offspring of racially mixed marriages of their German nationality

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(instead, they were allowed a right of abode as long as they were permanent residents). This clause later provided a stepping-stone for the Eleventh and Twelfth Ordinances to the Reich Citizenship Law, which were issued in 1943 and indirectly sanctioned the deportation of the Jewish population. However, there was never a definitive regulation of the legal status of the Jews — the government departments opposed it for a variety of reasons and adopted delaying tactics, whilst Hitler showed no personal interest in legal regularization. 2 0 O n this issue it would seem that Hitler cannot be regarded as one of the extremists; instead, he tended to compromise between the position of the various departments and the demands of party officialdom. Specifically, his regard for public opinion made him recognize the merits of a policy of exempting f r o m persecution those sections of the Jewish population that were largely assimilated, at least for the time being. He remained susceptible to arguments of this nature, although there can be no doubt that in principle he wanted to see persons of mixed blood removed from the German 'blood union'. Characteristically, as late as 1942 he decided against the deportation of the partners in 'privileged mixed marriages', w h o had previously been exempted f r o m persecution, and also of people of mixed descent ('Mischlinge') in general. 21 Hitler's conduct can be interpreted in various ways. Some historians believe that his decisions were determined by his conviction that the 'Jewish question' would be 'solved', possibly during a war, and that he acted throughout in pursuit of a plan that had long been decided. In this case, caution and tactical considerations - and even sometimes simple convenience - must be considered as determining factors in shaping his policies. This pattern of conduct is said to apply in particular to the field of foreign policy. 2 2 It was second nature to Hitler to make his decisions only when the situation seemed over-ripe, but it is certainly an exaggeration to claim that he waited upon events with the sure-footedness of a sleepwalker, as the propaganda would have us believe. Equally, he was not always, and not unconditionally, afraid to make decisions. His immediate and instinctive perception of impending dangers was rooted in a deep psychological insecurity, masked by a mixture of megalomania, joviality, harshness, determination and, not least, endless tirades of rhetoric. Ultimately, he would respond with restless activity and a flood of decisions, thus 'taking the bull by the horns'. 2 3 As far as I can see, no such reactions have been documented in the Jewish question. N o n e of the measures to restrict and then to deny Jews their civil and economic rights, and to make them into social

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Unthinkable

pariahs, were directly attributable to initiatives of the Führer himself. This is true of the boycott campaign of April 1933; of the Nuremberg Laws (abhorrent though they were, their significance in the persecution of the Jews has often been exaggerated); 24 of the pogrom of November 1938, which was unleashed by Goebbels; 25 and of the subsequent 'Aryanization policy' promoted by Hermann Goering. 26 To state these facts is not to claim that the events occurred without Hitler's approval and even encouragement. Nevertheless, given the ideological framework and the existence of machinery to trigger off 'spontaneous' anti-semitic outrages, they were first conceived by the rival satraps around Hitler, w h o were unscrupulously determined to outdo one another in implementing National Socialist policies, and thus to please the Führer. Only in retrospect have these measures acquired the appearance of being part of a systematic and cynical escalation of persecution. This can be demonstrated, for example, in the case of Goebbels. After the failure of his attempts to generate a pogrom atmosphere among the population in connection with the boycott campaign, he adopted the policy of legal measures against the Jewish community. 2 7 It is not likely that this change was the result of a tactical decision taken after consultation with Hitler. The Führer cared little for legal actions; he probably agreed to this course because it suited his objectives in foreign policy. However, it is also true that Hitler had little patience for the struggles of the rival departments as they strove to obtain, or to maintain, leadership in the Jewish question; he was instinctively in sympathy with the strong-arm methods favoured by the militant groups in the NSDAP, though he sometimes found it necessary to by-pass them. 2 8 N o r did Hitler interest himself in the detailed implementation of the anti-semitic programme; his few interventions do not reveal any practical plan. The propaganda aspect was of paramount importance for him, in this as in other issues. His conduct after the unsuccessful boycott campaign of 1 April 1933 reveals this clearly. He had approved Goebbels' initiative, had probably entrusted Streicher with the task of carrying out the boycott, and had defended the measures in the face of Cabinet criticism by claiming that there had been no other way to appease the 'anger of the people'. 29 Nevertheless, he was careful to distance himself from these events in public. He was fascinated by the idea, put forward by Goebbels at this time, of using German Jews as hostages for obtaining the good conduct of the Western powers in their foreign policy dealings with the Reich: This notion, which Goebbels had originally used as a propaganda expedient, was

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taken up by Hitler as a serious strategic argument. In later years it became a recurring leitmotiv in his public pronouncements. 30 Hitler's threat to take bitter revenge on 'worldJewry' in the event of war, and to destroy German Jewry in retaliation, was thus made in the context of exerting propaganda pressure. Many authors have nevertheless deduced from these utterances that Hitler was firmly resolved to wage an all-out campaign of genocide against international Jewry. The repetition of this threat has been interpreted as the decision that set in motion the systematic extermination of those Jews in German hands. 31 There is absolutely no doubt that Hitler's own ideas did indeed involve the physical destruction of the Jews, but they also involved the destruction of other entire populations. He did not hesitate to demand the liquidation of large groups of Slavs, and expressly ordered that the besieged population of Leningrad should be left to starve to death. 32 In the case of the Final Solution, Hitler maintained the taboo on public discussion of the issue until the very end. In this he was more consistent than Himmler, who spoke openly of the systematic liquidation of the Jews in the speeches mentioned above. This fact has led David Irving to assert that Hitler was not fully informed about the extermination programme before 7 October 1943 - and even then only informally - although it had been in full swing for over 18 months by that date. 33 In one respect Irving is correct: the actual measures for implementing this monstrous scheme never were discussed, either officially or privately, in the Führers headquarters. Hitler always kept carefully within the confines of the prescribed phraseology - to the efFect that 'the Jews are, en bloc, being mobilized for the appropriate labour duties', as Bormann put it in a confidential directive to high-ranking party officials on 11 July 1943 in an attempt to counter rumours about the 'special treatment' of the deportedjews. 3 4 Himmler's use of this camouflage language at its most striking in the reports of the SS statistician Richard Korherr 3 5 - reveals that the observance of secrecy and the use of prescribed terminology extended even to the internal correspondence of the Führer's headquarters. Hitler nevertheless continued to express his extreme racialist and anti-semitic opinions, which were nothing short of paranoid, in countless unofficial and official statements. Phrases typical of the language of Der Stürmer occur with great frequency: the Jews are described as a 'bacillus', as carriers of disease, and as dangerous vermin which must be destroyed. This terminology, which he shared with the militant anti-semitic wing of the party and the SS, remains constant throughout and did not become more extreme in

THE DECISION FOR THE FINAL SOLUTION The Realization of the Unthinkable

response to the Holocaust. Typically, it remained within the framework of propagandist metaphor. With the exception of his comment to a Slovak diplomat at the beginning of 1939 that 'Now we are going to destroy the Jews', 36 there are no known statements by Hitler that refer directly to the policy of genocide. There are, however, some recorded remarks that appear at first sight to refer to the issue. The 'Table Talk' of 25 October 1941 contains Hider's observation: 'By the way, it is no bad thing that we are rumoured to have a plan for the destruction of the Jews.' 37 The remark was made before the policy of genocide was systematically implemented (which began to occur only in March 1942 after preliminary steps had been taken in autumn 1941), so the comment must be interpreted in the context of proposals to settle the Jews in the Russian marshlands. Hitler wound up his remarks with the observation: Terror is salutary.' This was a reference to the liquidation programme of the Einsatzgruppen, which led to, but is not identical with, the subsequent Final Solution. 38 It is therefore not correct to infer from the passage quoted that Hitler was actually alluding the policy of the Holocaust. A similar picture emerges from the Table Talks' of 23 and 27 January 1942 and also from a note by Goebbels on 14 February 1942: 'The Fuhrer once more expressed his determination to clean up the Jews in Europe pitilessly'. 39 These comments amounted to massive threats against the Jews and emphatic support for the deportation programme, but did not constitute admission of an actual intention to commit genocide. It is also worth recalling Hitler's conversations with Marshall Antonescu and Admiral Horthy in mid-April 1943, when he evaded the straightforward comments of his Hungarian guests by resorting to standard anti-semitic rhetoric. 40 His reaction has been described by Martin Broszat, who emphasizes "Hitler's ability to distort the facts and turn them upside down whenever he was faced with the reality of criminal actions. 41 The apparently reliable record of Hitler's reaction to the reproaches of Frau von Schirach 42 also reveals how he deliberately avoided any mention of the true facts, indicating an instinctively defensive attitude. 43 The statement that comes nearest to an admission of genocide is Hitler's secret speech to Wehrmacht officers and generals on 26 May 1944, in which he explained, in apologetic tones: By removing the Jews, I eliminated the possibility of any kind of revolutionary nucleus or germ cell being formed. Of course, you could say to me: Yes, could you not have solved the problem in a simpler way - or not simpler, for everything else

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would have been more complicated - but in a more humane way? This justification is strikingly similar to remarks made by Himmler only a short time before. Significantly, it is once more only the policy of deporting the Jews that is being admitted, not the policy of mass liquidation; the reference to an allegedly 'more humane' solution should be regarded as a possibly subconscious allusion to the liquidation. In any case, his ambiguous statements reveal that Hitler himself felt a compulsive need for self-justification, psychologically balanced as always by aggressive accusations directed against the alleged enemy. This was especially apparent after the subject was taken up in Allied news reports. 44 The controversy provoked by David Irving over the question of how far Hitler was informed about the actual measures taken to implement the Final Solution - and this is the only point of real dispute - cannot easily be decided by examining the ambiguous statements of the Führer.*5 The question of whether or not Hitler was thoroughly briefed on the state of the genocide programme during Globocnik's visit to Führer headquarters on 7 October 1942 is not conclusive either. 46 Gerald Fleming, who disputes Irving's interpretation from beginning to end, nevertheless concludes that, despite the violent threats and prophecies in his speeches, Hitler used calculated cunning to disguise his own personal responsibility for events, especially for the implementation of the policies of destruction that he had nurtured for so long. In contrast to Irving, Fleming emphasizes that Hitler himself arranged the use of the camouflage language that was used whenever the policies of genocide were discussed. Such an interpretation - also made by others 47 — seems to be both plausible and consistent with the evidence. However, it also raises a number of difficulties. Even within Hitler's closest circle of trusted friends, there is no sign that he was ever prepared to abandon his usual metaphors in his references to the 'Jewish question'. If such behaviour had been based only on machiavellian cunning, there would have been no reason not to speak directly when the perpetrators were discussing events among themselves. There is not a single reliable piece of evidence that this ever happened. Himmler's speeches, in which he revealed the policy of the Final Solution, contain only passing references to a 'military' order by Hitler; he may well have been referring specifically to Hitler's speech of August 1939. 48 In so far as the implementation of the measures of liquidation rested on an order, rather than merely a 'wish of the

THE DECISION FOR THE FINAL SOLUTION The Realization of the Unthinkable

Fuhrer,49 that order was the Commissar Order (Kommissarbefehl) of 1941 and Hitler's instructions on how it was to be carried out. 5 0 In fact, we must conclude from these observations that Hitler gave no formal order to carry out the Final Solution of the 'EuropeanJewish question'. Krausnick still believes that Hitler gave a secret order to exterminate the Jews in March 1941 at the latest, in connection with his intention to 'have the political commissars of the Red Army shot'. 5 1 However, it is crucial to distinguish between the partial destruction of the Jews of Eastern Europe, based on the Commissar Order, and the systematic policy of the Final Solution, in spite of the fact that the latter developed from the former. As will be shown in a different context, preparations for the systematic implementation of the Final Solution were begun only in late autumn of 1941 and were not based on a written order. There are also many internal reasons for believing that Hitler never gave such an order orally, either. The exclusively metaphoric language in which the Fuhrer discussed the 'Jewish problem', as well as his general reluctance to take decisions that might have caused public opposition and perhaps have had to be withdrawn, make it unlikely that he would have come to a binding decision. Remarkably, even in early 1942 Hitler considered reactivating the abandoned Madagascar Plan. 52 If one attributes such behaviour to a desire to dissemble even among his closest friends, then it would simply be evidence of the extent to which he shrank f r o m referring openly to the factory-style destruction of human life. His conduct in this and other matters, however, appears to be due less to an extreme intellectual cynicism than to an ability to dissociate himself completely from reality. 53 Hitler's speech to the Reichstag on 30 January 1939 is cited more than any other as evidence of his early intention to destroy the Jews systematically: Today I shall once more be a prophet. If the international Jewish financiers inside and outside Europe should again succeed in plunging the nations into another world war, then the result will not be the Bolshevization of the world and thus a victory for Jewry, but the annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe. 5 4 This argument, repeated in the speeches of 30 January 1941, 30 January 1942, 30 September 1942 and 8 November 1942, 55 is complemented by Goering's report at the infamous meeting at the Reich Air Ministry on 12 November 1938, in which he quoted Hitler: 'If the German Reich comes into conflict with foreign powers

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in the foreseeable future, it goes without saying that in Germany too our main concern will be to settle accounts with the Jews.' 5 6 Although at first sight the connection with the subsequent genocide policy may appear to be evident, the political motive behind this statement is in fact ambivalent. Such threats were intended primarily to exert pressure on the Western nations, particularly Britain and the United States. They are thus connected with the hostage argument, which had surfaced as early as 1923: in that year the radical anri-semite Hermann Esser had argued that, in the event of a French invasion, one German Jew should be shot for every French soldier w h o stepped onto German soil. Andreas Hillgruber has concluded that such statements revealed the radical, racial-ideological objectives of the regime in the coming war. This is to over-state their significance, although the potential for a 'war of racial destruction ' that is discernible in them is not disputed. 57 Hitler considered the 'Jewish question' from a visionary political perspective that did not reflect the real situation. The struggle against Jewry was for him an almost metaphysical objective; as his 'Political Testament' reveals, it eventually took on a chiliastic dimension. 58 Hitler had always sympathized with 'spontaneous' attacks on Jews. They reflected his belief that anti-semitic opinions could be used both for mass mobilization and for the integration of the party's supporters. A campaign of extermination, implemented with extreme secrecy and with an increasingly bad conscience (as in the case of Himmler), was not completely compatible with this concept. Time and time again Hitler argued - quite incorrectly that it was the Jewish element in the population, and especially the Jewish elites, who were mobilizing resistance to National Socialism and opposing the triumph of the 'anti-semitic idea' in the world. The alleged need to 'remove' the Jews from German territory and to fight Jewry on the principle o f ' a n eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth' can always be traced back to the chiliastic component of Hitler's otherwise fragile personal philosophy. By contrast, the spurious justifications of the Einsatzgruppen for the murder of the Jewish population - ranging from housing shortages and the danger of insanitary conditions through to partisan warfare 59 - reflect their need to justify a crime that went beyond the causal connection of racial-biological anti-semitism. Throughout his career Hitler, out of a mixture of instinct and vanity, avoided any attempt to confront his ideological dreamworld with political and social reality. He felt strongly that the inner consistency of his Weltanschauung, or of the 'National Socialist Idea' as he described it with typical formalism, would be damaged if

THE DECISION FOR THE FINAL SOLUTION The Realization of the Unthinkable

confronted with the complexity of the real world. Even during the Kampfzeit (the period before 1933; lit. 'time of struggle7) he had adopted the habit of simply ignoring inconvenient realities. The refusal to accept disagreeable information increasingly became a dominant feature of his style of government. J. P. Stern has emphasized that Hitler's popularity was based on the fact that he turned his private sphere into a public one. 60 Political success and almost unlimited power enabled him to turn his subjective opinions on issues more and more into objective yardsticks for decision-making. Anti-semitic imagery spared him the need to reflect on the true consequences of his prophecies of the 'destruction of the Jewish race in Europe', a tendency that was reinforced after the invasion of the Soviet Union had committed him to an 'all or nothing' strategy. There was no middle ground between Hitler's daily work, crammed with military and armament production details, and the construct of ideas that formed his ideology and that bore no relation to reality. His passion for architectural planning was just another way of escaping into a dream-world once his supremacy as a military commander was threatened by unacknowledged defeats. Hitler's escape into the illusory world of film and opera formed part of the same syndrome. 61 When confronted with the actual consequences of the destruction of the Jews, Hitler reacted in exactly the same way as his subordinates, by attempting not to be aware of the facts or suppressing his knowledge. Only in this way could he give free rein to his anti-semitic tirades and his threats to destroy the Jews physically whilst simultaneously avoiding nearly all direct identification with the policy of genocide that was actually being implemented. The collective repression of disagreeable facts and criminal actions is an inevitable adjunct of any kind of political irrationalism; under National Socialism, the mechanism of repression was perfected. In 'good' years it was moderated by foreign policy considerations and by Hitler's instinctive perception of how the population would react. Above all else, he feared public alienation from the regime, and it is no coincidence that he vowed repeatedly that the events of 9 November 1918 would never be repeated. 62 However, as the war took its course this last corrective disintegrated, and the criminal and destructive energies that lay at the root of Hitler's personality ultimately prevailed over tactical and political considerations. The fact that the Final Solution tied down large quantities of materials, including vital transport capacity, and critically diminished the labour force that was so desperately needed, ought to have suggested the need for a modification of the deportation and

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murder programme. When Hitler was confronted with this problem, he usually responded evasively. In cases where he sensed a possible loss of prestige, as in the deportation o f j e w s from Berlin to Riga, 63 he ordered that the measures be delayed. However, the Führer did not stop Himmler and his thugs. As before 1939, he felt bound to stand by the party and the SS, institutions whose members took literally the 'grand' historical perspective presented them by Hitler. On the 'church question', Hitler was able to restrain Martin Bormann; on the 'Jewish question', he was the slave of his own public prophecies. Any retreat would have made him lose credibility in his own eyes, when his supreme guiding principle was to avoid any such development. At its root was his manic idea that, as bearer of the 'National Socialist Idea', he must not allow himself to contradict his own previous statements. 64 The realization of the Final Solution became psychologically possible because Hitler's phrase concerning the 'destruction of the Jewish race in Europe' was adopted as a direct maxim for action, particularly by Himmler. Hitler, it must be conceded, was the ideological and political author of the Final Solution. However, it was translated from an apparently Utopian programme into a concrete strategy partly because of the problems he created for himself, and partly because of the ambitions of Heinrich Himmler and his SS to achieve the millennium in the Führers own lifetime and thus to provide special proof of the indispensability of the SS within the National Socialist power structure. 65 Himmler's statements indicate that he intended to fulfil in one single, 'masterful', selfsacrificial act something that had actually been intended as a timeless programme. 6 6 He thus directed a large part of his energies towards a programme that, for Hitler, had only a low priority in comparison with the conduct of the war. Himmler and Heydrich thus played a decisive role in implementing the Final Solution. Nevertheless, it must be stressed that a purely personalized interpretation would prevent full understanding of the issue. The eventual step towards mass destruction occurred at the end of a complex political process. During this process, internal antagonisms within the system gradually blocked all alternative options, so that the physical liquidation of the Jews ultimately appeared to be the only way out. At this point it is necessary to recall the various stages of the National Socialist persecution of the Jews. It was certainly not carried out according to a carefully prepared plan; Karl A. Schleunes has justifiably spoken of a 'trial and error' method. 6 7 Only in 1941 did Heydrich succeed in eliminating rival contenders for control of

THE DECISION FOR THE FINAL SOLUTION The Realization

of the Unthinkable

the 'Jewish question'. Previously there had been constant infighting between departments and party offices determined to safeguard their own authority in the field. This infighting resulted in a continuous escalation in the persecution of the Jews. Seen from the perspective of the subsequent policy of genocide, the numerous individual moves against the Jewish community would appear to have been logical steps in one coherent plan. However, it would be inappropriate to seek any such degree of rationality in the motives of the men who initiated the specific measures. It would also be an entirely improper simplification of this process to trace it back to ideological factors alone. Anti-Jewish initiatives gained their momentum because they were associated with other interests. A desire to enhance their own prestige and to extend their authority was an important motive for many National Socialists, especially the Gauleiter, their rival attempts to declare 'their' districts 'Jew-free' play a conspicuous role in the genesis of the Holocaust. Straightforward economic interests were usually involved as well: in the case of the Gauleiter,68 in the case of Goebbels in relation to the pogrom of November 1938;69 in the anti-semitic outrages in Austria directly after the Anschluss;70 in the case of the Reich Security Head Office (RSHA) especially with regard to the attempts to establish an SS economic empire; 71 in industrial and banking circles as the 'spontaneous' and legalized 'Aryanization' measures and the exploitation of the labour of concentration camp prisoners offered advantages to many; 72 and among the commercial middle class which, especially in the early years of the regime, tried hard to intensify the repressive measures against their Jewish competitors. 73 The list could be extended at will: direct and indirect, legal and illegal gains at the expense ofJewish wealth and property were part of daily life in the Third Reich, which can accurately be described as a system of officially promoted corruption in this as in other respects. 74 It is scarcely surprising that Speer's construction department showed no reluctance to make use of Jewish dwellings in Berlin, and that Nazi officials at every level were prepared to claim Jewish property for their own private use without embarrassment. 75 Another mechanism, equally effective in radicalizing the persecution of the Jews, was provided by the Judenreferate (sections for Jewish affairs) which were established in each government department after 1933. These sections felt the need to justify their existence by introducing cumulative anti-Jewish legislation. Numerous shameful restrictions were imposed on German Jews by means of administrative decrees that were usually both defamatory and economically superfluous. Moreover, they were issued openly;

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every citizen could have found out about the inhuman treatment of his Jewish fellow citizens by reading the Reichsgesetzblatt (Official Gazette). 76 No less shocking is the willingness of the authorities to enforce this legislation down to the last detail, although their own primary motivation was not anti-semitic. 77 The anti-semitism of the conservative nationalist civil service elite, although more moderate than that of the NSDAP, prevented them from resisting anti-semitic infringements even when they involved blatant violations of the law. The same is true of the Wehrmacht, the public administration and the courts. The majority of those involved in the legal profession were willing to adapt the administration ofjustice to the dominant ideology of anti-semitism, even before the legal basis for such behaviour had been created. 78 They contented themselves with the illusion that the regime would go no further than the complete segregation of the Jewish section of the population. 79 In contrast to the conduct of a large proportion of the German upper class, anti-semitic feeling was less easily mobilized in the population as a whole. The boycott of April 1933 had been a complete failure in this respect. Similarly, the pogroms of November 1938 were greeted with overwhelming disapproval among the population. 80 There were scarcely any anti-semitic outbursts of the kind characteristic of Eastern European countries; only in Vienna after 18 March 1938 did anti-semitic outrages occur that had a comparatively broad basis of popular support. Anti-semitic resentment was traditionally directed more against non-assimilated Jews. It took years of systematic propaganda to transfer the stereotyped image of the East European Jew to the entire Jewish population and to indoctrinate the younger generation in particular with anti-semitism. 81 The strategy of exerting pressure on German Jewry by unleashing popular resentment thus proved to have been ill-conceived. Goebbels soon turned instead to the systematic 'legal' elimination of the Jews from public life, a course of action that was to be justified by the fiction that their alleged preponderance in certain professions had to be rectified and a programme for racial segregation implemented. 82 Accordingly, the attacks of the storm troopers and NSDAP were gradually supplanted by 'legal' procedures; this was not so much the result of a deliberate strategy linking 'spontaneous' with legal actions, but was due rather to the fact that the Nazis had no clearly thought-out conception of how they should proceed in the 'Jewish question'. 83 At any rate, it had quickly become apparent that toleration of 'spontaneous' actions by party hotheads did not

THE DECISION FOR THE FINAL SOLUTION The Realization of the Unthinkable

bring a 'solution' of the 'Jewish question' any closer. All the leading Nazi officials concerned with the issue - Heinrich Himmler, Reinhard Heydrich, Hermann Goring, Martin Bormann and Wilhelm Frick - were convinced until after the outbreak of the Second World War that a systematic policy of compulsory emigration offered the only real 'solution'. 84 However, the exclusion ofjews from public and social life, begun in 1933 and increased until 1939 though with varying degrees of intensity, must also be accounted a failure from this point of view; it was simultaneously an incentive and a handicap for those Jews who wanted to emigrate. The regime's reluctance even to make the financial terms of emigration tolerable - the Reich Flight Tax (Reichsfluchtsteuer) introduced for quite different reasons by Bruiting was retained85 — resulted in a relative decline in the number of emigrants. After the introduction of the Nuremberg Laws, which despite their discriminatory provisions were seen by many German Jews as providing a definitive statement of their legal position, Jewish emigration declined significantly.86 Even more significant were the steps that undermined the economic position of the Jewish community. A series of measures was enacted to exclude them from professions in the public service, to withdraw legal protection from them, to discriminate against them economically, and to confiscate Jewish businesses by means of'Aryanization' (a process that began long before November 1938). Such campaigns ensured that those Jews who remained, who were often older members of the community, frequently did not have enough money to leave; the emigration rate was correspondingly reduced. 87 The reluctance of the potential host countries to accept large numbers ofjews, so fateful in the light of later developments, also made emigration more difficult.88 The expropriation, proletarianization and ostracization of the Jewish minority cut their social contacts with the majority of the population and forced them to seek refuge in the anonymity of the cities. The well-intended efforts of Bernhard Losener, the official responsible for racial affairs in the Reich Ministry of the Interior, to exempt half-Jews and Jews living in so-called 'privileged mixed marriages', 89 actually heightened the isolation of the Jews. The segregation and extreme social isolation of the Jewish community were vital in ensuring that the majority of Germans - with the exception of genuine opposition groups - remained indifferent to their fate. 90 Gestapo terror helped to complete the social ostracization of the Jews. The intensified persecution of the Jews after 1938 was unquestionably connected with the foreign policy successes of the regime.

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which made caution in its dealings with foreign powers appear less necessary and also led to a more robust style in other areas o f National Socialist politics. The Anschluss with Austria resulted in a marked radicalization, especially as regards 'Aryanization'. This policy had long been demanded by groups within the party but it had been postponed, not least owing to the influence of Schacht, because of its negative effects on the economy and particularly on armaments production. 91 Subsequently, the important phases o f radicalization were first tried out in the 'colonial territories' and then transferred to the Old Reich. The annexation o f Austria, and by analogy all subsequent territorial extension o f German rule, ensured that the size of the emigration problem grew constantly. Eichmann's successes in establishing the Office for Jewish Emigration in Vienna, and subsequently the Reich Central Office for Jewish Emigration within the RSHA in 1939, were thus cancelled out. The creation o f Jewish ghettos, first mentioned during the conference at the Reich Air Ministry on 12 November 1938, and the transformation o f the 'Jewish question' into a Police problem, resulted in a transfer of authority for the Jewish question to the R S H A , despite Goering's official responsibility for it. Both Himmler and Heydrich had, for different reasons, disapproved of the orchestration o f the Kristallnacht pogrom by Goebbels; characteristically, the participants then reached agreement on the most radical line imaginable. All sides were thus saved from any loss o f prestige by this approach, which was possible because no established interests stood in its way. 92 The RSHA remained committed to the emigration programme even after the outbreak of the Second World War had drastically curtailed the opportunities for Jews to emigrate. Because o f their powerful position in the occupied Polish territories, and also Himmler's personal position as Reich Commissar for the Strengthening o f Germandom (Reichskommissar JUT die Festigung Deutschen Volkstums), the SS were able to take almost complete control of initiatives in the 'Jewish question'. It was crucially significant that the fate o f the vastly increased numbers o f Jews in German hands became inextricably linked with Himmler's scheme for the resettlement o f ethnic Germans in the East, which culminated in the Generalplan Ost (resettlement programme for Eastern Europe). As Reich Commissar for the Strengthening o f Germandom, Himmler ordered on 30 October 1939 that the Jewish population o f those Polish territories that had been annexed by the Reich should be deported to the Getieralgouvernement, a policy that was to be implemented side b.y

THE DECISION FOR THE FINAL SOLUTION The Realization

of the

Unthinkable

side with the creation of Jewish ghettos. 93 A preliminary decree by Heydrich on 21 September had already distinguished between a long-term 'ultimate objective', which was to be kept top secret, and the intermediate stage o f ' f o r c e d explusion'. 94 The primary motive was revealed in the executory provisions of Himmler's decree for the Reichsgau Wartheland: 'The purging and protection of the new German areas' was designed to provide housing and employment prospects for the ethnic German settlers (Volksdeutsche). 95 There is no doubt that the resettlement programme agreed to in the NaziSoviet Non-Aggression Pact, whereby ethnic Germans living in the Soviet Union were to be settled mainly in the Wartheland, provided the impetus for the large-scale deportation programme, which aifected Poles as well as Jews. 9 6 Although there was as yet no thought of systematic mass annihilation, a qualitatively new situation was created by ghettoizarion and the system of enforced labour for Jews, which was ordered at the same time. 97 These measures were crucially significant, although they were hampered by the opposition of the Generalgouuemeur, Hans Frank, by the preparation and waging of war in the West, and by sheer organizational chaos. Methods that were later extended to the Old Reich were first tested in the Gerteralgouvemement\ moreover, the deportation programme encouraged the Gauleiter of the Reich to send 'their' Jews to the Generalgouvemement. Hans Frank staunchly resisted further mass deportations of Jews, as demanded by Gauleiter Greiser in particular; he argued that the Lodz ghetto had become a transit camp for deported Jews and that intolerable conditions prevailed there. 98 This brought the deportation programme to a temporary halt. 99 The debates of late 1939 and early 1940 reveal that there was as yet no single, comprehensive programme of persecution. In March 1940 Frank stressed that the deportation ofJews from the Old Reich could be achieved only after the war. 1 0 0 One new feature was the fact that emigration, including forced emigration, was no longer regarded as the only 'solution', because there were now more than 3 million Jews under German rule. 101 The various departments concerned therefore produced schemes for the creation of a 'Jewish reservation'. The Ostministerium (Ministry for the Occupied Eastern Territories) suggested that such a 'reservation' should be created along the German-Soviet demarcation line. 102 This potential solution, which was supported by Hitler, was taken up eagerly by Eichmann, who was responsible for the deportation programme. The Nisco Project and similar attempts failed not so much because of the objections of Frank but because of catastrophically inept

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organization. On 24 March 1940, Goering responded by prohibiting further deportations from the Old Reich. 103 It is certain that the reservation plans were not intended for implementation until after the war. On 25 June 1940, the representative of the Reich Association o f j e w s in Germany was informed of a plan to settle vast numbers o f j e w s in some as yet undesignated colonial reservation area; at this stage Eichmann still favoured an extensive programme of emigration to Palestine. 104 The scheme was to involve the Jewish communities of the Old Reich, Austria, the Protectorate (Bohemia and Moravia), the Generalgouvernement, Scandinavia and Western Europe, including Britain. However, the scheme was developed more rapidly than had been anticipated, especially after the defeat of France made the end of the war seem very near. O n 12 June 1940 Legationsrat (legation councillor) Karl Rademacher of the German Foreign Ministry submitted the Madagascar Plan. 105 Even if Britain had agreed to it - which was most unlikely — the Madagascar project was actually completely unsuitable as a 'European solution to the Jewish question', quite apart from the fact that a rapid reduction of the population was anticipated due to the harshness of the climate and to the effects of severe overcrowding. Nevertheless, the project was taken up by Eichmann and the RSHA. Subsequently, Eichmann distinguished between a 'short-term plan' - i.e. an intermediate solution in the form of concentrating the Jewish population in certain parts of the Generalgouvernement - and a 'long-term plan' of deportation to Madagascar. Once the Russian campaign had begun these considerations receded into the background; however, not until 10 February 1941 did Rademacher report that the war against the Soviet Union had offered the possibility of using other territories for the Final Solution and that, on the instruction of the Führer, the Madagascar Plan could be dropped. There is no basis for the argument that the Madagascar project had the subjective function of concealing the regime's intention to annihilate the Jews. 106 The resumption of deportations to the Generalgouvernement and the deportation of 7,500 Jews from Baden and the Saarpfalz to France 107 were carried out as temporary measures and following pressure from the local Gauleiter. Heydrich's 'third short-term plan' of 8 February restricted to 250,000 the numbers to be deported from the annexed Polish territories; however, this total was not achieved and deportations were halted once more. 108 These facts indicate that the 'territorial final solution', a programme demanded by Heydrich as early as June 1940 and that gradually replaced the now unworkable emigration scheme, was to be achieved only after the war.

