Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil

When the deportations begin, Eichmann’s role is:

that of the most important conveyor belt in the whole operation, because it was always up to him and his men how many Jews could or should be transported from any given area, and it was through his office that the ultimate destination of the shipment was cleared, though that destination was not determined by him (153).

The German Reich at the time consists of Germany, Austria, Moravia, Bohemia, the Czech Protectorate, and the annexed Polish Western Regions. In 1940, the first two deportations send 1,300 Jews from Strettin to Lublin and 7,500 Jews from Baden and the Saarpfalz to Unoccupied France:

The objective seems to have been a test of general political conditions—whether Jews could be made to walk to their doom on their own feet […] [and] what the reaction of their neighbors would be when they discovered the empty apartments in the morning; and, last but not least, in the case of the Jews from Baden, how a foreign government would react to being suddenly presented with thousands of Jewish ‘refugees’ (155-56).

The deportations, from the Nazi point of view, work on all counts. Preparations for continued deportations include the use of the yellow badge for easy identification, the new law that states a “Jew could not be considered a German national if he lived outside the borders of the Reich,” and the confiscation of German-Jewish property by the Reich for any Jew who has lost their nationality (157).