37

The Pinnacle of Power

In the middle of February, Hitler was already reassuring Goebbels that the crisis of winter 1941/42 had in essence been overcome. On the eastern front ‘the worst aspects of the winter had been dealt with’. Given the continuing bitter cold in the east, this was a distinctly optimistic assessment; his propaganda minister, was, however, happy to hear it. The situation in North Africa was also under control, Hitler said, and he considered that the Japanese military successes in East Asia were a harbinger of a serious crisis for the British empire.¹ During the night of 11/12 February, the battleships ‘Scharnhorst’ and ‘Gneisenau’ and the heavy cruiser, ‘Prinz Eugen’, managed to sail from Brest through the English Channel to the North Sea without the Royal Navy and the RAF being able to prevent them. The aim was to strengthen the German naval forces in Norway against the threat of an invasion. Hitler, who was receiving a visit from the recently appointed Norwegian Prime Minister, Quisling, at the time, considered it ‘a tremendous boost to Germany’s prestige and a corresponding blow to Britain’s reputation’.² Hitler felt all the more triumphant because he had insisted on the risky operation against the advice of the navy.³

In fact, from the middle of February onwards, the situation on the eastern front began to improve.⁴ On 18 February, Hitler discussed the ‘overall situation’ with Halder and with the commanders of the Army Groups North and Centre. He issued the watchword ‘not a yard back’; the most important goal was to maintain the siege of Leningrad. He confidently told his generals that the threat of a panic, similar to that during Napoleon’s retreat of 1812, had now been averted.⁵ After the German press had remained silent for weeks about the situation on the eastern front, on 22 February it was told to focus once more on the performance of the German Army on the eastern front.⁶ These reports and the news about Japanese advances in East Asia ensured that the regime’s assessments of the national mood during February and March provided a somewhat more positive picture.⁷ This situation continued during April, despite difficulties in the supply of food and consumer goods⁸ and an increase in the number of British air raids.⁹ In his speech on 15 March, on the occasion of Heroes’ Memorial Day, Hitler not only emphasized that the winter crisis was now over, but solemnly announced that ‘this summer we shall annihilate the Bolshevik hordes’.¹⁰

However, the crisis had in fact left its mark on Hitler. Thus, on a visit to Führer headquarters on 19 March Goebbels found him showing clear signs of strain. The ‘Führer’ commented that ‘recently he had been feeling rather ill’ and, from time to time, had had to cope ‘with serious attacks of dizziness’. According to Goebbels, the long winter ‘had had such an effect on his spirits, that it had left its mark on him. . . . I notice that he has become very grey and simply talking about the concerns he’d had during the winter made him look much older.’ Had he ‘given way to a moment of weakness’, Hitler told Goebbels, ‘the front would have begun to collapse, causing such a catastrophe as would have put that of Napoleon in the shade’. Goebbels, at any rate, was convinced ‘that during this winter it was the Führer who alone saved the eastern front’.

However, it was above all Hitler himself who believed in the myth that he spread to the effect that he alone was responsible for preventing the collapse of the front through his iron determination to hold the army’s positions, despite opposition from his incompetent generals. Indeed, he was to keep returning to this key point.¹¹ This perspective was to have far-reaching consequences for his influence on the operational conduct of the war. For if, in his view, it had only been possible to hold the front line because he himself had taken over the day-to-day leadership of the army in the East, then it stood to reason that he would have to control the tactics and not just the strategy of the future offensive.

Hitler told Goebbels that his further objectives for ‘the coming spring and summer’ were ‘the Caucasus, Leningrad, and Moscow. If we can achieve these goals, by the beginning of next October he definitely wants to call it a day and go into winter quarters. He may possibly construct a massive defensive line and call a halt to the eastern campaign.’ In any event, there was not going to be another winter crisis. It might come ‘to a hundred years’ war’ in the East: ‘We shall then be in the same position vis-à-vis Russia as England is in relation to India. . . . It will then be our task to keep preventing the creation of any new state beyond our defensive line.’ In effect, Hitler was admitting that he no longer considered it feasible to complete the ‘annihilation of the Bolshevik arch enemy’, which he had announced in his Heroes’ Memorial Day speech. Some kind of rump state would remain, and he tried to project a positive future in terms of the need to be continually fighting this ‘remnant of Russia’, in order to prevent the emergence of a new power. In the course of the conversation Hitler admitted having ‘a certain respect’ for the Soviet enemy and described Stalin as a model: ‘Stalin’s brutal measures saved the Russian front. We must use similar methods in our conduct of the war . . .’¹²

Hitler, however, had not changed his view that the planned major offensive in the east would be decisive for the future of the war. For the construction of a defensive position far in the East against a greatly weakened Soviet Union would enable him to divert considerable resources to the war against the Western Allies. He appears to have become convinced that a successful offensive in the East would, after all, allow him to realize the strategic concept with which he had entered the war with the Soviet Union in June 1941. This was to establish a position in the East, enabling him to continue the war against the British Empire and the United States for years ahead. Following a major military success in the East, he would not only have the option, which he had been pursuing since 1940, of driving Britain out of the Mediterranean, but the entry of Japan into the war even opened up further perspectives: a weakening of the American position in the Atlantic on the assumption of Japanese naval superiority in the Pacific, and combined operations with Japan against British positions in the Near and Middle East. In spring 1942, Hitler envisaged the construction of an empire dominating the continent not as the final result of the war but rather as the decisive precondition for its continuation. The end of this global conflict would see a new partitioning of the world. However, all these far-reaching plans had one precondition: a decisive victory on the eastern front by autumn 1942.

These premises determined a series of important decisions Hitler took during the next few months. His military plans required, on the one hand, a rapid reorganization of the armaments sector, which was by no means fully efficient. This, in turn, involved finding a solution to the labour shortage through the forced recruitment of millions of workers from the occupied territories. Secondly, he wanted to increase his power at home by reducing the influence of the state bureaucracy, which he loathed, even further. By removing the remaining independence of the judiciary, he aimed to turn it into an arbitrary tool of his racial policies and an agent in realizing the core of his project: the creation of an empire spanning the whole of Europe and organized along racial lines. Only on this basis would the new colossus be capable of successfully conducting global warfare. This would inevitably have fateful consequences for the regime’s Jewish policy, which had already become a campaign of mass murder.

The development of rearmament

Hitler’s efforts in July 1941 to switch the main focus of armaments production to support the Luftwaffe and tank production, on the assumption that Barbarossa would soon be successfully concluded, rapidly turned out to be unrealistic. During the summer and autumn of 1941, it proved impossible to increase aircraft production. From November onwards, it even proved impossible to replace the planes that were being lost in the East. During autumn 1941, industry had also been unable to meet the army’s armaments’ priorities. The main reason for this was a shortage of raw materials. The regime was unable to realize its plans to exploit the resources of the Soviet Union on a large scale while the war was continuing. Here too Hitler’s assumptions were proving false.¹³ In view of this situation, in his edict of 3 December concerning ‘the rationalization and improvement of the performance of our armaments production’ Hitler had demanded that ‘mass production should be introduced and manufacturing processes be organized accordingly’.¹⁴ However, in view of the winter crisis, even Hitler soon realized that such rationalization measures were insufficient to deal with the problem.

