How Nazi policy changed from Ethnic Cleansing to Genocide - Christopher R. Browning
Peter Myers, February 25, 2011
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THE ORIGINS OF THE FINAL SOLUTION
THE EVOLUTION OF NAZI JEWISH POLICY, SEPTEMBER 1939 - MARCH 1942
CHRISTOPHER R. BROWNING
With contributions by Jurgen Matthaus
Published by the UNIVERSITY OF NEBRASKA PRESS, Lincoln, and VAD VASHEM, Jerusalem
c 2004 by Yad Vashem, the Holocaust Martyrs' and Heroes' Remembrance Authority, Jerusalem, Israel
{p. v.} The publication of this series was made possible by the generous gift of the Ike and Roz Friedman Family Foundation, in loving memory of Ike Friedman and jranis Friedman Yale and all those who perished in the Holocaust.
{p. xi} Preface
{by Browning and Matthaus, jointly. Matthaus uses the expression "the Holocaust", whereas Browning, when writing on his own, does not; he only uses the expression "Final Solution". This is akin to Arno J. Mayer's use of the word "Judeocide" in place of the ideologically-loaded word "Holocaust". When Browning and Matthaus write jointly, in the Preface and in pp. 234-243 of Chapter 6, both "Holocaust" and "Final Solution" are used. Browning's usage is not Denial, but probably implies a distancing from the Holocaust "Industry". Raul Hilberg sided with Norman Finkelstein on that issue: http://www.normanfinkelstein.com/article.php?pg=3&ar=167}
This book on the origins of the Final Solution is part of a wider project for a multivolume comprehensive history of the Holocaust. ...
Discerning readers will note that the two authors of this volume articulate interpretations that differ in some small ways. We have made no attempt to
{p. xii} force our views into a single mold but rather, in the spirit of the wider project, have let each interpretation speak for itself. ...
{p. 1} 1
Background
{by Browning; from here to p. 234 is by him alone. Then from p. 234 to p. 243 is by Browning & Matthaus jointly. Chapter 6, pp. 244 to p. 308, is by Matthaus. The remainder is by Browning}
In a brief two years between the autumn of 1939 and the autumn of 1941, Nazi Jewish policy escalated rapidly from the prewar policy of forced emigration to the Final Solution as it is now understood - the systematic attempt to murder every last Jew within the German grasp. The mass murder of Soviet Jewry had already begun in the late summer of 1941, and only one-half year later the Nazi regime was ready to begin implementing this policy throughout the rest of its European empire and sphere of influence. The study of these 30 months - from September 1939 through March 1942 - is crucial for understanding the genesis of the Final Solution and constitutes the core of this book. At this time the Nazi regime stood on the brink of a true watershed event in history. But why, after two millennia of Christian-Jewish antagonism and one millennium of a singular European anti-Semitism, did this watershed event occur in Germany in the middle of the 20th century?
Christians and Jews had lived in an adversarial relationship since the first century of the common era, when the early followers of Jesus failed to persuade significant numbers of their fellow Jews that he was the Messiah. They then gradually solidified their identity as a new religion rather than a reforming Jewish sect. First, Pauline Christianity took the step of seeking converts not just among Jews but also among the pagan populations of the Roman Empire. Second, the Gospel writers - some 40 to 60 years after the death of Jesus - sought to placate the Roman authorities and at the same time to stigmatize their rivals by increasingly portraying the Jews rather than the Roman authorities in Palestine as responsible for the crucifixion - the scriptural origin of the fateful "Christ-killer" libel. Finally the Jewish rebellion in Palestine and the destruction of the Second Temple motivated early Christians not only to disassociate themselves completely from the Jews but to see the Jewish catastrophe as a deserved punishment for the stubborn refusal to accept Jesus as the Messiah and as a divine vindication of their own beliefs. Christians and Jews, two small sects that had much more in common with one another by virtue of their
{p. 2} monotheism and scriptures than either had with the rest of the tolerant, syncretic, polytheistic pagan Roman world, developed an implacable hostility to one another.
This hostility became historically significant in the course of the fourth century when, following the conversion of the Emperor Constantine, Christianity became first the favored and then the official religion of the Roman Empire. The religious quarrel between two small and relatively powerless sects, both at odds with the pagan world in which they lived, was suddenly transformed into an unequal relationship between a triumphant state religion and a beleaguered religious minority. Even so, the Jews fared better than the pagans. Triumphant Christians destroyed paganism and tore down its temples; but the synagogues were left standing, and Judaism remained as the sole legally permitted religion outside Christianity. Without this double standard of intolerance - paganism destroyed and Judaism despised but permitted - there would have been no further history of Christian-Jewish relations. ...
{p. 12} 2
Poland, Laboratory of Racial Policy
The German invasion and conquest of Poland in September 1939 was an event of decisive importance in the evolution of Nazi Jewish policy toward the Final Solution. Over 2 million Polish Jews fell into German hands, and some 1.7-1.8 million remained at the end of the year when the border between the German and Russian zones was closed. Until then the Nazis' search for a solution to the Jewish question had been undertaken in reference to German Jews, and despite the addition of the Jews of Austria, the Sudetenland, and the Protectorate, the prospect of a solution through emigration and piecemeal expulsion remained feasible. Such a solution still offered the hope of a Germany ultimately "free of Jews" ( judenfrei). But the outbreak of war now threatened to constrict even further the already fast diminishing avenues of emigration, while the conquest of Poland swamped Germany with additional Jews on an unprecedented scale. Once on a path of imperialistic expansion, the Nazis could no longer view the Jewish question primarily within a German framework. The Jewish question would not be completely solved until the territories within the German spheres of occupation and influence, growing steadily until 1942 were likewise "cleansed" or "purified" of their Jews. The fragile solution of emigration could not begin to cope with the staggering numbers now involved. Thus the conquest of Poland inevitably set in motion a search for a new kind of solution to the Nazis' Jewish problem.
The change was not just quantitative, however, for this search would take place within drastically altered circumstances. Germany was now at war. While this was not accompanied by the waves of hypernationalistic euphoria that had marked August 1914, nonetheless it did free the Nazi leadership from various restraints and inhibitions under which it had labored for the past six years. For some time Nazi propaganda had branded the Jew as the enemy of Germany; if war came, it would be through the machinations of "international" Jewry. The
{p. 13} Jew was an integral part, indeed the quintessence, of the Nazi Feindbild or stereotyped image of the enemy. Now that Germany was at war, harsh measures against the "enemy" including "potential enemies" (noncombatant civilians, women, children), seemed self-evident and justified by national interest. ...
Unlike the riots of Kristallnacht, which had been played out before the shocked sensibilities of German burghers, Poland offered a field of activity at a conveniently discreet distance from direct observation. ...
{p. 14} Poland was thus destined to become a "laboratory" for Nazi experiments in racial imperialism, an area where they tried to turn into reality ideological slogans such as Lebensraum (living space), Volkstumskampf (ethnic or racial struggle), Flurbereinigung (a basic or comprehensive cleansing), and Endlosung de Judenfrage (Final Solution to the Jewish question). This would involve much trial and error, for the slogans were not explicit, their meanings were not self-evident, and often the need to choose priorities and make pragmatic compromises forced delays and modifications in the Nazis"'realization of Utopia."
Not only did the Nazis have to experiment in their policies, but they also had to construct the instruments of power to carry them out. Indeed, the story begins with the early failure of the German Wehrmacht to preserve its position as the initial holder of "executive power" in Poland, its feeble resistance to even the earliest manifestations of mass murder, and the resulting division of spoils between Heinrich Himmler's SS on the one hand and the party satraps on the other - a political defeat ultimately as stunning and fateful as the Wehrmacht's concurrent military victory. ...
