As Hitler’s own pep talks to the generals dur-
ing the spring of 1941 show, on the eve of the
attack on Russia, the ‘racial’ war was now being
openly launched. That spelt doom for the Jews,
the race that Hitler saw as a pestilence in human
society. He could now repeat his Reichstag speech
of January 1939, this time as a justification to the
German people for the destruction of Jewry. In
the light of this analysis Nazi policies followed a
path that had, inevitably, to end in genocide.
By every means available, the Nazis attempted
before 1939 to ‘clear’ Germany of Jews by forcing
them to emigrate. The Germans were not alone
in following such policies. The Poles, too, before
the war hoped to ‘solve’ their Jewish problem by
promoting forced emigration of the Polish Jews.
Anti-Semitism was virulent all over Europe and in
the US. But discrimination was not a part of gov-
ernment policy in any Western country, offend-
ing as it does against basic civil rights and
freedoms. Entry of Jews to settle outside
Germany was restricted. Unemployment was high
everywhere so any increase of labour was not
welcomed, especially if caused by immigrants
deprived of their money and possessions. Western
governments were preoccupied with their own
problems during the depression years. And it
always has to be remembered that before 1942
no government in the West could conceive what
‘Final Solution’ lay in store for the Jews on the
German-dominated continent.
Britain, holding the League Mandate for
Palestine and having promised the Jews a National
Home there had a special responsibility to aid the
Jews. Until German persecution became more
severe, the majority of German Jews, however, did
not wish to emigrate to Palestine. When they des-
perately sought to leave Germany after November
1938 and would have gladly escaped to Palestine,
the British government was more concerned to
safeguard its vital strategic interests in the Middle
East. Palestine had become a cauldron of conflict
between Arabs and Jews and the British occupiers.
In Arab eyes both the Jews and the British author-
ities were European colonisers of Arab lands. The
Arabs, moreover, could see that the increased
Jewish immigration had its roots in European
anti-Semitism, which strengthened Zionism.
British governments tried to extricate themselves
from these conflicting interests without satisfying
either the Zionists or the Arabs. Finally, in May
1939 the British government took the decision
that the Arabs would have to be appeased by
promising to limit Jewish immigration to 75,000
over the next five years and, after that, the gov-
ernment promised the Arabs that further immi-
gration would be subject to the consent of the
Arab majority.
Public opinion and voluntary organisations
before 1939 gave the efforts to rescue the Jews a
dynamism that governments lacked. Germany’s
European neighbours, and the US and Latin
America, accepted German and Austrian Jews in
tens of thousands. Although the Nazis were ready
at first to expedite their exit even after the war
broke out, the exodus was slowed down to a trickle
by the war. In all, more than half the German Jews,
some 280,000, succeeded in finding refuge
between 1933 and 1939, many, however, only
temporarily as Hitler overran the continent. The
Jews so saved came from Germany and from the
countries – Austria and Czechoslovakia – occupied
by Hitler before the outbreak of war in 1939. They
represented only a very small proportion of
Europe’s total Jewish population.
In Poland in 1940 many Polish Jews were
killed wantonly, and the whole Jewish population
was herded into ghettos, as in the Middle Ages,
by fencing off or building a wall around a part of
a city and leaving the Jews to fend for themselves.
The two largest were in Warsaw and Lodz. In the
ghettos the Germans could secure what was prac-
tically slave labour to supply the German armies.
Undernourished and overcrowded, the ghetto
population was decimated by disease and exhaus-
tion. The planned massacre designed to kill every
last Jew was begun on the day, 22 June 1941,
when the German armies invaded the Soviet
Union. These terrible killings of men, women and
children in Russia, machine-gunned next to the
open graves they had been forced to dig, had
been deliberately worked out beforehand. Hitler’s
full brutality is revealed by the record of a Führer
Conference held at his headquarters on 16 July
1941 in which he spoke of his aims and referred
to Russian orders to start partisan warfare behind