5
War, Extermination and Defeat
The early experience of the war seemed to prove Hitler right. The Polish Army, far less well-equipped than the German invaders, was defeated within five weeks by the combined might of military forces. Stalin attacked from the east less than three weeks after Hitler’s invasion from the west. By the end of September, Poland had been effectively dismembered. The western parts were incorporated into the Greater German Reich; eastern Poland and the Baltic states were later annexed by the Soviet Union; and what remained became the ‘General Government’ under the civil administration of Hans Frank. Agreements between Hitler and Stalin led to the first major enforced movements of population, as ethnic Germans were resettled into the newly incorporated territories of the Reich, while Poles and Jews were expelled eastwards into the area of the General Government. From the earliest days of the war, special killing squad units (Einsatzgruppen) systematically rounded up and killed those whom they considered potential enemies or undesirables: members of the Polish political and intellectual elites, inmates of psychiatric institutions, and many Polish Jews were simply murdered straight after the invasion of Poland. Murmurings by Army officers, and even sharp protests in the lower ranks, led to the understanding that the Army should turn a blind eye to SS transgressions of the normal ‘morality’ of warfare. Other Poles were drafted into becoming slave labourers for the victorious Nazis. Meanwhile, as far as Western powers were concerned, the rapid Blitzkrieg or lightning war was followed by the Sitzkrieg or ‘phoney war’ of relative inaction in the winter months.
Despite the rapid success of the Polish campaign there was dissent between Hitler and certain Army and intelligence leaders, including Canaris, Oster and Halder. The latter realistically considered that Germany was not equipped for a sustained military campaign, and wanted to enter into negotiations with Western powers. But their considerations were ignored by Hitler, and their own delays and disagreements rendered their embryonic opposition ineffectual. In the event, active military opposition was delayed so long that it could salvage neither millions of lives nor German honour. In the meantime, more decisive – but unsuccessful – action was taken by a lone, courageous individual, with neither political backing nor a personal stake in any future, non-Nazi state. It is worth looking at his case in a little detail to see what an ordinary person could try to do. A Swabian carpenter by the name of Georg Elser had come to the conclusion that Hitler was an evil who must be eliminated. Alone, Elser carefully planned his attempt to kill Hitler. He prepared to install a time-bomb in a pillar in the Munich Beer Hall where Hitler annually commemorated the anniversary of the failed 1923 putsch. Night after night, Elser waited in the Beer Hall until after closing time, then got down on hands and knees to work on hollowing out the pillar, taking the wood shavings away with him in a briefcase. Unfortunately, when Elser had successfully installed a bomb timed to go off during Hitler’s speech, the particular night of 9 November 1939 happened to be foggy. Hitler decided not to fly back to Berlin as planned, but rather to leave early and take a train. The bomb went off as planned – but Hitler had left shortly beforehand. Elser was later apprehended crossing the border into Switzerland. Despite hysterical Nazi assertions that a wider plot – including the British secret services – must have lain behind Elser’s assassination attempt, no such contacts were ever discovered. Elser was held under relatively favoured conditions in concentration camps throughout the war. In April 1945, on Hitler’s orders, Elser was forced to stand against the wall in Dachau and was shot dead.1
Meanwhile, in the winter of 1939–40, Hitler had taken personal control of the details of the military campaign, and paid ever less attention to the cautious advice of more senior military advisers. With Russia gaining control over Finland, Germany’s attention was focused on securing Scandinavia against the British. Denmark was rapidly occupied, and by the summer of 1940 a compliant regime under the pro-Nazi politician Vidkun Quisling had been established in Norway. In the West, a careful campaign of advance through Luxembourg and the Belgian Ardennes permitted rapid invasion of France in May 1940, and by 14 June the German Army had entered Paris. On 17 June the French leader Marshal Pétain capitulated to the Germans. France was divided, both geographically – with a rump French government based in Vichy, in the south, while northern France was taken under German occupation – and politically, between collaborators and those committed to resistance.
The British Army had been forced to retreat from Dunkirk, unable to withstand the bombardments of the advancing German Army. In Britain a governmental crisis had precipitated the formation of a war cabinet under the bullish leadership of Winston Churchill, who replaced the relatively conciliatory tones of his predecessor Neville Chamberlain with a public commitment to fight – and win. Churchill nevertheless had to contend with appeasing voices in his cabinet – notably in the guise of his Foreign Minister, Lord Halifax – and it was by no means clear in the dark hours of the summer of 1940 that the island kingdom would succeed in its attempt to hold out alone against the apparently invincible Germans. In August 1940 Germany mounted a major operation soon to be known as the Battle of Britain, bombarding London and major industrial centres in southern England day and night. By mid-September, however, it became clear that an invasion of Britain (under ‘Operation Sea-Lion’) was not practicable, and this plan was postponed for the spring. But after a few weeks’ lull in the air raids, bombardment was renewed with the massive destruction of Coventry on the night of 13–14 November 1940. Night air raids continued through the winter, sending the British population running for cover in air-raid shelters or clustering in the London Underground, while the RAF – including, it should be noted, also many Polish, Czech and other foreign pilots among its ranks – gained a reputation for bravery and expertise in combating the German onslaught.
In the summer of 1940 Hitler appeared to be at the height of his power, as the German public applauded his victories and had yet to feel the real pinch of economic strains on the domestic front. Faced with extraordinary military successes, elite opposition to Hitler evaporated or fell silent. Yet the war was proliferating, and the expansion of the military arena was soon to reveal the degree to which the German war machine was in fact overstretched. Even with the gains in materials and labour made by plundering the resources and exploiting the populations of defeated and occupied territories, the German economy increasingly felt the strain of escalating armaments production. Having ignored early warnings that the war should be strictly limited in time and territorial scope, Hitler proceeded to expand the range of fronts without waiting for a decisive victory against Britain. Within a year, this expansionism was to sow the seeds of Hitler’s ultimate defeat.
The Soviet Union, having annexed the Baltic states in June 1940, was now turning its attention to the troubled region of southeast Europe. What concerned Germany most was Russian pressure on Romania, the main source of German oil supplies. In the course of the autumn of 1940 Hitler made up his mind that Russia must be neutralized or knocked out of the war; and that if it were not possible to invade Britain itself, then the fight against Britain must be displaced to an attack on British colonies and interests overseas. This entailed co-operation with other powers with similar interests, in particular Italy and Japan. On 2 September 1940 Ribbentrop’s notion of a ‘world triangle’ was realized in a Tripartite Pact between Germany, Italy and Japan, each of which felt the others could be used in pursuit of their own particular ends. While Italy had interests in the Mediterranean – particularly North Africa, Yugoslavia and Greece – Japan could be encouraged to take over French and attack British colonies in the Far East, and to tie up the USA – which had both pledged support in principle for Britain and sent a considerable amount of equipment – thus keeping America fully occupied in Pacific conflicts and out of the European arena. Ribbentrop even contemplated including the Russians in this scheme; but soundings on this matter were taken just as Hitler was formulating plans for an invasion of Russia to take place the following summer, and hence came to nothing. On 18 December 1940 Hitler issued a directive for what was to be code-named ‘Operation Barbarossa’: the invasion of Russia.