{p. 15} While the Slavic populations of eastern Europe undoubtedly inhabited a rather low rung in his racial hierarchy, this never prohibited Hitler from allying with Slavic nations when it suited him. For example, having helped facilitate the disintegration of Czechoslovakia, the Slovaks were rewarded with a "model" vassal state. Poland's earlier pressure on Czechoslovakia through its demands for Teschen during the Munich crisis, had led Hitier to envisage a similar relationship with that country. If Poland accepted territorial adjustments along the German border, then it would be well compensated with Ukrainian territory in the east. It was only Poland's failure to take up this offer and the subsequent British guarantee of Poland in March 1939 that led Hitler in April to order his military to be prepared for an invasion of Poland no later than the following September. With Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop in Moscow to sign the Nazi-Soviet Non-Aggression Pact, rendering Poland's position helpless, Hitler summoned his leading generals to the Berghof on August 22 for a long exposition, interrupted only by a break for lunch, of his views on the strategic situation and the future of Poland. ...
While Hitler portrayed the postwar fate of Poland in ominous terms and exhorted his generals to brutality, the army prepared for the occupation of Poland on a busineSS-as-usual basis. The army would assume "executive power" in occupied Polish territory. ... a reassuring statement was issued that "the Wehrmacht does not see the population as its enemy. All provisions of international law will be observed. The economy ... will be restored." ...
The very existence of Poland,
{p. 16} created in part out of pre-1919 German territory, was a symbol of the humiliating defeat of World War I and the hated Versailles Treaty. The population, both Poles and Ostjuden, were looked down upon as primitive and inferior, fit for colonial rule by a German master race. ...
Moreover, the army was not acting alone. SS units known as Einsatzgruppen der Sicherheitspolizei (special task forces of the Security Police) were also to participate in the occupation and pacification of Poland. Initially, five Einsatzgruppen were formed, with one assigned to each of the invading armies. Subsequently, two more Einsatzgruppen and a separate Einsatzkommando 16 from Danzig were added. Together they totaled over 3,000 men. ...
If Germany's highest military leaders still had any doubt before the outbreak of the war that its promise to abide by international law was going to be mas-
{p. 17} sively violated, such doubts were certainly dispelled in the first two weeks of the war. Revelations of Polish atrocities against ethnic Germans in Poland during the first week of the war ... raised temperatures on the German side and occasioned a revealing outburst by Heydrich against the army. Though 200 executions took place daily, he complained that the courts-martial were much too slow. "The people must be shot or hanged immediately without trial. The little people we want to spare, but the nobles, priests, and Jews must be killed."
{Reinhard Heydrich was head of the Gestapo. He was in charge of the SS, the Einsatzgruppen and the Concentration Camps. Heinrich Müller was the Gestapo's chief of operations; he was subordinate to Heydrich. Heydrich took his orders from Himmler.}
Military leaders were aware that such a statement was not just a fit of pique by Heydrich, for they attributed similar sentiments to Hitler as well. On September 9 the army's chief of the general staff, Franz Halder, revealed to Major Helmuth Groscurth that "it was the intention of the Fuhrer and Goring to destroy and exterminate the Polish people." ...
Hitler's specific orders for Einsatzgruppe IV to take reprisals in Bydgoszcz had led the Army High Command (Oberkommando der Heeres, OKH) to order the army there not to intervene ...
In southern Poland Einsatzgruppe II had already carried out executions that
{p. 18} ran into the hundreds when on September 12 the intelligence officer of Army Group South, Major Rudolf Langhauser, heard of plans to shoot 180 Polish civilians in a camp just turned over from the army to the SS. He promptly returned the camp to army control. The following day he refused the SS demand to turn over the prisoners, and confronted the Einsatzgruppe commander, Emanuel Schafer, in Czestochowa. The latter justified his actions by referring to an order from Himmler, unknown to the army, that all members of insurgent bands were to be shot. Further inquiry confirmed that an order to shoot insurgents without trial had been issued from the "Fuhrer's train" directly to the police. Schafer also noted that such executions had already been carried out in Tarnow and Katowice (Kattowitz), where Woyrsch's Einsatzgruppe operated. ...
After discussions with the army's commander in chief, Walther von Brauchitsch, and his chief of staff Halder on September 18, the military's negotiator concerning the Einsatzgruppen, Quartermaster General Wagner, went to Berlin to meet with Heydrich for a "very important, necessary, and outspoken" conversation. Indeed, the conversation must have been very frank. Wagner insisted that the army be informed of the Einsatzgruppen's tasks, which Heydrich did in no uncertain terms: "Fundamental cleansing [Flurbereinigung]: Jews, intelligentsia, clergy, nobles." Wagner countered with the demand that this "cleansing" take place only "after the withdrawal of the army and the transfer to a stable civilian administration. Early December." Wagner then left to prepare Brauchitsch for a meeting with Hitler the following day. Meanwhile Heydrich summarized the results to his staff: "In this meeting it was established that the commanders of the Einsatzgruppen are subordinate to the army commanders, but receive direct instructions from the Chief of the Security Police. The entire conversation must be characterized as a very propitious result in terms of our cooperation with the military."
On September 20 Brauchitsch met with Hitler, who assured the army commander in chief that he would be informed of all decisions affecting the army's executive power in Poland taken by the Fuhrer himself, Himmler, Heydrich, and the Einsatzgruppen commanders. As with Heydrich vis-a-vis Wagner the day before, Hitler then treated Brauchitsch to a preview of what was intended in
{p. 19} Poland. Poles were going to be cleared out of the pre-1918 German territories. ... Ominously, Hitler noted that Himmler would be consulted about the possibility of setting up his own police courts. ...
Brauchitsch partially informed his army commanders of the upshot of this conversation, telling them that the Einsatzgruppen had received orders from Hitler to carry out "certain ethnic tasks" (geisse volkspolitische Aufgaben) in occupied Poland. ...
Two days later, on September 22 both Brauchitsch and Wagner met with Heydrich to finalize SS accommodation to the army's desires ... Brauchitsch was apparently far less intimidated by Heydrich than by Hitler, and a hot discussion ensued. Heydrich promised that orders of the SS would be made known to the army. While criticizing the army courts as too slow, Heydrich admitted that the order to shoot insurgents without trial had been rescinded. Alongside army courts, however, police courts would now be set up with appeal only through police channels, not to the army. Concerning economic interests, Heydrich was adamant that "no consideration could be given to nobles, clergy, teachers, and legionnaires. They were not many, only a few thousand. These had to be immediately arrested and sent to a concentration Camp." ...
{p. 20} But Heydrich's initial dissatisfaction and Wagner's glee must not obscure the significance of what had happened. First of all, faced with clear knowledge of the criminal nature of the Nazi plans for Poland, including mass arrests, vast population transfers, and the wholesale murder of targeted groups of people, the top military leadership (in this case, Keitel, Brauchitsch, Halder, and Wagner) had made no objection on principle. ...
The second fatal decision of the top military leadership was not to share their knowledge of Nazi intentions with their fellow officers. ... Many among the officer corps were not yet morally numbed. They had not yet learned how to turn a blind eye to mass murder. ...
{p. 21} In failing to make a stand on principle and in fostering a conspiracy of silence, the army leaders were of course behaving no differently from other elites in German society. Even the churches sought accommodation with National Socialism and balked at posing to their adherents the stark choice beteen Christian morality and loyalty to their country's regime. The officer corps was, after all, part of German society. The tragedy was that if the military had only distinguished itself from other institutions in Germany in Its response to National Socialism, it could have made a difference. ,,,
{p. 23} On October 5, when Forster complained that the army failed to understand the racial measures being taken in West Prussia, Hitler removed this territory from military administration and placed it under Forster as Reichskommissar. The following day Hitler decided to forgo halfway measures and ordered the preparation of a decree for the incorporation of the military districts of Danzig-West Prussia, Poznan, and East Upper Silesia into the Third Reich ...
Except for Wagner, however, the army was fast losing interest in Poland. On September 27 the stunned generals had learned of Hitler's intention to launch a November offensive in the west, when the predictable mud and fog would guarantee maximum ineffectiveness of Germany's air force and tanks. The issue of the western offensive was now far more important to the generals than atrocities in Poland. ...
{p. 24} Perhaps sensing the army's disenchantment and predicting Brauchitsch's response, Hitler informed the army commander in chief-that the military administration in the General Government would continue. ...
Wagner alone made one more attempt, arming Keitel with a memorandum of army demands regarding Poland: The responsibility of the military commander in Poland was not to be impaired by the granting of special powers to third parties. ...
