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The Decision to Exterminate the Jews of Europe

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The Jews, the Holocaust, and the Public

Part of the book series: The Holocaust and its Contexts ((HOLC))

Abstract

We know Hitler did not issue any formal written order for the ‘Final Solution of the Jewish Problem in Europe’, that is, the complete extermination of Europe’s Jewish population. Argument has raged over when precisely, and why, he issued what historians generally agreed as a verbal instruction for the genocide. This chapter argues these debates are based on a fundamental misunderstanding of the nature of Nazi decision-making. Taking as its model the description in the report of the Nazi Party Court on the murders committed during the nationwide pogrom of 9–10 November 1938, this chapter argues that the ‘decision’ to launch the extermination of Europe’s Jews was contained in the vehement antisemitic propaganda campaign launched on the invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941. The threats issued by Hitler and Goebbels and the propaganda campaign more generally were interpreted by Himmler and Goering as an instruction to begin the genocide.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Quoted in David Cesarani, Final Solution: The Fate of the Jews 1933–1949 (London: Macmillan, 2016), 222. For a video of the speech, in which Hitler’s gestures make it clear that he really does mean physical annihilation, see https://www.ushmm.org/learn/timeline-of-events/1939-1941/hitler-speech-to-german-parliament.

  2. 2.

    Cesarani, Final Solution, 448–449, also for the following, citing Toby Thacker, Joseph Goebbels: Life and Death (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 236–243, Ian Kershaw, Hitler 1936–1945: Nemesis (London: Penguin, 1998), 461–475, 484–487 and Peter Longerich, Heinrich Himmler (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 551–553.

  3. 3.

    Henry Friedlander, The Origins of Nazi Genocide. From Euthanasia to the Final Solution (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1995), 284–286; Dieter Pohl, Von der ‘Judenpolitk’ zum Judenmord: Der Distrikt Lublin des Generalgouvernement 1939–1944 (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 1993), 179.

  4. 4.

    Ernst Fraenkel, The Dual State: A Contribution to the Theory of Dictatorship (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017, reprinting the 1941 edition with additional material).

  5. 5.

    Cesarani, Final Solution, 453–455.

  6. 6.

    Christian Gerlach, The Extermination of the European Jews (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), 82. I accept that in a book review published in 2010 I was wrong to assert that Gerlach had changed his mind about this argument since first advancing it in 1998 (in English) in the publication used by David Cesarani: Christian Gerlach, “The Wannsee conference, the fate of German Jews, and Hitler’s decision in principle to exterminate all European Jews,” Journal of Modern History, 70, 4 (1998): 759–812; Richard J. Evans, “Who remembers the Poles?”, London Review of Books, 32 (2010) 21, 21–22.

  7. 7.

    Gerlach, The Extermination of the European Jews, 83–84.

  8. 8.

    Cesarani, Final Solution, 453–459.

  9. 9.

    Mark Roseman, The Wannsee Conference and the Final Solution: A Reconsideration (London: Penguin, 2002); Gerlach, “The Wannsee Conference, the fate of German Jews,” 759–812.

  10. 10.

    Richard J. Evans, The Third Reich at War (London: Penguin, 2008), 171–175. See also Frank Bajohr and Jürgen Matthäus eds., The Political Diary of Alfred Rosenberg and the Onset of the Holocaust (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield with the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, 2015), 432–434.

  11. 11.

    Evans, The Third Reich at War, 209–214; Evans, “Who remembers the Poles?”

  12. 12.

    Evans, The Third Reich at War, 242–243, also for the following.

  13. 13.

    Evans, The Third Reich at War, 244–245.

  14. 14.

    Peter Longerich, Der ungeschriebene Befehl. Hitler und der Weg zur “Endlösung” (Munich: Piper Verlag, 2001), 113. Peter Longerich, Holocaust. The Nazi Persecution and Murder of the Jews (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 268–269, argues that Goebbels blamed the Jews for ‘the lack of military success in the East’, but this is not supported by the evidence.

