Did the Nazis plan to extend the final solution beyond Europe? Assessing the evidence

ABSTRACT

This article examines theories that Nazi Germany had a plan to extend the Final Solution to the Near East, to Shanghai, and beyond Europe’s borders more generally. It argues for a strictly pan-European interpretation of the Final Solution policy as it unfolded in history, while acknowledging the implications of the Nazi Weltanschauung for Jews around the world who might have fallen under Nazi occupation.

KEYWORDS:

• Holocaust
• pan-European
• German extermination policy

Introduction and overview

The character of the persecution of non-European Jews in the Holocaust – a category in which I include both Jews of non-European origin and Jews domiciled outside of Europe – was considerably more heterogeneous than that of the ‘Final Solution’ in Europe. Many non-European Jews were murdered as part of the Holocaust. Others were ghettoized or enslaved, yet no effort was made to systematically kill them. And others still were marked as racially distinct from other Jews and thus exempt from the full anti-Jewish measures. This difference in the treatment of European vs non-European Jews raises a question about German policy – namely, did the German policy towards non-European Jews differ from the Final Solution imposed on European Jews?

This article's contention is that, in contrast to the Final Solution in Europe, there was no concrete plan or policy to exterminate Jews outside of Europe. Herein, I will argue that the fates endured by non-European Jews within the Nazi sphere of power – whether slave-labor, employment discrimination, or outright murder – were far more heterogeneous than those endured by European Jews under Nazi occupation. I will substantiate these conclusions with previously unseen contemporaneous German documents, as well as analyses of well-known documents related to the Holocaust, such as the Goebbels Diaries, the Wannsee Protocol, and Hermann Göring's 31 July 1941 letter to Reinhard Heydrich, authorizing the practical implementation of the Final Solution

Before we theorize about differences in German policy towards European vs non-European Jews, we should recapitulate in general terms the differences in how the Germans actually treated these groups. The most obvious difference is that by 1942 virtually all European Jews were marked for murder¹ by Germans as a matter of policy, whereas non-European Jews in the German sphere of influence endured a variety of different fates. While the persecution of non-European Jews was heterogeneous in nature, the extermination of the European Jews at the hands of the Nazis² eventually became organized, systematic, and largely homogeneous. The systematic character of the Nazi extermination operations, and the consistent manner in which the millions of killings occurred – through ghettoization, overwork, and deprivation, through mass shootings, and through gassings in the extermination camps – establish a concrete Nazi plan and policy for the extermination of the European Jews.

No original copy of a Führer order for the extermination of the European Jews has been identified. However, various witnesses – including Auschwitz Commandant Rudolf Höss³ and Adolf Eichmann⁴ among others – spoke of the existence of such an order. The present author's view is that common sense requires us to accept that such an order existed, given the systematic and homogeneous nature of the exterminations. The case for the existence of a Führer order for the Final Solution is strengthened by Hitler's numerous references to the exterminations during the war. On various occasions, Hitler attempted to fulfill his ‘prophecy’ – which he had made to the Reichstag on 30 January 1939 – that the ‘the extermination of the Jewish race in Europe’ (emphasis mine) would accompany the outbreak of world war. ⁵ The prophecy and Hitler's repeated wartime invocations of it, combined with the empirical reality of ongoing systematic extermination, certainly corroborate a Führer order for the extermination of the Jews, but only the Jews of Europe.

Hermann Göring's 31 July 1941 letter of authorization for the implementation of the Final Solution, sent to Reinhard Heydrich⁶ – also is supportive of an interpretation of the Final Solution confined to Europe. Göring spoke specifically of a genocide in Europe. He authorized Heydrich to make all necessary ‘organizational, factual, and material’ preparations for a ‘total solution to the Jewish question in Europe.’⁷ Similarly, the aforementioned Führer order for the exterminations of the Jews – as attested to by Walter Rauff,⁸ Rudolph Höss,⁹ and other perpetrators – referred to the liquidation of Europe's Jews. No separate Hitler order to extend the Final Solution to non-European Jews (or any references to such an order) can be found in the documentary or testimonial evidence.

Thus, one understands why the earliest scholarship on the Holocaust seems to have taken for granted that the extermination policy was confined to Europe. In his seminal The Destruction of European Jewry, Raul Hilberg wrote that ‘the final solution by its very definition was applicable only to the European continent.’¹⁰ In the last generation, however, a string of historians have claimed that the Nazis did in fact have a plan to exterminate North African and Middle Eastern Jews, as well as the Jews of Shanghai.

One claim is that the Wannsee Protocol contemplated the extermination of North-African Jewry. Citing the Protocol's reference to a Jewish population of 700,000 in ‘Unoccupied France’ – a population that was to be exterminated –¹¹ Peter Longerich,¹² Francis Nicosia,¹³ and other scholars contend that this figure referred to French North-African Jewry, and therefore conclude that there was a concrete German plan to exterminate these Jews. In addition to the Wannsee Protocol, another source commonly cited by scholars to prove there was a concrete extermination plan for North African and Middle Eastern Jews is a 2006 book by Klaus-Michael Mallmann and Martin Cüppers, Nazi Palestine: The Plans for the Extermination of the Jews in Palestine.¹⁴ The Mallmann-Cüppers book aspires to prove that Nazi extermination of the Jews in Egypt and Palestine was planned and imminent in 1942, forestalled only by German military defeat in North Africa.¹⁵ Nazi Palestine grounds its conclusion in the planned establishment of an Einsatzgruppe Egypt, which the Nazis intended to deploy in Egypt and Palestine following Rommel's anticipated victory in North Africa.¹⁶ In other words, Mallmann and Cüppers interpret the planned establishment of the Einsatzgruppe Egypt as evidence of a German plan to exterminate the Jews of the Middle East and North Africa.¹⁷

In contrast, Dan Michman, the former chief historian at Yad Vashem, has disputed the idea of a concrete plan to exterminate North-African or Middle-Eastern Jewry.¹⁸ While believing that a victorious Nazi Germany would have moved to exterminate North African and Middle Eastern Jewry,¹⁹ he nevertheless concludes that there was no concrete German plan or program to do so.²⁰ He dismisses the idea that the Wannsee Protocol included North-African Jewry, arguing that the 700,000 figure was a typographical error, and contends that the category of Jews in ‘unoccupied France’ referred only to Jews in the southern region of continental France unoccupied by the Germans.²¹

On the issue of the Wannsee Protocol at least, Michman's position is more compelling²² than that of Nicosia and other scholars who contend the protocols referred to North-African Jewry. In assuming that the term ‘unoccupied France’ in the Protocols refers to the aforementioned ‘free zone’ of European France, rather than to colonial France, Michman's analysis is consistent with how other contemporaneous documents referred to the region. Moreover, it is strange to suppose that of all the non-European Jews in the world, only Jews in colonial France would be mentioned (and not Jews in colonial Italy, colonial Britain, or colonial Spain). Indeed, regarding Turkey and the USSR, the headcount of Jews is limited to Europe, insofar as only the Jews in the European regions of Turkey and the USSR are included in the Wannsee census data.²³

In addition to the Middle East and North Africa, some scholars have claimed that the Nazis had a plan to exterminate the Jews of Shanghai. This claim originated in Marvin Tokayer and Mary Swartz's 1979 book The Fugu Plan.²⁴ The supposed extermination plan even has a name, the Meisinger Plan. Allegedly developed by Josef Meisinger, this plan contemplated the extermination of Shanghai's Jews by drowning, overwork, or medical experimentation.²⁵ But as we will see below, the Meisinger plan probably did not exist. It lacks any documentation, is contradicted by contemporaneous Japanese documentation, and relies on a single – and highly problematic – piece of eyewitness testimony.