THE DECISION FOR THE FINAL SOLUTION The Realization of the Unthinkable

Considerable efforts were made to exploit Jewish forced labour in the Reich instead, something that had hitherto been imperilled by bureaucratic friction. 109 Hitler intervened in this issue to reject any repatriation of Jewish labour from the East to the Reich for such purposes, a decision that was connected with his reluctance to revoke decisions once they had been made. 110 The attack on the Soviet Union on 22 June 1941, and the dazzling early successes of the German armies, influenced the planning process in the RSHA. The Commissar Order, and the deliberate use of the Einsatzgruppen to liquidate Jewish population groups in the occupied areas, signalled the start of a new phase.1 n Initially, however, the belief that a 'solution' of the 'Jewish question' could be implemented only after the war was retained. In summer 1941 the Nazi leadership expected the Soviet Union to be defeated in a matter of weeks, and at latest by autumn of that year, although they accepted that skirmishes might continue in the Asiatic regions of the Soviet Union. 112 It was taken for granted that Britain would have been forced to yield by this time. 113 Only against this background is a correct interpretation possible of the authorization given by Goering to Heydrich on 31 July 1941 in which Heydrich was instructed 'to present for my early consideration an overall draft plan describing the organizational, technical and material requirements for carrying out the Final Solution which we seek'. 114 The authorization, drafted by Eichmann and submitted to Goering for his signature, 115 is not connected with any preceding order from Hitler, although the existence of such an order has often been suspected. Its context is clearly that of the strategy pursued until that point, which was not yet directed towards systematic extermination. Its aim was a 'solution' that would no longer be implemented under the cover of war in the East. At the same time, the Einsatzgruppen were carrying out their massacres. These were based on the Commissar Order, unlike the systematic policy of the Final Solution that followed. There can be no doubt that Hitler approved and supported these measures, although it is a matter for conjecture how far he took notice of actual events. 116 Approximately 1.4 million Jews were murdered in these extensive operations, which were carried out on the pretext of securing the rear area of the battle zone; Hitler had from the outset declared the campaign against the Soviet Union to be a war of annihilation. Nevertheless, it is almost inexplicable that the leaders and members of the Einsatzgruppen lent themselves to this unimaginably barbarous slaughter and that the Army - with few exceptions — either stood by, weapons at the ready, or in many cases gave active

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support to the Emsatzgruppen.117 In the framework of National Socialist propaganda against 'subhumanity', the Russian Jews, like the Polish Jews before them, were classed as the lowest of the low. T h e massacres also provided an opportunity to rid the Germanoccupied territories of a part of the Jewish population, which had by then increased beyond any 'manageable' size. The fact that the killings were carried out on oral orders only, and that the Einsatzgruppen were careful to avoid giving only racial reasons for them in their reports, 1 1 8 indicates that the decision to liquidate the entire Jewish population had not yet fully matured. A decisive turning-point was necessary before leading officials would adopt a course of action that had been unthinkable only a short time before. Certainly, everything was propelling events towards a violent 'solution' of the 'Jewish problem' which the Nazis had created for themselves. The logistic prerequisites for the mass m o v e m e n t of populations were completely lacking. Conditions in the improvised ghettos were appalling, and appeared completely unacceptable to the German sense of order. In summer 1940 Greiser had already described conditions in the Lodz ghetto as untenable f r o m the 'point of view of nutrition and the control of epidemics'. 1 1 9 O n 16July 1941, SS-SturmbannJuhrer Hoppner drew attention to the catastrophic conditions in the ghetto which, as a transit camp for the Jews transported from the Old Reich, was permanently overcrowded. Besides, it was the only ghetto within the Reich and was regarded by Greiser as an intolerable burden. Hoppner added in his letter to Eichmann that 'it should be seriously considered whether it might not be the most humane solution to dispose of those Jews w h o are unfit for work by some quick-acting means. At any rate this would be more agreeable than letting them starve'. 1 2 0 Martin Broszat has emphasized the symptomatic significance of this reaction. 1 2 1 It is not an isolated one. The idea that it would ultimately be more 'humane' to finish off the victims quickly had already emerged in 1940; it was frequently prompted by the sight of countless trains standing at stations in the biting cold, with their captive Jewish passengers deprived even of drinking water during the dreadful j o u r n e y to the Generalgouvemement. The war in the East provided even more reasons for such arguments. The indescribably cruel treatment of the civilian population caused few protests and produced instead a fatal blunting of moral feeling among the Germans. T h e partial liquidation of transports o f j e w s from the Old Rcich and the annexed territories was a desperate new step. It could not be justified as part of the destruction of Bolshevik resistance cells. A pseudo-moral justification was needed as a precondition for

THE DECISION FOR THE FINAL SOLUTION The Realization

of the

Unthinkable

the systematic implementation of the Final Solution. Inhumanity had first to be declared as 'humanity' before it could be put into technocratic practice, 122 with moral inhibitions thereafter reduced to a minimum. Then, once the necessary bureaucratic apparatus had been created, a programme could be set in motion that was applicable to all deportees, including women and children. The operations of the Einsatzgruppen served as the link that enabled the exception - premeditated liquidation - to become the general rule. The immediate liquidation of groups of German Jews deponed to the Reichskommissariat Ostland, to Riga, Kovno and Minsk, did not proceed smoothly. Moreover, like the killings begun with the assistance of the 'euthanasia' experts in Chelmno in December 1941, they also encountered opposition, which led to the suspension of further transports. 123 Even if only for this reason, the change in the Jewish policy of the RSHA was by no means abrupt. One indication of such a change was that Jewish emigration from German-occupied areas of continental Europe was halted, although it had previously been explicitly supported. The head of the Gestapo, Muller, announced the prohibition of further Jewish emigration on 23 October 1941. Only ten days previously, Heydrich had actually approved a proposal by the Under-Secretary of State, Martin Luther, that Spanish Jews resident in France should be included in the Spanish Cabinet's plan to send 'their'Jews to Spanish Morocco. A few days later his decision was revoked on the grounds that these Jews would then be too far outside the German sphere of influence to be included in the Final Solution to be implemented after the war. 124 The reference to a 'post-war solution' reveals that at this point the decision for systematic genocide had not yet been reached. On 16 December 1941, Frank stated that 3.5 million Jews in the Generalgouuernement could not be liquidated, but that 'action will have to be taken that will lead to successful destruction, in connection with the major measures which are to be discussed at Reich level*.125 This was a reference to the impending Wannsee Conference, which is usually equated with the immediate launch of the genocide campaign throughout Europe. However, the 'operations' mentioned by Heydrich in connection with the 'evacuation of the Jews to the East' were presented simply as opportunities to gain practical experience 'in view of the coming Final Solution of the Jewish question'. The liquidation of those Jews who were deemed unfit for work was implied, and the subsequent destruction of the 'remaining stock' explicitly disclosed. 126 The psychological bridge between the emigration and reservation 'solutions' and the Holocaust itself was

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created by the fiction of Arbeitseinsatz ('labour mobilization'); reference was also still made to the chimerical 'territorial final solution', which was now to be achieved east of the Urals. O n the other hand, the formulation that 'certain preparatory work for the Final Solution' should be carried out 'in the areas concerned', i.e. the Generalgouvemement, signified the beginning of selective liquidations. These started early in 1942 and from spring onwards acquired the character of a planned and systematic programme. Even then, however, it was implemented with varying degrees of intensity; initially the measures were mainly improvised and some operations had to be countermanded. 1 2 7 It is important to note that the programme of annihilation thus retained its character as a temporary measure taken during the wartime state of emergency. T h e inclusion in the programme of the Jews in the occupied countries and satellite states 128 originally occurred within the framework of a long-term 'labour mobilization' programme; however, even the most elementary requirements for the fulfilment of such a scheme were lacking. 129 One further development was important for the implementation of the Final Solution. Since autumn 1941, Auschwitz-Birkenau had been expanded into an enormous 'prisoner and munitions centre', mainly for the 'utilization' of Soviet prisoners of war. 1 3 0 The selection of Soviet prisoners, and the brutal treatment inflicted upon them, reflected Himmler's own belief that there were unlimited human reserves in the East. 131 However, the turn of the tide in the war, and the appalling death-rate among the prisoners, meant that fewer human reserves than anticipated were available and that they were urgently needed to fill gaps in the labour market in the Reich itself. 132 Scarcely a week after the Wannsee Conference, Himmler issued his instruction to 'equip' the SS concentration camps primarily with German Jews. 1 3 3 Birkenau camp, where the technology of gassing had been developed with Soviet prisoners of war as the victims, 134 was now to be part of a comprehensive programme for genocide. The Generalplan Ost stood in the background, preventing any attempt to fall back on interim territorial 'solutions' to the 'Jewish question' in the occupied territory of the Soviet Union. T h e programme of annihilation was now implemented with astonishing speed and in several waves. This operation (later named 'Reinhard' after Reinhard Heydrich, assassinated in Prague in May 1942) formed the direct link between the Einsatzgruppen and the factory techniques of the Final Solution. The systematic destruction of the ghettos was followed by the withdrawal of Jewish labour from war industries; Jewish workers were also

THE DECISION FOR THE FINAL SOLUTION The Realization of the Unthinkable

removed from the SS enterprises in the Lublin region, which then collapsed.135 The use of gas vans as a transitional stage in the development of factory methods to destroy human life had begun because of a desire to prevent undesirable side-effects on the SS men caused by the semi-public shootings at Vilna and elsewhere.136 The fiction that only those Jews who were unfit for work were to be killed remained psychologically important. The selection process on the ramp at Birkenau helped Himmler's thugs to preserve this fiction. It was only a short step from this way of thinking to 'orderly* destruction, which could be justified on the grounds that organized killing was more practical and 'humane' than death from starvation or epidemics in the ghettos and camps.137 The horrific conditions produced by the brutal and inhumane treatment of the deported Jews were actually exploited by Goebbels to justify the deadly theory of 'subhumanity'.138 More importantly, people who under normal circumstances would have been roused to anger by the treatment of the Jews became indifferent, and their feelings of compassion were dulled. How many had the personal courage to see the whole truth behind the chain of cruelties, rather than putting the blame on occasional abuses? After all, work camps of all kinds - voluntary Labour service, compulsory labour and ultimately the practice of working people to death - were the civilian counterpart of military service, which sent millions to the slaughter. Everywhere in occupied Europe, even in the Reich itself, the labour camp became part of ordinary life. The atomization of the family, the destruction of traditional social structures, the sending of all age groups and professions to labour camps, training camps, education camps - these were everyday features of the Third Reich. The network of concentration camps and prisoner-of-war camps appeared to be part of this second civilization, offering an extreme example of the exercise of power over human beings. 139 The transfer of people within this labyrinthine network of camps was nothing unusual. However, the concentration ofjewish citizens in labour camps became an increasingly important transitional stage on the path to the Final Solution. The circumstances in which deportations occurred sometimes excited public criticism, but in general people chose to believe the fiction of the 'mobilization of labour'; moreover, the removal of Jews to transit camps ensured that their fate was decided out of sight of their fellow citizens. Even in the occupied areas, resistance to the 'mobilization' ofjewish labour occurred only rarely. Within the concentration camps, it had

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long been the practice to work people literally to death. The concept that arose as a result - that of'destruction by labour' - was one of the most effective pieces of cynicism in National Socialist ideology. The inscription on the gates of Auschwitz - 'Arbeit macht frei' ('freedom through work') - reveals that cynicism; it illuminates the entire master-race mentality, which degraded human beings into mere numbers and had no respect even for the dead. T h i s attitude first manifested itself in the 'euthanasia' p r o g r a m m e . 1 4 0 The fiction of mobilizing Jewish labour was used by the perpetrators of the Final Solution as a psychological justification for their actions. It is symptomatic that fanatical anti-semites such as Hans Frank and Wilhelm Kube began to protest against the systematic implementation of the extermination p r o g r a m m e when it was turned against the reserves of indispensable Jewish labour in the Eastern regions. 1 4 1 When the liquidations were n o t justified by the pretence that they were measures to combat partisans and to weaken 'Jewish—Bolshevik' potential, as was the case with the Einsatzgruppen. then they were frequently accounted for by the need to make space for fresh transports. There were phases during which the pace of the extermination programme was slowed, to permit the t e m p o rary exploitation of the prisoners by means of forced labour. Many Jews saw this as their only chance of survival. 1 4 2 T h e use of bureaucratic and technocratic methods to destroy h u m a n life also served to suppress quasi-moral inhibitions. 1 4 3 T h e original motive behind the development of technical methods of killing such as carbon monoxide and Zyklon B had been to avoid unrest among the general public. However, it was rapidly transformed into a problem of killing-capacity. T h e decisive preliminary stages of the systematic policy of the Final Solution were thus accompanied by the efforts of the RSHA to leam about these technical possibilities; the instructions given to Eichmann and Hoss in autumn 1941 were of this nature. 1 4 4 The Holocaust was not based upon a p r o g r a m m e that had been developed over a long period. It was founded upon improvised measures that were rooted in earlier stages of planning and also escalated them. Once it had been set in motion, the extermination of those people w h o were deemed unfit for work developed a dynamic of its o w n . T h e bureaucratic machinery created by Eichmann and Heydrich functioned more or less automatically; it was thus s y m p tomatic that Eichmann consciously circumvented H i m m l e r ' s order, at the end of 1944, to stop the Final Solution. 1 4 5 There was no need for external ideological impulses to keep the process of extermination going. Protests from those parties interested in saving the

THE DECISION FOR THE FINAL SOLUTION The Realization of the Unthinkable

Jewish workforce - the Wehrmacht, the armaments industry, SS-owned factories in the concentration camps, and the administration of the Generalgouvernement — proved largely ineffective. 146 The widespread assumption that the systematic policy of genocide rested on a clear directive from Hitler 147 is based on a misunderstanding of the decision-making process in the Führer's headquarters. If such an order had been given, even if only orally, then those in high office around Hitler must have known about it; they had no motive to deny the existence of such a directive in their personal records and testimonies after 1945. 148 Gerald Fleming has made a comprehensive search for traces of such an order from the Führer. AU he can prove is that at the middle level of command there was talk of it in one form or another; however, Hitler's express approval of criminal orders and his intensification of the fight against partisans seem to be the only concrete basis for these opinions. 1 4 9 In fact, the idea that Hitler set the genocide policy in motion by means of a direct instruction can be completely rejected. Such an order would have compromised the fiction of the 'mobilization of labour', which included the theory of'destruction by labour'. This could not have been in the Führer's interests, especially as he would then have had to choose between the destruction of human lives and the mobilization of labour demanded by the war economy. Hitler consistently avoided making such a choice. 150 This situation made it particularly difficult for the parties opposed to the extermination process to marshal their arguments: first, there was no one to w h o m they could appeal, and secondly, even if there were, they would have had to break through the taboo that surrounded the Final Solution. Thus it was that Generalgouvemeur Hans Frank saw no possibility of appealing to Hitler over the withdrawal of urgently needed Jewish workers. 1 5 1 T h e absence of any direct order for extermination also explains h o w almost all those in an influential position were able to suppress their awareness of the fact of genocide. Albert Speer provides the most striking example of this tendency. 152 Hitler's dominant position at the centre of all the National Socialist elites reinforced such behaviour, because his conduct was exactly the same as theirs: he took care not to allow conversation to turn to events in the concentration camps. This gave rise to the widespread impression that Heinrich Himmler was the driving force. In terms of ideological motivation this was not the case, for Hitler was always the advocate of radicalization. 153 The Utopian dream of exterminating the Jews could become

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reality only in the half-light of unclear orders and ideological fanaticism. Then, despite all opposing interests, the process developed its own internal dynamic. It is therefore impossible to assign sole responsibility for events to Hitler, Himmler, Heydrich, Bormann, the SS and the activists in the German Foreign Ministry. Many leading National Socialists tended to stay out of events as much as possible, although they had actively supported the deportation programme. The willingness with which the Ministries of Justice and the Interior gave up to the Security Service (SD) and the Gestapo their jurisdiction over the deportations, which they had initially defended strenuously, is a striking example of a general endeavour among officials to divest themselves of any responsibility whilst accepting that the events themselves were inevitable. 154 Adolf Eichmann offers a spectacular example of the mechanism of compartmentalized responsibility, which in his case was combined with bureaucratic perfectionism and submissiveness to the demands of the authoritarian state. As he testified in Jerusalem, his authority extended only as far as the gates of Auschwitz-Birkenau; he was just responsible for carrying out the deportations. 155 This fragmenting of responsibilities was a typical feature of the regime. It had its roots in the organization of the NSDAP, which had been imposed by Hitler and his followers during the 1920s. 156 The relative efficiency of the National Socialist system was based precisely upon Hitler's principle of conferring unlimited powers for specific tasks and allowing political co-ordination between institutions only where it was unavoidable. Any institutionalized communication between the lower levels of government was systematically prevented. Responsibilities were thus segmented. In the various war crimes trials, the former satraps of the regime always pleaded that they had merely followed orders and been cogs in the machine. N o one was prepared to accept overall responsibility or to consider the political consequences of the individual decisions that they made. N o n communication and collective suppression of knowledge complemented each other and, when these mechanisms failed, they were replaced by a vague awareness that involvement in the escalation of crime had gone too far for any opposition to be possible. 157 If these psychological mechanisms prevented the National Socialist elite from facing up to the escalation of criminality and drawing the necessary conclusions, then we can more easily accept that most ordinary Germans were reluctant to believe rumours and incomplete information. It is significant, in this respect, that the truth about the Holocaust was accepted only with hesitation and reluctance even by Western public opinion and Allied governments. 1 5 8 In

THE DECISION FOR THE FINAL SOLUTION The Realization of the Unthinkable so far as German civilians m u s t bear a share of moral responsibility, this does not lie in the fact that they did not protest against the Holocaust, particularly in view of its all-pervasive activity; instead, it is to be found in the passive acceptance of the exclusion of the Jewish population, which prepared the way for the Final Solution. An awareness of increasing injustice definitely did exist, as can be seen in the reaction of public opinion to the revelations about the Katyn massacre. 1 5 9 Ideological factors — the effects of anti-semitic propaganda and the authoritarian element in traditional German political culture - are not sufficient in themselves to explain h o w the Holocaust became reality. T h e political and bureaucratic mechanisms that permitted the idea of mass extermination to be realized could also have occurred under different social conditions. The ultimately atavistic structure of the National Socialist regime, coupled with the effective p o w e r of newly established bureaucracies, proved to be the decisive factor in the selection of negative 'elements of Weltanschauung'160 and in the overwhelming loss of reality that was epitomized by Hitler's mentality. 1 6 1 T h e genesis of the Holocaust offers a deterrent example of the way in which otherwise normal individuals can be led astray when they live in a permanent state of emergency, when legal and institutional structures collapse, and when criminal deeds are publicly justified as national achievements. The Holocaust is a warning against racial phobias and social resentment of minority groups; but it is also a reminder that the manipulation and deformation of public and private morality are a constant threat even in advanced industrial societies.

NOTES

An abridged version of this chapter was first published as 'Die Realisierung des Utopischen: die "Endlösung der Judenfrage" im "Dritten R e i c h " ' ; in Geschichte und Gesellschaft, 9 (1983), pp. 381420. 1

Gerald Reidinger, The Final Solution. The Attempt to Exterminate the Jews of Europe, 2nd edn (London, 1956); his work was preceded by Leon Poliakov, Brevriare de la Haine (Paris, 1951). 2 Konrad Kwiet provides a survey of the vast specialized literature on the subject in 'Zur historiographischen Behandlung der Judenverfolgung im Dritten Reich', Militärgeschichtliche Mitteilungen, 27 (1980/81), pp. 149-92. West German historians have so far addressed this subject

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only hesitantly. Apart f r o m W o l f g a n g Scheffler's creditable survey, Judenverfolgung im Dritten Reich 1933-1945 (Berlin, i960; 2nd edn, 1979), H e l m u t Genschel, Die Verdrängung derJuden aus der Wirtschaft im Dritten Reich (Göttingen, 1966) and U w e Dietrich A d a m , Judenpolitik im Dritten Reich (Düsseldorf, 1972), n o comprehensive m o n o g r a p h has been published on the Holocaust and its origins. A m o n g West G e r m a n writers, Helmut Krausnick, 'Judenverfolgung', in Hans Buchheim et a/., Anatomie des SS-Staates, vol. 2 (Olten/Freiburg i.Br., 1965), pp. 283-448, still provides the best overall analysis. See also M . Broszat, ' " H o l o c a u s t " und die deutsche Geschichtswissenschaft', Vierteljahrshtrftefur Zeitgeschichte, 27 (1979), pp. 285-98. 3

4

5

6

7

8

9

T h e literature of the extreme right must therefore be disregarded. See W o l f g a n g Benz, 'Die O p f e r und die Täter. Rechtsextremisten in der Bundesrepublik", Aus Politik und Zeitgeschichte, supplement to Parlament, B 27/80, pp. 29—45; Wolfgang Benz, ' J u d e n v e m i c h t u n g aus N o t w e h r ' , Vierteljahrshefteßir Zeitgeschichte, 29(1981), pp. 615-17. T h e Institut fur Zeitgeschichte, M u n i c h , is preparing a study: Wolfgang Benz (ed.), Die Zahl der jüdischen Opfer des Nationalsozialismus (forthcoming). O n the n u m b e r o f j e w s murdered, see Raul Hilberg, The Destruction of the European Jews, new edition ( N e w York, 1983), p. 767. T h e figure of 5.1 million victims can only be an approximation. See Alexander and Margaret Mitscherlich, Die Unfähigkeit zu trauern. Grundlagen kollektiven Verhaltens, 2nd edn (Munich, 1968), pp. 28-9, 205-6; Pierre Aycoberry, The Nazi Question. An Essay on the Interpretation of National Socialism ( N e w York, 1981), pp. 182-3. O f survivors' portrayals, one that seems to m e exemplary is H e r m a n n Langbein, Menschen in Auschwitz (Vienna, 1972). See Martin Broszat, 'Nationalsozialistische Konzentrationslager 1933— 1945', in Hans Buchheim et al., Anatomie des SS-Staates vol. 2, 2nd edn (Munich, 1967) pp. 77-8; Hilberg, Destruction of European Jews (as in n. 5), pp. 572-5. Raul Hilberg investigates this question methodically in Sonderzüge nach Auschwitz (Mainz, 1981); see Lawrence D. Stokes, ' T h e G e r m a n People and the Destruction of the European Jews', Central European History, 6 (1973), pp. 167-91 and particularly pp. 187-9; Marlis G. Steinert, Hitler's War and the Germans. Public Mood and Attitudes during the Second World War (Athens, O h i o , 1977) pp. 140-2; Christopher B r o w n i n g , The Final Solution and the German Foreign Office ( N e w York, 1978); Christian Streit, Keine Kameraden. Die Wehrmacht und die sowjetischen Kriegsgefangenen 1941-1945 (Stuttgart, 1978), pp. 109-11; Ian Kershaw, 'Antisemitismus und Volksmeinung. Reaktionen auf die J u d e n v e r f o l g u n g ' , in M . Broszat and Elke Fröhlich (eds), Bayern in der NS-Zeit. Herrschaft und Gesellschaft im Konflikt, vol. 2 (Munich, 1979), pp. 340-2. Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem. Ein Bericht von der Banalität des Bösen (Munich, 1964), pp. 188-90, 300. F. A. K r u m m a c h e r (ed.), Die

THE DECISION FOR THE FINAL SOLUTION The Realization of the Unthinkable

10 11 12

Kontroverse. Hannah Arendt, Eichmann und die Juden (Munich, 1964) documents the spirit in which Arendt's interpretation was received. The older view is found in Robert M. W. Kempner, Eichmann und Komplizen (Zurich, 1961). See the introduction to Martin Broszat (ed.), Kommandant in Auschwitz. Autobiographische Aufzeichnungen von Rudolf Höss (Stuttgart, 1958), pp. 16-18. See Reinhard Höhne, Der Orden unter dem Totenkopf. Die Geschichte der SS (Hamburg, 1966), pp. 149-50, 351-3. Heinrich Himmler on 6 Octobcr 1943: Perhaps at a much later date one will be able to consider telling the German people more about it [the destruction of the Jews]. I believe it is better that all of us together have borne this for our people, have taken the responsibility on ourselves (the responsibility for a deed, not only for an idea) and then take the secret with us to the grave.

Quoted in Bradley F. Smith and Agnes Peterson (eds), Heinrich Himmler. Geheimreden 1933 bis 1945 und andere Ansprachen, Frankfurt/ M., 1974, pp. 170-1; emphasis added. 13 O n attempts to destroy the evidence see Hilberg, Destruction of European Jews (as in n. 5), pp. 628-9; Adalbert Rückerl (ed.). Nationalsozialistische Vernichtungslager im Spiegel deutscher Strafprozesse (Munich, 1977), pp. 273—4 and passim. 14 The speech of 6 October is quoted in Smith and Peterson, Heinrich Himmler. Geheimreden (as in n. 12), pp. 162-3; that of 16 December 1943 (extract), ibid., p. 201; that of 26 January 1944, ibid., pp. 201-3; that of 24 May 1944, ibid., p. 203; that of 21 June 1944, ibid., pp. 203-5. Himmler's use of the word 'we' constantly involves the entire SS apparatus in what happened. His statement that 'we' are not justified 'in putting off anything hard or difficult that can be done today' is typical. It is made in connection with his advice that the problem should not be postponed until after Hitler's death (ibid., pp. 202, 204). Himmler's increasing degree of psychological strain was partly responsible for his disclosure of the crime to the higher functionaries and generals (see Höhne, Orden unter dem Totenkopf, as in n. 11, pp. 335-6). It was also related to the fact that he had begun to distance himself from Hitler inwardly. At the very least, he was aware of the state of Hitler's health and knew that he could not expect the support he normally received from Hitler to last much longer. 15

O n Hans Frank's contradictory behaviour during the trial see Bradley F. Smith, Der Jahrhundertprozess. Die Motive der Richter von Nürnberg (Frankfurt, 1977), pp. 214-16; Goering denied however that in signing Heydrich's authorization of 31 July 1941 he had been giving notice of any intention to liquidate the Jews. See Der Prozess gegen die Hauptkriegsverbrecher vor dem Internationalen Militärgerichtshof. Nürnberg, 14 Oktober 1945 - 1 Oktober 1946 [IMG], vol. 9, pp. 574-6. See

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T H E "FINAL S O L U T I O N

also the survey in Hilberg, Destruction of European Jews (as in n. 5), pp. 684-6. On the problem of Speer, see Ehch Goldhagen, 'Albert Speer, Himmler and the Secrecy of the Final Solution', Midstream (October, 1971), pp. 43-50; Speer's responses to this, and to W. Malanowsky's position, stated in Der Spiegel, 29, no. 46 (October 1975) have not yet been refuted. See my review of the 'Spandau Diaries' in Politische Vierteljahrsschrift, 17 (1976). pp. 108-10; the proof adduced by Matthias Schmidt in Albert Speer: Das Ende eines Mythos (Bern, 1972), pp. 232-3, does not refute his defence. Whatever one's doubts about this, it is a fact that the genocide was suppressed. Speer's later justification in Der Sklavenstaat (Stuttgart, 1981), pp. 376-8, tends to detract from his credibility. 16 This is the traditional view. It is put most consistently by Eberhard Jäckel, Hitlers Weltanschauung, new edn (Stuttgart, 1981), p. 68 in particular. Jäckel's thesis that Hitler's attitude became more radical as his Weltanschauung developed (pp. 66-7) is not convincing in view of earlier statements by Hitler in a similar tone: see E. Jäckel (ed.). Hitler. Sämtliche Aufzeichnungen 1905-1923 (Stuttgart, 1980): the connection between anti-semitism and anti-Bolshevism is clear f r o m the start. Gerald Fleming, Hitler and the Final Solution (London, 1985) and Lucy Dawidowicz, The War against the Jews: 1933-1945 (New York, 1975), p. 494, follow Jäckel. Fleming's reference to Albrecht Tyrell in Guido Knopp (ed.). Hitler heute. Gespräche über ein deutsches Trauma (Aschaffenburg, 1979) does not apply here. With Martin Broszat, 'Soziale Motivation und Führerbindung des Nationalsozialismus', Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte, 18 (1970), pp. 400-2, I emphasize that the propagandist nature of Hitler's statements is inconsistent with any firm intention to translate the metaphor of extermination into reality, despite the fact that he undoubtedly used them as a stylistic device to demonstrate tactical 'moderation', and that he had no psychological inhibitions preventing him from pursuing a policy of annihilation. See Broszat's objections to Jäckel's over-emphasis on Hitler's Weltanschauung (ibid., pp. 399-401). 17

See Helmut Auerbach, 'Hitlers politische Lehrjahre und die M ü n chener Gesellschaft 1919-1923', Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte, 25 (1977), pp. 8-10, and the literature cited in his n. 33. Further, Margaret Plewina, Auf dem Weg zu Hitler. Der 'völkische' Publizist Dietrich Eckart (Bremen, 1970); George L. Mosse, Rassismus. Ein Krankheitssymptom der europäischen Geistesgeschichte des 19. und 20. Jahrhunderts (Königstein, 1978); also the literature cited by Kwiet, 'Judenverfolgung' (as in n. 2), p. 186; see also Broszat, 'Soziale Motivation' (as in n. 16), p. 400. The total identification of N S propaganda with Hitler's Weltanschauung, frequently found in the literature, overlooks the correspondence between the anti-semitism of the party and that of the völkisch (racial-nationalist) right, and indeed that of much of the conservative nationalist right as well. This minimizes the extent of racial anti-semitism; see also Werner E. Mosse (ed.), Entscheidungsjahr

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The Realization of the Unthinkable

18 19

20

21

22

23 24

25

1932. Zur Judenfrage in der Endphase der Weimarer Republik (Tübingen, 1966). Hilberg, Destruction of European Jews (as in n. 5), pp. 293-4. Sec Hans Mommsen, 'Hitlers Stellung im nationalsozialistischen Herrschaftssystem', in Gerhard Hirschfeld and Lothar Kettenacker (eds), The Führer-State: Myth and Reality. Studies in the Structure and Politics of the Third Reich (Stuttgart, 1981), particularly pp. 66-8; Karl A. Schleunes, The Twisted Road to Auschwitz. Nazi Policy towards German Jews 1933-1939 (Chicago, 1970), pp. 73, 258-60; Adam, Judenpolitik (as in n. 2), pp. 163-5, 217. On this issue see Adam, Judenpolitik (as in n. 2), pp. 125-9; the Lösener files, Institut fur Zeitgeschichte [IfZ] F 71/2; B. Lösener, 'Als Rassenreferent im Reichsministerium des Innern', Vierteljahrsheße fur Zeitgeschichte, 9 (1961), pp. 264-6. On Hitler's evasions in settling the issues of 'Mischlinge' and racially mixed marriages, see Adam, Judenpolitik (as in n. 2), pp. 329-30, and David Irving, Hitler's War (London, 1977), p. 391. His position did not mean that Hitler was definitely yielding; it is in fact characteristic of a way of thinking that waits for the development of situations in which individual decisions of this sort are rendered unnecessary. See Klaus Hildebrand, Deutsche Aussenpolitik 1933-1945. Kalkül oder Dogma? (Stuttgart, 1971), pp. 26-8; Klaus Hildebrand, 'Innenpolitische Antriebskräfte der nationalsozialistischen Aussenpolitik', in Manfred Funke (ed.), Hitler, Deutschland und die Mächte (Düsseldorf, 1976), pp. 237-9 and passim; Hans-Adolf Jacobsen, 'Zur Struktur der NSAussenpolitik 1933-1945', ibid., pp. 172-4; A. Kuhn, Hitlers aussenpolitisches Programm (Stuttgart, 1970). See Joachim C. Fest, Hitler. Eine Biographie (Frankfurt/M., 1973), p. 927; Broszat, 'Soziale Motivation' (as in n. 16), pp. 401-2. On the April boycott see Genschel, Verdrängung der Juden (as in n. 2), pp. 43-5. The boycott was announced before Hitler and Goebbels made their decision on 26 March. See Hitler's typical justification of the boycott, ibid., p. 47. Also Karl Dietrich Bracher et al.. Die nationalsozialistische Machtergreifung, 2nd edn (Cologne, 1962), pp. 277-8. The Münchener Neueste Nachrichten of 15 September commented on the Nuremberg Laws: 'Jews within the borders of the German Reich have been offered the opportunity to become a national minority.' The laws actually sanctioned measures that had already been implemented in many cases; this, together with the language used in Nazi propaganda at this time, implying that there would be no further encroachments, created the impression that a definitive solution had been found. See Hermann Graml, Der 9. November 1938 - 'Reichskristallnacht', 2nd edn (Bonn, 1958), and Adam, Judenpolitik (as in n. 2), pp. 206-7. It is by no means certain that Hitler approved in advance the extensive pogrom organized by Goebbels. See Wolfgang Scheffler, 'Ausgewählte Dokumente zur Geschichte des Novemberpogroms 1938', Aus Politik und Zeitgeschichte, B 4/78, 4 November 1978, pp. 3-30; IMG, vol. 20,

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p. 320; IMG, vol. 32, p. 28; IMG, vol. 14, pp. 465-6; Klaus M o r i t z in Klaus Moritz and Ernst N o a m (eds), Justiz una Judenverfolgung, vol. 2: NS-Verbrechen vor Gericht (Wiesbaden, 1978), p. 213. According to Schallermeier's affidavit (IMG, vol. 42, pp. 510-12), w h e n H i m m l e r called on Hitler during the night, he received the impression that Hitler ' k n e w nothing about the course of events', i.e. k n e w n o t h i n g about an extensively organized p o g r o m as opposed to 'spontaneous' actions. 26 A d a m , Judenpolitik (as in n. 2), c o m m e n t s that 'the Chancellor of the Reich in the last analysis determined the course o f Jewish policy' (p. 19), while Schleunes, The Twisted Road (as in n. 19), p. 131, emphasizes that 'Hitler's hand appeared occasionally at crucial m o m e n t s , but it was usually a vacillating and indecisive one. H e did n o t delegate responsibility for Jewish policy, nor did he keep a close check on it'. O n 'Aryanization' see A d a m , Judenpolitik (as in n. 2), pp. 208-10; Genschel, Verdrängung der Juden (as in n. 2), pp. 180-2. 27 See Schleunes, The Twisted Road (as in n. 19), pp. 9 0 - 1 , 97-9. 28 See M o m m s e n , 'Hitlers Stellung' (as in n. 19), pp. 55-6. 29 See Genschel, Verdrängung der Juden (as in n. 2), pp. 46-8. 30 See O t t o D. Kulka, The Jewish Question in the Third Reich. Its Significance in National Socialist Ideology and Politics, 2 vols (Jerusalem, 1975), pp. 200-2. 31 Jäckel, Hitlers ¡Veitanschauung (as in n. 16), pp. 72—4; Krausnick, 'Judenv e r f o l g u n g ' (as in n. 2), pp. 38-40; A d a m , Judenpolitik (as in n. 2), pp. 25-6. T h e fact that such expressions were paraphrased in Nazi p r o p a ganda after 1933 enabled the public n o t to take the threat seriously. 32 See, for example, Irving, Hitler's War (as in n. 21), pp. 311-12. 33 ibid., p. 576. O n this issue see M . Broszat, 'Genesis der " E n d l ö s u n g " ', Vierteljahrshefte fur Zeitgeschichte, 25 (1977), pp. 759-61 and Fleming, Hitler and the Final Solution (as in n. 16), pp. 17-20 and passim. 34 Vertrauliche Informationen der Parteikanzlei, Institut fur Z e i t g e schichte, D b 15.06; see Broszat, 'Genesis der " E n d l ö s u n g " ' (as in n. 33), pp. 763-5. Any consideration o f a 'future total solution' was to be avoided in public discussion. In view of Hitler's deliberate restraint in referring to the mass exterminations, Fleming agrees w i t h Broszat (see pp. 61-3). 35 See Fleming, Hitler and the Final Solution (as in n. 16), pp. 135-9. T h e r e is an obvious inconsistency here. O n the one hand, the expression 'special treatment of the Jews' was to be avoided, on H i m m l e r ' s instructions (ibid., pp. 136-7); on the other, according to E i c h m a n n ' s statement (ibid., pp. 138-9), Hitler himself broke the prescriptions governing language. 36 ' H e r e w e are going to destroy the Jews. T h e Jews did n o t cause the ninth of N o v e m b e r for nothing. This day will be avenged.' N o t e by H e w e l , 21 January 1939, Akten zur deutschen auswärtigen Politik, Series D , vol. IV, p. 170. This remark should be seen in the context of the Reichstag speech shortly afterwards, o n 30 January 1939; it is difficult to interpret it as a declaration of intent to liquidate the Jews (see A d a m ,

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37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45