The transformation of what might have remained a limited, European war – from which Germany might well have emerged the victor – into a world war which was to bring total defeat and unconditional surrender came in 1941. After a diversionary invasion of Yugoslavia and Greece in the spring of 1941 – following earlier attacks, not co-ordinated with Hitler, by Germany’s Axis partner Italy – the invasion of the Soviet Union finally went ahead on 22 June 1941. The Russians, who had not taken serious action on being warned of the proposed attack, were initially unprepared, and the three invading German Army Groups were able at first to make rapid advances. However, Russian resistance quickly stiffened; and, unknown to the Germans, the Soviet Army had undergone considerable reform and strengthening since Stalin’s purges of officers and since the rather poor Soviet performance against Finland in 1939–40. The Germans were thus unable to inflict the rapid defeat on the Russians for which they had been planning, and soon started to suffer from overextended lines of communication and inadequate reserves. Disputes arose between Hitler and the High Command of the Army over priorities in the Russian campaign. By October the German troops were being seriously affected by the autumn rains, and were bogged down in mud; soon, the mud and mire gave way to an early winter. The German Army had been prepared only for a blitzkrieg; it was not equipped to contend with the icy winds, deep snows and frozen wastes of the Russian winter. Attempts to mobilize resources on the home front – through donations to the WHW (winter relief fund), giving up fur coats, boots and skis and eating ‘one-pot’ meals – proved pitifully inadequate to protect the freezing German soldiers on the eastern front. At the same time, incensed by the Nazi proclamation of all-out ideological warfare against communism (with the infamous ‘Commissar Order’ instructing that Bolshevik political commissars should be shot on the spot rather than taken as prisoners of war), and with the escalation of brutality and transgression of the normal rules of warfare, Soviet determination to resist the Nazis and defend their homeland solidified. A long drawn-out struggle ensued, characterized by increasing stridency and fanatic exhortations to self-sacrifice on the part of Nazi propagandists, combined with serious errors of military strategy and tactics under Hitler’s leadership. Despite all attempts to gloss over losses and setbacks, no amount of Nazi propaganda or biased newsreel coverage was in the end able to disguise the scale of German defeat at the battle of Stalingrad in the winter of 1942–3.
Having involved Germany in a war on two fronts – a situation which he had always been explicitly at pains to avoid – Hitler made a further move which was to seal the fate of the war he had launched. On 7 December 1941 Japan attacked the American fleet at Pearl Harbor. While Germany’s pact with Japan committed Germany to aid Japan if the latter were the victim of attack, there was no need for Germany to come to Japan’s assistance in an act of aggression. Yet Hitler used this opportunity to declare war on the USA, thus finally bringing America out of its isolationist stance and decisively turning the European war into a world war. A combination of strategic miscalculation – thinking the USA would remain tied up in the Pacific conflicts – and sheer megalomania and desire for ‘world mastery’ brought Hitler into making this ultimately suicidal move. No longer would America merely support Britain with supplies from the side-lines; now the full force of the world’s leading industrial power was entered into the military equation.2
By 1942–3 war was being waged on a number of fronts: there were conflicts in south-eastern Europe, desert campaigns in North Africa (with the Germans led by General Rommel), a resistant Britain supported by the USA in the west, and a protracted struggle against the Soviet Union in the east. Relentless air raids were being carried out over Germany itself by the British and American air forces, and fighting continued in Italy even after the fascist leader, Mussolini, had been deposed in July 1943. The burden of war was beginning to tell ever more heavily on the German people, as rations were shortened, labour and housing conditions deteriorated, and menfolk left for the front, often to return with serious injuries – or from whom there might be no news other than, eventually, a black-edged card proclaiming that they had fallen for the Führer and the fatherland. German women and children lived through air raids, surviving in ruined cities, or running their farms with foreign labourers from the occupied territories. Yet, however much they grumbled, their lot was infinitely better than that of the populations whom they were ruthlessly exploiting. Millions of forced labourers had been uprooted from their homelands across the continent and brought to Germany to keep the economy going while men were absent at the front. Inmates of concentration camps also were highly visible as slave labourers on a wide variety of work projects. While Nazi propaganda continued to proclaim the inevitable victory of the Thousand Year Reich, many Germans lost their faith in their erstwhile apparent saviour and charismatic Führer, and longed merely for a return to ‘normality’ and peace. Life for many ordinary people at this time was simply a sheer struggle for survival marked by private, familial concerns and personal worries. In so far as they were aware of the escalating scale of atrocities perpetrated by the regime, they preferred to ignore, suppress, blank out from consciousness what their leaders were co-ordinating and executing in their name.
For it was at precisely this time, as the war was raging on all sides, that Germany entered its darkest hour. It was then that the policy of systematic extermination began: the ‘Final Solution’, which has inevitably coloured all subsequent perceptions and interpretations of German history.
Mass Extermination and the Holocaust
Nazi policies were always murderous, and from 1933 onwards the victims were well aware of the fatal consequences of Hitler’s rule. From the start of the war, subjugated peoples in territories under Nazi occupation were subjected to varying degrees of exploitation and terror. The war on the eastern front was particularly brutal, while the ‘General Plan for the East’ (Generalplan Ost) treated the future of eastern Europe as living space for the Germans at the expense of Slavic peoples who were deemed by the Nazis to be inferior to the Germanic ‘master-race’. Members of the conquered populations were maltreated, often expropriated and moved as part of wider population planning, and subjugated into service of German aims, as in the forced labour policies, or punished horrifically for transgression or opposition to German rule. Partisans – both real and imagined – were murdered on the spot; Soviet Prisoners of War and civilians were brutally maltreated and starved to death; Germans and their collaborators killed innumerable individuals on spurious grounds. Numbers of victims are hard to gain with precision, but brutality and murder was widespread in central and eastern Europe.
The Nazis also developed organized policies of the mass murder of targeted groups, eventually constructing specially designated killing facilities to render the process more efficient. Industrially organized policies of mass murder were intended to kill all members of particular groups selected on ‘racial’ grounds. These policies began at home, and were widely known about among Germans.
From the late summer of 1939 a systematic ‘euthanasia’ programme was underway in Germany. This was based on eugenic theories and the alleged need to weed out those deemed to be hereditarily diseased in order to build a ‘healthy racial stock’; it was also premised on the view that a state need not support ‘unproductive’ or ‘worthless’ life (lebensunwertes Leben). Involuntary sterilization of such people had already begun in January 1934; ‘mercy killing’ of the mentally handicapped and incurably disabled took this one step further. An order signed by Hitler in October 1939, but dated 1 September (the date of the invasion of Poland), permitted the selection and removal of patients from asylums and sanatoriums, and their transportation to places of execution. Killing was effected in a number of ways: gassing and lethal injections were the most frequent means of administering death. Children with congenital abnormalities might be used first for ‘scientific’ experiments, with no consideration for their safety since they were in any case to die. Known as the T4 programme, after the Berlin address (Tiergartenstrasse 4) of the section of the Führer’s Chancellery which was responsible, the whole operation was conducted in a manner designed to deceive relatives and others concerned. There was a bureaucratic process of informing sanatoriums of selections, and later sending certificates to relatives notifying them of some appropriate alleged cause of death (pneumonia, asphyxiation during an asthma attack, or whatever) and offering to forward the urn containing the ashes of the victim, who had been cremated before any post-mortem could be requested. But suspicions began to be aroused, and soon many people were well aware of what was happening to their relatives – some of whom, far from being ‘insane’, merely suffered from, for example, occasional epileptic fits and were well capable of accurately assessing their situation. There was a growing wave of protest, until finally, on 3 August 1941, an outspoken sermon was delivered by the Bishop of Münster, Clemens August Count von Galen, thousands of copies of which were printed and circulated. Under pressure from this and other protests, Hitler called a halt to the main euthanasia programme on 24 August 1941. But those deemed ‘unworthy to live’ were still, in smaller numbers and less systematic ways, encouraged or allowed to die in asylums in the following years, through enforced malnutrition, administration of inappropriate medication, or heightened susceptibility to the inadequate treatment of disease. Numbers are hard to estimate: at a minimum, more than 70,000 people were directly killed as a result of the ‘euthanasia’ programme, and many tens of thousands died in subsequent years from the continued policies of deliberate neglect, active maltreatment and intentionally fatal enforced starvation.
Plate 3 German soldiers execute ‘partisans’, Lithuania, 1944.
Source: akg-images/Ullstein Bild.
The euthanasia programme is significant for two reasons: first, because it showed the potential power of German popular opinion in affecting Hitler’s overt policies; and second, because it inaugurated a new phase of mass murder. If Germans rallied in protest against the selection and murder of members of their own families and communities, they were less vociferous about the fate of those with whom they felt no such close bonds. Widespread indifference characterized the response of many Germans to the fate of the European Jews and others killed in the extermination camps after the formal termination of the euthanasia programme.
