35

The Radicalization of Jewish Policy

Meanwhile, it had become clear that the mood of the German population was subject to major fluctuations depending on the course of the war in the East and that people were acutely sensitive to domestic political issues; trust in the regime’s conduct of the war was distinctly lacking. The German people had gone to war without enthusiasm and, after the successes of the first twenty months, had hoped it would end rather than be extended. Lack of reports of successes from the front line was sufficient to produce a mood of pessimism, concern, and anxiety. In addition, Hitler, who was running the war from the isolation of his East Prussian headquarters, had not appeared in public for months, with the result that the propaganda machine could not deploy the usual ritual of mass support for the ‘Führer’s’ policies.

In this difficult situation, during the course of two weeks in the second half of August, Hitler took two decisions with significant domestic political repercussions: the introduction of a Jewish badge and a halt to the ‘euthanasia’ programme. Both decisions affected the core of his ideological concerns and could not have been more different in their implications. Jewish persecution was to be further radicalized, while the ‘elimination’ of so-called ‘life unworthy of life’ was – officially at least – to be stopped. As the regime had entirely geared its propaganda to the campaign against a Jewish world conspiracy that was allegedly uniting Germany’s enemies, it made sense to extend this campaign to the Jews still living in Germany, dubbing them the enemy within. This would underline the radical ‘ideological’ character of the war. The message that Germany was engaged in an existential struggle against the Jewish ‘world enemy’ was to dominate a ‘public opinion’ that was controlled by the regime, thereby pushing into the background the day-to-day worries and burdens of the war. Shortages, air raids, and fears about the military situation had to be borne stoically in the face of this life-and-death struggle.

The marking of German Jews with a yellow star represented the start of this campaign. The initiative came from Goebbels, who revived suggestions that had come from the security police and the Party leadership after ‘Kristallnacht’ and again during 1940.¹ In Poland the marking of Jews had already been compulsory since November 1939. On 15 August, Goebbels held an inter-ministerial conference in the Propaganda Ministry at which, among other things, the marking of the Jews was discussed.² When Goebbels, while visiting Hitler at his headquarters on 18 August, suggested marking the Jews so that they could no longer avoid detection as ‘grumblers and fault-finders’, the dictator immediately agreed both to that and to a reduction in their food rations. Moreover, he now reassured Goebbels ‘that the Berlin Jews [are to be] deported from Berlin to the East as quickly as possible as soon as transport becomes available. They will be worked over in the harsher climate there’.³ However, Hitler insisted that this should not happen until the campaign in the East had come to an end.⁴

In the course of the discussion Hitler also told Goebbels that his prophecy of 30 January 1939 that a new world war would end in the ‘annihilation’ of the European Jews was now becoming true during these weeks and months with a certainty that was almost uncanny. For ‘the Jews in the East must pay the bill; in Germany they have already paid part of it and in the future they will have to pay more.’ This statement makes it clear that, under the impression of the mass murder in the occupied eastern territories, Hitler was now prepared to take a tougher line with the Jews in Germany itself. His ‘global war against the Jews’ was not simply a propaganda fantasy; it was increasingly becoming reality.

At the same time as dealing with the ‘Jewish question’ Goebbels focused on another issue that threatened to affect the public ‘mood’: the conflict with the Churches. The Catholic population was not only concerned about the continuing confiscation of Church property by the state,⁵ there was also growing opposition to the ‘euthanasia’ programme, which, despite attempts to keep it secret, was becoming known to broad sections of the population.

