REINHARD HEYDRICH

WANNSEE A FATEFUL CONFERENCE

On the 30th January 1942 a snowy Tuesday morning, Heydrich gathered fourteen senior Nazi civil servants, party officials and high ranking SS officers in a former industrials villa on the shores of Berlin's Lake Wannsee.
As Heydrich indicated in his invitation letter of late November 1941, the purpose of the meeting was to establish a common position among the central authorities in regard to the final solution. Heydrich even referred to the 'eastward evacuation' of Jews from the Reich and the 'protectorate' as the reason why co-ordination with other central agencies of Nazi Germany

Note:

This is a fact very few know about, the Wannsee Conference did take place, but Heydrich was so concerned about security and about people learning about it - who shouldn't have, that he moved the conference over the road to a spot an 100 yards away. It did not take place in this famous house, and they did discuss the killing and mass deportation of the Jews, and how it could be accomplished in secrecy. Heydrich was in charge, Eichmann took the notes, and it all did happen as described except the venue was switched. The event was held un another Nazi-owned building about 100 meters across the road. [The conference was in fact held in the Dining Room of the Guesthouse about 90 Meters away from the Main Building, which in favt was the Headquarters of Interpol.,sic HKS 31.3.2017]

First page of the Protocol

ATTENDANTS

SS-Obergruppenführer (Lieutenant-General) Reinhard Heydrich	Chief of the RSHA Deputy Reich Protector of Bohemia and Moravia Presiding	Schutzstaffel (SS)	Reichsführer-SS (Reich Leader SS) Heinrich Himmler
SS-Gruppenführer (Major-General) Otto Hofmann	Head of the SS Race and Settlement Main Office (RuSHA)	Schutzstaffel (SS)	Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler
SS-Gruppenführer (Major-General) Heinrich Müller	Chief of Amt IV (Gestapo)	Reich Main Security Office (RSHA), Schutzstaffel	Chief of the RSHA SS-Obergruppenführer Reinhard Heydrich
SS-Oberführer (Senior Colonel) Dr. Karl Eberhard Schöngarth	Commander of the SiPo and the SD in the General Government	SiPo and SD, RSHA, Schutzstaffel	Chief of the RSHA SS-Obergruppenführer Reinhard Heydrich
SS-Oberführer (Senior Colonel) Dr. Gerhard Klopfer	Permanent Secretary	Nazi Party Chancellery	Chief of the Party Chancellery Martin Bormann
SS-Obersturmbannführer (Lieutenant Colonel) Adolf Eichmann	Head of Referat IV B4 of the Gestapo Recording secretary	Gestapo, RSHA, Schutzstaffel	Chief of Amt IV SS-Gruppenführer Heinrich Müller
SS-Sturmbannführer (Major) Dr. Rudolf Lange	Commander of the Sicherheitspolizei (Security Police; SiPo) and the SD for the General-District Latvia Deputy of the Commander of the SiPo and the SD for the Reichskommissariat Ostland Head of Einsatzkommando 2	SiPo and SD, RSHA, Schutzstaffel	SS-Brigadeführer (Brigadier General) and Generalmajor der Polizei (Major-General of Police) Dr. Franz Walter Stahlecker
Dr. Georg Leibbrandt	Reichsamtleiter (Reich Head Office)	Reich Ministry for the Occupied Eastern Territories	Reich Minister for the Occupied Eastern Territories Dr. Alfred Rosenberg
Dr. Alfred Meyer	Gauleiter (Regional Party Leader) State Secretary and Deputy Reich Minister	Reich Ministry for the Occupied Eastern Territories	Reich Minister for the Occupied Eastern Territories Dr. Alfred Rosenberg
Dr. Josef Bühler	State Secretary	General Government (Polish Occupation Authority)	Governor-General Dr. Hans Frank
Dr. Roland Freisler	State Secretary	Reich Ministry of Justice	Reich Minister of Justice Dr. Franz Schlegelberger
SS-Brigadeführer (Brigadier General) Dr. Wilhelm Stuckart	State Secretary	Reich Interior Ministry	Reich Minister of the Interior Dr. Wilhelm Frick
SS-Oberführer (Senior Colonel) Erich Neumann	State Secretary	Office of the Plenipotentiary for the Four Year Plan	Plenipotentiary of the Four Year Plan Hermann Göring
Friedrich Wilhelm Kritzinger	Permanent Secretary	Reich Chancellery	Reich Minister and head of the Reich Chancellery SS-Obergruppenführer Dr. Hans Lammers
Martin Luther	Under Secretary	Reich Foreign Ministry	Ernst von Weizsäcker, State Secretary to Reich Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop

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Participants at the Conference and their fate

Reinhard Heydrich was assassinated in Prague in June 1942. Roland Freisler was killed in an air-raid in Berlin in February 1945. Rudolf Lange was killed in action in Poland in February 1945. Alfred Meyer killed himself in April 1945. Heinrich Müller was last seen in Berlin on 30 April 1945. His fate is unknown, but he probably died in Berlin in the next few days. Martin Luther finished the war in a concentration camp after falling out with Foreign Minister Ribbentrop, and died in Berlin in May 1945. Karl Eberhard Schöngarth was executed for war crimes (killing British prisoners of war) in May 1946. Friedrich Wilhelm Kritzinger was acquitted of war crimes and died in October 1947. Josef Bühler was tried in Poland for war crimes and executed in Krakow in July 1948. Erich Neumann was briefly imprisoned and died in mid 1948. Wilhelm Stuckart was imprisoned for four years before being released for lack of evidence in 1949. He was killed in a car accident in November 1953. Adolf Eichmann was executed in Israel in May 1962. Georg Leibbrandt was charged with war crimes but the case against him was dismissed in 1950. He died in June 1982. Otto Hofmann was sentenced to 25 years in prison for war crimes, but was pardoned in 1954. He died in December 1982. Gerhard Klopfer was charged with war crimes but was released for lack of evidence. He died in January 1987.

