4 - From mass murder to comprehensive annihilation: 1941–42

Summary

This chapter deals with a period of time that included several dramatic turns in German anti-Jewish policies and practices. Extermination was not decided upon all at once. Within one-and-a-half years, from the spring of 1941 to the late summer of 1942, the imaginations about schemes for the territorial concentration of the Jews came to include more and more violence combined with ideas for the selective mass murder of Jews in the Soviet Union that was to be occupied. This led to intentions to kill virtually all Soviet Jews; to which were then added plans to murder those Polish Jews who were regarded as unproductive, until, finally, the plan to kill all European Jews by 1943 was developed. Such policies came about through a complex process involving different central and regional authorities and agencies – at different levels of their hierarchies – and were the result of a number of intertwined motives. Practice evolved accordingly, though in regionally uneven ways – from selective mass shootings to almost complete annihilation in the occupied Soviet territories in 1941, though in some regions large numbers of Jews were spared for a year or longer; and from selective deportations from many countries to newly built extermination centers; and then the almost complete wiping out of Jewish communities in 1942. Other policies of mass violence also emerged and evolved during 1941–42, including the starving of Soviet POWs and others, forced labor, and anti-guerrilla warfare, all of which were, in some ways, connected to the fate of Jews. All of these developments were closely connected to the war's having become a relentless life-and-death struggle as a result of Germany's invasion of the USSR in June 1941 – and the subsequent hard-fought battles; of Germany's feverish efforts to support the Eastern Front with a wartime economy hampered by scarcity; and by the start of guerrilla uprisings in several countries. Non-German policies and actions against Jews and others must also be borne in mind.

It is important to examine the many initiatives and twists and turns in German decision-making because such patterns indirectly provide insights into more profound questions about the motives behind, the forces driving, and the political structures responsible for the extermination of Jews.