Let us return to the more general question as to Nazi policy concerning European and non-European Jews. Statements by other leading Holocaust perpetrators provide insight into the question whether the Final Solution was being planned only for European Jews, or also for non-European Jews and Jews living outside of Europe. Numerous statements by leading Nazis describing to the planning and execution of the Final Solution refer specifically to the extermination of European Jews. On 18 November 1941, the Reich Minister for the Occupied Eastern Territories Alfred Rosenberg endorsed the ‘complete eradication’ of Jewry west of the Urals, i.e. the eradication of European Jewry.²⁶ Hitler demanded that the Jews ‘disappear from Europe’ 27 January 1942,²⁷ and a few days later, on 3 February, predicted that ‘the Jews will disappear from Europe.’²⁸ In a May 1943 speech, Robert Ley, head of the German Labor Front, declared that ‘we will not give up the struggle until the last Jew in Europe is annihilated and dead!’²⁹

Indeed, an examination of numerous statements by top Nazi leaders – people in a position to know about state policy towards the Jews – provides further grounds to doubt that the German ‘Final Solution’ policy applied to non-European Jews. The present author reviewed various incriminatory statements by Hitler, Rosenberg, Ley, SS Reichsführer Heinrich Himmler, Reich Security Main Office director Reinhard Heydrich, General Government administrator Hans Frank, and Nazi Propaganda Minister Josef Goebbels. None refer to a plan or policy of exterminating Jewry outside of Europe. The only identified statement that gets close to this is a journal entry by Goebbels. A 14 December 1942 entry in the diaries of Joseph Goebbels indicates that outside of Europe, the fate of the Jews was precarious, if not absolutely sealed. Goebbels writes that ‘Jewry must pay for its crime just as our Führer prophesied in his Reichstag speech; namely, by the extermination of the Jewish race in Europe and possibly in the entire world.’³⁰

Goebbels's remark indicates that – at a time when the fate of the Jews in Nazi-occupied Europe had been sealed – from his point of view, the fate of non-European Jews was still undetermined. It is also noteworthy that Goebbels invokes Hitler's prophecy, with its geographical qualification about the extermination of the European Jews. Nevertheless, the comment is quite ominous, insofar as Goebbels is plainly contemplating the extermination of Jews in the ‘entire world.’³¹

This article argues that Goebbels's formulation – the extermination of Jewry in Europe and possibly in the entire world – accurately represents Nazi wartime policy. That is to say, during World War II, there was no concrete or ongoing plan by the Nazis to exterminate entire non-European Jewish populations, the way such a policy existed in Europe.

This article will systematically consider the question of German policy towards non-European Jews.³² I will proceed by analyzing previously neglected German documentary evidence regarding the treatment of several non-European Jewish groups, including Chinese Jews, Iranian Jews, Afghan Jews, Turkic Jews, and North-African Jews. In this connection, I will consider German policy towards non-European Jews residing in Europe as well as in the countries of their nationality. I will also examine German policy towards European Jews residing outside of Europe, namely the Jews of Shanghai.

The article is about German policy towards non-European Jews. The core contention of this article is negative, i.e. that the Germans did not have a concrete plan or policy to exterminate non-European Jews. In this regard, arguments that such a plan or policy did exist – in North Africa, the Middle East, and Shanghai – will be considered and rejected. However, I will also discuss more generally the role of the Germans in influencing their allies to implement a host of anti-Jewish measures that fell short of murder. For example, I will detail the German role in the ghettoization of Shanghai's Jews and the promotion of anti-Semitism among Japanese intellectuals, politicians, and laypersons.

As we shall see, many non-European Jewish groups were subject to systematic murder and genocide (while others were not). However, the core point of this article is more general. In contrast to the categorical German commitment to exterminating European Jews, no such commitment existed with respect to non-European Jews.

A terminological clarification

This article concerns non-European Jews, who can be divided into two (sometimes overlapping) subgroups. First, Jews of non-European ethnic origin (inclusive of Jews living inside and outside of Europe). Second, Jews domiciled outside of Europe, regardless of their ethnic origin.³³ As we shall see – and in contrast to European Jews – there was no German program or policy to exterminate either group of non-European Jews.

Caucasian, Afghan, and Iranian Jews

Nazi ideology depicted Jews as a race rather than a group of co-religionists. In the context of the Holocaust, this meant that some people who considered themselves Jews might be spared, so long as they were not racial Jews under Nazi doctrine. Consistent with the Final Solution policy of exterminating virtually all European Jews, all European Jews fell within the racial definition of Jewish. But some non-European Jews were defined as racially distinct from other Jews.

Kiril Feferman and David Motadel have written about the encounters of the Einsatzgruppen with the Caucasian Jews. At a time when the Einsatzgruppen was systematically shooting Jewish civilians – men, women and children – in the German-occupied Soviet Union, the Karaites of Crimea were deemed by Nazi bureaucrats to be racially Turkic rather than Jewish and thereby spared.³⁴ David Motadel quotes Walter Groß, head of the NSDAP's racial policy office, as saying that the Karaites were to be spared ‘because of their close relations with the [ ] Muslim Tatars,’³⁵ the latter being a group the Nazis had perceived as potential allies and collaborators.

An examination of contemporaneous German document reveals a series of debates about the racial character of certain non-European Jewish group, including South-Caucasian, Afghan, and Iranian Jews. On 15 October 1942 Franz Rademacher – head of the Judenreferat in the German Foreign Office – made overtures to several purported experts in racial and Jewish studies.³⁶ Among those he reached out to was the aforementioned Walter Groß, head of the NSDAP's racial policy office.³⁷

Rademacher noted the point of view of the former Iranian consulate in Paris, that Iranians of Jewish religion (‘die Iranier mossischen Bekanntnisses blutmäßig’) were not actually Jews by blood (‘blutmäßig nicht Juden’).³⁸ If this were true, Rademacher indicated, Jews should be treated as any other Iranian citizens in Paris, and therefore be spared deportation to the Nazi concentration camps.³⁹ The question, therefore, was quite pivotal. Rademacher added that (what he called) ‘mosaic Georgians and Afghans’ are also of undetermined racial origin, and asked for scientific analysis of their racial character, specifically to determine whether they were racial Jews.⁴⁰

As we will see, Rademacher's query provoked a wide range of responses and opinions. But for our purposes – examining the contours of Nazi policy towards non-European Jews – the mere fact of the request for discussion been made is already insightful. It indicates an open-mindedness toward the classification and (therefore) fate of non-European Jews. It also supports the inference of no Hitler order to exterminate non-European Jews, since if Hitler had ordered such a thing, a bureaucratic debate on the question would have been unthinkable.⁴¹

One of the experts who responded to Rademacher's query was Dr. Euler, a professor at the Institute for the Research of the New Germany. Dr. Euler's response to the question of how to classify Iranian Jews was rather equivocal. He acknowledged in his 23 October 1942 letter that the Iranian Jews exhibited a ‘Near-Eastern-Semitic composition’ (Zusammensetzung), yet went on to argue that they exhibited ‘no specifically Jewish characteristics.’⁴² While devout followers of the Talmud and relatively ‘assimilated to the usual world Jewry,’ the Iranian Jews are still, Euler concluded, clearly ‘set apart from the rest of world Jewry.’⁴³

Walter Groß – the leader of the NSDAP's racial policy office, and the main addressee in Rademacher's original note – was far less tepid in classifying (and condemning) Iranian, Afghan, and Caucasian Jews as Jews.⁴⁴ In a 7 January 1943 note, Groß rejected the interpretation of Euler that the Iranian, Afghan, and Caucasian Jews should be seen as distinct. Groß argued that these Jews at best differed racially from European Jews, but differed ‘in no way from the Jews’ who had not mixed with Europeans.⁴⁵ Groß's harsh conclusion was that there was ‘no reason for any special treatment’ of these Jewish populations, and that ‘all practical racial policy measures’ applied to other Jews under Nazi control (i.e. extermination and enslavement) should be applied to these Jews as well.⁴⁶

On 3 June 1943, the Foreign Office appeared to confirm that Groß's view had carried the day.⁴⁷ Responding to a rumor that Iranian Jews domiciled in France were being treated as Aryans, the Foreign Office clarified that they were treated like any other Jews in the country.⁴⁸ It can be inferred from this note that the Iranian Jews domiciled in Europe were being murdered in the German camp system. While the fate of Afghan and Caucasian Jews was not spelled out in this document, one can also infer that any of them unfortunate enough to be domiciled in France too were subject to the full range of German anti-Jewish policy, meaning extermination.

