8

From War of Destruction to the Final Solution

EUPHORIA OF VICTORY AND DECISION MAKING, JULY–OCTOBER 1941

The First Peak of Victory Euphoria and the Fate of Soviet Jewry

In the first month of the Barbarossa campaign, the Germans experienced stunning and exhilarating success. On July 8 Goebbels confided to his diary, “No one doubts anymore that we shall be victorious in Russia.”1 The following day he flew to meet Hitler, who pronounced the military situation “surprisingly positive.” Two-thirds of the Soviet army and five-sixths of its tanks and airplanes had already been destroyed, Hitler claimed. “Of Bolshevism nothing more may be allowed to remain. The Führer intends to have cities like Moscow and Petersburg rubbed out.” (Der Führer hat die Absicht, Städte wie Moskau und Petersburg ausradieren zu lassen.)2 And one day later, July 10, the self-congratulatory Hitler proclaimed himself the Robert Koch of politics who had discovered in Jewry the bacillus of social decomposition.3

The mood of expectant victory intensified on July 16, 1941, when Hitler spoke at length to top Nazi leaders, including Göring, Bormann, Lammers, Rosenberg, and Keitel, but not in this case Himmler, and made what he termed “fundamental observations” (grundsätzliche Feststellungen). He proclaimed that Germany would never leave the eastern territories now occupied. Out of these territories he intended to create a “Garden of Eden.” “All necessary measures—shootings, resettlements, etc.” (alle notwendigen Massnahmen—Erschiessen, Aussiedeln, usw.) would be undertaken to accomplish this. It was thus fortunate that the Russians had given the order for partisan warfare, for “it gives us the opportunity to exterminate anyone who is hostile to us. . . . Naturally, the vast area must be pacified as quickly as possible; this will happen best by shooting anyone who even looks sideways at us.”4 (er gibt uns die Möglichkeit, auszurotten was sich gegen uns stellt. . . . Der Riesenraum müsse natürlich so rasch wie möglich befriedet werden; dies geschah am besten dadurch, dass man jeden, der nur schief schaue, totschiesse.) As usual, Hitler was not giving explicit orders, but the tenor of his speech was unmistakable. What role could Jews have in a German Garden of Eden? What could be expected of his subordinates when Hitler urged the shooting and extermination of all hostile elements? The euphoria of victory had elicited from Hitler both a utopian vision of a future Garden of Eden as well as the shrillest exhortations for intensified bloodletting. His subordinates were eager not to disappoint.

Most important for the fate of Soviet Jews was the reaction of Heinrich Himmler, who immediately acted to multiply many times over the limited manpower of the Einsatzgruppen committed to behind-the-lines pacification and mass killings. On July 19 he reassigned the SS Cavalry Brigade from his own Kommandostab to Erich von dem Bach-Zelewski, the HSSPF Center, for an impending sweep of the Pripet marches, and on July 22 he reassigned the 1st SS Brigade to the HSSPF South, Friedrich Jeckeln. The SS Cavalry contained nearly 4,000 men and the 1st Brigade over 7,200.5 Himmler also reassigned at least 11 police battalions to the HSSPFS. This reinforcement added at least another 5,500 men.6 And on July 25, 1941, he ordered the HSSPFS to form auxiliary police units from the Ukrainian, Belorussian, and Baltic populations, because “the task of the police in the occupied eastern territories can not be accomplished with the manpower of the police and SS now deployed or yet to be deployed.”7 By the end of the year there would be 26 police battalions on Soviet territory, and the number of native auxiliary police (Schutzmänner) under police command would reach 33,000.8 In just a few days in late July, therefore, Himmler had set in motion the rapid buildup of precisely those units that would subsequently constitute the core of the killing squads of the Final Solution on Soviet territory.

Himmler also continued to visit his men in the field. Already on June 30, while visiting Augustowo, he and Heydrich had approved the killing of Jews by the Stapostelle Tilsit, and extensive killings of Jews in Bialystok had immediately followed the appearance there of Himmler and Daluege on July 8–9.9 After giving his orders for the manpower build-up, Himmler traveled to the east once again. On July 31 he came to Riga and Baranovichi, meeting with HSSPFS Prützmann and Bach-Zelewski.10 On that same day he issued an “explicit order” (ausdrücklicher Befehl) to a regiment of the recently dispatched SS Cavalry Brigade about to commence its sweep of the Pripet marshes: “All Jews must be shot. Drive the female Jews into the swamp.”11

Several days after his July 31 meeting with Himmler, HSSPF Prützmann sent to the commander of Einsatzgruppe A, Franz Walter Stahlecker, a copy of the guidelines for the treatment of Jews that Hinrich Lohse, Reichskommissar for the Ostland, had just drafted, without consulting the SS. Prützmann offered Stahlecker the use of a plane to fly to Kaunas for a meeting with Lohse, which he considered imperative because the Security Police had “instructions” (Weisungen) that “in part contradict the draft” (die z. Tl. dem Entwurf widersprechen). Stahlecker did not fly to Kaunas but instead sent his commander there, Karl Jäger of Einsatzkommando 3, a three-page position paper that the latter was to transmit to Lohse orally.12

Stahlecker’s position paper indicated that much more than a mere jurisdictional issue was at stake.13 He complained that “the new possibilities in the east for a cleaning up of the Jewish question had not been taken into consideration” (die im Ostraum gegebenen neuen Möglichkeiten zur Bereinigung der Judenfrage sind im Entwurf nicht berücksichtigt worden). Lohse had failed “to keep in mind the radical treatment of the Jewish question now possible for the first time” (die im Ostraum erstmalig mögliche radikale Behandlung der Judenfrage ins Auge zu fassen). Rather than long-term ghettoization as in Poland, the situation required “an almost 100% immediate cleansing of the entire Ostland of Jews” (eine fast 100% sofortige Säuberung des gesamten Ostlandes von Juden). In a handwritten note at the end of the paper, Stahlecker added that the Lohse draft “to a great extent touches on general orders from higher authority to the Security Police which cannot be discussed in writing” (grundsätzliche, schriftlich nicht zu erörternde Befehle von höherer Stelle an die Sicherheitspolizei erheblich berührt).

What were the “instructions” or “orders” to the Security Police that Prützmann and Stahlecker referred to just days after Himmler’s visit to Riga but that neither would put in writing? One indication might be found in the carefully collected statistics of Karl Jäger. Beginning on August 15, 1941, the number of victims claimed daily by EK 3 jumped sharply and henceforth included large numbers of women and children.14

In addition, various postwar testimonies, in which precise dating is always uncertain, take on added significance when they are correlated with Himmler’s now established itinerary. On July 21, 1941, Himmler was in Lwow (Lemberg) in the Ukraine.15 After the war the commander of Reserve Police Battalion 45, Major Franz, vividly remembered a conversation with his superior, Colonel Besser of Police Regiment South. In Franz’s account, Besser told him that Himmler had ordered that the Jews in Russia were to be destroyed and that Police Battalion 45 was to participate in carrying out this policy. Several days later Reserve Police Battalion 45 began killing Jewish women and children in an action in Shepetovka. The diary of one of the policeman reliably placed the battalion in that town between July 24 and August 1, 1941.16

On August 12 Himmler met with HSSPF Jeckeln following the former’s complaint about inadequate reporting from the 1st SS Brigade. The commander of EK 5, Erwin Schulz, testified in 1953 that he had been summoned to Zhitomir by his superior, Dr. Dr. Otto Rasch of EG C on either August 10 or 12. Rasch let his officers know that he had been reproached for not treating the Jews sharply enough. Rasch then informed his commanders that, on the basis of a binding order from Himmler, Jecklen had ordered that all nonworking Jews, women and children included, be shot.17 Jeckeln himself then conducted the largest single massacre of the war to date at Kamenets Podolsky, and for the month of August reported that units under his command had “shot a total of 44,125 persons, mostly Jews.”18 As with Jäger’s killing statistics in Lithuania, Jecklen’s jumped dramatically in the weeks following Himmler’s intervention.

On August 14–16 Himmler was back in Belorussia, and on August 15 he was “present at an execution of partisans and Jews in the area of Minsk.” No immediate large-scale massacres on the scale of those of Jäger and Jeckeln followed, but Bach-Zelewski immediately requested a visit from the Warthegau expert in the gas-van killing of the mentally handicapped (the future commandant of Chelmno, Herbert Lange).19 This visit did not in fact take place, but others involved in the design and mass production of gas vans subsequently testified that the impetus for the visit had been Einsatzgruppe B’s complaints about the psychological burden of shooting women and children.20 Thus the issue of shooting women and children presumably came up during Himmler’s mid-August visit.21 By the end of August, on the occasion of a visit to Minsk by Himmler’s Order Police chief Daluege, Police Battalion 322 began to shoot Jewish women in significantly larger numbers than before.22

If there is a strong correlation between Himmler’s documented actions (both the manpower build-up and trips to the east) and the intensified killing of Soviet Jews (and especially the inclusion now of women and children), there is also ample evidence that Berlin explicitly insisted upon being kept informed of what was happening. Heydrich, of course, received from the Einsatzgruppen commanders a regular flow of information that he fashioned into the notorious daily reports.23 Heydrich’s Gestapo chief, Heinrich Müller, made explicit at least one purpose of these reports. “The Führer is to receive reports from here regularly about the work of the Einsatzgruppen in the east.” (Dem Führer soll von hier aus lfd. Berichte über die Arbeit der Einsatzgruppen im Osten vorgelegt werden.)24 The SS Cavalry Brigade made detailed reports of its killing sweep in the Pripet marshes.25 When the 1st SS Brigade in Ukraine did not make similar regular reports, it was rebuked by Himmler.26 Jeckeln made frequent radio reports on the August killing actions of his police battalions in the Ukraine.27 Clearly there was no gap between what was happening in the field and what was either known or desired by the top leadership of the Nazi regime.

While no single document conveys the exact date and manner of a decision for the Final Solution on Soviet territory, the period of mid-July to mid-August was fateful for Soviet Jewry. One scenario consistent with the existing evidence is that in mid-July Hitler, convinced that the military campaign was nearly over and victory at hand, gave the signal to carry out accelerated pacification and racial “cleansing” of Germany’s new “Garden of Eden.” His subordinates understood what such signals and exhortations meant, and Himmler in particular responded with alacrity. He massively increased the manpower of the killing forces behind the lines. Moreover, he traveled through much of the eastern territory, personally contacting his HSSPFS Bach-Zelewski, Jeckeln, and Prützmann. In the Pripet marshes he ordered his SS cavalry regiment to chase the Jewish women into the swamp. In Minsk he witnessed an execution and reportedly exhorted the men to carry out this difficult but historic task. For others not graced with a personal visit from Himmler, his orders and exhortations filtered eastward from the HSSPF to the Einsatzgruppen and police battalions. The major exception in this regard seems to have been Ohlendorf, who was initiated by Heydrich during a visit to Berlin in mid-August.28

In short, there was not a single, comprehensive killing order issued on a single date and disseminated by a single uniform method. The commanders of various killing units learned of their new tasks at different times and in different ways, and the Einsatzgruppen commanders were not the first to know. But despite the irregular manner in which the new policy was disseminated, by mid-August the results were virtually everywhere the same. German killing units—Order Police battalions and other SS units of the HSSPF as well as the Einsatzgruppen—knew that they were expected to commence implementing the Final Solution on Soviet territory, and at least in some areas, particularly in Lithuania, commensurate killing operations were already underway.

The pivotal change in how the killers themselves conceived of what they were doing can be seen in the documents at several levels. The Ereignismeldung or event report of July 23, 1941, includes a lament by the commander of Einsatzgruppe B, Arthur Nebe, that even though his men were killing hundreds of Jews each day, given the vast number of Jews a solution to the Jewish question was not possible until after the war and then only through deportation.29 Less than two months later, Nebe’s counterpart for Einsatzgruppe C, Otto Rasch, reported in a very different vein. Then it was no longer a solution to the Jewish question that seemed impossible through shooting, but rather the economic reconstruction of the Ukraine “if the Jewish labor force is entirely discarded.” He thus argued pragmatically for the temporary use of Jewish labor because it would still “result in a gradual liquidation of the Jews” but without damaging the economy.30 These two reports, less than two months apart, are based on entirely different premises. The first still assumes mass deportation sometime in the future; the latter assumes a default position of comprehensive and immediate mass murder, from which any exemption has to be justified on the basis that it would lead to “gradual liquidation” in the end.

The same change is reflected in the letters of a reserve policeman from Bremen in Reserve Police Battalion 105, previously quoted in chapter 7. Noting the treatment to which Jews were being subjected, he wrote on July 7 that “the Jews are free game. . . . One can only give the Jews some well-intentioned advice: Bring no more children into the world. They no longer have a future.” (Die Juden sind Freiwild. . . . Man kann den Juden nur noch einen gut gemeinten Rat geben: Keine Kinder mehr in die Welt zu setzen. Sie haben keine Zukunft mehr.) When he wrote exactly one month later, it was no longer a question of the dismal future for the Jews. “Here all the Jews are being shot. Everywhere such actions are underway. Last night 150 Jews from the village were shot, men, women, and children, all killed. The Jews are being totally eradicated.” (Hier werden sämtliche Juden erschossen. Überall sind solche Aktionen in Gange. Gestern nacht sind aus diesem Ort 150 Juden erschossen, Männer, Frauen und Kinder, alles umgelegt. Die Juden werden gänzlich ausgerottet.)31 Such was the difference between implied genocide in the future and the immediate reality of the Final Solution.

The Second Peak of Victory Euphoria and the Fate of European Jewry

As the Einsatzgruppen and other German units on Soviet territory shifted toward the comprehensive mass murder of Soviet Jewry in the weeks between mid-July and mid-August, the fate of European Jewry also hung in the balance. It is my conclusion that victory euphoria in mid-July marked not only the conclusion of the decision-making process leading to the mass murder of Soviet Jewry but also the point at which Hitler inaugurated the decision-making process that led to the extension of the Final Solution to European Jewry. What did the prospect that soon all Europe would be at his feet mean to Hitler?

Hitler seems to have put the European Jewish question on the agenda with renewed urgency, and the bacillus metaphor dominated his language. On July 22 he spoke to the visiting Croatian Marshal Kvaternik about his intentions concerning the Jews of Europe. Owing to a missing page in the protocol, the historian enters Hitler’s monologue in midstream:

. . . for if even just one state for whatever reasons tolerates one Jewish family in it, then this will become the bacillus source for a new decomposition. If there were no more Jews in Europe, then the unity of the European states would no longer be destroyed. Where one will send the Jews, to Siberia or Madagascar, is all the same. He [Hitler] would approach each state with this demand.

( . . . denn wenn auch nur ein Staat aus irgendwelchen Gründen eine jüdische Familie bei sich dulde, so würde diese der Bazillusherd für eine neue Zersetzung werden. Wohin man die Juden schicke, nach Sibirien oder Madagaskar, sei gleichgültig. Er werde an jeden Staat mit dieser Forderung herantreten.)32

If Hitler was informing even a visiting field marshal from Croatia of his intention to approach every state in Europe and demand the total evacuation of the Jews, what was he saying to Himmler and Heydrich? That they received signals from Hitler to turn their attention now to the wider question of European Jewry—and this against the background of the signal to commence systematic mass murder on Soviet territory—seems clear.

Within Eichmann’s Gestapo bureau for Jewish affairs, new manpower was added in this month of July. Sturmbannführer Friedrich Suhr was made Referent for the “Final Solution of the Jewish question,” especially for foreign countries.33 On July 31 Heydrich visited Göring and obtained his signature on a deceptively simple document of a mere three sentences—a document that presumably originated from Heydrich himself. Extending the powers entrusted to Heydrich on January 24, 1939, to organize a solution to the Jewish question through emigration or evacuation, this document authorized him (1) to make “all necessary preparations” (alle erforderlichen Vorbereitungen) for a “total solution of the Jewish question” (Gesamtlösung der Judenfrage) in the European territories under German influence; (2) to coordinate the participation of those organizations whose jurisdictions were affected; and (3) to submit a “comprehensive draft” (Gesamtentwurf) of this plan for a “Final Solution to the Jewish Question” (Endlösung der Judenfrage).34 The authorization does not explicitly mention mass murder, of course. The question, then, is did Heydrich at this point still understand the Final Solution as the mass expulsion of European Jewry into inhospitable regions of a conquered Soviet Union (and accompanying decimation) in order to make the German empire free of Jews, or was “the Final Solution” a term now freighted with a new and even more fateful meaning?

Both immediate context and subsequent events indicate that the authorization of July 31 was understood as Heydrich’s “charter” to draw up a “feasibility study” for the mass murder of European Jewry, procured from Göring in response to Hitler’s incitement of mid-July. The new authorization was received by Heydrich, who already had a previous authorization, dated January 24, 1939, and signed by Göring, for coordinating Jewish emigration. When Jewish emigration gave way to successive plans for massive “resettlement,” Heydrich had felt no need for a new authorization and cited the older one when relentlessly asserting jurisdiction over the Madagascar Plan in 1940 and other resettlement activities.35 Moreover, he had just spent the previous months organizing the Einsatzgruppen, which exactly at this time were moving into a full-scale extermination campaign against Soviet Jewry. The historical context would thus suggest that Heydrich needed the July 1941 authorization, not to continue the emigration and expulsion activities over which he had long established unchallenged jurisdiction, but rather because he now faced a new and awesome task that would dwarf even the systematic murder program emerging on Soviet territory.36

It had taken five months for the murder of Soviet Jewry to emerge from early conceptions of a “war of destruction” to the first steps of full-scale implementation, and the Final Solution would be a far more complex program. Thus Hitler’s instigation and the Göring authorization were only the first moves in a process that would stretch out over months. There was, after all, no precedent for the destruction plan that Himmler and Heydrich were to prepare. The task they faced posed daunting problems for which the solutions were not self-evident. Hence a seeming ambivalence continued to surround Jewish policy in the late summer and autumn of 1941. One possible conception of how the Final Solution might be implemented—through massive deportation to factories of death equipped with facilities to kill on an assembly-line basis through poison gas—emerged by October. But other options remained open as well, and the physical and political preparations even to begin implementing the Final Solution in this way were only in place in the spring of 1942.

Only at the end of this journey of innovation did the Final Solution take on an air of obviousness and inevitability that could not have been apparent to the perpetrators at the time. These pathfinders to the Final Solution, these inventors of a bureaucratically organized assembly-line mass murder, groped their way along a trail filled with contingencies and uncertainties. These uncertainties, however, must not disguise the fact that the perpetrators sensed what was expected of them and what they were looking for. The extermination camp was not an accident. It did not result from some mysterious process of spontaneous generation. It was a horrific monument to the perpetrators’ problem-solving abilities, but they needed lead time to invent and construct it.

Tracing this path to the Final Solution is made difficult not only by the uncertainties of the perpetrators but also by the problem of evidence. Hitler operated in a very nonbureaucratic manner, verbally indicating his “wishes” and priorities.37 No paper trail leads to the Führerhauptquartier. At the next echelon, the files of Himmler and Heydrich regarding the Final Solution were destroyed. The historian is left with copies of a few key papers—such as the Göring authorization, the Einsatzgruppen reports, and the Wannsee protocol—that Himmler and Heydrich sent to others, but not with the vital internal working papers at the coordinating center.

