The_Holokaust_-_origins,_implementation,_aftermath

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