Black Earth(84)

That very day the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, bringing the United States into the war. The global strategic catastrophe allowed Hitler to slip from one conception of his war to another. His very errors allowed him to radicalize his rhetoric. His misunderstanding of Poland had brought him a war with Britain. His underestimation of the Soviet Union meant that Germany now had to fight the British, the Soviets, and the Americans—all at once. Yet following the logic of his worldview, he could claim that the “common front” of capitalism and communism against Germany was the work of the Jews. A victory in the USSR might have allowed their deportation. A stalemate in the East and a long global conflict required something else. “The world war is here,” said Hitler on December 12, 1941, recalling his “prophecy” of January 1939. “The annihilation of the Jews must be the necessary consequence.”

In the occupied zones of the Soviet Union in the preceding six months, Germans had learned how this might be achieved: by mass shooting. By the time Hitler promised to annihilate the Jews in December 1941, a million Jews in the occupied Soviet Union had already been murdered. Even so, Governor-General Hans Frank had no idea how the Polish Jews packed into the ghettos of his General Government could be eliminated. After listening to Hitler in Berlin in December 1941, he returned to Cracow and spoke to his subordinates. “Gentlemen,” he began, “I must ask you to rid yourselves of all feeling of pity. We must annihilate the Jews wherever it is possible, in order to maintain the structure of the Reich.” He had understood what Hitler could not say: that the struggle was now defensive. The killing of the Jews was to substitute for a normal acknowledgment of defeat.

The lessons of the USSR could not be applied in Poland, at least not in the General Government and the lands annexed to the Reich, where Germany had been exercising power since 1939. Germany had invaded Poland more than two years earlier without beginning a Final Solution. Einsatzgruppen had ravaged western and central Poland in 1939, but mostly in the hunt for educated Poles. There had been no promises of political liberation then, only the project of destroying the Polish state forever. No Poles had been used as political collaborators: not because none had offered (a few had), but because Berlin had no use for them. Though the Polish police had been preserved, no thought was given to arming enough Poles to carry out a Final Solution by shooting. Polish Jews had been placed in ghettos in 1940 and 1941, not to kill them but to prepare for some deportation. To be sure, tens of thousands of Jews had died of disease or malnutrition in the ghettos. Still, two million Jews were still alive in the western and central lands of Poland taken by Germany in 1939. How would these people be killed?





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On January 30, 1942, Hitler spoke at the Berliner Sportpalast before masses of Germans. He recalled again, now publicly, his “prophecy” of January 30, 1939, issued right after his foreign minister had returned with the news that Poland would not join Germany in the war against the Soviet Union. He now misdated his “prophecy” to September 1, 1939, the date of the German invasion of Poland. Hitler had seen back then, it would seem, the logic of his own actions. If he won his war, he could defeat the Jews. And if he lost his war, he could characterize it as a planetary conflict and also defeat the Jews. In January 1942, he told Germans that Jews were to be held responsible for a world war. His “prophecy” would be fulfilled.

That same month, Hitler asked rhetorically why he should regard Jews any differently than he regarded Soviet prisoners of war. The comparison was a telling one. As of that point, the Germans had starved more non-Jewish Soviet citizens than they had shot Jews. That fall and winter something like two million Soviet citizens would die in the starvation camps, and another half a million in besieged Leningrad. Now this trend would reverse, and indeed some of the Soviet survivors of the starvation camps would be used to kill Jews. The threat of death by starvation turned the prisoner-of-war camps into factories of collaborators. About a million young men of the Soviet armed forces—Russians, Ukrainians, Belarusians, and others raised in communism and in anti-racism, most of them men of peasant or working-class origin aged between twenty and thirty—were chosen for new duties, directed against their homeland or against the Jews. Rather than killing the Slavs and then deporting the Jews, which had been the general idea, the Germans were finding ever new ways to exploit the Slavs against the Jews. They adapted the traditional African method of colonialism, exploiting a despised group against a still more despised one; they would even call these new collaborators Askaren. The Askaren had been local soldiers in German East Africa, first deployed in the 1888–1889 Abushiri rebellion, who had fought loyally in Africa under German command during the First World War. German East Africa was the only colony that had been defended until the end of the First World War, and so the legend of the Askaren was that of fidelity in a doomed but righteous struggle.