Holocaust: The Nazi Persecution and Murder of the Jews

by Peter Longerich

  perpetrators.

  So the pattern of ‘major actions’ running according to plan and almost entirely

  smoothly, which characterized the liquidations of the Polish ghettos in 1942,

  would not be repeated in the occupied Soviet territories. Just as resistance on a

  large scale was only possible here because of the experiences of the first wave of

  murders that happened in 1941, in Poland the experiences of 1942 resulted during

  the following year in the final ‘liquidations’ of the ghettos also encountering

  massive resistance in some cases. Thus, the crucial precondition for the emergence

  of an armed resistance movement was always the particular concrete experience of

  the German policy of extermination.

  Interim Summary: The Escalation of the Extermination

  Policy in Spring/Summer 1942

  In describing events in Eastern Europe we have already cast our eye over the whole

  of 1942, as the wave of murders that began in the spring, was intensified through-

  out the rest of the year, and finally encompassed almost the whole of German-

  occupied Polish and Soviet territory, had to be seen in context. In this context we

  should like to return once more to the first months of 1942 and analyse the way in

  which this wave of killing was set in motion and attempt to reconstruct the

  decision-making process underlying these events.

  For spring and summer 1942 a chain of events and developments may be

  reconstructed which, seen in context, represent a crucial escalation of anti-

  Semitic policy: the mass murders already under way or definitely planned in

  the Soviet Union and in certain other regions (Warthegau, the districts of

  Lublin and Galicia, Serbia), and the deportations that had been started or

  prepared since autumn 1941 were now linked together and extended into a

  Europe-wide programme of the systematic murder of all Jewish people living

  in that space.

  Since autumn 1941, a general rethink had begun among those involved in

  Judenpolitik in a process that can no longer be fathomed in all its details: reacting

  to the mass murders in Eastern Europe, the main players reached the conviction

  that the ‘Final Solution’, which had originally been envisaged as the European

  Jews slowly dying out in an inhospitable territory somewhere in the ‘East’, could

  be at least partially carried out during the war, that it could be anticipated by

  killing as many Jews as possible through a combination of inhuman living and

  working conditions and direct murder actions. During the winter of 1941/2 and

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  the spring of 1942 the comprehensive plan emerged, presumably in stages, to kill

  all the Jews in Europe if possible during the war. In parallel with this establish-

  ment of the temporal horizon, ideas crystallized about where and how this

  genocide was to occur: in occupied Poland, with the aid of poison gas.

  We can reconstruct three stages in the process by which the genocidal ideas

  assumed concrete form: between December 1941 and January 1942 Hitler gave

  clear signals that after the war had expanded into a world war Judenpolitik should

  be further radicalized to include the ‘extermination’ of the Jews on a large scale.

  During the Wannsee Conference, Heydrich still assumed a gigantic deportation

  programme towards the occupied Eastern territitories, which could only be

  realized to its full extent after the end of the war. But his address also reveals

  that the leadership’s ideas of how the deportees would die had in the meantime

  assumed concrete form: from now on the plan included a combination of ‘exter-

  mination through work’ and mass murder of those who survived the exertions

  and clearly also those who were ‘unfit for work’. Apart from this, there had already

  been talk at the Wannsee Conference of taking the Polish Jews out of the planned

  deportation programme and murdering them on the spot, and the murder

  methods had also been discussed.

  The second stage of this radicalization process can be dated to March. Now the

  policy of systematic extermination that had also been introduced in Poland in

  autumn 1941 was extended to the district of Lublin and to Galicia, while at the

  same time the deportations, which had also begun in autumn 1941, were extended

  to other territories in Central and Western Europe.

  In the middle of March 1942 the murder of the majority of the Jews in the

  districts of Lublin and Galicia was set in motion. Here the murder quota of 60 per

  cent cited by Goebbels is particularly important. Globocnik had already begun the

  corresponding preparatory work—the construction of Belzec extermination

  camp—in October 1941. The mass murder of the Jews of the Warthegau had

  also been initiated in October 1941, the murders in Chelmno began at the

  beginning of December. In both cases the mass murders occurred in connection

  with the deportations from the Reich. In the meantime, at the latest by the

  beginning of March, the RSHA had established an initial plan for a third wave

  of deportations for the Jews of the Reich (including the Protectorate), to occur in

  early March; in the course of this a total of 55,000 people were to be deported to

  the General Government, particularly the district of Lublin. This programme

  began in March.

