Hitler. 1936-1945: Nemesis полностью

On 20 January 1942, the conference on the ‘final solution’, postponed from 9 December, eventually took place in a large villa by the Wannsee. Alongside representatives from the Reich ministries of the Interior, Justice, and Eastern Territories, the Foreign Office, from the office of the Four-Year Plan, and from the General Government, sat Gestapo chief SS-Gruppenführer Heinrich Müller, the commanders of the Security Police in the General Government and Latvia, Karl Schoengarth and Otto Lange, together with Adolf Eichmann (the RSHA’s deportation expert, who had the task of producing a written record of the meeting).¹⁵⁷

Heydrich opened the meeting by recapitulating that Göring had given him responsibility — a reference to the mandate of the previous July — for preparing ‘the final solution of the European Jewish question’. The meeting aimed to clarify and coordinate organizational arrangements. (Later in the meeting an inconclusive attempt was made to define the status of part-Jews (Mischlinge) in the framework of deportation plans.)¹⁵⁸ Heydrich surveyed the course of anti-Jewish policy, then declared that ‘the evacuation of the Jews to the east has now emerged, with the prior permission of the Führer, as a further possible solution instead of emigration’. He spoke of gathering ‘practical experience’ in the process for ‘the coming final solution of the Jewish question’, which would embrace as many as 11 million Jews across Europe (stretching, outside German current territorial control, as far as Britain and Ireland, Switzerland, Spain, Turkey, and French north African colonies). In the gigantic deportation programme, the German-occupied territories would be combed from west to east. The deported Jews would be put to work in large labour gangs. Many — perhaps most — would die in the process. The particularly strong and hardy types who survived would have ‘to be dealt with accordingly’.

Though there was, as Eichmann later testified, explicit talk at the conference — not reflected in the minutes — of ‘killing and eliminating and exterminating (Töten und Eliminieren und Vernichten)’,¹⁵⁹ Heydrich was not orchestrating an existing and finalized programme of mass extermination in death-camps. But the Wannsee Conference was a key stepping-stone on the path to that terrible genocidal finality. A deportation programme aimed at the annihilation of the Jews through forced labour and starvation in occupied Soviet territory following the end of a victorious war was rapidly giving way to the realization that the Jews would have to be systematically destroyed before the war ended — and that the main locus of their destruction would no longer be the Soviet Union, but the territory of the General Government.¹⁶⁰

That the General Government should become the first area to implement the ‘Final Solution’ was directly requested at the conference by its representative, State Secretary Josef Bühler. He wanted the 2½ million Jews in his area — most of them incapable of work, he stressed — ‘removed’ as quickly as possible. The authorities in the area would do all they could to help expedite the process.¹⁶¹ Bühler’s hopes would be fulfilled over the next months. The regionalized killing in the districts of Lublin and Galicia was extended by spring to the whole of the General Government, as the deportation-trains began to ferry their human cargo to the extermination camps of Belzec, Sobibor, and Treblinka. By this time, a comprehensive programme of systematic annihilation of the Jews embracing the whole of German-occupied Europe was rapidly taking shape. By early June a programme had been constructed for the deportation of Jews from western Europe.¹⁶² The transports from the west began in July. Most left for the largest of the extermination camps by this time in operation, Auschwitz-Birkenau in the annexed territory of Upper Silesia. The ‘final solution’ was under way. The industrialized mass murder would now continued unabated. By the end of 1942, according to the SS’s own calculations, 4 million Jews were already dead.¹⁶³

Hitler had not been involved in the Wannsee Conference. Probably he knew it was taking place; but even this is not certain. There was no need for his involvement. He had signalled yet again in unmistakable terms in December 1941 what the fate of the Jews should be now that Germany was embroiled in another world war. By then, local and regional killing initiatives had already developed their own momentum. Heydrich was more than happy to use Hitler’s blanket authorization of deportations to the east now to expand the killing operations into an overall programme of Europe-wide genocide.