Holocaust: The Nazi Persecution and Murder of the Jews

by Peter Longerich

  institutions were created that were to organize the genocide during the war, and

  this was the period in which Judenpolitik was developed and radicalized and in

  which the regime learned how to deploy this new field of politics in a variety of

  ways for its own purposes.

  Introduction

  7

  The second effect of seeing the emergence of the ‘Final Solution’ as a complex

  process rather than as the outcome of a single decision, if we follow the suggestions of

  Gerlach, Aly, and others and take into consideration new thematic approaches to the

  analysis of the persecution of the Jews, is that it becomes necessary to see Judenpolitik as systematically interlinked with the other central thematic areas, notably in

  domestic policy but ultimately also with German hegemony on the continent of

  Europe. For the war years this means that we need to take account of German

  policies on alliances and inner repression across the whole of Europe, and of the

  issues of work, food production, and financing the war. It is necessary to show how

  these areas were redefined in a racist and specifically anti-Semitic sense, and to show

  how even during the war the Nazi system was attempting to establish the basis for a

  racist Imperium in which the murder of the Jews was the lowest common denom-

  inator in a series of alliances led by Germany. This implies, of course, a very broad

  programme of research that would exceed the scope of a single monograph. The

  present study will restrict itself to exploring in outline how such linkages functioned.

  Thirdly, if we accept that the decision-making process within Nazi Judenpolitik

  did not come to an end after the ‘Final Solution’ had been determined upon in

  principle but that after 1942 decisions were continually being reached that affected

  the lives of millions of people—in this case it is clear that the implementation of

  Judenpolitik was not only the result of priorities set by the leadership but was

  increasingly influenced by the behaviour of German allies, by the way that the

  local administration in occupied territories acted, and not least by the attitude of

  the local populations and the behaviour of Germany’s enemies.

  There is a further key factor to be considered, too. The Jewish population that in

  1941 faced the plans being made for the ‘Final Solution’ was defenceless and wholly

  unprepared, but in the second half of the war it too became an element that

  influenced the way the perpetrators proceeded. By fleeing, by seeking to escape

  persecution by living in a hide-away or underground, but also by negotiating with

  individuals or bribing them, they were attempting to slow down the inexorable

  process of annihilation and thereby—if only to a limited extent—influencing the

  behaviour of the perpetrators.

  Here research into the perpetrators reaches its limits, or in other words the

  further into the war is the stage that research concentrates on, the more difficult it

  becomes to reconstruct the development of the persecution and annihilation of

  the European Jews by concentrating exclusively on persecutors and their activities.

  This is not to say that concentrating on the persecutors in the period after 1942 is

  historiographically impossible or pointless, but that it is important to make

  precisely clear what the parameters are within which the perpetrators were able

  to act autonomously.

  Fourthly, if the history of the final solution is seen as a chain of ongoing

  decisions that together come to make up the full context of Judenpolitik, then

  the fate of the other groups persecuted by the Nazis must also be considered, or

  8

  Introduction

  considered at least in so far as they reveal direct comparisons with or information

  about the National Socialists’ Judenpolitik.

  These, then, are the fundamental ideas around which this book’s depiction of

  Judenpolitik in the years between 1933 and 1945 will be oriented. There is one

  further significant angle that needs to be considered in more detail, and it

  concerns the tricky nature of the available sources.

  As far as possible this study is based on primary sources. Alongside the

  documentary holdings of the German administrative departments that are housed

  in well-known archives in Germany and outside, this study will also consider the

  holdings of archives in the former Warsaw Pact states that since the 1990s have

  become accessible to scholars. In practical terms this primarily means Moscow’s

  ‘Special Archive’ where two collections have been used in some detail: the papers

  of the Central Association of German Citizens of the Jewish Faith—the Central-

  verein Deutscher Staatsbürger jüdischen Glaubens (hereafter referred to simply as

  the Centralverein)—which permits a far more detailed picture of the Nazis’

  persecution of the Jews in the period from 1933 to 1938 than has hitherto been

  available; and the papers of the Security Service of the SS (the Sicherheitsdienst, or

  SD), which cover the period from 1935 to 1940. In addition, papers from various

  other former Soviet, Polish, and Czech archives are considered, some of which

  were consulted from copies in Yad Vashem or the US Holocaust Museum in

  Washington.

  For my investigation of the radicalization of Jewish persecution in the occupied

  Soviet zones in the second half of 1941 I have made extensive use of papers from

  the Central Office for the Investigation of Nazi Crimes in Ludwigsburg (properly

  known as the Zentrale Stelle der Landesjustizverwaltungen zur Aufklärung nation-

  alsozialistischer Verbrechen) via the branch office there of the Bundesarchiv, or

  Federal Archive of Germany.

