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

announced in a dispatch from Eichmann to the Gestapo

regional and district headquarters dated 31 January 1942.35 In it he wrote that the

‘recent evacuation of Jews to the East carried out in individual areas’ represented

‘the beginning of the final solution of the Jewish question in the Old Reich, the

Ostmark, and the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia’. However, at that point,

‘only some state police [Gestapo] headquarters could be involved in view of

limited reception possibilities in the East and difficulties with transport’. But

‘new reception possibilities [would be] worked on with the aim of deporting

further contingents of Jews’.

The dispatch also identified those groups of people who were not yet to be

deported: Jews living in ‘mixed marriages’, Jews of foreign citizenship (excluding

stateless Jews as well as those of former Polish and Luxembourg citizenship); ‘Jews

in closed strategic work programmes’ as well as the elderly and the frail. The

separation of married couples as well as the separation from their families of

children up to the age of 14 years was to be avoided.

On 6 March 1942 Eichmann held a meeting with the representatives of the

Gestapo headquarters or Gestapo offices which were entrusted with the task of

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carrying out the deportations. Here it became clear that by this time a further

Reich-wide deportation programme had been established. 36 Eichmann announced that at first 55,000 Jews would be deported from the Reich territory including the

‘Ostmark’ and the Protectorate: 20,000 Jews were to be evacuated from Prague,

18,000 from Vienna. ‘The size of the other transports conforms proportionally to

the numbers of Jews still present in each State Police office/headquarters precinct.’

Individually, the transports could not be assigned a precise time. All that was

available were ‘empty “Russian trains”/worker transports to the Old Reich, which

were going back empty to the General Government and will now be used by the

RSHA with the agreement of the OKH’.

Eichmann also announced that it was intended that most of the Jews left in

the Old Reich would in all likelihood be deported to Theresienstadt in the course

of the summer or the autumn. Theresienstadt was being cleared at the time,

and ‘15–20,000 Jews from the Protectorate could move there temporarily’. This

would be done, Eichmann added, in order to ‘preserve outward appearances’—a

reference to the fact that the RSHA had internally reached the conclusion that the

pretext for the deportations, the supposed ‘work programme’ in the East, could be

easily seen through if, as had happened previously, old people were also deported

to the East European ghettos.

The third wave of deportations from the Reich was in the end to last from

mid-March to mid-June, and there are at least forty-three transports that are

individually known about; it may, however, have been over sixty, so that, if we

assume an average of 1,000 people per transport, a figure on the scale cited by

Eichmann of 55,000 deportees would probably have been reached. 37

The identifiable transports came primarily from the areas of the Old Reich that

were considered to be in danger from air raids (twenty-three trains) and from the

Protectorate (fourteen trains from Theresienstadt as well as one from Prague).

They were destined for a series of ghettos in the district of Lublin (particularly

Izbica, Piaski, Zamozc), whose inhabitants had been murdered in Belzec a short

time previously. Four transports ended in the Warsaw ghetto. 38 As a rule the deportation trains from the Reich stopped in Lublin, where men who were

assessed as ‘fit for work’ were taken from the trains and brought to the Majdanek

camp. 39

Hence the pattern of deportations of the Central European Jews and the murder

of the Jews of Eastern Europe corresponded to events already described that took

place in Lodz, Riga, and Minsk. The living conditions in the ghettos of the General

Government led to the miserable death of by far the majority of deportees within a

few months. Those who did not die in the ghettos were generally deported to the

extermination camps in the General Government.

The surviving documents of the German administration in the district of Lublin

indicate that here—under the designation ‘Judenaustausch’ (exchange of Jews)—the

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Extermination of the European Jew, 1942–1945

indigenous Jews were ‘taken out’ of the individual communities (i.e. sent to Belzec),

and replaced by ‘Reich Jews’. 40

The ‘Judenreferent’ (expert on Jewish affairs) of the SSPF Lublin and coordin-

ator of the deportation and extermination programme in the district, Hans Höfle,

asked the district administration on 16 March, in other words immediately before

the arrival of the first transports, ‘whether 60,000 Jews could be unloaded on the

stretch between Lublin and Trawniki’. 41 As surprising as this announcement was, over the next few months the district administration was only informed at short

notice about the arriving trains, whose inmates it then distributed summarily, and

in agreement with the SSPF (Höfle), to the Jewish residential quarters, which he

had recently ‘cleared’. 42 Through this improvised procedure and the chaotic conditions that prevailed as a result of it, the district administration was placed

under the pressure of artificially created ‘factual constraints’; the deportations of

the indigenous Jews, who had to make way for the impending arrival of the ‘Reich

Jews’, thus appeared as the inevitable consequence of a decision that had been

made outside their own sphere of responsibility.

Towards the end of the third wave of deportations, in June 1942, some trans-

ports had been assembled that deviated from the previous pattern: on 10 June 1942,

in ‘retaliation’ for the death of Heydrich, 1,000 Jews were deported from Prague

to Majdanek and placed both there and in the camps in the surrounding area. 43

Finally, from mid-June the last transports of the third wave were directed

towards Sobibor extermination camp, where the majority of deportees were

murdered in the gas chambers, after even smaller groups of people had been

taken off the trains during a stop in Lublin. This is attested with certainty for a

transport from Theresienstadt, one from Berlin and one from Vienna, which

arrived in Sobibor between 15 and 19 June. It is possible that exactly the same

fate befell the people on two further Theresienstadt transports which reached

the district of Lublin on 15 and 16 June. 44 As early as 18 May, however, half of a group of around 800 people who had been deported from Theresienstadt to

Siedliszcze, had been brought to Sobibor