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chapter 17
THE BEGINNING OF THE EXTERMINATION
POLICY ON A EUROPEAN SCALE IN 1942
By the middle of 1942, the Nazi regime was to consolidate and unify the mass
murders that it had begun in the occupied Soviet territories in the summer of 1941,
and in certain other regions of Eastern and South-Eastern Europe, into a com-
prehensive programme for the systematic murder of the Jews under German rule.
The authorities gradually moved away from the idea that the mass murders were
anticipations of the ‘Final Solution’ that was to be carried out to its full extent only
after the end of the war; instead, in the middle of 1942, the conviction had become
established that the ‘Final Solution’ could be achieved by an intensification and
expansion of these murders during the war itself.
This transition to the systematic and comprehensive extermination of all Jews
under German rule contained a radical change in the idea of the temporal
sequence of the ‘Final Solution’, but at the same time it meant a change in the
context of justification into which the murders were placed. If the mass murder of
the Soviet Jews had originally been justified with reference to the extermination of
the Jewish-Bolshevik complex, as the war progressed the idea became increasingly
established that the systematic ‘cleansing’ of the country of all Jews was a first step
in the construction of an empire of Lebensraum built on a foundation of racism.
The deportation of the Jews of Central and Western Europe since autumn 1941
had in turn created ‘factual constraints’ in the deportation zones where there were
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no possibilities of accommodation and these, as we have seen, were used to justify
the murder of indigenous Jews.
Even during these first waves of murder in Eastern Europe a distinction had
been introduced between those elements who were ‘capable of work’ and those
who were not, and thus had begun in this way to erect a further context of
justification for the mass murders which was, from the spring of 1942, transferred
to the overall European extermination programme that was under way. The
idea—ignoring realities—of a gigantic Jewish ‘workforce’ provided a seemingly
rational justification for mass murder in two respects: Jews who were ‘capable of
work’ were ruthlessly deployed in forced labour in camps and ghettos until they
were fatally exhausted, while those Jews who were ‘incapable of work’ or ‘not
deployable’ were immediately killed as ‘useless mouths’.
The launch of the systematic Europe-wide murder of the Jews was a complex
process. In order to make it more comprehensible, in this chapter we will first
give an account of two interlinking processes that led to the extension of the
murders to the whole of Europe in the first months of 1942: first of all the
intention pursued by the SS since the beginning of 1942 to deploy Jews in large
numbers as forced labourers, and thus to kill them (‘extermination through
labour’); secondly, the intention closely connected with this, to murder Jews in
Poland who were ‘incapable of work’, an intention that had been realized in the
districts of Lublin and Galicia since March 1942 with the help of stationary gas
chambers; thirdly, the beginning of the deportations of the Jews from Central and
Western Europe from the spring of 1942 onwards, to the district of Lublin, the
zone which was at this time the centre of the extermination of the Polish Jews
and—where individuals ‘capable of work’ were concerned—to Majdanek and
Auschwitz concentration camps.
As we shall see in the course of this chapter, from May and June 1942 a series of
further developments began which made a crucial contribution to the further
intensification of the mass murders that had already begun, and to their extension
into the whole of Europe: first of all, the systematic murder of Jews from Central
and Eastern Europe who were not capable of work; secondly, the extension of
systematic mass murder to the whole of Poland and the renewal of major murder
actions in the occupied Soviet territories; thirdly, the spread of the deportations to
the extermination camps to the rest of Europe.
‘Extermination through Labour’
The SS had already developed the basis for a policy of ‘extermination through
work’1 in the late summer of 1941 in the occupied Soviet territories. The concept had been explicitly formulated by Einsatzgruppe C in September 1941, when they
suggested the ‘solution of the Jewish question by a large-scale work deployment
Extermination on a European Scale, 1942
315
of the Jews’, which would lead to ‘a gradual liquidation of Jewry’, and corre-
sponded to the ‘economic conditions of the country’. 2 In fact the Einsatzgruppen in the occupied Eastern territories had proceeded, to some extent since July and
more intensively since August and September 1941, to confine some of the Jewish
population in ghettos as part of the now systematic extermination policy, and to
use them as a labour pool.
This policy did not follow a fixed and detailed plan, but was a modification of
the extermination policy under the conditions of the protracted war; the removal
of the greatest possible number of Jews was to be harmonized with the rising
demand for labour. In this way a variant on the extermination policy came into
being: part of the Jewish population was progressively decimated by ‘work details’
that exceeded their physical capacities, by minimal food and care, and by constant
selection of those who were no longer ‘capable of work’ or no longer ‘needed’.
