Dark Continent: Europe's Twentieth Century (29 page)

In “Some Thoughts on the Treatment of Alien Populations in the East,” Himmler suggested that the entire population of former
Poland be racially screened: the “racially valuable” could then be brought to the Reich, while the rest would be dumped in the General Government to serve as a reservoir of cheap labour for the Reich. Touching briefly on the subject of the Jews, Himmler noted: “I hope completely to erase the concept of Jews through the possibility of a great emigration to a colony in Africa or elsewhere.” The memorandum as a whole raised the possibility of genocide, only to dismiss it: “However cruel and tragic each individual case may be, this method is still the mildest and best, if one rejects the Bolshevik method of physical extermination of a people out of inner conviction as un-German and impossible.”
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The African colony which offered itself following the victory over France was Madagascar, and for some months the “Madagascar Plan” was taken very seriously. It rested, however, upon the assumption that not only France but Britain too would be defeated, and once it became clear that the Battle of Britain had failed, Madagascar faded from Nazi minds. Hitler’s short-term response was to override Hans Frank’s objections to having to receive more Jews in the General Government. But as Christopher Browning has remarked, the goal of the Final Solution at this stage remained “the expulsion of the Jews to the furthest extremity of the German sphere of influence.” What transformed Nazi policy towards the Jews was the invasion of the Soviet Union, and the consequent radicalization of the war. In 1940 the Germans killed at most approximately 100,000 Jews; the following year they killed more than one million. With Operation Barbarossa, the war changed; it became a
Vernichtungskrieg
—a war of annihilation—against the “Judaeo-Bolshevik” foe, and plans and military orders involving mass murder on an as yet unprecedented scale were drawn up.
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The behaviour of the German Army and SS in the initial stages of Barbarossa demonstrated the horrific character of the
Vernichtungskrieg
. Front-line troops under new standing orders shot captured Soviet commissars in defiance of international law. The upper echelons of the Wehrmacht offered little objection. As Soviet POWs fell into German hands in extraordinary numbers, they were treated quite
differently than their French or Belgian counterparts the previous year. They were starved to death or marched into the ground till they looked “more like the skeletons of animals than humans.” Within six months, over two million Soviet POWs had starved to death in German captivity.
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As the front advanced eastwards, it brought violent death to millions of civilians. On the heels of the front-line troops came Heydrich’s
Einsatzgruppen
—motorized SiPo/SD death squads—in search of Jews, partisans and communists. Their victims were largely Soviet Jews of all ages: more than 2.7 million lived in the former Pale of Settlement, more than five million in the 1941 borders of the Soviet Union. By mid-April 1942, the four
Einsatzgruppen
had reported the death of 518,388 victims, of whom the vast majority were Jews. A further round of killings took place in the following year, and may have led to the murder of as many as 1.5 million more: by the end of the war, only some 2.3 million Soviet Jews remained alive.
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Mass murder on this terrifying scale marked a new stage in the German approach to the
Endlosung
, and showed that the Final Solution was no longer being considered in terms of resettlement. The execution of so many civilians, including women and children, however, was also taking its toll on the executioners themselves. In August 1941 Sonderkommando 4a killed the hundreds of adult Jewish inhabitants of the Ukrainian town of Byelaya Tserkov, but left some ninety children under guard. “Following the execution of all the Jews in the town,” reported a Wehrmacht officer in the area, “it became necessary to eliminate the Jewish children, particularly the infants.” This was done. Yet afterwards, the reporting officer stated bluntly—to the fury of hardline Field Marshal von Reichenau—that “measures against women and children were undertaken which in no way differ from atrocities carried out by the enemy.” Such misgivings on the part of some perpetrators did not prevent mass murder, but they complicated it.
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It was partly to circumvent such unease, and partly to improve the efficiency of the killing process, that the use of gas in specially designed death camps was developed. The period when this policy was set in motion seems to have been the late summer and early autumn of 1941, at around the time that Himmler personally watched
Einsatzkommando
8 carry out a mass shooting in Minsk. The SS had already tried out mobile gas vans in East Prussia and the General Government in 1939–40. And just when Himmler was searching for an alternative to shootings, public outrage forced the euthanasia campaign in the Reich to be wound down. Hitler’s Chancellery had kept the T-4 programme under its own control; now it made the personnel, with their expertise in gassing techniques, available for transfer eastwards.

