I know this is an old thread, but I wanted to address this question:
murx wrote:In the first sentence of the protocol Heydrich announced to be appointed by the Reichsmarschall to be responsible for the "Endlösung" which is the subject of this meeting. In the sentence above the responsibilty for the "Endlösung" primarily is in direct responsibility of H. Himmler, Heydrich's chief. Why didn't the Reichsmarschall appoint Himmler directly?
Are both responsible?
Is it common somewhere that the highest ranks in a hierarchy appoint subordinated lower ranks directly, bypassing the chief? In the second case they inform the subordinate that his chief was appointed for a task?
How can this part of the text be understood or explained?
There seems to have been a pre-existing chain of command between Hitler-Göring-Heydrich since at least 1936 in addition to the Hitler-Himmler-Heydrich chain. The former was under the auspices of the 4-year plan, by which Göring was expropriating Jewish assets. There is a sequence of events here that led to Göring's famous order to Heydrich in mid-1941. This intriguing relationship, and the I think poorly elucidated role of Göring in the Holocast (overall), is discussed by Peter Longerich in his book
Holocaust:
On 7 July 1936 Göring, in his role as leader of the 'raw materials and currency team' (the group that preceded the Four-Year Plan) had already given Heydrich the task of setting up a 'Currency Investigation Office' (Devisenfahndungsamt), which was to be an authority reporting to Göring 'personally and directly'. This office was principally designed to make sure that the customs search and currency investigation authorities applied the complicated currency regulations against Jews with excessive rigour so as to secure pretexts for the financial authorities to 'secure' Jewish money. In taking on his new responsibilities Heydrich thus assumed an important function in the coordination of the efforts of the Security Police, the Four-Year Plan, and the financial management of the expropriation of the German Jews.
It was therefore both an aim and one of the functions of the Four-Year Plan to intensify the persecution of the Jews, which raises the question of whether this does not suggest new grounds for reconsidering the role of Göring in NS anti-Jewish policy development. The letter of appointment that Göring wrote for Heydrich in July 1936 was the first link in a chain of authorizations issued to the Head of the Security Police by the Reichsmarschall. It was followed by Heydrich's appointment as head of the 'Central Office for Jewish Emigration' in July 1939 and ended in the authorization given in July 1941 to make 'preparations for the final solution of the Jewish question'.
This is from Holocaust by Peter Longerich. It's at locations 1702-1714 in the Kindle version. He references the 1936 letter.
Longerich discusses this further in his biography of Himmler:
In general, Himmler left the implementation of anti-Jewish measures to Heydrich, who during the 1930s became the central figure in the Jewish policy of the Gestapo and SD. Heydrich's role was increased by the fact that Göring, in his position as head of the 'Raw Materials and Foreign Exchange Team' (the precursor of the Four Year Plan organization) assigned him the task of setting up a 'Foreign Exchange Search Office'. This new responsibility enabled Heydrich in the future to move against Jews who were under 'suspicion of emigrating' on the grounds of alleged breaches of foreign-exchange regulations. This appointment was the first of a whole series of responsibilities involving Jewish persecution which the Reichsmarschall assigned to the head of the security police and SD during the coming years. This created two competing chains of command involving Jewish policy: Hitler-Himmler-Heydrich and Hitler-Göring-Heydrich. [my emphasis] The Reichsführer-SS was thereby in danger of being excluded from the decision-making process in the event of his proving insufficiently active on the anti-Semitic front.
From
Heinrich Himmler: A Life by Peter Longerich (also the Kindle edition)
The importance of this potential 'exclusion' of Himmler is beyond this discussion, but it's important in explaining the radicalization of anti-Jewish policy. Longerich sees Himmler's relentless radicalization over the subsequent years as a way to seize power from other departments. Most notably, it was not clear who was responsible for the ethnic cleansing and germanization of occupied Poland, the "Protecterate", and later the occupied Soviet territories. There was some rivalry between Himmler and Rosenberg as to who would be responsible for the aryanization of the occupied eastern territories -- but by sharply radicalizing anti-Jewish actions under the pretext of anti-partisan security, Himmler essentially seized this policy for his own. This culminated in Himmler's tour of the occupied Soviet territories in July-August 1941 in order to get the Einsatzgruppen to exterminate all Jews including children. It was an extreme and utterly brutal type of Machiavellian power play on Himmler's part -- but in Hitler's empire the most radical behavior was usually rewarded. Longerich discusses this at some length in his bio of Himmler.
