The defining historical question about the Holocaust is when and how the regime moved from a policy of forced emigration to a policy of systematic mass murder. Two generations of historians have argued about it. There is no signed Hitler order to murder the Jews of Europe, of the kind there was for the T4 killing of disabled patients. There is no single date on which the policy changed. What the documents show is a shift that happened in stages, in the second half of 1941, partly in Berlin and partly in the field, with senior figures in the regime issuing increasingly explicit instructions to subordinates who were already doing more than they had been told to do.
What the regime had been doing before 1941
From 1933 to 1939 the regime’s Jewish policy had been forced emigration. The Reich tolerated, and at times encouraged, Jewish emigration to anywhere that would take them, including Palestine under the Haavara Agreement. Around half the Jews of Germany got out. After the invasion of Poland in September 1939, the regime had a much larger Jewish population on its hands. The first response was to ghettoise them: to herd Polish Jews into closed urban districts where they would be cut off from the wider population and slowly starved through inadequate food rations.
There were also schemes, taken seriously at high levels of the regime, for mass forced resettlement of Europe’s Jews to somewhere else. The Madagascar Plan of 1940 envisaged the deportation of all European Jews to the French colony of Madagascar after a German victory over Britain made the necessary shipping available. The plan was never operationally feasible and was quietly shelved by early 1941. There were also discussions of resettlement to Siberia after the planned defeat of the Soviet Union. None of these schemes was a plan to spare Jewish lives. They were all plans to remove Jews from Europe in conditions designed to kill most of them through exhaustion and starvation. But they were not yet plans for direct, systematic killing.
Operation Barbarossa, June 1941
The German invasion of the Soviet Union on 22 June 1941 was the decisive moment. The military operation was preceded by detailed instructions to the army and to the SS that this was a war of racial annihilation, in which the normal rules of war did not apply. The Commissar Order required Soviet political officers to be shot rather than taken prisoner. The Einsatzgruppen, four mobile killing units of around 3,000 men in total, followed the army into Soviet territory with the task of killing Jews, communists and other categories the regime considered enemies.
What the documentary record shows is that the Einsatzgruppen began by killing Jewish men of military age. By August 1941 they had moved to killing Jewish women and children as well. The shift was not announced. It was instructed in the field, by visiting senior officers, and the unit commanders complied. By the end of 1941 the Einsatzgruppen and their auxiliaries had murdered around half a million Jews in the territories the German army had occupied.
The Wannsee Conference, January 1942
By the time the Wannsee Conference was held on 20 January 1942, the killing was already in full swing. Wannsee was not the meeting at which the Final Solution was decided. It was the meeting at which Reinhard Heydrich, the head of the Reich Security Main Office, told the senior civil servants of the relevant Reich ministries that the policy had now been settled and that he expected their cooperation. The minutes of the conference, drafted by Adolf Eichmann, list the Jewish populations of every European country including Britain and Ireland and explain how each will be incorporated into the killing programme.
What Wannsee shows is not the moment the decision was made but the moment it was communicated through the bureaucracy. The men in the room were senior civil servants, not senior Nazis. They were being told what was going to happen, not asked whether it should. The minutes survive, found in 1947 in a German Foreign Ministry file. They are one of the most consequential documents of the twentieth century.
The death camps
The shift to systematic murder also produced new methods. Shooting in pits was psychologically taxing on the SS men involved, several of whom requested transfers, drank heavily, or had nervous breakdowns. The regime began experimenting with gassing in the second half of 1941. Mobile gas vans, in which the exhaust was diverted into a sealed compartment in the back of the lorry, were used at Chełmno from December 1941 onwards. Bełżec began operating with stationary gas chambers in March 1942, Sobibor in May, Treblinka in July. Operation Reinhard, the formal name given to the killing in the General Government of occupied Poland, ran from March 1942 to the autumn of 1943 and murdered around 1.7 million Jews in those three camps and at Majdanek. Auschwitz-Birkenau, originally a labour camp, became a death camp on the same scale through 1942 and into 1943.
Why this question still matters
The shift from persecution to systematic murder is not just a technical question for historians. It is the question that bears most directly on the question of how genocides happen. The Holocaust did not start with a signed order to kill. It started with a regime that had committed itself to an ideology of racial removal and that, when conditions allowed, escalated step by step from removal to murder. Each step was made possible by the steps that had gone before. The men who pulled the triggers in 1941 had spent the previous eight years administering an ever-tightening apparatus of dehumanisation. By the time the order to kill arrived, in whatever form it arrived, they were ready to obey it. That readiness, more than any specific decision in Berlin, is what made the Holocaust possible. It was built up slowly, over years, by ordinary administrative work.
See also
- The Wannsee Conference and the Final Solution
- The Einsatzgruppen
- Reinhard Heydrich
- Adolf Eichmann
- The Invasion of Poland and the Ghettos
- The Haavara Agreement
Sources
- Christopher Browning, The Origins of the Final Solution, University of Nebraska Press, 2004
- Mark Roseman, The Wannsee Conference and the Final Solution, Metropolitan Books, 2002
- Peter Longerich, Holocaust: The Nazi Persecution and Murder of the Jews, Oxford University Press, 2010
- USHMM: The Final Solution