Hitler’s plan for dealing with the second major obstacle for increasing armaments production, the shortage of workers, by employing millions of Soviet prisoners also proved unsuccessful. On 15 October, he had decided to use Soviet prisoners for road works and other forms of heavy labour and, on 31 October, he agreed to their ‘extensive deployment’ in the war industries.¹⁵ Millions of ‘racially inferior’ slave workers were to be brought into the Reich to make up for the war-induced shortage of males. Given Hitler’s racial views, this was a remarkable decision. However, the scheme came to naught, for systematic undernourishment and appalling treatment resulted in the death of large numbers of prisoners of war. The survivors had to be gradually ‘given a boost’ in order to restore their strength. In March 1942, of the 3.3 million prisoners only 5 per cent were in work.¹⁶

Already, at the beginning of the year, Hitler had issued a Führer command demanding an increase in armaments production and giving priority to the army. Fritz Todt, the Minister for Armaments and Munitions,¹⁷ had been introducing measures to increase armaments production and make it more efficient when, on 8 February, following a visit to Führer headquarters, he was killed in a plane crash. The following day, Hitler surprisingly transferred Todt’s offices to his personal architect, the 36-year-old General Building Inspector for the Reich Capital, Albert Speer. Thus, Speer became Reich Minister for Armaments and Munitions, General Inspector for the German Road Network, General Inspector for Water and Energy, General Plenipotentiary for the Regulation of the Construction Industry within the Four-Year Plan, and head of the Todt Organization, the official construction organization created by his predecessor.¹⁸

By making this appointment Hitler was, not least, hoping for psychological impact. Speer was regarded as dynamic, a good organizer, and had considerable experience with large-scale building projects, particularly in the armaments sector.¹⁹ He radiated youthful energy and optimism, and the fact that he clearly had the Fuhrer’s confidence indicated right from the start that he would have considerable clout within the regime. Speer’s appointment was designed to create a mood of optimism both within the confused and disorganized armaments sector, but also among the general public. From the very beginning, Speer’s activities were hyped in an extraordinary propaganda campaign, with which Hitler was personally involved, and which systematically constructed the legend of the ‘armaments miracle’ under Speer, the brilliant organizer.²⁰ Reinforced by Speer’s own personal propaganda after the war and often uncritically accepted, the legend has had a lasting effect right up until the present day.²¹

With Speer’s appointment, Hitler was following his principle of solving problems by appointing particular individuals who possessed his confidence, and who were directly responsible to him. A few weeks later, on 21 March, he applied this principle again by creating a new office with plenary powers in the shape of the General Plenipotentiary for Labour Mobilization, to which he appointed Fritz Sauckel, the Gauleiter of Thuringia. Sauckel was assigned the task of ‘organizing the deployment of all available supplies of labour, including foreigners and POWs, in accordance with the requirements of the war economy, as well as mobilizing all labour that is still not being utilized in the Greater German Reich, including the Protectorate, as well as in the General Government and in the occupied territories’.²²

Dr Robert Ley, the head of the German Labour Front, had tried to acquire this appointment, but both Bormann and Speer had objected to such an excessive concentration of power in Ley’s hands. Sauckel, Hitler’s eventual choice, was neither professionally qualified nor temperamentally suited to the post. However, by appointing an average Gauleiter, Hitler (no doubt under the influence of Bormann) intended to continue shifting the balance of power away from the state bureaucracy towards the Party apparatus. For in order to provide Sauckel with the necessary administrative machine, with his edict of 21 March Hitler removed two departments from the Reich Labour Ministry, subordinating them to Sauckel, who then went on to appoint the Gauleiters to be his ‘authorized representatives for labour deployment’ in their areas.

The General Plenipotentiary for Labour Mobilization was subordinated to the Four-Year Plan (above all, in order not to damage Göring’s prestige), and not, as Speer had wished, to the Armaments Ministry. Moreover, as a Gauleiter, Sauckel was directly responsible to Hitler. Thus, Hitler’s two important personnel appointments of February and March 1942 had created a new relationship calculated to produce conflict.

In his reorganization of the armaments sector Speer applied his own ideas, which, in close collaboration with Hitler and backed by his authority, he implemented during the following weeks. Like his predecessor, Todt, the new minister aimed to work in close cooperation with industry. Apart from ammunition, for which he was responsible for the whole of the Wehrmacht, to begin with his authority was limited to the equipment needs of the army. His main aims were: to secure a degree of clarity in the whole production process; to extend his authority to the whole of the Wehrmacht’s armaments production; to expand the armaments sector at the expense of the production of civilian goods and to make it more effective; and, above all, rapidly to increase armaments production, in order to achieve a decisive victory in the East, if possible before the end of the year, in other words before American resources could be mobilized.

A few days after his appointment, at an armaments conference in the Air Ministry, Speer was already making blatantly clear his claim to the central role in the whole of the armaments sector. Hitler, with whom he had discussed the path he intended to follow the previous day, strengthened Speer’s position by inviting the participants to a meeting in the Reich Chancellery, where he spoke for an hour about Speer’s appointment. Five days later, on 18 February, at a further armaments meeting, Speer got those present to provide written confirmation of their acceptance of the leadership role he was seeking. Having had the results of this meeting approved by Hitler in the course of a lengthy discussion, on 24 February he spoke to a meeting of Gauleiters in Munich, seeking their support.²³

Speer took over from Todt the system of ‘Committees’, in which the firms responsible for the final stage of the production of particular armaments were brought together, and extended this system with Hitler’s express approval.²⁴ Around these committees the ‘Rings’ were then reconstructed, bringing together the firms that provided the relevant parts for those particular armaments. In this way, under the slogan of the ‘self-responsibility’ of industry, the representatives of the various firms worked together in a complex, but unbureaucratic system made up of Main Committees, Special Committees, Main Rings, and Special Rings. These bodies were responsible, in the first instance, for the allocation of orders to the individual firms, giving preference to the most efficient ones, encouraging the exchange of best practice among the firms involved, and in general ensuring the continual optimization of production.²⁵

Speer also created a tough disciplinary instrument through Hitler’s Decree for the Protection of the Armaments Economy of 21 February, for which he had presented Hitler with a draft on the 19 February. Under it he could order the punishment of those who intentionally gave false statements about their labour or raw materials requirements, or about the size of their labour force or stocks of raw materials and the like.²⁶ In May Speer secured the bureaucratic apparatus he needed by using a Führer edict to remove the Armaments Office from the OKW’s Military Economic and Armaments Office and transfer it to his Ministry. This gave him control over the Armaments Inspectorates in the Reich and the occupied territories.²⁷

By April 1942, backed by Hitler’s authority, Speer secured Göring’s agreement to the creation of a ‘Central Planning’ committee [Zentrale Planung]. This new committee, of which Speer, Göring’s state secretaries, Erhard Milch (Luftwaffe)and Paul Körner (Four-Year Plan) were the permanent members, became the central coordinating body for the allocation of raw materials. To avoid damaging Göring’s prestige, Speer, as a formality, had subordinated himself to him as ‘General Plenipotentiary for Armaments Production within the Four-Year Plan’. In effect, however, this meant that Speer was responsible for all armaments projects within the Four-Year Plan.²⁸

In September 1942, Speer created a new intermediate authority by establishing regional armaments commissions, in which all the various agencies involved in armaments production in the various regions were represented. These regions followed the borders of the Gaus, not those of the military districts, that is, of the armaments inspectorates, and assigned a decisive role to the Gauleiters as chairmen of the commissions. This new arrangement prepared the way for a reorganization of the system of Reich Defence Commissioners. While hitherto only fifteen Gauleiters had held this office, which corresponded to the military districts, on 16 November 1942 Hitler appointed all Gauleiters Reich Defence Commissioners. From now onwards, these power-hungry regional Party bosses had the task of coordinating and promoting the war effort within their Gaus.²⁹

Speer now visited Hitler every two weeks, during the first months even more often, in order to discuss the armaments situation with him in detail, sometimes over a period of several days. These so-called ‘armaments meetings’, which began on 19 February 1942, contained on average several dozen agenda items. From Speer’s point of view, they served above all to secure Hitler’s agreement to his proposals and in most cases they succeeded in doing so. In June 1942, Hitler assured Speer ‘that everything that came from me would always be signed off’.³⁰ However, the minutes show that, in a considerable number of cases, Hitler opposed Speer’s proposals or wanted changes, above all in technical matters, which in some cases even involved going into detail. Thus, the idea that, during these armaments meetings, Hitler adopted a passive stance, merely nodding his agreement with Speer’s detailed expositions, is mistaken. On the contrary, the minutes reveal a dictator who was keen to make it clear that he knew what he was talking about in armaments matters, capable of making suggestions for improvement, and was reserving for himself the role of ‘effective head of armaments production’.³¹

It is important to note, however, that the continuing discussions between Hitler and Speer concerning armaments involved decisions on particular issues; they did not pursue a general programme based on an overall view of the various armaments and of the most important factors involved in production – industrial capacity, labour supplies, raw materials, transport availability and so on. Significantly, during these meetings, Speer did not provide a series of statistical pictures of the armaments sector as a whole, but used individual figures, whose reliability was difficult to verify but which evidently often impressed Hitler, who was a numbers enthusiast.³²

Speer’s method of always giving Hitler the opportunity of commenting on particular armaments issues and making decisions on the production of particular armaments without any reference to the overall situation corresponded exactly to the ‘Führer’s’ arbitrary armaments policy. This involved permanently overstraining the whole armaments sector with overambitious projects and abrupt changes of priorities, as well as putting pressure on those responsible by then referring to the resultant shortages and inadequacies. Had Hitler established a rationally functioning armaments operation, which matched his requests with the available resources, this would in time have created a control mechanism that might have acted as a veto over his overambitious military and strategic plans. However, Hitler had no interest in doing that, and Speer was aware of the limits of his power within Hitler’s system.

