On 1 September, a police decree stipulated that all Jews over the age of six had to wear the Star of David. A week later, preparing the population for its introduction, Goebbels ensured that the party Propaganda Department put out a special broadsheet, with massive circulation, in its publication Wochensprüche (Weekly Maxims), emblazoned with Hitler’s ‘prophecy’.77
According to SD reports — echoing in the main no doubt hardline feelings in Party circles — the introduction of the Yellow Star met with general approval but, in the eyes of some, did not go far enough, and needed to be extended to Mischlinge as well as full Jews. Some said the Yellow Star should also be worn on the back.78 Not all ordinary Germans responded in the same way as the Party radicals. There were also numerous indications of distaste and disapproval for the introduction of the Yellow Star, along with sympathy for the victims. According to the diary entry of one woman in Berlin, who had a strong antipathy to the regime, ‘the mass of the people is not pleased at this new decree. Almost all who come across us are ashamed as we are.’79 The Dresden intellectual Victor Klemperer, depressed and fearful at venturing out of doors once the Star of David singled him out, encountered indirect words of comfort from a tram-driver. On another occasion a driver, thumping his fist on his control-panel, exclaimed to Klemperer’s wife: ‘Such a mean trick! (Solch eine Gemeinheit!)’80 Inge Deutschkron, then a young woman living in Berlin, emphasized like Klemperer the devastating discriminatory isolation of the Yellow Star, but recalled some small acts of kindness and a mixture of attitudes: ‘There were people who looked at me with hate; there were others whose glances betrayed sympathy; and others again looked away spontaneously.’81 It is impossible to be certain which was the more typical response.82 Open support for Jews was at any rate dangerous. Goebbels castigated those who felt any sympathy for their plight, threatening them with incarceration in a concentration camp. He turned up his antisemitic invective to an even higher volume.83 Whatever the level of sympathy, it could carry no weight beside the shrill clamour of the radicals, whose demands — voiced most notably by the Reich Minister of Propaganda — were targeted ever more at removal of the Jews altogether. As Goebbels had recognized, deportation had to wait. But the pressure for it would not let up.
On 22 August, SS-Sturmbannführer Carltheo Zeitschel, Legation Counsellor at the German Embassy in Paris, produced a memorandum for the Ambassador, Otto Abetz, suggesting that the newly occupied areas of the east offered the possibility of ‘an ultimate (endgültigen) satisfactory solution’ to the ‘Jewish problem’. He recommended deporting the Jews from all over Europe into ‘a special territory’ to be sealed off for them. Transport, he thought, would not pose insuperable problems — Jews from the General Government, he even indicated, could go by road in their own vehicles — and could be implemented even during the war. He advocated putting his suggestion to Ribbentrop, Rosenberg, and Himmler, as well as to Göring who, he thought, was particularly open to ideas on the ‘Jewish problem’ and, after his experience in the eastern campaign, would probably offer strong support. If these suggestions were taken up, argued Zeitschel, ‘we could then have Europe Jew-free in the shortest time’.84
Much of the pressure for deportation came from the Security Police. Not surprisingly, the Security Police in the Warthegau, where the Nazi authorities had been trying in vain since autumn 1939 to expel the Jews from the province, were in the front ranks. It must have been towards the end of August that Eichmann asked the SD chief in Posen, SS-Sturmbannführer Rolf-Heinz Höppner — the self-same Höppner who had written to him in July suggesting the possible liquidation of Jews in his area who were incapable of working during the coming winter through a ‘fast-working preparation’ — for his views on resettlement policy and its administration.
