Black Earth(51)

When Hitler understood that Madagascar was impossible, his thoughts turned back to the Soviet Union. On July 31, 1940, just three weeks after he had begun his halfhearted British campaign, he asked his generals to review plans for the invasion of the Soviet Union. The war against the USSR would make sense, he reminded his generals, only if Germany could “smash the state” and that “in one blow.” In December, he issued the formal directive for the submission of war plans to “crush Soviet Russia in a rapid campaign.”

Thus the black hole for the Jews migrated from one obscure and exotic imperial locale to another, from the tropical maritime south to the frozen tundra of the north. Hitler imagined that the Soviet state would be crushed in a few weeks, and that its Jews, and perhaps other Jews as well, could then be dispatched to Siberia. About this, too, he was mistaken. But erring was an essential part of Nazi logic. The Führer could never be wrong; only the world could be wrong; and when it was, the fault would be borne by the Jews.

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Nazi strategic predictions about the behavior of particular states were often mistaken, but the Nazis were learning a lesson about what happened in general when states were destroyed. Indeed, misunderstandings of neighboring peoples forced unexpected campaigns to destroy states, which, in turn, opened a realm of experimentation. The annexation of Austria accelerated the deportation of Jews, the invasion of Poland created a new opportunity for their ghettoization, and then the war of annihilation against the Soviet Union would permit a Final Solution. It was not a Final Solution of the type that had been considered, a deportation to some obscure and distant place seized from another empire. It was a Final Solution of mass murder, in the Jewish homeland itself, in eastern Europe.

The three million German men assembled to invade the Soviet Union in June 1941 found themselves in Polish territories that had been colonized and terrorized. The Poland these three million German soldiers saw had been utterly transformed, its Jews humiliated and ghettoized, the rest of its population subjected to an improvised anarchy of exploitation. When these three million men crossed the German-Soviet border on the twenty-second of that month, they first set foot in a very special zone: the territories that Germany had granted to the Soviet Union in September 1939. The German invasion of the Soviet Union thus began as a reinvasion of territories that had just been invaded. The German attack on the Soviet Union meant destroying a state apparatus, the new Soviet one, right after the Soviets had destroyed another set of state apparatuses, those of the independent states of the 1920s and 1930s. A double invasion by great powers would have been dramatic enough, though not quite unprecedented.

Double state destruction of this kind was something entirely new.





5


Double Occupation


During the war, the gifted political thinker Hannah Arendt glimpsed what was happening. A Jewish political emigrant from Germany, she understood how National Socialist ideology could be realized. If Jews were to be removed from the planet, they first had to be separated from the state. As she wrote later, “one could do as one pleased only with stateless people.”

Like succeeding historians of the Holocaust, and in accord with the German Jewish experience she shared with some of them, she saw this separation from the state as the gradual deprivation of rights. As she observed, “the first essential step on the road to total domination is to kill the juridical person in man.” Yet the easiest way to deprive a Jew of law and to instruct non-Jews in lawlessness was to destroy entire jurisdictions, as with Austria and Czechoslovakia. As Arendt came to realize, the Jews “were threatened more than any other by the sudden collapse of the system of nation states.” Above all, Jews were placed in peril by the collapse of the states of which they were citizens. The war of 1939, the attack on Poland by Germany, brought new sorts of depravations as the state was fragmented along new, colonial lines. But even ghettoization and the proclamation of a colonial order were not enough to precipitate a Holocaust. Something more was needed: a double destruction of the state.

In 1939, when Hitler made his alliance with Stalin, he was undertaking to destroy states by proxy. Hitler had a vivid idea of what Soviet rule would mean for the places granted to Moscow by the German-Soviet Treaty on Borders and Friendship: the Baltic states of Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia; and the eastern half of Poland. If anything, his notion of Soviet terror was exaggerated: the total elimination of all thinking people, the murder of tens of millions by starvation. Himmler wrote of the “Bolshevik method” of the “physical extermination of a nation.” Hitler, in making his alliance with the Soviet Union, was always planning to invade the lands that he granted his ally. His invitation to Stalin in 1939 to destroy states would precede his own campaign in the same lands to follow in 1941. The German Führer was therefore contemplating the double destruction of states: first the crushing of interwar nation-states by Soviet techniques, seen as extraordinarily radical, and then the elimination of newly created Soviet state apparatus by Nazi techniques, still in the making.