part 1

So, crucially before delving into this subject matter, there are a couple of crucial things to consider: From the outset, the Nazi goal is the exclusion of Jews; their exclusion from German society, exclusion from Germany and so forth. That much is pretty obvious.

However, as the practice of the Nazi period shows, exclusion could mean a number of things. It meant, an attempt to exclude Jews from period of positions of prominence in society. Alongside that it could mean, via pieces of legislation like Nuremberg Laws, it meant defining Jews, thereby creating a clear social space between them and non-Jews – a process of exclusion within Germany. Secondly, it also meant, a process of exclusion from Germany by means of emigration, enforced and encouraged by economic sanction, further social stigmatization, and – especially following 1938 – state-sponsored violence. Thirdly, exclusion from Germany and the areas annexed to it developed into a specific form of spatial displacement. Alongside this development there developed a policy of increasing brutality in occupied Poland from 1939 on, where Jews were also slated to be deported to and even more fantastical, to the island of Madagascar. And with the invasion of the USSR, the lands beyond the Urals and elsewhere uninhabitatble were also envisioned to become said dumping-ground. And this dynamic especially fed into the fourth form of radical exclusion: wholesale murder.

All of the above, overlaps as political dynamics and feeds it into each other, which makes it so hard to talk about distinct "phases". E.g. even while German Jews are already being deported towards the end of 1941, there is still German legislation outlawing Jews from buying cows and using telephones. Because the deportation starts, the exclusion within Germany doesn't stop as an effort. Donald Bloxham in The Holocaust. Critical historical approaches writes about the idea of clearly distinct phases of the Holocaust where one policy of exclusion replaces another:

It [the equation of Jew-hatred with a plan for murdering Jews] is in itself simplistic, for it suggests that there were clearly distinct phases in the development of Nazi Judenpolitik [Jew policy]. These phases are actually only distinct in hindsight, and should not suggest that on this or that day it was decided upon to accelerate or expand the persecution policy in clearly definable ways. Indeed, one of the problemes of much of the existing scholarship has been to delinate too sharply between one type of "solution" [of the Jewish question] and another. Incarceration of ever larger number of Jews with minimum provisions in unsustainable ghettos or designated regions – the "territorial solution", to use Uwe Adam's term – necessarily entailed the death of huge numbers by "attrition", and formed part of the race-utopian vision of the Nazi new European order. A territorial solution was by no means incompatible with physical destruction. [...] Despite their fundamental differences, both "intentionalist" and "functionalist" interpretations [for more on that, check this answer as well as our podcast episode on it] [...] effectively still search for a critical moment or phase of policy crystallization, a time when "the Holocaust" was decided – or stumbled upon – and became "policy". A more differentiated, flexible notion of a "policy" of intended genocidal destruction seems to be called for. This "policy" was constantly underpinned – contra the functionalists – by explicitly exterminatory ideology but within it mass killing and designs for mass death could substantially precede, and would in fact feed into, official radicalization. Conversely, within the "policy", even after the most radical measures had become official, mass immeadiate killing could co-exist perfectly consistently with less direct measures of decimation such as a modified "territorial solution". [...]

In short, we should understand the functional develoment of the "final solution" much as the development of many everyday policies embarked upon by more everyday regimes, and perhaps other programs of genocide embarked elsewhere. Intention was ideologically fixed but the nature and extent of the implementation were subject to external circumstances. [...] Nazi extermination policy as a whole was variable in terms of tactics and method.

That all said – that rather than look for distinct phases, we should look for overlapping policies and processes of radicalization –, let's sketch out the general development of policy:

The first factor that is imperative to keep in mind here is that at the core of Nazi ideology and policy is the assumption that Jews are, by way of their assumed racial characteristics, dangerous. Dangerous in the sense of their mere presences in Germany and elsewhere constituted not only a risk of racial mixing in the long run but also an immediate security risk based on the idea that Jews with their "natural" link to Germany's enemies would work to sabotage and destroy Germany from within. Based on the "stab-in-back" myth of WWI even their mere presence in a German-controlled area constituted a threat.

Forced emigration, which existed as a policy in Germany until 1941 when a total emigration prohibition was enacted and which existed at the same time with other policies, was seen as in service of the goal of ridding Germany from this Jewish threat. What massively changed this policy and lead to the change in favor of physical annihilation was the war.

According to Hitler and the Nazis, war was inevitable, also in large parts because they conceived the world as conspiring against Germany because of the international Jewish conspiracy. At the latest from 1936 onward, it was clear that Germany was working towards a new European war because that year they were faced with a simple economic choice: In light of limited resources – material, foreign currency, labor – direct economic efforts towards building a consumer industry or an industry built on war material. In light of their long-standing dogma that war was inevitable, they chose the war industry.

Being well-aware that Germany alone had a very limited time-window to successfully fight this war against the combined industrial might of GB, France, possible the US, and the Soviet Union, the decision to invade Poland in 1939 was not only take on grounds of reclaiming territory they thought belonged to Germany but also because they had to do at this point in time in order to be able to win the war against GB and France. In short, they felt that economics and circumstance forced their hand in this matter.

The Polish Jews figured into this only as far as they were regarded as a problem afterwards. Nobody among the Nazi hierarchy would have ever suggested not invading Poland because so many Jews lived there – after all, not only did they regard Poland as historically German but as said above, they thought that circumstances were forcing their hand. And fighting this war in a manner to win it had priority over considerations for forced emigration, simply because – as their view ran – the Jewish problem could be sorted out after the war was won, as long as work on removing the Jews continued. Plus, getting their hand on more Jews, which subsequently could be removed, was also in line with their overall goal of diminishing alleged Jewish influence in Europe.

