Part III
Operational Situation Reports
The ruthless, unprecedented destruction by the Einsatzgruppen of the Jews was documented in great detail in daily Operational Situation Reports written from June 1941 to May 1943, Holocaust historian Ronald Headland points out. A special unit was established in the Reich Main Security Office (RSHA), to ensure that the highest levels of the military and government would receive mimeographed reports, especially Adolph Eichmann, a pivotal figure in implementing the Final Solution.
At the Nuremberg Trials, a number of terms were used to describe the murder of the Jewish population: “liquidate,” “execute,” “rendered harmless,” “special treatment,” “got rid of,” “done away with,” “taken care of,” “the Jewish question resolved,” and “there is no longer any Jewish population.”
“No writer of murder fiction, no dramatist steeped in macabre lore, can ever expect to conjure up from his imagination a plot which will shock sensibilities as much as will the stark drama of these sinister bands,” noted the prosecutors at the Nuremberg Military Trials. The members of the Einsatzgruppen and the Security Police were “not sitting in an office hundreds and thousands of miles away from the slaughter. … They were in the field actively superintending, controlling, directing, and taking an active part in the bloody harvest. They participated in a crime of such unprecedented brutality and of such inconceivable savagery that the mind rebels against its own thought image and the imagination staggers in the contemplation of a human degradation beyond the power of language to adequately portray.”
After reading the reports, written with “such cold precision … one is … left with the uniquely Nazi phenomenon of actions of such depravity as to require absolute secrecy on the one hand, and the strange desire to record the events on the other,” Headland said. We learn nothing from these detached accounts about the extent of the atrocities committed against the Jews and Germany’s “political enemies.”
The International Military Tribunal noted that although figures of the fatalities were clearly recorded in the Einsatzgruppen reports, “there were other vast numbers of victims of the Einsatzgruppen who did not fall under the executing files. In many cities, towns, and provinces hundreds and thousands of fellow-citizens of those slain fled in order to avoid a similar fate. Through malnutrition, exposure, lack of medical attention, and particularly, if one thinks of the aged and the very young, of exhaustion, most if not all of those refugees perished. … Then there were those who were worked to death. The Einsatzgruppen were still criminally liable without their having to do the[actual] killing.”
Remaining Decent
In his now-notorious speech to SS officers in Posen on October 4, 1943, Henrich Himmler, Reichsführer SS, assured those involved in the annihilation of the Jewish people they had remained decent. “Most of you know what it means to see one hundred corpses piled up, or five hundred, or one thousand,” he said. “To have gone through this and—except for instances of human weakness—to have remained decent, that has made us tough. This is an unwritten, never-to-be written, glorious page of our history.”
Himmler gave the speech “clearly, deliberately, and emphatically, but for the most part dispassionately, much like a schoolmaster reviewing a long and somewhat complicated lesson for his pupils,” historian Richard Breitman asserted. He observed sarcastically how Germans favored persecution of the Jews, yet “then they all come along, the 80 million worthy Germans, and each one has his one decent Jew. Of course, the others are swine, but this one, he is a first-rate Jew.”
Breitman added, “If the Jews were still lodged in the body of the German nation, we would probably by now have reached the stage of 1916-17,” where we would have Jews “in every city as secret saboteurs, agitators, and inciters.” There is no question “We had the moral right, we had the duty towards our people, to destroy this people that wanted to destroy us.”
At the same time, Himmler warned, “we do not have the right to enrich ourselves by so much as a fur, as a watch, by one Mark or a cigarette or anything else. We do not want, in the end, because we destroyed a bacillus, to be infected by this bacillus and to die. I will never stand by and watch while even a small rotten spot develops or takes hold. Wherever it may form we will together burn it away. All in all, however, we can say that we have carried out this most difficult of tasks in a spirit of love for our people. And we have suffered no harm to our inner being, our soul, our character … ”
While he was “praising and threatening,” SS judge Konrad Morgen, who headed an inquiry commission, exposed extensive corruption and unsanctioned murder of political prisoners, especially Poles and Russians, at Auschwitz. For Himmler, this became a relentless concern: how to curtail reckless murder in an extermination camp established for mass murder; and how to stop pervasive corruption in a structure designed to plunder all of the prisoners’ assets, noted historian Saul Friedländer. Historian Richard Breitman concluded, “It was the most strident and most emotional moment in the whole speech.” Himmler, “the architect of mass murder remained in his own eyes a moralist to the end.”
The speech was delivered, historian Lucy Dawidowicz explains, when the Germans were under intense military pressure: The Russians were forcing them to retreat, the Anglo-American bombings were crippling the German war effort, and the Allies had assumed air and land supremacy. Himmler’s intention to boost the spirits of his SS officers occurred after the Germans had already murdered 5 million Jews.
Dr. Alex Grobman is the senior resident scholar at the John C. Danforth Society, a member of the Council of Scholars for Peace in the Middle East and on the advisory board of the National Christian Leadership Conference of Israel (NCLCI). He has an MA and PhD in contemporary Jewish history from The Hebrew University in Jerusalem.
