Holocaust: The Nazi Persecution and Murder of the Jews

by Peter Longerich

  as possible must be seen as part of the escalation of the extermination policy

  directed against the Jews throughout the whole of Europe; we have already

  examined the measures that applied to the German Reich and Slovakia, and in

  the following sections we shall describe the corresponding radicalization in

  Eastern Europe.

  On 27 June, Carltheo Zeitschel, the fanatical ‘Jewish expert’ within the German

  embassy and liaison with the SD, noted of a conversation with Dannecker that

  the latter required ‘50,000 Jews to be transported from the unoccupied territory

  to the East as soon as possible’. 92 In negotiations with HSSPF Carl Oberg, the chief of police of the Vichy government, René Bousquet, declared himself willing,

  at the beginning of July, to arrest stateless or foreign Jews in the unoccupied zone

  as well as to make the police under his command available for the arrest of Jews

  in the occupied zone; this collaboration, however, would also be limited to

  foreign or stateless Jews. 93 (‘Stateless’ referred in particular to those Jews who had lost their citizenship as a result of German race legislation or the events of

  the war.) The Vichy government acceded to this outcome of the negotions. 94 But at this point Dannecker, Eichmann’s Jewish expert in France, was working on the

  assumption, as he reported to Berlin, that in a ‘2nd phase’ those Jews naturalized

  as a result of the French immigration legislation of 1919 and 1927 ‘could be

  tackled’. 95

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  Extermination of the European Jew, 1942–1945

  The ‘Final Solution’ in Eastern Europe 1942

  Poland

  The Deportations from the Districts of Lublin and Galicia to the

  Extermination Camps of Belzec and Sobibor

  On 20 January 1942 the population and welfare department of the General

  Government demanded that its offices attached to the district governors ‘send a

  list of ghettos in their district as soon as possible’, and forward their population

  figures. 96 These statistics had already been used in the preparation for the deportations in the districts of Lublin and Galicia.

  They could start on this since Belzec extermination camp, the construction of

  which had begun the previous November, was completed in March 1942. Belzec,

  in the south-eastern part of the district of Lublin, directly on the railway line to

  Lemberg (Lvov) was to be the prototype of the extermination camps built in the

  General Government. It covered a relatively small area, a rectangle with sides

  about 270 m long, and initially consisted of a barrack with three gas chambers.

  The staff consisted of 20 to 30 Germans, and 90 to 120 so called ‘Trawnikis’: Soviet

  prisoners of war, Ukrainians, and ethnic Germans who had passed through the

  Trawniki SS training camp in the district of Lublin, run by Globocnik. Apart from

  that, there was a Jewish work unit in Belzec whose members were repeatedly

  replaced by newly arrived prisoners and murdered.

  A spur line made it possible to move railway wagons directly into the camp.

  Here the victims were led to believe that they were in a transit camp. Men,

  woman, and children were separated; they had to undress, hand over their

  valuable objects, women had their hair cut off. The people were then driven

  naked along a narrow, fenced path, known as the ‘Schlauch’, or ‘tube’, to the gas

  chambers, which were disguised as shower rooms. An engine produced the

  deadly exhaust fumes which would generally kill the victims in an agonizing

  way within 20 to 30 minutes. 97 Jewish forced labourers then had to take the corpses of the murdered people out of the gas chambers and transport them to

  the large graves in the camp grounds, which had been dug by Jewish forced

  labourers in 1940.

  In the district of Lublin the deportations began in mid-March: between 16 March

  and 20 April the ghetto in the district capital, Lublin, was almost completely cleared

  in two phases. 98 This enterprise was run by SS and police chief Odilo Globocnik and by units of the Security Police, the Order Police, and Trawniki men, while the civil

  administration provided essential support. 99 Himmler had stayed there immediately before the beginning of the clearance of the Lublin ghetto, which marks the

  beginning of the systematic murder of the Jews in the General Government and

  Extermination on a European Scale, 1942

  331

  became the model for many similar ‘campaigns’. He had met HSSPF Friedrich

  Krüger in Lublin on 13 March, and Globocnik the following day. 100

  During the clearance of the Lublin ghetto, many people had already been shot

  within the ghetto; a few thousand people were retained in situ as a workforce, and

  some 30,000 were deported to Belzec, where they were murdered. The fiction of a

  ‘resettlement’ to the occupied Eastern territories was outwardly maintained, but

  within a short time information about the fate of the deportees within the whole of

  the General Government filtered out into the Reich. 101 Thus, for example, the propaganda minister, Goebbels, was informed about the murders in the district of