The reorganization of armaments production was already having an effect during 1942. Apart from expanding the motorized units of the army, Hitler’s basic directive of 10 January 1942 had, above all, envisaged boosting the supplies of army munitions by six times compared with the figure consumed in August 1941. This was the main challenge facing the new Reich Minister for Armaments and Munitions.³³ At the end of June, Hitler also told Speer what the monthly production figures for the most important types of munitions must be. As usual, his demands exceeded many times over the available productive capacity.³⁴ To achieve this goal, the allocation of steel to the munitions industry had to be rapidly and considerably increased. However, this was impossible within the existing allocation system, which had become completely distorted because of the excessive demands being made on it. Thus, in order to reorganize the whole steel sector, on 1 June Speer created the Reich Iron Association, and Hitler ‘recommended’ as chairman Hermann Röchling, a leading figure in heavy industry whom he admired.³⁵ To begin with, Röchling managed to sort out steel allocation on a clearer basis; but increasing steel production was much more problematic, in particular because of the need for a significant increase in coal supplies. On 11 August 1942, Hitler told a high-level meeting³⁶ that ‘if, as a result of a shortage of coking coal, the production of steel cannot be increased as envisaged, the war will be lost’.³⁷ In this way he forced Paul von Pleiger, the chairman of the Reich Coal Association, to pledge to deliver the required amount of coal. Sauckel agreed to provide the necessary number of workers. However, in the autumn these promises were revealed to be worthless. The impending crisis – a collapse in steel production – with catastrophic results for armaments production across the board – was in the end avoided through a 10 per cent cut in private coal consumption. Speer commented laconically that it was better ‘for people to feel a bit chillier at home than that armaments production should collapse’. As a result, and through an improvement in the allocation system, it even proved possible to increase steel production during winter 1941/42, which meant that Speer’s key goal, the increase in munitions production, could still be achieved.³⁸

As far as the armaments actually produced during 1942 were concerned, the balance shifted as follows: the most important products were aircraft, which made up 46.1 per cent of total production at the beginning of 1942, although only 36.3 per cent by the end. While warships increased their percentage from 9.3 per cent to 10.9 per cent, the production of tanks, motor vehicles, and weapons, during what was after all the year of the decisive eastern offensive, only increased from 18.3 per cent to 19.5 per cent of the total. The highest percentage increase was achieved by munitions, namely from 26.3 per cent to 33.3 per cent.³⁹

Meanwhile, Sauckel had been engaged in ruthlessly implementing the ‘Reich mobilization’ of foreign labour in the occupied territories. This occurred through a combination of more or less voluntary recruitment, conscription by the local administrations, and compulsory recruitment by the occupation authorities, in some cases by simply deporting people who were pressganged off the streets.⁴⁰ At the end of 1942, the total of all foreign workers in the Reich had already reached over 5.6 million, among whom there were over a million Poles, over 900,000 French POWs, as well as almost 50,000 Soviet POWs, and over 1.2 million Soviet civilians.⁴¹

Conditions in the Soviet POW camps were still horrendous, so that the death rate was extremely high.⁴² Civilian workers from the Soviet Union, who had been promised more or less equal treatment with that of German workers, ended up in camps surrounded by barbed wire, poorly fed, badly paid, and subject to disease. Clearly marked out by the ‘eastern worker’ badge they were forced to wear, they were in general treated as ‘sub-humans’ by the German guards and foremen. The edicts issued by the RSHA, which imposed on the eastern workers a strict and repressive regime, declared them to be ‘enemies of National Socialist Germany’.⁴³

In March, Hitler told Speer that he ‘did not approve of the poor nourishment of the Russians’ and was surprised that the civilian workers were treated the same as the POWs. Speer had to explain that this was the result of his own instructions, but the ‘Führer’ claimed not to be aware of it.⁴⁴ However, even when Hitler realized that the miserable situation of the eastern workers impaired their productivity for the war economy, as with the Soviet POWs, he did not make any serious attempts to change the situation fundamentally. The categorization of the eastern workers and the members of the Red Army as second-class humans was a direct result of the aggressive racism that was fundamental to the regime’s policies. Treating the Soviet workers in the Reich humanely would have threatened the foundations of his war policy. Thus he was obliged to accept that the ‘deployment of Russians’ would not achieve the desired results.

The radicalization of the murder campaign

It is striking that the gradual overcoming of the winter crisis and the move to a military offensive in the spring and summer of 1942 is chronologically linked to the further radicalization of Jewish persecution. The mass murders that began in the summer of 1941 and, during the autumn, were extended to Poland and also Yugoslavia, were now expanded by the Nazi state into a comprehensive plan, set in motion between May and July 1942, to murder all European Jews. Thus the military plans for the eastern offensive and the preparations for the ‘Final Solution’ occurred during the same period. Moreover, the planned schedule for the ‘Final Solution’ shifted: It was now no longer to be concluded after, but rather during, the war. The questions of ‘where’ and ‘how’ were also changed at the same time as the issue of ‘when’: no longer in the Soviet territories, but instead in Poland; no longer through a combination of deportation, debilitating forced labour, executions, and gas vans, but rather through stationary gas chambers in special death camps.

The concrete decision-making process and Hitler’s role within this process can only be partially reconstructed from documents. He had, however, played a central role in all the previous phases of Jewish policy. Moreover, as dictator, he alone possessed the requisite authority: (a) to coordinate the various radical plans for a ‘Final Solution’ that had been worked out during 1941/42 within the SS-police apparatus, the Party organization, the Foreign Ministry, and the other offices and administrative agencies of the Third Reich; (b) to combine them in a murder programme covering the whole of Europe; and (c) to set this in motion, ordering the participating organizations to carry out their various tasks within the extermination project.

To understand the fateful move towards the ‘Final Solution’ one should bear in mind the ‘Führer’s’ central role in determining the regime’s policies, his war aims, his out-and-out racist ideology, and his imperialist views. Governed by these various ideological perspectives, during spring and summer 1942, he developed and implemented his radical ideas for ‘solving the Jewish question’. For Hitler’s Europe, which now appeared to be taking shape, was to be reorganized along racist lines, that is to say to be dominated and exploited in order to fight a global war. He was determined that there should be no more Jews living in this empire. By breaching all the norms of civilization through its programme of murder, carried out by hundreds of thousands of perpetrators not only in Germany but within the occupied and allied states as well, this regime had burnt all its bridges.

The historical causes of the Holocaust are varied and cannot be reduced to the figure of Hitler. Anti-Semitism and racism were widespread in Germany and Europe; they had been firmly institutionalized within the administrative apparatus of the Nazi regime. Interest in a radical ‘solution to the Jewish question’ existed within the regime in different forms and with a variety of motivations – ideological, political, economic; and, for a number of reasons, the war encouraged the radicalization of Jewish persecution. However, the Holocaust cannot be explained solely by the coming together of these various factors, by structures and functions, however important these may be.

For a systematic anti-Semitic policy to emerge out of the widespread hostility to the Jews and for this policy to be geared to the most radical possible solution required the engagement, the coordination, the driving force of the authoritative man at the top of the regime, and in a particular historical situation, as he perceived it.

During the middle of March, Globocnik began supervising deportations of the Jews in the districts of Lublin and Galicia to the Belzec death camp, which had been under construction since autumn 1941 and was now ready. By the middle of April, around 60,000 people had been murdered there, the majority of whom had been designated as ‘incapable of work’.⁴⁵ Thousands of people had also been killed during the course of the bloody clearance of the ghettos. The mass murder in these two districts represented the first step in the ‘Final Solution’ in the General Government, as envisaged in the Wannsee Conference.