Keitel never did raise Wagner's demands, since Hitler made it clear from the beginning of this meeting that the military role in Poland was over. There could not be two administrations alongside one another, and since Brauchitsch had requested that the army be relieved of these duties, it should be happy to be rid of them. Hitler then went on to sketch out Poland's future, where "devils' work" (Teufelserk) was to be done. The Polish intelligentsia was to be prevented from reviving as a ruling class. The living standard was to be kept low, for the population was needed only as a source of "cheap labor." It was not Germany's task to restore order, but rather to let "the Polish chaos flourish" (Poln. Wirtschaff hochster Blute). Both the new and the old Reich territory would be cleared of "Jews, Polacks and riff-raff" (Juden, Polacken u. Gesindel ) through resettlement in Poland. A "harsh racial struggle" (harten Volkstumskampf ) permitting no "legal restrictions" would be carried out, so that Poland would never again become a battlefield. Nine days later the military administration in Poland was officially dissolved. ...
{p. 25} Although Hitler's shrill exhortations for a "harsh racial struggle" in Polnd made clear the general direction Nazi policy was to follow, they were barren of speafics. This had a twofold effect quite typical of Hitler's method of ruling. On the one hand, these exhortations constituted a "green light" to the various Nazis descending on Poland that the restraints under which they had operated since the heady months of the Machtergreifung were now lifted. No one was going to be called to account for being too "ruthless" or "energetic." On the contrary, ambitious Nazis now had to prove themselves capable of living up to their rhetoric. The result was to unleash a chaotic terror in Poland whose virulence and emphasis varied with the local perpetrators, and whose vague goal was a violent "fundamental cleansing" of Germany's enemies. On the other hand, Hitler's exhortations were an incitement to Nazi leaders to produce proposals for policies that would turn his vague ideological pronouncements and emotional tirades into specific programs with well-defined goals. Those who authorized proposals most attuned to Hitler's wishes were awarded with enhanced powers to carry them out. Those who not only proved themselves capabie of carrying out the drastic measures of "chaotic" terror but also displayed an organizational touch became the instruments of these more articulated policies. Those who did not accommodate themselves quickly enough were pushed aside. "Wild actions" gave way to centrally directed programs. Chaotic terror gradually became systematic terror. Such was the pattern of events in Poland in the fall of 1939.
The Shaping of Nazi Policy
Nazi plans for racial policy and Lebensraum in Poland took shape only during September, not before the invasion. When Heydrich met with his division heads on September 7, the "fourth partition" of Poland had already been decided, but not much else. Polish Jews, including those who had immigrated long ago and already attained German citizenship, were to be pushed out of Germany. The Polish leadership classes were to be "rendered harmless" (unschadlich gemacht) by being sent to concentration camps in Germany; the lowest classes left without education and "suppressed"; and the middling Poles put in provisional concentration camps in the border area and eventually deported to whatever remained of Poland. One week later plans were being made. Heydrich discussed the Jewish question with his division heads and noted: "Proposals are being submitted to the Fuhrer by the Reichsfuhrer [Himmler], that only the Fuhrer can decide, because they will be of consider-
{p. 26} able significance for foreign policy as well." ... Concerning the Polish leadership, the policy remained unchanged: the top leaders were to be sent to camps in Germany; those in the middle echelon (now defined as teachers, clergy, nobles, legionnaires, and returning officers) were to be arrested and deported to rump Poland. The "primitive" Poles were to be migrant laborers for the German economy and then gradually resettled. The former German territories were to become German provinces.
This expansion of German Lebensraum could not, of course, be accomplished without a solution to the Jewish question as well. "The Jewish deportation into the non-German region, expulsion over the demarcation line is approved by the Fuhrer," the protocol noted. Since this process would be spread over the next year, the Jews in the meantime would be concentrated in ghettos in cities, "in order to have a better possibility of control and later of deportation."
Hence it was urgent that the Jews disappear from the countryside and be sent to the cities "as quickly as possible." This concentration action was to be carried out within three to four weeks! Only then could one achieve a "systematic dispatching" of the Jews to Poland in freight cars, along with 30,000 "Gypsies." ...
{p. 27} The last days of September saw several further developments concerning the Nazis' plan for Lebensraum and racial policy. The final negotiations with the Soviet Union resulted in an unexpected change in the demarcation line, whereby Germany now surrendered Lithuania to the Russian sphere of influence and got in return territory in east central Poland around the city of Lublin up to the Bug River. Moreover, it was agreed that the ethnic Germans in the Soviet sphere would be repatriated to Germany.
When Hitler talked with one of his advisers on eastern Europe, Alfred Rosenberg, on September 29 he indicated that all Jews, including those from the Reich, would be settled in this newly acquired territory between the Vistula and the Bug Rivers. Along the new German boundary, ethnic Germans from all over the world would be resettled. Between the areas of German and Jewish settlement would be the Polish region. An Ostwall or eastern wall was to be created on the Vistula, separating the Jewish and Polish regions. ...
By the end of September the Nazis had developed a grandiose program of demographic engineering based on racial principles that would involve moving hundreds of thousands, indeed ultimately millions, of people like so many pieces on a checkerboard. It was not the result of any long-held blueprint. Rather it emerged from the unpredictable circumstances in the year of 1939, including Poland's refusal to accept vassal status in Germany's New Order, Stalin's decision to reach an agreement with Nazi Germany on the basis of a Polish partition, and the west's refusal to accept another fait accompli in eastern
{p. 28} Europe. Though improvised in September 1939, these policies were fully consonant with Hitler's underlying ideological assumptions: a need for Lebensraum in the east justified by a social Darwinist racism, a contempt for the Slavic populations of eastern Europe, and a determination to rid the expanding German Reich of Jews. They were also consonant with the emotional rage and hatred that arose in Hitler when the stubborn Poles, whom he had favored with a nonaggression pact in 1934 and a slice of Czech territory in 1938, rejected his offer for a continuing albeit junior partnership at the expense of Soviet territory to the east. ...
The actual details of the massive deportation and resettlement programs had yet to be worked out. The institutions, techniques, and personnel had still to be put in place. In the meantime the terror could be intensified, liquidating potential Polish opposition, offering a proving ground for Nazi personnel, and reducing through murder and flight the ultimate number of Poles and Jews to be expelled. ...
{p. 29} As the horror mounted through the month of September, not only the Einsatzgruppen but also the army and Waffen-SS units were involved in mass shootings. ...
Other incidents soon followed in which Jewish victims became increasingly prominent. ...
{p. 30} In addition to the mass shootings, the German authorities deliberately added to the stream of refugees in Poland set in motion by the invasion. Once again Jews were prominent both among those making their own decision to escape from German-occupied territory and among those expelled from their homes by German order. ...
Once the demarcation line was moved from the San to the Bug, similar events occurred there in October. ...
{p. 31} Gradually the terror began to shift away from sporadic mass shootings of Jews and Poles to a more systematic "liquidation" of particular categories of people deemed especiaily dangerous to permanent pacification and, in the case of the incorporated territories, the wholesale deportation of further groups deemed obstacles to "Germanization." ...
{p. 32} The Bydgoszcz terror also encompassed the clergy, as only 17 of 75 Catholic priests were left in their positions. After the "extermination of the radical Polish priests (das Ausrotten der radilal-polnischen Pfarrer), it was assumed that the survivors were either sufficiently shaken or weak-hearted and apolitical that no further difficulties from the church were expected. ...
{p. 35} The systematic liquidation in 1939-40 of Poles noted for their education, nationalism, or social status made it clear that the Nazis were capable of murdering by the thousands. By one estimate, the number of Poles executed by the Germans had reached 50,000 by the end of 1939. In the Germans view It was but one step to ensure the permanent rule of Germany in the conquered Polish territories. Complementary to this murdering of thousands was the "resettlement" of hundreds of thousands, eventually even millions. The expulsion of undesired elements - Poles, Jews, "Gypsies" - to the east and the recovery of valuable German stock to be settled in their place were to provide the real biological basis for the consolidation of German Lebensraum. Nazi Jewish policy was at least temporarily subsumed into these experiments in demographic engineering. When the problems of massive population resettlement roved insurmountable and a solution to the Jewish question had to be separated out and temporarily postponed, the Germans would be able to draw from this period of terror in Poland a lesson of immense importance. It was in many cases easier to murder than resettle.