However, Hitler’s words and Himmler’s and Heydrich’s actions at the center set in motion waves of political signals that radiated outward. Like expanding concentric circles, they encompassed more and more people who, reading these signals, became aware that something new was expected of them. Some documentation and witnesses did survive the war; they allow the historian to establish fixed points and thus to plot (or at least make informed speculations about) the course of these expanding concentric circles. When the historian discovers at what point certain perpetrators first knew that they were part of a program to murder the Jews of Europe, to be carried out in an unprecedented manner, he or she can then extrapolate backward in time and upward and inward through the hierarchy to calculate with some probability what had taken place at the center of the Nazi regime.

Another difficulty in assessing the evidence is the polycratic nature of the Nazi regime. Various Nazis received differing amounts of information and attained differing degrees of awareness. They also had differing interpretations and conceptions of how the Jewish question was to be solved and what Hitler expected of them. Thus they traveled by different paths and different timetables to the Final Solution. At any given point, therefore, what Frank, Rosenberg, or Goebbels understood about the state of Nazi Jewish policy could be quite different from what Himmler and Heydrich understood. It is this confusing and incomplete evidence that we must now survey to re-create Nazi Germany’s path from the War of Destruction to the Final Solution.

The spectacular military successes in the Soviet Union and Hitler’s mid-July exhortations created a new atmosphere and set off a series of reactions within Nazi Germany over the months of August, September, and October. These reactions took on different forms. Notable Nazi leaders as well as obscure lower- and middle-echelon officials pressed for immediate deportations. Those threatened with being on the receiving end of deportations objected. Others began to anticipate future events and either openly advocated or actually commenced the mass killing of Jews. And finally, within the SS and Führer Chancellery, a still relatively small group of men set about inventing the extermination camp as the technological and organizational solution to the task Hitler had posed to Himmler and Heydrich in July. These four reactions would sometimes run separately, sometimes intermingle, over the next three months.

Only at the end of October did the various strands of Jewish policy again come together, creating the initial outline of the course Nazi Germany was embarking upon. Until then the Nazi leadership envisaged solving their self-imposed Jewish question through expulsion, accompanied by no small amount of outright killing and attrition, in order to create a German empire free of Jews. Thereafter, the vision was clearer. No Jews were to escape the German grasp, and no Jews were in the end to be left alive. If before August 1941 the Jewish question was to be solved “one way or another,” after October it was to be solved in one way—through the death of all Jews.

The exhilaration and euphoria of victory affected not only Hitler. The Nazi hopes placed in various emigration and expulsion plans over the years had been dashed. By late 1940 a solution to the Jewish question in Europe had, except for piecemeal emigration, been postponed until after the war. To a whole variety of Nazis, therefore, seeming victory over the Soviet Union offered both the time and the place to fulfill the commitment that had fueled Nazi Jewish policy. A veritable consensus and competition to resume deportations—the logical consequence of the expulsion policies of 1939–40—permeated the Nazi power structure in the late summer and fall of 1941. As a result, even while continuing his verbal exhortations, Hitler had to curb rather than encourage the deportation zeal of his followers.

Heydrich and Goebbels took the lead. In August 1941 both of them impatiently pressured Hitler for intensified Jewish measures, and especially for deportations from Germany. On August 15 Goebbels’s state secretary, Leopold Gutterer, chaired a meeting attended mostly by party faithful but also by the Interior Ministry expert for racial questions, Bernhard Lösener, to discuss the issue of obligating the Jews to wear special markings. Gutterer justified this renewed attempt to have a hand in Jewish policy on the grounds that the marking of Jews was a matter vital to the morale of the German war effort. Blaming the Jews for every problem from the lack of housing to the shortage of strawberries, Gutterer noted that only 19,000 of the 70,000 Berlin Jews were working. The rest should be “carted off to Russia. . . best of all actually would be to kill them [italics mine]” (nach Russland abkarren . . . am besten wäre es, diese überhaupt totzuschlagen). Less rhetorically, Gutterer proposed numerous measures of intensified restriction and persecution, the precondition for the enforcement of which was the marking of Jews.

Eichmann then informed the gathering that a marking proposal had already been made to Göring, who had replied that it required the Führer’s decision, and the RSHA had thus prepared a proposal that Bormann would present to Hitler. As for evacuating the Jews, Eichmann added, Heydrich had also already made this proposal to Hitler. The Führer had “rejected evacuations during the war [italics mine]” (Evakuierungen während des Krieges abgelehnt). However, he had allowed Heydrich to prepare a proposal for a “partial evacuation of the larger cities.”38

Goebbels did not wait for Bormann to act on Heydrich’s marking proposal. He met with Hitler on August 19. An unsigned Propaganda Ministry memorandum for Goebbels, dated August 17, was presumably written to prepare him for this meeting. The memo invoked the alleged disgust and embitterment of German soldiers returning from the east when they encountered Jews in Germany running around freely, buying up scarce goods, and occupying scarce apartments:

It is clear that when the soldiers return from the war, they must find no more Jews. But it is equally clear that in the meantime harsh immediate measures must be enacted so that morale will not be poisoned by such grievances. Efforts in this direction founder upon such bureaucratic impediments as formalistic, juridical thinking, competency struggles, and dawdling. This last factor is further promoted by the line of thought that the Jews will soon disappear, and it is thus not worth shifting the machinery for drafting laws into high gear.

All the ministries and agencies concerned were agreed that marking was the prerequisite for all the intensified measures that were being planned.39

At the Goebbels-Hitler meeting on August 19, the Jewish question was discussed at length.

The Führer is convinced his prophecy in the Reichstag, that should Jewry succeed once again in provoking a world war, this would end in their annihilation, is being confirmed. It is coming true in these weeks and months with a certainty that appears almost sinister. In the east the Jews are paying the price, in Germany they have already paid in part and will have to pay still more in the future.

(Der Führer ist der Überzeugung, dass seine damalige Prophezeiung im Reichstag, dass, wenn es dem Judentum gelänge, noch einmal einen Weltkrieg zu provozieren, er mit der Vernichtung der Juden enden würde, sich bestätigt. Sie bewahrheitet sich in diesen Wochen und Monaten mit einer fast unheimlich anmutenden Sicherheit. Im Osten müssen die Juden die Zeche bezahlen; in Deutschland haben sie sie zum Teil schon bezahlt und werden sie in Zukunft noch mehr bezahlen müssen.)

Apparently Goebbels, like Heydrich earlier, took the opportunity to press for immediate deportations, but without success, for he noted that “it is not yet possible to make Berlin a city entirely free of Jews.” But Goebbels was consoled by the fact “the Führer has promised me. . . that immediately after the end of the campaign [italics mine] in the east, I can deport the Jews of Berlin” (hat der Führer mir zugesagt, dass ich die Juden aus Berlin unmittelbar nach der Beendigung des Ostfeldzugs in den Osten abschieben kann).

As for their subsequent fate in the east, Hitler hinted ominously, “Then they will be worked over in the harsh climate there.” Even more threatening, he noted: “As for the Jewish question, today in any case one could say that a man like Antonescu, for example, proceeds much more radically in this matter than we have done until now. But I will not rest or be idle until we too have gone all the way with the Jews” (bis auch wir dem Judentum gegenüber die letzten Konzequenzen gezogen haben).40

On the more limited issue of marking, however, Goebbels was not disappointed. On August 20 and 21 the word was quickly telephoned around Berlin that he had obtained Hitler’s approval for a marking decree.41 Goebbels had stolen the march on Heydrich and the RSHA, which in turn had been ignoring the Reich Interior Ministry.42 The last now moved belatedly to reassert its official but tenuous jurisdiction in the matter. State Secretary Stuckart presided over the meeting of August 29 held to draft the marking legislation. In the end, however, it was the RSHA that came away with the spoils. An RSHA draft formed the basis of discussion and was for the most part agreed upon. Moreover, the marking decree, dated September 1 and published on September 5, was issued in the form of a police ordinance because an ordinance was procedurally much quicker than a law. In addition, the tricky question of exempting foreign Jews of certain countries but not others could be handled by internal orders from Himmler in agreement with the Foreign Office, rather than in the public text of a law.43

The events of August are instructive in a number of ways. First, they illuminate the prevailing atmosphere. A Propaganda Ministry official like Gutterer could openly advocate, before a meeting of mostly party officials in Berlin, that the killing of German Jews was the optimal if as yet unattainable solution. Goebbels could confide in his diary Hitler’s prophesy that in the future the Jews of Germany would pay the price currently being paid by Jews in the east. Murder was in the air. Second, Hitler was directly involved in the decision-making process and controlled the pace of events. Although proposals were initiated by others, decisions concerning both marking and deportations could be taken only by him.44

Third, with the likes of both Heydrich and Goebbels—soon to be joined by others—pressing for deportations, Hitler at this point exercised restraint despite his inflammatory rhetoric and ominous threats about the looming fate awaiting German Jews. It must be kept in mind, however, that in the context of August 1941, postponing deportations until after the war only meant a very short delay. Fourth, Hitler’s decision to postpone the deportation of German Jews until after the war while simultaneously pushing for a rapid pacification in Russia indicates that the onslaught against Soviet Jewry as part of the “war of destruction” on the one hand and the Final Solution of the Jewish question in Europe on the other were as yet two separate programs or at least two distinct phases resulting from different decisions and involving different timetables. They did not merge into a single enterprise until later.

Finally, it should be noted that Hitler’s prophesy and the murder of the Jews, already being realized on Soviet territory and anticipated for German Jews following victory, were not tied to a “world war” defined by American involvement. For Hitler the fulfillment of his prophecy need not wait upon American entry into the war.45 Also, on August 20, the day after Goebbels visited the Führer headquarters, Himmler not only dined with Hitler but had lunch and a long walk with Göring.46 Presumably the mood and expectations that Hitler shared with Goebbels were being expressed to the rest of the top Nazi leadership as well.

Proposals for deportation and murder were not confined to the top Nazi leaders in Berlin. In Poznan a group of SS officers deliberated about the Jewish problem in the Warthegau. On July 16, 1941, Sturmbannführer Rolf Heinz Höppner wrote to “dear comrade Eichmann,” summarizing their discussions. After weighing the possibility of concentrating all Warthegau Jews in a huge labor camp, thus requiring fewer guards and lessening the chance of epidemic then threatening the ghettos, they considered two further proposals:

There exists this winter the danger that all the Jews can no longer be fed. It should be seriously considered if it would not be the most humane solution to dispose of the Jews, insofar as they are not capable of work, through a quick-acting agent. In any case it would be more pleasant than to let them starve.

In addition the proposal was made to sterilize all the female Jews in this camp from whom children could still be expected, so that with this generation the Jewish problem is in fact completely solved.

Asking for Eichmann’s opinion, Höppner concluded, “These things sound somewhat fantastic but are in my opinion definitely feasible.”47

There is no record of Eichmann’s reply to Höppner, but clearly the two remained in close contact. On September 3 Höppner submitted to his two superiors in the RSHA, Ehlich and Eichmann, a proposal for a major restructuring and expansion of the UWZ to handle large-scale deportations in the postwar period involving not just Jews but other racially undesirable elements as well. The memo, he noted, had been drawn up “on the basis of the recent consultation” (italics mine) (auf Grund der letzten Rücksprache) with Eichmann in Berlin. This “recent consultation” would have taken place at virtually the same time that Eichmann altered the wording of one of his stock formulations. Where in past correspondence with the Foreign Office he had referred to the “imminent Final Solution” (kommende Endlösung), on August 28, 1941, he added the phrase “now in preparation” (die kommende und in Vorbereitung befindliche Endlösung).48

Basically Höppner wanted the UWZ transformed into a subsection of the RSHA within the Gestapo, in charge of both the areas from which people would be deported and the “reception territories” (Aufnahmegebieten). His concrete proposals concerning the latter had to remain “patchwork” (Stückwerk) for the moment

because I do not know the intentions of the Führer and the Reichsführer-SS, as well as the Chief of the Security Police and SD, concerning the shaping of this territory. I could well imagine that large areas of the present Soviet Russia are being prepared to receive the undesired ethnic elements of the greater German settlement area. . . . To go into further details about the organization of this reception area would be fantasy, because first of all the basic decisions must be made. It is essential in this regard, by the way, that total clarity prevail about what finally shall happen to those undesirable ethnic elements deported from the greater German resettlement area. Is it the goal to ensure them a certain level of life in the long run, or shall they be totally eradicated.

(da ich die Absichten des Führers und des Reichsführers SS, sowie des Chefs der Sicherheitspolizei und des SD über die Ausgestaltung dieser Gebiete nicht kenne. Ich könnte mir vorstellen, dass man zur Aufnahme der im grossdeutschen Siedlungsraum unerwünschten Volksteile grosse Räume im jetzigen Sowjet-Russland bereitstellt. . . . Auf weitere Einzelheiten der Organisation dieser Aufnahmegebiete einzugehen, wäre Phantasterei, da zunächst die grundlegenden Entscheidungen ergehen müssten. Wesentlich ist dabei im Übrigen, dass von Anfang an völlige Klarheit darüber herrscht, was nun mit diesen ausgesiedelten, für die grossdeutschen Siedlungsräume unerwünschten Volksteilen endgültig geschehen soll, ob das Ziel darin besteht, ihnen ein gewisses Leben für dauernd zu sichern, oder ob sie völlig ausgemerzt werden sollen.)49

In late August/early September, it would appear that both in Poznan and in the RSHA in Berlin, planning and preparation for a new phase in Jewish policy were underway, and “total eradication” was being openly discussed. Moreover, great impatience and frustration was growing over the lack of “total clarity” because “basic decisions” had still not been taken.

At the other end of Europe, Sturmbannführer Carltheo Zeitschel, attached to the German embassy in Paris, was also growing impatient. He advised Ambassador Abetz on August 22, 1941, that “the progressive conquest and occupation of extensive eastern territory could now bring about a final satisfactory solution in no time to the Jewish problem in Europe.” Unlike Madagascar, which would require waiting until after the war and overcoming great transportation difficulties, in the new territories one could begin concentrating the Jews somewhere even during the war. “It could not be such a big problem on this occasion if the Jews from all the other countries of Europe would be added and also those Jews now packed in ghettos in Warsaw, Litzmannstadt, Lublin, etc., were also deported there.” Zeitschel immodestly urged Abetz to carry the idea to Ribbentrop, who in turn should urge it upon Himmler, Rosenberg, and Göring.50

In mid-August the occupation authorities in Serbia, faced with a growing insurgency, urged the deportation of Serbian Jews down the Danube to Romania or to the General Government.51 Ignored, this request was vehemently repeated three times, on September 8, 10, and 12, now with the backing of Ribbentrop’s roving ambassador, Edmund Veesenmayer.52 The Foreign Office ruled out deportation to Romania, but Undersecretary Martin Luther asked his Jewish expert, Franz Rademacher, to discuss with the RSHA the possibility of deportation to Russia or the General Government. Rademacher telephoned Eichmann and jotted down the latter’s cryptic response that “residence in Russia and GG impossible. Not even the Jews from Germany can be lodged there. Eichmann proposes shooting.”53 The Serbian Jews were not going to be given precedence over German Jews for deportation, and at the moment requests to deport German Jews had been blocked by Hitler. That Eichmann felt free to casually recommend shooting is evidence of the same mood and expectation seen in Höppner’s memos and Gutterer’s comments.

However, on September 14, the day after Eichmann told Rademacher that not even the German Jews could be lodged in the east, the deputy director of the political division of the Ostministerium, Otto Bräutigam, arrived at the Führerhauptquartier with a proposal from his boss, Alfred Rosenberg. In retaliation for Stalin’s deportation of the Volga Germans to Siberia, Rosenberg proposed the deportation of all Jews from central Europe to the east. Shunted aside by others at the Führer headquarters, Bräutigam finally found Oberst Schmundt of Hitler’s staff, who much to his surprise immediately asked for Bräutigam’s memorandum because “it was a very important and urgent matter, in which the Führer was very interested.” When Bräutigam inquired the next day about the fate of the Rosenberg proposal, he was told that Hitler would first confer with Ribbentrop on it.54

Before Ribbentrop met with Hitler, however, he had thrust upon him yet other deportation proposals. As we have seen, on August 22 Carltheo Zeitschel in Paris had urged his superior, Otto Abetz, to propose using the newly conquered eastern territories for a solution to the Jewish question. At the same time, faced with growing opposition to the German occupation in France following the invasion of the Soviet Union, the military commander, General von Stülpnagel, had the French police carry out a wave of arrests between August 20 and 23. In the end, 4,323 men—all Jews—were interned in a camp at Drancy outside Paris. The German military wanted to deter further resistance but did not want to alienate the French administration or arouse resentment in the general population. Their priority was still maximum exploitation of France with minimum German manpower, a balancing act they hoped to maintain by making the Jews bear the brunt of German reprisal measures.55

This provided the impetus for Zeitschel to take the initiative once again with Abetz, who was preparing for his scheduled meetings with Ribbentrop, Himmler, and Hitler at the Führer headquarters on September 16. The internment camps were filled with Jews, Zeitschel noted to Abetz before his departure. The ambassador should ask Himmler to deport them to the east as soon as possible. This would free up the only camps available, so that more Jews could be interned.56

Pressure for deportation also came from various Gauleiter in Germany. On the night of September 15, Hamburg was bombed. The Hamburg Gauleiter Karl Kaufmann urged Hitler to permit the evacuation of Jews from the damaged city so that their lodgings could be redistributed to those made homeless.57 The Gauleiter of Cologne also sent a delegation, including the head of the Stapoleitstelle Emanuel Schäfer and the party Kreisleiter Schaller, to Berlin to urge the evacuation of his Jews.58

Himmler and Heydrich were not inactive while this pressure for deportation was building up from various directions. On September 1, 1941, the two men met together. On the following day, Himmler met with his HSSPF in the General Government, Friedrich Wilhelm Krüger, and discussed the “Jewish Question—Resettlement from the Reich.” (Judenfrage-Aussiedlung aus dem Reich)59 Two days later Himmler met with his HSSPF from the Warthegau, Wilhelm Koppe, and probably discussed the deportation of 60,000 Reich Jews to Lodz.60 If in both these meetings Himmler was seeking reception areas in order to persuade Hitler of the feasibility of beginning deportations from the Reich, he was apparently more successful in the second meeting than the first. On September 14 Eichmann informed the Foreign Office that Russia and the General Government could not receive Jews even from the Reich and thus certainly not from Serbia. If Krüger had persuaded Himmler of the impossibility of deporting Jews to the General Government, presumably because of the anticipated reaction of Frank, apparently Koppe offered more hope concerning the Warthegau, as subsequent events in mid-September revealed.

