Holocaust: The Nazi Persecution and Murder of the Jews Peter Longerich (grave mercy .TXT) 📖

August, a few weeks after Heydrich’s ‘authorization’ by Goering, a fully elaborated

‘plan’ by Heydrich to murder the European Jews with gas had been authorized by

Himmler. The entry for 26 August 1941 in the diary kept by Himmler’s adviser, on

which Breitman relies, actually refers to the authorization of a ‘travel schedule’ for

Heydrich. The head of the Security Police intended to fly to Norway. 15 Likewise, Tobias Jersak’s thesis that Hitler had made a decision in mid-August to murder all

European Jews in direct response to the Atlantic Charter can be seen as specula-

tive and relatively easy to refute. 16

The statements of two major perpetrators, Adolf Eichmann and Rudolf Höß,

referring to a ‘decision by the Führer’ concerning the murder of the European

Jews in the summer of 1941, are also highly questionable. Höß made the following

statement on the subject in a memorandum he wrote in Cracow prison in

November 1946:17 ‘In the summer of 1941, I cannot at present give the precise moment, I suddenly received an order to see the Reichsführer-SS in Berlin, issued

by his adjutant’s office. Contrary to his usual custom, he revealed to me, without

the presence of an adjutant, in broad terms the following: the Führer had ordered

the Final Solution of the Jewish question, we—the SS—were to implement this

order. The existing extermination sites in the East are not capable of carrying out

the intended major actions. I have therefore selected Auschwitz for this purpose,

firstly because of its favourable location in terms of transport requirements,

secondly the area selected there is easy to close off and disguise. I had at first

sought a senior SS-Führer for this task; but in order to avoid difficulties of

competence from the outset, this won’t happen, and you will perform this task’

In fact the time mentioned, ‘summer 1941’ cannot be accurate, because the

‘existing extermination sites in the East’ did not yet exist at that point. 18

Höß’s further statements, that ‘shortly afterwards’ or, as he stated in April in

Nuremberg, ‘around 4 weeks later’19 Eichmann visited him in Auschwitz, are plainly false. Some further particulars of that visit as described by Höß indicate the

spring of 1942; possibly Höß is also conflating memories of various visits by

Eichmann to Auschwitz. There are also indications that Höß is confusing the

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Final Solution on a European Scale, 1941

summer of 1941 with events in the summer of the following year. 20 But if we must assume such confusion in Höß’s memory, he ceases to be a reliable witness for a

‘Führerbefehl’ issued in summer or autumn 1941. 21

Eichmann in turn said under questioning in Jerusalem: ‘In June, I think, it was

the start of the war, June or July, let’s say July, the start of the war. And it might

well have been two months later, it could also have been three months later. At

any rate it was late summer. I’ll tell you why I know it was late summer when

Heydrich summoned me to him. Called me, and he said to me: the Führer, all

those things about emigration and so on and so on, with a little speech before-

hand: “The Führer has ordered the physical extermination of the Jews.” . . . And

then he said to me, Eichmann, go and see Globocnik, Lublin . . . The Reichsführer

has already given Globocnik the relevant instructions, and take a look at how far

he has got with his plans. I think he’s using the Russian tank trenches here for the

extermination of the Jews.’22

He had then, Eichmann continued, gone to Lublin and travelled on from there

with Globocnik’s Jewish expert, Hans Höfle, to look at the construction of an

extermination camp in wooded grounds, the name of which he was unable to

remember. The construction was explained to him by a captain in the Schutzpo-

lizei, who can be unambiguously identified as Christian Wirth, the first camp

commandant of Belzec and later inspector of ‘Aktion Reinhard’: they visited two

to three wooden cottages still under construction, and Wirth explained that the

plan was to kill people with exhaust fumes from a submarine engine. Eichmann

told this story over the course of the years in various and slightly differing

versions. 23

Christopher Browning above all has relied on this statement, which he sees as

confirmation that in mid-September 1941, along with the decision to deport the

German Jews, Hitler had given the order to murder the deportees in principle, but

still with reservations.

But for two reasons Eichmann’s statement does not usefully support the thesis

of an order from the Führer for the murder of the European Jews in the summer of

1941. For one thing, his chronology of events is incorrect. He reports that he had

seen the extermination camp under construction at a time when the trees ‘were

still in the full glory of their leaves’, which indicates a time no later than October; 24

we know, however, that the construction of the first extermination camp at Belzec

(in the district of Lublin) did not begin until 1 November, and most importantly

Wirth was only transferred to Globocnik in December. 25 The minutes of the interrogation show that Eichmann himself was unsure about the date and place

of the meeting. In the course of his questioning he concedes that it might have

been Treblinka, and later he is even certain of it. That would mean that the

journey did not take place until the spring of 1942 or, which is more likely, that he

was transferring impressions of a later journey to Treblinka to his visit to Lublin. 26

His description of the places in dense woodland also seems rather to indicate

Europe-Wide Deportation after Barbarossa

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Treblinka. While in his interrogation he described the construction of wooden

barracks, he later remembered ‘cottages’ like the ones used in Auschwitz for the

first gas chambers. 27 He always described—also on another occasion—his meeting with Wirth in the context of other visits to other concentration camps and murder

centres, but was uncertain about the dating and sequence of those journeys. Thus

he remembered visiting Chelmno after his meeting with Wirth, saying it had been

cold but no longer winter. As the first murders in Chelmno took place in

December 1941, that visit cannot have been in 1941, but must have taken place in

the spring of 1942 at the earliest, as Eichmann