46

47

48

49

50

Judenpolitik (as in n. 2), p. 235), especially since the term 'Vernichtung' (destruction) was generally used as a metaphor for economic eleminacion. W. Jochmann (ed.), Adolf Hitler. Monologe im Führerhauptquartier 1941-1944 (Hamburg, 1980), p. 44. See Broszat, 'Genesis der "Endlösung" ' (as in n. 33), p. 757. See the basic study by Helmut Krausnick and Hans-Heinrich Wilhelm, Die Truppe des Weltanschauungskrieges. Die Einsatzgruppen der Sicherheitspolizei und des SD 1938-1942 (Stuttgart, 1981). Louis P. Lochner (ed.), The Goebbels Diaries (London, 1948), p. 48 and Broszat, 'Genesis der "Endlösung"' (as in n. 33), p. 758. Andreas Hillgruber, Staatsmänner und Diplomaten bei Hitler, vol. 2 (Frankfurt, 1970), pp. 232-3, 245, 256-7; talks with Antonescu on 13 April 1943 and with Horthy on 16/17 April 1943. Broszat, 'Genesis der "Endlösung"' (as in n. 33), pp. 773—4. See Hilberg, Destruction of European Jews (as in n. 5), p. 652, note 39, and Henriette von Schirach, Der Preis der Herrlichkeit (Wiesbaden, 1956), pp. 187-8. See Helmut Stierlin, Adolf Hitler. Familienperspektiven (Frankfurt, 1975), p. 118. Pers. Stab RFSS, IfZ: M A 316, p. 4994 ff. See Eberhard Jäckel, Hitlers Weltanschauung (as in n. 16), pp. 77-8 and, following him, Klaus Hildebrand, 'Hitlers "Programm" und seine Realisierung 1939-1942', in Manfred Funke (ed.), Hitler, Deutschland und die Mächte (Düsseldorf, 1976), pp. 78-80. Fleming, Hitler and the Final Solution (as in n. 16), pp. 63-5; Irving, Hitler's War (as in n. 21), pp. 391-2. Why should Hitler have broken the normal codes governing language when speaking to Globocnik? See Broszat, 'Genesis der "Endlösung"' (as in n. 33), p. 760. Fleming, Hitler and the Final Solution (as in n. 16), p. 20; also Broszat, 'Genesis der "Endlösung'" (as in n.33), pp. 763-4; Krausnick and Wilhelm, Truppe des Weltanschauungskrieges (as in n. 38), p. 633; William Carr, Hitler. A Study in Personality and Politics (London, 1978), pp. 72, 76. Smith and Peterson, Heinrich Himmler. Geheimreden (as in n. 12), p. 202; in the later speeches, Himmler talks o f an 'order' (Befehl) or 'instruction' (Auftrag), which suggests a connection with the Commissar Order. Fleming, Hitler and the Final Solution (as in n. 16), p. 44, quotes from the record o f the interrogation o f the Höherer SS- und Polizeifuhrer Jeckeln on 14 December 1945, for the period November 1941, that the liquidation of the Riga ghetto had been 'the Führers wish'. The testimony o f Rudolf-Christoph Freiherr von Gersdorf, quoted by Fleming on p. 53, stands alone; none o f the other statements refer to the European 'Programme for the Final Solution'. In this they accord with Heydrich's position o f May 1942, as testified by Otto Wagner. On the indisputable oral propagation o f the Commissar Order see

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51 52

53 54 55 56 57

58

59

60 61 62 63

Krausnick and Wilhelm, Truppe des Weltanschauungskrieges (as in n. 38), pp. 150-1, 348. On Hitler's role, ibid., pp. 114-15. Krausnick, 'Judenverfolgung' (as in n. 2), p. 361. Henry Picker (ed.). Hitlers Tischgespräche im Führerhauptquartier, 2nd edn (Stuttgart, 1977), p. 189: record of 24 July 1942. See Browning, Final Solution (as m n. 8), pp. 35-7. The sources presented by Browning make it difficult to sustain Leni Yahil's interpretation that, from the start, the Madagascar Plan was merely a cover for the Final Solution, although the plan would itself have meant mass physical destruction; Leni Yahil, 'Madagascar, Phantom of a Solution for the Jewish Question', in Bela Vago and George Mosse (eds),Jews and Non-Jews in Eastern Europe (New York, 1974). See Fest, Hitler (as in n. 23), pp.925, 927, 931; Broszat, 'Soziale Motivation' (as in n. 16), pp. 402-3, 407; J. P. Stern, Hitler. The Führer and the People (Glasgow, 1975), esp. pp. 83-4. Max Domarus (ed.). Hitler. Reden und Proklamationen 1932- 1945, vol. II, Part 1 (Munich, 1965), pp. 1057-8. ibid., vol. 4, pp. 1663, 1828, 1920, 1937; see Karl Dietrich Bracher, Die Deutsche Diktatur (Cologne, 1969), pp. 399-400. IMG, vol. 27, pp. 499-500; see Adam, Judenpolitik (as in n. 2), pp. 209-11. See Andreas Hillgruber, 'Die "Endlösung" und das deutsche Ostimperium als Kernstück des rassenideologischen Programms des Nationalsozialismus', in Manfred Funke (ed.), Hitler, Deutschland und die Mächte (Düsseldorf, 1976), pp. 94-114. Hitlers Politisches Testament (Frankfurt, 1981). Incidentally, the selfprotective method of expression is maintained even here: 'I have not kept anyone in the dark about the fact that this time millions of European children of the Aryan peoples will not starve, millions of grown men will not die, and hundreds of diousands of women and children will not be burned and bombed to death in the cities, without the real guilty parry being made to atone for his guilt, though by more humane methods' (emphasis added). On this issue see Krausnick and Wilhelm, Truppe des Weltanschauungskrieges (as in n. 38), pp. 165-7. Krausnick concludes that there was a corresponding regulation of language. Hilberg, Destruction of European Jews (as in n. 5), p. 217, by contrast, convincingly points out 'that psychological jusdfications were an essential part of the killing operations. If a proposed action could not be justified, it did not take place'. Stem, Hitler (as in n. 53), pp. 23-5. See Fest, Hitler (as in n. 23), pp. 772-4; Carr, Hitler (as in n. 47), pp. 135-7. See Tim Mason, 'The Legacy of 1918 for National Socialism', in Anthony Nicholls and Erich Matthias (eds), German Democracy and the Triumph of Hitler (London, 1971), pp. 215-39. See Wilhelm in Krausnick and Wilhelm, Truppe des Weltanschauungskrieges (as in n. 38), pp. 585-7. Irving, Hitler's War (as in n. 21),

THE DECISION FOR THE FINAL SOLUTION The Realization of the Unthinkable pp. 330-1, concludes from this that Hitler forbade the liquidation, once and for all. Irving's reasoning is faulty, because this solution presupposes a detailed knowledge of plans that Himmler had not yet fully developed, and that Irving denies existed until October 1943. See the explanation in Broszat, 'Genesis der "Endlösung" (as in n. 33), pp. 760-1. Broszat suspects that Hitler was not involved at all; Himmler would have anticipated Hitler's antipathy towards campaigns that provoked public protests. 64 See Broszat, 'Soziale Motivation' (as in n. 16), p. 408. 65 Most of the specialist literature casts doubt on the existence of a comprehensive plan by Hitler; see Hilberg, Destruction of European Jews (as in n. 5), p. 31; he nevertheless sees a consistent structure in the process of destruction. For my part, I argue that this is an inevitable result of the cumulative radicalization of the system; see Hans Mommsen, 'Hitlers Stellung' (as in n. 19), pp. 61—3; see Adam, Judenpolitik (as in n. 2), p. 357; Schleunes, The Twisted Road (as in n. 19), p. 2; Yehuda Bauer, The Holocaust in Historical Perspective (Canberra, 1978); Yehuda Bauer, 'Genocidc: Was it the Nazi Original Plan?', Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science (July 1980), pp. 34—45. 66 Irving's interpretation (see Hitler's War, as in n. 21, introduction, pp. xiii-xv) that, while Hitler explicitly supported and approved the deportation of the Jews 'to the East', he forbade liquidations and postponed a definitive solution until after the war, rests on an inaccurate assessment of Hitler's comments concerning genocide. These were all made in a 'futuristic' context, and present the aim of eliminating the European Jews, and indeed Jews all over the world, as a vision of the future. Unlike Himmler (see n. 11) or Goebbels (see Hans-Heinrich Wilhelm, 'Wie geheim war die Endlösung?' in Miscellanea. Festschriftfur Helmut Krausnick, Stuttgart, 1980, pp. 137-9), Hitler never refers to it as a programme directly implemented and in its final stages. This is not inconsistent with greater radicality after Stalingrad as established by Broszat ('Genesis der "Endlösung" ', as in n. 33, p. 772) and connected with Hitler's attitude, which became increasingly visionary and unrealistic as he confined himself more and more to his bunker. Hitler was intoxicated with the 'idea' of annihilation, but he endeavoured to ignore the reality; here, at least, we must agree with Irving. It is typical that Hitler, who normally had statistical details at his fingertips, used pre-war figures for the proportion of Jews in the population in his conversation with Horthy (see n. 40). 67 68

Schleunes, The Twisted Road (as in n. 19), p. 258. See Genschel, Verdrängung der Juden (as in n. 2), pp. 240-2, on the 'Aryanization' in Franconia; Peter Hüttenberger's creditable study. Die Gauleiter (Stuttgart, 1969), does not include this aspect. 69 See Helmut Heiber, Joseph Goebbels (Berlin, 1962), pp. 280-1; Adam, Judenpolitik (as in n. 2), pp. 206-7. 70 See Gerhard Botz, Wien vom 'Anschluss' zum Krieg. Nationalsozialistische

257

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THE "FINAL SOLUTION'

71 72 73 74 75 76 77

78

79

80

81 82

83

Machtübernahme und politisch-soziale Umgestaltung am Beispiel der Stadt IVien (Vienna, 1978), pp. 93-5, Genschcl, Verdrängung der Juden (as in n. 2), pp. 160-2. See Enno Georg, Die wirtschaftliche Unternehmungen der SS (Stuttgart, 1963); see also Speer's polemical, but factually accurate, Sklavenstaat (as in n. 15), pp. 346-8 and 381-3. See Hilberg, Destruction of European Jews (as in n. 5), pp. 166-8, 334—6, 341-2, 586-600. The role of individual banks in the 'Aryanization process' requires more detailed investigation. The basic study is Heinrich Uhlig, Die Warenhäuser im Dritten Reich (Cologne, 1965); Genschel, Verdrängung derJuden (as in n. 2), pp. 67-9. The boundless corruption of the functionaries of the regime, especially over the expropriation of thejews, contributed to the fa a that criticism of the deportation and liquidation was limited to a few individual cases. See Schmidt, Speer (as in n. 15), pp. 216-18. See the survey in Bruno Blau, Das Ausnahmerecht für die Juden in den europäischen Ländern, Part 1: Deutschland, 3rd edn (Düsseldorf, 1965). Impressive examples in Paul Sauer (ed.), Dokumente über die Verfolgung der jüdischen Bürger in Baden-Württemberg durch das nationalsozialistische Regime 1933-1945, 2 vols (Stuttgart, 1966); Dokumente zur Geschichte der Frankfurter Juden (Frankfurt, 1963); Maria Zelzer, Weg und Schicksal der Stuttgarter Juden (Stuttgart, 1964). H. Robinson, Justiz als politische Verfolgung. Die Rechtsprechung in 'Rassenschandefällen' beim Landgericht Hamburg 1936-1943 (Stuttgart, 1977); also Ernst Noam and Wolf-Arno Kropat (eds), Juden vor Gericht 1933-1945 (Wiesbaden, 1975); Bernd Rüthers, Die unbegrenzte Auslegung. Zum Wandel der Privatrechtsordnung im Nationalsozialismus (Frankfurt, 1973), pp. 15-77; Ilse Haff, Justiz im Dritten Reich (Frankfurt, 1978). See the indications in Hitler's speech of 15 September 1935 (Domarus, Hitler (as in n. 54), vol. I, Part 2, p. 537). See also Abraham Margaliot, 'The Reaction of the Jewish Public in Germany to the Nuremberg Laws', Yad Vashem Studies, XII (1977), esp. pp. 85-6. Von FreytagLoringhoven, a Reichstag member, expressed similar sentiments. See William Sheridan Allen, 'Die deutsche Öffentlichkeit und die "Reichskristallnacht" - Konflikte zwischen Werthierarchie und Propaganda im Dritten Reich', in D. Peukert and J. Reulecke (eds), Alltag im Nationalsozialismus (Wuppertal, 1981), pp. 397—411. See Botz, Wien (as in n. 70), pp. 403-4, on the different response to March 1938. See Ian Kershaw, 'The Persecution of t h e j e w s and German Popular Opinion in the Third Reich', Leo Baeck Year Book, 26 (1981), pp. 261-89. Schleunes, The Twisted Road (as in n. 19), pp. 97, 100-2; Krausnick, 'Judenverfolgung' (as in n. 2), pp. 315-17. See also Hans Mommsen, 'Der nationalsozialistische Polizeistaat und die Judenverfolgung vor 1938' Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte, 10 (1962), pp. 68-70. See the interpretation given by Schleunes, The Twisted Road (as in

THE DECISION FOR THE FINAL SOLUTION The Realization of the Unthinkable

84 85 86

87 88 89

90 91

92 93

94 95 %

n. 19), pp. 71-3; the opposing view is given by Adam, Judenpolitik (as in n. 2), p. 46, following Sauer in K. D. Bracher, W. Sauer and W. Schulz, Die nationalsozialistische Machtergreifung (Cologne, 1962), pp. 870-1, and Bracher, in ibid., p. 54. Schleunes, The Twisted Road (as in n. 19), pp. 253-5; Krausnick, 'Judenverfolgung' (as in n. 2), pp. 341-3. Schleunes. The Twisted Road (as in n. 19), pp. 212-13. See Werner Rosenstock, 'Exodus 1933-1939. Ein Überblick über die jüdische Auswanderung aus Deutschland', in Deutsches Judentum. Aufstieg und Krise (Stuttgart, 1963), p. 386; Paul Sauer, Die Schicksale der jüdischen Bürger Baden-Württembergs während der nationalistische Verfolgungzeit 1933-1945 (Stuttgart, 1969), p. 123; Herbert A. Strauss, 'Jewish Emigration from Germany. Nazi Policies and Jewish Responses', Leo Baeck Year Book, 25 (1980), pp. 317-39; Hans Lamm, 'Die innere und äussere Entwicklung des deutschenjudentums', Ph.D. dissertation. University of Erlangen, 1951, p. 46. Schleunes, The Twisted Road (as in n. 19), pp. 212-13. Strauss, 'Jewish Emigration' (as in n. 86), pp. 351-3; see Bernard Wasserstein, Britain and the Jews of Europe 1939-1945 (Oxford, 1979), pp. 6-8, 43-5. See Lösener, 'Als Rassenreferent im Reichsministerium des Innern* (as in n. 20), pp. 264-6; Sauer, Schicksale (as in n. 86), p. 103. The number of 'Mischlinge of the first and second grades' was declining demographically, standing at 84,000 in 1938. Kershaw, 'Persecution' (as in n. 81), pp. 283-4; Stokes, 'German People" (as in n. 8), pp. 180-2. Genschel, Verdrängung der Juden (as in n. 2), pp. 121-2. The flyleaf of Globke's commentary on the Nuremberg Laws (W. Stuckart and H. Globke, Reichsbürgergesetz, Blutschutzgesetz und Ehegesundheitsgesetz, Munich, 1936) announces a forthcoming commentary by Globke on the economic laws concerning the Jews. When Genschel asked Dr Hans Globke about this, Globke replied that he never intended to write such a commentary. Obviously a law was not passed because it would have resulted in undesirable restrictions of the kind opposed by Schacht. See Schleunes, The Twisted Road (as in n. 19), p. 156. See Genschel, Verdrängung der Juden (as in n. 2), pp. 213—15. See Kurt Pätzold, 'Von der Vertreibung zum Genocid. Zu den Ursachen, Triebkräften und Bedingungen der antijüdischen Politik des faschistischen deutschen Imperialismus', in Dietrich Eichholtz and Kurt Gossweiler (eds), Faschismusforschung. Positionen, Probleme, Polemik (East Berlin, 1980), p. 194; W. Präg and W. Jacobmeyer (eds). Das Diensttagebuch des deutschen Generalgouvemeurs in Polen 1939-1945 (Stuttgart, 1975), pp. 52-3. Pätzold, 'Von der Vertreibung zum Genocid' (as in n. 93), p. 193. ibid., pp. 194-5; Martin Broszat, Nationalsozialistische Polenpolitik (Stuttgart, 1961), pp. 86-8. See Roben L. Koehl, 'RKFVD'. German Settlement and Population

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97 98 99

100

101

102 103 104 105 106 107 108 109 110 111

Policy, 1939-1945 (Cambridge, Mass., 1957), pp. 49-51, 95-7; Helmut Heiber, "Der Generalplan Ost', Vierteljahrshefre fir Zeitgeschichte, 6 (1958), pp. 281-3. Pätzold, 'Von der Vertreibung zum Genocid' (as in n. 93), pp. 196-97; Adam, Judenpolitik (as in n. 2), pp. 248-50. As Pätzold rightly emphasizes, forced labour was a dominant motive. Pätzold, 'Von der Vertreibung zum Genocid' (as in n. 93), p. 917; Broszat, 'Genesis der "Endlösung" ' (as in n. 33), pp. 748-50. See Höhne, Ordert unter dem Totenkopf (as in n. 11), pp. 280-2. Blaskowitz's intervention with Hitler effected a delay only; the planned measures were eventually frustrated by the opposition of Goering (Broszat, Polenpolitik (as in n. 95), p. 48). Pätzold, 'Von der Vertreibung zum Genocid' (as in n. 93), p. 198. Nevertheless, Frank expected to receive between 400,000 and 600,000 Jews into the Generalgouvernement (Präg and Jacobmeyer, Diensttagebuch (as in n. 93), p. 131); on 12 July, Frank reported the Führer's decision, made at his request, 'that no more Jewish transports to the Generalgouvernement were to take place' (ibid., p. 252). See Heydnch to Ribbentrop on 24 June 1940 (quoted by Pätzold, 'Von der Vertreibung zum Genocid', as in n. 93, p. 201): 'The problem as a whole - it is already a matter of around 3xh million Jews in the areas under German jurisdiction today - can no longer be solved by emigration. A territorial Final Solution has therefore become necessary.' Adam, Judenpolitik (as in n. 2), pp. 294-5. Frank too had originally been prepared for such plans, which appeared feasible when the USSR handed over the district of Lublin. Seev Goshen, 'Eichmann und die Nisco-Aktion im Oktober 1939', Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte, 29 (1981), pp. 94-5. See Kulka, The Jewish Question (as in n. 30), vol. 1, Document 51, pp. 501-3; notes by Dr Eppstein on 25 June 1940 and 3 July 1940 concerning discussions in the RSHA. See Andreas Hillgruber, Hitlers Strategie. Politik und Kriegsfuhrung 1940-1941 (Frankfurt, 1965), pp. 148-9. See n. 52; also Pätzold, 'Von der Vertreibung zum Genocid' (as in n. 93), pp. 201-3. Krausnick, 'Judenverfolgung' (as in n. 2), pp. 357-8. These deportations - inconsistent with all medium-term planning - were, symptomatically, done with Hitler's approval. See Adam, Judenpolitik (as in n. 2), pp. 257-8, 289. ibid., pp. 185-7. ibid., p. 290; this decision was to be repeated when it came to the question of using Russian prisoners of war in the Reich; see Christian Streit, Keine Kameraden (as in n. 8), pp. 192—4. It is of fundamental importance that the generals now offered almost no resistance to Hitler's ideas and, in particular, accepted the equation of Bolshevism and Jewishness. See H. Krausnick, 'Kommissarbefehl

THE DECISION FOR THE FINAL SOLUTION The Realization of the Unthinkable

112 113

114

115

116

117 118 119 120 121 122

123 124 125 126

und "Gerichtsbarkeitserlass Barbarossa" in neuer Sicht', Vicrteljahrsheßefir Zeitgeschichte, 25 (1977), pp. 716-18; Streit, Keine Kameraden (as in n. 8), pp. 51-3. An official cessation of hostilities had not been thought of; see Hillgruber, Hitlers Strategie (as in n. 105), pp. 541-2, 555. This does not, of course, exclude wide-ranging strategic planning; see Hillgruber, Hitlers Strategie (as in n. 105), pp. 377-9; moreover. Hitler revealed considerable personal uncertainty over the question of England. IMG, vol. 26, p. 266; Document 710-PS. Adam's suggestion (Judenpolitik (as in n. 2), p. 308) - made with reference to Kempner (Eichmann (as in n. 9), p. 227) - that the authorization was given on Hitler's instructions, is not conclusive. Hilberg, Destruction of European Jews (as in n. 5), p. 262. Hilberg refers to Eichmann, (see Ich, Adolf Eichmann, Leoni, 1980, p. 479), but this procedure is completely plausible, particularly in view of the longterm tendency to give the RSHA fiill responsibility for the 'Jewish question'. In contrast, Fleming, Hitler and the Final Solution (as in n. 16), p. 110, points out that instructions were issued that Hitler was to receive 'continual updating on the progress of the Einsatzgruppen'. See Krausnick and Wilhelm, Die Truppe des Weltanschauungskrieges (as in n. 38), pp. 165-6, 335-6. O n the latter, see ibid., pp. 223-5, 232-4. This changed after the systematic Final Solution had been set in motion; see ibid., p. 166. Pätzold, 'Von der Vertreibung zum Genöcid' (as in n. 93), p. 197. Quoted in Hilberg, Destruction of European Jews (as in n. 5), p. 261. Broszat, 'Genesis der "Endlösung" ' (as in n. 33), p. 749. Himmler's memorandum of May 1940 about the treatment of Fremdvölkische' in the East (ed. Helmut Krausnick, Vierteljahrshefte fir Zeitgeschichte, 5 (1957), pp. 1944-6) still rejects 'the Bolshevik method of exterminating a people from inner conviction that it is ungermanic and impossible', but this occurs in the context of a consideration whether 'harshness' would not, in some circumstances, be less cruel. See Broszat, 'Genesis der "Endlösung" ' (as in n. 33), op. 751-2. Krausnick, 'Judenverfolgung' (as in n. 2), p. 373; Browning, Final Solution (as in n. 8), pp. 66-7, 69. Präg and Jacobmeyer, Diensttagebuch (as in n. 93), pp. 457-8. Wannsee Protocol of 20 January 1942, quoted here from W. Jochmann and H. A. Jacobsen, Ausgewählte Dokumente zur Geschichte des Nationalsozialismus (Bielefeld, 1966), pp. 2, 3-5. According to Eichmann's testimony, liquidation techniques themselves were discussed at the conference. In view of the reaction of Ministerialdirektor Kritzinger, who was present (see Gutachten des Instituts fir Zeitgeschichte, vol. 2, Stuttgart, 1966, p. 381 n. 38), this seems to me unlikely: Eichmann is

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THE "FINAL SOLUTION"

127 128 129

130 131 132 133 134 135 136

137 138 139

140

141

142 143

144

m o r e likely to be referring to a discussion b e t w e e n the experts involved on the same occasion. See Broszat, 'Genesis der " E n d l ö s u n g " ' (as in n. 33), pp. 755-6. O n the part played by the Foreign Ministry see B r o w n i n g , The Final Solution (as in n. 8), pp. 92—i. See Broszat, 'Genesis der " E n d l ö s u n g " ' (as in n. 33), and Hilberg, Destruction of European Jews (as in n. 5), pp. 586-600; also Rückerl, Vernichtungslager (as in n. 13), pp. 13-15. Streit, Keine Kameraden (as in n. 8), pp. 219-21. See Pätzold, 'Von der V e n r e i b u n g z u m G e n o r i d ' (as m n. 93), p. 207. Streit, Keine Kameraden (as in n. 8), pp. 222-3. Broszat, 'Nationalsozialistische Konzentrationslager' (as in n. 7), pp. 108-9. Streit, Keine Kameraden (as in n. 8), p. 223. See Speer's description in Sklavenstaat (as in n. 15), pp. 381-3, and H ö h n e , Orden unter dem Totenkopf (ai in n. 11), p. 403. O n Aktion T4's recruitment of personnel and its m e t h o d s , see Ino A r n d t and Wolfgang Sheffler, 'Organisierter M a s s e n m o r d an J u d e n in nationalsozialistischen Vernichtungslagern', Vierteljahrshefte fur Zeitgeschichte, 24 (1976), pp. 114-16. See Arendt, Eichmann (as in n. 9), pp. 135-7, 143-5. See Broszat, 'Genesis der " E n d l ö s u n g " ' (as in n. 33), p. 755, n. 39. See Studien zur Geschichte der Konzentrationslager (Stuttgart, 1970); Broszat, 'Nationalsozialistische Konzentrationslager' (as in n. 7), pp. 41-3. See Frank T r o m m l e r , 'Die "Nationalisierung" der Arbeit', in Reinhold Grün and Jost H e r m a n d , Arbeit als Thema in der deutschen Literatur vom Mittelalter bis zur Gegenwart (Königstein, 1979), pp. 102-25. See Fleming, Hitler and the Final Solution (as in n. 16), pp. 116-19; Hilberg, Destruction of European Jews (as in n. 5), pp. 253—4; Präg and Jacobmeyer, Diensttagebuch (as in n. 93), entry for 9 D e c e m b e r 1942, p. 588. See Hilberg, Destruction of European Jews (as in n. 5), p. 343. See Rainer C . B a u m ' s attempt to find a solution, The Holocaust and the German Elite. Genocide and National Suicide in Germany 1871-1945 (London, 1981), pp. 294-6; cf. pp. 265-7. In addition to the problem of moral indifference, there is also that of the suppression o f moral inhibitions, for instance in the deportation of Jewish children. Fleming, Hitler and the Final Solution (as in n. 16), pp. 93—4, puts forward the view that the Wannsee Conference w a s postponed because SS-Sturmbannjuhrer Lange w a s unable t o attend on 9 December. W h a t seems to have happened is that H e y d r i c h asked Eichmann for information about technical possibilities for mass killings in the late autumn of 1941 (see ibid., p. 73 and Jochen von Lang, Das Eichmann-Protokoll. Tonbandaufzeichnungen der israelischen Verhöre (Berlin, 1982), pp. 69-71).

THE DECISION FOR THE FINAL SOLUTION The Realization of the Unthinkable 145 146 147

148

149

150 151 152 153

154

Kempncr, Eichmann (as in n.9), pp. 424—6; Andreas Biss, Der Stopp der Endlosung (Stuttgart, 1966), pp. 227-8. Survey in Hilberg, Destruction of European Jeu/s (as in n.5), pp. 334—6, 344-5. Adzm,Judenpolitik (as in n.2), dates the destruction order from Hitler to the period between September and November 1941 (pp. 311-12). Hilberg, Destruction of European Jews (as in n.5), p. 263, surmises that Hitler's decision was made in September, on the basis of information given by Eichmann and Hóss, as well as a diary entry by Himmler on 17 November - 'extermination [Beiseitigung] of the Jews'. Fleming, Hitler and the Final Solution (as in n. 16), pp. 66-7 and passim, suspects that there was a secret order. Wilhelm (Die Truppe des Weltanschauungskrieges (as in n.38), pp. 630-2) argues that Himmler and Heydrich could not have begun an extensive extermination campaign without Hitler's approval. I, however, concur with Broszat ('Genesis der "Endlosung'", as in n.33) in seeing a mixture of improvisation and planning as characteristic of the process (see Krausnick and Wilhelm, Die Truppe des Weltanschauungskrieges, as in n.38, p. 635). Christopher Browning's criticism ('Zur Genesis der "Endlosung". Eine Antwort an Martin Broszat', Vierteljahrshefte fir Zeitgeschichte, 29, 1981, pp. 97-9) rests on the assumption that Hitler instructed Goering, Himmler and Heydrich, in the summer of 1941, 'to prepare a practicable programme for the destruction of the Jews'. He suggests that Goebbels was not necessarily informed, and that Hermann Goering, the only surviving witness, lied at Nuremberg (see IMG, vol. 9, pp. 574—6). The testimonies of Hóss and Eichmann referring to late summer 1941, on which he relies, are not very specific and also relate to the period before the definitive destruction order which he assumes was given in October/November. Fleming, Hitler and the Final Solution (as in n.16), passim. It is indisputable that at no time has there been any doubt that Hitler supported the genocide measures; however, there are different views about the factors that led to the implementation of the policy. For the Fiihrer directive on ñghting the partisans, see Walter Hubatsch (ed.). Hitlers Weisungen fir die Kriegsfihrung 1939-1945 (Frankfurt, 1962), pp. 201-3. O n Hitler's equivocation about the deployment of labour, see Speer, Sklavenstaat (as in n.15), pp. 367-9. See Prag and Jacobmeyer, Diensttagebuch (as in n.93), p. 583; Speer, Sklavenstaat (as in n.15), pp. 372—4. Obviously, Frank did not dare to broach this issue in his conversation with Hitler on 9 May 1943. Seen. 12. See Broszat, 'Genesis der "Endlosung"' (as in n.33), pp. 758-9 and passim. He justifiably points to the contradictions in Irving's position. However, the systematic transformation of the idea of genocide was the work of the SS bureaucracy. O n this see Adam, Judenpolitik (as in n.2), pp. 349-51; Hans

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155

156 157 158

159

160 161

Mommsen, 'Aufgabenkreis und Verantwortlichkeit des Staatssekretärs der Reichskanzlei', in Gutachten des Instituts Jur Zeitgeschichte, vol. 2 (Stuttgart, 1966), pp. 369-71. See von Lang, Eichmann-Protokoll (as in n.144), p. 88: '. . . with the delivery of the transports to their destination according to the timetable, my responsibilities ended.' On this, see Arendt, Eichmann (as in n.9), pp. 258-9. See Albrecht Tyrell, Vom Trommler zum Führer. Der Wandel von Hitlers Selbstverständnis zwischen 1919 und 1924 und die Entwicklung der NSDAP (Munich, 1975). Mommsen, 'Hitlers Stellung' (as in n.19), pp. 58-9. See Walter Laqueur, The Terrible Secret. An Investigation into the Suppression of Information about Hitler's Final Solution (London, 1980); Wasserstein, Jews of Europe (as in n.88); Helen Fein, Accounting for Genocide. National Responses and Jewish Victimization during the Holocaust (New York, 1979), esp. pp. 169-71. See Steinert, Hitler's War (as in n.8), pp. 143-4; Kershaw, 'Antisemitismus und Volksmeinung' (as in n.8), pp. 339-40; Otto D. Kulka, '"Public Opinion" in Nazi Germany: The Final Solution', The Jerusalem Quarterly, 26 (1983), pp. 149-51.' Broszat, 'Soziale Motivation' (as in n. 16), pp. 403-5. See Fest, Hitler (as in n.23), pp. 925, 927; also Carr, Hitler (as in n.47), pp. 6-7.

THE DECISION FOR THE FINAL SOLUTION

Planning for the Final Solution Against the Background of Developments in Holland in 1941* Joseph Michman

AT THE BEGINNING OF 1941 the Reich leadership took major decisions affecting the fate of Jews in all German-occupied areas. Due to insufficient documentation, many questions have been raised as to the timing and nature of those decisions. We lack an adequate picture of the measures taken by various German bodies — both the most important ones, particularly the SS, and others — with regard to the occupation administration in different countries, in preparation for carrying out the tasks assigned them by the political echelon. Developments in Holland, which are amply and richly documented, may cast additional light on this subject. In February 1941, the German administration was forced to formulate its policy toward the Jews, since the steps it had taken earlier provoked great anger among the Dutch people, which intensified following the rioting of the Dutch Nazi Party stormtroopers in the Jewish quarter of Amsterdam. The chain of actions and counteractions was triggered on February 11 by a scuffle in the Jewish quarter, in which a Dutch Nazi was killed; on the following day the Jewish Council (Joodse Raad) was formed.

I wish to thank the s t a f f o f the Rijksinstituut v o o r Oorlogsdocumentatie for the kind assistance in preparation o f this article.

266

THE "FINAL SOLUTION' JOSEPH M1CHMAN One week later an incident took place in a Jewish coffee shop, in which a detachment of the German police was involved. As a result, the Germans launched a large-scale and violent roundup of Jewish youth, 400 of whom were arrested on February 22-23 and sent to concentration camps (only one of them survived). The residents of Amsterdam and nearby cities reacted to the German violence with a general strike (the "February strike") which paralyzed public services and many industrial enterprises. All those events forced the heads of the German administration in Holland to give attention to its policy toward the Jews; at about the same time the German authorities issued new directives which signified the overhauling of the entire system of German occupation administration On February 12, Arthur Seyss-Inquart, Reichskommissar of Holland, set up the Jewish Council in Amsterdam. This was an unplanned step. 1 The German administration was notorious for its thorough and detailed preparation of the decrees and directives it issued, as evidenced, for example, by the numerous drafts of decrees drawn up by the lawyer, Dr. Kurt Rabl. 2 In this case, however, we are not in possession of any document (or evidence thereof) which was prepared in advance of the meeting between the representative of the Reichskommissar in Amsterdam, Dr. H. Bohmcker, and three leading Jewish figures he invited. The composition of the Jewish delegation to the talks aimed at forming the Judenrat also demonstrates that the chiefs of the German administration had not yet been apprised of the relation of forces within the Jewish community in Holland. Throughout its existence, the religious Jewish leadership in Holland wielded very little influence in matters concerning the policies of Jewish communal organizations. The invitations issued by the Germans to two rabbis — the Ashkenazi chief rabbi, L.H. Sarlouis, and the dayan of the Sephardic

1

2

See J. Michman, "The Controversial Stand of the Joodse Raad in the Netherlands," Yad Vashem Studies, vol. 10. Jerusalem, 1974, (henceforth: Michman), pp. 9-68. The decree concerning the registration of the Jews (VO 6/41) was drafted nine times. For the text of this decree, see J. Presser, Ondergang, 's-Gravenhage, 1965, (henceforth: Presser), vol. I, pp. 58-60.

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community, Eliahu Francès — as well as to the chairman of the Ashkenazi Community Council, Abraham Asscher, indicate that the Germans followed their established practice without examining closely the situation in Holland. 3 The two rabbis themselves drew the Germans' attention to their mistake, by declaring that in political questions they regarded Asscher, who at that time occupied the most important positions in Dutch Jewry, as the right man to whom Bohmcker's request should be addressed. Asscher did not hesitate to respond favorably, even though the request was not presented to him in writing and he had not been explicitly informed of the role and authority of the proposed Council he was to head in the future. Bohmcker's only demand was for the issuance of a manifesto to the Jews of Amsterdam ordering them to hand over to the police weapons which the Germans thought were in their possession. The hasty establishment of the Jewish Council in Amsterdam demonstrates that after the stormy events in the city, Seyss-Inquart grasped the necessity of revising the established practice of issuing directives concerning Jews without prior contacts with their representatives. As open resistance to the persecution of Jews became evident — it was regarded by the Germans as stemming from Jewish incitement — a need arose to appoint a representative Jewish body which could serve as a conduit for applying pressure on the Jews and for gaining control over them. At the same time, SeyssInquart and his assistants did not seek to establish ironclad rules governing the treatment of Jews throughout the country. They therefore restricted the powers of the newly established Council to the city of Amsterdam. It appears that only after the establishment of the Judenrat did the German administration in Holland begin to devote its attention to the treatment of the Jews. As the Chancellor of Austria at the time of the Anschluss, Seyss-Inquart was not satisfied with Hitler's decision to charge Gauleiter Josef Burckel with the implementation

3

On this issue, see J. Michman, "Historiography of the Jews in the Netherlands," Dutch Jewish History, Jerusalem, 1984, pp. 22-29.

