then, Hitler had rejected this initiative, but the idea continued to resurface
over the following years, most notably in the spring of 1941 when Goebbels
urged Hitler to reconsider the possibility of marking the Jews.117
Deteriorating morale on the home front in the summer of 1941 was
closely connected with the revival of the marking plans. Although the
Wehrmacht advanced swiftly into Soviet territory after the invasion of
22 June 1941 and achieved some remarkable early victories over its
surprised Red Army adversary, many Germans feared that, this time,
Hitler had gone too far. Starting that July the SD noted a clear decline in
confidence, along with fears that the campaign against the Soviet Union
could develop into an extended conflict of indefinite duration and heavy
losses. These pessimistic assessments were aggravated by the worsening
supply situation and repeated British bombing raids on western German
cities.118 As Goebbels noted in his diary on 12 August, he and other Nazi
leaders were convinced that the Jews were responsible for the deterio-
rating morale by spreading rumours and acting as ‘mood spoilers’. By
making them visible as Jews, Goebbels hoped to render it impossible for
them ‘to speak in the name of the German people’.119
Three days after this diary entry, on 15 August, a conference was held at
the Propaganda Ministry concerning the marking issue. Eichmann partici-
pated in the conference as Heydrich’s representative and confirmed that his
boss was seeking a direct decision on the matter by the Führer. Eichmann
also told the other delegates that the RSHA was already working on a
‘partial evacuation’ of Jews from large cities in the Old Reich.120
Hitler’s approval of the marking proposal on 18 August was a decision
influenced less by Goebbels’s personal intervention than by the Führer’s
general change of mind on the issue of deporting German Jews from the
Reich.121 Word of Hitler’s approval spread fast in Berlin. As the Foreign
Office’s Jewish expert, Franz Rademacher, recorded in a note for his boss
Luther on 21 August, Eichmann had ‘informed me confidentially that . . .
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203
Hey[drich] had received a telex from the Führer’s headquarters according
to which the Führer had approved the marking of Jews in Germany’.122
Eichmann’s phone call was a deliberate attempt to demonstrate to the
Foreign Office that Heydrich and his Jewish experts were already working
on the implementation of Hitler’s order. While the Reich Interior Ministry
was still contemplating potential exceptions from the marking decree, such
as Jews living in ‘privileged mixed marriages’, Heydrich’s RSHA processed
the marking regulations with extraordinary speed. Already on 1 September,
scarcely two weeks after Hitler’s decision, Heydrich signed the ‘police regu-
lation on the marking of Jews’.123 Heydrich’s order not only stigmatized all
German Jews over the age of six by forcing them to wear a clearly visible
yellow star with the word ‘Jew’ printed on it, but also included regulations
on ‘no-go areas’ for Jews and prohibited them from leaving their places of
residence without police permission.124
More detailed instructions from Heydrich followed over the next
few weeks, and he personally informed the representatives of the
Reich’s remaining Jewish organizations of the coming measures.125 On
8 September, Paul Eppstein from the Reich Association of Jews in
Germany and Josef Löwenherz from the Israelite Congregation of Vienna
were summoned to the RSHA to be acquainted with the details relating
to the distribution of the ‘Jewish stars’. They were given three days to
complete their task of distributing the badges at a price of 10 pfennigs per
piece.126 Yet although he had approved the marking of German Jews in
August, Hitler remained reluctant to authorize their deportation. In
September, encouraged by the Wehrmacht’s successes on the Eastern
Front, which would soon lead to the encirclement of Leningrad and Kiev,
he was prepared to revise his position on this issue and to make a number
of decisions that were far-reaching both for the further escalation of Nazi
genocidal policies and for Heydrich’s personal and professional life.127
Crucially, in response to the rise of resistance activities in the Protectorate
and as a result of his expressed wish to make Prague one of the first ‘Jew
free’ cities in the Greater German Empire, Hitler decided, in late
September, to replace his ‘weak’ representative in Prague, Baron von
Neurath, with Heydrich. Back in 1939, Neurath, an arch-conservative but
well-mannered and internationally respected Swabian aristocrat and
career-diplomat, had been a strategic appointment, a choice driven by
Hitler’s desire to appease London, where Neurath had once served as an
ambassador to the court of St James’s. Heydrich’s appointment, by
contrast, was dictated by the necessities of total war. As intended by Hitler,
Heydrich’s appointment as acting Reich Protector had immediate ramifi-
cations for the Jews of Bohemia and Moravia. Beginning on 1 October
1941, less than a week after his arrival in Prague, the Protectorate’s Office
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for Jewish Emigration ordered the Jewish Religious Congregation of
Prague, by now terrorized into complete compliance, to begin the process
of registering anew every Jew in the Protectorate. Heydrich did not trust
the figures produced under the ‘lax’ regime of Neurath, whom he suspected
of having little understanding of racial matters. In Prague alone thirty-
seven members of the Jewish congregation worked almost ceaselessly and
under the threat of deportation, at times registering 2,000 people per day.
Denunciations from the German and Czech population were actively
encouraged and proved crucial in identifying Jews.128
On 10 October, Heydrich chaired a meeting in Prague with Eichmann
and other race and settlement experts in attendance. According to the
transcript, the purpose of the meeting was to discuss ways in which the
Jewish problem in the Protectorate and the Reich could be resolved.
