Hitler's Holocaust E-Book

Guido Knopp

• Herausgeber: The History Press
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2011

Seitenzahl: 626

Beschreibung

No crime in the twentieth century has so deeply shocked mankind as the Holocaust. And none has so stubbornly resisted every attempt to explain it. More than six million people were murdered, and countless more endured horrific suffering. Guido Knopp's disturbing account is the most complete history of the Holocaust to date. It reveals the appalling truth using the most recent historical research, including minutes of daily briefings by Joseph Goebbels, private papers of the SS Einsatzgruppen in charge of mass murder, and East German State Security documents detailing the deportation of Jews. The book relives the agony of the victims and investigates the motives of the perpetrators. Survivors talk for the first time about their horrifying torture and their eventual escape from Nazi persecution. The persecutors now at last confront the atrocities they committed. This is not an attempt to rewrite the history of the Holocaust, but a searing account of the greatest crime of the twentieth century - if not of all time - using the latest research on the subject.

Leseprobe

This documentary record is the legacy of millions of victims

Simon Wiesenthal

First published in 2000 by C. Bertelsmann Verlag GmbH, Munich under the title Holokaust.

This English translation first published in 2001 by Sutton Publishing Limited

This paperback edition first published in 2004

Reprinted in 2009 by

The History Press

The Mill, Brimscombe Port,

Stroud, Gloucestershire, GL5 2QG

www.thehistorypress.co.uk

This ebook edition first published in 2016

All rights reserved

© Guido Knopp, 2000, 2004. 2009

English translation copyright © The History Press, 2009

© 2000 by C. Bertelsmann Verlag, München, within Verlagsgruppe Bertelsmann GmbH

In collaboration with Vanessa von Bassewitz, Christian Deick, Friederike Dreykluft, Peter Hartl, Michaela Liechtenstein, Jörg Müllner

Research: Alexander Berkel, Silke Gampper, Christine Kisler

Translation: Angus McGeoch

The right of Guido Knopp to be identified as the Author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyrights, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights, and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

EPUB ISBN 978 0 7524 6937 9

Typesetting and origination by Sutton Publishing Limited.

eBook converted by Geethik Technologies

CONTENTS

Picture Credits

List of Illustrations

Foreword

Introduction

1 Manhunt

Knopp/von Bassewitz

2 Decision

Knopp/Müllner

3 Ghetto

Knopp/Hartl

4 Death-factory

Knopp/Liechtenstein

5 Resistance

Knopp/Dieck

6 Liberation

Knopp/Dreykluft

Select Bibliography

PICTURE CREDITS

AKG 3, 4, 11, 26, 31

Bundesarchiv 2, 5, 7, 8

Fotoagentur Zentralbild 24

Imperial War Museum 29

Jüdisches Museum 12

Keystone 17, 23

Pan´stwowe Muzeum 25

Senoner/EUPRA 14

Süddeutscher Bilderdienst 10

Ullstein Bild 9, 27, 29

USHMM 6, 13, 15, 19, 21, 30

Yad Vashem 16, 18, 20, 22

ZDF – Archiv 1

LIST OF ILLUSTRATONS

1. German civilian police round up men in Lithuania

2. German troops in battle

3. An SS man shooting civilians

4. Abuse of a Jewish girl in Lvov

5. Lithuanians beating Jews to death

6. Prisoners at Buchenwald

7. Jews identified by their yellow stars

8. Feldmarschall Walter von Reichenau

9. Reinhard Heydrich with Alfred Naujoks

10. A Jewish family in Berlin

11. An entrance to the Łódz ghetto

12. Heinrich Himmler in conversation with Chaim Rumkowski

13. Chelmno, 1942

14. Auschwitz–Birkenau

15. SS guards outside the camp commandant’s house, Belzec

16. Death on the transports

17. Burning bodies

18. The arrival of a transport at Auschwitz

19. The boy from Warsaw

20. The Riegner telegram

21. Oskar Schindler

22. Hungarian Jews

23. Raoul Wallenberg

24. Suitcases belonging to Holocaust victims

25. Shoes of Holocaust victims

26. Auschwitz guards with cans of Zyklon B

27. Majdanek: the first camp liberated by the Russians

28. Guards forced to bury their victims

29. Fields of corpses

30. US soldiers give cigarettes to camp inmates

31. Rudolf Höss

FOREWORD

I warmly welcome the publication in English of Guido Knopp’s new book Hitler’s Holocaust. As Guido Knopp himself points out, the book arises from an acclaimed television series recently shown in Germany and soon to be available to viewers in many other countries. I had the privilege of being part of an international team of advisers – including such prominent experts as Yehuda Bauer (Israel), Christopher Browning (USA), Eberhard Jäckel (Germany), Peter Longerich (Germany/Great Britain), and Peter Witte (Germany) – who helped to shape the series. The very first discussion I had in Munich with the producer, Maurice Philip Remy, convinced me of the seriousness and thoroughness with which he and his researchers, who were by then already scouring archives throughout the world (especially in the recently opened documentary collections in eastern Europe), were undertaking the task. And when I learnt that Guido Knopp, winner of numerous awards for earlier outstanding TV documentaries, would direct the production for ZDF (the German equivalent of BBC2) I had no doubt that the series would be a major success.

This book is able to draw upon the extensive research of the team of researchers working for the television series as well as the notable advances in international scholarship made in recent years by historians of the Holocaust. Since the opening of the archives in eastern Europe following the collapse of the Soviet bloc, research on the Holocaust has been transformed in scope, leading to a great extension of knowledge. Important new monographs have been written, some of the most significant by younger German scholars, casting new light on the emergence of the ‘Final Solution’ (as the Nazis called the murder of the Jews). Much of this new research is only available in detailed studies whose readership is largely confined to specialists. It is among the great merits of Guido Knopp’s book that it is able, not least through the vivid and readable style he deploys, to make the findings of this extremely valuable scholarly research accessible to a wide readership.