  In parallel with this, in February, Germany developed a programme together

  with Slovakia that was initially to cover the deportation of 20,000 Jews, but which

  was extended at the end of March, at Himmler’s urging, to all the Jews living in

  that country. The destinations of the deportations were the district of Lublin and

  Auschwitz concentration camp. The Jewish hostages from France were also

  deported to Auschwitz from March onwards.

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  Clearly the mass murders in the district of Lublin and the deportations from the

  Reich and Slovakia to that area were linked. The old ‘reservation plan’ had been

  revived, according to which ‘room was made’ in the ghettos of the district through

  mass murders. A decision to link deportations and mass murder in this way must

  at any rate have been made before the beginning of March.

  From Heydrich’s statements during his visit to Tuka in early April we know

  that the deportations from the Reich and Slovakia were already part of an overall

  plan, presumably developed in March, for the deportation of around 500,000

  people from Central and Western Europe, for which, however, no concrete time

  frame can be demonstrated at this point.

  Even more serious, however, is the third stage of this process of radicalization,

  which was prepared at the end of April and came into full effect in May and June.

  Only now were the regional murders linked into a programme of systematic

  murder of the European Jews covering the whole of Europe.

  In early May the deportations from the district of Lublin were expanded with

  the systematic clearance of the counties (Kreise). At the end of May, with the

  deportations from the district of Krakau (Gracow), there began the extension of

  the murders to the other territories within the General Government, until in July

  and August the di
stricts of Warsaw and Radom were also included. The signifi-

  cant preparatory measures for this extension of the murders to the whole of the

  General Government included the extension of Krüger’s powers in May/early

  June and the start of the construction of Treblinka in May or June at the latest. So

  the corresponding decisions must have been made before May. At about the same

  time the decision must have been made to carry out a mass murder among the

  Jews of annexed Upper Silesia, to which tens of thousands of people fell victim

  between May and August. However, because of the transport moratorium, the

  mass murder of the Jews of the General Government could not begin to its full

  extent until July. Finally, the transport moratorium had a radicalizing effect on the

  development of mass murder. It accelerated the deportations from the western

  territories and the planners of the mass murder entered something like a phase of

  consolidation after which the whole programme was resumed with much greater

  impetus in July.

  At around the same time as this fundamental decision concerning the Jews in the

  General Government, at least before mid-May, a further momentous decision must

  have been made: the deportations of Jews from Central Europe were increased

  beyond the quota cited in March, and most or all of these people were murdered

  when the transports arrived at their destinations. This was the fate suffered by the

  Jews arriving from the Reich to Minsk from mid-May onwards, and the deportees

  from Slovakia from the beginning of June in Sobibor. And the great majority of

  those Jews who had been deported to Lodz from the Reich in autumn 1941 were

  now, in the first half of May, deported to Chelmno in a series of transports and

  murdered there.

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  359

  In parallel with these events, the mass murder of the Soviet Jews which had

  begun in the summer of 1941 was given a fresh impulse in May 1942: now the

  murders began on a large scale again, before leading in the summer to the total

  extermination of the indigenous Jewish population.

  The decision-making process underlying the systematic genocide remains

  largely obscure and must be reconstructed from the course of events. The entries

  in Himmler’s office diary for late April provide an initial clue: Himmler met

  Heydrich a total of seven times over only eight days between late April and early

  May 1942 in three different places (Berlin, Munich, and Prague). This unusually

  intensive series of discussions is framed by two lengthy meetings that Himmler

  had with Hitler on 23 April and 3 May 1942 in the Führer’s headquarters. 257 The attempt on Heydrich’s life and his subsequent death (27 May and 4 June) must

  have had a further radicalizing effect on this decision-making process; we need

  only recall Himmler’s announcement at Heydrich’s funeral on 4 June that he

  would end the Jewish ‘migration’ within a year.

  At the beginning of June the RSHA established a concrete deportation

  programme for the West which was to be realized within three months from

  mid-July. With this Western programme the plans which first became apparent

  in early April were realized and adapted to the conditions introduced by the

  transport moratorium in the East in June/July. But, as early as June 1942

  Himmler demanded the speedy and complete deportation of all the Jews in

  France.

  The people in these transports from the West, the Slovakian Jews, who from

  early July onwards were transported to Auschwitz in the wake of the transport

  moratorium and those Jews from the Reich who, starting with the first transport

  from Vienna on 17 July, arrived in Auschwitz, met with the same fate: from 4 July

  onwards most of them were, in so far as they were ‘unfit for work’, murdered in

  the two hastily erected makeshift gas chambers, Bunkers I and II.