  Despite what is an almost unmanageably large quantity of documents available

  for the reconstruction of Nazi Judenpolitik, from the point of view of the central

  decision-making processes for the ‘Final Solution’ the state of source material can

  only be described as ‘patchy’. This is because the most important decisions that led

  to the murder of the European Jews were not usually written down; the perpet-

  rators also systematically attempted to destroy documents that reflected these

  decisions, and were largely successful in doing so. Documents that have nonetheless

  survived are scattered between archives in several different countries. In addition,

  documents relating to the murder of the Jews are written in a language designed to

  veil their true purpose. And finally, bringing these fragments together is a process

  that leaves plenty of room for interpretation: in my view the decisive question that

  such an interpretation has to address is that of the role of Judenpolitik within the

  overall political activity of the regime.

  Given these difficulties with source material, a precise reconstruction of the

  individual complexes of events and actions—including executions, deportations,

  Introduction

  9

  murders in the concentration camps, and so on—that together constitute the

  genocide perpetrated against the European Jews is indispensable for any analysis

  of the decision-making process. The disparate nature of the sources leaves us no

  alternative but to draw conclusions about decisions from a reconstruction of the

&nbs
p; individual acts that they gave rise to. Since this study is primarily a reconstruction

  of the decision-making process the account will necessarily appear somewhat

  imbalanced or one-sided: whenever the Nazis’ Judenpolitik enters a new phase the

  narrative will broaden out, but a policy once implemented will be described

  relatively briefly. In other words, this book is designed to be an analysis of

  Judenpolitik that goes back to the events themselves in the form of a schematic

  narrative and where possible only summarizes them when it is necessary to do so

  in order to reconstruct an aspect of Judenpolitik. The account of the gradual

  radicalization of the persecution of the Jews in the occupied territories of the

  Soviet Union will, for example, need considerably more space than the depiction

  of the rapidly executed deportations of the Hungarian Jews in 1944. However, this

  study is only one-sided in so far as it is chiefly concerned with the perpetrators

  and only takes account of the reactions of the victims or of third parties when their

  behaviour permits conclusions to be drawn about the perpetrators.

  This book first appeared in Germany in 1998 under the title Politik der

  Vernichtung. For this English edition, the whole of the original text was revised

  to take account of the latest scholarship in the field of Holocaust studies: the book

  has been significantly reworked, shortened in some places and extended in others.

  The cuts that were made chiefly affect Part I on the persecution of the Jews in

  Germany and Part III on the war against the Soviet Union. The sections that are

  new to this English version are on anti-Semitism in the Weimar Republic (Intro-

  duction), the removal of the Jews (Entjudung) from German society (Chapter 1),

  life in the Polish ghettos (Chapter 7), the Holocaust in Eastern Europe between

  1942 and 1944, and the end of the Holocaust (Part V).

  HISTORICAL BACKGROUND: ANTI-SEMITISM

  IN THE WEIMAR REPUBLIC

  This study begins with the first anti-Semitic measures taken by the National

  Socialists immediately after taking over government in 1933. These measures

  represent the end of the equality of citizenship that the Jews had enjoyed

  throughout Germany since 1871.

  By gradually removing the citizenship rights of German Jews the Nazis were

  fulfilling one of the principal demands that radical anti-Semites had been making

  since the 1870s. It is possible to trace a line of development that began with anti-

  Jewish agitation in the context of the so-called ‘Gründerkrach’ of 1873 (the stock-

  market crash that ended the period known as the ‘Foundation Years’) and

  continues in the anti-Semites’ petition of 1880/1 and in successful political candi-

  datures from anti-Semitic parties from the 1890s onwards. It was also manifested

  in strongly anti-Semitic agitation on the part of large professional interest groups

  at that period. The line could be traced further within the right-wing, ethnic

  nationalist movement known as the ‘völkische Bewegung’ that formed after the

  turn of the century and was highly charged with anti-Semitic sentiments, or with

  the simultaneous breakthrough of a biological-determinist concept of race in

  various branches of science, which lent spurious respectability to the nonsense

  talked about the Jewish ‘race’. 1 One could argue, too, that this line was continued in the anti-Semitic agitation at the end of the First World War, 2 and in the wave of anti-Semitic hate campaigns and violence in the immediate post-war period, until

  it culminates in the anti-Semitism of the NSDAP. In this manner a picture could

  be painted of a virtually constant stream of radical anti-Semitic movements that

  led inexorably to the anti-Semitic policies of the Nazis.

