Day two: Life in the bunker | Hitler's last days | The Berlin Olympics | Genocide |

Destruction of the Jews

Jewish men being deported from Berlin, 1938
Photograph:AP

After two relatively quiet years, discrimination against the Jews intensified in 1938. Increasingly radical steps were initiated to eliminate them from the economy. Bit businesses, losing the uncertainties of the first years of Nazi rule, were willing partners, eager to profit from the takeover of Jewish firms at knock-down prices. By April 1938 more than 60 per cent of Jewish firms had been liquidated or 'aryanised'. From late 1937 onwards, individual Jews also faced an expanding array of discriminatory measures, initiated without central co-ordination by a variety of ministries and offices – all in their way 'working towards the new Fόhrer' – which tightened immeasurably the screw of persecution. Hitler's own contribution largely consisted of setting the tone and sanctioning the actions of others.

In fact, Hitler's ideological aims had so far played only a subordinate role in his expansionist policy. The Party and its numerous sub-organisations were, of course, important in sustaining the pressure for ever-new discriminatory measures against ideological target-groups. But little in the way of coherent planning could be expected from the central Party office. The key agency was not the Party, but the SS.

Buoyed by their successes in Austria and the Sudentenland, Himmler, Heydrich and the top echelons of the SS were keen to extend – naturally, under Hitler's aegis – their own empire. They were looking to territorial gains to provide them with opportunities for ideological experimentation on the way to the fulfilment of the vision of a racially purified Greater German Reich under the heel of the chosen caste of the SS elite. In a world after Hitler, with 'final victory' achieved, the SS were determined to be the masters of Germany and Europe.

They saw their mission as the ruthless eradication of Germany's ideological enemies, who, in Himmler's strange vision, were the News, Masons, Marxists and churches of all denominations.

'These forces – of which I presume the Jews to be the driving spirit, the origin of all the negatives – are clear that if Germany and Italy are not annihilated, they will be annihilated. That is a simple conclusion. In Germany the Jew cannot hold out. This is a question of years. We will drive them out more and more with an unprecedented ruthlessness.'

The speech was held a day before Germany exploded in an orgy of violence against its Jewish minority in the notorious pogrom of 9-10 November 1938, cynically dubbed in popular parlance, on account of millions of fragments of broken glass littering the pavements of Berlin outside wrecked Jewish shops, 'Reich Crystal Night'. This night of horror, a retreat in a modern state to the savagery associated with bygone ages, laid bare to the world the barbarism of the Nazi regime. Within Germany, it brought immediate draconian measures to exclude Jews from the economy, accompanied by a re-structuring of anti-Jewish policy, placing it now directly under the control of the SS, whose leaders linked war, expansion and eradication of Jewry.

For Hitler, too, the connection between the war he knew was coming and the destruction of Europe's Jews was now beginning to take concrete shape. Since the 1920s he had not deviated from the view that German salvation could only come through a titanic struggle for supremacy in Europe, and for eventual world power, against mighty enemies backed by the mightiest enemy of all, perhaps more powerful even than the Third Reich itself: international Jewry. It was a colossal gamble. But for Hitler it was a gamble that could not be avoided. And for him, the fate of the Jews was inextricably bound up with that gamble.

Hitler saw it as important that he should not be publicly associated with the anti-Jewish campaign as it gathered momentum during 1938. He had to do little or nothing to stir the escalating campaign against the Jews. Others made the running, took the initiative, pressed for action – always, of course, on the assumption that this was in line with Nazism's great mission.

There is no doubt that Hitler fully approved of and backed the new drive against the Jews, even if he took care to remain out of the limelight. One of the main agitators for radical action against the Jews, Joseph Goebbels, had no difficulty in April 1938 – in the immediate wake of the savage persecution of the Jews in Vienna – in persuading Hitler to support his plan to 'clean up' Berlin.

At this juncture Hitler was moving away from any assumption that emigration would remove the 'Jewish problem' in favour of territorial resettlement. The 'Madagascar solution' had been touted among radical anti-Semites for decades. Hitler favoured Palestine as a targeted territory. In early 1938, he reaffirmed the policy, arrived at almost a year earlier, aimed at promoting with all means available the emigration of Jews to any country willing to take them, but looking to Palestine in the first instance. But he was alert to the perceived dangers of creating a Jewish state to threaten Germany at some future date. In any case, other notions were being mooted. Ecuador, Colombia and Venezuela were mentioned as possibilities. Nothing came of such ideas. But the notion of Jewish resettlement was itself latently genocidal