1941 by Andrew Nagorski

Author:Andrew Nagorski
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Published: 2019-06-03T16:00:00+00:00

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For a long time, the Nazis had equivocated on the ultimate fate of the Jews. After Germany attacked Poland on September 1, 1939, the Germans had quickly begun planning the creation of ghettos in major cities and towns. Less than three weeks later, on September 20, General Halder wrote in his diary: “Ghetto plan exists in broad outline; details are not yet settled; economic needs are prime considerations.” The last part of his note indicated that in those early days of the war, there was at least some consideration of how to make the ghettos economically viable instead of using them as mere dumping grounds for Jews.

Some Nazi officials genuinely believed that they could make good use of the Jewish labor force. Hans Biebow, a Bremen businessman, served as the manager of the ghetto in Lodz, the Polish textile manufacturing city with the second-largest Jewish population after Warsaw. He pointed out to his superiors that almost all of the output of the ghetto’s factories served the Third Reich’s military needs. They were an “extremely sensitive component of the defense economy,” he argued. But most Nazi officials had no interest in providing the ghetto’s inhabitants with the food and other essentials required for them to remain productive. This even included Alexander Palfinger, Biebow’s deputy. “The rapid dying out of the Jews is for us a matter of total indifference, if not to say desirable,” he declared.

In his diary entry on December 19, 1939, Hans Frank, the governor general of occupied Poland, referred to the number of Jews estimated to be left in the territory that he presided over. “We cannot shoot 2,500,000 Jews, neither can we poison them,” he wrote, sounding regretful that this was the case. “We shall have to take steps, however, designed to extirpate them in some way—and this will be done.”

Most purported solutions still included the idea of further deportations rather than outright murder. When Germany invaded France in May 1940, the victors revived the so-called Madagascar Plan, which envisaged shipping four million Jews from German-controlled territory to the French island colony in the Indian Ocean, at a pace of one million per year. A totally impractical proposal, it was nonetheless seriously discussed by top Nazi officials, who believed the fall of France would be followed quickly by the defeat of Britain. When the Luftwaffe failed to win the Battle of Britain, Germany remained facing a formidable opponent in the skies and on the seas. As slim as the chances were for orchestrating such a massive transfer of Jews to Africa in peacetime, they evaporated altogether in the midst of the ongoing conflict.

Still, the notion of expelling Jews to some other distant destination lingered into 1941. SS Captain Theodor Dannecker, whom Eichmann had dispatched to Paris to deal with “the Jewish question” there, sent a memorandum on January 21 of that year to German offices in France about a “gigantic” task “whose success can be assured only through the most meticulous preparations.” The task in

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