Nazi Ideology, Operation Barbarossa, and the Holocaust

On June 22, 1941, Nazi Germany launched Operation Barbarossa, its invasion of the Soviet Union. Nearly four million Germans, Italians, Hungarians, and others poured over the Soviet frontier in the largest invasion in history. This was the moment: in many ways, it marks the culmination of the Nazi ideal in that it represented the physical manifestation of Hitler’s wildest dreams. The invasion was inextricably tied up with the Nazi leader’s views toward the Jews, toward the notion of Lebensraum, and the National Socialist utopian vision. So when people say, “If only Hitler hadn’t invaded Russia, the Germans could have won World War II,” they reveal that they do not understand the real reasons for the Second World War in Europe.

Nazi Germany wanted a reckoning with France for revanchist and vindictive reasons, and because it wanted to dominate continental Europe. Its reasons for wanting to do so were ideological and economic. Ideologically, the Nazis believed firmly that the Germans were racially superior to all other human beings, and that by right, they therefore had the right to be lords over them. The Slavs were dumb, the Latins lazy and decadent, the Jews cunning and evil. The British were highly respected and seen as racial equals (“cousins”, if you will), but Hitler foresaw a world where Germany would dominate the continent and Britain the seas. This may be why Hitler did not destroy the British armies as they evacuated from Dunkirk to the British Isles in May-June 1940. Hitler did not want to destroy the British Empire, and in an interesting way, his moment for the timing of the Soviet invasion and his strategic logic was partially a desire to impress the British such that they would have to come to terms with him.

Economically, Hitler and the Nazis believed in autarchy, an economic system in which a nation is self-sufficient and therefore has no need to trade with anyone. Hitler had a searing memory of the First World War and of the Allies’ economic blockade and chokehold over Germany. He would not allow this to happen again. He would knock out France and the Low Countries to establish dominance, but also to secure his rear flank for the real war, the war that he had wanted to fight since he had become politically conscious: the war against the Soviet Union, against what was, in Hitler’s mind, Judeo-Bolshevism. The Germans had come to a tactical agreement with the Soviets in 1939 so that they could invade Poland and avoid a two front war. That was successful (although not quite, as Hitler did not really think France and Britain would call his bluff) but Poland itself was but a jumping off point for the endless wheat fields of the Ukraine. Germany would never starve again, as it would control the breadbasket of Europe. Tying back in with the ideology, it would be done on the backs of tens of millions of slaving and starving Slavs. As for the Jews, they would be taken care of in a hazy “Final Solution” somewhere to the “East”.

It is very important to emphasize that Hitler’s invasion of the Soviet Union was not just a “war.” It was to be exterminatory and genocidal by its very intent. It was to fulfill a colonialist, utopian dream that burned brightly in the minds of Hitler, Himmler, Rosenberg, and Darré. Its purpose was not just the acquisition of territory but the complete and utter destruction of the enemy: it was a fight to the death. In some ways, then, to the Nazis, this was a holy war. A master plan was drawn up, called Generalplan Ost, which foresaw the extermination, enslavement, and mass deportation of the Slavs. German “warrior-farmers” (the fictional being that made Himmler’s heart aflutter like nothing else) and their families would replace them. 

As a preliminary step to Generalplan Ost, the Nazis, specifically Dr. Herbert Backe, drew up the Hungerplan, which foresaw the systematic starvation of tens of millions of Soviet citizens. Food would be stripped from the citizens and given first to the German occupiers, and then to Germans back home. Naturally, the Jews would only get whatever was left after everyone else had their share, if anything. All of this was meant to forestall another instance of the deprivation experienced by the German population during the First World War, which Hitler and the Nazis believed had sapped the Germans of their national feeling and lured them into Communism and, ultimately, to the Dolchstoss. Backe wrote, “If we take what we need out of the country, there can be no doubt that tens of millions of people will die of starvation.” Millions did indeed starve to death in the years 1941-44, when the area was under German occupation, although thankfully not in the kind of numbers Backe, Hermann Göring, and others envisaged. 

The invasion of the Soviet Union is inextricably wound up with the history of the extermination of the Jews. The Holocaust, as it is now known, did not begin in earnest until the summer of 1941 and in the western lands of the Soviet Union. Ghettos had been established in Poland, most famously in Lodz and Warsaw, in 1940, and Jews were marked with Stars of David as well. Jews were certainly shot out of hand and humiliated by military, civilian, and SS personnel. Nonetheless, there is a marked distinction between even the cruelest of humiliations and segregation and outright mass slaughter.  The latter is what the Germans embarked upon in the formerly Soviet territories.

