Holocaust: The Nazi Persecution and Murder of the Jews

by Peter Longerich

  Italian Jews from the whole of the German sphere of influence; to draw up Jewish

  legislation on the German model and coordinate their position vis-à-vis other

  states with Germany. 341

  In fact, however, the Italian occupation authorities would not hand over the

  Jews living in their zone; instead, from October 1942 they began interning them,

  more than 2,600 people according to official Italian figures. Jews who had or

  who could claim Italian citizenship were brought to Italian territory, and the

  others were accommodated on the Croatian coast, away from the hands of the

  Germans. 342

  Ribbentrop’s directive of September 1942, to demand of the Danish government

  the deportation of Jews living there, is probably directly traceable to the extraor-

  dinary displeasure with which Hitler reacted to developments in that country in

  September 1942. For a time, Hitler expressed the view that the particularly

  restrained form of German occupation in that country should be radically

  changed, and it should henceforth be ruled with an iron fist as a ‘hostile country’.

  The first consequence was that SS Gruppenführer Werner Best was appointed

  Reich Plenipotentiary in Denmark. However, Best also represented a relatively

  elastic policy in Denmark, one irreconcilable with the demand for the handover of

  the Jews living in the country. 343

  It seems possible that the deportation of the Norwegian Jews in the autumn of

  1942, which had plainly been prepared in a rush, and the history of which cannot

  be reconstructed in detail, formed a kind of second-best solution given that the

  deportation of the Danish Jews was undesirable for general political reasons to do

  with the occupation of the country. Some 2,000 Jews were living in Norway at the

  end of 1942. By that point they had been subjected to the usual measures, such as

  removal from public service, confiscation of property, stamping of passports, and

  other things besides. From autumn 1942 a statistical office set up by Quisling’s

  party began drawing up a list of Norwegian Jews. 344 Thus the technical preconditions for deportation were in place, and in October 1942 the RSHA, clearly on

  the spur of the moment (the lack of preparations concerning the preparation of

  transport capacity indicates as much) decided to go ahead with it. On 23 October

  the Norwegian police received the order to prepare for the detention of all Jews.

  Extermination on a European Scale, 1942

  373

  On 26 October the arrest of all Jewish men between the ages of 15 and 54 began,

  on 25 November that of the women and children. The next day a German

  transport ship containing 532 Jews set sail for Stettin (Sczeczin). 345 Further deportations occurred in November 1942, in February 1943 and 1944, bringing

  the total numbers of deportees to 770. Ninehundred and thirty Norwegian Jews

  had fled to Sweden. 346

  chapter 18

  THE FURTHER DEVELOPMENT OF THE POLICY

  OF EXTERMINATION AFTER THE TURNING OF

  THE WAR IN 1942–1943: CONTINUATION OF

  THE MURDERS AND GEOGRAPHICAL

  EXPANSION OF THE DEPORTATIONS

  In the second half of the war—apart from the efforts to secure the space controlled

  by Germany in a political, military, and police sense, and alongside the complex of

  economic and food policy—Judenpolitik was a main axis of Germany’s occupation

  and alliance policies. In the view of the National Socialist leadership the more the

  war advanced the greater the significance of the systematic murder of the Jews for

  the solidarity of the German power bloc. This increasingly important alteration in

  the function of Judenpolitik provides a significant explanation for the fact that the

  murder of millions in the second half of the war was not only continued, but even

  expanded.

  Under military pressure, Nazi Germany was less and less in a position to draft

  even sketchily the main features of a ‘New Europe’ in accordance with racial

  principles. If it had seriously made such an attempt, the issue of the racial

  ‘inequality’ of the peoples living on the continent, the core element of National

  Socialism, would inevitably have been raised, and the numerous unresolved

  Murders and Deportations, 1942–3

  375

  questions of borders and minorities would have come onto the agenda. If, on

  the one hand, the National Socialists did not want to abandon their claim to open

  the door to a completely new kind of order for the European continent, but, on the

  other, did not want to abandon the way in which this project was to be realized,

  they had no other option but concretely to anticipate their racist utopia in a

  negative way. From this point of view the Entjudung of the German sphere of

  influence represented the claim to be the start of a comprehensive racist new

  order, but was actually—because of the inconsistency and impracticability of a

  ‘positive’ racial policy—the substitute for the unfeasible ‘new order’ on a racial

  basis.

  In the second half of the war, the continuation and radicalization of Juden-

  politik, the only practicable element of the racist utopia of the National Socialists,

  became the iron band with which the ‘Third Reich’ held together the power bloc

  that it dominated. For with the implementation of the murder of the Jews within

  the German power bloc, the executive organizations—German occupying admin-

  istrations, local auxiliary organizations, collaborative governments or allies—were

  turned into lackeys and accomplices of the extermination policy and, given the

  unprecedented nature of this crime, irretrievably bound to the engine of this

  policy, the leadership of National Socialist Germany.

