Holocaust: The Nazi Persecution and Murder of the Jews Peter Longerich (grave mercy .TXT) 📖

suggestion, 52 and on 18 September Himmler informed the Gauleiter in the Warthegau, Greiser: ‘The Führer wants

the Old Reich and the Protectorate to be emptied and liberated of Jews from west

to east as soon as possible. As a first stage I am therefore anxious to transport the

Jews of the Old Reich and the Protectorate, if possible this year, to the Eastern

territories that have recently come into the Reich, before deporting them further

eastwards next spring. I intend to put around 60,000 Jews from the Old Reich and

the Protectorate into the Litzmannstadt ghetto—which, as I have heard, has

sufficient capacity—for the winter.’53 Heydrich, who was responsible for this

‘Jewish emigration’ would approach him at the right time.

However, this letter was preceded by enquiries on Himmler’s part concerning

possible deportation destinations, which can be traced back to the beginning of

September 1941. On the evening of 2 September, following a midday conversation

with Hitler, Himmler had talked to the Higher SS and Police Commander (HSSPF)

of the General Government, Friedrich Wilhelm Krüger, about ‘the Jewish question—

resettlements from the Reich’. After it turned out that the General Government

was not suitable for this purpose, Himmler had approached Wihelm Koppe,

the HSSPF in the Warthegau, who sent him a letter on 10 September dealing with

the deportation of 60,000 Jews to Lodz. 54 Hitler’s decision to start the deportations even before the victory in the East may in the final analysis have been influenced

by interventions by Rosenberg, Ribbentrop, and others. However, he must have

become attracted by the idea at the beginning of September, a time when he knew

nothing of the imminent deportation of the Volga Germans. It was the military

successes which began in September 1941 that made the deportations possible in

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Final Solution on a European Scale, 1941

the first place. To that extent there really was a connection between the course of the

war and the radicalization of the persecution of the Jews, even if, in the light of closer analysis of the complex decision-making process, Browning’s assertion that in the

‘euphoria of war’ a major preliminary decision had been made about the ‘Final

Solution’ appears to over-dramatize developments. 55

After the decision had finally been made to deport the German Jews, , following

a meeting with Heydrich, in his diary entry for 24 September Goebbels confirmed

his intention to ‘evacuate the Jews from Berlin as soon as possible. That will

happen as soon as we have sorted out the military situation in the East. They are

all finally to be transported [to the] camps set up by the Bolsheviks. These camps

were built by the Jews; so what could be more appropriate than that they should

now be populated by the Jews.’56

In fact the reasons for Hitler’s decision to begin the deportation of the German

Jews were complex ones. The fate of the Volga Germans only served as a pretext to

carry out the plan of a deportation of the Jews living within the German sphere of

influence, which had been pursued for two years and had become definitely

envisaged for the end of the Eastern campaign.

The first set of reasons is identified in a note by the Eastern Ministry’s liaison

in Hitler’s headquarters, Werner Koeppen, 57 dated 21 September: ‘The Führer has so far made no decision as regards reprisals against the German Jews

because of the treatment of the Volga Germans. As Ambassador von Steen-

gracht told me, the Führer is considering suspending this measure pending the

possibility of America joining the war.’ It is not impossible that Koeppen’s note

reflects the state of the information available to Steengracht, the representative

of the Foreign Ministry in the Führer’s headquarters, before he learned of the

deportation order on 18 September. In that case, Hitler would have decided at

short notice to implement the ‘reprisal’, the deportation, before the USA entered

the war. But if we assume that, on 20 September, Steengracht was already aware

of the deportation order, then the ‘reprisal’ could be taken to mean more than

the deportation itself.

At any rate, Koeppen’s note is a very important indication that the attitude of

the United States played an important part in the decision to deport the German

Jews. The increasing rapprochement between the United States and Great Britain

had reached a crucial stage with the passing of the Land-Lease Act by Congress on

11 March 1941, and in the summer of 1941 signs were accumulating that the USA

would soon enter the war: the landing of American troops in Iceland on 7 July, the

announcement of the Atlantic Charter by Roosevelt and Churchill during their

conference in Placentia Bay (Newfoundland) between 9 and 12 August, followed

very attentively by the Germans, and, finally, Roosevelt’s declaration, delivered

after a further contretemps on the high seas, that the American navy would

henceforth fight any warship belonging to the Axis powers that entered waters

essential for American defence (‘Shoot on sight order’). 58

Europe-Wide Deportation after Barbarossa

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The tenor of the anti-Jewish propaganda campaign, in which Roosevelt was

depicted as a stooge of ‘world Jewry’, which planned to exterminate the German

people, suggests that the Nazi regime established a connection between America’s

threatened entry into the war and the fate of the Jews under its control. From the

very first the regime had seen the Jews within its sphere of influence as potential

hostages for the good conduct of the Western powers, an attitude that Hitler had

summed up in the ‘prophecy’ of 30 January 1939 with his threat of extermination.

It is also clear that in the summer of 1940 they contemplated the idea of using the

Jews, due for deportation to Madagascar, as hostages in order to guarantee the

good conduct of the United States. 59

The argument that the deportations which were now beginning on a larger scale

also represented a threatening gesture towards the Western Allies is also sup-

ported by the fact that not only was no effort made to keep the deportations secret,

but that in fact they were generally implemented in the public eye. Goebbels, who

was unhappy with this procedure, 60 issued a directive that foreign correspondents seeking information should be told that the Jews were being sent to the East for

‘work deployment’; in internal propaganda, on the other hand, no further infor-

mation was to be provided about the deportations. 61 The coverage in the international press, which had