74 THE "FINAL SOLUTION"

Genocide: Was it the Nazis' Original Plan?

B y YEHUDA BAUER

ABSTRACT: Since the 1940s scholars have debated the ques-

tion, Did Hitler and his henchmen plan the Final Solution
decades before 1941? Many have answered in the affirmative.
However, examination of those developments that led to the
Final Solution raises serious questions. Although some have
declared that the Nazis with Hitler at the helm did indeed plan
the mass execution even before the 1930s, nowhere is there
any pronouncement of this before 1939! T h e plan the Nazis
did have was to evict all Jews from Germany. Although sev-
eral hundred thousand did leave, those left behind as well as
the millions conquered as the Nazis swept through Europe
provided a dilemma. Hitler wanted them out. No one wanted
them. T h e Schacht-Rublee negotiations and the Nisko/
Madagascar plans, efforts to clear Europe of Jews, had failed
dismally before 1939. The last alternative was the Final
Solution, which took form in 1941 with the adoption of the
Einsatzgruppen plan for the mass murder of Jews in Russia,
mainly by machine gun, and the Wannsee plan for the mass
murder of Jews in Poland in the gas ovens and the crematoria
established at six death camps.

Yehuda Bauer earned his Ph.D. from Hebrew University and has been a senior
lecturer at the Institute of Contemporary Jewry and head of the Department of
Holocaust Studies at Hebrew University since 1968. Currently he is head of the
institute. His work in Holocaust studies is the combination of his own experiences as
a young man living in Czechoslovakia before 1939 and of his academic preparation.
Living with hundreds of thousands of "refugees" pouring into Israel from death
camps and hiding places throughout Europe in the 1940s; studying history, phi-
losophy, and English; and attempti.ig to answer the many complex questions relat-
ing to the Holocaust caused Yehuda Bauer to become a pioneer in Holocaust
studies. In 1975 he was named Johnah M. Machover Professor of Holocaust Studies.
Among his most recent books are The Jewish Emergence From Powerlessness,
The Holocaust in Historical Perspective and From Diplomacy to Resistance.

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 THE DECISION FOR THE FINAL SOLUTION
T HE problem of the origins of the
Final Solution has been the
subject of much research. One has to
make the clear differentiation be-
tween the quest for the background
of Nazi-type murderous antisemitism
and the more immediate problem of
the planning tor mass murder. T h e
underlying problem of a study of
Nazi antisemitism is whether it was
the result of a continuity extending
from Christian, traditional, or even
pre-Christian anti-Judaism to which
racial antisemitism added a few new
ideas, or whether modern anti-
semitism, in its late nineteenth-
century form is a new departure,
qualitatively different from, though
influenced by, traditional or Christian
antisemitism. My own view is close
to that of Franklin H. Littell, Uriel
Tal, and Shmuel Ettinger, namely,
that while modern antisemitism un-
doubtedly contains new elements or
places new emphases on old ones
and leads to consequences that are
radically more extreme than those
attained by its predecessors, the ele-
ment of continuity is a predominant
factor. Without Christian, or tradi-
tional anti-Judaism, modern, nation-
alistic and racial antisemitism would
have been impossible.
T H E JEWISH PROBLEM:
H I T L E R ' S FIRST SOLUTION
However, the subject of this article
is the second problem—the ques-
tion of the origins of the Final
Solution in Nazi theory and practice.
Contrary to legend, nowhere in
Hitler's writings or pronouncements
before 1939 do we find a declaration
in favor of the annihilation of the
Jewish people. Lucy Dawidowicz,
in trying to prove the contrary,
argues that as early as 1919 Hitler
expressed views that "prefigure the
political realities of the German
dictatorship . . . when the Jews
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75
were deprived of all rights sys-
tematically and 'legally' and then
'removed altogether,' the ambiguity
of the word 'removal' is now more
apparent than it was in 1919." She
bases her views on the first political
propaganda letter written by Hitler
on 16 September 1919 to Adolf
Gemlich. In it Hitler, favoring what
he called rational as opposed to emo-
tional antisemitism, stated that "the
final objective must unswervingly
be the removal ( E n t f e r n u n g J of the
Jews altogether [überhaupt]." Da-
widowicz seems to argue from that
that the Final Solution in the sense
of mass murder was with Hitler
from the beginning. That leads her
to a deterministic, or teleological,
view according to which the ulti-
mate steps unfolded necessarily
from a basic Hitlerite concept which
already contained mass murder and
which remained constant from 1919
to the early forties. 1
This view is, I think, the popular
view. Ask any number of freshmen
students, and they will respond with
a question, Why did not the Jews
flee, or react energetically from the
start, if they could have known from
Hitler's writings and speeches that
he intended to kill them all?
