THE FINAL SOLUTION [ 1941 - 1945 ] - PART 1
[ t h e f i n a l s o l u t i o n ]
[ 1 9 4 1 - 4 5 ]
On 22 June 1941 Hitler launched Operation Barbarossa - the attack on the USSR. He was now fighting the war he had always wanted. Victory, as well as giving him control of all Europe, would provide the opportunity to destroy 'Jewish Bolshevism' and win lebensraum for the German master race. Defeat, on the other hand, would mean disaster. Given the colossal stakes involved, the war against the USSR was to be different in kind from the war in the west: it was to be a brutal and uncompromising war to the death. At first everything went well for Hitler. His forces won a series of major battles, capturing millions of prisoners and occupying huge swathes of land. As German troops penetrated deeper into Russia, special units of police and SS waged an unprecedented campaign of murder against Communist officials and Jews. This was the prelude to the Holocaust - the systematic extermination of all European Jews. A great deal of controversy surrounds this 'Final Solution', not least the question of when, but also the process by which, the genocide decision was made.
Operation Barbarossa
American historian Richard Breitman has recently claimed that Hitler made the fateful decision to exterminate all European Jews not later than January 1941, as the planning for Operation Barbarossa went ahead: the Final Solution thereafter just became a matter of 'time and timing'. However, Breitman has provided little but circumstantial evidence to support his case. Given the lack of hard evidence, most Holocaust historians think that the genocide decision came later. Yet there is absolutely no doubt that Hitler was determined to defeat and destroy 'Jewish-Bolshevists'.
On 3 March 1941 he issued a secret directive to his army high command insisting that 'the Bolshevik/Jewish intelligentsia' in the USSR 'must be eliminated', in the same way that the Polish elite had been annihilated. While some army leaders had opposed the massacre of Polish civilians, all seem to have accepted Hitler's call for unprecedented brutality in the USSR. In part, this reflected the army's increased faith in Hitler after the military successes of 1939-41. In part, it reflected the fact that most German officers shared Hitler's hatred of Bolshevism and Judaism (which they saw as one and the same) and his belief that the demonised enemy had to be beaten, whatever the cost. In early March the army high command accepted that the SS should be entrusted with 'special tasks' in the conquered areas 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 action against Bolshevik agitators, guerrillas, saboteurs, and Jews, and the total elimination of all active or passive resistance'. On 6 June 1941, army leaders ordered that political commissars (Communist Party officials), 'the initiators of barbaric, asiatic methods of combat', were to be shot after being taken prisoner.
Army leaders, while accepting the need for brutal measures, were happy to leave implementation of most of the dirty work to the SS and to the Einsatzgruppen. In June 1941 there were four Einsatzgruppen - A to D - attached to the four army groups that would invade the USSR. Each Einsatzgruppen, roughly 1,000 men strong, was divided into smaller units called Einsatzkommandos. Most men in the Einsatzgruppen were ordinary policemen, hurriedly seconded from various police departments. 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 of them, the precise content of their orders is a matter of controversy. After 1945 surviving Einsatzgruppen leaders gave conflicting evidence about the orders they had received. At the Nuremberg trials, Ohlendorf and several other Einsatzkommando leaders, testified that an order to kill all the Jews had been given shortly before the start of the campaign by Bruno Streckenbach, chief of the personnel for the Reich Main Security Office (RSHA), on instructions from Himmler. However, other Einsatzgruppen leaders later testified that they had received 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 denied having given the order. Three of the Nuremberg defendants then retracted their statements, saying that they had been made in an attempt to save Ohlendorf from the gallows.
To further complicate matters, it seems that different Einsatzgruppen did slightly different things at slightly different times in the summer of 1941. Generally, after entering Russian towns, they rounded up and shot Communist leaders and Jews. In some areas, especially the Baltic States and the Ukraine, where anti-Semitism was deep-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. Some Ukrainians had the scores of many years to settle.
The Einsatzgruppen leaders had certainly been given the task of liquidating potential enemies. However, by no means all Jewish men and relatively few Jewish women and children were killed in June/July. This very much suggests that there was no pre-invasion genocide order. Swiss historian Philippe Burrin has also pointed out that 4,000 policemen, not specially trained in mass killing techniques, were hardly likely to be thought sufficient to kill five million Russian Jews. While most historians accept that the extensive shootings of Jews in 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 Operation Barbarossa, Soviet commissars were more likely to be shot than ordinary Jews. Moreover some of the first (and worst) outrages against Jews were committed not by the Einsatzgruppen but by local people.
On 2 July Heydrich (pictured) issued written instructions to the Einsatzgruppen commanders. Leading Communist officials, 'Jews in the service of the Party or the State' and other extremist elements were to be 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 these directives is proof of the existence of a genocide order, both show that Nazi attitudes were hardening. Nevertheless, Alfred Rosenberg, head of the occupied Soviet territory (the Eastern Territories), was still not preparing for genocide. For Rosenberg, the final solution was still the resettlement of the Jews in indeterminate territory somewhere in the east. If an extermination programme for Soviet Jewry existed, he seems to have known nothing about it. It seems unlikely that Hitler would not have informed Rosenberg of a decision of such magnitude and of such vital concern to him. There is also evidence that not even Himmler was preparing for genocide. A July 1941 plan suggests that, while he expected a brief period of killing, he then envisaged massive population movement. Over a 30-year period, some 31 million people from the Eastern Territories were to be expelled to Siberia and replaced by 4.5 million Germans. The deportees would include Soviet Jews. This does not suggest that the Holocaust had yet been planned. The final evidence is statistical. Up until mid-August 1941, about 50,000 Soviet Jews are thought to have been killed: this was a modest figure given that 500,000 were to be killed in the next four months.
Browning thinks that an elated Hitler, confident that victory over the USSR was at hand, gave signals to carry out 'racial cleansing' in mid-July 1941. Apparently master of all of Europe, he no longer had to worry about world opinion. Interestingly, both Himmler and Heydrich 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 Hitler committed two SS brigades (over 11,000 men) to assist the overburdened Einsatzgruppen. This was only the start of the build-up. By the end of 1941 there were some 60,000 men in Einsatzgruppen or police battalions on Soviet territory - sufficient manpower to kill on a massive scale.
In August 1941 Himmler (pictured) travelled through much of the Eastern Territories and was thus in a position to confirm the new policy. The fact that he issued personal instructions probably explains why different Einsatzgruppen leaders learned of the new turn in policy at different times. Whatever the precise time-scale, there is no doubt that by late August the killing of Jews was on a different scale. Jewish women and children were now routinely massacred. In June/July most 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 edge of a trench (which they had often dug themselves) before being shot in the back of the head.
|
