Holocaust: The Nazi Persecution and Murder of the Jews (95 page)

population in the Warthegau should be ‘reduced’ by 100,000 ‘in compensation

for’ the reception of Jews from the Reich in Lodz, that is these people were to be

killed with gas vans. Further large-scale massacres were carried out until the end

of 1941 among the local Jewish population in the other sites destined to receive

Jews from the Reich, namely the ghettos of Minsk and Riga. When Einsatzkom-

mando 2 began shooting thousands of Jews deported from the Reich immediately

after their arrival in Riga or Kovno (Kaunas), the murder of the Reich German

Jews was suspended by a direct intervention from Himmler. Thus, a distinction

was still being made between the Eastern European and Central European Jews.

In the General Government too, particularly in the district of Lublin, prepar-

ations for a mass murder of the local Jewish population began in October 1941.

Previously, the government of the General Government had been informed that

they could not expect to deport any more Jews eastwards from that territory for

the foreseeable future. In October preparations began for the construction of the

first extermination camp at Belzec, and at, the same time, with the so-called

‘Schiessbefehl’ (order to shoot on sight) the death penalty was introduced for

leaving the ghetto. The goal of these measures was to murder the Jewish popula-

tion that were ‘unfit to work’, initially in the district of Lublin. These plans may

also have applied to the district of Galicia, which had only been part of the General

Government since 1 August and where, like the Einsatzgruppen in the other

occupied territories, the Security Police had been carrying out similar massacres

among the Jewish civilian population since October. References to the construc-

tion of an extermination camp in Lemberg (Lvov) are significant in this context.

However, the construction of an extermination camp in Belzec (and possible plans

for Lemberg) cannot be seen as specifically intended for the murder of the entire

Jewish population of the General Government. The occupying forces initially

concentrated on making preparations for those Jews who were ‘unfit for work’

in the district of Lublin, where a third wave of deportations was expected the

following spring. Thus, in autumn 1941 the murder of hundreds of thousands of

people had been planned, but not yet of millions. As far as the fate of the

remaining Polish and other European Jews was concerned, the older plan of a

mass deportation to the Soviet Union (with ultimately genocidal consequences)

428

Conclusion

had not yet been abandoned. At any rate a dynamic of mass murder had now been

set in motion, which could only have been halted by a radical change of direction

in the regime’s Judenpolitik.

In the autumn/winter of 1941 facilities for killing with gas were established not

only in Belzec (and possibly in Lemberg) as they had been in Chelmno. Further

possible locations have been identified through plans for the installation of such

facilities in Riga, and corresponding references to Mogilev (not far from Minsk).

There is also the offer that Himmler made to the Slovakian head of state on

20 October, to deport Slovakian Jews to a particularly remote area of the General

Government, possibly the basis for the construction of the second extermination

camp at Sobibor. The use of gas as a means of killing had thus initially begun in

the planned deportation zones. Parallel with this we should consider the events in

Serbia, where the Wehrmacht began systematically shooting Jewish men and

Gypsies in October. In November the military administration in France also

began deliberately to direct their retaliatory measures against Jews, who were to

be transported to the East as hostages. In October, November, and December

threatening statements by National Socialists also accumulated concerning the

deadly fate that awaited the Jews.

As confusing as the overall picture may seem at first sight, it does become clear

that, within the space of a few weeks in autumn 1941, German organizations in

various occupied territories began to react with remarkable similarity to the new

situation in Judenpolitik created by Hitler’s September decision to deport the

German and Czech Jews, by organizing mass shootings (Galicia, Serbia), deploy-

ing gas vans (Warthegau) or preparing the construction of extermination camps

(district of Lublin, Auschwitz, Riga, possibly Mogilev-Belarus).

If we see these activities in context, it becomes irrefutably clear that the German

power holders on the ‘periphery’ were always acting in the context of an overall

policy guided by the ‘centre’, meaning Hitler and the SS leadership. The centre was

always in a position to prevent an escalation of a policy which it found undesir-

able, as is demonstrated for example by Himmler putting a halt to the murders of

Reich German Jews in the Ostland in late November 1941.

However, the centre was only able to guide this process and set it in motion

because it knew that impulses issuing from the centre were picked up with great

independent initiative by the authorities in the ‘periphery’. Just as the extension of

the shootings to women and children in the Soviet Union from the summer of

1941 onwards was not simply ordered, the extension of the mass murders to

particular regions of occupied Europe in autumn 1941 also required a very

complicated interaction between the centre and the executive organizations,

involving orders and guidelines from the centre, as well as independent initiatives

and intuition on the part of the regional power holders, which were finally

channelled and coordinated by the centre, albeit at a much higher level of

radicalization.

Conclusion

429

The Wannsee Conference of 20 January 1942 provides an important insight into

the RSHA’s policy of consolidating the various approaches for an extension of the

murders and thereby designing a comprehensive programme for the impending

‘Final Solution’. While, on the one hand, the Germans continued to adhere to the

old programme of deporting all Jews to the occupied Eastern territories after the

end of the war, they were already engaging with the new prospect of implementing

ever larger stages of the ‘Final Solution’ even during the war, although the murder

method was not yet entirely clear. The idea of a gigantic forced labour programme

developed by Heydrich, with deadly consequences for those affected, may well in

fact have reflected ideas actually held within the RSHA.