Millions were killed by the Nazis, including Soviet Prisoners of War held under atrocious conditions or summarily executed, civilians who were starved to death, Polish partisans and others deemed to be a danger to the Germans. Other groups such as Jehovah’s Witnesses, homosexual men and those considered to be subnormal or ‘a-social’, were also despised, incarcerated and brutally maltreated, leading to tens of thousands of deaths. What was distinctive about some groups was that they were ultimately categorized as targets for total extermination. Those whom the Nazis deemed, on the basis of spuriously scientific quasi-biological theories, to be ‘unfit to live’ included categories of people other than Jews: although far smaller in numbers than the Jewish community, the European Roma and Sinti peoples, or ‘gypsies’, suffered proportionately greater losses, being nearly obliterated. In numerical terms, the largest number of victims of total extermination policies were Jews. The name given by the Jews to Hitler’s Final Solution, Shoah, means ‘catastrophe’; the more widely used term, or Holocaust, means ‘totally burnt’, and is often held to reference, inappropriately, a sacrificial ‘burnt offering’. While essentially a misnomer, the word Holocaust has come to stand for the whole policy of mass extermination for which Hitler’s Germany has attained its place of historical infamy. While it needs to be set in the context of far wider crimes and mass murder, there are also distinctive features of this genocide which have occasioned massive controversies.
Hitler’s anti-Semitism had been evident throughout his political career, and had formed a major part of NSDAP ideology, although it was given varying degrees of public emphasis at different times.3 That Jews were ‘not desired’ in the ‘New Germany’ after 1933 had become quite clear, with the escalating series of measures stripping Jews of their citizenship rights and making life increasingly uncomfortable in the prewar years. But there is a major difference between anti-Semitism as expressed in policies of exclusion from the ‘national community’ – however vile and inhumane – and the almost unimaginable qualitative leap to the bureaucratically organized mass killing of millions of children, old people, women and men.
The precise number of those killed will probably never be known with certainty. But in any event, to speak in terms of statistics – was it under or over six million, 60 per cent or 70 per cent of the previous population? – cannot convey the enormity of the phenomenon, the unthinkable nature of the Nazi programme of genocide. It is clearly almost impossible to write about, to seek to summarize and ‘explain’. Any attempt at brief description will inevitably be inadequate; but an attempt must be made.
For those fortunate enough never to have witnessed the Holocaust at first hand, or to have had close acquaintance with the sufferings of those affected, it can only be conceived if one attempts to imagine it in concrete, small-scale terms: one train arriving in Auschwitz station, shunting off down the siding into the extermination camp of Auschwitz–Birkenau, entering through the infamous watch-tower gate; passengers falling exhausted from the train, half-crazed with thirst, covered in excrement, among them those who had died on the journey; being lined up for ‘selection’ for work duties or immediate death, being whipped and insulted along the platform, jostled, cajoled and hit into the ‘showers’ for disinfection; the kicks, screams, cries, tears, fainting, bravado, farewells; the undressing in faint hope and widespread disbelief in the stories about showers and delousing; the crowding into the gas chamber and brief struggle in the dark against the unavoidable death with Zyklon B gas; the crematorium and disposal of the ashes. The whole process, with the tumultuous, noisy arrival of a train carrying hundreds of people, through its emptying, cleaning and silent return on the tracks back to the West, need last only three hours or so; it is described in terrifying detail by eyewitnesses and survivors in Claude Lanzmann’s film Shoah. Polish peasants working in the fields nearby would see the trains go in full, hear the cries, see the smoke from the chimneys, smell its stench for miles – and see the trains leave empty. To attempt to imagine it in this way – the sudden, complete, final end of a particular train-load of people, and the endless repetition of this process, camouflaged in the language of objectivity and heroism of the perpetrators – can help to begin to make the statistics more real. To see the piles of discarded clothes, spectacles, shoes, cooking implements, human hair, all carefully collected by the SS, gives some inkling of the realities of lives that had been truncated, terminated. To see the drawings of children from Theresienstadt is to apprehend the nature of young life that recorded, in all the simplicity of children’s drawings, everyday experiences: festivals at home, butterflies and family scenes – and gallows and corpses that were the current reality. And to read, below each drawing, the dates of the child artist’s life – ‘Born –, 1935; died Os´wie¸ cim (Auschwitz) 1944’ – is to choke on the criminality of the Nazi policy of extermination.
It is necessary to confront these realities if attempts to explain Nazi genocide are not to be reduced to an intellectual game, a dry debate among academics or a political curiosity belonging to another era. It is necessary, however, also to rise above a mere contemplation of these realities – accompanied by emotions ranging from an infinite sadness for all those unknown people whose lives and futures were taken away so brutally, to anger and bafflement in relation to the perpetrators of the evil – and to go beyond simply denouncing and abominating this crime. For simply recounting the evil does not attribute causality or explore responsibility: or, in so far as it does, there is the implication that the culprits were a small band of criminals, and no further analysis is required. For decades after the war, many West German popular histories of Germany tended to treat the Holocaust in this way: a sad story, we raise our hands in horror or hang our heads in shame, this exonerates us, and fortunately it is all over now. In their emphasis on the heroic resistance of communists in the struggle against fascism, East German accounts almost ignored persecution on racial grounds.4 In grappling with questions which often appear ultimately unanswerable, historical research has developed through a series of virulent controversies, cross-cut by different contemporary political agendas. Yet the contours are perhaps becoming clearer with the passage of time.
Among the many questions associated with the Holocaust, perhaps the following are the most important. How did it come about that the Nazis embarked on a policy of radical physical extermination, an extraordinary attempt simply to kill every single person they considered to belong to a particular category? Was it intended all along, or was it in some way the consequence of general radicalization in wartime? How was it actually possible to execute such policies: how was the co-operation or compliance of both perpetrators and victims achieved; and why was there not more public outcry and opposition, both in Germany and abroad, no serious attempt to halt the mass extermination of people?
The concentration camps that had been set up in Nazi Germany from March 1933 onwards had been camps for political prisoners and other ‘undesirables’ in which there was forced labour (with a range of satellite camps or Aussenlager) and in which conditions were by any standards terrible. There was overcrowding, inadequate food, poor sanitary facilities, and cruel and harsh treatment often resulting in death. Disease, starvation, torture, shooting and hanging were all common, and violence, brutality and murder were weapons which had been employed by the Nazis throughout their period of power. Following the invasion of Poland in 1939, numerous acts of mass murder were carried out, with the targeted killing of Polish elites who were seen as politically dangerous, civilians who were categorized as ‘partisans’, and of many Jews, although spurious political or military justifications for the killing of Jewish civilians were not as yet prevalent. Houses, villages, urban streets and synagogues were often burned in wanton acts of violence and destruction that bore little relationship to any ‘rational’ military purposes or the rules and practices of ‘normal’ warfare, in so far as this distinction makes any sense in the context of Hitler’s war. There were also massive, Nazi-organized population movements, following the division of Poland between the Soviet Union and Germany, and the redrawing of the boundaries of the enlarged Greater German Reich (now incorporating the Warthegau and Eastern Upper Silesia). In the process of being ousted from their homes and ‘resettled’ in inhospitable areas, or simply moved across borders and left to fend for themselves, many thousands of people succumbed to disease and starvation. Ghettoization and deployment as slave labour on highly restricted rations which were insufficient to sustain life similarly caused innumerable deaths through racially motivated maltreatment. Those Polish Jews who, now living under Nazi occupation, failed to obey ludicrous orders, or who fell foul of individual Nazis, or who were caught dealing on the black market, or who sought in any way to exert their human rights of freedom – or who even simply existed, and were seen as ‘provocations’ to be humiliated – were at risk of severe punishment or even summary execution. But before 1941 there were no camps devoted specifically to killing people, and no explicit sense that the ‘final solution’ of the self-defined ‘Jewish problem’ would be that of the physical annihilation of every single member of the ‘Jewish race’, along with others deemed on racial, moral or political grounds to be ‘life unworthy of living’.
