Hitler

negativecharacteristics of the Jewish character and pyschology. And all the time, civil servants worked like beavers to hone the legislation that turned Jews into outcasts and pariahs, their lives into torment and misery. The police, particularly the Gestapo – helped as always by eager citizens anxious to denounce Jews or those seen as ‘friends of Jews’ – served as a proactive enforcement agency, deploying their ‘rational’ methods of arrest and internment in concentration camps rather than the crude violence of the party hotheads, though with the same objective. Not least, the SD – beginning life as the party’s own intelligence organization, but developing into the crucial surveillance and ideological planning agency within the rapidly expanding SS – was advancing on its way to adopting the pivotal role in the shaping of anti-Jewish policy.
    Each group, agency, or individual involved in pushing forward the radicalization of anti-Jewish discrimination had vested interests and a specific agenda. Uniting them all and giving justification to them was the vision of racial purification and, in particular, of a ‘Jew-free’ Germany embodied in the person of the Führer. Hitler’s role was, therefore, crucial, even if at times indirect. His broad sanction was needed. But for the most part little more was required.
    There is no doubt that Hitler fully approved of and backed the new drive against the Jews, even if he took care to remain out of the limelight. One of the main agitators for radical action against the Jews, Joseph Goebbels, had no difficulty in April 1938 – in the immediate wake of the savage persecution of the Jews in Vienna – in persuading Hitler to support his plans to ‘clean up’ Berlin, the seat of his own Gau. Hitler’s only stipulation was that nothing should be undertaken before his meetings with Mussolini in early May. A successful outcome of his talks with the Duce was of great importance to him, particularly in the context of his unfolding plans regarding Czechoslovakia. Possible diplomatic repercussions provoked by intensified persecution of Jews in Germany’s capital were to be avoided. Goebbels had already discussed his own aims on the ‘Jewish Question’ with Berlin’s Police Chief Wolf Heinrich Graf von Helldorf before he broached the matter with Hitler. ‘Then we put it to the Führer. He agrees, but only after his trip to Italy. Jewish establishments will be combed out. Jews will then get a swimming-pool, a few cinemas, and restaurants allocated to them. Otherwise entry forbidden. We’ll remove the character of a Jew-paradise from Berlin. Jewish businesses will be marked as such. At any rate, we’re now proceedingmore radically. The Führer wants gradually to push them all out. Negotiate with Poland and Romania. Madagascar would be the most suitable for them.’
    The ‘Madagascar solution’ had been touted among radical antisemites for decades. Reference to it at this juncture seems to signify that Hitler was moving away from any assumption that emigration would remove the ‘Jewish problem’ in favour of a solution based upon territorial resettlement. He was conceivably influenced in this by Heydrich, reporting the views of the ‘experts’ on Jewish policy in the SD. The relative lack of success in ‘persuading’ Jews to emigrate – little short of three-quarters of the Jewish population recorded in 1933 still lived in Germany, despite the persecution, as late as October 1938 – together with the mounting obstacles to Jewish immigration created by other countries had compelled the SD to revise its views on future anti-Jewish policy. By the end of 1937 the idea of favouring a Jewish state in Palestine, which Eichmann had developed, partly through secret dealings with Zionist contacts, had cooled markedly. Eichmann’s own visit to Palestine, arranged with his Zionist go-between, had been an unmitigated failure. And, more importantly, the German Foreign Office was resolutely hostile to the notion of a Jewish state in Palestine. However, emigration remained the objective.
    Hitler, too, favoured Palestine as a targeted territory. In early 1938, he reaffirmed the policy, arrived at almost a year earlier, aimed at promoting with all means available the emigration of Jews to any country willing to take them, though looking to Palestine in the first instance. But he was alert to the perceived dangers of creating a Jewish state to threaten Germany at some