Hitler and the Holocaust

261 Pages·2001·1.41 MB·English

by  Robert Solomon Wistrich

M L C
ODERN IBRARY HRONICLES
C A on Africa
HINUA CHEBE
K A on Islam
AREN RMSTRONG
D B on mathematics
AVID ERLINSKI
R B on Nazi Germany
ICHARD ESSEL
I B on the rise of modern Japan
AN URUMA
J D on the Golden Age of Athens
AMES AVIDSON
S D on the Irish
EAMUS EANE
F F -A on the Americas
ELIPE ERNÁNDEZ RMESTO
L F on law in America
AWRENCE RIEDMAN
P F on World War II in Europe
AUL USSELL
P J on the Renaissance
AUL OHNSON
T J on the Cold War
ONY UDT
F K on the age of Shakespeare
RANK ERMODE
J K on the city
OEL OTKIN
H K on the Catholic Church
ANS ÜNG
B L on the Holy Land
ERNARD EWIS
M M on the Balkans
ARK AZOWER
J M and A W on the company
OHN ICKLETHWAIT DRIAN OOLDRIDGE
P M on the rise of modern India
ANKAJ ISHRA
A P on peoples and empires
NTHONY AGDEN
R P on Communism
ICHARD IPES
C R on prehistory
OLIN ENFREW
J R on the museum
OHN USSELL
K S on California
EVIN TARR
C S on the university
ATHARINE TIMPSON
M S on the German Empire, 1870–1918
ICHAEL TÜRMER
S W on science
TEVEN EINBERG
B W on freedom
ERNARD ILLIAMS
A. N. W on London
ILSON
G S. W on the American Revolution
ORDON OOD
J W on the history of the novel
AMES OOD

