Holocaust: The Nazi Persecution and Murder of the Jews

by Peter Longerich

  camp, at least a third of whom had lost their lives by the end of the war. 263

  The camp of Bergen-Belsen with its 60,000 prisoners, around 90 per cent of

  them Jewish, was handed over to the British army by the SS on 15 April 1945.

  Food supplies in the camp had completely collapsed, and there had been an

  outbreak of typhus. Between January and the liberation of the camp, 35,000

  prisoners had lost their lives, and a further 14,000 died in the first five days after

  the liberation. 264

  Also in mid-April, the department responsible for the concentration camps

  held one last conference in which—in accordance with Himmler’s order—the

  evacuation of the last concentration camps not liberated by the Allies must have

  been discussed: these were Sachsenhausen, Dachau, Neuengamme, Flossenbürg,

  and Ravensbrück. In mid-April there is evidence that Himmler directly instructed

  Flossenbürg camp that no prisoners could fall alive into the hands of the enemy,

  an order that must also have applied to other camps. Over the next few days the SS

  leadership refused to comply with the requests from the International Red Cross

  and hand over the last camps. 265

  The last death marches went in two directions: the prisoners from the

  camps of Flossenbürg and Dachau marched southwards, those from Ravens-

  brück, Sachsenhausen, and Neuengamme northwards, according to the div-

  ision of the still unoccupied Reich territory into two parts, which was still

  under way. The motives for these last violent marches are unclear: perhaps

  the objective was to deploy the prisoners as slave labourers in the construc-

  tion of fortresses (for example, for a planned alpine fortress that was never

  realized), and another factor must have been the SS’s intention to hand over

  as few prisoners as possible, but instead to take them along on the retreat for

  as long as possible, to be able to use them as hostages in last-minute

  negotiations.

  On 19 April 25,000–30,000 prisoners set off on a march towards Dachau, which

  only some of the prisoners reached, while the remaining columns remained stuck

  in the chaos prevailing in Upper Bavaria. 266 Of the 32,000 Dachau prisoners more than 8,500 were driven towards Austria, and at least 1,000 died. On 2 May the

  guards left and the camp was liberated by American troops. 267

  In the overcrowded Mauthausen camp and its sub-camps, which held many

  Jewish prisoners, some 41,000 prisoners died in the first months of 1945 leading up

  to the camp’s liberation in early May. In addition, around 2,000 people were

  murdered in the gas chambers of Mauthausen camp. 268

  The Sachsenhausen prisoners, 33,000 of them, were forced to march towards

  Schleswig-Holstein on 20 April, and from Ravensbrück 20,000 prisoners were also

  sent northwards towards Schleswig-Holstein on 18 and 24 April. In the chaos of

  collapse, however, the marching columns gradually dissolved, the guards disap-

  peared, and the hour of the prisoners’ liberation had arrived. 269

  418

  Extermination of the European Jew, 1942–1945

  The clearance of Neuengamme began on 19 April: 9,000 prisoners also had to

  march to Schleswig-Holstein. Prisoners deemed ‘unfit to march’ and ‘sick’ were

  murdered in the camp itself. 270

  Finally, on 25 April, the seaborne transport of the surviving 4,500 prisoners

  from Stutthof began. The ships travelled to Neustadt in the Bay of Lübeck, where

  the prisoners from Neuengamme had already been shipped in on three passenger

  boats, possibly a measure that had something to do with the release of prisoners to

  Sweden. Two of these ships were, however, set on fire by a British air attack, and

  most of the prisoners were killed, while those who were able to escape were killed

  on the beach, as were the Stutthof prisoners who were camped there, completely

  exhausted.

  Estimates suggest that between a third and a half of the 714,000 and more

  people who were in the concentration camp system at the beginning of 1945 fell

  victim to the clearances. 271 Of the 714,000 prisoners at the beginning of 1945, some 200,000 were Jews; the number of Jewish victims in the final phase of the ‘Third

  Reich’ is estimated to be somewhere between 70,000 and 100,000. In that last

  phase there was no comprehensive and deliberate policy to murder all Jewish

  prisoners still held, and Himmler’s negotiations did not lead to a consistent policy

  of sparing Jewish hostages. Rather, the last phase of the Holocaust, marked by

  the clearance of the concentration camps and the death marches, but also by the

  efforts—successful on a smaller scale—to release prisoners, shows that until the

  very last days of the war the fate of the European Jews under the SS terror regime

  depended on very contradictory decisions made at various levels of the SS

  hierarchy. This, once again, makes it clear that the murder of the European Jews

  was not an automatic programme of murder set in motion by a single order issued

  from behind a desk, but rather that the implementation of the general decision to

  practice systematic murder was repeatedly frustrated by different intentions and

  thus distracted and delayed. Accordingly, it becomes apparent that it took a vast

  amount of initiative and energy at all levels of the SS hierarchy actually to

  implement the systematic murder of the European Jews—and that the desire to

  destroy was still present through to the last days of the war.

