Hitler. 1936-1945: Nemesis полностью

Again, the Warthegau played a direct part in events. On 18 September, Arthur Greiser, Reich Governor and Gauleiter of the Warthegau, received a letter from Himmler. ‘The Führer wishes,’ ran the missive, ‘that the Old Reich and the Protectorate [Bohemia and Moravia] are emptied and freed of Jews from the west to the east as soon as possible.’ Himmler told Greiser that it was his intention to deport the Jews first into the Polish territories which had come to the Reich two years earlier, then ‘next spring to expel them still further to the east’. With this in mind, he was sending 60,000 Jews to the Lodz ghetto, in Greiser’s province, for the winter.⁹⁹

Around the middle of September, then, Hitler had bowed to the pressure to deport the German and Czech Jews to the east, some of them via a temporary stay in Lodz (where the ghetto was already known to be seriously overcrowded). It was the trigger to a crucial new phase in the gradual emergence of a comprehensive programme for genocide. Initiatives would tumble out, one after the other, during the next few months in widening the scope of the killing.

The decision to begin deporting the German, Austrian, and Czech Jews to the east, while the war was still raging, was a fateful one. It brought ‘the final solution of the Jewish question’ throughout the whole of Europe a massive step closer. We can only speculate on how it was arrived at, only surmise the course of the conversation between Hitler and Himmler during or after lunch on 16 September.

It would have stayed, almost certainly, at the level of terrible generalities. A start in the full-scale resettlement programme, and, in particular, in implementing Heydrich’s plan for a ‘total solution of the Jewish Question’, Himmler perhaps argued, could be made by transporting the Reich and Protectorate Jews to the east. This would be a deserved retaliation for the Soviet deportation of the Volga Germans. It would meet the wishes of the Party. It would address the complaints of the Gauleiter by relieving the housing problems of the big cities. And it would — an argument sure to impress Hitler — prevent the seditious undermining of morale by Jews spreading disaffection on the home front. Space for the deported Jews, Himmler perhaps continued, could be found for the time being in abandoned Soviet labour camps. There, they could be put to work until they perished. Any ‘dangerous elements’ could be liquidated immediately, along with those Jews incapable of working. Perhaps acknowledging transport difficulties, Himmler would have accepted that many of the Jews could only in the first instance be sent as far as Poland, before further dispatch to Russia the following spring or summer when, it was presumed, the war there would finally be over. It is unlikely that details were discussed.

However, even when it was agreed that the Reich Jews should be deported in stages, there remained the question of what to do with the millions of Jews in eastern Europe, particularly in Poland. Hans Frank had been promised the speedy removal of the Jews from the General Government. Arthur Greiser was desperate to deport the Jews from the Warthegau. If Himmler raised these issues, he was probably given the green light to ‘solve the problem’ as best he could, within Poland itself, making a start on the Jews who were unable to work.

The question of the consumption of scarce food resources was a crucial consideration, a vital element in the gathering whirlwind of extermination.¹⁰⁰ Feeding ‘burdensome existences (Ballastexistenzen)’ had been a central part of the thinking behind the ‘euthanasia action’ in the Reich itself. In the east, the inhumanity towards the subjugated and despised ‘inferior peoples’ meant that the most brutal stance imaginable was adopted on this issue. As the war expanded, and the problems of ensuring food supplies mounted, civilian and military authorities pressed all the harder for savings to be made at the cost of political, ideological, and racial enemies — above all, the Jews. Hitler’s own views would have made him open to any suggestion by Himmler that Jews who could not work — the elderly, the infirm, children, for example — should be liquidated.¹⁰¹ In these very days, Hitler was telling Goebbels that it was necessary for Leningrad to ‘disappear completely’. It would be impossible, even on taking it, to feed its 5 million population. Where would the food supplies and transport for them come from? he asked. The town where Bolshevism began would be razed to the ground — a ‘hard but justifiable nemesis of history’, as Goebbels put it.¹⁰² Hitler’s conclusion about the necessary fate of the Jews about this time was no milder.