Hitler

German
Reichsgaue.
So would, whatever the views of Dutch National Socialist leader Anton Mussert, the Netherlands.
    Two days earlier, one of Hitler’s most important henchmen, Reinhard Heydrich, Chief of the Security Police and since the previous autumn Deputy Protector of Bohemia and Moravia, had been fatally wounded in an assassination attempt carried out by patriotic Czech exiles who had been flown from London – with the aid of the British subversive warfare agency, the Special Operations Executive (SOE) – and parachuted into the vicinity of Prague. Hitler always favoured brutal reprisals. There could be no doubt that the attack on one of the keyrepresentatives of his power would provoke a ferocious response. Over 1,300 Czechs, some 200 of them women, were eventually rounded up by the SS and executed. On 10 June the entire village of Lidice – the name had been found on a Czech SOE agent arrested earlier – would be destroyed, the male inhabitants shot, the women taken to Ravensbrück concentration camp, the children removed.
    Hitler’s mood was ripe for Goebbels to bring up once more the question of the deportation of Berlin’s remaining Jews. The involvement of a number of young Jews (associated with a Communist-linked resistance group led by Herbert Baum) in the arson attempt at the anti-Bolshevik exhibition ‘The Soviet Paradise’ in Berlin’s Lustgarten on 18 May enabled the Propaganda Minister to emphasize the security dangers if the 40,000 or so Jews he reckoned were still in the Reich capital were not deported. He had been doing his best, he had noted a day earlier, to have as many Jews as possible from his domain ‘shipped off to the east’. Goebbels now pleaded for ‘a more radical Jewish policy’ and, he said, ‘I push at an open door with the Führer,’ who told Speer to find replacements for the Jews in the armaments industry with ‘foreign workers’ as soon as possible.
    Talk moved to the dangers of possible internal revolt in the event of a critical situation in the war. If the danger became acute, Hitler stated, the prisons ‘would be emptied through liquidations’ to prevent the possibility of the gates being opened to let the ‘revolting mob’ loose on the people. But in contrast to 1917 there was nothing to fear from the German workers, remarked Hitler. All German workers desired victory. They had most to lose by defeat and would not contemplate stabbing him in the back. ‘The Germans take part in subversive movements only when the Jews lure them into it,’ Goebbels had Hitler saying. ‘Therefore one must liquidate the Jewish danger, cost what it takes.’ West-European civilization only provided a façade of assimilation. Back in the ghetto, Jews soon returned to type. But there were elements among them who operated ‘with dangerous brutality and thirst for revenge’. ‘Therefore,’ recorded Goebbels, ‘the Führer does not wish at all that the Jews be evacuated to Siberia. There, under the hardest living conditions, they would doubtless again represent a vigorous element. He would most like to see them resettled in Central Africa. There they would live in a climate that would certainly not make them strong and capable of resistance. At any rate, it is the aim of the Führer to makeWestern Europe entirely free of Jews. Here they can no longer have any home.’
    Did such remarks mean that Hitler was unaware that the ‘Final Solution’ was under way, that Jews had already been slaughtered in their thousands in Russia and were now being murdered by poison gas in industrialized mass-killing centres already operating in Chelmno, Belzec, Sobibor, and Auschwitz-Birkenau (with Treblinka and Maidanek soon to follow)? That seems inconceivable.
    On 9 April 1942, a time when the deportations from western European countries to the gas-chambers of Poland were also getting under way, Hans Frank told his underlings in the General Government that orders for the liquidation of the Jews came ‘from higher authority’. Himmler himself was to claim explicitly in an internal, top-secret, letter to SS-Obergruppenführer Gottlob Berger, Chief of the SS Main Office, on 28 July 1942, that he was operating explicitly under Hitler’s authority: ‘The occupied Eastern territories are being made free of Jews. The Führer has placed the implementation of this very difficult order on my shoulders.’
    How much detail Hitler asked for, or was given, cannot be known. According to the