Hitler. 1936-1945: Nemesis полностью

Above all, the running in radicalizing anti-Jewish policy was made by the SS and Security Police leadership. While Hitler at this time paid relatively little attention to the ‘Jewish Question’ when not faced with a particular issue that one of his underlings had raised, Himmler and Heydrich were heavily engaged in planning the ‘new order’, especially in eastern Europe. By the autumn the Madagascar Plan was a dead letter — even though Eichmann was still waiting for a decision from Heydrich as late as December.²⁵⁰ But by then Hitler’s decision, taken under the impact of the failure to end the war in the West, to prepare for the invasion of the Soviet Union opened up new prospects again in the East for a ‘solution’ to the ‘Jewish Question’. Once more, policy in the General Government was reversed. Hans Frank, who had been expecting in the summer to have the Jews from his area shipped to Madagascar, was now told that they had to stay. Emigration from the General Government was banned.²⁵¹ The brutal forced-labour conditions and ghettoization were already highly attritional. Jews were in practice often being worked to death.²⁵² An overtly genocidal mentality was already evident. Heydrich suggested starting an epidemic in the newly sealed Warsaw ghetto in autumn 1940 in order to exterminate the Jews there through such means.²⁵¹ It was into an area in which this mentality prevailed that Frank, so Hitler told him in December, had to be prepared to take more Jews.²⁵⁴

With Hitler playing little active role, but providing blanket approval, conditions and mentalities had been created in the occupied territories of former Poland in which full-scale genocide was only one step away. Anti-Jewish policy had not followed a clear or straight line throughout 1940. But, particularly within the SS and Security Police leadership, the thinking and planning had moved in an implicitly genocidal direction. Hitler had responded to the vagaries of policy rather than providing clear direction. But his broad remit to ‘remove’ the Jews, and his ‘prophecy’ that the war would bring a solution to the ‘Jewish Question’, were enough. Paradoxically, the turn to preparations for war in the East had not emanated directly out of Hitler’s twenty-year-old ideological obsession with ‘Jewish-Bolshevism’, but from the strategic consideration of forcing Britain to yield to German demands. But once the preparations for invading the USSR began to take concrete shape, in the spring of 1941, the ideological essence of the coming showdown with ‘Jewish-Bolshevism’ became central. By a circuitous route, rather than following a straight line, Hitler was returning to the core of his Weltanschauung — now no longer just verbiage, but taking the form of concrete policy steps that would take Germany into all-out genocide.

Before Hitler signed the directive in December 1940 to prepare what would rapidly be shaped into a ‘war of annihilation’ against the Soviet Union, there was a hiatus in which the immediate future direction of the war remained uncertain. Hitler was ready, during this phase that stretched from September to December 1940, to explore different possibilities of prising Britain out of the conflict before the Americans could enter it. Out of the failure of the ‘peripheral strategy’, a term hinted at by Jodl at the end of July,²⁵⁵ which at no stage gained Hitler’s full enthusiasm, the hardening of the intention to invade the Soviet Union, first mooted in July, emerged until, on 18 December, it was embodied in a war directive.