Longerich Peter. Heinrich Himmler: A Life
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The first five transports intended for Riga, with around 5,000 people from
the Reich, were therefore diverted to Kaunas, where all the deportees were
shot by members of Einsatzkommando 3 in Fort IX of the historic fortress.
63
Meanwhile more mass murders were taking place in the Riga ghetto.
Between 29 November and 1 December the local HSSPF had around
4,000 Latvian Jews and, on 8 and 9 December, probably more than 20,000
inhabitants of the ghetto shot.
64
While in Soviet custody, Jeckeln stated that
he had received the order to liquidate the ghetto from Himmler himself.
65
Moreover, during the first massacre a thousand Jews who had just been
deported from Berlin were shot immediately on their arrival in the early
morning of 30 November. However, after this mass murder Himmler called
a halt to the murder of Jews from Reich territory for the following months;
he had also attempted to prevent the shooting of the Berlin Jews. There is a
relevant entry in Himmler’s office diary for 30 November which states:
‘Jewish transport from Berlin: do not liquidate.’
66
The phone-call, howev-
er, came too late; the massacre had already occurred.
67
Himmler then
threatened Jeckeln, in a wireless telegram dated 1 December, that he would
‘punish’ ‘independent actions and contraventions’ of ‘the guidelines that
I have issued or the Reich Security Main Office has given out in my name’
concerning how ‘the Jews resettled to the Ostland area’ are to ‘be treated’.
At the same time, he summoned Jeckeln and discussed the ‘Jewish question’
with him on 4 December.
68
The choice of words indicates that Jeckeln had
not contravened an express order of Himmler’s, but rather had not correctly
understood the policy contained in Himmler’s ‘guidelines’ (which we do
not know). In contrast to those living in the target areas, the Jews deported
from the Reich in the autumn of 1941 were not (yet) to be killed en masse.
It is not surprising that Jeckeln had ‘misunderstood’ Himmler. In the
autumn of 1941 more and more leading Nazis could be heard talking openly
about the coming ‘annihilation’ or ‘extermination’ of the Jews. At dinner
on 25 October Hitler once again recalled his ‘prophecy’ of 30 January 1939,
and told his guests among other things that it was ‘a good thing if people are
scared by talk that we are exterminating the Jews’.
69
The weekly journal
Das Reich published a leader article by Goebbels in its issue of 16 November
1941 in which he too recalled Hitler’s prophecy of 30 January 1939, and
commented: ‘We are experiencing the realization of this prophecy and the
Jews are meeting a fate that, though hard, is more than merited.’ ‘World
Jewry’, according to Goebbels, was now undergoing ‘a gradual process of
550 from mass murder to the ‘final solution’
annihilation’. Two days later Rosenberg spoke at a press conference of the
impending ‘biological elimination of the whole of European Jewry’.
70
It
was probably not a coincidence that this statement of Rosenberg’s was
preceded by a discussion with Himmler on 15 November lasting several
hours, which, among other things, was concerned with Jewish policy.
71
Evidently it was the leadership’s intention to extend the ‘solution of the
Jewish question’ beyond the murders that had hitherto been limited to
specific areas in order to pursue a still more radical ‘final solution’, even if
they were not yet clear about the ‘how’, the ‘where’, and the ‘when’ of a
programme of ‘annihilation’ that was being demanded with increasing
stridency. The mood within the top leadership circles can only be described
as murderous.
This matched the situation in the occupied territories. It was not a
coincidence that a variety of functionaries on the ‘periphery’ seized the
initiative to embark on or advocate mass murders of Jews more or less
simultaneously. The deportations were directed to ghettos that were already
completely full up, to camps which did not yet exist (Riga, Mogilev), or
to key regions that were envisaged as settlement areas for ethnic Germans.
In this way ‘impossible situations’ were being brought about quite system-
atically.
