Hitler

to give in bit by bit in deals with the enemy than to capitulate outright. His confidence in Mussolini had finally evaporated. It would be different, he thought, were the Duce still young and fit. But he was old and worn out. The royal family could not be trusted an inch. And – he added a characteristic last reflection – the Jews had not been done away with in Italy, whereas in Germany (as Goebbels summarized) ‘we can be very glad that we have followed a radical policy. There are no Jews behind us who could inherit from us.’
    As the war had turned remorselessly against Germany, the beleaguered Führer had reverted ever more to his obsession with Jewish responsibility for the conflagration. In his Manichean world-view, the fight to the finish between the forces of good and evil – the aryan race and the Jews – was reaching its climax. There could be no relenting in the struggle to wipe out Jewry.
    Little over a month earlier, Hitler had talked at length, prompted by Goebbels, about the ‘Jewish Question’. The Propaganda Minister thought it one of the most interesting discussions he had ever had with the Führer. Goebbels had being re-reading
The Protocols of the Elders of Zion
– the crude Russian forgery purporting to outline a Jewish conspiracy to rule the world – with an eye on its use in current propaganda. He raised the matter over lunch. Hitler was certain of the ‘absolute authenticity’ of the
Protocols
. The Jews, he thought, were not working to a fixed programme; they were following, as always, their ‘racial instinct’. The Jews were the same all over the world, Goebbels noted him as saying, whether in the ghettos of the east ‘or in the bank palaces of the City [of London] or Wall Street’, and would instinctivelyfollow the same aims and use the same methods without the need to work them out together. The question could well be posed, he went on (according to Goebbels’s summary of his comments), as to why there were Jews at all. It was the same question – again the familiar insect analogy – as why there were Colorado beetles. His most basic belief – life as struggle – provided, as always, his answer. ‘Nature is ruled by the law of struggle. There will always be parasitic forms of existence to accelerate the struggle and intensify the process of selection between the strong and the weak … In nature, life always works immediately against parasites; in the existence of peoples that is not exclusively the case. From that results the Jewish danger. So there is nothing else open to modern peoples than to exterminate the Jews.’
    The Jews would use all means to defend themselves against this ‘gradual process of annihilation’. One of its methods was war. It was the same warped vision embodied in Hitler’s ‘prophecy’: Jews unleashing war, but bringing about their own destruction in the process. World Jewry, in Hitler’s view, was on the verge of a historic downfall. This would take time. He was presumably alluding to Jews out of German reach, especially in the USA, when he commented that some decades would be needed ‘to cast them out of their power. That is our historic mission, which can not be held up, but only accelerated, by the war. World Jewry thinks it is on the verge of a world victory. This world victory will not come. Instead there will be a world downfall. The peoples who have earliest recognized and fought the Jew will instead accede to world domination.’
    Four days after this conversation, on 16 May, SS-Brigadeführer Jürgen Stroop telexed the news: ‘The Jewish quarter of Warsaw is no more! The grand operation terminated at 20.15 hours when the Warsaw synagogue was blown up … The total number of Jews apprehended and destroyed, according to record, is 56,065 …’ A force of around 3,000 men, the vast majority from the SS, had used a tank, armoured vehicles, heavy machine-guns, and artillery to blow up and set fire to buildings which the Jews were fiercely defending and to combat the courageous resistance put up by the ghetto’s inhabitants, armed with little more than pistols, grenades, and Molotov cocktails. Hitler’s long-standing readiness to link Jews with subversive or partisan actions made him all the keener to hasten their destruction. After Himmler had discussed the matter with him on 19 June, he noted that ‘the Führer declared, aftermy report, that the evacuation of the Jews, despite the unrest that would thereby still arise in the