by Yitzhak Arad
The total deportation of the Jews from the ghettos of the General Government, as planned by the SS authorities, produced economic dislocations and a shortage of manpower. On June 22, 1942, Max Frauendorfer, the director of the labor department of the General Government, spoke about these difficulties at a meeting of German high officials in Cracow. He said that out of the manpower sources of the General Government, about 100,000 skilled workers were employed in the arms industry, 800,000 workers were sent for work to Germany, and 100,000 workers were employed by the military authorities. Therefore, he “is now entirely dependent on Jewish labor. This point of view is shared also by the arms inspector of the General Government, General Lieutenant Max Schindler. Because of the shortage of Polish skilled workers, the Jews are irreplaceable. Indeed, they should not be excluded from the actions carried out by the SS, but in wartime, their labor should be exploited.”4
In mid-July 1942, on the eve of the “great expulsion” of the Jews from Warsaw, the largest ghetto in Europe, Himmler visited the Operation Reinhard death camps in the Lublin area. He closed his tour with a visit to operation headquarters in Lublin. Discussions with Globocnik led Himmler to conclude that with the completion of the three death camps, the Operation Reinhard staff was equipped with the means and facilities for the extermination of the Jews of the General Government. While still in Lublin, on July 19, Himmler issued an order to complete the deportation of all the Jews from the General Government to the death camps by December 31, 1942. By the time he issued the order, hundreds of thousands of Jews in the General Government had already been deported and murdered in the death camps. This order was intended to provide the “legal” basis for the deportations and killings already carried out, as well as for future operations. But to solve the manpower problem raised by this order, some camps where working Jews were to be kept had to be erected in the main towns of the General Government. Himmler’s order was sent to SS Obergruppenführer Friedrich Krüger, and it stated:
I herewith order that the resettlement of the entire Jewish population of the General Government be carried out and completed by December 31, 1942.
From December 31, 1942, no persons of Jewish origin may remain within the General Government, unless they are in the collection camps in Warsaw, Cracow, Czestochowa, Radom, and Lublin. All other work on which Jewish labor is employed must be finished by that date, or, in the event that this is not possible, it must be transferred to one of the collection camps.
These measures are required with a view to the necessary ethnic division of races and peoples for the New Order in Europe, and also in the interests of the security and cleanliness of the German Reich and its sphere of interest. Every breach of this regulation spells a danger to quiet and order in the entire German sphere of interest, a point of application for the resistance movement and a source of moral and physical pestilence.
For all these reasons a total cleansing is necessary and therefore to be carried out. Cases in which the date set cannot be observed will be reported to me in time, so that I can see to corrective action at an early date. All requests by other offices for changes or permits for exceptions to be made must be presented to me personally.5
Globocnik and his men on the Operation Reinhard staff received Himmler’s order to eliminate the Jews of the General Government with great satisfaction. A few days after the July 22, 1942, visit, Globocnik wrote to the head of Himmler’s personal staff, SS Obergruppenführer Karl Wolff: “. . . The SS Reichsführer was just here and gave us so many new tasks that from now on all our hidden ambitions will be directed toward carrying them out. I am so thankful to him for this that he can rest assured that the thing he is interested in will be executed in the shortest time.”6
Himmler’s order, however, met with objection from German army authorities, who had been using Jewish forced labor in their industrial enterprises and workshops. General Kurt von Gienanth, commander of the Military District of the General Government, sent a memorandum to the General Staff on September 18, 1942:
. . . The evacuation of the Jews without advance notice to most sections of the Wehrmacht has caused great difficulties in the replacement of labor and delay in correct production for military purposes. Work for the SS, with priority “Winter,” cannot be completed in time.
According to the figures supplied by the [General] Government’s central department of labor, manpower in industry totals a little over a million, of which 300,000 are Jews. The latter include roughly 100,000 skilled workers.
In the enterprises working for the Wehrmacht, the proportion of Jews among the skilled workers varies from 25 to 100 percent; it is 100 percent in the textile factories producing winter clothing. . . .
The immediate removal of the Jews would cause a considerable reduction in Germany’s war potential, and supplies to the front and to the troops in the General Government would be held up, at least for the time being. . . .
Unless work of military importance is to suffer, Jews cannot be released until replacements have been trained, and then only step by step. . . .
It is requested that the orders be carried out in this manner. The general policy will be to eliminate the Jews from work as quickly as possible without harming work of military importance. . . .
