The actual variation in the scale of the killing operations in the first weeks, and the sharp escalation from around August onwards, strongly suggests that no general mandate to exterminate Soviet Jewry in its entirety had been issued before ‘Barbarossa’ began. The number of men – around 3,000 in all, the core drawn heavily from the Gestapo, criminal police, regular police (Ordnungspolizei), and SD – initially engaged in the Einsatzgruppen actions would, in any case, have been incapable of implementing a full-scale genocidal programme, and could scarcely have been assembled with one in mind. The sharp increase in their numbers through supplementary police battalions began in late July. By the end of the year, there were eleven times as many members of the killing units as had been present at the start of ‘Barbarossa’.
On 15 August, immediately after witnessing that morning an ‘execution’ of Jews near Minsk which made him feel sick, Himmler had told his men that he and Hitler would answer to history for the necessary extermination of Jews as ‘the carriers of world Bolshevism’. It was during his visits to the killing units in the east that month that Himmler instructed them to widen the slaughter, now to include women and children. Had he received explicit new authorization from Hitler? Or did he presume that the Führer’s existing mandate sufficed for the massive extension of the killing operations?
While in FHQ in mid-July, Himmler had received minutes of the important meeting that Hitler had had on the 16th with Göring, Bormann, Lammers, Keitel, and Rosenberg. At the meeting, Hitler had made the telling remarks that the partisan war proclaimed by Stalin provided ‘the possibility of exterminating anything opposing us’ and that pacification of the conquered territory could best be achieved by shooting dead anyone ‘who even looked askance’. A day later, Hitler issued a decree giving Himmler responsibility for security in the newly established civilian regions of German rule in the east. Effectively, this placed the ‘Jewish Question’ as part of a wider policing remit directly in Himmler’s hands.
Within a week, Himmler had increased the ‘policing’ operations behind the front line in the east by 11,000 men, the start of the far bigger build-up that was to follow. Most probably, catching Hitler’s mood at the time, Himmler had pointed out the insufficiency of the forces currently available to him for the ‘pacification’ of the east, then requested, and been granted, the authority to increase the force to an appropriate level. That the Jews, as had been the case from the beginning of the campaign, were viewed as the prime target group to be exterminated – under the pretext of offering the most dangerous opposition to the occupation – would have meant that no specific mandate about their treatment within the general ‘pacification’ remit was necessary. In dealing with the Jews in the east as he saw fit, Himmler could take it for granted that he was ‘working towards the Führer’.
II
Hitler’s own comments about the Jews around this time would certainly have assured Himmler of this. In the twilight hours before dawn on 10 July, Hitler had remarked: ‘ “I feel like the Robert Koch of politics. He found the bacillus of tuberculosis and through that showed medical scholarship new ways. I discovered the Jews as the bacillus and ferment of all social decomposition. Their ferment. And I have proved one thing: that a state can live without Jews … ” ’
He retained his biological terminology when speaking – with remarkable openness – to the Defence Minister of the newly created, brutally racist state of Croatia, Marshal Sladko Kvaternik, on 22 July. Hitler called Jews ‘the scourge of mankind’. ‘Jewish commissars’ had wielded brutal power in the Baltic, he stated. And now the Lithuanians, Estonians, and Latvians were taking ‘bloody revenge’ against them. He went on: ‘If the Jews had free rein as in the Soviet paradise, they would put the most insane plans into effect. Thus Russia has become a plague-centre for mankind … For if only one state tolerates a Jewish family among it, this would provide the core bacillus for a new decomposition. If there were no more Jews in Europe, the unity of the European states would be no longer disturbed. Where the Jews are sent to, whether to Siberia or Madagascar, is immaterial.’
The frame of mind was overtly genocidal. The reference to Madagascar was meaningless. It had been ruled out as an option months earlier. But Siberia, which had in the interim come into favour, would itself have meant genocide of a kind. And, from his comments to Kvaternik, Hitler was plainly contemplating a ‘solution to the Jewish Question’ not just in the Soviet Union, but throughout the whole of Europe.
No decision for the ‘Final Solution’ – meaning the physical extermination of the Jews throughout Europe – had yet been taken. But genocide was in the air. In the Warthegau, the biggest of the annexed areas of Poland, the Nazi authorities were still divided in July 1941 about what to do with the Jews whom they had been unable to deport to the General Government. One idea was to concentrate them in one huge camp which could easily be policed, near to the centre of coal production, and gain maximum economic benefit from their ruthless exploitation. But there was the question of what to do about those Jews incapable of working.