But when one examines the evi-
dence, one finds that Hitler did not
say anything like that at all before
1939. Dawidowicz quotes the one
and only passage in Hitler's book,
Mein Kampf, in which a death wish
for Jews is uttered: " I f at the begin-
ning of the [First World] War twelve
or fifteen thousand of these Hebrew
corrupters of the people had been
held under poison gas, as Happened
to hundreds of thousands of our very
best German workers in the field, the
sacrifice of multitudes at the front
would not have been in vain."* This,
1. Lucy S Dawidowicz, The War Against
the Jeu* (London: 1975), p. 17.
2. Ibid., p. 3.
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76 THE "FINAL SOLUTION"
of course, is antisemitism at its
basest, but it is hardly a blueprint
for the planned mass killing of all
European Jews. Worse things were
said by antisemites in and out of
power in various countries before
Hitler. In fact, it is a solitary sen-
tence in a thick book of turgid
German prose.
Was there then a plan? Of course
there was, and Hitler stated it plainly
on 13 November 1919 in his first
public speech, also quoted by Da-
widowicz: "We will carry on the
struggle until the last Jew is re-
moved from the German Reich."
Or, as he said in 1920, he advocated
"the removal of the Jews from our
nation, not because we would be-
grudge them their existence—we
congratulate the rest of the world on
their company—but because the
existence of our nation is a thousand
times more important to us than that
of an alien race." 3
Until the end of 1938, neither
Hitler nor any of the chief propa-
gandists of the regime suggested
any other solution for what they
called the Jewish problem than
eviction from Germany. Why was
that their solution? How did they
perceive the Jew?
Ideology and practice, 1928-38:
The apparent contradiction
In his second book, written but
not published in 1928, Hitler made
his view of the Jews very clear. He
said that they were an antirace,
formed out of a hybrid, indeter-
minate, mongrel core, a nomad peo-
ple of eternal restlessness, incapable
of independent political, territorial
existence. He also noted that their
religion was a cover for their lust for
unlimited power and for absolute
3 Ibid.. ρ 18.
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rule over all others. Their control
of the world was not based on terri-
tory, which they never had, and in
this they differed fiom all the other
nations; it was based, rather, on
financial and other machinations.
Hitler wrote that at first the Jew
demanded equal rights, and then,
finally, superior rights, and that his
aim was to rule the world; but, as
his character was parasitic and as he
was incapable of separate existence,
his rule would lead not only to the
destruction of the nations oppressed
by him, but also to his own demise.
These views can be found, with
some variations, in the writings of
Alfred Rosenberg, Josef Goebbels,
and other close collaborators of Hit-
ler. They contain a number of crucial
elements. First among these is the
view of the Jew as a demonic pres-
ence in the world; the use of the gen-
eralizing singular "the J e w " already
suggests that. This, of course, is taken
from Christian antisemitism, which
postulated that only a people pos-
sessed by the Devil would have
killed the God-Messiah. T h e Jews,
in the Nazi demonology, are out to
rule the world, and, in fact, are al-
ready well on their way toward doing
so. This again is based on Christian
foundations, and we can find traces
of fear of the Jewish demons con-
trolling the world during the Middle
Ages—and even earlier. In modern
times, this superstition was re-
formulated in that famous forgery
by the tsarist Soviet police, The
Protocols of the Elders of Zion
(1905), which forms one of the cor-
nerstones of Nazi ideology.
A second basic element in the
Nazi view of the Jews is the de-
scription of the Jew as a parasite. 4
In Nazi literature Jews are de-
scribed as vermin, rats, or other
4. Alex Bein, " T h e J e w i s h Parasite," in
Leo Baeck Year Bonk, vol. 9 (1964), pp. 3 - 3 9 .
