Source: Anti-Semitism and the Holocaust

Jewish men await death in a gas van.
[Photo credits: Main Commission for the Investigation of Nazi War Crimes]

Introduction

On 22 June 1941 Hitler launched Operation Barbarossa - the attackon the USSR. He was now fighting the war he had always wanted.Victory, as well as giving him control of all Europe, would provide theopportunity to destroy 'Jewish Bolshevism' and win lebensraum for theGerman master race. Defeat, on the other hand, would mean disaster.Given the colossal stakes involved, the war against the USSR was to bedifferent in kind from the war in the west: it was to be a brutal anduncompromising war to the death. At first everything went well forHitler. His forces won a series of major battles, capturing millions ofprisoners and occupying huge swathes of land. As German troopspenetrated deeper into Russia, special units of police and SS wagedan unprecedented campaign of murder against Communist officialsand Jews. This was the prelude to the Holocaust - the systematic extermination of all European Jews. A great deal of controversy surroundsthis 'Final Solution', not least the question of when, but also theprocess by which, the genocide decision was made.

A Nazi about to shoot the last Jew left alive in Vinica, Ukraine
[Photo Credit: Library of Congress]

Operation Barbarossa

American historian Richard Breitman has recently claimed that Hitlermade the fateful decision to exterminate all European Jews not laterthan January 1941, as the planning for Operation Barbarossa wentahead: the Final Solution thereafter just became a matter of 'time andtiming'. However, Breitman has provided little but circumstantialevidence to support his case. Given the lack of hard evidence, mostHolocaust historians think that the genocide decision came later. Yetthere is absolutely no doubt that Hitler was determined to defeat anddestroy 'Jewish-Bolshevists'.

On 3 March 1941 he issued a secret directive to his army highcommand insisting that 'the Bolshevik/Jewish intelligentsia' in theUSSR 'must be eliminated', in the same way that the Polish elite hadbeen annihilated. While some army leaders had opposed themassacre of Polish civilians, all seem to have accepted Hitler's call forunprecedented brutality in the USSR. In part, this reflected thearmy's increased faith in Hitler after the military successes of 1939-41.In part, it reflected the fact that most German officers shared Hitler'shatred of Bolshevism and Judaism (which they saw as one and thesame) and his belief that the demonised enemy had to be beaten,whatever the cost. In early March the army high command acceptedthat the SS should be entrusted with 'special tasks' in the conqueredareas of the USSR, and that Himmler should have special independent powers. Army directives, issued on 19 May, proclaimed that the war against the USSR would require 'ruthless and energetic actionagainst Bolshevik agitators, guerrillas, saboteurs, and Jews, and thetotal elimination of all active or passive resistance'. On 6 June 1941,army leaders ordered that political commissars (Communist Partyofficials), 'the initiators of barbaric, asiatic methods of combat', wereto be shot after being taken prisoner.

Army leaders, while accepting the need for brutal measures, werehappy to leave implementation of most of the dirty work to the SS andto the Einsatzgruppen. In June 1941 there were four Einsatzgruppen - Ato D - attached to the four army groups that would invade the USSR.Each Einsatzgruppen, roughly 1,000 men strong, was divided intosmaller units called Einsatzkommandos. Most men in the Einsatzgruppen were ordinary policemen, hurriedly seconded from various policedepartments. The officers, on the other hand, were carefully selected.Well-educated, ambitious, and successful, they were committed Nazis.Otto Ohlendorf, commander of Einsatzgruppen D, was typical. A tall,handsome 34-year-old lawyer, he held degrees in both economics and law.

Although the commanders had been briefed by Heydrich in Berlin(on 17 June 1941) and knew in general terms what was expected ofthem, the precise content of their orders is a matter of controversy.After 1945 surviving Einsatzgruppen leaders gave conflicting evidenceabout the orders they had received. At the Nuremberg trials,Ohlendorf and several other Einsatzkommando leaders, testified thatan order to kill all the Jews had been given shortly before the start ofthe campaign by Bruno Streckenbach, chief of the personnel for theReich Main Security Office (RSHA), on instructions from Himmler.However, other Einsatzgruppen leaders later testified that they hadreceived no such order until some time in August or September 1941.Furthermore Streckenbach, who was thought to be dead in 1945,emerged from a Soviet prison camp in the mid-1950s and deniedhaving given the order. Three of the Nuremberg defendants thenretracted their statements, saying that they had been made in anattempt to save Ohlendorf from the gallows.

