The Devil's Diary by Robert K. Wittman

Author:Robert K. Wittman
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2016-02-22T00:00:00+00:00

An assault gun with the SS Division Totenkopf—the “Death’s Head” Division—speeds through the Soviet Union at the start of Operation Barbarossa in the summer of 1941. (Bundesarchiv, Bild 101I-136-0882-12/Albert Cursian)

17

“Rosenberg, Your Great Hour Has Now Arrived”

Tuning in on their radios at the end of March 1941, Germans heard the voice of Hitler’s ideological czar booming out across the airwaves. Rosenberg was talking about the Jews, and though his delivery was formal and stilted, to anyone listening with even half an ear, his words were unmistakably murderous.

“We are of the belief that this great war constitutes a cleansing biological world revolution,” the Reichsleiter was saying. “Today we consider the Jewish question one of the most important political problems facing us in Europe, a problem which must be solved, and will be solved. And we hope, yes, we know already today, that all nations of Europe will march behind this cleansing in the end.”

In Frankfurt, Nazi dignitaries were gathered in the medieval city hall that weekend to dedicate Rosenberg’s new Institute for Research on the Jewish Question. A crowd of anti-Semitic reporters, writers, and minor officials from ten European nations had descended on the city to discuss how to eliminate the Jews from the Continent. The timing was right, everyone knew: With the Nazis now in control of an enormous swath of Europe, the enemies of the Jewish people finally had the power to turn their words into deadly action. Rosenberg had attended the first part of the conference, but after Hitler summoned him to the capital on urgent business, he could not make it back to Frankfurt in time, so he read his keynote address from Berlin and broadcast it to all of Germany.

This war would exterminate “all those racially infecting germs of Jewry and its bastards,” he told the radio audience. “All the nations are interested in the solution to this question, and here we must declare with the utmost passion: We will and can no longer endure to see the greasy fingers of Jewish high finance meddle once again in the völkisch interests of Germany or other peoples of Europe. Nor are we any longer willing to put up with seeing Jewish and Negro bastards, instead of German children, running around in German towns and villages.”

The only question was “where to put the Jews.” The idea of an independent Jewish state was dead; it had only been a Zionist ploy to create a center from which Jews could continue their insidious control of the globe. Rosenberg suggested deporting them to a reservation, where they would be held “under experienced police supervision.”

Whatever the logistics, “we, as National Socialists, have only one categorical answer to give here to all the questions: For Germany, the Jewish question will only be solved when the last Jew has left the Greater German space,” he said. “For Europe, the Jewish question will only be solved when the last Jew has left the European continent.”

As he spoke those words, Rosenberg already knew that, for the first time in his life, he would have a chance to put his rhetoric to practical effect.

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