View: YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3ave9RHTqkI&feature=em-subs_digest-vrecs

LODZ GHETTO PICTURES

“In 1939, the Nazis destroyed all but one of the synagogues in Lodz. This was the most famous one. Ross was making a symbolic statement through photos like this. There’s a story he needed to tell.”

This photo.depicts survival on the street — with pails, bowls, tin cans, you could get your ration at a soup kitchen. None of these photos were staged. Photos like this are not images the Germans wanted to see.”

This is a powerful picture. Human beings were beasts of burden in the ghetto. Bread was the most desirable staple, note that there’s no documentation about any of the peripheral figures in photos like this.

No one knows anything about this child, though. It’s a wonderful image — she still has a bow in her hair, trying to look tidy and lovely. In the early years of the ghetto, there was a children’s colony called Marisin, with schools and orphanages. Eventually, if you were under 10 years of age, you were deemed of no use for labor. Many children were sent to Chelmno from the ghetto.”
Note: She wears the Star of David even at that age!
Einsatzkommavdo 9 under Alfred Filbert was the first to murder Jewish women and children systematically, in Belorussia from the end of July 1941 onwards, apparently on explicit orders from Heydrich

A tragic picture. Only one boy looks back. He seems frightened. To the Germans, children and the elderly did not have purpose in terms of labor. They asked for 20,000 children to get removed from the Ghetto. [Lodz ghetto leader Chaim] Rumkowski’s famous ‘Give me your children’ speech presented the situation to parents as a sacrifice for the greater good.

Heydrich's idea of concentrating Jews in ghettos in larger cities for the purpose of subsequent deportation was to become a crucial component of Nazi anti-Jewish policy. Yet he never gave much thought to how Jewish life in envisaged urban ghettos was to be organized. He noted that the 'concentration of Jews in the cities for general reason of security will probably bring about orders forbidding Jews from entering certain quarters of the cities altogether, and that - in view of economic necessity - they cannot for instance leave the ghetto, they cannot go out after designated hours, etc But these were suggestions, not explicit orders'...

In 1941 party radicals renewed efforts to extend their definitional however, to remove the protected categories and have the Mischlinge legally classified with full Jews. Heydrich too, began to take a more active interest in the question, particularly once it became important to define which groups should be deported from the Reich, By the summer of 1941, he decided that the time had come to revise the protection of the Mischlinge and mount a frontal attack on the compromises established by the Nuremberg Laws.
The numbers at stake was comparatively small. In 1939, there were 54,000 first-degree and around 43,000 second-degree Mischlinge in the Old Reich and Austria, including the Protectorate. Nevertheless, Heydrich spent considerable time outlining his own definition of the Mischlinge.
First degree Mischlinge or half Jews, he suggested, should be considered Jews, and consequently be deported, unless they were either married to 'persons of German blood' and the marriage had resulted in children or if they had received an exemption permit from a top Nazi authority. In return for having spared from transportation, the first degree Mischlinge 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 exceptional poor racial appearance that distinguished him or her as a Jew, or if he or she feels and behaves like a Jew.

German Poster for the film 'Der ewige Jude'. (The eternal Jew)

Heydrich's proposal did not encounter much opposition from the other delegates. Stucker's only concern was that the proposed measures involved endless administrative work. He therefore suggested as am alternative, the complete sterilization of the Mischling population, a suggestion supported by the director of the Race and Settlement Office, Otto Hoffmann.
As far as German Jews in mixed marriages were concerned, of which there were fewer the 20,000 at this point, Heydrich also suggested a radical solution: All fully Jewish partners of German spouses should be deported. The primary decision that remained was whether the Jewish partner should be evacuated to the East (that is, murdered) or, in view of the physiological impact of such measured on the German relatives, be sent to an old-aged 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.

Image result for picture inside lodz ghetto Jews having lunch

Image result for picture inside lodz ghetto Jews having lunch

Lodz ghetto, Jewish children having a meal

Once again, the purpose of Heydrich's suggestion seems to have been to assert SS's total definitional power in all aspects of the Jewish question. The Nuremberg Laws, though banning future unions between Jews and non-Jews, had little to say about existing mixed marriages. At the end of 1038 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. At Wannsee, it was once again Stuckart who made 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.

   No nonsenses 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 Mischlinge and of Jews in mixed marriages at the mid-level conference and meetings that would follow the Wannsee Conference in the summer and autumn 1942.
   After further request for future co-operation in carrying out the final solution, Heydrich closed the meeting. All in all, 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 Müller to stay behind for a glass or two or three of cognac'.
   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 group of people that were to be deported.
At las two of these aims were fulfilled. Wannsee had ambiguously affirmed Heydrich's overall authority in relation to the final solution. The Ministry of Interior , the General Government, and the Ministry for the Occupied Eastern Territories had all fallen into line, and had even occasionally proposed more radical solution than Heydrich had initially 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 he made this quite clear.

Jewish children inside Ghetto Litzmannstadt, 1940

However, if Heydrich believed that he had carried the day on the Mischling question, he was soon to be disappointed. If, as originally 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 deportation would have succeeded. The regime's racially radicalised at times of German military success, as the euphoria of victory tempted an elated Hitler to dare ever more drastic policies. But there were no military success in the winter of 1941-42and, even the following months, the SS leadership found it difficult to push the line on the Mischlinge. During the mid-level follow-up meetings to Wannsee in 1942, Eichmann pressed for radical solutions along the lines of Suckeart's or Heydrich's suggestions. but such policies were never implemented. Both the Ministry of Propaganda and the Justice Ministry were concerned about the implantation of compulsory divorce. In October 1943, Justice Minister Otto Georg Thierack and Himmler agreed not to deport Mischlinge for the duration of the war. [After the Allies arrested him, Thierack committed suicide in Sennelager, Paderborn, by poisoning before he could be brought before the court at the Nuremberg Judges' Trial sic.]

