by Ian Kershaw
Hitler’s personal paranoid fixation with the Jews as an omnipresent and omnipotent force within and outside Germany, the paramount threat to the nation, responsible for the lost war and all the ills that had followed from it, was shared in its entire lunacy by relatively few. The arcanum of his own peculiar ‘world-view’ had not won power for Hitler. But through different refractions–mutated, distorted and adapted–his hatred of the Jews had permeated in some sort of way by the time he was appointed Reich Chancellor the crude notions of millions as part of his broad message of restoring national unity and strength. And now, with the power of the state itself at the beckoning of a leader driven by pathological delusions about the Jews, whose word was a command to an army of apparatchiks, and who was accorded near-deified status by an adoring public, the quest to remove the Jews from Germany could take new political and institutional form. From now on, there was no hiding-place for Jews in Germany. The sensible, far-sighted or plain lucky ones left. Many others moved to the relative anonymity of the big city. But there was no safety; only borrowed time.
Already in spring 1933 the first big discriminatory steps were taken. Jews were ousted from the civil service. Barriers were placed in their way to entering the legal profession, practising as doctors and obtaining school places for their children. A national boycott of Jewish shops and stores lasted only a single day, 1 April, but local and regional attempts to force Jews out of business did not let up. Not only did the antisemitic climate worsen; now the state gave its backing to those who were making the lives of Jews a misery. A second major wave of antisemitic agitation and violence in the spring and summer of 1935 ended with the promulgation of the infamous Nuremberg Laws in September–the overture to a succession of decrees taking away all civil rights from Jews and reducing them to the status of social pariahs. The expansion of the Reich in 1938 saw open antisemitic violence plumb new depths in Vienna, following the Anschluss, then in the annexed Sudetenland. But it was the orgy of destruction unleashed on Jews, their property and their synagogues throughout Germany on the night of 9–10 November 1938, cynically dubbed ‘Reich Crystal Night’ from the amount of broken glass littering the streets of big cities following the pogroms, that opened the eyes of the Jewish community, and the rest of the world, to the full viciousness of Nazi persecution. Wherever they could, Jews fled. To help them on their way, the regime rounded up between 20,000 and 30,000 Jews as pawns until the money for their emigration could be drummed up. Measures were now rapidly taken to force remaining Jews out of the economy. The process of ‘aryanization’–the compulsory sales at giveaway prices of Jewish businesses–moved into its final stages. On the eve of war, a terrified, impoverished, numerically much reduced Jewish community stood at the mercy of Hitler’s henchmen. Hitler’s own rhetoric in his speech of 30 January 1939, and the actions of his regime, had by now left no Jews in any doubt that they had much to fear from the advent of a new war, a prospect which seemed by the day to become more certain.
Much of the radicalization of persecution between 1933 and 1939 had taken place with little or no specific direction by Hitler himself. Years later, he acknowledged that ‘even regarding the Jews’ he had been compelled ‘for long to remain inactive’–mainly out of foreign policy considerations, not desire, of course.29 He seldom needed to be active, except where a major decision (such as the passing of the Nuremberg Laws in 1935, or unleashing the pogrom in November 1938) was concerned. It sufficed that he provided the general guidelines for what was required.30 Characteristically, Hitler would give some ‘signal’ or ‘green light’ to his minions to indicate his wishes on measures against the Jews. Radicals would follow the prompt to intensify the persecution. This would either find Hitler’s subsequent sanction, or would be channelled into discriminatory legislation. Either way, the momentum of persecution was sustained, its level ever more radical. Hitler’s underlings at different levels of the regime were adept at knowing how to ‘work towards the Führer’ along the lines he would wish.31 This was not only the case for party apparatchiks and bureaucrats in government offices. It applied in exemplary fashion to the expanding realm of policing, security and surveillance under the control of Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler and his right-hand man, the arch-technocrat of power Reinhard Heydrich.
