Holocaust: The Nazi Persecution and Murder of the Jews

by Peter Longerich

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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

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  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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  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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  ‘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