{p. 36} 3
The Search for a Final Solution through Expulsion, 1939 - 1941
Two aspects of Nazi Jewish policy in Poland in the period between 1939 and 1941 are particularly prominent: expulsion and ghettoization. The first is what the Germans sought to do in this period, and the second is what they actually did. Too often, however, these policies and this period have been seen through a perspective influenced, indeed distorted and overwhelmed, by the catastrophe that followed. The policy of Jewish expulsion - and its relationship to resettlement policies in general - was for many years not taken as seriously by historians as it had been by the Nazis themselves. Conversely, the policy of ghettoization has all too often been seen as an integral, even conscious, preparatory step toward extermination, while to the Germans at the time it was a temporary improvisation, a "necessary evil" that followed from the failure of expulsion plans. These policies are the focus of the next two chapters. They will be studied not from hindsight but rather as the Germans conceived, implemented, and experienced them between 1939 and 1941. In short, an attempt will be made to see these policies in their own right, as the crux of Nazi Jewish policy in Poland before the Final Solution. ...
{p. 37} Eichmann, an obscure official in Heydrich's SD working on the Jewish question, had risen to prominence as the organizer of Jewish emigration from Austria following the Anschluss. ... However, emigration opportunities were rapidly diminishing in 1939, and prospects for continuing emigration after the outbreak of war were even dimmer. Eichmann was a man whose career faced a dead end unless he could adapt to the new situation. Many of his tactics - internment of one family member in a concentration camp until the rest had completed all preparations for emigration, sending Jews illegally out of Austria across the "green frontier" - already constituted expulsion. Formal approval for the continuing expulsion of Jews into the Soviet sphere opened a wide vista for the revitalization of Eichmann's career. In a striking example of an ambitious Nazi seizing the initiative from below in response to vague signals emanating from above, Eichmann set out to prove himseif the master deporter and expeller of Jews into the district of Lublin and beyond.
On October 6, 1939, Eichmann met in Berlin with Oberfuhrer Heinrich Muller, the head of the Gestapo. According to Eichmann's version of the conversation, Muller ordered Eichmann to contact Gauleiter Wagner in Katowice concerning the deportation of 70,000-80,000 Jews from East Upper Silesia. ...
By order of
{p. 39} Muller in Berlin, a Jewlsh transport from Mahrisch Ostrau and another from Katowice were to be assembled to take an "advance party" to a region southeast of Lublin, where it would erect a village of barracks to serve as a "transit camp for all subsequent transports." In contrast to subsequent deportations, in which no attention need be paid to the age or sex of the deportees, this first group was to contain only male Jews capable of physical labor, especially engineers, carpenters, artisans of various kinds, and at least ten doctors. These first trainloads were also to serve a second purpose as "model transports" (Mustertransporte). The Jews themselves were to be involved in carrying out an orderly implementation of German directives. "That is necessary in the interest of preserving a certain 'voluntary character' and also to obtain an unobtrusive as possible deparure of the transport."
On October 9 Eichmann and Rolf Gunther traveled to nearby Katowice, where they met with Major General Knobelsdorf and the chief of the military administration, Fitzner, and on the following day with Gauleiter Wagner. In Katowice, Eichmann's plans had suddenly grown. Now Mahrisch Ostrau and Katowice were to provide two 1,000-man transports each, and after the four transports had been sent, a report would be submitted to Heydrich that would "probably" then be shown to the Fuhrer. They would then wait "until the general deportation of Jews is ordered." This could confidently be expected, because "the Fuhrer has ordered first of all the shifting of 300,000 Jews from the Old Reich and Austria." ...
Eichmann was not only steadily increasing the number of transports but, in doing so, also changing the nature of the project.
{p. 81} THE MADAGASCAR PLAN
The German victory in France provided an impetus for the radicalization of Nazi racial policy in a number of ways. Himmler's stance vis-a-vis Goring's and Frank's inhibitive arguments based on economic pragmatism was greatly strengthened, and the euphoria of victory provided the perfect moment for Himmler to elicit Hitler's reconfirmation of sweeping plans for the total removal not only of all Jews but also of all Poles from the expanded territory of the Third Reich, and for the reduction of the east European populations under German occupation to a denationalized helot status. Victory had likewise com- pleted the transformation of the attitude of the army officer corps to one of adulation for Hitler's military genius and self-strangulation of any anti-Nazi criticism, particularly of Nazi racial policy. But the victory radicalized the situation in other ways as well. The occupation of territory in western Europe, with hundreds of thousands of additional Jews, ensured that the Nazis would no longer seek a solution to the Jewish question solely in terms of the Third Reich and the General Government. It was now a Europe-wide Jewish question that they would feel obligated to solve. This had always been implied in theory; now it was the case in practice as well. And finally, the expectation of an imminent peace settlement not only with France but also with Great Britain seemed to place at Germany's disposal both the colonial empire of the former and the merchant shipping of the latter. It was out of this conjuncture of factors that the Madagascar Plan was born, offering the prospect of a final solution to the Jewish question in Europe through the total removal of the continent's entire Jewish population. It was a heady and intoxicating vision to those who had experienced the bottlenecks of demographic engineering in eastern Europe over the past nine months and thus rekindled the flames of Nazi determination and fanaticism in this regard. However fantastical in retrospect, the Madagascar Plan was an important psychological step on the road to the Final Solution.
Among those advocating the removal of European Jewry from the continent, no potential resettlement area exercised such a faddish attraction in the years before World War II as the island of Madagascar, a French colony off the coast of Africa in the Indian Ocean. The idea was huckstered by the British anti-Semites Henry Hamilton Beamish and Arnold Leese, as well as by the mysterious Georg de Pottere (using the pseudonym Egon van Winghene). The Polish, French,
{p. 82} and British governments all toyed with the idea in the late 1930s, as did the Joint Distribution Committee, however briefly. The Poles, with the concurrence of the French, even sent a three-man investigating team (the Lepecky commission) to study the feasibility of relocating Polish Jews there. After a 13-week investigation, Lepecky concluded that 5,000-7,000 families could be settled on Madagascar, although the more optimistic of the two Jewish members of the commission thought a mere 500 families was the maximum.
If such a fantastic idea was seductive even to the French and the Poles, obviously it could not escape attention in Germany. From 1938 to the spring of 1940 various Nazi luminaries - Streicher, Goring, Rosenberg, Ribbentrop, and Frank - and even the fellow traveler Hjalmar Schacht mentioned the idea. Just ten days before the Anschluss Eichmann had been instructed to collect material for a "foreign policy solution" to the Jewish question, along the lines being explored by Poland and France. Presumably after the Anschluss Eichmann was too busy with coercing emigration in Vienna. There is no evidence that actual planning for a Jewish resettlement in Madagascar, as opposed to mere references to the possibility, took place among the Nazis until June 1940 when imminent French defeat seemed to place the territories of the French empire at Germany's disposal.
The initiative in this case came not from within the SS or the circle of Streicher's Der Sturmer, but rather from Franz Rademacher, the newly appointed head of the Jewish desk of the German Foreign Office (the so-called Referat D III or Judenreferat). ...
{83} The well-informed Heydrich got wind of the Foreign Office brainstorm and moved quickly to protect his jurisdiction. On June 24, 1940 he wrote Ribbentrop to remind the foreign minister that in January 1939 Goring had placed him in charge of Jewish emigration from all Reich territory, a policy he had successfully pursued until the outbreak of the war. Now the "whole problem" (Gesamtproblem) of some three and a quarter million Jews in the German sphere could no longer be solved by emigration, and "thus a territorial final solution becomes necessary" (Eine territoriale Endlosung wird daher notwendig). Heydrich asked to be included in any forthcoming discussions on the subject that the foreign minister might be planning. Ribbentrop immediately conceded Heydrich's jurisdiction. Rademacher was informed that the foreign minister had "in principle agreed to the preparation of an expulsion of the Jews from Europe, which was to go forward "in closest agreement" with the agencies of the Reichsfuhrer-SS.