By 1939, ‘removal’ of the Jews from Germany had proceeded a long way. But from the point of view of the Nazi leadership, it had not gone nearly far enough. Nazi policy towards Jews had been far from a straightforward route to a prescribed goal. It had encountered blockages, had experienced stops and starts and had followed a ‘twisted road’32–though never a path that deviated for long from ever-escalating radicalization of persecution. Despite the intensified persecution, by the end of 1938 over two-thirds of the Jewish population of 1933 still lived in Germany. And for most of these, as the Nazi authorities concluded, there was nowhere to go. Emigration was not an option.33 Since 1937, the Jewish desk of the SD had been looking for ways to speed up their expulsion. A far-reaching idea was a territorial solution: ship the Jews out to some foreign, inhospitable place and dump them there. Some of the more barren regions of South America were among the zany ideas mooted for a while.34 Nothing, of course, came of such far-flung notions. They were to recur, however, in a different–and even more dangerous–setting in 1940. Pogroms had been another method contemplated to speed up emigration. And, indeed, the terror of Reichskristallnacht prompted a flood of refugees, desperate now to leave Germany under any circumstances. Foreign doors to Jewish immigration that had largely been closed were temporarily forced open. Almost as many Jews left in 1938–9 as in the previous four years of Nazi rule.35 Even so, on the eve of the war Jews in Germany still numbered not much less than half of the figure of 1933. The Nazis were still far from a complete ‘solution to the Jewish Question’, even within the Reich.
As late as November 1938, immediately following Reichskristallnacht, Heydrich had thought it would take a decade to be rid of all the remaining Jews.36 He was soon given his chance to take the matter in hand. The wanton destruction of Jewish property by Nazi hordes had been widely criticized–though far less so the aim of forcing Jews out of Germany–and turned out to be the final explosion of large-scale public atrocities within the bounds of the Reich.37 A more ‘rational’ policy was needed. On 24 January 1939 Heydrich was appointed head of a Central Office for Jewish Emigration. This drew its inspiration from what the Nazi leadership saw as a highly successful operation, masterminded by Adolf Eichmann, in Vienna the previous year (where the proportion of Jews leaving had been far in excess of the rate for Germany itself).38 When units of the Security Police moved into Poland behind the invasion force in September 1939, Heydrich now occupied a pivotal position in dealing with the ‘Jewish Question’ in the newly conquered territories. It was a task that dwarfed any that he had taken on before the war. The job had then been to expedite the forced emigration of what remained of a Jewish community that had numbered around half a million at the time of Hitler’s accession to power. And now, with the initial aim still unfulfilled, the conquest of Poland had brought a further two million Jews within the Nazi orbit. The ‘Jewish Question’ to be solved was no longer confined to Germany. It was a part of the war. And it had become much larger, not smaller, with the outbreak of hostilities.
III
Poland became in many ways an experimental ground for what was to come. Three large regions of the conquered country abutting Germany’s eastern borders were incorporated into the Reich. But in contrast to Austria and the Sudetenland the year before, where the population had been overwhelmingly ethnic German, most of those in the newly annexed territories were Poles. Ethnic Germans were a minority. And a further small minority in these provinces were Jews. The aim of the new rulers was clear. The provinces, long contested between Germany and Poland, were to become fully Germanized, and as quickly as possible. Removing the Poles, it was plain, could not be done overnight. But clearing out the Jews, the lowest of the low in a vanquished po
pulation treated like dirt by the new overlords, seemed an easily manageable task. One of the most ruthless of these overlords, Arthur Greiser, the boss of what came to be designated Gau Wartheland (usually called the ‘Warthegau’), with its headquarters in Posen, presumed in November 1939 that the ‘Jewish Question’ was no longer a problem and would be solved in the immediate future.39 But Greiser, and other Nazi leaders, presumed too much. They had not reckoned with the logistical difficulties that stood in the way of their objectives, however ruthless they were prepared to be.
