ABSTRACT
More challenging is the view that the final solution was the outcome of ‘pure improvisation’, arising from the cumulative radicalism and competitive zeal within the movement, which expressed itself in ever more violent forms in response to growing pressure from the National Socialist leadership. The horrendous death toll exacted by the Einsatzgruppen against Russian Jews during 1941 marked a new phase in implementing racial policy. There was temporal overlap at the very least, for Hermann Goering authorized Heydrich at the end of July 1941 ‘to make all the necessary preparations with regard to organizational, technical and material measures for a complete solution of the Jewish question in Europe’. Goering observed in 1942 that this was not the Second World War but a racial war. On the one hand it was absolutely imperative for as full a record as possible to be built up of the fate of the actual victims of the final solution once the war ended.