However, the very fact that the Foreign Office was willing and able to entertain debate about the racial origin of these Jews – and consider exempting them from anti-Jewish measures – is striking. As noted earlier, it supports the absence of a Fuhrer order to exterminate all Jews within the reach of the Nazis (as opposed to European Jews). As the documents show, this debate was occurring from late 1942 to early 1943, well after Nazi Germany had marked all European-Jewish populations for extermination.⁴⁹

The mere existence of the debate surrounding the fate of these Jews – in addition to the sparing of the Karaites – fortifies my conclusion regarding the lack of a concrete plan to kill all non-European Jews. Many non-European Jews were murdered systematically, but whether (and which) of these non-European Jewish populations should be murdered, or even considered Jewish, was subject to debate. The debate among German policymakers about what to do with these non-European Jews differed markedly with the unswerving commitment of the Germans to exterminate virtually all European Jews.

The Jews of Shanghai

Contrary to the insistence of some scholars – on which more below – the Germans did not develop a plan to exterminate the Jews of Shanghai during the Second World War after Germany's ally Japan occupied Shanghai. Nevertheless, as we will see, the Germans played a key role in propagandizing the Japanese population with anti-Semitism, and in cajoling Japanese officials to ghettoize the Jews of Shanghai.

The threat of Nazi persecution and murder led many European Jews to immigrate to Shanghai between 1933 and 1941. In all, about 9,000 German Jews, 4,500 Austrian Jews, 1,000 Polish Jews, and 250 Czech Jews made their way to Shanghai as refugees.⁵⁰ These Jews joined thousands of other Jews who had arrived earlier, to constitute a thriving Jewish community in Shanghai. In the 1930s through most of 1941, these Jews lived in relative freedom and security.

The vast majority of the Jews in Shanghai had sufficient resources to sustain themselves. Many were unable to find employment – the lack of English-language skills was a grave hindrance in this regard – but could subsist off the patronage of friends and families.⁵¹ Others still made important contributions to Shanghai's culture and economy, serving as expert tailors, musicians, and architects.⁵² This period of Jewish freedom continued after the Japanese occupied Shanghai in 1937. Japanese leaders subscribed to an anti-Semitic conspiracy theory depicting Jews as global political conspirators and puppet-masters.⁵³ This belief initially led them to treat the Jews well, hoping to win favor from these supposed power-brokers of international politics.⁵⁴

This period of favorable treatment would come to an end in the aftermath of Pearl Harbor. The climate of total war hardened the Japanese outlook against a foreign people within their sphere of power. And by mid-1942, anti-Semitic publications and ideology were very much in vogue in Japan.⁵⁵ Meanwhile, the Japanese government sought to closely monitor the Jewish community in Shanghai. Top-secret documents from the Japanese Foreign Ministry make plain that Japanese policies were motivated by antisemitism rather than general wartime xenophobia. A message sent by Foreign Minister Togo to Mamoru Shigemitsu, the Ambassador to China, called for subjecting the German and other Jews in Shanghai (with the exception of Jews from neutral countries) to a policy of ‘strict surveillance.’⁵⁶

By November 18 of 1942, ‘strict surveillance’ had mutated into a policy of ghettoizing the Shanghai Jews in Hongkew.⁵⁷ Ghettoization was publicly announced as a policy rooted in national security – and not antisemitism.⁵⁸ However, as noted above, the policies were firmly rooted in anti-Jewish ideology. The ghettoization of Shanghai Jews was not an isolated policy. Other anti-Jewish measures undertaken by the Japanese government shortly thereafter included ‘harassment of Jews in the Philippines, the closing of the Jewish newspaper in Harbin, and the mass indoctrination of Japanese school children in Manchuria’ into anti-Semitic theories.⁵⁹

What was the role of the Germans in promoting this environment of antisemitism – an environment that led to the creation of the Hongkew ghetto and the confinement of most Shanghai Jews therein?

The first major role of the Germans was disseminating anti-Jewish propaganda in Japan. Attempting to exploit Japanese animus toward the Soviet Union, the German Embassy in Tokyo subsidized the printing of books and brochures attempting to link Jews to Stalin.⁶⁰ 32,000 copies of one such brochure – Juden Hinter Stalin, by Rudolf Kommoss – was distributed at a major fair in Tokyo.⁶¹ In addition to spreading anti-Jewish propaganda, German diplomatic officials in Japan and China directly lobbied Japanese officials to adopt anti-Semitic policies and ideology. According to the 22 January 1951 testimony of Fritz Wiedemann, ‘we were under orders to instruct the Japanese authorities about the racial policies of Germany and to suggest appropriate measures.’⁶² While the Japanese had not initially been antisemitic, Wiedemann contended that German pressure and persuasion spread this ideology to Japanese leadership. Wiedemann concluded that ‘[t]here is no doubt in my mind that the internment of Jews in the Shanghai ghetto had been instigated by German authorities.’⁶³

Under the influence and persuasion of Berlin, Tokyo made the final decision – formally announced on February 18, 1943 – to ghettoize the Jews of Shanghai.⁶⁴ The Japanese announcement of the decision to ghettoize makes no reference to antisemitism or even Jews – referring only to ‘stateless refugees.’⁶⁵ But it appears that only Jews were ghettoized; there is no reference to persons of other ethnic groups in Japan being forced into the ghetto.

While influenced by anti-Semitism, the Japanese remained far less radical on the Jewish question than the Germans would have preferred. A 15 May 1943 report sent by a German official in Tokyo – Fischer – indicated that all Jews who immigrated to Shanghai in 1936 or earlier were exempt from the ghettoization measures.⁶⁶ Fischer also wrote that in their conversations with community leaders, the Japanese emphasized that the ghettoization measure did not result from anti-Semitism.⁶⁷ And an earlier report by Fischer to the Foreign Office, from 20 February 1943, indicated that all Jews who immigrated to Shanghai prior to 1937 would be exempt from the ghettoization measures.⁶⁸ In the same report, Fischer refers to ghettoization as the ‘first Japanese step against the Jews.’⁶⁹

The alleged ‘Meisinger plan’ to exterminate the Jews of Shanghai

Did the Germans attempt to persuade the Japanese to exterminate the Jews of Shanghai? In their 1979 book The Fugu Plan,⁷⁰ Marvin Tokayer and Mary Swartz – in a conclusion endorsed by some authors thereafter⁷¹ – specifically contend that Colonel Josef Meisinger, the chief representative of the Nazi Gestapo in Japan, suggested that the Japanese round up and exterminate the Jews of Shanghai.

This claim rests on the basis of eyewitness testimony from Mitsugi Shibata, who worked as Shanghai vice-council during World War II and is said to have received Meisinger's proposals. When conducting research for The Fugu Plan in the 1970s, Marvin Tokayer interviewed Shibata.⁷² According to Shibata, Meisinger proposed either (1) taking the Jews out to sea and abandoning them to drown, freeze, or starve to death;⁷³ (2) subjecting the Jews to forced labor in mines, in the course of which most would soon be worked to death;⁷⁴ or (3) placing the Jews in a concentration camp in which they would be permitted to ‘volunteer’ as human guinea pigs for medical experiments.⁷⁵

Shibata is an unreliable witness. While the Nazis made their best effort to become caricatures of cruelty, it is still difficult to credit the idea that Meisinger told Shibata that the Shanghai Jews should be subject to sham medical experiments ‘on the human nervous system's tolerance for pain.’⁷⁶ Nazi medical experiments were an extreme form of medical torture but the Nazi physicians who carried them out believed them to be useful, either for the war effort or scientific research more generally. Meisinger's blatantly sadistic and villainous comment to a foreign dignitary suggesting that the Japanese torture Jews in sham medical experiments seems likely to be an invention or exaggeration, arising from popular accounts of Nazi medical experiments that emerged after the war.