In September 1941, some euthanasia centres received Jewish inmates from the concentration camps, a sign that their function was already being shifted to the mass murder of Jews. At around the same time, a castle at Chelmno, near Łódź, was converted into a rudimentary death camp, and stationary gas vans operated by former euthanasia programme specialists were used to kill off the remaining Jewish population of the Warthegau from December 1941. The
Einsatzgruppen
started to use mobile vans throughout the East. SS technicians developed two types—the smaller Diamond, with a capacity of twenty-five/thirty people, and the larger Saurer which held fifty/sixty—and carefully monitored their performance, especially in bad weather. “Since December 1941, ninety-seven thousand have been processed, using three vans, without any defects showing up in the machines,” notes one report.
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The key to the Final Solution, however, was the construction of special extermination centres in the General Government. The SS focused initially on the area of Lublin, which under the earlier resettlement plans had been designated as a dumping-ground for Jews from western Poland. Former euthanasia specialist Christian Wirth was put in charge of the first death camp, Belzec, and gassing by carbon monoxide began there in March 1942. Exhausted Soviet POWs built the Majdanek camp in late 1941 and the first Jews were sent there from Lublin in December. By September 1942 gas chambers were in operation there too. Other former euthanasia operatives were assigned to the death camps of Treblinka and Sobibor. Gas chambers were constructed at these and other sites, and expanded as problems with capacity emerged.
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Auschwitz itself had been growing from its first use as a camp for Polish political prisoners. SS town planners dreamed of turning the
Polish Oświęcimcim into Stadt Auschwitz, a nucleus for German colonization, with orderly streets, modern cinemas and rich fields regained from the marshes which surrounded the town. In addition to the prison barracks, the camp complex housed the giant synthetic rubber factory which I G Farben executives had wanted to build out of the range of Allied bombers. A gigantic new camp at nearby Birkenau housed Soviet POWs in truly appalling conditions, and it was on these that an insecticide called Zyklon-B, patented by an I G Farben subsidiary, was tested for the first time on 3 September 1941. A little later on, new gas chambers were built purposely for mass extermination. In 1942–43 Birkenau became the main death camp for Europe’s Jews.
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By 1942, then, the technological prerequisites for industrialized mass murder were in place. Death camps were under construction and cheap poison gases had been tested and were available. Spearheaded by the SS, backed by Hitler, the complex diplomatic, legal and logistical arrangements were now set in train for the extermination of the entire Jewish population of occupied Europe. The subject had been intensively discussed by the Nazi leadership during October and November 1941; its administrative dimensions formed the theme of the Wannsee Conference, originally scheduled for December but postponed until January 1942. By the time that Heydrich, Himmler’s deputy, was assassinated in May 1942, the Jews of Poland were being killed in “Operation Reinhard,” and the first trainloads of Jews from Slovakia had arrived at Auschwitz.
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In early 1943, SS chief statistician Richard Korherr drafted a report on the progress of the Final Solution for Himmler, in which he noted that 1,449,692 Polish Jews had already received “special treatment.” Himmler rebuked him for using that particular euphemism, and corrected the text to read: “Transportation of the Jews out of the Eastern Provinces to the Russian East: [1,449,692].” But the numbers speak for themselves. By the end of 1943, when the death camps were closed down, approximately 150,000 Jews had been murdered in Kulmhof/Chelmno, 200,000 in Sobibor, 550,000 in Belzec, and 750,000 in Treblinka—thus the Jews of Poland were mostly killed in the so-called “Reinhard” camps. Auschwitz-Birkenau, the giant combined labour camp and extermination centre, remained in operation for
another year. Between March 1942 and November 1944, well over one million people were killed there, mostly Jews from Greece, Hungary, France, Holland and Italy as well as Poland.
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The overall impact of the Final Solution was summarized by Korherr in the provisional report he prepared for Hitler in April 1943. “Altogether, European Jewry must have been reduced by almost 1/2 since 1933, that is to say, during the first decade of the development of the power of National Socialism. Again half, that is a quarter of the total Jewish population of 1937, has fled to other continents.” In fact, the final death toll was considerably higher, since the killing went on, inside and outside the camps, until the end of the war.
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By the war’s end, between five and six million European Jews had been killed, almost half of the eleven million Jews recorded at the Wannsee conference. In some countries, such as Poland and Greece, almost the entire community was murdered. Other ethnic groups were also decimated, notably between 200,000 and 500,000 gypsies (many of whom were murdered in Belzec and Birkenau), Serbs, Poles, Ukrainians and Russians; but the systematic nature of the Final Solution makes it a case apart. Compared with the primitive techniques employed by other exponents of genocide such as the Croat Ustaše (who slaughtered at least 334,000 Serbs in Croatia and Bosnia) and the Romanians (who carried out bloody pogroms in Transnistria), the
Endlösung
demonstrated the superior genocidal efficiency of an operation conducted by a modern bureaucracy with industrial equipment.
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We need not assume the complicity of all Germans to accept that responsibility for, and knowledge of, this crime stretched far beyond the ranks of the SS. Propaganda Minister Goebbels referred in a diary entry of 27 March 1942 to the “liquidation” of the Jews of Poland; by May, Reich Railway Department heads were conferring with the SS over transportation aspects of “the complete extermination” of the Jews. The Army, the Navy and the Foreign Office all played their part. In Salonika,. for example, a tiny team of SS “experts” could not have deported one fifth of the city, nearly 50,000 people, without the active support of the local military administration. As for scientists, doctors and academics, their advice and enthusiastic involvement had been integral to the Nazi racial programme from the start.
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When foreign governments were approached for support, their reactions depended upon the prospects for German victory, the nature of local attitudes towards the Jews and the opportunity costs of resistance. They tended to be particularly cooperative in handing over Jewish refugees and other non-nationals, but they were usually more reluctant to allow their own fellow-citizens to be deported. Some governments, notably the French, the Slovak and the Croat, were at least as enthusiastic in their anti-Semitism as the Germans and responded warmly to the chance of removing their Jewish population “to the east.” In Romania and later Hungary where extreme anti-Semitic movements briefly held power, the bloody consequences shocked the Germans themselves. Even where the locals dragged their heels, as in Greece or the Netherlands, cooperation among the various German authorities often ensured that a high proportion of the local Jewish population was deported. Virtually none emulated the Danes in helping most Jews to escape, though the Italians—for their own reasons—did all they could to obstruct the Final Solution in the areas under their control. And as for neutral Sweden and Switzerland, recent revelations indicate their willingness to turn Nazi racial policy to their own advantage.

The British and American governments, for their part, suffered from no lack of information. Churchill was receiving Ultra decrypts of the
Einsatzgruppen
reports from the East, which summarized the killing totals. Several individuals, including Jan Karski, an astonishingly brave Polish emissary, emerged from occupied Europe to brief London and Washington with eyewitness accounts of the ghettos and even the death camps themselves. But apart from some vague public warnings to the Germans, little was done, and the chance to bomb the camps was passed over. Whether this inaction stemmed from anti-Semitism, from inability to imagine was what taking place, or from the fact simply that the Final Solution was never a central concern of the Allied war effort remains a matter of controversy.
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