On 20 January 1942, the conference on the ‘final solution’, postponed from 9 December, eventually took place in a large villa by the Wannsee. Alongside representatives from the Reich ministries of the Interior, Justice, and Eastern Territories, the Foreign Office, from the office of the Four-Year Plan, and from the General Government, sat Gestapo chief SS-Gruppenführer Heinrich Müller, the commanders of the Security Police in the General Government and Latvia, Karl Schoengarth and Otto Lange, together with Adolf Eichmann (the RSHA’s deportation expert, who had the task of producing a written record of the meeting).157
Heydrich opened the meeting by recapitulating that Göring had given him responsibility – a reference to the mandate of the previous July – for preparing ‘the final solution of the European Jewish question’. The meeting aimed to clarify and coordinate organizational arrangements. (Later in the meeting an inconclusive attempt was made to define the status of part-Jews (Mischlinge) in the framework of deportation plans.)158 Heydrich surveyed the course of anti-Jewish policy, then declared that ‘the evacuation of the Jews to the east has now emerged, with the prior permission of the Führer, as a further possible solution instead of emigration’. He spoke of gathering ‘practical experience’ in the process for ‘the coming final solution of the Jewish question’, which would embrace as many as 11 million Jews across Europe (stretching, outside German current territorial control, as far as Britain and Ireland, Switzerland, Spain, Turkey, and French north African colonies). In the gigantic deportation programme, the German-occupied territories would be combed from west to east. The deported Jews would be put to work in large labour gangs. Many – perhaps most – would die in the process. The particularly strong and hardy types who survived would have ‘to be dealt with accordingly’.
Though there was, as Eichmann later testified, explicit talk at the conference – not reflected in the minutes – of ‘killing and eliminating and exterminating (Töten und Eliminieren und Vernichten)’,159 Heydrich was not orchestrating an existing and finalized programme of mass extermination in death-camps. But the Wannsee Conference was a key stepping-stone on the path to that terrible genocidal finality. A deportation programme aimed at the annihilation of the Jews through forced labour and starvation in occupied Soviet territory following the end of a victorious war was rapidly giving way to the realization that the Jews would have to be systematically destroyed before the war ended – and that the main locus of their destruction would no longer be the Soviet Union, but the territory of the General Government.160
That the General Government should become the first area to implement the ‘Final Solution’ was directly requested at the conference by its representative, State Secretary Josef Bühler. He wanted the 2½ million Jews in his area – most of them incapable of work, he stressed – ‘removed’ as quickly as possible. The authorities in the area would do all they could to help expedite the process.161 Bühler’s hopes would be fulfilled over the next months. The regionalized killing in the districts of Lublin and Galicia was extended by spring to the whole of the General Government, as the deportation-trains began to ferry their human cargo to the extermination camps of Belzec, Sobibor, and Treblinka. By this time, a comprehensive programme of systematic annihilation of the Jews embracing the whole of German-occupied Europe was rapidly taking shape. By early June a programme had been constructed for the deportation of Jews from western Europe.162 The transports from the west began in July. Most left for the largest of the extermination camps by this time in operation, Auschwitz-Birkenau in the annexed territory of Upper Silesia. The ‘final solution’ was under way. The industrialized mass murder would now continued unabated. By the end of 1942, according to the SS’s own calculations, 4 million Jews were already dead.163
Hitler had not been involved in the Wannsee Conference. Probably he knew it was taking place; but even this is not certain. There was no need for his involvement. He had signalled yet again in unmistakable terms in December 1941 what the fate of the Jews should be now that Germany was embroiled in another world war. By then, local and regional killing initiatives had already developed their own momentum. Heydrich was more than happy to use Hitler’s blanket authorization of deportations to the east now to expand the killing operations into an overall programme of Europe-wide genocide.
