Holocaust: The Nazi Persecution and Murder of the Jews
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quickly as possible that Jews employed in the German armaments business be
replaced by foreign workers’. 25 In view of the transport moratorium imposed in mid-June, the RSHA initially deported mainly elderly Jews to Theresienstadt, but
in September 1942 Hitler was to stress once again, at a conference on armaments,
that ‘withdrawing the Jews from the armaments factories in the Reich’ was of
prime importance. 26
But it was not only the concentration camp system that was restructured
through the policy of ‘extermination through work’ between autumn 1941 and
spring 1942. The impact of the new policy may also be observed in occupied
Poland, both in annexed Upper Silesia and in the General Government.
We have already described how in the camps of the Schmelt Organization in
Upper Silesia, which held 30,000 to 40,000 Jewish forced labourers in spring 1942,
Extermination on a European Scale, 1942
319
selections had been carried out since November 1941, sporadically at first, but soon
systematically, and those no longer fit for work were brought to Auschwitz, where
they were murdered. 27
In the ghettos and labour camps of the General Government there had also
been high mortality rates before, but that had been part of the German policy of
general decimation of the Jewish population, in which the ‘Final Solution’ had
been deferred until the post-war period. Initially from autumn 1941, but more
intensively from spring 1942, the system of ‘extermination through work’, along-
side the gas chambers, executions, and deportations, became a leading element in
the systematic murder of the Jews of the General Government.
In autumn 1941 in the district of Galicia, the SS launched what was probably
the largest forced labour project in which a Jewish labour-force was deployed:
the expansion of the strategically important road connection from Lemberg
(Lvov) towards the Donets basin, known as Durchgangsstrasse (transit road)
IV (DG IV). 28 In October 1941 Fritz Katzmann, the SSPF of the district of Galicia, had thousands of Jews put in concentration camps to work on road
construction under the most severe conditions. Katzmann’s verbal instruction to
the director of the camp was to shoot any Jews who were unfit for work or who
tried to escape, and to kill hostages for any escapees who were not caught; the
number of victims was a matter of indifference. Early in 1942 Himmler trans-
ferred to a series of SSPFs responsibility for the extension of further sections of
DG IV in the Ukraine, and on 7 February he transferred the overall running of
the project to the HSSPF of Ukraine and southern Russia, Prützmann. An order
issued by the Führer on 19 February placed extremely high priority on the
expansion of major communications, including the DG IV.
Using key German workers, members of the OT, about 50,000 Ukrainian
forced labourers, as many prisoners of war, and some 10,000 Jews were deployed
on DG IV in 1942. The existence of some thirty camps for Jewish workers in the
construction sector has been demonstrated, and some twenty more on the
Ukrainian part of the road. 29 The running of the extremely primitive camps, in which disastrous conditions prevailed, was placed in the hands of members of the
SS and the police; in some cases it was also exercised by OT staff, and the camps
were guarded by police and local guard units. After all those new prisoners who
arrived in the camp who were ‘not fit for work’ (old people, children, the sick) had
been singled out and murdered, camp inmates were constantly being shot for
inadequate levels of work, minor infringements of camp regulations, or purely on
a whim. When the work came to an end late in 1943/early in 1944, other large-scale
shootings occurred. Eighty-four shootings have been identified, in which some
25,000 Jews were murdered. 30
The forced labour project for the expansion of DG IV can be seen as a
pilot project for the takeover of all the forced labour in the General Government
by the SS and police leaders in spring/summer 1942. As we will show, 31
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Extermination of the European Jew, 1942–1945
the ‘deployment’ of Jewish workers did not, from the point of view of
the SS leadership, contradict the extermination policy, but formed an integral
part of it.
Deportations from Central and Western Europe
The deportations which resumed on a large scale in 1942 were preceded in January
and February 1942 by a series of public declarations by Hitler, in which he
unambiguously recalled his ‘prophecy’ of January 1939, that in the event of a new
‘world war’ the Jews would be ‘exterminated’. Pertinent passages appear both in his
New Year proclamation, 32 his speech in the Sportpalast on the anniversary of the
‘seizure of power’, 33 and in his declaration on the occasion of the celebration of the twenty-second anniversary of the Party’s Foundation on 24 February 1942.34 The fact that with America’s entry into the war National Socialist Germany was
actually waging a world war, Hitler’s constant habit of dating his prophecy to
the day of the outbreak of war, and the fact that he now no longer spoke of
‘destroying’ (vernichten), but of ‘exterminating’ (ausrotten), gave his threat a
particular emphasis.
