Hitler

not have hesitated in putting their ideas to Hitler. The thinking was now moving way beyond what had been contemplated under the Madagascar Plan, inhumane though that itself had been. In such an inhospitable climate as that now envisaged, the fate of the Jews would be sealed. Within a few years most of them would starve, freeze, or be worked to death. The idea of a comprehensive territorial solution to the ‘Jewish problem’ had by now become effectively synonymous with genocide.
    Hitler had been under continued pressure from Nazi leaders to deport the Jews from their own territories, with, now as before, the General Government seen as the favoured ‘dumping-ground’. Among the most persistent was the Gauleiter of Vienna, and former Hitler Youth Leader, Baldur von Schirach, who had been pressing hard since the previoussummer to relieve the chronic housing problems of Vienna by ‘evacuating’ the city’s 60,000 Jews to the General Government. Hitler had finally agreed to this in December 1940. The plans were fully prepared by the beginning of February 1941. Fresh from his visit to Vienna in March, on the third anniversary of the Anschluß, Hitler discussed with Hans Frank and Goebbels the imminent removal of the Jews from Vienna. Goebbels, anxious to be rid of the Jews from Berlin, was placated with an indication that the Reich capital would be next. ‘Later, they must sometime get out of Europe altogether,’ the Propaganda Minister added.
    Despite the problems which had arisen in 1940 about the transfer of Jews and Poles into the General Government, Heydrich (partly under pressure from the Wehrmacht, which needed land for troop exercises) had approved in January 1941 a new plan to expel 771,000 Poles together with the 60,000 Jews from Vienna (bowing to the demands for deportation from Schirach, backed by Hitler) into Hans Frank’s domain to make room for the settlement of ethnic Germans. A major driving-force behind the urgency of the ambitious new resettlement programme was the need to accommodate (and incorporate in the work-force) ethnic Germans who had been brought to Poland from Lithuania, Bessarabia, Bukovina and elsewhere in eastern Europe and since then miserably housed in transit camps. Frank’s subordinates were dismayed at having to cope with a massive new influx of ‘undesirables’. In the event, however, inevitable logistical complications of the new plan soon revealed it as a grandiose exercise in inhumane lunacy. By mid-March the programme had ground to a halt. Only around 25,000 people had been deported into the General Government. And only some 5,000, mainly elderly, Jews had been removed from Vienna. There was still no prospect, within the confines of the territory currently under German control, of attaining either the comprehensive resettlement programme that Himmler was striving for, or, within that programme, solving what seemed to be becoming a more and more intractable problem: removing the Jews.
    From comments made by Eichmann’s associate Theodor Dannecker, and, subsequently, by Eichmann himself, it was around the turn of the year 1940–41 that Heydrich gained approval from Hitler for his proposal for the ‘final evacuation’ of German Jews to a ‘territory still to be determined’. On 21 January Dannecker noted: ‘In accordance with the will of the Führer, the Jewish question within the part of Europe ruledor controlled by Germany is after the war to be subjected to a final solution.’ To this end, Heydrich had obtained from Hitler, via Himmler and Göring, the ‘commission to put forward a final solution project’. Plainly, at this stage, this was still envisaged as a territorial solution – a replacement for the aborted Madagascar Plan. Eichmann had in mind a figure of around 5.8 million persons.
    Two months later, Eichmann told representatives of the Propaganda Ministry that Heydrich ‘had been commissioned with the final evacuation of the Jews’ and had put forward a proposal to that effect some eight to ten weeks earlier. The proposal had, however, not been accepted ‘because the General Government was not in a position at that time to absorb a single Jew or a Pole’. When, on 17 March, Hans Frank visited Berlin to speak privately with Hitler about the General Government – presumably raising the difficulties he was encountering with Heydrich’s new deportation scheme – he was reassured, in what amounted to a reversal of previous policy, that the