On 30 January 1942, the ninth anniversary of the ‘seizure of power’, Hitler addressed a packed Sportpalast. As he had been doing privately over the past weeks, he invoked once more – how often he repeated the emphasis in these months is striking – his ‘prophecy’ of 30 January 1939. As always, he wrongly dated it to the day of the outbreak of war with the attack on Poland. ‘We are clear,’ he declared, ‘that the war can only end either with the extermination of the aryan peoples or the disappearance of Jewry from Europe.’ He went on: ‘I already stated on 1 September 1939 in the German Reichstag – and I refrain from over-hasty prophecies – that this war will not come to an end as the Jews imagine, with the extermination of the European-Aryan peoples (nämlich daß die europäisch-arischen Völker ausgerottet werden), but that the result of this war will be the annihilation (Vernichtung) of Jewry. For the first time the old Jewish law will now be applied: an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth… And the hour will come when the most evil world-enemy of all time will have played out its role, at least for a thousand years.’164
The message was not lost on his audience. The SD – no doubt picking up comments made above all by avid Nazi supporters – reported that his words had been ‘interpreted to mean that the Führer’s battle against the Jews would be followed through to the end with merciless consistency, and that very soon the last Jew would disappear from European soil’.165
VII
When Goebbels spoke to Hitler in March, the death-mills of Belzec had commenced their grisly operations.166 As regards the ‘Jewish Question’, Hitler remained ‘pitiless’, the Propaganda Minister recorded. ‘The Jews must get out of Europe, if need be through use of the most brutal means,’ was his view.167
A week later, Goebbels left no doubt what ‘the most brutal means’ implied. ‘From the General Government, beginning with Lublin, the Jews are now being deported to the east. A fairly barbaric procedure, not to be described in any greater detail, is being used here, and not much more remains of the Jews themselves. In general, it can probably be established that 60 per cent of them must be liquidated, while only 40 per cent can be put to work… A judgement is being carried out on the Jews which is barbaric, but fully deserved. The prophecy which the Führer gave them along the way for bringing about a new world war is beginning to become true in the most terrible fashion. No sentimentality can be allowed to prevail in these things. If we didn’t fend them off, the Jews would annihilate (vernichten) us. It’s a life-and-death struggle between the aryan race and the Jewish bacillus. No other government and no other regime could produce the strength to solve this question generally. Here, too, the Führer is the unswerving champion and spokesman of a radical solution…’168
Goebbels himself had played no small part over the years in pushing for a ‘radical solution’. He had been one of the most important and high-placed of the Party activists pressing Hitler on numerous occasions to take radical action on the ‘Jewish Question’. The Security Police – Heydrich’s role was, if anything, probably more important even than Himmler’s – had been instrumental in gradually converting an ideological imperative into an extermination plan. Many others, at different levels of the regime, had contributed in greater or lesser measure to the continuing and untrammelled process of radicalization. Complicity was massive, from the Wehrmacht leadership and captains of industry down to Party hacks, bureaucratic minions, and ordinary Germans hoping for their own material advantage through the persecution then deportation of a helpless, but unloved, minority which had been deemed to be the inexorable enemy of the new ‘people’s community’.
But Goebbels knew what he was talking about in singling out Hitler’s role. This had often been indirect,
rather than overt. It had consisted of authorizing more than directing. And the hate-filled tirades, though without equal in their depth of inhumanity, remained at a level of generalities. Nevertheless, there can be no doubt about it: Hitler’s role had been decisive and indispensable in the road to the ‘Final Solution’. Had he not come to power in 1933 and a national-conservative government, perhaps a military dictatorship, had gained power instead, discriminatory legislation against Jews would in all probability still have been introduced in Germany. But without Hitler, and the unique regime he headed, the creation of a programme to bring about the physical extermination of the Jews of Europe would have been unthinkable.
11
LAST BIG THROW OF THE DICE
‘If I don’t get the oil of Maykop and Grozny, then I must finish this war.’
Hitler, spring 1942
‘Overall picture: have we extended the risk too far?’
General Halder, 15 August 1942
‘You can be sure,’ he added, ‘that nobody will get us away from this place again!’
Hitler, speaking of Stalingrad, 30 September 1942
‘How can someone be so cowardly? I don’t understand it. So many people have to die. Then such a man goes and besmirches in the last minute the heroism of so many others.’
Hitler, on 1 February 1943 on hearing of the
surrender of Field-Marshal Paulus at Stalingrad
Snow still lay on the ground at the Wolf’s Lair. An icy wind gave no respite from the cold. But, at the end of February 1942, there were the first signs that spring was not far away.1 Hitler could not wait for the awful winter to pass.2 He felt he had been let down by his military leaders, his logistical planners, his transport organizers; that his army commanders had been faint-hearts, not tough enough when faced with crisis; that his own strength of will and determination had alone staved off catastrophe. Every crisis in his own mind amounted to a contest of will. The winter crisis had been no different. Coming through it had been yet another ‘triumph of the will’, comparable as he saw it with winning power against the odds in 1933. That the gamble of knocking out the Soviet Union within a few months had been absurd, or that the overall strategy of ‘Barbarossa’ had been flawed from the outset, never entered his head; nor that his own constant interference had compounded the problems of military command. The winter crisis had sharpened his sense, never far from the surface, that he had to struggle not just against external enemies, but against those who were inadequate, incapable, or even disloyal, in his own ranks. But the crisis had been surmounted. His leadership, he believed, had saved his army from the fate of Napoleon’s troops. They had survived the Russian winter. This in itself was a psychological blow to the enemy, which had also suffered grievously. It was necessary now to attack again as soon as possible; to destroy this mortally weakened enemy in one final great heave. This was how his thoughts ran. In the insomniac nights in his bunker, he was not just wanting to erase the memories of the crisis-ridden cold, dark months. He could hardly wait for the new offensive in the east to start – the push to the Caucasus, Leningrad, and Moscow, which would wrestle back the initiative once more.3 It would be a colossal gamble. Should it fail, the consequences would be unthinkable.
