The Second World War Read online

  Stalin’s general offensive was not the only one in the new year of 1942. On 21 January, Generaloberst Rommel took the British in North Africa by surprise. Ever since his supply situation had begun to improve a little, the ambitious Rommel had been planning another attack. The reinforcement of the Mediterranean theatre had depended on a rapid conquest of the Soviet Union, but the failure of Operation Typhoon against Moscow did not deter him. When a convoy reached Tripoli on 5 January with fifty-five panzers, as well as armoured cars and anti-tank guns, his determination to strike back grew while he had a temporary advantage.

  The Eighth Army was in a sorry state. The 7th Armoured Division, then refitting in Cairo, had been replaced by the inexperienced 1st Armoured Division. Other veteran formations, including the Australians, had been transferred to the Far East. The Germans were well aware of the British order of battle thanks to intercepts of reports from the American military attaché in Cairo, whose code they broke easily. But Rommel, who harboured wild notions of sweeping through Egypt and the Middle East, did not inform either the Italian Comando Supremo or the OKW of what he was plotting. Most of his soldiers, however, were thrilled to be on the attack again. A member of the 15th Panzer Division wrote home on 23 January to say: ‘once again we are rommeling ahead!’

  As Rommel struck back into Cyrenaica on 21 January, he ignored all orders to halt. One column advanced up the coast road to Benghazi, while the two panzer divisions swung inland. The panzers found the going very difficult, yet in five days of fighting the British lost nearly 250 armoured vehicles. Hitler was exultant and promoted Rommel to General der Panzertruppe. The hapless and over-promoted General Ritchie, who had assumed that this was just a raid, soon found that his 1st Armoured Division was at risk of encirclement. Fortunately for the British, Rommel’s over-ambition and the slow advance of the two panzer divisions allowed the bulk of their forces to flee in time. Ritchie pulled them all back to the Gazala Line, abandoning most of Cyrenaica. Rommel’s exhausted and fuel-starved troops did not bother to keep up. They knew that they could deal with them later.

  German soldiers sent across the Mediterranean as reinforcements were excited and proud to join ‘the small Afrika Korps’ in the desert. A medical Unteroffizier looked favourably on the ‘colonizing work’ of the Italians in Tripoli. ‘Also the Italian warships escorting our convoy were dashing,’ he wrote home. But many initial impressions would not last. Out in the Libyan Desert, they found ‘always the same landscape, sand and stone’. The war in North Africa was ‘quite, quite different’ to that in Russia, he emphasized. Yet they too suffered from homesickness as someone played the harmonica in the evening under the stars and they thought of the spring to come at home in Germany.

  19

  Wannsee and the SS Archipelago

  JULY 1941–JANUARY 1943

  Heinrich Himmler’s energetic deputy was SS Obergruppenführer Reinhard Heydrich. He led the Reich Security Head Administration (RSHA), which directed the burgeoning SS empire. Heydrich, a tall, immaculate, violin-playing anti-semite, was rumoured to have more than a trace of Jewish blood which seemed only to intensify his hatred.

  In the summer of 1941, Heydrich became irritated by the messy, adhoc ways of dealing with the ‘Jewish question’ and the lack of a central programme. As well as the massacres of Jews carried out by local security officials in the eastern territories, some SS satraps began to experiment with more industrial versions of extermination. In the Warthegau, unsatisfactory tests were carried out, pumping exhaust fumes into the interiors of sealed vans. In the Generalgouvernement, SS Polizeiführer Odilo Globocnik began to construct an extermination camp at Beec near Lublin. Himmler, meanwhile, was impatient to resolve the problems of psychological stress which the Einsatzgruppen suffered as a result of their work.

  Heydrich had instructed Adolf Eichmann to draft an authorization which Göring signed on 31 July. The document instructed Heydrich to ‘undertake, by emigration or evacuation, a solution of the Jewish question’, and charged him ‘with making all necessary organizational, functional, and material preparations for a complete solution of the Jewish question in the German sphere of influence in Europe’. About a month later, Eichmann was summoned to Heydrich’s office, where he was told that Himmler had received instructions from Hitler to proceed with ‘the physical annihilation of the Jews’. Although senior Nazi officials occasionally liked to take the Führer’s name in vain to advance their own policies, it would be unthinkable in this case that Himmler or Heydrich would have dared to do so on quite so important a matter.