In any historical field where issues of great complexity are concerned, differences in interpretation are inevitable. Leading historians of the Holocaust have, in fact, reached wide agreement on many significant points of interpretation. But the character and limitations of the archival remnants of this mega-crime against humanity mean that views will continue to vary on some important issues – such as the nature and timing of the decision (or decisions) to implement the Final Solution. There was disagreement on this and some other still open questions even among the group of expert consultants on the television series; on some points Guido Knopp and I would see things differently. Nonetheless, I admire the way his book shows excellent command of the latest scholarship which is presented to a wider public in a fair, balanced, and accessible way. The author skilfully weaves often highly complex and detailed academic findings into a lucidly written account which is horrifying, dramatic, and moving while remaining free of pathos. The many eye-witness accounts of victims presented are intensely harrowing. The photographic material is gripping in its horrific depictions. And the assembled testimony of perpetrators alongside the almost unbelievably inhumane documentary extracts cited from Nazi leaders and bureaucratic ‘desk-top murderers’ offer insights into warped mentalities which sometimes seem to come from a strange world and a bygone age – but in fact existed in a highly modern state and society not far away and not long ago.

To read Guido Knopp’s book poses the question with renewed sharpness: what motive could anyone possibly have for wishing to deny that such terrible events happened? The precision with which the author has pieced together the evidence in constructing such a compelling picture of this total collapse of civilisation highlights once more not only the historical absurdity but also the unstated prejudice that lie behind Holocaust denial. Only the wilfully perverse could refuse to accept that which the book so excellently portrays: the enormity of this crime against humanity, the magnitude of the disaster suffered by the Jews of Europe.

Beyond the strictly historical questions, the moral dimension of the Holocaust remains inescapable. And here it is, perhaps, of significance that the book and the television series from which it emanated are German products. No country has explored more thoroughly than has Germany the most painful and distressing parts of its recent history. Guido Knopp and his co-authors are of a German generation to which can be attributed no culpability for what took place under Hitler. But the book testifies to the honesty and openness with which they approach this darkest episode in their country’s history, and the responsibility they feel in facing up to that history. That way has led to, and will continue to lead to, positive shifts in mentalities and a heightened sense of public morality. In bringing a deepened awareness of the Holocaust to a wider public, this book is making its own contribution to such advances, both within Germany and elsewhere.

Hitler’s Holocaust is a well-researched and graphically written account of how the people of a civilised and cultured country could become involved in the perpetration of inhumanity on a gross scale. It deserves the widest possible readership. I am grateful for the opportunity to add this foreword to the English edition, and wish Guido Knopp’s book every success.

Ian Kershaw

2001

INTRODUCTION

This book came into being as a result of the research for a television series which is being broadcast all over the world: Hitler’s Holocaust – probably the most comprehensive attempt so far to present this crime against humanity through the medium of documentary film. For two years researchers working on the project looked for new material in over fifty archives, from Washington to Moscow, viewed millions of feet of film, and examined and evaluated thousands of original documents. In this process they came upon new sources which had not hitherto been available to researchers. Often they are only fragments – but even the smallest find can help to fill in the famous blank areas in the story. There is little that is more revealing, for example, than scenes filmed in secret by an amateur cameraman, of the ghetto, of pogroms and the public harassing of Jews, of transportation to the extermination camps. And many of these newly discovered sources are sometimes like pieces of mosaic which help academics to fill gaps in the documentary record.

The present book has also benefited from this preliminary work. Like the television series, it is divided into six chapters: from Hitler’s assault on the Soviet Union, which marks the beginning of the Holocaust, up to the liberation of the concentration camps in 1945. We were able to make use of interviews with over 500 contemporary eye-witnesses – often Jewish survivors who, in the last years of their lives, have found the strength to testify for the first time – people who now live in many different countries: in Russia, Germany, Lithuania, Latvia, Denmark, Poland, Israel, South Africa, Canada, Hungary, Austria, the Netherlands, Slovakia and the United States. They are still alive, they can still be questioned. In ten more years this last chance will have gone for ever. And this is also true of the dozen or so perpetrators who agreed to be interviewed.

That is why this project comes at an opportune moment. It is only in the last few years that we have had free access to archives in Eastern Europe, where the Holocaust took place. It has at last been possible not only to examine previously unpublished documents but also to look at film never shown before.

What the television series attempts to achieve is also reflected to an equal extent in the book: a concern for authenticity. It was important to place every foot of film, every newly found document and every eye-witness account in its precise historical context – in its correct period in time and its exact location.

No crime in the long history of humankind has so appalled us, none so stubbornly resists to this day all attempts at explanation. Why it could all happen remains an open question. If, however, we try to show what happened and by what means it was done, then this will actually help to answer the question about the reasons. It is in this sense that the film series and the book both represent an attempt at a historical summing-up – one which we want to bring to the attention of as many people as possible.

Manhunt

It started with the manhunt. In the early hours of 22 June 1941, while Hitler’s mouthpiece, Goebbels, tried to sell the invasion of Stalin’s empire as a preventive war, the Wehrmacht’s divisions were thrusting deep into the interior of the Soviet Union. In their wake came the so-called Einsatzgruppen or ‘action squads’: 3,000 men who carried out their murderous assignment to the rear of the front line. Their primary objective was the extermination of the ‘Jewish-Bolshevist intelligentsia’. Their orders were unambiguous and applied chiefly to ‘Jews in party or government positions’. Hitler had repeatedly hammered home to his henchmen that ‘Bolshevism’ and ‘Jewry’ were synonymous. In the very first days of the war against Russia thousands of Jews had been shot by the Einsatzgruppen; furthermore, these were predominantly men of military age.

For Hitler, this was the war he had long dreamed of: a war of annihilation aimed at gaining ‘living-space in the east’, the spawn of his deluded notion of a great Germanic empire stretching from the Atlantic to the Urals. The indigenous population was to be expelled, dispersed, ‘racially drained’, ‘scrapped’ – to use the sinister vocabulary of Himmler’s ‘General Plan East’.

While German armoured divisions were encircling entire Soviet armies, Himmler’s murder squads followed in the bloody tracks of the NKVD. The Soviet secret service headed by Lavrenti Beria had killed tens of thousands of people, most of them belonging to non-Russian nationalities. Now, in the Ukraine, Lithuania and Latvia, where pogroms had not been uncommon in the past, the German occupiers kindled the hatred of the local populations and watched them commit appalling massacres of the Jewish population, who for no reason were made the all-purpose scapegoats.

By mid-June the Germans had penetrated so deep into Russian territory that in the Führer’s eastern headquarters the mistaken impression arose that the war was already won. In the ‘Wolf’s Lair’, as it was known, the spoils were divided. Himmler was to maintain civil order. More than 30,000 men, battalions of the Ordnungspolizei (Order Police) and selected formations of the Waffen-SS (Military SS), were on hand for the ‘pacification’ of the region, as it was cynically termed. As Hitler saw it, the partisan war proclaimed by Stalin actually benefited them: ‘It gives us the opportunity to wipe out anyone who opposes us.’ Those receiving the orders knew who the principal targets were.