Along similar lines, one is inclined to dismiss Shibata's claim that Meisinger was literally drooling with excitement when he discussed Jews who had been subject to coercive medical experiments in Bergen-Belsen.⁷⁷ More substantively, Shibata's claim that Meisinger boasted to him about the Nazis performing medical experiments on Jews at Bergen-Belsen is historically erroneous. Very few Jews had been sent to Belsen as of July 1942, which was at this time a POW camp, not a concentration camp for Jews. More Jews would be sent there after the spring of 1943, when the camp was refashioned into a concentration camp.⁷⁸ But this was many months after Meisinger's alleged boast to Shibata about medical experiments on Jews in Belsen.⁷⁹

Thus, it is implausible that in the summer of 1942 – before the overwhelming majority of Jews were sent to Belsen – Meisinger would have seen Belsen as a place where Jews were systematically subject to medical experiments, and boasted about this to Shibata. This sounds like a post-war invention, colored by public memory of Nazi cruelty and the monstrous conditions in Belsen upon its liberation by the British on 15 April, 1945, as well as public revelations about the general Nazi practice of subjecting concentration camp inmates to medical experiments.

Despite the factual errors and general lack of credibility in Shibata's testimony, and a total absence of documentary evidence to support his claims, some historians of the Holocaust have uncritically repeated The Fugu Plan's claim of a German plan (articulated by Meisinger) for the extermination of the Shanghai Jews.⁸⁰ However, a Japanese scholar who – unlike the present author and most Western scholars of the Holocaust – engages Japanese wartime sources dismisses the notion of a Meisinger extermination plan as ‘fictional,’ and criticizes specific Western historians for uncritically repeating the claims of The Fugu Plan.⁸¹ This author, Kenji Kanno, praises Shibata's documented humanitarian efforts on behalf of the Shanghai Jews,⁸² but rejects his testimony in the Fugu Plan.⁸³ Having examined pivotal Japanese primary-source documentary⁸⁴ and testimonial⁸⁵ evidence, Kanno concludes that the real German proposal for the Jews of Shanghai was the one that was implemented, namely, forced relocation and concentration.

It seems likely that the Germans proposed a range of anti-Jewish policies to the Japanese. One of these proposed policies was concentration and ghettoization. Shanghai's Jews were in fact ghettoized, albeit in a less lethal fashion than the Germans would have hoped for. Regardless, there is no documentary evidence of a German plan or policy to exterminate the Jews of Shanghai. The claim that Meisinger proposed such a thing in the manner described by Shibata is dubious on its face and contradicted by the documentary evidence presented by Kanno.

German policy towards the Jews of Tunisia

Germany occupied Tunisia for six months, from November 1942 to May 1943. In Tunisia, German Jewish policy was drastically different than it was in Europe, insofar as the Jews of Tunisia – abused and enslaved though they may have been – were not systematically murdered. Though they were not systematically exterminated, it is important to emphasize the suffering and persecution of Tunisian Jews, who were enslaved and economically plundered. The Jewish community of Tunisia was forced to pay heavy fines on the pretext that ‘international Jewry’ was responsible for the war.⁸⁶ As slave-laborers, Tunisian Jews were forced to wear the yellow star and threatened with execution if they ran away.⁸⁷

The threat and reality of Nazi murder was a constant presence in the life of Tunisian Jews under German occupation. Klaus-Michael Mallmann and Martin Cüppers have shown that the Einsatzgruppen – which had a specific Einsatzgruppe Tunis division led by major Holocaust perpetrator Walter Rauff – frequently threatened to kill Jews who did not cooperate with the Germans.⁸⁸ Rauff and his cronies did not hesitate to engage in ad hoc murders of Jews.⁸⁹ Moreover, some Tunisian Jews were deported to the death camps of Europe.⁹⁰

Mallmann and Cüppers conclude that the Einsatzgruppe Tunis planned to exterminate the Jewish population of that region.⁹¹ In light of the aforementioned measures – as well as the limited eyewitness testimony presented by Laskier, indicating that the Germans were in the verge of exterminating the Tunisian Jews, perhaps by gassing, before simply running out of time⁹² – this conclusion cannot be dismissed out of hand.⁹³ But it is ultimately speculative, and barren of any firm documentary support.

One remarkable document contradicts Mallmann and Cüpper's idea of a concrete Nazi plan or Hitler order to exterminate the Jews of Tunisia. This 18 January 1943 report on the status of slave-laborers working for the German war effort in Tunisia shows that Jewish workers were receiving rations on a par with European workers in Tunisia.⁹⁴ The rations for these working Jews included 375 daily grams of bread, 10 daily grams of sugar, 600 daily grams of fruit, 15 daily grams of salt, 300 grams of weekly meat, and 100 grams of monthly soap.⁹⁵

This document indicates that the rations the Germans gave to Tunisian Jews were vastly greater than the starvation diet they allocated to European Jews, which was a core method of killing in the Final Solution. For example, the three million Jews of German-occupied Poland – after being ghettoized – were officially confined by the German authorities to 200-calorie daily diets.⁹⁶ Deliberately under-feeding Jews was an essential means of extermination under the ‘Final Solution’ in Europe. Hans Frank, the director of the General Government (German-Occupied Poland), spoke on 24 August 1942 of sentencing 1.2 million Polish Jews to death by starvation.⁹⁷ Frank went on to say that if the Polish Jews did not starve to death, it would hopefully lead to a speeding-up of the anti-Jewish measures (i.e. deportation to death camps).⁹⁸ By contrast, the aforementioned 18 January 1943 report on slave-laborers in Tunisia indicates that Jewish slave-laborers not only received better diets than the Jews of Nazi-occupied Europe, but diets on a par with European workers in Tunisia.⁹⁹

Paired with the fact that the Einsatzgruppe Tunis did not as a matter of historical fact systematically murder the Jews of Tunisia in its six months occupying that country,¹⁰⁰ this supports the inference of a different policy for North-African (and indeed all non-European) Jews, as compared with European Jews. This conclusion is fortified by the absence of any documentary evidence of planned extermination operations in North Africa. However, while there is no documentary evidence for an ongoing wartime plan or policy to exterminate the Jews of North Africa, there is limited documentary support for a general German intention to do so in the future, at some unspecified future date. This comes in the form of a 12 May 1942 statement by Dr. Gebhardt von Walther, an official at the German consul in Tripoli, who declared that ‘there is no doubt that, when the time comes, the Jewish question will also be solved in Tripolitania’ (emphasis mine).¹⁰¹ This statement could be reasonably, though not dispositively, interpreted as a commitment to exterminating the Libyan Jews at some indeterminate future point (‘when the time comes’), but not now.

Even more explicit is a 1 March 1943 report by Rudolph Rahn – the plenipotentiary minister in Tunisia – to the Foreign Office.¹⁰² Therein, Rahn advocates inciting pogroms against Tunisian Jews in the future. This reference to pogroms is pivotal. For pogroms are not only murderous in and of themselves, but the incitement to them preceded the introduction of the ‘Final Solution’ by the Einsatzgruppen in the German-occupied Soviet Union.¹⁰³ The Rahn document is therefore compelling evidence of a general intention to exterminate the Jews of Tunisia in the future.

Rahn is not specifically committed to pogroms as the means of attacking the Tunisian Jews. (The incitement of pogroms is one of a number of possible anti-Jewish policies that he raises in the document.¹⁰⁴) As to timing, Rahn merely says that the introduction of an anti-Jewish policy will not be possible at least until Germany has advanced into Algeria.¹⁰⁵ Moreover, Rahn couches his call for pogroms as a future possibility, rather than as an expression of current German policy. Thus, Rahn's document is best interpreted as evidence of a general intention or expectation to exterminate Tunisian Jews sometime in the future, rather than a concrete plan to do so (by specific means and at a specific time). One important question, of course, is whether Rahn's discussion of future pogroms against Jews was a reflection of German policy, or his own personal suggestion about what ought to be done with the Tunisian Jews. The answer to this question is not clear from the document.

At first blush, my emphasis on the difference between an ongoing or imminent extermination program for North African Jewry (which I deny existed) and a general intention to exterminate them in the future (which I acknowledge may have existed) seems tedious. But the difference between a general intention to exterminate in the future and an ongoing, concrete extermination policy had substantive consequences for North African and other non-European Jews living under Axis occupation. This distinction meant death for most European Jews, and survival for most non-European Jews.

