Höppner’s fifteen-page memorandum, sent to Eichmann on 3 September, was not concerned solely, or even mainly, with deporting Jews, but the ‘Jewish problem’ formed nevertheless part of his overview of the potential for extensive resettlement on racial lines. His views corresponded closely with the ideas worked out under the General Plan for the East
Höppner, aware of thinking in the upper echelons of the SD, was plainly open to ideas of killing Jews. He himself, after all, had expressed such an idea some weeks earlier. But in early September he was evidently not aware of any decision to exterminate the Jews of Europe. As far as he was concerned, the goal was still their expulsion to the available ‘spaces’ in the dismantled Soviet Union once the war was over.
Despite the mounting pressure for deportation, however, removal of the Jews to the east was at this point still blocked. When the German authorities in Serbia tried in mid-September to have 8,000 Jews deported to Russia, they received a peremptory reply from Eichmann. Not even the Jews from Germany could be sent there. He proposed shooting them.86
Any decision to allow the deportation of the Jews of Europe to the east could only be taken by Hitler. He had rejected Heydrich’s proposal to deport them only a few weeks earlier. Without Hitler’s approval, Heydrich had been powerless to act. Hitler was even now, in September, unwilling to take this step, though the pressure was mounting. Why Hitler resisted the pressure up to this point can only be surmised. He had, of course, presumed that deportations and a final settlement of the ‘Jewish Question’ would follow upon the victorious end of a war expected to last four or five months. But by this time, Hitler was well aware that this expectation had been an illusion. The old ‘hostage’ idea probably still played its part. In his warped understanding, holding Jews in his possession offered a bargaining counter with the ‘Jewish-run’ western ‘plutocracies’, especially the USA. But there were more practical considerations. Where were the Jews to be sent? The areas currently under German occupation were intended for ‘ethnic cleansing’, not as a Jewish reservation. Soviet Jews were now being slaughtered there in thousands. But how to deal with an influx of millions more Jews from all over Europe into the area posed problems of an altogether different order. Mass starvation — the fate to which Hitler was prepared to condemn the citizens of Leningrad and Moscow — still required an area to be made available for the Jews to be settled until they starved to death. This had to be in territory intended for the ‘export’, not ‘import’, of ‘undesirables’. Alternatively, it could only be in the battle-zone itself, or at least in its rear. But this was simply an impracticality; moreover, the Einsatzgruppen had been deployed to wipe out tens of thousands of Jews precisely in such areas; and from Hitler’s perspective it would have meant moving the most potent racial enemy to the place where it was most dangerous.
So, as long as the war in the east raged, Hitler must have reasoned, the expulsion of the Jews to perish in the barren wastes to be acquired from the Soviet Union simply had to wait. And if deporting Jews to Russia to be shot like the Soviet Jews was contemplated, the practical problems — even with the greatly increased manpower available — of undertaking a wholesale extermination programme through mass shootings effectively ruled out this option, at any rate as a short-term solution. Then there was the question of transport. Not enough trains were available to get supplies to the front line. That was more urgent than shipping Jews to the east. Once the war was over, the trains assigned to bring troops back from the east, along with millions of tons of grain and crate-loads of booty, could easily be used on the outward journey to carry Jews to their fate.87
