problem’. He recommended deporting the Jews from all over Europe into ‘a special territory’ to be sealed off for them. Transport, he thought, would not pose insuperable problems — Jews from the General Government, he even indicated, could go by road in their own vehicles — and could be implemented even during the war. He advocated putting his suggestion to Ribbentrop, Rosenberg, and Himmler, as well as to Goring who, he thought, was particularly open to ideas on the ‘Jewish problem’ and, after his experience in the eastern campaign, would probably offer strong support. If these suggestions were taken up, argued Zeitschel, ‘we could then have Europe Jew-free in the shortest time’.84
Much of the pressure for deportation came from the Security Police. Not surprisingly, the Security Police in the Warthegau, where the Nazi authorities had been trying in vain since autumn 1939 to expel the Jews from the province, were in the front ranks. It must have been towards the end of August that Eichmann asked the SD chief in Posen, SS-Sturmbannfuhrer Rolf-Heinz Hoppner — the self-same Hoppner who had written to him in July suggesting the possible liquidation of Jews in his area who were incapable of working during the coming winter through a ‘fast-working preparation’ — for his views on resettlement policy and its administration.
Hoppner’s fifteen-page memorandum, sent to Eichmann on 3 September, was not concerned solely, or even mainly, with deporting Jews, but the ‘Jewish problem’ formed nevertheless part of his overview of the potential for extensive resettlement on racial lines. His views corresponded closely with the ideas worked out under the General Plan for the East
Hoppner, aware of thinking in the upper echelons of the SD, was plainly open to ideas of killing Jews. He himself, after all, had expressed such an idea some weeks earlier. But in early September he was evidently not aware of any decision to exterminate the Jews of Europe. As far as he was concerned, the goal was still their expulsion to the available ‘spaces’ in the dismantled Soviet Union once the war was over.
IV
Despite the mounting pressure for deportation, however, removal of the Jews to the east was at this point still blocked. When the German authorities in Serbia tried in mid-September to have 8,000 Jews deported to Russia, they received a peremptory reply from Eichmann. Not even the Jews from Germany could be sent there. He proposed shooting them.86
Any decision to allow the deportation of the Jews of Europe to the east could only be taken by Hitler. He had rejected Heydrich’s proposal to deport them only a few weeks earlier. Without Hitler’s approval, Heydrich had been powerless to act. Hitler was even now, in September, unwilling to take this step, though the pressure was mounting. Why Hitler resisted the pressure up to this point can only be surmised. He had, of course, presumed that deportations and a final settlement of the ‘Jewish Question’ would follow upon the victorious end of a war expected to last four or five months. But by this time, Hitler was well aware that this expectation had been an illusion. The old ‘hostage’ idea probably still played its part. In his warped understanding, holding Jews in his possession offered a bargaining counter with the ‘Jewish-run’ western ‘plutocracies’, especially the USA. But there were more practical considerations. Where were the Jews to be sent? The areas currently under German occupation were intended for ‘ethnic cleansing’, not as a Jewish reservation. Soviet Jews were now being slaughtered there in thousands. But how to deal with an influx of millions more Jews from all over Europe into the area posed problems of an altogether different order. Mass starvation — the fate to which Hitler was prepared to condemn the citizens of Leningrad and Moscow — still required an area to be made available for the Jews to be settled until they starved to death. This had to be in territory intended for the ‘export’, not ‘import’, of ‘undesirables’. Alternatively, it could only be in the battle-zone itself, or at least in its rear. But this was simply an impracticality; moreover, the Einsatzgruppen had been deployed to wipe out tens of thousands of Jews precisely in such areas; and from Hitler’s perspective it would have meant moving the most potent racial enemy to the place where it was most dangerous.
So, as long as the war in the east raged, Hitler must have reasoned, the expulsion of the Jews to perish in the barren wastes to be acquired from the Soviet Union simply had to wait. And if deporting Jews to Russia to be shot like the Soviet Jews was contemplated, the practical problems — even with the greatly increased manpower available — of undertaking a wholesale extermination programme through mass shootings effectively ruled out this option, at any rate as a short-term solution. Then there was the question of transport. Not enough trains were available to get supplies to the front line. That was more urgent than shipping Jews to the east. Once the war was over, the trains assigned to bring troops back from the east, along with millions of tons of grain and crate-loads of booty, could easily be used on the outward journey to carry Jews to their fate.87
Suddenly, in mid-September, Hitler changed his mind. There was no overt indication of the reason. But in August, Stalin had ordered the deportation of the Volga Germans — Soviet citizens of German descent who had settled in the eighteenth century along the reaches of the Volga river. At the end of the month the entire population of the region — more than 600,000 people — were forcibly uprooted and deported in cattle waggons under horrific conditions, allegedly as ‘wreckers and spies’, to western Siberia and northern Kazakhstan. In all, little short of a million Volga Germans fell victim to the deportations.88 It was the first of Stalin’s terrible moves to destroy the nationalities in the south of the Soviet Union. The news of the savage deportations had become known in Germany in early September.89 Goebbels had hinted that they could prompt a radical reaction.90 It was not long in coming. Alfred Rosenberg, the recently appointed Reich Minister for the Occupied Eastern Territories, lost little time in advocating ‘the deportation
Revenge and reprisal invariably played a large part in Hitler’s motivation. But at first he hesitated. His immediate response was to refer the matter to the Foreign Office. Ribbentrop was initially non-committal. He wanted to discuss it personally with Hitler.92 Werner Koeppen, Rosenberg’s liaison officer at FHQ, noted: ‘The Fuhrer has so far still made no decision in the question of taking reprisals against the German Jews on account of the treatment of the Volga Germans.’ He was said to be contemplating making this move in the event of the United States entering the war.93
The remark gives a clue to Hitler’s thinking. He had continued to hold to the ‘hostage’ notion — embodied in his 1939 ‘prophecy’ and aimed at deterring the USA from entering the war through the threat of what would then happen to the Jews of Europe. In August, Roosevelt and Churchill had met for talks on warships off the coast of Newfoundland and in the ‘Atlantic Charter’ proclaimed their common principles of free and peaceful coexistence of nations in a post-Nazi world.94 Roosevelt had also declared on 11 September that the US navy would shoot on sight at Axis warships in waters essential for American defence. It seemed increasingly a matter of time before the United States became fully involved in hostilities as an ally of Britain. The deportation of the Jews at this juncture, prompted by the Soviet deportations of the Volga Germans, was Hitler’s stark reminder to the Americans of his prophecy: that European Jews would pay the price should the USA enter the war.95
With such thoughts in mind, Hitler was now ready to accept the case put by Heydrich and Himmler, reflecting demands and suggestions reaching them from their own underlings, and from the Gauleiter of the big cities, that it was urgently necessary to put the longstanding plans for a comprehensive ‘solution to the Jewish Question’ into action, and that deportation to the east was indeed feasible despite the unfinished war there. Why he was now prepared to bend to such arguments also lay partly, no doubt, in his acceptance that an early end to the Russian campaign was not in sight. It was, in fact, precisely the juncture at which he acknowledged that the war in the east