At the beginning of July a pastoral letter objecting to the killing of innocent people was read out in Catholic churches.⁶ On 3 August 1941, the Bishop of Münster, Clemens August von Galen, who had already criticized the policy of confiscating Church property, preached a sermon opposing the systematic murder of patients in mental hospitals. News of this protest quickly spread throughout the Reich during the following days.⁷ The fact that Münster, like other predominantly Catholic cities in north-west Germany, was a prime target for British air raids during the summer of 1941 increased the regime’s concern about the potential emergence of a particular threat to the home front, a concern heightened by the fact that Galen cleverly hinted at the raids being divine punishment.⁸ On 11 August, the chairman of the German Catholic Bishops’ Conference, the Breslau cardinal Adolf Bertram, wrote to the Minister for Churches, Hanns Kerrl, requesting his comments on the issue of ‘euthanasia’. Kerrl did not reply.⁹ Goebbels was clearly concerned about the situation.¹⁰ During his visit to the Führer headquarters on 18 August he agreed with Bormann that in future they should exercise restraint on religious issues. After he had obtained Hitler’s approval for this position, on 24 August he issued a circular to the Gauleiters and Reichsleiters to that effect.¹¹

On the same day, Hitler finally ordered a stop to the ‘euthanasia’ murders being carried out through the T4 programme because he clearly wished to avoid further discontent among the church-going population.¹² In fact, at this point the T4 programme had already achieved its original goal of killing 70,000 asylum patients,¹³ and the murder of patients did not then cease, but rather, from 1942 onwards, continued throughout the war in a decentralized form. In fact, during this second phase of ‘euthanasia’ more people were murdered than under the T4 programme.¹⁴ Moreover, as a direct consequence of the halt to ‘euthanasia’, Hitler decided to establish a large number of emergency hospitals near to certain areas threatened by air raids (he was naturally thinking in the first place of north-west Germany, which had been badly hit). The existing mental hospitals could be used for this purpose and their patients moved elsewhere. He put his personal physician, Karl Brandt, who had been responsible for the first case of child euthanasia, in charge of the project. The transfer of the patients was to be carried out by the Community Patients Transport Ltd, which had hitherto been involved in transferring the victims of ‘euthanasia’. The overall coordination of the transfer of patients was in the hands of a civil servant, Herbert Linde, who had been responsible for the Interior Ministry’s role in the T4 programme. As concern grew among the population that the plan for the transfers simply represented a continuation of the ‘euthanasia’ programme, they were to be reassured by, for example, the introduction of measures such as visits to the patients. Thus Hitler skilfully responded to the population’s concern, aiming to neutralize the protests against the murder of patients through targeted assistance to the cities affected by air raids, even doing so using personnel from the old T4 organization.¹⁵

In this critical phase the regime did everything possible to avoid a confrontation with the Catholic Church. During the summer, protests and even demonstrations occurred in Bavaria against the order, issued by the Bavarian Interior and Culture Minister and Gauleiter Adolf Wagner, to remove all crucifixes from schools. Wagner was forced to withdraw the edict on 28 August.¹⁶ During the following months as well, Hitler reiterated his position that there should be no conflicts with the Churches during the war. After the victorious conclusion of the war he would then set about achieving a fundamental solution to the Church problem.¹⁷

In September the war in the Soviet Union was dominated by the events in the southern sector of the front. As ordered by Hitler, elements of Army Group Centre, including Guderian’s panzer group, turned southwards and, operating together with sections of Army Group South, surrounded substantial Soviet forces east of Kiev. The city itself was conquered on 19 September. The battle in the greater Kiev area was concluded around 25 September with more than 600,000 Red Army soldiers taken prisoner. In contrast to the clashes of opinion during August, there was widespread agreement between Hitler and the army leadership concerning these operations. After their conclusion Army Group South pressed forward towards the Crimea and the Caucasus.¹⁸ These military successes were exploited by propaganda with the result that morale, which had deteriorated, not least as a result of the lack of reports from the front,¹⁹ improved once again during the second half of September.²⁰ At the end of the month the official announcements recorded an almost euphoric mood, as reports of victories gave many people hope that the war in the East would be over before the start of the winter.²¹

When Hitler once more received Goebbels in his headquarters on 23 September, he assured him that, while up until around 15 October they would ‘still have serious battles to fight, from then onwards he believed he would have the Bolshevists on the run’. All necessary arrangements had been made for the troops to survive the winter; he was even contemplating disbanding a number of divisions. If Stalin were to offer him a separate peace at this stage he would of course accept such an offer. ‘For if the military power of Bolshevism is broken it will no longer pose a threat; it will then be driven back into Asia.’

