WE ARE, ALL OF US who have thought and written about the Holocaust, accustomed to thinking of this event as unique. There is no concept in all history like the Final Solution. There is no precedent for the almost endless march of millions of men, women, and children into gas chambers. The systematization of this destruction process sets it aside from all else that has ever happened. Yet if we examine this event in detail, observing the progression of small steps day by day, we see much in the destruction of Jewry that is familiar and even commonplace in the context of contemporary institutions and practices. Basically, the Jews were destroyed as a consequence of a multitude of acts performed by a phalanx of functionaries in public offices and private enterprises, and many of these measures, taken one by one, turn out to be bureaucratic, embedded in habit, routine, and tradition. It is almost a case of regarding the whole upheaval in all of its massiveness as something incredible, and then observing the small components and seeing in them very little that one could not expect in a modern society. One can go further and assert that it is the very mundaneness and ordinariness of these everyday official actions that made the destruction process so crass. Never before had the total experience of a modern bureaucracy been applied to such an undertaking. Never before had it produced such a result.
The uprooting and annihilation of European Jewry was a multipronged operation of a highly decentralized apparatus. This was no perpetration by a single department staffed with specialists in destruction. Germany never had a commissariat of Jewish affairs. The machinery of destruction was the organized German society, its ministries, armed forces, party formations, and industry.1 In democratic countries we are accustomed to thinking of legislatures as devices that control administrative units, infuse them with power and money, authorize them to undertake action, and by implication, of course, apportion jurisdiction between them. In Nazi Germany there was no legislature that, like the US Congress, could create an agency and abolish it. In Nazi Germany every organization moved on a track of self-assertion. To some of us this may seem like anarchy. How much more remarkable then that this congeries of bureaucratic agencies, these people drawn from every area of expertise, operating without a basic plan, uncoordinated in any central office, nevertheless displayed order, balance, and economy throughout the destruction process.
The apparatus was able to advance unerringly because there was an inner logic to its measures. A decree defining the term “Jew,” expropriations of Jewish property, the physical separation and isolation of the victims, forced labor, deportations, gassings—these were not random moves. The sequence of steps was built-in; each was a stage in the development. By 1941, the participating decision-makers themselves became aware that they had been traveling on a determined path. As their assault took on gestalt, its latent structure became manifest. Now they had an overview that allowed them to see a beginning and an end and that prompted them to demand of indigenous administrations in occupied and satellite countries that the “Nuremberg” principle be adopted in the definition of Jews and that other precedents laid down in Germany be followed in the appropriate order for the accomplishment of a “final solution.”2
Nothing, however, was simple. Neither the preliminary nor the concluding phases of the destruction process could be traversed without difficulties and complications. The Jewish communities had all been emancipated and they were tied to the Gentile population in countless relationships, from business contacts, partnerships, leases, and employment contracts, to personal friendships and intermarriages. To sever these connections one by one, a variety of measures were necessary, and these actions were taken by specialists who were accountants, lawyers, engineers, or physicians. The questions with which these men were concerned were almost always technical. How was a “Jewish enterprise” to be defined? Where were the borders of a ghetto to be drawn? What was to be the disposition of pension claims belonging to deported Jews? How should bodies be disposed of? These were the problems pondered by the bureaucrats in their memoranda, correspondence, meetings, and discussions. That was the essence of their work.
No organized element of German society was entirely uninvolved in the process of destruction. Yet this very fact, which is virtually an axiom, has been extraordinarily hard to assimilate in descriptions and assessments of the Nazi regime. It is much easier to visualize the role of a propagandist or some practitioner of violence than to appreciate the contribution of a bookkeeper. For this reason the principal spotlight in postwar years has been placed on the SS and the Gestapo. There is some awareness also of the military, particularly where, as in occupied France, it had made itself conspicuous. Similarly unavoidable was the discovery that an enterprise like I. G. Farben had established branches in Auschwitz. Much less well known, however, are the activities of such faceless components of the destructive machine as the Ministry of Finance, which was engaged in confiscations, or the armed forces network of armament inspectorates, which was concerned with forced labor, or German municipal authorities that directed or participated in the creation and maintenance of ghettos in eastern Europe. Two large bureaucracies have remained all but obscure, even though they operated at the very scene of death: the German railroads and the Order Police. This omission should give us pause.
Trains and street police have been common sights in Europe for more than a century. Of all the agencies of government these two organizations have always been highly visible to every inhabitant of the continent, yet they have been overlooked in the analysis of the Nazi regime. It is as if their very size and ubiquity deflected attention from the lethal operations in which they were so massively engaged. What was the function of the German railroads in the annihilation of the Jews? What tasks did the Order Police perform?
In the chain of steps that led to the extinction of millions of Jewish victims, the Reichsbahn, as the German railways were known, carried the Jews from many countries and regions of Europe to the death camps, which were situated on occupied Polish soil. The Jews were passed from one jurisdiction to another: from the civil or military authorities who had uprooted and concentrated them, to the Security Police who was in charge of rounding them up, to the Reichsbahn that transported them to the camps where they were gassed. Reichsbahn operations were a crucial link in this process and their significance is underscored by their magnitude. Camps account for most of the Jewish dead, and almost all of the people deported there were moved by rail. The movement encompassed 3 million Jews.
Of course, these transports were but a small portion of the Reichsbahn’s business. At its peak the railway network stretched from Bordeaux to Dnepropetrovsk and points east, and its personnel consisted of half a million civil servants and almost twice as many other employees.3 In the Reich itself (including Austria, Polish incorporated territory, and the Białystok district), some 130,000 freight cars were being assembled for loading every day.4 Germany depended on its railroads to carry soldiers and civilians, military cargo and industrial products, throughout the war. A complex functional and territorial division of labor was required to administer these transport programs.
