On 15 July, Himmler returned to the Führer headquarters at Rastenburg in East Prussia after a quick trip to Berlin. As always, it seemed, when these two huddled in these days, bloody consequences followed. In mid-July, in the euphoria of apparent victory, Hitler now set in motion steps to accelerate the translation of his vision of a National Socialist New Order into horrible reality. With the military situation evidently going even better than expected—“No one doubts anymore our victory in Russia,” Goebbels confided to his diary on 8 July—Hitler in the first half of July was in a self-congratulatory mood, proclaiming himself the Robert Koch of politics, the man who had exposed the “Jewish bacillus” of social decomposition. For the Führer, the connection between the Jews and war was inescapable, a mentality shaped by the personal and national humiliation of defeat in World War I, for which Hitler held the Jews responsible as fomenters of internal unrest and revolution. From his very first public statement, in September 1919, in which he advocated a complete removal of the Jews from Germany, through the notorious passage in Mein Kampf in which he expressed the wish that the imperial government had killed thousands of Jews at the beginning of the war, to his political testament at the very end of a second war, Hitler displayed a recurring obsession with the theme of Jews and war. Indeed, he regarded himself as nothing less than the architect and executor of a historic wilclass="underline" a second war had to be fought to undo the disaster of the first. This meant not only achieving Germany’s historic destiny of great power status but also rewriting history on a racial basis, gaining revenge on those held responsible for the nation’s misfortunes, the Jews. For Germany to win, Jewry had to lose.51
From the late 1930s, as war loomed closer, Hitler and other top Nazi leaders displayed, more than a mere conspiratorial outlook, a vengeful mentality that demanded retribution against the Jews as the cause of wars in general and of Germany’s suffering in particular. The key to the Nazi outlook was not that the Jews were inferior but that the Jewish conspiracy represented nothing less than the supreme existential danger, the ultimate threat to Germany’s existence. The racial community that Hitler sought to build could never be secure until Jewish power, values, and corruption were eliminated forever. Germany’s salvation, as Saul Friedländer has stressed, thus required a “redemptive anti-Semitism” that would remove not just Jewish influence but, one way or another, the Jews themselves.52
In this mood of expectant victory, Hitler met for five hours on 16 July with Goering, Bormann, Rosenberg, Lammers, and Keitel to discuss and establish fundamental guidelines for the administration and exploitation of the occupied areas. After vowing that Germany would never leave these lands, he proclaimed his intention of creating a “Garden of Eden” for the benefit of all Germans, “our India.” The Crimea, the Baltic states, the oil area around Baku, and former Austrian Galicia would be annexed, with the rest to be treated as a “colonial land” to be ruled and exploited by a handful of administrators. He dismissed the Slavs as by nature a “slave mass crying out for a master.” The goals of German occupation policy would be brutally simple: “First, rule; second, administer; third, exploit.” To accomplish these goals, “all necessary measures—shootings, resettlements, etc.”—would be used. “This vast area must naturally be pacified as quickly as possible,” Hitler emphasized. “This will best be done by shooting anyone who even looks sideways at us.”53
Although Himmler was noticeably absent from this meeting, it was his response that was arguably most critical to the future course of events. In outlining his program, Hitler regarded himself as an architect reconstructing history on a racial basis, but he still needed someone to execute his will. The Führer had sketched a vision of a future utopia for Germans, but realizing this vision would necessitate destruction on a vast scale. That was to be Himmler’s task. Nor could he harbor any doubts about what it would entail. The minutes of the meeting, which he received on 17 July, clearly expressed Hitler’s will—exterminate anyone who opposes us—a task that would require a large-scale increase in available police forces. On both 19 and 22 July, he designated units from his own Kommandostab (command staff), the SS Cavalry Brigade and the First SS Brigade, totaling eleven thousand men, for use in antipartisan sweeps in the central and southern sectors of the front. He also reassigned a number of police battalions, over five thousand men in all, for use in the killing operations, which were now to be expanded, according to an evident Himmler edict on 21 July, to include all Soviet Jews. Searching for new sources of manpower, Himmler on 25 July ordered his police officials to form auxiliary police units from the Baltic, Ukrainian, and Belorussian populations since “the task of the police in the occupied eastern territories cannot be accomplished with the manpower of the police and SS now deployed or yet to be deployed.” Within a few days in late July 1941, then, Himmler, responding to his Führer’s wishes, initiated a swift buildup of precisely those units necessary for a rapid escalation of murder. The number of men involved in the killing activities rose from barely three thousand to over sixteen thousand, a figure that would rise to some thirty-three thousand by the end of the year, an elevenfold increase. Himmler then culminated this whirlwind of activity on 31 July by issuing an explicit order to top police officials: “All Jews must be shot. Drive female Jews into the swamp [i.e., Pripet Marshes].” In issuing orders for a radical escalation of the killing operations, Himmler surely felt confident that, in Ian Kershaw’s phrase, he was “working towards the Führer.”54
In late July, as if the Nazi leaders needed another reason to justify their anti-Semitic crusade, a curious and otherwise unimportant episode in the United States provided further “proof” of the destructive conspiracy they had warned against. On 24 July, a bloodcurdling headline, “The War Aim of Roosevelt and the Jews: Complete Extermination of the German People,” with the subtitle “A Monstrous Jewish Extermination Plan according to the Guidelines of Roosevelt,” adorned the front page of the Völkischer Beobachter, the main Nazi newspaper. From the beginning of the war in the east, the Nazi press had hammered home the importance of the Jewish dimension of the enemy, that Jews pulled the strings behind the scenes. In both public and private, Goebbels had thundered against the Jewish conspiracy of plutocrats and Bolsheviks that was determined to destroy Germany. Now, he evidently had his proof. In early 1941, Theodore Kaufman, a thirty-one-year-old Jewish businessman from New Jersey angry at the harsh treatment of Jews in Nazi-occupied Europe, self-published a small book he had written entitled Germany Must Perish! In it, he advocated the sterilization of all German men and the division of the country into five parts. The book caused a minor stir in the early spring of 1941; then Kaufman faded back into obscurity.55