  15. 15.

    Jeffrey Herf, The Jewish Enemy. Nazi Propaganda during World War II and the Holocaust (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006), 20–21, 108.

  16. 16.

    Wolfgang Benz, “Judenvernichtung aus Notwehr? Die Legenden um Theodore N. Kaufman”, Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte, vol. 29 (1981): 615–630.

  17. 17.

    Quoted in Evans, The Third Reich at War, 245.

  18. 18.

    Quoted in Longerich, Holocaust, 285; also Herf, The Jewish Enemy, 92–127, for the following.

  19. 19.

    Herf, The Jewish Enemy, 92–127; Longerich, Holocaust, 288–290.

  20. 20.

    Quotations in Evans, The Third Reich at War, 253–256.

  21. 21.

    Longerich, Der ungeschriebene Befehl, 138–142. It is important to note that the Wannsee Conference was initially summoned in November 1941, well before the declaration of war on the USA.

  22. 22.

    See for example Lucy Dawidowicz, The War Against the Jews (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1975); Andreas Hillgruber, “Die ideologisch-dogmatischen Grundlagen der nationalsozialistischen Politik der Ausrottung der Juden in den besetzten Gebieten der Sowjetunion und ihre Durchführung 1941–1944,” German Studies Review, 2, 2 (1979): 264–296; or Gerald Fleming, Hitler and the Final Solution (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1984).

  23. 23.

    Uwe Dietrich Adam, Judenpolitik im Dritten Reich (Düsseldorf: Droste Verlag, 1972); Martin Broszat, “Hitler und die ‘Endlösung’: Aus Anlass der Thesen von David Irving,” Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte, 25, 4 (1977): 739–775; Hans Mommsen, “Die Realisierung des Utopischen: Die ‘Endlösung der Judenfrage’ im ‘Dritten Reich,”’ Geschichte und Gesellschaft, 9, 3 (1983): 381–420. A powerful critique of this approach from an ‘intentionalist’ position is offered by Hermann Graml, “The Genesis of the Final Solution”, in Walter H. Pehle ed., November 1938: From ‘Kristallnacht’ to Genocide (New York: Berg, 1991), 168–186.

  24. 24.

    Christopher Browning, “Beyond ‘Intentionalism’ and ‘Functionalism’: The Decision for the Final Solution Reconsidered”, in The Path to Genocide: Essays on Launching the Final Solution, ed. Christopher Browning (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 86–121; updated in Christopher Browning, “The Decision-Making Process,” in The Historiography of the Holocaust, ed. Dan Stone (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), 173–196.

  25. 25.

    As pointed out by Donald Bloxham, The Final Solution: A Genocide (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 223.

  26. 26.

    Richard Breitman, The Architect of Genocide: Himmler and the Final Solution (London: Pimlico, 1991), esp. chapters 7–9.

  27. 27.

    Quoted in Evans, The Third Reich at War, 177–178.

  28. 28.

    Longerich, Holocaust, 264–265; Cesarani, Final Solution, 486–487.

  29. 29.

    For a useful examination of these arguments, see Saul Friedländer, The Years of Extermination: The Third Reich and the Jews 1939–1945 (New York: Harper Collins, 2007), 78–79, n. 160. For the Göring/Heydrich order, see Longerich, Holocaust, 260–261.

  30. 30.

    Hans-Joachim Neumann and Henrik Eberle, Was Hitler Ill? A Final Diagnosis (Cambridge: Polity, 2013), 144–147. This undermines the argument that Hitler took the decision to launch a Europe-wide programme of extermination in reaction to the promulgation of the Atlantic Charter on 14 August (Tobias Jersak, “Die Interaktion von Kriegsverlauf und Judenvernichtung: Ein Blick aus Hitlers Strategie im Spätsommer 1941”, Historische Zeitschrift, 268 (1999): 311–349).

