Greg Dawson - Judgment Before Nuremberg

“So Browning finally comes around to the solution that I first proposed in Hitler’s War —that Hitler was largely in the dark about what is now called the Holocaust, and certainly issued no order for the systematic extermination of the Jews,” Irving sniffed. “The Madagascar Plan was not aborted in the summer of 1940. Hitler was still referring to it as a likely outcome in his table talk in July 1942. That was six clear months after the Wannsee Conference where—so conformist wisdom has it—Hitler’s decision to exterminate was announced.”

To which the proper response is: So what? Irving is playing a silly game of semantic gotcha that ignores the fact that by July 1942, upwards of a million Ukrainian Jews, including my grandparents and great-grandparents, already were dead, murdered by the Einsatzgruppen and their Ukrainian helpers. What difference does it make what Hitler was talking about over his sauerbraten and potato pancakes?

In his deluded certitude, Irving reminds me of the paranoid-schizophrenic math genius John Nash (Russell Crowe) in A Beautiful Mind who fills up walls and notebooks with manic scribbling, codes and equations that supposedly provide proof of a vast, unspecified government conspiracy. But no matter how frantically Irving and other deniers spin their sophistical formulas, the result will forever be the same: six million dead. Arendt, whose moral imagination was as capacious as Irving’s is cramped, saw clearly the invisible writing on the wall spelling out the ineluctable logic of the Nazi neurosis. Hitler’s flirtation with the undoable—Madagascar—was laying the groundwork for doing the unspeakable.

“When the Madagascar project was declared to have become ‘obsolete,’ everybody was psychologically, or rather, logically prepared for the next step: since there existed no territory to which one could ‘evacuate,’ the only ‘solution’ was extermination,” [2] Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem , 77. Arendt wrote. A week before the invasion of the Soviet Union, Himmler addressed his top SS and police leaders. “It is a question of existence… a racial struggle of pitiless severity, in the course of which twenty to thirty million Slavs and Jews will perish through military actions and crises of food supply.”

Further research has shown that the Madagascar plan was merely a whimsical detour in what had been Hitler’s plan from almost the beginning. The visionary Führer had foreseen Lebensraum -through-extermination as early as 1931. In comments to a German newspaper editor which became public after the war, Hitler said, “We must colonize the East ruthlessly. We intend to introduce a great resettlement policy. Think of the biblical deportations and the massacres of the Middle Ages—and remember the extermination of the Armenians. One eventually reaches the conclusion that masses of men are mere biological modeling clay.”

Hitler and Himmler aimed to create a “Garden of Eden” in the East once it was cleared—one way or the other—of undesirables. “Hitler dreamed of the Crimea as the future German Riviera,” wrote historian Wendy Lower. Though Lebensraum was an article of faith for both men, for Himmler it was fulfillment of a youthful dream to become a “warrior-farmer” in the East. “Some day I will live my life in the East and fight my battles as a German far from beautiful Germany,” Himmler told his diary at age nineteen. He earned a degree in agronomy, but ultimately chose to leave the actual farming to others while he concentrated on warring.

Unveiled in April 1942, Himmler’s Edenic blueprint, Generalplan Ost , called for removal of thirty million people from Poland and the Soviet Union to make room for the migration of Germans and ethnic-Germans, including German-Americans who would be forcibly repatriated to the Fatherland after Hitler triumphantly marched up Pennsylvania Avenue with the Nazi flag flying over the U.S. Capitol—a grand encore to his stroll up the Champs-Elysees after conquering France.

In the spring of 1942—with more than half a million Ukrainian Jews in the ground, with the death camps at Belzec and Auschwitz and Sobibor “processing” thousands more a day from across Europe—all things seemed possible for Hitler, even a monstrous grandiosity like his plan to colonize the East, Generalplan Ost. He was still sailing on a cloud of “victory euphoria,” as Browning called it, untethered from reality on the ground. “He felt he could be more uninhibited, that he could give greater rein to turning his fantasies into reality,” Browning told The Atlantic.

Hitler’s “Garden of Eden” fantasy reached an abortive zenith in the fall of 1942 when nearly 100,000 Volksdeutsche (Germans and German-speaking Ukrainians) were moved from the barren north to fertile lands of Poland and Ukraine which had been cleared of Jews and other inhabitants. The Jews, of course, had been and continued to be murdered in “yars” throughout the region. The Ukrainian peasants occupying the target area were displaced en masse, a hundred miles or more to areas east of the Dnieper River. (They were more fortunate than the 1.5 million Ukrainians who were forcibly deported to Germany to perform hard labor or to serve as domestic servants.) The signature Generalplan Ost colony was Hegewald, situated near Himmler’s headquarters at Zhytomyr, where the farmerturned-warrior could watch others toiling in the fields. It did not take long for the fantasy to collapse under the weight of its own sheer implausibility and incompetent management.

SS and regional Nazi officials “found that they could not feed and care for the ethnic Germans, especially for the hundreds of kidnapped children who had been placed in makeshift orphanages,” wrote Lower. “Soviet partisans attacked the Volksdeutsche settlers and raided their food supplies. The defeat of Hitler’s forces by the Red Army and mounting partisan warfare behind the lines cut short Nazi colonization plans. Yet, regional leaders realized early in the campaign that developing productive colonies was a far more difficult task than destroying ‘non-Aryan’ populations and cultures.” [3] Wendy Lower, “The Holocaust and Colonialism in Ukraine: A Case Study of the General Bezirk Zhytomyr, 1941–1944” (paper presented at a symposium on the Holocaust in the Soviet Union at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Washington, D.C., September 2005).

Or shipping them to Madagascar. Had the technology been available, someone deep in a Berlin think tank surely would have proposed “relocating” the Jews to the moon, a climate that would permanently diminish their ability to offer resistance, while sparing Nazis on Earth the trauma of murdering them and disposing of the evidence. Eichmann no doubt would have claimed ownership of the ingenious “lunar solution” to the Jewish problem.

After the withering of his “garden” in the East and the German defeat at Stalingrad, Hitler could take solace in pursuing his overarching goal—extermination of the Jews—which “must be ruthlessly implemented and endured to the end,” he told Himmler. “Murdering the Jews, in Hitler’s eyes, was the equivalent to winning the war,” Rhodes wrote.

Madagascar, Nisko, and Hegewald were all just mile markers on the same road: This way lay madness.

Isuppose the same instinct that makes me tolerant of the death penalty when fairly applied—say, for Adolf Eichmann—allowed me to enjoy Inglourious Basterds , Quentin Tarantino’s glorious revenge fantasy about the Holocaust, without guilt. Well, maybe a trace. After all, my mother is Jewish and my father was Catholic. Those groups practically invented guilt.