Otto Thierack (on right) with the judge Roland Freisler at the end of August 1942

    Similar obstacles remained with respect to mixed marriages. The regime feared the effects on public morale if the partner 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-called Rosenstrasse protests in 1943 demonstrated that the regime was prepared to revise its policies when it encountered determined popular resistance. For 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 1943. Wannsee had thus failed to provide the decisive breakthrough on this issue for which Heydrich had hoped.
   Nor was Wannsee the moment at which 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 decision 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 mas killings in the history of mankind, were yet to follow.
   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 Reichs Protector of Bohemia and Moravia, he had spent the past three months installing a regime based on uncompromisingly terror.

THE ROSENSTRASSE PROTEST - BERLIN 1943

Many people believe that it was impossible for the Germans to resist the Nazi dictatorship and the deportations of German Jews. However, a street protest in early 1943 indicates that resistance was possible, and indeed, successful.Until early 1943, Nazi officials exempted Jews married to Gentiles or "Aryans" from the so-called Final Solution. In late February of that year, however, during a mass arrest of the last Jews in Berlin, the Gestapo also arrested Jews in intermarriages. This was the most brutal chapter of the expulsion of Jews in Berlin. Without warning, the SS stormed into Berlin's factories and arrested any Jews still working there. Simultaneously, all throughout the Reich capital, the Gestapo arrested Jews from their homes. Anyone on the streets wearing the "Star of David" was also abruptly carted off with the other Jews to huge provisional Collecting Centers in central Berlin, in preparation for massive deportations to Auschwitz.
The Gestapo called this action simply the "Schlußaktion der Berliner Juden" (Closing Berlin Jew Action). Hitler was offended that so many Jews still lived in Berlin, and the Nazi Party Director for Berlin, Joseph Goebbels, had promised to make Berlin "Judenfrei" (free of Jews) for the Führer's 54th birthday in April. This "Schlußaktion" was, indeed, the beginning of the end for about 8,000 of the 10,000 Berlin Jews arrested in its course. Many who left their houses for what they thought would be a "normal" day of work, without turning back for even a last glance or hug, were to end up shortly in the ovens of Auschwitz, never again to see home or family.: About 2,000 of the arrested Jews who were related to Aryan Germans, however, experienced quite a different fate. They were locked up in a provisional collecting center at Rosenstraße 2-4, an administrative center of the Jewish Community in the heart of Berlin. The Aryan spouses of the interned Jews; who were mostly women, hurried alone or in pairs to the Rosenstraße, where they discovered a growing crowd of other women whose loved ones had also been kidnapped and imprisoned there. A protest broke out. The women who had gathered by the hundreds at the gate of the improvised detention center began to call out together in a chorus, "Give us our husbands back." They held their protest day and night for a week, as the crowd grew larger day by day.
On different occasions the armed guards between the women and the building imprisoning their loved ones barked a command: "Clear the street or we'll shoot!" This sent the women scrambling pell-mell into the alleys and courtyards in the area. But within minutes they began streaming out again, inexorably drawn to their loved ones. Again and again they were scattered, and again and again they advanced, massed together, and called for their husbands, who heard them and took hope.

Part of the memorial "Block der Frauen" by Ingeborg Hunzinger, commemorating the protest

witness, "was crammed with people, and the demanding, accusing cries of the women rose above the noise of the traffic like passionate avowals of a love strengthened by the bitterness of life." One woman described her feeling as a protester on the street as one of incredible solidarity with those sharing her fate. Normally people were afraid to show dissent, fearing denunciation, but on the street they knew they were among friends, because they were risking death together. A Gestapo man who no doubt would have heartlessly done his part to deport the Jews imprisoned in the Rosenstraße was so impressed by the people on the streets that, holding up his hands in a victory clasp of solidarity with a Jew about to be released, he pronounced proudly: "You will be released, your relatives protested for you. That is German loyalty."

"One day the situation in front of the collecting center came to a head," a witness reported. "The SS trained machine guns on us: 'If you don't go now, we'll shoot.' But by now we couldn't care less. We screamed 'you murderers!' and everything else. We bellowed. We thought that now, at last, we would be shot. Behind the machine guns a man shouted something ;maybe he gave a command. I didn't hear it, it was drowned out. But then they cleared out and the only sound was silence. That was the day it was so cold that the tears froze on my face."
The headquarters of the Jewish section of the Gestapo was just around the corner, within earshot of the protesters. A few salvos from a machine gun could have wiped the women off the square. But instead the Jews were released. Joseph Goebbels, in his role as the Nazi Party Director for Berlin, decided that the simplest way to end the protest was to release the Jews. Goebbels chose not to forcibly tear Jews from Aryans who clearly risked their lives to stay with their Jewish family members, and rationalized that he would deport the Jews later anyway. But the Jews remained. They survived the war in Berlin, registered officially with the police, working in officially authorized jobs, and officially receiving food rations.
The implications of this protest are that mass, public and nonviolent acts of noncooperation by non-Jewish Germans on behalf of German Jews could have slowed or even stopped the Nazi genocide of German Jews.. Not many Jews were saved. Yet when the (non-Jewish) German populace protested nonviolently and en masse, the Nazis made concessions. When Germans protested for Jews, Jews were saved.
Although there were a few men in attendance, this was a protest by women; women were really the origin and the core of the protest. Women, traditionally, have felt responsible for home and family; to the women who were protesting, their families were, in some sense, their careers; to lose their families was to lose everything meaningful for them.
At the protest in the Rosenstraße there was a flickering of a tiny torch, which might have kindled the fire of general resistance if Germans had taken note of the women on the Rosenstraße and imitated their actions of mass civil disobedience. Perhaps they did not do so because they were used to thinking that neither women, nor nonviolent actions, could be politically powerful.