The Third and Fourth Wave of Deportation from the
Greater German Reich
The further deportations from the Reich, which began in substantial numbers in
the spring of 1942, were announced in a dispatch from Eichmann to the Gestapo
regional and district headquarters dated 31 January 1942.35 In it he wrote that the
‘recent evacuation of Jews to the East carried out in individual areas’ represented
‘the beginning of the final solution of the Jewish question in the Old Reich, the
Ostmark, and the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia’. However, at that point,
‘only some state police [Gestapo] headquarters could be involved in view of
limited reception possibilities in the East and difficulties with transport’. But
‘new reception possibilities [would be] worked on with the aim of deporting
further contingents of Jews’.
The dispatch also identified those groups of people who were not yet to be
deported: Jews living in ‘mixed marriages’, Jews of foreign citizenship (excluding
stateless Jews as well as those of former Polish and Luxembourg citizenship); ‘Jews
in closed strategic work programmes’ as well as the elderly and the frail. The
separation of married couples as well as the separation from their families of
children up to the age of 14 years was to be avoided.
On 6 March 1942 Eichmann held a meeting with the representatives of the
Gestapo headquarters or Gestapo offices which were entrusted with the task of
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321
carrying out the deportations. Here it became clear that by this time a further
Reich-wide deportation programme had been established. 36 Eichmann announced that at first 55,000 Jews would be deported from the Reich territory including the
‘Ostmark’ and the Protectorate: 20,000 Jews were to be evacuated from Prague,
18,000 from Vienna. ‘The size of the other transports conforms proportionally to
the numbers
of Jews still present in each State Police office/headquarters precinct.’
Individually, the transports could not be assigned a precise time. All that was
available were ‘empty “Russian trains”/worker transports to the Old Reich, which
were going back empty to the General Government and will now be used by the
RSHA with the agreement of the OKH’.
Eichmann also announced that it was intended that most of the Jews left in
the Old Reich would in all likelihood be deported to Theresienstadt in the course
of the summer or the autumn. Theresienstadt was being cleared at the time,
and ‘15–20,000 Jews from the Protectorate could move there temporarily’. This
would be done, Eichmann added, in order to ‘preserve outward appearances’—a
reference to the fact that the RSHA had internally reached the conclusion that the
pretext for the deportations, the supposed ‘work programme’ in the East, could be
easily seen through if, as had happened previously, old people were also deported
to the East European ghettos.
The third wave of deportations from the Reich was in the end to last from
mid-March to mid-June, and there are at least forty-three transports that are
individually known about; it may, however, have been over sixty, so that, if we
assume an average of 1,000 people per transport, a figure on the scale cited by
Eichmann of 55,000 deportees would probably have been reached. 37
The identifiable transports came primarily from the areas of the Old Reich that
were considered to be in danger from air raids (twenty-three trains) and from the
Protectorate (fourteen trains from Theresienstadt as well as one from Prague).
They were destined for a series of ghettos in the district of Lublin (particularly
Izbica, Piaski, Zamozc), whose inhabitants had been murdered in Belzec a short
time previously. Four transports ended in the Warsaw ghetto. 38 As a rule the deportation trains from the Reich stopped in Lublin, where men who were
assessed as ‘fit for work’ were taken from the trains and brought to the Majdanek
camp. 39
Hence the pattern of deportations of the Central European Jews and the murder
of the Jews of Eastern Europe corresponded to events already described that took
place in Lodz, Riga, and Minsk. The living conditions in the ghettos of the General
Government led to the miserable death of by far the majority of deportees within a
few months. Those who did not die in the ghettos were generally deported to the
extermination camps in the General Government.
The surviving documents of the German administration in the district of Lublin
indicate that here—under the designation ‘Judenaustausch’ (exchange of Jews)—the
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indigenous Jews were ‘taken out’ of the individual communities (i.e. sent to Belzec),
and replaced by ‘Reich Jews’. 40
The ‘Judenreferent’ (expert on Jewish affairs) of the SSPF Lublin and coordin-
ator of the deportation and extermination programme in the district, Hans Höfle,
asked the district administration on 16 March, in other words immediately before
the arrival of the first transports, ‘whether 60,000 Jews could be unloaded on the
stretch between Lublin and Trawniki’. 41 As surprising as this announcement was, over the next few months the district administration was only informed at short
notice about the arriving trains, whose inmates it then distributed summarily, and
in agreement with the SSPF (Höfle), to the Jewish residential quarters, which he
had recently ‘cleared’. 42 Through this improvised procedure and the chaotic conditions that prevailed as a result of it, the district administration was placed
under the pressure of artificially created ‘factual constraints’; the deportations of
the indigenous Jews, who had to make way for the impending arrival of the ‘Reich
Jews’, thus appeared as the inevitable consequence of a decision that had been
made outside their own sphere of responsibility.