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 THE DECISION FOR THE FINAL SOLUTION
noxious elements from the insect or
animal world, as well as bacilli or
viruses. In his previously men-
tioned second book, 5 Hitler says
that in order for the Jews to exist,
they use the creative faculties of
other nations because they are in-
capable of establishing a polity of
their own. They thus become para-
sitic, and perforce their aim must
be to control as many nations as
possible so as to live on their life-
blood. In this way, nazism combined
with the two divergent metaphoric
pictures it had created for the Jews:
that of demons and that of parasites.
For our purpose a third element
is most important. Nazism in effect
accused the Jew of vices that it was
guilty of. The picture of the demonic
force out to conquer the world re-
flects the desires of the Nazis them-
selves. Years before th£ wish to mur-
der the Jews became articulate in
their own minds, they formulated it
in obverse fashion. Thus Hitler
stated, in his directives to Goering
in 1936® regarding the four-year plan,
that Germany must be ready for war
within four years. T h e reason for the
tight time schedule, according to
Hitler, was that "the loss of months
may cause damage that will be ir-
reparable in hundreds of years."
The reason for that rather surprising
statement—in 1936!—was that in-
ternational Jewry was threatening
Germany's existence. The prospec-
tive victory of Jewry, said Hitler,
"whose most radical expression is
Bolshevism . . . will not this time
lead to new Versailles treaties, but
to the final destruction, that is the
extermination of the German peo-
5 . llitlcr·, Sccrct Bc>k
pp. 212-13
6 Wilhelm Trt-nc. Hitlers
zum VivrjtihrcspUtn 1936.
rcsheftpliir Zeitgeschichte.
210.
77
pie." This in turn will cause "the
catastrophic destruction of the Euro-
pean nations, such as humanity has
not known since the demise of the
states of antiquity."
I have chosen a clear statement
by Hitler but one can find this idea
in many places and at various levels
of Nazi officialdom in the thirties:
the accusation that the Jews were
out to destroy Germany, Europe, and
the world and that therefore all Ger-
many could do was to fight a de-
fensive battle against Jewry. Nazi
ethics, as I have pointed out in other
places, 7 are the ordinary bourgeois
ethics reversed, standing very pre-
cisely on their head. They could
murder because they accused the
Jews of wanting to murder them.
They extolled murder as a positive
ethical command to save the world
and white, Germanic supremacy be-
cause they accused the Jews of plan-
ning that fate for the Germans. Hav-
ing described the Jews as demons
and vermin, that is, as nonhumans,
they could murder them, because
they were no longer killing human
beings, but devils, bacilli, and rats
with human faces. In effect, then,
they could commit mass murder be-
cause they had dehumanized them-
selves. In other words, they had
done that of which they had accused
the Jews in a true reversal of
values. Das Umwerten aller Werte.
It may well appear that the pre-
ceding argument ends in a contradic-
tion. On one hand, the claim is ad-
vanced that there is no evidence of
any Nazi plan to murder the Jews
before the end of the thirties, and
indeed there is not; on the other
hand, great trouble has been taken
(New York: 1962).
to explain what it was that enabled
the Nazis to murder the Jews as
Dc'ikti hrift
vol. 3 (Vicrteljah- 7 Yehuda Bauer, The llnltitttusl in lli\-
1955), pp. 184- tohrrtl Ρΐ'Γ\μι·< tiie (Uni\emtv of Wash-
ington Presv, 1978).
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78 THE "FINAL SOLUTION'
seen from the point of view of the
Nazis' ideological d e v e l o p m e n t . But
t h e r e is really no contradiction. T h e
m u r d e r of t h e J e w i s h p e o p l e was
i n h e r e n t in t h e ideology that t h e
Nazis took from their p r e d e c e s s o r in
the n i n e t e e n t h c e n t u r y . It was in-
h e r e n t — a s a logical c o n c l u s i o n , not
as a practical plan. T o b e c o m e a
practical plan, to d e v e l o p from an
unarticulated wish logically em-
b e d d e d in their world view into
mass graves a n d gas c h a m b e r s ,
political and military d e v e l o p m e n t s
had to occur that w o u l d m a k e mass
m u r d e r a practicable proposition.
