Holocaust: The Nazi Persecution and Murder of the Jews

by Peter Longerich

  subjecting this group to total tyranny.

  After the November pogrom the Nazi regime proceeded to declare the Jews to

  be hostages menaced by ‘destruction’ (Vernichtung). Remarkably, Hitler himself,

  in referring to extermination in his speech of 30 January 1939, did not speak of the

  German Jews but prophesied—expressly in the instance of a ‘global war’—the

  ‘destruction of the Jewish race in Europe’.

  However, from the perspective of the National Socialists, the idea of exter-

  mination was not a tactically motivated threat but the logical consequence of the

  notion that dominated the whole of National Socialist policy, that the German

  people were engaged in a struggle against ‘international Jewry’ in which their

  very existence was at stake. The National Socialists saw war as the chance to

  realize their utopian ideas of an empire ordered along racist lines. From their

  point of view, war served to legitimate the idea of compensating for the loss of

  the ‘racially valuable’ by extirpating the racially ‘inferior’ in the interests of

  maintaining ‘ethnic biological’ equilibrium. It was the emergency of war that

  produced the opportunity for such an unparalleled break with the humanitarian

  tradition.

  Even during the war against Poland, in mid-September 1939, the German

  leadership began seriously to address their plans for Lebensraum by developing

  a gigantic resettlement programme for the newly conquered territories. This

  programme involved the deportation of all Jews living in territory under German

  control to a ‘Jewish reservation’ in conquered Poland. These plans were actually

  set in motion with the so-called ‘Nisko Action’ in October 1939, but had to be

  suspended after a short time. In fact, however, the Nazi regime kept to the plan of

  a ‘Jewish reservation’ in the district of Lublin and repeated fitful attempts were

  made to achieve such a mass programme through small-scale deportations.

  In fact the plan for a ‘Jewish reservation’ was aimed at concentrating the Jews

  from the whole of the German sphere of influence in an area which lacked

  adequate living conditions, and to cause the death of these more than two million

  people through undernourishment, epidemics, low birth rates, and so on, possibly

  over a period of several generations. Plainly such a long-term plan contained the

  potential to blackmail the Western powers that the leadership of the ‘Third Reich’

  needed in order to construct a Lebensraum empire without being disturbed by

  outside intervention.

  424

  Conclusion

  The plan for a reservation was thus an initial project for the ‘final solution of the

  Jewish question’, a long-term plan involving the deaths of the great majority of

  Jews living under the control of the Nazi regime. The radical nature of this project

  becomes fully clear when one views it within the context of the mass murders that

  the Nazi regime unleashed after the start of the war: the shootings of tens of

  thousands of Polish civilians (including thousands of Jews), as well as the ‘eutha-

  nasia’ programme, the murder of the sick and the disabled.

  Over the next two years, the ‘Jewish reservation’ project was maintained (in

  modified form). After the victory over France, the regime concentrated on

  Madagascar, and early in 1941, as part of the preparations for ‘Barbarossa’, a

  plan was developed to deport the Jews under German rule to the territories in

  the East, which the Germans thought they were about to conquer. Common to all

  these plans was the prospect of the physical ‘Final Solution’, even if this was to

  extend over a long period of time.

  Many historians have assumed that a fundamental decision to murder the Jews

  was taken sometime during the course of 1941 and that therefore one can clearly

  distinguish an early phase during which ‘territorial’ solutions were conceived from

  a later ‘final solution phase’. However, this view fails to perceive what was at the

  core of the plans of National Socialist Judenpolitik: the ‘territorial solution’ was

  also always conceived as a ‘final solution’, because in the final analysis its goal was

  the annihilation of the vast majority of the Jews.

  By autumn 1939, then, the point had already been reached at which those

  involved in Judenpolitik began to gear themselves up for the extermination of

  the European Jews. The measures taken by the regime from 1941 onwards were

  merely the concrete realization of the extermination already envisaged in 1939.

  There were only vague ideas of how and over what period of time this extermin-

  ation was to occur in practice. The ‘destruction of the Jewish race in Europe’,

  threatened by Hitler on 30 January 1939, was initially an option, the realization of

  which was still dependent on certain conditions. From 1941 onwards, when the

  systematic destruction of the European Jews was actually realized, the idea of what

  was meant by ‘Final Solution’ was to be radicalized. General notions of annihi-

  lating the Jews within the German sphere of influence over the long term were

  now developed by the National Socialist leadership into a comprehensive pro-

  gramme of mass murder which was essentially to be implemented even before

  the end of the war. The abstract concept of ‘destruction’ (Vernichtung) or ‘Final

  Solution’ used by the perpetrators allowed them to develop their plans, which

  since 1939 had been geared towards the death of the European Jews, in stages

  towards this systematic murder programme. However, since 1939 extermination

  and ‘Final Solution’ had equated to millions of deaths.