The deportation of the Jews from Reich territory, which had been interrupted during the winter, was also resumed in March. By mid-June, around 55,000 people had been deported to the General Government in a ‘third deportation wave’. In general, the trains from the Reich were halted in Lublin, where men who were considered ‘capable of work’ were sorted out and assigned to the camp at Majdanek.⁴⁶ The other deportees were placed in Polish ghettos (above all, Izbica, Piaski, Zamos´c´),⁴⁷ whose inhabitants had been murdered shortly beforehand in Belzec.⁴⁸ The majority of the Jews deported from the Reich succumbed to the miserable conditions in the ghettos during the following months; most of the survivors were deported to death camps. This pattern of systematic murder was a repetition of what had already happened in Łódz´ , Riga, and Minsk: the indigenous Jews were murdered and the Jews from the Reich then provisionally accommodated in the ‘freed-up’ ghettos.

By now, deportations were occurring in other countries. On the basis of an agreement that Himmler had made with Slovakia in autumn 1941,⁴⁹ between March and June 1942 Slovakian Jews were deported for forced labour in the district of Lublin and in Auschwitz in Upper Silesia.⁵⁰ At the end of March, following a decision by the military administration already made in December 1941, an initial train with a thousand Jewish men from France also went to Auschwitz. This was termed a ‘hostage transport’ and regarded as a reprisal for the actions of the French resistance. However, in March, the RSHA envisaged deporting a further 5,000 Jews from France to Auschwitz.⁵¹ And, at the beginning of April, preparations were made for the deportation of a further half a million Jews from the Reich, Slovakia, the Protectorate, the Netherlands, Belgium, and France.⁵²

Hitler’s comments on the ‘Jewish question’, which Goebbels noted in March and April, can be read as a kind of commentary on these events: ‘The Jews must be got out of Europe, if necessary by using the most brutal means.’⁵³ When, at the end of March, Goebbels learnt of the existence of the Belzec death camp, he had no doubt that Hitler was responsible for the murders being carried out there, since the ‘Führer is the protagonist and advocate of a radical solution, which, in view of the situation, is necessary and therefore appears unavoidable’.⁵⁴ And in April, after a further meeting with Hitler, he noted: ‘He wants to drive the Jews out of Europe completely. That is absolutely right. The Jews have caused so much misery in our part of the world that the toughest punishment that one can possibly inflict on them is still too mild.’⁵⁵

However, the people whom the RSHA were deporting from central Europe to Poland were not yet being killed in the death camps that already existed. At this point, it was Polish Jews, designated as ‘incapable of work’, who were being murdered in the gas chambers of Belzec and the gas vans of Chelmno. In Auschwitz, where the first gassings took place in Crematorium I from September 1941 onwards, the main victims were sick prisoners, Soviet POWs, as well as sick and exhausted Jewish prisoners from forced labour camps in annexed Upper Silesia.⁵⁶

Evidently, the RSHA was still sticking to the plan, outlined by Heydrich at the Wannsee Conference, of deporting the majority of Jews from western and central Europe to the occupied Soviet territories after the final military victory in the East. However, during the following months, on the basis of their initial experience with the gassings in Poland, this old plan was finally abandoned.

Crisis in the judiciary

It was not pure chance that, between spring and late summer 1942, Hitler engaged in a power struggle with the hated state bureaucracy over domestic affairs. For this was precisely the phase when, on the basis of renewed victories, he became increasingly convinced that he was about to achieve his dream of an empire providing Germany with living space. Hitler had not held any cabinet meetings since 1937, with the result that the government no longer existed as a collective body; the individual ministries went their own way. Hitler ruled with the aid of his chancelleries, above all with the support of the indispensable Martin Bormann, head of the Party Chancellery, who communicated Hitler’s wishes not only to the Party agencies but also to the ministries and to the special commissioners appointed by Hitler.

In spring 1942, Hitler decided to deal a further blow to the state administration, which was already in the process of disintegration. In a system governed by the absolute authority of the Führer’s will it was burdensome to continue to operate within legal rules and bureaucratic procedures. Instead, the principle of the arbitrary, politically-determined ‘measure’ was finally to triumph over the ‘state governed by norms’. Hitler chose the judiciary as the target for the further emasculation of the state bureaucracy. He now homed in on it, to begin with in comments to his entourage.⁵⁷

Hitler’s attacks began in February and March 1942. On 8 February 1942, for example, he declared: ‘Our judiciary is still too inflexible!’. The judiciary failed to understand that, during wartime, crimes that were committed in the blackout represented a particular threat to public security and, therefore, should be given exemplary punishment. It was also completely pointless sentencing soldiers to years of imprisonment if this meant that they avoided service at the front. ‘In any case, after ten years of penal servitude a person is of no further use to the national community. Who’s going to give him work? Someone like that should either be given a life sentence in a concentration camp or be killed.’ The judiciary, on the other hand, spent its time poking around ‘in their law books to come up with a sentence that fits in with their way of doing things in peacetime. It’s vital that such sentences are suspended!’⁵⁸

On 19 March, Hitler told Goebbels that he was determined to ‘get the Reichstag once again to provide him with special powers for a thorough overhaul of the conduct of political and military affairs’. It is clear from Goebbels’s report that Hitler did not simply want to attack the alleged abuses, thereby undermining the existing judicial system, but aimed to use his ‘criticism of the judicial system’ as a platform for securing a symbolic enhancement of his position as Führer vis-à-vis the state bureaucracy as a whole. These ‘special powers’ were specifically intended to give him the authority to intervene arbitrarily throughout the military and civilian sectors, and to make an example of officers or civil servants irrespective of their legal rights, dismissing or punishing them. Hitler referred in this context to the ‘Hoepner case’, that of the general he had dismissed from the Wehrmacht in January without regard to Hoepner’s legal rights as an officer, making it clear which way the wind was blowing. Two days after this conversation, Hitler signed an edict concerning the simplification of the administration of justice, intended to speed up the processing of cases as much as possible.⁵⁹

All that was now required was a pretext to launch the attack on the judiciary and the civil service. An article in the Berliner Illustrierte Nachtausgabe of 21 March alerted Hitler to the Schlitt case. A week earlier, the 29-year-old Ewald Schlitt had been sentenced by the district court in Oldenburg to five years’ penal servitude after his wife had died in an asylum. Schlitt had been abusing his wife for a long time, and, three months before, had subjected her to a brutal attack. The court considered this incident responsible for the woman’s physical decline and eventual death, sentencing Schlitt to five years’ penal servitude for manslaughter.⁶⁰ However, in Hitler’s view the only appropriate punishment was the death penalty. Up until now, Hitler had not in fact had a legal basis for peremptorily dismissing judges with whose sentencing policy he disagreed.⁶¹ Now, that night, he telephoned state secretary Franz Schlegelberger, since Gürtner’s death in January 1941 the acting Minister of Justice, demanding that the sentence be revised. Moreover, he threatened to take the ‘toughest measures’ if the judiciary did not mend its ways.⁶² The head of the Justice Ministry responded to Hitler’s criticism by referring the Schlitt case to the Reich Supreme Court in Leipzig.⁶³ On 31 March, Schlegelberger was able to inform Hitler that Schlitt had been condemned to death, and the sentence was carried out on 2 April.⁶⁴

On 29 March, during dinner, Hitler sketched out his ideas as follows: ‘The whole of current jurisprudence [is] nothing but a systematic abdication of responsibility’. Thus, he would do everything he could to make ‘the study of the law, that is the study of that kind of legal thinking, appear as contemptible as possible’. Moreover, ‘apart from a select group of up to 10 per cent of judges, he would replace the whole of the judiciary’. The ‘totally bogus system of using lay judges’, which simply enabled judges to evade their responsibility, would be abolished.⁶⁵ Four days later, Hitler issued an edict toughening the Wehrmacht’s sentencing policy: ‘Dubious elements must be prevented from using the opportunity of avoiding front line service by sitting out their sentence in prison.’ Instead, military units for prisoners had to be immediately created and ‘must where possible be deployed with the fighting troops to undertake the toughest duties under dangerous conditions’.⁶⁶

Around a month later, on 26 April, Hitler outlined his criticisms of the judicial system in a speech to the Reichstag. He began by explaining how the winter crisis had been overcome, once again blaming the deterioration of the military situation on the ‘international world parasite’. He effectively confirmed the widespread rumours about the fate of the Jews by declaring that, during ‘recent years, one state after another’ in Europe had been compelled by ‘its instinct for self-preservation to introduce measures that were designed to provide permanent protection against this international poison’.⁶⁷

As the climax of his speech, Hitler requested the Reichstag expressly to confirm that he possessed ‘the legal powers to oblige everybody to do their duty’ and ‘to subject to military degradation or dismiss from their office and position’ anyone who failed to perform their duty, irrespective of his ‘acquired rights’. As he had discussed with Goebbels at the end of March, Hitler assumed the right to dismiss officials regardless of their rights and privileges as civil servants, including their right to a pension.⁶⁸ Hitler concluded his speech with sharp criticism of the judicial system and, without naming names, quoted in detail the sentence in the Schlitt case, which he ‘found incomprehensible’.

