Holocaust: The Nazi Persecution and Murder of the Jews by Peter Longerich (booksvooks TXT) 📕

powers, Hitler had announced that Germany was

‘resolved to urge one European nation after the other, step by step, to contribute to

the solution of the Jewish problem, and when the time comes to turn to non-

European peoples with a similar appeal’. He would ‘carry on the fight until the total

destruction of the Jewish-Communist European empire’, and in the ‘not too distant

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future’ reach the southern tip of the Caucasus. Germany was not, however, pursu-

ing imperial goals in the Arabian world, but was working for the liberation of the

Arabs. ‘The German objective would be solely the destruction of Jews residing in the

Arab sphere under the protection of British power.’86 While this statement must admittedly be interpreted from a tactical perspective, it also shows that Hitler’s

fantasies of extermination already reached beyond the European sphere.

These quotations may of course be interpreted in different ways. If we consider

them in connection with the expansion of the mass murders in certain regions

which had already begun at the same time, or were under preparation, in my

opinion they represent components of a process of radicalization that had been set

in motion. The quotations make it clear that the Nazi leadership was in the

process of further escalating the original intention to deport the Jews under

German rule to the East where they were to die out under unbearable conditions.

In view of the comprehensive mass murders in the occupied Eastern territories,

which were also extended to Galicia in October, and with the first preparations for

the systematic murder of the Jews by gas in certain regions of Poland, the

organizers of the Judenpolitik developed increasingly terrible ideas of how

the ‘extermination’ or ‘Final Solution’ of the European Jews, envisaged since the

beginning of the war, was to be understood in concrete terms. A programme or a

plan for the systematic murder of all European Jews is admittedly not yet

discernible at this point, but the atmosphere for turning such a monstrous

intention into action was unambiguously present.

A Regional ‘Final Solution’ in the Warthegau, Late 1941

From mid-October onwards, a total of 25,000 Jews and Gypsies from across the

Reich were transported to the already overcrowded Lodz ghetto.

At around the same time, presumably still in October 1941, the mass murder of

indigenous Jews began in the district of Konim in the southern Warthegau. 87 In late November, in an ‘action’ lasting several days, 700 Jews were murdered in gas

vans in the Bornhagen (Kozminek) camp in the district of Kalisch. 88 The unit deployed was the ‘Sonderkommando’ Lange under HSSPF Warthegau Koppe,

which had already murdered thousands of inmates of institutions for the mentally

ill in the annexed Polish territories in 1939/40 and again in June/July 1941. 89 In October 1941 Lange’s unit had been summoned to Novgorod by Himmler to

murder patients in mental institutions there. 90 His driver confirmed that in autumn 1941 Lange had himself driven through the Warthegau to find a suitable

location for a stationary killing installation. Once an appropriate building had

been found in Chelmno, on 8 December Lange’s unit started using gas vans to

murder Jews there. At first most of the victims were indigenous Jews deported to

Chelmno from various ghettos in the Warthegau.

Autumn 1941: Deportation and Mass Murders

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From January 1942, those murdered in Chelmno were primarily inhabitants of

the Lodz ghetto. 91 In a first wave of deportations, between 16 and 29 January, the first 10,000 inhabitants of the ghetto were deported to Chelmno. Chaim Rumkowski, who performed his office as Jewish Elder in an autocratic fashion, had

managed to halve the figure of 20,000 people demanded by the Germans, and to

keep the selection of this group—‘undesirable elements’, Polish Jews who had

recently arrived in the ghetto from the provinces, and others—under his own

control. 92 Over the months that followed, however, it would prove that these

‘successes’ were mercilessly exploited by the Germans to involve the apparatus of

the Lodz Jewish council more and more closely in the machinery of deportation.

A letter dated 1 May 1942 to Himmler from Artur Greiser, the Gauleiter for the

Warthegau, 93 provides a major clue for the reconstruction of the decision to wreak mass murder among the Jews of the Warthegau. In this letter Greiser informed the

Reichsführer SS that the ‘action concerning the special treatment of some 100,000

Jews in my Gau territory, authorized by you in agreement with the head of the

Reich Security Head Office, SS Obergruppenführer Heydrich [could be] con-

cluded in the next 2–3 months’. If Himmler and Heydrich had to ‘authorize’

this mass murder, we can assume that the suggestion must substantially have

come from Greiser. 94 The planned number of 100,000 Jews ‘unfit for work’ and thus abandoned to murder can also be identified in another document from

January 1942.95 Presumably, then, the murder of the 100,000 people (Polish Jews

‘unfit for work’) was the ‘service in return’ that Greiser had demanded from

Himmler if he was to receive 25,000 Jews and Gypsies (rather than the 60,000

people originally stated by Himmler) into the Lodz ghetto. Some months later—

some time in summer or autumn 1942—Hitler gave Greiser, when he again

addressed the ‘Jewish question’ in his Gau, a free hand—special authorization

was no longer required to murder a certain number of people.

Eastern Upper Silesia: Forced Labour and Murder

of Jews ‘Unfit for Work’

As in the Warthegau, in eastern Upper Silesia the extensive resettlement plans that

Himmler had introduced in 1939 in his capacity as Reichskommisar for the

Strengthening of the German Nation, had been suspended in the spring of 1941

because of the concentration of troops in the East. Until then, some 38,000 ethnic

Germans had been settled in this area and more than 81,000 indigenous people,

including an unknown number of Jews, had been expelled to the General Gov-

ernment. After the suspension of the resettlement, in the eastern part of the

annexed territory, predominantly settled by Poles, we have the following picture:

while, since 1940, the Jewish population from the whole of eastern Upper Silesia

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had been concentrated in certain towns in this ‘eastern strip’ of the province,

thousands of Poles who had been driven from their homes were stuck in ‘Polish

camps’, and there were also thousands of ethnic Germans who could not be

accommodated in ‘transit camps’.

The