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THE "FINAL SOLUTION" JOSEPH MICHMAN

of the Anschluss and related matters.4 In any event, he was aware of the central place the Jewish question occupied in Hitler's policy, and the very fact that anti-Jewish emigration measures were introduced earlier in Austria than in Germany, demonstrates SeyssInquart's involvement in the persecution of Jews. After all, the man thanks to whose ingenuity and skill Austria was more successful than Germany in its economic actions against the Jews, was none other than Dr. Hans Fischböck, a close friend of Seyss-Inquart, whom the latter brought to Holland, appointing him Generalkomissar for finance and economics.5 Seyss-Inquart could also have relied on another old friend, Dr. Friedrich Wimmer, who was appointed Generalkommissar for administration and justice. Up until his arrival in Holland, Seyss-Inquart had held the post of deputy to Hans Frank, the governor of Poland. There he was witness to numerous quarrels between the latter and F.W. Krüger who was in charge of the security in Cracow and, at least de jure, subordinate to Frank, but in fact answerable directly to Himmler.6 '

5

6

On the relations between Seyss-Inquart and Biirckel, see M. Broszat, Der Staat Hitlers, Munich, 1969, pp. 164-166. Biirckel, who was charged with the annexation of Austria, ordered the establishment of the Zentralstelle (Central Office for Jewish Emigration). Dr. Hans Fischböck (1895 -1967) was a financial wizard who as a young man already occupied important posts in the Austrian economy. As minister in the short-lived government led by Seyss-Inquart, he played an important role in the confiscation of Jewish property, which was carried out much more rapidly in Austria than in Germany. See Gerhard Botz, Wien vom Anschluss zum Krieg, Vienna/Munich, 1978, p. 341. At a meeting convened by Goring in the aftermath of Kristallnacht (November 12, 1938), he presented a detailed plan containing a list of measures to be taken against the Jews. The ministers in charge of the economy were amazed by this plan and it was highly praised by Goring [see H. Genschel, Die Verdrängung der Juden aus der Wirtschaft im Dritten Reich, Göttingen, 1966 (henceforth: Genschel), pp. 163, 183]. He also conceived and developed the "Schacht Plan" aimed at encouraging the emigration of Jews and exploiting their assets for the benefit of the Reich. This plan was submitted to Dr. K.D. Rabl; see Ralph Weingarten, Die Hilfeleistung der westlichen Welt bei der Endlösung der deutschen Judenfrage, Bern/Frankfurt/New York, 1981, p. 125. See also E. Ben-Elissar, La Diplomatie du III Reich et les Juifs, Paris, 1969 (henceforth: Ben-Elissar), pp. 378-382. On the appointment of F.W. Krüger and his quarrels with the governor, see H. Höhne, The Order of the Death's Head, New York, 1971 (henceforth: Höhne),

THE DECISION FOR THE FINAL SOLUTION P L A N N I N G FOR T H E FINAL SOLUTION

In H o l l a n d H a n n s Rauter, t o o , held two posts: as Generalkommissar for security he was Seyss-Inquart's subordinate, but as chief of the SS and the police he was answerable directly to Himmler. 7 Seyss-lnquart was aware of the threat posed by the SS to his rule and, guided by experience, he strove to have the final say in all matters, including the Jewish issue; however, his aspirations were not quite fulfilled. He and his close associates sought to set up in Holland a representative Jewish body or a Jewish organization like the one that had been established earlier in Germany. A draft has been preserved of the regulations for the proposed Jewish organization, which are very similar to those of the Reich Association of the Jews in Germany (Reichsvereinigung) set up in Germany in 1939.® The administration in Holland sought to establish a countrywide

7

1

pp. 346-366. 471-472. See also K.D. Bracher. The German Dictatorship, Penguin University Books, 1973 (henceforth: Bracher), p. 443. Rauter's post and position were equal to those of Krüger in Krakow. Hanns Albin Rauter was an Austrian too, but Seyss-lnquart was not happy with Hitler's and Himmler's preference for Rauter (who belonged to fanatical nationalistic circles) over von dem Bach-Zelevsky who was of higher rank. For details, see N.C.K., in A. Veld,DeSSe/j Nederland, 's-Gravenhage, 1976, pp. 98107, 443-452; L. de Jong, Het Koninkrijk der Nederlanden gedurende de Tweede Weretdoorlog, 's-Gravenhage, 1969 (henceforth De Jong), vol. 4, pp. 77-85. Rijksinstituut voor Oorlogsdocumentatie (hereafter Riod), V(erwaltung) u(nd) J(ustiz), H(aupt)A(bteilung) Inneres 124 m. This draft, the second relating to the same subject, is dated May 21, i.e., two days after the meeting held by Seysslnquart which I discuss below. RabI, head of the Legislation Department, who composed this draft, also wrote that it included two separate proposals submitted to Seyss-lnquart: one suggested setting up the Central Office for Jewish Emigration, while the other advanced the idea of establishing a compulsory Jewish organization (eine jüdische Zwangsorganisation). Seysslnquart considered replacing the recently established Jewish Council by a general Jewish organization similar to the German Reichsvereinigung. See Documents on the Holocaust, Y. Arad, I. Gutman and A. Margaliot, eds., Jerusalem, 1981 (henceforth: Documents on the Holocaust) pp. 139-143). The purpose of this organization was: "Zwecks Regelung und Überwachung des sozialen und kulturellen Lebens... der Juden und zur Förderung ihrer Auswanderung." On this occasion Rabl proposed the publication of a decree ordering "cleansing the system of the Dutch culture of foreign influences" (Reinigung des Kultur-und Vereinswesens von artfremden Einflüssen). This proposal was rejected because it was too far-reaching and premature. It was never submitted again.

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organization whose board was to be appointed according to the decision taken by both the Ashkenazi and Sephardic communal organizations.9 German documents are not clear as to whether the administration gave its attention to the representative body for all of Holland appointed by the two communal organizations: the Jewish Coordinating Committee. This body, headed by the deposed president of the Supreme Court, L.A. Visser, rejected direct negotiations with the Germans since, in its view, the Dutch governing institutions should represent the interests of Jews who were Dutch nationals vis-à-vis the German administration.10 In any event, Böhmcker, who did give his attention to the principled position adopted by the Jewish Coordinating Committee, believed that he could coerce the boards of the two communal organizations into giving in to the German demand to set up a countrywide organization.11 The Main Office for Reich Security (RSHA) in Berlin harbored completely different plans for Holland, however. Using the services of the Central Office for Jewish Emigration (Zentralstelle für jüdische Auswanderung) which had been established in Vienna by Eichmann on August 10, 1938, the RSHA, resorting to a panoply of sometimes very unconventional methods, brought about the emigration of tens of thousands of Jews: up until the outbreak of World War II, over 100,000 Austrian Jews, i.e., two-thirds of the Jewish population, left the country.12 As a result of the success of this operation, Heydrich received Göring's approval to set up a Central Office for Jewish Emigration in Berlin on August 24, 1939. Six months later, on July 26, 1939, a similar body was established in Prague. Heydrich decided to improve the system and to set up a Central Office for Jewish Emigration in Holland also, which would set an example for the solution of the Jewish question in all European countries (die beispielgebendfür die Lösung der Judenfrage

'

10

"

12

Riod, VuJ, äs in footnote 8, paragraph 7. See footnote 1. In the appendix to the document referred to in footnote 8 (Anlage II, p. 2). Höhne, p. 383.

THE DECISION FOR THE FINAL SOLUTION PLANNING FOR T H E FINAL SOLUTION

in allen europäischen Ländern sein sollte).13 For this purpose, Dr. E. Rajakowitsch was dispatched to Holland in April 1941; he was an Austrian lawyer who, as a result of his private involvement in Jewish affairs, was introduced to Eichmann.14 Having established the Central Office for Jewish Emigration in Prague, Eichmann added Rajakowitsch to its staff, appointing him as head of the fund for Jewish emigration. Apparently, this fund was Rajakowitsch's brainchild and its purpose was to finance the Office's expenses as well as the emigration of poor Jews, so as to ensure that not only rich Jews would emigrate from the Reich. The money for the fund was, as a matter of course, collected from the Jews themselves.15 (Incidentally, Rajakowitsch was also involved in the abortive plan to establish a Jewish pale in Madagascar.)16 He was assigned the task of organizing such a fund in Holland also. The SS could use it as leverage to gain total control, both organizational and financial, over Jewish affairs, as well as to obtain wide power in all of Holland. The SS was asked to prevail upon the Dutch Jews to adopt the arrangements which had been introduced in Vienna and Prague. For that purpose the SS brought to Holland J. Edelstein and Richard Israel Friedmann who at that time worked in the Central Office for Jewish Emigration in Prague and, consequently, were familiar with the methods employed by these establishments in Prague and Vienna. They were supposed to explain to the Dutch Jews how to approach a similar institution to be established in Holland, and they even brought with them samples of questionnaires for candidates for emigration. At first, Edelstein and 13

14

15

16

Riod, VuJ, HA Inneres 124 w. From Rauter's letter to Seyss-Inquart of April 18, 1941. The full text of this letter is to be found in De Jong, vol. 5, opposite p. 1024. For details about Erich Rajakowitsch, see B.A. Sijes, Studies over Jodenvervolging, Assen, 1974 (henceforth: Sijes), pp. 66-94. The first reference to him as an employee of the Central Office for Jewish Emigration is dated April 1, 1941. His arrival in the Netherlands was therefore in March. The Central Office's success in forcing the Jews to emigrate caused Goring to set up, on January 24, 1939, the Reichszentrale für ßdische Auswanderung with Heydrich as its head. On the importance of this institution, which brought about a shift in German policy and resulted in the increased power of the Gestapo, see Ben-Elissar, pp. 415-417. Sijes, p. 57.

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Friedmann were treated with suspicion, but during extensive talks they held during their sojourn in Amsterdam (four to six weeks) they succeeded in winning the trust of the local Jewish leaders. They cautioned against the schemes of the Germans who, in their view, intended to increase the pressure on the Jews, but Asscher and D. Cohen, the two chairmen of the Jewish Council, dismissed those warnings. They believed that the German administration would not dare to maltreat the Dutch Jews in the way it had dealt with the Jews of Eastern Europe. Friedmann was influenced by the reckless optimism of Asscher who believed that the Allies would invade even at this early stage of the war. In contrast, Edelstein was disappointed and concerned about the unrealistic views of Asscher and Cohen who did not heed his warnings. 17 The fact that Edelstein and Friedmann, whose devotion to the Jewish cause was well known to Eichmann and his assistants, enjoyed unrestricted freedom of movement in Amsterdam, speaks for itself. The SS apparently sought to win over the Dutch Jews and to secure their cooperation. It is also conceivable that the intent was to face SeyssInquart with a fait-accompli before he formulated a plan of action. In any event, no practical results issued from this visit, except a letter written to Cohen by Edelstein on behalf of Eichmann's assistant, Hauptsturmführer H. Günther, ordering him to set up a liaison office (Expositor) as part of the Jewish Council, which would maintain contact with the Central Office for Jewish Emigration in Amsterdam, modelled after its Prague prototype. 18 Thus, d u r i n g those m o n t h s both the Seyss-Inquart administration and the SS were busy preparing the infrastructure for dealing with the Jews in a methodical way. Each one of those organizations believed it was serving German interests better than its rival. When the moment of implementation arrived, the confrontation between them could not be avoided.

17

18

On the visit of Friedmann to the Netherlands, see H.G. Adler, Theresienstadt, Tübingen, 1960, pp. 737-738. On Edelstein, see Presser, vol. 2, pp. 166-167; J. Melkman, "Tijd voor de Doden," Nieuw Israelitisch Weekblad, May 1965. D. Cohen, "Memoires," Nieuw Israelitisch Weekblad, May 1982.

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Deliberations on the Planning of the Final Solution On April 18, 1941 Rauter sent a letter to Seyss-Inquart which merits full quotation: 19 In line with the request of Reichskommissar Seyss-Inquart, an order was issued by the commander of the Security Police and the S.D., SS-Gruppenführer Heydrich, to establish a Central Office for Jewish Emigration in the occupied Netherlands, which would serve as an example of the solution of the Jewish question for all European countries. The Central Office for Jewish Emigration will be in charge of concentrating all Dutch Jews, supervising their everyday life, and of the centralized processing of emigration. As in Prague, a legally established fund would be set up in association with the Central Office for Jewish Emigration; it would be entrusted with procuring the necessary finances for emigration and the total solution of the Jewish question in Europe.20 I request the swift issuance of a decree based on the draft enclosed in the appendix. In my capacity as Generalkommissar, I shall transfer the office work relating to the handling of all the relevant matters to the commander of the Security Police and the S.D. who is acting on orders of the special commissioner in charge of the solution of the Jewish question, (SS-Gruppenführer Heydrich), who will work on this issue, following the request of the Reichskommissar for occupied Holland, under my supervision. I request the speedy issuance of an approval in view of the pressing need to take an appropriate decision. This letter not only reveals several important facts but is typical of the methods employed by the SS to attain its objectives. First of all, it is strange that Heydrich is mentioned twice in the letter as the person in charge of the implementation of the solution of the Jewish question. After all, the letter from Goring to Heydrich in which the latter is entrusted with undertaking all the organizational, substantive and material preparations for the

" 20

See footnote 13. The original reads as follows: "Und die kommende endgültige Lösung der Judenfrage in Europa." The term "endgültige Lösung" was translated as "total solution" so as to distinguish it from the term "final solution."

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THE "FINAL SOLUTION" JOSEPH

MICHMAN

general solution of the Jewish question in the German sphere of influence in Europe, is dated July 31, 1941, i.e., three and a half months later than Rauter's letter. Indeed, many scholars hold the view that the planning for the Final Solution began only at that time. 21 Although in his letter Goring refers to the decree of January 24, 1939 in which Heydrich was entrusted with the issue of Jewish emigration, in January 1939 the solution of the Jewish question was not openly mentioned. 22 Rauter's letter, then, makes it clear that already in April 1941, the Reich leadership, i.e., Hitler, Goring and Himmler (who was and remained Heydrich's superior), was resolved to commence the implementation of the general solution of the Jewish question. The fact that Rauter was pressing to take the decision also indicates that Heydrich was in a hurry, having received directives from his superiors. Heydrich simply followed the German policy toward the Jews which had been adopted earlier. There are

21

22

For example, see Christopher R. Browning, The Final Solution and the German Foreign Office, New York/London, 1978 (henceforth: Browning), p. 7. See also Uwe Dietrich Adam, Judenpolitik im Dritten Reich, Dusseldorf, 1972 (henceforth: Adam), pp. 308-309. Adam does not regard Goring's letter as marking the beginning of the Final Solution. He also disregards completely all the previous documentary references. Raul Hilberg, on the other hand, says that "the order of 31 of July marks a turning point in anti-Jewish history" (The Destruction of European Jewry, London, 1961, p. 262). Martin Broszat, in his "Hitler and the Genesis of the 'Final Solution': An Assessment of David Irving's Theses," in Yad Vashem Studies, vol. 13, Jerusalem, 1980, p. 84, regards this letter as the first order given to Heydrich to organize "the Final Solution," even though detailed plans concerning treatment of the Jews had not yet been developed at that time. This comment by Broszat disregards the systematic planning so typical of the Nazi regime. It thus marks a shift from the view he had held previously which in my opinion appears to tally better with the facts. See also footnote 88. More plausible is H. Krausnick's view, according to which this letter put an official stamp on the existing state of affairs (Anatomie des SS-Staates, Munich, 1967, vol. 2, p. 306). Documents on the Holocaust, pp. 125-126. Of special importance is the text of the Führer's announcement to Heydrich: "The Jewish question should be solved in the most satisfactory fashion, according to circumstances, either by emigration or evacuation." See B. Blau, Das Ausnahmerechtfür die Juden in den europäischen Ländern, New York, 1952 (henceforth: Blau), p. 62, n. 197. Although "final solution" is not mentioned here, the wording indicates an intention to remove the Jews from Europe.

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many indications that this policy was outlined by Hitler in late 1938; he stated it later in his famous Reichstag speech on January 30, 1939, in which he "predicted" the annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe. 23 This is an important statement and it differs fundamentally from the Führer's usual outbursts against the Jews 24 in several respects: 1) Hitler made this enunciation in his capacity as head of state; therefore it amounts to a declaration of an official policy. Later he referred to it as such. 2) Hitler took a number of practical steps prior to this declaration: from placing Goring in control of all Jewish matters on November 12, 1938, all the way to charging Heydrich with the implementation on January 24, 1939.25 3) Those steps marked the passage from the "anti-Semitism of feeling" (i.e., anti-Semitic pogroms) to the "anti-Semitism of reason" according to Hitler's definition at the onset of his political career. This is confirmed 26 by the act of entrusting Goring with 23

24

25 26

Documents on ihe Holocaust, pp. 134-135. Subsequently, Hitler referred repeatedly to his prediction, for example, in his speech on September 30, 1942, (see Reden des Führers, Munich, 1967, pp. 291-292). See also Adolf Hitler, Monologe im Führer-Hauptquartier, Hamburg, 1980 (henceforth: Monologe), p. 106. For example, his blunt statement in a conversation with the Czechoslovakian envoy, FrantiSek Chvalkovsky: "Our Jews will be exterminated." This undiplomatic statement indicates Hitler's obsession with the Jewish subject with which he was preoccupied at that time. See Höhne, p. 400. Blau, p. 62. In the first letter he wrote on September 16, 1919, at the onset of his political career, Hitler explained that he sought to replace the "anti-Semitism of feeling" with the "anti-Semitism of reason." The latter implied not excesses against the Jews but systematic activity: "The final objective should be the removal of all the Jews without any qualms." See E. Nolte, Der Faschismus in seiner Epoche, Munich, 1963, pp. 389-390. The early date of this letter notwithstanding, Nolte maintains — correctly, in my view — that Hitler's views did not undergo change over the years and remained unaffected by developments during the subsequent political history of National Socialism (ibid., p. 55). In actual fact, even the wording itself remained constant; the term "Endziel" recurs in the same context after the lapse of twenty years, as, for example, in Heydrich's urgent letter of September 21, 1939 (Documents on the Holocaust, p. 173). See also Eberhard Jäckel, Hitlers Weltanschauung, Tiibingen, 1969, pp. 389-390. On Hitler's rigid outlook, see Sebastian Haffner, Anmerkungen zu Hitler, Munich, 1978 (henceforth: Haffner), p. 97.

275

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carrying out the assignment 27 and by neutralizing Goebbels 28 which meant incorporating the anti-Jewish policy into the overall war effort supervised by Goring who was in charge of the Four-Year Plan. 4) In his speech Hitler made the connection between his "prediction" about the Jews and the war "liable" to break out since in his world view Jewry was the arch enemy and no victory would be complete without vanquishing it. 29 5) It should be noted that Hitler spoke about the European Jews and

27

28

29

On November 12,1938, Goring opened the session by stating that he had received a letter from Bormann on Hitler's order. According to this letter, "We shall have to handle the Jewish question in a comprehensive and uniform fashion and solve it one way or another." He went on to say that in a telephone conversation with Hitler the latter had instructed him to concentrate all crucial measures (against the Jews) in his own hands. See L. Poliakov and J. Wulf. Das Dritte Reich und die Juden, Berlin, 1955 (henceforth: Poliakov and Wulf), p. 57. For the main text of Göring's address, see Documents on the Holocaust, p. 108. Goebbels, who until that time had been the highest-ranking anti-Semitic propagandist and the instigator of Kristallnacht, did not subsequently occupy any operational post related to Jewish matters. In Hitler's view Goring was more efficient even though until that time he had not been actively involved in Jewish affairs and was not considered a radical anti-Semite. About Göring's views on the Jews, see R. Manvel! and H. Frankel. Goring. London. 1962. pp. 98-99. The discussion on November 12, 1938 (see footnote 27) also indicates that he was foreign to the subject and that he was uninformed about the steps which had already been taken against the Jews. A. Aronson speaks of the connection between the course of the war and the decision concerning the extermination of the Jews ("Die dreifache Fälle," Viertelsjahreshefte für Zeitgeschichte, vol. 32, 1984, pp. 29-60). But those very arguments make it clear that it is inconceivable that the decision to undertake the total extermination of the Jews was reached in the late fall of 1941. After all, Hitler had decided to attack Russia and to wage a world war at the end of 1940 or the beginning of 1941, and the decision concerning the extermination of the Jews was taken at that time. According to Haffner, there was a connection between the course of the war and the extermination. In his view Hitler decided to exterminate the Jews following the defeats on the front and on the assumption that a compromise with England could not be reached. Thus, he regards December 5, 1941 as the crucial date (see Haffner. pp. 178-179). Such a late date, however, is implausible for operational reasons. Moreover, Haffner displays lack of understanding in disregarding the Jewish question as part of Hitler's geopolitical thinking.

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not about Jews in general, and this qualification was to make its impact on the policy toward the Jews. Thus, the idea of the general solution of the Jewish question was mooted before 1941 and Heydrich looked for ways to realize it. Consequently, the discussions held by the Nazi leadership during preparations for the war against Russia did not revolve around the question of whether to activate the general solution to the Jewish question but around the ways of its implementation under the conditions that were to arise in the aftermath of the occupation of territories in Eastern Europe. Rauter's letter, in which he proposed a link between the prompting of Jewish emigration by means of the Central Office and the total solution of the Jewish question in Europe, demonstrates that the "Final Solution" should not be taken to mean a decision to exterminate all the Jews to be found under the German occupation rule. Furthermore, such an interpretation does not square with the known facts which prove that the Reich rulers had, for a long time, been engaged in developing a comprehensive plan aimed at solving the Jewish question, including forced emigration. Thus, for example, the Madagascar plan, which was supposed to be an indispensable component of the Final Solution, was kept on the agenda until the summer of 1941 and perhaps even later.30 Some concluded that the decision about the Final Solution was taken only after the hopes for mass Jewish emigration faded, or that the Final Solution did not stem from the decision of the Reich leadership but resulted from a continuous process which started with local improvised ventures and ended with mass killings in the extermination camps.31 Those 30

31

The Madagascar plan was still referred to in 1941 and 1942. According to Philip Friedman, this was done for reasons of propaganda, but it is inconceivable that when speaking to his close associates Hitler engaged in propaganda. See Philip Friedman, The Road to Extinction, New York/Philadelphia, 1980 (henceforth: Friedman), pp. 44-85. According to Wisliceny, the Madagascar plan was aborted as late as winter 1941 -1942 for ideological reasons. For the complete text of his testimony, see Poliakov and Wulf, pp. 87-94. For the entire affair, see Leni Yahil, "Madagascar—Chimera of Solution of the Jewish Question" (in Hebrew), Yalkuth Moresheth. 19, 1975, pp. 159-174. For a summary of opposing views regarding Nazi policy, see S. Friedlander, "From Anti-Semitism to Extermination: A Historiographical Study of Nazi

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assumptions, however, clash with the meaning of terms like "General Solution" and "Final Solution" which had already been referred to in early 1941. The very concept of "Final Solution" indicates the existence of a general approach of the state, entailing long-term planning and ruling out haphazard actions. Moreover, such assumptions leave the mass killings perpetrated by the Einsatzgruppen, which had been planned in early 1941, out of the scope of the Final Solution, turning them into an isolated action unconnected with the. general anti-Jewish policy. Opposing this view, De Jong maintains that the whole emigration scheme was but a ploy aimed at concealing the true intentions of the Germans who, already in early 1941, had taken a decision to annihilate the Jewish people. 32 This hypothesis, however, cannot be reconciled with the contents of the internal German correspondence which came to light after the war. This correspondence reveals intense German preoccupation with the issue of emigration. Furthermore, the question arises why Rauter, acting on Heydrich's order, should have urged Seyss-Inquart to set up the Central Office for Jewish Emigration and the Emigration Fund, if the sole objective of the rivalry between those two camps within the German administration was to deceive the Jews. Hitler's speech on January 30, 1939 resolved the spurious contradiction between the extermination plans and the preoccupation with emigration. As aforementioned, Hitler proclaimed the annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe,33 and this idea can be found later in many documents

12

33

Policies Toward the Jews and an Essay in Interpretation," in Yad Vashem Studies, vol. 16, 1985, Jerusalem, pp. 1-50. In his account of Mrs. G. van Tijn-Cohn, De Jong writes: "The Executive of the Jewish Council — Jood.se Raad — was deceived in a different fashion," and "The intention [of the Germans] was to divert the attention of the Joodse Raad" (De Jong, vol. 5, pp. 1014-1015). Hitler repeatedly emphasized that his decision to expel the Jews related only to Europe. See, for example, the following statements: "Der Jude werde aus Europa verschwinden" [Monologe, p. 44 (October 25, 1941)]; "Der Jude muss aus Europa heraus! Am besten sie gehen nach Russland" [ibid., p. 241, January 27, 1942)]; "Der Jude muss aus Europa heraus ... Warum haben denn die Juden den Krieg angezettelt? Dann mag es wieder drei-, vierhundert Jahre dauern, bis die Juden in Europa erneut einziehen. Zunächst als Händler, dann lassen sie sich nieder, um ihre

THE DECISION FOR THE FINAL SOLUTION PLANNING FOR T H E FINAL SOLUTION

including Rauter's letter referring to the solution of the Jewish question in all European countries. Hitler decided to "disinfect" Europe of Jews and not to oppose the emigration of some of them to other continents. Even if the Germans did harbor the idea of world rule, they nevertheless had not given serious thought to the question of world Jewry. It should be borne in mind that purging Europe of Jews was in itself a formidable operation, particularly in view of the fact that the Germans, obsessed as they were by the Jewish demon, were greatly overestimating the number of Jews. According to the calculations of one of the German experts, some seven million Jews lived in Eastern Europe, not counting the Jews in the Asian part of Russia.34 This estimate which, incidentally, concurred with estimates arrived at by the Jews themselves, included only Jews as defined by religion and not by the Nuremberg laws. As far as Holland is concerned, we know that estimates arrived at by racialist scientists were much higher than the figures obtained as a result of the 1941 census; the most cautious among the experts erred by a factor of 50%.35

34

35

36

Mitwelt zu begaunern" [ibid., p. 229 (January 25, 1942)]; "Denn da er [Hitler] mit Beendigung dieses Krieges auch den letzten Jude aus Europa hinausgeworfen haben werde" [Tischgespräche, p. 250, (July 21, 1942)]. P.H. Seraphim, Das Judentum im osteuropäischen Raum, Essen, 1938 (henceforth: Seraphim), p. 319. His estimate sets the number of Jews at 6,833,800 which is slightly higher than the figure arrived at by Leszczynski (6,640,000). We do not have at our disposal any German estimate of the number of descendants of mixed marriages in Eastern Europe. The statistics relating to the number of Jews in various countries which were presented at the Wannsee Conference were based on more accurate censuses conducted after hundreds of thousands of Jews had already been murdered. According to the Verordnung (VO) 6/41. The number of Jews in the Netherlands, including descendants of mixed marriages, was 159,606 in June 1941. The German and the Dutch "specialists" were stunned by this figure; they had expected a figure not lower than 240,000 and some of them even expected a much higher number. The German author of this report was particularly surprised by the small percentage of Mischlinge who comprised only 0.2% of the Dutch population, this being much lower than their percentage in the German population. See the letter of August 23, 1941 from the Generalkommissar for administration and justice to the Reichkommissar, Riod, VuJ, HA Inneres, 122f. The ban was dated January 23,1941, (Documents on the Holocaust, pp. 153-154). Heydrich reported on it at the Wannsee Conference. See also Browning, pp. 68-69.

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THE "FINAL SOLUTION" JOSEPH

MICHMAN

The original plan on which the framers of the Final Solution focused their attention at the beginning of 1941 comprised different components: mass killings by the Einsatzgruppen, sterilization, forced labor and starvation, but also the emigration of some Jews. In his opening speech at the Wannsee Conference, Heydrich explained to what extent the Germans had pinned their hopes on emigration and their disappointment when it had not come about. The ban imposed by Himmler on the emigration of individual Jews, announced by Heydrich in Wannsee, came as a result of disappointment with the outcome of emigration: since mass emigration proved to be impossible, individual emigration was not considered to be a significant factor contributing toward the Final Solution.36 At the same time it appears that Himmler's ban was dictated by temporal exigency only, since various proposals concerning Jewish emigration were debated throughout the war, with Himmler's knowledge and participation.37 Within the SS apparatus there were, of course, men who, driven by murderous impulses and boundless hatred of the Jews, kept preventing emigration of individual Jews. One of them was Eichmann; however, his order to expedite the shipment of Jews to the extermination camps at the time when the emigration option was still open, indicates that the Final Solution did not rule out the possibility of emigration.38 37

"

A very illuminating document concerning the so-called "Feldscher-Aktion" is of interest in this context. The document in question consists of a memorandum dated July 2, 1943, signed by Dr. Wagner of the German Foreign Ministry. It discusses ten proposals for the emigration of sizable groups of Jews, almost all of them to Palestine. In the consultations held between Himmler and Ribbentrop those proposals were not rejected, but the idea of Jews emigrating to Palestine was opposed since both men regarded it as an Arab territory. It was resolved to respond favorably to the request to permit the emigration of 5,000 Jews from Bulgaria, provided the Jews in question would go first to Britain and not to Palestine; all this despite the British refusal to exchange them for German nationals. In the meantime, the SS-Reichsfuhrer was to be requested to delay the transfer of candidates for exchange (Austauschobjekte) to Eastern Europe. For the text of this memorandum, see Poliakov and Wulf, pp. 20-23. See also B. Wasserstein, Britain and the Jews of Europe. 1939-1945, London, 1979, pp. 152-153. Eichmann ordered the speeding up of the transfer to the extermination camps of those Jews who expected to be issued foreign passports which would give them

THE DECISION FOR THE FINAL SOLUTION PLANNING FOR T H E FINAL SOLUTION

In any event, at the time Germany geared itself for war with Russia, mass emigration (or deportation from Europe) was still regarded as a real solution. This was the reason for Heydrich's striving to set up a model institution in Amsterdam which would organize such emigration and for which he received Seyss-Inquart's endorsement. Asscher and Cohen met for this purpose with Rajakowitsch (Friedmann was also present). They were charged with drawing up a proposal for the establishment of a department for emigration at the Jewish Council of Amsterdam; the activities of this department were to embrace all Dutch Jews. 39 The proposal was to be submitted by July 25, 1941. As part of the plan to step up Jewish emigration, Willy Zoepf, later the director of the Section IV B4, dispatched Mrs. Gertrud van Tijn-Cohn, who was in charge of emigration in the Refugee Committee at the Jewish Council, to Lisbon in April 1941 to negotiate with representatives of the American Joint Distribution Committee (Joint) to procure credit for financing emigration of Jews. 40 Zoepf told Mrs. van Tijn that the implementation of the emigration plan hinged upon the success of her mission. And in fact, in Lisbon she was promised some credit (she did not specify the exact amount), but it appears that the Germans expected a sum in foreign currency several times greater than that promised. Even when prospects for emigration dwindled considerably, emigration offices continued to operate. As late as September 1941, the Jewish Council was still required to submit 20 emigration applications daily. In November this number was increased to 200 and it was subsequently reduced to 150 as a result of a request submitted by the Jewish Council. 41 Since at that time

" 40

41

protection. See G. Hausner, Justice in Jerusalem, New York, 1977, p. 98; De Jong, vol. 6, p. 276. This meeting was attended by two more SS men; see Riod, Joodse Raad Gedächtnis-Aufzeichnungen, Id. The document is not dated. Gertrude van Tijn, Contribution towards the History of the Jews in the Netherlands, Naharia, 1944,pp. 35-36. Mrs. van Tijn, who was a senior official of the Commission for Refugees established in 1933, maintained close ties with the Joint (see Y. Bauer, My Brother's Keeper, Philadelphia, 1974, p. 171). Minutes of the Joodse Raad plenary session on September 17 and November 27, 1941. Riod, Joodse Raad, lc. In their conversation with Böhmcker and Lages which took place on November 22, 1941, Asscher and Cohen argued that the

282

THE "FINAL SOLUTION' JOSEPH M I C H M A N

Himmler had already banned emigration on an individual basis, it appears that the administrative processing of emigration applications, which at first had been intended as a serious venture, was kept alive only as a strategem aimed at deceiving the Jews.

The Struggle for Control of Jewish Affairs As aforementioned, Heydrich received Seyss-Inquart's approval to set up a Central Office in Amsterdam — because of Heydrich's position, Seyss-Inquart had no choice but to acquiesce to his request — but all the other matters mentioned in Rauter's letter of April 18 were on the latter's initiative, even though Rauter repeatedly insisted that these issues were agreed upon between Seyss-Inquart and Heydrich. Seyss-Inquart even expressed his opposition to the designation "The Central Office for Jewish Emigration," preferring "The Central Office for Jewish Affairs." 42 It is difficult to ascertain the reasons behind his objection; whether he was motivated by tactical considerations and, fearing the reaction of the Dutch people, he preferred not to reveal his intentions at this stage, or perhaps this was an attempt to remove the institution for which he was responsible from the control of Heydrich and his men. In any event, this last consideration certainly caused him to resist forcefully other proposals Rauter referred to in his letter: he was wary of entrusting the SS with the supervision of the daily life of Jews in Holland, and refused to set up a fund which would fall under the control of the Central Office for Jewish Emigration.43 He also rejected the idea of placing the handling of Jewish affairs in the hands of the Security Police Commissioner, Dr. W. Harster, appointed by Heydrich to the post of authorized deputy for Jewish

42 45

request to submit 200 applications a day on behalf of stateless Jews from Germany could not possibly be complied with, in view of the fact that since August 11 not a single emigration permit had been issued. They were informed that some applicants would soon be issued such permits. See footnote 11. On the process of forming the Emigration Fund and its purpose, see A.J. van der Leeuw, "Der Griff des Reichs nach dem Judenvermogen," in H. Paape, ed., Studies over Nederland in Oorlogstijd, 's-Gravenhage, 1972, pp. 228-229.

THE DECISION FOR THE FINAL SOLUTION P L A N N I N G FOR T H E F I N A L S O L U T I O N

affairs.44 Seyss-Inquart regarded this appointment as an attack on his position as Supreme Commissioner of Holland. After all, he had already appointed his representative in Amsterdam, Dr. Bohmcker, as Judenkommissar, and he had been the first to hold talks with Jewish representatives. Seyss-Inquart had not yet decided whether the Jewish Council would represent all Dutch Jews, and he viewed with apprehension the negotiations conducted by Heydrich's men (Zoepf and Rajakowitsch) and the Jewish leaders from Prague with heads of the Jewish Council on questions affecting all Dutch Jews. In order to resolve those and other issues affecting Jews, SeyssInquart summoned all five Generalkommissars and several security police officials to a meeting on May 19, 1941.45 As far as the final objective was concerned, i.e., removal of all Jews from Holland, there were no differences of opinion, as this was the official policy. The discussion revolved around the methods of its implementation and the organizations and functionaries who were to be assigned this task. On economic issues, Seyss-Inquart adopted the idea that the confiscated Jewish property would be earmarked for financing the Final Solution, but for the time being he rejected the proposal to set up an emigration fund. 46 Dr. Fischbock, whose expertise in financial matters was unquestionable, put forward a "plan in stages for achieving the general objective": the economy was to be rid of Jews; income from the sale of Jewish businesses or their liquidation was to be deposited with a company set up specially for this purpose, with responsibilities toward dispossessed Jews (its liability

44

45

46

Rauter related this story in his trial after the war: "Dr. Harsterwarin 1941 bei mir und übermittelte mir seine schriftliche Beauftragung als Subkommissar durch den R(eichs) K(ommissar) für die Judenfrage." B.A. Sijes, Adolf Eichmann und die Deportation der in den Niederlanden wohnenden Juden, Amsterdam, I960, p. 65. De Jong, vol. 5, pp. 590, 1017. No record of this meeting has been preserved, but it is referred to in a number of documents, including a memorandum by Rajakowitsch: "Zusammenfassende Darstellung der Entwicklung bezüglich die Hortung des Jüdischen VermögensRiod, BDS-65-a. It is also mentioned in the draft by Rabl (see footnote 11). Seyss-Inquart remained noncommittal and in the meeting he said that he regarded the establishment of ¡>uch a fund at that stage as premature.