  Lublin as early as 27 March, as his diary reveals: ‘Starting with Lublin, the Jews are

  now being deported from the General Government to the East. A rather barbaric

  procedure is being applied, one which should not be described in greater detail,

  and little remains of the Jews themselves.’ Goebbels’s remark that ‘60% of them

  must be liquidated, while only another 40% can be deployed in work’ provides a

  significant indication of current German plans. The ghettos in the General

  Government that were being ‘vacated’, Goebbels went on, would ‘now be filled

  with Jews deported from the Reich, and the procedure is to be repeated there after

  a certain time’. 102

  A statement by Eichmann to the Israeli police also reveals that Globocnik had

  been given the task of murdering the majority of the Jews in the district, namely

  those ‘incapable of work’. According to Eichmann’s information, once the mass

  murder had already begun, Globocnik had acquired Heydrich’s authorization to

  kill a further 150,000, probably 250,000 people. 103 The statement by Christian Wirth’s adjutant, Joset Oberhauser, according to which initially only ‘Jews from

  various ghettos who are unfit for work should be liquidated’, points in the same

  direction, and it was only in April or May that Globocnik was given the order

  ‘systematically to exterminate the Jews’. 104

  In parallel with the start of the clearance of the ghetto of Lublin came the

  deportation of Jews from the Reich and Slovakia to the district of Lublin, which

  had already been set aside for the planned ‘Jewish reservation’ since autumn 1939.

  As we have already described, the people deported to the district were accommo-

  dated in places from which the local Jews deemed ‘unfit for work’ were deported to

  Belzec. These deportations from the rural areas of the district began on 24 March.

  By mid-April some 14,000 Jews had been deported from these small communities

  to Belzec; then the extermination camp was temporarily closed. The reasons for

  this are not entirely clear. It is possible that Wirth, who had built the camp and

  run it during its first phase, saw his task as over; he had at first only been delegated

  to Globocnik by the T4 programm
e. 105

  In mid-March, in the district of Galicia, too, a new wave of mass murders began

  and, for the first time, deportations to extermination camps. From mid-March

  until early April 1942 about 15,000 people, inhabitants of the ghetto of Lemberg

  (Lvov) who were deemed ‘incapable of work’, were deported to Belzec. Further

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  Extermination of the European Jew, 1942–1945

  thousands of inhabitants from the smaller ghettos of the district took the same

  journey between mid-March and around 8/9 April, while thousands more from

  these ghettos were murdered on the spot. 106 These deportations were also directed by Globocnik’s staff.

  The systematic clearance of the Kreise (counties) began in the district of Lublin,

  independently of the arrival of Jews from other countries and even before the civil

  administration could begin to record all Jews capable of work. The victims—apart

  from about 2,000 forced labourers who were deported to Majdanek—were sent to

  Sobibor, the second extermination camp in the General Government, which had

  been built in the meantime and the construction and operation of which was

  based on Belzec. 107 Belzec, on the other hand, as mentioned above, had initially been shut down in the middle of April. More than 55,000 people fell victim to this

  wave of deportations, which was interrupted on 10 June. The deportations from

  the district of Lublin would not be resumed until August/September. 108

  Extension of the Murders to the Other Districts

  The temporary stop to the deportations from the district of Lublin in early June is

  likely to have been due to the decision to extend the mass murder of the Jews to the

  whole of the General Government. The deportations now encompassed the district

  of Cracow, while Globocnik’s specialists will probably already have been engaged

  with the preparations for the deportations from other districts, namely Warsaw. This

  decision quickly to extend mass murder to the other districts can only be recon-

  structed on the basis of the course of the deportations. It must have happened

  between the attack on Heydrich on 27 May and his death on 4 June. Himmler’s

  address to SS and police leaders at Heydrich’s funeral in Berlin on 9 June contains an

  important indication of such a momentous decision: ‘Within a year we will definitely

  have completed the mass migration of the Jews; then no more will migrate.’ 109

  With the appointment of HSSPF Krüger as state secretary for security issues in

  the General Government in May 1942 the weight of the SS had decisively grown

  compared to that of the civil administration. In particular, Krüger was assigned

  responsibility for all ‘Jewish affairs’ by the implementation order of 3 June, which

  concerned his new position as state secretary. 110 In this way, the SS had created the organizational preconditions for the murder of all the Jews in the General

  Government by means of a combination of executions, deportations to particular

  extermination camps, and forced labour.

  The murder of the Jews throughout the General Government—like the mass

  murders in the districts of Lublin and Galicia—was to be organized by Globocnik’s

  staff. The whole campaign was run under the heading ‘Aktion Reinhardt’ or

  ‘Aktion Reinhard’, a posthumous tribute to Reinhard Heydrich, who had died on

  4 June 1942 as the result of an assassination attempt some days previously. 111

  Individually, the ‘Reinhardt Actions’ encompassed the extermination of the Jews

  Extermination on a European Scale, 1942

  333

  of the General Government and the district of Bialystok in the three extermination

  camps of Belzec, Sobibor, and Treblinka as well as in Majdanek; it also included the

  murder of other Jews in these camps as well as the utilization of the goods and

  chattels of those who had been murdered, as well as the deployment of the Jews for

  forced labour. 112

  On 3 June 1942, the day when Krüger’s authority was decisively extended,

  Globocnik sent Himmler several memos concerning ‘ethnic policy’ in the district

  of Lublin. The content of these memos is not known in detail, but two of these

  papers concerned the fate of the Jews, 113 another the issue of ‘German-ness’