North-African Jews in Europe

Thousands of Jews of North African origin who were domiciled in Europe during the war were sent to the extermination camps and murdered alongside European Jews. This is confirmed, for example, by recent researchers who examined the ‘dog tags’ of various Sobibor victims, and matched hundreds of them to Jewish persons of North-African origin.¹⁰⁶ This paper therefore must not be misinterpreted as arguing that North-African Jews were completely spared; thousands were murdered in gas chambers alongside their European-Jewish brethren.

Palestine

Before discussing the question whether Nazi Germany had a plan or policy to exterminate the Jews of Palestine, one must consider the historical context of Nazi policy towards Palestine more generally.

Nazi policy towards Palestine varied considerably throughout the Second World War. In the first years of the Nazi regime, the Germans sought to encourage Jewish migration to Palestine under the terms of the so-called Haavara Agreement signed between Zionist German Jews and Nazi Germany on 25 August, 1933.¹⁰⁷ Pursuant to this agreement, about 60,000 German Jews immigrated to British Mandatory Palestine.¹⁰⁸ In the early years of the Nazi regime, when Jewish immigration to Palestine was official German policy, Nazi leadership and the SS actually supported the idea of Jewish nationalism and Zionism, provided that these movements supported Jewish immigration and segregation from Aryans.¹⁰⁹ Reinhard Heydrich wrote in May 1935 that the Germans objected to assimilationist Jews, but not to Zionist Jews who supported Jewish-gentile separatism.¹¹⁰

Meanwhile, Hitler showed little sympathy for the national aspirations of Arab Palestinians before World War II. As Francis Nicosia observes, there were two key barriers to Germany collaboration with Palestinians. First, Hitler envisioned an alliance between Germany and Britain, which precluded Germany from endorsing a policy that conflicted with British colonial interests.¹¹¹ Second, Hitler regarded the Arabs as an inferior race, and thus was hardly inclined to advocate for Arab-Palestinian statehood.¹¹² Hence Germany rebuffed Arab-Palestinian requests for material assistance in the Arab Revolt following the July 1937 publication of the Peel Report,¹¹³ which contemplated the partition of Palestine into Jewish and Arab states.

After the outbreak of world war, Hitler's (and thus, the Nazi) view on Jewish immigration to Palestine reversed. Now – as Hitler later said to the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem – the idea of a Jewish national state was considered ‘a national hub for the destructive influence of Jewish interests.’¹¹⁴ Consequently, Hitler prohibited all Jewish emigration out of the Third Reich and Nazi-occupied Europe, a decision which would cost these Jews their lives when the extermination operations began.

During the Second World War, Germany anticipated an eventual occupation of Palestine – and indeed the Levant in general. What would Germany have done with the Jews of Palestine in the event of occupation? This is a matter of counter-factual history, which we will discuss more below. But for now, let us consider the question as to whether Nazi Germany had, in our real historical timeline, developed a plan or policy to exterminate Palestinian Jewry.

There is scant documentary evidence to corroborate such a policy, but scholars have pointed to Hitler's 28 November 1941 meeting with Hajj Amin al-Husseini, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem. According to Christopher Browning's account of this meeting, Hitler promised al-Husseini that, following German victory in North Africa, the Levant, and victory over the Soviet Union in the Caucasus, Germany would move to exterminate the Jews of Palestine.¹¹⁵ On its face, this seems to point to a firm, time-bound plan by Hitler (and thus Germany) to exterminate Middle-Eastern Jewry.

But any reliance on Hitler's words to the Mufti is dubious, because there are two contradictory contemporaneous accounts of them. On the first account – on which Browning and other historians¹¹⁶ have relied – Hitler said Germany's goal in Palestine would be ‘the annihilation of the Jews residing in the Arab regions under the protection of British power.’¹¹⁷ This account was compiled by Dr. Paul Otto Schmidt, Hitler's interpreter.¹¹⁸ A conflicting account of the meeting were recorded by Fritz Grobba. Grobba quotes Hitler as saying that following German victory, Germany would carry out the destruction of the ‘power protecting the Jews’ in Palestine, i.e. the destruction of British colonial power.¹¹⁹

One might argue that Grobba was simply attempting to whitewash Hitler's statement to the Grand Mufti. But Grobba's account of the meeting accords with the Mufti's own memoirs. While it is tempting to assume the Mufti was lying about what Hitler said, it should be noted that the former was quite willing to discuss his knowledge of the exterminations in other portions of his memoirs, in which he noted that Hitler had told him about the liquidation of the European Jews in the summer of 1943.

I translate a relevant excerpt from al-Husseini's memoirs as follows:

Every time [Himmler and I spoke], I would hear from Himmler something indicating the intensity of his animosity for the Jews, accusing them of being unjust—while claiming to be oppressed—Himmler said that [the Jews] are igniting the fires of war, and that they are selfish and so forth. He also explained the amount of harm they inflicted on Germany in the last war, and that they always kindle the fire of war, then exploit [the war] for their own for their own interests, without losing anything in it, and therefore we insisted that in this war we would make them taste what they had done to others. In his remarks during the summer of 1943, Himmler told me, so far we have exterminated about 3 million of them [the Jews]. I was surprised by this number, and I hadn't known anything about it before then. Next, Himmler asked me, regarding this subject, how do you plan on resolving the Jewish question in your country? I answered him: we only want them to return to the countries from which they came [to Palestine]. Himmler said: we will never allow them to return to Germany.¹²⁰

Given the willingness of the Mufti to talk about the exterminations and his knowledge of them, the claim that he lied about Hitler's comments on 28 November 1941 is dubious, and the Mufti's memoirs instead provide some corroboration to Grobba's account of the meeting.

An additional epistemic problem with Schmidt's account of the meeting lies in the fact that the Final Solution as we know it – meaning the pan-European extermination policy – still was not being fully implemented in November 1941. To be sure, Soviet Jewish men, women, and children had been systematically murdered by the Einsatzgruppen since the summer of 1941. Since 1939, Polish Jews were being ghettoized, starved, and subject to extermination through overwork. However, the extermination camps had not yet been opened in November 1941. And systematic killing of all European Jews did not begin until 1942.

While there is no consensus view as to when exactly Hitler decided to exterminate all European Jews, considerable scholarship supports the view that Hitler made this decision after the entry of the United States into World War II, following the 7 December 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor.¹²¹ Christian Gerlach has pointed to a 12 December speech given by Hitler to Reichsleiter and Gauleiter in which Hitler declared that, with the Jews having caused another world war, their extermination must follow.¹²² Gerlach's interpretation accords well with the timeline concerning the creation of extermination camps, is consistent with Hitler's 30 January 1939 ‘prophecy’ that the European Jews would be annihilated in the event of world war, and is corroborated by Joseph Goebbels's account of the aforementioned 12 December, 1941 Hitler speech concerning the fate of the Jews.¹²³ The relevance of a post-Pearl Harbor dating for Hitler's decision to exterminate the Jews is highly pertinent to the debate over what he said to al-Husseini. For if Hitler did not decide upon the Final Solution policy – that is, pan-European extermination of Jews – until December 1941, he could not have contemplated an extension of that policy to the Middle East in his November 1941 conversation with al-Husseini.

Apart from this possibly misquoted remark by Hitler to the Grand Mufti, some have pointed to the planned establishment – beginning in June 1942 – of Einsatzgruppen units that would accompany a Germany advance into Egypt and Palestine. Documentary evidence of this ‘Einstzgruppe Egypt’ was found by Mallmann and Cüppers, and is the core piece of evidence for the purported Nazi plan to exterminate Middle Eastern and North African (MENA) Jews that these authors lay out in Nazi Palestine.¹²⁴ The Einsatzgruppe Egypt would have been commanded by the major Holocaust perpetrator Walter Rauff, who pioneered the use of gas vans to murder Jews on the eastern front.¹²⁵ Mallmann and Cüppers use the creation of this unit to argue that, as of June 1942, the Germans were implementing a plan to liquidate entirely the Jews of the MENA region.¹²⁶

The planned deployment of the Einsatzgruppen to Egypt and the Middle East uncovered by Mallmann and Cüppers is ominous. The unit was to be led by Rauff, a leading murderer of European Jews.¹²⁷ And the Einsatzgruppen as a whole played a pivotal role in murdering the Jews of Europe, murdering well over 1 million Jewish civilians in the occupied Soviet Union.¹²⁸ But the presence of the Einsatzgruppen within a region is not proof of an extension for the Final Solution therein.