Antisemitism: central to the Nazi
program
Nazi plans for J e w s b e t w e e n 1933
and 1938 w e r e to evict t h e m from
G e r m a n y . But b e t w e e n 1933 a n d t h e
e n d of 1937, only 129,000 out of a
half million G e r m a n J e w s left t h e
country. In our literature, t h e ac-
cusation is f o u n d against G e r m a n
J e w s for not h a v i n g read t h e signs on
t h e wall and not h a v i n g left early
e n o u g h . T h e description of the Weiss
family in the N B C Holocaust film
series has m a d e this v i e w e v e n more
popular. That d o e s not m a k e it his-
torically correct. T h e r e w e r e , of
course, large, t h o u g h d i m i n i s h i n g ,
n u m b e r s of G e r m a n J e w s w h o re-
f u s e d to leave a country w h e r e J e w s
had b e e n living b e f o r e the Ger-
mans had e v e n arrived there; J e w s
h a d lived in t h e Roman towns along
the R h i n e w h i c h w e r e part of t h e
Roman w o r l d ' s f r o n t i e r d e f e n c e
against the G e r m a n tribes. After t h e
1935 N u r e m b e r g Laws, especially,
which d e c r e e d the J e w s to be sec-
ond-class subjects rather than citi-
zens, t h e n u m b e r s of t h o s e w i s h i n g
to hang on w e r e g r o w i n g smaller,
though no poll exists w h i c h could
prove this statistically.
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T h e real test lies e l s e w h e r e ; it is
known from historical r e s e a r c h e s
that at no time in the thirties w a s
there any l e s s e n i n g of J e w i s h e m i -
gration p r e s s u r e on foreign con-
sulates in G e r m a n y . T h e r e w e r e
always considerably more J e w s want-
ing to leave t h a n , in a world stricken
by a vast e c o n o m i c crisis, t h e r e w e r e
p l a c e s w i l l i n g to a c c e p t t h e m .
America did not w a n t t h e m , a n d they
infiltrated t h e r e in relatively small
n u m b e r s . T h e n u m b e r of e m i g r a n t s ,
both J e w s a n d n o n - J e w s , from Ger-
m a n y was 4,392 in fiscal year 1933/
34; 5,201 in 1934/35; a n d 6,346 in
1935/36. In late 1935, t h e i n t e r v e n -
tion of s o m e of t h e so-called Ger-
man-Jewish aristocracy in A m e r i c a —
Felix M. W a r b u r g a n d H e r b e r t L e h -
m a n n — c a u s e d P r e s i d e n t Roosevelt
to give more liberal d i r e c t i v e s to t h e
State D e p a r t m e n t and t h e figures
show 10,895 i m m i g r a n t s from G e r -
m a n y for 1936/37; 17,199 for 1937/
38; and 19,452 for t h e rest of 1938
( J u l y - D e c e m b e r ) . 8 Of t h e s e 63,485
immigrants, p r o b a b l y 85 p e r c e n t
w e r e Jews, or a b o u t 55,000. H a d
Jewish emigration from G e r m a n y to
t h e United States a n d P a l e s t i n e ,
which a b s o r b e d a similar n u m b e r ,
and to other p l a c e s in w h i c h J e w s
could infiltrate in small n u m b e r s
c o n t i n u e d on this scale, G e r m a n
Jewry w o u l d h a v e d i s a p p e a r e d by
emigration a n d a g i n g in a b o u t 15 to
20 years. But t h e w h o i e p o i n t was
that t h e Nazis saw a d e m o n i c , cata-
strophic threat from an imaginary
world Jewry to t h e G e r m a n i c race.
War was p l a n n e d to solve this
p r o b l e m , a n d if G e r m a n y p l a n n e d to
free itself a n d t h e world from a
d e m o n i c force, it c o u l d not very w e l l
start the process w h i l e that d e m o n i c
force was sitting right in its midst.
8. Y e h u d a B a u e r , My Brother s Keeper
( P h i l a d e l p h i a : 1974), p p . 1 6 8 - 6 9
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 THE DECISION FOR THE FINAL SOLUTION 79

It is necessary to emphasize here for so-called Aryanization, various

the enormity of what is being said: economic restrictions, and from
I am indicating no more and no less June, 1938, mass arrests of Jews
than that World War II was unleashed who until then had not populated
primarily because of the Nazi desire Nazi concentration camps except
to assert the world dominance of insofar as Jews had belonged to the
the Germanic peoples of Aryan race anti-Nazi opposition. Then came the
in their struggle against world Jewry Kristallnacht pogrom of November,
and its minions, bolshevism in 1938. Its purpose was to accelerate
the East, and Western parliamentary Jewish exit from Germany. Of the
democracy, or Anglo-Saxon plutoc- approximately 30 to 35 thousand
racy (if one prefers Goebbels' favor- internees in Nazi concentration
ite phrase), in the West. Put dif- camps taken there on Kristallnacht,
ferently, it is imperative to distill most were set free in 1939 when
Nazi antisemitism as a major de- emigration papers or opportunities
terminant of Nazi aggression cul- were obtained for them from their
minating in World War II. If one frantic relatives. Illegal immigration
disagrees with this statement, one to Palestine was organized by the
will have to explain away a whole Jewish Agency representatives and
series of Nazi documents providing by Zionist Revisionist activists with
circumstantial or direct evidence the Gestapo's encouragement, as was
for these statements:. Hitler's in- illegal emigration to Latin America.
