Holocaust: The Nazi Persecution and Murder of the Jews by Peter Longerich (booksvooks TXT) 📕

July 1941 Frank once again referred to Hitler’s

approval and announced that the ‘clearance’ of the Warsaw ghetto would be

ordered in the next few days. 38

At this point the planned ‘deportation’ of the Jews to the ‘East’ was not—as it

was to become only a few months later—a metaphor for the planned mass murder

within the General Government; in October, Frank tried to win Rosenberg’s

agreement for the deportation of the Jews from the General Government.

The Deportation of the German Jews: Preparations

and Decisions

On 22 July, in a discussion with the Croatian head of state, Slavko Kwaternik,

Hitler reiterated his intention to deport the Jews from the German sphere of

influence:39 ‘If there were no Jews left in Europe the unity of the European states would no longer be disturbed. Where the Jews are to be sent, whether to Siberia or

to Madagascar, is irrelevant. He would approach every state with this demand.’

However, because of the military situation the Nazi leadership was forced to

postpone its original intention of implementing large-scale deportations to the

newly occupied territories after the expected victory in the East. On 15 August, at a

meeting in the Ministry of Propaganda, which was actually supposed to concern

the introduction of a special marking for Jews, Eichmann announced the current

state of the deportation plans that he had already talked about in the same place in

March. 40 According to this, Hitler had rejected Heydrich’s suggestion to carry out evacuations from the Reich during the war; as an alternative, Heydrich now

initiated a proposal ‘aimed at the partial evacuations of the larger cities’. 41

On 18 August, Hitler confirmed this information in conversation with Goeb-

bels. The ‘Führer’ had agreed, Goebbels recorded in his diaries, that the Jews of

Berlin should be deported to the East as quickly as possible, as soon as the first

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Final Solution on a European Scale, 1941

transport opportunity presented itself. ‘There, in the harsher climate, they will be

worked over.’ This would happen ‘immediately after the ending of the Eastern

campaign’, so that Berlin will become a ‘city free of Jews [judenfrei]’. 42 Thus the general prohibition on deportation for the duration of the war—or at least for the

duration of the war in the East—was maintained. At the same meeting, however,

Hitler had agreed to the introduction of a ‘Jewish badge’ in the Reich, and with the

idea that non-working Jews would henceforth receive reduced rations, because, as

Goebbels put it, ‘he who does not work, shall not eat’. 43

Immediately after his conversation with Hitler, Goebbels once more began an

anti-Semitic propaganda campaign, in which he pursued the goal above all of

preparing Party activists for a further radicalization of the persecution of the Jews,

and demonstrating to the general population that they were in a global conflict

with ‘the Jews’. Thus, a circular from the Reich Ring for National Socialist

Propaganda (an internal instruction for Party propagandists) of 21 August 1941

stated: ‘Since the start of the Eastern campaign it has been plainly apparent that a

large proportion of the population has once more become more interested in and

aware of the significance of the Jewish question than in the previous months.

None the less it is important that we should draw the attention of the German

people still more to the guilt of the Jews.’44

The ‘weekly slogan’ of the Reich propaganda headquarters of the NSDAP for 7

September 1939, a poster that was hung in many Party display cases, contained

Hitler’s prophecy of 30 January 1939 that the result of a new world war would ‘not

be the Bolshevization of the earth and thus the victory of Jewry’ but ‘the exter-

mination of the Jewish race in Europe’. 45

One central point in this campaign was the polemic against a brochure printed

privately in the United States, 46 in which an author by the name of Kaufman had, amongst other things, demanded the sterilization of the German people. Kaufman

was now presented as a close adviser of Roosevelt (which was pure invention); the

brochure, it was argued, showed the true plans of the American Jews, who had

forced Roosevelt to sign the Atlantic Charter. At the same time as its anti-Jewish

propaganda campaign, the German propaganda apparatus heightened its polemic

against Roosevelt, who was portrayed as a stooge of the Jews and the Free-

masons. 47 Hitler’s decision to mark out the German Jews in the middle of August 1941, vigorously demanded by Goebbels and other senior Nazis, must also be seen

in the context of this intensified anti-Jewish propaganda. The Jews, thus branded

as an internal enemy, should, as Goebbels wrote, ‘be forced out of the public

sphere’ and demonstratively excluded from certain goods and services. 48 During these days the general tenor of anti-Semitic propaganda consisted in portraying

the radicalization of the persecution of the Jews within the German sphere of

influence as a precautionary defensive measure against an omnipresent enemy.

When the anti-Jewish propaganda campaign reached its first climax in September,

Hitler revised his decision, only one month old, to veto the deportation of

Europe-Wide Deportation after Barbarossa

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the German Jews while the war was still going on. The explanation for this

dramatic step the sources suggest in the first instance is the decision by the Soviet

leadership on 28 August 1941 to deport the Volga Germans to Siberia, which had

been announced early in September. 49

Goebbels’s diary entry for 9 September makes it clear that the Nazi leadership

saw this decision as legitimizing the further radicalization of its policy: ‘For the

Reich to win, so many countless people must make the severest sacrifices that it

should lead us to remain harsh and ruthless, take things to the extreme, and finally

erase the word “compliance” from our vocabulary.’

The idea that the long-planned deportation of the Central European Jews was

now to be undertaken as ‘retaliation’ for the Soviet step was demonstrably put

about by Rosenberg, who had a suggestion to this effect passed to Hitler on 14

September. 50

At the same time, presumably on 16 September, the German ambassador in

Paris, Otts Abetz, suggested to Himmler that the Jews living in France and the rest

of occupied Europe be deported to the occupied Eastern territories. Himmler, who

was very intensely preoccupied with the plans for the ‘Jewish question’ and

‘Eastern settlement’, responded positively. 51 On 17 September Hitler seems to have talked to Ribbentrop about Rosenberg’s