Yet the Nazi dictator had underestimated the Soviets’ capacity for waging war. It was in the Pripyet Marshes that the first noteworthy actions were carried out behind the lines. With the deployment of the SS on the spot the manhunt gained a new dimension. For the first time large numbers of Jewish women were among the victims. A report at the end of July noted drily: ‘800 Jews and Jewesses shot, aged from 16 to 60.’

From mid-August onward, for the first time, even children were being killed, as they were in the Ukrainian town of Byelaya-Tserkov, on the instructions of Field-Marshal von Reichenau. This is the devastating report by SS-Obersturmführer August Häfner, who was in charge of the shooting: ‘The children were lifted down from the convoy trucks. They were made to stand above the pit and then shot. If we hit them, we hit them.’

It was not only in Byelaya-Tserkov that units of the Wehrmacht were brought in to assist with mass shootings, at other places soldiers were witnesses – and more. Not all of them were guilty of these crimes, not a great many even, but too many – especially in the towns. Some reacted with horror, others with disgust. Only a few protested. Hardly anyone enquired about the reasons. Quite a number never heard anything about the crimes, being exclusively occupied with their own survival. Then again there were others who applauded the murderous activities of the Einsatzgruppen, urged the perpetrators on and humiliated the victims at the very moment of their death. Sometimes regular soldiers committed murder themselves – often, though not always, on orders from above. In letters to relatives and friends at home there is comparatively little to be found about this first phase of the murder of Jews. But when the soldiers came home on leave they told of what they had seen, often whispering behind their hands. In this way news of the mass shootings in the east gradually trickled through.

Decision

It was probably in September 1941 that Hitler made his decision to murder every Jew in Europe. The dictator was the driving force in setting the machinery in motion towards industrialised mass killing; he was the central authority. In matters relating to the Jews he made all the important decisions, but always remained dependent on executives like Himmler and Heydrich – men with a fatal eagerness to obey, and with the ability to get inside the mind of the tyrant, to penetrate his criminal psyche, to divine his presumed wishes and to fulfil them.

The deportation of Jews from Germany or occupied Poland to the conquered lands to the east was not actually meant to begin until after the Soviet Union had been defeated. Hitler wanted to achieve his victory over Stalin by autumn 1941 at the latest.

At first his gamble in the east seemed to have paid off. The war against Russia was going according to plan, and the opposition appeared to have little to put up against the whole weight of the German onslaught, while the death-squads of the SS and the police went on with their killing behind the lines. But only a few weeks later the certainty of victory evaporated. The strength of Soviet resistance had been underestimated. The war would last longer than expected. Hitler’s hatred of the Jews became more intense. He held them solely responsible for his own crimes: the war and the thousands of deaths at the Front.

His obsessive vision of confronting an ‘international Jewish conspiracy’ was reinforced when Great Britain and the USA formulated the common objective of putting an end to the Nazi tyranny once and for all. The dictator now agreed with the wish of his henchmen Heydrich and Goebbels, to begin the deportation of Jews from Germany, Austria and the ‘Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia’, as the occupied region of Czechoslovakia was called. They were to be ‘resettled’ in areas where at that very moment the Jewish population – men, women and children – was being annihilated without distinction. Deportation amounted to a death-sentence. At the same time work started on building the death camps.

Ghetto

What did this mean for the Jews in Germany? Sometimes the horror came to them with correct and cultivated manners. For example, the Gestapo officials whose job was to fetch seven families from what was designated a ‘Jewish dwelling’ on Berlin’s elegant Kurfürstendamm, introduced themselves politely, requested them to bring their luggage and accompanied them to a waiting furniture-van. It was a journey that would end in death.

Other Jewish families received a letter couched in fine language, addressed to the local branch of the Reich Jewish Association, asking them on a certain day to ‘make themselves available for emigration transport’. Either on foot or in the last compartment of the tram (still accessible to them) they made their own way to the nominated collection point – often in broad daylight, under the eyes of all. There was an eerie normality about the exodus of the German Jews from Hitler’s Reich, organised by officialdom and accompanied by bureaucratic formalities. From the autumn of 1941 onward more than 130,000 German Jews were forced to begin the journey which, for the overwhelming majority of them, had no return. Millions of victims from the occupied or allied countries followed their fated path. Very few of them had any idea what unspeakable misery would await them. To calm their fears they were told about labour camps or agricultural estates, and were tricked with forged greetings cards from fellow-victims who had already been dragged off. Instead, the deportees found themselves to begin with in the ghettos of cities like Łódz or Riga. They were waiting-rooms of death. Even someone who survived the misery, hunger and cold, slave labour in the ghetto factories, random shootings and deadly epidemics in the overcrowded slums, was destined for death. With grim regularity human transports arrived in newly constructed extermination sites not far from the ghettos, where murder was being committed with industrial efficiency. From 1942 onward countless deportation trains ran non-stop directly into the unloading bays of the death camps.

Death-factory

Death from overwork, cold, hunger or shooting – in the long run all these methods of killing appeared too troublesome to the perpetrators. So it was that on 5 September 1941, in Block 11 at Auschwitz, a test was set up: on that day for the first time the SS used a preparation of hydrocyanic acid called ‘Zyklon B’, on human beings – ‘successfully’, as Hauptsturmführer Rudolf Höss noted with satisfaction. Later he remarked: ‘I must say frankly, the gassing had a reassuring effect on me, since of course in the foreseeable future a start would have to be made on the mass extermination of the Jews. I always dreaded the shootings. Now I was reassured that we would all be spared these blood-baths.’ Nearly 400 Soviet soldiers and around 300 sick Polish prisoners met their death in the first experimental gassings at Auschwitz. The method for the impending industrialised killing had been discovered – faster, cheaper and quieter than the originator of the racial mania himself could ever have dreamed.

