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The ‘Instruction’ to Heydrich

That winter of – Hermann Göring heard rumors of mass
killings in the east.
Given his control of the Forschungsamt and the Four-Year
Plan, it would be surprising if he had not heard earlier. Pathetic
transports of Jews deported from the west had clogged the rail-
road lines into Poland and eastern Europe, and his papers
would show him several times that spring discussing “transport
bottlenecks in Upper Silesia” with Hitler.
History now teaches that a significant proportion of those
deported  particularly those too young or infirm to work 
were being brutally disposed of on arrival. The surviving docu-
ments provide no proof that these killings were systematic; they
yield no explicit orders from “above,” and the massacres them-
selves were carried out by the local Nazis (by no means all of
them German) upon whom the deported Jews had been
dumped. That they were ad hoc extermination operations is