12: Wannsee and the Final Solution

With the "success" of both the killing squads in the east and the starvation in the ghettos in German-occupied Poland, a new prospect presented itself to Hitler, Himmler and the SS: blood need not be shed in any German street, or risk taken of local protests at violence done to the Jews of Germany. Instead, those German Jews who had not managed to emigrate before the outbreak of war would be deported to the east: either to the ghettos on Polish soil, where they would be left to suffer and starve with the local population, or to killing sites in the east.

Tens of thousands of Jews had been murdered between June and October 1941 in the Ratomskaya ravine on the outskirts of Minsk, in the Rumbula forest outside Riga, and in the nineteenth century Tsarist forts surrounding the city of Kovno -- principally the Ninth Fort. German Jews would be sent to these destinations: they would never be seen again in the streets of Greater Germany, and their distant fate could be kept a secret.

The first eastward deportations began on October 16, 1941. German Jews were rounded up in a dozen cities and sent to three ghettos -- Warsaw, Lublin and Lodz -- and to three eastern cities -- Minsk, Kovno and Riga. By November 29, more than 24,000 German Jews had been deported, including 5,000 from Vienna and more than 4,000 from Berlin. From Luxemborg, 500 Jews were deported, as were several thousand Czech Jews from Prague and Brno.

Most of those deportees who reached Minsk and Kovno were killed on arrival at Ratomskaya ravine and the Ninth Fort; a few were selected for slave labor. Those reaching Riga were sent into a ghetto (known as the "German ghetto") set up next to the existing ghetto for Riga Jews. From there many were sent to slave labor camps in the region, others to their death. Of 20,000 German deportees reaching Riga, less than a thousand survived the war. In the adjacent ghetto, 33,000 Riga Jews had been confined. On November 28, 1941, more than 15,000 of them were taken to the Rumbula forest and killed.

The eastward deportation of German, Austrian and Czech Jews continued until February 1942. Small towns were combed for Jews. From Munster -- near the Dutch border -- and from the smaller towns around it, 403 Jews were deported to Riga and killed.

The last six Jews living in Warendorf were also among those rounded up in December. Their small community dated back to 1837. In 1933 there had been forty-four Jews in the town; all but six managed to emigrate before 1939. In December 1941, the last six were deported to Riga, and killed.

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In July 1941, Hermann Goering, acting on the Fuehrers instruction in his capacity as Reich Marshal, nominally the highest official in government after Hitler, ordered SS security chief Reinhard Heydrich to draft "an overall plan of the organizational, functional and material measures to be taken in preparing for the implementation of the Final Solution of the Jewish question." Heydrich was instructed to involve all other departments that had any sort of jurisdiction in the proposed project. Behind the innocuous bureaucratic language lay sweeping authority for the SS to organize the extermination of European Jewry.

Heydrich sent a copy of Goering's order to 14 of the most powerful Nazi bureaucrats and invited them to discuss the matter at a conference in the Berlin suburb of Wannsee on the December 10, 1941. The recipients of his invitation, aware only that Jews were being deported to the East, had little idea of the meaning of "final solution" and awaited the conference with expectation and keen interest.

Their curiosity was whetted by a six-week postponement to January 20, 1942. Hans Frank, head of the Generalgouvernement (German-occupied Poland), became so impatient that he sent Philipp Bouhler, his deputy, to Heydrich for more details, then convened a conference of his own at Cracow in mid-December. "I want to say to you quite openly," said Frank, "that we shall have to finish the Jews, one way or another." He told about the important conference soon to take place in Berlin which Bouhler would attend for the Generalgouvernement. "Certainly the major migration is about to start. But what is to happen to the Jews? Do you think they will actually be settled in Eastern villages? We were told in Berlin, 'Why all this fuss? We can't use them in the Ostland either; let the dead bury their dead!'"

Frank urged his listeners to arm themselves against all feelings of sympathy. "We have to annihilate the Jews wherever we find them and wherever it is at all possible." It was a gigantic task and could not be carried out by legal methods. Judges and courts could not take the heavy responsibility for such an extreme policy. He estimated -- and it was a gross overestimate -- that there were 3,500,000 Jews in the Generalgouvernement alone.

