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

overall European extermination programme that was under way. The

idea—ignoring realities—of a gigantic Jewish ‘workforce’ provided a seemingly

rational justification for mass murder in two respects: Jews who were ‘capable of

work’ were ruthlessly deployed in forced labour in camps and ghettos until they

were fatally exhausted, while those Jews who were ‘incapable of work’ or ‘not

deployable’ were immediately killed as ‘useless mouths’.

The launch of the systematic Europe-wide murder of the Jews was a complex

process. In order to make it more comprehensible, in this chapter we will first

give an account of two interlinking processes that led to the extension of the

murders to the whole of Europe in the first months of 1942: first of all the

intention pursued by the SS since the beginning of 1942 to deploy Jews in large

numbers as forced labourers, and thus to kill them (‘extermination through

labour’); secondly, the intention closely connected with this, to murder Jews in

Poland who were ‘incapable of work’, an intention that had been realized in the

districts of Lublin and Galicia since March 1942 with the help of stationary gas

chambers; thirdly, the beginning of the deportations of the Jews from Central and

Western Europe from the spring of 1942 onwards, to the district of Lublin, the

zone which was at this time the centre of the extermination of the Polish Jews

and—where individuals ‘capable of work’ were concerned—to Majdanek and

Auschwitz concentration camps.

As we shall see in the course of this chapter, from May and June 1942 a series of

further developments began which made a crucial contribution to the further

intensification of the mass murders that had already begun, and to their extension

into the whole of Europe: first of all, the systematic murder of Jews from Central

and Eastern Europe who were not capable of work; secondly, the extension of

systematic mass murder to the whole of Poland and the renewal of major murder

actions in the occupied Soviet territories; thirdly, the spread of the deportations to

the extermination camps to the rest of Europe.

‘Extermination through Labour’

The SS had already developed the basis for a policy of ‘extermination through

work’1 in the late summer of 1941 in the occupied Soviet territories. The concept had been explicitly formulated by Einsatzgruppe C in September 1941, when they

suggested the ‘solution of the Jewish question by a large-scale work deployment

Extermination on a European Scale, 1942

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of the Jews’, which would lead to ‘a gradual liquidation of Jewry’, and corre-

sponded to the ‘economic conditions of the country’. 2 In fact the Einsatzgruppen in the occupied Eastern territories had proceeded, to some extent since July and

more intensively since August and September 1941, to confine some of the Jewish

population in ghettos as part of the now systematic extermination policy, and to

use them as a labour pool.

This policy did not follow a fixed and detailed plan, but was a modification of

the extermination policy under the conditions of the protracted war; the removal

of the greatest possible number of Jews was to be harmonized with the rising

demand for labour. In this way a variant on the extermination policy came into

being: part of the Jewish population was progressively decimated by ‘work details’

that exceeded their physical capacities, by minimal food and care, and by constant

selection of those who were no longer ‘capable of work’ or no longer ‘needed’.

From autumn 1941, more intensively from spring 1942, the SS transferred this

system to other areas of their empire, namely the prisoners within the concentra-

tion camp system and the Jews in occupied Poland. With the beginning of the

‘Final Solution’—alongside the mass executions in the East, the progressive plans

for deportations from Central and Western Europe, and the ongoing construction

of extermination camps in Poland—a fourth complementary element was formed:

the murderous Jewish Arbeitseinatz (work programme), which became a pillar of

the extermination policy.

In autumn 1941 Himmler began to toy with the idea of mobilizing the potential

labour-force in the concentration camps with a view to the SS’s gigantic building

projects in the ‘Ostraum’. 3 On the one hand, he introduced measures to make forced labour in the concentration camps, which had hitherto constituted above

all a repressive measure, effective in economic terms. 4 On the other hand, in September 1941 Himmler received the Wehrmacht’s agreement that a large number of Soviet prisoners of war would be handed over to the SS; accordingly, he

ordered the expansion of the Auschwitz-Birkenau and Lublin-Majdanek concen-

tration camps to receive prisoners of war. 5 These prisoners were to be used for forced labour.

However, because of the mass deaths of the exhausted prisoners (a considerable

number of whom had also been executed in the wake of the camp selections

described above6) these plans collapsed. From late 1941 Himmler received no more

prisoners of war from the Wehrmacht. 7 After Hitler’s corresponding decision of general principle in October 1941, Soviet prisoners of war were indeed to be

deployed on a large scale in the German arms industry, but not within the

concentration camps. 8

But at the same time the SS saw an ever greater need for manpower, first

in connection with their peacetime construction programme, which will be

described below, and from the spring of 1942 increasingly also for the construction

of their own armaments production—a project that would finally fail in the face of

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Extermination of the European Jew, 1942–1945

resistance from industry. 9 Accordingly, the SS pressed ahead with revision of the whole work programme of concentration camp inmates towards a more efficient

exploitation of the inmate workforce. The organizational foundations for this

project were laid between January and March 1942, through the incorporation of

the two Main Offices, Budget and Buildings Main Office and Administration and

Business Main Office, and the Concentration Camp Inspectorate into the newly

formed SS Business and Administration Main office (WVHA) under Oswald

Pohl. 10

Around the New Year in 1942, the plans of the Budget and Buildings Main

Office were gradually taking shape for the peacetime building programme of the

SS and the police. Prompted by Himmler to plan as generously as possible, the SS

Main Office chief, Hans Kammler, submitted a building programme costing in the

region of 20 to 30 billion Reichsmarks, containing, in particular, the planned

settlements in the ‘Ostraum’. To be able to realize this programme, Kammler

planned to set up SS construction brigades consisting of ‘prisoners, prisoners of

war, Jews