On 30 January 1942, the ninth anniversary of the ‘seizure of power’, Hitler addressed a packed Sportpalast. As he had been doing privately over the past weeks, he invoked once more — how often he repeated the emphasis in these months is striking — his ‘prophecy’ of 30 January 1939. As always, he wrongly dated it to the day of the outbreak of war with the attack on Poland. ‘We are clear,’ he declared, ‘that the war can only end either with the extermination of the aryan peoples or the disappearance of Jewry from Europe.’ He went on: ‘I already stated on 1 September 1939 in the German Reichstag — and I refrain from over-hasty prophecies — that this war will not come to an end as the Jews imagine, with the extermination of the European-Aryan peoples
The message was not lost on his audience. The SD — no doubt picking up comments made above all by avid Nazi supporters — reported that his words had been ‘interpreted to mean that the Führer’s battle against the Jews would be followed through to the end with merciless consistency, and that very soon the last Jew would disappear from European soil’.165
When Goebbels spoke to Hitler in March, the death-mills of Belzec had commenced their grisly operations.166 As regards the ‘Jewish Question’, Hitler remained ‘pitiless’, the Propaganda Minister recorded. ‘The Jews must get out of Europe, if need be through use of the most brutal means,’ was his view.167
A week later, Goebbels left no doubt what ‘the most brutal means’ implied. ‘From the General Government, beginning with Lublin, the Jews are now being deported to the east. A fairly barbaric procedure, not to be described in any greater detail, is being used here, and not much more remains of the Jews themselves. In general, it can probably be established that
Goebbels himself had played no small part over the years in pushing for a ‘radical solution’. He had been one of the most important and high-placed of the Party activists pressing Hitler on numerous occasions to take radical action on the ‘Jewish Question’. The Security Police — Heydrich’s role was, if anything, probably more important even than Himmler’s — had been instrumental in gradually converting an ideological imperative into an extermination plan. Many others, at different levels of the regime, had contributed in greater or lesser measure to the continuing and untrammelled process of radicalization. Complicity was massive, from the Wehrmacht leadership and captains of industry down to Party hacks, bureaucratic minions, and ordinary Germans hoping for their own material advantage through the persecution then deportation of a helpless, but unloved, minority which had been deemed to be the inexorable enemy of the new ‘people’s community’.
But Goebbels knew what he was talking about in singling out Hitler’s role. This had often been indirect, rather than overt. It had consisted of authorizing more than directing. And the hate-filled tirades, though without equal in their depth of inhumanity, remained at a level of generalities. Nevertheless, there can be no doubt about it: Hitler’s role had been decisive and indispensable in the road to the ‘Final Solution’. Had he not come to power in 1933 and a national-conservative government, perhaps a military dictatorship, had gained power instead, discriminatory legislation against Jews would in all probability still have been introduced in Germany. But without Hitler, and the unique regime he headed, the creation of a programme to bring about the physical extermination of the Jews of Europe would have been unthinkable.