The transport minister, Julius Dorpmüller, held the office from 1937 to the end of the war. The Staatssekretär (state secretary) responsible for railways in the Ministry was at first Wilhelm Kleinmann and, from the spring of 1942, Albert Ganzenmüller, a young, capable engineer and consummate technocrat who was to transport what Albert Speer was to produce.5 Ganzenmüller’s central divisions, labeled E (for Eisenbahn, or railway) included E 1 (Traffic and Tariffs), E 2 (Operations), and L (Landesverteidigung, or Defense of the Land, meaning military transport). The Traffic Division dealt with financial matters, E 2 with operational considerations, and L with military priorities. Within E 2, the following breakdown should be of interest:6
| E 2 (Operations) | Max Leibbrand (from 1942: Gustav Dilli) |
| 21 (Passenger Trains) | Paul Schell |
| 211 (Special Trains) | Otto Stange |
Stange administered the transport of Jewish deportees. He received the requests for trains from Adolf Eichmann’s office in the Security Police and channeled them to financial and operational offices in the Reichsbahn.7 The position and designation of 211 on the organization chart point to two important features of the deportation process. The first is that the Jewish deportees were always booked as people, even though they were carried in boxcars. The passenger concept was essential, in order that the Reichsbahn could collect the fare for each deported Jew in accordance with applicable tariffs and to preserve internal prerogatives and divisions of jurisdiction; the passenger specialists would remain in control. The second characteristic of Stange’s office is indicated by the word “special.” He dealt only with group transports, each of which had to be planned.
Passenger trains were either regular (Regelzüge), moving at hours stated in published schedules, or special (Sonderzüge), assembled and dispatched upon demand. Jews were deported in Sonderzüge and the procurement and scheduling of such trains was a lengthy and involved procedure that had to be administered at the regional level, particularly in the Generalbetriebsleitung Ost (General Directorate East), one of three such Leitungen in Nazi Germany. Ost was concerned with trains directed to Poland and occupied areas farther to the east, and hence Jewish transports from large parts of Europe were channeled through this office. An abbreviated chart of the Generalbetriebsleitung would look as follows:8
| Generalbetriebsleitung Ost | Ernst Emrich |
| I. (Operations) | [Albert] Eggert (Philipp Mangold) |
| L (Wehrmacht) | [Erich] Bebenroth |
| P (Passenger Schedules) | [Wilhelm] Fröhlich |
| PW (Passenger Cars) | [Karl] Jacobi |
| II. (Traffic) | [Alfred] Simon (Ernst Hartmann) |
| III. (Main Car Allocation Office for Freight Cars) | [Johannes] Schultz |
In this array of officials, it is primarily Wilhelm Fröhlich and Karl Jacobi who dealt with Jewish train movements. Conferences were called and dates were fixed for transport programs aggregating forty or fifty trains at a time: ethnic Germans, Hitler Youth, laborers, Jews—all were on the same agenda.9 The actual schedules were written locally, in the Reichsbahndirektionen, or in the Generaldirektion der Ostbahn, the railway network in central Poland that dispatched Jews on short hauls from ghettos to death camps nearby.10 The Reichsbahndirektionen were also responsible for the allocations of cars and locomotives. Only then were transports assembled for the Jews loaded, sealed, dispatched, emptied, and cleaned, to be filled with new, perhaps altogether different cargoes, in the circulatory flow. The trains moved slowly and most were overloaded. The norm in western Europe or Germany was 1,000 persons per train.11 During 1944, transports with Hungarian Jews averaged 3,000.12 In Poland, such numbers were often exceeded. One train, fifty cars long, carried 8,205 Jews from Kolomea to the death camp of Bełżec.13 Unheated in the winter, stifling in the summer, the cars, filled with men, women, and children, were death traps in themselves. Seldom would a transport arrive without 1 or 2 percent of the deportees having died en route.
One thinks of railroads as providing a service. What they produce is “place utility,” and in this case they contributed their industriousness and ingenuity to the possibility of annihilating people, by the thousands at a time, in places where gas chambers had been installed. Like the Reichsbahn, the Order Police was a major apparatus of the Third Reich and was needed over a long period of time in a wide geographic area, and its utility manifested itself in several stages of the destruction process, from concentration to killings.
Nazi Germany was, in essence, a “police state,” a type of regime that implies limitless power over the population. Under Heinrich Himmler, the offices and units of the SS and Police were welded into an organization that was a symbol of much that Nazism stood for: arrests and concentration camps, racism and destruction. The police components of this power structure were grouped under two main offices: Security Police, directed by Reinhard Heydrich, and Order Police, commanded by Kurt Daluege, organized thusly:14
Security Police (Sicherheitspolizei, or Sipo)
Gestapo, ca. 40,000 to 50,000 men
Criminal Police (Kripo), ca. 15,000
Order Police (Ordnungspolizei, or Orpo)
Stationary (Einzeldienst), ca. 250,000, including reservists
Cities: Schutzpolizei (Schupo)
Rural: Gendarmerie
Units (battalions and regiments), ca. 50,000, including reservists
Indigenous personnel in occupied territory of the USSR:
Schutzmannschaft (Schuma), ca. 100,000, including Einzeldienst and Schuma battalions
Other offices (technical services, volunteer fire departments, etc.)
Comparing the Security Police and the Order Police, we may note two differences between them. The Security Police, in which the Gestapo was the predominant element, could be regarded as a new institution, whereas the conventional Order Police was old and established in Germany. Security Police—spread out over a continent—were relatively few; Order Police were clearly more numerous. Even so, the Ordnungspolizei was strained by the extent and variety of its assignments.