A qualitative and quantitative leap came in the summer of 1941 with the invasion of Russia, when what had previously been relatively small-scale, ad hoc killings began to become larger and more systematically organized. Following the invading Army were four Einsatzgruppen, special task forces whose job it was to round up Jews and others identified as political enemies, or ‘partisans’, and kill them. Einsatzgruppen had already been in action for a few weeks following the invasion of Poland in 1939, but now their remit was on a much larger scale. As the Army drove forwards across eastern Europe, the killing squads destroyed whole Jewish communities in their wake, Jews would be collected together and taken to a suitable spot, usually in woods near the place of collection, where they would dig their own mass graves and then, in groups, undress and line up in front of the grave to be shot. There were, from the Nazi point of view, problems with this method of killing: those who did the actual shooting often required considerable quantities of alcohol before they could begin, and it was a relatively public spectacle, with many unintentional witnesses (such as engineers working on nearby road construction projects) as well as collaboration, and sometimes also conflict, with members of local Army units. Nor could the numbers killed, although large, begin to add up to a total ‘solution’ of the ‘Jewish question’, if complete removal of Jews from occupied territories were the aim.
Actual physical extermination of the Jews had not necessarily been intended all along – a question we shall return to in a moment. On 24 April 1940 a directive of the Reich Security Main Office (RSHA) attempted to encourage Jewish emigration. After the defeat of France in June 1940 plans had been seriously considered for resettlement of the Jews in Madagascar. In preparation for this, Jews were deported from Alsace and Lorraine to southern France. However, the attack on Russia in June 1941 made the Madagascar plan appear unrealistic, as there seemed no prospect of an early end to the war, and the idea was dropped. In the meantime, there had been moves to create a Jewish reservation in the territory of Lublinland, southeast of Warsaw, in Poland. Large Jewish ghettos had been created in Łódź (April 1940), a major industrial city (frequently said to be Poland’s Manchester) now incorporated in the Warthegau, and in the autumn of 1940 the Warsaw ghetto was established. There were also several hundred smaller ghettoes created across the region, some closed and some ‘open’, some lasting longer than others, some used only relatively briefly as incarceration points pending deportation to death. By the autumn of 1941, as Jews from Germany and western Europe were being sent eastwards to join already overcrowded ghettoes, the situation of overcrowding, malnutrition and disease was dreadful. Formerly civilized, cultured human beings were reduced to shivering, starving, ailing bundles of rags, a living caricature of the way in which the Nazis attempted to portray and dehumanize the objects of their persecution. At the beginning of October 1941 SS-Brigadeführer Dr Friedrich Übelhör, who was in charge of the Łódź ghetto, protested to Himmler about further deportations from the Reich, claiming that he could not cope with any more Jews. Death had already been a direct result of Nazis policies; but now the way was open for a more radical ‘final solution’ to the problem that the Nazis had created for themselves.
Plate 4 Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto, who, if they survived the misery, hunger and sickness of ghetto life, would ultimately be transported and murdered in an extermination camp.
There was some debate among historians about whether Hitler might have given an order for the physical extermination of the Jews some time in the course of the summer or autumn of 1941. No written order has been found, and any such order from Hitler would be more likely to have been given orally, making known to associates what was ‘the Führer’s wish’. What is clear is that by the end of 1941 death was no longer a matter of overwork, malnutrition, disease or separate incidents of mass shootings. The euthanasia programme had been at least formally terminated in response to public outcry from relatives, church people and others. But the techniques learnt on the euthanasia programme of 1939–41 were transported to the death camps in the east.
Map 5.3 Major concentration camps, including extermination centres.
The use of Zyklon B gas was tried out in Auschwitz on Soviet Prisoners of War already in September 1941. The first camp to use gassing for systematic extermination was at Chełmno (Kulmhof), northwest of Łódź. Not only Jews but also Roma and Sinti were transported there, collected for ‘delousing’ in an old castle, herded into vans which had the exhaust pipes directed back into the van, and the motors were run until the people in the back had died from carbon monoxide poisoning. Their bodies were dumped in mass graves in nearby woods. This process started in early December 1941. By the end of May 1942 at least 55,000 Jews had been deported from the Łódź ghetto and gassed at Chełmno, as well as around 5,000 Roma and Sinti. But this operation was nevertheless on a comparatively small scale, and technically inefficient. In the course of 1942 a number of camps were set up specifically to kill large numbers of people as quickly and unobtrusively as possible. Under the so-called Reinhard Action (retrospectively named after Reinhard Heydrich, who was assassinated in Prague in May 1942), camps were established at Bełżec (starting operations in March 1942 and continuing until December 1942), Sobibór (in operation from the end of April 1942 until 14 October 1943) and Treblinka (July 1942 until August 1943). Prisoner uprisings precipitated the already planned closures of the latter two camps. Between them, these camps ‘achieved’ the liquidation of the vast majority of Polish Jews deported from the ghettoes; a further 40,000 remaining in labour camps in the Lublin area were summarily slaughtered in November 1943 in the so-called Operation Harvest Festival. The Reinhard Action made considerable use of both the expertise and the personnel of the euthanasia programme, with T4 staff being transferred straight to the east.5
The camp whose name has become the most infamous international symbol of the Holocaust was of course Auschwitz. An Austrian Army barracks existed in Oświęcim (Auschwitz), a formerly Galician town that became incorporated into eastern Upper Silesia in the Greater German Reich, and was not part of the General Government (as were the extermination camps further east). This barracks was used as a prison and labour camp, largely occupied by Poles, from 1940, under Camp Commandant Rudolf Hoess. From these beginnings the Auschwitz camp expanded to become an enormous complex spread over several kilometres in and around the town of Auschwitz itself. The original camp, which was named Auschwitz I, held largely political prisoners (of whom Jews formed a minority) and was the scene of horrendous medical experiments, including surgical interventions without anaesthetic, compulsory sterilization and Dr Josef Mengele’s studies of twins which often culminated in killing them and examining the effects of the experiments on their organs after death. The first systematic use of Zyklon-B as a more efficient and easily obtainable gas for killing people took place in Auschwitz I. Its use was to be hideously extended with the construction of a new camp, Auschwitz–Birkenau, or Auschwitz II, a few kilometres away on the other side of the main railway line. Killings started here in 1942; gradually techniques were improved, with the construction of specially designed gas chambers and crematoria, the largest of which, it was boasted, could ‘process’ up to 3,000 people a day, although individual transports were never quite that large. When all the gas chambers and crematoria were in operation it was possible to kill over 9,000 people within twenty-four hours – a figure achieved one day in the summer of 1944.6
‘Selections’ of those fit to work, and those designed to go straight to the gas chambers, initially took place on the main Auschwitz station, and then, when the side line had been constructed to cope with the massive influx of Hungarian Jews in the summer of 1944, on the long platform or ‘ramp’ in Auschwitz–Birkenau itself. A third camp in the Auschwitz complex was at Monowitz, whose inmates worked for I. G. Farben’s new Buna plant at Dwory. The Auschwitz camps also supplied labour for a number of other German firms, including Krupp, Borsig and Siemens. The area covered by this complex of camps was large, interpenetrating the local industrial and residential areas, and the fields worked by Polish peasants lay along-side the barbed wire and watchtowers of the factory of death. This was no isolated, hidden extermination centre in the less populated east, outside the German Reich, but rather was a major enterprise straddling the main railway line from the west: a large-scale organization for exploiting human labour, experimenting on human subjects and killing train-load after train-load of people, whose trains, organized by hundreds of bureaucrats in the German railway system, arrived full and departed empty, according to timetable. The smoke and the stench from the chimneys could not be ignored by inhabitants or passers-by for miles around. The myth that mass killings took place so far from human civilization that the news could not have filtered out cannot be sustained.