After the conclusion of operations in the Kiev area the focus of events moved to the central part of the front. Strong Soviet forces had established themselves between Army Group Centre and Moscow.²² The Wehrmacht’s autumn offensive began on 2 October in full strength. With the conquest of Moscow the aim was to achieve a decisive success in the war against the Soviet Union before the end of the year so that during the coming year the main focus could once again be the war with Britain and, as was becoming increasingly probable, the United States.²³ On the day after the start of the offensive Hitler appeared in Berlin to make a speech in the Sportpalast to open the Winter Aid campaign, his first public appearance since 4 May 1941. He used it for a series of detailed justifications of his policies. He declared theatrically that his alliance with Stalin in 1939 could only be described as the ‘biggest humiliation . . . that I have ever had to put up with’. But the decision to attack the Soviet Union had been ‘the most difficult decision of my whole life’. ‘Every such step opens a door behind which secrets are hidden and only posterity can know how it came to pass and exactly what happened’. With this he was preparing for the main point of his speech – the announcement that the military operations in the East were about to reach a decisive stage: ‘I am talking about it today because I can say today that this enemy is broken and will not rise again’.²⁴ With this statement he was disguising the fact that that, even after the impending decisive blow against the Soviet Union, the war in the East would be continued.

According to Rosenberg’s liaison officer, on his return from Berlin on 4 October Hitler was still ‘in a remarkably good mood’.²⁵ At dinner on 8 October he referred to the ‘tremendous and decisive change in the military situation during the last three days’ and Jodl added that, in view of the great progress made by their operations ‘one could say without exaggeration that Germany had won this war’.²⁶ Hitler ordered a special announcement to be made that in the Viasma area ‘several Soviet armies had been surrounded and faced inevitable destruction’.²⁷ And, on 9 October, under the impression of the euphoria in the Führer headquarters, Reich Press Chief Dietrich even went so far as to call a press conference in Berlin at which he declared that the war in the East had been decided. According to both Hitler’s and Dietrich’s own statements, the ‘Führer’ had authorized him to make this announcement.²⁸

By 12 October, in two large encirclements near Briansk and Viasma, the Wehrmacht had in fact succeeded in surrounding a significant number of Soviet divisions and taking over 600,000 prisoners. As a result, Army Group Centre calculated that there were no longer any significant concentrations of enemy forces in front of Moscow.²⁹ On 12 October, Hitler gave instructions that any offer to surrender the city of Moscow should be rejected. German soldiers were not to set foot in either Leningrad or Moscow.³⁰

The ‘war against the Jews’

Between the middle of September and the middle of October Hitler succeeded in encouraging his immediate entourage to believe that Germany was about to achieve a great military success, and this sense of euphoria was transferred to the media and the ‘popular mood’ as reflected in the official reports, even though Goebbels tried to counteract it with a more realistic approach.³¹ On 15 September, in the midst of this victorious mood, the wearing of a yellow star, ordered by Hitler a month before, became compulsory for Jews. This move was prepared by a new anti-Semitic propaganda campaign. The yellow star badge was portrayed as necessary in order to mark out the Jews as participants in an international Jewish conspiracy. It was designed to ensure that the German population kept its distance from Jews still living in the country and, thereby, publicly demonstrated its support for the radical war against the Jews.³²

A central role in this campaign was played by a booklet published in the United States by a certain Theodore N. Kaufman, in which among other things he had demanded that the German people should be sterilized.³³ With Hitler’s express approval,³⁴ the booklet was extensively quoted and commented upon in a pamphlet that was widely distributed.³⁵ In it Kaufman, who was in fact a private individual with no connections to the American government, was described as an advisor to President Roosevelt. His booklet, which had been published at the beginning of January 1941, was claimed to be one of the ‘intellectual inspirations’ for the Atlantic Charter. In addition, propaganda tried to explain the need for the Jewish star in the light of the struggle against ‘international Jewry’, the war in the East, and the alleged Jewish atrocities committed there in Lemberg and other places.³⁶ Similar arguments were made in particular by the Party press.³⁷ Finally, to justify the star the Propaganda Ministry produced a leaflet (‘Recognize the real enemy!’)³⁸ that was distributed to every household along with their food ration coupons. However, the response of the German population to the compulsory Jewish star left much to be desired. While the official announcements of victories were undoubtedly a welcome confirmation of many people’s hopes, it is clear that the propaganda accompanying the introduction of the Jewish star met with little enthusiasm.³⁹ It was probably for this reason that a planned ‘campaign of enlightenment against the Jews’ did not take place.⁴⁰