Towards the end of the third wave of deportations, in June 1942, some trans-
ports had been assembled that deviated from the previous pattern: on 10 June 1942,
in ‘retaliation’ for the death of Heydrich, 1,000 Jews were deported from Prague
to Majdanek and placed both there and in the camps in the surrounding area. 43
Finally, from mid-June the last transports of the third wave were directed
towards Sobibor extermination camp, where the majority of deportees were
murdered in the gas chambers, after even smaller groups of people had been
taken off the trains during a stop in Lublin. This is attested with certainty for a
transport from Theresienstadt, one from Berlin and one from Vienna, which
arrived in Sobibor between 15 and 19 June. It is possible that exactly the same
fate befell the people on two further Theresienstadt transports which reached
the district of Lublin on 15 and 16 June. 44 As early as 18 May, however, half of a group of around 800 people who had been deported from Theresienstadt to
Siedliszcze, had been brought to Sobibor along with the indigenous Jews and
murdered there. 45
But the actual turning point in the deportation practice occurred only in the
middle of June 1942: only from that point onwards were Jews on the trains from
the Reich, after the selection of those ‘fit for work’ in Lublin, generally sent directly to the extermination camps.
While the third wave continued, in May 1942 a fourth wave of deportations
arrived from the Reich, destined for the occupied Eastern regions. As already
described, the deportations to Minsk planned during the second wave were
interrupted in November 1941, and only continued until February 1942 in the
case of Riga. The transports to Minsk now resumed; between May and September,
in at least seventeen transports, 46 some 16,000 people were deported from the territory of the ‘Greater German Reich’, interrupted only from mid-June to
Extermination on a European Scale, 1942
323
mid-July by a military transport moratorium: now those deported to Minsk were
no longer confined to the ghetto, and instead the trains were moved on to a stop
near the estate of Maly Trostinets, where from 11 May 1942 almost all deportees
were shot on the spot or murdered in gas vans. 47 In April 1942 Heydrich is supposed to have announced the resumption of deportations and the impending
murders during a visit to Minsk. 48
Thus, with the deportations to Minsk in May and the transports to Sobibor in
mid-June, a new phase of the extermination policy began. Now the deportees were
no longer accommodated temporarily in ghettos or labour camps, before perish-
ing as a result of the disastrous living conditions, or being murdered in an
extermination camp on the grounds that they were no longer ‘fit for work’; now
the great majority of deportees were shot directly at the end of the journey or
suffocated in gas vans. The previous pattern, according to which the indigenous
Jews were deported to the extermination camps to ‘make room’ for the Jews
arriving from the Reich had thus been abandoned. The murder machinery was
thus completely freed from the context of ‘resettlement’, ‘expulsion’, and ‘work
programme’; the goal, the death of the deportees, thus emerged with even greater
clarity.
As long as the murder machinery was contained within the old pattern, it was at
least possible to maintain the fiction that the murders were the result of ‘factual
constraints’ produced by ‘resettlement’ and the ‘work programme’: the ‘clearing’
of the ghettos for the suddenly arriving deportees; execution of deportees from the
Reich because there were no adequate reception facilities (as in Riga and Kovno
(Kaunas) in late 1941); the selection of those no longer fit for work, as ‘room was
needed’ again, and ‘no food was available’; ruthless deployment for forced labour
in the service of the war economy; renewed selection. Because of the systematically
excessive demands made upon them the local offices of the civil administration
and the security police were placed in situations that spasmodically required more
and more radical solutions, or which offered them a framework of action in which
such radical solutions could be presented as ‘factually justified’.
The transport moratorium introduced for the West–East railway in June saw
the start of the deportations of those people from the Reich who, as Eichmann had
announced in January, had for various reason been exempted from the ‘Eastern
transports’; these were elderly and frail people, decorated veterans with their wives
and children under the age of 14, and Jewish spouses from a ‘mixed marriage’ that
no longer existed, who were freed from labelling regulations, as well as single ‘half-
breeds’ who were ‘deemed’ to be Jews under the Nuremberg Laws. These deport-
ations went to Theresienstadt, 49 which served not only as the ‘old people’s ghetto’
for German Jews, but also above all as a transit camp for those deported from the
Protectorate, who numbered around 74,000. 50
In June and July 1942 a total of sixteen special trains each carrying about 1,000
elderly people from the Reich set off for Theresienstadt; after a further timetable
324
Extermination of the European Jew, 1942–1945
programme decided in early August, twenty-one further special trains followed
between mid-August and early October. On top of this, because of the transport