Holocaust: The Nazi Persecution and Murder of the Jews

by Peter Longerich

  people were deported to Sobibor. At the end of June 1943 Katzmann reported that

  ‘all Jewish residential districts have been dissolved with effect from 23.6.43’. This

  meant that the district of Galicia was ‘Jew-free apart from the Jews in camps

  controlled by the SS and police commanders’. There were still twenty-one ‘Jewish

  camps’ with a total of 21,156 inmates; the camps were, however, ‘still being

  continually reduced’. In his concluding report Katzmann gave the figure of

  434,329 Jews who had been ‘resettled’ between the spring of 1942 and 27 June

  1943. 16

  Accordingly, in June 1943 there were only a few tens of thousands of Jews in

  labour camps in the General Government, which were largely controlled by the SS.

  On 19 June, however, given the increase in resistance in the General Govern-

  ment, Himmler received the order from Hitler ‘that the evacuation of the Jews was

  to be radically enforced and seen through in spite of any unrest arising over the

  next 3 to 4 months’. In addition, Hitler extended Himmler’s authority in the field

  of partisan control, particularly by declaring the General Government to be a

  ‘Partisan Combat Zone’ (Bandenkampfgebiet). To rule out any possible resistance

  from employers who still had Jews working for them, Himmler now deliberately

  pursued the policy of declaring those ghettos and camps still in existence to be

  concentration camps. This applied not only in the General Government, but also

  in the Reichskommissariat Ostland, the other territory under German occupation

  in which Jews lived in any significant numbers. 17

  In the district of Lublin the Jewish labour deployment was massively reduced

  between June and October 1943, and was now employed in principle only for the

  needs of the Wehrmacht. The workers were barracked in SSPF labour camps which

  were to be brought under the control of the WVHA and run as sub-camps of

  Majdanek concentration camp. 18 This regulation, it was agreed early in September 1943 between Pohl, Krüger, and Globocnik, was to be applied to all labour camps in

  the General Government. This was done in January 1944: now the still existing

  labour camps in Plaszow (near Cracow) and the labour camps in Lemberg, Lublin,

  and Radom were turned into concentration camps. 19 After the Warsaw ghetto, declared to be a concentration camp in January 1943, was finally dissolved on an

  order from Himmler in June 1943, and all traces of its existence were removed, 20

  there were concentration camps specially set up for Jewish forced labourers in each

  of the four remaining district capitals of the General Government.

  In the district of Galicia, in June and July 1943 SSPF Katzmann had almost all

  the labour camps liquidated and their inmates murdered. 21 In July 1943 Himmler also ordered that Sobibor extermination camp be transformed into a concentration camp and that prisoners be used to sort captured ammunition. 22

  The radicalization of German Judenpolitik after the Warsaw ghetto uprising,

  and Hitler’s instruction to Himmler on 19 June also meant the end for by far the

  majority of those Polish Jews who had so far managed to survive in the Polish

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  Extermination of the European Jew, 1942–1945

  territories directly administered by the Reich—eastern Upper Silesia, Warthegau,

  and the district of Bialystok.

  In eastern Upper Silesia—paradoxically, in spite of its proximity to Auschwitz

  extermination camp—a relatively large proportion of the Jewish population had

  remained alive up until early summer 1943; the systematic forced labour deploy-

  ment in the context of the ‘Schmelt Organization’ granted them the chance of

  survival until that point. In early summer 1943, however, the civil administration

  in Upper Silesia, which had always worked on the assumption that the Jewish

  forced labour deployment was only a transitory phenomenon, prepared to replace

  Jewish workers with non-Jews. The definitive decision to liquidate the ghetto was