Hitler’s request was immediately accepted by the Reichstag. Its resolution, which repeated the main passage in Hitler’s speech, was given official status by being published in the official legal journal, the Reichsgesetzblatt.⁶⁹ It stated that Hitler, without being bound by existing legal provisions, was ‘entitled at any time . . . if necessary, to dismiss from his office, his rank or his position any German, whether a simple soldier or an officer, a low- or a high-ranking official or judge, a senior or a junior Party functionary, a blue- or a white-collar worker, without the need to follow prescribed procedures’. Hitler possessed this right ‘as Führer of the nation, as the supreme commander of the Wehrmacht, as head of government and possessor of supreme executive authority, as the supreme judge, and as leader of the Party’. The listing of all his official functions was designed to underline the fact that this empowerment of Hitler reflected his sovereign and autocratic position. The resolution was a demonstration of power targeted at the civil service, and designed to put it under psychological pressure and publicly humiliate it. However, it represented above all a symbolic degradation. For, in practice, Hitler’s special powers did not acquire any legal significance.⁷⁰

Although the Security Service was expected to report positively on the reception of Führer propaganda, it could not disguise the confusion in the population’s response to Hitler’s speech of 26 April. After all, his assurance that they were well equipped for war during the coming winter implied that it was unlikely that the war would be over by the autumn. Moreover, many asked themselves why on earth a further extension of his powers was necessary when, in effect, he already possessed absolute authority. Thus his action was interpreted as a sign of weakness.⁷¹

This confusion was increased by the rarity of Hitler’s public appearances. The reason for this was not only his intensive preoccupation with military affairs, which absorbed most of his energy, but presumably also his awareness that he would damage his prestige as a charismatic leader and warlord if he kept banging on in public about the tough demands made by the war and the need to stand firm. Moreover, the winter of 1941/42 had taken its toll on his energies and resilience. He failed to attend the celebrations of his 53rd birthday on the evening before 20 April. Goebbels tried to gloss over the fact by drawing attention to the parallels between King Frederick the Great of Prussia and Hitler, which were stressed in the film Der grosse König [The Great King], premiered in March 1942. In his speech, which he had got Hitler to approve,⁷² Goebbels praised the king as someone who, ‘despite crushing blows that sometimes brought him to the brink of collapse, kept finding the strength to triumph over testing times and defeats, and to act as a shining example of steadfastness in adversity, to his people, to his soldiers, to sceptical generals, wavering ministers, conspiring relatives, and recalcitrant officials’. Like Frederick the Great, Hitler was engaged in a ‘titanic struggle’ for ‘the life of our people’.⁷³ The film showed Frederick as prematurely aged by grief and the burdens of responsibility, a clear indication that Führer propaganda was undergoing a profound transformation.

The conduct of war in spring 1942

In his Directive No. 41 of 4 April 1942 Hitler had assigned the forces in the East the primary task in the southern sector of ‘securing a breakthrough into the Caucasus region’. In the course of this offensive the enemy was ‘to be destroyed in front of the Don’, and Hitler gave detailed instructions as to how the pincer movements were to be carried out, referring to Stalingrad as a goal of the operations. Afterwards, they were to conquer the oil region further east, considered by Hitler essential for the continuation of the war, and the Caucasus. However, the Kerch peninsula and Sebastopol were the initial targets and the Izyum region, where the Red Army had established a salient, also had to be cleared. Following the conclusion of operations in the south, his second major operation for the coming year was to be the capture of Leningrad.⁷⁴

Thus, in effect the directive represented an admission that, following Germany’s failure to defeat the Red Army during the previous year, and its great difficulty in overcoming the winter crisis, the armies in the East were now only capable of mounting a limited offensive. Only one of the three army groups was going to carry out a wide-ranging offensive. Moreover, even if all its goals were achieved, while the Soviet Union would have been considerably weakened by the cutting off of its important sources of raw materials, it would still not have been completely defeated. In other words, the war in the East would have to be continued during 1943, although Hitler hoped that he would be able to free up a considerable number of troops in order to provide a counterweight to America’s growing military potential. The military leadership supported the basic premise of the offensive, but was fully aware that, fundamentally, the resources were inadequate even for this advance in the south, on which every effort was now to be concentrated. In fact, the initial successes of the summer offensive were due primarily to the fact that the Soviet leadership had anticipated a resumption of the attack on Moscow, concentrating large forces in the central sector of the front. In short, the summer offensive was a final effort on the part of the already seriously weakened eastern armies, which were no longer capable of mounting another major campaign.⁷⁵

Halder was obliged to report to Hitler that, as a result of the winter battles, there had been a ‘wastage’ of 900,000 men, of which it had been possible to replace only half. Of the total of 2,340 tanks lost during the winter only 80 per cent could be replaced.⁷⁶ The army’s general staff estimated that only 5 per cent of divisions were capable of carrying out all tasks, 8 out of 162; in June 1941 it had been almost two thirds: 134 out of 209. The transport situation in the East was precarious; the shortage of fuel was undermining the army’s mobility.⁷⁷

These weaknesses could only be partially compensated for by further enlisting the services of allies. During the previous months the German leadership, and Hitler in particular, had made strenuous efforts to get Italy and Hungary to promise to increase their respective contingents to the size of an entire army, while the Romanians had promised two armies. All these contingents arrived on the southern sector of the eastern front during the summer.⁷⁸

A development that occurred during the planning phase of the summer offensive illustrates the extent to which Hitler overestimated Germany’s military potential. In February, the commander-in-chief of the navy suggested an alternative strategy to Hitler. The main focus of the war during 1942 should not be on the Soviet Union. Instead, through a dual offensive in North Africa and the Caucasus, and with a simultaneous campaign by the Japanese via the Indian Ocean, the attempt should be made to destroy the British position in the Near East.⁷⁹ Hitler had basically approved these ideas in March, but, significantly, for after the conclusion of the summer offensive (and not as an alternative).⁸⁰ Thus, he was returning to his far-reaching plans for the post-Barbarossa phase, although with the decisive difference that he now wanted to advance in the Near East without having first defeated the Soviet Union.

On 8 May, the Wehrmacht began a series of attacks on the eastern front, intended to prepare the ground for the real summer offensive.⁸¹ Within a few days the Kerch peninsula in eastern Crimea was conquered. However, the fortress of Sebastopol, which was strongly defended, managed to hold out until the beginning of July.⁸² By the end of May, the Wehrmacht was able to cut off a Soviet advance from the Izyum salient towards Kharkov, which began on 12 May, with a counter offensive, which captured 240,000 Red Army troops. However, a further German offensive to sort out the whole situation round Izyum lasted until the end of June and, as well as the tough Soviet resistance in Sebastopol, resulted in the great summer offensive, originally planned to begin on 15 June, being delayed for two weeks.⁸³

The news from the eastern front aroused great expectations among the German population for the success of a major summer offensive, but also fears that, despite all their military efforts, it would not succeed in finally defeating the Soviet colossus. Concerns about the uncertain length of the war, the continuing enemy air raids, and, last but not least, the precarious food situation, were in fact creating a rather tense atmosphere.⁸⁴

While in the East the initial signs were promising, Hitler’s attention was focused on the start of the major offensive in the southern sector of the front, which he believed would prove decisive for the war. An opportunity for him to report to the Party leadership on the great events that were impending was provided on 22 May 1942, when the Gauleiters and Reichsleiters attended a memorial ceremony for the Gauleiter of Weser-Ems, Carl Röver, who had died suddenly.⁸⁵

Figure 12. By the middle of 1942 queues such as this at fruit and vegetable stalls were an everyday sight. Food shortages, which had occurred repeatedly from the beginning of the so-called Third Reich and grew more acute during the war, depressed the public ‘mood’. The regime’s assurances of a glorious future could not alleviate the gloom.