2001 Modern Library Edition
Copyright © 2001 by Robert S. Wistrich
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American
Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by
Modern Library, a division of Random House, Inc., New York,
and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of
Canada Limited, Toronto.
MODERN LIBRARY and colophon are registered trademarks
of Random House, Inc.
Published by arrangement with Weidenfeld & Nicolson,
a division of Orion Publishing Group Ltd.
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Wistrich, Robert S.
Hitler and the Holocaust / Robert Wistrich.
p. cm.—(Modern Library chronicles)
eISBN: 978-1-58836097-7
1. Holocaust, Jewish (1939-1945) I. Title. II. Series.
D804.3.W469 2001
940.53’18—dc21
2001030835
Modern Library website address: www.modernlibrary.com
v3.1
To my mother, Sabina,
who lived through it all without losing faith
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The research for this book was conducted over a number of years in
many archives, libraries, and research institutes in Israel, Europe,
Britain, and America. My indebtedness to the work of countless scholars,
too numerous to mention here, will be apparent from the endnotes. As
one of the six historians appointed to the Vatican Historical Commission
to study the role of Pius XII during the Holocaust, I also benefited from
access to many sources in at least seven languages that proved helpful in
the writing of this book. During the first six months of 2000, I was
fortunate enough to be a visiting professor at the Netherlands Institute
for Advanced Studies in Wassenaar. I wish to thank Professor Wesseling
and his gracious staff for their hospitality and assistance. This project
was originally proposed to me by Toby Mundy and supervised by
Rebecca Wilson of Weidenfeld & Nicolson, whose suggestions were most
useful. I gratefully acknowledge the efforts of Frances Bruce in
deciphering my handwritten text and putting it into a readable format. I
owe a special debt to Trudy Gold, Director of Holocaust Education at the
London Jewish Cultural Institute, for help and encouragement at critical
moments. I also learned much from my earlier work with the Institute in
writing the text for the educational packet Lessons of the Holocaust
(1997), now used widely in British schools; and in collaborating with
Rex Bloomstein in making the film Understanding the Holocaust, for
which I also wrote the script. As always, I owe a debt of gratitude to my
wife, Daniella, and my three children for their patient understanding of
my single-minded dedication to this project. This book is dedicated to
my mother, Sabina, born in Cracow ninety years ago, who always set me
an example of how one can overcome adversity with fortitude and spirit.
Robert Solomon Wistrich
London/Jerusalem
December 2000
CONTENTS
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Acknowledgments
Introduction
1 A -S J
NTI EMITISM AND THE EWS
2 F W H
ROM EIMAR TO ITLER
3 P R
ERSECUTION AND ESISTANCE
4 T “F S ”
HE INAL OLUTION
5 B C S
ETWEEN THE ROSS AND THE WASTIKA
6 C A E
OLLABORATION CROSS UROPE
7 B , A H
RITAIN MERICA, AND THE OLOCAUST
8 M N G
ODERNITY AND THE AZI ENOCIDE
Notes
About the Author
INTRODUCTION
The missionaries of Christianity had said in effect: You have no right to live among us as
Jews. The secular rulers who followed had proclaimed: You have no right to live among us.
The German Nazis had at last decreed: You have no right to live.
RAUL HILBERG, The Destruction of the European Jews (1961)
The Holocaust was an unprecedented crime against humanity that aimed
at the annihilation of the entire Jewish population of Europe, down to
the last man, woman, and child. It was the planned, deliberate policy
decision of a powerful state, the Nazi Reich, which mobilized all of its
resources to destroy an entire people. The Jews were not condemned to
die for their religious beliefs or for their political opinions. Nor were
they an economic or military threat to the Nazi state. They were killed
not for what they had done but for the simple fact of their existence.
To be born a Jew, in the eyes of Adolf Hitler and the Nazi regime,
meant that one was a priori not a human being and therefore unworthy
of life. There were other innocent victims of Nazi racial ideology:
Gypsies, who were considered racially impure, were sent to the gas
chambers; Russians, Poles, and other occupied peoples in eastern Europe
were reduced to slavery; even those ethnic Germans who were branded
as mentally or physically defective were put to death until a public
outcry moderated this policy. We know that under the Nazi regime, the
SS, the Einsatzgruppen (mobile killing units), the Wehrmacht, the Order
Police, and the guards in the death camps practiced brutality on a
hitherto unknown scale; that they mowed down row upon row of
shivering, half-naked adults and smashed the heads of Jewish infants
without pity or remorse; that they built a vast system of concentration
camps and death camps, the purpose of which was the production of
corpses on an industrial scale.
The central unanswered question is why? Why were Jews worked to
death on senseless, unproductive tasks, even when the Reich was
experiencing an acute labor shortage? Why were skilled Jewish
armament workers killed in the camps despite the pressing military
needs of the Wehrmacht? Why did the Nazis insist they were fighting an
omnipotent “Jewish” power even as their mass murder of the Jews
revealed the powerlessness of their enemy?
At the heart of this seeming mystery lay a millenarian weltanschauung
(worldview) which proclaimed that “the Jews” were the source of all
evils—especially internationalism, pacifism, democracy, and Marxism;
that they were responsible for Christianity, the Enlightenment, and
Freemasonry. They were branded “a ferment of decomposition,”
formlessness, chaos, and “racial degeneration.” The Jews were identified
with the fragmentation of urban civilization, the dissolving acid of
critical rationalism, and the loosening of morality. They stood behind
the “rootless cosmopolitanism” of international capital and the threat of
world revolution. In a word, they were the Weltfeind—the “world
enemy” against which National Socialism defined its own grandiose
racial utopia of a Thousand-year Reich.
In Hitler’s genocidal, racist ideology, the redemption (Erlösung) of the
Germans and of “Aryan” humanity depended upon the “Final Solution”
(Endlösung) of the “Jewish question.” Unless the demonic Weltfeind was
annihilated, there would be no “peace” in a Europe that was to be united
under Germanic leadership so that Germany could fulfill its “natural
destiny” by expanding to the east to create Lebensraum (living space) for
its people. The Second World War, which Hitler initiated, was
simultaneously a war for territorial hegemony and a battle against the
mythical Jewish enemy.
War made the Holocaust a concrete possibility. The victories of the
Wehrmacht brought millions of Jews under the heel of German power
for the first time. The task of annihilating them in cold blood was
delegated by Hitler to the SS, under Reichsführer Heinrich Himmler and
his closest subordinate, Reinhard Heydrich. As early as 1939, a so-called
euthanasia program, directly responsible to Hitler and the Führer
Chancellery, had been initiated to eliminate nearly ninety thousand
ethnic Germans who were deemed “unfit to live” because they were
physically or mentally “defective.” This program, halted temporarily in
1941, proved to be a training ground for the “Final Solution.” In late
1941, its personnel, apparatus, and experience in killing by poison gas