It is requested that the evacuation of Jews employed in industrial enterprises be postponed until this has been done.7
General von Gienanth’s memorandum was handed over by the German General Staff to Himmler. Himmler’s reply of October 9, 1942, stated:
Secret
With reference to the memorandum from the Commander of the Military District [Wehrkreisbefehlshaber] in the General Government to the OKW [High Command of the Wehrmacht] concerning the replacement of Jewish labor by Poles, I have the following comments:
1. I have given orders that all so-called armament workers who are actually employed solely in tailoring, furrier, and shoemaking workshops be collected in concentration camps on the spot, i.e., in Warsaw and Lublin, under the direction of SS Obergruppenführer [Friedrich] Krüger and SS Obergruppenführer [Oswald] Pohl. The Wehrmacht will send its orders to us, and we guarantee the continuous delivery of the items of clothing required. I have issued instructions, however, that ruthless steps be taken against all those who consider they should oppose this move in the alleged interest of armament needs, but who in reality only seek to support the Jews and their own businesses.
2. Jews in real war industries, i.e., armament workshops, vehicle workshops, etc., are to be withdrawn step by step. . . .
3. Our endeavor will then be to replace this Jewish labor force with Poles and to consolidate most of these Jewish concentration-camp enterprises into a small number of large Jewish concentration-camp enterprises—in the eastern part of the General Government, if possible. But there, too, in accordance with the wish of the Führer, the Jews are some day to disappear.
[signed] H. Himmler8
The request by the German army caused changes and delays in carrying out the total elimination of the ghettos and the extermination of their inhabitants, but it did not change their final fate—to be wiped out entirely. This was Hitler’s wish, and Himmler and his men carried it out enthusiastically.
The German army and civilian authorities did not object in principle to the liquidation of the Jews in the General Government. Their objections were temporary and relevant to only a small segment of the victims, and were based on immediate manpower needs. When it came to the actual deportations, the SS authorities received all the help they needed from the civilian and military authorities; this included the vital transportation necessary for the task.
The Deportation Trains
The deportation of the Jews to the death camps was based on railway transportation. The railways in the General Government were run by the “Generaldirektion der Ostbahn” (Directorate General of the Eastern Railroad), called “Gedob” for short. This organization, headed by Dr. Adolf Gerteis, operated the expropriated Polish railways. It was subordinate, o
perationally, to the German railways (the Reichsbahn), which were under the Ministry of Transport. Transports to the German eastern front (i.e., the Soviet Union) and military supplies crossed through the area of the General Government and came under the jurisdiction of Gedob. Gedob’s headquarters were in Cracow, but there were five distinct operational branches: in Cracow, Lublin, Radom, Warsaw, and Lvov. Personnel included about 9,000 Germans, 145,000 Poles, and a few thousand Ukrainians.9
Gedob was responsible for the allocation of trains for deportations within the framework of Operation Reinhard. It had to coordinate the traffic schedule with the SS authorities in charge of the deportations to determine at which railway stations the trains were to be waiting, the number of freight cars needed, the timetable, and the destinations of the trains. Gedob was in charge of planning the traffic schedule in accordance with military and other important priorities and of carrying out the transportation of the deported Jews from the embarkation stations, which were close to where they lived, to the death camps.
The trains with Jewish deportees were classified “special trains” (Sonderzüge). Usually they were closed freight cars; only on rare occasions did Jews travel in open cars. But, as a rule, each train included one or two passenger cars for the guards attached to the transport.
Within Gedob, Department V (Operations), headed by Erwin Massute, and, subordinate to him, Section 33, were in charge of the “special trains.” Railway-inspector Stier was the man directly responsible for them.10 The requests for the trains came from the SS and Police Leaders in charge of the deportation of the Jews from their districts. It was their duty to bring the Jewish deportees to the railway station, to supervise the embarkation, and to provide the police escort for the trains heading for the death camps.
The legal basis for the allocation of “special trains” for “resettlement” purposes was Hitler’s secret order of October 7, 1939, which had appointed Himmler “Reich Commissar for the Strengthening of German Nationhood” (Reichskommissar für die Festigung deutschen Volkstum—RKF). This order imposed on Himmler three main tasks:
1. the repatriation of persons of German race and nationality resident abroad and considered suitable for permanent return to the Reich;
2. the elimination of the injurious influence of those sections of the population which were of foreign origin and constituted a danger to the Reich and the German community; and
3. the formation of new German settlement areas by means of transfer of population.11
To carry out these tasks, Himmler was authorized by this decree to issue directives to all the governing authorities in the Third Reich and to take any administrative measures he considered necessary. Among other things, this order obliged the Ministry of Transport of Germany to meet Himmler’s demands for trains for the purpose of resettlement and deportation. Dr. Leibrand, head of the Operations Department in this ministry, sent a telegram to Gedob authorizing it to meet transport requests for resettlement. Himmler empowered the Higher SS and Police Leaders to submit their requests for trains directly to the railway authorities.12
During the first four months of Operation Reinhard, from the middle of March to the end of July 1942, when only Belzec and Sobibor were active, there were some transport problems and difficulties in getting the trains needed for the deportations. Although the number of trains requested during that period was small—because of the relatively limited killing capacity of the gas chambers in Belzec and Sobibor at that time—requests could not be met by the transportation authorities. At a conference of the highest German officials in the General Government, held by Hans Frank in Cracow on June 18, 1942, the problem of the lack of trains and the request to speed up the deportation of the Jews were raised. This conference was attended by the heads of the five districts, by Higher SS and Police Leader Krüger, and by the SS and Police Leaders of the districts. Krüger responded to complaints by the civilian authorities that the deportation of the Jews was going too slowly by stating that the police were prepared for a wider scale of deportations but the shortage of trains was causing delays. He promised that in the weeks and months to come the situation would improve.13 At that time the German army was engaged in a major offensive on the eastern front directed at the Volga and Caucasus, and the German railways were heavily burdened with military traffic. As a result there were difficulties in allocating trains for the deportation of the Jews.