The Reinhard Action camps had killed most of the Polish Jews; Jews from Germany and Western Europe and other occupied countries were in the main transported to Auschwitz. A major staging-post for some was in the Czech town of Terezin, or Theresienstadt. This eighteenth-century fortified town, with its walls and fort (named after the then Austrian ruler, Maria Theresa), provided both a political prison (in the fort) and a ghetto (in the main town). In the latter, the Jews were allowed a large degree of self-government, extending even to their own postal system, and there was a considerable level of artistic and cultural activity. Despite the overcrowding, malnutrition and repression by terror, this transit camp helped to sustain the fiction that the deported Jews were simply being ‘resettled’ in the East. Many Jews from Western Europe, despite apprehension, went to the deportation trains in the hope and belief that stories of resettlement were true – clinging to arguments such as that the Nazis would not have given such precise instructions about what possessions to bring for their new life if there were to be no such life. These shreds of hope were given forlorn nourishment when a group of families from Theresienstadt were taken to Auschwitz and held under relatively favourable conditions in the ‘family camp’ at Birkenau, where they were forced to write misleadingly happy postcards to friends and relatives at home. Even the arrival of a few postcards led people in the West to continue to hope for the silent survival of many more who had, in actuality, long since perished.
What were the final statistics of the Final Solution? This is almost a meaningless question, but statistics must be attempted. Estimates vary, but at least 4.2 million and probably over 6 million Jews were killed; the latter figure is probably nearest the truth. In the Nuremberg trials, the figure of 5.7 million was given. On the highest estimates, perhaps 80–90 per cent of the prewar Jewish populations of Poland, Czechoslovakia, Lithuania, Latvia, Yugoslavia, Greece, Holland and Germany were exterminated.7
Map 5.4 Proportions of Europe’s Jewish population murdered in the Final Solution.
What role did Hitler and Hitler’s rabid anti-Semitism play in the genesis of the Final Solution? This question is closely related to debates about the structure of the Nazi state. Although the historiography has now moved on, from the late 1970s through to the end of the twentieth century these debates were dominated by the controversy between ‘intentionalist’ and ‘functionalist’ interpretations of the Third Reich. This debate remains significant because of the light it sheds on the character of the regime, and because of the ways in which it stimulated more detailed research on the involvement of different groups in the functioning of the Nazi state.
On the one hand, the so-called intentionalists perceived the Holocaust as the straightforward outcome of Hitler’s ideological world-view. In the words of Gerald Fleming, ‘the line that leads from these early manifestations [of Hitler’s congenital hatred for the Jews] to the liquidation orders that Hitler personally issued during the war […] is a direct one’.8 According to Lucy Dawidowicz: ‘The nexus between idea and act has seldom been as evident in human history with such manifest consistency as in the history of anti-Semitism’.9 This approach fitted in well with intentionalist interpretations of other aspects of policy, such as the emphasis placed by German historians Andreas Hillgruber and Klaus Hildebrand on Hitler’s long-term foreign policy plans and their phased implementation under changing circumstances. On the other hand, from the later 1970s onwards the so-called functionalists (sometimes also called structuralists because of their emphasis on the way structures function) challenged this line of interpretation. Rather than seeing the Holocaust as the direct, logical outcome of a system of pre-existing ideas and intentions, historians such as Hans Mommsen and Martin Broszat emphasized rather the fumbling, improvisational way in which anti-Semitic policies developed. As Hans Mommsen put it: the development of anti-Jewish measures was not ‘a result of a single plan’ but rather ‘a consequence of a combination of uncoordinated strategies’. Moreover, ‘While Hitler supported this process ideologically, he never designed it’.10 In Mommsen’s view, ‘intra-party rivalries as well as those between the party and state agencies contributed decisively to what can be described as a process of cumulative radicalization’.11 While Broszat agreed with intentionalists that Hitler’s ‘fanatic–pathological’ ideological views are indispensable to the explanation, he argued that historians must still examine the ways in which ideology was transformed into reality, and the ways in which the constraints of circumstances and the mediation of institutions and individuals affected, even distorted, this translation from theory into practice.12 Broszat saw mass killing as an ‘improvised’ solution which was not set in motion by a single Hitler order but rather emerged, bit by bit, as the only way of ‘disposing’ of the increasing numbers of Jews collected by Nazi policies in Eastern Europe. Granted that the basic aim was to ‘cleanse’ Germany’s empire of Jews (make it Judenrein), a number of different possible means could be considered, including the Madagascar plan mentioned above. It was only the combination of factors in the winter of 1941–2 which rendered mass killing the eventual or ‘final’ ‘solution’. The reversal of the war’s fortunes meant that vast areas for resettlement in the East would not be available; at the same time, however, the transgression of moral norms incurred by the mass shootings, and the deteriorating conditions in the ghettos with associated rising death rates, made the purging of the ‘Jewish bacillus’ by organized, rapid physical liquidation more possible to contemplate. Local initiatives were finally co-ordinated into a more coherent overall policy at the Wannsee conference of January 1942.
This debate proceeded on a number of levels: the interpretation of available empirical evidence; the more general theoretical level of interpretation of the regime’s dynamics as a whole; and the moral level of the implications for allocation of guilt and responsibility. Yet neither side sought seriously to downplay the role and responsibility of Hitler. Broszat, for example, stressed the intense personal interest of Hitler in the progress of the Final Solution. He also argued that, since aspects of the extermination of the Jews (such as their transportation, and the loss of Jews from the labour force engaged in war industries) were against the interests of the Army, policies could only be forced through against Army protests with Hitler’s backing. There was no attempt on the part of the functionalists to exonerate Hitler from blame; on the other hand, the shift of emphasis away from ideology to conditions of execution of policy did involve the implication of other groups and individuals in a measure of guilt.
This broadening of emphasis effectively challenged the older ‘totalitarian’ model of the intentionalists, which posited a streamlined power structure in which Hitler’s will was simply transmitted down the dictatorial hierarchy to be translated into practice at lower levels. The functionalist model, by contrast, saw specific policies emerging as a question of improvised practice, with each stage producing further ‘problems’ requiring ever more radical ‘solutions’, and with the outcome affected by competition for power and for Hitler’s favour. The Holocaust was, on the functionalist view, thus not simply a version of the ‘triumph of the will’ – after all, the crazy ideas even of dictators are not always effected in reality – and Hitler’s dictatorship was never as streamlined as either Nazi propaganda images at the time, or postwar (often self-exonerating) accounts of the power of a few men at the top and the relative impotence of underlings and functionaries liked to suggest.
The intentionalist/functionalist debate has in part petered out because the question of the undoubted significance of Hitler’s ideological views for the overall context and goals of the regime has, over time, been somewhat disassociated from earlier debates over power structures. Although the concept of totalitarianism lives on in political debates (perhaps rightly so), and also (less appropriately) in some textbooks, there is by now far wider agreement on the ‘polycratic’ character of the Nazi regime. Hitler’s own role as ‘charismatic leader’, and the significance of an appeal to the ‘Führer’s orders’ or ‘Hitler’s will’, are now widely seen as having developed in large part as a consequence of the increasingly polycratic structure of the state, with its lack of clear, institutionalized lines of authority. Hitler’s ‘intentions’, while still central, thus did not translate into ‘outcomes’ in the simple way posited by the intentionalists, through a direct line of orders and commands in a streamlined state; rather, Hitler’s views provided a framework of ideological aspirations, within which different organizations and personnel sought – at times preemptively – to ‘work towards the Führer’ and to implement the ‘racially pure’ state which was the widely acknowledged goal of the Nazi Volksgemeinschaft from the very outset. The lurching shifts from the inhumane practices of stigmatization and exclusion in the 1930s, occasioning the massive disruption of lives and causing thousands of deaths, through the heightened but still sporadic violence of the early war years, to the ever more efficient and highly organized mass murder programme carried out more systematically in the extermination camps, is indeed an exponential process; and this process is better characterized in terms of progressive improvisation rather than in terms of any clear prior planning.