From the autumn of 1941 the SS had also developed the perfidious system of

‘extermination through work’. Within this system, not only were many people

worked to death in a very short time, but it also meant that a hurdle had been

erected that those people who were no longer fit for work, or who were not capable

of being deployed, were unable to surmount. The perfidious nature of the system

of ‘extermination through work’ was also particularly apparent where there were

only a few forced labour projects for Jews, or none at all, as it provided a pretext

for marking out those Jews who were ‘non-deployable’ as ‘superfluous’. Jewish

‘work deployment’ formed an important complementary element in the early

phase of the ‘Final Solution’.

In the first months of 1942, the deportations were extended in accordance with

the declarations of intent made at the Wannsee Conference. In March 1942

Eichmann announced a third wave of deportations involving a total of 55,000

people from the territory of the ‘Greater German Reich’. This third wave actually

began on 20 March 1942 and lasted until the end of June. Its destination was

ghettos in the district of Lublin, the original ‘Jewish reservation’.

Now, at the beginning of March 1942, a decision must again have been made to

practice mass murder in the reception zone, in the district of Lublin. This decision

also applied to the adjacent district of Galicia. In the eyes of the Nazi leadership

Galicia represented something like an advance base for the planned New Order of

Lebensraum in the East and, since the autumn of the previous year, had been

already the scene of large-scale mass shootings.

The statement in Goebbels’s diaries that the intention was to murder 60 per

cent of the Jews living in the two districts is particularly important here. The

decision to implement mass murder in the two districts, made early in March, had

been prepared since October 1941 by SSPF Globocnik, who was responsible for

this mass murder in both districts. The measures taken in the district of Lublin

demonstrate important parallels with the mass murder of the Jews in the Warthe-

gau, which was also introduced in autumn 1941, although unlike Greiser Globoc-

nik used stationary gas chambers. As in the Warthegau, and as in Riga and Minsk,

the mass murder of the indigenous Jews in the district of Lublin was directly

linked to the deportations from the Reich.

430

Conclusion

With the start of the third wave of deportations to the district of Lublin and the

completion of the first extermination camp in the General Government the option

of a later resettlement to the East had been definitively abandoned. Most of the

people deported to the district of Lublin died miserably in the ghettos after a short

time, or were also deported to extermination camps. However the façade of a

programme of resettlement and work deployment was maintained. During this

third wave of deportations, which occurred between March and June, the RSHA

prepared a Europe-wide deportation programme conceived on a much larger

scale.

Between 25 March 1942 and the end of June, 50,000 Jews were deported from

Slovakia to Auschwitz concentration camp on the basis of the agreements with the

Slovakian government. The deportation of hostages from France to Auschwitz

also began in March 1942.

It is clear from a remark by Heydrich to Tuka on 10 April that these first

deportations from territories outside the ‘Greater German Reich’ were already

part of a Europe-wide programme. According to this, it was planned initially to

deport to the East half a million Jews from Slovakia, the Reich, the Protectorate,

The Netherlands, Belgium, and France.

This introduced the fourth stage of escalation in the transition to the ‘Final

Solution’. Now, in spring 1942, the previous scheme for the deportation of Central

European Jews to particular areas in which the indigenous Jews had first been

murdered was abandoned. In late April/early May the decision must evidently

have been made henceforth to murder Jews indiscriminately.

It can be assumed that in late April or May the Nazi regime made the decision

to extend the mass murder of the Jews, which was already in progress in the

districts of Lublin and Galicia, to the whole of the General Government. At the

same time, the decision must have been made to implement a mass murder

among the Jews of annexed Upper Silesia. The systematic mass murder of the

Jews in the General Government began in June, but was then interrupted for a few

weeks because of the transport ban. The transport ban, introduced because of the

offensive in the East, finally had a radicalizing effect on the extermination policy: it

accelerated the deportations from the Western territories, and, during this period,

the planners of the mass murder clearly had an opportunity to rethink and

consolidate their ideas so that the overall programme could resume in July with

much more devastating effect. It was during this phase that the SS took over

Jewish forced labour in the General Government and thus maintained control

over those prisoners who were ‘fit for work’ and so initially excluded from

extermination.

At around the same time as this fundamental decision regarding the Jews in the

General Government, at any rate before mid-May, significant decisions must have

been made as a result of which the operation of the extermination machinery was

further extended. On the one hand, it was decided that the deportations from the

Conclusion

431

territory of the ‘Greater German Reich’ should be intensified beyond the quota set

in March, and on the other the regime now set about murdering either all or

almost all of the Jews deported from Central Europe when the transports arrived

at their destinations in Eastern Europe. This happened to Jews deported from the

Reich in Minsk from mid-May, and from early June in Sobibor to the Jews

deported from Slovakia.

It can be assumed that on 17 April 1942 Himmler had already ordered the

murder of over 10,000 Central European Jews still living in the Lodz ghetto, who

had been deported there in October 1941 and survived the inhuman conditions in

the ghetto.

With these decisions, probably made in the second half of April or early May,

which came into effect in May/June, the Nazi regime definitively abandoned the

idea of a ‘reservation’ in the eastern area of the General Government or

the occupied Eastern territories which had increasingly become a fiction given

the mass murder that was already under way. The link between this renewed