Little over a month earlier, Hitler had talked at length, prompted by Goebbels, about the ‘Jewish Question’. The Propaganda Minister thought it one of the most interesting discussions he had ever had with the Führer.145 Goebbels had been re-reading The Protocols of the Elders of Zion — the crude Russian forgery purporting to outline a Jewish conspiracy to rule the world — with an eye on its use in current propaganda. He raised the matter over lunch. Hitler thought antisemitic propaganda would play an important part in the war effort, particularly in its impact on the British. He was certain of the ‘absolute authenticity’ of the Protocols. The Jews, he thought, were not working to a fixed programme; they were following, as always, their ‘racial instinct’.146 The Jews were the same all over the world, Goebbels noted him as saying, whether in the ghettos of the east ‘or in the bank palaces of the City [of London] or Wall Street’, and would instinctively follow the same aims and use the same methods without the need to work them out together. The question could well be posed, he went on (according to Goebbels’s summary of his comments), as to why there were Jews at all. It was the same question — again the familiar insect analogy — as why there were Colorado beetles (Kartoffelkäfer). His most basic belief — life as struggle — provided, as always, his answer. ‘Nature is ruled by the law of struggle. There will always be parasitic forms of existence to accelerate the struggle and intensify the process of selection between the strong and the weak… In nature, life always works immediately against parasites; in the existence of peoples that is not exclusively the case. From that results the Jewish danger. So there is nothing else open to modern peoples than to exterminate the Jews (Es bleibt also den modernen Völkern nichts anderes übrig, als die Juden auszurotten).’147
The Jews would use all means to defend themselves against this ‘gradual process of annihilation (allmählichen Vernichtungsprozeß)’. One of its methods was war.148 It was the same warped vision embodied in Hitler’s ‘prophecy’: Jews unleashing war, but bringing about their own destruction in the process. World Jewry, in Hitler’s view, was on the verge of a historic downfall (geschichtlichen Sturz). This would take time. He was presumably alluding to Jews out of German reach, especially in the USA, when he commented that some decades would be needed ‘to cast them out of their power. That is our historic mission, which cannot be held up, but only accelerated, by the war. World Jewry thinks it is on the verge of a world victory. This world victory will not come. Instead there will be a world downfall. The peoples who have earliest recognized and fought the Jew will instead accede to world domination.’149
Four days after this conversation, on 16 May, SS-Brigadeführer Jürgen Stroop telexed the news: ‘The Jewish quarter of Warsaw is no more! The grand operation terminated at 20.15 hours when the Warsaw synagogue was blown up… The total number of Jews apprehended and destroyed, according to record, is 56,065…’150 A force of around 3,000 men, the vast majority from the SS, had used a tank, armoured vehicles, heavy machine-guns, and artillery to blow up and set fire to buildings which the Jews were fiercely defending and to combat the courageous resistance put up by the ghetto’s inhabitants, armed with little more than pistols, grenades, and Molotov cocktails. The month-long ghetto uprising had exacerbated Hitler’s mounting frustration with Hans Frank’s inability to maintain order in the General Government amid increasing unrest caused by SS attempts to uproot and deport 108,000 Poles from the Zamosc district in the Lublin area in order to resettle it with Germans.151 His long-standing readiness to link Jews with subversive or partisan actions made Hitler all the keener to hasten their destruction. After Himmler had discussed the matter with him on 19 June, he noted that ‘the Führer declared, after my report (Vortrag), that the evacuation of the Jews, despite the unrest that would thereby still arise in the next 3 to 4 months, was to be radically carried out and had to be seen through’.152