  This radicalization of the process leading to systematic mass murder occurred

  in the context of the expanding war. For the National Socialists, the racial war for

  Lebensraum included from the outset the prospect of exterminating what they had

  Conclusion

  425

  defined as the Jewish enemy, particularly when the war grew into a world war and

  the dream of a Lebensraum empire was thus endangered.

  This link between war and extermination policy does not represent an inevit-

  able automatism, and it would be wrong to imagine that a ‘decision’ to murder the

  European Jews was taken around the start of the war. The link was, in fact, the

  result of National Socialist policy. For the extermination process to be actually set

  in motion crucial preconditions had first to exist: the ‘reservation’ had to be

  definitely determined and established. So long as this had not occurred, exter-

  mination remained an intention that could also under certain circumstances be

  revoked.

  In the summer of 1941 the extermination policy reached the second stage of its

  escalation with the murder of the Soviet Jews. While tens of thousands of Jewish

  men eligible for military service had been shot during the first few weeks of the

  war in Russia (and earlier in the mass executions in Poland), from the end of July,

  but more intensively from August, September, and October 1941, hundreds of

  thousands of men, women, and children were murdered. This transition from

  a terroristic modus operandi to a murderous ‘ethnic cleansing’ cannot be

  adequ
ately explained by the elation of victory, nor by a change of mood provoked

  by the failure of the blitzkrieg strategy in autumn/winter 1941.

  In fact, in the summer of 1941, the Germans began the ‘New Order’ (Neuord-

  nung) of the conquered Lebensraum, precisely as originally planned without

  waiting for military victory. However, while the war continued the planned

  reordering of the ‘Ostraum’ had to be restricted to purely negative measures.

  The mass murder of the Soviet civilian population, that is those who stood at the

  lowest level of the Nazis’ racist hierarchy, and in their distorted perception formed

  the chief supports of the Bolshevik system, was from the perspective of the

  National Socialist leadership an anticipation of the plans discussed before the

  start of the war, according to which millions of people on Soviet territory were to

  fall victim to the ‘New Order’ of the Lebensraum.

  One factor that may have been crucial to the initiation of genocide in Soviet

  territory in late summer 1941, which had been planned since the beginning of the

  same year, was an initiative by Himmler, who wished, through his brutal treat-

  ment of the Jewish civilian population, to transfer his competencies as Reichs-

  kommissar for the Strengthening of the German Nation to the newly conquered

  territories, as was also finally sanctioned by Hitler. By ordering in July 1941 the

  inclusion of elderly men, women, and children in the campaign of extermination

  through shooting, Himmler was preparing the ground for the ‘ethnic cleansing’

  that was intended to be carried out by the SS and was doing so even while the war

  was still going on and before the apparatus of the occupying administration could

  be consolidated. It is plain that in doing this Himmler was anticipating Hitler’s

  intentions; Hitler himself had done everything he could to make sure even before

  the beginning of the invasion that this war would have the character of a campaign

  426

  Conclusion

  of racist extermination, and he was fully informed about the actions of the

  Einsatzgruppen.

  This is not to say, however, that the gradual extension of the murders to the

  general Jewish civilian population can simply be seen as the result of an order

  from the Führer or an independent initiative on the part of Himmler which had

  been authorized by Hitler. The crucial point is that there was from the outset a

  consensus among the decision makers that the persecution of the Jews should be

  further and further radicalized in the further course of the war. On the basis of this

  consensus, general instructions in line with the intuition of the subordinates were

  issued in certain situations; in this way wider scope was given to independent

  initiatives. In the end the entire process was coordinated and standardized at the

  top. The leadership at the centre and the executive organizations on the periphery

  radicalized one another through a reciprocal process.

  The third stage of escalation in the transition to the systematic extermination of

  the Jews occurred in the autumn of 1941. It consisted of two crucial decisions: on

  the one hand Hitler’s decision made in mid-September 1941 to deport the Jews

  from the whole of the Reich including the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, if

  possible that same year, to the incorporated Polish territories, and further east-

  wards the following spring. If the first step was originally seen as being the

  deportation of 60,000 Jews to the Lodz ghetto, this intention was soon modified

  and extended: now 25,000 Jews and Gypsies were to be deported to the ghettos of

  Riga and Minsk. We know that at this point a third wave of deportations was

  already planned for the start of the following year. Between September and

  November, with the marking of the German Jews, the general prohibition on

  emigration imposed upon Jews throughout the whole of the area under German

  control, and the withdrawal of citizenship and the remaining property of those

  deported from Germany, major administrative preparations for the deportation

  had also been made.