The Einzeldienst, a term denoting stationary duty that could be performed by a single individual, was significant mainly in the Reich and annexed territories, while mobile formations (battalions and regiments) were important primarily outside of home or incorporated regions. In most of the occupied countries, including France and the General Government of Poland, where German Order Police personnel served only in units, an indigenous police force remained in place to carry out its own tasks and to assist the Germans in theirs.
The areas wrested from the USSR were covered by a thin layer of Order Police, composed of both Einzeldienst and units. Einzeldienst, stationed in large urban centers as well as in many rural zones, reached a total of close to 15,000 at the end of 1942; battalions not fighting at the front contained a similar number of men.15 To augment this German police establishment, a native Schutzmannschaft was created that, by 1 July 1942, had already grown to 42,708 in Einzeldienst within cities and on the land, and to 33,270 in Schuma battalions.16 The so-called rural districts in Latvian, Lithuanian, White Russian, and Ukrainian regions included small towns with many Jewish residents as well as villages with purely Baltic or Slavic populations. Such a district (Gebiet), generally with around 250,000 inhabitants, was garrisoned by a German Gendarmerie platoon and its native helpers. The fairly typical rural Gebiet of Brest-Litovsk in occupied Ukraine was controlled by 26 Gendarmerie men (15 of them older reservists) and 308 Ukrainian Schuma.17 If all of these figures appear to be small, they should be juxtaposed with the numerical strength of the Security Police. Gestapo and Criminal Police in the entire occupied USSR were barely a few thousand, and when a Security Police post was placed in a rural area, it would contain around a half dozen men.
The sheer geographic expanse of the Order Police is in fact the principal clue to its function in destructive operations. The Orpo was the ever-present standby force that could be drawn upon whenever Jews had to be concentrated or killed. In Amsterdam, Order Police contingents were needed to round up Jews for deportation.18 In eastern Europe, Order Police guards were posted near the walls and at the gates of ghettos. For example, in Warsaw, a company of a police battalion was steadily engaged in ghetto supervision.19 Similarly, in Riga, eighty-eight Schuma were assigned to this duty.20 And so on, for hundreds of ghettos. Order Police detachments were also guarding laborers outdoors. One Order Police battalion and seven Schuma battalions were deployed along Durchgangsstrasse IV, a thousand-kilometer road construction project from the Danube estuary to Taganrog, on which many Jews worked and died.21 Furthermore, Order Police routinely accompanied the special trains to their destinations.22 To put it simply, what the victim saw from a ghetto fence, a labor camp, or a box car, were the rifles of ordinary policeman.
The Order Police could not be dispensed with in killing operations themselves. A police battalion (the 9th in 1941 and the 3rd in 1942) was divided among the four Einsatzgruppen of the Security Police that followed the German armies into the USSR to shoot Jews and Communists.23 Two Order Police detachments in Kiev assisted Einsatzkommando 4a of Einsatzgruppe c in the massacre of Babi Yar.24 An Order Police contingent was similarly engaged in herding Jews to shooting sites near Riga.25 A Lithuanian Schuma battalion was stationed in Majdanek,26 and German Order Police from Łódź were transferred to the death camp at Chełmno (Kulmhof).27 Often, officers of the Order Police were all but in charge of the killings. During the summer of 1942, when an attempt was made to annihilate the Jews in each of several dozen rural Gebiete of the occupied USSR, the local Gendarmerieführer, deploying his Germans and native helpers, would surround a small-town ghetto with guards standing approximately twenty meters apart, round up the Jews inside, and supervise the shootings in ditches nearby.28 To the west of the USSR, in the improvised killing centers of the General Government, Order Police personnel with previous experience in “euthanasia operations” were serving not only as guards, but also as commanders. Such was the career of Franz Stangl, commander of Sobibór and, thereafter, Treblinka.29
To be sure, neither the railroads nor the Order Police fit any preconceived notion of an ideological vanguard. For that very reason, however, their heavy participation in relentless acts of mass destruction should engage our attention. If nothing else, this history should tell us that if an Adolf Hitler and his Nazi movement of party offices and SS formations were essential for the destruction of the Jews, so was, at least in equal measure, the readiness—in the fullest sense of the word—of ordinary agencies to engage in the extraordinary tasks inherent in the Final Solution.
