30: Executioners

While all his power had come from Hitler, the Fuehrer wanted nothing to do with Himmler personally. "I need such policemen," he told an adjutant, Julius Schaub, "but I don't like them." Hitler went so far as to order another adjutant, SS Captain Richard Schulze, not to keep his nominal chief informed about the daily military discussions.

At the same time, he put the Reichsfuehrer fully in charge of the operation closest to his heart, the Final Solution. In some respects it was an appropriate appointment. From the beginning Himmler had been under Hitler's spell and he remained totally Hitler's man, his disciple and subject.

Furthermore, Himmler was the epitome of National Socialism, for it was as a diligent professional party worker that Himmler had overcome is own problems of identity. He was the Fuehrer's faithful right hand who, despite squeamishness in the face of blood or beatings, had become a mass killer by remote control, and efficient businessman murderer. He had done so while retaining his sentimentality.

Under Himmler's supervision the work of the killing centers reached the peak of efficiency by the fall of 1943. At Auschwitz, those selected for death marched to the gas chambers, unaware of their fate, past an inmate symphony orchestra conducted by the Jewish violinist Alma Rose.

At Treblinka, however, the Jews almost always knew they were about to die and would cry and laugh from shock. Annoyed guards lashed away at them. Babies who hindered attendants while shaving their mothers' hair, would be smashed against a wall. If there was any resistance, guards and Kapos (trusties) would used whips to drive the naked victims into trucks bound for the gas chamber.

The thought of refusing the order to murder never entered the heads of the executioners. "I could only say Jawohl," said Hoess, the commandant of Auschwitz. "It didn't occur to me at all that I would be held responsible. You see, in Germany it was understood that if something went wrong, then the man who gave the orders was responsible." Nor did the executioners ever question whether the Jews deserved their fate.

"Don't you see, we SS men were not supposed to think about these things; it never even occurred to us. . . . We were all so trained to obey orders, without even thinking, that the thought of disobeying an order would simply never have occurred to anybody, and somebody else would have done it just as well if I hadn't." Besides, those who participated in the exterminations had been trained so rigorously "that one would shoot his own brother if ordered to. Orders were everything."

Some of the executioners thoroughly enjoyed their work, but these were sadistic at the peril of punishment from their chief. Years earlier Himmler had forbidden independent action against the Jews by any member of the SS.

"The SS commander must be hard but not hardened," he had instructed. "If during your work, you come across cases in which some commander exceeds his duty or shows signs that his restraint is becoming blurred, intervene at once."

In 1943 he had passed down a similar judgement to the SS Legal Department in regard to unauthorized shootings of Jews. "If the motive is selfish, sadistic or sexual, judicial punishment should be imposed for murder or manslaughter as the case may be." That was undoubtedly why had had authorized Georg Konrad Morgen to bring the commandant of Buchenwald to trial.

Training his men to become hard but not hardened was a difficult task for Himmler, and he attempted to do so by transforming the SS into an order of knights with the motto: "Loyalty in my honor." He imbued the SS, therefore, not only with a sense of racial superiority but with the hard virtues of loyalty, comradeship, duty, truth, diligence, honesty and knighthood. His SS, as the elite of the party, was the elite of the German Volk, and therefore the elite of the entire world.

By establishing castles of the order to indoctrinate SS members in his ideals, he hoped to breed a New Man, "far finer and more valuable than the world had yet seen."

He also lectured his men on good manners and good breeding. "Whether it is a dinner you are giving or the organization of a march, wherever there are guests, I insist that you attend to the slightest details, for I want the SS to set an example of propriety everywhere, and show the utmost courtesy and consideration to all fellow Germans."

His SS men were to be models of neatness. "I do not want to see a single white vest with the slightest spot of dirt." Furthermore they must drink like gentlemen "or you will be sent a pistol and asked to put an end to it."

The SS men were to be gentlemen, in fact, no matter how atrocious their mission. And with this in mind, Himmler summoned his SS generals to Posen on October 4, 1943. His primary purpose was to enlarge the circle of those privy to the extermination of the Jews. The recent revelations by Morgen, combined with the persistent rumors of terrors in the concentration camps, were causing apprehension and some revulsion among the most loyal adherents of the Fuehrer.

Now that the truth was leaking out, Hitler had decided to involve the party and the military in his Final Solution. By making them, in effect, co-conspirators, he would force them to fight on to the end. The war was probably lost, but this would give him time to fulfill his main ambition. If worse came to worst he would take millions of Jews to death with him.

The speech to the SS officers was only the first in a series of information lectures by Himmler that were to include many civilian leaders and Wehrmacht officers. In a sense, the first was the most important of the scheduled speeches since he must convince the SS that the execution of this distasteful deed was not at variance with the highest principles of their order. He said he wanted to talk to them quite frankly, on a very grave matter.

"Among ourselves it should be mentioned once, quite openly, but we will never speak of it publicly." His reluctance to proceed was obvious but finally he said, "I mean the evacuation of the Jews, the extermination of the Jewish race. It's one of those things easy to talk about -- 'The Jewish race is being exterminated," said one party member, 'that's quite clear, it's in our program -- elimination of the Jews, and we're doing it, exterminating them.'"

These plain words, after years of rhetoric and sloganeering, were shocking despite the unwelcome suspicions raised by Morgen and Kurt Gerstein. More so was Himmler's condemnation of those who had been profiting by the Final Solution.