  However, this image of a clear, uninterrupted line of anti-Semitism in Germany

  is the result only of a superficial examination of history. It is important, too, to

  consider the political contexts in which such radically anti-Semitic movements

  developed. Despite its prominence in Imperial Germany, radical anti-Semitism was

  only a splinter-group and had no decisive influence on the political course of the

  German state. In comparison with contemporary manifestations of anti-Semitism

  Anti-Semitism in the Weimar Republic

  11

  in other European countries (such as Austria, Hungary, France, or Russia) it by no

  means represented a vibrant political force. The tide of anti-Semitic action was

  stemmed by the fact that whilst the political establishment—above all the power

  base in the Conservative Party—certainly cultivated anti-Semitism, it also resisted the

  repeal of Jewish emancipation: from a conservative perspective the emancipation of

  the Jews was a component of the compromise that lay at the foundation of the Empire

  and could not simply be ignored. Furthermore, the repeal of rights once granted could

  not easily be reconciled with the claims of the German Empire to be a state founded

  on the rule of law. Nationalist utopia and populist anti-Semitic agitation were in

  contradiction to the elitist political conception of many conservatives. 3

  With the end of the First World War, however, the context in which the

  nationalist radical anti-Semitic movement was to operate changed fundamentally.

  These new conditions for a breakthrough in radical anti-Semitism in Germany are

  much more important than the anti-Semitic tradition that can be traced back to

  the early years of the Second Empire. Two points are decisive with respect to the

  changed conditions that the end of the First World War brought about.

  The first is the completely new status that the radical anti-Semitic movement

  gained by virtue of a need to renew the basis of nationalism in Germany after its

  military defeat and the end of the Empire. 4 It was clear that the institutions of the Empire that had collapsed in 1918 (the monarchy, the Imperial government, and the

  army) could not represent German nationalism any longer and the ‘kleindeutsch’,

  Prussian-German interpretation of German history lost conviction with the end of

  Bismarck’s Empire. It was just as obvious that the old hierarchical structures of the

  Empire, the class society and the nation’s religious divide, were obstacles that would

  have to be comprehensively surmounted if national regeneration were to be possible. 5

  The various attempts to found a new German identity in place of imperial

  nationalism and create a strong enough sense of nation to overcome the traumatic

  defeat of 1918 shared one common element: a reversion to the idea of the people as

  the real source of national energy—or an attempt to found a new nation by

  regenerating the people and the ideas of nationhood that lay dormant in them. 6

  This regeneration could be directly linked to the recent experience of war by

  suggesting that it was in the trenches of the First World War that class boundaries

  had been dissolved and the nation reborn.

  The fact that this new attempt to found a sense of national identity from within

  the people was structured in großdeutsch or ‘greater German’ terms (as opposed to

  stemming from a kleindeutsch or ‘smaller German’ viewpoint) meant that it

  derived particularly explosive potential from the foreign-policy situation at the

  end of the war. Policy
framed in großdeutsch terms effectively gave Germany a

  stick of dynamite that could blow apart the new Central and Eastern European

  order that the treaties signed in the suburbs of Paris had created. In concrete

  terms, consideration was given to the incorporation of German-speaking

  Austrians and German minorities in Czechoslovakia, Poland, and the Baltic into

  12

  Historical Background

  a ‘greater German Reich’ which would at the same time take the German

  minorities in South-Eastern Europe ‘under its wing’.

  If during the years of the Weimar Republic a concept of nation based on the

  common ancestry and shared culture of the German people gradually gained accept-

  ance even amongst moderate right-wingers, an attitude such as this was relatively

  open to the ideas represented by the nationalist völkisch movement. 7 The rediscovery of the people via the ‘everyday anti-Semitism’ of the conservatives or the moderate

  right was distinct from the völkisch position largely because the latter defined the

  people using racist criteria, raised the idea of the regeneration of the German people to the level of an absolute good, and linked their programme of ‘purifying’ the German

  people of alien elements with visions of redemption. However, their point of reference

  was essentially the same as that of more moderate nationalism: the restitution of the

  ‘body of the people’ to full health. Above all a concept of nation that was based on

  common ancestry and shared culture remained open to the kind of radical anti-

  Semitism propounded by the völkisch movement and especially to the argument that

  Jews did not form a proper part of the community of the German people because of

  their distinct culture and alien ancestry. Before 1918 the völkisch idea was mostly the

  province of sectarians, outsiders, and nutcases, but this new context gave it the chance

  to take centre stage in the process of founding a new German national identity.

  The second decisive aspect of the changed conditions in Germany after the First

  World War was the shift in the relationship of radical anti-Semitic groups to the

  state. Before 1914 they had in principle been loyal to the system, or in other words

  they reckoned that the institutions of Imperial Germany would ultimately be