And the war did have a profound impact on Jewish and general policy. First of all, it made emigration, whether forced or voluntary, very difficult. Secondly, in their program of turning Poland into a reservoir for slave labor under German hegemony, the Germans crossed the threshold to systematic mass murder in their killing program against the Polish intelligentsia concurrently with the T4 killing program inside the Reich. This is what Hastings talks about (presumably, I have never read him): What happened in the first weeks after the invasion of Poland was that the Nazis implemented a program that was aimed at "executing the carriers of the Polish nation", meaning people they viewed as a specific threat to their goal of in the short- and middle-term annihilating even the idea of a Polish nation. Among those "carriers of Polish nationalism" were priests, intellectuals, politicians and among these many Jews that were shot alongside non-Jewish Poles for being carriers of the Polish nation.

Also thirdly, the invasion of Poland gave rise to first practical attempts at creating a "Jewish reservoir" under Nazi supervision (that existed concurrently with shooting Jews identified as "carriers of the Polish nation).

Concerning the latter, first attempts were made by Eichmann and his organization in 1939 with deportations of Jews to Nisko in Poland at the border between German and Soviet controlled Polish territory. These plans did not end like the Nazis had imaged. After they dumped several hundred Jews from Vienna and elsewhere in Nisko, they had no infrastructure there so many of them just walked to the next train station and took the next train back to their home.

This experience was a major influence on the Madagascar Plan, developed in 1940. As I described here, the Madagascar Plan already was genocidal in nature as it foresaw the death of many of the deported Jews through neglect. In preparation of this or other, similar plans, the Jewish population was also concentrated in Ghettos. These plans however did not materialize due to various problems such as shipping space etc.

The impression I got from Rees's Auschwitz was that the Nazis originally did not wish to exterminate the Jews. Himmler had described such an act as 'un-German' and the Nazis contemplated many ideas for deporting the Jews from Europe, e.g. to the island of Madagascar.

This is an incorrect impression. The Third Reich's Jewish policies were genocidal from their inception, there were just different mechanisms to carry out this elimination. The abortive Madagascar Plan is a case in point. On the surface, it would appear to be a more benign solution to the Jewish question compared to the Holocaust, but the Madagascar Plan would have been just deadly had it been carried out. To relocate several million Jews onto sections of the island that could at best sustain less than a hundred thousand souls and place them under guard shows that the overall intent was to murder Jews. The surviving documentation for the Plan shows that the Foreign Ministry were thinking of this as a way to eliminate Jews, not relocate them.

Very broadly speaking, the Nazi's Jewish policies evolved into channels that made extermination and mass murder the logical outcome of these policies. The prewar Jewish policies were centered on the social death of German Jews- removing them from any normal daily life interactions such as normal employment- and the hopes that Jews would leave the Reich sans any wealth. The expansion of the German sphere of influence through occupation brought these policies to occupied Europe. In Western Europe, Jews were catalogued, had restricted use of their property, and segregated in the occupation regime. Jews were ghettoized as well in Poland and other areas of Eastern Europe. The overall idea behind these Jewish policies possesed a degree of continuity with prewar Jewish policies within Germany: "Jewish" is a racial designation, all Jewish property was ill-gotten, and there was no future role for Jews in the new order.

The invasion of the USSR was a Rubicon of sorts for German Jewish policies. The activities of the Einsatzgruppen marked a major development in which the state used mass violence as a solution to Jews who would come under German occupation. There were prologues of this in Poland in 1939 where SS security troops engaged in mass shootings of Jews as well as in the Balkans. But the Einsatzgruppen's activities was part of a wider turn in German Jewish policy towards immediate murder as a solution to many (self-created) problems. Much of the survivng documentation from Nazi officials in this period envisions that Western European and Polish Jews were to be used as a vast corvee labor force. There were already precedents to this in Poland where Jewish forced labor helped construct anti-Soviet defenses between 1939-40. Like plans for Madagascar, this was not a nonviolent solution; the general idea was that Jews would be worked to death in the conquered Soviet Union. The problem was that ghettoization and cutting Jews off from higher rations meant that Jews were less able to work these grand projects. German failure to defeat the USSR also meant that the envisioned workplace for Europe's Jews was not available. The state of the war imparted a sense of urgency too to evolving Jewish policies as German planners saw Jews as net drain on the collective resources of Europe and no longer useful as a bargaining chip against the US with American entry into the war. The natural end result of this climate was that SS officials familiar with gassings from the T4 program came to the fore as the problem-solvers for the Jewish question. The construction of extermination camps as well as mobile gas vans were to initially be used to eliminate Jews in Poland and the Western USSR, but gradually expanded for the rest of Europe's Jews, many of whom had been catalogued by occupation and German-allied governments.

The above is a very generalized narrative of the evolution of Jewish policy during the war. The main thing to realize is that fundamental Nazi idea about Jews was that they were to be gone. This remained a consistent thread in both the prewar period and the war. The whole of Nazi Jewish policy was predicated on the idea that being Jew-free was the end result of National Socialism. Removing whole populations from a society is inherently a violent process involving dislocation and the use of state power. There never a formal blueprint for immediate mass murder, but the collective weight of Nazi Jewish policy made mass extermination the most likely end-result of these actions.