By early July the word on Madagascar had reached Hans Frank in the General Government. On July 1O his HSSPF Kruger reported on the new plan. Jewish deportations would no longer take place from Germany into the General Government, including "the expulsions that were to have begun in August." Now all Jews, including those already in the General Government, were to be sent to an African colony "that the French government must turn over to Germany for this purpose." ...
{p. 84} The word on Madagascar naturally spread to all levels of the German administration in the General Government. ...
{p. 85} Meanwhile in Berlin work on the Madagascar Plan proceeded feverishly in Rademacher's Judenreferat in the German Foreign Office and now also in Eichmann's office forJews and evacuations in the RSHA. Rademacher made contact with agencies of the SS and the Interior Ministry as well as with the party. By early July he submitted his first reports. "The imminent victory gives Ger- many the possibility and, in my opinion, also the obligation to solve the Jewish question in Europe," he wrote. "The desirable solution is: All Jews out of Europe." ... In the peace treaty France would be forced to cede the island of Madagascar to Germany as a mandate. Strategic points would be placed under a police governor of the SS. "The Madagascar solution means, as seen from the German point of view, the creation of a superghetto [GroSS-gettos]. Only the Security Police has the necessary experience in this area." The Jews would be held financially liable for the real estate given them on Madagascar, and all their European property would be transferred to a special bank for this purpose. On the island they would not be subjected to a colonial administration. This would be a "superfluous overlap of authorities" with the police governor; moreover, their treatment as a colonial people would cause an uproar among American Jews. Instead they would be given autonomy under the police
{p. 86} governor, with their own mayors, police, postal administration, and so on. Rademacher thought such "generosity" (Grossmut) toward the Jews could be used as propaganda to Germany's benefit. ...
But above all Rademacher became intrigued by the economic side of the Madagascar Plan and drew up, for submission to Helmuth Wohlthat of Goring's Four-Year Plan, a memorandum on the foundation of an intra-European bank for the utilization of Jewish property. The main idea was to replace Jewish economic influence in Europe with that of Germany in one blow, without disrupting the economy of any country. Jewish assets would be administered in trusteeship by the bank and gradually liquidated to pay for the entire cost of the resettlement operation. Property in Madagascar would likewise be adminis- tered by the bank in trusteeship and gradually transferred to the Jews. The bank would then continue to function as the economic intermediary between the Jewish reservation in Madagascar and the outside world, since no direct economic contact between the Jews and others would be permitted. ...
{p. 87} Eichmann and Dannecker proceeded unperturbed by the lack of enthusiasm on the part of the Jewish leaders and by mid-August had completed their own draft of a plan - a neatly printed brochure, complete with table of contents and maps, entitled "Reichssicherheitshauptamt: Madagaskar Projekt." ... Thus the four million Jews in the German sphere - one million per year over four years - were to be sent to Madagascar. ...
THE LAST SPASMS OF EXPULSION POLICY, FALL 1940 - SPRING 1941
As prospects for the imminent realization of the Madagascar Plan declined with Germany's military fortunes in the Battle of Britain, Germany's Jewish policy based upon expulsion faced a dead end. The idea of a Polish reservation had proven impossible to realize immediately; no new vistas had opened up overseas. Yet old habits, thought patterns, and temptations died hard, and from the fall of 1940 through the spring of 1941 the expulsion policy spasmodically revived as local Gauleiters along the borders of the Third Reich - in both east and west - successfully prevailed upon Hitler to rid them of some of their unwanted Jews through piecemeal deportations into Vichy France and the General Government. Hitler's open encouragement inspired the demographic engineers to produce yet further plans for the massive population transfer of Poles in 1941 and also induced Frank's grudging acquiescence. Once again, however, practical obstacles proved too great, and the plan remained mostly unrealized. But the key obstacle to the massive transfer of Poles - preparations for Operation Barbarossa, the invasion of the Soviet Union - also fueled further planning for the expulsion of Jews. Expulsion remained the central theme or leitmotiv of Nazi demographic engineering well into the spring of 1941.
{p. 223} Various meetings were held among large groups of officers to explain the Barbarossa orders. ...
Finallx guidelines for troop behavior were distributed at the divisional level on June 4, with instructions that they were to be made known to the troops at the beginning of the invasion. The opening section stated: "Bolshevism is the deadly enemy of the national socialist German people. This disintegrative worldview and its carriers must be combated by Germany. This struggle de-
{p. 223} mands ruthless and energetic measures against bolshevik agitators, guerillas, saboteurs, Jews, and complete elimination of any active or passive resistance." Among the various orders issued by the military, this was the only explicit mention of Jews. Significantly, they were equated with those categories of people - guerrillas, saboteurs, agitators, resisters - whom not iust the Einsatzgruppen but even the military were to shoot on sight.
Between the invasion of Poland and the invasion of the Soviet Union, therefore, the German military had evolved from passive if complaining bystanders to accomplices and participants in building Hitler's New Order. How had such a descent come to pass? On the one hand, the military was responding to a political situation. Having frequently warned Hitler against the consequences of his gambles and having been proved wrong time and again, the military jumped on the Hitler bandwagon in the wake of the fantastic triumph over France. They no longer had faith in their own judgment against the Fuhrer's intuition, sense of destiny, and incredible luck. Moreover, they wanted to protect their own institution against the rising influence of the SS. Expecting a short war, they were prepared to take on some of the "devil's work" themselves as the necessary price of preserving their position, stature, and influence in the New Order.
But more than loss of nerve and political expediency on the part of the military was at work. Two experiences from their formative years in World War I haunted and obsessed the senior German officers. First was the blockade that had slowly strangled Germany's capacity to wage war and allowed a nation of despised shopkeepers to outlast the military prowess of the Kaiserreich. Second was the traumatic collapse at the end, when virtually all they had cherished was swept away by defeat and revolution - a collapse blamed on a "stab in the back" from Marxist and internationalist-pacifist (and therefore naturally Jewish) influences that had subverted the home front.
Thus in many ways the outlook of Germany's military elite vis-a-vis the Soviet Union overlapped axioms of National Socialism. The Nazi leadership and the German military elite shared the geopolitical, social Darwinist postulate that Germany must seize Lebensraum in the east to make itself blockade-proof and secure its position as a world power. They shared a low regard for Slavs, who were fitting objects of Germany's colonial exploitation and domination. They were both obsessed with anticommunism. The conquest of the Soviet Union and the extirpation of Bolshevism would revenge the stab in the back of 1918 and remove forever a subversive, disintegrative threat that was their poIitical nightmare. The malignancy of communism justified in their minds all kinds of drastic preventive measures ...
{p. 241} Himmler's planning for vast population decimation and expulsion on the one hand and German settlement on the other continued relentlessly. ... A solution to the Jewish question was no longer part of the wider framework of a vast decimation and expulsion of Slavs but had gained an autonomy and priority it had not enjoyed earlier. But this fateful development took place after the invasion and not during the preinvasion planning. ...
{p. 244} 7
Operation Barbarossa and the onset of the Holocaust, June - December 1941
Jurgen Matthaus
{This is the only chapter by Matthaus. Notice that he uses the expression "the Holocaust", whereas Browning, when writing on his own, does not; he only uses the expression "Final Solution". When the two write jointly, in the Preface and in pp. 234-243 of Chapter 6, both expressions are used}
{p. 247} Images of "the east" had influenced German policy making since World War I, when the German army first occupied parts of the Russian empire. This element of continuity is most obvious when looking at the attitudes toward Russia of commanding Wehrmacht officers, the majority of whom had served during the Great War. Afterward, military conflict between the two countries was perceived as being deeply rooted in history, a struggle in which Germanic peoples fought Slavs for "the defense of European culture against the Muscovite-Asiatic deluge." The occupation of eastern Poland, parts of the Baltic area, Belorussia, and Ukraine during World War I had also confronted German soldiers with the peoples of eastern Europe. Members of the officer corps in particular regarded the local population not only as different but as degraded and unable to appreciate western values. On the sliding scale of backwardness, the lowest place was reserved for the eastern Jews. Urban ghettos appeared to German soldiers as remnants of medieval times, their occupants filthy and repulsive.