The initial idea was to create a huge reservation in a strip lying between the rivers Vistula and Bug, in the extreme east of the part of Poland occupied by Germany (following the division of the country between the Reich and the Soviet Union). Jews from the newly annexed provinces, and in addition all the Reich’s Jews and 30,000 Gypsies, would be rounded up, loaded into cattle wagons and packed off to this dumping-ground. Hitler had approved the deportations. Heydrich expected them to last for about a year.40
This was utterly illusory. Before autumn had passed, the idea of the reservation beyond the Vistula had been given up. Instead, Jews were to be deported into all four districts of the largest part of what remained of Poland, the ‘General Government’ with its headquarters in Cracow and not designated for incorporation into the Reich. A second notion swiftly to be abandoned–or rather, postponed–was the rapid deportation of the Reich Jews. Eichmann had organized the deportation of several thousand Jews from Mährisch-Ostrau in the Protectorate (what remained of Czechoslovakia, now under German rule), Katowice in Upper Silesia, and Vienna to the Lublin district of eastern Poland in autumn 1939, and had presumed this would be the first stage of the removal of the Jews from Germany and Austria. However, the deportations were no sooner started than they were halted on orders from above, most probably from Himmler.41 The Reichsführer-SS had been given broad new powers by Hitler in early October to control resettlement in the occupied eastern territories. His priority was to find space in the newly annexed provinces, beginning with the ‘Warthegau’, to accommodate ethnic Germans from the Baltic and elsewhere beyond Germany’s areas of occupation. This meant the urgent removal not only of Jews but of vast numbers of Poles. In November the figure of a million Poles and Jews to be removed by February was mentioned.42 Deportation of Jews from the Reich, former Austria and the Protectorate had less urgency.
Staggering brutality was deployed in rounding up and deporting Poles and Jews from the ‘Warthegau’, but the targets in successive grandiose plans proved utterly impossible to meet. Little headway had been made by the time that Hans Frank, the head of the General Government who had earlier welcomed the plans to send Jews east of the Vistula, commenting that ‘the more that die the better’,43 was closing the doors on further deportations into his area. He simply had no possibility of accommodating huge numbers of deported Poles into his already overpopulated and impoverished region, desperately short of food supplies, he lamented. As for Jews, he wanted to make his area ‘Jew-free’, not to turn it into a dumping-ground for Jews from other, more privileged areas. But he recognized that in the short term, the General Government would have to take in more than half a million additional Jews and that ‘only then can we gradually talk about what must happen to them’. He still had in mind a huge Jewish reservation in the eastern extremities of his region, on the border with the Soviet-controlled part of former Poland.44
By spring 1940 it was evident to the Nazi leadership that their schemes for immense population transfer and resettlement (of which the Jews were only one part) could not be realized within the existing bounds of the occupied Polish territories. Leaders in the annexed provinces, most of all Greiser in the ‘Warthegau’, were frantic to be rid of the Jews under their aegis, but no avenue was open for their deportation. Ghettos, initially envisaged as no more than temporary holding places until their inhabitants could be deported, turned into more lasting institutions. The largest of them, Łód in the ‘Warthegau’ and later Warsaw in the General Government, offered such opportunities for profit and corruption that their Nazi administrators were loath to contemplate their dissolution. Frank, meanwhile, was becoming even more obdurate. He had, it is true, told Hitler and Himmler that he had no other interest than to serve the Reich’s need in making his region ‘the receptacle of all elements that stream into the General Government from outside, be they Poles, Jews, Gypsies etc.’ But he had then convinced Heydrich that the food situation in the General Government made it impossible to continue the resettlement programme.45 An impasse had been reached.
A possible way out had, however, been mentioned by Frank himself as early as January, when he had seized upon the old antisemitic idea, first advanced by the German racist writer Paul de Lagarde in the 1880s, of settling millions of Jews in Madagascar, a French colony.46 This, Frank suggested, would create space in the General Government.47 At the time, it was no more than a pipe dream. But precisely this prospect opened up with the German military triumph in the western offensive in spring 1940. Five days after the German advance began, Himmler, in a memorandum prepared for Hitler on the treatment of the ‘alien population in the east’, remarked–seemingly as not much more than an aside–that he hoped to see the term ‘Jew’ ‘completely extinguished through the possibility of a large-scale emigration of all Jews to Africa or to some other colony’.48 Perhaps Himmler had put out the idea of deporting the Jews to Africa (Madagascar was not specifically mentioned) as a feeler. If so, he had met with no objection. Hitler approved the memorandum. And it must soon have been obvious in wider sections of the regime’s leadership what was in the wind. For, as the defeat of France became a foregone conclusion, a proposal emanating from the Foreign Ministry envisaged Madagascar, not the General Government, as the destination for deported Jews. The idea was rapidly picked up. Madagascar would provide the answer to all the blockages in Poland. When, in July, Himmler halted deportations into his region,49 Frank felt ‘colossal relief’.50 His difficulties would soon be over. Not only would no more Jews enter his domain; those there, in excess of two million, were to be shipped overseas and would cease to be his problem.
