What passed between the two men during the five days, from 15 to 20 July, that Himmler was staying in the Führer Headquarters is not known.52 But while in FHQ, Himmler had received minutes of the important meeting that Hitler had had on the 16th with Göring, Bormann, Lammers, Keitel, and Rosenberg. At the meeting, as we have already noted, Hitler had stated that Germany would never leave the conquered territories. All measures necessary for a final settlement, such as shooting and deportation, ought to be taken. He had made the telling remarks that the partisan war proclaimed by Stalin provided ‘the possibility of exterminating anything opposing us
Within a week, Himmler had increased the ‘policing’ operations behind the front line in the east by 11,000 men, the start of the far bigger build-up that was to follow.55 Most probably, catching Hitler’s mood at the time, Himmler had pointed out the insufficiency of the forces currently available to him for the ‘pacification’ of the east, then requested, and been granted, the authority to increase the force to an appropriate level. That the Jews, as had been the case from the beginning of the campaign, were viewed as the prime target group to be exterminated — under the pretext of offering the most dangerous opposition to the occupation — would have meant that no specific mandate about their treatment within the general ‘pacification’ remit was necessary. In dealing with the Jews in the east as he saw fit, Himmler could take it for granted that he was ‘working towards the Führer’.
Hitler’s own comments about the Jews around this time would certainly have assured Himmler of this. In the twilight hours before dawn on 10 July, Hitler had remarked: ‘“I feel like the Robert Koch of politics. He found the bacillus of tuberculosis and through that showed medical scholarship new ways. I discovered the Jews as the bacillus and ferment of all social decomposition. Their ferment. And I have proved one thing: that a state can live without Jews; that the economy, culture, art, etc. etc. can exist without Jews and indeed better. That is the worst blow I have dealt the Jews.”’56
He retained his biological terminology when speaking — with remarkable openness — to the Defence Minister of the newly-created brutally racist state of Croatia, Marshal Sladko Kvaternik, on 22 July. He had begun with a revealing illogicality: not he, but Stalin, would this time meet with the fate of Napoleon. It was not the first time he had made a remark which hinted at a deep-lying uncertainty about his decision to invade Russia.57 In the first weeks of the ‘war of annihilation’ that he had unleashed, Hitler’s genocidal mentality was surfacing. As in his discussions with the Japanese Ambassador Oshima a week earlier, Hitler went on to describe the Russian people as ‘bestial’. In advising Kvaternik to intervene at home with an iron fist against ‘criminals and anti-social elements’, Hitler declared that there was only one thing to be done with them: ‘annihilate