  also presumably made with the Warsaw ghetto uprising still in mind; it was

  prompted by Himmler’s order on 21 May 1943 according to which all Jews in

  the Reich, including the Protectorate, were to be deported ‘to the East’ or to

  Theresienstadt by 30 June. This order contained a supplement according to which

  Eichmann was to discuss the ‘Abbeförderung’ (transportation) of the Eastern

  Silesian Jews on the spot with Schmelt. Between 22 and 24 June 1943, 5,000 Jews

  from Sosnowitz and Bendzin were deported to Auschwitz. On 1 August the

  liquidation of the two ghettos began: a total of over 30,000 Jews were transported

  from Sosnowitz and Bendzin in around fourteen transports to Auschwitz, where

  some 6,000 were deployed as forced labourers and the rest were murdered. On 16

  August these two large ghettos were completely cleared. Ten days later the last

  ghetto in Warthenau, holding a total of 5,000 people, was liquidated. Of the

  100,000–120,000 Jews who had lived in Upper Silesia at the time of the German

  invasion, at least 85,000 had been murdered by the end of the war.

  On 11 June, Himmler ordered the Lodz ghetto to be turned into a concentration

  camp; however, this order never came into effect. 23 The alternative attempts by Himmler and Pohl to achieve the transfer of the production capacity available in

  the ghetto to Lublin were also defeated by Greiser’s resistance. In February 1944

  the Gauleiter in the Warthegau, Artur Greiser, agreed with Himmler that the

  ghetto should be retained as a ‘Gau-ghetto’; only as many Jews should be allowed

  to live there as was ‘absolutely necessary for the interests of the armaments

  economy’. 24

  In August 1943 Himmler had ordered that the forced labour camps in the

  Warthegau, of which there were still more than 100, be liquidated. This had

  been done by October 1943: the forced labourers either ended up in Lodz ghetto

  or were deported to Auschwitz and murdered there. 25 In June 1944, on the basis of an agreement that Himmler and Greiser had made in February 1944, those

  inhabitants of the Lodz ghetto who were either unfit for work or no longer needed

  from the viewpoint of the ghetto administration were murdered with gas vans in

  the specially reactivated extermination camp at Chelmno. By mid-July 1944 more

  than 7,000 people died this way. However, Himmler had presumably already

  issued the order to dissolve the ghetto completely in May 1944. In August the great

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  majority of the ghetto-dwellers, still more than 68,000, were deported to

  Auschwitz, where all of them were murdered, apart from some 2,000 people

  who were deployed as forced labourers. Around 1,300 ghetto-dwellers stayed

  behind in Lodz for clearing-up work. 26

  Between 16 and 23 August 1943 the Bialystok ghetto was finally liquidated. The

  various Jewish resistance groups that had formed a united front only in July 1943,

  fiercely resisted the ‘action’ and involved the German police in battles that lasted

  five days. After the uprising was put down, 150 fighters managed to escape the

  ghetto and join the partisans. 27

  In August 1943 more than 25,000 people were deported from Bialystok either to

  Treblinka, where they were murdered, or, if they were deemed to be ‘fit for work’,
/>   deported to Majdanek, where they were deployed in forced labour. The complete

  liquidation of the ghetto was run by Globocnik. Plans originally in place to

  transfer the factories in the ghetto to Lublin had in the meantime been abandoned

  by Globocnik; instead a unit of the Ostindustrie plundered the factories that still

  existed in Bialystok. The over 1,000 Jews who had stayed in Bialystok after the

  ‘action’ were also deported to Lublin. 28

  In 1942–3 tens of thousands, possibly as many as 100,000 Jews living in Poland

  had managed to escape the ghetto liquidations and get away. Thus, in an extensive

  study of escape from the Warsaw ghetto, Gunnar Paulsson reached the conclusion

  that a total of some 28,000 Jews went into hiding outside the ghetto and of those

  around 40 per cent, or 11,500, survived. The mass of escapes occurred after the big

