Inferno - Max Hastings [322]
Late in July 1941, a new policy was adopted: confinement of eastern European Jews to ghettos, where they became easier to control and deploy for labour service, while freeing up outside accommodation. The Wehrmacht strongly supported this measure, because it resolved administrative difficulties in its rear areas. The SS extended the range of Jewish murder victims to include many more women and children, but after experiencing the practical difficulties of industrial killing, few SS officers yet felt able to accept a challenge as ambitious as exterminating the entire race. Through the winter of 1941–42 they focused upon packing the ghettos, then completing regional cleansing processes by killing all those Jews found outside them, most in rural areas. Ghetto living conditions were unspeakable: from August 1941 onwards, 5,500 Jews died each month from starvation and disease out of Warsaw’s total ghetto population of 338,000, and mortality was comparable elsewhere.
Final victory in Russia was still assumed to be imminent. Until this came, with a consequent liberation of resources, most of the Nazi leadership favoured deferring a “Final Solution.” Heinrich Himmler, however, was less patient: he saw swift eradication of Jews in the occupied territories both as a national priority and a means of extending his personal authority. He flaunted his mandate as Reichskommissar “for the strengthening of the German nation,” even though at that stage Hitler had made no decision about “Germanisation” of occupied Soviet territory. It may sound trite to emphasise the centrality of the influence of the SS upon the Holocaust, but it is nonetheless necessary. The most powerful fiefdom in Nazi Germany pursued the extinction of the Jews almost heedless of its impact on the country’s war making. As John Lukacs has observed, Himmler focused far more single-mindedly on this objective than did Hitler.
In September 1941, the Führer confirmed Himmler’s victory in his contest with Alfred Rosenberg for authority over eastern Europe: the Reichsführer SS was given explicit licence to conduct ethnic cleansing in the east. This decision marked the onset of the Third Reich’s systematic campaign of genocide. Amid expectations of looming victory, commitments were made that became significant impediments to Germany’s war effort when faced with the rising spectre of defeat, yet they were never reversed. Himmler pursued the extermination of Jews with a concentration of purpose conspicuously absent from every other aspect of Nazi policy making. Any rational assessment of Germany’s predicament in late 1941 demanded dedication to winning the war, above all against the Soviet Union. If this was achieved, the Third Reich could thereafter order its polity as it wished; if not, then National Socialism was doomed. But Himmler committed the SS to a task which could contribute nothing to German victory, and indeed diverted resources from its achievement.
Through the autumn and into the winter of 1941, the pace of slaughter accelerated: scores of towns and villages were systematically purged of Jews. In October, when a Soviet “stay-behind” commando unit blew up the Romanian army’s newly established headquarters in Odessa, Romanian troops assisted by German SS men killed some 40,000 of its Jews. On 18 and 19 October, the SS murdered all 8,000 Jewish inhabitants of Mariupol, and a week later another 1,800 in Taganrog. Week after week the process continued, in towns the world had never heard of—Skadovsk and Feodosiya, Kertsh and Dzhankoy, Nikolayev and Kherson. Mental-asylum patients were killed as a matter of course, whatever their religious affiliation. The SS also shot large numbers of prisoners whom they identified as “of Asiatic appearance,” and began the work of murdering gypsies, which became systematic in 1942. POW camps were combed for Russian Jews and commissars; those identified, at least 140,000 in all, were removed