In Europe

creeds applicable to the whole of social life. But in many circles during the first half of the twentieth century this contradistinction became the hub around which all the rest revolved. ‘Purity’ evolved into a concept that dominated discussions everywhere, not only among rabid racists, but among anthroposophists, politicians and artists as well. Half of Europe suddenly seemed afflicted with a morbid dread of sickness. It is almost impossible to find a cultural essay from the 1930s in which terms such as ‘pure’ and ‘healthy’ do not appear. It was the leitmotif of the modern age.
    For the Nazis, this notion of purity meant they had to make their empire ‘healthy’ by, among other things, ‘cleansing’ it of ‘non-national’ taints. Hence their attempts to reorganise nations, to ‘
entjuden
’ the occupied territories, and to herd millions of
Untermenschen
into the part of Poland which became known as the General Government, and other outlying areas of their empire. These
hinausgesauberten
Jews, Poles and Gypsies could then serve as a ‘reservoir’ of cheap labour.
    This was, in rough outline, the system the Nazis had in mind until 1940. At first they had hoped to send the Jews to Palestine. In the 1930s that was still an isolated area, economically unimportant, run by the British and far from Europe. In summer 1933, they even signed an agreement with the German Zionist Federation. Approximately 60,000 Jews took advantage of it, until the British put a stop to all Jewish immigration.
    After 1939, the Nazis ran the General Government of Poland as a reserve for the Jews, until it quickly proved too small. Then the SS commander Heinrich Himmler proposed a solution to the ‘Jewish question’ in the form of ‘mass emigration to a colony in Africa or elsewhere’. The French colony of Madagascar seemed particularly interesting to him. In his policy paper ‘Some Thoughts on the Treatment of Foreign Peoples in the East’ (May 1940), he touched upon the idea of ‘physical extermination’, only to reject it immediately.
    Meanwhile the deportations continued. The General Government became overpopulated with the huge influx of Poles and Jews, the economies of the surrounding towns and villages were destroyed and huge problems arose with regard to the region's food supply, making the settlement of new German colonists almost impossible. Within the Nazi command, conflicts were soon raging between the ‘ideologists’ and the ‘technologists’. Himmler's
Blut und Boden
(Blood and Soil) routine, after all, was turning the General Government into a kind of ethnic storehouse, while Göring and governor general Hans Frank hoped to make of it a well organised slave state.
    In autumn 1941, however, it became obvious that the quick conquest of the east was not going according to plan. There are clear indications that, as early as October 1941, Hitler, Himmler and Reinhard Heydrich, headof the
Sicherheitsdienst
and later Reich governor of Bohemia and Moravia, had arrived at the conclusion that none of the deportation schemes were working, and that mass extermination was the only answer. The first experiments with poison gas date from this period. Himmler, who had personally attended a mass execution by
Einsatzgruppe B
in Minsk, felt that the shootings by roaming Eastern European commandos – in which hundreds of thousands of Jews had already been killed in 1940 and 1941 – were far too time-consuming. They also generated too much emotion, an undesirable side effect. He went looking for a faster and better alternative. Equipment and personnel from the T-4 euthanasia programme were quickly sent east. On 3 September, 1941, at Auschwitz, Zyklon B was first tried out on 600 Soviet prisoners of war. Soon afterwards, the experimental process was speeded up on a large scale with two mobile gas chambers – converted trucks, one for thirty persons, the other for sixty.
    The euthanasia specialists, wearing white coats and stethoscopes in order to mislead their victims, were extremely satisfied. Their departmental report literally read: ‘97,000 have been processed since December 1941, using three trucks, with none of the machinery showing a single defect.’
    The plans for forced emigration, deportation and national ‘cleansing’ were transformed in this way into a single giant bureaucratic project, aimed at a ‘definitive solution to the Jewish question’.
    The Wannsee meeting was held around the pivotal point