Source: Scherl/Süddeutsche Zeitung Photo

After the ceremony Hitler gave a speech lasting two hours. Goebbels’s notes give the impression of a very serious and crisis-laden atmosphere, in which Hitler endeavoured to provide new hope in the light of the coming offensive. He remarked that the members of the leadership corps were now all between 45 and 60 years of age and ‘it may well be unfortunate for the National Socialist movement that we are all of the same age and so, when death comes to our ranks, it could have a devastating effect. . . . He himself hoped that he would outlive the war, as he was convinced that nobody else would be in a position to deal with the problems created by it.’ Hitler then talked about the ‘world situation’, in particular the dramatic crisis of the past winter. In a long-winded discourse he blamed it on the Wehrmacht leadership, the leadership of the Reich railways, the judiciary and the civil service. ‘He is also of course aware that the Jews are determined under all circumstances to win this war, since they know that defeat would also mean personal liquidation for them.’ It was a case of ‘triumph or downfall’. In addition, according to Goebbels, Hitler said that he was ‘determined to give the Soviets the coup de grace this summer’. Victory in the East was the basis for the ‘creation of a new Eastern Marches’, for which Hitler sketched out grandiose future prospects: ‘There we shall hugely extend our land. There we shall acquire coal, grain, oil and above all national security. . . . A shrewd population policy, above all using the resettlement of ethnic Germans, could within sixty, seventy years easily increase the German population to 250 million.’ However, according to Hitler, they should ‘not believe that with this war all war would be abolished. In future too, war would still be the father of all things.’⁸⁶

The concentration of military forces in the East during the spring also meant that the Luftwaffe in the West was not in a position to provide an effective defence against the RAF or to mount a substantial counterattack on Great Britain. Hitler was increasingly compelled to get to grips with this problem. After the destruction of the densely populated historic centres of Lübeck and Rostock at the end of March and beginning of April,⁸⁷ he ordered attacks on cities in Britain that were primarily of cultural rather than military significance, as the Luftwaffe was too weak for major raids on Britain’s industrial centres. He hoped that these so-called ‘Baedeker raids’, as British propaganda dubbed the attacks on cities like Exeter, Bath, Norwich, or York,⁸⁸ would at least have a psychological effect.⁸⁹ The RAF had, however, only just begun its major offensive against German cities. During the night of 30/31 May, it launched the first 1,000-bomber raid in military history on Cologne, which, contrary to expectations, did not wipe out the city, but destroyed 13,000 dwellings and killed almost 500 people, more than any previous air raid. Two nights after the bombing of Cologne, the RAF launched a big raid on Essen, carried out by almost 800 bombers and, during the remaining seven months of the year, the RAF took part in over fifty more raids on German cities, with several hundred bombers involved each time.⁹⁰ Moreover, in July, the Luftwaffe largely had to abandon its ‘retaliation’ attacks on Britain because of heavy losses.⁹¹ As the Luftwaffe was unable to defend Germany effectively against British raids, in Hitler’s view ‘retaliation’ was the only feasible way of stopping the British air offensive. Thus, he increasingly placed his hopes in new rocket systems on which Luftwaffe and army engineers were working flat out. He was hoping they would bring about a change in the air war during 1943.⁹²

Heydrich’s death and its aftermath

During May and June, alongside the preparations for the summer offensive, the regime initiated a concrete programme for the murder of the European Jews. How this decision was reached is unclear;⁹³ the result, however, was unambiguous. The distinction made hitherto between East European Jews, who were shot or gassed, and the West and Central European Jews, who were deported to the East and deployed in forced labour, vegetating in ghettos under miserable conditions, was no longer applied. Now the trains from the Reich, from Slovakia, and, from July onwards, also from other European countries went directly to Auschwitz and to the other death camps that had been constructed in the meantime.⁹⁴ In May, Himmler, to whom Governor General Frank had already transferred significant responsibilities in March, secured the appointment of the Higher SS and Police Leader in the General Government, Friedrich-Wilhelm Krüger, as state secretary for security issues in Frank’s regime. This appointment specifically covered all ‘matters involving Jews’.⁹⁵ Himmler now set about gradually extending the murder programme to every district in the General Government and to occupied Upper Silesia.⁹⁶ At the same time, a second wave of murders was unleashed in the occupied parts of the Soviet Union.⁹⁷ This meant that the original plan, which had still been referred to in Heydrich’s statement at the Wannsee Conference, namely to deport the Jews to the Soviet territories that had not yet been occupied, had finally been abandoned.

However, during May and June, certain events occurred which are likely to have accelerated the shift to a Europe-wide deportation programme. On 18 May 1942, a left-wing Berlin resistance group, the majority of whose members were of Jewish origin, carried out an arson attack on a propaganda exhibition, ‘The Soviet Paradise’, which the Propaganda Ministry was putting on in Berlin’s Lustgarten. Those involved were soon arrested. As a reprisal, on 27 May, the Gestapo arrested a large number of Berlin Jews. A total of 154 were transferred to Sachsenhausen concentration camp and shot, together with another 96 Jewish inmates. In addition, a further 250 Jews were also transferred to Sachsenhausen and held there as hostages. The Jewish community in Berlin was informed that, in the event of another ‘act of sabotage’, these people would also be shot.⁹⁸

On the same day, 27 May, Heydrich, both head of the RSHA and, as deputy Reich Protector, Hitler’s strong man in Prague, was seriously injured in an attack by Czech resistance fighters, trained by British Intelligence and dropped by parachute. To begin with, it looked as if Heydrich’s condition was stabilizing, but after a few days it deteriorated.⁹⁹ On the same day as the assassination attempt, Hitler ordered that everybody who had helped those involved should be ‘shot together with his whole family’. In addition, 10,000 suspect or politically compromised Czechs, not already incarcerated, were to be arrested and all of them shot ‘in concentration camps’. In fact, however, the following day Karl Hermann Frank, Heydrich’s state secretary, was able to persuade Hitler to drop this part of his order.¹⁰⁰

The next day, 29 May, Hitler told Goebbels that they must take ‘vigorous and ruthless action against those [in the Protectorate], who are supporting assassination attempts’. ¹⁰¹ When Goebbels then responded by mentioning his aim of ‘deporting all the Jews from Berlin’, since ‘there were now 40,000 Jews hanging around in the capital of the Reich who have nothing more to lose’ (he was referring to the attack on the Soviet Paradise exhibition), Hitler immediately agreed. He ordered Speer to replace Jewish workers with foreign workers and in September raised this issue again.¹⁰²

To a wider audience during the lunch that followed, Hitler insisted that they must ‘liquidate the Jewish threat, whatever the cost’. He did not want ‘the Jews to be evacuated to Siberia’, thereby distancing himself from Heydrich’s old plan. The best thing would be to ‘resettle [them] to Central Africa’, where there was a climate that ‘certainly would not make them strong and hardy’. However, in view of the military situation, this goal was completely unrealistic – at the beginning of May the British had landed in Madagascar, the deportation destination for Jews favoured by Germany’s ‘Jewish experts’ in 1940. Hitler was evidently trying to gloss over the real situation. In any case, he continued by saying that it was his aim ‘to make western Europe completely free of Jews’.¹⁰³ These comments show that it is possible that at this stage no final plan for murdering the western European Jews had been decided. In fact, large-scale deportations from France to Auschwitz began only in July, whereas deportations from Central Europe to a death camp (Maly Trostinets near Minsk) had already started in May.¹⁰⁴