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was extremely reduced and in most cases was not honored); Jewish land was also to be confiscated and ownership transferred to another special company; Jews were to deposit their money and securities in one bank which would handle only this type of transactions. 47 The novelty which distinguished Fischbock's plan from the established practices in Austria and in the Reich was centralization achieved by the founding of special companies controlled by the German authorities. 48 This system had the advantage of ensuring the seizure of all Jewish property on the one hand, and eliminating the corruption which had plagued the aryanization campaign in Austria and Germany, on the other. In his plan Fischbock realized the proposals he had advanced in a meeting with Goring following Kristallnacht, at that time those proposals had been enthusiastically endorsed by Goring. The Fund for Jewish Emigration, conceived by Rajakowitsch, could not accommodate this comprehensive and professionally conceived plan, and Fischbock was charged with its implementation. By stripping the SS of control over economic matters, the independence of the Central Office was considerably reduced, especially since Fischbock did not place at its disposal the proceeds from the Jewish property. The SS complained that Seyss-Inquart's principle of financing the Final Solution was thereby violated, but to no effect. 49 As a result, the Central Office, which was planned to be a large organization,

47

In Germany the Jews were allowed to deposit securities in the bank of their choice. See VO über den Einsatz des jüdischen Vermögens von December 3, 1938. in Reichsgesetzblatt (RGBL) l.S. 1709) Art. 11, par. 11 (Blau, pp. 54-58) See also Fauck, "Vermögensbeschlagnahme an jüdischen Eigentum vor dem Erlass der VO zum Reichsbürgergesetz," Cutachten des Institutsfür Zeitgeschichte, vol. 11, 1966, pp. 92-125. 48 For the surprising proposals advanced by Fischbock at the meeting with Goring, see Genschel. pp. 180-184. The "trustee" system was introduced in Austria on April 13, 1938, prior to its introduction in Germany, i.e., eight months before the session with Goring following Kristallnacht. See ibid., p. 162. 4 ' At the end of July 1941, Rauter complained to Seyss-Inquart that Fischbock contented himself with transferring Jewish property to "Aryans"; in Rauter's view this property should have provided the finances for the "Final Solution" (De Jong, vol. 5, p. 1019).

THE DECISION FOR THE FINAL SOLUTION PLANNING FOR THE FINAL SOLUTION

remained a very limited enterprise until the beginning of deportations from Holland. 50 Since economic matters fell within Fischbôck's scope of authority, the handling of Jewish affairs was no longer concentrated in the hands of a single organization, i.e., the Security Police, but was spread among various specialized branches of the German administration. Consequently, Wimmer, a friend of Seyss-Inquart who was in charge of administration and justice, retained his prerogatives also in Jewish affairs. This had important implications which, however, lie beyond the scope of this study. Seyss-Inquart's victory, however, was not complete, and he was forced to give in to the SS in various areas, such as the establishment of the ghetto in Amsterdam. Among the enthusiastic supporters of this venture were Generalkommisar F. Schmidt, representative of the NationalSocialist Party in the administration, and Dr. Bôhmcker, SeyssInquart's representative in Amsterdam.51 The leadership of the Jewish Council did everything it could to foil this plan, and it also received the support of the new mayor, a Dutch collaborator, who was appointed to his post following the February strike.52 However, their efforts would have been to no avail had not Rauter himself forcefully opposed the setting up of the ghetto.53 His position in this

50

51

52

53

The Central Office for Emigration was subordinate to the branch of the Security Police in Amsterdam and directives were passed on through a branch of the RSHA's Section IV B4 in The Hague. Bohmcker's letter of April 17, 1941 to Seyss-Inquart indicates that its addressee had supported setting up the ghetto in Amsterdam at the meeting which took place on March 25, 1941. The establishment of the ghetto was meant to achieve two objectives: to humiliate the Jews and to facilitate sealing off the town sections included in the ghetto when the time came. Riod, VuJ, HA Inneres 124. The Joodse Road prepared a comprehensive demographic survey to demonstrate that setting up ghettos entailed dangers also for the non-Jewish population. This survey encompassed the ten most important cities from the Jewish point of view. A. Veffer and J. Brandon, Onderzoek naar de gevolgen van Ghettovorming in Amsterdam, 1941 (typescript). The objections advanced by the mayor of Amsterdam are quoted in Bohmcker's letter (see footnote 48). Already on October 10, 1941, Seyss-Inquart ordered the reexamination of the possibility of establishing a ghetto in Amsterdam, but on November 25 he announced that for the time being this plan was shelved (De Jong, vol. 5, pp. 1030-1031).

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regard was in line with the policy Heydrich had defended in view of operational considerations in the meeting with Goring following Kristallnachf, Heydrich had then asserted that the task of concentrating the Jews did not necessitate the establishment of ghettos.54 It should be mentioned, however, that he pursued a different policy in Eastern Europe, and in 1942 and 1943 in Amsterdam too the Jews were concentrated in special areas, even though they were not marked as such.55 Seyss-Inquart aspired to become the supreme inspector of Jews, but he was also unsuccessful in this, as becomes evident from the affair of the Jewish umbrella organization which was supposed to replace the Jewish Council in Amsterdam. According to a draft of the decree relating to this issue, the new organization was to receive directives from the Central Office for Jewish Affairs to be established for the purpose of supervising the social and cultural life of the Jews as well as directing and promoting their emigration. The proposed set of regulations for this Office specified that its director was to be appointed (and dismissed) by the Reichkommissar, to whom he was to be subordinated.56 Thus, Seyss-Inquart sought to adopt the formal aspect of Rauter's proposal, but, at the same time, to retain control over the whole system — a plan which clashed with Heydrich's intentions. We cannot ascertain the degree to which heads of the Jewish Council were aware of those plans, even though it is clear that at a relatively early stage they were informed about the plan to establish a countrywide organization with legal standing. However, differences of opinion between various German officials delayed for six months Seyss-Inquart's decision concerning the Jewish representative body and its legal standing.57 s

* Documents on the Holocaust, pp. 110-115. There is no contradiction between Heydrich's opposition to setting up ghettos, which he had voiced to Goring, and the directive to establish concentrations of Jews which he issued in an urgent letter of September 21,1939. He persisted in his opposition to the establishment of ghettos in Western, Central and Southern Europe. This was also the view expressed by P.H. Seraphim, expert on Jewish affairs, at the beginning of 1941 (see Friedmann, p. 64). 56 See footnote 8. In the gloss to his proposal Rabi commented that it was an attempt to combine the proposals of Wimmer and Rauter. 57 See text above.

55

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Summer 1941 — the Turning Point The Germans expected that the war with Russia, codenamed "Operation Barbarossa," would follow a course similar to that on the Western Front in spring 1940. And indeed in the first weeks it seemed that the Blitzkrieg would attain its objectives. As early as mid-July, however, it became evident that, despite the occupation of huge areas and the heavy casualties and material losses sustained by the Russians, victory would not be obtained quickly. The Soviet regime did not falter, the Russian army was not defeated, and the population failed to revolt. The war was far from being concluded.58 Its prolongation entailed serious consequences for policy toward the Jews. Mass killings in the east reduced the number of Jews but did not satisfy Hitler's demand to cleanse Europe of Jews. At the same time, the war made possible the employment of cruel methods which even the Germans found it difficult to resort to in times of peace. Moreover, the expulsion of Jews to overseas countries was no longer possible, since peace with the Western powers was becoming ever more remote as the war continued. Thus the Jews had to be liquidated if Hitler's orders were to be executed. This development seems to have dampened Heydrich's enthusiasm to set up an enterprise in Amsterdam which could serve as a model for similar ventures in other countries. In contrast, the secret circular distributed in late August by Security Police commissioner Harster contained the idea of total extermination. This circular provided a new excuse for a quarrel over the division of power between Seyys-Inquart and the SS.59 Harster informed his

ss

59

The rapid German advance came to a halt in mid-July 1941, and the German Command began to worry over the Russian resistance. See A. Clarck, Barbarossa, Penguin Books, 1966, ch. 4: "The First Crisis," pp. 105-126; A. Werth, Russia at War, London, 1965, ch. 4: "Smolensk, the First Check to the Blitzkrieg," pp. 169-175; H.A. Jacobsen, 1939-J945, ¡Der zweite Weltkrieg in Chronik und Dokumenten, Darmstadt, 1959, pp. 227-230. The full text of this memorandum (of August 25, 1941): Das Schwurgericht bei dem Landesgericht Mimchen, II 12 KS 1/66, Urteil in dem Strafverfahren gegen Dr. Wilhelm Harster etc., pp. 42 ff.; Riod, HSSuPF a. According to this memorandum, "die Zentralstelle fiir ßidische Auswanderung ist zuständig für die

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subordinates about the establishment of a special department for Jewish affairs (Sonderreferat J) under his direct control and headed by Rajakowitsch. This department, he said, was designed to "wage war against Jewry as a whole, war whose aim is to solve finally the Jewish question by uprooting (Aussiedlung) all Jews." The purpose of its establishment was to expand the powers of the Security Police to regulate the life of the Jews. As part of its activities the department was supposed to grant emigration permits and to fix policy for the Central Office (Zentralstelle), as well as to collect Jewish affairs (Sonderreferat J) under his direct control and headed Office "will be responsible for transfer of Jews to transit camps prior to their deportation from Holland." 6 0 It added that the Central Office would be expanded and no other body would be empowered to issue orders to the Jewish Council. It was as though all the agreements reached by Seyss-Inquart in the May 19 meeting had never existed. According to the circular, Jewish matters were now completely in the hands of Harster and his subordinates. Seyss-Inquart did not resign himself to such a serious blow delivered by the SS to his authority and position. On September 25 he met with Hitler who had always esteemed him greatly. Afterwards he reported that the Fiihrer had expressed his satisfaction with the measures taken against Dutch Jews, which had resulted in their economic and social segregation from the rest of the Dutch population. 61 Reassured by this meeting, Seyss-Inquart ordered Bohmcker to prepare a detailed memorandum on the situation of Dutch Jews, which constitutes a kind of precis of all the steps taken against the Jews and their implications for the Dutch economy. Bohmcker also added recommendations for the completion of the job. 62 The memorandum provided the focus of

60

" 62

Durchschleusung von Juden als Voraitr.massnahme fur die kommende Aussiedlung unddie technische Behandlung von Ausv.anderungsantragen." By the term "Durchschleusung" Harster probably meant the transfer of Jews from their places of residence to transit camps (Westerbork, Vught) from which they were to be dispatched beyond the Dutch border (Aussiedlung). See De Jong, vol. 5, p. 1027. Die Erfassung der Juden in den Niederlanden, October 2, 1941, Riod, VuJ HA Inneres 122 ad.

THE DECISION FOR THE FINAL SOLUTION PLANNING FOR THE FINAL SOLUTION

the meeting called by Seyss-Inquart, to which he invited all the Generalkommissars or their representatives. At this meeting he also sought to define the authority of various bodies involved and to take decisions on matters of principle and practice concerning controversial issues.63 Here again mutual concessions were made. The idea of establishing a countrywide Jewish organization was shelved: No Jewish organization with legal standing shall be established. The Amsterdam Judenrat will also be responsible for all Dutch Jews. Though the Judenrat, primarily, is to relay German directives to the Jews, the Security Police can nevertheless choose persons to pass on its directives to the Jews. The commissioner (i.e., the Reichkommissar's representative in Amsterdam) is to be the political deputy of the Reichkommissar. The Security Police and the Office for Jewish Emigration are obliged to reach an agreement with the commissioner concerning all the basic problems and to coordinate their spheres of activity. Later on a decision will be taken, as to who will inform the Jews of the decisions: the police alone or both the police and the commissioner. Up to now the police and the commissioner have done this jointly and quite successfully.

Seyss-Inquart also summarily rejected the idea of extending the authority of the Central Office as proposed in the circular distributed by Harster. The Security Police were to carry out all police measures against the Jews, whereas the Central Office for Jewish Emigration would deal only with preparing plans for emigration of the Jews. Ever since deportations to the east were referred to as "emigration" (in October 1941 all those attending the meeting with Seyss-Inquart were aware of this), the powers of the Central Office in all matters concerning Jews had been expanded considerably. At this stage the RSHA took a decision which proves conclusively that Heydrich and his colleagues had given up the idea of establishing a model emigration office in Amsterdam: a branch of Section IV B4, directly answerable to Eichmann (and, of course, to Harster), was set up in The Hague, while the Central Office for Jewish Emigration

"

Besprechung bei dem Reichskommissar, 8 Oktober 1941.

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THE "FINAL SOLUTION' JOSEPH MICHMAN

was subordinated directly to the commissioner of the Security Police in Amsterdam, Willy Lages. The director of the Central Office was transferred from his post and a lower-ranking officer appointed in his place. Rajakowitsch remained under Harster's command in The Hague and was still involved in Jewish issues, particularly economic matters. 64 The Central Office, which had provided leverage for stepping up Jewish emigration, became a purely executive branch in the plan for the extermination of the Jews. At the end of October, the Jewish Council was informed that from now on it would be responsible for all Dutch Jews; the Jewish Coordinating Committee was disbanded. The Jewish Council did not receive the legal recognition it strove to obtain and which SeyssInquart had been prepared to grant to a Jewish representative body as early as May. 65 Those decisions, which had been long overdue ever since the Jewish Council and the Jewish Coordinating Committee were existing side by side, i.e., since February 1941, were taken so late not because of lack of interest, but on account of the internal conflict between various bodies within the German administration. Even then, however, not all the problems were solved. At the end of November, Seyss-Inquart informed Wimmer, Generalkommissar for Administration and Justice, about certain changes in the division of powers relating to Jewish matters; this new arrangement could be seen as a partial victory for Rauter. 66 "The Commissioner for Amsterdam," Seyss-Inquart wrote, "will be entrusted with implementation of all the measures proposed by the general director, whereas the director of the Amsterdam branch of the Security Police and the director of the Central Office (answerable to the former) will be responsible for [taking] other steps." He went on to define more precisely the powers of those two bodies and of the Jewish Council which was to serve as conduit for German orders and directives to the Jews.

M 65 66

About the' "Sonderreferai J" and its director, see Sijes, pp. 71-88. See my paper on this subject (footnote 1). Zur Behandlung der Judenfrage (25-11-1941), Riod, VuJ, HA Inneres 122 A.

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This was the situation de facto, but in practice the balance shifted increasingly in favor of the Security Police. Although Rajakowitsch, the economics expert of the SS, was appointed a member of the board of directors in the company managing Jewish property ( W R A ) 6 7 and also occupied some secondary posts, he did not exercise decisive influence on the course of events. Economic matters remained under the exclusive control of Fischböck. Generalkommissar Wimmer also retained his powers (including the questions of race and the legal standing of those of mixed marriages and their offspring) within the framework of his office until the end. 68 As the number of edicts and prohibitions issued against the Jews increased, the latter were forced to maintain more frequent contacts with the German police. In contrast, since June 1942 the activities of Böhmcker, Seyss-Inquart's representative in Amsterdam, declined considerably for two reasons: Böhmcker, a fanatical anti-Semite, returned to Germany, and at the time the deportations from Holland conducted by the German police began. Developments in 1942, however, transcend the scope of this paper.

Conclusions The events in Holland enabled us to gain a better understanding of German Jewish policy in this critical period. First of all, we can learn about Hitler's involvement in the Jewish issue, not only as far as general guidelines were concerned but also in the implementation of policy guidelines in specific places such as Holland. Thus he personally endorsed the steps taken by Seyss-Inquart. Although this endorsement can be viewed as an instance of Hitler backing his personal representative in the latter's disagreement with the SS,

®7 Vermögensverwaltung und Rechtsanstalt (the corporation set up to handle property of the Jews). 68 The fact that Wimmer retained the power to establish racial origin (who is not a Jew) was of great advantage to the Jews, since the officials of the department involved, headed by the lawyer Calmeyer, were anti-Nazis and did everything they could to save Jews. Wimmer himself was an anti-Semite par excellence but because of his rivalry with Rauter he protected his men. This, however, was an exceptional phenomenon in the entire system in the Netherlands.

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THE "FINAL SOLUTIONJOSEPH M I C H M A N

this was not the case in the spring of 1941. At that time the heads of the German administration in Holland were concerned about the thousands of Jews who had been dismissed from their jobs or had lost their businesses and a large part of their financial assets. In order to remove those unemployed Jews from the streets, a proposal was advanced to set up labor camps for them near the border with Germany and to employ them in various occupations and in forced labor.69 In a letter sent on July 16 to the Jewish Council, Bohmcker requested the assembly of fifty-seven people who were to be the first to leave for the labor camp. In the course of discussions on drawing up a detailed plan, a meeting took place on August 20, 1941 in Generalkommissar Schmidt's office, in which the following was said: "According to the Generalkommissar''% announcement, the Fiihrer has cancelled the forced labor plan. He is not seeking to train the Jews but to uproot them (Aussiedlung)" (emphasis mine, J.M.). It follows, then, that a relatively modest plan was submitted to Hitler for his approval at the time when he, the supreme commander, was locked in a titanic struggle with the Russian enemy. This forced labor plan is an example of a general phenomenon. Had not a written testimony bearing on this subject accidentally turned up after the war, nobody would have surmised that Hitler devoted his attention to such a minor issue, which was not even the subject of controversy among the various German institutions involved. It leads us to conclude that lack of written evidence does not constitute proof of Hitler's non-involvement in a certain decision. On the contrary, in many cases Hitler took important decisions affecting the Jews without leaving any written evidence. Examples abound: Einstazgruppen operations,70 the introduction of "

About this whole affair, see De Jong, vol. 5, pp. 1020-1023. The heads of the Joodse Raad maintained that their maneuvers succeeded in foiling this plan and that thanks to them the deportations were delayed for another year. Presser does not reject this statement outright (see Presser, vol. 1, p. 180), but it is quite clear that there are no grounds for it. The first allusions to the establishment of the Einsatzgruppen are to be found in a note written by Jodl on March 23 referring to the Kommissarbefehl. See Hohne, p. 40, and also a document issued by the Supreme Military Command on March 13, 1941, which deals with arrangements relating to Operation Barbarossa. See Krausnick, pp. 166-169. In both cases the name is not mentioned and we cannot

THE DECISION FOR THE FINAL SOLUTION PLANNING FOR THE FINAL SOLUTION

yellow badge in Germany,71 and the concentration of all Jewish matters in the hands of Goring.72 There is no doubt that Goring's letters to Heydrich in January 1939 and June 1941 were also written with Hitler's knowledge, since without his approval Goring could not have assigned such a mission to an official who was not his subordinate. In the Third Reich Hitler's directive was law, and the oath sworn to him by his subjects was binding on them even if no written instructions were provided.73 Nobody dared to act without Hitler's approval in the area which for the Fiihrer was one the war goals. He issued major orders orally and despite the lack of written evidence of his directives regarding the Jews, they can be traced back to him. As I have mentioned earlier, Seyss-Inquart and his friends battled fiercely with the SS over the control of Jewish affairs. Power disputes are ubiquitous in every regime, all the more so at the time of rapid expansion and the occupation of vast areas, as was the case with the Third Reich. Some scholars maintain that because of those disputes the Germans failed to evolve a uniform and consistent policy toward the Jews and instead undertook various

71

72

73

learn anything from them about the decision. The negotiations between Heydrich and the Wehrmacht on April 4 make things clear, but here the operational echelon was involved. All the aforementioned documents pertain to administrative matters alone. On August 29, 1941, Eichmann announced via the telephone to Rademacher that Hitler had approved the special marking of German Jews, see Browning, p. 55. The police decree of September 1, however, does not contain any evidence of Hitler's involvement. See Blau, p. 84. Documents on the Holocaust, p. 108. Goring did, in fact, receive a letter from Bormann, but on that day Hitler gave him additional orders in a telephone conversation. It should be borne in mind that the oath of loyalty to the Fiihrer, as phrased by Hitler himself following the death of Hindenburg, took precedence over the law and morality in the Third Reich. For the text of this oath, its introduction and its meaning for soldiers and officials, see A. Bullock, Hitler, a Study in Tyranny, London, 1971 (henceforth: Bullock), p. 309; Bracher, pp. 305-306; John Toland, Adolf Hitler, New York, 1977, p. 488. About the refusal of a judge to swear this oath, see Gerhard Fieberg, Justiz im nationalsozialistischen Deutschland, Koln, 1984, p. 68. Cf. the outburst of Eichmann in his pre-trial investigation (Jochen von Lang, Das Eichmam-Protokol, Frankfurt/Berlin/Vienna, 1982, p. 180).

294

THE "FINAL SOLUTION' JOSEPH MICHMAN

uncoordinated local initiatives. The developments in Holland, however, refute the assumption that a low-ranking official could act on his own without following general policy. Both Seyss-Inquart and the SS accepted without reservations the policy formulated in Berlin. Differences of opinion emerged on the method of implementation alone, and only when no specific instructions had been issued. Furthermore, those disputes cannot be portrayed as quarrels between hard- and soft-liners. Fischbock's methods of plundering the Jews were more sophisticated and effective than the emigration fund of the SS, and in the final analysis the Reich was the chief beneficiary of his victory which raked in more money and assets. Power disputes did not crack the iron discipline which was upheld until the collapse of the Reich. In point of fact, bodies on many levels of the Reich hierarchy competed for more efficient execution of the policy outlined by the leadership. This policy was being developed concurrently with the preparations for Operation Barbarossa, and, consequently, the decisions taken at that time were a matter of principle and not tactics. As aforementioned, in April 1941 Heydrich was preoccupied with setting up the Central Office for Jewish Emigration which would set an example for other European countries. 74 At the same time, however, he was busy preparing the Einsatzgruppen for action in the territories to be occupied in Russia, in line with the authorization received by Himmler in March. Thus, Heydrich worked simultaneously on two ways of executing the Final Solution: mass murder and the incentive for emigration. Many historians who do not acknowledge emigration as part and parcel of the General or Final Solution are faced with insoluble contradictions. Scholars who presuppose that the term "Final Solution" denoted extermination only, are forced to fix the date of the decision on this issue in the fall of 1941 and, consequently, can explain neither the usage of this term as early as the beginning of 1941 nor the detailed preparations for the Einsatzgruppen operations. According to this view, the timing of the

74

See above his letter of April 18, 1941.

THE DECISION FOR THE FINAL SOLUTION PLANNING FOR THE FINAL SOLUTION

implementation was very close to that of taking the decision in the fall of 1941, which is implausible. On the other hand, those taking the view that the Final Solution entailed total extermination and was decided upon at the beginning of 1941,75 have no option but to regard the encouragement of emigration as an artifice aimed at deceiving the Jews. This, in turn, leaves unexplained the struggle between various German bodies over the control of the emigration fund. We must, therefore, regard the term "Final Solution" as implying an umbrella plan providing for both extermination and emigration. This conclusion is further validated by Himmler's approach to the question of Jewish emigration. For practical purposes, Himmler was in charge of implementing the Final Solution, especially after the murder of Heydrich and after Goring stopped handling Jewish affairs. And indeed, not only was Heydrich still busy promoting Jewish emigration at the beginning of 1941, but SS functionaries themselves were for some time involved in exploring the possibilities of emigration: Dietrich Wisliceny in Slovakia and Hungary, and Kurt Becher in Hungary. Himmler's view did not stem from personal feelings of compassion for the Jews but from his adherence to the original conception of the Final Solution which, as aforementioned, included the option of emigration even if much limited in scope. The fact that Becher informed Rudolf Kästner that Himmler had given his consent to the emigration proposal, provided the Jews would be transferred to countries outside Europe (August 2, 1944), should be viewed in this context; here Himmler repeated verbatim Hitler's position.76 Himmler's approval of the emigration plan or its alternative should not be seen as a change of or deviation from policy adopted from the outset. All we know about Himmler's personality, his pursuit of set objectives and his unbounded devotion to Hitler until the last months of the war, rules 75 76

According to De Jong, vol. 5, pp. 1014-1015. Himmler repeated to Becher the precise and fixed formula of the Final Solution: "Seine [Himmler's] einzige Bedingung bestünde darin, dass die Juden nicht in Europa bleiben da der Reichsführer nicht wünsche, dass nach dem Krieg auch nur ein einziger Jude in Europa existiert" (Der Kastner Bericht, Munich, 1961, p. 157).

296

THE "FINAL SOLUTION" JOSEPH M I C H M A N

out the possibility of his straying from the declared policy of the Ftihrer on so central a question, or of his complicity in such deviation from the policy which was upheld almost till the last months, even weeks, of the Third Reich.77 The argument that Himmler sought to prepare an alibi for himself in case Germany was defeated is unacceptable both in view of the negotiations with Brandt and Kastner in the spring of 1944 and certainly in view of the contacts that Wisliceny established with the Working Group in Slovakia in the summer of 1942. Exchanging Jews for goods and money was not a new idea, as this type of blackmail had been introduced and perfected in the late 1930s.78 Although an alternative plan, providing for the exchange of Jews for German nationals in Palestine, did not involve money, in this case too, Jews were to be removed from European soil in exchange for payment acceptable to the Germans. This alternative scheme began to take shape at the end of 1942 and the beginning of 1943,79 and Himmler was the one to order the establishment of a special camp inside Germany (Bergen-Belsen) for this purpose.80 It is evident that this 77

78 79

Kersten, who knew Himmler well, regarded him as a person incapable of working unless subordinated to somebody else, in which case he would execute his superior's order without questioning. See J. Kessel, Les Mains du Miracle, Paris, 1960. In his memoirs General Guderian maintains that as late as March 21,1945 Himmler refused to act against Hitler because he was scared of him (see H. Guderian, Erinnerungen eines Soldaien, Heidelberg, 1951, p. 387). Goebbels, who was very close to Hitler during the Fiihrer's last days, was praising Himmler as late as March 7, 1945, and only from March 11 on, after it became clear that Hitler had failed in the war, did his close associates start to criticize their leader. See J. Goebbels, Final Entries, 1945, New York, 1978, pp. 87-89, 126. In any event, it appears that Himmler's unquestioning loyalty to Hitler did not falter before February 1945 when Schellenberg sought to prevail upon him to dissociate himself from the Fuhrer. See Bullock, pp. 790-791, and also H.R. Trevor Roper, The Last Days of Hitler, New York, 1947, pp. 25, 95. See footnote 5. Mrs. van Tijn reported of this plan for the first time at the Central Commission (session of the heads of departments on November 2, 1942). At that time only registration of children whose parents resided in Palestine and were nationals of that country was discussed. She didn't expect much; at the session on January 22, 1943, 170 persons (not belonging to the age category between 16 and 60) were registered. On March 5, a number of certificates arrived (Riod, JR lc.). Mrs. van Tijn feared that the number of applications would increase, which would not have been to the Germans' liking, but it turned out that the Germans did not

THE DECISION FOR THE FINAL SOLUTION P L A N N I N G FOR T H E F I N A L S O L U T I O N

plan did not replace extermination which was proceeding apace and being intensified at that time. It does, however, confirm that Himmler was prepared to permit the emigration of Jews, not only individually, but also in groups. Moreover, the Jews in question were designated by the RSHA for extermination since they were either nationals of countries under German occupation or stateless persons. Astonishingly, out of fourteen lists of would-be immigrants to Palestine (2,817 persons) forming part of the alternative plan, only the first two (231 persons) included Jews to whom the British Government had issued immigration certificates.81 As far as the remaining Jews were concerned, the Germans were contented with announcements of registration issued by the Jewish Agency; those announcements lacked any official or practical impact, since the British Government did not issue certificates for the Jews in question neither during the war nor afterwards. However, recipients of the Jewish Agency announcements were protected and not sent to extermination camps, except for one shipment dispatched when the protection was temporarily abolished.82 This affair demonstrates Himmler's willingness to get rid of Jews and to facilitate their emigration to countries outside Europe in exchange for payment acceptable to the

80 81

82

hinder the correspondence with the Office of the Jewish Agency in Geneva conducted via the Red Cross. E. Kolb, Bergen-Belsen, Hannover, 1962, pp. 33-34. Ruth Zariz, "Rescuing the Dutch Jews by Means of Certificates" (in Hebrew), Moreshet, no. 23, 1974, p. 150. On July 20, 1943 some 1,500 would-be emigrants (but not certificate-holders) were shipped to Sobibor, because Department IV B 4 had annulled their immunity ("Sperre"). Afterwards, however, holders of "Palestinian papers" who had not been included in the transport (such as the present author) or those who arrived at Westerbork later, were again offered protection. The Germans knew full well that the permits issued by the Jewish Agency did not entitle their holders to a certificate as long as the British Government kept witholding them. Neither were the permit-holders foreign nationals: despite the fact that all of them were either Dutch nationals or stateless persons (formerly German nationals), 1,300 were transferred from Westerbork to Bergen-Belsen and not to extermination camps, while some (222 persons) were released from Bergen-Belsen and traveled to Palestine (except those who resided in the Biberach camp under very good conditions).

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THE "FINAL SOLUTION" JOSEPH M I C H M A N

Germans. It also shows that Himmler did not observe strictly the ban on Jews leaving territories occupied by the Reich, as announced by Heydrich at Wannsee Conference.83 The significance of the Wannsee Conference did not lie in its declaration about extermination of the Jews — this had been decided one year earlier—but in backing out of the emigration plan as part of the Final Solution. Furthermore, there was no need for mass emigration owing to the great advances in methods of mass killing, which ensured that the job would be completed within reasonably short time84 and solved operational and psychological problems besetting the activities of the Einsatzgruppen. Understanding of the Reich's treatment of the Jews necessitates making proper distinctions between ideology and practice, the outlining of policy and its application and — within the process of application itself — between planning and execution.85 Each one of those processes was time consuming, but there is no doubt that there is a direct and unmistakable connection between ideology and the definition of policy, various designations of which only serve to

84

15

It goes without saying that those rescued in this way regarded this as a miracle. It should be understood that members of the "Working Group" in Slovakia believed that they were about to effect a decisive change in German policy (see L. Rotkirchen, "The Role of the "zech and Slovak Jewish Leadership in the Field Rescue Work." in Rescue Attempts During the Holocaust, Jerusalem, 1977, p. 427). According to one view, this was a ploy used by Himmler who sought to create an alibi for himself and to conduct an independent policy. Our regard for those who went to great lengths to get the Jews out of hell should not obscure the fact that without the consent of the German authorities, who adhered to the original policy, all those rescue attempts had no chance of success. About setting up the concentration camp, see Hilberg, pp. 564-567. According to his calculations, construction of the camp installations took about six months. It should be borne in mind, however, that Himmler's announcement to Höss in summer 1941 that Auschwitz would become a concentration camp was preceded by deliberations concerning alternative plans and solutions to intricate logistical problems. Even in the totalitarian Nazi regime such deliberations could last many weeks. This means that the planning began in spring 1941. U. Adam, who belittled this policy, failed in this; "abgesehen von dem nichtssagendem Hinweis auf die endgültige Lösung der Judenfrage" (Adam, p. 307).

THE DECISION FOR THE FINAL SOLUTION PLANNING FOR THE FINAL SOLUTION

underline the unity of meaning: final purpose, general solution, total solution, or final solution.86 Hitler proclaimed this policy, which he had been conceiving for quite some time,87 when he began to realize the central idea of his geopolitical view, i.e., conquest of Lebensraum for the German nation. This goal could be achieved only by Germany waging war against enemies ruling over territories belonging to it by nature. But in Hitler's view no victory over those enemies would be complete without vanquishing the arch-enemy standing behind all others, the warmonger endangering all of Europe and particularly Germany — the Jew. The removal of Jews from European soil was an intricate, complex and formidable operation. In the beginning the Final Solution comprised a number of options: forced labor, starvation, uprooting and killing as well as emigration. Only when gas proved its effectiveness did it replace almost completely all other methods. This undertaking, the awesome scale of which surpassed everything known to mankind and which was carried out with astonishing effectiveness and success, required, like any other military operation, detailed and long-term planning.88 Hitler, who assumed the position of supreme commander of his army and who attended to small details of battles on the war front, also took command of the implementation of the Final Solution which until his last day he regarded as more important than victory on the battlefield. He also attended to the smallest details of the Jewish question, as I have tried to demonstrate. Consequently, differences of opinion and power struggles between various bodies and functionaries acting on his orders could affect the implementation aspect only, and to a very limited extent at that. Hitler's policy was carried out by many organizations, especially the SS and the Security Police whose

86

" "

Endlösung, endgültige Lösung, Gesammtlösung, Endziel. This is how one should interpret Hitler's statement that the plans concerning Jews would remain on paper for a long time. (Monologe, p. 107). Broszat maintains, correctly in my view, that the Final Solution was "Termus technicus einer Generalstabsmässig geplanten und perfekt organisierten geheimen Operation" (Der Staat Hitlers, p. 346). Not unlike military plans, this plan too required considerable time for preparations.

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THE "FINAL SOLUTION" JOSEPH MICHMAN

loyalty remained firm and unshaken until the end of the war. Everything Himmler did in his capacity as commander of the SS was done with the Fiihrer's knowledge; he surely did not act against Hitler's will when introducing or approving various methods and experiments aimed at achieving the objective.

THE DECISION FOR THE FINAL SOLUTION

From Anti-Semitism to Extermination: A Historiographical

Study of

Nazi

Policies Toward the Jews and an Essay in

Interpretation*

Saul Friedlander

VER THE PAST DECADES, the volume o f recorded history

dealing with the extermination of the Jews of Europe has reached considerable proportions. This applies equally to the history of the roots of Nazi anti-Semitism and its development, of Nazi policies toward the Jews, of the "Final Solution" as such, or the attitudes and reactions of German society, the Neutrals or the Allies during the war, of the Church, of Western society in general, and also of the victims, the Jews, as they faced the growing peril and the ultimate catastrophe. Studies and publications have multiplied, historical approaches have evolved and

* I wish to thank my friends and colleagues Yehuda Bauer, Dov Kulka, Hans Mommsen, Dina Porath and Aharon Weiss for their help at various stages of the preparation of this paper. For earlier presentations of some of the issues dealt with in this paper, see Saul Friedlander, "Some Aspects of the Historical Significance of the Holocaust," Jerusalem Quarterly, No. 1, fall 1976; " D e l'Antisémitisme à l'Extermination: Esquissé Historiographique," Le débat. No. 21, Septembre 1982; for Part III, see also my " I n t r o d u c t i o n " to Gerald i.. Fleming, Hitler and the Final Solution, Berkeley, 1984.