Figure 11. The ‘Jewish star’ openly stigmatized German Jews. Contrary to the regime’s intention, the non-Jewish population did not altogether welcome this move. More people than expected made small gestures of sympathy to those forced to wear them. ‘German philistines are shits’, thundered Goebbels.

Source: Scherl/Süddeutsche Zeitung Photo

However, it was precisely during these days immediately before and after the introduction of the yellow star that Hitler took the decision to deport the German Jews. He had been preoccupied ever since the beginning of September with the idea of starting the deportations before the end of the war. After a meeting with the ‘Führer’, Himmler had discussed the matter on 2 September with Friedrich-Wilhelm Krüger, the Higher SS and Police Leader in the General Government, and, following his negative response, on 4 September with the Higher SS and Police Leader in the Warthegau, Wilhelm Koppe. On 10 September Koppe wrote to him referring to the deportation of 60,000 Jews to Łódz´.⁴¹ During the coming days, the idea for a project involving the mass deportation of Jews was put to Hitler on several occasions. Himmler’s soundings were evidently having an impact.

In addition, however, there was a new development. Probably on 8 September, the German leadership learnt of the Soviet government’s decision of 28 August to deport the Volga Germans to Siberia. From the point of view of the Nazi leadership this clearly represented an example of ‘ethnic cleansing’ that demanded ‘counter measures’.⁴² On 11 September, Rosenberg proposed to Hitler that he ‘inform Russia, England, and the USA through a radio broadcast that if this mass murder [sic!] were carried out Germany would make the Jews of Central Europe suffer for it’.⁴³ Probably on 16 September, at a meeting with Himmler, the German ambassador in Paris, Otto Abetz, proposed deporting the Jews living in France and in the rest of occupied Europe to the occupied eastern territories, an idea to which Himmler, who at this point was heavily preoccupied with dealing with the ‘Jewish question’ and ‘eastern settlement’, responded positively.⁴⁴ The same day, Abetz spoke with Hitler, who used the opportunity for a lengthy discourse on his future eastern empire. On 17 September, Hitler met Ribbentrop, with whom he discussed the deportations, and afterwards Ribbentrop met Himmler.⁴⁵

The decision was taken the following day. Himmler informed the Gauleiter in the Warthegau, Artur Greiser, that Hitler wanted ‘the Old Reich and the Protectorate to be cleared and liberated of Jews from west to east as soon as possible. As a first stage I am, therefore, anxious to transport the Jews of the Old Reich and the Protectorate, if possible this year, to the eastern territories that came into the Reich two years ago, before deporting them further eastwards next spring. For the coming winter I intend to put around 60,000 Jews from the Old Reich and the Protectorate into the Litzmannstadt [Łódz´] ghetto, which, as I have heard, has sufficient capacity.’⁴⁶ Only a few days later Hitler informed Goebbels that Berlin, Vienna, and Prague would be the first places to be made ‘free of Jews’ and the Propaganda Minister prepared to transport ‘a significant number of Berlin Jews to the East before the onset of winter’.⁴⁷

There is only an indirect record of Hitler’s decision to start the deportations after all, before achieving victory in the East, namely through Himmler’s letter to Greiser. The reasons prompting him to make this decision must be deduced from the regime’s assessment of the overall situation in which it found itself at this stage. The fact that within the occupied eastern territories, the ‘final destination’ for the deportations, SS, civil administration, and Wehrmacht had in the meantime expanded the mass murder of Jewish civilians into a comprehensive genocide was a fundamental precondition for Hitler’s decision to begin deporting the Jews from Germany and the rest of Europe. The racial war of extermination being pursued in the East – in the regime’s view, a fight for Germany’s very existence – inevitably resulted in a radicalization of the whole conduct of the war. After Himmler, on Hitler’s initiative, had started at the beginning of September to sound out the feasibility of deportations, the Soviet decision to deport the Volga Germans provided the opportunity to justify them as retaliation, to accelerate the whole process, and to exploit them for foreign policy purposes.

