Nazi Germany and the Jews, Volume 2: The Years of Extermination

by Saul Friedlander

  During the 1920s, apart from pogroms in the immediate postwar period, anti-Jewish attacks were kept under control first by the postwar democratic governments and then by Marshal Józef Pilsudski’s autocratic regime.87 But, after Pilsudski’s death, mainly from 1936 on, anti-Jewish aggression grew in all domains. Widespread physical violence, economic boycott, numerous clashes in the universities, and church incitement were encouraged by successive right-wing governments. Thus, as the war started, the largest Jewish community in Europe, already badly bruised by surrounding hostility, was caught in the Nazi net.88

  The SS Einsatzgruppen I, IV, V, and mainly Obergruppenführer Udo von Woyrsch’s “Special Purpose Operational Group” were in charge of terrorizing the Jewish populations. The wanton murder and destruction campaign launched against the Jews did not have the systematic goal of liquidating a specific segment of the Jewish population, as was the case with the Polish elites, but it was both a manifestation of generalized Nazi anti-Jewish hatred and a show of violence that would incite the Jewish populations to flee from some of the regions about to be incorporated into the Reich, such as eastern Upper Silesia.89 More generally the Einsatzgruppen had probably received instructions to drive as many Jews as possible beyond the San River to what was to become the Soviet-occupied area of Poland.90

  The men of Woyrsch’s mixed Einsatzgruppe of SD and Order Police excelled. In Dynow, near the San, Order Police detachments belonging to the group burned a dozen Jews in the local synagogue, then shot another sixty of them in the nearby forest. Such murder operations were repeated in several neighboring villages and towns (on September 19, more than one hundred Jewish men were killed in Przekopana). Overall, the unit had murdered some five hundred to six hundred Jews by September 20.91

  For the Wehrmacht, Woyrsch had transgressed all tolerable limits. Fourteenth Army commanding officers demanded the withdrawal of the Einsatzgruppe and, atypically, Gestapo headquarters immediately complied. On September 22 the group was pulled back to Katowice.92 Woyrsch’s case, however, was extreme, and more generally the tension between the Wehrmacht and the SS did not lead to any measures against the SS units as such but rather to army complaints about the lack of discipline of Heydrich’s men: “An SS artillery unit of the armored corps has herded Jews into a church and massacred them,” Gen. Franz Halder, chief of the Army (OKH) General Staff, noted in his service diary. “The court-martial has sentenced them to one year in jail. Küchler [Gen. Georg von, commander in chief of Armies Three and Eighteen] has not confirmed the sentence, because more severe punishment is due.”93 Again, on October 10: “Massacres of Jews—discipline!”94

  The Wehrmacht may have considered massacring Jews as something demanding disciplinary action, but torturing them offered welcome enjoyment to both soldiers and SS personnel. The choice victims were Orthodox Jews, given their distinctive looks and attire. They were shot at; they were compelled to smear feces on each other; they had to jump, crawl, sing, clean excrement with prayer shawls, dance around the bonfires of burning Torah scrolls. They were whipped, forced to eat pork, or had Jewish stars carved on their foreheads. The “beard game” was the most popular entertainment of all: Beards and sidelocks were shorn, plucked, torn, set afire, hacked off with or without parts of skin, cheeks, or jaws, to the amusement of a usually large audience of cheering soldiers. On Yom Kippur 1939 such entertainment for the troops was particularly lively.

  Part of the invasion army was strongly ideologized, even at that early stage of the war. In a “Leaflet for the Conduct of German Soldiers in the Occupied Territory of Poland,” issued by the commander-in-chief of the army, General Walther von Brauchitsch, on September 19, 1939, the soldiers were warned of the “inner enmity” of “all civilians that were not ‘members of the German race.’” Furthermore, Brauchitsch’s “leaflet” stated: “The behavior toward Jews needs no special mention for the soldiers of the National-Socialist Reich.”95 It was therefore within the range of accepted thinking that a soldier noted in his diary, during these same days: “Here we recognize the necessity for a radical solution to the Jewish question. Here one sees houses occupied by beasts in human form. In their beards and kaftans, with their devilishly grotesque faces, they make a dreadful impression. Anyone who was not yet a radical opponent of the Jews must become one here.”96

