Hitler

all ordinary Germans responded in the same way as the party radicals. There were also numerous indications of distaste and disapproval for the introduction of the Yellow Star, along with sympathy for the victims. It is impossible to be certain which were the more typical responses. Open support for Jews was at any rate dangerous. Goebbels castigated those who felt any sympathy for their plight, threatening them with incarceration in a concentration camp. He turned up his antisemitic invective to an even higher volume. Whatever the level of sympathy, it could carry no weight beside the shrill clamour of the radicals, whose demands – voiced most notably by the Reich Minister of Propaganda – were targeted ever more at removal of the Jews altogether. As Goebbels had recognized, deportation had to wait. But the pressure for it would not let up.
    Much of the pressure came from the Security Police. Not surprisingly, the Security Police in the Warthegau, where the Nazi authorities had been trying in vain since autumn 1939 to expel the Jews from the province, were in the front ranks. It must have been towards the end of August that Eichmann asked the SD chief in Posen, SS-Sturmbannführer Rolf-Heinz Höppner – the self-same Höppner who had written to himin July suggesting the possible liquidation of Jews in his area who were incapable of working during the coming winter through a ‘fast-working preparation’ – for his views on resettlement policy and its administration.
    Höppner’s fifteen-page memorandum, sent to Eichmann on 3 September, was not concerned solely, or even mainly, with deporting Jews, but the ‘Jewish problem’ formed nevertheless part of his overview of the potential for extensive resettlement on racial lines. His views corresponded closely with the ideas worked out under the General Plan for the East
(Generalplan Ost).
He envisaged deportations once the war was over ‘out of German settlement space’ of the ‘undesirable sections of the population’ from the Great German Reich and of peoples from eastern and south-eastern Europe deemed racially unfit for Germanization. He specifically included ‘the ultimate solution of the Jewish Question’, not just in Germany but also in all states under German influence, in his suggestions. The areas he had in mind for the vast number of deportees were the ‘large spaces in the current Soviet Union’. He added that it would be pure speculation to consider the organization of these territories ‘since first the basic decisions have to be taken’. It was essential, however, he stated, that there should be complete clarity from the outset about the fate of the ‘undesirables’, ‘whether the aim is to establish for them permanently a certain form of existence, or whether they should be completely wiped out’.
    Höppner, aware of thinking in the upper echelons of the SD, was plainly open to ideas of killing Jews. He himself, after all, had expressed such an idea some weeks earlier. But in early September he was evidently not aware of any decision to exterminate the Jews of Europe. As far as he was concerned, the goal was still their expulsion to the available ‘spaces’ in the dismantled Soviet Union once the war was over.
    IV
    Any decision to allow the deportation of the Jews of Europe to the east could only be taken by Hitler. He had rejected Heydrich’s proposal to deport them only a few weeks earlier. Without Hitler’s approval, Heydrich had been powerless to act. Hitler was even now, in September, unwilling to take this step. He had, of course, presumed that deportations and a final settlement of the ‘Jewish Question’ would follow uponthe victorious end of a war expected to last four or five months. But by this time, Hitler was well aware that this expectation had been an illusion. So practical considerations arose. There was the question of transport. Not enough trains were available to get supplies to the front line. That was more urgent than shipping Jews to the east. And where were the Jews to be sent? The areas currently under German occupation were intended for ‘ethnic cleansing’, not as a Jewish reservation. Soviet Jews were now being slaughtered there in thousands. But how to deal with an influx of millions more Jews from all over Europe into the area posed problems of an altogether different order. Mass starvation – the fate to which Hitler was prepared to condemn the citizens of Leningrad and Moscow – still required