For Hitler clearly saw the chance of using the deportations as a means of threatening the United States and as a clear warning – only comprehensible in terms of his radical anti-Semitic tunnel vision – that the threatened entry of the United States into the war would have consequences for the European Jews. Since 1939 he had after all been announcing repeatedly ‘the annihilation’ of the Jews in Europe in the event of a ‘world war’. On 21 September, he threatened ‘in the event of America’s entry into the war’ to impose further ‘repressive measures on the German Jews because of the treatment of the Volga Germans’.⁴⁸ The Nazi leadership had been using ‘repressive measures’ against the German and European Jews as a means of putting pressure on the United States ever since the 1933 ‘Jewish boycott’. The November 1938 pogrom had been designed to increase the willingness of the United States and other nations to accept Jewish emigrants, and the Madagascar project was very likely aimed at blackmailing the United States with mass deportations.

The deportations were intended mostly to take place in daylight and in the public eye,⁴⁹ to become known through the neutral and American media, and so to provide a ‘warning’ to the United States.⁵⁰ Goebbels himself was responsible for ensuring that foreign correspondents were given access to information.⁵¹ Domestic propaganda, on the other hand, was not to deal directly with the deportations of Jews, taking place in broad daylight, from the biggest cities in the Reich,⁵² but rather emphasize the ‘guilt of the Jews for the war’ in general. It was, however, inevitable that the deportations, officially ‘non-events’, would provoke discussion.⁵³

This leads us on to the domestic motives that lay behind Hitler’s decision to deport the Jews. In general, as already outlined, the intention was to gear the German population to their involvement in an ‘ideologically’ based struggle for existence. In addition, however, the propaganda machine subtly used the growing intensity of the British air raids since autumn 1941 to portray Jews as the alleged string pullers behind the bombing war and the deportations as retaliation. The air war also helped the regime to justify the speeding up of the eviction of Jews from their homes, which had already begun in a number of cities during the summer of 1941.⁵⁴ This local policy of displacement, the repeated appeals from Goebbels and various Gauleiters to Hitler finally to make their areas ‘free of Jews’, will certainly also have influenced Hitler’s decision to begin the deportations.⁵⁵ At the same time, tens of thousands of inhabitants of the big cities were moving into the ‘Jewish homes’ that had been vacated and securing household goods at favourable prices, and so had become beneficiaries of the deportations and complicit in the injustice inflicted on the Jews.

With his decision to begin the deportation of Jews from the Reich, Hitler had prompted preparations for the deportation of Jews from the occupied territories. This was motivated by the increasing tension in the occupied territories during autumn 1941. Following the attack on the Soviet Union, resistance movements began to form throughout Europe, often led by communists. The German occupation authorities generally responded by shooting hostages, in July in Serbia, in September in France, Belgium, and Norway, and, from the end of September, in the Protectorate. Here, Reinhard Heydrich, who had been recently appointed as Deputy Reich Protector, immediately declared martial law and, during the following two months had over 400 men and women shot for alleged resistance activities on the basis of sentences pronounced by summary court martials.⁵⁶

This policy of massive repression had Hitler’s full backing. In September he not only advocated ‘draconian punishments, but in more serious cases . . . shootings’ and, at the beginning of October, contemplated replacing the military commander in Belgium, Alexander von Falkenhausen, whom he considered too soft, with someone who would act more ruthlessly.⁵⁷ He also intervened personally, for example giving instructions to extend the shootings in France.⁵⁸ At this point the military had already developed a systematic basis for the radicalization of hostage-taking in Europe. The OKW Order of 16 September ‘Concerning the Communist Resistance Movement in the Occupied Territories’ decreed that, as atonement for the killing of one German soldier, the execution of 50–100 communist hostages should be considered ‘appropriate’.⁵⁹