For those in the Führer Headquarters not preoccupied with military planning, life was dull and monotonous. Hitler’s secretaries would go for a daily walk to the next village and back. Otherwise, they whiled away the hours. Chatting, a film in the evenings, and the obligatory gathering each afternoon in the Tea House and late at night again for tea made up the day. ‘Since the tea-party always consists of the same people, there is no stimulation from outside, and nobody experiences anything on a personal level,’ Christa Schroeder wrote to a friend in February 1942, ‘the conversation is often apathetic and tedious, wearying, and irksome. Talk always runs along the same lines.’ Hitler’s monologues – outlining his expansive vision of the world – were reserved for lunch or the twilight hours. At the afternoon tea-gatherings, politics were never discussed. Anything connected with the war was taboo. There was nothing but small-talk. Those present either had no independent views, or kept them to themselves. Hitler’s presence dominated. But it seldom now did much to animate. He was invariably tired, but found it hard to sleep. His insomnia made him reluctant to go to bed. His entourage often wished he would do so. The tedium for those around him seemed at times incessant. Occasionally, it was relieved in the evenings by listening to records – Beethoven symphonies, selections from Wagner, or Hugo Wolf’s Lieder. Hitler would listen with closed eyes. But he always wanted the same records. His entourage knew the numbers off by heart. He would call out: ‘Aida, last act,’ and someone would shout to one of the manservants: ‘Number hundred-and-something.’4
The war was all that mattered to Hitler. Yet, cocooned in the strange world of the Wolf’s Lair, he was increasingly severed from its realities, both at the front and at home. Detachment ruled out all vestiges of humanity. Even towards those in his own entourage who had been with him for many years, there was nothing resembling real affection, let alone friendship; genuine fondness was reserved only for his young Alsatian.5 He had described the human being the previous autumn as no more than ‘a ridiculous “cosmic bacterium” (eine lächerliche “Weltraumbakterie”)’.6 Human life and suffering was, thus, of no consequence to him. He never visited a field-hospital, nor the homeless after bomb-raids. He saw no massacres, went near no concentration camp, viewed no compound of starving pris-oners-of-war. His enemies were in his eyes like vermin to be stamped out. But his profound contempt for human existence extended to his own people. Decisions costing the lives of tens of thousands of his soldiers were made – perhaps it was only thus possible to make them – without consideration for any human plight. As he had told Guderian during the winter crisis, feelings of sympathy and pity for the suffering of his soldiers had to be shut out.7 For Hitler, the hundreds of thousands of dead and maimed were merely an abstraction, the suffering a necessary and justified sacrifice in the ‘heroic struggle’ for the survival of the people.
Among ordinary soldiers, amid the brutality and barbarization, less heroic views of war could be encountered. One soldier on the eastern front who, in peacetime, had attended the Party rallies at Nuremberg, mourned the death of a comrade at the end of January. ‘Why must it always be: sacrifice, struggle, victory, death!’ he lamented. ‘Is the heroic death then the ideal of this globe?.’8 A young recruit from Cologne, by no means opposed to the regime, wrote in his diary a few weeks later, while in training in East Prussia before being sent to the eastern front: ‘I’m convinced that, if I knew that all this really had a meaning, I could and would voluntarily achieve much more. But for what? I ask myself. For what and for whom must we perish? For what and for whom be a slave? For what starve, freeze, and then finally croak? For what? For what? A thousand questions – no answer.’9
The ties which had bound a high proportion of the German population to Hitler since 1933 were starting to loosen. SD reports from early 1942 still declared that people craved shots of Hitler in the newsreels. ‘A smile of the Führer. His look itself gives us strength and courage again.’ Such effusions were mentioned as commonplace remarks.10 But Hitler was becoming a remote figure, a distant warlord. His image had to be refashioned by Goebbels to match the change which the Russian campaign had brought about. The première of his lavish new film, The Great King, in early 1942 allowed Goebbels to stylize Hitler by association as a latter-day Frederick the Great, isolated in his majesty, conducting a heroic struggle for his people against mighty enemies and ultimately overcoming crisis and calamity to emerge triumphant.11 It was a portrayal which increasingly matched Hitler’s self-image during the last years of the war.12
But the changed image could do nothing to alter reality: the German people’s bonds with Hitler were to weaken immeasurably as victories turned into defeats, advances into retreats, expansion into contraction, as the death-toll mounted catastrophically, allies deserted, a
nd the war came to be widely recognized as leading to inevitable disaster. And as the war turned inexorably against Germany, Hitler cast around all the more for scapegoats.