  The Nazi Regime’s Policy Towards the Gypsies in the

  Second Half of the War: Parallels with and

  Differences from the ‘Final Solution’

  At the end of 1942 the Nazi regime proceeded to step up the persecution of the

  Gypsies in a decisive fashion. Up until this point the Zigeunerpolitik (policy

  towards the gypsies) had been marked by ‘unsimultaneities and contradictions’. 272

  The overview below should make this clear.

  Murders and Deportations, 1942–3

  419

  In the Netherlands the Gypsies, a group comprising only a few hundred people,

  had at first been subjected to certain residence restrictions and intensified police

  checks, and finally, in 1943, as part of the measures directed against the entire

  ‘travelling’ population, held at collection points. The measures against the equally

  small group of Gypsies in Belgium and northern France were limited to certain

  prohibitions and intensified control. 273

  As in the Netherlands and Belgium, in France the Gypsies, along with the rest of

  the non-sedentary population, had been driven out of the security zone by the

  Atlantic coast or the Channel. In October 1940 the military administration had

  ordered the construction of collection camps for Gypsies in the occupied northern

  zone. Several thousand people not following a settled way of life, Gypsies and

  others, ended up in these camps. In the unoccupied southern zone the prohibition

  on wandering, passed in April 1940, continued to be applied in principle.

  In the occupied Soviet Union, in Poland and Serbia, Gypsies had already been

  murdered in their thousands in 1942. But the comparison with the persecution of

  the Jews shows the different degrees of intensity of the extermination policy:

  Gypsies tended to be killed in the wake
of the ‘actions’ against the Jews, a policy

  of systematic and total murder of the Gypsies cannot be demonstrated in these

  three Eastern or South-Eastern European countries.

  The regimes in the South-East European satellite states pursued their own

  ‘Gypsy policy’. In May 1942 the Croatian Security Police ordered the arrest of all

  Gypsies, except those of the Muslim religion. The Gypsies were concentrated in

  the camp of Jasenovac; there those ‘unfit for work’ were literally slaughtered, while

  those ‘fit for work’, where they did not fall victim to the unimaginably terrible

  conditions of imprisonment, were also murdered in large numbers. The precise

  figure of victims is unknown, as are the numbers for the Gypsy population; the

  estimates for Jasenovac vary between 10,000 and 40,000, for the whole of Croatia

  between 25,000 and 50,000 dead. 274

  In Romania, where a Gypsy minority of around 300,000 people existed, in 1942

  on the orders of the Romanian government between 20,000 and 26,000 Gypsies

  were deported to Transnistria. By far the greatest number of them died as a result

  of the devastating conditions there. 275

  In Slovakia Gypsies, like Jews, were excluded from citizenship in 1939 if they

  behaved in a socially maladjusted way, that is, if they did not belong to families

  following a settled way of life or in regular work. Measures introduced as early as

  1941 for the arrest of Gypsies seem to have been pursued seriously only after the

  German intervention in the summer of 1944. After that point the German

  Einsatzgruppe H murdered Gypsies in larger numbers, possibly as many as

  1,000 people. 276

  Under the rule of the Arrow Cross Party, many Roma were arrested in Hungary

  at the end of 1944 and deported to concentration camps in the Reich, where they

  were used as forced labourers. 277

  420

  Extermination of the European Jew, 1942–1945

  At the end of 1942, the SS and police apparatus came to the conclusion that, as

  far as the Gypsies living in Germany were concerned, henceforth distinctions were

  to be made between, on the one hand, the ‘racially pure’ Sinti and Lalleri

  (including the ‘half-breeds’ (Mischlinge) in those groups capable of assimilation)

  and, on the other, the Roma and other ‘half-breeds’, and that this second group

  was to be systematically murdered. The ‘racially pure’ Gypsies were to be taken to

  a ‘reservation’ in the General Government after the end of the war and there,

  pursuing their ‘racially specific’ way of life in isolation, be returned to their

  allegedly ‘Aryan’ roots. The remaining Gypsies, on the other hand, were to be

  deported to camps. On 16 December 1942, Himmler, after rebutting initial con-

  cerns on the part of Hitler and the Party Chancellery, issued the order that ‘Gypsy

  half-breeds, Roma Gypsies, and members of Gypsy clans of Balkan origin not of

  German blood’ be sent to concentration camps. This decision coincided directly

  with the preparation of the last major wave of Jewish deportation from the Reich,

  which the Nazi regime had plainly been preparing since December 1942, and the

  deportation of even non-Jewish prisoners in concentration camps also ordered by

  Himmler in December. In view of the mass recruitment of new foreign workers

  these intensified deportations did not seem to represent a notable risk for arma-

  ments production. Added to this was the fact that after the turning point in the

  war introduced by the Allied landing in North Africa, the Germans intensified

  Judenpolitik in various countries on the new ‘southern front’ (in France, Greece,

  and Bulgaria). This may have contributed to a general radicalization of the

  decision-making process and the accelerated implementation of further deport-

  ations. 278 ‘Socially adjusted’ Gypsies were not to be deported, although the criteria for this selection remain unclear. 279

  The deportation of the Gypsies involved the ‘Greater German Reich’, including

  the Protectorate and the district of Bialystok, Belgium, and the Netherlands.

