As a project of national and social renovation based on war, the invasion of the Soviet Union had from the beginning posed the existential question of survival or annihilation. The characteristic dynamism of Nazi policy, its sense of urgency, was based as much on a notion of must do as on one of can do. This insistent desire to prevent the destruction they imagined their enemies were about to visit on them produced in the Nazis a feeling of liberation from conventional morality and a willingness to use maximum violence. Not surprisingly, then, despite, or perhaps because of, the military crisis in the winter of 1941–1942, the process of radicalization of Nazi racial policy accelerated. With the growing recognition that Germany now faced a long war, top Nazi leaders drew certain conclusions: the labor problem had to be solved and armaments production increased; the food situation had to be stabilized; any unrest at home had to be stemmed by moving against “privilege”; and, above all, the underlying source of all such discontent, the Jews, had to be eliminated immediately. “It must be done quickly,” Hitler told Himmler in late January 1942. “The Jew must be ousted from Europe…. He incites everywhere…. I see only one thing: total extermination…. Why should I look at a Jew any differently from a Russian prisoner…? Why did the Jews start this war?” In mid-February, Goebbels, always sensitive to the Führer’s mood, recorded Hitler’s mounting fury and decision “to do away ruthlessly with the Jews in Europe”: “The Jews have deserved the catastrophe that they are now experiencing. We must accelerate this process with cold determination.” This “clear-cut anti-Jewish position” was also conveyed, Goebbels gloated, to a number of top army officers.34
Nor did Hitler’s apocalyptic vision wane as the situation at the front stabilized. In a late February gathering of the “Old Fighters” in Munich, Hitler promised “the elimination of these [Jewish] parasites,” a vow that was hardly meant to be kept secret since the next day many German newspapers headlined the speech, “The Jew will be exterminated.” That this threat had now materialized as a comprehensive process of destruction was evident to Goebbels in late March when he recorded with some trepidation in his diary:
Starting with Lublin [the first ghetto to be liquidated], the Jews are now being deported from the General Government to the East. The procedure used is quite barbaric and should not be described in any further detail. Not much remains of the Jews themselves…. The Jews are being subjected to a sentence that is barbaric, but they have fully deserved it. The prophecy that the Führer made… starts to come true in the most terrible way. In these things no sentimentality should be allowed. If we didn’t defend ourselves, the Jews would exterminate us…. Thank God, during the war we now have a range of possibilities that we couldn’t use in peacetime.
This thundering crescendo of anti-Jewish threats and abuse culminated in a late April speech to the Reichstag in which Hitler set out the “historical context” of Nazi policy. The Jews, he claimed, had played an evil role and done great harm to Germany in World War I. Now they were trying to complete the second act of their destructive process but would fail since Germany had declared war on “this Jewish infection.” Victor Klemperer, an acute observer of the anti-Semitic mood in Germany, noted worriedly of this speech, “The concentration of hatred has this time turned into utter madness. Not England or the USA or Russia—only, in everything, nothing but the Jew.”35
Even at the height of the danger on the eastern front, then, when it appeared as if Army Group Center, if not the entire Ostheer, might collapse, Nazi killers on the ground kept at their murderous task while top officials continued to refine procedures for a more efficient destruction of the Jews. In the east, the men of Einsatzgruppe B spent the winter in the vicinity of Smolensk, Mogilev, and Bryansk, but, even as they recoiled from the Russian counteroffensive, their advanced commandos systematically killed the surviving Jews in the rear area of Army Group Center. To the south, during the early months of 1942, Einsatzgruppen C and D engaged in more extensive operations, murdering perhaps 75,000 people in all between the beginning of the Soviet attack and the end of March. In one particularly gruesome incident, 4,000–5,000 Jews were placed in stables that were then doused with the gasoline in such scarce supply to the army and set afire. In Transnistria, 43,000 Jews, in groups of 300–400, were shot while kneeling naked in the icy weather on the rim of a precipice; the shootings continued for days, interrupted only by the celebration of Christmas. Almost 30,000 Jews were deported to the makeshift camp of Berezovka, some sixty miles northeast of Odessa, where most perished from the abysmal conditions or being shot. The shootings had been conducted so haphazardly that some of the corpses had been left on the main road or thrown into a local lake, raising fears of epidemics in the spring. To the north, in the Baltic, Einsatzgruppe A also continued its operations, with the murderously reliable Karl Jäger and his Einsatzkommando 3 alone accounting for over 138,000 victims between the start of operations and early February 1942.36
Even as the Einsatzgruppen worked nonstop during the winter months to kill as many Jews as possible, officials in Berlin discussed ways in which to extend the reach of the Final Solution. In the wake of the Wannsee Conference, a number of smaller meetings, involving lower-ranking officials, were held to work out the details of the complicated process. News about the decisions made at Wannsee spread quickly throughout the bureaucracy, where there was no lack of willingness to participate. In Heydrich’s original scheme, Europe was to be “combed from west to east,” but, in practice, because transportation problems were less acute in Poland, the systematic extermination of the Jews at death camps began in the General Government. Already on 26 January 1942, Albert Speer had informed Rosenberg that, owing to the rail crisis, any additional Jewish transports from the west would have to be postponed until April. Even the deportations of Reich Jews to concentration camps approved by Himmler on the same day had to be delayed for a time.37
These difficulties, however, merely caused Nazi officials to shift their focus, rather than postpone their plans. In early December 1941, the Germans had begun killing Jews in gas vans at the extermination camp at Chelmno. As the killers gained experience in and skill at their deadly craft, the pace and scope of their operations expanded accordingly, and increasing numbers of Jews from the Warthegau and the Lodz ghetto, deemed unsuitable for work and, therefore, useless eaters, were sent to their fate. Beginning in early February 1942, selections also began to be made in Riga: Jews deemed incapable of work were shot or murdered in gas vans. In Minsk, too, executions became a regular feature. That same February, 150 Jews were killed in the first test of the gas chambers at the newly constructed camp of Belzec, near Lublin. Similarly, construction of a new camp to accommodate large numbers of Soviet prisoners of war had begun at Auschwitz-Birkenau in October 1941. But, by early 1942, with it increasingly evident that large numbers of Soviet prisoners would never reach the camp, the site’s mission began to change: Birkenau would now assume the same role, killing nonworking Jews, as Chelmno and Belzec. Systematic mass murder was clearly in the air as winter gave way to early spring, but the process initially used to kill euthanasia victims in Germany had to be shown to be feasible on a large scale in the east. The first transports of Jews from Galicia and Lublin arrived in mid-March at Belzec, where they were successfully gassed to death in one large operation. The technical hurdle to assembly-line murder had been overcome. In April, when the Reichsbahn again supplied special trains for Jewish deportations, so had the transportation obstacle. The will was never in doubt. Late that month, in a detailed discussion of the Jewish question, Goebbels found that Hitler’s attitude remained “unrelenting”: the Jews had to disappear from Europe.38