While the German advance on the eastern front had come to a standstill, while Rommel in North Africa had captured Tobruk but was driven back at El Alamein, the decision on the ‘Final Solution of the Jewish Question’ was put into effect. On 26 March 1942 the first trainload of Jewish women from Slovakia, organised by Adolf Eichmann, arrived at Auschwitz. Their death-sentence had been passed; only the execution was – for the moment – postponed. There was still insufficient capacity in the human slaughterhouse. Three months later this ‘bottleneck’ had also been overcome. The new camp complex of Auschwitz–Birkenau with its underground gas-chambers I and II was ‘ready for operation’.

On 14 July 1942 Himmler was summoned to the Führer’s headquarters. Hitler put pressure on his henchman: the ‘Final Solution’ must be completed by the end of the year! The Reichsführer-SS then proceeded to carry out an inspection of Auschwitz. The ‘visitors’ programme’ included the selection and gassing of a trainload of Jews from Holland. The process of extermination was followed with close attention by Himmler. To the very last moment the murderers tried to lull their victims into a false sense of security. The undressing-rooms adjacent to the gas-chambers had signs on them like ‘Shower’ and ‘For Disinfecting’. It was recommended to the victims that they should hang up their clothes and remember the number of the hook – so that they could find their things again later. Then an SS man chivvied them along: ‘Hurry up, the food and coffee are getting cold.’

The presence of prisoners in the Sonderkommando or ‘special detachment’ helping the camp staff, provided the victims with further comfort – they were Jews like themselves. ‘The people had been washed and were still smiling. We had to keep quiet about what was going to happen to them’, recalls Jehoshua Rosenblum, a survivor of the Sonderkommando: ‘. . . and when the last one had gone into the gas-chamber, the door was closed and immediately two SS men threw in the Zyklon B through an opening in the roof.’ The amount needed for a killing operation: 5 kilograms – for 1,500 people. ‘After a while I heard piercing screams from inside, people banging on the door, wails and groans . . . The noise, which to start with grew louder and more unmistakable, died down minute by minute and soon changed into a gasping death-rattle from hundreds of throats. The gas had penetrated their lungs and caused a paralysis of the respiratory system’, reports Filip Müller, another prisoner in the Sonderkommando. After 15 or 20 minutes the killing-operation was over. With their bare hands the members of the Sonderkommando dragged the dead bodies from the gas-chamber and took them to the cremation area. Before they were thrown into the fire, specialist ‘work-groups’ went into action. The gold fillings were removed from the teeth of the dead, and the women’s hair was cut off. The gold fillings were melted down and sent to the Reichsbank in the form of gold ingots.

Himmler was satisfied with the whole operation. Before he left an informal party was held, at which Himmler must obviously have spoken about the reality of Auschwitz. Shortly afterwards, the Breslau industrialist, Eduard Schulte, got to hear of this conversation by roundabout means. He was a man with a conscience. Without delay he boarded a train bound for Switzerland. In Geneva he secretly passed the information on to two contacts in the Jewish community. Through them the horrifying news reached the World Jewish Congress. ‘We discussed it for over six hours. Is it possible that millions of Jews are being put to death? And it was another two days before we became convinced that it was not only possible but even probable’, we are told by Gerhart Riegner, at that time head of the Swiss section of the Congress. For a long time the mass murder had been bitter reality: not only in Auschwitz, but in Chelmno, Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka and Maly Trostinets near Minsk, Jews were being systematically gassed. It was only in 1943 that Auschwitz–Birkenau became the central human abattoir of the regime – and thus the symbol for the entire Holocaust.

Those human beings who, after an agonising train journey, were selected for labour on arrival in the sidings of a concentration camp, were for the most part condemned to a wretched and protracted death. Shipped to the camp like cattle, the prisoners were first registered and marked with a tattoo. ‘From then on we were just numbers’, recalls Helena Gombosovà, from Slovakia. What followed was weeks of pointlessly excruciating physical exercises, ruthless drilling and beatings – endless beatings. In primitive wooden barracks, originally intended to house 52 horses each, 800 people were now crammed. The huts were so infested with rats and lice that diseases quickly developed, especially typhus. This meant that time and again the occupants of entire blocks were wiped out, from one day to the next. After a few hours of fitful semi-sleep, the daily routine began before dawn with a head-count. The bodies of those who had died during the night were thrown out of the huts. Those prisoners fit for work headed off for gravel-pits, quarries, farms and arms factories in the vicinity. The annihilation of the Jews through labour was an extremely profitable business for the SS. The average life expectancy was nine months, the proceeds from ‘hiring out’ was 6 marks per day, less costs of feeding and accommodation – 6 pfennigs per day. Net profit 1,631 Reichsmarks per labour-slave!

By the middle of 1943 the eventual defeat of the Third Reich had become inevitable – yet in Auschwitz the everyday killing routine continued unchanged. The military setbacks only increased Hitler’s determination to annihilate every Jew in Europe. The German armed forces were ordered by the dictator no longer to fight exclusively for the ‘final victory’, but also – largely without their knowledge – for another reason: in order to cover up the Holocaust. This second war within a war was one Hitler wanted to win at all costs.

Resistance

Why was Auschwitz repeatedly photographed by the Allies, but never bombed? On 20 August 1944 three prisoners looked up into the sky above Auschwitz, full of hope. From the south a deep drone could be heard – planes of the US 15th Bomber Squadron. But once again the bombs dropped elsewhere, this time on the fuel refineries of Monowitz, only 5 miles from the death-camp. ‘I simply cannot understand why they didn’t help us’, complains ex-prisoner Andras Lorenczi. He and many of his fellow-victims had no greater desire than to be bombed by the Americans. ‘At least they could have hit the crematoria’, says Lorenczi, ‘then maybe a few thousand would have had to die. But we were so familiar with death, anyway.’ Bombs on Auschwitz? The destruction of the scene of the crime as a protest against the crime?

By October 1944 still no bombs had been dropped on Auschwitz, and Nahum Goldmann of the World Jewish Congress made a last attempt to change the minds of the military. After the deputy US Secretary of Defence, John McLoy, had fobbed him off with the misleading information that it was the British who made the decisions about bombing-targets in Europe, Goldmann turned to the British Air-Marshal Dill, who stated bluntly that ‘the British had to conserve their bombs for military targets, and that the only salvation for the Jews lay in the Allies winning the war’.

There were other forms of resistance – even in Germany. Despite all the attempts to keep it secret, the mass murder provoked courageous and desperate opposition. The people who deserve to be rescued from oblivion are the courageous men and women who put their own lives in danger to save their Jewish fellow-citizens: from officers in military counter-intelligence (the Abwehr), who smuggled Jews into Switzerland in the guise of agents, through to all those who provided food and hiding-places for the more than 6,000 Berlin Jews who went underground. ‘He who saves but one life saves the whole world’ – this wise saying from the Talmud is true of others besides Oscar Schindler.