  More commonly soldiers and officers, like their Führer, regarded the Jews with bottomless disgust and contempt: “When you see such people,” Pvt. FP wrote to his wife on September 21, “you can’t believe that this is still possible in the 20th century. The Jews want to kiss our hands, but—we grab our pistol and hear ‘God protect me,’—and they run as fast as they can.”97 Back in Vienna First Cpl. JE recorded some of his impressions from the campaign in a letter of December 30: “And the Jews—I rarely saw such neglected people walking around, covered in tatters, dirty, greasy. To us they looked like a pest. The mean appearances, the cunning questions and behavior have often led us to draw our pistols in order…to remind them of reality.”98 Such impressions and reactions constantly recurred, and the line separating this sort of visceral hatred from brutality and murder was very faint.

  Looting, however, did not demand any ideological passion: “They knock at eleven in the morning,” Sierakowiak noted on October 22, “…a German army officer, two policemen and the superintendent come in. The officer asks how many persons are in the apartment, looks at the beds, asks about the bedbugs, and if we have a radio. He doesn’t find anything worthy of taking and finally leaves disappointed. At the neighbors’ (naturally they go only to Jews), he took away radios, mattresses, comforters, carpets, etc. They took away the Grabinskis’ only down quilt.”99

  On October 13, 1939, the Polish physician and longtime director of the hospital in Szczebrzeszyn, near Zamóść, Dr. Zygmunt Klukowski, recorded in his diary: “The Germans posted several new regulations. I am noting only a few: ‘All men of Jewish religion between the ages of fifteen and sixty must report at 8 a.m. on the morning of October 14, at city hall with brooms, shovels, and buckets. They will be cleaning city streets.” On the next day he added: “The Germans are treating the Jews very brutally. They cut their beards; sometimes they pull the hair out.”100 On the fifteenth the Germans added more of the same, yet with a slightly different—and certainly inventive—slant: “A German major, now town commandant, told the new ‘police’ [an auxiliary Polish police unit, organized by the Germans] that all brutalities against Jews have to be tolerated since it is in line with German anti-Semitic policies and that this brutality has been ordered from above. The Germans are always trying to find new work for the Jews. They order the Jews to take at least a half hour of exhausting gymnastics before any work, which can be fatal, particularly for older people. When the Jews are marched to any assignment, they must loudly sing Polish national songs.”101 And, on the next day, Klukowski’s entry encapsulated it all: “Persecution of Jews is increasing. The Germans are beating the Jews without any reason, just for fun. Several Jews were brought to the hospital with their buttocks beaten into raw flesh. I was able to administer only first aid, because the hospital has been instructed not to admit Jews.”102 (The same, of course, was happening everywhere else.) “In the afternoon,” Sierakowiak wrote on December 3, “I went outside for a while and visited Ela Waldman. She had been chucked out of school, as they do to all the Jews. They also beat Jews terribly in the streets of the city. They usually come up to the Jews who walk by and slap them in the face, kick, spit, etc.” And at that point the young diarist added a puzzling question: “Is this evidence that the end for the Germans will probably come soon?”103

  Such brutal behavior by the Wehrmacht demonstrates a measure of continuity between the attitudes and actions of German troops at the very outset of the war and their murderous behavior after the attack on the Soviet Union.104 Yet, during the Polish campaign, at top echelons of the army the inroads of Hitler’s exhortations were still neutralized in part by traditional rules of military behavior and discipline
, as well as, in some cases, by moral qualms. Thus, Gen. Johannes Blaskowitz, the army commander in Poland (Oberbefehlshaber Ost), addressed a protest directly to Hitler. Blaskowitz was shocked by the behavior of Heydrich’s units and by the brutalization of the army. “It is wholly misguided,” he wrote on February 6, 1940, “to slaughter some 10,000 Jews and Poles, as it is happening at the moment; such methods will eradicate neither Polish nationalism, nor the Jews from the mass of the population.”105 Hitler shrugged off the complaint. By mid-October the Wehrmacht was divested of its authority over civilian matters in occupied Poland.

