Even so, compared with the first years of the war when he had neither in public nor — to go from Goebbels’s diary accounts — in private made much mention of the Jews, Hitler did now, in the months when their fate was being determined, refer to them on numerous occasions. Invariably, whether in public speeches or during comments in his late-night monologues in his East Prussian headquarters, his remarks were confined to generalities — but with the occasional menacing allusion to what was happening.
At lunch on 6 October, conversation focused mainly on eliminating Czech resistance following Heydrich’s appointment on 27 September as Deputy Reich Protector. Hitler spoke of ways ‘to make the Czechs small’. Shooting ten hostages for every act of sabotage where the perpetrator could not be found was one method. Another — as usual, the carrot as well as the stick — was to improve food-rations in factories where there was no case of sabotage. His third means was the deportation of the Jews. He was speaking about three weeks after he had agreed to their deportation from the Reich and the Protectorate. His comments reveal at least one of the reasons why he agreed to deport them: he continued to believe in the Jews as dangerous ‘fifth-columnists’, spreading sedition among the population. It was exactly what he had thought of the role of the Jews in Germany during the First World War. ‘All Jews must be removed from the Protectorate,’ he declared around the lunch-table, ‘and not just into the General Government, but straight away further to the east. This is at present not practical merely because of the great demand of the military for means of transport. Along with the Protectorate’s Jews, all the Jews from Berlin and Vienna should disappear at the same time. The Jews are everywhere the pipeline through which all enemy news rushes with the speed of wind into all branches of the population.’140
On 21 October, a month after the deportation order, as part of a diatribe comparing ‘Jewish Christianity’ with ‘Jewish Bolshevism’, he compared the fall of Rome with latter-day Bolshevization through the Jews. ‘If we eradicate (ausrotten) this plague,’ he concluded, ‘we will be carrying out a good deed for mankind, of the significance of which our men out there can have no conception.’141 Four days later his guests were Himmler (a frequent visitor to the Wolf’s Lair during these weeks) and Heydrich.142 The conversation again revolved mainly around the connections of Jewry and Christianity.143 Hitler reminded his guests and his regular entourage of his ‘prophecy’. ‘This criminal race has the two million dead of the World War on its conscience,’ he went on, and ‘now again hundreds of thousands. Don’t anyone tell me we can’t send them into the marshes (Morast)! Who bothers, then, about our people? It’s good when the horror (der Schrecken) precedes us that we are exterminating Jewry. The attempt to found a Jewish state will be a failure.’144 These notes of Hitler’s rantings were disjointed. But, although lacking coherence, they point to his knowledge of the attempts — eventually given up — in the summer to drown Jewish women by driving them into the Pripet marshes.145 Hitler’s allocation of guilt for the dead of the First World War and the current war to the Jews, and the recourse once more to his ‘prophecy’, underline his certainty that the destruction of Jewry was imminent. But, other than the reference to the efficacy of rumours of extermination, there was no suggestion of the looming ‘Final Solution’. With Himmler and Heydrich as his guests, it was scarcely necessary to dissemble. However, no significance ought to be attached to the absence of any reference.146 By mid-October the consequences flowing from the deportation order of the previous month had still to merge into the full genocidal programme.