  Earlier ideas that the total annihilation of the Jews would take place only after victory had been achieved were forgotten. One senses for the first time an unspoken anxiety that the opportunities presented by the war in the east should not be missed. Pressure also grew in Germany and in occupied countries, including France, that they should send their Jews eastwards. In Paris, the SS ordered the French police to round up French and foreign Jews, an initial operation which on 10 May 1941 sent 4,323 people to two holding camps.

  On 18 September, an instruction from Himmler revealed that the ghettos were now to be used as ‘storage’ camps. More than half a million Jews had died of starvation and disease in the Polish ghettos, but this was seen as far too slow a process. Further discussion showed that the plan was to put all Jews in concentration camps. But even in a totalitarian state there were legalistic problems to overcome, such as how to deal with Jews possessing foreign passports, and what to do with those married to Aryans.

  On 29 November 1941, Heydrich issued an invitation to senior officials from the Ostministerium and other ministries and agencies to discuss a common policy with him and representatives of the RSHA. This was due to take place on 9 December. At the last moment, the meeting was postponed. Marshal Zhukov’s great counter-attack had been launched on 5 December, and two days later the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor. Time was needed to assess the implications of these momentous events, and then on 11 December Hitler announced to the Reichstag his declaration of war on the United States. The following day, he summoned Nazi Party leaders to a meeting in the Reich Chancellery. There, he referred to his prophecy of 30 January 1939, that if a world war ensued, ‘the instigators of this bloody conflict will thus have to pay for it with their lives’.

  With Hitler’s declaration of war and the Japanese attacks in the Far East, the conflict had become truly global. In Hitler’s distorted logic, the Jews had to suffer for their guilt. ‘The Führer is determined to make a clean sweep,’ Goebbels wrote in his diary for 12 December. ‘He prophesied to the Jews that if they were once again to cause a world war, the result would be their own destruction. That was no figure of speech. The world war is here, the destruction of Jewry must be the inevitable consequence. This question is to be viewed without sentimentality.’

  Less than a week later, Hitler had a meeting with Himmler to discuss the ‘Jewish question’. Yet despite a heightened, even feverish, atmosphere, when Hitler frequently referred back to his pre-war prediction that the Jews were bringing their own destruction upon themselves, he still does not appear to have made an irrevocable decision on a ‘Final Solution’. Despite his apocalyptic diatribes against the Jews, he does seem to have been remarkably reluctant to hear details of mass killings, rather as he shied away from any image of suffering in battle or from bombing. His desire to keep violence abstract was a significant psychological paradox in one who had done more than almost anyone else in history to promote it.

  After the delay, Heydrich’s conference finally took place on 20 January 1942, in offices of the RSHA in a large villa on the shore of the Wannsee on the south-western edge of Berlin. SS Obergruppenführer Heydrich presided, and SS Obersturmbannführer Eichmann took notes. Apart from other members of the RSHA, most of those present were senior representatives from the occupied territories, the Reichschancellery, and four Staatssekretäre, the head officials of key ministries. They included Dr Roland Freisler of the justice ministry, who
later became notorious as the persecutor of the July plotters. The foreign ministry was represented by Unterstaatssekretär Martin Luther, the namesake of a far more famous and influential anti-semite. He arrived with a carefully prepared memorandum entitled ‘Requests and Ideas of the Foreign Ministry in Connection with the Intended Final Solution of the Jewish Question in Europe’. Just over half of those present had doctorates, and a significant minority were lawyers.

  Heydrich began by asserting his powers for the preparation of the Final Solution over all territories and official functions. He presented statistics on all Jewish communities throughout Europe, including even British Jews, who would be ‘evacuated to the east’. Their numbers–his estimated total was eleven million–would first be whittled down through hard labour, then the survivors would be ‘treated accordingly’. Elderly Jews and those who had fought for the Kaiser would be sent to the show camp of Theresienstadt in Bohemia.