As far as the Nazi leadership was concerned, communists and Jews were more or less identical. In the increasingly brutal war against ‘Jewish Bolshevism’ it was thus only logical to act ever more ruthlessly against Jewish minorities. And so the phantom of a Europe-wide Jewish–communist resistance movement soon had repercussions: in October 1941 the Wehrmacht in Serbia began systematically shooting all male Jews as ‘retaliation’ for attacks.⁶⁰ As far as the various occupation authorities were concerned, the complete removal of the Jews came to be regarded as an essential prerequisite for the restoration of internal ‘security’ in their area. Hitler himself had confirmed this policy, when, at the beginning of October, he explained to his dinner guests how he envisaged ‘sorting out the Czechs’, namely by shooting hostages among the rebellious work forces, while at the same time allocating food to peaceful work forces – above all, however, by the deportation of all Jews from the Protectorate to the occupied eastern territories. For in the final analysis the Jews were ‘everywhere the link through which all enemy news reports spread like wildfire into every corner of the nation’.⁶¹ On 20 October Himmler offered the Slovakian government the opportunity of deporting the Slovakian Jews to a specially allocated part of the General Government.⁶² In France at the end of the year the military authorities stopped shooting Jewish and communist hostages and began plans to deport them ‘to the East’.⁶³

The various motives that lay behind the decision no longer to postpone the deportations until the end of the war had one thing in common: in the autumn of 1941 Hitler and the Nazi leadership began to conduct the war on all levels as a war ‘against the Jews’. The deportation of the German Jews – a project that had been pursued since the autumn of 1939 – was intended to emphasize this commitment and to underline to the German people, to the populations in the occupied territories, and to international public opinion the seriousness with which the Germans regarded their racial war aims. The concept of a war of racial extermination, introduced in the Russian campaign, was now being transferred to the conduct of the whole war and focused particularly on the Jews. The decision in September to begin the deportations should not, therefore, be attributed primarily to the ‘euphoria of victory’ as in Christopher Browning’s influential interpretation, but rather to the fact, that under the impression of the events of summer 1941, Hitler and the Nazi leadership had revised their whole concept of the war.⁶⁴ ‘That race of criminals’, Hitler told his guests, Himmler and Heydrich, at a meal on 25 October, ‘has the two million dead of the First World War on its conscience, and now already hundreds of thousands more. Let nobody tell me: We can’t send them into the swamps [of Russia]! Who’s worrying about our own people. It’s a good thing if the fear that we’re exterminating the Jews goes before us.’⁶⁵

At this time the first deportation trains were already on their way. At the beginning of October, following objections from the regional authorities to the originally planned transfer of 60,000 Jews to the Łódz´ ghetto,⁶⁶ the RSHA had modified the plans: now 20,000 Jews and 3,000 Gypsies were to be deported to Łódz´ and 25,000 each to the ghettos in Riga and Minsk.⁶⁷

In fact, the first wave of deportations began on 15 October. By 9 November, around 20,000 Jews from Reich territory and 5,000 Gypsies (Sinti and Roma) from the Burgenland had been deported to Łódz´,⁶⁸ between 8 November 1941 and 6 February 1942 a total of almost 25,000 people to Riga⁶⁹ and Kovno (as a substitute for Riga)⁷⁰, and by December almost 8,000 people to Minsk (where winter weather caused a halt to the deportations).⁷¹ Already in November 1941 the RSHA was acting on the assumption that the deportations would continue in the spring in a third wave. In fact, those trains were to go to the Lublin area, in other words to the district in the General Government where already in 1939 there had been a plan to establish a Jewish reservation [the Nisko project]. The deportations were then intended to occur ‘city by city’, a procedure to which Hitler had given express approval.⁷² Following his fundamental decision of mid-September 1941 to begin the deportations, the ‘Führer’ continued to concern himself with the concrete details of the ‘evacuations’.