From the study of letters and Wehrmacht orders it can be proved today that even some members of the circle who plotted to kill Hitler on 20 June 1944 were involved in the Holocaust – as accessories and, regrettably, as perpetrators. The case of General von Stülpnagel, for example, who in 1941 advocated the war of annihilation and also played an active part in the attempted coup in 1944, shows the gaping gulf that can sometimes exist between reality and the idealised view of it.

Most dramatic of all was the resistance by the Jews themselves. It began belatedly. ‘People simply didn’t want to believe it’, recalls Marek Edelmann, one of the leaders of the Jewish uprising in Warsaw. Not until orders were given for the final ‘clearing’ of the ghetto did the victims make a stand. They fought bravely and desperately and forced the SS to keep calling in reinforcements and heavy weapons. The unequal battle lasted three weeks. In the end the former ghetto was left a smoking ruin. The superior arms of the German culprits had won – as they did in all other rebellions in ghettos and camps, in Warsaw or Sobibor. Yet the message from the victims, that they would not be led like lambs to the slaughter, remains with us.

The history of resistance against the Holocaust also throws up the pressing question as to why, in the face of the monstrosity of this crime, there was no massive protest within Germany. Only on one isolated occasion was there any kind of public demonstration. In February 1943, when the last Berlin Jews were being deported, their non-Jewish friends and relatives protested for several days outside the collection point in Rosenstrasse and forced the regime to release 1,500 men and women from ‘mixed marriages’. This ‘rebellion of the heart’ was successful. But it remained an exception.

Liberation

In the spring of 1945, when Allied troops reached the concentration camps, the martyrdom which had lasted for years came to an end. From camps within Germany the Allies were able to release hardly more than 50,000 Jewish survivors. Almost six million people had lost their lives. What the soldiers saw in the camps was beyond all imagining: heaps of corpses the height of a man lined the roads. Draped in rags, the few survivors gazed at their liberators with expressionless eyes.

‘They just lay there and stared at us. And we stared back’, remembers the British colonel, William Roach, whose unit occupied the concentration camp at Bergen–Belsen in north-west Germany. A horrified outcry went around the world, when pictures from the camps showed inconceivable horrors. Yet these were ‘only’ concentration camps. There were no pictures from the extermination camps, which lay far to the east, mainly in Poland.

In the last twelve months of the war Hitler’s henchmen, of greater or lesser importance, had staged the final act of this horrific drama, in which they tried to drag their victims to destruction with them. In the spring of 1944 the long arm of the Holocaust reached Hungary, the only country in Europe in which the Jewish population had so far remained spared. In just twelve weeks 437,000 Hungarian Jews were deported to Auschwitz. Most of them were murdered immediately. By 1944 Auschwitz was no longer a secret; the Hungarian tragedy was played out in the full light of day. Even now the feeling has never left the survivors that the world abandoned them to their fate.

When the Allied armies reached German territory, Heinrich Himmler issued the order that the inmates of the camps located in the east were to be marched back into Germany. Not one must fall into Soviet hands alive. Tens of thousands of half-dead people dragged themselves westwards on these death-marches. They were heading for German or Austrian camps: Mauthausen, Flossenbürg, Dachau, Buchenwald, Sachsenhausen, Dora-Mittelbau, Neuengamme and Bergen–Belsen – which turned into ante-rooms of hell. Crammed into the smallest of spaces, the victims spent the final hours of the regime in a race between death and liberation. The guards watched the prisoners dying from hunger and disease. When the Allies reached the concentration camps, they were dumbfounded at the scale of the horror. It was something which – despite knowledge of the camps’ existence – no-one had thought possible.

Many victims remained silent, often for decades. Sometimes not even their children knew what sufferings a father or mother had been through. Not until today, at the end of their lives, have many found the courage to talk about their torment, and to provide a testimony for posterity. The way back to the past is painful, yet there are some for whom it is bound up with the hope that by taking it they can contribute to ensuring that what once happened is never repeated. To this day the survivors bear the scars of the Holocaust on their bodies and in their souls. Their liberation has not been able to free them from that.

Consequences

Today, when we put the question of guilt for all this to a representative sample of Germans (and Austrians), the majority of those questioned reply that ‘Hitler’, ‘his henchmen’ or ‘the SS’ were responsible for the mass murder. Only a minority place the blame with ‘the Germans as a whole’.

However, everyone did contribute their part of it. There is no doubt that Hitler was the prime mover. Without Hitler there would probably have been no invasion of the Soviet Union, without Hitler there would have been no Holocaust. This does not mean that the guilt can be shifted on to one individual. Yet it was only Hitler’s criminal energy that released the criminal energy of others. Hitler had an iron grip on his henchmen. They carried out what the dictator ordained – or what in their view the Führer had in mind. The murder of the Jews did not result from a sequence of uncoordinated bureaucratic measures within the dictatorship, but was a state-organised crime deliberately staged by Hitler. Hitler not only set the killing in motion, he also managed it, through his delegate Heinrich Himmler.

This does not mean the accomplices are acquitted – quite the contrary. Hitler’s Holocaust was carried out by many little Hitlers – hundreds of thousands of willing executioners, who later pleaded that they were under orders – as a rule they were not psychopaths, but perfectly normal, ‘ordinary’ men. What the latest detailed research reveals is terrifying. It shows how thin is the veneer which separates human beings from the inhuman beings who are prepared, apparently without a second thought, to slaughter their fellow creatures. For what motivated them was not only and not exclusively a murderous anti-Semitism. Rather, it was the opportunity, which a satanic regime had offered them, of indulging their basest and most repulsive instincts. Millions of people, not only in Germany, looked on and looked away. Millions certainly knew enough to understand quite clearly that they did not want to know any more.

This was possible in Germany – and if there, then it is possible anywhere. Genocide in the twentieth century has not been restricted to Germany: the murder of millions was committed in Stalin’s gulag, in Cambodia and in China. What makes the Jewish Holocaust so unparalleled in history is the industrialised manner in which the deed was carried out. Those of us Germans who were born after the war cannot be held responsible for the Holocaust. But we are all the more responsible for the memory of it. Responsibility means making oneself fully open to history.

