The fate of the Jews between 1933 and 1949 was rooted in anti-Semitism but it was shaped by war. Dislike and hatred of Jews was widespread in Europe before 1914, but the Great War created the conditions to superheat these hostilities. The war made Hitler and it made large numbers of Germans receptive to his message – that the Jews were to blame for Germany’s defeat, that they were a constant source of subversion, an enemy that had to be vanquished. The years of civil unrest after 1918, on top of the horror that trench warfare inflicted on servicemen and the effect of the blockade on the home front, coarsened German society and lowered inhibitions against illegality or violence. Cadres of young men emerged who conjured up military solutions to social issues and political questions, who believed in decisive action and the use of violence. The Nazi movement was infused with the spirit of the trenches and Hitler’s leadership style reflected the German military practice of delegation, Auftragstaktik. Above all, Hitler and those around him were haunted by the defeat in November 1918 – which they attributed to the Jews. If, or when, Germany resumed a martial course, they were determined never to allow the Jews to commit such treachery again. They would strike first and destroy the Jewish enemy.
Hitler believed that Germany was at war with international Jewry, a contest on which hinged the fate of all mankind. Yet there was a puzzling gap between Nazi rhetoric and concrete policy. Judenpolitik in the first years of the Third Reich was erratic: it lacked consistency or central direction. Nevertheless, the Jews were the object of unremitting obloquy while at the same time the German population was schooled in hatred. The unofficial boycotts, sporadic violence, and a stream of legislation at local and national level sent out the message that Jews were fair game. Conversely, the practice of denying Jews the protection of the law or access to state benefits fortified the collective identity of the rest of the population as the Volksgemeinschaft – the racially defined people’s community.
The regime assumed that world Jewry cared about the Jews in Germany and that their influence could sway governments in Whitehall and Washington. The early response of the Jewish diaspora and the international community tended to confirm that perception; it made German Jews hostage to the behaviour of both. Over time it became increasingly apparent that the Jews in Germany were hardly valuable hostages, but this reality did not impinge on Nazi thinking.
Preparations for war galvanized and focused Judenpolitik in 1936–7. The German economy was straining to meet the armament targets set by Hitler, so despoliation of the Jewish population offered an attractive income stream. This set a pattern for the future: when there were tough economic choices to make, the Jews would always be squeezed the hardest. Another pattern soon took shape. Every stage in the expansion of the Third Reich, starting with the occupation of Austria, was marked by ritualized violence against Jewish populations. The brutality and plunder in the newly acquired territories in turn radicalized attitudes and practices in the Reich itself.
While the personal predilections of Hitler and Goebbels played a major role in triggering the violence of 9–10 November 1938 that came to be known by the Germans as ‘Kristallnacht’, it was also a by-product of the bellicose mood generated by the Sudeten crisis. Hitler felt that his people had not shown enough enthusiasm for war, so exposure to massive violence would toughen them up. Many of the men and women who assaulted the Jews were letting off steam after a period of extreme tension. Yet none of this explains the elaborate and deliberate degradation of Judaism; the November pogrom was also the unrestrained expression of traditional Jew-hatred. Paradoxically, it provided the pretext for the adoption of more controlled, research-based methods of persecution advocated by the SD under Heydrich. Arguably, Goebbels’ extra-marital affair with a Czech actress resulted in the SS gaining a dominant position in the formation and execution of Judenpolitik.
Once Germany was at war, the position of the Jews deteriorated sharply. The abuse and mass shooting of Jews in Poland marked a profound escalation of violence combined with a weakening of inhibitions. In this sense Operation Tannenberg was far more important in the course of anti-Jewish policy than the covert compulsory euthanasia project. The former was open and unashamed, the humiliation and killing of Jews openly celebrated; the latter was secret and stained with such ignominy that the perpetrators wished to conceal their deeds. But despite this extensive violence, the main thrust of German thinking was still directed towards a mixture of voluntary emigration and the forcible removal of Jews from areas of German habitation. The ghettos in Poland came into being when extrusion proved impractical and, like all previous Judenpolitik, ghettoization was muddled and inconsistently implemented. It generated further dilemmas for the Germans – from which they seemed miraculously freed by the defeat of France in the summer of 1940. Once again, though, the prospect of removing the Jews vanished like morning mist. As a result, conditions in the ghettos deteriorated and the death rate soared, although this was not a case of planned destruction. On the contrary, key figures in the German occupation authorities in Poland were converted to the idea of making the Polish Jews useful for the war effort. This policy created a nexus that proved hard to break once Berlin had resolved on the physical annihilation of all Jews.