"We can't shoot these 3,500,000 Jews," said Frank, "we can't poison them, but we can take steps which, one way or another, will lead to an annihilation success, and I am referring to the measures under discussion in the Reich. The Generalgouvernement will have to become just as free of Jews as the Reich itself. Where and how this is going to happen is the task for the agencies which we will have to create and establish here, and I am going to tell you how they will work when the time comes."

On January 20, the selected officials -- representing the Nazi Party, Goering's Four-Year Plan agency, the Ministry of the Interior, the Foreign Ministry, the Ministry of Justice and the administrators of the occupied territories -- arrived in Wannsee armed with pertinent documents and a number of proposals for their departments' contributions to the effort. Bouhler was far better prepared than most of the conferees to understand the generalities uttered.

At noon that day, Heydrich formally opened the proceedings. He announced that his own SS security department, known by its German initials RSHA, had "the responsibility for working out the final solution of the Jewish problem regardless of geographical boundaries." This euphemism was followed by a veiled and puzzling remark which involved Hitler himself. "Instead of emigration," he said, "there is now a further possible solution to which the Fuehrer has already signified his consent -- namely deportation to the East."

Heydrich then exhibited a chart indicating which Jewish communities were to be evacuated, and gave a hint as to their fate. He explained that the evacuees were to be organized into huge slave-labor battalions, that many would "fall away through natural reduction," but that the remainder, "which doubtless constitutes the toughest element," would "have to be dealt with appropriately" so it could not become the "germ cell of a new Jewish development."

The task that Heydrich outlined was a colossal one. According to a detailed RSHA tabulation, 131,800 Jews still lingered in the territory of the prewar Reich, and 43,700 hung on in Austria. Fully five million Jews would have to be evacuated from the Soviet Union, 865,000 from France, 160,000 from the Netherlands and 58,000 from Italy; smaller Jewish populations would come from Norway, Denmark and Belgium. Germany's Balkan allies would send several hundred thousand Jews, and Hungary would contribute 742,800. The RSHA report also listed Jews who would have to be dealt with at a later date: 330,000 in England, 4,000 in Ireland and 6,000 in Spain.

Heydrich went on to explain that the Jews would be collected out of Europe from west to east. They would be collected first in ghettos or conveniently located holding camps. Then, country by country, they would be transported to selected terminals in Poland. Clearly, the underdeveloped areas of Poland would permit more efficient operations than the populous West.

One by one, the delegates presented the proposals that they had worked up for the conference. Their suggestions dovetailed neatly with Heydrich's overall plan. Martin Luther, the crude and ambitious assistant secretary of the Foreign Ministry, suggested a deportation schedule, complete with the order in which countries might best be cleared of Jews. Bouhler, said that his territory should be cleared first, since "no problems of transport existed"; the local Jews would have only a short journey to their final destination. Otto Hofmann, chief of the SS Race and Resettlement Office, urged the use of sterilization to solve "complicated legal questions" as to the treatment of those troublesome people who had one Jewish parent or grandparent, or Jews who had intermarried with Aryans. Wilhelm Stuckart, Undersecretary of the Interior, declared that sterilization should be made compulsory in all such cases.

The formal meeting lasted about an hour, then cocktails and lunch were served. As butlers passed through the large room with food and drink, the delegates gathered in small groups to debate liquidation timetables and the relative efficiency of mass killings by gunfire versus carbon monoxide fumes.

Heydrich assured his colleagues that "even now practical experiences are being gathered," but he added no specifics to what some delegates knew in a general way. For example, he did not dwell on the energetic work of the Einsatzgruppen. Nor did he discuss the six production-line extermination camps -- Auschwitz, Chelmno, Belzec, Sobibor, Majdanek, Treblinka -- that were already under construction in Poland.