  In addition to this, there was the fact that any further radicalization of perse-

  cution was bound to strengthen the power of the SS and radical Party forces

  within the occupying administrations or the German diplomatic apparatus and,

  via the periphery of the German sphere of rule, alter the overall character of the

  regime in favour of those forces. The implementation of Judenpolitik within the

  German sphere of influence thus amounted to the definitive realization of

  National Socialism’s total claim to power. But this was, from the perspective of

  National Socialism, the sole key to success in this war.

  If we see Judenpolitik at the intersection of these considerations, it becomes

  clear that from the perverted perspective of the Nazi leadership, it had effectively

  become a guarantee for the complete victory of the National Socialist Revolution.

  Continuation of the Policy of Extermination

  in Eastern Europe

  Poland

  In October and November 1942, HSSPF Krüger had, through police decree,

  defined a total of fifty-four ‘Jewish residential districts’1 in the General Government, most of them parts of earlier ghettos. Alongside these, there was a large

  number of camps for Jewish forced labourers. At this point, the deportations to

  the extermination camps were temporarily shelved.

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  Extermination of the European Jew, 1942–1945

  At the beginning of 1943, however, the mass murders and deportations in the

  General Government began again on a large scale. By deciding to reorganize
the

  ‘labour deployment’ the Nazi leadership believed that they would be able largely to

  do without the Jewish workforce. Those ghettos that still existed were liquidated in

  the course of 1943 (apart from Lodz), the people still living there were shot on the

  spot or deported to the extermination camps; a minority were sent to forced

  labour camps. The SS also took control of Jewish forced labour, thus ensuring that

  the only Jews who would remain temporarily alive were those who were absolutely

  required for war production.

  In the district of Galicia the mass murders resumed at the beginning of 1943,

  after a decision by HSSPF Krüger, which he must have made at the end of 1942. 2

  In January, SSPF Katzmann had some 10,000 people shot in an ‘action’. They were

  from the Lemberg ghetto, in which around 24,000 people had lived up to that

  point. Subsequently the reduced ghetto was run as a ‘Jewish camp’; further

  shootings occurred regularly. After the Lemberg massacre the office of the KdS

  Lemberg ravaged the smaller ghettos and labour camps in the district, where

  massacres leading to thousands of fatalities were carried out. From March 1943

  onwards an increasingly large number of ‘actions’ took place in the smaller

  ghettos of the district. These mass murders were accelerated still further from

  the end of March. 3

  In the district of Radom the last deportations occurred in January 1943. They

  affected the town of Radom as well as Szydlowiec, Sandomierz Radomsko, and

  Ujazd; the victims were deported to Treblinka. 4 All that existed now in the district of Radom was labour camps under the control of the SS and police commanders,

  as well as so-called ‘Jewish camps’ directly attached to armaments factories, for

  which the armaments inspection department of the Wehrmacht was responsible.

  In the district of Krakau (Cracow), in March 1943, the ghetto in the city of Cracow

  was the last ghetto to be definitively cleared. Those ‘fit for work’ ended up in

  Plaszow labour camp (ZAL Plaszow). 5 Also in January the deportations from Warsaw to Treblinka resumed after their interruption in November. 6

  In January 1943, after a visit to Warsaw, Himmler ordered that the ghetto there

  be destroyed. Some of those factories that still existed were to be dissolved, and

  the 16,000 workers there were to be deported ‘to a KL [Konzentrationslager ¼

  concentration camp] ideally to Lublin’. The factories actually working for arma-

  ments production were to be ‘centralized somewhere in the General Government’.7

  When the relocation of production to Lublin at short notice proved impossible,

  on 15 February Himmler ordered a concentration camp to be built inside the

  Warsaw ghetto, so that control could be exerted directly over those ghetto

  inhabitants who had been claimed as workers by the armaments factories. 8

  In the meantime, the SS had once again begun to deport Jews ‘unfit for work’

  from the Warsaw ghetto: between 18 and 22 January around 5,000 to 6,000 people

  were deported from the Warsaw ghetto to Treblinka and murdered there. 9

  Murders and Deportations, 1942–3

  377

  In the months that followed concrete preparations were made within the SS

  empire to bring about the planned transfer of the Jewish forced labourers. To this

  end Globocnik negotiated with the WVHA to establish the ‘Ostindustrie’, which

  was officially founded in March 1943. This holding company was an attempt to

  create an armaments company run by the SS itself, which was to work with Jewish

  forced labourers and Jewish property. In fact, over the next few months, the

  Ostindustrie was to maintain various factories in the districts of Lublin and

  Radom, and deploy around 10,000 Jewish workers who were interned in labour

  camps. But they produced no armaments, only for the most part simple items of

  everyday use. 10

  In the spring of 1943, however, a development occurred which led the Nazi

  leadership to the decision to conclude the ‘Final Solution’ in the General Govern-

  ment as quickly as possible, and no longer to take Jewish workers into consider-

  ation. This last escalation of Judenpolitik in the General Government was

  prompted by the Warsaw ghetto uprising of April and May 1943.