  31. 31.

    Christopher Browning, The Origins of the Final Solution: The Evolution of Nazi Jewish Policy, September 1939-March 1942 (Lincoln, Nebraska: University of Nebraska Press, 2004), 362; Longerich, Holocaust, 259–264, 524 n. 31.

  32. 32.

    Robert Jan van Pelt, “Auschwitz,” in Günther Morsch and Bertrand Perz eds., Neue Studien zu nationalsozialistischen Massentötungen durch Giftgas (Berlin: Metropol Verlag, 2011), 199; Karin Orth, “Rudolf Höss und die ‘Endlösung der Judenfrage’: Drei Argumente gegen die Datierung auf den Sommer 1941,” Werkstatt Geschichte 18 (1997): 45–58.

  33. 33.

    Browning, The Path to Genocide, 116–121; Christopher Browning, “Hitler and the Euphoria of Victory: The Path to the Final Solution,” in The Final Solution: Origins and Implementation, ed. David Cesarani (London: Routledge, 1994), 137–147; Christopher Browning, “The Decision-Making Process,” 188.

  34. 34.

    Browning, “The Decision-Making Process,” 186.

  35. 35.

    Ibid., 189–190; Yitzhak Arad, Belzec, Sobibór, Treblinka: The Operation Reinhard Death Camps (Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University Press, 1987), 23–29.

  36. 36.

    Longerich, Holocaust, 209–210, criticizing Gerlach on this point.

  37. 37.

    Ibid., 426–427; Cesarani, Final Solution, 440–441.

  38. 38.

    Longerich, Holocaust, 272–275; in similar terms, Philippe Burrin, Hitler and the Jews. The Genesis of the Holocaust (London: Arnold, 1994), 124–133.

  39. 39.

    Sybille Steinbacher, Auschwitz: A History (London: Penguin, 2005), 88; Nikolaus Wachsmann, KL. A History of the Nazi Concentration Camps (London: Little Brown, 2015), 267–269.

  40. 40.

    Longerich, Holocaust, 429–431; Cesarani, Final Solution, 426–427.

  41. 41.

    Steinbacher, Auschwitz, 105–106. See also Stephan Lehnstaedt, Der Kern des Holocaust: Belzec, Sobibór, Treblinka und die Aktion Reinhardt (Munich: CH Beck, 2017).

  42. 42.

    For the argument that it was the assassination of Heydrich that prompted the decision to launch a Europe-wide extermination programme, see Florent Bayard, La ‘Solution Finale de la question juive’: La technique, le temps et les catégories de la décision (Paris: Fayard, 2004). As we have seen, however, the process was already well under way by this point: see also Christopher Browning, “A Final Hitler Decision for the ‘Final Solution?’ The Riegner Telegram Reconsidered,” Holocaust and Genocide Studies, 10 (1996): 3–10.

  43. 43.

    Cesarani, Final Solution, 709–710.

  44. 44.

    Christopher Browning, Nazi Policy, Jewish Workers, German Killers (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 142.

  45. 45.

    Longerich, Holocaust, 427–429.

  46. 46.

    Cesarani, Final Solution, 453–459.

  47. 47.

    Cited in Richard J. Evans, The Third Reich in Power (London: Lane, 2005), 582.

  48. 48.

    Cited in Jeremy Noakes and Geoffrey Pridham, eds., Nazism 1919–1945: A Documentary Reader, Vol. III (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 2001), 517; and in Cesarani, Final Solution, 665–666.

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  1. The University of Cambridge, Cambridge, UK

    Richard J. Evans

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  1. University of Derby, Derby, UK

    Larissa Allwork

  2. King’s College London, London, UK

    Rachel Pistol

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Evans, R.J. (2019). The Decision to Exterminate the Jews of Europe. In: Allwork, L., Pistol, R. (eds) The Jews, the Holocaust, and the Public. The Holocaust and its Contexts. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-28675-0_6

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