Economic Entjudung in Nazi Europe
Europe due to conquests, expulsions to places outside of the Nazi
empire would become less of an option; total removal would then turn
from expulsion into removal from the world, that means: into murder.
The murderous tone, essentially inherent in the total removal obsession,
could already be sensed in that same meeting on November 12, 1938, in
another part of the discussion between Goring and Heydrich: when
Goring remarked that — if the Jews were to migrate inside Germany
from the countryside and smaller cities and crowd into the major cities
due to the deteriorating conditions for them — “Verbungern lassen kön-
nen Sie ihn nicht [...] Der Jude muß doch Lebensmittel, muß Strümpfe
kaufen können” (We cannot let them die from hunger [...] the Jew shall
have to buy food, trousers), Heydrich responded by saying: “Es muß
entschieden werden, ob man das will oder nicht” (One has [only] to
decide if one wants it or not).® The murderous tone was emphasized
even more in Hitler’s notorious speech of January 30, 1939. In it he envi-
stoned the annihilation (Vernichtung) of the Jewish race in Europe if a
world war would break out once again. In hindsight we understand that
the Vernichtung which Hitler had in mind was a physical one. Yet, in the
1930s Vernichtung meant something else: the total elimination of eco-
nomic existence. This is not only the way Loose, Kreitzmiiller and Niet-
zel use the term now, as mentioned above: this was the way the Zionist-
Revisionist leader Ze'ev (Vladimir) Jabotinsky used the term in his open-
ing address of the first convention of the New Zionist Organisation in
September 1935: “Die Haltung des Dritten Reiches den Juden gegeniiber
ist der Vernichtungskrieg” (the attitude of the Third Reich towards the
Jews is one of a war of annihilation).** One has to be aware that the
semantics of the term Vernichtung changed afterwards — into the mean-
ing we attribute to it today. Vernichtung is in its essence the other side of
the Entfernung der Juden überhaunupt-principle.
And thus, even if the economic interpretation of total removal/
annihilation lost its predominance, it did not disappear and lose its role
as such, because it was another dimension of the will to exorcise the
omnipresent Jewish spirit, a dimension that remained essential. This is
63 Ibidem, p. 535.
64 Der Deutschland-Teil der Jabotinsky-Rede, Kongreflzeitung der Neuen Zionisti-
schen Organisation, Wien, 9. September 1935, Nr. 2, Teil 1.
227