structions for the foui-year plan; the By 1941, 450,000 central European
Hossbach protocol of November Jews that included four-fifths of Aus-
1937, in which Hitler explains the trian Jewry and close to that per-
urgency of war within a short time; centage of German Jewry, had left
the report of the SS (Lagebericht) Greater Germany, though some of
for 1939, in which the Jewish prob- these were caught again later in the
lem is defined as "the problem"* German conquest of other European
of world politics, and many others. countries.
This second period of Nazi rule,
1938-41, was characterized by an
Expulsion attempt to evict the Jews from the
All this meant that the Nazis were Nazi sphere quickly and radically.
bent on radicalizing their anti-Jewish According to a circular letter, dated
policies in early 1938. Expulsion 25 January 1939, of the German
of Jews was now a central German Foreign Office to all German repre-
state interest and had to be achieved sentatives abroad, the expulsion of
quickly. A series of steps in 1938 was the Jews would cause greater under-
indicative of this policy and was standing of Germany's stand by for-
aimed at the expulsion of Jews from eign powers, because the expelled
German economic life: the aboli- Jews would cause antisemitic reac-
tion of the right of Jewish communi- tions in their new abodes, and this
ties to act as legal bodies, registra- would help Germany!
tion of Jewish properties, pressure
Ransom: Schacht-Rublee
9. "daas es ü b e r h a u p t das Problem der negotiations
Weltpolitik im Augenblick ist" U 112: Das
Judentum alz Weltprohlem, q u o t e d in O. D. What is interesting is that parallel
Kulka, 1:206(19 Jan. 1939). with this radicalization, Nazi Ger-

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80 THE "FINAL SOLUTION'
many appears to have been willing
to sell its Jews. In the so-called
Schacht-Rublee negotiations of late
1938and early 1939, rlitlei agreed to
release 100,000 young German Jews
with part of their property, who
would go to establish themselves in
a new country with large additional
sums to be raised by Jews abroad;
their families would then join, and
only the old and sick would remain
in Germany, to be kept there by the
rest of the Jewish capital. The Jews
in the United States and elsewhere
not only did not have the necessary
money at that time, but it was also
feared by Jews and non-Jews that
this plan would increase German ex-
ports and help Nazi Germany eco-
nomically. The plan was rejected
by the American government, though
hesitatingly accepted by the Ameri-
can Jewish Joint Distribution Com-
mittee (JDC), which represented
American Jewish philanthropy to-
ward Jews overseas, as well as the
Zionists and the American Jewish
Committee. 10 In hindsight, the plan
was perfectly logical from a Nazi
point of view: if Jews were not really
human, one could sell them rather
than exorcise t h e m — i f there were
someone who would buy. The tragedy
was that there was no buyer.
Resettlement: Nisko/Madagascar
plans
In late 1939 and 1940, two other
possibilities emerged, again per-
fectly in line with what has been
outlined: one was to expel the Jews
to the Nisko area in the southeastern
part of recently occupied Polish
territory, with a view of possibly-
pushing them across the new border
10. T h e AJC. founded in 1906. represented
the upper cnjst of American Jewry in their
endeavor to fight antisemitism and protect
the civic rights of Jews everywhere
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into Soviet Russia. And the second
was to ship them to the island of
Madagascar of! the coast of Africa,
then a French possession that would
become a German colony at the ulti-
mate peace settlement with de-
feated France. Both plans were very
seriously considered, and in connec-
tion with the Madagascar plan, the
term "territorial final solution" was
used by Heydrich. As late as May,
1940, a memorandum by Himmler"
rejected the idea of mass murder
of peoples and advocated instead en-
slavement and cultural deprivation.
