Hitler decided on the final solution before the Russian invasion in 1940

Evidence

In the summer of 1942, he still talks about “[kicking] even the last Jew out of Europe” (p. 113) and resettling the Jews in Siberia or Africa (p. 311), or Madagascar, while in reality he had already decided on the “final solution” prior to the Russian invasion, probably in 1940, and ordered the gas ovens to be set up in the fall of 1941 … Himmler already knew in the spring of 1941 that “the Jews [must be] exterminated to the last man by the end of the war. This is the unequivocal desire and command of the Fuehrer” (Dossier Kersten in the Centre de Documentation Juive). — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 2601

Categorization

• XREF: This is a concrete historical anchor for the biopolitics/necropolitics module — the extermination decision predates the public ‘resettlement’ discourse, illustrating how propagandistic language masks administrative reality.
• QUESTION: The gap between Hitler’s 1942 talk of Madagascar/Siberia resettlement and the already-decided gas ovens — Arendt uses this to show the propaganda/decision disjuncture. Worth chasing how other genocide scholarship handles this timing debate.