, 39, Reichsführer-SS, leads the police apparatus and all of the SS — and so the Reich's machinery of persecution. In May 1940, as victory in the west takes shape, he drafts for Hitler a secret memorandum on the "treatment of alien populations in the East."
The conquests place under German control more than five million people considered Jewish — an ordinary, largely impoverished minority, but designated by Nazi ideology as the absolute enemy. Within the regime, several "schools" clash over what they call the "Jewish question": expulsion out of Europe, exploitation as labour, or confinement in ghettos until extinction. No decision of systematic extermination has yet been settled, and no written order to that effect exists.
Himmler must fix an orientation in writing. Projects for a "territorial solution" circulate: deport the Jews to a distant colony. The imminent fall of France would open access to Madagascar, a French colony, and the hoped-for surrender of Britain would guarantee maritime passage.
To set this line down on paper is to arbitrate among methods of persecution and to give official direction to all the SS.
What orientation should you inscribe in this memorandum on the fate of Europe's Jews?
Himmler chose A. In his memorandum of 25 May 1940, Some Reflections on the Treatment of Alien Populations in the East, he rejected "the Bolshevik method of physically exterminating a people" as "un-Germanic and impossible," and hoped to see "the concept of Jew completely extinguished through the possibility of a great emigration of all Jews to Africa or some other colony." Hitler annotated "quite right." The Foreign Ministry then drew up the Madagascar Plan: deport the Jews to the island, under police guard. The project, genocidal in scale — the island could not have fed such a population — was rendered impracticable from late 1940 by Britain's refusal to capitulate and the lack of ships. Abandoned, the "territorial solution" would give way, in 1941, to industrial mass murder.
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The Madagascar Plan on paper
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The Prophecy Speech
Lodz — sealing the ghetto
The Barbarossa decree — the 'licence to kill'
Gleiwitz — Naujocks at the Transmitter
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Serov — 10 February 06:00 at Lwów
AB Aktion — planning at the Wawel