My thanks are due to Eberhard Jäckel for casting a critical eye over the whole book. My thanks also go to Ian Kershaw for his many excellent suggestions. I thank my co-authors Vanessa von Bassewitz, Jörg Müllner, Peter Hartl, Michaela Liechtenstein, Christian Deick and Friederike Dreykluft, who provided me with superb drafts – and above all Maurice Philip Remy who, as producer and originator of the television series, did invaluable preparatory work.

CHAPTER ONE

MANHUNT

KNOPP/VON BASSEWITZ

Anti-Semitism on purely emotional grounds will find its final expression in the form of pogroms. However, rational anti-Semitism must lead to a carefully planned legal curbing and eradication of Jewish privilege . . . though its final, unalterable objective must be the removal of the Jews altogether.

Hitler in a letter, 1919

The rattle of rifle salvoes was swallowed up in the wide expanse of the dunes. On the white sands south of the lighthouse at Liepaja in Latvia (then known by the Germans as Libau) hundreds of people were gathered – German occupation troops, and Latvians as well. What had drawn them there was certainly not the beauty of the Baltic Sea, sparkling in the evening sun. On the grass-covered dunes there was a bustle of activity. The crowd of rubbernecks watched as grey Wehrmacht trucks struggled with engines howling, through deep sand on the track across the dunes. On their open platforms, crammed tightly together, stood men on whose jackets were patches of bright yellow fabric. When the vehicles halted, an order rang out causing a stir on the truck platforms. Hurriedly but awkwardly, the men jumped down off the trucks. These civilians seemed strangely bemused as they staggered, wordless and uncomplaining, through the dunes – forced to hurry along by the guards with kicks and blows from their rifle-butts. ‘Achtung! The next two groups!’ a businesslike German voice ordered. In groups of five the prisoners were driven to the edge of a deep pit and then forced to jump down into it. There they stood side by side, motionless. No-one put up a fight, there were no despairing cries. Above them, at the edge of the pit, militiamen of Latvia’s ‘self-defence force’ raised their carbines to their right shoulder. A few seconds to aim, then the crack of a salvo, felling the men in the pit. Only a few yards away, the next group of five had watched it all – there can be no doubt at all that these men, too, knew what was about to happen to them.

In Libau, in July 1941, the shooting of hostages was a daily occurrence. Since 29 June the town with its naval harbour had been in German hands – following the Wehrmacht’s invasion of the Soviet Union, it had only taken a week to defeat the town’s defenders – Soviet sailors and the militia formed from workers in the Torsmare dockyard. But there were still exchanges of fire between German occupiers and scattered defenders. Reason enough for the men of Einsatzkommando 2 to ‘pacify’ the town of Libau with ‘the most ruthless of methods’, as the orders put it. A call for assistance had come from the town commandant, a lieutenant-commander in the German navy. It was he in fact who had announced the draconian reprisals: ‘For each individual attempted assault, act of sabotage or looting, ten of the hostages in German hands are to be shot.’ The first ‘hostages’ were shot on 4 July with the assistance of the SS component of Einsatzgruppe 2 – they were 47 Jews and five Latvian communists. Three days later the local commandant raised the number of hostages to be shot in reprisal to 100 for each German soldier wounded.

The German Einsatzkommandos – Hitler’s willing executioners in the struggle against the ‘international Jewish–Bolshevist enemy’ – knew exactly who were to be selected as hostages: the Jews of the town that had just been captured. So far, their victims were still Jewish men ‘capable of bearing arms’ – those were the orders they had received. As yet, women, children and the old were spared.

In the night of 17–18 June Russian patrols again made probes into German Reich territory and could only be driven back after a prolonged exchange of fire. This means that the time has now come when it is necessary to take action against this plot by the Jewish and Anglo-Saxon warmongers, and those, also Jewish, who hold power in the central Bolshevist government in Moscow.

Adolf Hitler, 22 June 1941

I remember the Germans marching in, in the summer of 1941. We fled to a village and hid there. Then the Lithuanians with white armbands – they were the ones who killed Jews – immediately began to torment us, to take everything from us, to beat us up and kill our children. They thought that all Jews were communists and had to be stamped out.

Rozèle Goldenstein, Lithuanian Jew

My father went down the street to find out whether there was still some way to escape, and he disappeared. We never saw him again and I presume he was dragged off somewhere by the Lithuanians or was shot. No-one saw him again and no-one knows what became of him.

Zvi Katz, Lithuanian Jew

Teams of thugs combed the houses in search of hostages; young Jewish men were picked up on the streets without warning – they were easy prey for their pursuers, because a decree by the local commandant on 5 July obliged Jews to wear a patch of yellow cloth on their chest and back. It was around this time that Fanny Segal, then a sixteen-year-old high-school girl, lost her father – he had suspected that terrible things were in store for the Jews of Libau. ‘One day he came home and told my mother that they were digging graves by the sea. “I think those graves are for us”, he said.’ His fears were realised on 8 July, as Fanny Segal recalls: ‘We were working in an army camp outside Libau. At five o’clock the Germans took us back to Libau where we were told we had to apply for work permits. We went to the centre of town. There was a big hall in a big building there. There were several hundred of us, and suddenly an order came: ‘All the men outside!’ My father began to cry; he kissed me and gave me his watch. He knew it was the end.’ A total of 1,000 Jewish men were executed in Libau in the first month of German occupation, by Einsatzgruppen and the Latvian ‘self-defence force’.

There were other Libaus everywhere behind the German front line in that summer of 1941. Only a few days after the invasion of the Soviet Union on 22 June 1941 Hitler’s Wehrmacht had rolled across the western border region of the vast Red empire, and countless Jews were suddenly confronted with a German occupation which they could not yet assess, but which they would soon come to know in all its horror. In the summer of 1941 it looked as though nothing could halt the German war-machine that had become so accustomed to victory. Virtually everything was going as planned. Armoured columns had pushed across the River Bug on five undamaged bridges and, along the entire front, crushed the Soviet troops stationed in the border region. The swift armoured advance was followed up by the infantry divisions. Within two days the Army Group North reached the Lithuanian city of Vilnius. Units of the Army Group Centre also advanced at breakneck speed. The 3rd Panzer Division under General Model only took six days to cover the 265 miles from Brest-Litovsk, near the Polish border, to Bobruysk in Byelorussia; on 27 June they set a record of 69 miles in one day. The Blitzkrieg strategy perfected in Poland and in the French campaign seemed to be bringing success even in the wide open spaces of Russia. For one thing was clear to everyone involved: a swift advance was necessary if the war objectives were to be achieved before the onset of the Russian winter – the Germans only had two months left before the annual autumn rains turned the Russian soil into an endless morass, and mud would hamper the progress of the tanks.