EINSATZTRUPPEN ON THE EASTERN FRONT
On 22 June 1941, a historically unprecedented invasion army of 3 million German soldiers and more than 600,000 Italian, Hungarian and Finnish troops plunged into the Soviet Union on an extended battlefront of 1,500 kilometres.The speed of the Wehrmacht's advance was extraordinary. Within two days of launching the invasion, Army Group North had captured the Baltic cities of Grodmo, Vilnius and Kaunas. By the end of June, Low had fallen, too. Army Group Centre pushed eastwards, towards taking Smolensk in mid-July, while Army Group South drove deep into the southern Ukraine. By the autumn the Wehrmacht had captured more than 3 million Soviet soldiers, the vast majority of whom would perish in German POW camps due to starvation, typhus and other infectious diseases.
There was the Commissar Order of June 1941 , which followed directly on the Barbarossa decree. It was called Instructions on the Treatment of Political Commissars, as well as 'other radical elements, saboteurs, propagandists,snipers, assassins, demagogues etc.

The target group of people to be executed was deliberately kept vague, but was clear that the formulation 'all Jews in the service of the communist party and state was merely a coded reference in order to kill a nebulously defined Jewish upper class . It would largely left to the commando leaders themselves to decide, who precisely would be included in this class, an approach that was once more highly characteristic of Heydrich's leadership style, which called for initiative without specifying exact aims, and which would contribute significantly to the rapid escalation of mass murder over the following weeks.

[In 1942, terror campaigns against the German territorial administration, staffed by local "collaborators and traitors" was additionally emphasized. This resulted, however, in definite divisions within the local civilian population, with the beginning of the organisation of anti-partisan units with native personnel in 1942. By November 1942, Soviet partisan units in Belarus numbered about 47,000 person,sic]

German photo showing alleged partisans hanged by the Germans in January 1943

In practice, the Einsatzgruppen found most of the political candidates for liquidation had fled. The great majority of executions in the first five weeks of Barbarossa were therefore aimed at those who were immediately accessible – Jewish males, particularly those in leadership positions and members of the intelligentsia. But late July 1941, the killing escalated to include all Jewish men, women and children. If there had ever been any doubt about what Nazi policy was to be in the Soviet Union, during the course of a conversation Hitler had with Göring, Lammers, Rosenberg and Keitel on 16 July 1941, it was now made abundantly clear. Victory over the Soviet Union was imminent. To create a "Garden of Eden" in the east, "all necessary measures – shootings, resettlements, etc." would be undertaken. It was fortunate that the Russians had given the order for partisan warfare, for "it gives us the opportunity to exterminate anyone who is hostile to us." Hitler did not issue an explicit order (he rarely did), but the intention was obvious. Within a week of this speech, Himmler had more than quadrupled the number of SS men operating behind the advancing German army. At least a further 11 battalions of Order Police were assigned to the HSSPF. Local auxiliaries in Selbstschutz battalions were recruited; they numbered 33,000 by the end of 1941, 165,000 by June 1942, and 300,000 by January 1943.

If the task of killing Soviet Jewry with the 3,000 men of the Einsatzgruppen had been impossible, by the end of July 1941, the manpower had become available for the execution of the task. By the end of 1941 between 500,000 and 800,000 Jews had been murdered – an average of 2,700 - 4,200 per day.

Ghetto in Grodno - Jews flooding the gates of Ghetto One during relocation action, November 1941

Heydrich's Einsatzgruppen followed the Army's rear grimly determined to excel in carrying out the orders. Although Heydrich was to be informed daily of their progress through daily incidents reports, he and Himmler quickly decided that they would monitor their work first-hand. Eight days after the beginning of Operation Barbarossa, on June 30th, they travelled from Hitler's headquarters in East Prussia to Grodno in the former Soviet-occupied part of Poland and Augustowo in recently conquered Lithuania, home of the largest Jewish community of the Baltic States. In Grodno, Heydrich was dismayed to find that, not a single representative of the Security Police or the SD was on hand. He issued a reprimand and a warning to the commando leader in charge of the area, ordering him to show greater flexibility in tactical operations and to keep pace with military advance. The commander of the Einsatzgruppe B, Arthur Nebe, responded with an apology. Although 'only ninety-six Jews were liquidated' in the first few days of the occupation of Grodno and Lida, he assured Heydrich that he had given orders 'that this must be greatly increased'. 'The implementation of the necessary liquidation was guaranteed under all circumstances'.
Meanwhile in Augustowo Heydrich and Himmler caught up with the Einsatzkommando 'Tilsit' under the command of Hans Joachim Böhme. Over the previous week Böhme and his men had engaged in various shootings of civilians and had come to Augustowo in order to initiate further 'routine actions' in the rear of the quickly advancing Wehrmacht. Both Himmler and Heydrich approved of these mass shootings 'in their entirety. Encouraged by the endorsement of their superiors, the Einsatzkommando 'Tisit' shot more than 300 civilians that day, most of them Jewish men between the ages of seventeen abd forty-five. By 18 July, Böhme's unit claimed to have murdered a total of 3,300 victims.
[ Hans Joachim Böhme, born in Magdeburg in 1909, joined the Nazi party and the SS in 1933. As head of Einsatzkommando Tilsit, Böhme commanded the murder operations carried out in the occupied Baltic regions between 1941-1942. On October-December 1943, Böhme was head of the Security Police in Zhitomir, and from May 1944 until January 1945 he headed the Security Police and SD in Lithuania. In 1958, Böhme was put on trial in Ulm, Germany, for taking part in murder operations. He was sentenced to fifteen years and died in prison in 1960.sic].
On 11 July Himmler and Heydrich returned to Germany to view the progress of the Einsatzgruppen's extermination campaign. Both could see for themselves that the murder squads had overcome their passivity for which they had been critized on 30 June, when they arrived, mass shootings of civilians took place in Grodno, Oshmiany and Vilius. In between thedse visits, Heydrich found distraction and solace in daily fencing exercises, preparing himself for the German National Fencing Championship in Bad Kreusnach in August 1941 [where he came fith.sic]

