He had commented in the last chapter of Mein Kampf that ‘the sacrifice of millions at the front’ would not have been necessary if ‘twelve or fifteen thousand of these Hebrew corrupters of the people had been held under poison gas’.123 Such rhetoric, appalling though the sentiments were, was not an indication that Hitler already had the ‘Final Solution’ in mind. But the implicit genocidal link between war and the killing of Jews was there. Göring’s remarks at the end of the meeting on 12 November had been an ominous pointer in the same direction: ‘If the German Reich comes into foreign-political conflict in the foreseeable future, it can be taken for granted that we in Germany will think in the first instance of bringing about a great showdown with the Jews.’124
With war approaching again, the question of the threat of the Jews in a future conflict was evidently present in Hitler’s mind. The idea of using the Jews as hostages, part of Hitler’s mentality, but also advanced in the SS’s organ Das Schwarze Korps in October and November 1938, is testimony to the linkage between war and idea of a ‘world conspiracy’. ‘The Jews living in Germany and Italy are the hostages which fate has placed in our hand so that we can defend ourselves effectively against the attacks of world Jewry,’ commented Das Schwarze Korps on 27 October 1938, under the headline ‘Eye for an Eye, Tooth for a Tooth’.125 ‘Those Jews in Germany are a part of world Jewry,’ the same newspaper threatened on 3 November, still days before the nationwide pogrom was unleashed. ‘They are also responsible for whatever world Jewry undertakes against Germany, and — they are liable for the damages which world Jewry inflicts and will inflict on us.’ The Jews were to be treated as members of a warring power and interned to prevent their engagement for the interests of world Jewry.126 Hitler had up to this date never attempted to deploy the ‘hostage’ tactic as a weapon of his foreign policy.127 Perhaps promptings from the SS leadership now reawakened ‘hostage’ notions in his mind. Whether or not this was the case, the potential deployment of German Jews as pawns to blackmail the western powers into accepting further German expansion was possibly the reason why, when stating that it was his ‘unshakeable will’ to solve ‘the Jewish problem’ in the near future, and at a time when official policy was to press for emigration with all means possible, he showed no interest in the plans advanced by South African Defence and Economics Minister Oswald Pirow, whom he met at the Berghof on 24 November, for international cooperation in the emigration of German Jews.128 The same motive was probably also behind the horrific threat he made to the Czechoslovakian Foreign Minister Franzisek Chvalkovsky on 21 January 1939. ‘The Jews here (bei uns) will be annihilated (vernichtet),’ he declared. ‘The Jews had not brought about the 9 November 1918 for nothing. This day will be avenged.’129
Again, rhetoric should not be mistaken for a plan or programme. Hitler was scarcely likely to have revealed plans to exterminate the Jews which, when they did eventually emerge in 1941, were accorded top secrecy, in a comment to a foreign diplomat. Moreover, ‘annihilation’ (Vernichtung) was one of Hitler’s favourite words. He tended to reach for it when trying to impress his threats upon his audience, large or small. He would speak more than once the following summer, for instance, of his intention to ‘annihilate’ the Poles.130 Horrific though their treatment was after 1939, no genocidal programme followed.
But the language, even so, was not meaningless. The germ of a possible genocidal outcome, however vaguely conceived, was taking shape. Destruction and annihilation, not just emigration, of the Jews was in the air. Already on 24 November Das Schwarze Korps, portraying the Jews as sinking ever more to the status of pauperized parasites and criminals, had concluded: ‘In the stage of such a development we would therefore be faced with the hard necessity of eradicating (auszurotten) the Jewish underworld just as we are accustomed in our ordered state (Ordnungsstaat) to eradicate criminals: with fire and sword! The result would be the actual and final end of Jewry in Germany, its complete annihilation (Vernichtung).,’131 This was not a preview of Auschwitz and Treblinka. But without such a mentality, Auschwitz and Treblinka would not have been possible.
