There is no doubt that Hitler fully approved of and backed the new drive against the Jews, even if he took care to remain out of the limelight. One of the main agitators for radical action against the Jews, Joseph Goebbels, had no difficulty in April 1938 — in the immediate wake of the savage persecution of the Jews in Vienna — in persuading Hitler to support his plans to ‘clean up’ Berlin, the seat of his own Gau. Hitler’s only stipulation was that nothing should be undertaken before his meetings with Mussolini in early May. A successful outcome of his talks with the Duce was of great importance to him, particularly in the context of his unfolding plans regarding Czechoslovakia. Possible diplomatic repercussions provoked by intensified persecution of Jews in Germany’s capital were to be avoided. Goebbels had already discussed his own aims on the ‘Jewish Question’ with Berlin’s Police Chief Wolf Heinrich Graf von Helldorf before he broached the matter with Hitler. ‘Then we put it to the Führer. He agrees, but only after his trip to Italy. Jewish establishments
The ‘Madagascar solution’ — which would be considered seriously for a brief time in 1940 — had been touted among radical antisemites for decades.22 Reference to it at this juncture seems to signify that Hitler was moving away from any assumption that emigration would remove the ‘Jewish problem’ in favour of a solution based upon territorial resettlement. He was conceivably influenced in this by Heydrich, reporting the views of the ‘experts’ on Jewish policy in the SD. The relative lack of success in ‘persuading’ Jews to emigrate — little short of three-quarters of the Jewish population recorded in 1933 still lived in Germany, despite the persecution, as late as October 1938 — together with the mounting obstacles to Jewish immigration created by other countries had compelled the SD to revise its views on future anti-Jewish policy.23 By the end of 1937 the idea of favouring a Jewish state in Palestine, which Eichmann had developed, partly through secret dealings with Zionist contacts, had cooled markedly. Eichmann’s own visit to Palestine, arranged with his Zionist go-between, had been an unmitigated failure. And, more importantly, the German Foreign Office was resolutely hostile to the notion of a Jewish state in Palestine.24 However, emigration remained the objective.
Hitler, too, favoured Palestine as a targeted territory. In early 1938, he reaffirmed the policy, arrived at almost a year earlier, aimed at promoting with all means available the emigration of Jews to any country willing to take them, but looking to Palestine in the first instance.25 But he was alert to the perceived dangers of creating a Jewish state to threaten Germany at some future date. In any case, other notions were being mooted. Already in 1937 there had been suggestions in the SD of deporting Jews to barren, unwelcoming parts of the world, scarcely capable of sustaining human life and certainly, in the SD’s view, incompatible with a renewed flourishing of Jewry and revitalized potential of ‘world conspiracy’. In addition to Palestine, Ecuador, Columbia, and Venezuela had been mentioned as possibilities.26 Nothing came of such ideas at the time. But the suggestions were little different in essence from the old notion, later to be revamped, of Madagascar as an inhospitable territory fit to accommodate Jews until, it was implied, they eventually died out.27 The notion of Jewish resettlement, already aired in the SD, was itself latently genocidal.
Whatever line of policy was favoured, the ‘final goal’ (as Hitler’s comments to Goebbels indicated) remained indistinct, and as such compatible with all attempts to further the ‘removal’ of the Jews. This eventual ‘removal’ was conceived as taking a good number of years to complete. Even following ‘Crystal Night’, Heydrich was still envisaging an ‘emigration action’ lasting from eight to ten years.28 Hitler himself had already inferred to Goebbels towards the end of July 1938 that ‘the Jews must be removed from Germany in ten years’. In the meantime, he added, they were to be retained as ‘surety’