Image result for picture; reinhard Heydrich fencing

Heydrich in Fencing Gear

Heydrich's inspection tour to Grodno and the subsequent radicalization of pacification measures that followed it, was indicative of a more general pattern. Throughout the first weeks of the war against Soviet Russia, Himmler and Heydrich and other senior SS-Officers frequently visited their men in the field and their inspection tours usually preceded or coincided with an increase in the number of atrocities. While there is no hard evidence that either of them called directly for killing of unarmed civilians irrespective of age or gender, Himmler's and Heydrich's mere presence appears to have led to an upsurge in the mass murders of Jewish civilians of the formerly Soviet-occupied territories. By approving what had happened already by encouraging their men to show more initiative, they made a decisive contribution to the swift escalation of mass murder. Radicalism and imitative were sure to receive praise, a lesson that was quickly learned by Einsatzgruppen officers along the Eastern Front.

The killings consequently intensified over the course of the summer . From late June towards, nearly all Einsatzcommandos as well as a range of German Police Battalions along the entire front line began to shoot indiscriminately Jewish men of military age, often in hundreds even thousands at a time. These executions took place under a variety of pretexts, ranging from retribution for atrocities committed by Soviet Secret Services (NKDV) to the punishment of looters and the support in the activities of partisans.

Soviet partisans take on a burning village trying to drive away German punitive expedition. Theatre of operations

With memories of clashes between the SS and the Wehrmacht in the occupied Poland still fresh, Heydrich had been concerned that tension over the execution might re-emerge and instructed leaders of the advance units to show the necessary political sensitivity in carrying out their tasks. His fears proved to be unfounded. Co-operation with the Wehrmacht was 'exelent', the first activity report of the Einsatzgruppen noted. Individual complaints continued to be submittedto Army Commanders, but no widespread outrage similar to that in Poland occured. When in August 1941, partisan activities behind German lines increase, the vastly overstretched German front began to burgeon, the Wehrmacht's willingness to tolerate and participate in atrocities fourther increased. Manpower shortages on a rapidily overextended front went hand in hand with growing fears of partisan warfare.The responce to thios dilemma was greater 'pre-emptive' violence against ptential as well as real enimies.

Partisans in the forest near Polotsk, Byelorussian SSR, September 1943.

Mass murder, was NOT, however, restricted to the SS task force. In numerous newly occupied territories, the SS succeeded in unleashing pogroms carried out by local populations. On 29 June, presentably in response to the horrific pogrom which took place in Kaunas in late June and which cost the lives of 3,000 Jews, Heydrich reminded the task force commanders that self-cleaning efforts of anti-Communists or anti- Jewish groups in the occupied Soviet territories are not to e hindered. On the contrary, they were actively encouraged and indeed without leaving a trace of German involvement so that they look like spontaneous outbursts of anti-Jewish rage. In the areas occupied by the Red Army from 1939 onwards, there is evidence of anti-Jewish pogroms in at least sixty towns, particularly in Lithuania, Latvia and the western Ukraine. Although estimates of victims vary, at least 12,000 and possibly as many as 24,000 Jews fell victim to these pogroms.

Lithuania militia guards Jews to be killed at Ponary

Despite his eagerness to use pogroms as an indicator of local hatred towards Jewish-Bolsheviks, Heydrich was also aware of the dangers inherent in his policy. Given the complex mix of nationalistic, opportunistic and anti-Semitic motives at work, pogroms continued an element of basic ingredients recommended by the RSHA - instigating pogroms and making use of local collaborators without officially sanctioning their auxiliary function - did not strike any commanders in the field as a recipe for efficient occupation policy. On 1 July, following an inquiry from the Seventh Army under General Car-Heinrich von Stülpnagel, Heydrich elaborated on his previous order regarding the , non-prevention of self-cleaning measures by anti-Communist and anti-Jewish circles', partly to prevent an uncontrollable mushrooming of violence by non-Germans and partly to avoid clashes with the Wehrmacht. Heydrich called it 'self evident that the cleaning actions have to be directed primarily against Bolshevists and Jews'. Poles on the other hand, were to be exempted for the time being, as Heydrich believed to be sufficiently anti-Semitic to be 'of special important initiators of pogroms'. Their long-term fate was to be decided at a later stage.

Lithuania militia guards Jews to be killed at Ponary

Lithuanian militia unit force a group of Jewish women to undress before their execution in the Pajuoste Forest

[General Carl Heinrich von Stülpnagel despite his serious wounds (he tried to commit suicide and blinded himself) was found guilty in the planning to assassinate Hitler by the People's Court and sentenced to death, to be executed by hanging in Berlin-Plötzensee by hang,sic.]

General Carl Heinrich von Stülpnagel

The fate of Bolshevik Commissars, by contrast, was straightforward: when captured, they were to be shot immediately, although Heydrich managed to convince the Wehrmacht that, whenever possible, they should be interrogated by the SD and Abwehr Officers before their execution. Their statements, usually given after sustained periods of torture, helped Heydrich to give a clearer picture of the organisational structure and operational methods of the NKVD.
For Heydrich, the German attack against the Soviet Union thus marked the end of a highly unsatisfactory period of stagnation in terms of both ideological fulfillment and carer problems. Between the invasion of Poland and the beginning of Operation Barbarossa, he had failed to advance the influence of the SD and the Security Police in the occupied territories of Western Europe. Simultaneously, both the Germanisation of Western Poland and the Jewish question remained unresolved. Operation Barbarossa offered him a potential exit strategy from this stalemate.