During these months Himmler behaved as he had in July–August when it
came to the inclusion of women and children in the mass murder. The
initiative for the intensification of Jewish policy—in this case, the start of the
deportations—once again came from Hitler, but Himmler, like other lead-
ing functionaries, intuited such a decision, felt his way forward, and acted in
advance of it and took on an active role as soon as the time was ripe. The
first suggestion that gas might be used as a method of murder appears to have
come from him; he took advice from the experts who had acquired relevant
experience in the context of the ‘Euthanasia’ programme; he made sugges-
tions, adopted proposals such as that from Globocnik to establish an exter-
mination camp in Belzec, gave the initiators enough space to develop their
ideas, but intervened if his subordinates went too far. Thus the murder
process was typically set in motion by the tension between, on the one
hand, orders that had been framed in general terms and were intended to be
understood intuitively, and on the other, individual initiatives on the part of
those who were responsible at the local level. At the same time, the
leadership—and that meant very largely Himmler himself—could intervene
as required in order to speed up or slow down the process.
from mass murder to the ‘final solution’ 551
On the evening of 7 December Himmler dined at Hitler’s headquarters.
Afterwards they discussed the most recent world political events, as is clear
from Himmler’s office diary: ‘Japan’s declaration of war on America and
England.’ As a result of Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor, which immediately
preceded its declaration of war, the Second World War had finally become a
‘world war’.
As an ally of Japan, Hitler was determined to declare war on the United
States. From his point of view this was a relatively risk-free undertaking, as
America’s armed forces would be tied down in the Pacific for years, while in
the meantime he could bring his European war to a successful conclusion
and in any case could attack American transports to Europe by sea at will.
On 12 December, at a special session of the Reichstag, Hitler officially
declared war as an ally of Japan, a decision that was enthusiastically received
by the Nazi members of parliament, among whom was Reichstag deputy
Himmler.
72
On the following day Himmler took part in a meeting of the Gauleiters
and Reich leaders which was held in Hitler’s private rooms in the Reich
Chancellery. Hitler made some observations about the critical situation on
the eastern front, as well as about the situation created by the declaration of
war on the United States. As Goebbels noted, he referred once more to his
‘prophecy’ of 30 January 1939: ‘As far as the Jewish question is concerned,
the Fu
¨
hrer is determined to sort things out. He prophesied to the Jews that if
they once more brought about a world war they would bring about their
own annihilation. That wasn’t just words. The world war has happened; the
annihilation of the Jews must be the necessary consequence. We must treat
this question without any sentimentality.’ To feel any compassion was
inappropriate. ‘Those responsible for this bloody conflict [ . . . ] will have
to pay with their lives’ for the German losses.
73
However radical these statements were, they did not differ in tone from
the earlier threats of annihilation that Hitler, Rosenberg, and Goebbels had
been making during the previous months. Thus they represent neither a
change of policy nor a ‘fundamental decision’ in Jewish policy.
74
They were
simply a further demand to extend and speed up the mass murder of the
Jews that had been in progress for months. When Himmler had a lengthy
meeting with Hitler on 18 December his notepad contained numerous
points for discussion, which in the first instance referred to the organization,
equipment, deployment, and appointments of the armed SS, but also issues
concerning the order police. However, he had noted the ‘Jewish question’
552 from mass murder to the ‘final solution’
as the first point, and wrote next to it, evidently as a result of this meeting:
‘to be exterminated as partisans.’ In fact, since the summer Jews were being
murdered en masse in connection with the combating of partisans or, to put
it more accurately, under this pretext. It appears that Himmler simply
wanted this practice (or this use of words) once again to be confirmed by
the highest authority in the regime.
