The historical events enumerated by Nick Terry, such as the killings at or near Maly Trostinets, or at the extermination centres in Distrikt Lublin, eventually at the Auschwitz-Birkenau complex represent a change of course, a move away from the plan for mass deportation into occupied Soviet territory towards one of killing Jews unfit for labour at points along the deportation routes.
As long ago as 1954, Reitlinger was able to see that what Heydrich revealed at the Wannsee Conference was actually the "last gasp" of what he calls the Russia Plan, before it was replaced by plans to send Jews to extermination centres closer to Central Europe.
My concern is to try to determine when the change away from a projected mass deportation of Western and Central European Jews to points of concentration in the occupied Soviet Union toward mass extermination occurred, and how and why it occurred.
I am exploring the possibility that the change did not occur as a result of a single decision at one point of time, but rather as the result of the addition of elements of extermination of particular groups of Jews to the deportation plan, in order to facilitate it by reducing the numbers to be deported.
The first such addition was the authorisation to kill about one third of the Jews of Reichsgau Wartheland, which was given as the result of an initiative by Reichsstatthalter Greiser. Presumably, the aim was to reduce the number of Jews held in the Lodz Ghetto (which was scheduled to be increased by Jews deported from Germany), until such time as the projected mass deportation to occupied Soviet territory could get underway after a victory in the East.
I am suggesting that the second such addition was the authorisation to liquidate the Jews of either Distrikt Lublin or the whole Generalgouvernement unusable for forced labour, some 60% of the total, and that it came sometime in March 1942, judging by the difference between Goebbels' diary entries of 7 and 27 of that month. By May of that year, an authorisation had been given to kill the unfit German Jews who had been deported to Lodz and Minsk.
Eventually, as the expected victory over the Soviet Union did not eventuate, the deportation plan was abandoned entirely (except for the groups of labourers who were actually sent to the DG 4 labour camps, or to Smolensk and a few other places), so that only extermination in specialised killing centres remained.
However, the deportation plan was still alive, at least in theory, when Goebbels made his diary entry on 27 March, since his wording implies that the 40% of Polish Jews adjudged fit for labour were also to be sent to the East, out of the Generalgouvernement. And at around that time Heydrich was still talking about sending European Jews to labour camps in the White Sea area, and others were talking about sending Jews tyo work on drainage projects in the Prypiat' Marshes; those were both elements of the deportation plan that had still not been definitively abandoned as of mid 1942, when the large-scale killing of Polish and German Jews unfit for labour was well underway.
Even after the deportation plan had been finally abandoned in the face of failure to gain victory over the Soviet Union, some anomalies still remained ,such as the survival of German Jews deported to Riga, or of Lithuanian Jews held in the Kaunas Ghetto.
As to the use of the term "entsprechend behandelt", I draw Nick Terry's attention to what I actually wrote, which was:
In the extract from an Einsatzgruppen Report quoted by Nick Terry, the expression "entsprechend behandelt" does indicate killing, and is a circumlocution similar to others such as "unschädlich gemacht". Those circumlocutions were not officially defined, unlike the word "Sonderbehandlung".an expression that did not have any official definition, that could suggest active killing but did not necessarily do so
I further wrote that Heydrich probably was suggesting that, since the remaining core of Jewish deportees could not be released for fear of a Jewish rebirth, in his opinion they would have to be physically destroyed at some unspecified time in the future.
But the essential point is that there is no indication in the Wannsee Protocol that, despite Heydrich's suggestion about what would have to be done in the future, a definitive decision to kill the European Jews deported into occupied Soviet territory had been made at the time of the conference, an interpretation supported by the recent SD and Police memorandum summarised by Goebbels on 7 March, which gave him the impression that the deported Jews were to be concentrated in the East pending their transportation to a destination outside Europe after the war, which Goebbels speculates might be Madagascar.