  In the middle of July, after the end of the transport moratorium, the deport-

  ation and murder programme had been set fully in motion. Now, during a visit to

  Globocnik on 19 July, Himmler established a concrete timetable for the major part

  of this programme, the extermination of the Jews of the General Government.

  This was a day after he had visited Auschwitz and three days after he had, at the

  Führer’s headquarters, demanded increased transport opportunities from the

  Reich railways. By the end of the year, the Jews of the General Government

  would have been murdered, apart from a few people who were fit for work and

  were to be placed under the control of the SS.

  At about the same time, the decision must have been made to send almost all

  further transports from the Reich directly to the extermination camps and no

  longer to ghettos.

  Finally, as will be outlined in the next section, already in the summer of 1942 the

  Germans had introduced the crucial steps to extend the deportation programme

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  Extermination of the European Jew, 1942–1945

  beyond Eastern Europe. While the occupation authorities in Western Europe set

  about undertaking deportations beyond the quota of 125,000 people for 1942

  decided in June, in July the German government approached its allies, Romania,

  Bulgaria, Croatia, Hungary, and Finland, to secure the deportation of the Jews

  living in those countries.

  Deportations from the Occupied Western Territories

  in the Second Half of 1942

  Continuation of the Deportations from France

  After six deportation trains carrying some 6,000 Jews had already set off from

  France to Auschwitz between March and early July 1942, and with the SS having

  established plans for the deportation of a total of 125,000 people from France,

  Belgium, and the Netherlands in June, between 19 July and 7 August a further ten

  transports carrying a total of around 10,000 people set off for Auschwitz. These

  deportees, ‘stateless Jews’, had been arrested in Paris during a major raid on 16 and

  17 July. 258 The age limit for the deportation had now been raised to 55 for women and 60 for men. The inmates of these transports were now, as the Jews from

  Slovakia had been, subjected to a selection in Auschwitz; after that those people

  deemed ‘unfit for work’ were murdered in the gas chambers immediately upon

  their arrival.

  In August, as agreed with the Vichy government in July, the deportations of the

  stateless Jews from the unoccupied zone began (Transports 17–19). After Himmler

  had agreed to a suggestion from the French Prime Minister, Pierre Laval, in early

  July that children under the age of 16 should also be included in the deportations,

  between 17 and 26 August over 2,000 children whose parents had already been

  taken to Auschwitz in the previous transports were also deported with the

  following five transports. Transports 24–39 (their departure dates were between

  26 August and 30 September 1942) were stopped at Kosel in Silesia, where men

  who were fit for work had to leave the trains to be deployed as forced labourers

  with the ‘Schmelt Organization’. 259

  At a meeting held in his office on 28 August Eichmann demanded that all

  stateless Jews be removed from France by the end of October 1942 (after that the

  deportations had to be
postponed until February); along with the 25,000 people

  deported already that meant a further 50,000 people. ‘The end of June ’43’,

  Eichmann continued, was envisaged as a ‘final deadline for the evacuation of

  the remaining foreign Jews’. 260

  In order to guarantee this quota of deportations, at the end of August more than

  6,500 stateless Jews had been arrested in the unoccupied zone, who were deported

  during the following months, along with around 3,000 Jews of foreign origin who

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  361

  had been kept in internment camps in the south of France for a long time. These

  included a large number of children who had been separated from their

  mothers. 261 As these deportations met with strong hostility from the French population and led to the open opposition of the Church, at the beginning of

  September 1942 the Vichy government made it clear to the Germans that further

  arrests and deportations could no longer be carried out in the unoccupied zone.

  Since HSSPF Oberg, in view of the general political situation in France, and with

  regard for President Laval’s domestic prestige, had secured a decision from

  Himmler that no French citizens were to be deported from the occupied zone

  for the time being, 262 the occupation authorities now arrested foreign Jews in the occupied zone (Greeks and Romanians above all), who were deported in

  November in four further transports. After this came the expected halt in deport-

  ations until February 1943. The total figure of deportees from France for 1942 was

  approximately 42,000.263

  Extension of the Deportations to the Netherlands and Belgium

  Since the summer of 1940 the occupation administration had begun to introduce

  the anti-Jewish measures customary in German-occupied territory into the

  Netherlands as well: a definition of Jews on the model of the Nuremberg Laws

  was introduced; Jewish officials were dismissed from public service, a Jewish

  council (Joodse Rat) responsible for the execution of German orders was formed,

  Jewish property was expropriated. 264 In March 1941 the German Security Police established the Central Office for Jewish emigration, which dealt at first with

  those Jews living in the Netherlands. In May 1942 Jews were ordered to wear the