SOBIBÓR - Holocaust Handbooks

226 J. GRAF, T. KUES, C. MATTOGNO, SOBIBÓR
Schellenberg, which prohibited the emigration of Jews from France
and Belgium. The former policy of emigration, expulsion, and resettlement
was abandoned only progressively. In July of 1941 the
RSHA informed the Ministry of Foreign Affairs that no more expulsions
to France were planned. In February of 1942 the Ministry of
Foreign Affairs officially dropped the Madagascar plan. The preparations
for the murder of the Russian Jews would thus not have any
immediate repercussions on the Nazi Jewish policy in other countries.”
(Emph. added)
Still, Browning did not have any doubt that his conjecture concerning
an order to massacre the Russian Jews was unfounded. He maintained
on the contrary that the “idea of a final solution for the European
Jews developed in a separate process and resulted from a decision of its
own.” 653
But since not even this alleged decision was supported by documentary
evidence, the field remained open to the most wildly diverging conjectures
on this point as well, which Browning sums up in the following
manner: 653
“Hilberg dates the decision to July 1941 at the latest; Uwe Dietrich
Adam opted for a date between September and November; Sebastian
Haffner suggests December and Martin Broszat rejects even
the idea of a global decision and a particular date and believes in a
gradual and unconscious process of intensification.”
On the subject of the alleged extermination order Browning’s position
was as follows: 654
“In July of 1941, when the Nazi armies had shattered the defenses
on the border of the Soviet Union, captured masses of Russian
soldiers, and in the end covered two thirds of the distance to Moscow,
Hitler approved the outline of a plan for the mass extermination
of the Jewish population in Europe. In October of 1941, with the
victorious encirclement of Vyasma and Bryansk and with the brief
glow of a hope for the final triumph before the onset of winter, he
approved the final solution.”
Yet this is just another conjecture unsupported by documents.
The problem of the origins of the decision to embark on the alleged
extermination, which had remained unresolved at the Paris meeting,
was again examined at the Stuttgart convention which took place from
654 C.R. Browning, Verso il genocidio, Il Saggiatore, Milano 1998, p. 36.