Hitler’s mood was ripe for Goebbels to bring up once more the question of the deportation of Berlin’s remaining Jews. The involvement of a number of young Jews (associated with a Communist-linked resistance group led by Herbert Baum) in the arson attempt at the anti-Bolshevik exhibition ‘The Soviet Paradise’ in Berlin’s Lustgarten on 18 May enabled the Propaganda Minister to emphasize the security dangers if the 40,000 or so Jews he reckoned were still in the Reich capital were not deported.137 He had been doing his best, he had noted a day earlier, to have as many Jews as possible from his domain ‘shipped off to the east’.138 Goebbels now pleaded for ‘a more radical Jewish policy’ and, he said, ‘I push at an open door with the Führer,’ who told Speer to find replacements for the Jews in the armaments industry with ‘foreign workers’ as soon as possible.139
Talk moved to the dangers of possible internal revolt in the event of a critical situation in the war, something Hitler had touched upon in his speech to the Gauleiter a few days earlier.140 If the danger became acute, he now repeated, the prisons ‘would be emptied through liquidations’ to prevent the possibility of the gates being opened to let the ‘revolting mob’ loose on the people.141 But in contrast to 1917 there was nothing to fear from the German workers, remarked Hitler. All German workers desired victory. They had most to lose by defeat and would not contemplate stabbing him in the back. ‘The Germans take part in subversive movements only when the Jews lure them into it,’ Goebbels had Hitler saying. ‘Therefore one must liquidate the Jewish danger, cost what it takes.’ West-European civilization only provided a façade of assimilation. Back in the ghetto, Jews soon returned to type. But there were elements among them who operated ‘with dangerous brutality and thirst for revenge
Did such remarks mean that Hitler was unaware that the ‘Final Solution’ was under way, that Jews had already been slaughtered in their thousands in Russia and were now being murdered by poison gas in industrialized mass-killing centres already operating in Chelmno, Belzec, Sobibor, and Auschwitz-Birkenau (with Treblinka and Maidanek soon to follow)? That seems inconceivable, even if he did not need to be informed of the fine detail of what was taking place, or for that matter of the very names of the extermination camps. As we have noted, reports of the slaughter by the Einsatzgruppen in the USSR had been requested to be sent to Hitler on a regular basis. In December 1941, he had explicitly affirmed to Himmler that Jews — meaning, certainly, those in the east — were to be ‘exterminated as partisans’. And in March 1942, Goebbels had referred to Hitler as the inspiration behind the most ‘radical solution’ of the ‘Jewish question’, in referring to the liquidation of the Jews from the Lublin district.
On 9 April 1942, a time when the deportations from western European countries to the gas-chambers of Poland were also getting under way, Hans Frank told his underlings in the General Government that orders for the liquidation of the Jews came ‘from higher authority’.143 Himmler himself was to claim explicitly in an internal, top-secret, letter to SS-Obergruppenführer Gottlob Berger, Chief of the SS Main Office, on 28 July 1942, that he was operating directly under Hitler’s authority: ‘The occupied Eastern territories are being made free of Jews. The Führer has placed the implementation of this very difficult order on my shoulders.’144