  Luther, on behalf of the foreign ministry, urged caution and delay in the rounding up of Jews in countries such as Denmark and Norway, where this might provoke an international reaction. Much time was then spent arguing over the complicated question of those of partial Jewish descent–the so-called Mischlinge–and those married to Aryans. Perhaps predictably, the representative of the Generalgouvernement urged that its Jews should be dealt with first. Finally, while they drank brandy after lunch, the participants discussed the various methods available of achieving their objective. But the minutes of the meeting retained the usual euphemisms, such as ‘evacuation’ and ‘resettlement’.

  One thing, however, was clear to everyone involved. All ideas of a ‘territorial solution’ had come to nothing. With Stalin’s erratic general offensive following the Battle of Moscow, there was no suitable area of the occupied Soviet territories where the Jews could be dumped to starve. The only certain solution now seemed to be industrialized slaughter.

  A great impatience to get on with tackling the task permeated the Nazi administration, both in Berlin and, especially, in Frank’s fiefdom of the Generalgouvernement. And Gauleiter Arthur Greiser wanted to eliminate 35,000 Poles suffering from tuberculosis in the Warthegau. SS lawyers even discussed the possibility of killing German and other prisoners who had the misfortune to look ‘like the miscarriages of hell’. During the ‘Shoah by bullets’, ‘the killers in the occupied USSR moved to [find] the victims’, but in the ‘Shoah by gas’ ‘the victims were brought to the killers’. This process began to be put into effect initially in the extermination camps of Chemno (or Kulmhof, due west of Warsaw) where gas vans were used, and continued in Beec, Treblinka and Sobibór (all in the eastern part of the Generalgouvernement), and then Auschwitz-Birkenau (southwest of Kraków) in the summer.

  A formidable administrative apparatus was set up to cope with the Jews who had not yet died in the ghettos or been shot. Eichmann, who was responsible for rounding up all the Jewish populations outside Poland, worked closely with Gruppenführer Heinrich Müller, the head of the Gestapo. Eichmann, another who loved the violin, played chess with Müller once a week while they continued to mull over their immense task. The most essential element in the operation was transport.

  Planning and timetables were of critical importance. The Reichsbahn, with 1.4 million employees, was the largest organization in Germany after the Wehrmacht, and it made a considerable profit. Jews were transported in freight cars and cattle wagons at the same price as fare-paying passengers, in coaches on a one-way ticket. Journeys for the guards from the Ordnungspolizei were charged on the basis of return fares. The Gestapo took the money to pay for this from Jewish funds. But the ideological obsession of Hitler, Himmler and Heydrich often proved totally at odds with the conduct of the war they were trying to win. The Wehrmacht began to complain about the elimination of skilled Jewish labour in the armaments industry and the huge diversion of rail transport, when it was so badly needed to resupply the eastern front.

  Jewish community leaders were told to organize their own policing of the ‘relocation’, with the threat that if they did not do it, then the SA or the SS would do it instead. They knew what that signified in terms of broken heads. They also had to draw up lists for the ‘transports’. Those sent to the Ostland were executed by shooting on arrival mainly in Minsk, Kaunas and Riga. The majority, depending on their point of departure, were soon despatched to the extermination camps. The elderly and ‘privileged’ Jews sent to Theresienstadt did not know that their death sentence was merely in abeyance.

  Ordnungspolizei and Gestapo men employed in clearing the ghettos were allocated a ration of brandy. Ukrainian auxiliaries were not. Those Jews who tried to hide or escape were shot on the spot. So too were the old who could not move to the transports unaided. The vast majority departed in the railways wagons, apparently accepting their fate. But a number managed to escape from the trains into the woods. Some were helped by Poles and others managed to join partisan groups.

