Hitler's Hangman (54 page)

return for being spared from deportation, the first-degree
Mischling
would

have to submit to ‘voluntary’ sterilization if he or she was to remain in the

Reich. A second-degree
Mischling
or quarter-Jew was to be considered a

Jew if any of the following three criteria applied: if both parents were

Mischlinge
; if he or she had an ‘exceptionally poor racial appearance’ that

distinguished him or her as a Jew; or if he or she ‘feels and behaves like a

Jew’.177

Heydrich’s proposals did not encounter much opposition from the

other delegates. Stuckart’s only concern was that the proposed measures

involved ‘endless administrative work’. He therefore suggested as an alter-

native the complete sterilization of the
Mischlinge
population, a suggestion

supported by the director of the Race and Settlement Office, Otto

Hofmann.178

As far as German Jews in mixed marriages were concerned, of which

there were fewer than 20,000 at this point, Heydrich also suggested a radical

solution: al ful y Jewish partners of German spouses should be deported.

The primary decision that remained to be made was whether the Jewish

partner should be evacuated to the East (that is, murdered) or, in view of the

psychological impact of such measures on German relatives, be sent to an

old-age ghetto. The only exception to this rule, Heydrich believed, should be

cases where there were children deemed to be second-degree
Mischlinge
. In

these cases the Jewish parent could stay for the foreseeable future.179

Once again, the purpose of Heydrich’s suggestion seems to have been

to assert the SS’s total definitional power in all aspects of the Jewish ques-

tion. The Nuremberg Laws, though banning future unions between Jews

and non-Jews, had little to say about existing mixed marriages. At the end

of 1938, after consulting Hitler, Göring drew up guidelines distinguishing

between so-called privileged mixed marriages and others. The privileged

marriages were those where the man was non-Jewish, with the exception

of marriages where there were ‘Jewishly educated’ children. Marriages in

which the husband was Jewish were not privileged, with the exception of

those marriages in which there were Christian children. At Wannsee, it

was once again Stuckart who made a radical suggestion for how to solve

the issue of mixed marriages. He called for a straightforward legislative act

that would dissolve all existing mixed marriages, paving the way for the

deportation of the Jewish spouses.180

No consensus on this issue was reached at Wannsee, but it was agreed

that SS racial experts and other Nazi officials should discuss the fate of the

216

HITLER’S HANGMAN

Mischlinge
and of Jews in mixed marriages at the mid-level conferences

and meetings that would follow the Wannsee Conference in the summer

and autumn of 1942.181

After a further request for future co-operation in carrying out the final

solution, Heydrich closed the meeting. Al in al , it had lasted no longer

than an hour and a half. If Heydrich had expected ‘considerable stumbling

blocks and difficulties’ prior to the meeting, he must have been pleasantly

surprised by the amicable nature of the negotiations. According to Eichmann,

Heydrich was visibly satisfied with the results of the meeting, and invited

him and Mül er to stay behind for ‘a glass or two or three of cognac’.182

Heydrich’s satisfaction was not unfounded. He had hoped to achieve

three things at the gathering. First, he sought official endorsement from

civil authorities of the deportation process, as well as of the extent of the

planned comprehensive solution to the Jewish question. Secondly, he

wanted to emphasize his sole responsibility for the solution of the Jewish

question against all resistance from those civilian authorities, which, over

the previous months, had sought to protect their waning influence from

further incursions by the RSHA. Thirdly, he wanted to reach a consensus

on the groups of people that were to be deported.

