things would not happen again it was claimed that
the trains had been misrouted.
Then there was some talk about Vernichtungstrup-
pen [destruction squads]. What I was told was this
that there were many diseased people in these camps,
and that many died of epidemics. These squads had
the job of taking the corpses to a crematorium where
they would be cremated.Göring’s role as evidenced in the archival documentation is
clear. Since November official Nazi policy had been to ex-
trude the Jewish community from Greater Germany. In January
, as chief of the Four-Year Plan, Göring had put Reinhard
Heydrich in charge. By mid- some two hundred thousand
Jews had emigrated, often under the most harrowing and hu-
miliating circumstances. Since few countries were willing to ac-
cept them, the idea had emerged in Berlin of resettling all of
Europe’s Jews eventually in Madagascar, a large French colonial
island where no neighbors could molest them, and where they
could not intrude upon their neighbors, either. But Hitler’s vast
military victories in and had brought three million
more Jews under the Nazi aegis and, writing on June , , to
Foreign Minister Ribbentrop, Heydrich had suggested adopting
what he termed “a geographical (territoriale) final solution” in-
stead shipping the millions of Jews overland eastward out of
Europe, rather than overseas to Madagascar. Twelve months
later Barbarossa provided the necessary territories, and Göring
naïvely endorsed the Auftrag that Heydrich had drafted that
rainy evening in Berlin. It was a document that Lord Halifax
would have described as “platitudinous,” but the SS Obergrup-
penführer made liberal use of it. Issuing invitations to the inter-
departmental conference to be held as Hans Frank had urged
in Berlin’s leafy Wannsee suburb, Heydrich had prefaced