The Germans had a policy of provoking pogroms from behind the scenes, but this of course could not have been a successful policy absent a murderous anti-Semitism among the populations. A toxic breed of primordial distrust and hatred, jealousy, greed, and fear of the stereotypical, and largely ahistorical, bogeyman of Zydokomuna (Jewish Communism) led natives of these lands to partake in massacres. They were largely steered form behind the scenes by the Germans and by nationalists who had fled and established contact with the Germans after the Soviets had invaded in 1939. In Kaunas, Lithuania, just days after the invasion, thousands of Jews were murdered. In one particular instance, at the Lietukis Garage, one young man, known to history as the “Death Dealer of Kaunas,” beat dozens of Jews to death with an iron pipe, clambered atop their corpses, and played the Lithuanian national anthem on an accordion. In Lvov, around the same time, thousands of Jews were murdered by Ukrainian nationalists, who were furious upon discovering that thousands of their fellow citizens had been murdered by the NKVD, the Soviet secret police. In many of their eyes, Jews and Communists were one: some of the most prominent of the Communist leaders were Jews. This was not an accidental policy of the Communist Party, which sought a policy of divide and conquer by placing Jews in such roles. Indeed, these scenes got so out of control that the obsessive Reinhard Heydrich, Himmler's deputy, urged his local commanders to rein in the mob and proceed in a more "orderly" fashion. 

Heydrich's men, the Einsatzgruppen, were mobile killing squads. There were four: from north to south, they were named A through D. They moved behind the Wehrmacht as it exploded through the Western territories of the Soviet Union in the summer and autumn of 1941. The Einsatzgruppen were specifically trained in ideological rigor and “toughness,” the latter in the Nazi idiom signifying utter indifference to murder and mass death. They were assisted in their mass shooting by police battalions (including Police Battalion 101, the focus of an inestimable analysis in Christopher Browning’s Ordinary Men); non-German auxiliary forces (including Ukrainians, Lithuanians, Latvians, and Romanians); the Wehrmacht; and, most ominously, SS units set up by Heinrich Himmler under his personal acolytes Erich von dem Bach-Zelewski (in command of the SS Cavalry Brigade) and Friedrich Jeckeln (head of the 1^st SS Brigade).

These mass killings were first centered on Jewish men. Heydrich’s instructions for the Einsatzgruppen included the execution of middle- and senior-ranking Communist functionaries and political commissars, as well as Jews in party and government positions. Because of the ideological training of not only the specially trained killing squads but of the military, Jews and Bolsheviks were essentially seen as identical entities. “Jews in party and government positions,” then, meant essentially all Jewish men of military age, and they were therefore to be shot. Soviet prisoners of war were treated barbarously, with 3.3 million out of 5.7 million dying during the war, many of outright starvation. The Jews among them were taken from among their comrades and executed without question. (Here it should be briefly noted: The Wehrmacht itself was largely ideologically motivated to carry out the most murderous of deeds, and also took part in the murder of the Jews in a significant way. The army high command had set up a division of labor, so to speak, with the SS, whereby the SS and police would commit the actual murders, but the Wehrmacht provided them with munitions, logistical support, cordons, and even, occasionally, manpower to do the dirty deeds themselves. In combating “partisans,” German soldiers shot Jews in the tens of thousands. The German Soldat’s “barbarization” in the netherworld of the Eastern Front is explained magnificently by the historian Omer Bartov).

Starting in July and August 1941, the murder squads began to interpret their directives more flexibly. From the beginning they did not flinch at murdering women who they believed, or who they claimed, were supporting partisan activities. In August 1, Himmler gave Bach-Zelewski’s men the order to kill all of the Jewish men under their control and to “drive the Jewish women into the swamps [the Pripet Marshes, which cover much of southern Belarus and northwestern Ukraine].” Some SS commanders took this quite literally; one complained that the women and children did not drown in the swamps as they were too shallow. Others took a broader interpretation; men were shot in droves, the women were driven away with livestock. And yet others took it upon themselves to shoot everyone, down to the last man, woman, and child. The first explicit mention of the murder of Jewish women and children was recorded by Karl Jäger, the commander of Einsatzkommando 3, a subunit of Einsatzgruppe A, in mid-August 1941 in Lithuania. Around the same time, Jeckeln’s units shot some 24,000 Jews in Kamenets-Podolsky in southern Ukraine, mostly Hungarian Jews who had been driven out of their homes into formerly Soviet territory by the Hungarian military. There does not appear from the documentary evidence to have been a centralized order to begin shooting everyone; it began to happen, however, and in a mutually radicalizing process, soon all of the mobile squads were involved. Hundreds of thousands of Jews in the former Soviet territories were murdered by these squads in three sweeps in 1941-42.

The highs and lows, from the Nazi perspective, of the invasion had a significant impact on Lebensraumpolitik and, more specifically, Judenpolitik, and it’s something that historians of the Holocaust have argued about for decades. Did Hitler’s order (Führerbefehl) to exterminate all Jewry occur in the summer of 1941, in the flush of victory; in autumn 1941, when he realized that the Germans were in for a long fight; or in December 1941, when the German offensive petered out only a few miles outside of Moscow and the United States entered the war? There is no scholarly consensus, although most scholars believe the decision happened some time in 1941. I’ve dithered back and forth, and have ultimately been convinced by the argument of the German historian Peter Longerich, which is that there may not have been one, single Führerbefehl. The center of the Nazi command structure, in Berlin, gave guidelines for brutal, radical policies that needed to be enacted; the how’s were figured out by officers on the ground on the periphery; then when those on the periphery acted, if the policies were suitable, they were authorized by the center and then everyone followed suit. This follows the historian Ian Kershaw’s notion of “working toward the Führer” – the men who made it in the jungle of the National Socialist system instinctively grasped what Hitler wanted and carried it out without needing an explicit order. This is not to say that Hitler did not give orders: he did. But he may have issued a series of gradually radicalizing orders, which culminated in what we now call the Holocaust.

