Hitler. 1936-1945: Nemesis

would stretch into 1942.⁹⁶ Tackling the ‘final solution of the Jewish Question’, he would have acknowledged, could not wait that long. If victory over Bolshevism had to be delayed, he must have concluded, the time of reckoning with his most powerful adversary, the Jews, should be postponed no longer. They had brought about the war; they would now see his ‘prophecy’ fulfilled.

It would have been remarkable, when Himmler lunched with Hitler at the ‘Wolf’s Lair’ on 16 September, had the deportation issue not been raised.⁹⁷ Almost certainly, the Reichsfuhrer-SS pressed for the Reich’s Jews to be deported. The following day, Ribbentrop met Hitler to discuss the Rosenberg proposal. That evening, 17 September, Himmler paid the Foreign Minister a visit.⁹⁸ By then, Hitler must have agreed to the suggestions to start deporting German, Austrian, and Czech Jews to the east. Himmler evidently left with the authorization. He gave notification of the decision next day.

Again, the Warthegau played a direct part in events. On 18 September, Arthur Greiser, Reich Governor and Gauleiter of the Warthegau, received a letter from Himmler. ‘The Fuhrer wishes,’ ran the missive, ‘that the Old Reich and the Protectorate [Bohemia and Moravia] are emptied and freed of Jews from the west to the east as soon as possible.’ Himmler told Greiser that it was his intention to deport the Jews first into the Polish territories which had come to the Reich two years earlier, then ‘next spring to expel them still further to the east’. With this in mind, he was sending 60,000 Jews to the Lodz ghetto, in Greiser’s province, for the winter.⁹⁹

Around the middle of September, then, Hitler had bowed to the pressure to deport the German and Czech Jews to the east, some of them via a temporary stay in Lodz (where the ghetto was already known to be seriously overcrowded). It was the trigger to a crucial new phase in the gradual emergence of a comprehensive programme for genocide. Initiatives would tumble out, one after the other, during the next few months in widening the scope of the killing.

The decision to begin deporting the German, Austrian, and Czech Jews to the east, while the war was still raging, was a fateful one. It brought ‘the final solution of the Jewish question’ throughout the whole of Europe a massive step closer. We can only speculate on how it was arrived at, only surmise the course of the conversation between Hitler and Himmler during or after lunch on 16 September.

It would have stayed, almost certainly, at the level of terrible generalities. A start in the full-scale resettlement programme, and, in particular, in implementing Heydrich’s plan for a ‘total solution of the Jewish Question’, Himmler perhaps argued, could be made by transporting the Reich and Protectorate Jews to the east. This would be a deserved retaliation for the Soviet deportation of the Volga Germans. It would meet the wishes of the Party. It would address the complaints of the Gauleiter by relieving the housing problems of the big cities. And it would — an argument sure to impress Hitler — prevent the seditious undermining of morale by Jews spreading disaffection on the home front. Space for the deported Jews, Himmler perhaps continued, could be found for the time being in abandoned Soviet labour camps. There, they could be put to work until they perished. Any ‘dangerous elements’ could be liquidated immediately, along with those Jews incapable of working. Perhaps acknowledging transport difficulties, Himmler would have accepted that many of the Jews could only in the first instance be sent as far as Poland, before further dispatch to Russia the following spring or summer when, it was presumed, the war there would finally be over. It is unlikely that details were discussed.

However, even when it was agreed that the Reich Jews should be deported in stages, there remained the question of what to do with the millions of Jews in eastern Europe, particularly in Poland. Hans Frank had been promised the speedy removal of the Jews from the General Government. Arthur Greiser was desperate to deport the Jews from the Warthegau. If Himmler raised these issues, he was probably given the green light to ‘solve the problem’ as best he could, within Poland itself, making a start on the Jews who were unable to work.