From autumn 1941, more intensively from spring 1942, the SS transferred this
system to other areas of their empire, namely the prisoners within the concentra-
tion camp system and the Jews in occupied Poland. With the beginning of the
‘Final Solution’—alongside the mass executions in the East, the progressive plans
for deportations from Central and Western Europe, and the ongoing construction
of extermination camps in Poland—a fourth complementary element was formed:
the murderous Jewish Arbeitseinatz (work programme), which became a pillar of
the extermination policy.
In autumn 1941 Himmler began to toy with the idea of mobilizing the potential
labour-force in the concentration camps with a view to the SS’s gigantic building
projects in the ‘Ostraum’. 3 On the one hand, he introduced measures to make forced labour in the concentration camps, which had hitherto constituted above
all a repressive measure, effective in economic terms. 4 On the other hand, in September 1941 Himmler received the Wehrmacht’s agreement that a large number of Soviet prisoners of war would be handed over to the SS; accordingly, he
ordered the expansion of the Auschwitz-Birkenau and Lublin-Majdanek concen-
tration camps to receive prisoners of war. 5 These prisoners were to be used for forced labour.
However, because of the mass deaths of the exhausted prisoners (a considerable
number of whom had also been executed in the wake of the camp selections
described above6) these plans collapsed. From late 1941 Himm
ler received no more
prisoners of war from the Wehrmacht. 7 After Hitler’s corresponding decision of general principle in October 1941, Soviet prisoners of war were indeed to be
deployed on a large scale in the German arms industry, but not within the
concentration camps. 8
But at the same time the SS saw an ever greater need for manpower, first
in connection with their peacetime construction programme, which will be
described below, and from the spring of 1942 increasingly also for the construction
of their own armaments production—a project that would finally fail in the face of
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Extermination of the European Jew, 1942–1945
resistance from industry. 9 Accordingly, the SS pressed ahead with revision of the whole work programme of concentration camp inmates towards a more efficient
exploitation of the inmate workforce. The organizational foundations for this
project were laid between January and March 1942, through the incorporation of
the two Main Offices, Budget and Buildings Main Office and Administration and
Business Main Office, and the Concentration Camp Inspectorate into the newly
formed SS Business and Administration Main office (WVHA) under Oswald
Pohl. 10
Around the New Year in 1942, the plans of the Budget and Buildings Main
Office were gradually taking shape for the peacetime building programme of the
SS and the police. Prompted by Himmler to plan as generously as possible, the SS
Main Office chief, Hans Kammler, submitted a building programme costing in the
region of 20 to 30 billion Reichsmarks, containing, in particular, the planned
settlements in the ‘Ostraum’. To be able to realize this programme, Kammler
planned to set up SS construction brigades consisting of ‘prisoners, prisoners of
war, Jews etc.’ totalling 175,000 men. 11
Himmler set out his ideas for an ‘economization’ of the concentration camp in a
note written in late March 1942, responding to statements by Kammler, now
director of construction in the WVHA. Here Himmler criticized the fact, for
example, that Kammler had set the work performance of a prisoner at only 50 per
cent of that of a German worker. It was precisely in the raising of the individual
performance rates of the prisoner workers, Himmler stressed, that ‘the greatest
pool of labour resides. The chance to extract it is given to the head of the ‘Business
and Administration Main Office’. 12 The WVHA’s director, Pohl, stressed this change in the concentration camp system, by now under way, in a report for
Himmler on 30 April: according to this report, the ‘preservation of prisoners only
for reasons of security, education, or prevention is no longer the priority’; it was
rather that the ‘emphasis [had] shifted to the economic side’. 13 In an order issued the same day14 Pohl made the concentration camp commandants ‘responsible for the deployment of the workforce. This deployment must be exhausting in the true
sense of the word in order to achieve the greatest possible performance.’
It is quite plain that the ‘exhausting’ work programme of the prisoners was an
obstacle to their economically effective use in the armaments industry, which
also proceeded correspondingly slowly in the spring of 1942. Because of under-
nourishment, the disastrous living conditions in the camps, and constant exces-
sive physical demands as well as the security provisions that obstructed the
running of the work programme, the prisoners were comparatively unproduct-
ive; despite low wages (which were to be paid to the SS), the deployment of
prisoners was relatively unprofitable from the point of view of the armaments
industry. 15 The SS did not take the route of encouraging greater output from prisoners by offering incentives, as had been successfully attempted with Soviet
prisoners in 1942. 16 The prevalent idea was to terrorize the prisoners into Extermination on a European Scale, 1942
317
achieving higher performance rates before replacing the soon exhausted slave
labourers by new workers.