When did mass murder appear on
the scene as a viable alternative
in Nazi eyes? We hear the first
rumblings in November, 1938, after
the Kristallnacht, in an article in
Das Schwartze Korps, the SS journal
that on November 24 threatened
Jewry with "fire and sword." There
followed Hitler's declaration on 30
January 1939, in which he threatened
the destruction of the Jewish race
in Europe if international Jewry
were to unleash another world war.
Slightly less explicit threats were
uttered in two private meetings
with Hitler, one with the South
African minister of defence, Otto von
Pirow, in November, 1938, and one
with the hapless Czech foreign min-
ister, Josef Chvalkovsky, in Feb-
ruary, 1939. One may perhaps con-
clude that Hitler saw mass murder
as a possibility then. But he agreed
to the Schacht-Rublee plan then
(January, 1939) and later supported
the Madagascar plan as well. We
have every evidence that these plans
were meant seriously, and no evi-
dence whatsoever that any mass
murder plan exists at that stage! The
establishment of ghettos and Juden-
raele (Jewish Councils), as in a fa-
l l . See Vierteljahreshefte fur Zeitgesch-
ichte, 2:196-98 (1957).
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 THE DECISION FOR THE FINAL SOLUTION
mous instruction by Reinhard Hey-
drich, chief of the SS security
police, on 21 September 1939, at the
time of the conquest of Poland, has
often been interpreted as being
indicative of a mass-murder plan.
Close scrutiny proves the opposite:
it was a brutal plan to evict a maxi-
mum of Jews, starve them as much
as possible, and concentrate them so
as to facilitate a later massive
expulsion.
With all the suffering and the mas-
sive mortality in the ghettos in East-
em Europe between 1939 and 1942,
the large mass of Polish Jewry
would have survived the war had the
decision to mass murder them not
been taken. It is therefore crucial
to examine when and how this
happened.
THE FINAL SOLUTION
It is clear that as late as October,
1940, Hitler himself gave the order
to expel the Jews of the Mannheim-
Pfalz area in western Germany to
France and not to Poland, an act that
made sense only if a final expulsion
to Madagascar was envisaged. But
in May, 1941, special Nazi murder
units (Einsatzgruppen) were being
trained to kill Jews and Communists
in the coming campaign in Russia.
It has therefore been assumed by
most historians that an oral order—
there never was a written one—to
mass murder the Jews was given by
Hitler about mid-March, 1941, to-
gether with his other commands and
orders relating to the coming Rus-
sian war. The fact that such an order
was given is seemingly attested to by
Himmler in his speech at Poznan in
October, 1943, and elsewhere. But
nowhere does Himmler or anyone
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81
else state exactly when the order
was given or what specifically the
order said. The date of March, 1941
makes sense. The Nazis expected
to find more Jews in Russia—they
were thinking of five million—and
the idea to send them all to Madagas-
car was becoming impossible. The
Americans had not reacted to the
news about ghettos, although Amer-
ican newspapers in 1940 and 1941
had fully reported what was hap-
pening to the Jews in Poland and
elsewhere up to that point. There-
fore, there was nothing to fear from
that quarter.
The logical consequence of Nazi
ideology could now be drawn, and it
was. There followed the mass mur-
ders committed by the Einsatzgrup-
pen in Russia from June, 1941, when
the Germans invaded that country,
until late in 1942, when they prac-
tically completed the annihilation of
that part of Soviet Jewry who had
not fled. Rudolf Hoess, the com-
mandant of Auschwitz, said that he
received the order to prepare the
camp for mass annihilation of Jews
in the summer of 1941. On 3 Sep-
tember 1941, the first experimental
gassing was done, with Soviet pris-
oners of war as the first victims.
In December, 1941, the Nazis es-
tablished the first death camp at
Chelmno in western Poland, where
they killed the Jews from that area,
especially from the city of Lodz. In
March, 1942, the systematic mass
murder of the rest of Polish Jewry
commenced.
