Kaiser's Holocaust (49 page)

On the afternoon of 16 July 1941, a secret conference was held on Hitler’s private train, the
Amerika
. In a siding outside the Polish town of Angerburg, this fifteen-carriage armoured behemoth was an awesome sight. Propelled by two locomotives, she had armourplated flak cars at each end, both equipped with heavy antiaircraft guns. Other carriages contained the offices and sleeping berths of Hitler’s numerous adjutants, bodyguards and servants. There was a fully equipped dining car and carriages of additional accommodation for visitors. The Führer’s private coach consisted of a large drawing room with table and chairs, as well as sleeping quarters. The nerve centre of the
Amerika
was in the ‘command coach’, with its map room, communications centre and conference room. She was a miniature Chancellery on wheels, and that July the whole train hummed with activity as communiqués were sent and received via teleprinters and radio-telephones.

Five hundred miles away on the great Russian Steppe, 3 million German soldiers were coming to the end of day twenty-five of Operation Barbarossa, the invasion of the USSR. For over three weeks, the mechanised brigades of the Blitzkrieg had destroyed everything in their path. Great fleets of Panzers had sailed across the vast golden wheat fields, silhouetted against a dark-blue summer sky that was regularly punctuated by columns of smoke rising from burning farms and homes. Hundreds of thousands of Russian prisoners of war marched past the invader. The majority of the Germans who looked down from the trucks and Panzers and the majority of bewildered Russians who squinted up to see the faces of their conquerors were to die in the coming months and years. Neither captives nor captors had any idea of the catastrophes awaiting them.

If the men on board the
Amerika
in mid-July 1941 had wanted to look for early indications of disaster, they had already begun to appear. On 3 July Hitler’s Chief of the Army General Staff, Franz Halder, had confided in his diary that the Russians were almost defeated. Entries made days later reveal not only a dramatic change of opinion but Halder’s shock at the breathtaking inaccuracy of the military assessment of the Red Army, on which Germany had planned the invasion. The confident predictions about the likely behaviour of Soviet soldiers and the technical abilities of their officers had been proved completely false by recent experience. Pre-invasion assessments on the morale and equipment of the Russians had also been proved catastrophically inaccurate, and whole Russian divisions – of whose existence German Intelligence had been completely unaware – had already been thrown into battle.

But on 16 July the Nazi leadership, and much of the army, dismissed the Intelligence failures and other ominous portents as defeatism. They remained electrified by the daily dispatches from the front. The unimaginable scale of the battle itself and the incredible speed of the German advances blinded even the generals to the impossibility of their task.

If success blinded the generals, it expanded Hitler’s vision. His dream of destroying the USSR with one gargantuan blow was slowly becoming a reality. Exactly as he had predicted, the German armies had kicked down the door and the USSR, eaten from within by ‘Jewish Bolshevism’, had begun to collapse. With victory seemingly in sight, Hitler felt confident enough to draw up plans against his other enemies. On 14 July he had signed a decree that diverted armaments production away from the army, which was to be drastically reduced in size. The factories of the Reich were to concentrate their efforts on aircraft production and expanding the German navy for a renewed struggle against Britain and her supporters in America.

Hitler, now more than ever, was convinced of his own genius. He was fifty-two and had reached the apex of his life. In power for almost a decade, he had erased the shame of the Versailles
Treaty, reclaimed much of the nation’s lost territory and overseen the rebuilding of Germany’s economy – or at least taken credit for its revival. As a former soldier who had spent four years in the filth of the Western Front, he had had the unimaginable satisfaction of arriving in Paris at the head of a conquering German army and chasing the British off the continent. Yet these conquests, critical though they were, had been merely geopolitical. Victory against the USSR was of a different order. The fight against ‘Jewish Bolshevism’, the ‘re-invasion’ of the East, was a crusade steeped in the
Völkisch
and colonial traditions from which Nazi ideology had emerged.

From the windows of the
Amerika
, a new world was slowly becoming visible – a world without Bolshevism, without Stalin and eventually without the Jews in Western Europe. The time had come to set out the shape and character of the ‘New Order’ that would fill the void left by the USSR, and Hitler’s deepest-held ideological passions came to the fore; the racial obsessions and distorted Social Darwinism that underpinned his most fundamental beliefs were liberated by military victory. Freed from the pragmatic considerations that had limited his plans only weeks earlier, Hitler had a vision of appalling clarity and set about planning the ethnic cleansing, resettlement and ruthless exploitation of what he later called ‘the future German empire’.

At three o’clock on 16 July, Hitler sat at the long conference table in the
Amerika
’s command coach. He had gathered around him the men who were going to administer and exploit the new empire in Russia. Göring was there, not as Air Reich Marshal, but as overseer of the Four-Year Economic Plan. Alfred Rosenberg, ‘the philosopher of National Socialism’, had come to the meeting in the fervent hope that his vision of a network of national states bound to Germany and turned against Moscow might win his leader’s approval. But Hitler had no interest in these visions for the East. Another of the National Socialist luminaries at the conference table was Heinrich Lammers, Hitler’s legal adviser, Chief of the Reich’s Chancellery and honorary SS General. Lammers, along with Hitler’s personal secretary Martin
Bormann, were men on their way up in the party. Representing the army was Wilhelm Keitel, the Chief of Staff who had threatened to resign in the hope of dissuading Hitler from invading Russia. It was his only act of resistance. Now utterly convinced of the Führer’s genius, Keitel was not a man to stand in the way of the colonial fantasy unveiled a on board
Amerika
. His compliance ultimately led him to the Nuremberg gallows.