Accepting a combination of a focus on Hitler’s intentions (or rather, his ideological obsessions and ultimate goals, without clear long-term plans for realizing his aims) with the theoretical model of a state characterized by internal feuds and competition, still leaves open the question of explaining the transition to a policy of seeking total eradication of ‘the Jewish race’, rather than simply ‘removal’, including deaths, from areas of German settlement and occupation. It also leaves open a whole variety of far wider questions concerning the conditions and responses which made such developments possible. There has been a renewed focus on subjective experiences as represented in ‘ego-documents’ from the time, of which the diaries of Victor Klemperer are among the best known, along with retrospective accounts such as those by Ruth Klüger and Inge Deutschkron. Among historians there have been major attempts to integrate the history of policy-making, of perpetrators and of the experiences and strategies of resistance on the part of the victims, with an understanding of the changing and very varied social, cultural and political contexts in which anti-Semitic and racist policies unfolded. This has led to a proliferation of research on the unfolding of racist policies in different local areas, the character of life and death in ghettoes, patterns of collaboration and resistance among victim communities and other residents in the locality, as well as attempts to provide more comprehensive, well-founded and accessible overviews of the unfolding process. In Saul Friedländer’s extensive explorations, the history is to be one which can be imagined and understood in a vivid, direct and comprehensive manner, giving voice to victims as well as collaborators – stylistically, too, a long way from the relatively dry tones and archival emphases of the functionalist theorists.13
But the final switch to genocide remains a central puzzle. Historians have long agreed that it is unlikely – given both Hitler’s work habits, his known desire to camouflage the Final Solution, even linguistically, and his experiences with opposition to the euthanasia programme – that a single, unambiguous order for mass murder would have been issued in written form, so the question is rather one of piecing together many often ambiguous scraps of evidence over a longer period of time to try to identify key turning points. Much detailed attention has been focused on developments in the ‘fateful months’ of 1941: and particularly on the ways in which the fortunes of the Russian campaign were related to the haphazard and uneven but dramatic radicalization of policy, with a number of scholars seeking to relate Hitler’s moods – ranging between elation and despair – to the transition to full-blown genocide. While Christopher Browning, for example, sees the shift to mass genocide as rooted in a degree of euphoria occasioned by the early phases of the Russian campaign in July and August 1941, Philippe Burrin emphasizes rather the mood of despair and desire for revenge in the autumn of 1941.14 Ian Kershaw’s painstaking analysis of the events of 1941 – from the plans in the spring for ‘Barbarossa’, which was clearly intended as a racial as well as political war against the Untermenschen (inferior beings), through the immediate, but still relatively small-scale and patchy mass killings carried out by Einsatzgruppen within days of the invasion on 22 June, with massive escalation of numbers of killers and victims (including now far more women and children) during August, to the systematization and attempted ‘improvement’ of killing techniques by early September – shows that this was an unfolding process, characterized by wide variations in the scale of killing between different Einsatzgruppen, which cannot easily be explained simply in terms of a single order or command from Hitler.15 Rather, initiatives appear to have been taken on the ground, within a general framework of overall aims and objectives set by Hitler, and in the context of the increasing brutalization of warfare. Experiments with Zyklon-B gas, the introduction for German Jews of the yellow star badge and the pressures for deportation of German Jews in September, the prohibition on further emigration from Germany in October, and the gassings of Jews from the Łódź ghetto in Chełmno in December, were but further faltering steps along this road. Yet even by the time that Hitler talked of the Final Solution in early December, the precise shape this would take was still inchoate, emerging.
Shifting the focus away from Hitler’s intentions to the conditions of implementation and improvisation also served to broaden the scope of research to the roles of other groups of ‘perpetrators’. No longer could the Holocaust be conveniently written off as merely the affair of Hitler and his small band of criminal associates, particularly the SS. Attention thus shifted to new areas of debate, bringing new groups into the spotlight. Götz Aly drew attention to the role of what he called the ‘planning intelligentsia’, with a particular emphasis on population planners as those who prepared the way, through resettlement programmes, for later extermination policies; and in a later controversial work emphasizing economic factors, Aly implicated virtually the whole of the German people as material beneficiaries of Nazi policies of ‘Aryanization’ and wartime looting (with some form of implicit guilt being extended even to German children who, after their homes had been destroyed by air-raids, were comforted by cuddling the toys and snuggling in the blankets of Jewish children who had long hence been deported to their deaths). More directly seeking to explain the violence involved in the face-to-face killing, Christopher Browning brought situational factors, including the role of peer-group pressure and the emotional brutalization occasioned by context, into the understanding of how ‘ordinary men’ could become killers.16 Research into long-forgotten photographs taken by former German soldiers, which had been found among their possessions when captured or killed and which had lain untouched in the archives of eastern Europe and Russia through the Cold War period, led a group of historians at the Hamburg Institute for Social Research to conclude that knowledge of and even active participation in war crimes, including the mass killing of self-evidently innocent women and children as well as people more plausibly designated as ‘partisans’, was far more widespread than had previously been acknowledged. The resultant travelling exhibition, entitled ‘The Crimes of the Wehrmacht’, thus effectively challenged the previously relatively unblemished role of the German Army with respect to its role in facilitating and participating in genocide.17 Perhaps the most well-known, if historically far less productive, of these debates on perpetrators was that unleashed by the publication of Daniel Jonah Goldhagen’s thesis on ‘Hitler’s Willing Executioners’.18 This implicitly resurrected older notions of national character and collective guilt by arguing that ‘ordinary Germans’ shared a common collective mentality, inherited across centuries (even when it appeared to lie dormant, as in the eighteenth century), characterized by a peculiarly virulent form of ‘eliminationist anti-Semitism’; when let loose by a state which fostered and legitimated anti-Semitic violence, Germans killed Jews because they wanted to kill them – effectively, an implicit broadening of intentionalism to encompass an entire nation. This thesis, written in a direct and emotive style (in contrast to the works of some of Goldhagen’s opponents among academics), found wide public resonance in Germany in the mid-1990s, where there appeared to be something of an appetite for self-flagellation – however ill-founded in this case – but was far less well-received by historians.
Debates on the motivations and character of the perpetrators, and the involvement or at least knowledge of wide numbers of Germans, were in one sense hardly new. The difficulties in understanding and the sensitivities of any kind of explanation were evident already the moment the war ended. There were widespread reactions of shock and horror as pictures of liberated concentration camps began to be published. For Americans, ‘Dachau’ came to symbolize the evils of Nazism, while the word ‘Belsen’ to describe extreme degrees of emaciation entered the English language simply because the camp of Bergen–Belsen happened to be the first to be encountered by the British. Germans, forced by the Allies to confront the criminal acts committed in their name, of course generally professed to have known nothing of it. But were these protestations of innocence and expressions of horror merely the belated cover-up for previous sins of omission?
