SOBIBÓR - Holocaust Handbooks

J. GRAF, T. KUES, C. MATTOGNO, SOBIBÓR 221
“If you want to summarize the essence of the Nazi policy towards
the Jews, there is one permanent and primary objective: to separate
the Jews from the ‘Aryans.’ This political and racial objective of Nazi
ideology – the elimination of the Jews from the ‘Volkskörper’ (the
body of the nation) – was reached in 1938.”
After the start of the hostilities the National Socialist policy towards
the Jews aimed at a consolidation of this separation, but according to
Adam: 639
“[it was] worked out to a great extent under the influence of imponderable
factors, of short-term ideas, of rivalries between officials,
of accidental or intentional allusions by Hitler. The absence of
any central authority for the coordination, the administration or the
direction of anti-Jewish measures played a non-negligible role in
this absence of unity and this aimless legislation.”
During this period before the outbreak of the war, the RSHA carried
on with the policy of emigration. Adam: 640
“Before the beginning of the war, the security service [641] in particular
insisted on a ‘solution of the Jewish question’ by way of emigration.
The creation of the Central Agency for Jewish Emigration
[642] in January of 1939 allowed Heydrich to assume the leading
role of the Jewish policy at ministerial level. He rapidly activated
the SD plans for emigration and obtained his first major success
when, in July of 1939, he created the ‘Reich Association of Jews in
Germany.’ [643] It operated under the authority of the RSHA and he
thus had the control of the large cultural Jewish associations and,
above all, of the financing and the direction of the Jewish emigration.”
But the RSHA had not “reckoned with the anarchic structure of the
Third Reich,” which slowed down the Jewish emigration and did not allow
Germany to reach “the astonishing figures reached by Eichmann in
Vienna. Once the war had broken out, we may assume that the RSHA
policy was in tune with Hitler’s wish to attain as soon as possible a ‘judenreines
Deutschland,’ a Germany free of Jews.” 640
The RSHA desperately tried to solve the problem of emigration. 644
639 Ibid., p. 185.
640 Ibid., p. 186.
641 Sicherheitsdienst, SD
642 Zentralstelle für jüdische Auswanderung
643 Reichsvereinigung der Juden in Deutschland
644 Colloque de l’École…, op. cit. (note 635), pp. 186f.