410. The Nazis in Power: The Night of Broken Glass (Part 7)
The Rest Is History
From Refuge to Extermination: The Bureaucratic Path to Genocide
During the height of persecution, around 80,000 Jewish individuals managed to flee Germany, seeking refuge primarily in countries like the USA, Britain, Holland, Brazil, Argentina, and notably Shanghai, which had relatively lenient immigration policies for Jews. In contrast, Britain and most European nations imposed strict barriers against accepting refugees. By early 1939, with many Jews still remaining in Germany, the Nazis, unsatisfied with the number of departures, established a central office for Jewish immigration under Reinhard Heydrich. This office aimed to expel the remaining Jewish population from Germany and implicitly Europe. Ian Kerschel notes that this marked a critical point leading to the horrors of the Holocaust, as Heydrich's commission laid the groundwork for systematic genocide, culminating in the implementation of the Final Solution at the Wannsee Conference in January 1942. This period illustrates the chilling transformation of bureaucratic processes into tools of mass extermination, reflecting the horrific industrialization of genocide.
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