Historian: Nazis wanted to deport all Jews to Siberia and Ukraine

The Nazis wanted to deport all Jews to the Soviet Union, a newly discovered document suggests. Russian historian Pavel Polian, now a professor at the University of Freiburg in Germany, said that Third Reich officials apparently approached Moscow in early 1940 with the idea of deporting all Jews in the German Reich to Birobidjan, a Siberian area that Stalin had designated as a Jewish autonomous region, and to western Ukraine. Two letters, one from Berlin and another from Vienna, are mentioned in the February 1940 correspondence from Yevgeny Chekmenyov, of Moscow’s Department of Resettlement, to Viatcheslav Molotov, then foreign minister and head of the Soviet government. In Chekmenyov’s letter, found in the Russian national archive, Molotov's advice is sought on how to answer the German request. Polian suggests the enclosures to the letters, so far not found, were written by Adolf Eichmann and Alois Brunner, responsible for Jewish immigration in Berlin and Vienna, respectively. The Nazis considered several resettlement proposals, including sending all Jews to Madagascar, before starting their extermination policy.