  The first Gypsy transport from the Reich arrived in Auschwitz-Birkenau on

  26 February 1943; by July 1944 around 23,000 people had been deported to the

  Gypsy camp (which was not segregated according to sex). 280

  From April 1944 those Gypsies still ‘fit for work’ were moved from Birkenau to

  concentration camps in the Reich, some 1,600 people in all. Of the other Gypsies

  deported to Birkenau around 6,000 were still alive in the spring of 1944. In May

  1944 the camp authorities decided to liquidate the Gypsy camp in view of the

  immediately impending extermination action against the Hungarian Jews. After a

  first attempt in May had been defeated by the resistance of the camp inmates, on

  2 and 3 August almost 300 Gypsies were murdered in the gas chambers in

  Auschwitz; only around 1,600 people, former soldiers and the relatives of soldiers,

  were spared. 281 Of the 22,600 people originally confined in the Gypsy camp 19,300

  perished.

  The sterilization of ‘maladjusted’ Gypsy half-breeds in the Reich was system-

  atically undertaken by the Criminal Police in 1944. The written agreement of the

  Murders and Deportations, 1942–3

  421

  victims was often forced with threats of deportation. Overall an estimated

  2,000–2,500 Gypsies were sterilized. 282

  The figure for Gypsies murdered on racial grounds under German rule can no

  longer be established with any kind of precision. In Germany an estimated 15,000

  people were killed as Gypsies or Gypsy half-breeds, in Austria around 8,000, and in

  Czechoslovakia around 35,000. In Belgium/northern France and the Netherlands

  it must have been several hundred people; in the occupied Soviet territories at

  least 10,000, possibly very many more, and in Poland around 8,000. 283

  These figures themselves show that the Roma were not persecuted with any-

  thing like the same intensity as the Jews. Neither did the persecution of the

  Gypsies include all the countries under German rule; after 1942 there were no

  deportations whose goal was the immediate murder of the deportees in extermin-

  ation camps. On the other hand the persecution of the Gypsies reveals numerous

  parallels with the persecution of the Jews; the fate of the Gypsies makes it plain

  that Judenpolitik was part of a more widely based Rassenpolitik.

  CONCLUSION

  In this study we have made an attempt to interpret the decision-making process

  leading to the systematic murder of the Jews of Europe within the wider context of

  German Judenpolitik. As a result we have identified four distinct stages of escal-

  ation between the start of the war and the summer of 1942, in the course of which

  the Nazi leadership developed and set in motion a programme for the systematic

  murder of the European Jews. We have argued that the decisive turning point

  leading to the ‘Final Solution’ occurred as early as autumn 1939 and we have

  shown that the radicalization of Judenpolitik occurred within the context of a

  Rassenpolitik, but that no other group was persecuted with the same relentlessness

  and the same disastrous consequences as the Jews of Europe.

  In the years between 1933 and 1939 Judenpolitik within the Germa
n Reich

  remained closely associated with the National Socialist seizure and maintenance

  of power. The ‘de-jewification’ (Entjudung) of German society, in the broader

  sense the implementation of a racist policy, provided the Nazis with the instru-

  ment for gradually penetrating the individual spheres of life in German society

  and subjecting them to their total claim to power. In the years between 1933 and

  1939, not only did this key function of Judenpolitik become apparent, but it also

  became evident that a particular tactic for the phased implementation of the

  policy was being developed: the regime leadership set general goals and

  the subordinate organizations utilized the broad scope they were given for the

  exercise of considerable individual initiative and did so to a degree in competition

  with one another. But the frictions and tensions that arose could not disguise the

  fact that the goal of the expulsion of the Jews from German society was based on a

  broad consensus within the National Socialist movement. The initiation and

  radicalization of the persecution of the Jews cannot simply be traced back to a

  chain of decisions taken at the top of the Nazi regime; it would be more accurate to

  say that a new political field was constituted and developed, in which complex

  structures and autonomous dynamics then developed, without the leaders of the

  regime losing control of the overall process of Judenpolitik.

  This policy was clearly exhausted with the November pogrom and the subse-

  quent legal measures. After the German Jews had been reduced to the status of a

  Conclusion

  423

  plundered minority, completely stripped of its rights, even Nazi propaganda had

  difficulty evoking dangers that this completely powerless minority could have

  represented; it was barely possible to supply motives for further anti-Semitic

  ‘actions’.

  On the other hand, however, the Nazi regime had not managed to expel all the

  German Jews. Now it became apparent that, as a result of the plundering of the

  Jewish minority, a relatively large group of people had been left behind, which was

  no longer in a position to emigrate. With war on the horizon, the regime set about