For example, the Einsatzgruppen operated in Poland in 1939 and 1940, and while they certainly engaged in mass murders in this period, they did not engage in the systematic extermination of Jewish civilians. (This practice began in 1941 in the occupied Soviet Union.) Nor – pivotally – did the Einsatzgruppe Tunis engage in systematic killing of Jews in the six months during which Germany occupied Tunisia (Nov 1942 to May 1943).¹²⁹

Another point should be raised against the thesis of Cüppers and Mallmann, that the establishment of the Einsatzgruppe Egypt constituted proof of a German plan to exterminate MENA Jews. By June 1942 – at which time a division of the Einsatzgruppen was being prepared for deployment in Egypt and the Middle East – the Germans had mostly abandoned mass shooting as a means of exterminating Jews. Now, Jews were killed by gassing in Chelmno, the Aktion Reinhardt Camps of Treblinka, Sobibor, Belzec, and Majdanek, and Auschwitz-Birkenau. This policy change had arisen from the Nazi recognition that the mass shootings were psychically debilitating the SS (Einsatzgruppen) men who were carrying them out.¹³⁰ It is dubious to assume – as Mallmann and Cüppers do – that this policy would be reversed so abruptly, and that the Nazis would carry out the extermination of Middle Eastern Jews by way of (what they considered to be) the problematic method of mass shooting. Moreover, the documentary record indicates Rauff intended to use the Jews of the region as slave laborers. In contrast with the paper trail of the other Einsatzgruppen – which are littered with explicit references to killing operations, as well as Nazi code-words for killing such as ‘special treatment’ and ‘resettlement’ – nothing I could find in Rauff's papers indicate plans for exterminations in North Africa or the Middle East.

Finally, the number of people assigned to the Einsatzgruppe Egypt, 24 (!)¹³¹ is inconsistent with their supposed task of killing all Middle Eastern and North African Jews. While it is true that the Einsatzgruppen in the occupied Soviet territories was relatively small in number and made liberal use of local collaborators, there was still a core of thousands of SS men that the Einsatzgruppe Egypt lacked. It is also dubious whether the Einsatzgruppen would have had the linguistic competence in the local dialects of Arabic needed to recruit locals to their cause.

Mallmann and Cüppers wish their readers to believe that the establishment of the Einsatzgruppe Egypt represented the practical implementation of German plans to exterminate the Jews of the Middle East.¹³² But it is a major stretch to imagine that – even with auxiliary support from the Wehrmacht and native collaborators – a unit of 24 men was supposed to exterminate the Jews of the MENA region, who were comparable in number to the Jewish population of the occupied Soviet Union. After all, the Einsatzgruppen sent to the occupied Soviet Union were (excluding local collaborators and Wehrmacht helpers) 3,000 strong, or 125 times greater than the Einsatzgruppe Egypt (24 strong), which was supposedly commissioned to liquidate all the MENA Jews.

The absence of documentation for an extermination policy outside of Europe

As I have noted, there is convincing evidence, in the form of the von Walther, Rahn, and Goebbels documents, that the Germans anticipated exterminating non-European Jews at some future date. But – contrary to Mallmann and Cüppers, and Fugu Plan authors Tokayer and Mary Swartz¹³³—there is no serious evidence of concrete plans or policies to implement this vision. During the war, tens of thousands of non-European Jews were murdered by the Nazis. But there was no program or policy to exterminate any non-European Jewish population wholesale. In other words, there may have been a vision and general intention to apply the ‘Final Solution’ outside of Europe, but there was no concrete plan or policy to implement this vision. This paucity of documentary evidence is in contrast to European exterminations, whose planning (as well as execution) are overwhelmingly documented. And it is counter-intuitive, insofar as the logistics of exterminating Palestinian and other Levantine Jews, such as cultural and linguistic barriers, would presumably be more complex than exterminating European Jews.

It is also noteworthy in this connection that all major captured perpetrators of the Final Solution – such as Eichmann, Höss, and Rauff himself – were all silent on a supposed plan to exterminate Jewry in the MENA region or the broader world. On the contrary, they consistently spoke of a Führer order to exterminate the Jews of Europe, not the Jews of Palestine, the Levant, or the world. If a plan existed to exterminate non-European Jewish populations, it is strange indeed that no perpetrators spoke of it.

After the main method of extermination changed from mass shooting to gassing in 1942, the killing process had become highly bureaucratic and institutionalized, and occurred mostly according to a highly specific procedure. Jews were taken from their homes (or from ghettos) under the guise that they would be resettled (in the case of Treblinka, Sobibor, and Belzec) or put to work¹³⁴ (in the case of Auschwitz). They were then deported to extermination camps, where they were asphyxiated in gas chambers.

The Nazis undertook extraordinary efforts to destroy the evidence of these extermination operations – razing, for example, the ‘Aktion Reinhardt’ camps of Treblinka, Sobibor, and Belzec wholesale; systematically excavating and burning many hundreds of thousands of victims of mass shootings and gassings; and destroying almost all documentation associated with these camps. Nevertheless, the dramatic amount of planning, resources, infrastructure, and bureaucracy that went into the extermination camps left an extensive paper trail, including documents related to the planning of the extermination operations and preparations for the camps. In contrast stands the total absence of documentary evidence of any concrete plans for a systematic extermination of Jews in the Middle East, North Africa, Shanghai, or anywhere else outside of Europe. This absence of evidence – together with the case studies I have discussed above – support the inference that no such policy existed.

Conclusion

Based on the documents I have presented in this article – the repeated references by German leaders to a European extermination policy, the documents concerning rations for Tunisian Jewish slave laborers, the documents I have presented concerning the release of Chinese Jews from the camp system, and the debates concerning the racial origins of Iranian, Chinese, and other non-European Jews – I conclude there was no wartime Nazi program or policy for the extermination of non-European Jews, or some kind of imminent plan to do so. That policy, as it existed during World War II, was objectively circumscribed to Europe.

This conclusion does not preclude the possibility that leading Nazis had a general vision or expectation of exterminating Jews outside of Europe. As Goebbels wrote, Jews were to be exterminated in Europe and ‘possibly in the entire world.’¹³⁵ But the distinction between a concrete plan and a more abstract expectation or intention is historically real. It is also of more than academic interest, insofar as it meant European Jews were killed while a great many non-European Jews were spared.

The purported evidence for planned extermination operations outside of Europe is unpersuasive. Contrary to Nicosia and Longerich, the Wannsee Protocols did not refer to or contemplate the extermination of North African Jews. Contrary to Tokayer and Swartz's The Fugu Plan, there is no credible evidence of a Meisinger plan to exterminate the Jews of Tokyo. And contrary to Mallmann and Cüppers, the establishment of a 24-person Einsatzgruppe Egypt does not amount to proof of a German plan to systematically exterminate the Jews of Palestine or North Africa.

One can reasonably predict that the Nazi exterminations would have – eventually, at some point – extended to all Jews under Axis control, including outside of Europe. As I have shown by reference to the Rudolph Rahn and Gebhardt von Walther documents, as well as the 14 December 1942 Goebbels diary entry, at least some important Nazi officials had a vision or general intention of exterminating non-European Jewish populations. But during the war, in history as it actually unfolded, there was neither an ongoing nor imminent plan to carry this dream out.

Non-European Jews within the Nazi sphere of power were subject to oppression, enslavement, and (sometimes) extermination. That is to say, non-European Jews were victims of genocide. But the Final Solution in Europe was more than an episode of genocide; it was the unprecedented attempt to kill all members of an ethnic group within a continent. This historic effort never extended outside of Europe.

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Correction Statement

This article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

1 The small category of exceptions include Jewish-German spouses of Aryan Germans and Jewish Allied POWs. These Jews, which constitute well under 1% of European Jews who fell under German control, were generally not murdered. Jews selected for work at the extermination factories such as Auschwitz-Birkenau should not be considered exceptions to the policy since they were marked for murder once they were no longer able to work, a process of ‘extermination through labor’ that often occurred quite rapidly.

