Exterminatory antisemitism

Exterminatory antisemitism is the ideology that converts antisemitic persecution into a program of mass murder. The novel presents it as both a political decision and a practical appetite: bureaucratic orders and institutional pressures shape its course, but its ultimate force lies in the willingness to kill, whether by modern machinery or by bullets and pyres. Its perpetrators can debate methods, labour needs, and propaganda while treating the destruction of Jewish people as an available policy.

From authorization to escalation

In a conversation with Thomsen, Professor Peters identifies July 31, 1941, as a decisive point in what he calls the crime without a name. He describes a letter drafted by Eichmann and Heydrich, sent to Goring, and returned with Goring’s signature. In Peters’s account, the letter authorized action after manpower had been assembled in the east. The passage gives extermination an administrative origin: a crime is set in motion through correspondence, delegated authority, and a command to begin.

Peters does not describe the subsequent course as the execution of a fully specified plan from the outset. He says the regime may initially have imagined removing Jews to a cold, barren place beyond the Urals or in the Arctic Circle after a quick victory over Russia. That territorial solution receded as the war continued. At the same time, pressure grew among the plenipotentiaries in Poland, where the annexation of an additional three million Jews intensified the perceived problem of numbers. The account therefore connects central authorization with local and regional pressure: an overarching murderous purpose meets administrative rivalry and the failure of proposed territorial alternatives.

The decisive escalation, as Peters presents it, was the extension of killing from men, who had already been murdered for months, to women and children. The novel makes this change concrete through the language of supposed rationales: children are represented as future avengers, women of childbearing age as possible mothers, and older women as people to be killed simply because they are already included in the operation. The grotesque logic does not offer a defensible distinction among victims; it reveals how the premise of extermination makes every distinction serve the same end.

Will, machinery, and the organization of murder

Peters challenges the idea that the distinctive feature of extermination was its industrial technology. Gas chambers and crematories, he argues, accelerated killing, economized effort, and spared the killers’ nerves, but they were not the source of the policy. Bullets and pyres could have accomplished it more slowly. The distinction matters: technology changes the pace and organization of murder, while the underlying willingness to kill remains constant.

He invokes the Einsatzgruppen and their mass shootings to insist that murder on an enormous scale did not depend on the later machinery of the camps. In his account, they had already killed well over a million people with bullets; without gas chambers, they would still have continued killing women and children by that method. The number and the counterfactual sharpen the novel’s point: industrialized methods are not an alternative explanation that displaces intent. They are means adopted by people who have already shown that they possess the will to destroy.

The discussion also places extermination alongside other forms of violence. Peters links the appetite for death to forced abortions, sterilizations, and the killing of tens of thousands through euthanasia. He describes cruelty treated as a virtue, one that can be rewarded with advancement and power. In that formulation, exterminatory antisemitism is part of a broader political culture in which violence is normalized and rewarded; the effort to kill Jews is not presented as an isolated malfunction of an otherwise humane order.

Bureaucratic contradiction and antisemitic framing

A private reflection by Paul Doll exposes the way institutional demands make Jewish people legible as competing administrative categories. The Economic Administration Head Office presses him to increase labour strength for the munitions industries, while the Reich Central Security Department presses for the disposal of evacuees. Doll frames the latter demand as self-defence, describing Jews as a fifth column. That language does not establish a real threat: it displays the antisemitic premise by which persecution is recast as protection against an imagined enemy.

The labour dispute does not interrupt the murderous logic. Doll objects to a proposal that able-bodied mothers be worked to exhaustion in a boot factory at Chełmek, but his objection concerns the practical impossibility of separating mothers from their children at the camp ramp. The scene reveals a conflict between the exploitation of labour and the disposal of those deemed unwanted, not a rejection of persecution. Even a dispute over how to handle mothers and children takes place within a system that has already turned them into objects of policy.

The novel sets that administrative calculation beside Peters’s account of the move toward killing women and children. The contrast reveals the instability of a regime that can demand more labour from some deportees while pressing for the removal of others, and the continuity beneath that apparent contradiction: both departments treat human lives as material to be allocated, exploited, or destroyed. Exterminatory antisemitism operates not only through declared hatred but through this bureaucratic conversion of people into problems to be managed.

Propaganda and the limits of public respectability

Doll’s response to the antisemitic newspaper Der Stürmer introduces a pointed contradiction. He condemns Julius Streicher’s publication as harmful to the movement and claims that it may be the main reason exterminatory antisemitism has failed to gain acceptance in the West. His concern is not that antisemitism or extermination is wrong; it is that the newspaper’s crude presentation damages the movement’s public standing. He posts a warning in the Officers’ Club threatening officers found with the paper with the loss of a month’s pay and a year’s leave.

The penalties make the distinction between belief and presentation especially stark. Doll attempts to suppress one form of antisemitic propaganda while remaining embedded in a system that classifies Jews as a security danger and weighs their labour against their removal. The novel thus presents exterminatory antisemitism as compatible with a demand for discipline and respectability: a perpetrator may object to a public image of hatred because it is politically damaging, not because he rejects the violence that the ideology enables.