On 4 June, Heydrich died of septicemia, and, a few days later, an elaborate state memorial ceremony was held in Berlin for him.¹⁰⁵ In his commemorative address Himmler committed himself to ‘atone for his death, take over his task and now more than ever destroy the enemies of our people without mercy or weakness’.¹⁰⁶ Finally, Hitler paid tribute to Heydrich in a short address. He had been ‘one of the best National Socialists, one of the strongest defenders of the idea of the German Reich, one of the greatest opponents of all the enemies of this Reich’.¹⁰⁷

Following the ceremony, in the presence of Lammers, Bormann, Karl Hermann Frank, and other top functionaries, Hitler received the Czech Protectorate government, led by President Hacha, who tried to distance themselves from the assassination. Hitler made a speech in which he threatened his guests that he would ‘deport a few million people from Bohemia and Moravia . . . if necessary during the war’.¹⁰⁸ Immediately after this meeting Frank ordered the commander of the security police in Prague – referring specifically to a ‘meeting with the Führer’ – to carry out retaliatory action against the Czech village of Lidice near Kladno, despite there being no proof of any support for the assassins coming from this village. In pursuit of this order, on 10 June, the security police murdered all 199 men, deporting the women to Ravensbrück concentration camp, and the children to the Chelmno death camp after the ‘racially valuable ones’ had been sorted out.¹⁰⁹ A few weeks later, during his table talk, Hitler referred to this brutal action with approval.¹¹⁰

However, the retaliation for the death of Heydrich, the organizer of the Einsatzgruppen murders and the deportation programme, above all affected the Jews, in other words those against whom, in the first instance, the regime was fighting the war. On 10 June 1942, a thousand Jews from Prague were deported to Majdanek and to camps in the surrounding area, where they were incarcerated.¹¹¹ Much more serious, however, was the fact that, following Heydrich’s assassination, the Nazi leadership was evidently determined to intensify and accelerate the expansion of the mass murder of Jews throughout Europe that was already under way.

During these critical days, Hitler was having unusually frequent meetings with Himmler. Between 27 May, the day of the assassination attempt, and the memorial ceremony on 9 June they met a total of eight times. Once again we do not know the content of their conversations, but we can presume that they were closely connected with Himmler’s actions to speed up the ‘Final Solution’ that immediately followed.

Himmler’s efforts were not hindered by a transport ban in the General Government between 19 June and 7 July as a result of the coming summer offensive; on the contrary, it simply prompted the reorganization of the deportation and murder programme. While the transports from the Reich to Maly Trostnets near Minsk had to be interrupted, in June they were already being replaced by an increase in transports to the ‘old people’s ghetto’ in Theresienstadt.¹¹² The transports from Slovakia that were originally intended to go to the Lublin district were now rerouted to Auschwitz where, on 4 July, for the first time, a selection of Jews ‘incapable of work’ took place, who were then murdered immediately after their arrival.¹¹³ In addition, the deportations from western Europe to Auschwitz were now significantly expanded. On 11 June, deportation quotas were fixed for a total of 135,000 people from France, Belgium, and the Netherlands and, before the end of the month, Himmler established the target of achieving ‘sooner rather than later the total liberation of France from Jews’.¹¹⁴

After the lifting of the transport ban on 7 July the deportations from the Reich to Maly Trostnets, and thus the murder of German Jews, were resumed.¹¹⁵ In July the security police also began the deportation of Croatian Jews, of whom 5,000 were murdered in Auschwitz during August.¹¹⁶ Also in June, the SS arranged with the Antonescu regime for the deportation of the Romanian Jews¹¹⁷ (which the Romanians then, however, prevented), and Himmler tried to persuade the Finnish prime minister, Johan Rangell, to deport the Finnish Jews, albeit in vain.¹¹⁸ Above all, the deportations within the General Government to the three death camps that were now available – Belzec, Sobibor, and Treblinka – were being carried out on a large scale.¹¹⁹ After lengthy meetings with Hitler on 11, 12, and 14 July, Himmler used his liaison officer in the Führer headquarters, Karl Wolff, to press for an even larger transport capacity for deportations to the death camps. Then, having visited Auschwitz and Lublin’s Higher SS and Police Leader, Globocnik, on 19 July he ordered that the ‘resettlement [i.e. murder] of the whole of the Jewish population of the General Government be carried out and completed by 31 December 1942’.¹²⁰

While we can only presume that, in the middle of July, Hitler discussed the murder of the Jews in the General Government with Himmler, we have clear written proof for the so-called second wave of murders in the Soviet Union, which had already begun in May and to which around half a million people fell victim. On 28 July, Himmler wrote to Gottlob Berger, the head of the SS Head Office: ‘The occupied eastern territories [i.e. the Soviet territories] are being made free of Jews. The Führer has placed the implementation of this very difficult order on my shoulders.’ The document clearly demonstrates that Himmler was not acting on the basis of a general authorization, a single Führer order, but evidently received an explicit order from Hitler for each of the occupied territories.¹²¹

In July 1942, when the SS began to involve the whole of Europe in the programme for murdering the Jews, Hitler also decided to give Himmler the responsibility for combatting Soviet partisans. Behind this decision lay the idea of also murdering the surviving Jews in the East, in other words to follow the method he had already proposed to Himmler in December 1941: ‘to exterminate Jews – as partisans’.¹²²

On 18 August, Hitler signed Directive No. 46, ‘Guidelines for the Enhanced Combatting of Partisan Activities in the East’. In it he set Himmler the task of making sure that ‘by the start of the winter . . . these bands [must have been] basically exterminated’.¹²³ Himmler reported to Hitler regularly on the ‘successes’ of the ‘fight against the bandits’. At the end of 1942, he passed on to Hitler a report from Hans-Adolf Prützmann, the Higher SS and Police Leader in southern Russia, in which Prützmann stated that in the course of ‘combatting bandits’ in his area of responsibility, which included the Ukraine and Bialystock, during the period from 1 September to 1 December 1942, he had ‘executed’ a total of 363,211 Jews. A note in the margin indicates that Hitler had read this document.¹²⁴

The summer offensive

Meanwhile, since January Rommel had been gradually moving onto the offensive in North Africa and, by the beginning of February, had conquered Cyrenaica. At the end of May, he launched an attack on the British position in Gazala and, using an enveloping movement, forced the British to retreat. In June, he advanced on the port of Tobruk, capturing it on 21 June¹²⁵ and, in view of these successes, Hitler promoted him to field-marshal.¹²⁶ By the end of June, he had reached a point around a hundred kilometres from Alexandria;¹²⁷ during the so-called first battle of El Alamein, which lasted the whole of July, he was, however, unable to break through the British lines.¹²⁸ In fact, his resources had already become overstretched.

In the meantime, by the end of June, considerable progress was being made on the eastern front. On 28 June, Army Group South launched the real summer offensive. By the beginning of July, it had reached the River Don and, at the end of the month, had established a broad front along the river. However, although the first goal of the operations had been reached, the underlying intention of destroying the enemy forces west of the Don had not been achieved. The Red Army had managed to avoid being surrounded by retreating to the south-east.¹²⁹

At the beginning of July, Hitler divided Army Group South into two independent Army Groups, A and B, and then, on the 13th, dismissed Field-Marshal von Bock, whom he blamed for what he considered the unnecessary delay in the advance of Army Group B. The dismissal of the independent-minded and self-confident Bock was a foretaste of the major confrontations between Hitler and his generals that were to occur during the course of the campaign.¹³⁰

Based on the reports of success from the front, on 16 July, Hitler moved his headquarters to a new location around 10 kilometres north of Vinnitza in the Ukraine. The relatively extensive complex, with the codename Werwolf, was in a dark forest and basically consisted of simple wooden houses and a few bunkers. It was from here, in the middle of conquered enemy territory, that, during the coming weeks, Hitler intended to inflict a decisive defeat on the Soviet Union. This would then open the way for the creation of his racial empire and enable him to fight a global war against the western powers. The base was more than 1,500 kilometers from Berlin; its residents were out of touch with the realities of wartime life in the Reich, suffering from the summer heat, and subjected to a plague of flies and mosquitos and the monotony of daily routine. Its remoteness and seclusion created a surreal atmosphere and, during the coming weeks, encouraged Hitler’s growing illusions about the prospects for victory. As his military advisors did not share this optimism, there was growing tension, and, because there were no distractions or ways of avoiding each other, this increasingly led to aggressive confrontations. Hitler remained in Vinnitza until 31 October 1942, a stay broken only by a visit to Berlin for several days between the end of September and the beginning of October.¹³¹