Image result for Reinhard Heydrich's Death Mask

Reinhard Heydrich's Death Mask

Sources:
wikipedia new zealand
Breitman, Richard. The Architect of Genocide: Himmler and the Final Solution. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1991.
Fleming, Gerald. Hitler and the Final Solution. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1984.
Gilbert, Martin. The Holocaust: A History of the Jews of Europe During the Second World War. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1985.
Robert Gerwarth Hitler's Hangman
MacDonald, Callum. The Killing of Reinhard Heydrich. New York: The Free Press, 1989.
Toland, John. The Last 100 Days. New York: Random House, 1966.
The World Book Encyclopedia. "Heydrich, Reinhard". 1988 Edition.
Editing/Design:
d_stolpmann@hotmail.com

Appendix dated 31 March 2017

The Day Hitler Blinked
by Barbara Ash

For more information on this article, contact: Dr. Nathan Stoltzfus: 850-644-9529; e-mail: nstoltzf@mailer.fsu.edu
Day and night for a week in early 1943, hundreds of unarmed German women did something that was unheard of in Nazi Germany.
They stood toe-to-toe with machine gun-wielding Gestapo agents and demanded the release of their Jewish husbands from Adolph Hitler’s murderous grip. The men were locked up in the Jewish community center in the heart of Berlin, victims of Hitler’s "final roundup" of German Jews.
The women's courage and passion prevailed: As thousands of other Berlin Jews were crammed into cattle cars and transported to Auschwitz, the Jews married to “Aryan” German women were set free.