  Heydrich had grasped the thrust of the changes taking place within the Wehrmacht. In his already mentioned letter to Daluege of July 1940, he alluded to his difficulties with “the upper-level commanders of the army” but indicated that “cooperation with troops below staff level, and in many cases with the different staffs of the army themselves, was generally good.” He added: “If one compares [the number of] physical assaults, incidents of looting, and atrocities committed by the army and the SS, the SS and police do not come away looking bad.”106

  VII

  On September 21, 1939, Heydrich had issued the following guidelines to the commanders of the Einsatzgruppen: Their tasks included (1) the rounding up and concentration of Jews in large communities in cities close to railway lines, “in view of the end goal”; (2) the establishment of Jewish Councils in each Jewish community to serve as administrative links between the German authorities and the Jewish population; and (3) cooperation with the military command and the civil administration in all matters relating to the Jewish population.107

  The “end goal” in this context probably meant the deportation of the Jewish population of the Warthegau and later of the western and central parts of former Poland to the easternmost area of the General Government, the Lublin district, along the lines of Hitler’s vague indications at that same time. A few days later, on September 27, in a conference with heads of the RSHA departments and the Einsatzgruppen chiefs, Heydrich added an element unmentioned until then: the expulsion of Jews over the demarcation line [between German occupied Poland and the Soviet occupation area] had been authorized by the Führer (“Abschiebung über die Demarkationslinie ist vom Führer genehmigt”).108 Such an authorization meant that at this early stage the Germans had no clear plans. Their policy regarding the Jews of former Poland seemed to be in line with the measures they had elaborated before the war, mainly from 1938 on, regarding the Jews of the Reich—now applied with much greater violence, of course: identification, segregation, expropriation, concentration, and emigration or expulsion (emigration was allowed until early 1940, as far as the Jews of Poland were concerned).

  In this context the significance of a September 29 letter from Heydrich to Daluege seems as hazy as the “end goal” he had mentioned a few days before. “Finally,” Heydrich wrote, “the Jewish problem will, as you already know, be settled in a special way (Schliesslich, soll das Judenproblem, wie Du ja schon weisst, einer besonderen Regelung unterworfen werden).”109

  By then, however, a new element had become part of the picture and considerably influenced the measures taken against Jews and Poles (particularly in the areas annexed to the Reich): the mass ingathering of ethnic Germans from Eastern and Southeastern Europe. Jews and Poles would be expelled and Volksdeutsche would move in. On October 7 Himmler was appointed head of the new agency in charge of these population transfers, the Reichskommissariat für die Festigung des deutschen Volkstums, or RKFDV (Reich Commissariat for the Strengthening of Germandom).

  This ethnic-racial reshuffling of vast populations in Eastern Europe after September 1939 was but one further step in the initiatives already launched before the war to bring “home into the Reich” the Germans of Austria, the Sudetenland, Memel, Danzig, and the like. In Nazi phantasms the reshuffling planned at the end of 1939 would eventually lead to entirely new and far-flung Germanic colonization much farther east, if a new political and military situation were to allow it.

  Over recent years many historians have sought a link between these plans and the onset of the “Final Solution.” Yet, as we shall see further on, these operations appear to have been distinct and to have stemmed from separate motives and plans. Nonetheless, between 1939 and 1942, Himmler’s population transfers led directly to the expulsions and deportations of hundreds of thousands of Poles and Jews, mainly from the Warthegau into the General Government.

  German projects for the East did not originate in academic research, but German academia volunteered historical justification and professional advice to enhance the exalting new vistas for the expansion of the Volk. In fact some of these expansion plans had been part and parcel of ongoing “research on the East” (Ostforschung) since the late 1920s. In other words this Ostforschung was a major nationalist, völkisch, and increasingly Nazi-tainted but self-initiated scholarly effort to bolster German expansion plans and, eventually, to suggest various practical options.110 A particularly influential role in terms of the historical legitimation of this endeavor was played by a Jewish luminary at the University of Königsberg, the historian Hans Rothfels; of course none of his vocal nationalism protected him from dismissal and forced emigration in the late thirties.111

  Two of Rothfels’s students, the already well-established Werner Conze and his colleague Theodor Schieder (both destined to become pillars of the historians’ guild in West Germany after 1945), came to play an important advisory role after the beginning of the war—with drastic anti-Jewish steps added for good measure. In a paper he had prepared for the International Congress of Sociology, scheduled to open on August 29, 1939, in Bucharest, Conze dwelled at length on the overpopulation problem in Eastern Europe; it could be alleviated, he suggested, by the “de-Judaization (Entjudung) of cities and marketplaces, to allow the integration of peasant offspring in commerce and crafts.”112 Schieder’s proposals became more immediately applicable once Poland fell into German hands.

