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

in particular because of the overstretched transport situation. 141 On 16 December, the Commissar General for White Russia, Wihelm Kube, advised Lohse against

further transports of Jews from the Reich, since he wanted to see ‘people who

come from our cultural background’ treated differently from the ‘indigenous,

animalistic hordes’. 142 The Minsk deportations were actually suspended after eight transports (the last one left Vienna on 28 November).

However, when the deportations to Riga began on 19 November, the construc-

tion of the concentration camp planned for the German Jews in the area of Riga

had not even begun. 143 The Jews transported from Germany were to build the camp themselves, in unimaginably primitive conditions in the middle of winter. 144

As in Lodz and in Minsk, the relevant offices in Riga were placed in an impossible

situation in November 1941 when they were called upon to accommodate 25,000

Jews in the shortest possible time; the officials on the ground responded to the

challenge with a radical, murderous solution.

The first five transports meant for Riga, from Frankfurt am Main, Munich,

Vienna, Breslau, and Berlin, with around 5,000 people, were redirected via

Kaunas. All the transportees were shot there immediately on arrival at Fort IX

Autumn 1941: Deportation and Mass Murders

299

by the murder units of Einsatzkommando 3.145 And as in Minsk, in Riga the inhabitants of the ghetto fell victim to mass murder: between 29 November and

1 December around 4,000 Latvian Jews and between 8 and 9 December an

estimated over 20,000 further ghetto-dwellers were shot. 146 In his Soviet prison, HSSPF Friedrich Jeckeln, the man responsible for the murders, stated that he had

received the order to liquidate the ghetto directly from Himmler in November.

Himmler had also ordered him to kill ‘all Jews in the Ostland down to the last

man’. 147 During the first massacre, 1,000 Jews deported from Berlin were also shot in the early morning of 30 November, immediately on arrival.

After this mass murder, however, the shooting of Jews from the Reich was

temporarily suspended. This is borne out by an entry in Himmler’s telephone

diary for 30 November 1941 about a conversation with Heydrich: ‘Transport of

Jews from Berlin. No liquidation.’148 However, by this time, the Berlin Jews had already been murdered. On 1 December Himmler sent a radio telegram to Jeckeln,

stating that ‘unauthorized acts and contraventions’ of the ‘guidelines issued by

myself or by the Reich Security Main Office on my behalf’ for how the ‘Jews

resettled to the Ostland territory’ were to be ‘treated’ would be ‘punished’. At

the same time he summoned Jeckeln to discuss the ‘Jewish question’ on 4

December. 149

From the way Himmler had phrased his 1 December telegram it becomes clear

that the murder of the 6,000 people from the Reich had neither been expressly

ordered nor explicitly forbidden; ‘guidelines’ were in place, but no precise instruc-

tions or orders. No general policy for the immediate murder of those deported to

the Eastern European ghettos existed, as is demonstrated by the fate of the

deportees to Lodz and Minsk, who were initially put in ghettos there. If we assume

that the RSHA or Himmler had issued such an explicit order to murder deportees

in Riga, and the Reichsführer SS had revoked it on 30 November, Jeckeln’s rebuke

fom Himmler would make no sense; in that case he would only have been acting

on orders. However, no express prohibition seems to have existed either; had it

done so, Himmler would have referred to such a prohibition in his telegram to

Jeckeln, and not referred in general terms to ‘guidelines’. It appears that it was not

envisaged from the start that the Jews deported from Central Europe would be

murdered on arrival. Instead, it seems that Jeckeln acted on his own initiative, on

the assumption that the RSHA’s ‘guidelines’, which were drafted in general terms

and of which we are inadequately informed, permitted such action in view of the

extremely difficult situation in Latvia, where there was no available accommoda-

tion for the deportees who were arriving in quick succession.

There is some reason to believe that the rapid deportations to Riga, like those to

Lodz and Minsk, were deliberately used to create ‘intolerable situations’ as a way

of effectively forcing the local authorities to find more radical ‘solutions’. Greiser

in Lodz had responded with his proposal to murder 100,000 indigenous Jews and

the HSSPF for Russia-Centre had organized a mass murder in the Minsk ghetto.

300

Final Solution on a European Scale, 1941

However, while Jeckeln had reacted in the desired way with the liquidation of

the Riga ghetto, by executing the Central European Jews he had gone beyond the

desired goal (at this point). There was, though, a tension characteristic of the

process of putting the murder machinery in motion between general orders that

were to be understood intuitively, and independent initiatives on the part of the

local authorities, and on this occasion there had to be intervention from the top to

control matters. Himmler intervened, for once, in order to de-escalate the situ-

ation rather than—as with his other interventions—to radicalize it still further.

Himmler’s intervention had at first led to a complete halt to the systematic

murder of those deported to Latvia: the Jews of the next twenty-two transports

that arrived in Riga were confined in the Riga ghetto or the two camps of Salaspils

and Jungfernhof. There do seem, however, to have been two exceptions. Signifi-

cant indications suggest that, on 19 January 1942, most of the passengers of a

transport from Theresienstadt, more than 900 people, were shot immediately on

arrival, and that at the end of January around 500 Jews, from a transport either

from Berlin or Vienna, were also shot. 150 At the end of March and the beginning of April 1942, selections of Jews no longer fit for work also took place in the Riga

ghetto and Jungfernhof: the victims were mainly Jews from Vienna and Berlin. In

the ghetto we may assume that 3,000 died, and in the Jungfernhof, in an ‘action’

on 26 March, around 1,800 people. 151

‘Final Solution’ in Serbia, Autumn 1941

After the German military administration had ruled in May that Jews and

Gypsies were to be marked, dismissed from public service, deployed in forced

labour, and have their property confiscated, 152 the anti-Jewish policy was further intensified with the start of the attack on the Soviet Union.