A memorandum sent on 16 July 1941 to Eichmann, at Reich Security Head Office, by the head of the SD in Posen, SS-Sturmbannführer Rolf-Heinz Höppner, struck an ominous note. ‘There is the danger this winter,’ his cynical report to Eichmann read, ‘that the Jews can no longer all be fed. It is to be seriously considered whether the most humane solution might not be to finish off those Jews not capable of labour by some sort of fast-working preparation.’ Asking for Eichmann’s opinion, Höppner concluded: ‘The things sound in part fantastic, but would in my view be quite capable of implementation.’
On the last day of the month, Heydrich had Eichmann draft a written authorization from Göring – nominally in charge of anti-Jewish policy since January 1939 – to prepare ‘a complete solution of the Jewish question in the German sphere of influence in Europe’. The mandate was framed as a supplement to the task accorded to Heydrich on 24 January 1939, to solve the ‘Jewish problem’ through ‘emigration’ and ‘evacuation’. Heydrich was now commissioned to produce an overall plan dealing with the organizational, technical, and material measures necessary. This written mandate was an extension of the verbal one which he had already received from Göring no later than March. It enhanced his authority in dealings with state authorities, and laid down a marker for his control over the ‘final solution’ once victory in the east – presumed imminent – had been won. There was no need to consult Hitler.
The dragnet was closing on the Jews of Europe. But Heydrich’s mandate was not the signal to set up death camps in Poland. The aim at this point was still a territorial solution – to remove the Jews to the east. Within the next few months, recognition that the great gamble of the rapid knockout victory in the east had failed would irrevocably alter that aim.
III
With victory apparently within Germany’s grasp, pressures to intensify the discrimination against the Jews and to have them deported from the Reich were building up. The growing privations of the war allowed party activists to turn daily grievances and resentment against the Jews. The SD in Bielefeld reported, for instance, in August 1941 that strong feeling about the ‘provocative behaviour of Jews’ had brought a ban on Jews attending the weekly markets ‘in order to avoid acts of violence’. In addition, there had been general approval, so it was alleged, for an announcement in the local newspapers that Jews would receive no compensation for damage suffered as a result of the war. It was also keenly felt, it was asserted, that Jews should only be served in shops once German customers had had their turn. The threat of resort to self-help and use of force against Jews if nothing was done hung in the air. Ominously, it was nonetheless claimed that these measures would not be enough to satisfy the population. Demands were growing for the introduction of some compulsory mark of identification such as had been worn by Jews in the General Government since the start of the war, in order to prevent Jews from avoiding the restrictions imposed on them.
Evidently, par
ty fanatics were at work – successfully, so it seems – in stirring up opinion against the Jews. The pressure from below was music to the ears of party and police leaders like Goebbels and Heydrich anxious for their own reasons to step up discrimination against the Jews and remove them altogether from Germany as soon as possible. It did not take long for it to be fed through Goebbels to Hitler himself.
An identification mark for Jews was something Hitler had turned down when it had been demanded in the aftermath of ‘Crystal Night’. He had not thought it expedient at the time. But he was now to be subjected to renewed pressure to change his mind. By mid-August, Goebbels had convinced himself that the ‘Jewish Question’ in Berlin had again become ‘acute’. He claimed soldiers on leave could not understand how Jews in Berlin could still have ‘aryan’ servants and big apartments. Jews were undermining morale through comments in queues or on public transport. He thought it necessary, therefore, that they should wear a badge so that they could be immediately recognized.
Three days later a hastily summoned meeting at the Ministry of Propaganda, filled with party hacks, attempted to persuade representatives from other ministries of the need to introduce identification for the Jews. Eichmann, the RSHA (Reich Security Main Office) representative, reported that Heydrich had already put a proposal to this effect to Göring a short while earlier. Göring had sent it back, saying the Führer had to decide. On this, Heydrich had reformulated his proposal, which would be sent to Bormann, for him to speak to Hitler about it. The view from the Propaganda Ministry embroidered upon the remarks Goebbels had entrusted to his diary a few days earlier. The Jews of Berlin, it was alleged, were a ‘centre of agitation’, occupying much-needed apartments. Among other things, they were responsible, through their hoarding of food, even for the shortage of strawberries in the capital. Soldiers on leave from the east could not comprehend that Jews were still allowed such licence. Most of the Jews were not in employment. These should be ‘carted off’ to Russia. ‘It would be best to kill them altogether.’ On the question of ‘evacuation of the Jews from the Old Reich’, Eichmann commented that Heydrich had put a proposal to the Führer, but that this had been refused, and that the Security Police Chief was now working on an amended proposal for the partial ‘evacuation’ of Jews from major cities. Given the alleged urgency of the need to protect the mood of the front soldiers, Goebbels, it was announced, intended to seek an audience with the Führer at the earliest opportunity.
