Hitler

– under ten per cent of the Jewish population – were captured and deported to Theresienstadt. Most escaped. Countless Danish citizens helped the overwhelming majority of their Jewish countrymen – in all 7,900 persons, including a few hundred non-Jewish marital partners – to flee across the Sound to safety in neutral Sweden in the most remarkable rescue action of the war.
    In October, Hitler accepted Ribbentrop’s recommendation (prompted by the Reich Security Head Office) to have Rome’s 8,000 Jews sent ‘as hostages’ to the Austrian concentration camp at Mauthausen. Again, the ‘action’ to round up the Jews misfired. Most of the Jewish community were able to avoid capture. Some were hidden by disgusted non-Jewishcitizens. Thousands found shelter in Rome’s convents and monasteries, or in the Vatican itself. In return, the Papacy was prepared to maintain public silence on the outrage. Despite Hitler’s directive, following his Foreign Minister’s advice, those Jews captured were not, in fact, sent to Mauthausen. Of the 1,259 Jews who fell into German hands, the majority were taken straight to Auschwitz.
    Hitler’s compliance with SS demands to speed up and finish off the ‘Final Solution’ was unquestionably driven by his wish to complete the destruction of those he held responsible for the war. He wanted, now as before, to see the ‘prophecy’ he had declared in 1939 and repeatedly referred to fulfilled. But, even more so than in the spring when he had encouraged Goebbels to turn up the volume of antisemitic propaganda, there was also the need, with backs to the wall, to hold together his closest followers in a sworn ‘community of fate’, bonded by their own knowledge of and implication in the extermination of the Jews.
    On 4 October, Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler spoke openly and frankly about the killing of the Jews to SS leaders gathered in the town hall in Posen, the capital of the Warthegau. He said he was ‘referring to the Jewish evacuation programme, the extermination of the Jewish people’. It was, he went on, ‘a glorious page in our history, and one that has never been written and never can be written. For we know how difficult we would have made it for ourselves if, on top of the bombing raids, the burdens and the deprivations of war, we still had Jews today in every town as secret saboteurs, agitators, and troublemakers. We would now probably have reached the 1916–17 stage when the Jews were still part of the body of the German people.’ The mentality was identical with Hitler’s. ‘We had the moral right, we had the duty to our people,’ Himmler concluded, ‘to destroy this people which wanted to destroy us … We do not want in the end, because we have exterminated a bacillus, to become ill through the bacillus and die.’ The vocabulary, too, was redolent of Hitler’s own. Himmler did not refer to Hitler. There was no need to do so. The key point for the Reichsführer-SS was not to assign responsibility to a single person. The crucial purpose of his speech was to stress their joint responsibility, that they were all in it together.
    Two days later, in the same Golden Hall in Posen, Himmler addressed the Reichs- and Gauleiter of the party. The theme was the same one. He gave, as Goebbels recorded, an ‘unvarnished and candid picture’ of the treatment of the Jews. Himmler declared: ‘We faced the question: whatshould we do with the women and children? I decided here too to find a completely clear solution. I did not regard myself as justified in exterminating the men – that is to say, to kill them or have them killed – and to allow the avengers in the shape of the children to grow up for our sons and grandchildren. The difficult decision had to be taken to have this people disappear from the earth.’ Himmler seemed to be indicating that the extension of the killing to women and children had been his initiative. He immediately, however, associated himself and the SS with a ‘commission’ – ‘the most difficult which we have had so far’. The Gauleiter, among them Goebbels who had spoken directly with Hitler on the subject so many times, would have had no difficulty in presuming whose authority lay behind the ‘commission’. Again, the purpose of the remarkably frank disclosures on the taboo subject was plain. Himmler marked on a list those who had not attended his speech or noted its contents.
    Himmler’s speeches, ensuring that his own