On the afternoon of September 16 Abetz met with Himmler and then Hitler. The latter expansively sketched to Abetz his vision of leveling to the ground the recently besieged Leningrad and turning Russian territory to the Urals into Germany’s “India.” Himmler also met with Greifelt and Meyer of the RKFDV to discuss a series of issues, including compensation to the Baltic Germans, the Judenfrage, “settlement in the east” (Siedlung Ost), and brickworks. The following day Ribbentrop met with Hitler in the afternoon and Himmler in the evening.61

Out of this cluster of meetings, Hitler seems to have reached the basic decision to proceed with the deportation of Reich Jews that just weeks earlier he had deferred until after the war. Neither Ribbentrop nor Rosenberg seems to have been informed, though they had each played a small role in the decision-making process. Gauleiter Kaufmann would later write: “The Führer immediately accepted my suggestion and issued the appropriate orders for the deportation of the Jews.”62 But it is not clear when Kaufmann actually learned that the Hamburg Jews would be deported. It is clear, however, that Himmler learned of Hitler’s change of heart immediately and proceeded without delay to inaugurate the new policy.

On September 18, 1941, Himmler wrote Arthur Greiser in the Warthegau: “The Führer wishes that the Old Reich and Protectorate be emptied and freed of Jews from west to east as quickly as possible.” (Der Führer wünscht, dass möglichst bald das Altreich und das Protektorat vom Westen nach Osten von Juden geleert und befreit werden.) Thus Himmler intended, “as a first step” (als erste Stufe), to deport the Jews of the Old Reich and Protectorate into the incorporated territories, “in order to deport them yet further to the east next spring” (um sie im nächsten Frühjahr noch weiter nach dem Osten abzuschieben). He therefore was going to lodge for the winter some 60,000 Jews in the Lodz ghetto. Himmler understood that this involved “difficulties and burdens” for Greiser, but requested his full support for the “Jewish migration” that would be arranged between Heydrich and the Warthegau HSSPF Wilhelm Koppe.63 Himmler apparently tried to use the Hamburg bombing as a means of breaking down Frank’s resistance to receiving any Jewish transports from the Third Reich, but without success. In early October Frank specifically vetoed a plan to evacuate two trainloads of Hamburg Jews to Hrubieszow in the Lublin district.64

What brought about this decisive turning point? Unless the likes of Rosenberg, Ribbentrop, and Kaufmann are to be credited with greater influence on Hitler than Heydrich and Goebbels, whose similar proposals a month earlier were unsuccessful, it is best to see the proposals and interventions of Rosenberg via Bräutigam, Zeitschel via Abetz and Ribbentrop, and Gauleiter Kaufmann more as the occasion than the basic cause of Hitler’s change of heart.65 A look at the correlation between Hitler’s reversal and Germany’s changing fortunes of war on the eastern front points to a second peak of German victory euphoria as a crucial factor in the timing of this decision.

Following the heady days of mid-July, the German war effort encountered increasing frustrations. While advance on the central front halted and the German military sought to consolidate its gains, refit its units, and prepare a final push on the now not-so-distant Moscow, Hitler attempted to persuade his generals to divert armored forces north and south for offensives against Leningrad and Kiev. Hitler made it clear that he gave priority to the capture of economic targets over Moscow, which he dubbed a “mere geographic concept.” The generals resisted stubbornly and dragged their feet until Hitler unequivocally imposed his will on August 18. In the end Hitler successfully insisted that there would be no resumption of an offensive against Moscow until all his goals in the north and south had been achieved.66 It was during this period of strategic stalemate with his generals that Hitler also resisted the pressures of Goebbels and Heydrich to begin immediate deportations from the Third Reich. But Goebbels also reported from his meeting with Hitler on August 19 that after several very difficult weeks, Hitler had expressed renewed hope. He would not only surround and starve out Leningrad and Kiev, but the refitted tank forces would reach Moscow before winter. “Then for all practical purposes at least the military striking power of Bolshevism is disposed of.”67

The offensive in the north resumed first, and Leningrad was successfully cut off in early September. The Ukrainian campaign that Hitler imposed on his reluctant generals quickly followed. On September 12 Ewald von Kleist’s tanks broke through the Soviet lines behind Kiev. On the same day German forces cracked the defensive perimeter around Leningrad. In the words of Alan Clark, this day could be “reckoned the low point in the fortunes of the Red Army for the whole war.”68 By September 16 Kleist had joined up with Heinz Guderian at Lokhvitsa to complete the vast Kiev encirclement. By September 26 Kiev had fallen and 665,000 Soviet prisoners had been taken.69

The resumption of successful offensives on the Leningrad and Ukrainian fronts, therefore, was the military context of Hitler’s mid-September indication to Himmler that deportations from the Third Reich could begin. As the Soviet position in Kiev became increasingly desperate, Hitler met with Himmler, Heydrich, Goebbels, and what the latter termed a “great parade of notables” in lengthy meetings on September 23 and 24. Speaking with Heydrich, Goebbels expressed his desire to deport the Jews of Berlin as soon as possible. Heydrich replied that “this could occur as soon as we arrive at a clarification of the military situation in the east. In the end they should be transported into camps that have been erected by the Bolsheviks. These camps were erected by the Jews, so what could be more fitting than that they now also be populated by Jews.” (Das wird der Fall sein können, sobald wir im Osten zu einer Bereinigung der militärischen Fragen gekommen sind. Sie sollen am Ende [in die von den] Bolschewisten angelegten Lager [. . .] transportiert werden. Diese Lager sind von den Juden errichtet worden; was läge also näher, als dass sie nun auch von den Juden bevölkert werden.) Speaking with Hitler, the propaganda minister learned, “The Führer is of the opinion that the Jews are to be removed from Germany step-by-step. The first cities that have to be cleared of Jews are Berlin, Vienna, and Prague. Berlin is first in line, and I hope it will be possible even in the course of this year to deport a significant portion of Berlin Jews to the east.”

Goebbels’s hope for deporting the bulk of Berlin’s Jews by the end of the year stemmed from Hitler’s extraordinarily optimistic views on the military situation, the clarification of which Heydrich had said was the one remaining obstacle to commencing deportation. Hitler thought the Kiev encirclement would be cleaned up in a few days, and then Germany would advance quickly on other fronts. “The spell is broken. In the next three to four weeks we must once again expect great victories.” (Der Bann ist gebrochen. Wir haben in den nächsten drei bis vier Wochen wiederum grosse neue Siege zu erwarten.) Hitler believed that serious fighting would last until October 15, after which date Bolshevism would be routed. After relishing the destruction and starvation that awaited Leningrad, Hitler prescribed the same fate for Moscow. German preparations were sufficiently advanced that he once again contemplated the encirclement of Moscow by the fateful date of October 15.70 Between mid-August and mid-September, Hitler’s expectations of quick victory had increased enormously. Was it mere coincidence that his reversal of policy concerning deportations took place at this time?

The need for “a clarification of the military situation in the east” posed by Heydrich to Goebbels was not long in coming. Having had his way with his generals, Hitler on September 6 had permitted Army Group Center to prepare for a decisive campaign to destroy the opposing Soviet forces.71 On September 30, just four days after the fall of Kiev, Guderian’s army began the offensive, and on October 2 the rest of the forces of Operation Typhoon struck along the central front.

The initial reports on the progress of Operation Typhoon indicated a tremendous success. Goebbels, who persuaded Hitler to return to Berlin on October 4 to give a speech at the Sportspalast, recorded his Führer’s mood:

He looks at his best and is in an exuberantly optimistic frame of mind. He literally exudes optimism. . . . The offensive has been surprisingly successful so far. . . . The Führer is convinced that if the weather remains halfway favorable, the Soviet army will be essentially demolished in fourteen days.

(Er ist von besten Aussehen, befindet sich in einer übersprudelnd optimistischen Laune. Er strahlt förmlich Optimismus aus. . . . Die Offensive ist bisher zu überraschenden Erfolgen gekommen. . . . Der Führer ist der Überzeugung, dass wenn das Wetter halbwegs günstig bleibt, die sowjetische Wehrmacht in vierzehn Tagen im wesentlichen zertrümmert sein wird.)72

On October 6, one day before the double encirclement of Vyazma and Bryansk was complete, Hitler again spoke of deportations: “All Jews have to be removed from the Protectorate, not only to the General Government but straight on to the east.” But Hitler voiced another reservation. “Only the great shortage of transport prevents this being done at once. Together with the Jews of the Protectorate all the Jews of Vienna and Berlin must disappear.”73 But expectations remained high. By October 7 the Germans had completed the double encirclement at Vyazma and Bryansk that ultimately led to the capture of another 673,000 Soviet troops: On that day Goebbels again noted: “It goes well on the front. The Führer continues to be extraordinarily optimistic.” (Der Führer ist weiterhin ausserordentlich optimistisch.)74 Despite the transportation difficulties and the need for military clarification noted by Hitler and Heydrich, preparations for the deportations were in any case already underway. As one official in Prague noted subsequently, the first transport from Prague on October 16 “required quite lengthy preparation beforehand, from at least mid-September.”75

By the time of an October 10 conference in Prague, chaired by Heydrich,76 no further reservations were recorded. In addition to Lodz, Heydrich mentioned Riga and Minsk as destinations for 50,000 deported Jews. Similar to his earlier statement to Goebbels, Heydrich declared that “Nebe and Rasch [given his earlier reference to Riga, presumably he means Stahlecker here, not Rasch] could take in Jews in the camps for communist prisoners in the theater of operations” (könnten in das Lager für kommunistische Häftlinge im Operationsgebiet Juden mithineinnehmen). Deportations were to begin around October 15, and 5,000 Jews from Prague would be deported in the first month. “Because the Führer wishes that by the end of this year as many Jews as possible be removed from the German sphere,” Heydrich concluded, “all pending questions must be solved immediately. Even the transportation question must not present any problems.” (Da der Führer wünscht, dass noch Ende d. J. möglichst die Juden aus dem deutschen Raum herausgebracht sind, müssen die schwebenden Fragen umgehend gelöst werden. Auch die Transportfrage darf dabei keine Schwierigkeiten bedeuten.)77 The first deportation train, in fact, left Vienna on October 15, the same day that resistance died in the Vyazma pocket and panic spread through Moscow. This was also precisely the date Hitler had twice given to Goebbels on September 23 as when he expected the military verdict to be settled and serious fighting on the eastern front to be at an end. By the time the Bryansk pocket was liquidated on October 18, three more Jewish transports had departed from Prague, Luxemburg, and Berlin.78

The fundamental change in German policy at the center was not yet known on the periphery, where frustrated officials continued to press for deportation. The zealous Carltheo Zeitschel of the German embassy in Paris contacted Eichmann’s local representative, Theo Dannecker, on October 8. Zeitschel reported that Ambassador Abetz had taken the Zeitschel proposal to Himmler and received the promise that the Jews in the concentration camps of the occupied territories could be deported to the east as soon as transportation was available. Zeitschel urged Dannecker not to let Himmler’s “agreement in principle” be wasted. Every other week he should forward to Berlin the urgent request to deport the Jews of France as soon as possible.79 Apparently Zeitschel had also worked on the military authorities in France. On October 14, 1941, Frank asked the Ostministerium leader about the possibility of deporting the Jews of the General Government to the east. Rosenberg noted that the military administration in Paris had brought up a similar idea. Unfortunately, for the moment he saw no possibility for carrying out such deportation plans, but he promised to facilitate them in the future.80

By early October one question concerning the deportation of the Jews had been settled. Hitler had, after initial hesitation, embraced the idea of deporting as many Jews as possible from within Germany’s prewar borders by the end of the year. The other areas of the wider German empire aspiring to be included—the General Government, France, Serbia—were not yet, however, to be relieved of their Jews.

The limited deportation program approved by Hitler posed two major problems. The first was the question of reception areas. An overall plan for a total solution to the Jewish question, which Heydrich had been authorized to draw up on July 31, was not ready to be implemented. Where were the Jews deported from Germany to go? Himmler’s answer was to buy time until the following spring by lodging them over the winter partly in Lodz but mostly in Minsk and Riga, much to the consternation of the local German authorities on the receiving end. The second problem concerned those unable to rid themselves of their unwanted Jews. Faced with what seemed to be an intractable situation, they began on their own initiative to anticipate a murderous solution. It is to these local manifestations of consternation and anticipation that we must now turn.

CONSTERNATION AND ANTICIPATION

Lodz, Riga, and Minsk

If the deportation of the Jews was fervently hoped for by many Nazis, local German officials fated to be on the receiving end had a different perspective. Already in the early summer of 1941, Hans Biebow of the Lodz ghetto administration had found his attempts to stabilize the ghetto economy threatened by the prospect of having all the other Jews of the Warthegau interned in Lodz as well. Biebow warned of the catastrophic consequences if this were done without both enlarging the ghetto and ensuring adequate food supplies. Nonetheless, in mid-July the Warthegau Gauleiter, Greiser, ordered Lodz to accept 2,900 Jews from the Leslau district. The German authorities in Lodz dragged their feet and delayed this transfer until late September.81 By then, however, they were faced with a far greater threat in the form of Himmler’s letter to Greiser of September 18 announcing that 60,000 German Jews would be lodged in Lodz over the winter. The numbers were quickly scaled down to 20,000 Jews and 5,000 “Gypsies,” but the Lodz officials were still flabbergasted at the prospect. Biebow assiduously assembled counterarguments for his immediate superiors, Oberbürgermeister Ventzki and Regierungspräsident Uebelhoer. They promptly sent Biebow’s counterarguments, over their own signatures, to Himmler.

These counterarguments noted the past history of the Lodz ghetto. Initially the Jews lived solely off their hoarded goods, but such means of support eventually came to an end. Therefore, through great effort a “work ghetto” had been created, “in which the Jews today earn 80% of their subsistence through their own labor.” Some 95% of ghetto production went to fulfill military contracts. “If the Lodz ghetto were a pure decimation ghetto, then one could contemplate a greater concentration of Jews” (Wäre das Ghetto Litzmannstadt ein reines Dezimierungsghetto, dann könnte man an eine noch grössere Zusammenpferchung der Juden denken); however, it was a “finely tuned and thereby extremely sensitive component of the defense economy” (ein fein verästeltes und dadurch äusserst empfindliches Wehrwirtschaftsgebiet). Thus the addition of 20,000 Jews and above all 5,000 “Gypsies” would have catastrophic consequences. Factories would have to be closed to house the newcomers; military contracts would not be fulfilled; the ghetto would again have to be fed at the expense of the Reich; German workers would no longer be freed for military duty by virtue of the ghetto’s contribution to military production; epidemics would break out and cross the wire into the surrounding German population. For all these reasons the planned importation of 20,000 Jews and 5,000 “Gypsies” was “intolerable.”82

Himmler replied to Uebelhoer that while Ventzki (in fact Biebow) had written an “excellent” report, he did not appear to be an “old National Socialist.” In any case, their arguments were rejected from the start, because “endangerment of work for the war economy” was “the most beloved counterargument in Germany today . . . when one wants to refuse something.” It was “obviously not pleasant” to receive new Jews, but Himmler nonetheless asked Uebelhoer to understand that this was necessary “in accordance with the will of the Führer that the Jews should be driven out step-by-step from west to east” (gemäss dem Willen des Führers, dass die Juden von Westen nach Osten hin Stufe für Stufe ausgetrieben werden sollen).83

Before receiving this letter, however, Uebelhoer had gone to the Interior Ministry in Berlin, investigated the situation, and written again to Himmler to tell him that he (Himmler) had been deceived by Eichmann and Dr. Robert Schefe of the Lodz Gestapo. Eichmann’s claim to have consulted with Uebelhoer beforehand was false. His claim that the economic supervisor of the ghetto had agreed to the plan was false, for that man—Biebow—was in fact the author of the “excellent” report signed by Ventzki. Eichmann’s claim that the ghetto was subdivided into a work ghetto and a residence ghetto, so that adding people to the latter would not affect the former, was false. Finally, the claim of Dr. Schefe that the ghetto population had declined from 185,000 to 120,000 and thus could easily hold another 25,000 was false. The population had dropped from 160,000 to 145,000, but the ghetto had also been diminished in size. Uebelhoer concluded by describing the methods of Eichmann and the Lodz Gestapo as “ugly Gypsylike horse-trading manners” (von den Zigeunern übelgenommene [sic] Rosstäuschermanieren) and suggesting that the Jews be sent to Warsaw instead.84 Uebelhoer also induced General Thomas, head of the War Economy and Armaments Office, to make common cause with him.85

Himmler was not pleased and told Uebelhoer to read his letter again. “You have adopted quite the wrong tone and obviously forgotten that you were writing to a superior.” (Sie haben sich im Ton völlig vergriffen und offenkundig vergessen, dass Sie an einen Vorgesetzten geschrieben haben.) He gave instructions that any further communications from Uebelhoer were to be sent back until this matter had been cleared up.86 Heydrich took up the correspondence that Himmler now refused to pursue and harshly condemned Uebelhoer for his “oppositional attitude,” his “totally unrestrained and hostile manner,” his “deficient sense of belonging to the SS,” and his pettiness in attacking subordinate SS officers who were only following orders. Unless he received from Uebelhoer an immediate explanation concerning his ability to continue working with Dr. Schefe in the future, Heydrich would draw the “appropriate conclusions.”87 Subsequently, Greiser covered for Uebelhoer and assured Heydrich that the Regierungspräsident had carried out his orders. Himmler suggested that “the good Uebelhoer” should take a vacation to sooth his nerves; if he came back recovered, Himmler would consider the matter closed. In the meantime he trusted that Uebelhoer had learned the lesson that the interests of the Reich were higher than the local church tower (dass der Bau des Reiches höher ist als der Kirchturm von Litzmannstadt).88 Thus the deportations to Lodz were not deterred, but Uebelhoer’s career survived intact.