"A number of SS men -- there are not very many of them -- have fallen short, and they will die without mercy. We had the moral right, we had the duty of our people, to destroy this race which wanted to destroy us. But we have not the right to enrich ourselves with so much as a fur, a watch, a mark, or a cigarette or anything else. Because we have exterminated a bacterium we do not want to be eventually infected by the bacterium or die of it. I will not allow so much as a sepsis to appear here or gain hold. Wherever it may form, we must cauterize it. In the final analysis, however, we can say that we have fulfilled this most difficult duty for the love of our people. And our spirit, our soul, our character have not suffered injury from it."

Two days later, Himmler spoke in the same vein to a group of Gauleiters and Reichsleiters. "The sentence 'The Jews must be exterminated,' with its few words, gentlemen, can be uttered easily. But what that sentence demands of the man who must execute it is the hardest and toughest thing in existence." It was apparent to his listeners that they were about to hear what they had been closing their ears to for months.

"I ask you really only to hear and never to talk about what I tell you in this circle. When the question arose, 'What should by done with the women and children?' I decided here also to adopt a clear solution. I did not deem myself justified in exterminating the men, that is to say, to kill them or let them be killed, while allowing their children to grow up to avenge themselves on our sons and grandchildren. The hard decision had to be taken -- this people must disappear from the face of the earth."

This was, he said, the most onerous assignment the SS ever had. "It was carried out -- I think I can say -- without our men and our leaders suffering the slightest damage to spirit or soul." They had remained knights despite mass extermination. A leaden silence fell over the hall.

"He spoke," recalled Baldur von Schirach, "with such icy coldness of the extermination of men, women and children, as a businessman speaks of his balance sheet. There was nothing emotional in his speech, nothing that suggested an inner involvement."

After enlarging on the difficulties of this awesome task, Himmler brought the subject to a close. "You now know what is what and you must keep it to yourself. Perhaps at a much later time we shall consider whether something about it can be told to the German people. But it is probably better to bear the responsibility on behalf of our people (a responsibility for the deed as well as for the idea) and take the secret with us into our graves." He was like Brutus, forcing his colleagues to dip their hands in Caesar's blood. The Final Solution was no longer the burden only of Hitler and Himmler but theirs, a burden they must carry in silence.

A lunch was held after the meeting in an adjoining hall. During the meal Schirach and the other Gauleiters and Reichsleiters wordlessly avoided each others eyes. Most guessed that Himmler had only revealed the truth so as to make them accomplices and that evening they drank so much that a good number had to be helped into the train that was taking them to the Wolf's Lair.

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By late 1943, Hitler's armies in the East were being steadily driven back toward the homeland. Inspired by success in the Battle of Kursk the Soviet high command had gone over to the offensive with confidence and daring. In the last six months of 1943, the Red Army had advanced in some places as much as two hundred and fifty miles, throwing the Germans in the south and center back towards the Dnieper River.

This only spurred Hitler to accelerate the Final Solution and early in 1944 he allowed the secret to be revealed to a large non-party, non-SS group. On January 26, 1944, Himmler made his third address, this time to some 260 high-ranking army and navy officers in a theater at Posen. In his cool, antiseptic manner he told how Hitler had given him the mission of extermination. "I can assure you that the Jewish question had been solved."

A wave of applause swept the auditorium. On Wehrmacht officer near Colonel von Gersdorff stood up on a chair in his enthusiasm. From the rear of the hall an aghast general checked to see how many of his colleagues were not applauding. He could count all of five.

Himmler continued his campaign of enlightenment in the next weeks. He admitted to a group of navy leaders that he had ordered woman and children killed. "I would be a weakling, a criminal to our descendants if I allowed hate-filled sons to grow to manhood in this battle of humans against subhumans . . . but we must recognize more and more that we are engaged in a primitive, original, natural racial battle."

He told much the same story to another group of generals at Sonthofen. "The Jewish question in Germany and in general throughout the occupied territories is solved," he said. And when he added that it had been done "without compromise," there was applause.

In all, Himmler made some fifteen speeches on the Final Solution, covering a wide range of audiences. Significantly, however, there were no audiences of Foreign Office personnel.

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By August 1944, the British and Americans had broken out of their beachhead at Normandy. Field Marshal von Kluge warned Hitler that the battle for France was all but over. In a letter to Hitler, he praised the Fuehrer for his iron will and genius and the "great and honorable fight" he had fought.

"Prove yourself new to be so great as to put an end, if need be, to the hopeless struggle." It seemed to epitomize the final humiliation of the Wehrmacht. But the warning was futile. Hitler was still bound by his ultimate mission: to rid the world of Jews, a task, so Adolf Eichmann reported in August, that was nearing its end. Eichmann told Himmler that six million Jews had already been eliminated -- four million of them in the killing centers and the rest in mobile operations.

Spurred by the rapid advance of the Red Army and the continuing investigations of the unrelenting Konrad Morgen, who also calculated the figure at six million dead Jews, Hitler instructed Himmler to prepare the dismantling of all the killing camps except Auschwitz. There were still Jews in Hungary, Lodz, Slovakia and Theresienstad to be gassed but Commandant Hoess had the facilities to wind up the entire job, provided the troops in the East did not allow a Soviet breakthrough.

By the end of April 1945, the Soviets were closing in on the chancellery in Berlin. In his bunker Hitler dictated his last political testament, in which he reaffirmed the obsession of his life and career by taking credit for the annihilation of the Jews. They had started the war, he said, and he had made them pay, "even if by more humane means, for their guilt."

He had no remorse for what he had done. He was proud that he had never weakened. "Above all," he concluded, "I enjoin the leaders of the nation and those under them to uphold the racial laws to their full extent and to oppose mercilessly the universal poisoner of all peoples, International Jewry."

He was proud for having accomplished his mission of extermination and his words reaffirmed that, though he had many accomplices, without him there would have been no Final Solution.