  Resistance organizations had formed in the Warsaw ghetto after the start of the

  major deportations of summer 1942: the Zydowska Organizacja Bojowa (ZOB,

  Jewish combat organization), originally formed from three Zionist youth organ-

  izations, later joined by other groups, some of them non-Zionist. At the same time

  the revisionist wing of the Zionists formed an autonomous organization, the

  Zydowski Zwiazek Wojskowy (ZZW, Jewish Military Association).

  After the temporary halt to the deportations in October 1942 there were still

  between 55,000 and 60,000 people in the ghetto. In view of the attitude of the

  majority of ghetto-dwellers who could hardly have any illusions about their fate

  any longer, the resistance had a good prospect of receiving wide support for a

  revolt from the ghetto population.

  When the Germans began a partial deportation of the ghetto-dwellers on

  18 January, they encountered armed resistance by ZOB fighters, who were able

  to disrupt the execution of the arrests to such an extent that with 5,000 to 6,000

  deportees the Germans were able to deport fewer people than they had originally

  intended.

  Over the next few months the resistance fighters got ready for the final

  engagement with the Germans: they got hold of more weapons and prepared

  for a guerrilla war on the urban terrain by setting up fortified positions and escape

  routes. The rest of the ghetto population, whose will to resist had been intensified

  by the events of January, began to set up hiding-places, known as ‘bunkers’ in the

  cellars of the houses.

  When the Germans began the definitive clearance of the ghetto on 19 April,

  they found themselves facing several hundred armed fighters, while most of the

  ghetto population sought refuge in the bunkers.

  It took the far superior and heavily armed troops, led by SS Brigadeführer

  Jürgen Stroop, four weeks, until 16 May 1943, to put down the revolt. They only

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  Extermination of the European Jew, 1942–1945

  succeeded by using explosives and incendiary devices moving from house to

  house, hiding-place to hiding-place. Despite putting up tremendous resistance,

  the resistance groups were wiped out, apart from a small number who were able to

  escape. Apart from this thousands of ghetto-dwellers were killed during the

  fighting; the survivors were deported either to the gas chambers of Treblinka or

  to labour camps. Their attackers suffered several dozen fatalities.

  There is good reason to identify the revolt as a popular uprising: in the ruins

  of the ghetto the fighters found support from the ghetto-dwellers, many of

  whom shared the fate of the resistance fighters and perished under miserable

  circumstances. 11

  There was also armed resistance against the planned liquidation of ghettos in

  other places. Thus in Czenstochowa a small group of Jewish fighters resisted the

  attempted clearance of the ghetto on 25 June 1943 and went down fighting. In

  Cracow, in the
winter of 1942–3, a Jewish resistance group launched attacks on

  German installations outside the ghetto; the group left the ghetto the following

  spring as it was about to be liquidated. In a number of smaller ghettos armed

  resistance groups formed, escaping into the surrounding forests in the face of

  the imminent liquidation of the ghettos. In other places it can be shown that

  preparations for armed resistance existed, but either came to nothing or is only

  inadequately documented. 12

  The Nazi leadership’s resolution, sparked by the Warsaw ghetto uprising, to

  murder all the Jews in the General Government, is reflected in a series of sources

  from between April and May 1943. Thus, for example, Goebbels’s diary entry for

  25 April reads: it is high time ‘for us to remove the Jews as quickly as possible from

  the General Government’. Himmler stressed in May, to Greifelt, the head of his

  Central Office for Nationality Questions (Hauptamt für Volkstumsfragen), that it

  was an ‘urgent task in the General Government . . . to remove the remaining

  300,000–400,000 Jews there’. 13

  HSSPF Krüger, who was responsible for the General Government, declared on

  31 May that he had ‘only recently received the order to carry out the “Entjudung” ’;

  according to Krüger, Himmler wanted the employment of Jews deployed in the

  armaments industry to cease; a desire that Krüger did not think he was able to

  fulfil because of irreplaceable skilled workers. 14

  With the Warsaw ghetto uprising still fresh in the minds of the Germans, from

  April 1943 the liquidation of the still existing ghettos and small labour camps in

  the district of Lublin was intensified. The inmates were either shot on the spot

  or deported to the larger labour camps, Majdanek above all. Most of these

  ‘resettlements’ occurred in May.

  Also in May 1943 Katzmann ordered the dissolution of all still existing ghettos

  in the district of Galicia and had a ‘general liquidation plan’ prepared to this end. 15

  These mass murders were carried out with the utmost brutality between the end of

  May and the end of June 1943; some 80,000 people fell victim to them. Apart from

  Murders and Deportations, 1942–3

  379

  the mass executions, from the end of 1942 until June 1943 some 15,000–25,000