During World War I, the German army had been unable to secure the captured areas. The threat by franc-tireurs (irregulars) in the west seemed small compared to the danger posed by "bandits" and later communist infiltrators in the east. For many officers more than twenty years later, the lessons of the Great War loomed large. In mid-June 1941 the Army High Command's (Oberkommando des Heeres, OKH) legal expert Lt. General Muller told officers of Panzer Group 3 that the expected severity of the coming war called for equally severe punitive measures against civilian saboteurs. To prove his point he reminded his audience of the brief Russian occupation of Gumbinnen in Eastern Prussia in 1914 when all inhabitants of villages along the route from Tilsit to Insterburg were threatened with execution if the railway line was damaged. It did not matter that the threat was not executed. ...
Another crucial element of ideological continuity after 1918 - the identification of Jews with Bolshevism - linked old anti-Semitic stereotypes with the new fear of a communist world revolution. ...
{p. 253} EARLY ANTI-JEWISH MEASURES AND THE MID-JULY TURNING POINT
... In June 1941 a solution to the Jewish question was still envisioned by the German leadership in terms of forced resettlement that, though inherently destructive, did not amount to the systematic mass murder of all Jewish men, women, and children. Precedents set in the early weeks of the Barbarossa campaign would prove crucial in the turn to systematic and total mass murder. ...
{p. 255} South of the Lithuanian sector of the front, equally destructive precedents were being set. Few of the early killings show as obvious a link to Jew-hatred as the mass murder of Jews in Bialystok on June 27, 1941, in which men of Police Battalion 309 and other units subordinated to the Wehrmacht's 221st Security Division killed at least 2,000 Jews. More than 500 persons including women and children were driven into a synagogue and burned alive; those trying to escape were shot. Wehrmacht units blew up adjacent buildings to make sure that the fire did not spread across the city. The scarcity of wartime documentation on this massacre is to some extent compensated for by investigative material compiled by a West German court after the war. ...
{p. 256} The mass murders in Garsden and Bialystok in late June reflect most of the features of what Raul Hilberg has called the "first killillg sweep." The perpetrators used their image of the "enemy" and the pretexts of "retaliation" and "pacification" to legitimize the selection and execution of undesirable persons, primarily Jews, without waiting for specific orders from above. If the murder of Jews on occupied Soviet territory did not result from a preconceived master plan, the sequence, speed, and scope of the killings must have been connected to regional factors and the dynamics of ad hoc decision making. ...
{p. 257} One witness claimed to have heard from others at the time that Himmler had complained about the small number of Jews arrested and had called for a more active course in that direction. ...
{p. 258} By visiting their men behind the front line, Himmler and some of his closest associates both provided and gathered important information on how to synchronize the "pacification" efforts. But while backing what had been done already and appealing to the men's sense of initiative in a rapidly escalating situation, they did not call directly for the killing of unarmed civilians irrespective of age or gender. The absence of specific orders from Berlin to kill all the Jews east of the border is reflected in the fact that the incoming reports described the first victims of physical annihilation as local Jewish men of military age, especially Jewish intelligentsia in leadership positions in the community. However, from the beginning the delineation of the target group was not clearcut. The massacre in Bialystok on June 27 shows the prpetrators' lack of inhibitions about killing even those Jews who were the least suspicious and the most vulnerable. And among the 201 persons shot in Garsden on June 24 there were a boy, one woman, and several Jews from Memel who but for the Nuremberg laws were German.
To some extent, the sequence of German anti-Jewish measures adopted in the occupied Soviet Union followed the model first established in Poland. ...
{p. 259} In late June in the city of Minsk the local military commander established a camp that housed at times up to 100,000 Soviet POWS and 40,000 civilians, predominantly men of military age. Conditions in the camp were terrible; even Germans voiced their disgust. In the following weeks, units of the Security Police and SD in conjunction with the army's Secret Military Police (Geheime Feldpolizei) screened both prisoner groups, taking out an estimated 10,000 for execution. Many of the men selected were Jews; however, a significant number of Jews were also among the approximately 20,000 persons released from the Minsk camp in mid-July. ...
{p. 260} The killings in the first five weeks of Operation Barbarossa were of crucial importance for the later sequence of events. What had previously been regarded as logistically difficult, morally questionable, and politically dangerous became a new point of reference for German occupation policy. Starting in Garsden and Bialystok, the last taboo - the killing of women and children - eroded. On July 3 the I c officer of the 295th Infantry Division reported from Zloczow that "Jews
{p. 261} and Russians including women and children" were murdered in the streets by Ukrainians. From Lithuania, Jager's EK 3 was reporting small but increasing numbers of women among the victims of executions. In late July significant numbers of women seem to have been among the victims of pogroms in Lwow and Grodek Jagiellonski. Police Regiment Center ordered its subordinate police battalions to provide execution statistics specifying the number of Russian soldiers, Jews, and women shot. Around the turn of July/August 1941, other units - the Ist SS Brigade subordinated to HssPFJeckeln, Einsatzgruppe B (E:K 9) and C (SK 4a) - started to shoot women and children in larger numbers. In early August the previously quoted member of Reserve Police Battalion 105 from Bremen wrote: "Last night 150 Jews from this village were shot, men, women, and children, all killed. The Jews are being totally eradicated."
By that time, a standardized method of mass murder had been adopted. The Jews were first rounded up, then brought, in groups of varying size depending on circumstances, to a more or less remote execution site, where the first arrivals were forced to dig a pit. The Jews had to undress and line up in front of the mass grave; they were then either shot into the pit or were murdered after being forced to lie on top of those already killed. ... "Order" was restored for the murderers at the end of the day when they reentered the world of seemingly normal values or when they attended, as advised by Himmler, their "social gatherings." ...
{p. 263} ... Third, Himmler was committed to caring for the psychological needs of his men, and
{p. 264} he feared that the perslstent use of extreme violence posed a threat to the coherence, loyalty, and postwar effectiveness of the troops. Fourth and most important, given the Nazi leadership's obsession with preventing a situation similar to 1918, the quiet on the home front was not to be endangered. Economic considerations that already in the planning stages of the war enabled the branding of entire groups of the local population as redundant and dispensable were not an end in themselves but resulted to a significant degree from the Nazi leaders' determination to avoid putting an undue burden on the German Volk. Concern about potential unrest led to the official stop of the "euthanasia" killings (Aktion T4) in August 1941. "The Fuhrer," Heydrich explained to his subordinates in early September, "has repeatedly stressed that all enemies of the Reich use - like during the [First] World War - every opportunity to sow disunity among the German people. It is thus urgently necessary to abstain from all measures that can affect the uniform mood of the people." ...
{p. 277} TOWARD THE FINAL SOLUTION, AUGUST - DECEMBER 1941
By the beginning of August 1941 all factors were in place for passing the threshold to the murder of all Jews in the occupied Soviet Union. The German army had occupied the Baltic States and Belorussia, and in Ukraine had reached the Kiev-Kirovograd line; the encirclement battles of Uman and Smolensk/Roslawl were to add almost another half a million Soviet POWs to those already starving in German camps. In mid-July, Heydrich had issued guidelines for the screening of camps for Soviet POWS that called for the identification of "all Jews." At the end of the month, Goring had authorized Heydrich to prepare a "total solution of the Jewish question in the German sphere of influence in Europe." ...
{p. 282} The activities of Himmler's Kommandostab units in early August undoubtedly mark an important step in the history of the Holocaust. A vast area had been "cleansed" in several sweeps, and someural communities had been completely wiped out. At the same time, hower, the innovative aspects of the Kommandostab action should not be overratld. As Dieter Pohl rightly points out, "killings of [Jewish] women and children started already at the end of July in the Soviet Union." On the other hand, the murder of all Jews in a given area was not initiated on a massive scale before fall, with the notable exception of Lithuania, and in some areas of the occupied Soviet Union did not begin before spring 1942. ...
{p. 283} In the attempt to clarify Himmler's role in the escalation of the killing process, historians have greatly stressed the importance of his visit to Belorussia in mid-August. ...