It is quite clear that somewhere in the region of several millions of people in Germany did know, if not the full overview and the precise details, then at least the general thrust of anti-Semitic policy in Nazi Germany; and that several hundreds of thousands of Germans were actively involved in facilitating the deaths of civilians, whether within or beyond the specifically designed centres of extermination. Indeed, to limit the notion of ‘the Holocaust’ to the designated extermination camps assists in the self-exculpatory strategies of those hundreds of thousands of bureaucrats and civilians who also, if less directly than members of the SS and Army, played a role in causing innumerable deaths through policies such as ‘Aryanization’, reduction of rations to starvation levels and brutal exploitation of slave labour under intolerable conditions. The fundamental inhumanity of Nazi racist policies was evident – certainly to the victims – from the very start; but among those included within the Nazi Volksgemeinschaft, a process of ‘not seeing’ or even of actively contributing to and benefiting from what was going on, compounded by constant exposure to racist ideology in everyday life, appears to have assisted many in ignoring the consequences of racial exclusion from the outset, turning a blind eye to later deportations and ‘resettlement’, and later claiming they ‘knew nothing about it’. As far as the radicalization of violence and the more systematically organized mass killings of wartime are concerned, there were enough eye-witnesses in the occupied and newly incorporated territories of Eastern Europe and the Greater German Reich, enough eye-witnesses on the battle lines of the eastern front, enough couriers and postal services, enough avenues of communication even in wartime Europe, for a large number of Germans to have been reliably informed that exterminations were taking place. Even if, as Walter Laqueur points out, those Germans who knew that the Jews were being killed en masse constituted only a small percentage of the population, this small percentage would still amount to several million people. In Laqueur’s view, ‘by the end of 1942, millions in Germany knew that the Jewish question had been radically solved, and that this radical solution did not involve resettlement, in short, that most, or all of those who had been deported were no longer alive’.19
Similarly, it is clear that news of the extermination of the Jews was reaching foreign governments from a wide range of sources, including members of the Polish underground, such as Jan Karski; two prisoners who had remarkably managed to escape from Auschwitz, Rudolf Vrba and Alfréd Wetzler; and even a German industrialist with moral scruples, Eduard Schulte, who was present at a dinner party near Auschwitz with Himmler and members of the local civilian administration and was shocked by what he gleaned from the evening’s conversation. While details and numbers might have been inaccurate, the general picture that Hitler was systematically killing as many of the Jews of Europe as he could emerged quite clearly and was articulated in the Western press. In June 1942 the British newspaper the Daily Telegraph was the first to report the gassing of 700,000 Jews; by December 1942, the Guardian had followed suit with disturbingly accurate reports; and the knowledge of techniques and aims, if not actual numbers of killings, was widespread not only in the occupied countries, but also among the neutrals and the Allies. As far as foreign governments were concerned, there appears to have been a difference between receiving factual information, and believing in its reality, not to mention acting upon it. For one thing, the propaganda stories about alleged atrocities in the First World War predisposed people to a certain scepticism in relation to these new stories. For another, the very nature of the Final Solution is almost beyond imagining. Sheer doubt about the literally ‘incredible’ news might be compounded by a more moderate anti-Semitism on the part of the recipient of the news; in Laqueur’s view, this played a role in the British Foreign Office’s unwillingness to publicize the news of the Holocaust.20 Moreover, it must not be forgotten that in wartime, there were other, more immediate preoccupations: mere daily survival, and wartime strategy, took priority. In the end, there were many reasons why the news of the Holocaust did not produce action. In Laqueur’s summary:
The failure to read correctly the signs in 1941–2 was only one link in a chain of failures. There was not one reason for this overall failure but many different ones: paralysing fear on the one hand and, on the contrary, reckless optimism on the other; disbelief stemming from a lack of experience or imagination or genuine ignorance, or a mixture of some or all of these things. In some cases the motives were creditable, in others damnable. In some instances moral categories are simply not applicable, and there were also cases which defy understanding to this day.21
No doubt that aspect of the Final Solution which proves most resistant to understanding is the question of how the perpetrators on the spot were actually able, psychologically, to carry out their tasks – and to live with the knowledge afterwards. Again, there can be no one simple and all-encompassing answer to this question. Different groups were involved in very different ways in the process, operating under quite different constraints. For those Jewish prisoners who had to empty the gas chambers and load the corpses into the crematoria, the alternative to compliance was of course immediate death. One Jewish survivor, Filip Müller, speaks with retrospective horror in Claude Lanzmann’s film Shoah about the way in which his own survival depended on the continued deaths of others. It was known, too, that convicted criminals were used to help staff concentration camps; and there was inevitably considerable coercion exercised over the lower levels of organizational personnel. Perhaps more problematic are the mentalities of the bureaucrats who made the machinery function, and the leaders of the SS and others who spearheaded the programme. On the one hand, there was an attempt both to ‘objectify’ and dehumanize the process, making use of technical language not only to camouflage the real nature of what was happening, but also to make it psychologically possible to continue the operations. (Terms such as ‘special treatment’ and ‘processing’ stood in for killing.) There was also an attempt to dehumanize the victims, both linguistically, describing Jews in medical terms as dangerous bacilli which would infect the healthy community, and in actuality, by reducing them to gaunt bestiality with few remnants of individual humanity. Despite such techniques, it is still clear that the process was by no means one with which even Himmler could be comfortable: he returns again and again in his speeches to the problem of the deed whose history must not be written; his reiterated attempts at justification reveal the need for reassurance about the long-term historical importance of the action, and the moral qualms which had repeatedly to be suppressed by members of the SS.22 (Himmler himself vomited when he witnessed gassings.) The shaping of the ethos of the SS itself, with its stress on notions such as Härte (hardness), and its techniques of inculcation of obedience, was itself complex and problematic.23
The psychological legacies of the Holocaust, for perpetrators as well as for survivors, and for the families of former perpetrators, collaborators and victims, have by no means been exhaustively examined, although the research on intergenerational transmission and legacies of the Holocaust has been growing rapidly. As we shall see, however, in the shorter-term, processes of ‘denazification’ after the war bore little serious relation to the realities of what had taken place in Germany during these years.
Resistance and Defeat
While Jews, Roma and Sinti, Jehovah’s Witnesses, homosexual men and Christian and political opponents of Nazism were being persecuted and murdered, the war was raging across Europe, North Africa and the Pacific, claiming the lives of millions more, whether active soldiers, prisoners of war, or civilians at home. With the defeat of the Germans at Stalingrad, the truth became clear even to the most fanatical Nazis: Germany was not destined to become master of the world, and the Thousand Year Reich was rapidly heading for its Götterdämmerung, its collapse in ruins. The war-weary German people turned in on themselves; and Hitler himself became more and more of a recluse, refusing to make public appearances, and increasingly retreating to the relative isolation of his ‘Wolf’s Lair’ in East Prussia, surrounded only by a small circle of sycophants and trusted advisers.
There were courageous individuals who attempted, in one way or another, to protest against and even sabotage the ever more evil regime. Even in the peacetime years, around a quarter of a million Germans, largely of left-wing sympathies, had been imprisoned or forced to emigrate because of their political opposition. At least 150,000 German Communists and Social Democrats had been put into concentration camps; about 40,000 had emigrated for political (rather than racial) reasons; around 12,000 had been convicted of high treason, attempting to overthrow the government; and perhaps 40,000 had been sent to prison for lesser political crimes – and all this before the outbreak of war and associated radicalization of brutality.24 Sometimes such opponents of the regime acted as individuals; others were associated with small opposition cells, such as the left-wing group known as ‘New Beginning’.
Most of this clandestine resistance was limited to such activities as the publication and circulation of subversive newspapers; there was little that ordinary opponents of the regime could do, far as they were from the centres of power and influence. The one left-wing group with members in high places was the so-called Red Orchestra, including Harro Schulze-Boysen and Arvid Harnack, who were able to pass military and economic intelligence reports to the Russian secret service after the invasion of the Soviet Union. Other left-wingers, such as the trade unionist Julius Leber, or the Social Democrat Wilhelm Leuschner, sought to foster contacts with Army and conservative opponents of the regime. More broadly, research by Tim Mason and others has not succeeded in definitively clinching the argument that working-class ‘resistance’ through strikes, go-slows and acts of sabotage constituted effective resistance to Nazi policies. Similarly, refusals to conform were largely demonstrative, rather than able to achieve real changes in the regime.
Many could simply hope to keep a flame of morality alive amidst the indifference, the compromises and acquiescence in evil. In Munich a group known as the ‘White Rose’, associated with the Catholic students Hans and Sophie Scholl, produced and distributed large numbers of leaflets intended to arouse public opposition to Hitler’s dictatorship. Idealistic quotations from Goethe and Schiller were interlaced with urgings to their fellow citizens to rise against the system, or at least to help the resistance by duplicating and spreading as many leaflets as possible. These young people – apart from Professor Huber, members of the White Rose group were in their twenties – risked their lives to protest against an evil regime. Their activities lasted from the summer of 1942 until February 1943, when the Scholls were arrested and executed. Others – Probst, Schmorell, Graf and Huber – were also put to death later in the year for their part in the group. Even individual acts might be of some limited effect: in Berlin alone, for example, some 4,000 Jews were able to go into hiding and survive the war through the help of their ‘Aryan’ German friends. Despite widespread indifference and apathy, many Germans retained a certain decency and civic courage on a personal level. Some, like the industrialist Oskar Schindler (who has achieved posthumous fame in Spielberg’s film, Schindler’s List) even appear to have developed a degree of moral courage they would never have expected under ‘normal’ conditions. But, unfortunately for the fate of millions, such individuals remained mostly an isolated minority: there was no broad, co-ordinated mass movement against the Nazi regime.25 Nor, by and large, did many ordinary Germans have much hope of even coming close to Hitler, let alone toppling him and replacing the Nazi regime with any realistic alternative form of government.