March, 1941
Most historians agree, then, that
the decision to mass murder the
Jews was made in March, 1941, and
transmitted in an oral order to
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82 THE "FINAL SOLUTION'
H i m m l e r . H o w e v e r , a serious Ger-
man historian, U w e Dietrich Adam,
in his Judenpolitik im Dritten
Reich (Düsseldorf, 1972), disagrees
and argues that since b e t w e e n J u n e
and D e c e m b e r , 1941, m u r d e r a c t i o n s
took place only in t h e areas taken
from t h e U.S.S.R., t h e March de-
cision must have r e f e r r e d to t h e s e
areas only, w h e r e a s a later de-
cision, probably in N o v e m b e r , must
have referred to t h e rest of E u r o p e .
Another important G e r m a n historian,
Martin Broszat, has since e x p r e s s e d
a similar view. T h e a r g u m e n t ap-
pears s o m e w h a t problematic, be-
cause it p r e s u p p o s e s that Hitler re-
garded Polish J e w s differently from
Russian Jews, a n d it stands to rea-
son that t h e decision to start with
Russia was part of a larger decision,
i m p l e m e n t e d a few m o n t h s later, to
carry on with all areas. E v e n if Adam
is right, what d i f f e r e n c e does it
make? We w o u l d t h e n h a v e to say
that the decision was taken in t w o
stages, but that t h e p r i n c i p l e of mur-
der was a c c e p t e d in March; t h e rest
f o l l o w e d logically. B e s i d e s , t h e
Hoess testimony is ignored. T h e r e
is no e v i d e n c e at all for a Novem-
b e r decision apart from p u r e con-
jecture and t h e fact that t h e C h e l m n o
Concentration C a m p started operat-
ing on D e c e m b e r 8. T h a t fact could
just as well m e a n that t h e decision
was taken m o n t h s earlier and was
i m p l e m e n t e d w h e n t h e staff and the
technical m e a n s w e r e ready. What is
important is t h e d e c i s i o n in prin-
ciple. By D e c e m b e r , 1941, well over
a million J e w s had b e e n killed —
the Nazi machine had i n d e e d crossed
the Rubicon!
What followed was t h e W a n n s e e
C o n f e r e n c e on 20 J a n u a r y 1942.
T o p German b u r e a u c r a t s of the vari-
ous ministries, of the G e r m a n occu-
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pation authorities in P o l a n d a n d
c o n q u e r e d Russia, a n d t h e chief SS
h e n c h m e n , Heydrich a n d E i c h m a n n ,
were p r e s e n t . T h i s c o n f e r e n c e has
b e e n r e p r e s e n t e d as t h e f o r u m at
which the destruction of E u r o p e a n
J e w s was d e c i d e d . N o t h i n g of t h e
sort occurred. T h e d e c i s i o n , as w e
have s e e n , had b e e n m a d e 10 m o n t h s
b e f o r e that and h a d b e e n i m p l e -
m e n t e d in t h e mass e x e c u t i o n s in
Russia. In January, 1942, w a y s a n d
means w e r e d i s c u s s e d by w h i c h t h e
various b r a n c h e s of t h e G e r m a n ad-
ministration w o u l d h e l p t h e SS to
i m p l e m e n t t h e d e c i s i o n in areas
w h e r e their h e l p was r e q u i r e d .
T h e decision of t h e W a n n s e e Con-
f e r e n c e was to m u r d e r t h e J e w s
from West to East, a n d to carry on
with t h e Nazi satellites in s o u t h e a s t
E u r o p e . T h e s e c o n c l u s i o n s w e r e not
i m p l e m e n t e d . T h e main effort of t h e
m u r d e r e r s was in P o l a n d , not in t h e
West, and then i n t e r m i t t e n t l y in
o t h e r parts of E u r o p e . T h e y n e v e r
m a n a g e d central R u m a n i a at all, or
most of Bulgarian J e w r y . T h e y d e -
stroyed Saloniki J e w r y in 1943, a n d
not in 1942, and so on. G e r m a n y
u n d e r t h e Nazis w a s a d i c t a t o r s h i p
t e m p e r e d by inefficiency a n d t h e
s q u a b b l e s of s e m i - i n d e p e n d e n t "fief-
d o m s " b e l o n g i n g to t h e various t o p
Nazis. T h e m u r d e r of t h e J e w s was
d o n e brutally, in factory' fashion, in
s u d d e n twists a n d s p a s m s , d i r e c t e d
by the SS and a i d e d by practically all
t h e b r a n c h e s of G e r m a n officialdom.