The army which marched into Russia on 22 June 1941 was the largest force in history to be assembled for a single campaign: almost 3.2 million soldiers, divided into seven armies, four armoured groups with 3,580 tanks, 7,184 artillery pieces, 600,000 trucks, 750,000 horses, and three Luftflotten comprising more than 2,000 aircraft. At 3.15 a.m. on the morning of 22 June 1941, this mighty war-machine attacked along a front 960 miles in length – from the Memel estuary on the Baltic to the Black Sea.

There is probably not a German soldier left who doubts that in the event of a successful Bolshevist invasion of Europe, the Jews would have wiped out absolutely everything German. It is all the more incomprehensible, then, that in a detachment which shot 7 Jews on a patrol, men still asked why they were shot. . . . If a patrol finds out that in a village the mood among the population is expectant and anxious, and in that village you wipe out the Jews and their Bolshevist supporters, then in a very short time you will sense a sigh of relief in the village. . . . There are no compromises in this, only a very clear and unambiguous solution, and that is, especially here in the east, the complete annihilation of our enemies. These enemies are, however, no longer human beings in the European cultural sense, but animals who from an early age have been brought up and trained as criminals. And as such they must be eradicated.

Situation report by Generalmajor von Bechtolsheim, commandant in Ruthenia, 10 October 1941

The twenty-year-old Polish Jew, Arnold Arluk, still felt secure in his little home town of Lida in northern Poland, for Lida lay in the Soviet-occupied part of the country. Arluk knew nothing of the plans and strength of the Wehrmacht, which stood at the ready on the other side of the demarcation line. But what he saw of the Red Army in Lida impressed him: heavy tanks and artillery reinforced the Soviet garrison which had been stationed there since September 1939. The whole town was completely moulded by the military presence. By night trains loaded with military equipment rumbled westward. ‘We knew something was up’. Arluk remembers. He had learned from broadcasts by Britain’s BBC that German troops were massing behind the River Bug, which formed the frontier. Yet when the Germans did indeed strike out on Sunday 22 June 1941, he was taken completely by surprise. It was only some hours after the attack that he – like the rest of the Soviet population – heard that the war had begun. The 6 a.m. news from Radio Moscow still made no announcement about the attack on Russia which had already taken place. It was not until nearly midday that the invasion by Hitler’s troops was revealed on Radio Moscow to the Soviet population, and then it was not done by Stalin himself but by the Soviet Foreign Minister, Molotov, in the General Secretary’s name: ‘At 4 a.m. today German troops attacked our country without the slightest warning and without a formal declaration of war. Our cause is just. The enemy will be defeated. Victory will be ours.’

The second surprise for Arnold Arluk was the speed of the German advance. The fighting did not last long. Arluk was amazed to see how the Wehrmacht moved from Bialystok towards Minsk ‘as though out for a stroll’. In his home town the Soviet army was in disarray – and suddenly the garrison that had impressed him so much was gone. In spite of all this, he could not make up his mind to flee. ‘We knew there would be anti-Semitism; we knew there would be reprisals against Jews, but that outright murder would take place, that a race would be wiped out – we never suspected that.’

As a precaution he went underground for a few days. When he ventured out from his hiding-place again, he could tell that for him, as for all Jews, a new and cold wind was blowing in Lida. The German occupiers went down the streets with lists and fetched Jewish men from their houses. ‘It was a list of intellectuals, of people in the public eye, doctors, lawyers, a number of factory managers – they were dragged out of their homes, but without their wives or children.’ Arluk immediately assumed that Polish fellow-citizens had helped the Germans draw up the lists. He felt helpless, just as helpless as the townspeople who stood at doors and windows for hours, watching this activity. At first he thought that the men were merely being arrested. They were assembled in the town’s market square and then taken away in trucks. But before long Arluk and all the other silent observers knew what was happening to the men – they heard shots coming from the forest beyond the barracks. As Arnold Arluk explains: ‘It was a small town and soon people came along who had been on the spot and told us that men were being shot and buried.’

He and his fellow-Jews suspected that the German occupation heralded the start of a time of terror. From now on, one predominant feeling gripped him: ‘Fear. Fear, because for the first time we had seen killing, not just persecution. A fear about what do I do now? There was nothing I could do.’ The action was all on the part of the occupiers. The field commander of the Wehrmacht decreed that the Jews had to be made recognisable. ‘To begin with we didn’t wear stars, just a white armband with a Star of David marked on it and the word “Jew” written inside the star’. Arluk explains. The young man made a decision that saved his life: he went into the forests and joined the partisans.

The Germans came to our town but only stayed for a short while, about a week. In the course of that week we certainly got a foretaste of what was awaiting us. Many of our men were arrested and locked in the synagogues without food or drink. In a nearby town they even set fire to synagogues, with people in them.

Irene Horovitz, Ukrainian Jew from Borislav

It was 5 o’clock in the morning when we suddenly heard bombs exploding. Window-panes shattered and everyone panicked. Of course, we didn’t know what was happening. We believed the Red Army was strong enough to teach the Wehrmacht a lesson. About ten days later German troops marched into our town and the disaster we’d been warned of began. We were now in the same situation as those refugees from Germany and western Poland who had told us horrific stories, which we didn’t want to believe.

