WHY DID THE HEAVENS NOT DARKEN? Also by Arno]. Mayer The Persistence of the Old Regime: Europe to the Great War Dynamics of Counterrevolution in Europe, 1870-1956 Politics and Diplomacy of Peacemaking: Containment and Counterrevolution at Versailles, 1918-1919 Political Origins of the New Diplomacy, 1917-1918 WHY DID THE HEAVENS NOT DARKEN? THE "FINAL SOLUTION" IN HISTORY Arno J. Mayer - iiiliiIi PANTHEON BOOKS ' NEW YORK Copyright © 1988 by Arno J. Mayer All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Pantheon Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Mayer, Arno J. Why did the heavens not darken? Bibliography: p. Includes index. 1. Holocaust, Jewish (1939-1945) 2. Holocaust, Jewish (1939-1945)-Causes. I. Title. D804.3.M39 1989 940.53'15'03924 88-42621 ISBN 0-394-57154-1 Book Design by Michael Mendelsohn Maps by James Perry Manufactured in the United States of America 98765432 CONTENTS A Personal Preface vii Maps xvi I. PROLOGUE: Historical Signposts 3 PART ONE II. THE GOLDEN AGE 39 III. THE EAST EUROPEAN RIMLAND 64 IV. THE SYNCRETISM OF MEIN KAMPF 90 PART TWO V. THE FOUNDING AND CONSOLIDATION OF THE NAZI REGIME: Mainsprings of Deemancipation 113 VI. EXPANSION AND WAR, 1938-40: Catalysts for Forced Emigration, Ghettoization, and Deportation 159 VII. CONCEIVING OPERATION BARBAROSSA: Conquest and Crusade 200 VllI. THE MISCARRIAGE OF BARBAROSSA: Ftom Pogtom to Babi Yar 234 PART THREE IX. WANNSEE: Toward the "Final Solution" 279 X. WAGING WAR TO THE DEATH: The Rape of Europe 313 Xl. AUSCHWITZ 348 XII. THE EXTERMINATION SITES: Chefmno, Bdiec, Sobib6r, Treblinka 376 v A PERSONAL PREFACE Any student of contemporary history has an obligation to disclose his or her subjective values. This obligation is all the more imperative for a Jewish historian of Nazi Germany's genocide of the Jews who is sworn, as I am, to seek critical distance, but not cold detachment, from his subject of study. My own historical sensibility has necessarily been conditioned by my scholarly, personal, and political life experi­ ences, which eventually moved me to try to integrate the singularity of the Jewish catastrophe into an equally singular historical epoch. As a specialist in the recent European history, I knew that in time I would have to confront systematically what I propose to call the Judeocide. Through the years I became increasingly convinced that the unspeakable mass torment and murder of the Jews of continental Europe was one of the quintessentially distinctive events of one of Europe's darkest and most turbulent epochs. Above all, the persecu­ tion of the Jews, apart from its intrinsic enormity and significance, impressed itself upon me as a fundamental touchstone of the depth and extremity of the dislocation of Western civilization during the first half of the twentieth century. Just as the history of war is too complex and serious to be left primarily to military historians, so the study of the Judeocide is too complex and serious to be left primarily to students of recent Jewish and German history, who treat it as an encapsulated chapter of their respective academic specialties. The wholesale and systematic vio­ lence against unarmed and essentially unresisting Jews during Europe's recent age of convulsions glaringly exposed the precondi­ tions and mechanisms involved in crossing the thin line that divides widely accepted norms of modern civilized behavior-even in war­ fare-from the nether world of man's officially sanctioned willful inhumanity to man. vii viii I should add that as a historian I also had methodological reasons for turning to the Judeocide. At a time when avant-garde professional historians continue to make a virtue of the fragmentation of their discipline and all but eliminate politics from it, the study of the Jewish disaster calls for an integrated approach and recalls the centrality of ideology, politics, and war in human affairs. Moreover, the mass murder of the Jews, more than any other single event, points up the importance of returning to the contextual study of short-term events. In the wake of T reblinka and Auschwitz it is difficult nor to scorn Fernand Braudel's characterization of short-term events as mere "dust." Braudel went so far as to imply that short-term events were not worth studying since, unlike long- and medium-range events, they "traverse history as flashes of light" destined instantly to "turn to darkness, often to oblivion." Pace Braudel and his epigones, I have tried not only to contemplate the circumstances in which millions of Jews-along with millions of non-Jews-were reduced to "dust" in seconds of historical time but also to recapture the evanescent "light" of their torment to illuminate