The Years of Extermination: Nazi Germany and the Jews, 1939-1945 by Saul Friedländer Read Free Book Online Page A

various social and medical measures meant to bolster the biological health of the national community. Such theories and measures were as fashionable in the Anglo-Saxon and Scandinavian countries as they were in Germany. After the end of World War I, the view increasingly held in Weimar Germany argued that the biological depletion incurred by the Reich as a result of the war, and the economic difficulties that precluded any large-scale social policies to foster “positive” eugenic measures, reinforced the need for excluding the weak, the nonadapted, and diseased individuals from the biological pool of the Volk . Such notions became tenets of Nazi ideology during the “years of struggle.”
    Within months of his accession to the chancellorship, Hitler initiated a new law that ordered compulsory sterilization of individuals suffering from certain hereditary diseases. Yet, as late as September 1935, the Nazi leader refused to take the next “logical” step: murdering those individuals “unworthy of living.” Negative reactions from the population and the churches could have been expected—a risk that Hitler was not yet prepared to take. At the end of 1938 and mainly in 1939, the Nazi leader’s readiness to move ahead in this domain—as in that of foreign aggression—grew and, once the war started, the final authorization was given; 37 the crucial move from sterilization to straightforward group extermination was made.
    In each of the medical institutions turned into killing centers, physicians and police officers were jointly in charge. The exterminations followed a standardized routine: The chief physician checked the paperwork; photos of the victims were taken; the inmates were then led to a gas chamber fed by containers of carbon monoxide and asphyxiated. Gold teeth were torn out and the bodies cremated. 38
    The killing of Jewish patients started in June 1940; they had previously been moved to a few institutions designated only for them. 39 They were killed without any formalities; their medical records were of no interest. Their death was camouflaged nonetheless: The Reichsvereinigung (the representative body of Jews in Germany) had to pay the costs of the victims’ hospitalization in a fictitious institution: the “Cholm State Hospital,” near Lublin. In August 1940 identical letters were sent from Cholm to the families of the patients, informing them of the sudden death of their relatives, all on the same date. The cause of death was left unspecified. 40
    IV
    As we saw in the introduction, in Hitler’s view the Jews were first and foremost an active (eventually deadly) threat. Yet, in the wake of the Polish campaign, the first German reactions to the sight of the Ostjuden (Eastern Jews) were more immediately dominated by disgust and utter contempt. On September 10 Hitler toured the Jewish quarter of Kielce; his press chief ( Reichspressechef ), Otto Dietrich, described the impression of the visit in a pamphlet published at the end of that year: “If we had once believed we knew the Jews, we were quickly taught otherwise here…. The appearance of these human beings is unimaginable…. Physical repulsion hindered us from carrying out our journalistic research…. The Jews in Poland are in no way poor, but they live in such inconceivable dirt, in huts in which no vagrant in Germany would spend the night.” 41
    On October 7, referring to Hitler’s description of his impressions from Poland, Joseph Goebbels, the propaganda minister, added: “The Jewish problem will be the most difficult to solve. These Jews are not human beings anymore. [They are] predators equipped with a cold intellect which have to be rendered harmless.” 42 On November 2 Goebbels reported to Hitler about his own trip to Poland. “Above all,” Goebbels recorded in his diary, “my description of the Jewish problem gets his [Hitler’s] full approval. The Jew is a waste product. It is a clinical issue more than a social one.” 43
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