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Himmler and Heydrich visited the sites of the massacres and approved them, including the burning by Order Police of 500 women and children in a synagogue in Białystok. On 29–30 September 1941, at Babi Yar, near Kyiv, Einsatzgruppe C, aided by Ukrainians, killed 33,771 Kyivan Jews. ‘The action itself proceeded smoothly,’ said the official report. ‘The Wehrmacht welcomed the measures.’ Army officers registered the Jews, marked them with white armbands and concentrated them, providing trucks for transportation, cordoning off execution zones, even participating in the slaughter themselves. By the end of the year Einsatzgruppen had killed 500,000 Jews in Ukraine and the Baltics.^*

That August, Himmler had attended an execution, which may have been filmed by Hitler’s personal cameraman, though it is unknown if the Führer watched it, after which he asked the Einsatzgruppe commander Arthur Nebe to find a less ‘psychologically burdensome’ means than mass shootings. Nebe turned to the doctors who had euthanized Germany’s disabled and who were now free since Hitler had cancelled the programme when the Bishop of Münster denounced it.

In November 1941, SS-Standartenführer Walther Rauff tested gassing by carbon monoxide in special trucks which were then provided to Einsatzgruppen. In October, Himmler had ordered SS police chief Globocnik to create a death camp at Belzec – as Hitler ordered all Jews to wear yellow stars and decided to deport all Jews from Germany. The RAF’s bombing of German cities and, above all, the failure of the Russian war justified this path towards physical extermination. At meetings with his paladins, Hitler constantly called for the liquidation. As Goebbels recorded, ‘The Führer has decided on a total clean-up. He prophesied to the Jews that if they started a world war they would experience their own destruction. This is not just a turn of phrase … the destruction of Jewry must be the result.’ At a meeting with Hitler on 18 December, Himmler noted: ‘Jewish question. To be exterminated as partisans.’ Himmler later remembered that ‘The Führer placed the execution of this very difficult order on my shoulders.’ It is likely that the decision to launch the Holocaust was taken by Hitler between 12 and 18 December 1941 – the moment the Russian counter-attack was revealing that the war might not be won.

On 20 January 1942, at a lacustrine SS villa at Wannsee in Berlin, Heydrich held a meeting with fifteen civil servants (from the Interior, Justice, Foreign and other ministries) and SS and Nazi Party officials, including Eichmann of the RSHA Jewish Department to decide ‘a consistent approach among the central organs’ to the ‘final solution’. After reminding everyone pompously that Göring had given him and Himmler responsibility for this ‘Endlösung’, Heydrich reported that of eleven million Jews in Europe the able-bodied could be worked to death, ‘eliminated by natural causes’, while the rest, the strongest, would have to be ‘treated accordingly’ since they would be ‘the product of natural selection and if released act as a seed of a new Jewish revival’. The representative of the General Government suggested that his 2.5 million Jews should be liquidated immediately, then Heydrich explained that the rest of the Jews would be transported to ‘transit ghettos from which they would be transported to the east’ – a euphemism for mass murder. Jews would be gathered across Europe, transported to death camps and ultimately killed. Afterwards, Heydrich invited Eichmann for a cognac.

Five days later, at the Wolf’s Lair, Hitler told Himmler and others, ‘This has to be done quickly … The Jews must leave Europe … I see only one option: complete extermination …’ On 14 February, he told Goebbels, ‘No sentimental feelings. The Jews deserve the catastrophe they’re now experiencing … We must accelerate this process with unemotional ruthlessness.’ Three days later the first victims, Jews from Lublin, were gassed at Belzec. In a month 70,000 were killed. New killing camps were built at Sobibor and Treblinka, where by autumn 1942 a total of 1.7 million Polish Jews had been murdered.^* A new killing camp, Birkenau, was added to the existing Auschwitz complex, where in September 1941 a new poison, Zyklon-B gas, was tried out on Russian prisoners.

On 27 May 1942, Heydrich, now protector of Moravia, whom Hitler was planning to appoint as French governor, was being driven out of Prague when his Mercedes was struck by grenades, thrown by brave Czech commandos. Fragments of the car seat peppered his spleen. Although penicillin, being developed in America, would have cured him in a week, he died days later. But the Final Solution continued.

THE SLAVE MASTERS: KRUPP