Madagascar, as the mooted new location of a Jewish reservation, was an idea with a short lifespan. But for several months in 1940 it was taken seriously at the highest level of the Reich leadership. And now, for the first time, a solution to the ‘Jewish Question’ was envisaged that embraced western Europe. Heydrich swiftly moved to acquire control. He spoke of the need to find a ‘territorial final solution’ to the ‘entire problem’ of the three and a quarter million Jews under German rule.51 Eichmann and his associates were put to work to design plans. By mid-August they were ready. Four million Jews–a million per year over the next four years–would be shipped off to the inhospitable island in the Indian Ocean, a faraway place where they would be out of sight and out of mind. The entire operation would be directed by the Security Police. There would be no independent existence there for the Jews. Their new home, a massive reservation or ‘super-ghetto’, would be run by the SS. The previous autumn, it had been recognized (and welcomed) that deporting the Jews to the Lublin district would decimate the Jewish population.52 Nothing different could have been expected from the ‘Magadascar Project’. The Jews, it was obvious, were being sent there to rot. The genocidal implications were plain. But the idea was stillborn. Not even the basic prerequisites were satisfied. Vanquished France could certainly have been compelled to cede Madagascar as a mandate under German aegis. But with Britain refusing to come to terms, the shipping fleet and security on the seas necessary to freight the Jews to Madagascar were unobtainable. Eichmann’s blueprint was left to gather dust in a forgotten corner of Heydrich’s desk.53 By now, a better option was becoming feasible.
Hitler’s decision in December 1940 that the attack on the Soviet Union would go ahead the following spring had massive implications for the attainment of racial objectives. On the one hand, millions more Jews would fall into Nazi hands, at a time wh
en no solution had been found to the problem of deporting the existing almost four million (soon to be recalculated at almost six million) in the German sphere. And whichever invasion routes the Wehrmacht might take, large numbers of Jews would lie within their path. On the other hand, the expected rapidly attained victory would open up the possibility of population transfer and resettlement through racial ‘cleansing’ on a gigantic scale.
By the time the invasion was launched, plans for precisely this were being compiled. The SS anticipated the removal, mainly through deportation to Siberia, of no fewer than thirty-one million people, mainly Slavs, over the next quarter of a century or so. It was taken for granted that five to six million Jews would ‘disappear’ as the first stage.54
Before such plans were conceived, presumed victory in the east conjured up a new potential for solving the ‘Jewish Question’. In place of the already obsolete notion of Madagascar, there was now the prospect of deporting Europe’s Jews ‘to the east’, into the icy wastes of former Soviet territory, where the freezing cold, malnutrition, exhaustion and disease could be expected rapidly to take their toll. This is what Hitler had in mind when he cryptically commented at the beginning of February 1941 that, with Madagascar raising insuperable problems, ‘he was now thinking about something else, not exactly more friendly’.55
By this time, Hitler’s unfriendly thoughts had already been transmitted to Himmler and Heydrich, who had been quick to see what an attack on the Soviet Union might mean for their own spheres of power. For Himmler, the planning possibilities for reordering the racial composition of eastern Europe were endless. For Heydrich, huge new tasks loomed for his Security Police. Beyond that lay the attainable prospect of accomplishing a ‘final solution’ to the ‘Jewish Question’. From the beginning of 1941 this term was in frequent use. It referred, however, not, as it later came to do, to the programmed extermination in the gas chambers of the death camps, but to a territorial resettlement–though itself genocidal in implication–in the east as a replacement for the ‘Madagascar Project’.