The all-encompassing readiness for action of the diverse machinery of public and private agencies is one of the key phenomena of the bureaucratic destruction process. It resulted, in the case of several professions, in complete reversals of time-honored roles. An obvious example is furnished by the physician who performed medical experiments in camps, or who, as public-health officials, urged the creation of hermetically sealed ghettos for the ostensible purpose of preventing the spread of typhus from Jewish inhabitants to the surrounding population, or who, as specialists in psychiatry, administered the euthanasia program, which was transformed in the General Government into a network of camps to kill approximately 1.5 million Polish Jews. Indeed, one of the euthanasia physicians, Dr. Irmfried Eberl, was the first commander of Treblinka.30 A second illustration of such negation is the planning by offices in occupied Poland, labeled “Population and Welfare,” of deportations of ghetto Jews to death camps.31 Yet a third instance of goal transformation may be glimpsed in the efforts of civil engineers or architects to construct the ultimate antithesis of a shelter or home the concentration camp, especially the installations designed for controlled, efficient mass annihilation.32
What prompted such a sprawling bureaucratic machine to involve itself so profoundly in a single direction toward death and more death? There were, of course, leaders who gave orders, for this was, after all, the state that utilized the Führerprinzip, the leadership principle. Clearly, if orders had been disregarded or evaded, the destruction of the Jews could not have been carried out.33 Scarcely less important, however, is the fact that the process could not have been brought to its conclusion if everyone would have had to wait for instructions. Nothing was so crucial as the requirement that the bureaucrat had to understand opportunities and “necessities,” that he should act in accordance with perceived imperatives, and most especially so when it was not easy to enunciate them in plainly written words. The German historian Uwe Dietrich Adam has shown that, even before the war, there was a pronounced tendency to dispense with laws and other formal enactments. Laws (Gesetze) in particular were to be held to a minimum. “Implementary decrees” no longer carried into effect the laws to which they referred and, like the 11th Ordinance to the Reich Citizenship Law that dealt with confiscations, contained entirely new subject matter.34 Decree-making gave way to government by announcement, as in the case of a Himmler order of December 1938 to deprive Jews of their driver’s licenses that was published in newspapers directly without first appearing in the appropriate legal gazette.35 This administrative evolution continued with more and more reliance on internal directives, first written, then oral. An order by Hitler to annihilate European Jewry was almost certainly given only in oral form.36 In the final phases, not even orders were needed. Everyone knew what had to be done, and no one was in doubt about directions or goals.
The bureaucracy itself was the source of much that was to transpire. Ideas and initiatives were developed by experts in its ranks. They were submitted as proposals to supervisors and returned as authorizations to their originators. The foremost example is the famous Göring directive at the end of July 1941 charging Heydrich with organizing the “final solution of the Jewish question” in Europe.37 It was drafted by Eichmann at the request of Heydrich and presented to Göring ready for signature (unterschriftsfertig).38 Every word, including an opening reference to an earlier directive for expediting Jewish emigration, was carefully chosen. The substantive paragraph, with its euphemism about a “final solution,” was designed to assure the necessary backing for maximum freedom of action.
Not surprisingly, a constant reliance on bureaucratic initiation eventually brought about the existence of experts accustomed to dealing with Jewish matters in particular. Many agencies had one or more of these specialists: Bernhard Lösener and Hans Globke in the Ministry of the Interior, Walter Maedel in the Ministry of Finance, Franz Rademacher in the Foreign Office, Erhard Wetzel in the Ministry for the Occupied Eastern Territories, Otto Stange in the Reichsbahn, and Adolf Eichmann in the Security Police. This kind of specialization also emerged in the field. The organization chart of the Finance Office of the Reichskommissar in the Ostland shows an official assigned to Jewish property.39
Occasionally, there were enthusiasts who were not constantly preoccupied with Jewish matters in the normal course of their activities, but who would not relinquish an opportunity to go out of their way to leave their imprint on the annihilation process. One of these men was the army’s Major General Otto Kohl who, until 15 June 1942 was in charge of transport, civilian and military, in the occupied zone of France.40 On 13 May 1942, he met for an hour and a half with an SS captain, the deportation specialist Theodor Dannecker to assure him: “When you tell me ‘I want to transport 10,000 or 20,000 Jews from France to the East,’ you can count on me to provide the necessary rolling stock and locomotives.” Kohl explained that he regarded the rapid solution of the Jewish question in France a vital necessity for the army of occupation, and therefore he would always maintain a radical point of view, even if some people might regard him as “raw.”41 Most participants, however, were aware of the fine line between volunteering one’s services, as Kohl had done, and acting, when the time came, in the full use of one’s office. Although they avoided an appearance of rawness or reality, they did not have to be goaded to destroy human lives.
Viewing the makeup of the administrative machine as a whole, we must conclude that there was very little prodding or purging of the German bureaucracy. The Reichsbahn or the Order Police could hardly have been pressured in any case. No one but a railroad man could dispatch a train, and no one but the Schutzpolizei and the Gendarmerie could provide police garrisons in the farthest corners of Europe. Within the entire system, internal directives were, if anything, few and sparse. The fact is that the initiators, formulators, and expediters, who at critical junctures moved the bureaucratic machine from one point to the next, came from within that apparatus. Overburdened as they often were, they contributed their share to the destruction of the Jews as a matter of course.
Even as the bureaucracy of annihilation consisted in large part of regular personnel in well-established agencies, so the methods of destruction were to a great extent the traditional means of administrative action. Normal procedures were employed also in abnormal situations, as if extreme decisions were not being made, and there were no discernible differences between everyday government functions and the Final Solution.