To further complicate matters, it seems that different Einsatzgruppen did slightly different things at slightly different times inthe summer of 1941. Generally, after entering Russian towns, theyrounded up and shot Communist leaders and Jews. In some areas,especially the Baltic States and the Ukraine, where anti-Semitism wasdeep-rooted and where Jews were seen as representatives of the USSR,the Einsatzgruppen were helped by the local populace who enthusiastically joined in pogrom-style killings. After a year under Soviet rule,many people in the Baltic States had their own scores to settle. SomeUkrainians had the scores of many years to settle.

The Einsatzgruppen leaders had certainly been given the task ofliquidating potential enemies. However, by no means all Jewish menand relatively few Jewish women and children were killed inJune/July. This very much suggests that there was no pre-invasiongenocide order. Swiss historian Philippe Burrin has also pointed outthat 4,000 policemen, not specially trained in mass killing techniques,were hardly likely to be thought sufficient to kill five million RussianJews. While most historians accept that the extensive shootings of Jewsin June/July marked a 'quantum leap' in the direction of genocide,there is a world of difference between savage violence and cold-blooded, systematic genocide. In the first weeks of OperationBarbarossa, Soviet commissars were more likely to be shot than ordinary Jews. Moreover some of the first (and worst) outrages againstJews were committed not by the Einsatzgruppen but by local people.

On 2 July Heydrich (pictured above) issued written instructions to the Einsatzgruppen commanders. Leading Communist officials, 'Jews in theservice of the Party or the State' and other extremist elements were tobe executed and pogroms by local people should be 'encouraged'.On 17 July Heydrich issued an order that all Jews among Russian prisoners of war were to be executed by the SS. While neither of thesedirectives is proof of the existence of a genocide order, both show thatNazi attitudes were hardening. Nevertheless, Alfred Rosenberg, headof the occupied Soviet territory (the Eastern Territories), was still notpreparing for genocide. For Rosenberg, the final solution was still theresettlement of the Jews in indeterminate territory somewhere in theeast. If an extermination programme for Soviet Jewry existed, heseems to have known nothing about it. It seems unlikely that Hitlerwould not have informed Rosenberg of a decision of such magnitudeand of such vital concern to him. There is also evidence that not evenHimmler was preparing for genocide. A July 1941 plan suggests that,while he expected a brief period of killing, he then envisaged massivepopulation movement. Over a 30-year period, some 31 million peoplefrom the Eastern Territories were to be expelled to Siberia andreplaced by 4.5 million Germans. The deportees would includeSoviet Jews. This does not suggest that the Holocaust had yet beenplanned. The final evidence is statistical. Up until mid-August 1941,about 50,000 Soviet Jews are thought to have been killed: this was amodest figure given that 500,000 were to be killed in the next fourmonths.

Browning thinks that an elated Hitler, confident that victory overthe USSR was at hand, gave signals to carry out 'racial cleansing' inmid-July 1941. Apparently master of all of Europe, he no longer hadto worry about world opinion. Interestingly, both Himmler andHeydrich were in close proximity to his headquarters from 15-20 July.Here was an opportunity for Hitler to have confided new orders.Certainly events now began to gather momentum. In late July Hitlercommitted two SS brigades (over 11,000 men) to assist the overburdened Einsatzgruppen. This was only the start of the build-up. By theend of 1941 there were some 60,000 men in Einsatzgruppen or policebattalions on Soviet territory - sufficient manpower to kill on a massive scale.

In August 1941 Himmler (pictured above) travelled through much of the EasternTerritories and was thus in a position to confirm the new policy. Thefact that he issued personal instructions probably explains whydifferent Einsatzgruppen leaders learned of the new turn in policy atdifferent times. Whatever the precise time-scale, there is no doubtthat by late August the killing of Jews was on a different scale. Jewishwomen and children were now routinely massacred. In June/Julymost of the victims were shot individually by firing squad. By August,however, hundreds at a time were forced to lie in or kneel at the edgeof a trench (which they had often dug themselves) before being shotin the back of the head.

