institutions were created that were to organize the genocide during the war, and
this was the period in which Judenpolitik was developed and radicalized and in
which the regime learned how to deploy this new field of politics in a variety of
ways for its own purposes.
Introduction
7
The second effect of seeing the emergence of the ‘Final Solution’ as a complex
process rather than as the outcome of a single decision, if we follow the suggestions of
Gerlach, Aly, and others and take into consideration new thematic approaches to the
analysis of the persecution of the Jews, is that it becomes necessary to see Judenpolitik as systematically interlinked with the other central thematic areas, notably in
domestic policy but ultimately also with German hegemony on the continent of
Europe. For the war years this means that we need to take account of German
policies on alliances and inner repression across the whole of Europe, and of the
issues of work, food production, and financing the war. It is necessary to show how
these areas were redefined in a racist and specifically anti-Semitic sense, and to show
how even during the war the Nazi system was attempting to establish the basis for a
racist Imperium in which the murder of the Jews was the lowest common denom-
inator in a series of alliances led by Germany. This implies, of course, a very broad
programme of research that would exceed the scope of a single monograph. The
present study will restrict itself to exploring in outline how such linkages functioned.
Thirdly, if we accept that the decision-making process within Nazi Judenpolitik
did not come to an end after the ‘Final Solution’ had been determined upon in
principle but that after 1942 decisions were continually being reached that affected
the lives of millions of people—in this case it is clear that the implementation of
Judenpolitik was not only the result of priorities set by the leadership but was
increasingly influenced by the behaviour of German allies, by the way that the
local administration in occupied territories acted, and not least by the attitude of
the local populations and the behaviour of Germany’s enemies.
There is a further key factor to be considered, too. The Jewish population that in
1941 faced the plans being made for the ‘Final Solution’ was defenceless and wholly
unprepared, but in the second half of the war it too became an element that
influenced the way the perpetrators proceeded. By fleeing, by seeking to escape
persecution by living in a hide-away or underground, but also by negotiating with
individuals or bribing them, they were attempting to slow down the inexorable
process of annihilation and thereby—if only to a limited extent—influencing the
behaviour of the perpetrators.
Here research into the perpetrators reaches its limits, or in other words the
further into the war is the stage that research concentrates on, the more difficult it
becomes to reconstruct the development of the persecution and annihilation of
the European Jews by concentrating exclusively on persecutors and their activities.
This is not to say that concentrating on the persecutors in the period after 1942 is
historiographically impossible or pointless, but that it is important to make
precisely clear what the parameters are within which the perpetrators were able
to act autonomously.
Fourthly, if the history of the final solution is seen as a chain of ongoing
decisions that together come to make up the full context of Judenpolitik, then
the fate of the other groups persecuted by the Nazis must also be considered, or
8
Introduction
considered at least in so far as they reveal direct comparisons with or information
about the National Socialists’ Judenpolitik.
These, then, are the fundamental ideas around which this book’s depiction of
Judenpolitik in the years between 1933 and 1945 will be oriented. There is one
further significant angle that needs to be considered in more detail, and it
concerns the tricky nature of the available sources.
As far as possible this study is based on primary sources. Alongside the
documentary holdings of the German administrative departments that are housed
in well-known archives in Germany and outside, this study will also consider the
holdings of archives in the former Warsaw Pact states that since the 1990s have
become accessible to scholars. In practical terms this primarily means Moscow’s
‘Special Archive’ where two collections have been used in some detail: the papers
of the Central Association of German Citizens of the Jewish Faith—the Central-
verein Deutscher Staatsbürger jüdischen Glaubens (hereafter referred to simply as
the Centralverein)—which permits a far more detailed picture of the Nazis’
persecution of the Jews in the period from 1933 to 1938 than has hitherto been
available; and the papers of the Security Service of the SS (the Sicherheitsdienst, or
SD), which cover the period from 1935 to 1940. In addition, papers from various
other former Soviet, Polish, and Czech archives are considered, some of which
were consulted from copies in Yad Vashem or the US Holocaust Museum in
Washington.
For my investigation of the radicalization of Jewish persecution in the occupied
Soviet zones in the second half of 1941 I have made extensive use of papers from
the Central Office for the Investigation of Nazi Crimes in Ludwigsburg (properly
known as the Zentrale Stelle der Landesjustizverwaltungen zur Aufklärung nation-
alsozialistischer Verbrechen) via the branch office there of the Bundesarchiv, or
Federal Archive of Germany.