the historical landscape in which it occurred. This book bears the imprint of my origins as a west European Jew. I was, like my parents, born and raised in the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg, where I spent the first fourteen years of my life. In the very early morning hours of May 10, 1940, as the armies of Nazi Germany crashed into France and the Low Countries, my parents put my sister, my grandfather, and myself in a car, and the five of us set out from Luxembourg. The family sought safety and refuge in France. Traveling in a two-door Chevrolet, we barely stayed ahead of the fast-moving Wehr­ macht and managed to avoid roads that were being strafed by the Luftwaffe. Near Verdun we experienced our first bombing raid and came within a hairsbreadth of having our flight cut short at a military control point. Except for the totally fortuitous intervention of an understanding general of the French army, we would have been interned as security risks because my seventy-four-year-old paternal grandfather was still carrying a German passport-he had been born in Bockenheim in the Rhenish Palatinate-despite his fifty years in Luxembourg. Having been issued a special laissez-passer by the local military command, we drove from Verdun first to Troyes and Avallon, and then to Cannes, Montpellier, and Bagneres-de-Bigorre. A few months after the French surrender, in the early fall of 1940, we proceeded to Hendaye, on the Spanish frontier. But because my father was only A PERS ONAL PREFACE ix thirty-nine years old, in keeping with Madrid's agreement with Berlin to bar Allied men of military age from entering or passing through Spain, the Spanish border officials turned us back. Given my grandfather's advanced years, my parents discarded the option of crossing the Pyrenees on foot. Instead, we drove to Mar­ seille and soon bought tickets on a boat that during the night of October 19-20 took us across the Mediterranean to Oran. In this Algerian port city we boarded the Trans-Sahara Railway in the direc­ tion of Casablanca. But on October 23 at Oujda, a Moroccan town on the Algerian border, we were taken off the train for lack of Moroccan visas. After a week in Oujda, where we attended Yom Kippur services in one of several local synagogues, a combination of diplomatic intervention and bureaucratic laxity enabled us to con­ tinue on to Rabat. We spent two months in forced residence in this political seat of Vichy France's Moroccan Protectorate, but with permission to visit Casablanca. It was there that my father on Novem­ ber 26, 1940, secured our American immigration visas and then illegally bought other transit visas in the manner portrayed in the film Casablanca. Meanwhile, my sister Ruth was hospitalized with typhoid fever at the very moment that rumors were rife that under German pressure the local French authorities were about to prohibit the exit of all Allied males between eighteen and forty years of age. In early Decem­ ber 1940, after much agonizing, and following official assurances that upon her recovery my sister, together with my mother and grandfa­ ther, would have no difficulty leaving Morocco, my parents decided that my father and I should hasten ahead. Our journey took us by train through Spanish Morocco to Tangiers, ana thence by hydro­ plane to Lisbon, where we landed on December 10. In the Portuguese capital we booked passage on the SS Serpa Pinto, and on December 18 sailed for New York, where we arrived in early January 1941. After taking a ship from Tangiers to Algeciras, and then the train to Lisbon, the rest of the family reached New York on the SS Laurenco Marques four weeks later. Although our brief odyssey had its harrowing moments, it was nothing compared to the torment of my maternal grandparents. At the time of the German invasion they refused to leave Luxembourg, which was annexed to the Third Reich, and they remained unwilling to leave their home until after the emigration of Jews was banned. Eventually, after being interned in an abandoned monastery in the north of the Grand Duchy, my grandparents were transported on April 6, 1943, to Theresienstadt, the concentration camp located in an ancient fortified town with large military barracks not far from x Prague. At the time of their deportation my grandfather was seventy­ three years old, my grandmother sixty-eight. Unknown to them, and to us, who knew about their deportation, Theresienstadt was a rela­ tive "oasis" in Nazi Germany's concentration-camp system. During the life of this camp close to 140,000 Jews must have been interned there. Of these, over half are estimated to have been sent to Ausch­ witz, where all but a few thousand perished.