This decision also involved the idea of deporting those who had already been ‘evacuated’ that autumn ‘further east’ in the coming spring. Thus, with the aid of the local civilian authorities, the SS immediately began preparations for the reception of the deportees at their intended destinations. The intention now was to begin by murdering the indigenous Jews in those localities. Himmler had given a clear signal for this at an early stage. The relevant documents suggest that Reich Governor Greiser’s ‘agreement’ to receive 25,000 deportees in the Łódz´ ghetto had been secured in exchange for Himmler’s permitting him to murder 100,000 local Jews.⁷³ This programme of mass murder was to be carried out by gas, which had been used in the T4 ‘euthanasia’ programme, halted in August 1941. Hence there was considerable experience of this method. The gas wagons of the ‘Special Commando Lange’, which had murdered Polish mental patients in the Warthegau during 1940, were now deployed in the Łódz´ district to murder the existing ghetto inhabitants.⁷⁴

Considering the various developments as a whole, it is clear that, after Hitler’s September decision to deport the German Jews, the SS worked out a comprehensive deportation and murder plan. The mass murder of Jews, already under way in the Soviet Union, was now to be extended to particular key districts in Poland. As in the case of the murders in the Soviet Union, Himmler was the decisive figure, issuing the necessary orders in the areas involved and pulling everything together.⁷⁵ In the middle of October he assigned the SS and Police Leader in the Lublin district, Odilo Globocnik, the task of building an extermination camp (Bełz˙ec).⁷⁶ In December he met Viktor Brack, one of the key figures in the ‘euthanasia’ programme, who shortly afterwards dispatched his murder experts to Globocnik.⁷⁷ In October preparations began for the construction of extermination camps in Riga,⁷⁸ and apparently also in the Minsk district (Mogilev).⁷⁹ In other words, preparations were being made for the murder by means of gas of the local Jews at all four of the planned destinations for the deportees from Germany: in Łódz´, Riga, Minsk, as well as the district of Lublin (Bełz˙ec).

In addition, at the beginning of October, the security police in the district of Galicia began to shoot large numbers of Jewish men, women, and children. This new district had been created on 1 August from Soviet-occupied Polish territory and was attached to the General Government. The security police engaged here in the same murderous activity as in the other German-occupied Soviet territories.⁸⁰

The parallel with Serbia, where also in October the Wehrmacht was extending its repressive measures into a comprehensive campaign of extermination aimed at the Jewish population, is evident. And it was doubtless no coincidence that, shortly afterwards, the German military administration in France began directing its reprisals for resistance activities against Jews (in addition to communists), with the aim of deporting them as hostages to the East.

There is no written record of the ‘decision’ to embark on this programme of deportations and murder; it is an assumption based on a reconstruction of a series of events. The programme was developed by Himmler directly after Hitler’s order for the deportation of the German Jews, issued in the middle of September, and then subsequently carried out. Hitler provided the impulse and initiative and the backing and confirmation for it, as is clear from his recorded table talk of 25 October. To what extent he became involved in issuing detailed orders for it, and how far he arranged for Himmler, who was a regular visitor to his headquarters, to report to him on its progress is unclear. However, this circumstance is of no significance in evaluating the assertion that has sometimes been made that Hitler’s henchmen carried out the murder of the Jews without his knowledge, or even against his will. For if one considers Hitler’s treatment of the ‘Jewish question’ over a lengthy period, it is clear that it was always he who set the agenda for the various stages of radicalization and controlled developments. With his unchallengeable authority he ensured that the SS could rely on the cooperation of the various administrative agencies (civilian occupation authorities, local government in the deportation cities, the Reich railways, the finance administration, and numerous other agencies), which were involved in this comprehensive deportation and murder programme. Himmler, Heydrich, and the SS leadership focused on its actual implementation, but the final responsibility lay with the ‘Führer’.