The Final Solution: the Decision

By September 1941 the mass slaughter of Russian Jews was wellunderway. However, what Hitler had in store for Jews in other parts ofEurope remains unclear. Browning is convinced that Hitler wasconsidering killing all Jews in July 1941 and asked Himmler andHeydrich to come up with a genocide 'feasibility study': after all, it wasillogical to kill Russian Jews and then transport Polish Jews into thevacuum thus created. In Browning's view, the mass murder of Jews wasthe first use to which German victory was going to be put: 'in theeuphoria of seeming victory [in July 1941] Hitler solicited a plan toextend the killing process already underway in Russia to the rest ofEurope's Jews'.

On 31 July Goering sent the following document to Heydrich:

I hereby charge you with making all necessary preparations with regardto organisational, technical and material matters for bringing about acomplete solution of the Jewish question within the German sphere ofinfluence in Europe. ... I request you further to send me, in the near future, an overall plan covering the organisational, technical and materialmeasures necessary for the accomplishment of the final solution of theJewish question which we desire.

Goering (pictured above) did not initiate but only signed this authorisation, which wasactually prepared by Heydrich's office. (Heydrich was thus essentiallygiving orders to himself) Nevertheless, historian Raul Hilbergregards the Goering document as a critical 'turning point'. Browningagrees. Given that the SS already had far-reaching authority, Heydrichdid not need Goering's authorisation to continue expulsion/extermination activities. The 31 July document thus suggests that Heydrichnow knew he faced a new and awesome task that dwarfed even the Einsatzgruppen massacres.

However, other historians are not convinced. Some think the 31July document simply represented an extension of Heydrich's responsibility for the Jewish question beyond Germany's borders. They pointout that neither Heydrich nor Goering, in fact, behaved in the daysfollowing 31 July as if the decision to kill all Europe's Jews had beentaken. There are no signs in August of frenzied activity to organise agenocide programme.

Historians like Burrin and Kershaw are not convinced that thesurge of killings in the USSR meant that Hitler had yet decided to killall of Europe's Jews. They think that Hitler's decision came later -- either in September or October 1941 - and had little to do with theeuphoria of victory. 'Everything seems to suggest that there was adecision-making process lasting several weeks before the fatal verdictwas handed down in September', thinks Burrin. Kershaw stresses that'unequivocal signs of actual planning of systematic genocide inPoland, the key area, are not to be found before October'. Burrinand Kershaw believe that Hitler finally decided on genocide more outof a sense of desperation than of elation. By September 1941Operation Barbarossa was not going to plan. The campaign, whichthe Germans had anticipated would last no more than four months,was far from over. By August, Hitler was increasingly anxious. Thelonger the USSR kept up the fight, the greater the danger of guerrillawar. Thus there was a need for even harsher methods to keep theoccupied areas under control. Moreover, German casualtiescontinued to mount. According to Burrin, Hitler decided that theJews would have to foot the bill for the spilling of so much Germanblood. The central decision in late September or early October,claims Burrin, 'had arisen from a murderous rage increasingly exacerbated by the ordeal of the failure of his campaign in Russia'. Bykilling his archetypal enemies, he was demonstrating his will to fightto the end.

It is, of course, possible that Hitler gave two extermination orders:one concerning Russian Jews in July 1941 and another later in 1941affecting the rest of European Jewry. This is Browning's view. Havingordered the killing of Russian Jews and the setting up of a feasibilitystudy, Browning believes that Hitler vacillated between July andSeptember - his mood fluctuating as the fortunes of war in the USSRfluctuated. From mid-September 1941 until mid-October 1941,however, the fighting suddenly swung in Germany's favour. At somestage in September/October 1941, with the second peak of Germanmilitary success, Browning thinks Hitler unleashed the second greatintensification of the Holocaust.