Let us take the example of setting up a concentration camp. When Auschwitz was being expanded, condemnation proceedings were launched to acquire public and private property with a view to bringing about land transfers,42 and when barracks were being built and cyanide gas was being procured, the acquisition of materials was subject to the allocation mechanisms of Speer’s Ministry for Armaments.43
The routines were being followed with even greater perseverance in financial matters. Fiscal integrity was not to be impaired in the destruction process. Heinrich Himmler himself once had to consider the case of an SS lieutenant who in a previous role as a “trustee” of real estate had been obliged to manage the property for the benefit of the Reich until it could be sold to a new owner but who had “prematurely” terminated leases of Jewish tenants with resulting losses of rent. Had the officer violated his fiduciary responsibility?44
A larger quandary faced the German municipal officials of Warsaw after the sudden mass deportations of the ghetto’s Jews had begun in July 1942. Utility bills for electricity and gas had not been paid, and how was this debt going to be covered?45 A similar dilemma was generated for the chief of the Finance Division of the Generalkommissariat Latvia (Dr. [Willy] Neuendorff) who discovered that taxes owed by dead Jews could not be collected without transfer to his office of money realized from disposals of their confiscated property.46
One of the biggest problems was the financing of transport. The Reichsbahn derived its income from clients, that is, people, corporations, or agencies requiring space on its equipment for personal travel or for shipments of cargo. The client for a death train was the Gestapo and the travelers were Jews. The fare, payable by Gestapo offices, was calculated at the passenger rate, third-class, for the number of track kilometers, one-way only, with reductions for children. For guards, the round trip price was charged.47 If at least four hundred Jews were deported, group rates were applicable.48 Arrangements could be made directly or through the official travel bureau (Mitteleuropäisches Reisebüro).49 The Gestapo, however, had no budget for transport and it would have been awkward to present a bill for the deportations to the Ministry of Finance. Accordingly, a policy of “self-financing” was instituted, whereby the funding burden was shifted to authorities in foreign areas where Jewish property had been expropriated or to Jewish communities themselves. In the satellite state of Slovakia, for example, the Foreign Office argued that the Slovak government should pay for the “resettlement,” and that, in exchange, the Jews would not be returned.50 In Germany, the Gestapo directed the official Jewish community organization, the Reichsvereinigung der Juden in Deutschland, to collect cash “contributions” from deportees at the point of their departure to help defray the costs of their future existence in the “east.”51 Such levies were deposited in special accounts “W,” which the Gestapo could control. The Ministry of Finance, which discovered the stratagem, considered it an evasion of the basic principle that only the ministry could collect funds for the Reich and disburse them to agencies as needed, but it acquiesced in the practice.52 Even more complex was the payment for transports leaving Holland or France, Italy or Greece, for Auschwitz. These trains passed not only through various countries, but also through several currency zones, and in this traversal the balance of payments had to be considered every time a border was crossed.53 So costly and difficult were all of these funding requirements that at one point consideration was given to the possible erection of a death camp in western Germany for Jews from western countries.54
“Self-financing” was involved also for projects other than transport, such as the building of the Warsaw Ghetto wall. The chairman of the ghetto’s Jewish council, Adam Czerniaków, protested to the German ghetto commissar against this burden on the community’s treasury, arguing that, since the ghetto had been created for the stated purposes of protecting the non-Jewish population from the spread of epidemics, the assessment was tantamount to asking the pharmacist to pay the bill for the medicine.55
The legal procedures and accounting routines were the essential tools of a decentralized apparatus that was attempting to preserve non-Jewish rights at every turn and to balance the books at all times. By these means, the bureaucrat would satisfy himself that his actions were appropriate and proper. He could equate correctness with rightness and accuracy with accountability. The culmination of this way of thinking may be observed in the reporting system, particularly the regular flow of daily, monthly, or annual reports from regional or local offices. Just as there were no special agencies or extraordinary operating funds for the destruction of the Jews, so there was no separate reporting channel or segregated record-keeping in matters of annihilation.56 Frequently, offices and units in the field would therefore make references to the Final Solution only in long summaries of diverse activities. Such reports, with their markings denoting authorship and distribution, followed a rigid format, maintained a single perspective, and were cast in a laconic, matter-of-fact style. Typical is a sentence from the war diary of the Armament Inspectorate in the Netherlands for November 1942: “The accelerated implementation of the de-Jewification action by the commander of the Security Police is being accompanied by unavoidable disturbances in fur and clothing enterprises under contract with the armed forces.”57 For many of these officials, the Jews became a subheading. We see it in rubrics: Wages—Jews, Rations—Jews, Taxes—Jews, Production—Jews. The Jews are absorbed in the daily passage of events, and there is seldom any disconcerting emphasis on their ultimate fate.
Even secrecy could be abandoned in record management. Railroad timetable orders were being dispatched without stamps calling attention to their sensitivity,58 and in Riga a bureaucrat noted in 1942 that correspondence about the Jewish “estate” (Nachlass) in the Trusteeship Division of the German administration of Latvia was no longer classified for security purposes.59 In a sense, nonlabeling became the ultimate camouflage.
What sort of man then was the perpetrator? The very structure and practices of the German bureaucracy should provide us with indications of his character. He valued his competence and efficiency to surmount innumerable obstacles and adverse conditions. He knew what to do without having to ask for directives. Political platforms and campaigns provide little specific content for bureaucratic action, and Nazi Germany was no different in this respect. The public utterances of leaders and propagandists, the flags, torches, and drums, all these were acts of psychological mobilization that gave theme, form, and pace to the physical measures that were to follow. The bureaucrat, however, was not a creation of the Nazi Party, nor was he an old-fashioned indoctrinated anti-Semite. Julius Streicher’s Stürmer was not his literature. When the war ended, he would assert that he had never hated Jews, and in any nineteenth-century sense, he did not harbor such feelings in actual fact. He had stood above the small issues to face the larger challenge, though he would not talk in such terms any more than he would have written the word “kill” in an order or report.
Some observers have already recognized that the diffuse machine that destroyed the Jews was staffed by people who would not be recognized for what they were if one talked to them in a living room or some other quiet place. Their social mores were not atypical and their family life and personal concerns were completely commonplace. To one commentator this was “banality.”* Another, noting the rote manner of bureaucratic action, may find that the most salient trait of German officialdom was a kind of stupefaction, a vast indifference to the nature and consequence of one’s acts. Yet we must beware of veneers. There is nothing that appears banal in Eichmann and his many colleagues as soon as they are seen in their acts of destruction. Nor can we describe them as robots when we recall how they deliberated about definitions and classifications, gains and costs. To be sure, they left unsaid much that they thought, for they were breaking barriers and crossing thresholds in ways that bureaucrats seldom attempt. What they did was designed to make history and they were aware of their roles in this undertaking. In the basement of the Nuremberg Traffic Museum, secluded from the gaze of casual visitors, there is a railway map. It shows the network of lines under German control in 1942, the year of its greatest extent.