Another point about Longerich and Wannsee -- it's no accident that Longerich is the one quoted earlier in this thread and now I'm quoting him as well. He champions a very compelling argument about how the final policy of total extermination did not exist until May-June 1942 -- and therefore Wannsee is a much less central moment in this process. The argument, put forward in several of his works (including the two I reference above) goes something like this:
1) The Nazis had essentially embarked on an extermination policy in 1939. This wasn't mass murder within the timespan of the war, but their emigration policy was exterminatory. The ideas of deporting millions of Jews to Madagascar or some hostile remote part of the Soviet arctic, guarded on a reservation (at either place) by the SS, was essentially a plan that would lead to their ultimate disappearance. It was only in 1939, when millions of Jews in Poland came under the Nazis' rule, that the grand scale of this extinction plan come into existence. And sure enough, the Nisko experiment was a tiny example of this -- where thousands of Jews were just dumped somewhere hostile without any means of sheltering or feeding themselves. So, Wannsee did not mark the moment when the Nazis committed to a plan of extermination, that already existed.
2) By the time of Wannsee, which had already been delayed by almost 2 months, the extermination of Jews had already begun under several quasi-local auspices -- the Einsatzgruppen (directly under Heydrich in the SD); Chelmno had become operational really under a strange hybrid between a non-SS person (Greiser), a euthanasia person (Lange), and Himmler; and Belzec was in some state of construction (under Himmler-Globocnik). So widespread extermination was already underway, but it did not reflect a single policy in January 1942 (to say nothing of December 1941 when it was originally planned).
3) Both the Wannsee discussion, and a March 27, 1942 diary entry by Goebbels, refer to very large numbers of Jews who will be put to work and "eventually" exterminated (40% saved for labor according to Goebbels). This was essentially true between January and May, 1942. Trains that went to the Lublin district stopped in Lublin, and substantial numbers of Jews were taken out for forced labor before the trains went on to Belzec and Sobibor. Also, the policy in place at the time was to send Jews from Germany to ghettos in the Lublin district and Baltic, not to exterminate them -- the extermination was reserved for the indigenous Jews. This was initially true of Lodz-Chelmno as well.
4)
There was a major radicalization in May-June, 1942, following Heydrich's death (though the connection is not necessarily causal). According to Longerich, there was a flurry of meetings between Hitler and Himmler that immediately preceded this radicalization. In the summer of 1942 there were the following changes to Jewish policy:
- deportations from Germany, Austria, etc, no longer dropped off their Jews in ghettos -- they now went straight to extermination camps. There were also fewer selections for labor. So the pretext of "resettling" Jews and of selecting slave laborers was abandoned
- the Einsatzgruppen launched their second wave through the Soviet territories, and by the end of the year had all but completely exterminated the indigenous Jews
- Mass deportations from Western European countries (e.g. Netherlands, France) did not begin until the summer of 1942
- Treblinka had become operational, and mass deportations from Radom, Bialystok, and Warsaw began
- Himmler expressed his intention that the General Government's Jews be completely exterminated by the end of 1942 -- and there is no evidence that this rapidity was planned at Wannsee
So the point here is that Wannsee reflects an intermediate moment in the implementation of the Holocaust, and the seminal radicalizations of Jewish policy had either already taken place before Wannsee or would follow some months later.
For further reading I'd refer you to this presentation by Longerich at the USHMM. The discussion of interest begins on page 15 of the PDF.
http://www.ushmm.org/research/center/pu ... /paper.pdf
From this document:
Heydrich’s words at the Wannsee Conference indicate that the RSHA then was still adhering to the plan that the “Final Solution of the Jewish Question” would be undertaken in the occupied areas in the East, and that this “Final
Solution” could only be completed after the war. Heydrich was also clear about what the term “final solution” meant: the European Jews should be exterminated by means of a combination of forced labor and mass murder.
The minutes also reveal when the deportations would start: as soon as the military situation would allow it, i.e., spring 1942. But, the fact that the figure of 11 million Jews, which Heydrich mentioned, included Jewish minorities in Great Britain, Spain and Turkey reveals his post-war perspective.
We have no evidence to indicate that, during the course of the Wannsee Conference, there already was a plan to deport Jews from Central and Western Europe directly to extermination camps. On the contrary, the first deportations from Germany and from other countries in Central and Western Europe (from Slovakia and France), deportations that began in the spring of 1942, did not lead directly to extermination camps. The killing facilities in the extermination camps were not rapidly enlarged directly after the Wannsee Conference, but rather in late spring and summer of 1942.
At the same time, the minutes of the Wannsee Conference make it clear that participants debated a suggestion that the Jews in the Generalgouvernement and in the occupied areas of the Soviet Union be withdrawn from this general plan and killed immediately. The minutes additionally reflect discussion of how this “final solution” was to be implemented technically, i.e., the use of gassing probably was discussed. The minutes do not, however, make clear whether or not a decision was made on this point.