Those in elite positions in the Army and government were, however, in such a situation. Over the years, there were several plans to assassinate Hitler (apart from the attempt by Elser discussed above). These were in the main (often suicidal) attempts to kill Hitler, repeatedly foiled by bad luck; being refused permission to enter a meeting, Hitler failing to act according to plan, a bomb on a plane refusing to detonate. Hitler escaped unscathed on numerous occasions. By and large, such assassination attempts were not accompanied by serious plans for an alternative, post-Hitler government. In this respect, the conspiracy of 1944 was distinctively different.
It is the rather belated attempt at resistance to Hitler in the ‘July Plot’ of 1944 which for decades was celebrated in West Germany as the opposition to Hitler, and as evidence of ‘another’, democratic, Germany. Clearly the personal courage and moral integrity of those involved in this plot is not in question. It took considerable bravery on the part of Colonel Claus Schenk Count von Stauffenberg – who had been seriously injured on the Russian front, incurring the loss of an eye and his right hand – to play his role in transporting a bomb to Hitler’s headquarters at the Wolf’s Lair, and placing it in a briefcase by the table where Hitler was involved in discussing military strategy. Had subsequent events gone otherwise – had the full quantity of explosives been prepared for detonation, had the briefcase not been pushed under what turned out to be an extremely solid table – Hitler might have been killed by the blast rather than coming away with minor injuries and a ruined pair of trousers. Then the subsequent course of German history might have run rather differently. As it was, Stauffenberg returned to Berlin under the impression that all had gone according to plan, and plans for the governmental coup were set in motion before it was realized, too late, that Hitler had indeed survived the blast. Those closely involved in the conspiracy were shot the same night; others were arrested and executed later; a couple were able to commit suicide. In the ensuing reprisals there was what can only be described as an orgy of generalized political repression. In the winter of 1944–5 around 5,000 people were executed after ‘trials’ in the so-called People’s Court under its notorious President, Roland Freisler. And the slightest muttering of discontent, refusal to believe in inevitable victory, listening in to foreign radio broadcasts, or repeating of low political jokes against prominent Nazis, was sufficient to occasion arrest and even death. The individual case histories at Berlin’s Plötzensee jail provide chilling evidence of this final phase of Nazi terror.
Those involved in the July Plot, for all their individual integrity and courage, have come under belated posthumous criticism on a number of counts. For one thing, despite all earlier discussion of resistance, in the event plans had been postponed and shelved until very late, when it was quite clear that the war was lost. Against this, it might be said that by this stage the Allies would have accepted nothing less than unconditional surrender whatever the nature of the regime; but it still seems clear that members of the conservative resistance were hesitant about attempting a coup at a time when German military fortunes were on the ascendant. For another, for all the differences of view represented among the conspirators, on the whole these conservative opponents of Hitler were not committed democrats. Clearly there were variations. For example, the nationalist Carl Goerdeler distanced himself from the ideas being elaborated by the so-called Kreisau Circle (named after the Silesian estate of Count Hellmuth James Moltke, where it met). This group, which first met in 1940 and continued with a series of meetings in 1942–3, encompassed a fairly broad spectrum, including Christian and socialist reformism as well as conservative-nationalism, with links ranging from Adam von Trott to the socialists Adolf Reichwein and Julius Leber. But what plans were provisionally formulated for the post-Hitler government suggested little sympathy for notions of pluralist democracy, and little perception of the need for any popular legitimation of the new government. As Hans Mommsen has put it, the July Plotters ‘saw themselves as a political leading caste, and their claim to represent “the whole” as legitimate simply by reason of their social position and concomitant political responsibilities’.26 Under the conditions in which they were operating, the most important thing was to oust Hitler: to restore a state of law and justice, and to put an end to the corruption, inhumanity and fanaticism of Nazi rule. It was less easy to provide clear guidelines for what sort of constitutional arrangements should ultimately be put in place in any postwar regime – and with their sympathies for German soldiers fighting on the front, the plotters felt these too should have a say in their future. As far as foreign policy was concerned, there was desire for peace – but this had to be a ‘just and lasting’ peace, unlike the Treaty of Versailles.27 For all the differences of opinion, the prevailing political orientation of those involved in the July Plot can be said to have been a form of traditional conservative authoritarianism, rather than any preview of Bonn democracy, however much the latter may have laid claim to the July Plotters as celebrated forebears.
In the event, however, the July Plotters had no chance to develop any sort of post-Hitler government. Hitler survived to preside over the devastation and ruin of the succeeding months. Following a successful landing in Normandy by the Western Allies on 6 June 1944, combined with decisive advances by the Soviet Army on the eastern front, the Germans were increasingly beleaguered. Hopes were raised by talk of new, secret weapons, and by a German counter-offensive in the spring of 1945. But, with the Allied crossing of the Rhine and the Red Army coming ever closer to Berlin, it became increasingly clear that all was lost. While thousands fled their homes in the east, starting the treks westwards in advance of the dreaded Soviet troops, those who had profited from the Nazi regime attempted to salvage their booty and hide the traces of their misdeeds. Concentration camps were cleared and the half-starved inmates forced into long marches to other locations, while Nazi bigwigs tried to conceal their stolen works of art, gold and jewellery, casks of wine and other luxury goods. Amidst all the devastation and destruction, the loss of life and tragedy, with the clear realization that the end was near, Hitler proclaimed the ‘scorched earth’ policy: Germans must never surrender, but fight to the last. If the Germans were not strong enough to be victors, then they deserved to be vanquished, annihilated – Hitler was true to his Social Darwinist views to the last. The depleted German troops were replenished by old men and young boys, hastily thrown into uniform and sent as sacrifices to Hitler’s fanaticism. Finally, as the Red Army closed in on the ruins of Berlin itself, Hitler took his own way out of the catastrophe he had brought down on Germany. On 29 April 1945, in his bunker in Berlin, Hitler married his long-time faithful friend Eva Braun; on 30 April the two of them committed suicide, and their remains were partially incinerated by members of Hitler’s entourage.
The Thousand Year Reich lay in ruins. The Germans surrendered to the Western and Soviet victors on 7 and 8 May. A short-lived government under Hitler’s allotted successor, Admiral von Dönitz, was finally wound up on 23 May 1945, when the victorious powers took over control of the defeated country. As the Allies explored the terrain they had overcome, the scale of problems facing them appeared ever more immense: lack of housing, communications, sanitation; displaced persons on the move, whether refugees, returning soldiers, foreign labourers, released concentration camp inmates, or prisoners of war; malnutrition, disease, disorientation; a population in a state of physical and moral collapse. And the wartime alliance of convenience between Western democrats and Soviet communists was by no means a firm base for securing a united set of consistent policies to deal with this extraordinary situation.
Far from resolving the tensions which had troubled the short-lived democracy of the Weimar Republic, Hitler had exacerbated them. Internal social divisions had been ‘solved’ by radical displacement: ‘national renewal’ could only be attempted by removing those who disagreed, imprisoning them and killing them; the united ‘national community’ could only be sought for by stigmatizing, separating and ultimately murdering those who were deemed to pollute its ‘purity’. Divisions within were displaced also by the ultimately catastrophic division without of war, engulfing the world in a conflict of unprecedented scale. Hitler’s ‘achievement’ ultimately lay in total destruction and total defeat. A cycle appeared to have run its course, and many of the protagonists in the previous drama had been, or were about to be, written out of the script. In the following four years under military occupation, international events were to impose a new form of division, and one that for nearly half a century seemed to solve the problem at least of domestic political stability: the division of the German nation and the formation of two quite different German states.