Himmler now proposed plans—put together with Heydrich—to Hitler to rid Europe of all Jews through “forced evacuation to the east”—their euphemism for physical extermination—the “final solution to the Jewish problem.” Hitler approved. In June 1941, following the invasion of the Soviet Union, Himmler—delegated to carry out “special tasks”—dispatched his SS Einsatzgruppen, who murdered 1,300,000 Jews, Gypsies and communists. Himmler and Heydrich personally toured the areas behind the front, encouraging and organizing more murders of men, but also increasingly women and children. Himmler himself personally witnessed executions, and when, in August 1941, brains from one of the victims spattered his SS uniform, he demanded that concentration camps be equipped with gas chambers as a more efficient way of killing, more humane for the executioner.
On January 20, 1942 Heydrich convened a meeting of the fifteen leading Nazi bureaucrats, many of them lawyers and eight of them possessing doctorates, in a large house in an affluent suburb of Berlin, near a picturesque lake called the Wannsee.
Over a million Jews had already been murdered by the mobile Einsatzgruppen, but the work was considered too slow and demoralizing. The purpose at Wannsee was to convey directives from the Führer regarding the final solution of the Jewish question and create an administrative and legalistic framework for mass murder. “Europe was to be combed of Jews from east to west,” and those present were charged with the capture, transportation and industrial extermination of the estimated 11 million European Jews.
“Another possible solution of the problem has now taken the place of emigration, i.e. the evacuation of the Jews to the East,” said Heydrich. The notes, kept by Adolf Eichmann, carefully avoid direct reference to extermination but “evacuation” was the accepted euphemism for slaughter, as Heydrich made clear:
Under proper guidance, in the course of the final solution the Jews are to be allocated for appropriate labor in the East. Able-bodied Jews, separated according to sex, will be taken in large work columns to these areas for work on roads, in the course of which action doubtless a large portion will be eliminated by natural causes. The possible final remnant will, since it will undoubtedly consist of the most resistant portion, have to be treated accordingly, because it is the product of natural selection and would, if released, act as the seed of a new Jewish revival.
Numerous such camps—including Bergen-Belsen, Auschwitz-Birkenau, Belzec and Treblinka—were hastily constructed. Bergen-Belsen held over 60,000 Jews, of whom over 35,000 died of starvation, overwork, disease and medical experiments. Dachau—built in March 1933 to house political prisoners—served as a labor camp and center for horrific medical experiments, those too sick to work being summarily executed or sent to the nearby Hartheim killing center. Meanwhile, 3 million Russian prisoners of war were deliberately starved to death on Hitler/Himmler’s orders.
Most notorious of the death camps was Auschwitz-Birkenau, established by Himmler in May 1940, and by 1942 equipped with seven gas chambers in which an estimated 2.5 million were murdered, roughly 2 million of whom were Jews, Poles, Gypsies and Soviet POWs. Only about 200,000 people survived, the rest cremated or piled into mass graves.
Himmler and Heydrich had very different styles: Himmler considered himself a soldier, but his real gift was as a bureaucratic intriguer and Hitlerite courtier. He devoted much time to devising pedantic and preposterous rules for his new SS order. Himmler spent his rare leisure with his assistant, who became his mistress. Heydrich was a gifted sportsman and musician. In between his many duties, he trained as a pilot, flying daring missions in Norway and Russia, where he crashed and had to be rescued. He had many love affairs and sexual adventures. He was chilling but never banal. Himmler was terrifying but always blandly pedantic.
In addition to his already vast responsibilities, in September 1941 Heydrich was appointed Reichsprotektor of Bohemia and Moravia (formerly part of Czechoslovakia), where he instituted repressive measures and became known as Der Henker (the Hangman). On May 27, 1942, as he rode without an escort in an open-top green Mercedes, he was ambushed by two British-trained Free Czech fighters and died later of his wounds. In retaliation, the Nazis wiped out the entire Czech village of Lidice.
In June 1942, Himmler ordered the deportation of 100,000 Jews from France and approved plans to move 30 million Slavs from eastern Europe to Siberia. The following month he ordered the “total cleansing” of Jews from the Polish General Government—6000 a day from Warsaw alone were transported to the death camps.
In 1943, Himmler was appointed minister of the interior. The following year Hitler disbanded the military intelligence service (the Abwehr) and made Himmler’s SD Nazi Germany’s sole intelligence service. In 1944, as the Allies advanced from the west, Himmler failed completely as military commander of Army Group Vistula.
Recognizing defeat was inevitable, Himmler desperately attempted to destroy evidence of the death camps, then attempted to seek peace with Britain and America. Hitler ordered his arrest. Himmler fled in disguise but was arrested in Bremen, after which he swallowed a cyanide capsule.
A chinless, bespectacled ex-chicken-farmer who suffered from nervous ailments, he built a second family with his mistress, the ex-secretary whom he called Bunny—but the attic of their house contained furniture and books made from the bones and skins of his Jewish victims. He was a meticulous administrator who organized the systematic extermination of 6 million Jews (two-thirds of the Jewish population of Europe), 3 million Russians, 3 million non-Jewish Poles, 750,000 Slavs, 500,000 Gypsies, 100,000 of the mentally ill, 100,000 Freemasons, 15,000 homosexuals and 5000 Jehovah’s Witnesses—murder on a scale never before imagined.
KHOMEINI
1902–89
I shall kick their teeth in. I am appointing the government. I am appointing the government by the support of this nation!
The Grand Ayatollah Khomeini led the 1979 revolution that overthrew the last shah of Iran and became the supreme leader of a theocracy, the Islamic Republic of Iran, that has become an often disruptive power across the Near East. This aged, white-bearded Shiite cleric proved to be a dynamic, shrewd and unforgiving revolutionary leader who created a totally new system with his own power protected in a constitution that has proved surprisingly enduring, thanks to the brutal suppression of any opposition. Today’s resurgent, bold Iran, pursuing a nuclear arsenal and regional hegemony, threatening war against the “Great Satan” America and annihilation of the “Little Satan” Israel, backing the Hamas and Hezbollah militias in Gaza and Lebanon, murdering and terrorizing its own people, is the Iran of Khomeini.
Khomeini, whose family had spent much time in India under the British Raj and who used the nom de plume Hindi for some of his own poetry, studied the Koran and in particular Iran’s Twelver Shiism at madrassas in Arak and the holy city of Qom. The Iranian clergy were challenged and almost broken by the rule of Reza Shah, who made himself king of Iran during the 1920s, in a campaign to modernize and secularize the country like his hero Ataturk had done in Turkey.
Reza Shah was forced to abdicate the throne to his young son Muhammad Reza Pahlavi, who at first proved adept at managing the powerful Shiite ayatollahs. Khomeini, not yet a cleric of the top rank, still accepted the idea of a limited constitutional monarchy but gradually he became repulsed by the secular and modernizing instincts of the new shah.
Khomeini was already in his sixties when the deaths of the leading ayatollahs enabled him to emerge as a clerical leader. In 1963, Muhammad Reza Pahlavi announced his White Revolution, a revolution of land ownership, liberation and education of women, and modernization imposed from above by the monarch himself. It was anathema to Khomeini who, calling a meeting of the top ulema (clergy), denounced the shah, whom he called a “wretched miserable man,” a decadent tyrant like Muawiya’s son, Caliph Yazid of history.