Introduction

The first major step leading to the "Final Solution" was the attempt on the part of the Nazi regime to force Jews to emigrate out of Germany. Hitler's motivation seems to have been two-fold: to ensure the racial purity of Germany and to create lebensraum, "living space," for German nationals of "Aryan" blood. His obsession with the former is reflected in the Nuremburg Laws of 1935. Throughout the 1930's Nazi domestic policy was aimed at stripping Jews of any citizenship rights, economic and political rights. The first step toward a "Final Solution of the Jewish Problem" was the complete dehumanization of the Jew.

Hitler's preoccupation with lebensraum became patently obvious with the German invasion of Poland on September 1, 1939, Yugoslavia and Greece on April 6, 1941 and the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941. On the eve of the invasion of Poland, Hitler made a speech to his generals in which he said,

Genghis Khan had millions of women and men killed by his own will and with a gay heart. History sees in him only a great state builder... I have sent to the east...my 'Death's Head Units,' with the order to kill without mercy men, women and children of the Polish race or language. Only in such a way will we win the 'lebensraum' that we need. Who, after all, talks nowadays of the extermination of the Armenians? (cf. Helen Fein, Accounting for Genocide, The Free Press, 1979:4).

Pursuant to these two goals, in late 1937, Hitler announced his plans to annex Austria. His incredible and swift rise to power between 1932 and 1934, his militarization of the Rhineland in 1936 and the international cooperation he got when Germany hosted the 1936 Olympic Games convinced him that he was infallible and that the world would stay out of his affairs. As history unfolded over the next few years, Hitler was wrong on both counts. But it is terrifying to think how close he was to being absolutely correct on both.

In March, 1938, German troops marched into Austria with very minimal resistance either from Austria or from the world. Since World War I, there had been strong sentiment, both in Berlin and in Vienna, that Germany and Austria were destined to be together (the Anschluss). Prior to his rise to power in Germany, Adolph Hitler has spent several years in the extremely conservative political atmosphere of Vienna -- a city literally festering with German nationalism and antisemitism. A very strong German nationalist movement advocated union with Germany, the German domination of Europe and the expulsion of "inferior people."

Karl von Lueger, the mayor (or burgomaster) of Vienna in the late 1890's was of particular influence on young Hitler. Lueger was openly antisemitic and manipulated the antisemitic passions of Vienna into a major political victory, This was a lesson not lost on Hitler.

The publication of Darwin's Origin of the Species in the mid 1800's seems to have provided a basis for a vulgar theory of "survival of the fittest and racial theories of human behavior. The ideas of Darwin were dramatic in their impact upon social and economic structures -- biological racism in the United States as a rationale for slavery and antisemitism in Europe as a rationale for cultural nationalism. Jews were blamed for all of the political and economic woes of Austria and Germany from the end of World War I. Hitler even blamed World War I on the "international Jewish economic conspiracy. So, when Hitler rode in Vienna as Austria's new leader, he was generally received as a savior.

Almost immediately the Nazi government set up an Office of Emigration in Vienna. Adolph Eichmann, the Jewish expert in the SD, was placed in command of the center. There were more than 180,000 Jews in Austria in 1938. Eichmann began deporting Jews as efficiently as possible and by September of 1939, there were only about 60,000 remaining in Austria. But there were still hundreds of thousands of Jews in Germany and in Austria. The Emigration Center encountered serious difficulties finding countries around the world to open their doors to Jews. However, there was enough interest to cause President Roosevelt to call a meeting of some 32 nations to discuss the problem. They convened at Evian, France on July 6, 1938.

By 1938, the world outside Germany should have known something of Hitler's sentiments and intentions toward the Jews. As early as 1935, the Nazis had passed the infamous Nuremberg Laws regarding racial purity and, in subsequent statutes, defined the Jews as non-citizens. In the three months prior to the conference at Evian, several specific statutes were passed which were clearly intended to deprive Jews of their economic livelihood and to remove them from a competitive position in the German economy. Despite these widely known facts, the conference closed on July 15 without deciding on any policy for assisting Jewish deportees.

