rise-and-fall-of-the-third-reich-william-shirer-pdf

868 THE RISE AND FALL OF THE THIRD REICHIf the international Jewish financiers . . . should again succeed inplunging the nations into a world war the result will be . . . theannihilation of the Jewish race throughout Europe.This was a prophecy, he said, and he repeated it five times, verbatim, insubsequent public utterances. It made no difference that not the ”internationalJewish financiers” but he himself plunged the world into armed conflict. Whatmattered to Hitler was that there was now a world war and that it affordedhim, after he had conquered vast regions in the East where most of Europe’sJews lived, the opportunity to carry out their ”annihilation.” By the time theinvasion of Russia began, he had given the necessary orders.What became known in high Nazi circles as the ”Fuehrer Order on the FinalSolution” apparently was never committed to paper – at least no copy of it hasyet been unearthed in the captured Nazi documents. All the evidence showsthat it was most probably given verbally to Goering, Himmler and Heydrich,who passed it down during the summer and fall of 1941. A number of witnessestestified at Nuremberg that they had ”heard” of it but none admitted everseeing it Thus Hans Lammers, the bullheaded chief of the Reich Chancellery,when pressed on the witness stand replied:I knew that a Fuehrer order was transmitted by Goering to Heydrich. . . This order was called ”Final Solution of the JewishProblem.” 1201But Lammers claimed, as did so many others on the stand, that he did notreally know what it was all about until Allied counsel revealed it at Nuremberg. ∗By the beginning of 1942 the time had come, as Heydrich said, ”to clearup the fundamental problems” of the ”final solution” so that it could at lastbe carried out and concluded. For this purpose Heydrich convened a meetingof representatives of the various ministries and agencies of the S.S.-S.D. at thepleasant Berlin suburb of Wannsee on January 20, 1942, the minutes of whichplayed an important part in some of the later Nuremberg trials. 1202 Despite thecurrent setback of the Wehrmacht in Russia the Nazi officials believed that thewar was almost won and that Germany would shortly be ruling all of Europe,including England and Ireland. Therefore, Heydrich told the assembly of somefifteen high officials, ”in the course of this Final Solution of the European Jewishproblem, approximately eleven million Jews are involved.” He then rattled offthe figures for each country. There were only 131,800 Jews left in the originalReich territory (out of a quarter of a million in 1939), but in the U.S.S.R.,he said, there were five million, in the Ukraine three million, in the GeneralGovernment of Poland two and a quarter million, in France three quarters of amillion and in England a third of a million. The clear implication was that all∗ Lammers was sentenced in April 1949 to twenty years’ imprisonment by a U.S. militarytribunal at Nuremberg, chiefly because of his responsibility in the anti-Jewish decrees. Butas in the case of most of the other convicted Nazis whose sentences were greatly reduced bythe American authorities, his term was commuted in 1951 to ten years and he was releasedfrom Landsberg prison at the end of that year, after serving a total of six years from thedate of his first imprisonment. It might be noted here that most Germans, at least so far astheir sentiment was represented in the West German parliament, did not approve of even therelatively mild sentences meted out to Hitler’s accomplices. A number of them handed overby the Allies to German custody were not even prosecuted – even when they were accused ofmass murder – and some of them quickly found employment in the Bonn government.