This was the closest Himmler came to directly observing the murder of the Jews in the occupied Soviet Union. After the war, as a witness before the International Military Tribunal in Nuremberg, Bach-Zelewski described how Himmler became nervous when watching the execution performed by men from Nebe's Einsatzgruppe B and afterward gave a speech that legitimized the killings as a necessary means of defense for which he would bear responsibility. According to other postwar statements by members of Einsatzgruppe B, the Reichsfuhrer on this occasion issued an order for the liquidation of all Jews in the east (Gesamtliquidierung deruden im Osten) and mentioned a directive from Hitler.
In the afternoon Himmler visited a hospital with mental patients in Novinki near Minsk. There, he seems to have talked with Bach-Zelewski and Nebe about the possibility of killing methods other than shooting. Nebe's criminal technicians at the RSHA had already gathered practical experience during the murder of asylum inmates in the Reich and Poland. In early September, more than 500 mental patients were gassed in Mogilev; on September I8 a similar "test gassing" by carbon monoxide took place in Novinki.
August 15, 1941 marks a caesura in the history of the Holocaust for reasons other than Himmler's visit to Belorussia, however. For on that day and the following, EK 3 in Lithuania for the first time reported the incorporation of children in mass executions. In doing so, Jager made no reference to any directive from above. ...
{p. 284} With the delegation of power to his commanding officers, it was not Himmler but the HSSPF, the leaders of the Einsatzgruppen, Kommandostab units, and police battalions who, in conjunction with the military and representatives of the emerging civil administration, decided matters of practical policy. Anti-Jewish measures adopted in the following months show how the pattern of interaction between local and central authorities solidified until the end of 1941. ...
{p. 288} The murder of more than 2,200 men, women, and children in Mogilev on October 2 and 3, 1941, by SS and policemen under the command of HSSPF Bach
{p. 289} -Zelewski marked the turning point towards genocide in Byelorussia. Units of Einsatzgruppe B had since late August begun killing women and children; in early October HSSPF Bach-Zelewski pushed for the "de-Jewification" of entire areas, to the extent that by the end of the year Jews were virtually extinct on prewar Soviet territory. ...
{p. 374} 9
THE FINAL SOLUTION FROM CONCEPTION TO IMPLEMENTATION
{by Browning, as is the rest of the book}
While the Lodz ghetto administration was adjusting to the new situation, Eichmann went on to Prague, where Heydrich once again discussed the imminent deportations on October 10. "Temporarily much consideration still had to be shown for the authorities in Litzmannstadt," Heydrich conceded. Thus 50,000 Jews would be sent to Minsk and Riga, where the Einsatzgruppen commanders could place them in camps. "This has already been initiated accordin to Sturmbannfuhrer Eichmann's information." And, of course, the busy Eichmann was back in Berlin on October 23 and met not only with his deportation experts but also with Wetzel. The latter thereupon concluded that there would be no objection to removing with the help of Brack's "gassing apparatus" those Reich Jews sent to Riga who could not work.
In fact, Brack's "gassing apparatus" was not constructed in Riga, but other solutions had already been considered and were being tried. ... A number of transports with German Jews would shortly begin arriving in Minsk, Remmers was told. In order to create room for them in the Minsk ghetto, a large number of Russian Jews would have to be shot. ...
After these first seven transports to Minsk, which had departed the Third Reich between November 8 and 28, no further transports arrived. But the Generalkommissar Weissruthenien, Wilhelm Kube, was troubled even by the
{p. 394} presence of the first 6,000-7,000 of the promised 25,000 Reich Jews. They were as susceptible to east European epidemics as "Reich Germans." Certain army and police units had already set upon their property. In the coming months they would probably starve or freeze to death. This disturbed Kube.
{quote} Among these Jews are front veterans with the Iron Cross first and second class, war wounded, half-Aryans, and even a three-quarter Aryan. ... In repeated official visits to the ghetto I have discovered that among these Jews, who distinguish themselves from Russian Jews in their personal cleanliness, are also skilled workers, who are perhaps five times as productive as Russian Jews. ... I am certainly tough and ready to help solve the Jewish question, but human beings who come from our cultural sphere are something other than the native bestial hordes. Should one assign the Lithuanians and Latvians, who are even rejected by the population here, with their slaughter? I could not do it. {endquote} ...
In fact, transports to Minsk did not resume until May 1942, when the ground was no longer frozen. Kube's "other possibilities" were then implemented. Unlike the first transports, these subsequent Reich Jews would be murdered upon arrival.
Thus in Lodz the labor potential of the incoming Reich Jews was still valued, although plans were clearly afoot to rid the ghetto of its undesired nonworking population; while in Minsk German officials shot Soviet Jews immediately to make room for the newcomers from the Reich but still felt some inhibitions
{p. 395} about the mass murder of the latter. But no such pragmatic inhibitions troubled the Germans in Kaunas. On November 8 Stahlecker relayed to Lohse's officials in Riga that 5 of the 25 Jewish transports destined for Riga would instead be directed to Kaunas ... On November 20 Lange informed the Reichskommissariat Ostland that indeed the first five transports were being diverted to Kaunas. These five trains departed from Munich, Berlin, Frankfurt, Vienna, and Breslau between November 15 and 23. The men of Karl Jager's Einsatzkommando 3, the most prolific killers on the entire eastern front, were waiting at the Fort IX execution site. The notorious Jager report noted succinctly in its five-page list of "executions":
25 Nov. 41 Kaunas-F.IX - 1159 male Jews, 1600 femaleJews, I75 Jewish children. 2934 (Resettled from Berlin, Munich and Frankfurt a.M.)
29 Nov. 41 Kaunas-F.IX - 693 maleJews, 1155 femaleJews, 152 Jewish children. 2000 (Resettled from Vienna and Breslau)
These 4,934 victims were a mere fraction of EK 3's incredible tally of 133,346 Jews murdered by the end of November 1941.
These were the first German Jews systematically murdered by the Nazi regime as part of the Final Solution to the European Jewish question. Another threshold had been crossed. ...
{p. 424} Conclusion
HITLER AND THE DECISION-MAKING PROCESS IN NAZI JEWISH POLICY, SEPTEMBER 1939 - MARCH 1942
In the five weeks between September 18 and October 25, 1941 events had moved rapidly. Hitler had reversed his earlier decision not to permit the deportation of Jews from the Third Reich until after the war and instead sought the unrealizable goal of a judenfrei Germany by the end of the year. The sites of the first extermination camps were selected. The testing of various methods of killing by poison gas were conducted. Jewish emigration from the Third Reich was forbidden. And the first 11 Jewish transports had departed for Lodz as a temporary holding station. The vision of the Final Solution - a program aimed at murdering every lastJew in the German grasp - had crystallized in the minds of the Nazi leadership and was henceforth being turned into reality. ...
{p. 425} If one wants to know what Hitler was thinking, one should look at what Himmler was doing. ...
{p. 424} 10
Conclusion ...
{p. 426} In May 1940, after the decisive breakthrough in France, Himmler submitted his memorandum on the treatment of the alien populations in the east, with the prospect of sending the Jews to Africa. Hitler deemed the memorandum "very good and correct." In the following month, with the victory over France assured, Hitler embraced the Madagascar Plan, which had been initiated in the Foreign Office and immediately co-pted by Heydrich.
With the imminent expansion of the war into the Soviet Union, Hitler again signaled new expectations. On at least four occasions between February 26 and March 30, 1941, he set the tone for a "war of destruction" against Jewish Bolshevism. Not just the SS but also the military and economic planners immediately sought to cast his ideological pronouncements into specific policies, such as the SS-Wehrmacht agreement on Einsatzgruppen activities in the war zone the Kommssarbefehl, and the plan to deprive large areas of the Soviet Union of a subsistence-level food supply. In mid-Jluly, with the stupendous early victories of the Barbarossa campaign, Hitler urged an acceleration in the murder campaign, to create a "Garden of Eden" in the east from which Germany would never withdraw. He also indicated that the time had now come to approach every country in Europe with the demand for the removal of every last Jew. Shortly thereafter, Heydrich procured authorization to prepare and submit a "total solution" to the European Jewish question. In September the Germans encircled Leningrad and captured Kiev, and in early October they resumed the march on Moscow and won the stunning double encirclement victory at Vyazma and Bryansk. Victory by the end of the year still seemed attainable, and a mood of euphoria reminiscent of midsummer again permeated the Fuhrer's headquarters. Also in mid-September Hitler reversed his ealier deferral of deportations until "after the war." In October the deportations began, and further Jewish emigration from the Continent was forbidden. In the same weeks various gassing experiments were conducted, and German commandos ap-
{p. 427} peared in Belzec and Chelmno in preparation for the construction of extermination camps at these sites. The creation of gassing facilities in Riga, Mogilev, and Sobibor was also contemplated at this time.