1. These four hierarchical structures, and their roles as independently operating conglomerates, were first recognized by Franz Neumann, Behemoth: The Structure and Practice of National Socialism, 1933–1944 2nd ed. (New York, 1944), 467–70. The US prosecution at Nuremberg classified its evidentiary material under four headings: NG, NOKW, NO, and NI, corresponding to the four groups identified by Neumann.
2. Negotiations (by the Foreign Office and SS representatives attached to German embassies and legations) were conducted with Vichy France, Italy, Croatia, Slovakia, Bulgaria, Romania, and Hungary, not always successfully. For characteristic criticism of a Slovak law defining the term “Jew,” see Donauzeitung (Belgrade), 10 December 1941, 3.
3. Dokumentationsdienst der DB, Dokumentarische Enzyklopädie V—Eisenbahn und Eisenbahner zwischen 1941 und 1945 (Frankfurt am Main, 1973), 110.
4. Eugen Kreidler, Die Eisenbahnen im Machtbereich der Achsenmächte während des Zweiten Weltkrieges (Göttingen, 1975), 278–89.
5. Kreidler, Eisenbahnen, 205–6. Albert Speer, Inside the Third Reich (New York, 1970), 222–25. Prosecution at Düsseldorf to Landgericht Düsseldorf, 16 March 1970, transmitting indictment of Ganzenmüller, File No. 3 Js 430/67, in Zentrale Stelle der Landesjustizverwaltungen, Ludwigsburg, and in Landgericht Düsseldorf. Statement and answers to questions by Ganzenmüller, 7 October 1964, Case Ganzenmüller, vol. 5, 216–27.
6. See the annual Verzeichnis der obersten Reichsbahnbeamten, particularly for 1941 and 1943.
7. Statement by Franz Novak, 19 October 1966, Strafsache gegen Novak 1416/61, Landesgericht für Strafsachen Wien, vol. 16, 33.
8. See Verzeichnis and undated statement by Philipp Mangold, Verkehrsarchiv Nürnberg, collection Sarter, folder aa. Generalbetriebsleitung West was involved in processing transports from France, Belgium, and Holland. Leibbrand to West, Ost, Wehrmachtverkehrsdirektionen Paris and Brussels, Plenipotentiary in Utrecht, and Reichsbahndirektion Oppeln (arrival jurisdiction for Auschwitz), 23 June 1942, Case Ganzenmüller, vol. 4, pt. 3, 57.
9. Directives by Jacobi, 8 August 1942 and 16 January 1943, Institut für Zeitgeschichte, Munich, Fb 35/2, 217 and 206.
10. For example, Reichsbahndirektion Königsberg, timetable instruction no. 62, 13 July 1942, ibid., 260, and Generaldirektion der Ostbahn, timetable instruction no. 567, 26 March 1943, Zentrale Stelle Ludwigsburg, Polen 167, Film 6, 192–93.
11. Summary of Reich Main Security Office IV B 4 conference in Düsseldorf, under chairmanship of Eichmann, March 1942, Case Novak, vol. 17, 203–7.
12. Report by Lt. Col. Ferenczy (Hungarian gendarmerie), 9 July 1944, Case Novak, vol. 12, 427.
13. Reserve lieutenant of Schutzpolizei (Wessermann?) to Kommandeur of Ordnungspolizei for Galician district in Lwów, 14 September 1942, Zentrale Stelle Ludwigsburg, UdSSR, vol. 410; 508–10. About two hundred of the Jews were dead on arrival.
14. Affidavit by Walter Schellenberg (Security Police), 21 November 1945, Nuremberg document PS-3033. Kurt Daluege (chief of Order Police) to Karl Wolff (chief of Himmler’s personal staff), 28 February 1943, Nuremberg document NO-2861. Daluege was the only Order Police general who began his career in the SS.
15. Daluege to Wolff, 28 February 1943, NO-2861.
16. Order Police strength report (Stärkenachweis) of Schuma for 1 July 1942, Bundesarchiv R 19/266. Firemen and auxiliaries not included in the figures. Year-end data given by Daluege to Wolff, 28 February 1943, NO-2861. By December, the Schuma (without firemen or auxiliaries) was well over 100,000.
17. Gendarmeriegebietsführer in Brest-Litovsk (Lt. Deuerlein) to Kommandeur of Gendarmerie in Lutsk, 6 October 1942. National Archives microfilm T 454, roll 102.
18. SS Sturmbannführer Zöpf to Judenlager Westerbork, 10 May 1943, Israel Police Eichmann trial document 590. Otto Bene to Foreign Office, 25 June 1943, NG-2631.
19. The 304th Battalion, replaced in 1941 by the 61st. Zentrale Stelle Ludwigsburg, Polen 365 d and e, passim.
20. Instructions by Captain Kompa, 22 June 1942, T 459, roll 21. The original force was larger. Instructions by Major of Schutzpolizei Quasbarth, 24 April 1942, T 459, roll 21. The men belonged to the 20th Latvian (Guard) Battalion.
21. The German battalion was set up in Berlin for this purpose. Schuma included the 4th, 7th, and 8th Lithuanian battalions, the 17th, 23rd, 27th, and 28th Latvian battalions. Hans-Joachim Neufeldt, Jürgen Huck, and Georg Tessin, Zur Geschichte der Ordnungspolizei 1936–1945 (Koblenz, 1957), pt. II (by Tessin), 51–68, 101–9. Daluege to Wolff, 28 February 1943, NO-2861.