302

THE "FINAL SOLUTION' SAUL FRIEDLÁNDER

changed with time.1 Today, in fact, one can perceive clearly distinct ways of considering these issues — one could almost speak of different schools of thought. As far as Nazi anti-Semitism and the policies of the Third Reich toward the Jews are concerned — the only aspect of the problem which will be considered here — any global evaluation of the historical studies published since the end of the war cannot but aim at answering one central question. Do these studies make it possible to insert the events under consideration into the framework of a global and coherent historical explanation, or do they provide only very fragmentary insights, which do not lend themselves to a significant synthesis and, ultimately, to an overall understanding? In other words, does what Isaac Deutscher wrote some 15 years ago still apply today? For the historian w h o a t t e m p t s t o u n d e r s t a n d the holocaust of the J e w s , the m o s t i m p o r t a n t obstacle is the absolutely unique character of this c a t a s t r o p h e . It is not only a m a t t e r of time and of historical perspective. I d o u b t t h a t in a thousand years people will b e t t e r understand Hitler, A u s c h w i t z , M a j d a n e k and T r e b l i n k a than w e do today. W i l l they h a v e a b e t t e r historical perspective? It m a y be, on the c o n t r a r y , that posterity will understand all that even less than w e do. 2 1

Among the historiographical studies dealing with what is now commonly called the "Holocaust," let us mention, among others: Léon Poliakov, "Changing Views in Holocaust Research," Yad Vashem Bulletin, No. 20, April 1967; Leni Yahil, " T h e Holocaust in Jewish Historiography," Yad Vashem Studies, Vol. VII, 1968; Philip Friedman, " T h e Study of the History of the Holocaust and its Problems" (in Hebrew), in Israel Guttman and Livia Rothkirchen (eds.), Shoat Yehudei Europa, Jerusalem, 1973; Shaul Esh, "Problems of the Study of the Holocaust" (in Hebrew), lyounim Beheker Hashoa Ve Yahadut Zmanenu, Jerusalem, 1973; Yehuda Bauer, "Trends in Holocaust Research," Yad Vashem Studies, Vol. XII, 1977; Konrad Kwiet, " Z u r historiographischen Behandlung der Judenverfolgung im Dritten Reich," Militargeschichtliche Mitteilungen, Vol. 27, 1980/B1; Lucy S. Dawidowicz, The Holocaust and the Historians, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, 198i; O t t o Dov Kulka, "Die Deutsche Geschichtsschreibung über den Nationalsozialismus und die "Endlosung, Historische Zeitschrift, Vol. 239, 1984.

2

Isaac Deutscher, The Non-Jewish Jew and Other Essays, Oxford University Press, London, 1968, p. 163.

THE DECISION FOR THE FINAL SOLUTION FROM ANTI-SEMITISM T O EXTERMINATION

Or should we accept instead the interpretation given some years ago by Raymond Aron? As for the genocide...I w o u l d say that its a p p a r e n t irrationality results f r o m a false perspective. Hitler h a d proclaimed m a n y times, particularly on the first day of the w a r , that the J e w s would not survive a w a r w h i c h they, a c c o r d i n g to him, had initiated.... If one is p r e p a r e d to admit that the liquidation of the J e w s , the J e w i s h poison, the c o r r u p t i n g blood, was H i t l e r ' s p r i m a r y aim, the industrial organization of death becomes rational as a means t o w a r d this end, genocide. Instrumental rationality is a m o r a l by its v e r y nature, or morally neutral. O n c e the genocide had been established as the aim, the materials, the m e n , and mostly the means of t r a n s p o r t a t i o n needed for this enterprise had to be d i v e r t e d f r o m the logistics of the a r m e d forces. 3

These two opposing positions are the implicit foundation of the historiography of our subject. But, insofar as the more specific evaluation of this historiography is concerned, one can consider it at two different levels of analysis: that of the global interpretations of Nazism, and that of the more limited but no less controversial interpretation of the anti-Jewish measures taken by the Nazis, considered from the viewpoint of their concrete evolution and internal dynamics. We shall discuss the issues of the global level in brief, and approach the controversies over the origins and development of concrete policies in somewhat greater detail.

I. Anti-Semitism

in the Global Interpretations of

Nazism

At the level of global interpretations of Nazism, one can distinguish between three major approaches: explanations drawn mostly from German history; those using the concept of "fascism"; and those which consider National Socialism as a facet of 3

Raymond Aron, "Existe-t-il un mystère Nazi?" Commentaire, No. 7, 1979, p. 349.

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THE "FINAL SOLUTION" SAUL FRIEDLÄNDER

"totalitarianism." 4 Within each of these approaches we find more or less systematic attempts to integrate Nazi anti-Semitism into the general explanatory framework. W e shall briefly mention some of these attempts. The first of these approaches, that which explains Nazism as being mainly the result of a specific German national evolution beginning, for most historians, in the nineteenth century, sometimes places German anti-Semitism at the very core of its interpretation (some of these interpretations, in fact, take German anti-Semitism, German racial or "völkisch" thinking, as a Starting point of what is either an explicit or an implicit interpretation of the roots of National Socialism). 5 That Nazi anti-Semitism cannot be explained without this national background goes almost without saying. However, the difficulty lies in assessing the significance of those roots, the relative importance of the völkisch ideology, and the place of anti-Semitic themes and attitudes within German society, be it during the Wilhelminian period or under the Weimar Republic. Only such an assessment, linked to the various studies of German 4

5

In using these three broad distinctions, w e follow Wolfgang Sauer, "National Socialism: Totalitarianism or Fascism?" American Historical Review, December 1967, pp. 404 ff. See also Andreas Hillgruber, Endlich genug über Nationalsozialismus und Zweiter Weltkrieg? Düsseldorf, 1982, pp. 24 ff. This obviously applies to studies concentrating essentially on anti-Semitism or racial and völkisch thinking, such as: Paul Massing, Rehearsal for Destruction, N e w York, 1949; Eva G. Reichmann, Hostages of Civilisation, London, 1950; Fritz Stern, The Politics of Cultural Despair, Berkeley, 1961; George L. Mosse, The Crisis of German Ideology, N e w York, 1964; Peter G.-J. Pulzer, The Rise of Political Antisemitism in Germany and Austria, N e w York, 1964; Leon L. Poliakov, Histoire de l'Antise'mitisme, T o m e III: De Voltaire a Wagner, Paris, 1968. O n the other hand, some of the major postwar historical studies dealing with the German roots of Nazism minimize or completely disregard the place of anti-Semitism within that past. Cf. chiefly Friedrich Meinecke, Die deutsche Katastrophe, Zürich, 1946; Gerhard Ritter, Europa und die deutsche Frage, Munich, 1948; Hans Rothfels, The German Opposition to Hitler, Chicago, 1962; Hans Kohn, The Mind of Germany, N e w York, 1960. O n this issue, see Lucy S. Dawidowicz, op. cit., pp. 60-67; Konrad Kwiet, " Z u r historiographischen Behandlung...," loc. cit., pp. 149 ff.

THE DECISION FOR THE FINAL SOLUTION FROM ANTI-SEMITISM T O EXTERMINATION

public opinion and the Jews under the Third Reich, would allow us to understand the possible interaction between the Nazi drive against the Jews and German society. The roots of Hitler's own ideology are essential in an interpretation of Nazi policies. However, an evaluation of the explicit or implicit support given to his policies concerning the Jews, at various levels of the population, is another aspect necessary for the interpretation, one directly linked to the question of the national roots of anti-Semitism and their relative importance. The available studies on this crucial matter may lead to quite different conclusions. First of all, in assessing the importance of German antiSemitism at the end of the nineteenth century and up to World War I, one has to take into account recent studies on France which reveal very similar themes, attitudes and initiatives of various anti-Jewish groups.6 This implies having to look for a specific German evolution during the war years and the Weimar Republic; but the precise importance of the diffusion of antiSemitism in German society during this period remains unclear. We don't have an overall systematic study of the subject. The many studies dealing with aspects of the issue do not provide an entirely coherent picture. We know, for instance, that the German anti-Semitic parties disappeared on the eve of the war, 7 and that anti-Semitic themes decreased at the outset of the hostilities. We are also aware of the subsequently sharp increase in anti-Jewish agitation between 1916 and 1924.8 The signifi6

7

8

Cf. Zeev Sternhell, La Droite révolutionnaire 1885-1914: les origines françaises du fascisme, Paris, 1978; see also, by the same author, Ni Droite ni Gauche: l'idéologie fasciste en France, Paris, 1983. Richard S. Levy, The Downfall of the Antisemitic Political Parties in Imperial Germany, N e w Haven, 1975. Egmont Zechlin, Die Deutsche Politik und dieJuden im Ersten Weltkrieg, Göttingen, 1969; Saul Friedländer, " D i e politischen Veränderungen der Kriegszeit und ihre Auswirkungen auf die Judenfrage, " and W e r n e r Jochman, "Die Ausbreitung des Antisemitismus," in W e r n e r E. Mosse (hrg), Deutsches Judentum in Krieg und Revolution 1916-1923, Tübingen, 1971. T h e contradictory aspects of

306

THE "FINAL SOLUTION" SAUL FRIEDLANDER

cance of anti-Semitism during the decisive period of the early 1930s is less than clear. According to William Sheridan Allen's study of the rise of Nazism in a small town near Hanover, it played only a minor role, 9 but it seems more significant in other regions. 10 Regional differences appear to be an important element of the interpretation, 11 as we shall notice also when we deal with public opinion and the Jews under the Third Reich. 12 One conclusion at least seems plausible from the information that has been gathered about German anti-Semitism prior to 1933: extreme racial anti-Semitism in its Austrian or German garb certainly fed Hitler's ideology and that of the "true believers" within the NSDAP, 13 but it offered latent rather than active support to the policies against the Jews, which unfolded from 1933 on, as far as its prevalence among the general population is concerned. In fact, as we shall see, for some historians there isn't even a necessary link between Hitler's ideology and the unfolding of the anti-Jewish policies of the Nazis to their ultimate end. Acceptance of this view would exclude the ideological roots of Nazism as an explanation for the development of Nazi policies toward the Jews. Some of the studies which minimize the role of the national ideological background tend to stress the importance of traditional German anti-Semitism during the first t w o decades of the century have been well presented in Donald Niewyk, TheJews in Weimar Germany, Baton Rouge, 1980, and in the first chapter of Sarah Gordon's Hitler, Germans and the "Jewish Question," Princeton, 1984. ' William Sheridan Allen, The Nazi Seizure of Power: the Experience of a Single German Town 1930-1935, London, 1966 (see for instance p. 77). 10 In Lower Saxony, for instance. Cf. Jeremy Noakes, The Nazi Party in Lower Saxony 192i-1933, London, 1971. " This is also the conclusion reached in Richard F. Hamilton, Who Voted for Hitler?, Princeton, 1982, pp. 606-607. 12 See infra, p. 33. 13 Peter Merkl's analysis of the main ideological tenets of the SAand the SSin the 1920s (based on the personal files collected by Theodor Abel) shows that anti-Semitism ranks fourth in terms of importance, being of prime importance to 10.7% of the members only (14.9% within the rank and file of the party). Cf. Peter Merkl, The Making of a Stormtrooper, Princeton, 1980, p. 222.

THE DECISION FOR THE FINAL SOLUTION FROM ANTI-SEMITISM T O E X T E R M I N A T I O N

social structures (the bureaucracy, the army, the judiciary) in the development of Nazi policies, but the function of the traditional element in the evolution of the anti-Jewish policies is not always clearly explained. 14 All in all, few of the global interpretations of Nazism completely dismiss the national background in dealing with the Nazis' anti-Jewish policies, but the importance of that background is often difficult to assess. Of all the generalizing interpretations of Nazism, the one which places the Hitlerian phenomenon within the wider category of "fascism" still remains the most current. 15 It has a Marxist and a non-Marxist version, and in both cases Nazi anti-Semitism, because of its singularity, represents a serious obstacle to this particular type of generalization. Many theoreticians of fascism solve the problem by disregarding it completely: their theories circumvent the obstacle and more or less avoid mentioning it (except for a few words, when necessary).16 Others do recognize the difficulty, but nonetheless look for the common ground of fascism, "the fascist minimum." 17 Finally, there are those who have tried to integrate Nazi anti-Semitism into the framework of their general theory. The inclusion of Nazi anti-Semitism within the framework of a non-Marxist theory of fascism can adopt three different focal

14

It is sometimes difficult to distinguish between what may be the " g e n e r a l " characteristics of a social group and its "historical" German ones. In Raul Hilberg's The Destruction oj the European Jews (Chicago, 1961), the central role in the process of destruction is played by the bureaucratic machine, but is it bureaucracy as such, or German bureaucracy specifically, owing to the development of a particular national tradition? 15 However, it should be noted that the very concept of "fascism" is often criticized. Cf., among others, Gilbert Allardyce, " W h a t Fascism Is Not: Thoughts on the Deflation of a Concept," American Historical Review, April 1979, pp. 367ff. 16 See for instance recent studies on the various theories of fascism, such as Wolfgang Wipperman, Faschismustheorien, Darmstadt, 1980. " See for instance Stanley G. Payne, Fascism: Comparison and Definition, Madison, 1980.

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points: reducing it to a more fundamental ideological characteristic; explaining it through the particular inner dynamics of fascist parties and regimes; and comparing it with similar attitudes toward outside groups evident in other fascist movements and regimes. Ernst Nolte, in his monumental study Three Faces of Fascism, makes the most systematic attempt to reduce Hitlerian antiSemitism to the common ideological denominator of all fascist movements: anti-Marxism. For Nolte, Nazi anti-Semitism was but the extreme form of the anti-Bolshevism of "radical fascists": Hitler always succumbed to an ungovernable passion on the subject of bolshevism. He regarded it as the most radical form of Jewish genocide ever known.... According to Eckhart's book, Hitler had specified another bolshevism ahead of Lenin's as an origin — that of Moses!"

Nolte's quotations give the impression that Hitler's anti-Judaism determined his anti-Bolshevism, rather than the other way around. A recent publication of all the early texts of Hitler, up to Mein Kampf, allows a better evaluation of the relative importance of anti-Judaism and anti-Marxism. References to the Jews are approximately three times more numerous than those related to Bolshevism, Communism, or Marxism. 1 9 This brings us back to the obvious difference between National Socialism and other types of fascism: in Nazism, anti-Semitism occupies a central

" Ernst Nolte, Three Faces of Fascism, London, 1965, p. 406. " Cf. Eberhard Jäckel (hrg), Hitler. Sämtliche Aufzeichnungen 1905-1924, Stuttgart, 1980. The comparison was made possible thanks to the very detailed index of this volume. The centrality and predominance of Hitler's antiSemitism within his ideological system and in his political agitation, during these early years, is confirmed by many other sources. For a general picture, see Helmut Auerbach, "Hitlers politische Lehrjahre und die Münchener Gesellschaft 1919-1923," Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte (hereafter— VfZ), Vol. 25, 1977, No. 1, pp. 15-16.

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and particular place. And in fact the Jews, not the Marxists, were the target of both Hitler's first, and last, ideological statements. While the Soviet Union and the European Communist parties were temporary allies between 1939 and 1941, and the idea of a separate peace with Stalin was frequently discussed toward the end of the war, any "arrangement" with the Jews was absolutely unthinkable from Hitler's viewpoint. Finally, we have the most explicit statement, from Martin Bormann, on the relation between anti-Judaism and anti-Marxism: National-Socialist doctrine is entirely anti-Jewish, which means antiC o m m u n i s t and anti-Christian. Everything is linked within National Socialism and everything aims at the fight against Judaism. 2 0

Racial anti-Semitism — we reach now the second approach to an interpretation of Nazi anti-Semitism within the framework of fascism — existed in Germany since the end of the nineteenth century. Its transformation from the stage of hazy theory to that of systematic policy required structural conditions which, according to Hans Mommsen, for instance, are those of fascist regimes: It is n o t enough to consider[Nazi anti-Semitism—S.F.]as a moreradical variety [of preexisting tendencies —S.F.].... O n e has to inquire into the structural conditions w h i c h allowed it not to remain at the level of propaganda declarations or at that of outbursts of " s a v a g e " radicalism. 2 1

To explain these necessary conditions, Mommsen refers to the structure of the Nazi Party and of the Nazi system. This structure, in his opinion, is typical of fascist parties and regimes: a direct link between the various dignitaries and the supreme leader, but vaguely defined areas of authority and therefore 20

21

Adolf Hitler, Table Talk (quoted from Adolf Hitler, Libres Propos surla Guerre et la Paix, Paris, Tome II, 1954, p. 347). Hans Mommsen in Totalitarismus uni Faschismus. Eine u/issenschaftliche Begriffskontroverse, Munchen, 1980, pp. 63-64.

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constant rivalries and internal fights creating a process of "cumulative radicalization. " 2 2 In that sense, the fight to control "Jewish affairs" led to a growing radicalization in this field, which would explain the "Final Solution" as an ultimate outcome of the internal dynamics of a fascist regime. 23 We will later revert to the problems posed by the "cumulative radicalization" theory. Suffice it to say here that even if we admit the existence of such a process within the Nazi regime and the explanation offered by Mommsen, we hardly notice it in the only other full-fledged fascist regime, that of Italy. As far as Italy is concerned, one could possibly speak of "cumulative radicalization" up to 1939, and of "cumulative moderation" (at least within the party) from 1939 to 1943, when Mussolini was dismissed with the help of the Fascist Grand Council (the shortlived Salo "Republic" being a direct Nazi product). Finally, an attempt has been made to compare Nazi antiSemitism with the racism of Italian fascists toward the Africans, the Slavs (Trieste, Fiume), and the Germans of South Tyrol.. .the difference in degree being explained by the war situation.... 24 One may wonder why Italy at war did not attain the same results as Germany and, all in all, question the seriousness of this kind of comparison for the sake of maintaining a unified concept of fascism. In fact, as Karl Dietrich Bracher has written: A general theory of fascism will always remain questionable when confronted with this problem [Nazi anti-Semitism and the extermination of the J e w s —S.F.].... While [Italian] fascism centred around the quest of the strong state, Stato Totalitario, as the basis of a renewed Impero Romano,

22 23

24

Ibid., p. 24. Hans Mommsen, "National-Socialism; Continuity and Change," in Walter Laqueur (ed.). Fascism: A Reader's Guide, London, 1979, pp. 178-179. This is a transposition to the theory of fascism of the functionalist analysis of Nazi policies which we will examine at some length in the second part of this article. Wolfgang Schieder in Totalitarismus und Faschismus (op. cit.), p. 58.

THE DECISION FOR THE FINAL SOLUTION FROM ANTI-SEMITISM T O EXTERMINATION Hitler's basic n o t i o n w a s the p r i m a r y role of the race, the racist f o u n d a tion of a f u t u r e empire, for w h i c h the organization of a strong state was no m o r e than instrumental — n e v e r an end in itself. 2 5

In the Marxist conception of Nazism as fascism, Nazi antiSemitism is assigned an even less coherent place than in the non-Marxist theory of fascism. First of all, it includes political propaganda camouflaged as history: in a certain Soviet "historical" rendition of the last 20 years, the Nazis are found on the same side of the barricades as the Zionists, against their common victim, the Jewish masses. The aim of the Nazis does not matter; that of the Zionists is simple: to collaborate in the extermination of the majority in order to allow a small minority to reach the shores of Palestine and help in the creation of the Zionist state. 26 On another level, the Marxist view of fascism tries very systematically to insert Nazi racism and even the extermination of the Jews into the framework of an ideological orthodoxy. Within this framework the "Final Solution" cannot but be the result of the planned policy of Heavy Industry, thereby reaping enormous benefits (by the exploitation of a slave labor force, constantly renewable according to needs, and by the confiscation of Jewish property, etc.). This position, often found in East German historical writing, 27 does not take into account the 25

Karl Dietrich Bracher, " T h e Role of Hitler: Perspectives of Interpretation," in Walter Laqueur (ed.), Fascism: A Reader's Guide (op. cit.), pp. 201-202. For elements of the historiographical debate about the differences between Italian Fascism and National Socialism, see Andreas Hillgruber, Endlich genug...(op. cit.), pp. 40 ff.

26

On this issue, see for instance Lucy Dawidowicz, The Holocaust and the Historians (op. cit.), p. 68 ff.; Erich Goldhagen, " D e r Holocaust in der Sowjetischen Propaganda und Geschichtsschreibung," VfZ, Vol. 28, No. 4,1980, pp. 502 ff. and particularly p. 504. Cf. Konrad Kwiet, "Historians of the German Democratic Republic on Antisemitism and Persecution," Leo Baeck Institute Yearbook, Vol. XXI, London, 1976, p. 174. Kurt Pa'tzold's work is something of an exception and his points are a mixture of Marxist orthodoxy and functionalism, allowing for various nuances. Cf., among others, his "Von der Vertreibung zum Genozid.

27

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obvious fact that the extermination of European Jewry deprived German war industries and the German war economy in general of a considerable labor force, and in the Eastern territories in particular, of crucially important skilled manpower. 28 The "Final Solution" meant a loss for the German war economy, which was compensated only to a very small degree by the partial exploitation ofJewish slave labor and the property seized from the victims.29 Another Marxist approach consists of interpreting the persecution of the Jews as a method used by the Nazis, and therefore by German Capital, to deflect the attention of the masses from the absence of any significant social change and from the endemic crises of the system. In this context, anti-Semitism would be fulfilling the same role as external aggression, that of a necessary derivative. But here again, the thesis contradicts the most obvious facts. One knows today that the social transformation wrought by Nazism was much more important than was thought immediately after the war. 30 One is also aware, as we shall later show in some detail, that public opinion was not particularly enthusiastic about the anti-Jewish persecutions.31 And, as far as the ultimate stage of these policies — the extermiZu den Ursachen, Triebkräften und Bedingungen der antijüdischen Politik des faschistischen Deutschen Imperialismus," Dietrich Eichholtz und Kurt Grossweiler (hrg), Faschismus—Forschung: Positionen, Probleme, Polemik, Berlin (Ost), 1980, pp. 180 ff. See also Kurt Pätzold, Faschismus, Rassenwahn, Judenverfolgung: Eine Studie zur politischen Strategie und Taktik des faschistischen Imperialismus 1933-1945, Berlin (Ost), 1975. 21 The documents concerning the unsuccessful attempts of the Wehrmacht and even at some stage of the 5 5 Wirtschaftsvervaltungshauptamt to retain; Jewish skilled labor are numerous and well known. See, for instance, Enno Georg, Die wirtschaftlichen Unternehmungen der SS, Stuttgart, 1963, pp. 58,61,93-97. In each case the extermination orders from the RSHA or from Himmler himself prevailed. 2 ' Raul Hilberg, The Destruction of the European Jews (op. cit.), p. 645. 30 Cf. David Schoenbaum, Hitler's Social Revolution. Class and Status in Nazi Germany 1933-1939, New York, 1966. " Cf. infra, p. 33.

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nation — is concerned, it certainly was not aimed at deflecting anybody's attention, as it was kept absolutely secret.32 "Totalitarianism" is the third major approach for a global interpretation of Nazism. As a matter of fact, "fascism" and "totalitarianism" are not opposite concepts: Italian fascism proclaimed itself "totalitarian" from the very outset. However, the contemporary analysis of Nazism tends to consider these concepts as representing opposite outlooks. In essence, fascism implies the centrality of ideology (anti-Marxism and antiliberalism), and totalitarianism — the centrality of the instruments of control and domination, as such. Thus, contrary ideological systems could appear more similar than opposed (Stalinist Russia and Nazi Germany). 33 At first glance, totalitarianism seems to offer a better global explanation of Nazi policies toward the Jews than does fascism, for instance, but the difficulties soon become apparent in this case too. The interpretation within the framework of totalitarianism can use two main themes. According to the first theme, it is not a fundamental ideological motivation, but rather the will

J2

There are some variations to these classical Marxist approaches. Some historians, e.g., T . W . Mason, use, indirectly, the argument of the autonomy of the political sphere (and therefore of its actions and policies toward the Jews); others, e.g., Reinhard Kuhnl, explain Nazi anti-Semitism by using a synthesis of Marxism and psychoanalysis, etc. For a good overview of some of these approaches, see Pierre Ayçoberry, La Question Nazie. Les interprétations du National-Socialisme 1922-1975, Paris, 1979, pp. 93 ff. and 233 ff.; Klaus Hildebrand, Das Dritte Reich, Munchen, 1979, pp. 134 ff. More specifically for Mason's position, see T . W . Mason, " T h e Primacy of Politics—Politics and Economics in National-Socialist G e r m a n y , " in S. E. W o o l f (éd.). The Nature of Fascism, London, 1968, p. 192. For Kuhnl's approach, see Reinhard Kuhnl, "Problème einer Theorie iiber den deutschen Faschismus, "Jahrbuch des Instituts fur âeutsche Geschichte, Vol. Ill, Tel Aviv, 1974, pp. 322 ff.

35

The very concept of totalitarianism and in particular its application to the Nazi system have been forcefully criticized since the early 1960s. See for instance Robert F. Koehl, "Feudal Aspects of National-Socialism," American Political Science Review, Vol. LIV, December 1960, pp. 921 ff.; Wolfgang Sauer, loc. cit., pp. 406-407.

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for total domination over individuals and groups that drives the totalitarian system to oppress its victims and to choose them accordingly. When control requires it, the destruction of this or that group is decided upon, indifferently. The enemy to be annihilated becomes a functional element within the system of total domination —in order to terrorize a whole population or to galvanize its energy, any one group, then another, may be chosen in a more or less arbitrary way. 34 The bureaucratic machinery is the most efficient instrument of totalitarian power and terror; bureaucracy with its banal servants whose only ambition is to fulfill their task as efficiently as possible; bureaucracy which, once set in motion, can lead from the most elementary identification measures to total extermination. 35 The most diverse studies confirm the crucial role of German bureaucracy in the persecution and destruction of the Jews, e.g., Raul Hilberg's classic work, Hannah Arendt's essay on Adolf Eichmann, H.-G. Adler's study of the deportation of the Jews of Germany, Christopher Browning's research on the role of the German Foreign Office in the destruction process, or Joseph Walk's compendium of the laws and decrees dealing with or relating to the Jews during the Nazi regime.36 But the "totalitarian" interpretation of the anti-Jewish policies of the Nazis also faces major difficulties, the main ones being the centrality of anti-Jewish ideology for the leaders of the party, and the nonfunctionality of the enemy within the Nazi system. 54

35

36

The arbitrary choice of the enemy to be terrorized is supposed to be one of the fundamental characteristics of the totalitarian system. Cf. Carl Joachim Friedrich and Zbigniew Brzezinski, Totalitarian Dictatorship and Autocracy, Cambridge, Mass., 1956, p. 10. This is the crux of Raul Hilberg's thesis in his The Destruction of the European Jews (op. cit.). Raul Hilberg, op. cit.; Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, N e w York, 1963; H. G. Adler, Der verwaltete Mensch. Studien zur Deportation derJuden aus Deutschland, Tubingen, 1974; Christopher R. Browning, The Final Solution and the German Foreign Office, N e w York, 1978; Joseph Walk,

THE DECISION FOR THE FINAL SOLUTION FROM ANTI-SEMITISM T O EXTERMINATION

There is no need to state once again how deep-seated Hitler's anti-Semitic passion was and what an essential role his antiJewishness played within his entire ideological system.37 The same could be said of Goebbels and Himmler, 38 as well as of an important part of the Nazi elite. "In the theory and the method of mass extermination," writes Karl Dietrich Bracher, himself a proponent of the "totalitarian" interpretation of Nazism, "the racist ideology of National Socialism had become an aim in itself. " 3 9 If that is so, then the interpretation of the Nazi persecution ofJews within the framework of totalitarianism confronts a major difficulty. The classical theory of totalitarianism, as presented by Hannah Arendt in the early 1950s, postulates a growing ideological emptiness as one penetrates into the center of the system — the totalitarian leader supposedly does not believe in his ideology; ideology is merely used to control and mobilize the masses or, at best, the outer periphery of the totalitarian party. 40 The Nazi system does not correspond to this model as far as the role of anti-Semitic ideology was concerned. Moreover, if antiSemitic ideology was of central importance to Hitler and part of

Das Sonderrecht für dieJuden im NS-Staat. Eine Sammlung der geszetzlichen Massnahmen und Richtlinien—Inhalt und Bedeutung, Heidelberg, 1981. Nearly 2,000 ordinances and decrees concerning the Jews were issued for the territory of the Reich alone. The last known decree, that of February 16, 1945, stipulates: " W h e n it becomes impossible to transfer the files dealing with anti-Jewish activities, one should destroy them to avoid their falling into the hands of the e n e m y " (ibid, p. 406). 37 For a very clear presentation of the essential place of Hitler's anti-Semitism within his ideology, see Eberhard Jäckel, Hitlers Weltanschauung, Tiibingen, 1969. See also Andreas Hillgruber, " D i e 'Endlosung' und des deutsche Ostimperium als Kernstück des rassenideologischen Programms des Nationalsozialismus," in Hillgruber, Deutsche Grossmacht und Weltpolitik im 19 und 20Jahrhundert, Düsseldorf, 1977, pp. 252 ff. 38 About Himmler, see Josef Ackerman, Heinrich Himmler als Ideologe, Göttingen, 1970. 3 ' Karl Dietrich Bracher, The German Dictatorship, London, 1971 (German edition, p. 464). 40 See Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, N e w York, 1958.

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the leadership of the party, then the explanation of the persecution and extermination of the Jews must be sought outside the constitutive elements of the totalitarian system: the totalitarian framework is the means of destruction, not its basic explanation.

Moreover, the centrality and autonomy of the anti-Jewish ideology in Nazism resulted in a situation where the "enemy" was not a functional concept 41 and could not be replaced, at will, by another target. The Jewish enemy was the prime unchangeable target, exterminated in utter secrecy, a sacred aim and not an instrument for the achievement of some other end. Considering these various approaches, it seems that no global interpretation of Nazism can integrate Nazi anti-Semitism and Nazi policies toward the Jews without encountering major p r o b l e m s . In fact, Nazi anti-Semitism and Nazi policies toward theJews place a question mark on the validity of the main global interpretations of Nazism.

II. Nazi Policies: The Contending Approaches Most historians do not work at the level of global interpretations but at that of the concrete interpretation of facts within their immediate context, of decisions in relation to one another, of a policy in terms of its internal coherence. Since the end of the 1960s, the historiography of National Socialism at this level, in the Federal Republic in particular but in other Western countries too, has tended to adopt two opposite positions: "intentionalism" and "functionalism. " 4 2 41 42

W e will discuss this problem at greater length further on. See infra, pp.29 ff. In an early version of this paper, I made a distinction between those historians w h o stress the continuity of Nazi policies and those w h o place the accent on their discontinuous character: the former would be the "intentionalists" and the latter the "functionalists." Cf. Saul Friedlânder, " D e l'Antisémitisme à l'Extermination. Esquisse historiographique," loc. cit. The current definitions allow for m o r e precision. Although the contending positions were developed

THE DECISION FOR THE FINAL SOLUTION FROM ANTI-SEMITISM T O EXTERMINATION

For the intentionalists, there is a direct relationship between ideology, planning and policy decisions in the Third Reich. As for the absolute centrality of the supreme leader, Adolf Hitler, it is obvious to such a degree that Klaus Hildebrand claims: "one should not talk about National Socialism but about Hitlerism. " 4 3 The functionalist position, on the other hand, implies that there is no necessary relationship between the ideological basis and the political initiatives of the Nazis. It holds that decisions are functionally linked to each other and to a given state of the political context, that through the constant interaction of various semi-autonomous agencies the role of the supreme decisionmaker may sometimes be quite limited, and that his decisions often take on the aspect of planned policy only from the vantage of hindsight. 44 We have the image of a system in which every

43

44

since the 1960s, the currently used concepts were coined, in their present context, by British historian T i m Mason. Cf. T i m Mason, "Intention and Explanation: A Current Controversy about the Interpretation o f NationalSocialism," in Gerhard Hirschfeld and Lothar Kettenacker (hrg), Der FührerStaat, Mythos und Realität, Stuttgart, 1981, pp. 23-41. Q u o t e d by T i m Mason, "Intention and E x p l a n a t i o n , " loc. cit., p. 29 (Hildebrand's definition is given without exact reference). For the same position, see also Klaus Hildebrand, " M o n o k r a t i e oder Polykratie? Hitlers Herrschaft und das Dritte R e i c h , " in Gerhard Hirschfeld and Lothar Kettenacker, op. cit., pp. 73 ff.; see particularly Karl Dietrich Bracher, Zeitgeschichtliche Kontroversen um Faschismus, Totalitarismus, Demokratie, München, 1976, p. 85. Many o f these points had already been made in one form or another quite independently o f the systematic development o f the functionalist school in W e s t Germany. The best known example is A. J . P. Taylor's The Origins of the Second World War, London 1961; see also E d w a r d N . Peterson, The Limits of Hitler's Power, Princeton, 1969, or the study of Heinz Höhne on the internal "pulling and hauling" within the SS itself: Heinz Höhne, Der Orden unter dem Totenkopf. Die Geschichte des SS, Gütersloh, 1968. In Germany the controversy actually started after the publication of Fritz Tobias' book on the Reichstag fire (Fritz Tobias, Der Reichstagsbrand. Legende und Wirklichkeit, Rastatt, 1962), with Hans Mommsen's "functionalist" appraisal o f the issue: Hans Mommsen, " D e r Reichstagsbrand und seine F o l g e n , " V f Z , Vol. 12, N o . 3,1964, pp. 351 ff. Functionalism implies, o f necessity, a polycratic view o f the Nazi system. For a classical statement about the Nazi regime as a polycracy or as "anarchic authoritarianism," see Martin Broszat, Der Staat Hitlers. Grundlegung und Entwicklung seiner inneren Verfassung, München, 1969.

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crucial decision depends on the will of Adolf Hitler on the one hand, and that of a more or less anarchic polycracy on the other hand. The opposition between these two theses appears with particular clarity in terms of their interpretations of Nazi policies toward the Jews. For the intentionalists there is, first of all, continuity between the ideology of the 1920s and the final extermination. This linear approach is strongly underlined in Ernst Nolte's Three Faces ofFascism, where the author shows that in Hitler's system the Jews, the carriers of Bolshevism and, more generally, of all the anti-natural forces, had to be annihilated in order to save humanity. 45 Their extermination is the obvious corollary of ideology in Eberhard Jacket's study of Hitler's Weltanschauung: W h e t h e r it is possible or not to establish a link b e t w e e n the use of gas d u r i n g the First W o r l d W a r and the gas chambers of W o r l d W a r II, there is n o d o u b t t h a t H i t l e r ' s anti-Semitism, as presented in Mein Kampf, w a s m a r k e d by w a r . It w a s born f r o m the w a r , it needed w a r - l i k e methods and had to b e realized in w a r t i m e ; it w a s therefore logical that this anti-Semitism w o u l d find, d u r i n g the n e x t w a r , w h i c h a n y h o w w a s foreseen f r o m the v e r y beginning, its bloody climax. 4 6

Sometimes the thesis of a direct link between the initial ideology and ultimate policies finds an even more extreme expression. In Gerald Fleming's recent book, Hitler and the Final Solution, the declarations attributed to the young Hitler by his friend, August Kubiczek, are directly related to his annihilation orders during World War II. Fleming states:

45

44

According to Ernst Nolte, "Auschwitz was as directly included in the principles of the racial doctrine of the Nazis as the fruit in its seed." E. Nolte, Three Faces (op. cit.), p. 400. Eberhard Jäckel, Hitlers Weltanschauung, Stuttgart, 1981, 2nd edition, pp. 71-72.

