The_Holokaust_-_origins,_implementation,_aftermath
The_Holokaust_-_origins,_implementation,_aftermath
The_Holokaust_-_origins,_implementation,_aftermath
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HITLER’S DECISION TO EXTERMINATE JEWS<br />
for total liquidation. Prior to this there had not existed such a comprehensive plan for<br />
systematic extermination to be carried out within a brief span of time. With regard to<br />
the savage treatment already being meted out to Jews in the occupied territories of the<br />
Soviet Union, the new directives of December 1941 hardly meant much. <strong>The</strong>y may<br />
have had a slightly greater effect in the General Government, though there, too, regional<br />
impulses from the police and from elements in the civil administration in favor of largescale<br />
exterminations had already become so powerful that sooner or later a catastrophe<br />
was inevitable.<br />
What this evidence shows is that Hitler by no means decided everything, even in<br />
what may have been his most significant intervention in the processes leading to the<br />
mass exterminations. Nor did he need to decide everything. <strong>The</strong> results of his<br />
intervention were clear, but in a certain sense they were also limited. Earlier findings<br />
by various researchers as to the grave responsibility shared by other official bodies,<br />
particularly by the authorities directly in charge in the occupied territories, are confirmed<br />
by our analysis.<br />
In order to understand the decision-making process that led to the destruction of<br />
the European Jews it may be useful to refer to the concept of the utopian. <strong>The</strong> National<br />
Socialists, with Hitler foremost among them, certainly entertained ideas about<br />
eliminating the Jews and indicated a willingness to put these ideas into practice well<br />
before 1941. But there is a difference between having ideas or intentions to exterminate<br />
a people and the actual <strong>implementation</strong> of those ideas and intentions. <strong>The</strong> initial<br />
schemes for a “Final Solution” involved various plans for a forced migration. <strong>The</strong>y<br />
were markedly destructive in character, with features such as slow annihilation through<br />
brutal living conditions and limits on reproduction. In a way, however, these plans<br />
were also utopian, principally because none of them, however seriously pursued, had<br />
any practical chance of being realized. This was as true of the Madagascar plan as it<br />
was of the 1939–40 plan to deport Jews to the Lublin district. Destructive elements<br />
grew more pronounced in the plan to deport European Jews to conquered regions of<br />
the Soviet Union following a successful conclusion of the war there. Exactly how to<br />
go about exterminating the Jews became imaginable only little by little, even though a<br />
widespread readiness to do so had long existed. What was decisive for the actual<br />
realization of mass murder plans were the intermediate steps between the utopian<br />
emigration and extermination schemes, on the one hand, and liquidation programs<br />
that could be practically implemented, on the other. <strong>The</strong> scheme proposed at the outset<br />
of 1941 to reduce some thirty million individuals in the Soviet Union to starvation in<br />
order to guarantee food supplies to the European areas controlled by Germany proved<br />
to be impractical. It was replaced in the fall of 1941 by programs for eliminating groups<br />
of specific individuals, like the millions of Soviet war prisoners who were “incapable of<br />
work.” For the antisemitic efforts, the steps undertaken in December 1941 marked an<br />
ominous turn toward the practical <strong>implementation</strong> of concrete measures for racial<br />
genocide.<br />
Although these monstrous developments could certainly not be called normal<br />
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