2 Of course, the Holocaust also included extermination operations carried out by the Romanians and the Independent State of Croatia. My contention is not that the Holocaust as a whole was homogeneous; rather, I contend that the treatment of European Jews were by the Nazis was quite homogeneous by 1942.

3 In the autobiography he wrote in Polish custody in 1947, Höss asserted that it ‘goes without saying that the Hitler order [for the extermination of the Jews] was a firm fact for all of us, and also that it was the duty of the SS to carry it out’. Höss, Death Dealer, 161.

4 See Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem, 83. According to Arendt's account of Eichmann's trial, Eichmann testified that Hitler gave an order for the ‘physical extermination of the Jews. P. 83. This order was conveyed to Eichmann by Reinhard Heydrich. Ibid.

5 See Kershaw, Hitler, the Germans, and the Final Solution, 103–4. Kershaw notes that Hitler referred to the prophecy on numerous occasions between 1941 and 1945 (Ibid., 104).

6 Göring's letter should not be assumed as an order for or encapsulation of the entire Final Solution policy as we now know it, but rather is best seen as a part of the process in developing the pan-European extermination policy, as well as a practical assignment of jurisd.

7 LVVA Riga, P1026, opis 1, B 3, Bl. 9. Recent scholars have been much more skeptical as to whether Göring's July 1941 letter to Heydrich actually envisioned – much less authorized – the pan-European extermination policy that would begin in 1942. Regardless, it is noteworthy that the total solution Göring described was limited to Europe.

8 In an entire biography about Rauff – including a chapter devoted to explaining Nazi plans for Rauff to lead an Einsatzgruppe Egypt and his actual work on the ground in Tunisia – Klaus-Michael Mallmann and Martin Cüppers provide no document or statement from Rauff indicating the existence of a plan to exterminate Middle Eastern or North African Jews. See Mallmann and Cüppers, Walther Rauff, 145–80. This absence of documentation is all the more striking given how abundantly documented Rauff's plan to exterminate Jews on the Eastern Front via gas-vans was.

9 Höss, Death Dealer, 286. ‘In the summer of 1941 Himmler summoned me to Berlin to give me the disastrous and harsh order for the mass annihilation of the Jews from all over Europe.’ Ibid. (emphasis mine).

10 Hilberg, The Destruction of the European Jews, 687.

11 PAAA Berlin, R 100857, Bl. 166–88.

12 See Longerich, The Unwritten Order, 96. Longerich writes that ‘[i]ncluded in the 700,000 Jews for unoccupied France arc those of the North African colonies. Ibid.

13 See Nicosia, Nazi Germany and the Arab World, 239.

14 Mallmann and Cüppers, Nazi Palestine.

15 See generally, Ibid.

16 See Ibid., 118.

17 Ibid., 125. The authors assert that, with the help of Arab collaborators, the Einsatzgruppe Egypt would have ‘quickly put into action’ the extension of the Holocaust to the Middle East.

18 See generally, Michman, “Were the Jews of North Africa,” 59–78.

19 See Ibid., 69–70.

20 Ibid., 70.

21 Ibid., 69.

22 In defense of the contrary view, it should be noted that 700,000 is a gross over-estimation of the Jews living in unoccupied European France, and would indeed be a more plausible estimate of the Jews living in French-colonial North Africa. However, it is more likely that the Germans were simply mistaken in their estimate of the Jewish population in France. Given the large number of refugees, foreigners, and other relatively obscure Jewish persons living in the free zone, such a mistake is quite plausible.

23 PAAA Berlin, R 100857, Bl. 171.

24 In this article, I cite a later edition of the book. See Tokayer and Swartz, The Fugu Plan.

25 See Ibid., 256–57.

26 PAAA Berlin, RZ 211/105192, Bl. 3.

27 Hitler, Hitler's Table Talk, 1941–1944, 260.

28 Ibid. at 288.

29 Speech of Robert Ley, April 1943, Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiter-Partei Miscellaneous Records, XX555.1, Hoover Institution Library & Archives.

30 Goebbels Diary Entry, 14 December 1942, in Joseph Goebbels Papers, 1942 December 7–15, Box 4, Hoover Institution Library & Archives, p. 17.

31 Ibid.

32 Recall that I define this category, ‘non-European Jews’, to encompass both (1) Jews of non-European descent – regardless whether they are living in Europe or their home countries – and (2) European Jews living outside of Europe.

33 The second category of ‘non-European Jews’ would include, for example, European-Jewish refugees residing in Shanghai.

34 See Feferman, The Holocaust in the Crimea and the North Caucasus, 272–75; see also Motadel, Islam and Nazi Germany's War, 57. It must be emphasized that the Krymchaks and Mountain Jews of the North Caucasus received no such reprieve, and were systematically murdered by the Einsatzgruppen. See Ibid.; see also Feferman, The Holocaust in the Crimea and the North Caucasus, 281–307. Although these latter Jewish groups were technically European – the North Caucasus region is in Eastern Europe.

35 See Motadel, Islam and Nazi Germany's War, 57.

36 See PAAA, RZ214/99422, Bl. 32.

37 Ibid.

38 Ibid.

39 See Ibid.

40 Ibid.

41 My point here should not be misunderstood. Non-European Jews living under Nazi occupation were often murdered, but also often could be spared, in contrast to the fate of European Jews, virtually all of whom the Nazis attempted to systematically kill.

42 See PAAA, RZ214/99422, Bl. 34.

43 See Ibid., Bl 35. As an aside, Euler briefly observes that Caucasian Jews differ more from ‘the usual world Jewry’ than do Iranian Jews. See Ibid. Thus, on Euler's reasoning, the case for Caucasian Jews being considered (and treated) separately from European Jews from was stronger than that of Iranian Jews.

44 PAAA, RZ214/99422, Bl. 52.

45 See Ibid.

46 See Ibid., Bl. 52-3.

47 See PAAA, RZ214/99422, Bl. 75.

48 See Ibid.

49 Scholars debate over the specific time in which Nazi extermination policy was confirmed. There is broad agreement however that the policy was fixed by early 1942.

50 Kranzler, “The Jewish Refugee Community of Shanghai, 1938–1949,” 404.

51 See Ibid., 405.

52 Ibid., 406.

53 See Kranzler, Japanese, Nazis, and Jews, 210.

54 See Ibid., 209–11.

55 See Kranzler, Japanese, Nazis, and Jews, 478.

56 Ibid., 481.

57 See Ibid., 477–78.

58 See Ibid., 489.

59 See Ibid., 487.

60 See Ibid., 485–86.

61 See Ibid., 486.

62 Ibid., 488.

63 Ibid.

64 See Ibid., 489.

65 Ibid.

66 See PAAA Berlin, RZ 214/99401, Bl. 230.

67 Ibid. “Japanischerseits wird gesprächsweise betont, dass Maßnahmen nicht Antisemitismus entspringen.”

68 See PAAA Berlin, RZ 214/99401, Bl. 222.

69 Ibid.

70 See Tokayer and Swartz, The Fugu Plan.

71 See, for example, Guang, “Shanghai in the Annals of Jewish Diaspora,” 442.

72 See Tokayer and Swartz, The Fugu Plan, 9.

73 See Ibid. at 256.

74 See Ibid.

75 See Ibid. at 257.

76 Ibid.

77 Ibid.

78 See Lattek, “Bergen-Belsen: From ‘Privileged’ Camp to Death Camp,” 43–46. Included in the Belsen concentration camp was a ‘holding camp’ for valuable Jews, who could be exchanged as hostages for German civilians or deposits of foreign currency. Ibid.

79 As to coercive medical experiments, it is unclear whether they were performed at Belsen at all. While there is overwhelming documentary and testimonial proof that they were performed on Jews and other inmates at Auschwitz, Dachau, Ravensbrück, Natzweiler, among other camps, there is no documentation indicating that any experiments were performed at Bergen-Belsen. See Weindling, John W. Thompson, 97. There is some eyewitness testimony about ‘mutilating operations’ being performed on Belsen inmates. Ibid. Such testimony must be taken seriously, even in the absence of the documentary and pictorial support we have for experiments in other camps. But if such experiments were in fact systematically performed on Jewish inmates, they would have been performed in 1943 or later, after Belsen was converted to a concentration camp.