THE DECISION FOR THE FINAL SOLUTION FROM ANTI-SEMITISM T O EXTERMINATION There is a direct way leading from the remark made by Adolf Hitler, the student at the Realschule in Linz, to the friend o f his youth, August Kubiczek, "this doesn't belong to Linz," as both were walking in the Bethlehemstrasse by the small synagogue, to the Fiihrer's declaration on October 21, 1941, " . . . if we exterminate this pest, we shall accomplish something for humanity, the meaning o f which cannot even be grasped by our men out there " A direct way leading from Hitler's antiSemitism in its Linz formulation o f the years 1904-1907 to the first mass executions o f German Jews in Fort I X in Kovno on the 25th and 29th o f November, as well as on the 30th o f November, 1941, at 8:15 in the morning, in the forest o f Rumbuli near Riga.... 4 7

Few historians, even among the staunchest intentionalists, would accept such an extreme linear thesis. But even if the intermediary stages between Hitler's early anti-Semitism and his final policies toward the Jews were numerous and complex, Fleming's position is helpful on one essential point. It reminds us of the implacable aspect of Hitler's anti-Semitism, of its deep and early roots, as well as of its obsessional character. Any attempt to deny that it was an essential factor in the later extermination policies calls for at least as much explanation as the view considering it as a major impetus. To prove their point, the intentionalists can cite the distinct and rapid succession of stages in Nazi anti-Jewish policies (as well as in other fields, foreign policy being perhaps the most telling example): The National-Socialist program called for the disenfranchisement o f all Jews; anti-Semitic activities were part o f its early history. Once in power, the Nazis began the systematic organization o f the persecution o f Jews. No tactical considerations were allowed to interfere substantially with instituting the boycott o f Jews, expelling them from public life, making them subject to special laws, and finally annihilating them. 48

47 48

Gerald L. Fleming, Hitler und die Endlosung, Munchen, 1982, pp. 13-14. Karl Dietrich Bracher, The German Dictatorship (op. cit.), p. 252; the same author presents his thesis of the direct unfolding o f Nazi extermination plans and policies in a more detailed and forceful way in the same book on pp.

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In addition to discerning a continuity between Hitler's ideology and his policies and pointing to a rapid succession of stages, the intentionalists sometimes assume technical planning. The "euthanasia" program at the beginning of the war, for example, could represent a technical preparation for the "Final Solution." In any event, killing by gas on a small scale certainly led to the idea of using it for mass extermination: " T h e method that was later used for the mass extermination of Jews by gas was then tried from the very beginning of 1940, during the extermination of people interned in psychiatric institutions, within the framework of the Aktion called ' T 4 . ' " 4 9 The major issue which separates the two approaches is that of the actual order to implement the extermination. For those historians who believe there was planning and premeditation, Hitler must have given an order to exterminate the Jews of Europe, one way or another, sometime in the spring or early summer of 1941. For the functionalists, such an order may have been given much later on in the course of events, but in all probability was never issued at all. For a presentation of the intentionalist position relating to Hitler's order, let us consider the following statement of Helmuth Krausnick:

49

399 -401. For Raul Hilberg, the successive stages of Nazi policies were: definition, expropriation, concentration, extermination. Ino Arndt/Wolfgang Scheffler, "Organisierter Masscnmord an Juden in uationalsozialistischen Vernichtungslagern," Vfz, 1976 (2), p. 112. It should be mentioned, within this context, that Jewish inmates of clinics were considered a special category and were killed whatever their degree of illness. Cf. Eugen Kogon et al. (hrsg), Nationalsozialistische Massentotungen dutch Ciftgas, Frankfurt a/Main, 1983, p. 53. The significance of such a decision should not be underestimated, but even if it is difficult to ascertain that the Euthanasia killings were considered as a technical preparation for the extermination of the Jews, there is little doubt that the killing by gas of small groups of Soviet war prisoners, at Auschwitz, in the fall of 1941, was meant to test different gas killing techniques with a view to the start of the "Final Solution." For the killing by gas of Soviet prisoners of war, see Christian F. Streit, Keine Kameiaden. Die Wehrmacht unddie sowjetischen Kriegsgefangenen I941-t945, Stuttgart, 1978, p. 397, note 32. See also injra, p. 42'.

THE DECISION FOR THE FINAL SOLUTION FROM ANTI-SEMITISM T O EXTERMINATION W h a t is c e r t a i n is that the n e a r e r H i t l e r ' s plan to o v e r t h r o w Russia as the last possible e n e m y on the c o n t i n e n t o f E u r o p e a p p r o a c h e d m a t u r i t y , the m o r e he b e c a m e obsessed w i t h the idea — w i t h w h i c h he had been toying as a " f i n a l s o l u t i o n " for a long time — of w i p i n g out the J e w s in the territories u n d e r his control. It c a n n o t have been later than M a r c h 1941, w h e n h e openly declared his intention of having the political commissars of the R e d A r m y shot, that he issued his secret decree — w h i c h never appeared in w r i t i n g though it was m e n t i o n e d verbally on several occasions — that the J e w s should be eliminated.... 5 0

The possibility that such an order was issued in the spring of 1941 is made even more plausible by a series of additional concurring indications. At the same time, the Einsatzgruppen were instructed to exterminate the Jews in occupied Soviet territory, and a "certain final solution of the Jewish problem" was mentioned in a Reich Main Security Office circular forbidding further Jewish emigration from Belgium and France.51 Alternatively, the order could have been given in the early summer of 1941, shortly after the German attack on Russia, when Goring instructed Heydrich to prepare the "total solution of the Jewish problem in all the territories under German control." 52 No historian today believes that such an order was issued in writing. In its oral form it could have been either a clear instruction passed on to Goring or Himmler, or, more probably, a broad hint understood by everybody. In any event, the intentionalist historians believe that a signal must have come from Hitler to set the "Final Solution" in motion. 50 51

52

Helmut Krausnick et al.. Anatomy of the SS State, London, 1968, p. 60. Ibid., pp. 60, 67. Recent research shows that there are some contradictions concerning the nature, place and time of the orders given to the heads of the Einsatzgruppen about the extermination of Soviet Jewry. However, the overall evaluation of this material still indicates that a verbal order about the wholesale extermination of Soviet Jews must have been given at some stage just before or just after the launching of Operation Barbarossa. Cf. Helmut Krausnick and Hans-Heinrich Wilhelm, Die Truppe des Weltanschauungskrieges. Die Einsatzgruppen der Sicherheitspolizei unddes SD 1938-1942, Stuttgart, 1981, pp. 162, 539 and mainly p. 627. Raul Hilberg, The Destruction of the European Jews (op. cit.), p. 262.

THE "FINAL SOLUTION" SAUL FRIEDLÄNDER

For the functionalists, most of the basic tenets of the intentionalist position are improbable. Let us recall, first of all, the common denominator of all functionalist interpretations: the Nazi system was to a great extent chaotic, and major decisions were often the result of the most diverse pressures, without any imperative central planning, forecasting, or clear orders given from the top indicating the aim and means of execution of a given policy. Within the functionalist mode of interpretation, the existence of a strong anti-Semitic ideology is not denied, but its link to policies is considered to be indirect at most. For Martin Broszat, for instance, Nazi anti-Semitism had essentially a general mobilizing aim — it was a fighting symbol," not a direct source of action. It did lead to the "Final Solution," in a way by chance, because slogans so often repeated ultimately had to be carried out: The stereotypical negative aims were from the beginning the only concrete element around which the Nazi "extremism of the middle" could unite itself, that which allowed it to keep the illusion of a community of action.... 53 The selection of negative ideological aims during the power seizure and during the later development of the Third Reich... meant simultaneously an increasing radicalization, a growing perfection and institutionalization of inhumanity and persecution But, this process of discrimination could not go on indefinitely. In consequence, the "movem e n t " had ultimately to end in the "final solution".... The phraseology had ultimately to take itself on its word and what had objectively been only an ideological instrument for the mobilization of fighting readiness, what had had a sense only in terms of belief in the future, had to be literally realized.... The secret extermination of the Jews, with which anti-Semitism as a propaganda instrument was also logically brought to an end, concretized the insane confusion between a fighting symbol and a final aim.... 5 4

55

54

Martin Broszat, "Soziale Motivation und Führer-Bindung des Nationalsozialismus," VfZ, Vol. 18, No. 4, 1970, p. 403. Ibid., pp. 405, 408.

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If in Broszat's view ideology leads indirectly to the "Final Solution" through confusing a mobilizing symbol with a concrete aim, for Hans Mommsen the lack of relation between ideology and policies is even greater: In p r e s e n t - d a y research the conception is still held that f r o m the b e g i n ning Hitler gave a concrete sense to the e x t e r m i n a t i o n of the J e w s and set it as an u l t i m a t e aim. T h e carefully collected utterances of the f u t u r e d i c t a t o r on this issue certainly do not c o n f i r m this in any necessary 55 way

According to Mommsen, Hitler's declarations are no different from those made by any radical anti-Semite since the later part of the nineteenth century, and as far as his actions during the 1920s are concerned, they rather show restraint. 56 Mommsen does not deny Hitler's hatred of the Jews, but, in his opinion, this hatred was not necessarily the origin of the various measures taken. In fact, he states, "whenever he [Hitler] was confronted with concrete alternatives, he used to act not as an extremist, but to give preference to the less radical solution."57 We will revert to these various points. Let us now consider some aspects of the functionalist interpretation of the course of antiJewish policies under the Third Reich. In the words of Karl Schleunes: D u r i n g the early years of the T h i r d Reich, no one in the N a z i m o v e m e n t , f r o m the Fiihrer d o w n , had defined w h a t the substance of a solution to the J e w i s h p r o b l e m m i g h t b e . . . . O n l y in the broadest sense are the antiSemitic premises o f National Socialism useful in explaining the course w h i c h a w i d e v a r i e t y of Jewish policies eventually took. 5 8 55

56 57 58

Hans Mommsen, " D i e Realisierung des Utopischen: Die 'Endlosung der Judenfrage' in ' D r i t t e n R e i c h , ' " GeschichteundGesellschaft, Vol. 9, No. 3,1983, p. 386. Ibid. Ibid., p. 387. Karl A. Schleunes, The Twisted Road to Auschwitz: Nazi Policy Towards the German Jews 1933-1939, Urbana, 1970, p. 257.

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Uwe Dietrich Adam, after following in detail the anti-Jewish measures of the 1930s in which, he claims, no clear direction is to be found until 1938 — when the SS took over and furthered a systematic emigration policy —reaches a first general conclusion: O n e cannot speak of a coordinated and planned policy t o w a r d the Jews... a global plan concerning the nature, content, and scope of the persecution of the J e w s never existed; it is even highly probable that the mass e x t e r m i n a t i o n was n o t an aim that Hitler had set a priori and that he tried to achieve. 5 9

As an example of this total lack of planning during the 1930s, Mommsen mentions the Nuremberg Laws of 1935. According to him, a foreign policy declaration concerning the Abyssinian conflict was to be delivered by Hitler at the Party Congress which opened on September 10. This project was abandoned on September 13 at the request of Foreign Minister von Neurath, and it was only then, two days before the closing session of the Congress, that Hitler hastily had the racial laws prepared.60 With regard to the crucial events of 1941, the functionalist interpretation is diametrically opposed to the one presented by the intentionalists. In Adam's view, the extermination of the Jews in occupied Soviet territory was not necessarily part of a global extermination plan. It was only between September and December of that year, following the situation created by the deportations ofJews from the Reich to the ghettos of the East on the one hand, and the stalled German offensive in Russia on the other, that Hitler decided to replace the "territorial solution" of the Jewish problem with global extermination. 61 Uwe Dietrich Adam, Judenpolitik im Dritten Reich, Düsseldorf, 1972, p. 357. Hans Mommsen, "Die Realisierung...," loc. cit., p. 387. W e shall come back to this example further on and suggest a course of events somewhat different from the our mentioned by Hans Mommsen. U w e Dietrich Adam, op. cit., pp. 303-313. See also, for a summary of Adam's position, U w e Dietrich Adam, " D e r Aspekt der 'Planung' in der NSJudenpolitik," Thomas Klein, Volker Losemann, Günther Mai (hrg), Judentum und Antisemitismus von der Antike bis zur Gegenwart, Düsseldorf, 1984, pp. 161 ff.

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Broszat adopts Adam's general description of the 1941 events, but he takes the argument one step further. Whereas Adam concedes that Hitler must have ordered the global extermination of European Jewry some time in the fall of 1941, Broszat believes that such an order probably never existed. The "Final Solution," Broszat suggests, was the result of a series of local initiatives aimed at solving local problems (the chaotic situation in the ghettos); it only gradually developed into an overall action: It thus seems that the liquidation o f the Jews began not solely as the result o f an ostensible will for extermination but also as a " w a y o u t " o f a blind alley into which the Nazis had maneuvered themselves. The practice o f liquidation, once initiated and established, gained predominance and evolved in the end into a comprehensive "program." This interpretation cannot be verified with absolute certainty but in the light o f circumstances, which cannot be discussed here in detail, it seems more plausible than the assumption that there was a general secret order for the extermination o f the Jews in the summer o f 1941.

In a footnote to the above lines, Broszat adds: "It appears to me that there was no overall order concerning the extermination of the Jews and that the program of extermination developed through individual actions and then gradually attained its institutional and factual character in the spring of 1942 after the construction of the extermination camps in Poland. " 6 2

62

Martin Broszat, "Hitler und die Genesis der 'Endlösung': Aus Anlass der Thesen von David Irving," K/Z,Vol. 25. No. 4,1977, pp. 752-753. The English translation used here is from Yad Vashem Studies, Vol. 13, 1979, p. 93. Some of Broszat's arguments have been neatly countered in Christopher R. Browning's "Zur Genesis der Endlösung: Eine Antwort an Martin Broszat," VfZ, Vol. 29, No. 1, 1981, pp. 99-109. Further on we shall deal with some of Broszat's main arguments and with Browning's answer. In his recent article, "Die Realisierung des Utopischen...," Hans Mommsen reaches the same conclusion as Broszat about the nonexistence of a Hitler order to exterminate the Jews of Europe; cf. Hans Mommsen, loc. cit., p. 395.

T H E "FINAL SOLUTION' SAUL FRIEDLANDER In B r o s z a t ' s presentation, Hitler's anti-Jewish ideology is not denied, but, as w e have already seen, its d i r e c t relation to policies is questioned. A c c o r d i n g t o M o m m s e n , i d e o l o g y is even m o r e independent o f the dynamics o f destruction, w h i c h can be e x p l a i n e d m u c h b e t t e r in the c o n t e x t o f the previously m e n tioned process o f " c u m u l a t i v e r a d i c a l i z a t i o n " resulting f r o m the constant

competition

between

various

Nazi

agencies,

and

representing the o v e r a l l fight for positions o f p o w e r w i t h i n the system: ... to prevent Jewish property from falling into the hands of the Gau organizations as a result of wildcat "aryanization," Goring, following the November Pogrom...gave orders for aryanization by the state; the departments involved hastily busied themselves with supporting legislation, even if only to retain their share of responsibility. The impossible situation created by the material and social dispossession of the Jews caused individual Gauleiters to resort to deportations, regardless of consequences, a move bitterly resisted by the departments concerned. However, the result was not the replacement of deportation by a politi- • cally "acceptable" solution, but, on the contrary, the systematic mass murder of the Jews, which no one had previously imagined possible — the most radical solution, and, incidentally, one which coincided with Hitler's own wishes.63 In M o m m s e n ' s i n t e r p r e t a t i o n , H i t l e r ' s role in the i m p l e m e n t a t i o n o f a n t i - J e w i s h policies and the e x e c u t i o n o f the " F i n a l S o l u t i o n " is particularly minimized: Hitler hardly dealt with the concrete realization of the anti-Semitic program; his occasional interventions do not point to any practical

65

Hans Mommsen, "National-Socialism: Continuity and Change," in Walter Laqueur (ed.), Fascism: A Reader's Guide, London 1979, p. 179. For the earliest presentation of this thesis by the same author, see his "Der Nationalsozialistiche Polizeistaat und die Judenverfolgung vor 1938," VfZ, Vol. 10, No. 1, 1962, p. 76; for the most recent restatement of this position, see his "Die Realisierung...," loc. cit., pp. 389-390.

THE DECISION FOR THE FINAL SOLUTION FROM A N T I - S E M I T I S M T O E X T E R M I N A T I O N conception and they lay in the line o f more extreme reprisals. It is the propagandist aspect which remains for him, as usual, in the foreground.... 64

As for the absence of planning, even the Wannsee Conference of January 1942, usually considered as having established the main operational directives for the global extermination of European Jewry, appears in Mommsen's presentation as rather hazy in this respect. 65

III. Some Comments It may be tempting to seek a synthesis between the intentionalist and functionalist positions. 66 In fact, functionalism, which stresses the dynamics of a system rather than the central role of a leader, in many ways fits better within the mainstream of modern historiography. 67 The image it offers of Nazism is more 64

65

66

67

Hans Mommsen, "Die Realisierung...," loc. cit., p. 390. The author considers Hitler's declarations of January 1939 about the extermination of the Jews of Europe in the event of war as rhetoric. Even Hitler's discussions of April 1943 with Marshal Antonescu of Rumania and Regent Horthy of Hungary, in which extermination is clearly mentioned, are still considered as mostly rhetorical. Ibid., pp. 390, 393. Hans Mommsen, "Die Realisierung...," ¡oc. cit., p. 412. In a communication to the author, Hans Mommsen argues that this haziness was meant by Heydrich to leave doubts in the minds of the participants, in order to minimize the basis for possible opposition. My argument is that there was no haziness whatsoever, that the participants in the conference knew exactly what was meant and that anyhow the process o f extermination was clear enough to all concerned in case anybody had wished or dared express any opposition. In fact, even a small part of the picture was enough to incite opposition; hundreds of thousands were aware of parts o f the picture, but no opposition was voiced... See also note 111. This is the stand I took in my " D e l'Antisémitisme à l'Extermination," loc. cit., p. 148, thereby approaching the position also expressed in Helmut Krausnick and Hans-Heinrich Wilhelm, Die Truppe des Weltanschauungskrieges. Die Einsatzgruppen der Sicherheitspolizei uni des SD 1938-1942, Stuttgart, 1981, p. 634. Actually, the opposition between a social-structural historiography and the more traditional "narrative" one is beyond the specific issues at the core of the

328

THE "FINAL SOLUTION" SAUL FRIEDLÄNDER

"normal," easier to explain: any group can stumble haphazardly, step by step, into the most extreme criminal behavior. Beyond the sociological theory of polycracy and administrative chaos, functionalism confronts us, implicitly, with Hannah Arendt's thesis of the "banality of evil." Functionalists can claim, quite correctly, that their position implies a much broader spread of responsibility for the crimes committed than that recognized by the opposite position which considers Hitler as the prime mover and the only authority.68 On the other hand, the intentionalist position implies a key element: premeditation. Planning and premeditation at the top lead, of necessity, to planning and premeditation at various levels of the hierarchy and to no less awareness of the events within the various agencies involved than is implied by the functionalist position. At the more concrete level of historical inquiry, functionalism has undoubtedly added greatly to our understanding of the chaotic nature of the Nazi system and the complex interactions'

discussion. It appears clearly in Tim Mason's presentation of the two schools (cf. Tim Mason, loc. cit.), as well as, for instance, in Wolfgang J. Mommsen's article "Gegenwärtige Tendenzen in der Geschichtsschreibung der Bundesrepublik," Geschichte und Gesellschaft, Vol. X X X , No. 2,1981, pp. 161 ff. But, in fact, this may well be a misleading dichotomy, as the "intentionalist" position could be set within the conceptual framework of "political religions," in which structural analysis becomes essential and, in many ways, far more sophisticated than the accepted social-structural approach. See also infra, p. 49. 68

This is also one of David Irving's arguments. Similarly, he refers to the " w e a k d i c t a t o r " and, in general, uses and misuses some of the salient points of the functionalist position to bolster his own thesis of Hitler's non-involvement in the Final Solution: " M y analysis of this controversial issue [the extermination of the Jews — S. F.] serves to highlight t w o broad conclusions: that in wartime, dictatorships are fundamentally weak—the dictator himself, however alert, is unable to oversee all the (unctions of his executives acting within the confines of his far-flung empire; and that in this particular case, the burden of guilt for the bloody and mindless massacre of the Jews rests on a large number of Germans, many of them alive today, and not just on one 'mad dictator,' whose order had to be obeyed without question." David Irving, Hitler's War, London, 1977, p. XIII.

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surrounding various decisions. However, as has been pointed out, while correcting past interpretations which may have been too simple, it went to the opposite extreme by trying to stress autonomous processes to such a degree that the role of Hitler was almost eliminated. 69 Some of the functionalist arguments are bolstered by the somewhat obvious fact that even in a monolithic system decisions are constantly subjected to the pressure of the most varied internal and external factors, and that no policy can unfold without false starts, hesitations, tactical adaptations, etc. This becomes even more evident if we admit that the Nazi regime was anything but monolithic in its internal structure. Moreover, as Hans Heinrich Wilhelm has mentioned, the Fuhrer's orders were followed but not always without hesitation, the more so because Hitler himself, although set on a line of action, would still continue to muse quite openly about alternative ways of attaining his goal. 70 Thus the impression of improvization and haphazardness — the mainstay of the functionalist approach — is created. Nevertheless, it appears that the available evidence strengthens the traditional, intentionalist position, at least insofar as anti-Jewish policies and the "Final Solution" are concerned. In the matters which obsessed Hitler, those forming the core of his system — conquest of the Lebensraum, as well as the allembracing fight against the Jews —his intervention is felt at all crucial stages, and his declared policies were ultimately carried out, notwithstanding hesitations and obstacles. Within the limited framework of this historiographical essay, any detailed discussion of the various arguments presented by both sides is impossible. Of necessity, only a few comments will be ventured, in response to some of the points presented above. I shall deal with some arguments concerning Hitler's personality " 70

Helmut Krausnick and Hans-Heinrich Wilhelm, Die Truppe des ÌVeltanschauungkrieges, op. cit., p. 623. Ibid., p. 630.

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and the function of his ideology; a few aspects of Nazi antiJewish policies during the 1930s; and, finally, with the discussion concerning the course of events in 1941 and Hitler's direct involvement in the "Final Solution." In discussing Hitler's anti-Semitism and his role in the antiJewish policies of the Nazi regime, many of the historians mentioned here have tried to present an explicit or implicit psychological portrait of the dictator. 71 None of these authors deny Hitler's fanatic anti-Semitism and many stress its pathological aspect. Martin Broszat ranks among those who place the strongest emphasis on the pathological form of Hitler's hatred of the Jews and stress the fact that the more Hitler sensed that the military confrontation was lost, the more he pushed forward what had become the "real" war for him. 72 There is an obvious element of contradiction between the description of such a basic obsessive hatred on the one hand and Broszat's main thesis concerning the "genesis of the Final Solution" and the absence of an order from Hitler on the other. Why would such a pathological Jew-hater shy away from giving an order of total extermination? How could he let his subordinates be in sole charge of what was, according to Broszat himself, his main obsession? Hans Mommsen tries to avoid this logical pitfall not by denying Hitler's fanatic anti-Semitism but by presenting a rather complex psychological picture which one could sum up more or less as follows: Firstly, and this relates to earlier texts by Mommsen, Hitler often did not impose his will, but was something of a "weak dictator." 73 In "Die Realisierung des Utopischen," this weakness appears in another form. In many fields, Hitler did not avoid decisions, but on the contrary we often

71

72 75

For example, Martin Broszat, "Soziale Motivation...," loc. cit., pp. 401-402; and Hans Mommsen, " D i e Realisierung...," loc. cit., pp. 388-398. Martin Broszat, "Hitler und die Genesis der Endlösung," loc. cit., pp. 770 ff. Hans Mommsen, "Nationalsozialismus," in Sowjetsystem und demokratische Gesellschaft. Eine vergleichende Enzyklopädie, Bd IV, Freiburg, 1971.

THE DECISION FOR THE FINAL SOLUTION FROM ANTI-SEMITISM T O EXTERMINATION

witness, according to Mommsen, a kind of "forward flight. " 7 4 But this did not apply in the case of the Jewish question, on which, for some mysterious reason, Hitler constantly presented his position in chiliastic terms 7 5 and hesitated to confront his ideological make-believe world with political and social reality (Hitler.. .scheute davon zuruck, die ideobgische Scheinwelt, in der er lebte, mit der politischen und sozialen Realität zu konfrontieren). This would explain his noninvolvement in the decisions concerning the extermination of the Jews: C o n f r o n t e d w i t h the real consequences of the e x t e r m i n a t i o n of the Jews, H i t l e r did not react d i f f e r e n t l y f r o m his subordinates — he tried not t o take notice of it or to repress it (Konfrontiert mit den realen Konsequenzen der Juden Vernichtung, reagierte Hitler nicht anders als seine Unterführer — er suchte diese nicht wahrzunehmen oder zu verdrängen).76

The extermination process unfolded through the inner dynamics of the system, as we have already mentioned, and through Himmler's fanatic ambition to realize Hitler's apocalyptic dreams here and now. 7 7 In this way, the fanatic dreamer remains a fanatic, but, being a dreamer, he is hardly involved in the actual decisions concerning the extermination itself. This explanation runs into difficulty because it fails to take into account known facts about Hitler's personal involvement in the "Final Solution." W e shall come back to this later on. However, one may well ask why, for instance, did Hitler request to be kept informed regularly of the operations of the Einsatzgruppen on Soviet territory 7 8 and why, on December 21,1942, was Report 74 75 76 77 n

Hans Mommsen, " D i e Realisierung...," loc. cit., p. 389. Ibid., p. 397. Ibid., pp. 397-398. Ibid., p. 399. Cf. the order sent on August 1,1941 by Gestapo Chief Heinrich Müller to the heads of the four Einsatzgruppen: "Regular reports have to be submitted to the Führer concerning the w o r k of the Einsatzgruppen in the East," in Gerald L. Fleming, Hitler und die Endlosung, op. cit., p. 58.

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THE "FINAL SOLUTION' SAUL FRIEDLANDER

No. 51 sent to him by Himmler? It deals with the Einsatzgruppen operations on Soviet territory over the period August through November, 1942, and it mentions the execution of 363,211 Jews (according to a note by Hitler's adjutant, Pfeiffer, the report was submitted to Hitler on December 31,1942).79 One also wonders why we have direct orders from Hitler to execute the Jews remaining in the Rowno district in Ukraine in 1942.80 And, finally, if Hitler shied away from confronting his ideological dream-world with reality, if he repressed the knowledge of the extermination of the Jews or avoided it for any number of psychological reasons, then one wonders why in his ultimate political declaration, the testament written on April 29,1945, on the eve of his death, he boasted of this very extermination as the greatest service rendered by National Socialism to humanity.81 In more general terms, the discrepancy between Hitler's absolute ruthlessness concerning the unleashing of the war, the killing of the mentally ill, the orders given about the type of annihilation war to be fought in Russia, etc., and his presumed fear of facing reality as far as the extermination of the Jews was concerned, does not carry conviction. If we move from Hitler's personality to the function of his anti-Semitic ideology as described by Broszat, that is, as an essentially instrumental, mobilizing ideology,82 we encounter the same kind of difficulty as previously mentioned. Why would such an obsessive Jew-hater not wish, first and foremost, to implement his anti-Jewish ideology? Why wouldn't that ideology lead to a concrete aim, to a concrete policy? But beyond this logical point, the question arises: Whom should this mobilizing ideology have mobilized? The general population? The party members? As far as the general population is concerned, we know today that although anti-Jewish prejudices were widespread and 79 80 81 82

Ibid., p. 14. Ibid., p. 141. See Eberhard Jackel, Hitlers Weltanschauung, 2nd edition, Stuttgart, 1981, p. 78. Cf. supra, p. 22.

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although the anti-Jewish policies of the regime did not significantly affect attitudes even within German opposition circles, 83 these measures did not evoke general enthusiasm. From the Nazi viewpoint, the reaction patterns to their anti-Semitism must have been considered mixed at best. Otto Dov Kulka's studies of this issue reveal important regional variations, but some predominant aspects nevertheless emerge: a dislike of disorderly anti-Jewish measures and, therefore, a preference for an orderly, "legal" solution (the Nuremberg Laws), but mostly growing depersonalization, passivity and inertia. 84 Ian Kershaw's study, more specifically centered on Bavaria, shows a greater reticence on the part of the population: The permanent radicalization o f the anti-Jewish policies o f the regime can hardly be said, on the evidence we have considered, to have been the product of, or to have corresponded to, the strong demands o f popular opinion. It led in 1935 and 1938 to a drop in prestige for the Party, which might even have had repercussions for Hitler's own nimbus had he been seen to have supported and sided with the radicals. The radicalization o f the negative dynamism, which formed the driving-force o f the Nazi Party, found remarkably little echo in the mass o f the population. Popular opinion, largely indifferent and infused with a latent anti-Jewish feeling further bolstered by propaganda, provided the climate within which spiraling Nazi aggression towards Jews could take place unchallenged. But it did not provoke the radicalization in the first place. 85 83

84

85

See mainly Christof Dipper, "Der deutsche Widerstand und die Juden,"Geschichte und Gesellschaft, Vol. 9, No. 3, 1983, pp. 349 ff. Cf. Otto Dov Kulka, "Public Opinion in Nazi Germany and the Jewish Question,"Zion, Vol. 40,1975, pp. 186 ff. (in Hebrew) and an abridged version in English in The Jerusalem Quarterly, Nos. 25/26, Fall/Winter 1982, pp. 121 ff. See also Kulka, "Die Nürnberger Rassengesetze und die deutsche Bevölkerung," VfZ, Vol. 33, No. 1, 1985. Ian Kershaw, "The Persecution of the Jews and German Popular Opinion in the Third Reich," Leo Baeck Institute Yearbook, Vol. X X V I , 1981, p. 288. For earlier studies of German public opinion, which either touch upon attitudes toward the anti-Jewish policies or are devoted to the subject, see Marlis Steine«, Hitlers Kreig und die Deutschen, Düsseldorf, 1970; and L.D. Stokes, " T h e German People and the Destruction of the European J e w s , " Journal of Central European History, Vol. 6,1973. See also the critical survey by Kulka and Rodrigue in the present volume.

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Whatever the nuances of public opinion reactions may have been, it soon must have become clear to the Nazi Party, well informed by the police and the SD about the state of mind of the population, that anti-Semitism had no major mobilizing effect and could even have its drawbacks. There remains, therefore, the question of the mobilization of the party itself. That anti-Jewish actions were an outlet for party radicals, in the spring of 1933, the spring and summer of 1935, and in November 1938, is well documented today.86 But was this outlet fostered by the leadership, were those outbursts encouraged by Hitler? The documentation seems to prove the contrary: in 1933, in connection with the expulsion of the Jews from the Civil Service, and mostly in connection with their expulsion from the legal profession, Hitler opposed the demands of the radicals, siding with the more restrained proposal of the Ministry of Justice.87 In 1935 the Nuremberg Laws were proclaimed, inter alia to put an end to the agitation of the radicals.88 In his speech to party district chiefs at Ordensburg-Vogelsang, on April 29, 1937, Hitler warned the radicals not to demand of him steps in Jewish matters which he had not carefully planned beforehand. 89 In November 1938, after the disastrous consequences of the Kristallnacht became obvious, Hitler definitively took Jewish matters out of the hands of the party radicals and transferred them to the Goring—Himmler-Heydrich triumvirate, 90 true radicals indeed, but who did not need anti-Semitism as an outlet, or anti-Jewish initiatives in order to be "mobilized." 91 86

See among others Dietrich Orlow, The History of the Nazi Party, Vol. II, J933-1945, Newton-Abbot, 1973, pp. 33, 163-165, 247. 87 Cf. Uwe Dietrich Adam, JuJenpolitik (op. cit.), pp. 65-66. 18 Dietrich Orlow, op. cit., pp. 164-165. " For a full text of this very important speech, see Hildegard von Kotze and Helmut Krausnick, Es spricht der Führer. Sieben exemplarische Hitlcr-Rcim, Gütersloh, 1966, particularly pp. 147-148. 90 Karl A. Schleunes, op. cit., pp. 245-246. " In fact, the non-instrumental, non-mobilizing aspect of Hitler's racial or biological ideology and its direct, non-rhetorical link to policies becomes even

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Nazi anti-Jewish policies of the 1930s do indeed indicate the absence of any precise preestablished plan at the outset and the necessity to act according to a somewhat loose strategy, owing to internal and external difficulties. However, a general aim is quite evident: the segregation ofJews from German society and their expulsion (by voluntary or forced emigration) from German territory. The points of the party program of February 1920 which deal with the Jewish question were, in fact, being implemented. Ideology expressed itself in concrete measures; there was no backtracking whatsoever. Since we are speaking of an aim and a policy, the problem of Hitler's direct involvement is of importance. 92 To reach a firmer conclusion concerning this involvement, we would need a study of the 1930s, similar to that carried out by Gerald L. Fleming on the period of the war and the "Final Solution." As such a study does not exist (the importance of the general works on Nazi anti-Jewish policies during that period notwithstanding), let us limit ourselves here to a few remarks. On March 26,1933, Hitler summoned Goebbels to Berchtesgaden to discuss preparations for the anti-Jewish boycott of April 1. Two days later, he again spoke of the forthcoming event with his Propaganda Minister, indicating what themes should be used in the first substantial anti-Jewish initiative of the new

92

more evident when one turns to the little discussed issue of "the destruction of unworthy l i f e " (the so-called euthanasia). Hitler touched upon it in his early writings, proclaimed it as a worthy aim in a public speech at Nuremberg, in 1929, and he gave the secret order for its secret implementation a few days after the beginning of the war. O n the whole subject, see Klaus Dorner, "Nationalsozialismus und Lebensvernichtung," Vjz, Vol. 15, No. 2, April 1967, pp. 121 ff. (for the Nuremberg speech, see p. 131). It is minimized in Schleunes' conclusion and even more so in Hans Mommsen's various texts, particularly in " D i e Realisierung...," loc. cit., p. 387. U w e Adam, on the other hand, although stressing the chaotic aspect of Nazi policy t o w a r d the Jews, points out that "ultimately the Rcichskanzlcr alone decided upon the course of the policy toward the J e w s " (als letzte Instanz allein Jer Reichskanzler Jen Gang der JuJmpolitik bestimmte). U w e Adam, op. cit., p. 1%.