Less spectacular but equally ineffective was the reaction of the German officials in Riga to the unexpected and unwanted deluge of Reich Jews. On October 11, 1941, Einsatzgruppe A commander Stahlecker informed the Generalkommissar of Latvia, Dr. Otto-Heinrich Drechsler, that he needed materials for a big concentration camp to be built to lodge Jews from the Reich who were being sent to Riga in accordance with the Führer’s wish. Ten days later Sturmbannführer Rudolf Lange of EK 2 elaborated; it was a question of 25,000 Jews in a camp outside Riga.89 Three days after that, on October 24, Reichskommissar for the Ostland, Hinrich Lohse, and Drechsler met with Lange to discuss the issue. Lange was insistent “that he was merely acting according to the order of Obergruppenführer Heydrich.” He had been instructed to inform the authorities of the Reichskommissariat Ostland, which he had done. Drechsler complained that he had not been informed for the purpose of discussing the issue but merely notified after the fact. Because of the “salient political significance” of these measures, Lohse added, he intended to go to Berlin the next morning to clarify the matter. To a pointed question, Lange assured Lohse that “essential work” on the camp had not yet begun, so that irrespective of construction on the camp other decisions could be made.90

While Lohse was in Berlin to discuss the Jewish transports to the Ostland, the civil administration there was informed that the transports would begin arriving in Minsk on November 11 and in Riga on November 19. Thereafter, until December 17 transports of 1,000 Reich Jews would arrive every other day. Five of the Riga-bound transports would be sent to the ghetto in Kaunas. In Riga itself, a camp was under construction at Salaspils. Since it would not be completed in time, the first transport would be lodged in the former troop barracks at Jungfernhof.91 Lohse’s assistant, Friedrich Trampedach, telegraphed to the Ostministerium and to Lohse at the Hotel Adlon in Berlin an urgent request to stop the transports because the Judenlager ought to be located much further east.92 In Berlin the Ostministerium Jewish expert, Erhard Wetzel, had just had very interesting discussions (which will be analyzed below) about the eventual fate of the Jewish transports to the Ostland. Dr. Leibbrandt of the political division of the Ostministerium could thus assure the Germans in Riga that the Jews were indeed going to be sent “further east. Camps in Riga and Minsk only temporary measures, therefore no objections on our part” (weiter nach Osten. Lager in Riga und Minsk nur vorläufige Massnahmen, daher hier keine Bedenken).93

When the military commander in the Ostland, General Braemer, learned of the intended deportation of 25,000 Reich Jews to Minsk, he too objected. Already the Jews of Belorussia—pro-Bolshevik and anti-German—were the “driving force” behind the resistance. The addition of German Jews, who according to Braemer were far superior intellectually to the Belorussians, would endanger security even more. Considering also the problems of food and transportation shortages, the military commander urgently requested that the Jewish transports be stopped. One week later Lohse tried to put an end to such protests, issuing instructions that “no objections were to be raised anymore to any kind of transport from the Reich.”94 Despite Lohse’s attempt to override Braemer’s objections, they were in this rare case of military exigency not without effect. Only 7 rather than the planned 25 Jewish transports were in fact sent to Minsk.95

Himmler and Heydrich were reluctant to compromise on the issue of Jewish deportations to Lodz, Riga, Kaunas, and Minsk. The transports could not be stopped entirely by local objection, although in the face of strong opposition in Lodz and Minsk the numbers of projected deportees were scaled back. Himmler and Heydrich were not unsympathetic about the problems posed to local authorities by virtue of this influx of Jews. They were more than willing to help local authorities mitigate overcrowding, not by halting the transports but rather by reducing the Jewish population through other means. And the consternation felt by local German authorities at the prospect of receiving more Jews made them only more ready to participate in mass murder when that time came.

Serbia

While some fated to receive new shipments of Jews from the Reich protested in vain, others viewing the seemingly intractable situation of the Jews within the Nazi empire drew their own conclusions, thus anticipating the Final Solution. In Serbia situational and ideological factors combined with deadly effect. On the one hand, the request to deport the Jews of Serbia had been vetoed in Berlin, leaving the Jews trapped in a country convulsed by a growing, communist-led insurgency. On the other hand, the German military forces occupying Serbia shared the views of the German military as it prepared for a war of destruction in the Soviet Union—above all, the stereotypical equation of Jews with communism. As a result, the first systematic massacre of European Jews outside Soviet territory was perpetrated by the German military in Serbia in October 1941.96

Following Yugoslavia’s rejection of an alliance with Germany at the end of March 1941, Yugoslavia along with Greece had been overrun in the following month. The country was divided up among Germany’s southeast European allies, although the Serbian heartland remained a German occupation zone under a military administration of unparalleled complexity and confusion. A Luftwaffe general—first Ludwig von Schröder, then Heinrich Danckelmann—served as military commander in Serbia (Militärbefehlshaber in Serbien), responsible to the Wehrmacht commander in Greece, Field Marshal Wilhelm List. The Serbian military commander had two staffs: a command staff, which exercised direct control over the regional defense battalions in Serbia and a more distant control over General Paul Bader’s 65th Corps; and an administrative staff under State Councillor and Gruppenführer Harald Turner,97 which supervised the activities of a Serbian provisional government, the German commandants in the four districts into which Serbia had been divided, the Sipo-SD Einsatzgruppe of Wilhelm Fuchs, and the 64th Reserve Police Battalion. In addition, Göring’s Four-Year Plan was represented by a plenipotentiary for the economy, Hans Neuhausen, and the Foreign Office was represented by yet another plenipotentiary for all matters touching on foreign policy, Felix Benzler.

Even before the uprising in Serbia was triggered by the German invasion of the Soviet Union, German occupation authorities had already imposed the usual array of anti-Jewish measures: registration, exclusion from many occupations and social activities, expropriation of property, marking, and forced labor. Almost as an afterthought, all these measures had been applied to Serbian “Gypsies” as well. The German authorities in Belgrade anticipated the uprising, but initially assumed that police measures would be sufficient to counter resistance. Among the earliest police measures instituted were reprisal shootings of arrested communists. In addition, the Jewish community had to provide 40 hostages weekly, and Jews were explicitly among the 111 people executed in German reprisals by July 22.98

As the uprising and commensurate reprisals intensified, in late July Schröder’s administrative staff disseminated guidelines for “deterrent and expiatory measures” (Vorbeugungs- und Sühnemassnahmen), which imposed many restrictions. Special care was to be taken to investigate the facts of any incident, for “measures unjustly enacted damage German prestige.” Reprisal shooting was to occur only for actions committed after hostages had been arrested and sufficient warning had been given. And a close connection between the hostages and the perpetrators had to exist. However, the guidelines also permitted measures against the population of a location if they made themselves “coresponsible” (mitverantwortlich) by facilitating sabotage committed by others, by passively resisting German investigation, or by providing a supportive environment for anti-German activity. Thus in addition to arrested communists and Jewish hostages, who were hitherto used as reprisal victims, Serbians on the spot deemed coresponsible were now vulnerable.99 This new reprisal policy was first put into effect on July 27, when Serbian police were forced at gunpoint to shoot 81 harvest workers rounded up in the fields near the site of an ambushed German car.100

Since German police measures were proving inadequate in stemming the growth of the partisan movement, the occupation authorities sought a more effective counterinsurgency policy. Field Marshal List urged a more active combat role for the troops of Bader’s 65th Corps, but Bader’s three divisions were undermanned, overage, poorly equipped, immobile, and still in training. Such units were unable to cope with the partisans.101 The OKW refused reinforcements and instead emphatically urged an intensification of the reprisal policy begun on local initiative.102 This proved not just inadequate but counterproductive.103 Numerous German documents make it clear that Schröder’s initial injunction to avoid injustices was a dead letter and that German reprisal policy was driving the population to the side of the insurgents. Saying that “in the Balkans life counts for nothing,” an OKW German report conceded, “Even with the most unrestricted reprisal measures—up until the end of August a total of approximately 1,000 communists and Jews had been shot or publicly hanged and the houses of the guilty burned down—it was not possible to restrain the continual growth of the armed revolt.”104 In contrast to greater military involvement or increasingly draconian reprisals, a number of local German officials preferred expanded police measures, with particular emphasis on a strengthened and better-armed Serbian police. However, the ill-equipped Serbian police became increasingly demoralized and unreliable as partisan success grew.105

By late August drastic measures were required, but the Germans in Belgrade and List in Greece continued to advocate contrasting solutions based on starkly different interpretations of the partisan movement. The Belgrade Germans felt that the communists were the main force behind the insurgency, that the Serbian nationalists (including the Chetniks) had hitherto remained aloof and deliberately avoided confrontation with the Germans, and that the population at large still rejected communism even if it did not cooperate with the German troops against the partisans. The Belgrade Germans did not want to drive the communists and nationalists into a united front; rather, they wanted to work with the latter against the former. Thus in late August, Danckelmann (with the support of Turner, Benzler, Neuhausen, and Bader) asked the former Serbian minister of defense Milan Nedic, a popular figure with an anticommunist, pro-German record, to become president of a new Serbian government. It was hoped that he would have the popularity and prestige to win broad support and mobilize anticommunist sentiment.106

List reluctantly agreed to give the Nedic government a chance, but he flatly rejected the local diagnosis of the insurgency, insisting that it was not only a communist but also a Serbian national movement.107 In two messages to Belgrade on September 4 and 5, List made clear his preference for intensified military action and repression in contrast to greater reliance on Serbian collaborators. He advocated “ruthless” measures against the insurgents and their families, such as “hanging, burning down of villages involved, seizure of more hostages, deportation of relatives, etc. into concentration camps” and also a more general “increased pressure on the population in areas where the insurgents are tolerated.”108

List’s behavior toward Serbia in September 1941 was typical of neither the rest of his career nor his character. He was neither a Nazi nor a traditional Prussian officer but a highly cultured and deeply religious man trained at a military academy in Munich before World War I.109 No less prestigious a witness than Archbishop Angelo Roncalli, later Pope John XXIII, testified to List’s strict efforts to protect Greek civilians from mistreatment by German soldiers and his efforts on behalf of food deliveries to Greece to avoid famine.110 He was, moreover, no careerist willing to do anything to keep his position, nor a timid man afraid to stand up to Hitler. When ordered by Hitler to carry out an attack in the Caucasus in 1942 that he deemed suicidal for his troops, List refused and his military career came to an abrupt end.111

List’s behavior in Serbia in September 1941 reflected the military frustrations of a professional soldier with little political sense. A strict disciplinarian with a paternalistic concern for the welfare of his troops, List found the insurgency and its “insidious” methods an outrageous affront to his sense of order and decency. The insurgents and the unruly Serbian people from whom they sprang had to be punished. And because List had a stereotypical image of “hot-blooded” Serbs made cruel by centuries of Turkish domination, he felt they could only be disciplined with measures commensurate with their own violent nature.112

List, and indeed almost every German officer in the Balkans, was tormented by another concern—the damage to the prestige and image of the German army caused by its inability to cope with partisan tactics. The partisan success was more than just an embarrassment to their professional pride. If not checked, the increasing display of German military impotence could snowball into military disaster. In early September, when List fired off his exhortations for greater terror, this was no longer a fanciful prospect. Some Chetnik units were now entering the battle against the Germans, swept up in the wave of partisan success, and in the first days of September 175 Germans were captured in two separate incidents.113 Thus List was reacting to two major setbacks of unprecedented proportions in the guerrilla war which clearly demonstrated that the thinly stretched German troops in Serbia were not only impotent to suppress sabotage and ambush but now threatened with piecemeal defeat.

As the German position continued to deteriorate, even the proponents of the Nedic experiment (and Nedic himself) concluded that the uprising could only be crushed with German forces.114 List then moved to end what he considered the “intolerable chain of command” in Serbia in which a “vain” and “superficial” Luftwaffe general, who had been seduced by the political calculations of Turner and Benzler, outranked the army troop commander.115 His request for the appointment of General Franz Böhme, a former Austrian officer who would presumably have few inhibitions about repression in Serbia, as “plenipotentiary commanding general” as well as his request for a frontline division were both granted.116

When Böhme arrived in Belgrade on September 18, he found fervent converts to List’s call for “increased pressure on the population.” A major punitive expedition by the 342nd division arriving from France was already being planned for the Sava Bend region around Sabac, a particularly dense area of partisan activity. The premise of the expedition was that the entire population had joined the insurgency, and that a horrifying example had to be made that would immediately become known throughout Serbia.117 Orders were issued by Böhme that all men in the area between 14 and 70 years of age were to be placed in a concentration camp and the female population was to be driven off into the mountains. All inhabitants who participated in resistance or in whose houses weapons were found or who attempted to flee were to be shot and their houses burned down.118 In a message to the troops, Böhme exhorted: “Your mission lies in a country in which German blood flowed in 1914 through the treachery of the Serbs, men and women. You are the avengers of these dead. An intimidating example must be created for the whole of Serbia which must hit the whole population most severely.”119

On September 23, units of Lt. General Dr. Hinghofer’s 342nd division entered Sabac. The male population was rounded up, held for two days without food, force marched to Jarak 23 kilometers away, and then marched back again four days later when the site proved unsuitable for a concentration camp.120 Meanwhile, as German troops fanned out from Sabac, particular towns were earmarked for total destruction, and all suspected communists were shot.121 Then the fury began to subside. On October 2 Hinghofer ordered that the female population was not to be driven off into the mountains but left in the villages to take care of the livestock and harvest. Two days later he ordered that shootings and burning of houses and villages be halted. By then over 20,000 men had been interned and 1, 126 executed.122

The 125th regiment, sent from Greece, carried out a similar punitive expedition to Valjevo south of Sabac, but elsewhere the partisans remained on the offensive. Another German unit was overrun and captured at the end of September. Even more shocking to the Germans was the ambush of a communications unit near Topola on October 2: the German troops who surrendered were executed by machine-gun fire at close range.123 Böhme’s staff concluded that “no trace can be found of a deterrent effect from the clearing actions carried out so far,” and they determined upon an even harsher policy.124

On September 16 Keitel had issued a general directive to implement Hitler’s demand for the “harshest measures” against communist insurgency in occupied territories. Because human life in these countries often meant nothing and a deterrent effect could only be achieved through unusual harshness, Keitel asserted, he ordered that 50–100 communists be executed in retaliation for the death of each German soldier.125 In the wake of the Topola ambush, Böhme’s quartermaster, Captain Hans Faulmüller, drafted a proposal, also initialed by the chief of staff Colonel Max Pemsel, that “for every murdered German soldier, 100 Serbian prisoners are immediately to be shot.” For the 21 men lost at Topola, Turner was “requested to select 2, 100 prisoners in the concentration camps Sabac and Belgrade (predominantly Jews and communists).”126

On October 5, the day after his order for 2, 100 reprisal executions, Böhme received a further counterinsurgency directive from List. List was responding to Böhme’s request to deport to Germany all the interned Serbs at Sabac, for he opposed either holding them indefinitely or releasing them. List vetoed deportation and ordered that while all those caught in active resistance were to be shot immediately, men merely encountered in the area of operations were to be investigated. Those proven to be partisans were to be executed, those suspected were to be held as hostages subject to reprisal execution, and those not suspected of anti-German activities were to be released.127 While in theory Keitel’s and List’s directives were not incompatible, in practice they would prove to be so. Future events would show that if prisoners had to be investigated and only the suspicious held as hostages, the reprisal ratio would be unobtainable; if the ratio was to be met, screening of prisoners would have to be dispensed with.

Böhme’s staff proceeded to develop a general reprisal policy. Drafted by Faulmüller, initialed by Pemsel, and signed by Böhme, it was issued to all units on October 10, 1941. “In Serbia it is necessary because of the ‘Balkan mentality’ and the great expansion of the . . . insurgency movements, to carry out the orders of the OKW in the sharpest form. . . . In every command area in Serbia all communists, all those suspected as such, all Jews [italics mine], and a certain number of nationalist and democratically inclined inhabitants are to be seized as hostages.” Of these hostages, 100 were to be shot for each German killed and 50 for each wounded.128

This reprisal policy of Böhme, Pemsel, and Faulmüller was not simply a minimal compliance with the Keitel guidelines. Not only did they adopt the maximum suggested ratio of 100:1 instead of the minimum of 50:1, but they also explicitly included “all Jews,” a group which Keitel had never mentioned. Why did they do this? The German military in Serbia had long accepted the identification or at least the natural combination of communist and Jew. From the beginning of the uprising, reprisals had been carried out against “communists and Jews.” Böhme, Pemsel, and Faulmüller were not breaking new ground.

While many officers may simply have accepted the communist-Jewish identification as an unquestioned and self-evident tenet of Nazi ideology, a narrowly professional and nonideological mode of thinking among other officers led to the same results. It was obvious to every German officer that the Jews in occupied countries would assuredly be among Germany’s enemies. As List stated at his trial, “I can well understand from the view of the Jews that they worked against the Germans and that they combined with the communists. I say I can well understand that on the basis of events which had occurred.”129 Professional soldiers stood ready to defend their country against its enemies; they did not stand in judgment of or make their loyalty conditional upon the policies of their government, which created those enemies. As long as the anti-Jewish measures in Serbia were perceived and construed as measures against Germany’s enemies, it did not require nazified zealots (though surely such were not lacking), merely conscientious and politically obtuse professional soldiers to carry them out.

The inclusion of all male Jews as hostages for reprisal shooting did not strike the Germans in Serbia as extraordinary or unusual. On the contrary, it was a course of action that must have seemed almost natural and obvious. The male Jews of the Banat and Belgrade had been interned in Belgrade since late summer, and a large group of Jewish refugees from central Europe, who had been stranded in Yugoslavia when their travel arrangements to Palestine had collapsed, had been interned in Sabac since June 1941.130 Efforts by Turner and Benzler to deport the interned Jews to Romania or elsewhere had been vetoed by the Foreign Office and SS, and thus they remained in camps. List had likewise vetoed the deportation of the vast number of male prisoners rounded up in the Sava Bend and ordered the screening of prisoners and the holding of suspects as hostages instead. Thus the German military in Serbia found itself presiding over more and more camps whose inmate population could not be deported and could be decreased only by release, which they did not favor, or by hostage shooting.

Since the Serbian Jews constituted a group from whose ranks reprisal victims had already been selected for the past four months and whose blanket identification by the Germans with the elusive communist enemy obviated the bothersome and unreliable screening process now prescribed for Serbian prisoners, it is almost inconceivable that the military authorities would have given the Jews a special protected status among the internees and not included them in the hostage pool. And since the Jews were already interned while the communists for the most part defied capture, it had to be clear to Böhme and his staff upon whom the brunt of the reprisal shootings would fall.

Indeed, the 2,100 reprisal shootings for the Topola ambush were carried out exclusively against Jews and “Gypsies” in Belgrade and Sabac. In a fateful chain of associated stereotypes, Jews had been equated with communists and “Gypsies” with Jews. On October 9 and 11 a firing squad from the communications unit that had suffered the casualties of the Topola ambush shot 449 Jews. Its commander, Lieutenant Walter Liepe, noted that the men returned from the first execution “satisfied,” but “unfortunately” his unit could not continue after the second day because of an assignment in the field. Other communications troops continued the executions in Belgrade thereafter.131 In Sabac parts of the 750th regiment under Major Faninger and the 64th Reserve Police Battalion guarded the town and camp. The records of neither unit have survived, but one witness, a Serb forced to dig graves and bury the corpses, lived to testify to the mass executions of the Sabac Jews and “Gypsies” carried out by German soldiers at Zasavica on October 12 and 13, 1941.132 In the case of Sabac, this had the grotesque consequence that central European refugees, mostly Austrian, were shot by troops of predominantly Austrian origin in retaliation for casualties inflicted by Serbian partisans on the German army!

Among the Germans in Belgrade, Harald Turner alone showed signs of ambivalence about using the interned Jews for the purpose of filling reprisal quotas. On October 17 he wrote in a personal letter:

In the last eight days I had 2,000 Jews and 200 Gypsies shot in accordance with the ratio 1:100 for bestially murdered German soldiers, and a further 2,200, likewise almost all Jews, will be shot in the next eight days. This is not a pretty business. At any rate, it has to be, if only to make clear what it means even to attack a German soldier, and, for the rest, the Jewish question solves itself most quickly in this way. Actually it is incorrect, if one is to be precise about it, that for murdered Germans—on whose account the ratio 1:100 should really be borne by Serbs—100 Jews are shot instead; but the Jews we had in camps—after all, they too are Serb nationals, and besides, they have to disappear.133

But Turner’s preferred solution for the necessary disappearance of the Jews had been deportation to Romania or elsewhere, and suddenly he saw the opportunity to press for this solution once more when Foreign Office Jewish expert Franz Rademacher and one of Eichmann’s deputies, Friedrich Suhr, arrived in Belgrade on October 18.