Here is my interpretation, cautiously given (these are matters of the highest complexity): the Germans had a long-term plan for the Final Solution of the Jewish Question. It was simultaneously part of and apart from Hitler’s “Garden of Eden” in the East. On the one hand, the Nazis had an overarching plan for the entirety of the eastern territories by which, definitionally in the National Socialist mindset, the Jews were of least importance. On the other hand, it was the Jews alone who were to suffer the unique fate of being destroyed in their entirety. The Nazis initially intended to push all of the Jews out of Europe, somewhere beyond the Urals. This was genocidal in any event because they were to be deported to areas with the harshest climates imaginable where they would inevitably starve and die in the millions. This plan did not, however, preclude “temporary” measures such as the mass shootings of Jews perpetrated by the Einsatzgruppen. The notion of murdering Jewish men of military age gave way to the notion of working Jews to death: Jews who were healthy and could work would have a temporary stay of execution, all of the rest would be murdered immediately.

When the German offensive stalled, the Nazis hit a rut. The war was not winnable, at least not in the short term, so the Jews could not be deported somewhere to the “East.” The Jews of the Reich needed to go. How could the land of the master race be sullied with Jews? But there were millions of Jews in the General Government, the area between the Vistula and the Bug that was home to the major cities of Krakow, Warsaw, and Lublin. This is not to mention the hundreds of thousands of Jews crammed into the Lodz Ghetto, located in the area called the Warthegau that had been annexed into Germany. While the Jews of the Reich “had to go”, Hitler and his cronies were hesitant in making such a bold move because they were haunted by their (fantastical) memories of 1918, when the German home front, disillusioned and disunited, “stabbed” the nation’s leadership in the “back.” Germany needed to be united and even the radical Nazis were afraid to rock the boat. Nonetheless, however, eventually Jews were marked with the yellow star in September 1941 and deported to Riga, Latvia; Kaunas, Lithuania; and Minsk, Belarus, where they were shot in the tens of thousands. In order to make room for the rest, the Jews of the Warthegau (the area around Lodz and Poznan) were gassed at Chelmno and the Jews of the General Government were sent to Treblinka, Sobibor, and Belzec. The German Jews would then have their turn as the General Government would be gradually Germanized. 

The Jews of the General Government, just mentioned, were murdered because there was nowhere further they could be sent. I do not mean to suggest that the Germans had driven themselves into an ideological cul-de-sac, did not know what to do with the Jews on their hands, and so slaughtered them. Rather, the far off, abstract Final Solution was short-circuited into an all-too real one when the German army did not completely destroy the Soviet Union within a matter of weeks or months. The Judeo-Bolshevik structure centered in Moscow may stand for years yet, but the Jews of the General Government and the Ukraine needed to die to make room for their German betters in the mean time. Odilo Globocnik, one of Himmler’s most loyal men and the SS and Police Leader of Lublin, was obsessed with the notion of Germanic settlement. The Lublin District, specifically the area around Zamosc, would become a jewel of German settlements. This could only come to be, however, if the Poles and the Jews were expelled. Because of the stalled German offensive, Globocnik and Himmler decided to murder the Jews of the Lublin District, if not the entire General Government, at Belzec, whose construction began in October 1941 and began operating in March 1942. It is possible that it was Globocnik who was the first to proffer the idea of the stationary gas chamber to murder the Jews (gas vans had been mobilized in the Warthegau, Serbia, parts of Poland, and in the eastern territories). The gas chamber would have the benefits of being more efficient and secretive than mass shootings and, very importantly to Himmler, easier on the conscience of his men.

It is very possible, even likely, that Belzec was a local “solution” to a local “problem,” as Chelmno was in the Warthegau. However, the Nazis began to realize that the Final Solution did not have to wait until after the victory over the Soviet Union in the East. It could be solved here and now. Sobibor opened its gates two months after, and then Treblinka, the Moloch of the Jews of Warsaw, two months after that. The General Government, originally a dumping ground for Jews and Poles, and then a desired settlement area for Germans, became the abattoir of European Jewry. Globocnik was so proud of having exterminated the Jews that when Himmler demanded, in 1942, that the bodies in the camps needed to be burned to erase all traces, Globocnik demurred, saying that, rather, bronze plaques should be buried along with the corpses to teach the world that it was the Germans who had had the spine to carry out this necessary task. It was no accident that, given the nature of National Socialist ideology, Himmler’s chief subordinate in the realm of German settlement ultimately stood upon the tallest mound of Jewish ashes and bones.

This nightmarish, ghoulish reality was the attempt at, and partial fulfillment of, Hitler’s dream, his “Garden of Eden.”