To all appearances, a fundamental decision had been taken in the early autumn to kill the Jews of Europe, a decision that even the deteriorating military situation would not reverse. In early November, a time resonant in Hitler’s mind with the shameful capitulation of 1918, events at the front seemed to harden his determination to destroy the Jews. At lunch with Himmler on 5 November, Hitler vowed that he would not allow “criminals” to stay alive while “the best men” were dying at the front. “We experienced that in 1918,” he added, with little need to expand on what he meant, given the notorious passage in Mein Kampf in which he rued the Kaiser’s failure to kill “Hebrew polluters” at the beginning of World War I. That evening, he launched a diatribe against the Jews, vowing that the war would bring their ruin. In Munich three days later to address the old comrades on the anniversary of the failed putsch, the Führer once again blamed the Jews for the war, noting that it was merely the continuation of the struggle that had not ended in 1918. Germany had been cheated of victory then, he remarked bitterly, “But that was only the beginning, the first act of this drama. The second and the finale will now be written. And this time we will make good what we were then cheated of.” Finally, at his field headquarters in the early hours of 2 December, just days before the Soviet counterattack in front of Moscow, he remarked bitingly of the Jews, “He who destroys life, exposes himself to death. And nothing other than this is happening to them.” Just a few days later, the first extermination center, at Chelmno, went into operation. The day before, however, the Japanese bombed the American naval base at Pearl Harbor. The European war was now part of a world war. On the twelfth, meeting with party leaders the day after having declared war on the United States, Hitler again referred to his prophecy, drawing the logical, if murderous, conclusion. As Goebbels noted, “He warned the Jews that if they were to cause another world war, it would lead to their own destruction. Those were not empty words. Now the world war has come. The destruction of the Jews must be the necessary consequence. We cannot be sentimental about it.” With his insistence that his prophecy be taken literally, Hitler had finally resolved any remaining ambiguity about the timing of the Final Solution: the destruction of Europe’s Jews would take place immediately and not be delayed until after the war.75
In a strict sense, no plan yet existed for the coordinated murder of Europe’s Jews, although, since October, Heydrich had been sending reports to various ministries in the Berlin bureaucracy both to acquaint them with the ongoing annihilation of Soviet Jewry and to prepare the ground for their eventual cooperation. To that end, Heydrich had on 29 November sent out invitations to those in the civilian bureaucracies most concerned with Jewish policy for a conference to be held on 9 December to clarify matters. The worsening military situation forced a postponement of the meeting, and not until 20 January did Heydrich convene the conference, with lunch included, at a confiscated Jewish villa on the Wannsee, a large lake on the outskirts of Berlin. In the meantime, Hitler and other top Nazis had not been idle. In the two days following his speech to party leaders, Hitler and Himmler had a flurry of meetings with Philipp Bouhler and Viktor Brack, the key figures in the euthanasia organization, securing the extensive use of euthanasia personnel in the solution to the Jewish question. Himmler also expressed a new sense of urgency, stressing to Brack, “One must work as quickly as possible.” Then, in a meeting with Alfred Rosenberg on the sixteenth, Hitler remarked that the Jews “had brought the war down on us, they had started all the destruction, so it should come as no surprise if they became its first victims.” Time and again in these momentous mid-December days, Hitler referred to the retribution that would be visited on world Jewry for its alleged anti-German activities and responsibility for the war. The Jews having lost their role as hostages who might deter American entry into the war, nothing now stood in the way of their mass annihilation.76
Back from Berlin, Hans Frank on 16 December conveyed to his subordinates in the General Government the attitude at the top: “The Jews will disappear…. We must destroy the Jews wherever we find them…. But what is going to happen to these Jews? Do you imagine there will be settlement villages for them…? In Berlin we were told… : Liquidate them yourselves!” As if to confirm Frank’s assessment, in a reply on 18 December to an official inquiry from Reichskommissariat Ostland asking whether all Jews were to be liquidated, Berlin indicated: “Clarity on the Jewish question has been achieved through oral discussion: economic interests are to be disregarded… in the settlement of this problem.” That same day, Himmler, following a meeting with Hitler, expressed clearly in his appointment book what that meant: “Jewish question/to be exterminated as partisans.”77
By the time of the Wannsee Conference, then, none of the participants harbored any doubts about the fate of the Jews: what they were to organize and prepare was not a resettlement operation but the deportation and systematic destruction of Europe’s Jews. Although Heydrich referred to using Jewish labor to build roads in the east, during which project a large number would die from overwork and starvation (which, in fact, was already occurring in Polish Galicia), the idea of annihilating Jews through forced labor after a victorious war had given way to the recognition that the Jews would be destroyed during the war, and not in the Soviet Union but in the newly created death camps in Poland. “Practical experiences,” Heydrich mentioned cryptically, were being gathered that would be of great significance for the “imminent” Final Solution. Heydrich had been quite pleased at the outcome of the meeting. He had anticipated difficulties, but, instead, his authority had been recognized, no objections had been raised to the extermination of the Jews, the state secretaries of the relevant bureaucracies were enthusiastic about doing their part, and the basic outline for the practical implementation of the Final Solution had been agreed on. Not all the details had been settled, and the methods and techniques being experimented with were still untried on a large scale, but no one at the conference could doubt the ultimate goaclass="underline" every Jew in Europe was to be killed.78
The gas chambers at Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka, and Auschwitz did not begin operation until March 1942, and not until July would large-scale deportations from Western Europe begin, but the key decision about the fate of the Jews had been taken. Until the summer of 1941, the Nazi leadership had envisioned the solution to its self-imposed Jewish problem through emigration, expulsion, and resettlement, only to be frustrated at every turn. With the magnitude of the problem increased through territorial conquest in Russia, military success itself led to a further radicalization: the Jews of the Soviet Union would be shot where they were found, with the fate of the remainder of the European Jews left hanging. By mid-October, the expectation of imminent victory led to the ultimate radicalization: no European Jews were to be allowed to escape what would now not be a slow death through hunger, disease, and harsh labor. Instead, the goal would be the immediate physical destruction of the Jews even as the war continued, as the regional killing operations were merged into a comprehensive program of systematic mass murder. The decision was not made all at once but instead reflected a process of incremental radicalization within which Hitler often responded to, and approved, the initiatives of his subordinates. But, for the ultimate step to mass murder, both Hitler’s authorization and the context of the war were vital. On 30 January 1942, just ten days after the Wannsee Conference, Hitler spoke before a packed house at the Sportpalast, where he once again referred to his prophecy. The war, he declared, “can only end either with the extermination of the Aryan peoples or the disappearance of Jewry from Europe.” He thought, however, that the war would not end as the Jews imagined: “The result of this war will be the annihilation of Jewry. For the first time the old Jewish law will now be applied: an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth…. And the hour will come when the most evil world-enemy of all time will have played out its role.”79 The Wehrmacht had invaded the Soviet Union as the vanguard of a regime with murderous intentions; Barbarossa had now become a war of annihilation in the fullest sense.