  (Deutschtum). Himmler only returned to these proposals during a further meeting

  with Globocnik on 9 July. In the meantime—from about 19 June until 7 July—

  because of the imminent offensives in the East a general transport moratorium

  had been imposed, and Himmler was also preoccupied with other issues because

  of the death of Heydrich. 114

  On 18 June a police meeting in Cracow agreed, as Krüger put it, that the

  ‘problem of Jewish resettlement urgently requires a decision’. Once the transport

  moratorium was over, ‘the Jewish campaign must be stepped up’. 115 At this meeting, representatives of the civil administration, the district chiefs Ludwig

  Losacker (Galicia), Herbert Hummel (Warsaw), and Michael Oswald (Radom)

  pressed for an acceleration of the deportations, particularly, as the arguments

  presented had it, in order to tackle ‘smuggling’ more effectively, and avoid

  in advance any problems with the imminent ‘harvesting’; Hummel wanted to

  remove those Jews who were ‘unfit for work’ from the Warsaw ghetto ‘within a

  reasonable time’, in order to increase the profits of the ghetto industry still further.

  On 22 June, at a meeting of heads of the main departments, Krüger again urged

  those in charge of the General Government to intensify measures against ‘the

  Jews’; he encountered resistance from the head of the Main Labour Department,

  Dr Max Frauendorfer, who warned that a ‘resettlement of the Jews’ will ‘have

  profound effects on all sectors of public life’; in his plea for the preservation of

  Jewish workers, Frauenhofer referred expressly to Himmler, Speer, and Sauckel. 116

  The civil administration thus wanted to speed up the deportations for reasons of

  food and ‘security’, but to keep the workers in the ghettos and camps. A few weeks

  later Krüger was to take over the issue of Jewish forced labour in the General

  Government and ignore such considerations.

  A few days previously, on 12 June, Himmler had ordered that the measures

  for the ‘Germanization’ of large areas in the East, including the General

  Government, be implemented at a faster rate, within twenty years. Early in

  July Krüger suggested that the General Government be designated for settlement

  by Germans. 117

  Meanwhile, since the end of May, and increasingly since the temporary sus-

  pension of the deportations in Lublin district on 10 June, more than 16,000 Jews

  had been deported from the district of Crakow to Belzec and murdered, until these

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  Extermination of the European Jew, 1942–1945

  deportations were suspended because of the transport moratorium on 19 June. 118

  In Belzec the murders had been resumed, after Wirth, who had left the camp in

  April 1942, had returned to Belzec at the end of May; his return was clearly

  connected with the assignment of additional T4 staff to the General Government

  as agreed by Himmler and Brack with the Chancellery of the Führer of the

  NSDAP. 119 In May, or by the beginning of June at the latest, work had begun on the th
ird extermination camp, Treblinka in the district of Warsaw. 120 In the district of Radom by mid-June all the preparations had been made for a

  deportation of the Jews living there. 121

  The murder of the Jews in the General Government had not by any means been

  interrupted by the transport moratorium. In the district of Lublin, for example,

  numerous small ‘actions’ took place, but also mass executions, as for example—

  between June and September—in Tyszowcew, Josefow, Lomazy, Serokomla, and

  Biala Podlaska with a total of 3,500 victims. 122 In the district of Galicia, too, the mass executions were continued. 123

  The transport moratorium also meant the end of the deportations from the

  Reich and Slovakia to the district of Lublin. All the transports from Slovakia now

  went directly to Auschwitz, where the greater proportion of deportees, beginning

  with the transport of 4 July, was directly murdered in the gas chambers without

  even being admitted to the camp. After the lifting of the transport moratorium the

  deportations from the Reich went above all to Minsk and, over the months that

  followed, to Riga, Treblinka, and Auschwitz.

  After the lifting of the transport moratorium the overall situation within the

  General Government emerged as follows: in the second week of July, the trans-

  ports from the district of Cracow to Belzec were resumed, after the transport

  moratorium had been used to extend the capacity of the gas chambers there by a

  considerable amount. On the other hand, Sobibor became inoperative because of

  repairs on the railway tracks until the beginning of October, and here too the

  pause was used to build additional gas chambers. 124 The transports from the district of Cracow lasted until November, with the bulk of the deportations

  concentrated in August and September. 125

  Meanwhile the decisive preconditions for the initiation of the deportations had

  also been created in the other districts. Himmler played a central part in this. After

  heralding, on 9 June, the end of the Jewish ‘mass migration’ within a year, he now

  seemed to have staked everything on accelerating the murder of the Jews of the