The visit of Rademacher and Suhr had been set in motion much earlier. From mid-August through mid-September Benzler, incited by Turner and seconded by Ribbentrop’s roving ambassador, Edmund Veesenmayer, had repeatedly urged the deportation of the Serbian Jews. Benzler had justified this request to make Serbia judenfrei on the grounds that the Jews made common cause with the communist uprising and no pacification could take place until they were removed.134 Benzler’s fourth appeal for deportation had been the occasion of Rademacher’s inquiry to Eichmann about the feasibility of moving the Serbian Jews to Poland or Russia. Eichmann had rejected deportation and proposed “shooting.”135 Undersecretary Martin Luther thereupon informed Benzler that deportation was impossible; by “tough and uncompromising” methods, it had to be possible to keep the Jews from spreading unrest.136

The persistent Benzler did not quit. He went over the head of the Wilhelmstrasse bureaucracy and on September 28 wrote Ribbentrop “personally.” He chided Ribbentrop for not providing the help he had been promised and invoked the support of the military for the immediate deportation of at least the 8,000 male Jews in Serbia.137 Luther, who received a copy of this letter, was very irritated. He drafted his own memorandum for Ribbentrop. “If the military commander is agreed with Benzler to the effect that these 8,000 Jews prevent pacification action in the Serbian Old Kingdom in the first place, then in my opinion the military commander must take care of the immediate elimination of these 8,000 Jews. In other areas other military commanders have dealt with considerably greater numbers of Jews without even mentioning it.” Luther requested Ribbentrop’s authorization to discuss the question with Heydrich, due to return shortly from Prague. “I am convinced that in agreement with him we can come very quickly to a clear solution of this question.”138

Luther’s request of October 2 was initialed by Weizsäcker but went no further, for at the same time Weizsäcker received instructions from the foreign minister. Stung by Benzler’s reproach of insufficient support, Ribbentrop now wanted to contact Himmler to clarify the question “whether he could not take over the 8,000 Jews, in order to move them to east Poland or anywhere else.”139 Luther had his authorization to contact Heydrich, which he used to achieve his aims, not Ribbentrop’s.

Luther’s meeting with Heydrich must have taken place when Heydrich briefly returned from Prague to Berlin on October 4, for on that same day he informed Benzler of his agreement with Heydrich to send representatives to Belgrade—Rademacher and Suhr.140 “Purpose of the trip,” Rademacher wrote, “was to check on the spot whether the problem of the 8,000 Jewish agitators, whose deportation had been urged by the embassy, could not be settled on the spot.”141 Rademacher and Suhr arrived in Belgrade on October 18, and Rademacher met with Turner the following morning. The latter informed him that the problem of the 8,000 male Jews was already three-quarters solved. Through an unexplained mix-up, it turned out that there had only been about 4,000 male Jews, “of which moreover only 3,500 can be shot” because 500 were needed by the police to maintain the ghetto they were planning to build. Of these 3,500 male Jews, 2,000 had already been shot in reprisal for attacks on German soldiers.

Just as Luther had hoped, the military was eliminating the Jews without even mentioning it. The problem of the remaining 1,500 Jews would have solved itself if Turner had simply turned them over to the army firing squads. Böhme’s ratios already required over 4,000 additional reprisal shootings. To the army the problem now was not that there were too many Jews but that there were too few! But one obstacle stood in the way of the quick dispatch of the remaining 1,500 male Jews earmarked for reprisal execution, and this was Turner. He once again saw the chance to press for the deportation of the male Jews and expressed to Rademacher his bitterest disappointment that Benzler’s earlier requests had been ignored. Rademacher explained the difficulties of sending the Jews to Romania, Poland, or Russia. “Staatsrat Turner could not close his mind to these reasons. However he urged as before the deportation of the Jews from Serbia.”

Unable as yet to overcome Turner’s insistence on deportation, Rademacher went on to visit Einsatzgruppe commander Wilhelm Fuchs and his entourage of Jewish experts. They reiterated that the problem of the male Jews could be settled within a week by having them shot as hostages. Already the number of incarcerated Jews did not suffice. On the following morning, October 20, Rademacher, Suhr, Fuchs, and Turner met together. Rademacher and Suhr explained the impossibility of deportation; Fuchs pressed to have the Jews shot within the framework of Böhme’s reprisal policy. Faced with this united front, Turner made no objection. Rademacher could thus report: “The male Jews will be shot by the end of the week, so the problem broached in the embassy’s report is settled.”

As the fate of the remaining male Jews in Serbia was being sealed in Belgrade, events to the south of the capital, in the towns of Kraljevo and Kragujevac, were building to a crisis that would force the Germans to reconsider their reprisal policy. The 717th division of Major General Hoffmann was responsible for this region, and the reprisal order of October 10 was to him a veritable hunting license. When units of his division suffered casualties in an attack on Kraljevo on October 15 and 16, they went on a house-to-house search through the city, and by the evening of the 17th had shot 1,736 men and 19 “communist” women.142

The Kraljevo massacre was shortly followed by an even larger one in Kragujevac, when a German punitive expedition returning to the town suffered casualties and Hoffmann ordered immediate retaliation. The number of communist suspects, prison inmates, Jews, and even men rounded up from the surrounding villages considered “communist infested” left the Germans far short of their quota of 2,300. The German commander, Major König, an ardent critic of “soft” measures, had his troops seize 3,200 inhabitants from the city itself, including the students of the local high school, and they fired away on October 21 until the quota had been met.143

List and Böhme had reaped the whirlwind sown by their constant incitements to “ruthless” terror. The two massacres in Kraljevo and Kragujevac had immediate repercussions, especially as the entire Serbian workforce of an airplane factory in Kraljevo producing for the German war effort was among the victims. The OKW was dismayed at this incident, and Nedic also urged that the arbitrary shootings be stopped. Böhme agreed, and Bader ordered all units to cease mass executions until further orders.144 Meanwhile, Faulmüller and Turner hammered out a new reprisal policy, forthcoming on October 25, which stated: “Arbitrary arrests and shootings of Serbs are driving to the insurgents circles of the population which up to now did not participate in the insurrection, [and so] strengthen the communist resistance. . . . It must be avoided that precisely those elements of the population are seized and shot as hostages who, being nonparticipants in the insurrection, did not flee before the German punitive expedition.”145

If the massacres at Kraljevo and Kragujevac moved Böhme to ensure that further arbitrary shootings of Serbs did not occur, that was of no help to the incarcerated Jews. If the Germans could conceive that not all Serbs were partisans and that random shooting of “innocent” Serbs would damage German interests, they had no doubt that all Jews were anti-German. And if more care had to be exercised in selecting Serbian hostages, the pressure to find hostages elsewhere was that much greater. Harald Turner, who had previously sought to deport the Jews, best exemplified this attitude in a memorandum of October 26. On the one hand he noted that “the belief in the feeling for justice of the German Wehrmacht must be destroyed if not only people who are completely innocent are shot to death but—as occurred in one case—just those men of the village were executed who remained at the place of work waiting for German troops because of their confidence in their own innocence.” On the other hand he noted: “As a matter of principle it must be said that the Jews and Gypsies in general represent an element of insecurity and thus a danger to public order and safety. . . . That is why it is a matter of principle in each case to put all Jewish men and all male Gypsies at the disposal of the troops as hostages.”146

The murder of the remaining male Jews in Serbia began on October 27.147 Two days later 250 additional Gypsies were arrested in Belgrade to swell the hostage pool.148 The shooting commando of Lieutenant Hans-Dietrich Walther resumed the executions on October 30. Walther noted in his summary report on “the shooting of Jews and Gypsies”: “At first my soldiers were not affected. On the second day, however, it became obvious that one or another did not have the nerve to carry out shootings over a long period of time. It is my personal impression that during the shooting one does not have psychological blocks [keine seelischen Hemmungen]. They set in, however, after several days when one reflects about it on evenings alone [wenn man nach Tagen abends in Ruhe darüber nachdenkt].” A week later, after Walther had had some days to reflect, he was ordered to carry out yet a third execution. Afterward he went to his battalion commander and pleaded release from his assignment because his nerves were finished and he dreamed of the shootings at night. The next execution was given to a different company commander.149

After the liquidation of the male Jews and “Gypsies” in Serbia, the reprisal quotas were no longer enforced with the earlier severity. Although 11,345 reprisal shootings were carried out in November and an additional 984 in December, this left the Germans far behind in fulfilling their quota.150 With random reprisals excluded and the supply of Jews and “Gypsies” exhausted, the quotas simply could not be met. When General Bader replaced Böhme on December 5, he had a statistical study of the reprisal program prepared. It concluded that at least 11,164 reprisal shootings had been carried out as of December 5, 1941, although this figure was low, for the compilers admitted not receiving data from all units (including those units which had carried out the Sabac shootings in mid-October). Calculating German casualties, the report concluded that there was a still a shortfall of 20,174 reprisal executions.151

On December 22 Bader issued a lowered reprisal quota, stipulating ratios of 50:1 and 25:1 for dead and wounded, respectively. But still to be taken as reprisal prisoners were those who “because of their attitude and behavior were earmarked to atone for German lives, for example, communists captured without weapons, Gypsies, Jews, criminals, and so forth” (auf Grund ihrer Einstellung und ihres Verhaltens zur Sühne für deutsche Menschenleben bestimmt sind, z.B. nicht mit der Waffe betroffene Kommunisten, Zigeuner, Juden, Verbrecher, u. dergl.).152 Even after the male Jews and “Gypsies” had been murdered, the Germans could not refrain from including them among the groups who, because of their presumed attitude and behavior, could automatically be counted as reprisal prisoners doomed to death. Thus if the Germans did not fulfill their reprisal quota, it was because insufficient numbers of communists could be found, the political cost of randomly killing Serbs was too high, and the supply of “expendable” Jews and “Gypsies” was exhausted. There is absolutely no reason to believe the quota would not have been met if enough Jews and “Gypsies” had been available.

The mass murder of the male Jews in Serbia was not a conscious part of a European-wide Final Solution to the Jewish question. The killing of the male Jews emerged primarily out of local factors related to the partisan war and the army’s reprisal policy. The victims, both Jews and “Gypsies,” were convenient and expendable groups whose execution would satisfy the required reprisal quotas without producing undesired political repercussions aggravating the antipartisan struggle. Most important, the army did not operate with the avowed aim of exterminating the entire Jewish population, and thus the women, children, and elderly were not killed.

But at the same time, the massacres in Serbia in the fall of 1941 were an anticipation of the Final Solution, for ultimately the Jews were killed because they were Jews.153 The mass murder was the culmination of a process in which the German authorities had first singled the Jews out for special persecution in the spring of 1941 and subjected them to disproportionate reprisals and internment in the summer. Once partisan resistance drove the Germans to impose upon themselves the obligation to fulfill the maximum reprisal quota, all Serbs were at risk, but the male Jews were doomed. The German military could conceive of innocent Serbs but not of innocent Jews, hence the totality of the destruction of Jewish men.

Even if local in its origins, this first systematic mass murder of Jews outside Soviet territory had wider implications concerning German preparedness for the Final Solution. Not only on the eastern front but also elsewhere in Europe, the German military viewed the Jews as part of the wider “enemy” against whom “ruthless” measures—including mass murder—were justified. The German Foreign Office, perhaps the elite of the ministerial bureaucracy, proved itself equally accommodating to mass murder. Without orders from above (Ribbentrop had in fact authorized Luther to inquire about deportation), Luther moved on his own initiative to reach an agreement with Heydrich on a “local solution” to the troublesome Jewish problem in Serbia. Such initiative from below obviated the necessity for orders from above in harnessing the Foreign Office to the mass murder of European Jewry. In sending Rademacher and Suhr, Heydrich and Luther together sought to push the German authorities in Serbia into shooting the Jews on the spot. They discovered that they were pushing on an open door, since the executions were already underway by the time the Berlin emissaries arrived. Thus a commonality of interests had emerged between the Wehrmacht, SS, and Foreign Office to kill the male Jews of Serbia even before the Final Solution to murder all the Jews of Europe was in operation. It is no wonder that, when instituted, the European-wide murder program would meet no meaningful resistance from any organized segment of German society.

Eastern Galicia

In Serbia Jews were killed simply because they were Jews. However, the killing was limited to adult males and took place within a framework of large-scale reprisal shootings, not as a conscious first step toward the comprehensive murder of the entire Jewish population. At that time in Serbia it was still expected that the surviving Jewish women, children, and elderly would be expelled eastward. In one other region of Europe to the west of Rosenberg’s Occupied Eastern Territories, Eastern Galicia, the mass shooting of Jews also occurred in the fall of 1941. Here too the killing owed a great deal not only to encouragement and approval from above but also to local consensus and initiative. In Eastern Galicia, however, the killing not only reached even greater dimensions than in Serbia but also was more clearly perceived as the first step toward the liquidation of the entire Jewish population.

Eastern Galicia, part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire until 1918 and then Poland until 1939, fell to Stalin in the Nazi-Soviet Non-Aggression Pact. German occupation replaced Soviet occupation in June and July 1941, and approximately half a million Jews—about 10% of the population—came under Nazi control.154 The capital, Lwow, with 150,000–160,000 Jews at the time of the invasion,155 became the third largest Jewish community in the Nazi empire after Warsaw and Lodz. On August 1 this region was joined to the General Government of Hans Frank and designated as the district of Galicia.

When the Soviet armies were driven from Eastern Galicia, the Jews there suffered a double blow. First, the native population—predominately Ukrainian—unleashed pogroms against the Jewish communities in Lwow, Tarnopol, and elsewhere. These were often encouraged and always tolerated by the German authorities.156 Second, Einsatzgruppe C swept through on its way to the Ukraine, and was quickly followed by another ad hoc Einsatzgruppe assembled by Schöngarth from the KdS Dienststellen of Cracow (150 men), Warsaw (50 men), and Lublin (30 men).157 Both Einsatzgruppen carried out mass executions, aimed above all at the Jewish intelligentsia.158 As with the Einsatzgruppen in Poland in the fall of 1939, various units of Schöngarth’s Einsatzgruppe became stationary, forming the nuclei of the branch offices or Aussendienststellen of the KdS in Lwow under Obersturmbannführer Dr. Herbert Tanzmann. The crucial components of this network were the KdS Aussendienststellen in Tarnopol, Stanislawow, Czortkow, Kolomyja, and Drohobycz, from which most of the local massacres and deportations of Galician Jews would be directed. As in the other districts of the General Government, an SSPF was also appointed, in this case 35-year-old Friedrich Katzmann, who was transferred from Radom.159

Following the pogroms and Einsatzgruppen massacres in the summer of 1941, a partial abatement in the murder of Galician Jews set in until the fall. (The major exception was the murder of 1,000 Jews from Stryj on September 1.)160 Nazi Jewish policy in Galicia was then intensified with the initiation of three programs: the creation of a network of forced labor camps, ghettoization, and a new wave of mass executions.

Ghettoization in Galicia, as earlier in the other districts of the General Government, was more haphazard than systematic. As of late October there was still a general prohibition against constructing more ghettos in the General Government, “because it is hoped that the Jews can be deported out of the General Government in the near future.”161 Nonetheless, in September 1941 the Krieshauptmann in Tarnopol, Gerhard Hager, had ordered the establishment of a ghetto in that city. Implementation of the population transfers was put in the hands of his Judenreferent, none other than Alexander Palfinger, the erstwhile advocate of deliberate attrition in the Lodz and Warsaw ghettos. Permission then seems to have been obtained from Cracow to construct ghettos in Stanislawow and eventually Lwow as well.162 The process of ghettoizing 12,000 Jews in Tarnopol apparently went slowly, and the ghetto was closed only in early December.163

According to Dieter Pohl, “It is no accident that the massacres took place almost simultaneously with the first ghettoizations.”164 In Stanislawow, with a Jewish population of at least 27,500 and possibly over 40,000, the local German authorities (Kreishauptmann Heinz Albrecht and Stadtkommissar Emil Beau) pressed for ghettoization. However, the space they were willing to grant for the envisaged ghetto amounted to only one-sixth of the town’s area for over half the town’s population.165 The task of reducing the Jewish population sufficiently to make ghettoization possible lay in the hands of the chief of the Stanislawow Security Police, Hans Krüger.166

Krüger had arrived in Galicia with Schöngarth’s Einsatzgruppe. Along with 20–30 other officials slated for assignment in the branch offices, he attended a special “model shooting” (Mustererschiessung) put on by Schöngarth in Lwow. He was then dispatched to Stanislawow, where on August 8 he had carried out the execution of some 300 Jewish and 200 Polish intellectuals and professionals. In late September or early October, Katzmann held a meeting in Lwow with Krüger and Tanzmann. According to Krüger’s postwar testimony, Katzmann announced that Himmler had ordered large-scale actions and thus the liquidation of the Galician Jews was now to begin. But Krüger also admitted that the first large-scale massacre that he would subsequently carry out had a more specific and immediate goal. “It was not actually intended to make Stanislawow ‘free of Jews’ in one day. It was much more a matter of decimating the Jews, in order to be able to construct a ghetto in Stanislawow.”167

In preparation or training for such a large-scale execution—what would be the largest massacre yet carried out by the Nazis in Galicia—Krüger took a team of Security Police, Ukrainian militiamen, and Order Police of Reserve Police Battalion 133 to nearby Nadworna on October 6, 1941, and shot 2,000 Jews.168 Only nightfall brought a halt to the shooting. Krüger discussed the Nadworna execution with Katzmann, who then ordered a decimation of the Stanislawow Jews, with the remainder to be ghettoized.

