This reprieve, if such it could be called, did not extend to the Jews. By mid-August, as we have seen, the question had turned from why the Jews in the Soviet Union should be killed to why they should not be killed. As any perceived economic value they might have as laborers was trumped by ideological or security concerns, their status as useless eaters or the “bearers of Bolshevism” marked them for annihilation. Two months of continual killings had created a reliable body of executioners, while the steady drumbeat of Nazi propaganda had convinced many of the necessity of eliminating “this scum that tossed all of Europe into the war.” Both local authorities and officials at the center in Berlin now began to perceive the possibility for a large-scale solution of the Jewish question. If in mid-August the onslaught against Soviet Jews and a final solution of the Jewish question in Europe were still separate entities, time, space, and opportunity intersected in the autumn of 1941 to transform regional murder into European-wide genocide. “The occupied Soviet areas,” Alfred Rosenberg announced in a mid-November speech, “should become the scene of the biological elimination of all European Jews.” Thus, although in mid-August Hitler had rejected proposals for the deportation of German Jews during the war, by December a training journal of the Order Police could proclaim openly,
The word of the Führer [in his January 1939 speech] that a new war, instigated by Jewry, will not bring about the destruction of… Germany but rather the end of Jewry, is now being carried out. The gigantic spaces of the east, which Germany and Europe have now at their disposition for colonization, also facilitate the definitive solution of the Jewish problem in the near future. This means not only removing the race from power, but its elimination…. What seemed impossible only two years ago, now step-by-step is becoming a reality: the end of the war will see a Europe free of Jews.65
Clearly, then, the autumn of 1941 marked a watershed at which the threshold to mass murder, not just of Soviet Jews but of all the Jews of Europe, was crossed. In this complex process of decisionmaking and evolving policy formulation, pressures from the periphery, events at the center, and seemingly decisive military triumphs resulted in key decisions being made in mid-September, when it looked as if the war in the east would soon be over and Germany left as the master of the Continent. Preparations and plans for implementation of mass murder, set in motion before the drive on Moscow lagged in late October, continued apace despite the increasing military difficulties—and, in some cases, such as transportation, deportations took place that even aggravated shortages at the front.
As with the earlier decision to expand the killing of Jews in the Soviet Union, perceptions of the ongoing war effort proved pivotal. With the slowing of the Germans’ advance in the face of stout Russian resistance and growing doubts about their ability to win the war in 1941, Hitler’s mid-August decision reflected the recognition that it was impractical at that juncture to deport Jews from the Reich into the Soviet Union. Perhaps, too, in the wake of the recent meeting between Churchill and Roosevelt, the old notion of using Jews as hostages to warn America against entering the war played a role in Hitler’s thinking. His decision, however, did not stifle mounting pressures from local and regional officials in Germany and the occupied east for a clearer definition of Jewish policy. As pressure for deportation and other anti-Jewish measures mounted in Germany, in the east ambitious administrators pressed for approval from Berlin of more comprehensively radical measures. Military officials, too, voiced concerns over the partisan war and the deteriorating security situation. At the same time, given the severe food shortages, local administrators stressed the untenable conditions within the Polish ghettos. If the ghettos were to support themselves financially, productive jobs had to be created. That, however, would require significant investment that would likely pay off only in the long term. By the autumn, however, Nazi authorities had begun to see the solution to their labor problem in the exploitation of Soviet prisoners of war and civilians. Murdering the Jews thus appeared to many the most utilitarian solution to a burdensome problem. Amid growing frustration and impatience, then, those at the periphery clamored for some basic policy direction.66
By mid-September, the military situation had changed substantially for the better. German forces had cut off Leningrad early in the month, while the encirclement east of Kiev, completed on the fifteenth, promised a spectacular triumph. That same day, following an aerial bombing, the Gauleiter of Hamburg, Karl Kaufmann, urged Hitler to allow the evacuation of Jews from the city in order that their dwellings be distributed to victims of the raid. This suggestion followed by a day a proposal from Rosenberg that all Jews from Central Europe be deported to the east in retaliation for Stalin’s deportation of the Volga Germans to Siberia. Although noncommittal, the Führer expressed interest in Rosenberg’s “very important and urgent matter.” At the same time, Hitler was pressured by officials in France to evacuate a number of Jews to the east as part of a reprisal policy. All the while, of course, Heydrich and Goebbels had continued to push for the removal of German Jews. On 16 and 17 September, Hitler had a cluster of meetings with top officials in which he discussed the Jewish question, talked of turning the conquered eastern territories into Germany’s India, and stressed the importance of resettling ethnic Germans. He also gave approval to Kaufmann on the seventeenth for the removal of Jews from Hamburg.67
The next day, clearly searching for a place to put more than a few thousand Hamburg Jews, Himmler informed Arthur Greiser in the Warthegau that he would have to accept sixty thousand Jews into the Lodz ghetto since “the Führer wishes that the Old Reich and Protectorate be emptied and freed of Jews from west to east as quickly as possible.” Hitler had, thus, not only permitted the evacuation of Hamburg’s Jews, but now, in light of new military successes, also sanctioned what he had prohibited just a month before, the removal of all German Jews during the war. “The spell is broken,” Hitler told Goebbels in late September, in meetings also attended by Himmler and Heydrich. “In the next three to four weeks we must once again expect great victories.” The serious fighting, Hitler thought, would last until 15 October, after which Bolshevism would be beaten. Heydrich even delighted in pointing to the irony of his suggestion that the Jews should be “transported into camps that have been erected by the Bolsheviks. These camps were erected by the Jews, so what should be more fitting than that they now also be populated by Jews.” With this seemingly offhand mid-September decision to permit the deportation of German Jews, Hitler set in motion a process that would culminate in genocide.68
By early October, with Operation Typhoon enjoying great success, Hitler remained optimistic about the deportations, his only reservation being a possible shortage of trains. On the tenth, however, Heydrich held a conference in Prague at which he removed any further obstacles. “Because the Führer wishes that by the end of this year as many Jews as possible be removed from the German sphere,” he stressed, “all pending questions must be solved…. Even the transportation question must not present any problems.” Symbolically, the first deportation train left Vienna on 15 October, the date Hitler expected the defeat of Russia to be sealed and the same day panic broke out in Moscow. Although local authorities had prepared the evacuations from Vienna, Prague, and Berlin with remarkable speed, the problem of reception areas in the east remained. Greiser succeeded in getting the figure dispatched to Lodz reduced to twenty thousand, but that simply meant that larger numbers were sent further east to Kaunas, Riga, and Minsk. In those cities, in the absence of clear guidelines for what to do with the deportees, local officials, reflective of a process of cumulative radicalization that rewarded personal initiative, largely acted as they saw fit and took whatever measures they deemed necessary.69