Despite what is an almost unmanageably large quantity of documents available
for the reconstruction of Nazi Judenpolitik, from the point of view of the central
decision-making processes for the ‘Final Solution’ the state of source material can
only be described as ‘patchy’. This is because the most important decisions that led
to the murder of the European Jews were not usually written down; the perpet-
rators also systematically attempted to destroy documents that reflected these
decisions, and were largely successful in doing so. Documents that have nonetheless
survived are scattered between archives in several different countries. In addition,
documents relating to the murder of the Jews are written in a language designed to
veil their true purpose. And finally, bringing these fragments together is a process
that leaves plenty of room for interpretation: in my view the decisive question that
such an interpretation has to address is that of the role of Judenpolitik within the
overall political activity of the regime.
Given these difficulties with source material, a precise reconstruction of the
individual complexes of events and actions—including executions, deportations,
Introduction
9
murders in the concentration camps, and so on—that together constitute the
genocide perpetrated against the European Jews is indispensable for any analysis
of the decision-making process. The disparate nature of the sources leaves us no
alternative but to draw conclusions about decisions from a reconstruction of the
&nbs
p; individual acts that they gave rise to. Since this study is primarily a reconstruction
of the decision-making process the account will necessarily appear somewhat
imbalanced or one-sided: whenever the Nazis’ Judenpolitik enters a new phase the
narrative will broaden out, but a policy once implemented will be described
relatively briefly. In other words, this book is designed to be an analysis of
Judenpolitik that goes back to the events themselves in the form of a schematic
narrative and where possible only summarizes them when it is necessary to do so
in order to reconstruct an aspect of Judenpolitik. The account of the gradual
radicalization of the persecution of the Jews in the occupied territories of the
Soviet Union will, for example, need considerably more space than the depiction
of the rapidly executed deportations of the Hungarian Jews in 1944. However, this
study is only one-sided in so far as it is chiefly concerned with the perpetrators
and only takes account of the reactions of the victims or of third parties when their
behaviour permits conclusions to be drawn about the perpetrators.
This book first appeared in Germany in 1998 under the title Politik der
Vernichtung. For this English edition, the whole of the original text was revised
to take account of the latest scholarship in the field of Holocaust studies: the book
has been significantly reworked, shortened in some places and extended in others.
The cuts that were made chiefly affect Part I on the persecution of the Jews in
Germany and Part III on the war against the Soviet Union. The sections that are
new to this English version are on anti-Semitism in the Weimar Republic (Intro-
duction), the removal of the Jews (Entjudung) from German society (Chapter 1),
life in the Polish ghettos (Chapter 7), the Holocaust in Eastern Europe between
1942 and 1944, and the end of the Holocaust (Part V).
HISTORICAL BACKGROUND: ANTI-SEMITISM
IN THE WEIMAR REPUBLIC
This study begins with the first anti-Semitic measures taken by the National
Socialists immediately after taking over government in 1933. These measures
represent the end of the equality of citizenship that the Jews had enjoyed
throughout Germany since 1871.
By gradually removing the citizenship rights of German Jews the Nazis were
fulfilling one of the principal demands that radical anti-Semites had been making
since the 1870s. It is possible to trace a line of development that began with anti-
Jewish agitation in the context of the so-called ‘Gründerkrach’ of 1873 (the stock-
market crash that ended the period known as the ‘Foundation Years’) and
continues in the anti-Semites’ petition of 1880/1 and in successful political candi-
datures from anti-Semitic parties from the 1890s onwards. It was also manifested
in strongly anti-Semitic agitation on the part of large professional interest groups
at that period. The line could be traced further within the right-wing, ethnic
nationalist movement known as the ‘völkische Bewegung’ that formed after the
turn of the century and was highly charged with anti-Semitic sentiments, or with
the simultaneous breakthrough of a biological-determinist concept of race in
various branches of science, which lent spurious respectability to the nonsense
talked about the Jewish ‘race’. 1 One could argue, too, that this line was continued in the anti-Semitic agitation at the end of the First World War, 2 and in the wave of anti-Semitic hate campaigns and violence in the immediate post-war period, until
it culminates in the anti-Semitism of the NSDAP. In this manner a picture could
be painted of a virtually constant stream of radical anti-Semitic movements that
led inexorably to the anti-Semitic policies of the Nazis.