Given that documentation is scarce and that most of the chiefpeople responsible for the Holocaust died before the end of the war,the debate about the precise timing of the Final Solution looks set tocontinue. But most Holocaust historians now accept Burrin's viewthat the pieces of the Holocaust fell into place between 18 Septemberand 18 October 1941. The vast majority also believe that it was Hitlerwho initiated the Holocaust. Nothing so radical could have begunwithout his approval. Admittedly the factors which led to his decision remain speculative, but events do seem to have been propelling himtowards a violent solution to the Jewish problem. The slaughter ofSoviet Jews would enable Hitler to break out of the vicious circle inwhich military success brought millions more Jews under Germancontrol. Once he resolved to kill all Russian Jews it was but a small stepto decide to kill all Jews. Just as with the euthanasia programme,Hitler seems to have been anxious to avoid associating himself tooclosely with the Holocaust. Thus he probably left it to Goering andHimmler to sort matters out between themselves, having given themthe go-ahead in general terms. It is possible that Hitler authorised Himmler to produce a solution to the Jewish question withoutenquiring too closely into what would be involved. But since any genocide solution required the involvement of numerous state agencies,some form of authorisation from Hitler was necessary. At no stagewere local officials acting on their own initiative. They were obeyingorders from Himmler, who in turn was obeying Hitler's orders.Himmler later said: 'I do nothing that the Fuhrer does not know.'

The Final Solution in the USSR

By mid-August 1941 all the Einsatzgruppen interpreted their task as theextermination of all Soviet Jews. Karl Jager, head of Einsatzkommando 3 of Einsatzgruppen A, kept extensive execution records. In July 1941,the kommando killed 4,293 Jews, of whom only 135 were women. InSeptember 1941, by contrast, the kommando killed 56,459 Jews - 15,104men, 26,243 women and 15,112 children. By 25 November Jagerreported the following number of deaths: 1,064 Communists, 56partisans, 653 mentally ill, 44 Poles, 28 Russian prisoners, 5 Gypsies, 1Armenian, and 136,421 Jews. The situation was the same elsewhere.Perhaps the most notorious killing took place outside Kiev (theUSSR's third largest city) in September 1941. A few days after thecapture of the town on 19 September 1941 a huge explosion killedmany German soldiers in the Continental Hotel, the German armyheadquarters. In reprisal, 33,771 Jews were shot, over a three-dayperiod, at the Babi Yar ravine on the outskirts of Kiev.

Not only the Einsatzgruppen carried out the killings. Auxiliaryforces, recruited from people of the Baltic States and the Ukraine,were also willing executioners. So were ordinary German soldiers.The mass shootings of Jews had the support of the army authorities.The following order was issued by Field-Marshal von Reichenau on 10October 1941:

The main aim of the campaign against the Jewish-Bolshevist system isthe complete destruction of its forces and the extermination of theasiatic influence on the sphere of European culture. As a result, thetroops have to take on tasks which go beyond the conventional purely military ones. In the eastern sphere the soldier is not simply a fighter according to the rules of war, but the supporter of a ruthless racialideology and the avenger of all the bestialities which have been inflictedon the German nation and those ethnic groups related to it. For thisreason soldiers must show full understanding for the necessity for the severe but just atonement required of the Jewish subhumans. It also hasthe further purpose of nipping in the bud uprisings in the rear of the Wehrmacht which experience shows are invariably instigated by Jews.

On 28 October, after Hitler described Reichenau's order as excellent,the army high command instructed all its field commanders to issueorders along the same lines.

After 1945 the Wehrmacht tried to hide the fact that it was involvedin the Holocaust. However, there is now little doubt about itscomplicity in the USSR killings - at every level. Army leaders gave thecommands and ordinary soldiers willingly carried them out. Indeedthey sometimes undertook brutal 'cleansing' operations on their owninitiative. The 'primeval' fighting on the eastern front in the SecondWorld War seems to have had a particularly brutalising effect onGerman troops. The nature of the war - the terrible climatic conditions, the horrendous losses (the Germans suffered some six millioncasualties in the USSR), the cultural differences between the invadersand the occupied - resulted in German soldiers becoming indifferentto death and suffering. The murder of tens of thousands of Jews wasviewed by many as an unavoidable by-product of the battle forsurvival: probably few had serious misgivings about it. The Germanarmy was thus a crucial part of the genocidal machinery in the USSR.

The following description of a killing in the Ukraine in 1942 wasgiven by Hermann Graebe, a German engineer, to a Nurembergtribunal in 1945.