75
from mass murder to the ‘final solution’ 553
21
The Murder
of the European Jews
H
immler spent Christmas 1941 on the eastern front. On 23 December
he set off from Rastenburg for Poltava in the Ukraine to meet Walter
von Reichenau, the commander of Army Group South. On the following
day he flew to Mariupol, where he visited Colonel-General Ewald von
Kleist, the commander of the 1st Panzer Army. From there he continued his
journey to Taganrog on Lake Asov to spend Christmas Eve with wounded
members of the ‘Leibstandarte’. The next day he travelled to the divisional
HQ of the ‘Leibstandarte’ in Nikolajevka to meet the divisional commander,
Sepp Dietrich; on 26 December he inspected the front-line positions of the
‘Viking’ division and met the divisional commander, Felix Steiner. On the
following day he flew back to Poltava, stayed there overnight, and next day
attended a briefing at the HQ of Army Group South.
On 3 January 1942, six days after his return to headquarters, he embarked
on another trip to the front, this time to the northern sector of the eastern
front, where he visited the other two Waffen-SS divisions that were in
action, the Death’s Head and the police division. He returned on 6 January,
and during the following days concentrated on dealing with matters that had
arisen as a result of his trips to the front: promotions, the setting up of
hospitals for the Waffen-SS in the east, improvements to the combating of
lice infestation, ‘warm things’ for the police deployed in the east. He even
had time to watch the film Request Concert .On14 and 15 January the heads
of the SS Main Offices met under his chairmanship to discuss a redistribu-
tion of responsibilities. On 17 January Himmler took part in a hunting party
which the East Prussian Gauleiter Erich Koch had organized in Leissienen,
and on the eighteenth as well as the twentieth he had lunch with Hitler.
1
On 21 January his routine was broken by a phone-call from Heydrich
concerned, among other things, as he noted, with the ‘Jewish question.
Meeting in Berlin’. The head of the Reich Security Main Office informed
him about the results of a conference that had taken place the day before at
the SS’s guest-house on the Wannsee. Referring to his assignment from
Go
¨
ring ‘to make all the preparations necessary [ . . . ] for an overall solution
to the Jewish question in Europe’, Heydrich had invited all the important
agencies involved—SS and police, Party and Reich Chancelleries, the
Ministry of the Eastern Territories, the government of the General Gov-
ernment, the Reich Justice, Interior, and Foreign Ministries, Go
¨
ring’s Four-
Year Plan agency—to a ‘general discussion’, ‘in the interests of achieving a
common viewpoint’. Originally scheduled for 9 December 1941, the con-
ference was postponed at short notice because of America’s entry into the
war, as some of those invited would have been unable to attend.
2
The participants focused above all on the question of whether or not the
‘half-castes’ (Mischlinge) and those living in ‘mixed marriages’ should be
included in the ‘final solution’. Discussion of this issue took up most of the
conference, without resolving it.
3
Before Heydrich opened the discussion
he gave a general overview of the state of Jewish persecution throughout
Europe. We do not have a verbatim account of his statement; we have only
the minutes prepared by Eichmann at Heydrich’s request, subsequently
revised in accordance with instructions from the Gestapo chief Mu
¨
ller,
and then sent to the participants.
4
The central passage in Heydrich’s address ran as follows: ‘As previously
authorized by the Fu
¨
hrer, emigration has now been replaced by the evacu-
ation of the Jews to the east as a further solution.’ These ‘actions’ (in other
words, the deportations that had already started) were merely ‘provisional
options’; they would, however, provide ‘the practical experience’, which,
‘in view of the impending final solution (Endlo
¨
sung) of the Jewish question’,
was of vital importance. The ‘final solution’ would involve a total of 11
million Jews; a statistical appendix attached to the minutes broke the
numbers down according to countries, including not only Jews from neutral
states but even those living in Great Britain. It was clear from this that the
‘final solution’ that was being sought could be fully achieved only after
victory had been won.
According to Heydrich, ‘during the course of the final solution the Jews
are to be suitably assigned to labour in the east under appropriate direction.
