It was probably the Soviet counterattack just outside Moscow in the autumn of 1941 that finally prompted Hitler to formalise his ideas on how to murder Europe’s Jews. In the first days of the war, it had been thought possible that the Jews could be removed to Madagascar or elsewhere in Africa, but this had long since been ruled out, and now that the Soviets were fighting back, Hitler’s hopes of herding the Jews east into seized Russian lands had also fallen away.