But even today, more than 50 years after the Nazi reign of terror, few Germans acknowledge the significance of protest on Rosenstrasse, the street where the dramatic showdown took place. To admit that unarmed women saved 1,700 Jews from deportation would be to challenge postwar Germany's consensus that ordinary citizens were powerless to curb Hitler's anti-Semitic rampage.
But with his book, Resistance of the Heart: Intermarriage and the Rosenstrasse Protest in Nazi Germany, published by W.W. Norton, FSU historian Nathan Stoltzfus demands that Germans re-examine their collective conscience.
When the book is released in German next year, the story of this little-known protest is likely to unearth feelings of uneasiness over what ordinary Germans did, or failed to do during the dozen years of the Third Reich, 1933 to 1945.
Resistance of the Heart arrived in 1996 on the heels of Daniel Goldhagen's Hitler's Willing Executioners (Vintage, 1996). That work looks no further than "eliminationist anti-Semitism"--nurtured by a society that for generations viewed Jews as evil and dangerous--to explain why ordinary Germans not only allowed, but encouraged, Hitler's genocidal pursuits.
By no means minimizing the central role anti-Semitism played in the Holocaust, Stoltzfus, who teaches modern European history, maintains that the deadly combination of anti-Semitism and self-interest implicates Germans. Rewarded socially and economically for unfriendliness to Jews, Germans enthusiastically denounced and isolated their Jewish neighbors and colleagues.
By isolating Jews from the rest of society, ordinary Germans made it easy for Hitler to introduce increasingly radical anti-Jewish measures, and laid the foundation for mass murder.
The protest on Rosenstrasse was the only public German protest against deportation of Jews. It shows what happened when German women confronted the regime and refused to abandon their Jewish spouses. Jews whose German spouses had died or who had divorced them were immediately sent to death camps. Jews whose German spouses stuck by them survived. By war’s end, in fact, 98 percent of German Jews who survived the Holocaust were in these intermarriages, a fact that many Germans ignore.
The story of these women who saved their husbands is not always the story of heroes or great love, Stoltzfus says. Germans married to Jews remained married at great risk to themselves for a variety of reasons, including honor and tradition. “There was no such thing as a ‘happy’ Jewish-German marriage during the Nazi terror,” one man, the son of a Jewish father and a German mother, told Stoltzfus.
“People were driven in despair to defend what they saw as essential to themselves, and their acts only now appear to be acts of great courage,” another man said.
The success of the protesters on Rosenstrasse is discomfiting because it contradicts the notion that Germans had to chose between resistance and martyrdom, Stoltzfus says. Even toward the end of the war, during years marked by increased violence and terror, resistance was possible. The regime backed down when even its most basic ideology of racial purity was challenged.
Throughout the Nazi years, for example, there was other evidence that successful and unpunished protest was possible. In 1941, for example, outcries by the Roman Catholic Church and victims’ families curtailed the regime’s centralized program of euthanasia, of which mentally and physically “defective” Germans were victims. And millions of German homemakers defied Goebbels’s January 1943 call for “total war” by refusing to be conscripted into the workforce. Neither group suffered reprisal.
“The genocide of Jews was a Nazi imperative,” Stoltzfus says, “but unrest that challenged wartime morale and secrecy had to be avoided. Rosenstrasse indicates that a relatively small number of public protesters could exercise disproportionate influence because of their ‘negative effect on the general populace.’”
If non-compliance and the open protest saved 1,700 Berlin Jews from extermination, Stoltzfus asks, what would have happened if other Germans had confronted Hitler?
The Protest
By early 1943, millions of German Jews had been murdered. Only Jewish factory workers considered “irreplaceable’’ in the war effort and “privileged” Jews, those married to Aryan Germans, were spared.
Jewish-German couples, however, lived precariously. Stripped of citizens’ privileges, subjected to relentless torment, loss of jobs and economic hardships, and shunned by their neighbors, Germans married to Jews paid a high price for loyalty to their partners.
Yet for more than a decade they defied the Reich’s relentless efforts to compel them to divorce. At least 90 percent of intermarried Germans remained with their spouses. In late 1942, there still were nearly 30,000 of these marriages in Germany, half of them in Berlin.
Afraid that forcing these couples to separate would provoke social unrest, Nazi leaders had “temporarily deferred” Jews in German-Jewish marriages from the final solution that had begun two years earlier.
But now, Jews in intermarriages were seen as the remaining obstacle to ridding Germany of Jews once and for all.
So, in Berlin on February 27, 1943, no Jew was safe.
In the pre-dawn hours, hundreds of police, Gestapo agents , and the Leibstandarte Adolph Hitler--the SS division created for his personal protection--swooped down upon Berlin’s last Jews. The victims were plucked from factories, snatched from the streets, and torn from their homes and families. Others, summoned to pick up new ration cards, walked into ambushes planned months before.
They were forced with whips and bayonets into waiting trucks, and taken to collection centers around the city. Of the 10,000 Berlin Jews arrested in the final roundup, 8,000 were deported to Auschwitz, where they were murdered.
But the Jews married to Aryan Germans were separated from the rest, and locked up at Rosenstrasse 2-4, the Jewish community center in the heart of Berlin.
As word of what happened spread, the German wives of these Jews began descending upon Rosenstrasse, gingerly at first, and only with the intention of finding their husbands. But as one day stretched into the next, and their desperation and numbers grew, the women became more courageous. “Give us our husbands back,” they shouted over and over in unison.
Despite attempts by SS thugs to intimidate with machine guns and threats of arrest, the women refused to leave without their husbands.
As head of the Nazi party in Berlin, Joseph Goebbels, should have been delighted that his city would be among the first to be free of Jews. But as Hitler’s propaganda minister, and one of his most trusted advisors, he faced a public relations nightmare.
The two leaders would have liked nothing more than to rid Germany of intermarried Jews. These people had tainted Aryan blood and were offensive to the Nazi sense of racial purity. But Hitler was so sensitive to public sentiment that he waffled.
He was afraid that deporting intermarried Jews would trigger an uprising among their German relatives and endanger not only the domestic unity especially necessary during war, but also the secrecy the regime tried so hard to maintain about the fate of deported Jews. Millions had perished since the first trial deportation in October 1940, but neither Hitler nor Goebbels wanted to risk exposure.
This unprecedented protest presented a political quagmire. By now, the protesters had been on the street for a week and had been joined by thousands of others, including people without imprisoned relatives.
Charlotte Israel was among the women who waited in freezing temperatures outside Rosenstrasse 2-4, desperate for news of her husband. She had been coming each day, since the police arrested Julius Israel. When Stoltzfus spoke with her in 1990 in Berlin, she clearly recalled the protest and the moment it turned more political, more daring.
“Without warning, the guards began setting up machine guns,” she said. “Then they directed them at the crowd and shouted: ‘If you don’t go now, we’ll shoot.’ The movement surged backward. But then, for the first time, we really hollered. Now we couldn’t care less...Now they’re going to shoot in any case, so now we’ll yell too, we thought. We yelled, ‘Murderer, murderer, murderer, murderer’...”
The protest exasperated Goebbels, who on March 6 wrote in his diary: “There have been unpleasant scenes...The people gathered together in large throngs and even sided with the Jews to some extent.’’
The same day, he ordered the release of intermarried Jews, promising, however, to finish the job more thoroughly “in a few weeks.” Meanwhile, as these intermarried Jews were being returned to their families, other Berlin Jews were being torn from theirs as the final roundup continued.
The Cover-Up
The Nazi lies began immediately. Goebbels insisted the protesters were civilians left homeless after British bombings of Berlin.
He blamed the arrest of intermarried Jews on overzealous local Gestapo leaders who had overstepped their authority. And he downplayed the influence of the protesters on his decision to free the Jews, claiming the release was the corrective measure to the unauthorized arrests.
But Stoltzfus found otherwise.
"These Jews at Rosenstrasse were supposed to be put on a train, and then no one would have heard from them again,” Siegbert Kleeman, the Jewish Community’s personnel director who had organized the Jewish task forces to help the Gestapo during the Final Roundup, said.
They were separated to make it seem that they would not share the same fate as other Jews. There may have been a plan to take them to labor camps, from which they could be retrieved if complaints warranted it, but from which they were never supposed to return, Stoltzfus says. Because German wives had repeatedly opposed the regime’s efforts to deport their Jewish spouses, Goebbels expected opposition. He hoped that deception would throw the women off balance until their husbands had been shipped out.
Leopold Gutterer, Goebbels’s deputy at the Ministry of Propaganda and Public Enlightenment told Stoltzfus that Goebbels had one motive for freeing the men held at Rosenstrasse.
“Goebbels released the Jews in order to eliminate the protest from the world,” Gutterer told Stoltzfus. “That was the simplest solution: to eradicate completely the reason for the protest. Then it wouldn’t make sense to protest anymore. So that others didn’t take a lesson from (the protest), so that others didn’t begin to do the same, the reason (for the protest) had to be eliminated. There was unrest, and it could have spread from neighborhood to neighborhood...”
Goebbels was sure that the Rosenstrasse protest would end with the release of the Jews and that the regime could then proceed with the enormous program of genocide elsewhere, where there were no protests.
Although “every” option of police force had been a possibility, Gutterer said, Goebbels did not have the protesters arrested because there would have more unrest from the relatives.
“Goebbels realized he could not murder all the people he wanted to murder--the Jewish relatives, spouses, sympathizers,” Stoltzfus says. “At some point the Germans would have begun to identify with one another rather than with a government that kept demanding ever more human victims.”
Within months of the release, the Gestapo made its final sweep of German Jews. This time, Jews working in the armaments industry were among those arrested. Intermarried Jews were not.
In fact, Heinrich Himmler, the SS chief, warned Nazi officials that protective custody arrests and deportations of intermarried Jews could only be made for “real offenses.” He ordered them to release any intermarried Jews who had been deported on “general grounds”--solely because of their Jewish identity.
On May 19, 1943, though intermarried Jews remained in Berlin, Goebbels declared the capital free of Jews, preferring, Stoltzfus says, to ignore their presence and lie, rather than risk another protest.
Why it Succeeded
The protest erupted because the regime attacked an important tradition. Germans could sympathize with women trying to hold their families together. It was successful because women, such as Elza Holzer, were so deeply motivated that they risked their lives even though there was no central organization, Stoltzfus says.
“We acted from the heart, and look what happened,” Holzer told Stoltzfus nearly half a century after she protested the arrest of her husband, Rudi. She still lives in Berlin.
“We wanted to show that we weren’t willing to let them go...I did what was given to me. When my husband needed my protection, I protected him. I went to Rosenstrasse every day before work. And there was always a flood of people there. It wasn’t organized or instigated. Everyone was simply there. Exactly like me.”
By January 1943, German women in general were particularly influential in any collective effort to oppose the Nazi regime.
They were beginning to grumble over the sacrifices imposed on them during three years of war. Not only had they lost husbands, sons, brothers, but they also were expected to cut back on food and material consumption and abstain from light-hearted activities. And now, with little hope of German victory following the epic battle at Stalingrad, Goebbels was calling for “total war” and demanding even more of them..
Although Hitler fully supported the Nazi tenet that a woman’s place was in the home, and their primary purpose to support their men and raise children of the so-called “master race,” Goebbels convinced him that the only way to win the war was to put them to work.
By the thousands, women ignored the call to work. The widespread refusal was not viewed as opposition to Hitler, but as standing up for family traditions that the regime had encouraged for a decade. Thus the women weren’t punished.
Similarly, how could the regime justify arresting or mowing down German women protesting on Rosenstrasse?
Gutterer attributed the success of the Rosenstrasse protest to its openness and contrasted it with conspiratorial resistance, which the regime could more easily portray as a treasonous act against the people and state. This protest was for “personal reasons.”
Protest ignored in post-war Germany
Until Stoltzfus began researching the Rosenstrasse incident in 1985, the protest had received little attention, aside from a handful of brief newspaper articles.
“Nobody knew about it, it was like a non-event,” said sculptor Ingeborg Hunzinger, who lives in the former East Berlin. The 82-year-old sculptor, who is half Jewish, credits Stoltzfus for being the first to shed light on the protest.
In the late 1980s, Hunzinger proposed to the city councils of East and West Berlin that she build a monument honoring the women of Rosenstrasse. Though the councils agreed to offset a portion of the cost of constructing the seven-foot-high stone monument, Hunzinger bore most of the expense herself.
“This was such an important fact of history of Berlin, but the only monuments were to commemorate Communist victories,” Hunzinger explained.
She offers two explanations for the silence surrounding Rosenstrasse. Some Jews themselves preferred not to discuss it, she said, because they are opposed to mixed marriages, afraid that Jews would be assimilated into extinction. But mainly no one spoke of the Rosenstrasse protest for another reason, Hunzinger said.
“People say: ‘What’s the point of talking about it? You couldn’t do anything against Hitler. How could you stop him?’ But these women did stand up to him.”
Stoltzfus says that part of the reason for the post-war silence could be that the women at Rosenstrasse had no political constituency to put their story forward as a symbol of German resistance, as did the men who were put to death after their failed assassination attempt on Hitler in July 1944.
That event is among several others commemorated in the German Resistance Memorial Center, charged in 1983 with documenting the entire extent of German resistance. The center has published scores of brochures and books on a wide range of incidents, but nothing on Rosenstrasse.
And leading contemporary German historians have dismissed the protest as local history, a “fluke” that could not have had anything to do with the release of Jews at Rosenstrasse. Stoltzfus is convinced otherwise.
The notion that an ordinary German could do nothing against the Holocaust, that a handful of crazed Nazis were responsible for the murder of Jews, has been the official accepted wisdom in Germany since the war. While this takes ordinary Germans off the hook for not trying to stop Hitler, Stoltzfus says, it also stifles contradictory views.“Without these German partners, mostly women, these Jews would have certainly been killed like other Jews,” he says. “The one reason these people survived was that their spouses didn't divorce. This was one incident that showed how far they would go not to divorce."