The people who had got off the lorries - men, women, and children ofall ages - had to undress on the orders of an SS man who was carryinga riding or dog whip in his hand. ... Without weeping or crying outthese people undressed and stood together in family groups, embracing each other and saying good-bye while waiting for a sign from another SSman who stood on the edge of the ditch and who also had a whip.During the 15 minutes which I stood near the ditch, I did not hear asingle complaint or a plea for mercy. I watched a family of about eight,a man and a woman, both about fifty years old with their children of about one, eight, and ten, as well as two grown-up daughters of abouttwenty and twenty-four. An old woman with snow-white hair held aone-year-old child in her arms singing to it and tickling it. The childsqueaked with delight.The married couple looked on with tears in theireyes. The father held the ten-year-old boy by the hand speaking softly to him.The boy was struggling to hold back the tears.The father pointed afinger to the sky and stroked his head and seemed to be explainingsomething to him. At this moment, the SS man near the ditch called outsomething to his comrade. The latter counted off about twenty people,and ordered them behind the mound. The family of which I have just spoken was among them. ... I walked round the mound and stood infront of the huge grave. The bodies were lying so tightly packed togetherthat only their heads showed, from almost all of which blood ran downover their shoulders. Some were still moving. Others raised their handsand turned their heads to show they were still alive. The ditch was already three quarters full. I estimate that it already held about a thousand bodies. I turned my eyes towards the man doing the shooting. Hewas an SS man; he sat, legs swinging, on the edge of the ditch. He had anautomatic rifle resting on his knees and was smoking a cigarette. Thepeople, completely naked, climbed down steps which had been cut into the clay wall of the ditch, stumbled over the heads of those lying thereand stopped at the spot indicated by the SS man. They lay down on topof the dead or wounded; some stroking those still living and spokequietly to them. Then I heard a series of rifle shots. I looked into theditch and saw the bodies contorting or, the heads already inert, sinking on the corpses beneath."

The following extract was written in January 1942 by Dr RudolfLange, responsible for Einsatzgruppen operations in Latvia:

The aim of Einsaztkommando 2 from the start was a radical solution ofthe Jewish problem through the execution of all Jews. For this purposecomprehensive purges were carried out in the whole area of our operations by special teams with the help of selected forces from the Latvian auxiliary police (mainly relatives of Latvians who had been abducted or murdered by the Bolsheviks). In early October, the number of Jewsexecuted in the kommando's sphere of operations was about 30,000. Inaddition, a few thousand Jews have been eliminated by Latvian self-defence formations off their own bat after they had been given suitable encouragement....

It was impossible to achieve the complete elimination of Jews fromLatvia in view of the economic factors and, in particular, the demands ofthe army.

As the above source makes clear, economic concerns resulted insome Jews escaping immediate death. This issue produced considerable friction between civilian authorities and the army on the onehand, and the SS on the other. Orders from Berlin in December1941 made it clear that 'economic considerations are to be regardedas fundamentally irrelevant in the settlement of the problem'.However, in practice, a compromise was struck between the SS andthe army and economic agencies, whereby a few Jews were given astay of execution for labour purposes. Nevertheless, over the nexttwo years the Russian ghettos were progressively liquidated, firstthrough piecemeal selections of those no longer capable of work,and then, more comprehensively, during the so-called 'secondsweep' starting in the summer of 1942.

The numbers of Jews killed in the course of the Einsatzgruppen operations in the USSR can only be estimated. During the first sweep fromJune 1941 to April 1942 some 750,000 were probably murdered. Afurther 1.5 million may have been killed in the second sweep of 1942-3. Most of the victims were shot - sometimes by machine gun. Anumber died in special gas vans, used from December 1941. Othersdied in labour camps where they were worked to death or succumbedto disease brought about by malnutrition.

It was not just Jews who suffered. The fate of the non-Jewish peoplesin the occupied zones depended essentially on the Nazis' conceptionof where they came on the racial scale. The Estonians, Latvians andLithuanians, who were considered partially German, were treatedreasonably well. Other peoples were not so fortunate. The 40 millionUkrainians, whose hatred for Soviet oppression was so intense thatmost welcomed the Germans at first, were soon in the grip of a terrorsimilar to that in Poland. Disobedience of the most trivial kindresulted in summary execution. Tens of thousands of able-bodiedUkrainians were transported to Germany as slave labourers.

