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

The Jewish community of Belgrade now had to supply forty hostages a day. From the beginning of

July onwards, hostages from this community, Communists and Jews, were shot

almost daily as ‘retaliation’ for acts of resistance. 153 In August, the arrests were extended to all Jewish men. In Serbia too, then, the ‘retaliatory measures’ were

directed against the hostile image of ‘Jewish Bolshevism’. In spite of these

shootings the Serbian resistance against the occupying power grew steadily.

When twenty-two German soldiers were killed in a further attack, on 4 October

the Plenipotentiary Commanding General in Serbia, Franz Böhme, ordered, 154 as

‘reprisal and atonement . . . that 100 Serbian prisoners be shot for every murdered

German soldier’. Those to be executed were prisoners from the concentration

camps in Sabac and Belgrade, ‘predominantly Jews and Communists’. 155 In fact, between 9 and 13 October some 2,000 Jews and 200 Gypsies from these camps

were shot. 156 Böhme had received express support for his policy of directing his retaliatory measures primarily against Jews from Martin Luther, the head of the

Autumn 1941: Deportation and Mass Murders

301

German department of the Foreign Ministry, and from Eichmann, the Jewish

specialist of the RSHA. In his memorandum to the AA representative in Bel-

grade, dated 16 September, Luther had recommended that the arrested Jewish

men be treated as hostages across the board, 157 and in a phone call to the Jewish expert of the Foreign Ministry on 13 September 1941 Eichmann had suggested

that this group be shot. 158

On 10 October Böhme issued a general order to shoot 100 prisoners or hostages

‘for every German soldier or ethnic German (men, women or children) killed or

murdered’, ‘for every wounded German soldier or ethnic German 50 prisoners or

hostages’. The following were to be ‘immediately’ arrested as hostages: ‘all Com-

munists, male inhabitants suspected of being so, all Jews, a certain number of

nationalist and democratically minded inhabitants’. 159

In accordance with this scheme, a few days later an additional 2,200 men, Jews

and Gypsies once again among them, were shot for 10 members of the Wehrmacht

killed in battle and 24 wounded. 160 In the two weeks following the order of 10 October, Wehrmacht units killed over 9,000 Jews, Gypsies, and other civilians. 161

At the beginning of November, 8,000 Jewish men, or almost all the Jewish men that

the occupying forces had been able to round up, were executed by the firing

squads. 162 The families of the victims were interned in a concentration camp during the winter and murdered the following spring, in gas vans.

During the ‘retaliatory actions’ Wehrmacht firing squads had also shot around

1,000 Roma. Unlike the Jewish minority, however, the Gypsies living in Serbia,

whose numbers far exceeded 100,000, were spared mass murders on this scale; this

clearly demonstrates the differences in the intensity of the persecution of the two

population groups. 163

Interim Conclusion: The Transition to Regional

Murder Actions

Taken as a whole, the decisions described above provide the following picture:

from the end of July the shootings in the Soviet Union were gradually extended to

include women and children, from August onwards certain places were made

judenfrei, and in October, in practically all parts of the occupied territory, the

policy of murdering the entire Jewish population apart from a small number of

people ‘fit for work’ was implemented. Late in August 1941 the ‘euthanasia

murders’ in the Reich came to an end in their existing form, which meant that

the staff were freed up and initially deployed on a short-term basis in the context

of action 14f13. Mid-September saw the gas experiments in Mogilev in which the

murderous technology of euthanasia was tried out in the Eastern territories for the

first time. Presumably towards the end of September the decision was made to

302

Final Solution on a European Scale, 1941

murder around 100,000 people from the Warthegau. At the beginning of October

the Security Police began large-scale mass shootings in the district of Galicia in

the territory of the General Government, in which murder was carried out just

as indiscriminately as in occupied Soviet territory. In parallel with this, the

Wehrmacht began systematically shooting Jewish men and Gypsies in Serbia.

In mid-October Globocnik received the assignment to build an extermination

camp (Belzec), and in the days that followed the government of the General

Government began organizational preparations for the mass murder of the Polish

Jews. The middle of October, however, was a particularly critical phase in Juden-

politik in the district of Lublin for a different reason. On 20 October Himmler

proposed to the Slovakian head of state that the Slovakian Jews be deported to a

particularly remote area within the General Government this may have been

the starting point for the construction of the second extermination camp at

Sobibor. 164 In November the T4 murder specialists were assigned to Globocnik.

In October preparations began for the construction of extermination camps in

Riga and presumably also in the area around Minsk (Mogilev); there are indica-

tions of similar plans for Lvov in November. Non-Jewish prisoners were first

murdered in Auschwitz with Zyklon B in September 1941. In the course of the

enlargement of the camp in October, a larger crematorium was ordered for

Auschwitz. In 1942 the cremation ovens originally intended for Mogilev were

diverted to Auschwitz. In November Reich German Jews were also shot during

the massacres of Lithuanian Jews by Security Police in Riga and Kaunas. However,

Himmler put a stop to this murderous practice, which was not in line with RSHA

policy at this point.

These events are so closely connected that they permit the following conclu-

sions to be drawn. In autumn 1941 the Nazi regime clearly decided to murder

several hundred thousand Jews deemed unfit for work in areas that seemed

particularly important from a strategic point of view. This decision followed on

directly from Hitler’s order, issued in mid-September, to deport the German Jews.

This swift radicalization of the decision-making process is connected with the

change in the original plan to deport 60,000 Jews to Lodz ghetto. This led to two

interrelated decisions: first, the gradual modification and extension of the deport-

ation programme. This was first directed to the ghettos of Minsk and Riga.

However, after October there are increasing signs that it was to be extended to

the district of Lublin and also to include Jews from outside the Reich. Secondly,

there was the bloody decimation of the reception