Jews capable of work will be brought to these territories and will be put to
the murder of the european jews 555
work building roads in large labour columns with the sexes separated. In the
course of this work a large proportion will undoubtedly disappear through
natural diminution.’ ‘The remaining remnant, which will undoubtedly
constitute the segment most capable of resistance, will have to be appropri-
ately dealt with’, to prevent it from becoming a ‘germ cell of a Jewish
reconstruction’. Heydrich left open the question of the fate awaiting those
Jews who were not ‘capable of work’, in particular the women and children,
though it is clear from the context that these people would have to be killed
in order to avoid creating a ‘germ cell of a Jewish reconstruction’.
The Jews were to be initially brought to ‘transit ghettos’, ‘from there to
be transported further east’. Jews over 65 years of age, according to
Heydrich, would be accommodated in a ‘ghetto for the aged’ in order to
avoid ‘frequent interventions’,
5
and presumably also to give added plausi-
bility to the alleged ‘labour deployment in the east’.
Thus, at this point in time, as at the beginning of 1941, the Reich Security
Main Office assumed that the ‘Jewish question’ would be solved in the
occupied eastern territories; it would be solved only after the end of the war
and through a combination of forced labour and mass murder.
6
However,
the Wannsee conference also conceived of the possibility of murdering the
Jews in the General Government and in the occupied Soviet territories at
that time and irrespective of the overall plan. In mid-December 1941, on his
return from the conference of Reich leaders and Gauleiters on 12 Decem-
ber, Governor-General Frank had told his colleagues that, as far as dealing
with the Jewish question was concerned, he had been tersely advised:
‘Liquidate them yourselves.’
7
While at the time Frank had been asking
himself how that could be done,
8
his state secretary, Josef Bu
¨
hler, now
suggested to the conference that they should ‘begin solving this question in
the General Government’, ‘because here the transport problem would not
play a significant role and issues of labour deployment would not get in
the way of this action being carried out’; in any case, the majority of Jews
there were ‘incapable of work’. ‘In conclusion,’ according to the minutes,
‘the various possible solutions were discussed, Gauleiter Dr Meyer and state
secretary Dr Bu
¨
hler both advocating carrying out certain preparatory mea-
sures connected with the final solution themselves at once, although the
population must not be alarmed in the process.’
9
By ‘preparatory measures’
they can have been referring only to the establishment of extermination
camps along the lines of Belzec, which was already in the process of being
built.
556 the murder of the european jews
Thus Bu
¨
hler had put forward an alternative solution that rendered the
deportation programme to the east just proposed by Heydrich largely
superfluous. During the following months Himmler and the Reich Security
Main Office were to adopt this proposal and develop it further. As a result,
the main focus of the European ‘final solution’ shifted from the occupied
eastern territories to occupied Poland.
Extermination through work
The fact that the mass murder that was in progress during the spring and
early summer of 1942 expanded into a comprehensive programme of
extermination had much to do with the development of labour deployment
within the SS empire. It was the concept of ‘extermination through work’
that led to the systematic distinction being made between ‘those capable of
work’ and ‘those incapable of work’, and, as a result, to the organization of
forced-labour camps and extermination centres on a vast scale, with the aid
of which the European Jews were to be eliminated.
In the summer of 1941 Himmler had already begun contemplating how
best to exploit the labour of the concentration camp inmates—initially for
the SS’s major building projects in eastern Europe.
10
However, when in
September the Wehrmacht agreed to assign him a large number of Soviet
POWs he no longer pursued these ideas, and instead ordered the expansion
of Auschwitz-Birkenau and Lublin-Majdanek concentration camps to
operate as forced-labour camps for POWs.
11
In fact, these plans came to
nothing; the majority of the Soviet soldiers, who were already exhausted at
the time they were taken prisoner, did not survive the catastrophic condi-
tions in the Wehrmacht POW camps during the autumn and winter of
1941. By the end of 1941 Himmler had received only 30,000 prisoners from
the Wehrmacht, and after that he did not receive any more.
12
However, the SS’s need for prisoners was continually growing. For a long
time it had been trying to reach deals with armaments concerns for
the labour deployment of KZ inmates.