Once again mobilizing the local Schupo with its Ukrainian militia, as well as Reserve Police Battalion 133, Krüger carried out the “Bloody Sunday” massacre of Stanislawow Jews on October 12, 1941. The Jews were ordered to assemble, taking their valuables with them. From the Ringplatz, columns of 200–250 Jews at a time were marched to the Jewish cemetery, where Schupo commander Captain Streege had supervised the digging of graves by his Ukrainian militia. The Jews were taken through the cemetery gate, where they were forced to surrender their valuables and undress. They were then led to one of the graves and shot by rotating firing squads. The shooting began at noon. At nightfall Krüger attempted to continue the shooting under the headlights of trucks but finally gave up and allowed the remaining Jews to return to the newly formed ghetto. At least 10,000 Jews were killed on “Bloody Sunday.”169

But ghetto building in Stanislawow was not the only reason behind Krüger’s “Bloody Sunday.” The Nadworna and Stanislawow massacres were only the first in a series of large-scale massacres carried out in the southern region of Galicia in the fall of 1941. Just four days after “Bloody Sunday,” policemen from the border police post (Grenzpolizei-Posten or GPP) at Tatarow under Krüger’s subordinate Ernst Varchim, along with the 3rd company of Reserve Police Battalion 133, which had assisted the “Bloody Sunday” massacre, and a unit of the ubiquitous Ukrainian Hilfspolizei (Hipo or auxiliary police), descended upon Delatyn and shot 1,950 Jews.170 Varchim’s police also carried out several smaller massacres over the next several months to clear his border area of Jews.171 The Stanislawow Security Police were also at least suspected of having carried out the shooting of 1,000 Jews in Brzezany on December 12, 1941.172

Krüger’s chief rival for large-scale massacres in Galicia in the fall of 1941 was the Security Police Aussendienststelle at Kolomyja under Obersturmführer Peter Leideritz and his deputy Erwin Gay. Founded in September 1941, it was composed of some 25 German officials and a guard force of 20 ethnic Germans and Ukrainians. Also stationed in Kolomyja was a Schutzpolizei-Dienstabteilung of Obersturmführer Herbert Härtel, with 25 police officials and 100 Ukrainian militia men.173

On October 12, the same day as the events in Stanislawow, Leideritz’s men killed several thousand Jews in Kolomyja.174 Three days later, Leideritz sent Gay to the town of Kossow, some 20 miles from Kolomyja, with instructions to shoot as many Jews as possible. Order Police from Reserve Police Battalion 133 were loaned from Stanislawow, and with their help over 2,000 Jews in Kossow were shot on October 16–17.175 Following the killing of an additional 800 Jews in Kolomyja itself on November 6,176 the murderous efforts of Lederitz and his men peaked in December. On December 4–5 Lederitz himself led a commando to Horodenko, where the Kreishauptmann had assembled the Jewish population of 4,000 under the pretext of receiving typhus inoculations. Leideritz conducted the selection, exempting workers and doctors. The remaining 2,600 Jews were shot.177 Finally, on December 19 and 26, Kolomyja Sipo units orchestrated massacres of 600 and 1,000 Jews in Zabie and Zablatow, respectively.178

While Krüger and Leideritz conducted large-scale massacres in the southern areas of the district of Galicia, numerous smaller killings—often aimed at sick and elderly Jews or the intelligentsia—were carried out by the Security Police Aussendienststellen of Tarnopol under Edmund Schöne, of Drohobycz under Franz Wenzel, and of Czortkow under Karl Hildemann.179 At the end of the year, Tanzmann temporarily suspended the shooting actions.180

In addition to gaining approval for the construction of ghettos in Tarnopol and Stanislawow in the fall of 1941, the German occupiers in Galicia also pressed for the ghettoization of the largest Galician Jewish community in the district capital of Lwow. They cited the proverbial shortage of housing and the cultural status of the city, as well as the anomaly that the Jews of Lwow were being treated differently from those of Cracow and Warsaw. An exception to the official policy of the General Government against further ghetto building was once again granted. On November 6, the governor, Dr. Karl Lasch, entrusted SSPF Katzmann with transferring some 80,000 Lwow Jews into the Zamarstynow and Kleperow districts, where some 25,000 Jews already lived. The population transfer, ordered on November 8, was to take place between November 12 and December 15.181 As in Stanislawow, ghettoization was combined with decimation. Access to the ghetto was limited to passage under two railway bridges, where German and Ukrainian policemen seized valuables from the incoming Jews and conducted a selection. As Katzmann later wrote, as the Jews passed through his “sluices” (Schleusen), “all the shirking and asocial Jewish rabble were seized and subjected to special treatment” (das gesamte arbeitsscheue und asoziale jüd. Gesindel erfasst und sonderbehandelt wurde).182 Many thousands of Jews were killed in the so-called bridge of death Aktion, and unlike the so-called Intelligenz-Aktion the previous summer, women were for the first time the primary victims.183 Many thousands of other Jews must also have fled or gone underground, for the Judenrat of Lwow reported a drop in the Jewish population between October and December from 119,000 to 106,000.184

Shortly before the December deadline to close the ghetto, with 20,000 Jews still on the “Aryan” side and spotted fever breaking out and threatening to spread through the city, the Germans broke off the ghettoization process they had set in motion. Katzmann, who was in charge of the resettlement, later wrote in his summary report: “It became increasingly apparent that the civil administration was unable even to approach a satisfactory solution to the Jewish question. Because the repeated attempts of the city administration of Lwow, for example, to lodge the Jews in a sealed Jewish quarter failed, this question was also solved by the SSPF in short order. . . . These measures were all the more urgent because large centers of epidemic appeared everywhere in the city in the winter months of 1941.”185 Dieter Pohl, the German historian of the Final Solution in Eastern Galicia, has observed: “Here is demonstrated once again what a grotesque distortion of facts Katzmann submitted to the SS hierarchy in 1943. He himself had been entrusted with the formation of the ghetto in 1941, and this was stopped precisely because it led to a spread of epidemic.”186

By the end of 1941, therefore, although few Galician Jews were as yet ghettoized, they were no strangers to mass murder. By one estimate, at least 30,000 Galician Jews had been killed in the fall of 1941, and total loss of Jewish life since the German invasion had reached 55,000–65,000.187 If the dimensions of the unfolding tragedy in Galicia seem clear, the light that these events shed on the overall evolution of Nazi Jewish policy is less so. It is particularly unclear who was primarily responsible for initiating the wave of killing. After the war, the most incriminated executioner from the fall of 1941, Hans Krüger, head of the Stanislawow Security Police, testified in various interrogations to orders from both Katzmann and Tanzmann that in turn allegedly came from Himmler and the RSHA.188 Katzmann himself, in his self-congratulatory summary report of 1943, boasted that he had seen the solution of the Jewish question as his “most urgent task.”189 But Krüger’s testimony was self-exculpatory. And strangely for a man seeking to maximize his own achievements, Katzmann’s own report did not even mention the fall 1941 massacres and began its account of “resettlement” in Galicia in April 1942. The two leading scholars on the topic, Dieter Pohl and Thomas Sandkühler, suggest that local authorities, particularly leading figures in the Security Police, played a particularly significant role in initiating the mass killings of fall 1941.190 Given the consistent use of combined police forces (Sipo, Order Police battalions, Schupo, border police, and Ukrainian militia), Katzmann was clearly deeply involved. It was precisely the coordination of such combined police forces that was, after all, the principal task of the SSPF.

Whatever the relative balance of orders from above and initiative from below, two factors seem clear. On the one hand, the ghettoization and shootings of the fall of 1941 in Galicia were not a uniform policy for the entire district. Ghettoization was limited to special cases—Tarnopol, Stanislawow, and Lwow—for which special exemption to the general prohibition against further ghetto building in the General Government was obtained by district officials. The large-scale massacres were concentrated in the southern region of the district and were carried out above all by just two of the Security Police branch offices—Stanislawow and Kolomyja. In the early massacres the victims seem to have been chosen randomly for the purpose of reducing the overall population. Only later—especially in Horodenko and Lwow—did a consistent pattern of selection, targeting the weak and exempting potential workers, emerge. Large-scale massacres confined to one region of the district, with a shifting pattern of targeting, do not suggest that a comprehensive policy to liquidate all the Jews of Galicia was already underway.

On the other hand, by the fall of 1941 local officials in Galicia did not seem to be in any doubt about the eventual fate awaiting all Jews there. They could relieve their security concerns along the southern border and the housing shortage, as well as potentially overcrowded ghettos, by killing large numbers of Jews. And they could do so knowing that such killings would not only meet with approval from Berlin but constituted the first step in a program of mass murder that they were going to carry out eventually in any case. They were anticipating the future even more consciously than the executioners in Serbia.

INVENTING THE EXTERMINATION CAMP

The “war of destruction” on the eastern front had unleashed an onslaught against Soviet Jewry through the primitive firing-squad methods of the Einsatzgruppen and their many helpers. With the increased targeting of Jewish women and children in August, the crucial step to systematic mass murder had been taken. The enticing prospect of vast spaces in conquered Soviet territory had brought forth a groundswell of pressure from occupation authorities throughout the German empire to commence the long-stalled expulsion of European Jewry. Hitler had initially rejected such deportations until “after the war.” Then in mid-September he approved them, at least for Jews from the territories of the Third Reich, before the end of the year. The unprepared and distressed recipients of these deportations complained vociferously, as did those who were not yet allowed to rid themselves of their unwanted Jews. In several places exhortations to the mass murder of European Jewry anticipated the Final Solution, and in Serbia and Galicia anticipation passed from words to deeds.

Yet another set of developments must be taken into account to complete the picture of the crucial and complex events between August and October 1941—namely, attempts to solve the unprecedented problems posed by the possible extension of systematic mass murder to the European Jews. Just as the Nazi regime was making the transition from selective to total mass murder of Soviet Jewry in mid-summer 1941, Hitler apparently gave the signal (this is admittedly speculative) that some kind of mass murder program should also be prepared for European Jewry for implementation after the Russian campaign. In any case, Heydrich had procured Göring’s authorization on July 31 to draft and submit a plan for a “total solution” to the European Jewish question. Given that Heydrich had been in charge of Jewish emigration and expulsion since January 1939 and that he had already submitted to Göring a plan for the total “resettlement” of European Jewry into the Soviet Union in March 1941, a new authorization for yet another kind of plan would indicate that something new and different was now expected.191 What Heydrich had procured from Göring was, in effect, authorization to prepare a “feasibility study” for perpetrating mass murder on an unprecedented scale.

But events on Soviet territory had demonstrated that many problems had to be solved. The staggering logistical task of killing even the Soviet Jews by firing squad had required the mobilization of considerable manpower, and the awesome task had just begun. Two other difficulties also emerged. One was the psychological burden on the killers. As HSSPF Bach-Zelewski claimed to have told a shaken Himmler after the latter had witnessed a relatively small execution in Minsk: “Look at the eyes of the men in this commando, how deeply shaken they are! These men are finished for the rest of their lives. What kind of followers are we training here? Either neurotics or savages!”192 And finally, the mass executions in Russia were simply much too public. Knowledge of the massacres became widespread among the German troops.193 They in turn took pictures, wrote home, and spoke to family and friends on leave. Word of the massacres on the Russian front filtered through German society. Given the shortcomings for firing-squad methods on Soviet territory, where proximity to the battlefield and the cover of antipartisan actions helped to mitigate the most serious repercussions, clearly different methods—more efficient, detached, and secret—were needed to extend the killing process to the rest of Europe in what was still envisaged as the postwar period.

By October Nazi innovators had conceptualized one potential, though as yet untried, solution to their problems: the Vernichtungslager or extermination camp. Basically, the planners brought together elements of three programs they were already experienced with. The concentration camp setting—in existence since 1933 and expanding rapidly since the outbreak of the war—provided secrecy, especially in eastern Europe far from prewar German boundaries. The gassing technology of the euthanasia program provided a killing method of much greater efficiency and psychological detachment. And finally, the factories of death were to be fed their endless streams of victims by a program of massive uprooting and deportation that would utilize the experiences and personnel—in particular, the HSSPF and Eichmann’s RSHA office for “Jewish affairs and evacuations”—of the earlier population resettlement programs.

The actions of these innovators in August and September are difficult to trace in detail. Their actions were not centralized, and they did not leave the kind of paper trail that characterized either the voluminous and wordy protests of German officials in Lodz and Riga or the eager, even impatient, suggestions of Höppner in Poznan and Zeitschel in Paris. Nevertheless, the idea of using poison gas for mass killing beyond the euthanasia program was clearly widespread in the late summer of 1941 and led to local experimentation. By September and October gassing as one possible method for the mass murder of Jews was an idea waiting to be institutionalized.

The first written proposal in this regard seems to have been Rolf Heinz Höppner’s letter to “dear comrade Eichmann” of July 16, urging the use of a “quick-acting agent” as the “most humane solution to dispose” of the nonworking Jews of Lodz.194 The killers on the central Russian front, HSSPF Bach-Zelewski and Einsatzgruppe B commander Arthur Nebe, were not far behind. In early August, Nebe requested a chemist of the Criminal Technical Institute (KTI) to come to Smolensk.195 On August 16 and 18, just after Himmler’s visit to Minsk, Bach-Zelewski asked HSSPF Koppe of the Warthegau to send his itinerant euthanasia killer, Herbert Lange, from Poznan.196 Lange’s Sonderkommando in Poznan had considerable experience in killing mental patients inside a sealed van using bottled carbon monoxide.197 According to Bach-Zelewski’s postwar testimony, another initiative had come from Himmler, who after witnessing the execution in Minsk on August 15 had asked Nebe to consider other killing methods. In response Nebe allegedly suggested the testing of explosives.198

There is no evidence that Lange ever visited, but a chemist from the KTI, Dr. Albert Widmann, along with an explosives expert, did visit Nebe and Bach-Zelewski in Minsk and Mogilev in mid-September 1941.199 The crime lab chemist Widmann had in fact already conducted experiments in the fall of 1939 and had advised the euthanasia program to use bottled carbon monoxide for its killing operations. Within the KTI, its director Dr. Walter Heess had already mentioned to Widmann, while riding home from work on the underground, that Nebe had suggested the possibility of using engine exhaust instead of bottled gas. The suggestion had been occasioned by Nebe’s close brush with death when, returning home from a party after drinking heavily, he had fallen asleep in his garage with the car motor running. Both this earlier Nebe suggestion and his early August request even before Himmler’s visit to Minsk would suggest that it was Nebe who initiated the subsequent exhaust gas experiment, but as of mid-August he did so with the knowledge, approval, and encouragement of Himmler.

In any case, a test using explosives on mental patients from the Novinki asylum near Minsk proved most unsatisfactory. The gruesome experiment required two explosions to kill all the test victims locked in a bunker and left parts of bodies strewn about and even hanging from nearby trees. Two gassing tests, one on mental patients from the Novinki asylum and the other in Mogilev, were more successful. The victims were killed in sealed rooms by introducing exhaust gas through hoses from a car and truck parked outside.

The Minsk-Mogilev experiments in killing with exhaust gas did not remain a local experiment for local purposes. In Berlin, Reinhard Heydrich immediately turned to the head of his office for technical affairs within the RSHA (Amt II D), Walter Rauff. Rauff’s jurisdiction included all motor vehicles—some 4,000 thousand—of the Security Police. The chief of this motor pool was Friedrich Pradel, who had already organized transportation for the Einsatzgruppen when they were training at Pretzsch. His chief mechanic in the Security Police garage on Prinz Albrecht Strasse was Harry Wentritt. Sometime in September Rauff summoned Pradel to his office and instructed him to ask his chief mechanic if exhaust gas could be directed into a closed truck to kill the passengers. A “more humane method of execution” was needed for the Einsatzgruppen in Russia, Rauff noted.200 Pradel put the question to Wentritt, likewise explaining that the firing squads in Russia suffered frequent nervous breakdowns and needed a “more humane” method of killing. Pradel informed him that the work would have to be done in Wentritt’s garage. Wentritt later claimed that he asked Pradel if there was a way out of having to do this, but Pradel told him—“in a friendly tone”—to think of his wife and children.201 Rauff then instructed Pradel to consult with Dr. Heess of the KTI on how the proposed gas van should function. After some difficulty, Rauff himself procured five Saurer model truck chassis.202 Pradel and Wentritt visited the body-making firm of Gaubschat in Berlin and subcontracted them to construct airtight compartments on the RSHA truck chassis. When work on the first chassis was finished, Wentritt brought the converted Saurer, which now looked like a furniture van, to his garage. He inserted a T-joint in the exhaust pipe and bored a two-inch hole in the floor of the rear compartment. A perforated U-shaped pipe was welded on the inside and a nozzle on the outside of the hole. When the T-joint and the nozzle were joined by a pipe and the regular exhaust pipe was capped, exhaust gas was diverted into the rear compartment.203

Wentritt drove the prototype to the courtyard of the KTI, where Widmann summoned his young chemists and explained that through adjusting the timing of the ignition, one could maximize the amount of poisonous carbon monoxide in the exhaust. One of his men then donned a gas mask and conducted a measurement of the carbon monoxide that could be produced within the sealed compartment. With this truck, Widmann explained, the firing squads on the eastern front would be spared. Some days later, probably in late October or early November,204 Dr. Heess drove two of the young chemists who had been present at the recent KTI carbon monoxide measurement to the concentration camp at Sachsenhausen. There they found the gas van amid a group of about thirty SS officers. Forty naked Russians were led from a nearby barracks and locked in the truck, which drove to the crematorium in another part of the camp. After twenty minutes the doors were opened, and the bodies pressed against the doors tumbled out. The pink color of the corpses indicated that death had been caused by poisoning, not suffocation.205 Firma Gaubschat was thereupon contracted for a total of thirty conversions.206

The initiative that led to the development and construction of the gas van may have come from Nebe, and the initial intention may have been to facilitate the Einsatzgruppen killing operations on Soviet territory. Nonetheless, by the time the prototype gas van had been constructed and tested in Berlin under Heydrich’s auspices, it was available as one potential solution to SS planners pondering the means for killing the European Jews. Moreover, Heydrich’s vans were in fact only one of three different gassing technologies being tested and developed in September and October of 1941. A second involved the testing of Zyklon B in Auschwitz, while the third involved preparations to transfer the technology and personnel of carbon-monoxide gassing (using the newly tested engine exhaust, however, rather than bottled gas) from the euthanasia institutes in Germany to stationary gas chambers in Poland.

According to Auschwitz commandant Rudolf Höss’s partially contradictory testimony,207 either two or three gassing tests took place in Auschwitz in late summer 1941. In one account his assistant Fritzsch used a powerful chemical fumigant, Zyklon B, to gas Russian prisoners of war in the basement cells of Bunker 11, and somewhat later he was present at a test using the crematory of Auschwitz I, after the doors had been made airtight and holes had been punched in the ceiling through which the Zyklon B could be poured.208 In Höss’s second account, Fritzsch conducted a small test in Bunker 11, and then Höss was present at a second, large-scale test in Bunker 11. On this occasion Höss wore a gas mask for protection. Then a third test, with Höss also present, was conducted “soon afterward” in the “old crematory.”209 September 3, 1941, has been reasonably suggested as the date for the large-scale test in Bunker 11. One room in the “old crematory” in the Auschwitz Stammlager (Auschwitz I) was then converted into a gas chamber and first tested on September 16.210 Several further gassings with Zyklon B were conducted later in the year on small contingents of Jews trucked into the camp.211 These were apparently Jews from the nearby Organisation Schmelt camps, where now for the first time, in the fall of 1941, Jews no longer capable of work were regularly selected and sent to their death in Auschwitz.212

As in the case of Nebe’s August initiative that led to the Widmann tests, the Zyklon B experiments in Auschwitz were not initially envisaged as part of a search for the means to kill the European Jews, Höss’s postwar testimony notwithstanding. Rather, as Robert Jan van Pelt and Karin Orth have persuasively demonstrated, the experimental gassing of the Soviet POWS was part of the extension of euthanasia killing into the concentration camps, known as Aktion 14f13. As part of this program, in late July 575 sick prisoners had been sent from Auschwitz to the euthanasia center at Sonnenstein and gassed. With the closing of the euthanasia centers and the arrival of large numbers of Soviet POWS in August, the Auschwitz camp commanders then experimented with methods to carry out such killings on the spot.213 But once the old crematory in the Auschwitz Stammlager was periodically used for the killing of Jews selected in the Organisation Schmelt camps, the potential of crematories as dual-purpose buildings was an idea that took on a life of its own.