By t h e b e g i n n i n g of 1943, as t h e
Nazi e m p i r e b e g a n to c r u m b l e a n d
contract, t h e old idea of s e l l i n g t h e
Jewish d e m o n s to a n y o n e w h o w o u l d
buy t h e m for a d e s i r a b l e e q u i v a l e n t
was revived. O n e m i g h t p o s t u l a t e
t h e thesis that Nazi m u r d e r of J e w s
was one of two p o s s i b l e Nazi m o d e s
of behavior. T h e o t h e r was barter.
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 THE DECISION FOR THE FINAL SOLUTION
or ransom. Between 1942 and 1945
the Nazis, and especially Himmler
and some of his collaborators, tried
to get rid of the Jews in return for
a separate peace agreement with
the Western Allies." What seems to
be abundantly clear is that the de-
cision to kill the Jews was one
logical outcome of Nazi ideology,
but not the only one. T h e trouble
with the solution as proposed by
Himmler in the latter part of the war
was that, as in 1938 and 1939 in the
case of the Schacht-Rublee plan,
nobody wanted to buy Jews. T h e
Nazis turned to the other alternative.
Both resulted from the same premise,
namely, that the Jews were not hu-
man, and that therefore they could
either be killed or sold—in other
words, they could be treated as
nonhuman elements, as animals or
goods.
Definitions
Was the murder of the Jews
genocide? We ought perhaps to dif-
ferentiate very clearly between a
planned total annihilation of a na-
tional group, on one hand, and what
the Nazis did in Poland, Czecho-
slovakia, or elsewhere on the other
hand. T h e term "genocide," though
invented in 1943, did not really cover
the Holocaust at all. True, the first
sentence of Raphael Lemkin's defi-
nition seemingly does so: " T h e prac-
tice of extermination of nations and
ethnic groups as carried out by the
invaders is called by the author
'genocide.' "I·1
12 1 have developed this theme in some
recent publications; see fn. no. 7; see also
The Jenish Emergence from Powerlessness
(Toronto: 1979).
13. Raphael Lemkin. Aril Rule in Occu-
pied Kurrifie (New York: 1943), pp. xi-xii.
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83
But when Lemkin goes on to de-
scribe the act he called "genocide,"
he describes fairly exactly what hap-
pened to Poles, for instance, the de-
struction of the "institutions of self-
government . . . disrupting the so-
cial cohesion of the nation involved
and killing or removing elements
such as the intelligentsia . . . de-
stroying cultural institutions . . .
introducing a starvation system . . .
and mass killings . . . interfering
with the Churches," and so forth. If
the plan was to kill everyone, then
the restrictions in the religious field
or the curtailing of cultural activi-
ties was hardly a matter of any im-
portance any longer. I f genocide
meant mass murder, then one did
not have to detail the political re-
strictions: dead people do not have
political institutions. What happened
to Lemkin in 1943 is typical of what
happened then to many Jews and
non-Jews: they talked about what
they called "extermination" but they
did not comprehend it. They talked
about the brutal, murderous en-
slavement of European nations by
the Nazis, but what we call "the
Holocaust" was beyond them.
T h e term genocide is appropriate,
according to Lemkin's definition,
for what the Americans did to the
Native American population, for the
attempt of the Nazis to destroy
Poles and Czechs, for the fate of the
Biharis in Bangladesh, perhaps, and
so on. The Holocaust, however, was
a total act; moreover, it was a sacral
act. Hitler said that by destroying
the Jew he would be doing the will
of God. It was, in Nazi eyes, a fight
against Satan, it had cosmic im-
portance, it was a quasi-religious
act of the first importance. Therein
lies the importance of the Holo-
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84 THE "FINAL SOLUTION"

caust; it is unique in the sense that mass murder of the Jews was the
it stands alone- logical consequence of Nazi theories,
but that the logical conclusion was
Holocaust: logical consequence of not drawn until 1941; that even then
ideological antisemitism mass murder was avoidable because
there was a willingness to sell or
Genocide and Holocaust are, there- barter Jews out of the same attitude
fore, two different concepts. Both are that produced the readiness to mur-
repeatable, and in that lies the uni- der them; and that the free world
versal importance of dealing with the was not prepared to buy the Jews,
subject. I f we then change the name because its priorities then and now
of this article, we can ask, Was Holo- fall short of its declared ethical
caust the Nazis original plan? And values. Winning wars was primary;
our answer will be that the idea of a saving human lives was not.

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