Reichstag, Berlin, 1945

From Final Solution to Armageddon

By Benjamin Schwarz
The Atlantic, May 2009

Edited by Andy Ross

The past two years have seen a flood of major works on Nazi Germany. The Final Solution is at the heart of all these books. They make clear that just as the Final Solution itself is now understood to inform many aspects of Nazi Germany, so too the Germans' knowledge of the murder of the Jews influenced and altered the history of the Third Reich and the war it started.

The Final Solution was too vast to be kept secret. But the Final Solution reached its height just as Germany's military fortunes began to ebb. Severe wartime privations, ever-mounting death tolls, growing anxiety about the fate of loved ones on the Eastern Front, the disintegration of everyday life caused by Allied bombing — all crimped human empathy, to say nothing of collective action.

Although knowledge of the Final Solution prompted action by only a heroic few, that knowledge nevertheless loomed large in the mind of the nation. This was deliberate on the part of the regime. In their public pronouncements Hitler, Goebbels, and Alfred Rosenberg married the bluntest language about an exterminationist policy toward the Jews with a complete absence of detail regarding implementation of that policy.

The crime revealed and concealed by that open secret became for many Germans the central psychological fact of the war. For those with the exceedingly rare courage to support an acute and active conscience, the war of extermination was the Third Reich's irredeemable disgrace. It was a crime that demanded the Nazis' overthrow and brought upon Germany a "blood guilt" (the term used almost ritualistically) that could not be expunged.

But the letters, diaries, and SS reports on the popular mood reveal that even for the many who possessed a more commonplace sense of their own interest, the Final Solution emerged as their nation's defining act, one that would provoke a terrible retribution. Even if the Jews had started the war and were therefore responsible for their own suffering, so the thinking went, they would nevertheless thirst for revenge, so the Germans didn't dare surrender.

By 1943 at the latest, the war was lost for Germany. Yet for nearly two more years the Germans would continue the struggle. With its fighter force obliterated and its cities naked before the Allies' fire from the sky, Germany saw civilian deaths in air raids increase nearly tenfold in 1945. The army, already bled white in a series of desperate retreats, would suffer more battlefield deaths in the final 10 months of the war than it had in the previous five years combined.

Many factors help explain the ferocious tenacity of German soldiers and civilians. One of them was the open secret Goebbels shared with the nation in a grim 1943 exhortation to fight to the bitter end: "As for us, we've burned our bridges behind us ... We will either go down in history as the greatest statesmen of all time, or the greatest criminals." The Final Solution had given the Germans no way forward but Armageddon.
 

AR  I see the crime of the century as my very own philosophical chestnut — I could write a book about all this.