22. Order by Daluege, 24 October 1941, PS-3921.
23. Tessin, Ordnungspolizei, 97. Helmut Krausnick and Hans-Heinrich Wilhelm, Die Truppe des Weltanschauungskrieges (Stuttgart, 1981), 146–47.
24. Reich Main Security Office IV A 1 Operational Report USSR no. 101, 2 October 1941, NO-3137.
25. Text of Soviet interrogation of Friedrich Jeckeln (Higher SS and Police Leader in Ostland), 14 and 15 December 1945, Krausnick and Wilhelm, Truppe, 566–70.
26. Strength Report of Schutzmannschaft, 1 July 1942, R 19/266, and Friedrich-Wilhelm Kruger to Himmler, 7 July 1943, Himmler Files, folder no. 94, Library of Congress.
27. Adalbert Rückerl, NS-Vernichtungslager (Munich, 1977), 262–64.
28. Orchestration of the killings remained in the hands of the Security Police, whose representatives would usually appear on the local scene a few days before an operation. See Deuerlein report, 6 October 1942, T 454, roll 102. Also, statement by Zeev Sheinwald (survivor of Luboml, Ukraine), Yad Vashem Oral History document 0–3/2947.
29. Stangl’s life was reconstructed in detail by Gitta Sereny, Into that Darkness (New York, 1974).
30. On Eberl, see Sereny, Darkness, 77, 85, 86, and 160, and Lothar Gruchmann, “Euthanasie und Justiz in Dritten Reich,” Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte 20, no. 3 (1972): 250.
31. See, for example, report by Richard Türk (Population and Welfare Division, Lublin District) for March 1942, Jüdisches Historisches Institute Warschau, Faschismus-Getto-Massenmord (Berlin, 1960), 272–73.
32. Note the career of the architect Walter Dejaco. See Friedrich Brill, “Sie hatten nichts gewusst!” Aufbau 8, no. 5 (1942): 5. Dejaco was a body disposal expert in Auschwitz. Report by Untersturmführer Dejaco, 17 September 1942, NO-4467.
33. One of the most telling examples is the attitude of Italian officials and army officers. See Daniel Carpi, “The Rescue of Jews in the Italian Zone of Occupied Croatia,” in Rescue Attempts during the Holocaust: Proceedings of the Second Yad Vashem International Historical Conference, Jerusalem, 8–11 April 1974, ed. Israel Gutman and Efraim Zuroff (Jerusalem, 1977), 465–525.
34. Uwe Dietrich Adam, Judenpolitik im Dritten Reich (Düsseldorf, 1972), esp. 108–13, 240–46, 292–302.
35. Order dated 5 December 1938, in Völkischer Beobachter, PS-2682. Also Adam, Judenpolitik, 213, 244.
36. The issuance of an oral order from Hitler to Himmler is reported by Eichmann in his autobiography, Ich, Adolf Eichmann (Leoni am Starnberger, 1980), 176–79, 229–31. See also affidavit by Albert Speer, 15 June 1977, facsimile in Arthur Suzman and Denis Diamond, Six Million Did Die (Johannesburg, 1977), 109–12.
37. Göring to Heydrich, 31 July 1941, PS-710.
38. Eichmann, Ich, 479.
39. Organization plan of Reichskommissar Ostland II (Finance), 17 August 1942, T 459, roll 2. His deputy was Bruns.
40. Hans Umbreit, Der Militärbefehlshaber in Frankreich 1940–1942 (Boppard am Rhein, 1968), 243–44. On that date, the Reichsbahn took over civilian traffic. Directive of Transport Minister (Dorpmüller), 13 June 1942, in Kreidler, Eisenbahnen, 356–57.
41. Text in Serge Klarsfeld, ed., Die Endlösung der Judenfrage in Frankreich Deutsche Dokumente 1941–1944 (Paris, 1977), 36–37.
42. Land transfer conferences, 3 November and 17–18 December 1942, under chairmanship of Oberfinanzpräsident Dr. Casdorf, PS-1643.
43. Speer to Himmler, 5 April 1943, Himmler Files, folder no. 67. On gas, see affidavit by Dr. Gerhard Peters, 16 October 1947, NI-9113, and testimony by Joachim Mrugowski, Nuremberg doctors case (U.S. v. Brand), transcript 5403–4.
44. Correspondence in T 175, roll 60.
45. Durrfeld (Dezernat 3 of German city administration in Warsaw) to SS and Police Leader von Sammern, 10 August 1942, and memorandum by Kunze (Dezernat 4), 13 August 1942, Zentrale Stelle Ludwigsburg, Polen 365 d, 275–77.
46. Neuendorff to Generalkommissar/Trusteeship (Kunska), 4 June 1942, T 459, roll 21.
47. Deutsche Reichsbahn/Verkehrsamt, Łódź, to Gestapo in city, 19 May 1942, enclosing bill for twelve trains, facsimile in Faschismus-Getto-Massenmord, 280–81, and directive of Reichsverkehrsdirektion Minsk, 27 January 1943, Fb. 82/2, among others.
48. Paul Treibe (E 1) to Reichsbahndirektionen, copies to Generaldirektion der Ostbahn, Protectorate railways, and Mitteleuropäisches Reisebüro, 26 July 1941, Case Ganzenmüller, special vol. 4, pt. 3, 47–55.
49. Reichsbahndirektion Vienna (signed Dr. Bockhonn) to Slovak Transport Ministry, copies in house and to Dresden, Oppeln, and Mitteleuropäisches Reisebüro, 27 April 1942, Yad Vashem document M-5/18 (1).