When the Wansee conference broke up, Heydrich was greatly reassured by all he had seen and heard. The proceedings also laid to rest his concern that the many contentious government departments would not pull together in the interest of their common goal. He was pleased by the enthusiasm of the delegates and felt sure that the necessary bureaucratic machinery would work smoothly. He was confident that the delegates realized that the Final Solution was as important as the war. In fact, they would sometimes give it even higher priority in the competition for manpower, transportation and material.

But some of the delegates left the conference confused. Bouhler knew exactly what Heydrich was talking about, but Luther assured Fritz Hesse that there were no plans at all to kill the Jews.

Thirty copies of the conference record were distributed to the ministries and SS main offices and the term "Final Solution" became known throughout the Reich bureaucracy. Yet the true meaning of what Heydrich had said was fathomed only by those privy to the killing operations, and many of this select group, curiously, were convinced that Adolf Hitler himself was not totally aware that mass murder was being plotted.

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A few days after the Wansee conference, Hitler confirmed in spite of himself, that he was indeed the architect of the Final Solution.

"One must act radically," he said at lunch on January 23, 1942, in the presence of Himmler. "When one pulls out a tooth, one does it with a single tug, and the pain quickly goes away. The Jew must clear out of Europe. It's the Jew who prevents everything. When I think about it, I realize that I'm extraordinarily humane. At the time of the rules of the Popes the Jews were mistreated in Rome. Until 1830, eight Jews mounted on donkeys were led once a year through the streets of Rome. For my part, I restrict myself to telling them they must go away. If they break their pipes on the journey, I can't do anything about it. But if they refuse to go voluntarily I see no other solution but extermination."

Never before had he talked so openly to his inner circle and he was so absorbed by the subject that on the 27th he again demanded the disappearance of all Jews from Europe.

His obsession with Jews was publicly expressed a few days later in a speech on the ninth anniversary of his rise to power. "I do not even want to speak of the Jews," he said, and then proceeded to do so at length. "They are simply our old enemies, their plans have suffered shipwreck through us, and they rightly hate us, just as we hate them. We realize that this war can only end either in the wiping out of the Germanic nations, or by the disappearance of Jewry from Europe."

Hitler reminded the audience, which included some forty high-ranking military officers, of his 1939 prophecy that the Jews would be destroyed. "for the first time it will not be the others who will bleed to death, but for the first time the genuine ancient Jewish law, 'an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth,' is being applied. The more this struggle spreads, the more anti-Semitism will spread -- and world Jewry may rely on this. It will find nourishment in every prison camp, it will find nourishment in every family which is being enlightened as to why it is being called upon to make such sacrifices, and the hour will come when the worst enemy in the world will have finished his part for at least a thousand years to come."

To those presently engaged in designing gas chambers, to those constructing the killing centers in Poland, and particularly to those who were being prepared to administer the mechanics of the final solution, this statement was a clarion call for genocide. But to foreign observers, Hitler's words and appearance that afternoon seemed to foreshadow a German disaster. "His face," wrote Swedish journalist Arvid Fredborg, "now seemed ravaged and his manner uncertain."

To the Führer, the extermination of Jews and Slavs was as important as Lebensraum. He had turned the invasion into ideological warfare and his military decisions, therefore, could only be understood in this context. What appeared irrational to his generals was not a sudden mental lapse but the fruit of decisions made as early as 1928.

Ironically, never had he shown more military acumen than after the shocking defeats at the gates of Moscow. Surrounded by demoralized military leaders pleading for general retreat, Hitler did not lose his nerve. He refused to grant any requests to withdraw. Enforcing his orders ruthlessly, Hitler managed to rally the army and stem the Russian advance.

All was well on the other war fronts. In France the resistance was hopelessly splintered and of little concern. In the Mediterranean, U-boats, Italian "human torpedoes" and mines had recently sunk or crippled a carrier, three battleships and two cruisers, thus eliminating Britain's Eastern battle fleet as a fighting force. Moreover, Rommel was almost ready to launch another major offensive on North Africa. Meanwhile, the Japanese were continuing their unbroken series of victories in the Pacific.