At least two of these aims were fulfil ed. Wannsee had unambiguously

affirmed Heydrich’s overal authority in relation to the final solution. The

Ministry of the Interior, the General Government and the Ministry for the

Occupied Eastern Territories had al fal en into line, and had even occa-

sional y proposed more radical solutions than Heydrich had initial y

deemed acceptable. The long-standing conflict with the civil authorities in

the General Government also seemed to be resolved. Reducing the number

of Jews in the General Government, rather than dumping them on the

region, was something on which Heydrich and Frank’s representative at

Wannsee could agree. Disputes would continue after January 1942, but the

‘basic line’, Heydrich confidently stated in a letter to Luther, had been

established.183

However, if Heydrich believed that he had carried the day on the

Mischling
question, he was soon to be disappointed. If, as original y planned,

the Wannsee Conference had taken place after a successful capture of

Moscow, it is not unlikely that his attempt to include the
Mischlinge
in the

deportations would have succeeded. Nazi racial policy usual y radicalized at

times of German military success, as the euphoria of victory tempted an

elated Hitler to dare ever more drastic policies.184 But there were no military

successes in the winter of 1941–2 and, even in the fol owing months, the SS

leadership found it difficult to push its line on the
Mischlinge
. During the

mid-level fol ow-up meetings to Wannsee in 1942, Eichmann pressed for

radical solutions along the lines of Stuckart’s or Heydrich’s suggestions, but

AT W A R W I T H T H E W O R L D

217

such policies were never implemented. Both the Ministry of Propaganda

and the Justice Ministry were concerned about the implications of compul-

sory divorce. In October 1943, Justice Minister Otto Georg Thierack and

Himmler agreed not to deport
Mischlinge
for the duration of the war.185

Similar obstacles remained with respect to mixed marriages. The regime

feared the effects on public morale if the partners of Aryan men and

women were deported. When, in the spring of 1943, for example, hundreds

of non-Jewish women in Berlin publicly protested against the threatened

deportation of their Jewish husbands, the Nazis backed off and released

the men. These so-cal ed Rosenstrasse protests of 1943 demonstrated that

the regime was prepared to revise its policies when it encountered deter-

mined popular resistance.186 For the most part, however, Jews in privileged

mixed marriages would be saved. Only after the death of their Aryan

husbands were some Jewish widows in formerly privileged marriages

deported after December 1943. Wannsee had thus failed to provide the

decisive breakthrough on this issue for which Heydrich had hoped.187

Nor was Wannsee the moment at which a fundamental decision was

made to turn the already murderous anti-Jewish policies in the East into

an all-encompassing genocide of all European Jews. Nobody at the

conference, not even Heydrich, was able to make that decision without

Hitler’s explicit consent. The discussions at Wannsee rather testified to the

gradually increasing radicalism with which the central authorities of Nazi

Germany viewed the Jewish question. Decisions that would turn 1942

into the most astounding year of murder in the Holocaust, indeed one of

the most horrifying years of systematic mass killings in the history of

mankind, were yet to follow.188

The day after the Wannsee Conference, Heydrich telephoned Himmler

to inform him of the meeting’s results, before boarding a plane that would

bring him back to Prague, where, in his capacity as acting Reich Protector

of Bohemia and Moravia, he had spent the past three months installing a

regime based uncompromisingly on terror.189

C H A P T ER V I I I

✦

Reich Protector

The Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia

Of the numerous territories occupied and administered by Nazi

Germany over the course of the Second World War, the Protectorate of

Bohemia and Moravia was one of the more curious. With a size of

roughly 49,000 square kilometres and an overall population of 7.5 million

inhabitants (245,000 of whom were ethnic Germans), the Protectorate

was by no means the largest of the Nazi-occupied territories. However, it

played a special role in occupied Europe, both because the Nazis perceived

Bohemia and Moravia as an integral part of the future Greater German

Reich, and because of its crucial geo-strategic location and economic

importance for Germany’s war effort.1

Established on 16 March 1939, the day after the German occupation

of the western half of Czechoslovakia, the Protectorate was to become

a German colony presided over by an appointed Reich Protector, a

viceroy directly responsible to Hitler. Yet while the colonial rhetoric

employed by leading Nazis in order to describe the future of the

Protectorate was striking, it concealed more than it revealed: the new

constitutional structure imposed on the country was merely a wartime

solution which would eventually give way to the full political, economic

and racial integration of Bohemia and Moravia into the Greater German

Reich. After Germany’s victory in the Second World War, the Czechs

would either become Germans or they would have to disappear in one

way or another.2

For the time being, however, the Czech inhabitants of the Protectorate

retained their own autonomous government (at least in theory), while the

Sudeten Germans were granted full citizenship of the Reich. All demo-

cratic remnants of the Czechoslovak Republic, including the parliament,

were abolished. Existing political parties were dissolved and reorganized

R E I C H P R OT E C TO R

219

under the umbrella of the so-called National Solidarity Movement. All

that remained of the once thriving democratic system was a nominal

Czech administration, headed by Emil Hácha as president, with an

appointed fifty-member Committee of National Solidarity chaired

by Prime Minister Alois Eliáš. Some 400,000 Czech state employees

and civil servants remained in their posts after 1939, alongside, or rather

subordinate to, some 11,000 German civilian administrators. This

peculiar form of administration imposed on the Protectorate differed

significantly from those introduced elsewhere in Nazi-occupied

Europe and it reflected the Nazi leadership’s recognition that the

Protectorate’s advanced economy was too precious to be upset by a

brutal occupation regime of the sort inflicted on Poland, Belorussia and

Ukraine.3

With a major armaments industry in Brünn (Brno) and other

Protectorate cities, including one of Europe’s leading arms manufacturers,

the Škoda works in Pilsen (Plzeň), as well as a large number of skilled

labourers, the Protectorate’s importance for Hitler’s war is difficult to

overestimate. From the beginning of the occupation, German special units

had seized huge quantities of military equipment, arms and ammunition,

and Jewish assets were transferred to the German authorities.4 Native

industry, however, was left to get on with things under nominal German

direction. Czech-owned international companies such as the Bata shoe

empire brought in valuable profits and high tax returns, and were not seri-

ously restricted by the German occupiers.5

Until the outbreak of the Second World War, the first Reich Protector,

Konstantin von Neurath, ran a remarkably lenient regime compared to

that in occupied Poland. An old-fashioned conservative rather than a

radical Nazi, Neurath had spent more than twenty years in the diplomatic

service, crowning his career by becoming the first Foreign Minister in

Hitler’s coalition government of 1933, before being assigned to Bohemia

and Moravia in 1938. Compared to his successor, Neurath was not a man

of heavy-handed occupation policies. Although he had enthusiastically

supported the remilitarization of the Rhineland in 1939 and the annexa-

tion of Austria in 1938, he was privately dismissive of Hitler’s ideas about

German
Lebensraum
in the East. He was also, however, respected abroad

for being well mannered and cultured, which was the key reason why

Hitler appointed him Reich Protector in the spring of 1939 against objec-

tions from other senior Nazis.6

The priority of the German occupiers was initially to gain control over

the country’s resources and to suppress any open resistance to German

rule. After the outbreak of the Second World War on 1 September 1939