Initial success in the advance toward the Caucasus had convinced Hitler that the Soviet Union would soon be cut off from its sources of oil, and from supplies from the west via Iran, and he now set about trying to block its northern supply route. His Directive No. 44 of 21 July ordered preparations to be made for an attack on the Murman railway in the far north of Russia, in order to cut off transports from the port of Murmansk. He was working on the assumption that a renewed assault on Leningrad would lead to its capture at the latest by September. To achieve this he transferred the 11th Army under Erwin von Manstein, which had played a major part in the conquest of Sebastapol, to the Leningrad front. He had not changed his mind about the city’s future. He told the commander of Army Group North at the end of August that, right from the start, the attack must focus on its ‘destruction’. However, Soviet counterattacks in the Leningrad sector frustrated Hitler’s wide-ranging plans in the north.¹³²

The division of Army Group South into two Army Groups (A under Field-Marshal Wilhelm von List and B under Bock) at the beginning of July was the product of an increasing diversification of the operational goals of the summer offensive. In the middle of July, Hitler forced the army leadership to agree to Army Group A sending strong panzer forces south in order to envelop a large concentration of enemy forces round Rostov. Rostov was indeed taken on 23 July, but the majority of enemy units once again evaded capture. While Halder believed that the enemy was withdrawing intentionally in order to avoid a decisive battle, Hitler assumed the enemy forces were at the end of their tether and urged that they should be rapidly pursued.¹³³

Hitler’s over-optimism was reflected in his Directive No. 45 of 23 July, in which he divided further operations between the two groups.¹³⁴ Army Group A, which now became the main focus of the offensive, was ordered to envelop and destroy the enemy forces withdrawing over the Don in the Rostov area, and then, in a wide-ranging operation to the south, capture the east coast of the Black Sea, thereby securing the sea route for further operations. Finally, a group of light infantry and mountain infantry divisions were to advance through the Caucasus to Baku on the Caspian Sea. Meanwhile, Army Group B was to take Stalingrad and then advance along the Volga towards Astrakhan.

Halder, on the other hand, wanted to concentrate the offensive initially on Stalingrad, as Hitler had originally intended, and to postpone the advance on the Caucasus. However, Hitler, who, in the light of the overall war situation, was seeking a rapid victory in the East, thought he could achieve both war aims – Stalingrad and the Caucasus – simultaneously.¹³⁵

On 23 July, after Hitler had ‘ranted and raved, heaping serious reproaches on the military leadership’, Halder noted bitterly: ‘This chronic tendency to underestimate the enemy’s capabilities is gradually assuming grotesque proportions and becoming dangerous. The situation is increasingly intolerable. Serious work is no longer taking place. This so-called “leadership” is marked by pathological responses to impressions of the moment and a complete lack of judgement when it comes to the military command and its potential.’¹³⁶

The reorganization of the judicial system

In August 1942, at the climax of the summer offensive, Hitler brought to an end the crisis in the judicial system he had initiated in the spring. On 20 August, he appointed the President of the People’s Court, Otto Georg Thierack, Reich Minister of Justice and state secretary Schlegelberger, who had been acting Justice Minister, was retired. Hitler had already contemplated replacing him with a hard-line Nazi the previous February.¹³⁷ At the same time, the previous President of the Hanseatic High Court in Hamburg, Curt Rothenberger, became a state secretary in the Justice Ministry,¹³⁸ while the previous incumbent, Roland Freisler, was appointed President of the People’s Court.

Hitler also appointed Thierack to succeed Hans Frank as President of the Academy for German Law and leader of the Nazi Lawyers’ Association. Frank also resigned as head of the Nazi Party’s Reich Legal Office, which was dissolved. According to the official explanation of these changes, Frank had requested to be relieved of these offices so that he could devote himself ‘entirely to his duties as Governor General’. Frank’s removal as head of the Nazi Lawyers’ Association was in fact the result not only of his involvement in a corruption affair, but also because, in a number of speeches, he had spoken out in favour of the independence of the judiciary and the ‘upholding of the law’. In the light of Hitler’s Reichstag speech, this represented a direct provocation of the ‘Führer’.¹³⁹ At the same time, Hitler authorized the new Justice Minister, Thierack, ‘to develop a new National Socialist legal system and to take all necessary measures to secure it’. It was expressly stated that, in doing so, he was permitted ‘to depart from established law’.¹⁴⁰

On the day of Thierack’s appointment Hitler received him, Rothenberger, and Schlegelberger in his headquarters in order to spell out once again his views on the tasks of the judicial system.¹⁴¹ He displayed a purely utilitarian understanding of the law. According to him, the judge was in the first instance ‘an agent for ethnic self-preservation’. The war was inevitably leading to a process of ‘negative selection’ since the bravest were the ones killed at the front, while the law-breakers were conserved because of the relatively light prison sentences they received. If one did not ‘ruthlessly exterminate the scum then one day there will be a crisis. I’m definitely not a brutal person but on this matter I’m a rational one.’

In future judges must represent a ‘select cadre of the nation’, who will receive from the ‘highest authority’ ‘an insight into the aims and intentions of legislation and into the whole policy background that must inform their sentencing’. They must ‘get rid of the idea that the judge is there to deliver justice, whatever the cost’. Rather ‘the primary task . . . is to preserve the social order’. For this purpose the current detailed penal code should instead be replaced by framework legislation, within which judges, having been politically instructed, could make uniform judgments.¹⁴²

Thierack got the Reich Chancellery to send him the minutes of this table talk and used Hitler’s statements, in some cases word for word, in his address to the presidents of the regional high courts on 29 September 1942.¹⁴³ Less than a month after his appointment, Thierack was already applying Hitler’s idea of a negative selection occurring during the war in the most brutal fashion. On 18 September, Thierack and Rothenberger agreed with Himmler that, in future, all ‘inadequate sentences’ should be ‘corrected’ by ‘police special treatment’. All ‘asocial elements serving prison sentences’, in particular, all prisoners in preventive detention, all Jews, Gypsies, Russian, Ukrainians, Poles sentenced to more than three years, Czechs, and Germans sentenced to more than eight years who were still in prison should be transferred to concentration camps to be ‘liquidated through labour’. Moreover, it was agreed that, in future, Jews, Poles, Gypsies, Russians, and Ukrainians should no longer be tried in the normal courts; rather they should be ‘dispatched by the Reichsführer SS’.¹⁴⁴

Thus, in summer 1942, Hitler pushed through a ‘reform’ of the penal system, according to which ‘racial inferiors’ were now no longer to be taken to court, and those already sentenced were no longer to be kept in prison, while the remaining criminal justice system was to be subordinated to political priorities. Together with his ‘authorization’ of April 1942, enabling him in future to call anybody to account for failure to fulfil their wartime duties, irrespective of legal provisions, these actions inflicted significant damage on those elements of the rule of law that were still operating in the ‘Third Reich’. They also represented a clear signal that, in future, his rule would be based even more on the Party, the SS, and special commissioners and was in the process of finally abandoning traditional forms of state authority.

As we have seen, it was not by chance that these changes occurred during a period in which Hitler was seeking to achieve a decision in the East that would enable him to free up substantial military forces in order to prevent a British–American invasion in the West and to wage a global war alongside his successful Japanese partner. He now aimed to order his nascent empire in such a way that it could provide the basis for a successful continuation of the war. The decision forcibly to recruit millions of slave workers from abroad belongs in this context, as does the extension of the systematic murder of Jews throughout his whole territory. Hitler was making it clear that his war was a racial war, that he was waging it systematically, and from it there was no way back either for him or for all those who were supporting him. A few days after the fateful agreement between Thierack and Himmler, during the armaments meeting of 20–22 September, Hitler ordered Speer to complete ‘the removal of Jews from the armaments plants in the Reich’ in order substantially to conclude the deportation of German Jews to the death camps. In doing so, he was once again clearly reinforcing this approach.¹⁴⁵