On October 1, 1941, Karl Bischoff was put in charge of Auschwitz construction, with a mandate to design a second large camp at Birkenau for an anticipated 100,000 Soviet prisoners of war. He quickly realized that the existing cremation capacity at Auschwitz would be entirely inadequate and summoned Kurt Pröfer of Topf and Sons, the firm with which the SS had contracted for crematoria at other concentration camps. Meeting on October 21 and 22, 1941, Prüfer and Bischoff designed and contracted for a new crematory of vastly increased capacity, with five three-muffle furnaces, to be located in the Stammlager.214

Two features of the new crematory’s design support the commonsense proposition that the SS engineers and architects were not designing a new crematory that would be less versatile and less capable of being used as a gas chamber than the old one already in dual use. First, the smaller of two underground cellar rooms in the new crematory, in contrast to the rest of the building, was to have an additional forced air ventilation system—one that extracted old air and another that introduced fresh air.215 Second, the ventilation ducts for this particular cellar, but again in no other parts of the building, were recessed into the wall and covered with concrete. Such a design was both unusual and considerably more expensive. Michael Thad Allen has concluded that “the massively built masonry and concrete ductwork for Morgue 1 would seem to have only one explanation: the SS did not want to take any chances that its victims, in the throes of death and gasping for air, would kick in or pull down fragile tin ducts.”216 Since the special design for the recessed ducts was already present in the refined design drawings of January 1942, the idea of recessed ducts must have already emerged in the fall of 1941 in close conjunction with the idea for the extra feature of the forced air ventilation system.217 The design of a single new crematory in the Stammlager to serve also as a gas chamber was simply an improvement on the existing facilities at Auschwitz, to facilitate existing practices, and does not yet suggest the camp’s future role in the Final Solution. But it does indicate how widespread the idea of gassing had become in the fall of 1941.

The third chain of developments was centered in Lublin. Events here can be seen from two perspectives, that of the German occupiers in Poland and that of officials in Berlin. First the perspective from the General Government.

Frank, following his mid-March 1941 meetings with Hitler, was still taking a long-term view. Although the General Government was to become free of Jews “within a reasonable space of time” (in absehbarer Zeit), economic decisions relating to the Warsaw ghetto were made in the context of maintaining the ghetto for up to five years. Making the General Government as purely German as the Rhineland was seen as a project that would extend over several decades.218 As with so many other plans, Frank’s timetable shortened under the impact of Germany’s initial military success against the Soviet Union. On July 17, 1941, Frank cited Hitler’s renewed assurance that “within a reasonable space of time” the Jews would be removed from the General Government, which would thus henceforth serve only as a “kind of transit camp” (gewissermassen Durchgangslager.)219 Just two days later, Frank proposed to Lammers that the Pripet marshes be added to the General Government, because that currently worthless territory could be made valuable through the productive labor of certain “elements of the population (above all things Jewish)” (Bevölkerungselemente [vor allen Dingen jüdisch]).220 And on July 21 Frank was discussing “the imminent clearing” (die kommende Räumung) of the Warsaw ghetto with his chief of public health, Dr. Jost Walbaum.221 At virtually the same moment, Himmler visited SSPF Globocnik in Lublin on July 20, 1941. Globocnik received instructions to build a large concentration camp (Majdanek) and to prepare for German settlement in the Lublin district (particularly the Zamosc region) and the construction of SS and police strongholds further east.222

Just as the expectations of quick military victory over the Soviet Union were thwarted, so expectations in the General Government of an “imminent clearing” of the Warsaw ghetto and expulsion of Jews eastward to areas like the Pripet marshes proved futile. The pre-Barbarossa plans to increase the rations of Jewish workers in the ghettos were likewise unrealized. And Globocnik’s “Germanization” plans remained on the drawing board. From the local perspective, the bottleneck blocking a solution to these problems was broken by a series of developments in October 1941.223 On October 1 Globocnik wrote to Himmler: “Reichsführer! In implementation of your intentions for the Germanization of the district, yesterday I turned over the prepared documentation to Obergruppenführer Krüger and intended that Obergruppenführer Krüger immediately submit these documents to you, Reichsführer.” (Reichsführer! Im Vollzug Ihrer Absichten in der Verdeutschung des Distriktes habe ich gestern Obergruppenführer Krüger die ausgearbeiteten Unterlagen übergeben und wollte SS-Obergruppenführer Krüger diese Unterlagen Ihnen, Reichsführer, sogleich zur Vorlage bringen.) Globocnik indicated that Krüger shared his sense of urgency because the situation of the Volksdeutsche in the General Government was deteriorating. He also noted that a “consolidation” (Zusammensiedlung) of the ethnic Germans was tied to a “removal” (Entsiedlung) of the alien populations. Krüger had therefore ordered Globocnik to request an immediate meeting with Himmler.224

For two hours on the evening of October 13, Globocnik and Krüger met with Himmler.225 The content of that meeting is not recorded, but two days later Hauptsturmführer Hellmut Müller summarized Globocnik’s views. He considered “a general clearing of the entire GG of Jews and also Poles as necessary for the security of the eastern territory. . . . He is full of far-reaching and good plans in this regard” (die allmähliche Säuberung des gesamten GG. von Juden und auch Polen zwecks Sicherung der Ostgebiete usw. für notwendig. . . . Er steckt in diesem Zusammenhang voller weitgehender und guter Pläne).226 Among the many far-reaching plans proposed by Globocnik that found Himmler’s immediate approval, both Dieter Pohl and Bogdan Musial agree, must have been one for the creation of a camp with gas chambers at Belzec. Polish workers at that site began construction work just two weeks later on November 1, 1941.227

The notion of killing Jews in the General Government struck a responsive chord among Frank’s men, who felt beleaguered on a number of fronts at this moment. On October 13, 1941, the same day as the Himmler-Krüger-Globocnik meeting, Frank had approached Rosenberg about “the possibility of deporting the Jewish population of the General Government into the occupied eastern territories.” “For the moment,” however, Rosenberg saw “no possibility for the carrying out of such resettlement plans.”228 Two days later, on October 15, Frank began a series of meetings with district authorities in the General Government. The first such meeting was in Warsaw, where the district governor Fischer and the ghetto administrators Auerswald and Bischof gave discouraging reports on the state of the Warsaw ghetto with particular emphasis on the food shortage and looming threat of epidemic.229 Frank responded by refusing any increase in rations, since “even for the Polish population . . . hardly anything more can be provided.”230 At the same time he agreed to the death penalty for all Jews caught leaving the ghetto.231 (It was also at this time that Dr. Jost Walbaum addressed a meeting of 100 public health, SS, and military doctors in Bad Krynica, and his statement that “we sentence the Jews in the ghetto to death by hunger or we shoot them” was greeted with stormy applause.)232

Continuing his tour of the district capitals, Frank was in Lublin on October 17. Globocnik was back from his Berlin meeting with Himmler and also present in Lublin. Frank and Globocnik clearly conferred, for a few days later, on October 25, Globocnik reported to Himmler on his conversations with Frank at this time.233 In Lublin as earlier in Warsaw the local authorities pressed for the death penalty for Jews caught outside the ghettos, and the Stadthauptmann of Lublin, Fritz Sauermann, added, “Naturally a clarification of the Jewish question will finally be achieved only when a total deportation of all Jews can be accomplished.” Local officials were informed of the forthcoming edict decreeing the death penalty for Jews caught outside the ghettos without authorization.234 But they also learned of a yet further development. “The Jews—with the exception of indispensable artisans and the like—will be evacuated from Lublin. To begin with, 1,000 Jews will be sent over the Bug River [über den Bug überstellt werden]. The SS and Polizeiführer [Globocnik] will be in charge of the implementation. The selection of the Jews to be evacuated will be made by the Stadthauptmann [Sauermann].” To this revelation, Frank personally added the additional news: “In the near future, on the basis of a special assignment of the Führer, I will have much to do here and will thus have the good fortune to appear frequently in Lublin.”235

In sum, from his October 17 visit to Lublin and meeting with Globocnik, Frank had learned that Hitler had approved clearing the Lublin district of all Jews except indispensable workers, and clearly assumed that he and his civil administration would have a central role to play. Moreover, Frank obviously realized that the alleged deportation over the Bug was a euphemism for killing, since he had no intention of deporting Jews into the district of Galicia and he knew that deportations to Rosenberg’s territories were foreclosed. Moreover, he either knew or at least hoped that the looming evacuation of Jews would not be limited to the Lublin district. Four days later, when Frank was in Lwow, the prohibition against further ghetto building was repeated, “because the hope exists, that in the near future [italics mine] the Jews can be deported out of the General Government” (da die Hoffnung besteht, dass die Juden in naher Zukunft aus dem Generalgouvernement abgeschoben werden könnten).236 Frank immediately followed his visit to Lwow with a festive reception in Stanislawow on October 22, where just ten days earlier the “Bloody Sunday” massacre had inaugurated the wave of mass executions in the district of Galicia that would continue into December.237

Seen from the perspective of the General Government, it is tempting to conclude that the impetus for Hitler and Himmler’s approval of a plan for the “evacuation” of Polish Jews and the construction of the Belzec extermination camp was triggered by Globocnik’s initiative on October 1 and welcomed by local officials because of the multifaceted crisis facing the General Government. From this point of view, the October developments in the General Government are to be seen as “a kind of special program” arising from local circumstances, motives, and initiatives, quite apart from and preceding any wider decision to kill all the Jews of Europe.238 But the course of events in September and October must also be traced through the perspective of the center.

In mid-September Hitler had reversed his earlier position of deferring the deportation of Jews from the Third Reich until “after the war” and authorized Himmler to commence with their immediate deportation to temporary internment in Lodz, Riga, and Minsk, with subsequent deportation “further east” the following spring. Did this decision also constitute an answer to the question posed by Rolf-Heinz Höppner concerning the fate of the deportees, “Is it the goal to ensure them a certain level of life in the long run, or shall they be totally eradicated”? Was this deportation program still envisaged within the framework of earlier expulsion plans, or did it represent the Nazi regime’s fundamental watershed after which all subsequent decisions were taken and plans were made with the expectation and goal of total eradication? There is a strong convergence of evidence and higher probability for the latter interpretation.

On September 2, 1941, Himmler met with HSSPF Krüger of the General Government and discussed the “Jewish question—resettlement from the Reich.”239 Two days later, Himmler met with the HSSPF of the Warthegau, Wilhelm Koppe, and apparently discussed the possibility of sending 60,000 Reich Jews to Lodz.240 While Himmler was launching the search for reception areas for deported Reich Jews, the highest officials of the euthanasia program were also becoming active on a new front. On August 24 Hitler had suspended the adult euthanasia program in Germany. Sometime in September, Bouhler and Viktor Brack, the men in the Führer Chancellery in charge of euthanasia, visited Globocnik in Lublin.241 Back in Berlin, employees of the deactivated euthanasia program sat in the canteen and talked about the transfer of people to Lublin, including the subsequent head of Globocnik’s extermination camps in the General Government, Christian Wirth. “I knew police captain Wirth, the administrative head of various euthanasia institutes, who told me in the late summer of 1941, that he . . . was being transferred to a euthanasia institute in the Lublin area” (erzählte mir im Spätsommer 1941, dass er . . . an eine Euthanasie-Anstalt im Raum Lublin versetzt sei.)242 Another man recalled that it was “clear” that “something similar” to the euthanasia program was starting in Lublin, only this time according to rumor it was to be for the Jews.243

The convergence of these two strands of deportation and gassing was dramatically illustrated by the encounter between the SS deportation export Adolf Eichmann and euthanasia functionary Christian Wirth, both of whom had been sent from Berlin to the Lublin district. Sometime in the fall of 1941, according to Eichmann,244 he was summoned to Heydrich and told: “The Führer has ordered the physical destruction of the Jews. Globocnik has received his relevant instructions from the Reichsführer. Thus Globocnik is supposed to use antitank ditches for that purpose. I want to know what he is doing and how far he has come.”245

Eichmann was driven from Lublin for an hour and a half or two hours by Globocnik’s assistant Hans Höfle until they arrived at a small wooden house on the right-hand side of the road. Eichmann could not remember the name of the place, but it had “a more Polish-sounding name” than Treblinka.246 “We were received by an Order policeman in rolled up sleeves, who himself apparently had been working by hand. The style of his boots and the cut of his riding breeches indicated that he was an officer. From the introduction I learned that I was dealing with a captain of the Order Police. In the postwar years his name had long ago escaped me. Only through the literature did I remember again. His name was Wirth.”247 Concerning Wirth, Eichmann remembered specifically that he spoke in a coarse voice and southwest dialect.248

Wirth led Eichmann and Höfle along a small forest path on the left side of the road. In one version Eichmann said they came to two to three wooden houses “still under construction” (noch im Bau).249 In a second version they arrived at “two small peasant huts standing under the deciduous trees” (standen unter Laubbäumen zwei kleinere Bauernhäuser). Wirth explained that he “he had to hermetically seal all the windows and doors” (hatte er sämtliche Fenster und Türen hermetisch zu verschliessen). “After the work was completed, Jews would come into the rooms and be killed by exhaust gas from a Russian U-boat engine that would be channeled into these rooms.”250 In yet another version Eichmann added that “these wood structures were in, were in a forest, a deciduous forest, a quite dense deciduous forest, large trees and so in, in full color, their leaves were. . . . It was therefore 1941 in the fall” (diese Holzhausbauten in einer, in einer Laub, in einer Laubbaumzone gewesen sind, ziemlich dichten Laubbaumzone, grössere Bäume und so im, im vollen Schmuck, ihrer Blätter waren. . . . Das wäre also 1941 im Herbst).251

Eichmann could not remember seeing any working parties.252 “The motor was not yet there, the installation was not yet in operation.”253 Indeed he did not see anything that was yet identifiable as a camp. But he did remember distinctly that he had gone to Lublin expecting to see preparations for using antitank ditches as a shooting site, and instead this was the first time that he learned of actual preparations for gassing Jews.

There are three key elements to Eichmann’s account. He was sent to Poland after being told by Heydrich of a basic Hitler decision for the physical destruction of European Jewry. He visited the site of a prospective Globocnik extermination camp near Lublin at the very earliest stage of construction, when the idea of constructing stationary gas chambers and using exhaust gas was just taking shape. And this visit came at the peak of fall colors in 1941, therefore in late September or early October.254 If Eichmann’s account is correct on these counts, then clearly Hitler’s decision to deport German Jews in mid-September cannot be distinctly separated from an allegedly later decision for the Final Solution, and the role of the central government in the fall of 1941 was not one of merely reacting passively to unrelated initiatives from the periphery.

As with any detailed eyewitness testimonies after so many years, Eichmann’s various accounts differ from one another and are not free of puzzling contradictions with other evidence. In terms of his dating this visit to the fall of 1941, two problems stand out. First, according to the testimony of Josef Oberhauser, Wirth did not arrive at Belzec until late December 1941.255 And second, according to the testimony of Stanislaw Kozak and Eustachy Urkainski, construction at Belzec by local Polish workers of the first three wooden barracks, including the future gas chambers, did not begin until November 1.256 But there is no evidence that precludes Wirth’s having been to Lublin before Oberhauser’s arrival in October or November. Indeed, given the visit of Bouhler and Brack to the General Government in September, it is not at all unlikely that a representative of the euthanasia program, such as Wirth, would have been present during the earliest stages of testing and planning and then returned later to take command of Belzec when the camp was near completion. And if Eichmann’s final testimony is correct, that is, that he saw two small peasant houses in the midst of a thick forest rather than two to three wooden houses under construction, there is yet another puzzle. The site of the Belzec camp, long presumed to be the site of this initial visit, lay alongside the main road and rail line, in sight of the train station and town. The location of the camp and the size of the buildings constructed for it do not at all fit Eichmann’s description of two peasant huts deep in the forest.

Can these seeming contradictions be resolved? I would suggest the following scenario. In September Wirth was sent to the Lublin district to create a gassing facility. He first contemplated converting two peasant huts into gas chambers by sealing them hermetically (as Höss was to do with Bunkers 1 and 2 at Birkenau), but then after Eichmann’s visit, presumably at the meeting of Himmler, Krüger, and Globocnik on October 13, it was decided to construct the entire camp from scratch next to the rail line for the logistical necessity of handling a continuous flow of transports. In this scenario, Wirth’s initial peasant huts in the woods would have formed the basis for some of the “prepared documentation” and “far-reaching and good plans” that Globocnik was eager to submit to Himmler on October 1. The plans were then altered and expanded to meet Himmler’s needs and expectations.

In support of this possibility, a number of obscure and seemingly trivial items of evidence are worth noting. In recounting his first visit to Birkenau in the spring of 1942, Eichmann said that he saw “these same huts” (dieselben Häuschen) as he had seen in the camp in the woods.257 The commander of the Gendarmerie in the Lublin district, Ferdinand Hahnzog, also testified to the existence of “a primitive installation, consisting of a hermetically sealed shack hidden deep in the forest across from Galicia near Belzec” (eine tief im Grenzwalde gegen Galizien bei Belzec verborgene primitive Anlage . . . die aus einem abgedichteten Schuppen bestand), into which exhaust gas from a truck was piped in a test killing.258 On two occasions Eichmann also placed his trip to Lublin in a sequence that implied late September. In court he stated that this trip took place “a little while before” his negotiations in Lodz.259 And in his last account he wrote that the trip occurred “shortly before the order to prepare this first great Jewish deportation.”260 Eichmann said that he met with Heydrich in Berlin, but after September 27 Heydrich was increasingly in Prague.261 All of this would indicate the existence of an experimental site in the woods near Belzec which Eichmann visited in late September and which formed the basis for an entirely new camp to be constructed by the rail line in Belzec beginning on November 1.

In any case, the problems and contradictions of accepting Eichmann’s testimony for a fall visit to Belzec are minor in comparison to asserting that it can be made compatible with a visit in the following winter.262 By the end of December, according to Kozak, the Polish workers had constructed three large barracks (50 m × 12.5 m, 25 × 12.5 m, and 12 × 8 m), while simultaneously 70 Russian POWs in black uniforms had dug the first large grave (50 m long, 20 m wide, and 6 m deep) connected to the future gas chamber by a narrow rail line. They had also encircled the camp with a thick, barbed wire fence.263 In short, in any winter visit Eichmann would have encountered a nearly complete camp not remotely similar to anything he described in any of his testimonies.

The credibility of Eichmann’s account of a fall visit to Belzec following a Hitler decision for the Final Decision must above all be tested against the context of other events in October 1941. Following the Himmler-Krüger-Globocnik two-hour meeting on October 13, which presumably was the occasion of Himmler’s approval for the construction of Belzec, and a five-hour Himmler-Heydrich meeting on following day, October 14,264 within a very short time period there occurred an extraordinary flurry of events that fall into two categories. The first concerned the proliferation of prospective gassing sites. The second reflected a watershed change in the vision of a solution to the Jewish question from expulsion to extermination.

