To begin with, he ordered the establishment of the Office of American Absorption, in his judgment an agency inconsequential enough to leave the Jews essentially unharmed while seemingly meeting—with token programs like Just Folks and Homestead 42—Himmler’s directive “to inaugurate in America a systematic process of marginalization that will lead in the foreseeable future to the confiscation of all Jewish wealth and the total disappearance of the Jewish population, their appurtenances, and their property.”
