Hitler

ministers to the Allies. He posed, as usual, a stark choice of outright victory or ‘complete destruction’ in a fight to the end for ‘living space’ in the east. Part of Hitler’s implicit argument, increasingly, in attempting to prevent support from seeping away was to play on complicity in the persecution of the Jews. His own paranoia about the responsibility of the Jews for the war and all its evils easily led into the suggestive threat that boats had been burned, there was no way out, and retribution in the event of a lost war would be terrible. The hint of this was implicit in his disapproval of Antonescu’s treatment of the Jews as too mild, declaring that the more radical the measures the better it was when tackling the Jews.
    In his meetings with Horthy at Klessheim on 16–17 April, Hitler was more brusque. Horthy was berated for feelers to the enemy secretly put out by prominent Hungarian sources but tapped by German intelligence. He was told that ‘Germany and its allies were in the same boat on a stormy sea. It was obvious that in this situation anyone wanting to get off would drown immediately.’ As he had done with Antonescu, though in far harsher terms, Hitler criticized what he saw as an over-mild policy towards the Jews. Horthy had mentioned that, despite tough measures, criminality and the black market were still flourishing in Hungary. Hitler replied that the Jews were to blame. Horthy asked what he was expected to do with the Jews. He had taken away their economic livelihood; he could scarcely have them all killed. Ribbentrop intervened at this point to say that the Jews must be ‘annihilated’ or locked up in concentration camps. There was no other way. Hitler regaled Horthy with statistics aimed at showing the strength of former Jewish influence in Germany. He compared the ‘German’ city of Nuremberg with the neighbouring ‘Jewish’ town of Fürth. Wherever Jews had been left to themselves, he said, they had produced only misery and dereliction. They were pureparasites. He put forward Poland as a model. There, things had been ‘thoroughly cleaned up’. If Jews did not want to work ‘then they would be shot. If they could not work, then they would have to rot.’ As so often, he deployed a favourite bacterial simile. ‘They would have to be treated like tuberculosis bacilli from which a healthy body could become infected. This would not be cruel if it were considered that even innocent creatures, like hares and deer, had to be killed. Why should the beasts that want to bring us Bolshevism be spared?’
    Hitler’s emphasis on the Jews as germ-bacilli, and as responsible for the war and the spread of Bolshevism, was of course nothing new. And his deep-seated belief in the demonic power still purportedly in the hands of the Jews as they were being decimated needs no underlining. But this was the first time that he had used the ‘Jewish Question’ in diplomatic discussions to put heads of state under pressure to introduce more draconian anti-Jewish measures. What prompted this?
    He would have been particularly alerted to the ‘Jewish Question’ in April 1943. The previous month, he had finally agreed to have what was left of Berlin’s Jewish community deported. In April, he was sent the breakdown prepared by the SS’s statistician Richard Korherr of almost a million and a half Jews ‘evacuated’ and ‘channelled through’ Polish camps. From the middle of the month, he was increasingly frustrated by accounts of the battle raging in the Warsaw ghetto, where the Waffen-SS, sent in to raze it to the ground, were encountering desperate and brave resistance from the inhabitants. Not least, only days before his meeting with Horthy, mass graves containing the remains of thousands of Polish officers, murdered in 1940 by the Soviet Security Police, the NKVD, had been discovered in the Katyn Forest, near Smolensk. Hitler immediately gave Goebbels permission to make maximum propaganda capital out of the issue. He also instructed Goebbels to put the ‘Jewish Question’ at the forefront of propaganda. Goebbels seized upon the Katyn case as an excellent opportunity to do just this.
    Hitler’s directive to Goebbels to amplify the propaganda treatment of the persecution of the Jews, and his explicit usage of the ‘Jewish Question’ in his meetings with foreign dignitaries, plainly indicate instrumental motives. He believed, as he always had done, unquestioningly in the propaganda