Hermann Göring - Complicity in The Holocaust

Complicity in The Holocaust

Goebbels and Himmler were far more antisemitic than Göring, who mainly adopted that attitude because party politics required him to do so. His own deputy, Erhard Milch, had a Jewish parent. But Göring supported the Nuremberg Laws of 1935, and later initiated economic measures unfavourable to Jews. He required the registration of all Jewish property as part of the Four Year Plan, and was livid at a meeting held after Kristallnacht that the financial burden for the Jewish losses would have to be made good by German-owned insurance companies. He proposed that the Jews be fined one billion marks. At the same meeting, options for the disposition of the Jews and their property were discussed. Jews would be segregated into ghettos or encouraged to emigrate, and their property would be seized in a programme of aryanization. Compensation for seized property would be low, if any was given at all. Detailed minutes of this meeting and other documents were read out at the Nuremberg trial, proving his knowledge of and complicity with the persecution of the Jews. He told Gilbert that he would never have supported the anti-Jewish measures if he had known what was going to happen. "I only thought we would eliminate Jews from positions in big business and government," he claimed.

In July 1941 Göring issued a memo to Reinhard Heydrich ordering him to organise the practical details of a solution to the "Jewish Question". By the time this letter was written, many Jews and others had already been killed in Poland, Russia, and elsewhere. At the Wannsee Conference, held six months later, Heydrich formally announced that genocide of the Jews of Europe was now official Reich policy. Göring did not attend the conference, but he was present at other meetings where the number of people killed was discussed.