Nazi racial policy was radicalized at points in time that coincided with the peaks of German military success, as the euphoria of victory emboldened and tempted an elated Hitler to dare ever more drastic policies. With the "war of destruction in the Soviet Union underway and the imminent prospect of all Europe at his disposal, the last inhibitions fell away. Hitler's final hesitations in August 1941 - to wait until "after the war" - were overcome in late September and early October, with the last great military encirclements that still promised an early victory.
But Germany's string of military successes finally came to an extraordinarily abrupt end in late October. The bad weather, terrible roads, shortage of supplies, exhaustion of German troops, and stubborn retreat of the remnants of the Red Army all combined to bring the Wehrmacht to a halt. There was no open road to Moscow. But the tide of war turned too late for European Jewry. The Soviet Union was saved but the Jews of Europe were not. The Nazis were now committed to a program of mass murder which, though conceived in the euphoria of victory, would be implemented in defeat. Lebensraum and Final Solution, Hitler's twin obsessions, had evolved and radicalized under the spur of victory and opportunity. In defeat, the evolution was over. Henceforth Hitler would cling grimly to the vision of Lebensraum and Final Solution that had been reached in the fall of 1941, bringing about the destruction first of European Jewry and then of Germany itself.
{Arno J. Mayer, in his book Why Did the Heavens not Darken?, says that the Nazis instituted the genocide of all Jews at that point BECAUSE the war was turning against them. Like Browning, Mayer chooses not to use the ideologically-loaded word "Holocaust". Instead, he coins the word "Judeocide". Mayer's book is listed in Browning's bibliography, but Mayer's name is not in the Index of Browning's book}
That October 1941 was not only the fateful watershed in Nazi Jewish policy but also a crucial military turning point on the eastern front can be seen in hindsight. Such a perspective was not, of course, available to the Nazi leadership at the time. The Nazi regime would continue doggedly to pursue military victory which would elude them, as well as preparations for a genocide of the European Jews that would prove all too successful. In regard to the latter, Hitler continued to incite his followers and legitimize the policy of mass murder. On December 12,1941 he met with the party leadership and made it clear that the entry of the United States into the war would not delay implementation of the Final Solution. In the month following the Wannsee Conference he made numerous comments, both public and private, about the fate of the Jews that exceeded in frequency and vitriol even his comments of the preceding months.
On March 10, 1942 Hitler had dinner with Himmler, who also gave a postdinner presentation. On March 11,12, and 13, Himmler spoke with Hey-
{p. 428} drich on the telephone about the Jewish question ... and then departed for Cracow and Lublin. There Himmler had meetings with Frank, Kruger, and Globocnik on March 13 and 14, on the eve of the first deportations from Lublin and Galicia to Belzec. And on March 17, Hitler had both lunch and dinner with the recently returned Himmler, who made yet another presentation to the Fuhrer as well. This was just hours after the gas chambers at Belzec had begun to operate full-time. Ten days later, on March 27, Goebbels reported in his diary:
The Jews in the General Government, beginning in Lublin, are now being evacuated to the east. This is a pretty barbaric procedure, not to be described here more precisely, and of the Jews themselves not much will remain. ... A judgment is being carried out against theJ ews that, indeed barbaric, is fully deserved. The prophecy that the Fuhrer made about them for causing a new world war is beginning to come true in a most terrible manner. ... No other government and no other regime would have the strength to solve this question comprehensively. Here, too, the Fuhrer is the unflinching champion and spokesman of a radical solution.
In the long evolution of Nazi Jewish policy to the Final Solution, Hitler had been of course not only "champion and spokesman" but also the necessary and pivotal decision maker." ...
{p. 429} The conquest and partition of Poland in September 1939 was a major step in the creation of Nazi Germany's east European empire and offered a propitious
{p. 430} site for various policies of racial imperialism. As the terms of the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, the Freikorps campaigns, and the almost total rejection of the Versailles Treaty demonstrate, refusal to accept the verdict of World War I and unquenched imperial aspirations in eastern Europe underpinned by notion German racial and cultural superiority were broadly held sentiments in German society. They provided more common ground between the bulk of the German population and the Nazi regime than did anti-Semitism.
In short, wartime Poland offered a time and place where Germans would be more transformed by what they saw and did between 1939 and 1941 than they had been by their experience of the domestic dictatorship in 1933-39. Just as the decision-making process leading to the Final Solution was incremental and influenced by the intoxicating euphoria of success on the one hand and the frustration of impasse and dashed expectations on the other, so was the process of adaptation among the perpetrators. An unbroken chain of victories not just in Poland but also in Scandinavia, France and the Low Countries, and the Balkals extended German control over the Continent. But it was in Poland above all that Germans were exhorted to behave as the master race over inferior native populations and where they encountered in massive numbers the strange and alien Ostuden so different from assimilated, middle-class German Jews. Here the corrupting process of racial imperialism could be launched most easily.
In Germany the regime attempted to keep the mass murder of the mentally and physically handicapped relatively secret. Not so for racial imperialism in Poland. There was little reticence over the arrest and murder of the Polish leadership and intelligentsia, and the roundups of Poles for either expulsion or labor were even more open. The degradation rituals and public torments aimed against Polish Jews were especially visible. The flood of measures for marking, expropriation, forced labor, and segregation and the heightened incidence of impoverishment, starvation, and disease that so disproportionately afflicted Polish Jewry accelerated the vicious circle of dehumanization and further persecution.
Committed to Germany's proclaimed mission of racial empire building in the east, German occupiers in Poland soon accepted and indeed advocated the notion that when they were done remaking the demographic map of eastern Europe, noJews would remain. The Jews in Poland, far more than the relatively small and constantly declining number of assimilated Jews in Germany, posed a problem to be solved. Mass expulsion - what we now call "ethnic cleansing" but what the Nazis euphemistically called "resettlement" - first to Lublin, then to Madagascar, and finally further east was the imagined panacea. It was but one aspect of a wider demographic revolution the Nazis intend to engineer, but it
{p. 431} proved illusory. ...
{p. 596} {this is the Index entry for "Holocaust"}
Holocaust. See Final Solution to the Jewish Question
{end Browning quotes}
You can buy a copy of THE ORIGINS OF THE FINAL SOLUTION at http://www3.addall.com/New/compare.cgi?dispCurr=USD&id=13565&isbn=0803259794&location=10000&thetime=20090503182314&author=&title=&state=AK
My Purpose and Strategy in placing this material online - Peter Myers
This is a relatively recent book (2004), and I am mindful of the need not to impede sales or adversely affect the revenue-flow to the publishers & authors.
On the other hand, second-hand copies are plentiful and cheap, suggesting that new sales have probably tailed off already. Abebooks as of May 4, 2009 list 141 second-copies, beginning at $3.29: http://www.abebooks.com/servlet/SearchResults?an=browning&bi=0&bx=off&ds=30&sortby=2&sts=t&tn=ORIGINS+OF+THE+FINAL+SOLUTION&x=0&y=0
I have excluded footnotes - which are essential to any serious reader - and selected scattered parts of the book which show the evolution of Nazi policy from ethnic-cleansing to genocide.
My purpose has been to use Browning's material to persuade Deniers and Sceptics that Nazis DID pursue Genocide (later in the war); but also to correct the erroneous Hollywood impression that this was ALWAYS Nazi policy.
The gaps in the selections would, in my opinion, spur serious readers to obtain a copy so that they can read the continuous (un-broken) text.
Browning's evidence to the Irving-Lipstadt trial is already online: holocaust-debate18.html.
{end}
The Memoirs of Rudolph Hoss (Hoess), Kommandant at Auschwitz: Hoss-Memoirs.html.
The Holocaust Denial debate: holocaust-debate.html.
Write to me at contact.html.