THE EICHMANN TRIAL
The world felt a need for a trial at Nuremberg. But Israel knew it needed even a more important demonstration of justice in Jerusalem.

Adolf Eichmann was the man chosen by Hitler to carry out his infamous "Final Solution." It was he who boasted, "I will go to my grave happy that I murdered six million Jews." In spite of this, Eichmann managed to escape after the war and find a safe haven in Argentina. It was extremely painful for Jews to know that their archenemy had eluded justice and was now living a life of comfort while they were still hounded by nightmares. But more than knowing that evil in this case had gone unpunished, Jews were deeply plagued by the realizations that a new type of historic revisionism began to doubt the inhuman details of the Holocaust. Because it was so unbelievable, there were people who refused to believe it ever happened.

And so Israel realized that there had to be at least one trial in which the Holocaust survivors would have an opportunity to tell their stories. Those who were still able to speak would serve as the mouths of the countless victims who prayed only that their deaths not be in vain. That their suffering be somehow remembered. That their memories be allowed to live on even if their corpses were not blessed with dignified burial, and their remains would forever be unmarked.

In a dramatic story that became a movie, the famous Nazi hunter, Simon Weisenthal, discovered Eichmann's whereabouts. Israeli agents kidnapped him in a fantastic cloak-and-dagger operation. And Eichmann was brought to trial so that the world might have a clear and indisputable record of the crime of the centuries. The transcript of the trial is available. The stories, which defy human understanding, can be read by anyone with a stomach for them. They confirm the profound depth of the tragedy. Eichmann, of course, was found guilty and was hanged on May 31, 1962. Among his last words was the remark that would show the extent of his self-delusion, "I am an idealist." Jews could only hope that they executed not only Eichmann but the ideals he represented.

from "The Complete Idiot's Guide to Jewish History and Culture,"Alpha Books