• Conceivable to suggest that all soviet jews were, from this point on, condemned to die. 
  

• Conceivable to suggest that the SS has an open-ended extermination order- the nature of which would develop over time. 
  

• If genocide has been decreed in Summer ’41, then the policy towards Jews in the Reich should have made that apparent. 
  

• Deportation to the east ordered in September.
  

• Would eliminate Jewish ‘bellyachers’ and ‘defeatists’ from going unrecognised throughout Germany.
  

• Linked to the war, Goebbels knew that talk of Jewish ‘defeatists’ would convince Hitler.
  

• Measure not adopted in view of an impending deportation.
  

• Hitler stated that he would be able to send them to the east immediately after the end of the eastern campaign.
  

• Beginning of September, Germans in Serbia sought to deport 8,000 Jewish men from the region to spread partisan activity. Eichmann refused.
  

• 18th September, Hitler wished the Reich and the protectorate to be liberated from the Jews. Himmler asked Greiser to send them to Lodz ghetto for the winter before their being sent further east.
  

• ‘But this would reduce to naught the plan for a total resettlement of the Jews out of the territories occupied by us’.
  

• Shows that they were at the start of a vast project- which it was feared would face challenges.
  

• ‘Resettlement’ could mean nothing more than extermination as the Jews in the east- where it was proposed to send the evacuated Jews- were facing extinction at the hands of the Einsatzgruppen.
  

• Hitler does not seem to have had another idea in mind for the Euthanasia crews.
  

• However, others distributed across the ‘space’ that would develop into the Final Solution.
  

• There does seem to have been a central decision dated to the end of September/beginning of October.
  

Dispatching of Jews to the USSR was primarily due to the pressure exerted by Hitler who wanted to purify the Reich by the end of the year, whether facilities were ready or not

Death camps eventually became concentrated in the General Government and Upper Silesia.

• Massacre of Jews in the USSR assumed the characteristics of a genocide. 
  

• Decision to deport Jews from the Reich to the east- accompanied by preparations indicating that all Jews under Nazi control would be marked for death.
  

• Hitler who decided that Reich jews should wear a yellow star.
  

• The way Hitler reacted to the Russian campaign may give us some idea as to why he chose to take these steps.
  

• Focus on Hitler’s perception of things at the time is key. Documentation sufficient to illuminate the context in which the shift to genocide took place.
  

• Germans believed that they would make short work of a poorly equipped, poorly led enemy.
  

• German army would surround soviet troops and crush them before they had time to retreat which would lead to the collapse of the Soviet regime.
  

• Hitler was determined for fast success and a definitive defeat of Bolshevism. ‘We must have early successes. There must be no reversals.’
  

• Hitler knew, however, that the campaign was a risk. He still has confidence in the army generally and the OKW more specifically.
  

• By the beginning of July, the German generals viewed the battle as as good as won.
  

• Hitler gave free reign to dreams of colonisation, declaring that Moscow and Leningrad would be ‘pulverised’.
  

• He had fears for the troops headed for Kyiv’s safety as 35% of Kyiv was Jewish.
  

• Hitler believed that the worst blow he had dealt the jews at this point was to show that countries could- and should- live without them.
  

• 14th July approved the armament programme that was to begin at the end of Barbarossa.
  

• Did have some doubts, for instance he had underestimated the Soviet troops’ morale.
  

• 15th of July, he told Oshima (Japanese ambassador to Germany) of the serious surprises he had faced in the USSR. ‘Russians could fight like wild animals
  

• On the 22nd of July, Hitler directed the commanders of the rear echelons to employ the harshest methods to impose order on the population.
  

• In the event of opposition. From the population, collective reprisals must be used.
  

• Suspicious elements to be turned over to the Einsatzgruppen.
  

• Acts of the SS increasingly mirrored the brutality of the campaign.
  

• Due to the connection between the Jews and Soviet partisans, the work of the SS Einsatzgruppen would ‘know no bounds’.
  

• Hitler urged his Croat counterpart to use the most brutal measures to achieve purification.
  

• ‘Asocials and criminals must be exterminated; when a country sends its best to risk their lives at the front, it need not spare the scum’.
  

• Hitler expressed his wish to get them out of Europe, he was ‘indifferent’ as to their specific destination.
  

• Hitler reaffirmed his intention to concentrate the Jews into a specific territory.
  

• Began to use the word ‘hope’ more and more when speaking of the war.
  

• Hiter had a growing certainty that the war was bogging down.
  

• Hitler dreamed of a miraculous peace to save him from the trap he had drawn around him.
  

• 18th of August, Hitler reiterated to Goebbels his desire to expel the Jews from the Reich (also agreed to an insignia). He referred to their deportation east after the war and stated that the harsh climate would teach them how to live.
  

• The idea of extermination was taking shape in proportion to the difficulties encountered in the war in the east, but the final verdict had not yet been reached.