The minutes of the meeting on 16 July were taken by Martin Bormann. They reveal that Hitler was adamant that Germany’s task in Russia was not occupation but colonisation. In the privacy of his inner sanctum and in the company of the party elite, Hitler spoke with clarity and without rhetoric. He began with a warning. ‘It is essential’, he said, ‘that we should not proclaim our aims before the whole world. Rather Germany should emphasise that we were forced to occupy, administer and secure a certain area … we shall act as though we wanted to exercise a mandate only.’ With this veil in place the real work of colon isation could begin. ‘We can’, Hitler reassured his audience, ‘take all the necessary measures – shooting, resettling etc. – and take them we shall … It must be clear to us’, he insisted, ‘that we shall never withdraw from these areas.’
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Over the course of this five-hour meeting, many of the states of Eastern Europe were redesigned as colonial administrative districts. Their borders were to be redrafted for the convenience of future German administrators. The Balkans would be renamed Ostland, other states were to be bisected or amalgamated. The Crimea was to be evacuated of its entire population – whom Hitler referred to as ‘foreigners’ – and resettled with ethnically German farmers. The Ukraine would become a sort of plantation colony with the produce of its wheat fields redirected into German mouths.

Towards the end of the meeting, the viceroys who would rule these colonies were appointed. A list of Nazi functionaries were plucked from semi-obscurity and set on the road to infamy. The names of some still resonate in parts of Eastern Europe. Fritz Sauckel became the Gauliter of Thuringia, Heinrich Lohse the
Reich Commissioner of the Baltic States. Erich Koch, whose brutal methods in Poland had gained Hitler’s approval, was given the task of transforming the Ukraine into a twentieth-century slave state. Others were appointed prematurely. Siegfried Kasche, whom Himmler once dismissed as ‘a man of the desk’, was never able to take up his post as Gauliter of Moscow, though he still nursed ridiculous hopes of doing so as late as 1944.
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At eight in the evening the meeting was declared over. It was still light as the delegates left their seats and prepared for dinner. On a train called
Amerika
, on the outskirts of a Polish town, a German dictator had declared the birth of an empire in Russia. It was perhaps no more preposterous than the birth of any other empire.

We are not accustomed to think of imperialism as a phenomenon that touched the continent of Europe itself. Yet Hitler’s war for
Lebensraum
was the greatest colonial war in history. It brought into existence a realm of genocide, slavery and barbarism that consumed half of Europe for four years. It saw slave-hunting parties, reminiscent of those sent into the forests of King Leopold’s Congo, scouring the woods of the USSR. Thousands of villages were wiped off the map in punitive raids, and 11 million civilians, 6 million of them Jews, were systematically murdered, many in industrial killing factories.

By contrast, Germany’s struggle against the Western powers was mostly fought according to a code of military ethics whose immediate origins stretched back to the middle of the nineteenth century. Although there were a number of infamous atrocities committed against combatants and civilians in Western Europe, they pale in comparison to the routine barbarity of the East – fought by the same regime during the same years. But the war against the Jews, Poles and the peoples of the USSR was not barbarous simply because established European conventions of war were abandoned. Rather, it was shaped and directed by
another set of conventions, those developed in Europe’s colonies and on the frontiers of America during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Although European history is not without its wars and massacres, the Nazi war for
Lebensraum
took much of its inspiration from the colonial world.

In the 1870s and 1880s, colonialism in Africa and Asia had been transformed by the emergence of Social Darwinian racism. Its advocates had learned to reject the appeals of the missionaries and the ‘sentimentalists’ who believed that the dark races could be educated and raised to higher cultural levels. By the end of the nineteenth century imperialists had instead come to imagine the colonial process as the physical expression of racial superiority. Some envisaged its climax as the extinction of all but the higher Northern European race.

Half a century later, Germany’s eastern colonial impulse underwent a similar shift. As it made the transition from the Second to the Third Reich, it entered its own Social Darwinian phase and fused with a strain of German anti-Semitism of appalling virulence. By the summer of 1941 the Nazis, and millions of their followers, had come to regard the Jews, Gypsies and Slavic peoples of the East in ways that were little different from how the
Schutztruppe
and settlers of German South-West Africa had regarded the Herero and Nama four decades earlier.

In the Nazi world view, the East had changed little since General von Ludendorff’s armies had been driven out in 1918 and 1919. Without German leadership, the Slavs had supposedly remained in stasis, incapable of stamping even their limited culture on their landscape. The Jews – whom the Nazis regarded as a dangerous and parasitic race – had spent the inter-war years infecting Slavic USSR with the peculiarly Jewish poison of Bolshevism. Germany, by contrast, was a nation transformed: a ‘racial state’ in which marriage, reproduction, citizenship were governed by race laws. When the Nazis applied the same biological-racial certainties that governed the lives of German citizens to the peoples of the East, the sheer folly of her former policies became clear. By 1941 the paternalist belief that through spreading her language, wealth and
Kultur
, Germany could uplift the peoples of the East – both Slavs and Jews – was dismissed by the Nazis as a deluded fantasy, based on unscientific ideas. Nine months into the war against the USSR, Joseph Goebbels noted in his diary that the ‘nationalist currents’ encouraged by the Kaiser’s armies could be seen in the former Baltic States, then under German occupation. In the same entry, he went on to mock those among these Slavic minorities who erroneously ‘imagined that the German Wehrmacht would shed its blood to set up new governments in these midget states … One would have to take the imperial regime of Kaiser Wilhelm as a model if one were to inaugurate so short-sighted a policy. National Socialism is much more cold-blooded and much more realistic in all these questions. It does only what is useful for its own people.’
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