Samuel Pisar, Jew from Bialystok, north-east Poland

The war which had descended on the Soviet Union and its people was different from anything that had been known before – as Fanny Segal, Arnold Arluk and many of their Jewish fellow-sufferers quickly came to realise. But the other Soviet citizens – civilians and Red Army alike – were to experience this as well. The German soldiers were not only equipped with weapons of steel and the latest military technology. Their Führer, Adolf Hitler, had provided those who believed in him with the ideological armament needed to wage this war with utter ruthlessness. For Hitler, 22 June saw the beginning of the war he had always longed for. On 3 March 1941 the war leader had issued instructions to Alfred Jodl, chief of operations of the armed forces high command (OKW), which amounted to an order to murder – and indeed it was clear enough who the perpetrators were to be and who the victims: ‘This coming campaign is more than just a clash of arms; it will lead to a conflict between two ideologies’, we read in the OKW wardiary. ‘The Jewish-Bolshevist intelligentsia that has hitherto oppressed the people must be removed. . . . Whether it might be necessary to deploy elements of the SS alongside the secret field police was something which would have to be examined with the Reichsführer-SS. The need to put all Bolshevist bosses and commissars out of action immediately would indicate its necessity.’ At a conference on 30 March 1941, which brought the top brass of the Wehrmacht together in the Reich Chancellery, the dictator spoke quite openly about how this war was to be waged: ‘The conflict will be very different from the one in the west. We have to abandon the attitude of soldierly comradeship. The communist never has been any comrade of ours and never will be.’ The chief of the general staff, Franz Halder, dutifully noted in his diary: ‘We are involved in a war of annihilation.’

Finally, we read in the Guidelines for the conduct of troops in Russia, issued on 19 May 1941 by Wilhelm Keitel, the OKW chief-of-staff: ‘Bolshevism is the deadly enemy of the National Socialist German people. It is against this subversive ideology and its proponents that Germany is fighting. This struggle requires ruthless and energetic measures against Bolshevist agitators, partisans, saboteurs and Jews, and the total stamping out of all active or passive resistance.’ In this decree borderlines were deliberately blurred rather than clearly drawn, and Jews were mentioned in the same breath as ‘Bolshevist agitators’.

In the Ninth Fort in Kaunas Jews were locked up – three or four hundred of them. Holes were dug in the ground – graves – where they were required. We were then taken to the Ninth Fort. There were a number of Germans there, SS troops. They had set up machine-guns and used us to escort the Jews, twenty or thirty at a time, to the graves. After a head-count the order came: ‘Ready – forward.’ Straight into the graves. There they had to lie down and these SS men shot them where they lay. They were lying face down. The Germans fired their machine-guns – raking them over and over again. Anyone still moving was finished off by the Germans. The victims went to the graves calmly, with bowed heads. They made no fuss – it was a tragic thing to see. It was a thoroughly unpleasant business to be involved in. But we were given as much to drink as we wanted. And after that, when the schnapps began to work, we all had the courage to take part in the operation. As the last men were brought forward, I fired as well. I can’t understand why our officers agreed to such a thing. I hated the whole affair. But when you’re in the army you get given orders. And an order has to be carried out.

Petras Zelionka, former Lithuanian auxiliary gendarme

The essential objective of the campaign against the Jewish-Bolshevist system is the complete smashing of its power-structure and the eradication of Asiatic influence in the European cultural domain. . . . The soldier must fully understand the necessity of hard but justified retribution against Jewish sub-humanity. . . . Only in this way will we do justice to our historic task of freeing the German people once and for all from the Asiatic–Jewish peril.

Generalfeldmarschall Walter von Reichenau, commander of the 6th Army, in an order of 10 October 1941

The arbitrary linking of Bolshevism with Jewry was an idée fixe of which the dictator never let go. Now, in the summer of 1941, at the zenith of his power, Hitler wanted ‘Operation Barbarossa’ to bring the achievement of his long-cherished goal: the destruction of ‘Jewish Bolshevism’. In this way the Soviet threat which – as Hitler and a good many Germans saw it – was a combination of Jewry and Bolshevism, had to be removed. The concept of Bolshevism as domination by the Jews over the Slavic masses in Soviet Russia was part of the original ideological repertoire of the National Socialist movement. In Mein Kampf Hitler got carried away by his abstruse assertion that pre-revolutionary Russia thrived from the ‘Germanic core of its upper ruling classes’. However, this old Russia had been wiped out by the Bolshevik revolution of 1917. After the revolution the place of the old Germanic governing class had been taken by ‘the Jew’. In his polemic, Hitler evoked the alleged reign of terror by the Jews in Russia: ‘In seizing political power, the Jew casts off his last remaining veils. The Jew of popular democracy becomes the Jew of blood and the tyrant of nations. . . . The most fearful example of this is offered by Russia, where with truly fanatical savagery, and often with inhuman torture, he has killed –or allowed to starve – close on 30 million people, in order to secure the domination of a great nation by a bunch of Jewish scribblers and stock-exchange gangsters.’ Hitler saw the empire in the east as a threat. ‘In Russian Bolshevism we are seeing the attempt of Jewry to achieve world domination in the twentieth century.’

Paradoxically, however, he also made it known that he considered the Soviet empire to be weak: ‘Just as it is impossible for the Russian, by his own efforts, to shake off the yoke of the Jews, so it is equally impossible for the Jew to maintain that vast empire in the long term. . . . The giant empire in the east is ripe for collapse. And the end of Jewish domination in Russia will also be the end of Russia as a state.’ For the Germans, therefore, undreamed-of opportunities presented themselves. In Mein Kampf Hitler announced a completely new and expansionist foreign policy: ‘With this, we National Socialists are deliberately drawing a line under the direction of Germany’s pre-war foreign policy. We are beginning again where we left off six centuries ago. We are calling a halt to the eternal Germanic drift towards the south and west of Europe and turning our eyes to the land in the east. We are finally putting an end to the colonial and mercantile policy of the pre-war era and switching to the policy of the future, the policy of soil and territory.’ For Germany, he claimed, was a nation without space, which had to acquire room for itself if it was to have a future at all. Thus one of the key phrases in Mein Kampf runs: ‘The right to soil and territory may become an obligation if, without an enlargement of its territory, a great nation appears doomed.’

In this country they [the Jews] are and remain chiefly responsible for the subversion and existing mess in every respect. Isolating them from the rest of the population seems imperative. . . . Complete command of this long-standing communal conflict combined with the elimination of the Jews is at the same time the key to the total political and economic pacification of the region.

Oberleutnant Helmut Mann, counter-intelligence officer of 221 Security Division, in a handover report for the civil administration of Erich Koch, 28 July 1941

‘Operation Barbarossa’ bundled together all the ideological and strategic elements of Hitler’s thinking in one practical solution. His belief in the superiority of the ‘Aryan German’ over the ‘subhuman Slav’, his anti-Semitism and anti-Marxism were combined with the well-advertised intention to free Europe from the scourge of ‘Jewish Bolshevism’. At the same time he wanted to destroy its power centre in Moscow in order to secure the future of the German master race in its new Lebensraum