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regime. 93 With regard to the discussion on the Civil Service law and the legal profession law, we have already noted what Hitler's general stand was; according to Uwe Adam, Hitler probably participated in this discussion which took place on March 31 or April 1, 1933.94 As for the exclusion of the Jews from the legal profession, his rejection of the demands of the radicals is on record. 95 In fact, we see that throughout 1933 Hitler kept control of the rhythm of the anti-Jewish measures taken, accepting the initiative of a boycott as desired by the radicals, but opposing the extreme measures they urged later, in view of the global political situation. The Nuremberg Laws are at the heart of the argument over Hitler's interventions during the 1930s. We have seen Mommsen's account, the gist of which was presented already in Bernhard Loesener's report: the laws were prepared at the very last moment, because the issues which were supposed to be dealt with by Hitler at the closing session of the Party Congress were abandoned two days before the final meeting. 96 In fact, reexamination of the sources shows that the racial laws had been in preparation for several months, and that they were discussed at the ministerial level and with Hitler himself. On August 30, 1935, their forthcoming promulgation at the September Party Congress was even reported in the foreign press.97 93 94 95 94 97

M . , p. 61. Ibid. Cf. supra, p. 34. Cf. supra, p. 24. Otto Dov Kulka, "Die Nürnberger Rassengesetze...," note 128; Cf. supra, n. 84. We know that several proposals for such a legislation were discussed within various party and ministerial forums after the Nazis came to power, in particular since the end of 1934 (cf. Lothar Gruchmann, "'Blutschutzgesetz' und Justiz. Zu Entstehung und Auswirkung des Nürnberger Gesetzes vom 15. September 1935," VfZ, Vol. 31, No. 3,1983, pp. 418 ff.). Gruchmann's article does not analyze the August 1935 discussions at the ministerial level. The reexamination by Kulka makes obvious that the major source for the spontaneous aspect of the legislation, i.e., Bernhard Loesener's report (Bernhard Loesener, "Als Rassereferent im Reichsministerium des Innern," VfZ, Vol. 9, No. 3, 1961), is probably less trustworthy than was thought up to now.

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As to Hitler's attentiveness to even the smallest details relating to anti-Jewish policies, one could mention his last-minute deletion o f the crucial words "this law applies to full Jews only," w h e n announcing the l a w for the Protection of German Blood and Honor before the Reichstag on September 15, 1935. 98 One could also point out that during the Anschluss, it was Hitler himself w h o conceived o f forbidding Austrian Jewish civil servants from taking the n e w loyalty oaths made to him persona l l y . " Finally, one could indicate that on November 9, 1938, w h e n V o m Rath's death was announced, a Hitler-Goebbels meeting probably took place prior to the unleashing of the anti-Jewish pogrom. But as far as the main arguments dealing w i t h the evolution o f the anti-Jewish policies are concerned, the decisive period is obviously that of the war. As w e have indicated, the general aim during the years 1933-1939 seems to have been segregation and expulsion. The outbreak of the war was followed by a necessary interval of groping for a n e w solution in v i e w of the entirely n e w circumstances. 1 0 0 Finally, the year 1941, when the hesitations seem to " 99 100

Bernhard Loesener, lot. cit., p. 274. Uwe Dietrich Adam, op. cit., p. 195. During the period 1938-1941, one actually can distinguish four different aspects of Nazi policies: a. Hitler's threats of extermination, which began at the end of 1938 and were expressed in well-known discussions with foreign dignitaries and in public speeches such as that o f j a n u a r y 30,1939, as well as in discussions with close aides after the defeat of Poland; b. A simultaneous policy of forced emigration and expulsion which in a w a y includes the Madagascar scheme as well as the expulsions of Jews f r o m Saarpfalz and Baden to unoccupied France, etc. c. A policy of concentration in the Government General, including the Nisko project. Concerning Hitler's initiative on the latter, see Arthur Rosenberg's entry of September 9,1939, in his PoUtisches Tagebuch, Munich, 1964, p. 99; d. Various limited-scale extermination measures against the Jews or other groups, including the operations of the Einsatzgruppen in Poland and the "euthanasia" program. Moreover, this period of transition becomes even more complex when one notes that at some stage Hitler decided to leave the measures to be taken for the disappearance of the Jews up to his Gauleiters. This is clearly stated in Bormann's letter to Lammers of November 20,1940, in which the latter is informed that the Fiihrer expects the Gauleiters to see to it that their areas become purely German within a few

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come to an end, is that which confronts the historian with the most crucial questions. Martin Broszat stresses that none of Hitler's principal aides, when interrogated after the war, had any recollection of a verbal order for the overall extermination of the Jews. Moreover, entries in Goebbels' unpublished diaries, when referring to the Jewish problem during the summer and fall of 1941, often allude to an evacuation to camps in Russian territory, but do not mention any extermination order. Finally, still in terms of documentary evidence, Broszat cites, inter alia, the controversy between Himmler and SS-Brigadeführer Ubelhór, in charge of the Lodz ghetto. At the beginning of October 1941, Ubelhór strongly objected to deportations from the Reich to Lodz, because of the overstrained absorption capacity of the ghetto. This controversy would be meaningless if extermination had already been decided upon. 101 These arguments have been answered by Christopher B r o w n ing. He points out that after the war, Himmler and Heydrich, the main architects of the "Final Solution," were not available for interrogation, and Goring, fighting for his life, would certainly not have admitted that he furthered a global extermination order. The Goebbels diaries were a poor source at best, as Goebbels was known to have been deliberately excluded f r o m Jewish affairs as from November 1938 by Goring, Himmler and Heydrich. O n the other hand, a series of references to the preparation, during the summer and fall of 1941, of the "Final Solution" was omitted by Broszat — f o r instance, after the war both Rudolf Hóss, former commander of Auschwitz, and Adolf Eichmann referred to overall extermination plans being worked

101

years, in which case he would not then ask them what methods were utilized to achieve this end. Cf. Helmut Krausnick and Hans-Heinrich Wilhelm, op. cit., p. 626. As stated in the text, this hesitation period was to be expected and it somehow came to an end just before or just after the attack on the Soviet Union For these various arguments, see Martin Broszat, loc. cit., pp. 746 ff.

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out during that period. As for the treatment which, according to Broszat, was envisaged for the Jews transferred to the East (death by hunger, overwork, exposure to cold, etc.), it was not very different from an extermination plan. Finally, Goring's order to Heydrich o fJuly 31,1941, signifies a global preparation which necessarily entailed exploring various possible methods, hesitations and sudden initiatives, which together may, for a few months, have given the impression of chaos that Broszat takes as a sign of the total lack of planning. 102 But let us turn to the sequence of events as such. Until the fall of 1941, only the Soviet Jews were systematically exterminated. Adam and Broszat do not regard these exterminations as being necessarily linked to the "Final Solution," although, as Browning points out, the exterminations on Soviet territory represent a manifest "qualitative" change in Nazi policies toward the Jews. Moreover, in the fall of 1941 deportations from the Reich began, mostly to Lodz, Kovno, Minsk, and Riga. Some of the deportees sent to Riga and Lodz were murdered on the spot, near Riga and in the Chefmno (Kulmhof) extermination camp near Lodz (local Jews were included in these killings). It would seem that we are now confronted with the stages of an overall plan, as the extermination process includes Jews transported from Germany to the killing sites. However, as mentioned before, Broszat interprets these killings as having been necessitated by local considerations (the deportations from the Reich increased the overcrowding in the ghettos and the Jews could not be sent further east, because the Wehrmacht's advance in Russia was slowing down). He adds that the very chaotic aspect of the deportations, due to Hitler's sudden desire to see the Reich cleared ofJews as soon as possible, seems to preclude any systematic planning of an extermination process.

102

Christopher R. Browning, loc. cit., pp. 98 ff.

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In fact, however, the Riga exterminations were not a local improvization. On November 10,1941, Hinrich Lohse, the Reichskommissar for the Baltic countries, was advised by Himmler, through SS-General FriedrichJeckeln, that these exterminations were to be carried out on his (Himmler's) orders, in accordance with the Führer's wishes ("Tell Lohse that it is my order, which is also the Führer's wish" — "Sagen Sie dem Lohse es ist mein Befehl, was auch Führers Wunsch ist'n0i). Clearly, then, this is no local initiative, but to all purposes, an initiative from Hitler. The evidence relating to the onset of the Cheimno exterminations is more complex. Broszat reminds us that the idea of exterminating some of the Lodz ghetto Jews in an attempt to solve the problem of overcrowding was already discussed among local SS officers and with the Reichssicherheitshauptamt as early as July 1941, when no general plan for the "Final Solution" could yet have existed. 104 Isn't it possible that the exterminations of the fall resulted from the same kind of consideration, developed at a rather low echelon? In March 1944, according to Gerald Fleming, Wartheland Gauleiter Greiser (whose domain included Lodz and Cheimno) proudly reported to his Führer that practically all the Wartheland Jews had been exterminated (mostly in Cheimno). On November 21, 1942, Greiser informed Himmler that when he had met Hitler he was instructed to "act according to his own judgment" as far as the Jews were concerned. Greiser had had two meetings with Hitler, the first on October 1,1942, and the second on November 8 of the same year. 105

103 104

105

Gerald Fleming, op. tit., p. 88. Martin Broszat, be. cit., p. 749 n. Ubelhör's protests against sending deportees f r o m the Reich to Lodz tie in with this kind of reasoning. Gerald Fleming, op. cit., pp. 34-35. It seems that the extermination by gas of the Warthegau Je ws was mentioned for the first time in a communication sent to Eichmann on July 16, 1941 by SS-Sturmbannführer Rolf-Heinz Höppner, belonging to the staff of the Higher SS and Police leader of the Warthegau. One may assume that Eichmann discussed the matter with Heydrich, but w e

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Greiser's report to Hitler in 1944 clearly indicates that Hitler's statements of October or November 1942 were well understood. On the other hand, as we know, Greiser had initiated the exterminations in Cheimno a year before those meetings. If he had received the same kind of order as Lohse did in the fall of 1941, Hitler's words, a year later, would not make sense. T w o possible explanations, of wider significance, come to mind. Either Greiser, or for that matter, Ubelhor in Lodz, was not informed of the general plan at that early stage, or — and this could explain Heydrich's own hesitations about the fate of Spanish Jews in France in October of the same year (a case used by Mommsen to challenge the hypothesis of an existing order for general extermination 1 0 6 ) —the manifold concrete situations, as would be the case throughout the following years, led to limited contradictory decisions, notwithstanding the general plan of extermination. If one moves f r o m individual cases to the general context, the whole picture becomes much more obvious. During the second half of 1941, the Einsatzgruppen exterminated nearly one million Jews in the Soviet Union; 11,000 stateless Jews expelled from Hungary were exterminated at Kamenetz Podolsk during the last days of August 1941; in November mass-killing of Jews deported from the Reich started in Riga and in December the first extermination center, that of Cheimno near Lodz, was set in action. All emigration of Jews from occupied Europe was forbidden (order of October 23,1941), and construction work on the Belzec extermination camp in the Government General had commenced. It is also commonly mentioned that in the early fall of the same year the first experiments in killing with Zyklon B gas took place at Auschwitz, this method of liquidation being

106

do not know if Hitler was involved at that stage and gave his assent. As already mentioned, Kommando Lange, which took charge of the exterminations starting in December, came f r o m Berlin. For Heinz Hoppner's communication to Eichmann, see Eugen Kogon et al., Nationalsozialistische Massentotungen... (op. cit.), pp. 110-111. Hans Mommsen, " D i e Realisierung ...," loc. cit., p. 411.

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used mainly on Soviet officers. In view of these converging elements, the existence of an overall plan for the extermination of the Jews of Europe, by the fall of 1941, can hardly be questioned any longer: the groping phase had come to an end and the general framework of the "Final Solution" was becoming apparent. It is within the same context, as much as by itself, that the intent of the Wannsee Conference —where on January 20,1942, Heydrich presented to the assembled representatives of various ministries and SS agencies the outline of the "Final Solution" — seems to be unmistakable. The establishment of extermination camps in the Government General in the following months eliminates any possible remaining doubt or vagueness about what was meant at Wannsee.107 Moreover, what logic dictates, direct evidence confirms. At his trial in Jerusalem, Adolf Eichmann — who was technical organizer of the conference and attended its meetings — was asked by the President of the Tribunal what the general sense of the discussion was. He answered: "One spoke of killing, of

107

H a n s M o m m s e n has presented the following interpretation of the W a n n s e e C o n f e r e n c e . A f t e r alluding to Hans Frank's remarks of D e c e m b e r 16, 1941, r e f e r r i n g to " m a j o r measures to be discussed in the Reich [concerning the J e w s — S . F . ] , " M o m m s e n writes: " T h i s relates to the f o r t h c o m i n g ' W a n n s e e C o n f e r e n c e ' w h i c h is generally identified w i t h the immediate c o m m e n c e m e n t of the overall European Genocide, although the 'Initiatives' (Aktionen) m e n tioned by H e y d r i c h in relation to the evacuation of the Jews to the East w e r e presented as alternatives (Ausweichmoglichkeiten) aimed at gathering practical e x p e r i e n c e 'in v i e w of the c o m i n g final solution of the Jewish Q u e s t i o n . ' T h e liquidation of those J e w s w h o w e r e unable to w o r k was mentioned explicitly. T h e fiction of compulsory labor (Arbeitseinsatz) created the psychological link b e t w e e n the emigration, the reservation solution and the Holocaust itself. At the same time, the c h i m e r a of a territorial 'final solution,' w h i c h was n o w t o be located b e y o n d the Urals, w a s still held f o r t h (schimmerte noch dutch). O n the o t h e r hand, the f o r m u l a t i o n concerning 'certain p r e p a r a t o r y actions relating to the Final Solution' w h i c h had t o be taken in the 'territories concerned, ' i . e . in the General G o v e r n m e n t , r e f e r r e d to immediate partial liquidation...." Hans M o m m s e n , " D i e Realisierung...," loc. cit., p. 412.

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elimination, of annihilation" ("Es wurde von Toten und Elimitiieren und Vernichten gesprochen").108 If w e admit that the intent of the Wannsee Conference is unmistakable, if w e recall that in his opening remarks Heydrich referred not only to the order given him by Goring, but also to Hitler's agreement to start evacuating the J e w s to the East, this can only mean one thing: Hitler agreed to the extermination plan. One can hardly believe that Heydrich would present an extermination plan to a whole array of high-ranking civil servants if Hitler had intended a bona fide evacuation plan. The conference was first set for December 9, 1941 (later postponed to January 20, 1942). One has to assume, therefore, that the preparation of the scheme presented by Heydrich must have taken several months, and it seems likely that Hitler's "agreement" was expressed some time in the summer of 1941, at the latest. And Hitler's "agreement," like Hitler's "wish," actually means Hitler's "order," with no necessity for a formal decree. Finally, from an early interrogation of Rudolf Hoss undertaken by the British authorities at the time of his arrest, it now appears that when he wrote in his prison memoirs about having heard of an order for the global extermination of the Jews in the summer of 1941, he was not mistaken about the date, as was often thought. It seems that Hoss met Himxnler in June 1941 and heard from him about a Hitler order to prepare for a general extermination of the Jews. 1 0 9 Hoss's testimony fits in with the material collected by Gerald Fleming and with the various references to an order from

The Eichmann Trial, Session 107, July 24,1961, quoted in Fleming, op. cit., p. 105. For a particularly thorough analysis of the unmistakable meaning of the Wannsee Conference, see Wolfgang Scheffler, "Zur Entstehungsgeschichte der 'Endlosung,"'in Aus Politik undZeitgeschichte: Beilagezur WochenzeitungDas Parlament, B 43/82, Oktober 1982, pp. 8 ff. 10 ' Yehuda Bauer, "Auschwitz and the 'Final Solution,'" lecture given at the international conference on the extermination of the Jews of Europe, Stuttgart, May 3 - 5 , 1984. 108

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Hitler, coming from the most diverse sources. When in August 1941 Otto Bradfisch, head of the Einsatzkommando 8 operating in the Minsk region, asked Himmler who bore responsibility for the executions, Himmler answered "the orders come from Hitler and, as such, have force of law." 110 A year later, when SS-General Gottlob Berger, speaking on behalf of the Ministry for the East, suggested that a more exact definition of the term "Jew" should be provided, Himmler rejected the very idea of further definition, which would only impose limitations, and added: T h e occupied eastern territories will be freed of Jews {judenfrei). T h e Führer has laid on m y shoulders the execution of this very difficult order. N o b o d y can take the responsibility a w a y f r o m m e anyway, and I therefore forbid any i n t e r f e r e n c e . 1 "

During the first half of 1944, Himmler made reference to the very difficult Führer order concerning the "Final Solution" in no less than four different speeches (January 26, May 5, May 24, and June 21), three of which were delivered before large audiences of senior Wehrmacht officers. 112 According to the testimony of SS-Judge Konrad Morgen, when Christian Wirth's special sections were dispatched to the General Government to help Globocnik in the extermination process, "Himmler is supposed to have asked of each of them to swear an oath of silence and to have told them: 'I have to expect of you superhuman acts of inhumanity. But it is the Führer's will.'" 113

110 111 112

113

Gerald L. Fleming, op. cit., p. 62. Helmut Krausnick et al., Anatomy of the SS State (op. cit.), p. 69. Gerald L. Fleming, op. cit., pp. 65-67. As we have already mentioned in the case of Heydrich at the Wannsee Conference, one cannot imagine that Himmler would have referred to a nonexistent Fuhrer-order, especially in front of such audiences. Helmut Krausnick et al., op. cit., p. 97.

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At the end of December 1941, Bernhard Loesener, Adviser on Jewish Affairs at the Ministry of the Interior, informed Undersecretary Wilhelm Stuckart that because of the extermination of the Jews in the Riga region, news of which had reached him, he could not remain in his position. Stuckart replied: "Don't you know that these things happen according to the highest orders?" 114 In May 1942, Reinhard Heydrich, the head of the Reich Main Security Office and newly appointed Protector of Bohemia and Moravia, and several Abwehr officers met in Prague. In the course of a very heated discussion on the exterminations, Heydrich stated that the Reich Main Security Office was not responsible for the killings; they were being executed on the personal orders of the Führer. 115 As mentioned before, on August 1, 1941, Gestapo Chief Heinrich Müller sent the following order to the heads of the four Einsatzgruppen: "Regular reports have to be submitted to the Führer concerning the work of the Einsatzgruppen in the East" ("Dem Führer sollen von hier aus lfd. Berichte über die Arbeit der Einsatzgruppen im Osten vorgelegt werden").116 W e have noted that in December 1942 Report No. 51 was sent by Himmler to Hitler. It deals with the operations of the Einsatzgruppen in Soviet territory for the period August through November 1942, and mentions "363,211 Jews executed" (the report was submitted to Hitler on December 31, according to a note by his adjutant, Pfeiffer). 117 During the same month, Himmler noted: "Point (3) Jews...to be eliminated, Jews in France, 600-700,000, to be eliminated" ("Juden...abschaffen, Juden in Frankreich, 600-700,000, abschaffen").118 In fact, in terms of statistics, Himmler was to be better informed at the end of December, when the SS-Inspector 114 115

117 118

Bernhard Loesener, "Als Rassereferent...," loc. cit., p. 311. Gerald L. Fleming, op. cit., p. 77. Ibid., p. 58. Ibid. Josef Ackermann, Himmler ah Ideologe (op. cit.), p. 166. The w o r d Abschaffen is added in red ink. It means that Hitler took the decision during the meeting.

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for Statistics, Richard Korherr, prepared for him a complete and accurate report on the course of the "Final Solution." In April 1943 the report, updated to March 31 of that year and condensed to six and a half pages, was ready for the Führer. Typed on the special '"Fuhrer-typewriter" (which had extra-large letters), the report was submitted to H i d e r some time before mid-April 1943.119 According to Eichmann's testimony, when the report was returned to the Reich Main Security Office, it bore the following note: " T h e Führer has seen. To be destroyed. H.H.[i.e., Heinrich Himmler]" 1 2 0 Here w e must consider the strange contradictions of Nazi camouflage of the "Final Solution." Richard Korherr was asked to delete the word Sonderbehandlung (special treatment), which appeared in his report; Rudolf Brandt, Himmler's personal assistant, wrote to Korherr: He [Himmler] wishes that in no place should one speak of a "special treatment of the J e w s " (dass an keiner Stelle von "Sonderbehandlung der Juden" gesprochen wird). O n page nine, point four, the formulation should therefore be as follows: "Transportation of Jews f r o m the Eastern Provinces to the Russian East: they passed through the camps in the General Government... through the camps in the W a r t h e g a u " (Transportierung von Juden aus den Ostprovinzen nach dem russischen Osten: Es wurden durchgeschleust durch die Lager im Generalgouvernement...durch die Lager im Warthegau."). Another formulation is not allowed. I am sending you back the copy of the report already marked by the Reichsführer SS, with the demand that page nine be changed accordingly and the report be sent back again. 121

One wonders about the inconsistency of the attempts at camouflage. O n the one hand, even the code word Sonderbehandlung was eliminated from the report sent to Hitler; on the other hand, Himmler referred on several occasions to Hitler's orders when speaking about the total extermination of the Jews. O r , 1

" For the text of both Korherr reports and the related correspondence, see Serge Klarsfeld (ed.), The Holocaust and the Neo-Nazi Mythomania, New York, 1978. 120 Gerald L. Fleming, op. cit., pp. 149-152. 121 Cf. Serge Klarsfeld (ed.), op. cit.

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even more paradoxical: in a document sent to Hitler himself, no reference to the "Final Solution" is permitted; but in speeches delivered to wide audiences (not only SS officers, but also regular officers of the Wehrmacht), Himmler quite blatantly refers to Hitler's orders. It may well be that in the case of the Korherr report the explanation is provided by an instruction issued somewhat later, on July 11, 1943, by the head of the Party Chancellery, Martin Bormann, whereby "in agreement with the Führer, the 'Final Solution' should in no way be mentioned in any document relating to the Jewish question: mention should only be made of Jews being sent to work." 1 2 2 Nevertheless, the inconsistency remains. In 1942, in no less than four speeches (January 1, January 30, February 24 and November 8), Hitler himself hinted darkly that his prophecy about the extermination of the Jews in the event of a world war was being fulfilled. 123 In April 1943, he more or less admitted to the extermination in his talks with the Rumanian Chief of State, Antonescu, and the Hungarian Regent, Admiral Horthy. 124 In 122 123

124

Joseph Walk (hrg), Das Sonderrecht für die Juden im NS-Staat (op. dt.), p. 400. For the relevant excerpts of these speeches, see Eberhard Jäckel, Hitlers Weltanschauung (op. cit.), pp. 74-75. The constant repetition of the theme during 1942 seems to indicate, in itself, that Hitler wished to convey that a turning point had been reached, that the extermination he had prophesied had started. In the second conversation with Horthy, on April 17, 1943, Ribbentrop answered first, when Horthy asked what should be done with the Jews. According to the Foreign Minister, the Jews should either be exterminated or put in concentration camps. Hitler then explained his policies in the clearest possible way: "The Jews are parasites. In Poland one took care of these matters in the most systematic way. If the Jews there did not want to work, they were shot. If they could not work, they had to perish (Wenn die Juden dort nicht arbeiten wollten, wurden sie erschossen. Wenn sie nicht arbeiten könnten, müssten sie verkommen). They had to be handled like tuberculosis bacilli, which could contaminate a healthy body. This was not cruel if one took into account that even innocent creatures like deer had to be killed, to avoid their causing damage. W h y should one show greater leniency to those beasts which brought us Bolshevism." Cf. Andreas Hillgruber, Staatsmänner und Diplomaten bei Hitler, Teil 2, Frankfurt, 1970, pp. 256 ff.

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one of his last talks, on February 13, and in the political testament he w r o t e on the eve of his death, he boasted about it quite emphatically. There is, finally, indirect evidence of Hitler's attention to the extermination process. For example, Odilo Globocnik, the Higher SS and Police leader in charge of the four extermination camps established in the General Government during 1942, visited the Reich chancellery in the autumn of that year. A note by Himmler referring to a conference with Hitler on October 7, 1942, bears the following annotation: "Situation in the General Government. Globus [Globocnik's nickname was 'Globus']." 125 The subject of the conference thus becomes evident. O n April 13, 1943, a proposal to promote Christian W i r t h (Globocnik's right-hand man and a specialist in killing by gas — first the mentally ill and then the Jews) to the rank of 5 5 Sturmbannführer was submitted to the Main Personnel Office of the SS. The file notes that since the beginning of the war Wirth has been " o n a special mission by order of the Führer." 1 2 6 That Hitler could have been unaware of the "Final Solution" up to 1943, as suggested by David Irving, 127 goes against all evidence; that he gave an oral order for the overall extermination of the Jews of Europe some time in the spring or summer of 1941 is highly probable, but cannot be proved with absolute certainty on the basis of existing documents. W e have seen, however, that he was kept informed of the extermination process and made ad hoc interventions in it.

O n the limited level of the analysis of Nazi policies, the resolution of the debate between various approaches appears possible. On the level of global historical interpretation, however, the

125 126 127

Gerald L. Fleming, op. cit., p. 70. Ibid., p. 37. David Irving, Hitler's War, London, 1975.

THE DECISION FOR THE FINAL SOLUTION FROM ANTI-SEMITISM T O EXTERMINATION

real difficulties remain. The historian who is not encumbered with ideological or conceptual blinkers can readily recognize that it is Nazi anti-Semitism and the anti-Jewish policies of the Third Reich that gave Nazism an essential part of its sui generis character. W e have noted that the explanation based on the course of German history leaves many questions unanswered, and that "fascism" and "totalitarianism" are hardly adequate categories, in view of the centrality of Hitler's anti-Semitic drive. The consideration of Nazism as a "political religion" could eventually offer us a better grasp of some of the issues raised here, if inquiry in that direction is further developed. 128 In fact, the very difficulty of integrating the "Final Solution" into the framework of global interpretations of Nazism has led some historians into the paradoxical position of stressing the absolute centrality of Hitler's racist ideology within the Nazi system and then continuing the interpretation of the main issues posed by Nazism without taking the policies against the Jews into account. 129 All this may well lead us to the conclusion that the destruction of European Jewry poses a problem which historical analysis and understanding may not be able to overcome. At most one can speak of the emergence, unique to date, of a messianic faith and an apocalyptic vision of history at the heart 128

James M. Rhodes, The Hitler Movement — a Modern Millenerian Revolution, Hoover Institution Press, Stanford University, 1980, chaps. 2,8; Uriel Tal, Political Faith in Nazi Ideology and Policy Prior to the Holocaust, Annual Lecture of the Jacob M. and Shoshana Schreiber Chair for Contemporary Jewish History, Tel-Aviv University, 1978, 53 pp.; idem, " O n Structures of Political Theology and Myth in Germany Prior to the Holocaust," in Yehuda Bauer and Nathan Rotenstreich (eds.), The Holocaust as Historical Experience, N e w York and London, 1981, pp. 43-74; idem, "Nazism as a Political Faith," The Jerusalem Quarterly, Jerusalem, No. 15, 1980, pp. 70-90.

129

An interesting example of this paradoxical situation is Andreas Hillgruber's Endlich genug...(op. cit.), where the absolute centrality of Hitler's racial dogma is strongly emphasized ("everything was subordinated to the racial dogma, internal policy as well as foreign affairs," op. cit., p. 52). However, among the main issues discussed and considered as most relevant to the understanding of Nazism, the anti-Jewish policies and the "Final Solution" do not appear.

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of the political, bureaucratic, and technological system of an advanced industrial society. Yet here again, the image is false — there was no mass movement with respect to the Jews, nor even a crusade of a fanatic sect. Bureaucracy occupied center stage, a bureaucracy indifferent to the destruction, but driven by its leader who, in turn, was moved by the most intense of convictions. The historian's paralysis arises from the simultaneity and the interaction of entirely heterogeneous phenomena: messianic fanaticism and bureaucratic structures, pathological impulses and administrative decrees, archaic attitudes within an advanced industrial society. We know the details of what occurred, we are aware of the sequence of events and their probable interaction, but the profound dynamics of the phenomenon evades us. And what likewise escapes us is the almost immediate disintegration of the political, institutional, and legal structures of Germany, as well as the surrender of the moral forces that by their very nature ought to have been important obstacles to the Nazis in Germany, in other European countries, and in the entire Western world.

Footnotes for "Hitler Orders the Holocaust," by Eberhard Jacket, continued from page 73. 14. June 6, 1938. Droste Geschichts-Kalendarium, vol. 2, 1 (Düsseldorf: Droste, 1982), p. 4 5 1 . 15. Conference, October 14, 1938. Nuremberg Document PS-1301, Der Prozess gegen die Hauptkriegsverbrecher vor dem Internationalen Militärgerichtshof, vol. 27 (Nuremberg, 1948), p. 163 (hereafter cited as 1MT). 16. ADAP, vol. 5, nos. 84, 88, 89, 9 1 , 92, 95, 97, 98, 1 0 1 , 103, 107, 127, 652, 664, 665. 17. Conference, November 1 2 , 1938. Nuremberg Document PS—1816, IMT, vol. 28, pp. 5 3 8 - 5 3 9 . 18. ADAP, vol. 4, p. 293. 19. Helmut Krausnick, "Judenverfolgung," in Hans Buchheim et al. (eds.), Anatomie des SS-Staates, vol. 2 (Olten: Walter, 1965), p. 338. 20. ADAP, vol. 4, p. 170. 2 1 . Krausnick, "Judenverfolgung," pp. 3 4 2 - 3 4 3 . 22. Stenographische Berichte des Reichstags (1939), p. 16(B). 23. Jochen Thies, Architekt der Weltherrschaft (Düsseldorf: Droste, 1976), p. 1 1 5 . 24. Krausnick, "Judenverfolgung," p. 3 5 1 . 25. Hans-Günther Seraphim (ed.), Das politische Tagebuch Alfred Rosenbergs (Munich: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, 1964), p. 99. 26. Nuremberg Document PS-686, IMT, vol. 26, pp. 2 5 5 - 2 5 7 . Cf. Robert L. Koehl, RKFDV: German Resettlement and Population Policy 1939—1945 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1957). 27. Werner Präg and Wolfgang Jacobmeyer (eds.), Das Diensttagebuch des deutschen Generalgouverneurs in Polen 1939—1945 (Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 1975), pp. (hereafter cited as Diensttagebuch). 28. Reitlinger, The Final Solution, p. 46. 29. Tb Colin Ross, March 12, 1940, ADAP, vol. 8, p. 716. 30. "Denkschrift Himmlers über die Behandlung der Fremdvölkischen im Osten (Mai 1940)," Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte 5 (1957): 197. 3 1 . Krausnick, "Judenverfolgung," p. 355. 32. See Eberhard Jäckel, Frankreich in Hitlers Europa (Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 1966), pp. 4 6 - 5 8 . 33. Paul Schmidt, Statist auf diplomatischer Bühne 1913—45 (Bonn: Athenäum, 1952), p. 485. 34. Diensttagebuch, p. 252. 35. Jäckel, Frankreich, pp. 81 and 128—129. 36. Diensttagebuch, p. 284. 37. Ibid., p. 327. 38. Letter from Lammers to Schirach, December 3, 1940, Nuremberg Document PS-1950, IMT, vol 29, p. 176. 39. Krausnick, "Judenverfolgung," p. 358. 40. Diensttagebuch, pp. 335-337. 4 1 . See Helmut Krausnick and Hans-Heinrich Wilhelm, Die Truppe des Weltanschauungskrieges: Die Einsatzgruppen der Sicherheitspolizei und des SD, 1938—194z (Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 1981).

4 1 . Krausnick, "Judenverfolgung," p. 3 7 1 . 43. Reitlinger, The Final Solution, p. 28. 44. Diensttagebuch, p. 336. 45. Ibid., p. 386. 46. For example, in a letter of July 5, 1 9 4 3 , Himmler called Sobibör a Durchgangslager, as did other SS officials in the ensuing correspondence. Adalbert Rückerl (ed.), Nationalsozialistische Vernichtungslager (Munich: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, 1977), pp. 1 7 6 - 1 7 8 . 47. Tb Marshal Kvaternik, ADAP, vol. 1 3 , 2, p. 838. 48. Alfred Streim, Die Behandlung sowjetischer Kriegsgefangener im "Fall Barbarossa" (Heidelberg: C. F. Müller, 1981), pp. 7 4 - 9 3 . 49. Jözef Marszalek, Majdanek (Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1982), pp. 24-2.6. 50. Diensttagebuch, p. 389. 5 1 . See Yisrael Gutman, The Jews of Warsaw, 1939—1943 (Brighton: Harvester Press, 1982), and Raul Hilberg et al. (eds.), The Warsaw Diary of Adam Czerniakow (New York: Stein and Day, 1979). 52. Nuremberg Document PS-710, IMT, vol. 26, pp. 266—267. T h a t the authorization was prepared by Heydrich in advance and was written by Eichmann: Rudolf Aschenauer (ed.), Ich, Adolf Eichmann (Leoni: Druffel, 1980), p. 479. That Heydrich went to see Goring is confirmed by an entry in Göring's appointment book: Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte 3 1 (1983): 3 6 6 - 3 6 7 . 53. Goebbels diary, August 20, 1 9 4 1 , quoted by Broszat, "Hitler," p. 750. 54. See Martin Broszat (ed.), Kommandant in Auschwitz: Autobiographische Aufzeichnungen von Rudolf Höss (Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 1958), p. 1 5 3 , and Jochen von Lang (ed.), Das EichmannProtokoll (Berlin: Severin und Siedler, 1982), p. 69. 55. Hans-Heinrich Wilhelm, "Wie geheim war die 'Endlösung'?," in Miscellanea: Festschrift für Helmut Krausnick (Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 1980), p. 1 3 7 . 56. Robert M. W. Kempner, Eichmann und Komplizen (Zürich: Europa Verlag, 1961), p. 87. 57. Note by Rosenberg, Nuremberg Document P S - 1 5 1 7 , IMT, vol. 27, p. 270. 58. Nuremberg Document PS-709, published in Rückerl, Nationalsozialistische Vernichtungslager, pp. 99—100. 59. Document 203 AR 690/65, Zentrale Stelle der Landesjustizverwaltungen, Ludwigsburg; quoted by Broszat, "Hitler," p. 749. On SSSturmbannführer Rolf-Heinz Höppner, who signed the letter, see Martin Pollack, "Jäger und Gejagter," Transatlantik, November 1982, pp. 1 7 - 1 4 . 60. Bradley F. Smith and Agnes F. Peterson (eds.), Heinrich Himmler: Geheimreden 193) bis 1945 (Berlin: Propyläen, 1974), pp. 169 (Oct. 6, 1943), 1 0 2 (May 5, 1944), 2-03 (May 1 4 , 1944), and 1 0 3 - 2 0 4 (June 2 1 , 1944)6 1 . Louis P. Lochner (ed.), Goebbels Tagebücher aus den Jahren 194z43 (Zürich: Atlantis, 1948), pp. 142—143. 62. Kempner, Eichmann, p. 97. 63. Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte 1 1 (1963): 2 0 6 - 2 0 9 . 64. Browning, "Decision" (see note 2).

65. Broszat, "Hitler," p. 764. 66. Helmut Heiber, "Aus den Akten des Gauleiters Kube, Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte 4 (1956): 6 7 - 9 2 . 67. Seev Goshen, "Eichmann und die Nisko-Aktion im Oktober 1 9 3 9 " Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte 29 (1981): 7 4 - 9 6 . 68. Keesings Archiv der Gegenwart 1942, p. 570J. 69. Adolf Hitler, Hitlers Politisches Testament: Die Bormann Diktate vom Februar und April 1945 (Hamburg: Knaus, 1 9 8 1 ) , pp. 70 and 1 2 2 . 70. Felix Kersten, Klerk en beul (Amsterdam: Meulenhoff, 1948), p. 198.