This was the purpose of the Propaganda Minister’s visit to FHQ on 18 August. He encountered a Hitler recovering from illness, in the middle of a running conflict with his army leaders, in a state of nervous tension, and highly irritable. In this condition, Hitler was doubtless all the more open to radical suggestions. Eventually raising the ‘Jewish problem’, Goebbels undoubtedly repeated the allegations about Jews damaging morale, especially that of front soldiers. He was pushing at an open door. Hitler must have been reminded of the poor morale which had so disgusted him in Berlin and Munich towards the end of the First World War, for which he (and many others) had blamed the Jews. He granted Goebbels what the Propaganda Minister had come for: permission to force the Jews to wear a badge of identification. According to Goebbels, Hitler expressed his conviction that his Reichstag ‘prophecy’ – that ‘if Jewry succeeded in again provoking a world war, it would end in the destruction of the Jews’ – was coming about with a ‘certainty to be thought almost uncanny’. The Jews in the east were having to pay the bill, noted Goebbels. Jewry was an alien body among cultural nations. ‘At any rate the Jews will not have much cause to laugh in a coming world,’ Goebbels reported him as saying.
Next day, Goebbels wrote that he would now become immediately active in the ‘Jewish Question’, since the Führer had given him permission to introduce a large, yellow Star of David to be worn by every Jew. Once the Jews wore this badge, Goebbels was certain they would rapidly disappear from view in public places. ‘If it’s for the moment not yet possible to make Berlin into a Jew-free city, the Jews must at least no longer appear in public,’ he remarked. ‘But beyond that, the Führer has granted me permission to deport the Jews from Berlin to the east as soon as the eastern campaign is over.’ Jews, he added, spoiled not just the appearance but the mood of the city. Forcing them to wear a badge would be an improvement. But, he wrote, ‘you can only stop it altogether by doing away with them. We have to tackle the problem without any sentimentality.’
On 1 September, a police decree stipulated that all Jews over the age of six had to wear the Star of David. A week later, preparing the population for its introduction, Goebbels ensured that the party Propaganda Department put out a special broadsheet, with massive circulation, in its publication Wochensprüche (Weekly Maxims), emblazoned with Hitler’s ‘prophecy’.
According to SD reports – echoing in the main no doubt hardline feelings in party circles – the introduction of the Yellow Star met with general approval but, in the eyes of some, did not go far enough, and needed to be extended to Mischlinge as well as full Jews. Some said the Yellow Star should also be worn on the back. Not all ordinary Germans responded in the same way as the party radicals. There were also numerous indications of distaste and disapproval for the introduction of the Yellow Star, along with sympathy for the victims. It is impossible to be certain which were the more typical responses. Open support for Jews was at any rate dangerous. Goebbels castigated those who felt any sympathy for their plight, threatening them with incarceration in a concentration camp. He turned up his antisemitic invective to an even higher volume. Whatever the level of sympathy, it could carry no weight beside the shrill clamour of the radicals, whose demands – voiced most notably by the Reich Minister of Propaganda – were targeted ever more at removal of the Jews altogether. As Goebbels had recognized, deportation had to wait. But the pressure for it would not let up.
Much of the pressure 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-Sturmbannführer Rolf-Heinz Höppner – the self-same Höppner 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.
Höppner’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 (Generalplan Ost). He envisaged deportations once the war was over ‘out of German settlement space’ of the ‘undesirable sections of the population’ from the Great German Reich and of peoples from eastern and south-eastern Europe deemed racially unfit for Germanization. He specifically included ‘the ultimate solution of the Jewish Question’, not just in Germany but also in all states under German influence, in his suggestions. The areas he had in mind for the vast number of deportees were the ‘large spaces in the current Soviet Union’. He added that it would be pure speculation to consider the organization of these territories ‘since first the basic decisions have to be taken’. It was essential, however, he stated, that there should be complete clarity from the outset about the fate of the ‘undesirables’, ‘whether the aim is to establish for them permanently a certain form of existence, or whether they should be completely wiped out’.
Höppner, 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
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. 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. So practical considerations arose. 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. And 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.