The Fate of the German Jews

From August 1941 it became illegal for German Jews to emigratevoluntarily. On 1 September all Jews were forced to wear the yellowstar of David sewn on their clothing, a move which facilitated theimplementation of further anti-Semitic measures. Later that monthHitler declared that the Reich should be liberated of Jews 'as rapidlyas possible'. In October Eichmann began transporting German Jewseastwards. Given the situation in Germany, it was not too difficult tofind volunteers. Those Jews who were to be 'resettled' in the east wereallowed to take with them some money, a case or two of luggage andfood for the journey. (The rest of their property was confiscated bythe state.) Whatever feelings of optimism the 20,000 Jews who weredeported to Lodz in October 1941 had ended as soon as they reachedtheir destination. Some of those deemed incapable of working werekilled on arrival. The rest were dumped in the over-crowded ghetto,where many died from starvation and disease. Protests from theauthorities in Warthegau about their inability to absorb more Jews ledto a temporary end of the transportations to Lodz on 4 November. Bythen there were other - worse - destinations.

In November and December 1941 some 25,000 Reich Jews weredeported to Riga, Minsk and Kovno, towns in the Ostland - a territoryin which the Einsatzgruppen operated. (See map) Events inOstland suggest that, if the ultimate fate of Jews was not in doubt, theactual timing and form of killing was largely improvised, with membersof each transport having different experiences depending on whereand when they arrived. Some Jews were spared to eke out a survival inthe ghettos or nearby labour camps. But in late November 1941, fivetransports of Jews were massacred at Kovno soon after their arrival andwithout prior screening to select those fit for labour. The same thing happened in Riga on 30 November 1941. 14,000 Jews from Riga itselfwere massacred, as well as l,000 Jews who had arrived from Berlin thenight before. On 8 December another 13,000 were massacred on theoutskirts of Riga. After the war the Ostland SS police leader claimedthat Himmler had told him (in November) that 'all Jews in theOstland must be exterminated right down to the very last one'. Evenso, it seems to have been presumed that there would be a Jewish presence for some time in both Riga and Minsk. Trains of Jewish deporteescontinued to arrive in both towns until the spring of 1942.

The Start of Gassing

Until the winter of 1941-2 the main method of eliminating Jews wasmass shootings. While effective in terms of the number killed, thismethod had some disadvantages, not least the fact that suchmassacres were hard to conceal, as well as occasionally producingpsychological stress among the killers. In August 1941 Himmlercommissioned his SS technical advisers to test different ways of killingand recommend those which were more efficient and more'humane'. Tests with explosives proved to be a gruesome failure. Notsurprisingly the SS soon hit upon the idea of gas, which had proved tobe a highly effective method in the euthanasia programme. Added tothis was the fact that Hitler's Chancellery was eager to redeploy the T-4 personnel.

The initial gassing experiment occurred in the Warthegau. By theautumn of 1941 conditions in the Lodz ghetto were appalling andthousands more Jews were still expected. In October Wilhelm Koppe,the area's police chief, aware of the thinking in Berlin, appointedHerbert Lange to find a suitable place for the killing of Warthegau'sJews. (Koppe had already used a special unit commanded by Langein 1940 to kill some 1,500 mental patients.) In early November Langerecommended Chelmno, some 40 miles north-west of Lodz. An SSteam set about converting an old mansion into a barracks where Jewswould arrive and undress. A forest clearing, some three miles fromthe village, was chosen as the site for a mass grave. The first victims in December 1941 were killed in gas vans, the exhaust fumes fromwhich were taken by pipes into the sealed rear. By January 1942 apermanent gas chamber was in use. Chelmno was a pure killingcentre: it had no labour camp. By the time it was destroyed in March1943, some 140,000 Jews (and a few thousand Gypsies, Poles andRussians) are thought to have died there.

Himmler selected Odilo Globocnik, the Lublin police chief, tooversee the killing of Jews in the General Government. Dozens of SSand ex-T-4 men were assigned to him in the autumn of 1941. His taskwas to construct and run a number of death camps in the Lublinregion. Work at Belzec, the first of three sites, began in November1941. Meanwhile, at Auschwitz (in Upper Silesia), the first gassingexperiments on Russian prisoners of war took place in September1941...cont.