80 See, for example, Guang, “Shanghai in the Annals of Jewish Diaspora,” 442.

81 See generally, Kanno, “Was There a Plan to Exterminate the Jews in Shanghai, 69–90. Note that the article as cited in the original Japanese, and I am relying on an English translation of the article, which I personally commissioned. My translation of this article is available upon request.

82 See Ibid. at 87.

83 See Ibid. at 85 (disputing the idea that Meisinger ‘was in any position to make any proposals to the Japanese military authorities in Shanghai in the name of Germany or the Nazi regime.’)

84 See generally Kanno, “The Designated Area for Stateless Refugees in Shanghai.”

85 See generally Kanno, “Was There a Plan to Exterminate the Jews in Shanghai Under the Japan Military Regime?”

86 See Laskier, North African Jewry in the Twentieth Century, 74.

87 See Mallmann and Cüppers, Nazi Palestine, 173. Although Michael Laskier asserts that the yellow star was only partially introduced in Tunis. See Laskier, 74.

88 See See Mallmann and Cüppers, Nazi Palestine, 173.

89 See Ibid.

90 See Abitbol, The Jews of North Africa during the Second World War, 138.

91 See Mallmann and Cüppers, Nazi Palestine, 174.

92 See Laskier, North African Jewry in the Twentieth Century, 76.

93 Nicosia argues in Nazi Germany and the Arab World (2015), that we know ‘with reasonable certainty’ that Hitler's regime was planning to ‘extend the final solution … to the Jews of North Africa and the Middle East.’ (Nicosia, 239). But his evidence in this regard – the supposed reference to the North-African Jews in the Wannsee Protocols – is unpersuasive, for the reasons stated above.

94 See BA, RH 26/334, Bl 16.

95 Ibid.

96 See Stone et al,, “Extraordinary Curtailment of Massive Typhus Epidemic in the Warsaw Ghetto,” 1. It should be noted that many ghettoized Jews managed to get far more daily food via the black market. However, the genocidal intent of this food policy is plain, and it led to hundreds of thousands of deaths. See Hilberg, The Destruction of the European Jews, 687.

97 See Hans Frank Diaries, 24 August 1942 entry, NARA, RG-238, National Archives Collection of World War II War Crimes Records: Other World War II Crimes Records. Accessed at United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Archives, RG-67.038M, Roll 6. („Das wir 1, 2 Millionen Juden zum Hungertod verurteilen, sei nur am Rande festgestellt.”)

98 See Ibid. („Es ist selbstverständlich, dass ein Nichtverhungern der Juden hoffentlich eine Beschleunigung der antijüdischen Maßnahmen zur Folge haben wird.”)

99 See BA, RH 26/334, Bl16.

100 Mallmann and Cüppers attempt to explain this apparent inconsistency away, arguing that inhibitions on the part of the French and the Italians convinced the Nazis not to use the Einsatzgruppen to kill Tunisia's Jews (Ibid., 174). But this is a strange argument to make, given that Nazi Germany had already demanded that the French turn over their Jewish population for extermination, and would demand the same of the Italians a few months after the end of the German occupation of Tunisia.

101 YVA JM/2213, pp. 380–83, p.3. („Trotz alles wird man mit der Zeit auch im Tripolitanien das Judenproblem aufnehmen müssen.”)

102 See Rudolph Rahn, 1 March 1943 Letter to the German Foreign Ministry, Bad Arolsen Archives PP 82202695-82202697.

103 See Polonsky, The Jews in Poland and Russia, 427.

104 See Rudolph Rahn, 1 March 1943 Letter to the German Foreign Ministry, Bad Arolsen Archives PP 82202695-82202697.

105 To infer from this that the policy would be implemented after the Germans advanced into Algeria would be to fallaciously conflate a necessary condition with a sufficient one.

106 See Aderet, “Jews from Morocco, Tunisia, and Algeria Were Killed by the Nazis in Sobibor.”

107 For an excellent exposition on the history and motives behind the Haavara Agreement, see Nicosia, The Third Reich and the Palestine Question, 29–49.

108 See “Haavara,” Jewish Virtual Library, 2008.

109 See Nicosia, The Third Reich and the Palestine Question, 55. An extraordinary expression of this concordance of interests between the Nazis and some Zionist groups in the mid-1930s is Georg Kareski's September 1935 interview with Der Angriff, in which the former endorsed the Nuremberg Laws as necessary to preserve the Jewish race. See Ibid., 56.

110 See Ibid.

111 See Ibid., 83.

112 See Ibid., 84.

113 See Ibid., 181.

114 See Mallmann and Cüppers, Nazi Palestine, 90.

115 See Browning, The Final Solution from Conception to Implementation, 406.

116 See, for example, Michman, Adolf Hitler, The Decision-Making Process Leading to the “Final Solution of the Jewish Question”.

117 See Ibid.

118 Ibid., 37–8.

119 Ibid., 41.

120 al-Husseini, The Memoirs of Amin-Al Husseini, 126–27.

121 In Kershaw, Hitler, the Germans, and the Final Solution, 95–100, the author examines the debate regarding the time at which the Final Solution – meaning the pan-European extermination policy – was determined.

122 See Gerlach, “Die Wannsee-Konferenz, das Schicksal der deutschen Juden und Hitlers politische Grundsatzentscheidung, alle Juden Europas zu ermorden,”7–44.

123 To quote from Goebbels's summary of Hitler's speech:

Bezüglich der Judenfrage ist der Führer entschlossen, reinen Tisch zu machen. Er hat den Juden prophezeit, daß, wenn sie noch einmal einen Weltkrieg herbeiführen würden, sie dabei ihre Vernichtung erleben würden. Das ist keine Phrase gewesen. Der Weltkrieg ist da, die Vernichtung des Judentums muß die notwendige Folge sein. Diese Frage ist ohne jede Sentimentalität zu betrachten. Wir sind nicht dazu da, Mitleid mit den Juden, sondern nur Mitleid mit unserem deutschen Volk zu haben. Wenn das deutsche Volk jetzt wieder im Ostfeldzug an die 160.000 Tote geopfert hat, so werden die Urheber dieses blutigen Konflikts dafür mit ihrem Leben bezahlen müssen.

For the full quotation from the diary, see Gerlach, “Die Wannsee-Konferenz, das Schicksal der deutschen Juden und Hitlers politische Grundsatzentscheidung, alle Juden Europas zu ermorden,” 7–44, 25.

124 See Mallmann and Cüppers, Nazi Palestine, 116–25.

125 See Ibid., 119.

126 See Ibid., 130.

127 See Ibid., 119.

128 See Hilberg, The Destruction of the European Jews, 1320.

129 In attempting to explain the lack of exterminations by Einsatzgruppe Tunis, scholars have understandably pointed out that logistical, military, and political barriers would have made such a policy impractical to implement. See, for example, Abitbol, The Jews of North Africa During the Second World War, 119. But it must be noted in response that impracticality was no inhibition for the Holocaust in Europe. In mid-1943, for example, Hitler threatened his relations with a critical ally – the Hungarian Regent Horthy – by insisting on exterminating the Hungarian Jews. The liquidation of Hungarian Jewry was carried out in the spring and summer of 1944, at a time where Germany's diplomatic situation was dire and it could not afford to use so much infrastructure, manpower, and resources for exterminations. Yet these practical considerations were no inhibition for the Nazis. Hitler's prophecy of the extermination of European Jewry needed to be fulfilled.

130 See Klee, Dressen, and Reiss, The Good Old Days, 59–75 (presents perpetrator testimony corroborating the psychological stress participating in mass shootings caused the men of the Einsatzgruppen, and the eventual decision of the SS to switch to gassing as a method of killing).

131 See Mallmann and Cüppers, Nazi Palestine, at 124.

132 See Ibid., 24.

133 As well as their progeny.

134 A small minority were in fact put to work – about 20% in Auschwitz Birkenau, and fewer than 1% in the case of the Reinhardt camps. But this rationale was a lie for most deportees.

135 Goebbels Diary Entry, 14 December 1942, in Joseph Goebbels Papers, 1942 December 7–15, Box 4, Hoover Institution Library & Archives, p. 17.