However, this image of a clear, uninterrupted line of anti-Semitism in Germany
is the result only of a superficial examination of history. It is important, too, to
consider the political contexts in which such radically anti-Semitic movements
developed. Despite its prominence in Imperial Germany, radical anti-Semitism was
only a splinter-group and had no decisive influence on the political course of the
German state. In comparison with contemporary manifestations of anti-Semitism
Anti-Semitism in the Weimar Republic
11
in other European countries (such as Austria, Hungary, France, or Russia) it by no
means represented a vibrant political force. The tide of anti-Semitic action was
stemmed by the fact that whilst the political establishment—above all the power
base in the Conservative Party—certainly cultivated anti-Semitism, it also resisted the
repeal of Jewish emancipation: from a conservative perspective the emancipation of
the Jews was a component of the compromise that lay at the foundation of the Empire
and could not simply be ignored. Furthermore, the repeal of rights once granted could
not easily be reconciled with the claims of the German Empire to be a state founded
on the rule of law. Nationalist utopia and populist anti-Semitic agitation were in
contradiction to the elitist political conception of many conservatives. 3
With the end of the First World War, however, the context in which the
These new conditions for a breakthrough in radical anti-Semitism in Germany are
much more important than the anti-Semitic tradition that can be traced back to
the early years of the Second Empire. Two points are decisive with respect to the
changed conditions that the end of the First World War brought about.
The first is the completely new status that the radical anti-Semitic movement
gained by virtue of a need to renew the basis of nationalism in Germany after its
military defeat and the end of the Empire. 4 It was clear that the institutions of the Empire that had collapsed in 1918 (the monarchy, the Imperial government, and the
army) could not represent German nationalism any longer and the ‘kleindeutsch’,
Prussian-German interpretation of German history lost conviction with the end of
Bismarck’s Empire. It was just as obvious that the old hierarchical structures of the
Empire, the class society and the nation’s religious divide, were obstacles that would
have to be comprehensively surmounted if national regeneration were to be possible. 5
The various attempts to found a new German identity in place of imperial
nationalism and create a strong enough sense of nation to overcome the traumatic
defeat of 1918 shared one common element: a reversion to the idea of the people as
the real source of national energy—or an attempt to found a new nation by
regenerating the people and the ideas of nationhood that lay dormant in them. 6
This regeneration could be directly linked to the recent experience of war by
suggesting that it was in the trenches of the First World War that class boundaries
had been dissolved and the nation reborn.
The fact that this new attempt to found a sense of national identity from within
the people was structured in großdeutsch or ‘greater German’ terms (as opposed to
stemming from a kleindeutsch or ‘smaller German’ viewpoint) meant that it
derived particularly explosive potential from the foreign-policy situation at the
end of the war. Policy
framed in großdeutsch terms effectively gave Germany a
stick of dynamite that could blow apart the new Central and Eastern European
order that the treaties signed in the suburbs of Paris had created. In concrete
terms, consideration was given to the incorporation of German-speaking
Austrians and German minorities in Czechoslovakia, Poland, and the Baltic into
12
Historical Background
a ‘greater German Reich’ which would at the same time take the German
minorities in South-Eastern Europe ‘under its wing’.
If during the years of the Weimar Republic a concept of nation based on the
common ancestry and shared culture of the German people gradually gained accept-
ance even amongst moderate right-wingers, an attitude such as this was relatively
open to the ideas represented by the nationalist völkisch movement. 7 The rediscovery of the people via the ‘everyday anti-Semitism’ of the conservatives or the moderate
right was distinct from the völkisch position largely because the latter defined the
people using racist criteria, raised the idea of the regeneration of the German people to the level of an absolute good, and linked their programme of ‘purifying’ the German
people of alien elements with visions of redemption. However, their point of reference
was essentially the same as that of more moderate nationalism: the restitution of the
‘body of the people’ to full health. Above all a concept of nation that was based on
common ancestry and shared culture remained open to the kind of radical anti-
Semitism propounded by the völkisch movement and especially to the argument that
Jews did not form a proper part of the community of the German people because of
their distinct culture and alien ancestry. Before 1918 the völkisch idea was mostly the
province of sectarians, outsiders, and nutcases, but this new context gave it the chance
to take centre stage in the process of founding a new German national identity.
The second decisive aspect of the changed conditions in Germany after the First
World War was the shift in the relationship of radical anti-Semitic groups to the
state. Before 1914 they had in principle been loyal to the system, or in other words
they reckoned that the institutions of Imperial Germany would ultimately be