  Thus, in September 1941, Hitler set in motion the plan, made early in 1941, to

  deport the European Jews to the territories of the Soviet Union that were soon to

  be conquered, although without waiting for the victory over the Red Army. The

  fact that, although the war was not going to plan, Hitler insisted on the imple-

  mentation of the final variant of the reservation plan that had been pursued since

  1939—with its genocidal consequences—seems to be more significant for the

  analysis of the decision-making process than any additional factors (the issue of

  accommodation, repression because of the deportations of the Volga Germans,

  etc.), which, from the point of view of the Nazi leadership, argued in favour of the

  instigation of the deportations in autumn 1941. As with the Nisko and Madagascar

  plans, the Nazi leadership clearly associated the idea of ‘hostage-taking’ with the

  first deportations. The United States were to be dissuaded from entering the war

  through the more or less open threat to liquidate the deported Jews, entirely in the

  spirit of Hitler’s prophecy of 30 January 1939.

  Conclusion

  427

  The decision that Hitler made in autumn 1941 gradually to deport the Jews

  under German rule to the East was linked to a second momentous decision (but

  one which cannot be reconstructed in detail), namely to carry out the mass

  murder of the indigenous Jews in the provisional reception areas. Now areas

  ‘free of Jews’ were also to be created in the occupied Polish territories, as they

  had been in the Soviet Union since the end of the summer. With the

  prospect of sending tens of thousands of Central European Jews to the already

  completely overcrowded ghettos, more radical solutions were demanded of the

  local authorities.

  Reichsstathalter Greiser himself had proposed that the indigenous Jewish

  population in the Warthegau should be ‘reduced’ by 100,000 ‘in compensation

  for’ the reception of Jews from the Reich in Lodz, that is these people were to be

  killed with gas vans. Further large-scale massacres were carried out until the end

  of 1941 among the local Jewish population in the other sites destined to receive

  Jews from the Reich, namely the ghettos of Minsk and Riga. When Einsatzkom-

  mando 2 began shooting thousands of Jews deported from the Reich immediately

  after their arrival in Riga or Kovno (Kaunas), the murder of the Reich German

  Jews was suspended by a direct intervention from Himmler. Thus, a distinction

  was still being made between the Eastern European and Central European Jews.

  In the General Government too, particularly in the district of Lublin, prepar-

  ations for a mass murder of the local Jewish population began in October 1941.

  Previously, the government of the General Government had been informed that

  they could not expect to deport any more Jews eastwards from that territory for

  the foreseeable future. In October preparations began for the construction of the

  first extermination camp at Belzec, and at, the same time, with the so-called

  ‘Schiessbefehl’ (order to shoot on sight) the death penalty was introduced for

>   leaving the ghetto. The goal of these measures was to murder the Jewish popula-

  tion that were ‘unfit to work’, initially in the district of Lublin. These plans may

  also have applied to the district of Galicia, which had only been part of the General

  Government since 1 August and where, like the Einsatzgruppen in the other

  occupied territories, the Security Police had been carrying out similar massacres

  among the Jewish civilian population since October. References to the construc-

  tion of an extermination camp in Lemberg (Lvov) are significant in this context.

  However, the construction of an extermination camp in Belzec (and possible plans

  for Lemberg) cannot be seen as specifically intended for the murder of the entire

  Jewish population of the General Government. The occupying forces initially

  concentrated on making preparations for those Jews who were ‘unfit for work’

  in the district of Lublin, where a third wave of deportations was expected the

  following spring. Thus, in autumn 1941 the murder of hundreds of thousands of

  people had been planned, but not yet of millions. As far as the fate of the

  remaining Polish and other European Jews was concerned, the older plan of a

  mass deportation to the Soviet Union (with ultimately genocidal consequences)

  428

  Conclusion

  had not yet been abandoned. At any rate a dynamic of mass murder had now been

  set in motion, which could only have been halted by a radical change of direction

  in the regime’s Judenpolitik.

  In the autumn/winter of 1941 facilities for killing with gas were established not

  only in Belzec (and possibly in Lemberg) as they had been in Chelmno. Further

  possible locations have been identified through plans for the installation of such

  facilities in Riga, and corresponding references to Mogilev (not far from Minsk).

  There is also the offer that Himmler made to the Slovakian head of state on

  20 October, to deport Slovakian Jews to a particularly remote area of the General

  Government, possibly the basis for the construction of the second extermination

  camp at Sobibor. The use of gas as a means of killing had thus initially begun in

  the planned deportation zones. Parallel with this we should consider the events in

  Serbia, where the Wehrmacht began systematically shooting Jewish men and