From Deportation to Genocide: Fall 1941
Whereas the deportations carried out in October 1939 and in the spring of 1941 served the purpose of expelling the Jews from Austria, the transports leaving Vienna in October and November 1941 led directly to death. In the course of the war with the Soviet Union the Nazi regime changed its policy from expulsion to extermination. The murder of the majority of the European Jews, euphemistically called "final solution of the Jewish question" in the language of the Nazi bureaucrats - in the language of today, the Holocaust or Shoah - was a unique event in history; for the first time a highly developed industrialised country with a high level of culture used every governmental instrument of power to carry out planned, systematic genocide of a particular group within the population.
The National Socialists did not yet have a detailed programme for the extermination of the Jews when they seized power in 1933, even though Hitler had already spoken of poison gas in connection with the Jews, and many of his supporters were ready to use physical violence against them. Down to 1939 the Nazi regime tried to find a "solution to the Jewish question" in systematic expulsion; the plan to settle the Jews in Madagascar was suggested seriously among others. The possibility of "emigration", however, ended with the beginning of the war, and at the same time each military success increased the number of Jews in German-controlled territory, so that expulsion of the Jews from the "Reich" area, which had begun without the immediate intention to murder, gained ground as a possible "solution". The catastrophic conditions brought on by deportations and the concentration in ghettos strengthened the tendency to "solve" the "Jewish question" by radical measures, particularly where the local Nazi leadership was concerned. The systematic mass murder of mentally and physically handicapped people resp. of the Polish intelligentsia from October 1939 onwards seems to have removed the last barriers, and the experience that had been gained there (staff, organisational structure, technology of the gas chambers, etc.) was made use of after the "euthanasia" stop of August 1941, in the mass murder of the Jews in Poland ("Aktion Reinhard").
The genocide began with the ideologically motivated war of annihilation against the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941, as Security Service (SD) units (Sicherheitsdienst-Einsatzgruppen) murdered thousands of Jewish civilians, at first only men, then women and children too, behind the lines. These mass shootings proved to be rather inefficient from the point of view of the organisers, not least because of the stress suffered by the murderers themselves, so that those responsible went over to killing by poison gas (both in mobile and fixed gas chambers) at the end of 1941/beginning of 1942.
Adolf Hitler gave order to murder the European Jews in the second half of 1941, very probably not in writing, but verbally, and possibly in several steps. At the Wannsee Conference in January 1942 the modalities of carrying out the mass murder programme, which was kept strictly secret, were fixed by the responsible administrative units and authorities of the German "Reich". Thereafter the Jews from the entire area ruled by the Nazis were deported to extermination camps under the control of the RSHA (Reichssicherheitshauptamt), and by far the greater part of them were murdered.
Maltreatment and humiliation of victims before their murder.
» Deportations to the "Reichskommissariat Ostland", 1941/42
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