23: Total War

On the last day of September 1942, Adolf Hitler addressed Winter Relief Rally in the Sportpalast in Berlin. It was a short, uninspired speech delivered without the usual sparkle. It struck many foreign listeners as pure bombast of no import, but they missed the implications of the anti-Semitic remarks that accompanied Hitler's pledge to take Stalingrad. Perhaps it was because his words about the Jews had been so oft repeated. For the third time that year he reiterated his prediction that if the Jews instigated "an international war to exterminate the Aryan peoples it would not be the Aryan peoples that would be annihilated but Jewry itself."

The motivation for this repetition was obscure except to those privy to the secret of the Final Solution. Each mention was a public acknowledgement of his program of extermination; each gave reassurance and authority to the elite charged with the task of mass murder. Noteworthy, too, was his repetition of the false date of the original prophecy. It was made on January 30, 1939, not, as he kept saying, on the first of September.

This could not have been a slip of the tongue since Hitler repeated it three times. By changing the date to that of the attack on Poland, the beginning of the Second World War, he linked his racial program to the war. He was preparing the people for the hard truth they must eventually face: the extermination of the Jews was an integral part of the war from the very first day of combat.

He was also announcing, if obscurely, that his twin programs -- the Final Solution and Lebensraum -- was progressing as planned. His listeners left the auditorium with a generally uneasy impression. They themselves had contributed the only lift to the meeting, the unison rendition of "The Song of the Eastern Campaign," whose melody even foreign correspondents found extremely moving:

We have been standing guard for Germany

Keeping the eternal watch.

Now at last the sun is rising in the East,

Calling millions into battle.

In a speech entitled, "Do You Want Total War?" on February 15, 1943, in Duesseldorf, Joseph Goebbels all but announced Hitler's Final Solution. Two thousand years of Western civilization, he said, were in danger from a Russian victory, one forged by international Jewry. There were cries from the audience of "Hang them!" and Goebbels promised that Germany would retaliate "with the total and radical extermination and elimination of Jewry!" This brought wild shouts and manic laughter.

Three days later, Goebbels presented the same total war theme in Berlin during a speech at the Sportpalast to a select audience of trusted party members. On the podium the propaganda minister was more actor than orator and what he said was not as important as how he said it.

In a rhetorical tour de force, he raised his listeners to such a frenzy that when he shouted, "Do you want total war? Do you want total war? Do you want it, if necessary, to be even more total and radical than can be imagined today? Is your confidence in the Fuehrer greater, surer, more unshakeable than ever?" the response was a mighty chorus of Ja's. And when he asked: "Do you accept the fact that anyone who detracts from the war effort will lose his head?" there was thundering approval.

"What an hour of idiocy!" he cynically remarked later to his entourage. "If I had told these people to jump from the fourth floor of the Columbus House they would have done it."

To most Germans, Hitler's treatment of the Jews was a matter of minor importance. They had been indifferent to the lot of Jewish neighbors forced to wear the Star of David -- after all, didn't they deserve it? And even after the same neighbors began to disappear it was assumed they had been deported. It was only wise to discount unspeakable rumors in a land where listening to a foreign broadcast was punishable by death.

Not many knew about the killing centers. These were all in Poland and each was surrounded by a barren stretch several miles wide posted with notices that trespassers would be shot on sight. To ensure secrecy, the process from deportation to murder was not only executed speedily but done so under a smoke screen of euphemism: the over-all operation was referred to as "special treatment"; collectively the centers were described as the "East"; individual installations were called labor, concentration, transit or PW camps; and gas chambers and crematorium units "bathhouses" and "corps cellars."

Rumors of atrocities were answered by lies. When an important Nazi official, Hans Lammers, brought Himmler several reports that Jews were being executed in large numbers, the Reichsfuehrer was vehement in denial. He explained that the so-called Final Solution order, received from the Fuehrer through Heydrich, merely entailed evacuation of the Jews from the homeland. During these movements there had unfortunately been some deaths from sickness and attacks by enemy aircraft -- and a number of Jews, he admitted had to be killed during revolts as examples.

Himmler assured Lammers that the majority of Jews were being "accommodated" in camps in the East and brought out photo albums to show how they were working for the war effort as shoemakers, tailors and such. "This is the order of the Führer," emphasized Himmler. "If you believe you have to take action, then tell the Führer and tell me the names of the people who made these reports to you."

Lammers refused to divulge any information and sought more information from Hitler himself. The Führer gave almost identical information. "I shall later on decide where these Jews will be taken," he said, then added reassuringly -- "and in the meantime they are being cared for there."

