the German front. Hitler saw in this order ‘some
advantages for us; it enables us to exterminate
everyone who opposes us’. The actual task for the
open-air killings was assigned to special SS
detachments, the Einsatzgruppen. The German
army and special police units recruited in
Germany, too, became heavily implicated in the
mass murder. Nazi ideology had come to be
widely accepted by ordinary people. Hitler and a
small leadership group could not have committed
such crimes without thousands of active helpers
and an uncaring attitude to the victims by many
more even where it was not actually hostile. The
‘Final Solution’ in the Soviet Union avoided all
need for transport and special camps or ghettos.
In Poland, the Jews were not perishing fast
enough. Then the destruction had to be planned
of the Jews remaining in German-occupied
Europe, and of the Jews living in the countries of
Germany’s allies. After discussions among the
Nazi leaders an order to Heydrich, a subordinate
of Himmler, was issued by Göring on 31 July
1941 to draw up plans for the destruction of non-
Russian Jewry on a systematic basis. In accor-
dance with these instructions Heydrich called the
notorious conference on 20 January 1942 of
senior administrators from the various Reich min-
istries who would be involved and which took its
name from Wannsee, a favourite picnic area just
outside Berlin, where they met. It was assumed
that the Jews in the rest of Europe could not be
massacred as in Russia. Though there were several
concentration camps in Germany itself, these
could kill only tens of thousands, not millions!
The greatest concentration of Jews was already in
Poland, so to Poland and the east the Jews were
to be transported: ‘Europe will be combed from
west to east.’ What ‘resettlement’ really meant
was clear from the record of the conference:
the Jews capable of work will be led into these
areas in large labour columns to build roads,
whereby doubtless a large part will fall away
through natural reduction... The inevitable
remainder will have to be dealt with appropri-
ately, since it represents a natural selection
which upon liberation is to be regarded as a
germ cell of a new Jewish development.
1
THE ORDEAL OF THE SECOND WORLD WAR 267
Survivors of the Warsaw ghetto rising are marched to their deaths, 1943. © National Archives, Washington