  deportations of 1942: of 55,000 to 60,000 remaining ghetto-dwellers more than

  13,000 escaped. These people survived on the ‘Aryan’ side of Warsaw, either in

  hiding-places or under false identities; as many Poles were living illegally in

  Warsaw, a certain infrastructure of illegality had been created that made access

  to fake papers relatively easy. 29

  In the district of Galicia, particularly after 1943, thousands of Jews managed to

  find refuge in hiding-places, mostly in the homes of non-Jewish acquaintances, far

  more than 1,000 in Lemberg alone. 30 Other Jews used fake papers to find jobs as

  ‘Ostarbeiter’ in the Reich or at one of the building sites run by the Todt Organ-

  isation in occupied Europe. 31

  Other escapees tried to survive in forest camps that they had built themselves. 32

  The Israeli historian Shmuel Krakowski estimates the number of Jews who

  escaped into the forests in the four districts of the ‘old’ General Government

  (i.e. without Galicia) in 1942–3 at 50,000 and in his seminal study of the Jewish

  resistance in Poland he presents figures which suggest that the great majority of

  these escapees were killed by German Jagdkommandos (Hunting Commandos). 33

  After the liquidation of the ghettos, from the summer of 1943 the focus of the

  persecution of the Jews in the General Government shifted clearly to the tracing of

  these people who had fled into the forests or otherwise gone into hiding, often in

  the wake of the anti-partisan campaigns that were now being intensified. 34

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  Extermination of the European Jew, 1942–1945

  In the district of Lublin these raids began in May 1943. The monthly surveys by

  the district Commander of the Order Police indicate a total of 1,657 victims for the

  period between May and October 1943, under the heading ‘Jews exterminated’. 35

  In the district of Galicia, from July 1943 onwards, the police intensified their raids

  in the forests and killed thousands of Jews. 36

  Poles who offered Jews hiding-places were generally shot, in many cases the

  whole family was murdered, in extreme cases the entire population of the village

  in question. Conversely, denunciations of hidden Jews were rewarded with boun-

  ties; the SSPF in the district of Lublin, for example, ordered that such informants

  be given up to a third of the property of the Jewish victim who had been hunted

  down. 37

  Armed resistance in the ghetto clearances in Bialystok and Vilna, the mass

  escape from Treblinka in August 1943, and particularly the prisoner revolt in

  Sobibor on 14 October, in which eleven SS members had been killed, 38 all of this in the face of the threatened Soviet invasion, must have been what led Himmler to

  give Krüger the order, in October 1943, to liquidate the most important camps still

  in existence in the district in Lublin. Early in November the prisoners in the

  Lublin camp complex were shot during a two-day massacre, under the code name

  ‘Harvest Festival’, and the same fate awaited the prisoners in the camps of

  Trawniki and Poniatowa. The total number of victims reached around 42,000.39

  Sobibor extermination camp had also been dissolved after the attempted uprising

  on 14 October. After this, in the district of Lublin there were only a few smaller

  forced labour camps with several thousand Jewish prisoners, which were cleared

  from February 1944; most of the prisoners were deported to the west. 40

  During the Harvest Festival murders in the district of Lublin, at the beginning

  of November 1943 the German police also murdered the Jewish inmates of the

  Szenie labour camp in the district of Cracow (Krakau), and a few days later the

  inmates of ZAL (labour camp) Plaszow in Cracow. On 19 November the Jewish

  forced labourers in the Janowska camp in Lemberg (Lvov) were murdered. 41

  In his notorious speech to the Reichs- and Gauleiters in Posen (Poznan) on

  4 October 1943, Himmler gave an assurance that the ‘Jewish question in the

  countries occupied by us . . . will be resolved by the end of the year’. 42

  Occupied Soviet Territories

  After the big wave of murders in Ukraine in 1942 Jews only lived in any numbers

  in the occupied Soviet territories in Reichskommissariat Ostland. In summer 1943,

  72,000 Jews still lived in this territory. According to the State Secretary, Alfred