This unproductive, lethal deployment of forced labourers in a time of mounting
labour shortages is often seen as confirmation of the unconditional precedence of
ideological motives over economic considerations within the Nazi system, and is
singled out for its profoundly irrational and self-destructive character. But iden-
tifying such an evident ‘discrepancy between the physical extermination of the
ideological adversary and the exploitation of his workforce to develop the arma-
ments industry’17 assumes a bipolarity between ‘world-view’ and ‘rationality’ that was alien to the world of the SS. If instead we start with the idea prevalent among
the SS leadership around the end of 1941 and beginning of 1942 that the occupation
and reordering of the ‘Ostraum’ was imminent, then the interconnection of terror
and total exploitation to death, the system of ‘extermination through work’
appears as a horribly consistent anticipation of the barbaric methods of rule
intended for the East. Just as the planned conquest in the East, which was to
ensure the rule of the ‘Aryan race’ for centuries to come, destroyed any economic
calculations, concerning the work of the prisoners too, the SS went far beyond any
considerations of profitability. This was made easier by the fact that the initial plan
was to deploy the prisoners for SS projects above all; at first the idea was
construction, then later SS armaments production. 18
From the point of view of the SS, mass murder and mass production were easily
linked with the system of ‘extermination through work’. The concentration camp
system could also be extended, and the proof for its adaptability to the conditions
of war demonstrated. Above all, ‘extermination through work’ could be used to
defuse the argument repeatedly levelled against the SS during their murder
campaigns in the Soviet Union: the ‘pointlessness’ of the extermination of
urgently required manpower. This was because with ‘extermination through
work’ a context was established that provided an ‘objective’ justification for the
extermination of people ‘unfit for work’.
When the plans for the deployment of prisoners as forced labourers became
gradually more concrete around the end of 1941 and the beginning of 1942, 19
Himmler showed himself determined to deploy a large number of Jewish
prisoners above all, especially in order to find a quick replacement for the Soviet
prisoners of war who were by now exhausted. In preparation for the planned
major construction and armaments tasks, on 26 January 1942 Himmler briefed the
head of Department D of the WVHA on its new tasks: ‘Since no more Russian
prisoners of war may be expected in the near future, I will send a large number of
Jews who have been emigrated [sic!] from Germany to the camps. Prepare to
receive 100,000 male and up to 50,000 female Jews in the concentration camps
within the next four weeks. Major economic tasks will confront the concentration
camps in the weeks to come. ’20 Over the next few months, in fact, the deportations from the Reich were to go to the district of Lublin, where some of those Jews
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Extermination of the European Jew, 1942–1945
‘capable of work’ had to perform forced labour in Majdan
ek and other camps. On
the other hand, several thousand Slovakian Jews were to be deported chiefly to
Auschwitz, where they were also to be deployed in forced labour projects. 21 Both camps had originally been intended to receive a large number of Soviet prisoners
of war. But it was to become apparent that apart from the goal of the economic
exploitation of the Jewish prisoners, Himmler achieved one thing above all with
this new policy: he created a pretext for the murder of the prisoners who were now
‘superfluous’, who were not used for the ‘work programme’.
We have access to a key document that reveals especially clearly the close
connection between ‘extermination through work’ and the murder of those
‘unfit for work’. It is a letter from the chief of the Gestapo, Müller, to the
commander of the Security Police in Riga, Karl Jäger, written on 18 May 1942.
In it he says that because of a ‘general (!) decree by the Reichsführer SS and head of
the German police’, ‘Jews between the ages of 16 and 32 are to be excluded from
the implementation of special measures until further instructions. These Jews are
to be added to the closed work programme. Concentration camp or labour camp.’
This exemption implicitly contains a reference to the fundamental guidelines that
existed for the treatment of older prisoners, younger prisoners unfit for work, and
children within the concentration camp system at this point in time: they were
subject to the ‘special measures’. We do not know whether Himmler’s order,
which Müller quotes here, the original of which has not yet been found, is more
precise with regard to the group of people to whom the exemption did not apply.
We will return to this subject elsewhere. 22
This order by Himmler came at a time when pressure on Jews still working in
German industry was constantly mounting. In March 1942, Goering had forbid-
den the deportation of this group, 23 but his prohibition had had very little effect, since the Reich Security Head Office (RSHA) interpreted the exemptions for those
Jews in the ‘closed strategic work programme vital to the war effort’ in an
increasingly restrictive way. 24 Goebbels’s diary entry for 29 May reveals that Hitler responded to the Propaganda Minister’s urging to commission Speer ‘to ensure as
Holocaust: The Nazi Persecution and Murder of the Jews Page 56