The euphoria of the victory over France dissipated in the second half of 1940. Britain held out and Hitler found it impossible to cajole his allies and vassals into a strategy that might make her continued resistance impossible. Instead, Hitler opted to invade the USSR, dealing a blow against the Jewish-Bolshevik enemy, seizing the land and resources to maintain Germany’s war economy, and providing a place to which Europe’s Jews could be consigned finally. The invasion of the USSR was to be accompanied by a mass-murder campaign, Operation Tannenberg writ large. The military logisticians had also programmed mass death through starvation into their strategy: to compensate for the paucity of German resources Jews and Russians would starve. This was an unashamedly genocidal project, but it did not embrace or even impact on Jews in the rest of Europe. In fact, Operation Barbarossa generated a slight improvement in conditions in the Polish ghettos. Unfortunately, the attack on the USSR provoked resistance by communists across occupied Europe that was interpreted by Germans as evidence of Jewish subversion, the stirrings of the Jewish enemy. Reprisal actions against the Jews were taken by the army and civilian authorities in France and Serbia even before the SS considered such actions.
German military failure in the Russian campaign during 1941 triggered a further radicalization of anti-Jewish policy. Within weeks of the invasion, German armies inside Russia were being tormented by irregular forces operating in their rear areas, which they dogmatically attributed to Jewish incitement. The harassment of their supply lines by partisans only compounded the implications of failing to defeat Russia on schedule. Condemned to continue the war into 1942, the German leadership faced the prospect of a food and resource crisis. Morale on the home front was also flagging. Consequently, Hitler gave way to demands for the deportation of German Jews to the eastern occupied territories and towards the end of the year appears to have assented to a comprehensive solution of the ‘Jewish question’ across Europe. The trigger was most probably his decision to declare war on the United States, which in his mind formalized the state of hostilities between the two powers and brought into the open the global war that Germany was fighting. Driven by the determination to avoid another November 1918, and determined to punish the Jews in America by wreaking a terrible vengeance on their brethren in Europe, Hitler approved the physical annihilation of the Jews.
And yet, the European-wide genocide that unfolded from spring 1942 was no less haphazard than previous phases of anti-Jewish policy. It was low-cost and low-tech. The construction of extermination camps and the organization of deportations was never the highest priority; military exigencies always took precedence. Although the death camps were small-scale and crude constructions, it took months to build them and even then the killing apparatus was ill-designed, in need of modification. Even the manpower came mainly from non-German sources. Heydrich entrusted the planning to Adolf Eichmann, who had proved his mettle in promoting forced emigration and the logistics of mass deportations. But Eichmann had to reset the objectives to a more realistic level. The Germans managed to deport tens of thousands of Jews from western Europe in mid-1942, but they relied on extensive local assistance – which was not a given. Indeed, they would never achieve such numbers or such cooperation again over a comparable period. Apart from exceptional cases, such as Salonica in 1943 and Hungary in 1944, the Germans found themselves chasing ever more evasive Jews with ever more diminishing manpower at their disposal. Their greatest overall ‘success’ was in Poland, but here the Jews were already bottled up and the logistics were uncomplicated. Hence, over a quarter of a million Jews were conveyed from the prison-like ghetto of Warsaw to Treblinka in eight weeks on a few freight trains using one rail line. When they resumed the deportations in early 1943, however, they faced extensive evasion and resistance.
Ultimately the genocidal assault was devastating, but this outcome was not due to the scientific killing machinery or the well-considered deception techniques that the Germans employed. Auschwitz-Birkenau has come to represent the apex of genocidal technology, although in fact the entire camp evolved in fits and starts with no clear design. Rather, the catastrophic rate of killing was due to German persistence, the active or passive cooperation of the populations amongst whom the Jews dwelt, and the duration of the murderous campaigns. This last factor was largely a consequence of Allied military failure.
Despite hopes of a German collapse in the winter of 1941–42, during the early spring or late summer of 1943, and autumn 1944, the Allies proved unable to administer a fatal blow against the German armed forces, while the Nazi state was sustained by a combination of resilience and repression. Most importantly, Hitler remained in place – willing on the war effort and the war against the Jews. In a startling reversal of Judenpolitik, however, he was persuaded to allow Jews to be exploited for labour in the concentration camps and in the Reich itself. Jewish policy thus came full circle, with some Jews protected to some slight degree thanks to their economic utility. Once again, though, anti-Jewish violence erupted on the streets of German towns, and ordinary Germans showed their racial superiority by casually murdering Jews in their vicinity. As in November 1938, the mayhem was decentralized, chaotic, and contrary to central orders.
During the last hours of his life and amidst the death agony of his empire, Hitler repeated his conviction that the Jews were the cause of Germany’s misfortune and summoned his remaining followers not to repeat the humiliation of 1918. In this, at least, his Judenpolitik was consistent. Hitler’s suicide and the destruction of Germany did not mark the end of Jewish suffering, though. The fate of the Jews continued to be determined by war – although now it was the Cold War and Britain’s war against the Jews in Palestine. The immediate preoccupations of the western allies and the ideological fixation of the communists ensured that the Jewish survivors did not enjoy the retribution, restitution and reparation that they had longed for. There would be much unfinished business.