It was no accident that the war in the east led to genocide. The ideological objective of eradicating ‘Jewish-Bolshevism’ was central, not peripheral, to what had been deliberately designed as a ‘war of annihilation’. It was inseparably bound up with the military campaign. With the murderous onslaught of the Einsatzgruppen, backed by the Wehrmacht, launched in the first days of the invasion, the genocidal character of the conflict was already established. It would rapidly develop into an all-out genocidal programme, the like of which the world had never seen.
Hitler spoke a good deal during the summer and autumn of 1941 to his close entourage in the most brutal terms imaginable about his ideological aims in crushing the Soviet Union. During the same months, he also spoke on numerous occasions in his monologues in the Führer Headquarters — though invariably in barbaric generalizations — about the Jews. These were the months in which, out of the contradictions and lack of clarity of anti-Jewish policy, a programme to kill all the Jews in Nazi-occupied Europe began to take concrete shape.
In contrast to military affairs, where his repeated interference reflected his constant preoccupation with tactical minutiae and his distrust of the army professionals, Hitler’s involvement in ideological matters was less frequent and less direct. Hitler had laid down the guidelines in March 1941. He needed to do little more. Self-combustion would see to it that, once lit, the genocidal fires would rage into a mighty conflagration amid the barbarism of the war to destroy ‘Jewish-Bolshevism’. When it came to ideological aims, in contrast to military matters, Hitler had no need to worry that the ‘professionals’ would let him down. He could rest assured that Himmler and Heydrich, above all, would leave no stone unturned in eliminating the ideological enemy once and for all. And he could be equally certain that they would find willing helpers at all levels among the masters of the new
Just as, from autumn 1939 onwards until his ‘halt order’ of August 1941, he had seen no need to involve himself in the ‘euthanasia action’ any further, once he had authorized its commencement, so now he would see no cause to participate in the daily business of the dirty work of genocide. That was neither his style, nor his inclination.1 Organization, planning, and execution could confidently be left to others. There was no shortage of those keen to ‘carry out practical work for our Führer’.2 It was sufficient that his authorization for the major steps was provided; and that he could take for granted that, with regard to the ‘Jewish Question’, his ‘prophecy’ of 1939 was being fulfilled.
On the eve of ‘Barbarossa’, Hitler had assured Hans Frank that the Jews would be ‘removed’ from the General Government ‘in the foreseeable future’. Frank’s province could therefore be regarded merely as a type of ‘transit camp’
The 5–6 million Jews of the USSR were included in the wholesale resettlement scheme for the racial reordering of eastern Europe, the ‘General Plan for the East’ which Himmler, two days after the launch of ‘Barbarossa’, had commissioned his settlement planners to prepare. The Plan envisaged the deportation over the subsequent thirty years of 31 million persons, mainly Slavs, beyond the Urals and into western Siberia.6 Without doubt, the Jews would have been the first ethnic group to perish in a territorial solution which, for them, was tantamount to their death warrant. What was intended was in itself plainly genocidal. The ‘territorial solution’ could, therefore, be seen as a type of intended ‘final solution’. But shooting or gassing to death all the Jews of Europe — the full-scale industrialized killing programme that evolved over the following months into what would then be a differently defined ‘final solution’ — was at this stage not in mind.
