Suddenly, in mid-September, Hitler changed his mind. There was no overt indication of the reason. But in August, Stalin had ordered the deportation of the Volga Germans — Soviet citizens of German descent who had settled in the eighteenth century along the reaches of the Volga river. At the end of the month the entire population of the region — more than 600,000 people — were forcibly uprooted and deported in cattle waggons under horrific conditions, allegedly as ‘wreckers and spies’, to western Siberia and northern Kazakhstan. In all, little short of a million Volga Germans fell victim to the deportations.88 It was the first of Stalin’s terrible moves to destroy the nationalities in the south of the Soviet Union. The news of the savage deportations had become known in Germany in early September.89 Goebbels had hinted that they could prompt a radical reaction.90 It was not long in coming. Alfred Rosenberg, the recently appointed Reich Minister for the Occupied Eastern Territories, lost little time in advocating ‘the deportation
Revenge and reprisal invariably played a large part in Hitler’s motivation. But at first he hesitated. His immediate response was to refer the matter to the Foreign Office. Ribbentrop was initially non-committal. He wanted to discuss it personally with Hitler.92 Werner Koeppen, Rosenberg’s liaison officer at FHQ, noted: ‘The Führer has so far still made no decision in the question of taking reprisals against the German Jews on account of the treatment of the Volga Germans.’ He was said to be contemplating making this move in the event of the United States entering the war.93
The remark gives a clue to Hitler’s thinking. He had continued to hold to the ‘hostage’ notion — embodied in his 1939 ‘prophecy’ and aimed at deterring the USA from entering the war through the threat of what would then happen to the Jews of Europe. In August, Roosevelt and Churchill had met for talks on warships off the coast of Newfoundland and in the ‘Atlantic Charter’ proclaimed their common principles of free and peaceful coexistence of nations in a post-Nazi world.94 Roosevelt had also declared on 11 September that the US navy would shoot on sight at Axis warships in waters essential for American defence. It seemed increasingly a matter of time before the United States became fully involved in hostilities as an ally of Britain. The deportation of the Jews at this juncture, prompted by the Soviet deportations of the Volga Germans, was Hitler’s stark reminder to the Americans of his prophecy: that European Jews would pay the price should the USA enter the war.95
With such thoughts in mind, Hitler was now ready to accept the case put by Heydrich and Himmler, reflecting demands and suggestions reaching them from their own underlings, and from the Gauleiter of the big cities, that it was urgently necessary to put the longstanding plans for a comprehensive ‘solution to the Jewish Question’ into action, and that deportation to the east was indeed feasible despite the unfinished war there. Why he was now prepared to bend to such arguments also lay partly, no doubt, in his acceptance that an early end to the Russian campaign was not in sight. It was, in fact, precisely the juncture at which he acknowledged that the war in the east would stretch into 1942.96 Tackling the ‘final solution of the Jewish Question’, he would have acknowledged, could not wait that long. If victory over Bolshevism had to be delayed, he must have concluded, the time of reckoning with his most powerful adversary, the Jews, should be postponed no longer. They had brought about the war; they would now see his ‘prophecy’ fulfilled.
It would have been remarkable, when Himmler lunched with Hitler at the ‘Wolf’s Lair’ on