13
In January 1941, as already men-
tioned, IG Farben had decided to set up a Buna plant near Auschwitz for the
industrial production of synthetic rubber. It is clear that access to the
Auschwitz prisoners played an important part in this decision. Himmler
had approved the deployment of prisoners for this purpose in his order of
26 February, in which he had ordered the ‘evacuation’ of the Jewish
the murder of the european jews 557
population of the town of Auschwitz. The building work began in April
and cost the lives of around 25,000 prisoners. In fact the plant never
produced significant amounts of Buna.
14
The SS also deployed thousands of prisoners for a project proposed by
Ferdinand Porsche, the managing director of the Volkswagen Company.
Porsche persuaded Himmler to use prisoners to build a light-metals foundry
in the VW plant. In return he promised to provide the Waffen-SS with
modern amphibious jeeps. Hitler, who was brought in on the affair, signed
an order on 11 January 1942 in which he assigned to Himmler the task of
‘constructing, equipping, and operating’ the foundry, expressly stating that
it should be done with the aid of KZ inmates. The use of the word
‘operating’ implied for the SS the expectation that at last they were going
beyond simply supplying labour and were now actually becoming involved
in armaments production.
15
Ill. 25. In July 1942 Himmler visited Auschwitz-Monowitz and presumably also
met representatives of IG Farben. Among the inmates employed in the Buna
works was the Jewish resistance fighter Primo Levi, who later recorded his
experiences in the book Is This a Man?
558 the murder of the european jews
Far more workers, however, were required for the SS’s so-called building
programme for peacetime (Friedensbauprogramm), which involved in partic-
ular plans for the reorganization of the occupied eastern territories. In
December 1941 Pohl had submitted to Himmler the first construction
programme, which had a budget of 13 billion Reich marks and had been
drafted by Hans Kammler, the head of the SS Main Office Budgets and
Building.
16
When it finally became clear, at the beginning of 1942, that he
could no longer count on receiving Soviet prisoners, Himmler revived his
plans of the previous summer to deploy KZ inmates as forced labour for his
own building projects. But for this to happen the camps had to be filled up
first. On 26 January 1942 he informed the Inspector of Concentration
Camps, Richard Glu
¨
cks, that ‘in view of the fact that we cannot anticipate
receiving Russian prisoners in the immediate future, I shall consign a large
number of Jews and Jewesses who will be emigrated [sic] from Germany to
the camps. In the course of the next four weeks, therefore, you must prepare
to receive 100,000 male and up to 50,000 female Jews in the concentration
camps. During the coming weeks the concentration camps will be expected
to carry out major economic tasks.’
17
In fact, during the following months
tens of thousands of Jews were deported to the district of Lublin, where
those who were designated ‘capable of work’ were forced to work in
Majdanek and other camps. In Auschwitz Jews from Slovakia were
deployed as forced labour.
18
Himmler not only filled his camps with new prisoners, however, but also
concentrated on exploiting more effectively those who were already there.
On 19 January, the day before the Wannsee conference, he ordered the
amalgamation of Pohl’s Main Offices—Budgets and Building and Admin-
istration and Business—with the Administration Office in the SS Leadership
Main Office, that was also controlled by Pohl, to form the SS’s Business and
Administration Main Office (Wirtschafts- und Verwaltungshauptamt =
WVHA). In March 1942 he also incorporated the Concentration Camp
Inspectorate into the new Main Office, which, on the one hand, empha-
sized the economic importance of the camps, but was also intended to
provide a barrier to any future encroachment on the part of Fritz Sauckel.
For Sauckel’s appointment as General Plenipotentiary for Labour Mobiliza-
tion threatened to generate disagreements over who was in charge of the
concentration camp inmates.
19
Meanwhile, Kammler revised his draft of the peacetime building
programme. Himmler had been dissatisfied with the first draft and specifically
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