  As already mentioned, Nazi concentration camps had been set up soon after Hitler’s assumption of power in 1933 in order to hold political opponents. They also acted as a threat to potential critics of the regime, whether gentile or Jewish. Himmler organized one of the first for political prisoners at Dachau just north of Munich, and soon he took over the administration of all such camps. The guards came from the Totenkopfverbände or Death’s Head Units and received their name from the skull cap-badge they wore. In 1940, when the scale of the camp network expanded dramatically following the conquest of Poland, Obergruppenführer Oswald Pohl created his own sub-empire within the SS, turning labour camps into a means of raising revenue. He also became a key figure in the development of the camp system.

  Although tests had been carried out with Zyklon B at Auschwitz in September 1941, the first extermination camp with proper gas chambers constructed under Pohl’s direction was Beec. Work began in November 1941, two months before the Wannsee conference. The preparation of others rapidly followed. The work of the extermination camps was greatly assisted by the expertise of those who had been involved in the euthanasia programme under the direction of the Reichschancellery.

  Some have argued that the production-line method of the extermination camps was strongly influenced by Henry Ford, who in turn had obtained his ideas from the Chicago slaughterhouses. Ford, who had been a ferocious anti-semite since 1920, was revered by Hitler and other leading Nazis. He may even have helped fund the Nazi Party, but nobody has managed to obtain documentary evidence of this. In any case, his book The International Jew had been translated and published in Germany, where it had a great influence in Nazi circles. Hitler kept a portrait of Ford hanging on the wall in his office in Munich, and in 1938 awarded him the Grand Cross of the Supreme Order of the German Eagle. But there is no real evidence that the Ford production-line techniques were copied in the extermination camps.

  By the end of 1942, close to four million Jews from western and central Europe as well as the Soviet Union would be killed in the extermination camps, along with 40,000 Roma. The active participation of the Wehrmacht, officials in almost every ministry, a large part of industry and the transport system spread the guilt to a degree which German society took a long time to acknowledge in the post-war years.

  The Nazi regime did everything that it could to keep the extermin ation process secret, but many tens of thousands were involved. Himmler, speaking to senior SS officers in October 1943, described it as ‘an unwritten, and never to be written, page of glory in our history’. Rumours spread rapidly, especially after the photographs taken by soldiers of mass executions of Jews in the Soviet Union. At first, most civilians could not believe that Jews were being killed by production-line gassing. But so many Germans were involved in various aspects of the Final Solution, and so many were profiting from the confiscation of Jewish property, both businesses and apartments, that a large minority of Germans soon had a fairly good idea of what was happening.

  Although a certain amount of sympathy had been shown to Jews when the
y were forced to wear the yellow star, once the deportations began Jews became non-persons in the eyes of their fellow citizens. Germans preferred not to dwell on their fate. This, they later persuaded themselves, was due to ignorance when it was in truth much closer to denial. As Ian Kershaw wrote: ‘the road to Auschwitz was built by hatred, but paved with indifference’.

  German civilians, on the other hand, had little idea of the infamous medical experiments at Auschwitz carried out by Dr Josef Mengele and his colleagues. Even today, those carried out on Russian, Polish, Roma, Czech, Yugoslav, Dutch and German political prisoners at Dachau by SS doctors are comparatively unknown. More than 12,000 died, usually in agony, as a result of tests and practice operations and amputations. The victims included those injected with diseases, but also at the request of the Luftwaffe, those subjected to extremes of high and low pressure, immersed in freezing water as research for aircrew shot down over the sea, force-fed salt water and subjected to liver-puncture experiments. In addition, prisoners in the autopsy room were forced by SS personnel to remove and treat the good-quality skin of corpses (but not those of Germans) ‘for use as saddles, riding breeches, gloves, house slippers and ladies’ handbags’.

  In Danzig at the Anatomical Medical Institute, Professor Rudolf Spanner had ‘Poles, Russians and Uzbeks’ killed at the nearby concentration camp of Stutthof so that he could carry out experiments on recycling their corpses to make soap and leather. Such a mentality in a doctor may be beyond our comprehension, but as a traumatized Vasily Grossman observed after describing the horrors of Treblinka: ‘It is the writer’s duty to tell this terrible truth, and it is the civilian duty of the reader to learn it.’