First of all, Belzec was not the only extermination camp being planned, either in the General Government or elsewhere at this time. According to the stationmaster at Sobibor, Jan Piwonski, a group of SS officers arrived there sometime in the fall of 1941 to measure the track and ramp, which indicates that the site of that future extermination camp was also already under consideration.265 In the neighboring Warthegau, similar events were occurring. Since early 1940 Herbert Lange in Poznan had led a Sonderkommando that had carried out euthanasia killings in East Prussia and the incorporated territories, some through shooting and at least some in a gas van equipped with canisters of bottled carbon monoxide.266 According to Lange’s chauffeur, he drove the Sonderkommando chief around the Warthegau in the fall of 1941, searching for a suitable site for a camp. Lange then drove to Berlin for consultations and returned to a village northwest of Lodz in late October or early November, where a team of SS men and Order Police was assembled from both Lodz and Poznan and a workforce of Poles began renovating and fencing an old villa or Schloss in the center of town. The village was Chelmno.267 A similar chronology was confirmed by the local Volksdeutsche Amtskommissar. He was away from town toward the end of 1941 when some SS men arrived and investigated the Schloss and other buildings in town. Some days later, after his return, Lange appeared and confiscated various buildings. Lange returned still later with a team of SS men, followed by police, and work on the Schloss began.268

It has been argued that the founding of the extermination camp at Chelmno, like Belzec, was primarily a local phenomenon, the product of special approval by Himmler on the initiative of Gauleiter Greiser to reduce the nonworking Jewish population of the Lodz ghetto in order to make the local authorities more amenable to the arrival of the 20,000 Reich Jews and 5,000 “Gypsies” who were being deported there as of mid-October 1941.269 But the assignment of the euthanasia killer Lange and the dispatch of gas vans and drivers by the motor pool of the RSHA in Berlin indicated the close cooperation and common purpose of Brack and the Führer Chancellery, Heydrich and the RSHA, as well as Himmler and his HSSPF Wilhelm Koppe. Chelmno may have been a local extermination camp for the Warthegau Jews, but its rapid emergence in the fall of 1941 occurred in no small part because the perceptions and desires of local officials there dovetailed perfectly with the visions and goals at the center.

If preparations for the future extermination camps at Belzec and Chelmno were already underway in late October (and at least site selection for the future camp at Sobibor occurred sometime in the fall of 1941), planning (ultimately unrealized) for at least two other extermination camps can also be dated to late October. Just as Chelmno was being constructed near the terminus of the initial deportations to Lodz, two camps were being planned for Mogilev and Riga at the very moment that the second wave of deportations to Minsk and Riga were being prepared. On October 23, the day that Eichmann met with all his deportation experts in Berlin to discuss the impending deportation of 50,000 Reich Jews to these two cities,270 Himmler was in Mogilev inspecting a factory labor camp of Bach-Zelewski’s. According to one witness, Himmler declared that solutions other than shooting would soon be available to kill Jews. According to Bach-Zelewski (who attributed this episode to a later date), Himmler explicitly discussed the construction of gas chambers. By mid-November the Topf company had been commissioned to construct a huge crematorium in Mogilev, and in December the first four-chamber crematorium oven was delivered. The gas chambers were never constructed, and subsequent crematory units were diverted to Auschwitz.271 Instead, a killing center at Maly Trostinez, closer to Minsk, was created the following spring.

At the same time that Himmler was discussing plans for installing gas chambers in a camp in Mogilev during his visit there on October 23–25, the possibility of establishing gassing facilities in Riga was a topic of conversation in Berlin between officials of the euthanasia program, the Ostministerium, and the RSHA. As noted earlier, on October 24 Reichskommissar Lohse and Generalkommissar Drechsler met with Einsatzkommando leader Rudolf Lange to discuss the arrival of Jewish transports from the Reich. Frustrated by the unilateral action of the SS, Lohse announced that he was going to Berlin the next day to clear up the matter.272 Two weeks later Lohse was still in Berlin when the head of his political division, Trampedach, urged his intervention to prevent the now imminent Jewish transports. The reply from Berlin informed Trampedach that the Ostministerium had no objections because the camps in Riga and Minsk were only temporary measures. The Jews would be sent “further to the east.”273 What had Lohse learned in Berlin that so completely altered the Ostministerium’s attitude to the Jewish transports?

On October 25, the day after Lohse’s meeting with Lange and the very day he arrived in Berlin, Ostministerium Jewish expert Erhard Wetzel drafted a letter for his minister, Rosenberg, concerning conversations he had had first with Viktor Brack and then with Eichmann of the RSHA. The letter’s recipient was to be none other than Lohse. The time of the meeting was shortly before the successful testing of the prototype gas van in Sachsenhausen but perhaps after the preliminary tests at the KTI.

According to Wetzel, Brack declared himself ready to aid in the construction of “gassing apparatuses” (Vergasungsapparate) on the spot in Riga because they were not in sufficient supply in the Reich. They had yet to be built. Brack offered to send his chemist Dr. Kallmeyer to Riga, where he would take care of everything. The procedure in question, Brack warned, was “not without danger,” so special protective measures would have to be taken. Thus Lohse should apply through the HSSPF in Riga for Kallmeyer and other personnel.

Eichmann confirmed that Jewish camps were about to be set up in Riga and Minsk to receive German Jews. Following this discussion with Eichmann, Wetzel concluded that those Jews capable of labor would be sent “to the east” later, but under the circumstances there would be no objections “if those Jews who are not fit for work are removed by Brack’s device” (wenn diejenigen Juden, die nicht arbeitsfähig sind, mit den Brackschen Hilfsmitteln beseitigt werden) in the meantime.274

According to Wetzel’s postwar testimony, he was summoned on October 23 to a meeting with Brack in the Führer’s Chancellery. “Brack said to me . . . he had a task for me. I should inform Minister Rosenberg of the following: He, Brack, had a gassing apparatus that ought to be sent to Riga. The Minister should inform Reichskommissar Lohse of this. Brack told me, the gassing apparatus was intended for the destruction of Jews. During his explanation, Brack told me by the way that it was a question of a Führer order or a mandate of the Führer.” Wetzel subsequently sought out Eichmann, with whom he had a “short and substantive conversation” (ein kurzes und sachliches Gespräch). He then returned to the Ostministerium and gave a detailed report to Dr. Otto Bräutigam, who said it was a “delicate matter” (heikle Sache) that had to be discussed with Leibbrandt. It was Leibbrandt’s suggestion to draft a letter for Lohse containing a report on the Brack and Eichmann meetings.275

Since Lohse had just arrived in Berlin, presumably Bräutigam and Leibbrandt discussed with him in person the question of Jewish transports to Riga as well as Brack’s proposal, and the letter drafted in Rosenberg’s name was neither signed nor sent. Apparently, Kallmeyer did not make the trip, and gas vans were not constructed in Riga.276 Ultimately, gas vans constructed in Berlin were sent instead.

Inevitably, as the invention of the extermination camp passed from conception and experimentation to preparation, other people within the Nazi regime began to receive unmistakable signals from their colleagues in the SS that Nazi Jewish policy had passed a fateful divide. Not expulsion but mass murder awaited the European Jews. Two examples documented in the records of the Foreign Office demonstrate the hints that officials there were receiving by the end of October.

A number of Spanish Jews had been arrested and interned in France, which led the Spanish government to suggest the possibility of evacuating all Spanish Jews (some 2,000) to Spanish Morocco. On October 13, 1941, the Foreign Office Undersecretary Martin Luther urged negotiations in that direction—a position fully in line with the hitherto prevailing policy of achieving a judenrein Europe through expulsion. But four days later (and just three days after Heydrich’s five-hour meeting with Himmler), Heydrich’s RSHA informed Luther by telephone of its opposition to the Spanish proposal, since the Spanish government had neither the will nor the experience to guard the Jews effectively in Morocco. “In addition these Jews would also be too much out of the direct reach of the measures for a basic solution to the Jewish question to be enacted after the war.” (Darüber hinaus wären diese Juden aber auch bei den nach Kriegsende zu ergreifenden Massnahmen zur grundsätzlichen Lösung der Judenfrage dem unmittelbaren Zugriff allzusehr entzogen.) The rejection of deportation to Morocco combined with the mention of a basic solution to be enacted after the war, which removal of the Jews would thwart, indicate that a fundamental shift in Nazi Jewish policy had occurred. Within the SS a judenfrei Europe was no longer being pursued through expulsion.277

On October 18, 1941, one day after Heydrich informed Luther that the Spanish Jews in France could not be allowed to go to Morocco, Heinrich Himmler made a note on a telephone conversation with Heydrich: “No emigration by Jews to overseas.”278 On October 23, the emigration gates officially closed. Gestapo chief Heinrich Müller dispatched a circular letter to the various agencies and offices of the Sipo-SD announcing Himmler’s order that Jewish emigration was to be stopped.279 If the message had not been clear enough already, Franz Rademacher in the Foreign Office received official confirmation from Eichmann on November 4 that the halt to Jewish emigration did not just apply to the case of Spanish Jews and Morocco, but to all Jews in Europe.280

Also in October 1941 Eichmann’s associate Friedrich Suhr accompanied the Foreign Office Jewish expert Franz Rademacher to Belgrade to deal with the Jewish question in Serbia. After the fate of the adult male Jews had been settled at a meeting on October 20, Rademacher reported on the women, children, and elderly: “Then as soon as the technical possibility exists within the framework of a total solution to the Jewish question, the Jews will be deported by waterway to the reception camps in the east.” (Sobald dann im Rahmen der Gesamtlösung der Judenfrage die technische Möglichkeit besteht, werden die Juden auf dem Wasserwege in die Auffanglager im Osten abgeschoben.)281

When Rademacher returned to Berlin five days later, he found waiting a letter of October 23 from an old friend, Paul Wurm, foreign editor of Der Stürmer. Wurm had been visiting Berlin and had just missed seeing Rademacher, but he had had another interesting conversation, which he hurried to inform Rademacher of in this personal note. “Dear Party Comrade Rademacher! On my return trip from Berlin I met an old party comrade, who works in the east on the settlement of the Jewish question. In the near future many of the Jewish vermin will be exterminated through special measures.” (Auf meine Rückreise aus Berlin traf ich einen alten Parteigenossen, der im Osten an der Regelung der Judenfrage arbeitet. In nächster Zeit wird von dem jüdischen Ungezeifer durch besondere Massnahmen manches vernichtet werden.)282 What an extraordinary coincidence that on that very day, October 23, when Wurm encountered visitors from the east to Berlin talking of exterminating Jews through special measures, Eichmann had met in Berlin with his deportation experts, including those from the east, to discuss the impending deportation of 50,000 Reich Jews to Riga and Minsk that would follow the first wave of deportation to Lodz.283

In the last days of October, Hitler’s own rhetoric before his guests at headquarters, usually veiled in such circumstances, became more candid. For top Nazis seeking affirmation that they had understood Hitler’s intentions and “wishes” correctly, he left no ambiguity. On October 17, in the presence of Fritz Sauckel and Fritz Todt, he ruminated about the Germanization of the eastern territories. The native populations were to be treated “as Indians” (als Indianer). They would be “sifted,” except for the urban populations that were to be starved. Moreover, “we are getting rid of the destructive Jews entirely” ([d]en destruktiven Juden setzen wir ganz hinaus). Hitler showed no qualms. “I proceed with these matters ice-cold. I feel myself to be only the executor of a will of history.”284 On October 21, during a midday meeting with Bormann, Hitler talked expansively about Christianity and Bolshevism as two versions of the eternal revolutionary Jewish threat. “When we exterminate this plague, then we perform a deed for humanity, the significance of which our men out there can still not at all imagine.”285 And on the night of October 25, he met with Heydrich and Himmler just after the latter’s return from Mogilev. He recalled his Reichstag prophecy and blamed the Jews for the German lives lost in both wars. “Let no one say to me: We cannot send them into the swamp. Who then cares about our own people? It is good when the terror precedes us that we are exterminating the Jews. . . . We are writing history anew, from the racial standpoint.” (Sage mir keiner: wir können sie doch nicht in den Morast schicken! Wer kümmert sich denn um unsere Menschen? Es ist gut, wenn uns der Schrecken vorangeht, dass wir das Judentum ausrotten. . . . Wir schreiben die Geschichte auch wieder neu: vom Rassestandpunkt aus.)286

What kind of scenario can be constructed out of the incomplete, disparate, and sometimes contested evidence? I would suggest the following. In mid-July, during the first peak of victory euphoria, Hitler gave the signal to Himmler and Heydrich to commence with the immediate and comprehensive murder of Soviet Jewry. The transition to implementation followed swiftly over the next four weeks, as Himmler both increased manpower and visited various units in the east to spread the word. At the same time, Hitler also led Himmler and Heydrich to believe he expected proposals concerning the fate of the rest of European Jewry that went beyond the expulsion plans of the previous years. Heydrich moved quickly to get written authorization from Göring both to prepare a new, unprecedented plan, different from what he had submitted to Göring in March, and to coordinate the activities of the agencies that would be involved. In August, Heydrich, followed by Goebbels, also proposed that deportation of the Reich Jews begin. But Hitler—facing new uncertainty on the eastern front—declared that such deportations would not occur until after the war. By late August, with the conflict over strategy resolved and resumption of the offensive pending, Hitler granted Goebbels’s request for a marking decree on August 19. Himmler also met with Hitler on August 20 and may well have come away with the impression that the latter’s position on deferring deportations until after the war was not inflexible.

In the last days of August, Eichmann wrote of plans for the Final Solution “now in preparation.” His colleague Höppner, after consulting with Eichmann, impatiently awaited the basic Führer decision as to whether deportees should be “totally eradicated.” In the first days of September, Himmler met with the two HSSPFs of the General Government and the Warthegau, Krüger and Koppe. He discussed the “Jewish question” in relationship to “resettlement from the Reich” with the former, and the resettlement of 60,000 Reich Jews in Lodz with the latter. On September 16 Himmler met with Hitler and two days later wrote to Greiser about deportations to Lodz and subsequent deportation further east the following spring. On September 22–24 Himmler and Heydrich were again with Hitler, by which time deportations to “camps” in Minsk and Riga were also being planned. Sometime during this same month Bouhler and Brack, with men to spare from the recently suspended adult euthanasia program, visited the General Government, and Christian Wirth informed colleagues that he was heading for Lublin. In my opinion, it is most probable that in mid-September Hitler tentatively approved not only the deportations but also at least in principle the “eradication” of the deportees, though precisely how, when, and where this would take place was still not clear. The capture of Kiev and double encirclement victory at Vyazma and Bryansk created a second peak of victory euphoria that emboldened Hitler further. What had been tentative in mid-September became definite in early October.

I think that it was most probably in late September that Heydrich informed Eichmann of Hitler’s decision for the “physical destruction” of the European Jews and dispatched him to Lublin to report on Globocnik’s progress. Heydrich knew that Himmler had initiated Globocnik but still thought he was going to use antitank ditches for mass shooting. Instead, Eichmann encountered Wirth in the very earliest stages of sealing two peasant huts in the forest to create gas chambers. This was presumably one of the many “good and far-reaching plans” that Globocnik and Krüger were so anxious to share with Himmler when they requested a meeting on October 1. In the meeting with Globocnik and Krüger on October 13, Himmler must have seized upon the Wirth solution with alacrity. Four days later, after meeting with Globocnik, Frank knew that beginning in Lublin the nonworking Jews of the General Government were going to be deported “over the Bug,” that is, killed. And on November I construction of two large barracks and the gas chambers began at Belzec next to the rail line, indicating that the modest preparations Eichmann had seen earlier were now being considerably enlarged upon. Belzec was no longer simply to be the site of a Wirth experiment but rather a camp capable of receiving a steady flow of deportation trains. Soon the possibility of a further site at Sobibor (where the train station ramp was measured by investigating SS men) was also being explored.

At the same time that Himmler took up the Belzec project, Heydrich seized upon the Widmann experiments in Belorussia and undertook the mass production of gas vans through the RSHA motor pool in Berlin. By late October the visiting Herbert Lange was promised several of these vans for Chelmno, and on October 23 Brack invited Wetzel to the Führer Chancellery to offer the Ostministerium officials help in constructing similar vans in Riga. On October 23–25 Himmler was in Mogilev, apparently laying the groundwork for the construction of a gas chamber camp there as well. Thus in the last weeks of October, extermination camps were envisioned not only in the Lublin district but also near the three cities that were to receive deportations from the Reich—Chelmno for Lodz, Mogilev for Minsk, and Riga. The idea of gassing Jews had demonstrably been percolating among various Nazis since Höppner’s mid-July suggestion and Nebe’s August initiatives. In mid-October this idea was eagerly seized upon by Himmler and Heydrich as the answer to their search for an effective mass killing method, a search that had become urgent with Hitler’s approval of deportations from the Reich one month earlier, to say nothing of the onset of deportations on October 15.287

By October 25 even Germans who were not at the center of these developments—such as Franz Rademacher and Paul Wurm—had become aware of plans for “reception camps” in the east and “special measures” to exterminate “many” of the “Jewish vermin” in the “near future.” Moreover, all the Jews of Europe were targeted. On October 17 Heydrich articulated the policy that no Jews should be allowed to escape “the direct reach of the measures for a basic solution to the Jewish question to be enacted after the war.” And one day later, October 18, Himmler instructed Heydrich to end all Jewish emigration.

In his superb study of the Nazi persecution of the Jews, Peter Longerich takes a somewhat different approach. He argues that in the fall of 1941 “a concrete plan for the short term, systematic murder” of the Jews did not yet exist, rather only “the climate for the development of such a program or plan.”288 He adds: “In the fall of 1941 the decision for the immediate murder of all European Jews had not yet been taken. In the fall of 1941 the murder of hundreds of thousands, but not millions of human beings was being prepared.”289 Longerich chooses his words carefully, and in a strict sense he is correct. A plan or program for the “immediate” mass murder of “all European Jews” did not yet exist. Over the coming months many important decisions were yet to be taken concerning how, when, where, at what rate, and with what exceptions the task of murdering the European Jews was to be accomplished.

But such an approach underplays the significance of what had happened by the last week in October 1941. Quite simply, the fundamental question concerning the fate of the Jews that had been posed by Höppner on September 3, “Is it the goal to ensure them a certain level of life in the long run, or shall they be totally eradicated,” had been answered. The Nazi regime had crossed the key watershed. Until the summer of 1941, the Nazi leadership had envisaged a solution to its self-imposed Jewish question through expulsion and accompanying decimation. By the last week of October, the close circle around Hitler, and gradually others as well, knew what Hitler expected of them and in what general direction they planned to proceed. They were now aware that, whatever the methods and timetable, no European Jews, not even women and children in Belgrade or Spanish Jews in Paris, were to escape the “measures for a basic solution to the Jewish question to be enacted after the war.” And the goal of these measures was “physical destruction.” The vision was there, the decision had been taken, planning was underway, and implementation was scheduled for a time period characterized as both “the next spring” and “after the war.”