  Meyer, Rosenberg’s deputy in the Ministry of the East, 22,000 of these had already

  been selected for ‘resettlement’, meaning murder. 43 Of the 30,000 or so Jews still living in the General Commissariat of White Ruthenia in 1943, the occupying

  forces killed around half. 44

  Murders and Deportations, 1942–3

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  Thus, on 8 February, the KdS station in Minsk murdered all the Jews in Slutsk

  in the wake of an anti-partisan action; in view of the resistance of the ghetto-

  dwellers, District Commissar Heinrich Carl ordered that the ghetto be burned

  down along with its entrenched inhabitants—this was the same Carl who had

  complained to his superiors about the cruel behaviour of Lithuanian auxiliary

  police against the Jews of Slutsk. 45 About 3,000 people lost their lives in this action.

  In the district of Vileyka, between February and April 1943, the members of the

  local KdS station murdered almost all the Jews living there, around 5,000 people.

  There was also a large number of Jewish people who tried to hide outside ghettos

  and camps, and were hunted down and murdered by German units and their local

  auxiliaries; according to the figures of the SSPF of White Ruthenia, Curt von

  Gottberg, 11,000 were killed between November 1942 and March 1943 alone. 46

  The remaining three ghettos in the General District of White Ruthenia were

  destroyed between August and October 1943. On 13 August Himmler issued an

  order to restrict the labour deployment of the Jews, which was adopted by the

  OKH on 29 September as ‘binding for the whole of the field army in the East’. As a

  result, interventions by Wehrmacht posts in favour of Jewish work commandos

  were effectively scotched. 47

  The ghetto of Glebokie near Vilna was liquidated on 20 August following a

  further anti-partisan action. In August 1943 the inhabitants of the ghetto resisted

  their planned deportation to Majdanek; the majority of the ghetto-dwellers,

  between 2,000 and 3,000 people, lost their lives in the ghetto, which was set on

  fire by German forces. 48 The ghetto of Li
da was dissolved in September, and some 4,000 inhabitants were deported to the concentration camps of Sobibor and

  Majdanek. 49

  Finally, the Minsk ghetto was cleared in September in a number of stages. Some

  of the 10,000 or so ghetto-dwellers still living there were sent to Auschwitz and

  Sobibor extermination camps, others murdered on the spot, and yet others

  deported to the district of Lublin for forced labour. In October 1943 the surviving

  ghetto-dwellers were murdered in the extermination centre of Trostinets near

  Minsk. 50

  In Lithuania and Latvia, where there were still large numbers of Jews, Himmler

  acted in 1943 as he had in occupied Poland: he endeavoured to turn those Jews

  who were still ‘fit for work’ into concentration camp inmates, so that he would

  have total control over their future fate.

  On 2 April 1943, Himmler issued the order to build a concentration camp in

  Riga, dated retrospectively to 13 March. 51 On 21 June, after a meeting with leading SS functionaries, Himmler ordered that ‘all remaining Jews in the territory of

  Ostland be brought together in concentration camps’. At the same time, with

  effect from 1 August 1943, he prohibited ‘the removal of Jews from concentration

  camps for work’ and again issued the order for the construction of a concentration

  camp near Riga. Those ‘members of the Jewish ghettos not required’, Himmler

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  finally specified, were to be ‘evacuated to the East’, meaning murdered. 52 With this order Himmler gained total control over the Jewish forced labourers in the

  Reichskommissariat of Ostland. This decision of Himmler’s was closely connected

  with the order to conclude the ‘Final Solution’, which Hitler had given him two

  days previously. It is also significant that, on 21 June, Himmler appointed Bach-

  Zelewski as head of the anti-partisan units (Bandenkampfverbände), after Hitler

  had extended his authority in this sphere. The internment of the surviving Jews in

  concentration camps, constant selection of the Jewish forced labourers in the

  concentration camps, and the hunting down of Jews in hiding under the cloak of

  ‘anti-partisan combat’—these, then, were the instruments with which Himmler