But if the driving force for a solution is an ideology backed up by brute force, then the final result was going to be mass murder. At the beginning, in Germany, Hitler had still to establish that he could get away with murder and so sanctioned concentration camps and immigration as methods by which he could reduce the numbers of Jews in Germany and, later, Austria. Once he attacked Poland, the whole picture changed. Not only was he now at war with half Europe, but he had within his power some 7 million people who he had declared were not human, they were untermensch. And whatever sense was left in his crazed brain must have told him that he could not simply sweep them under the carpet, there had to be some sort of plan if he were to make all the conquered countries Judenfrei. For the first two years, the method was to detain all Jews and send them, trainload by trainload to Warsaw and other cities in Poland, to be crowded into the ghettoes and camps, as if in some enormous assembly points. It became a game, a deadly competition, as to who could claim that his area was free of all Jews. During these expulsions, there was much murder done but not systematically, simply as a means of hurrying on the process. Mostly the orders were to ship the people east, and forget about them. But in the east, they could not be forgotten as they arrived in ever-increasing numbers, enough to fill ghettoes and camps many times over. At this point, it could be said that a deliberate policy of attrition was followed. Food made available to the ghettoes and camps was minimal, and so people starved.
Captured documents show how the ‘problem’ of the Jews would just not go away, and the swell of paper got larger and larger as lower echelon officials tried to follow orders, the swell overflowing into constant reminders to the Nazi hierarchy of something that needed attending to. Not that the top gang needed reminding, their very souls, it seemed, were blackened by their overwhelming hate. Heydrich and Eichmann had been working under Himmler’s command, as Head of the SD and a member of the SD’s Jewish Affairs office respectively, since 1936. Eichmann had been ‘blooded’ as part of the SS unit in Dachau in 1935 but, in other respects, he appeared to be an administrator and he worked diligently in the Jewish Affairs office. He must have impressed Himmler and Heydrich, for he was sent to Vienna in 1938 to rid the city of Jews. He was successful enough to be promoted to the Jewish Affairs section of the Reich Security Central Office at the outbreak of war in 1939, working directly under Heydrich who had just been appointed Head of the Office. Heydrich was the one responsible for the formation of the Einsatzgruppen which slaughtered behind the advancing German armies, first in Poland and then in Russia. Between them, he and Eichmann organized the first orderly reception of the Jews into the ghettoes of Poland.