  In the fall of 1939 Schieder, then a member of the “Königsberg Circle” affiliated with the North and East German Research Association (Nord-und Ostdeutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, or NODFG), was asked by his colleagues in the association to draft a memorandum about “the German national and racial border in the East” for the benefit of the political and administrative authorities in the newly occupied territories. The text was submitted to Himmler on October 7.

  In the memorandum Schieder recommended the confiscation of the land and the transfer of parts of the Polish population from the annexed territories to the eastern part of the country in order to open the way to German settlement. And in order to facilitate the transfer of the Poles, the young Königsberg scholar pleaded for the evacuation of the Jews from Polish cities (die Herauslösung des Judentums aus polnischen Städten) and, as a further step, even more radically than Conze, the “total de-Judaization of remaining Poland.” The evicted Jewish population could be sent overseas. Thus, whereas Hitler, Himmler, and Heydrich were still considering the deportation of the Jews of Poland into a reservation in the Lublin area or even their expulsion over the demarcation line into Soviet-occupied territory, Schieder and his colleagues were already suggesting an overseas territorial solution that would indeed become the next Nazi territorial plan a few months later.113

  The NODFG was functionally linked to the older Berlin Publikationsstelle (PuSte), whose own leading specialists volunteered from day one: “We must make use of our experience, which we have developed over many long years of effort,” Hermann Aubin wrote to Alfred Brackmann, the director of PuSte, on September 18, 1939. “Scholarship cannot simply wait until it is called upon, but must make itself heard.”114 Aubin had no reason to worry. On September 23 Brackmann wrote to his colleague Metz: “It is in fact a great satisfaction for us to see that the NODFG with its PuSte offices has now become the central institution for scientific advice to the Foreign Ministry, the Ministry of the Interior, the OKH, and partly also the Propaganda Ministry and a series of SS agenci
es. We are certain now that we shall be thoroughly consulted on the future drawing of borders.”115

  From the outset PuSte and NOFDG scholars worked on various aspects of the Jewish question in occupied Poland. Statistician Klostermann, for example, calculated the proportion of Jews in Polish towns with populations of ten thousand inhabitants or more; this study was prepared for the Gestapo.116 Professor Otto Reche prepared a detailed memorandum titled “Main Theses for a Population Policy Aimed at Securing the German East.” The study was transmitted by Brackmann to high SS officials, who, it seems, passed it on to Himmler.117 The main ideas were not fundamentally different from those submitted by Schieder, except that they delved into details that the Königsberg historian had not emphasized. In matters of mass expulsion of Poles and Jews, for example, Reche suggested that the Poles be allowed to take their belongings: “With the Jews however one may act with less generosity” (bei Juden wird man weniger weitherzig verfahren dürfen).118 And, beyond these early studies, another scholar—a specialist in planning the demographic organization of large-scale space—Professor Konrad Meyer-Hetling, was launching his own research for Himmler’s colonization projects; it was to become “General Plan East.”

  Schematically the Germanization of the annexed eastern territories (and later colonization of further space in the East) demanded the liquidation of the Polish elites, the transfer of ethnic Germans or the migration of Reich Germans to the new territories, and of course the expulsion of the local racially alien inhabitants: the Poles and the Jews. The Poles who could not be expelled would be strictly separated from the German colonists, and a “happy few,” mainly children, would be mustered as belonging to Germanic stock, included in the Volksliste, and integrated into the Volksgemeinschaft.

  Himmler’s RKFdV and the RSHA were in charge of the operations, as we saw, and the general expulsion plan regarding the ex-Polish areas was subdivided by Heydrich in a series of short-term plans (Nahpläne) mainly to be launched from the end of 1939 on. There was, however, one exception to the expulsion plans regarding Jews. In heavily industrialized Upper Silesia, the Jews living east of the “police line,” which divided the Kattowitz district into two separate administrative regions, were to stay. They would be moved, in the course of 1940, into forced-labor camps and employed in local industries or building projects. The SS officer whom Himmler put in charge of this forced-labor operation, which within a few months was to employ some seventeen thousand Jewish workers, was the former police chief of Breslau, SS Oberführer Albrecht Schmelt.119