In fact, the rest of the world turned a totally deaf ear to the problem. The United States admitted about 100,000 prior to 1939 (during the years from 1933 to 1943, there were 400,000 unfilled slots in the U.S. quota system which had been established by the Johnson-Reed Act of 1924; however, Germany's quota was filled and the quotas were non-transferable!) England accepted 80,000, Holland, 22,000, Belgium, about 13,000, Switzerland, 9,000, Argentina, 20,000, other Latin American countries, about 20,000. British-controlled Palestine only admitted about 70,000 prior to 1941. These numbers are pitifully small in contrast to the fate which Europe's 11 million Jews faced in 1933.

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At this point, it is interesting to ask whether Hitler's attempts to deport Jews to other parts of the world were genuine -- or did he know that the world would close its doors. Was emigration a ruse designed to further dehumanize European Jews and provide a rationale for the invasion of Poland? Whatever the answer to this question, the fact remains that the vast majority of Jews could not leave Germany, or the expanding Reich, because there was no place for them to go. Hundreds of thousands of Jews moved eastward into Poland and the Soviet Union believing that they would find safety from the antisemitism virus that infected all of the Nazi movement. Instead, they found themselves trapped in the remote reaches of eastern Europe and at the mercy, first of the Einsatzgruppen and later of the ghettoes, ghetto liquidation process and finally the extermination camps (almost all of which were located in eastern Poland).

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1938 appears to have been a pivotal year for the Nazi movement and for Jews. The frantic efforts to force Jews out of the Reich set in motion two additional processes. First, Hermann Goering, assumed wide-ranging powers over the German economy and began his process of "Aryanization" of Jewish economic resources. Numerous policies were instituted in an effort to pauperize Germany's Jews and cut them off from the German economy. In April, Jews were required to register with the government all personal property valued at 5,000 marks or more. In June, required registration of all Jewish-owned firms was made law. In July, the medical licenses of Jewish doctors were declared invalid. This was extended to lawyers in September. On November 12, 1938, Goering convened a conference in Berlin to plan the systematic "Aryianization" (Ger. arisierung) of Jewish businesses. These policies extended into 1939: in February Jews were required to surrender all gold and silver to the government. These policies seem to contradict the avowed desire of the government to deport Jews to other countries. Without money for transportation and resettlement, Jews could not afford to emigrate.

To further this process, Joseph Goebbels, Hitler's Minister of Propaganda, instigated the Kristallnacht pogrom of November 9-10, 1938. At the infamous meeting of top Party leaders on November 12 following Kristallnacht, Goering announced Hitler's wishes on the subject of how to proceed with the Jewish Question:

The Jewish question is to be summed up and coordinated once and for all and solved one way or another...If the German Reich should in the future become involved in conflict abroad then it is obvious that we in Germany will first of all make sure of settling accounts with the Jews. Apart from that, the Fuehrer is now at last to make a major move abroad, starting with the powers that have brought up the Jewish question, in order to get around to the Madagascar solution. He explained this to me in detail on November 9. There is no longer any other way.(quoted in Christopher Browning, "The Final Solution," Encyclopedia of the Holocaust, Israel Gutman, ed.), New York: Macmillan, 1990, Vol.II, p. 490. [The "Madagascar solution" was a widely publicized plan to ship all German Jews to the island of Madagascar, off the east African coast. Madagascar had formerly been a French colonial possession. There were other similar plans for an African colony -- Uganda, Nigeria, South Africa. BSA]

Prior to the Anschluss, the annexation of Austria, emigration was voluntary. Important steps were taken toward a "final solution" when the decision was made first to force Jews to emigrate and, second, to pauperize Jews to the point that emigration was impossible. The crucial turning point in this process was the invasion of Poland on September 1, 1939. Hitler's predictions before the Reichstag early in 1939 contain an ominous forboding of the next stages of the Final Solution:

Today I will once more be a prophet! If the international Jewish financiers inside and outside Europe should again succees in plunging the nations into a world war, the result will not be the bolshevization of the earth and thus the victory of Jewry, but the annihilation of the Jewish race throughout Europe.

Events which were soon to follow suggest that Hitler had already begun consideration of an all-out extermination of Jews upon the outbreak of war.

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