Heydrich announced that Hitler demanded that ‘al Jews be removed from
this German space by the end of the year’ and noted that ‘al pending ques-
tions [regarding the Jewish policy] must be solved immediately. Even the
transportation question must not present any problems.’ Fol owing their
concentration in ‘temporary col ection camps’, notably in Theresienstadt
(Terezín), the Jews of the Protectorate were to be deported to Łódź. In
view of predictable objections from the local authorities in Łódź, however,
50,000 of the ‘most burdensome’ Jews – those least capable of work – were
to be shipped to Minsk and Riga. The leaders of Einsatzgruppen B and C,
Nebe and Rasch, would make space for some of these Jews and others
from the Reich ‘in the camps for Communist prisoners’. An additional
5,000 Gypsies were to be sent from Austria to Riga.129
In a press announcement issued the following day, Heydrich summa-
rized the results of the meeting: the ‘final aim’, he stated, was not merely
to exclude Jewry from social and economic life, but to ‘resettle them
outside Europe’ and to do so ‘as quickly as possible.’ Four days later, on
15 October, the deportations from Prague began with daily transports
carrying 1,000 people each.130
Heydrich clearly envisaged the deportation of the Central European
Jews as no more than a first step towards a pan-European solution, a plan
which, as he underlined in a meeting with representatives of Rosenberg’s
Ministry for the Occupied Eastern Territories on 4 October and again in
a letter to the army’s Quartermaster General of 6 November, would ulti-
mately lead to the ‘total evacuation of Jews from Europe’.131
Shortly after the beginning of the deportations of Jews from the
Protectorate and the Reich, all exit possibilities from German-controlled
Europe were closed. When on 13 October the Spanish Foreign Office
proposed to expel 2,000 Spanish Jews residing in France to Spanish
Morocco, Heydrich rejected the proposal on two grounds. First, he
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believed that the Spanish government had neither the will nor the deter-
mination to guard the Jews effectively in Morocco. Secondly, ‘these Jews
would also be too much out of the direct reach of the measures for a basic
solution to the Jewish question to be enacted after the war’.132
Emigration was clearly no longer part of Heydrich’s solution to the
Jewish question. On 18 October, one day after he had informed Luther in
the Foreign Office of his objection to the Spanish government’s proposal,
he and Himmler took a more general decision on the issue of Jewish
emigration. ‘No emigration by Jews to overseas’, Himmler noted in his
diary after a telephone conversation with Heydrich.133 On 23 October, the
emigration gates were officially closed. All of Europe’s Jews were now to
be included in the final-solution project.
Yet the implementation of even the limited deportation programme
authorized by Hitler continued to pose practical problems. One of the
most pressing issues – the question of reception areas – remained unre-
solved; and if Heydrich hoped that the deportees from the Reich could
be temporarily lodged in occupied Poland before being sent into the
Soviet Union after the German victory, local officials on the ground took
a very different view. In early October, Friedrich Uebelhoer, the District
President of Łódź, lodged a vehement protest against the intended transfer
of 60,000 German Jews to the already overcrowded Łódź ghetto.134
An infuriated Heydrich, appal ed by Uebelhoer’s ‘oppositional attitude’,
threatened to draw ‘appropriate conclusions’ should he not change his
‘hostile manner’.135 In the end, Heydrich had to settle for a compromise
and the number of deportees sent to Łódź was subsequently scaled down
to 20,000 Jews and 5,000 Gypsies. As an immediate alternative solution,
Heydrich advised Himmler that the ghettos of Riga and Minsk would
have to accommodate 50,000 additional Jews, predominantly from the
Protectorate.136
While unfriendly letters were still being exchanged between Himmler,
Heydrich and Uebelhoer, Heydrich met with high-ranking officials from
Rosenberg’s Ministry for the Occupied Eastern Territories in order to
address a second problem: the issue of overlapping competences in the
Eastern territories. Ever since Hitler had declared that Himmler’s juris-
diction as Reich commissioner for the strengthening of Germandom,
previously confined to Poland, was to be extended to the newly occupied
territories of the Soviet Union, clashes between Rosenberg and Himmler
had become the norm.137
Heydrich now suggested that a co-ordinated approach to the Jewish
question would be useful, especially in preventing pseudo-economic
considerations from jeopardizing any ‘plan of a total resettlement of the
Jews from the territory occupied by us’. He complained bitterly that many
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businesses in Germany claimed Jewish labourers as ‘indispensable’ instead
of trying to employ other foreign labourers. He also expressed his dissat-
isfaction with Rosenberg’s apparently ‘uncooperative’ attitude and stressed
that ‘the implementation of the treatment of Jews’ would lie ‘in every
respect in the hands of the Security Police’.138
On the same day, Heydrich managed to convince the Foreign Office
that the Jewish problem in Serbia, where partisan activities were causing
serious disruptions, required an urgent solution. Heydrich and Under
Secretary Martin Luther agreed to send their Jewish experts to Belgrade
the following week. Their presence spurred on both the SD commander
on the ground, Wilhelm Fuchs, and the chief administrative officer of the
military occupation regime in Serbia, Harald Turner, to speed up the
killing of Jewish men.139 As Browning has rightly argued, the mass
murder of the male Jews of Serbia was not consciously part of a Europe-
wide final solution to the Jewish question: ‘The killing of the male Jews
emerged primarily out of local factors related to the partisan war and the
army’s reprisal policy. The victims, both Jews and Gypsies, were considered
‘expendable’ groups whose execution would satisfy the required reprisal
quotas without producing undesired political repercussions and aggra-
vating the anti-partisan struggle. The army did not operate with the
avowed aim of exterminating the entire Jewish population, and thus the
women, the children and the elderly were not killed’.140