After Himmler’s order of July 19, 1942, to complete the “resettlement” (i.e., extermination) of the Jewish population within the framework of Operation Reinhard by the end of that year, and especially with the beginning of the mass expulsion from the Warsaw ghetto to Treblinka, transportation problems became acute. Himmler, who had checked out the transport problems during his visit to Operation Reinhard headquarters in July 1942, ordered his chief of personal staff, SS Obergruppenführer Karl Wolff, to contact the Secretary of State of the Ministry of Transport, Dr. Theodor Ganzenmüller, on the matter. In his testimony at Ganzenmüller’s trial, Wolff told of a phone conversation he had had with the accused on July 16, 1942:
In July 1942, while I was at the Führer’s headquarters, Himmler ordered me to contact Secretary of State Dr. Ganzenmüller and inform him that serious transportation difficulties had arisen in the course of the concentration of Jews from several ghettos to one central place near Lublin. Complaints had been received from those responsible for the operation, the SS and Police Chief in Poland SS Obergruppenführer Krüger and Lublin Police Chief SS Brigadeführer Globocnik. The SS Reichsführer has ordered me to request most urgently that Secretary of State Dr. Ganzenmüller personally ask those responsible for railroads in the General Government to eliminate these transportation difficulties as quickly as possible. . . .14
Dr. Ganzenmüller responded to Himmler’s request, and in a letter to Karl Wolff on July 27, 1942, wrote:
Since July 22, a train load of 5,000 Jews has departed daily from Warsaw via Malkinia to Treblinka, and in addition a train load of 5,000 Jews has left Przemysl twice a week for Belzec. . . .
Gedob is in constant contact with the Security Police in Cracow. It has been agreed that the transports from Warsaw through Lublin to Sobibor be suspended for as long as the reconstruction works on that section make those transports impossible (approximately until October 1942). These trains have been agreed upon with the commander of the Security Police in the General Government, and SS Brigadeführer Globocnik has been advised.
Heil Hitler!
Yours faithfully,
[Ganzenmüller]15
In reply, Wolff wrote Ganzenmüller on August 13, 1942: “Hearty thanks, in the name of the Reichsführer SS, for your letter of July 28, 1942. With great joy I learned from your announcement that, for the past fourteen days, a train has gone daily to Treblinka with 5,000 ‘members of the chosen people’ (Angehörige des auserwählten Volkes).”16
To work out the transportation requirements for the deportation of an additional 600,000 Jews from the General Government and the expulsion of 200,000 Jews from Rumania to Belzec, a conference was held at the Ministry of Transport in Berlin on September 26 and 28, 1942. At this conference, attended by Eichmann or Rolf Günther from the IV B 4 Gestapo, Stier of Gedob, and headed by Klem of the Ministry of Transport, the following was decided:
Evacuation of the Polish Jews
Urgent transports as proposed by the Chief of the Security Police and the SD:
2 trains daily from the Warsaw district to Treblinka
1 train daily from the Radom district to Treblinka
1 train daily from the Cracow district to Belzec
1 train daily from the Lvov district to Belzec
These transports will be carried out with the 200 freight cars already made available for this purpose by order of the Directorate of the German railways in Cracow, as far as this is possible.
Upon completion of the repair of the Lublin-Chelm line, about November 1942, the other urgent transports will also be carried out. These are:
1 train daily from the north Lublin district to Belzec
1 train daily from the central Lublin district to Sobibor
insofar as this is practicable and the required number of freight cars are available. With the reduction of the transport of potatoes, it is expected that it will be possible for the special train service to be able to place at the disposal of the Directorate of the German railway in Cracow the necessary freight cars. Thus the train transportation required will be available in accordance with the above proposals and the plan completed this year.17
These decisions afforded the transportation requests of the SS authorities high priority. As the distances from the ghettos to the death camps, according to the deportation plans of Operation Reinhard, were not great—on the average, between 100 and 120 kms—the two hundred freight cars allocated within the General Government could transfer as many as 25,000 Jews daily. With the solution of the transport problems, Himmler’s order to complete Operation Reinhard by the end of 1942 could be realized.