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

Eichmann. Ein historischer Zeugenbericht (Leoni am Starnberger See, 1980), 479) confirms that the memo was drafted in the RSHA; Goering’s

official diary records a meeting with Heydrich on 31 July, 6.15 p.m. (IfZ, ED 180/5).

11. IMT xxvi. 710-PS.

12. See pp. 175–6.

13. See Götz Aly, ‘Final Solution’: Nazi Population Policy and the murder of the European Jews (London, 1999), 172–3. (Frankfurt a. M., 1995). The discovery of this document

confirms the view that has long been represented by authors like Adam (Judenpolitik,

308–9), Burrin (Hitler, 134), and Broszat, (‘Genesis’, 747).

14. See Jäckel, Introduction to Mord, 15.

15. Breitman, Architect, 198; Der Dienstkalender Heinrich Himmlers 1941/42, ed. Peter Witte et al. (Hamburg, 1999), 26 Aug. 1941, p. 198.

16. Tobias Jersak, ‘Die Interaktion von Kriegsverlauf und Judenvernichtung. Ein Blick auf Hitlers Strategie im Spätsommer 1941’, Historische Zeitschrift 268 (1999), 311–74. Jersak puts forward the view that Hitler had seen the Atlantic declaration of 14 August 1941 as

the definitive entry of the US into the anti-German alliance, and with this event in mind he had resolved in mid-August 1941 to suspend his policy aimed at world domination

and introduce the murder of all European Jews, as he held ‘the Jews’ largely responsible

Notes to pages 261–263

523

for Germany’s encirclement. Goebbels’s diaries clearly reveal, however, that Hitler

agreed with Goebbels that the Atlantic Charter was a ‘propaganda bluff’. If Churchill,

both men agreed, had actually pursued the intention of drawing the United States into

the war, this tactic had totally failed. So it is not convincing to see the Atlantic Charter as the cause of a ‘change of strategy’ on Hitler’s part, and a related decision to implement the ‘Final Solution’, or even as the origin of the decision to implement the ‘Final Solution’

(Elke Frölich, ed., Die Tagebücher von Joseph Goebbels, Teil II (Munich, 1966), 15.–21

Aug. 1941, especially 19 Aug. 1941 concerning the conversation with Hitler), 263.

17. Rudolf Höß, Commandant of Auschwitz: The Autobiography of Rudolf Hoess (London,

1959), 206 ff.; in agreement with this the statement made on 14 Apr. 1946, IMT xi. 438–66.

18. Breitman’s attempt, to date the meeting of Höß and Himmler in Auschwitz to 13–15

July 1941 (Breitman, Architekt, 250), is unconvincing for this and other reasons. See

Longerich, Politik, 696 ff.

19. IMT xi. 441.

20. Burrin, Hitler, 197, on the other hand suggests that Höß might have been a year out in his calculations; likewise Jean-Claude Pressac, Die Krematorien von Auschwitz (Munich, 1994), 136, who dates the meeting as early June 1942; equally sceptical about the

dating to summer 1941 are Hans Safrian, Die Eichmann-Männer (Vienna, 1993), 106,

and Karin Orth, ‘Rudolf Höß und die “Endlösung der Judenfrage”. Drei Argumente

gegen deren Datierung auf den Sommer 1941’, Werkstatt Geschichte 18 (1997), 45–57.

There is one other statement that suggests that when Höß said 1941 he meant 1942 (IMT

xxxiii. 275 ff., 3968-PS); but even if we impute this error to him, the chronology

proposed by Höß cannot be made consistent with the known facts (Longerich, Politik,

697).

21. Thus in his latest work, Origins, Browning no longer uses Höß’s statement to support

his thesis, as he still did in ‘Decision,’ 22–3, albeit with major reservations.

22. The Trial of Eichmann, vii. 169–70; also the statement in the main trial, ibid. iv. 1559.

23. In the so-called ‘Sassen interviews’, given before his abduction from Argentina, he

stated that Heydrich had already informed him about the Führer’s order after the

Wehrmacht’s first great military successes in Russia in the battles of Bialystok and

Minsk (that was at the end of June). In his memoirs (Götzen, September 1961),

Eichmann identifies Wirth as the police captain in question (p. 174). On the various

versions of his statements on this subject see Christian Gerlach, ‘The Eichmann

Interrogations in Holocaust Historiography’, HGS 15/3 (2001), 428–52; and David

Cesarani, Eichmann: His Life and Crimes (New York, 2004), 143 ff.

24. Trial of Eichmann, vii. 174. Eichmann gives this as his reason for giving the date as late summer or autumn. But he does not speak expressly of autumn. (Götzen: Note about

foliage.)

25. See p. 280.

26. Trial of Eichmann, vii. 171 and 179. When describing a second trip to the Treblinka

camp, which was by now completed, he becomes increasingly certain that this was the

camp he saw under construction (ibid. 229); later he admits that it might have been

Sobibor (ibid. 400).

27. In the Götzen manuscript, p. 175, also under questioning, Trial of Eichmann, vii. 372–3.

28. Ibid. vii. 174. In his statement to the court, after further acquainting himself with the subject from Reitlinger’s book on the history of Chelmno, he admitted that the visit

524

Notes to pages 263–265

might have taken place at the end of December 1941 or shortly afterwards (ibid.

iv. 1560).

29. Ibid. vii. 210 ff.; Gerlach, ‘Eichmann Interrogations’, 436.

30. Trial of Eichmann vii. 378, 384.

31. Browning, Origins, 523–4, now assumes that Eichmann met Wirth in September 1941,

and not in Belzec but in a kind of experimental facility that Wirth had built before the

construction of Belzec. Wirth could, Browning suggests, already have supervised the

construction of this facility even before being definitively moved to Lublin. Apart from

the fact that this claim is purely speculative, Browning’s proposed chronology seems

too crowded. According to Browning, Hitler made the main decision concerning the

murder of the Jews in mid-September and charged his Führer Chancellery with its

implementation, whereupon Brack and Bouhler went to see Globocnik and Wirth went

to Lublin to undertake his experiments and then present them to Eichmann—all in less

than fourteen days. It seems much more plausible that the plans for Belzec extermin-

ation camp only began in October 1941, just as Wetzel only offered Brack’s support to

Hinrich Lohse, the Reichskommissar in Ostland (Baltic States), on 25 October. See

p. 279. Browning’s assertion that Wirth had already spoken of an impending transfer to

a euthanasia institution in the district of Lublin, is based solely on a post-war witness statement (NO 3010, Bodo Gorgaß); and Brack and Bouhler’s trip to Lublin, which

Brack dates in his trial as ‘early September’, cannot yet have taken place at this time, as Burrin, Hitler, 199, has already shown. In early September Globocnik had not yet been

informed about impending deportations from the Reich, which, according to Brack’s

statement, he spoke about when the two men met (Trials of War Criminals,