The question of the consumption of scarce food resources was a crucial consideration, a vital element in the gathering whirlwind of extermination.¹⁰⁰ Feeding ‘burdensome existences (Ballastexistenzen)’ had been a central part of the thinking behind the ‘euthanasia action’ in the Reich itself. In the east, the inhumanity towards the subjugated and despised ‘inferior peoples’ meant that the most brutal stance imaginable was adopted on this issue. As the war expanded, and the problems of ensuring food supplies mounted, civilian and military authorities pressed all the harder for savings to be made at the cost of political, ideological, and racial enemies — above all, the Jews. Hitler’s own views would have made him open to any suggestion by Himmler that Jews who could not work — the elderly, the infirm, children, for example — should be liquidated.¹⁰¹ In these very days, Hitler was telling Goebbels that it was necessary for Leningrad to ‘disappear completely’. It would be impossible, even on taking it, to feed its 5 million population. Where would the food supplies and transport for them come from? he asked. The town where Bolshevism began would be razed to the ground — a ‘hard but justifiable nemesis of history’, as Goebbels put it.¹⁰² Hitler’s conclusion about the necessary fate of the Jews about this time was no milder.

Hitler’s agreement to the deportation of the German Jews was not tantamount to a decision for the ‘Final Solution’.¹⁰³ It is doubtful whether a single, comprehensive decision of such a kind was ever made. But Hitler’s authorization of the deportations opened the door widely to a whole range of new initiatives from numerous local and regional Nazi leaders who seized on the opportunity now to rid themselves of their own ‘Jewish problem’, to start killing Jews in their own areas. There was a perceptible quickening of the genocidal tempo over the next few weeks. The speed and scale of the escalation in killing point to an authorization by Hitler to liquidate the hundreds of thousands of Jews in various parts of the east who were incapable of work.¹⁰⁴ But there was as yet no coordinated, comprehensive programme of total genocide. This would still take some months to emerge.

V

Within a few days of the decision to deport the Reich Jews, Goebbels was back at FHQ, seizing the opportunity to press once more for the removal of the Jews from Berlin. Before his audience with Hitler, he had the chance to speak with Reinhard Heydrich. Himmler, Neurath, and a number of other leading figures were also in the Wolf’s Lair. The occasion for the assembly of notables was Hitler’s decision to ‘retire’ Neurath as Reich Protector in Prague, following intrigues against him by radicals within the Nazi administration in the former Czech capital, able to exploit reports of a mounting incidence of strikes and sabotage. Levels of repression had been relatively constrained under Neurath.¹⁰⁵ But the growing disturbances now prompted Hitler to put in a hard man, Security Police Chief Heydrich — nominally as Deputy Reich Protector — with a mandate to crush with an iron fist all forms of resistance.

Goebbels lost no time in reminding Heydrich of his wish to ‘evacuate’ the Jews from Berlin as soon as possible. Heydrich evidently told the Propaganda Minister that this would be the case ‘as soon as we have reached a clarification of the military question in the east. They [the Jews] should all in the end be transported into the camps established by the Bolsheviks. These camps had been set up by the Jews. What was more fitting, then, than that they should now also be populated by the Jews.’¹⁰⁶

During his two-hour meeting alone with Hitler, Goebbels had no trouble in eliciting the assurance he wanted, that Berlin would soon be rid of its Jews. ‘The Fuhrer is of the opinion,’ Goebbels noted down next day, ‘that the Jews have eventually to be removed from the whole of Germany. The first cities to be made Jew-free are Berlin, Vienna, and Prague. Berlin is first in the queue, and I have the hope that we’ll succeed in the course of this year in transporting a substantial portion of the Berlin Jews away to the east.’¹⁰⁷

He was in the event to be left less than wholly satisfied. He noted towards the end of October that a beginning had been made with deporting Berlin’s Jews. Several thousand had been sent in the first place to Litzmannstadt (as Lodz was now officially called).¹⁰⁸ But he was soon complaining about obstacles to their rapid ‘evacuation’.¹⁰⁹ And in November he learnt from Heydrich that the deportations had raised more difficulties than foreseen.¹¹⁰

Goebbels kept up the pressure with a hate-filled tirade in Das Reich — a ‘quality’ newspaper reaching over 1? million homes — on 16 November, entitled ‘The Jews are Guilty’. He explicitly cited Hitler’s ‘prophecy’ of the ‘annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe’, stating: ‘We are experiencing right now the fulfilment of this prophecy.’ The fate of the Jews, he declared, was ‘hard, but more than justified’, and any sympathy or regret was entirely misplaced.¹¹¹ Goebbels ordered the widest circulation of the article