The Path to Destruction

by Leah Goldstein

Christopher R. Browning, The Origins of the Final Solution:

The Evolution of Nazi Jewish Policy, September 1939 – March 1942 

with contributions by Jürgen Matthäus

Yad Vashem in association with University of Nebraska Press, 2004, 616 pages

In a brief two years between the autumn of 1939 and the autumn of 1941, Nazi Jewish policy escalated rapidly from the pre-war policy of forced emigration to the Final Solution as it is now understood—the systematic attempt to murder every last Jew within the German grasp.  The mass murder of Soviet Jewry had already begun in the late summer of 1941, and only six months later the Nazi regime was ready to begin implementing this policy throughout the rest of its European empire and sphere of influence. 

The study of these 30 months—from September 1939 through March 1942—is crucial for understanding the genesis of the Final Solution and constitutes the core of The Origins of the Final Solution. This latest publication in the wider series The Comprehensive History of the Holocaust is one of three volumes which will examine the development of Nazi Jewish policy (the other two will focus on the pre-war years and the implementation of the Final Solution respectively), and this year’s prizewinner of the Jewish Book Council’s (US) National Jewish Book Awards in the Holocaust Category.

Professor Christopher Browning

Nazi Jewish policy evolved through a series of “final solutions,” which first envisaged a judenfrei (Jew-free) Germany through emigration and then a judenfrei Europe through expulsion.

Hitler’s obsession with the Jewish question ensured that the Nazi commitment would not slacken. No leading Nazi could prosper who did not appear to take the Jewish question as seriously as Hitler did. The commitment to some kind of final solution permeated the entire regime—unquestioning loyalists, eugenicists and planning experts, technicians and political careerists—and such a priority on the part of the regime was actively supported or passively accepted by many in the German population at large.

Under Nazi influence, the Jews in Poland quickly became a symbol for the “untenable circumstances” of disease, overcrowding, black marketeering, filth and starvation, and a solution was envisaged through mass expulsion. By 1941 the Jews in Soviet territory had become a code word for Bolshevism, Asiatic threat, and partisan resistance in what was perceived as an all-or-nothing war between implacable racial and ideological enemies. Within the context of the war against the Soviet Union, the leap from disappearance of the Jews “sometime, somehow” to immediate mass murder was taken in the summer of 1941.

Nazi racial policy was radicalized at points in time that coincided with the peaks of German military success, as the euphoria of victory emboldened and tempted an elated Hitler to dare ever more drastic policies. With the “war of destruction” in the Soviet Union underway and the imminent prospect of all Europe at his disposal, the last inhibitions fell away. Hitler’s final hesitations in August 1941—to wait until “after the war”—were overcome in late September and early October, with the last great military encirclements that still promised an early victory.  In five weeks between 18 September and 25 October 1941, events moved rapidly. Hitler reversed his earlier decision not to permit the deportation of Jews from the Third Reich until after the war. The sites of the first extermination camps were selected. The testing of various methods of killing by poison gas was conducted.  Jewish emigration from the Third Reich was forbidden. The first 11 Jewish transports departed for Lodz as a temporary holding station. The vision of the Final Solution had crystallized in the minds of the Nazi leadership and was henceforth being turned into reality. And once they were in the midst of committing mass murder against millions of Jews and non-Jews on Soviet territory, “ordinary” Germans did not shrink from implementing Hitler’s Final Solution for the Jews of Europe as well.

Germany’s string of military successes came to an extraordinarily abrupt end in late October. The bad weather, terrible roads, shortage of supplies, exhaustion of German troops, and stubborn resistance of the remnants of the Red Army all combined to bring the Wehrmacht to a halt. There was no open road to Moscow. But the tide of war turned too late for European Jewry. The Soviet Union was saved but the Jews of Europe were not. The Nazis were now committed to a program of mass murder, which—though conceived in the euphoria of victory—would be implemented in defeat. Henceforth Hitler would cling grimly to the vision of Lebensraum and the Final Solution that had been reached in the fall of 1941, bringing about the destruction first of European Jewry and ultimately of Nazi Germany itself. 

Copyright ©2004 Yad Vashem The Holocaust Martyrs' and Heroes' Remembrance Authority