Anti-Semitic policy in Albert Speer's plans for the rebuilding of Berlin

On November 12, 1938, the housing issue reached a top-level meeting of ministerial representatives called by Hermann Goring, who was in charge of state economic planning as Plenipotentiary for the Implementation of the Four-Year Plan (one of several positions he held). Both Reinhard Heydrich (head of the SS Reich Security Main Office) and the Minister of Propaganda, Paul Joseph Goebbels, attended the meeting. The point of the meeting, as Goring made clear, was to advance beyond simply discussing methods of aryanizing the German economy, and to start taking the necessary measures and creating laws that dealt firmly with Jewish business and property rights. While most of the discussion centered on whether the insurance companies should pay for the destruction of Jewish property caused by the pogrom and what to do with factories, department stores, or other property owned by Jews, the latter part of the meeting dealt specifically with forcing apartment houses out of Jewish hands and with the question of ghettoization. Yet Speer's more radical near-ghettoization plan proposed in October was eclipsed by the SS proposal to concentrate the Jews in scattered Jewish housing because of policing considerations. When Goring pointed out the inevitability of all plans leading to a ghetto, Heydrich justified the scattered concentration of Jews as follows:

From the point of view of the [SS-controlled] police, I don't think a ghetto, in the form of a completely segregated district where only Jews would live, can be put up. We could not control a ghetto where Jews congregate amid the whole Jewish people. It would remain a hideout for criminals and also for epidemics and the like. We don't want to let the Jews live in the same house with the German population; but today the German population, their blocks or houses, force the Jew to behave himself.(32)

Although here and elsewhere in the meeting Heydrich argued that Jews could not possibly be left living in the same buildings as other Germans, at this point he, Goring, and Goebbels agreed that Jews would be removed from "Aryan" homes but remain under the watchful eye of non-Jewish neighbors. This decision was justified through reference to the needs of the German economy and the preferred goal of forcing Jews to emigrate, a tactic that the SS was already using effectively in Vienna.(33)

The results of this meeting appeared in a classified letter from Goring to the Reich ministers (to be communicated to all levels of the administration and Party) detailing the decisions on the "Jewish question" (Judenfrage) concerning aryanization.(34) Along with measures banning Jews from the use of sleeping and dining cars in trains, from certain public buildings (e.g., hotels visited by Party members, such as the Four Seasons Hotel, Munich), and from the right to hold patents, Goring also resolved the question of Jewish tenants and property holders. Jews in general were not to be deprived of property or tenant protection; however, it was desirable within specific (and unnamed) circumstances to evict Jews in order to concentrate them in Jewish dwellings and to aryanize Jewish houses. The latter was to happen only as the last stage of the entire aryanization process, that is, after businesses and agricultural property had been aryanized. As the policy of the state toward the German Jews at this time was concerned with attempting to coerce them to emigrate, Goring's letter should be taken as the resolution of the "Jewish question" up to that point within Germany. If they were not to emigrate, they should at least be separated from the other Germans.