50. Luther (Foreign Office/Division Germany) via Trade Political Division to Staatssekretär Weizsäcker, 29 January 1943, NG-5108. Ludin (German minister in Slovakia) to Foreign Office, 18 April 1942, NG-4404. Representative of Transport Ministry in Slovakia to Slovak Transport Ministry, 1 March 1945, M-5/18 (I).
51. Reichsvereinigung directive of 3 December 1941, Israel Police document 738.
52. Maedel to Mayer and Kallenbach (all in Finance Ministry), 14 December 1942, Bundesarchiv R 2/12222.
53. Rau (E 1/17) to High Command of the Army, 1 March 1944, and subsequent correspondence in Bundesarchiv R 2/14133.
54. SS Standartenführer Dr. Siegert (budget specialist in the Reich Main Security Office) to Finance Ministry, 17 August 1942, Bundesarchiv R 2/12158. The precipitating factor was the heavy transport cost from France to Auschwitz.
55. Entry by Czerniaków in his diary, 2 December 1941, in Raul Hilberg, Stanislaw Staron, and Josef Kermisz, eds., The Warsaw Diary of Adam Czerniakow (Briarcliff Manor, NY, 1979), 304.
56. In Eichmann’s office there were ca. 200,000 open and 30,000–40,000 secret folders. He states that destruction of the records was ordered at the end of January 1945. Eichmann, Ich, 155, 449. On Stange’s files, see statement by Reichsbahn specialist Karl Heim, 18 April 1969, Case Ganzenmüller, vol. 18, 98–103. By their very nature, such records were filled with Jewish affairs.
57. Armament Inspectorate Netherlands (Vizeadmiral Reimer), War Diary, summary for 1942, Wi/IA 5.1. German records located in Alexandria, Virginia, during postwar years.
58. Statement by Erich Richter, 11 June 1969, Case Ganzenmüller, vol. 19, 5–12. Interrogation of Walter Stier, 16 March 1963, Case Novak, vol. 16, 355 ff. Richter and Stier were Reichsbahn specialists in Krakow.
59. Notation by Kunska (Generalkommissar of Latvia/Trusteeship), 27 June 1942, on copy of directive from Reichskommissar’s Trusteeship Office, 30 April 1942, T 459, roll 21.
Adam, Uwe Dietrich. Judenpolitik im Dritten Reich. Düsseldorf: Droste Verlag, 1972.
Brill, Friedrich. “Sie hatten nichts gewusst!” Aufbau 8, no. 5 (1942).
Carpi, Daniel. “The Rescue of Jews in the Italian Zone of Occupied Croatia.” In Rescue Attempts during the Holocaust: Proceedings of the Second Yad Vashem International Historical Conference, Jerusalem, 8–11 April 1974, ed. Israel Gutman and Efraim Zuroff, 465–525. Jerusalem: Yad Vashem, 1977.
Dokumentationsdienst der DB. Dokumentarische Enzyklopädie V—Eisenbahn und Eisenbahner zwischen 1941 und 1945. Frankfurt am Main: Redactor Verlag, 1973.
Eichmann, Adolf, and Rudolf Aschenauer. Ich, Adolf Eichmann. Leoni am Starnberger: Druffel-Verlag, 1980.
Gruchmann, Lothar. “Euthanasie und Justiz in Dritten Reich.” Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte 20, no. 3 (1972): 235–79.
Hilberg, Raul, Stanislaw Staron, and Josef Kermisz, eds. The Warsaw Diary of Adam Czerniaków. Briarcliff Manor, NY: Stein & Day, 1979.
Jüdisches Historisches Institute Warschau. Faschismus-Getto-Massenmord. Berlin: Rutten & Loening, 1960.
Klarsfeld, Serge, ed. Die Endlösung der Judenfrage in Frankreich. Deutsche Dokumente 1941–1944. Paris: Centre de Documentation Juive Contemporaine, 1977.
Krausnick, Helmut, and Hans-Heinrich Wilhelm. Die Truppe des Weltanschauungskrieges. Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlagsanstalt, 1981.
Kreidler, Eugen. Die Eisenbahnen im Machtbereich der Achsenmächte während des Zweiten Weltkrieges. Göttingen: Musterschmidt Verlag, 1975.
Neufeldt, Hans-Joachim, Jürgen Huck, and Georg Tessin. Zur Geschichte der Ordnungspolizei. Koblenz: Breuer, 1957.
Neumann, Franz L. Behemoth: The Structure and Practice of National Socialism, 1933–1944. 2nd ed. New York: Oxford University Press, 1944.
Rückerl, Adalbert. NS-Vernichtungslager. Munich: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, 1977.
Sereny, Gitta. Into that Darkness. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1974.
Speer, Albert. Inside the Third Reich. New York: Macmillan, 1970.
Suzman, Arthur, and Denis Diamond. Six Million Did Die. Johannesburg: South African Jewish Board of Deputies, 1977.
Umbreit, Hans. Der Militärbefehlshaber in Frankreich 1940–1942. Boppard am Rhein: Harald Boldt Verlag, 1968.
Originally published in French as “La bureaucratie de la solution finale,” in L’Allemagne nazie et le genocide juif, ed. École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (Paris: Seuil, 1985), 219–235. Subsequently published in English in Unanswered Questions: Nazi Germany and the Genocide of the Jews, ed. François Furet (New York: Schocken Books, 1989), 119–33.
* Hilberg avoided calling the “commentator” by her name. It was his “rival” Hannah Arendt. On Hilberg’s difficult relationship with Arendt, see his autobiography: The Politics of Memory: The Journey of a Holocaust Historian (Chicago 1996), 147–157.