While some of those closest to Hitler truly did not know what was going on in the East, many others, victims of self-deception, guessed if they did not know the terrifying facts. "Don't let anyone tell you he had no idea," Hans Frank later wrote, including himself in the accusation. "Everyone sensed that there was something horribly wrong with this system, even if we didn't know all the details. We didn't want to know! It was too comfortable to live on the system, to support our families in royal style, and to believe that it was all right."

This was the man who had recently told his subordinates that they were all accomplices in the elimination of the Jews which, disagreeable as it might be, "was necessary in the interests of Europe." In his role as head of the Generalgouvernement in Poland, Frank knew the order had come directly from the Führer. But the average German was still convinced that Hitler had no part in any brutality.

"People are now clinging to the hope that the Führer doesn't know about such things, can't know, otherwise he would take some steps," wrote an ardent Nazi woman to a friend in reference to the Euthanasia Program, the overture to the Final Solution. "Anyway, they think he can't know how this is being done or on what scale. I feel, however, that this can't go on much longer without even this hope being lost."

Those in Hitler's "family circle" (those who often shared mealtimes with the Führer; secretaries, adjutants, and other select members) could not imagine Uncle Adi authorizing the murder of Jews. It was unthinkable. Hadn't he been persuaded to let a number of part Jewish Wehrmacht officers keep their commissions?

The villain had to be either Martin Bormann or Himmler, acting behind his back. But these two were only Hitler's faithful agents. He alone conceived the Final Solution and he alone could have ordered its execution. Without him there would have been no Final Solution, and he was confident he could get away with it if it were presented to the world as a fait accompli. There would be threats of retribution, but the memories of men are short. Who today recalled the bitter condemnation of Turks for massacring a million Armenians during the Great War?

In a secret conversation on June 19, 1943, the Führer instructed Himmler to proceed with the deportation of Jews to the East "regardless of any unrest it might cause during the next three or four months." It must be carried out, he added, "in an all-embracing way." While these words would certainly not have convinced the family circle that Hitler was a mass murderer, he did utter such words later to Bormann that would have.

"For us," he said after proudly admitting that he had purged the German world of Jewish poison, "this has been an essential process of disinfection, which we have prosecuted to its ultimate limit and without which we should ourselves have been asphyxiated and destroyed."

Hadn't he always been absolutely fair in his dealings with the Jews?

"On the eve of the war, I gave them one final warning. I told them that, if the precipitated another war, they would not be spared and that I would exterminate the vermin throughout Europe, and this time once and for all. To this warning they retorted with a declaration of war and affirmed that wherever in the world there was a Jew, there, too, was an implacable enemy of National Socialist Germany. Well, we have lanced the Jewish abscess; and the world of the future will be eternally grateful to us."

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One month before Goebbels' "Total War" speech, in January 1943, members of the American and British governments met in a major planning conference at Casablanca in Morocco. One of the many decisions made at the Casablanca Conference was confirmation of the intensified bomber offensive against Germany, now to be undertaken by both RAF Bomber Command and the U.S. Eighth Air Force, based in Britain. This was known as the "Casablanca Directive.”

Before the month was out, the U.S. Eighth Air Force would conduct its first strike on a German city. Adam Tooze has written in his book The Wages of Destruction:

"The Making and Breaking of the Nazi Economy, a turning point in the Allied bomber offensive was reached in March 1943, during the Battle of the Ruhr. Over five months 34,000 tons of bombs were dropped. Following the raids, steel production fell by 200,000 tons, making a shortfall of 400,000 tons. Speer acknowledged that the RAF were hitting the right targets, and raids severely disrupted his plans to increase production to meet increasing attritional needs. Between July 1943 and March 1944 there were no further increases in the output of aircraft.

"The bombing of Hamburg in 1943 also produced impressive results. Attacks on Tiger I heavy tank production, and of that of 88mm guns, the most potent dual-purpose artillery piece in the Wehrmacht, meant that output of both was 'set back for months'. On top of this, some 62 percent of the population was dehoused causing more difficulties.

"In January 1943, at the Casablanca Conference, it was agreed RAF Bomber Command operations against Germany would be reinforced by the USAAF in a Combined Operations Offensive plan called Operation Pointblank. Chief of the British Air Staff MRAF Sir Charles Portal was put in charge of the 'strategic direction' of both British and American bomber operations. The text of the Casablanca directive read: 'Your primary object will be the progressive destruction and dislocation of the German military, industrial, and economic system and the undermining of the morale of the German people to a point where their capacity for armed resistance is fatally weakened.'

"On January 27, 1943, the U.S. Eighth Air Force sent its first large-scale mission into Germany which saw a mixed force of 91 heavy bombers, including a small formation of B-24s, go against Wilhelmshaven."