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

authorities. Altogether, almost

58,000 people had been deported in fifty-seven transports. 75

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327

France and the First Outlines of a Deportation Programme

for Western Europe

In the face of continuing attacks by the French resistance, at the end of 1941

the military administration in France continued its policy of reprisals: on 15

December 95 hostages, including 58 Jews, were shot, a high monetary penalty to

be paid by the Jewish population of the occupied zone had been established, and

1,000 Jews and 500 Communists designated for a transport ‘to the East’. In order

to fill this quota, the occupying forces, again with the support of the French police,

had arrested 743 Jewish men, who were held along with 300 men previously

arrested at the Compiègne camp: the actual deportation, however, was at first

delayed for lack of means of transportation. 76

After Eichmann had approved the deportation of these 1,000 people on

1 March, 77 according to information from Theodor Dannecker, the expert for Jewish affairs of the Gestapo, it was agreed at a meeting in the RSHA on 4 March

to suggest that the French government deport ‘some 5,000 Jews to the East’. These

were ‘initially to be male Jews who were fit for work, no older than 55’, who were

also French citizens. 78 Also according to Dannecker, Heydrich is supposed to have agreed at this discussion that after the first 1,000 people ‘another 5,000 Jews

were to be transported from Paris in the course of 1942’; for 1943 he had

announced ‘further major transports’. 79

The first ‘hostage transport’, totalling 1,112 people, of whom half were French

Jews and half Jews of other nationality, arrived in Auschwitz on 30 March. 80 For the deportation of a further 5,000 people, Eichmann had given more detailed

instructions to the commander of the Security Police in France, Helmut Knochen,

on 12 March: only Jews of German, French, formerly Polish, and Luxembourg

nationality were to be deported, of whom no more than 5 per cent were to be

women. 81 In March responsibility for all police matters and expressly all sanctions had been transferred to the newly created office of a Higher SS and Police

Commander in France; the position was occupied by Karl Oberg, the former

SSPF in the district of Radom. 82

By the end of May—as a response to further attacks by the resistance movement—

a further 471 people, Jews and Communists, had been shot in the occupied zone;

the military administration had also designated so many people for deportation

as a reaction to individual assassination attempts that the quota of 5,000 Jews set

out in the March deportation plans of the RSHA had already been reached. 83

On 13 May, Dannecker established at a meeting with the head of the railway

transport department, Lieutenant General Kohl, on 13 May, that he was an

‘uncompromising adversary of the Jews’ who ‘agrees 100 % to a final solution of

328

Extermination of the European Jew, 1942–1945

the Jewish question with the goal of the total extermination of the adversary’. 84

The next five transports, each with 1,000 people, left Compiègne between 5 June

and 17 July, destined for Auschwitz.

During a visit to Paris at the beginning of May, Heydrich is supposed to have

announced that ‘greater, more perfect, more numerically fruitful’ solutions were

in preparation to kill the Jews of Europe. 85 At the same time Heydrich objected to further hostage shootings in France, welcome news for the military, who assumed

that deportations from France would be less provocative to the Resistance than

executions in the country itself. 86

On 11 June 1942 a meeting was held in the RSHA attended by the ‘Jewish

experts’ in Paris, The Hague, and Brussels. Dannecker recorded that the meeting

concluded that ‘for military reasons’ ‘an evacuation of Jews from Germany to the

Eastern deportation zone’ could not be carried out during the summer. ‘RFSS has

therefore ordered that large numbers of Jews should be transferred either from

the South East (Serbia) or from the occupied Western territories to Auschwitz

concentration camp for the purposes of work. The fundamental condition is that

the Jews (of both sexes) are between the ages of 16 and 40. 10 % of Jews unfit for

work can be sent with them.’ At the meeting an agreement was reached about the

quotas from the occupied Western territories: according to this, 15,000 Jews were

to be deported from the Netherlands, 10,000 from Belgium, and 100,000 from

France, including from the unoccupied zone. ‘The transports are to start moving

from 13 July, about 3 per week.’87

The original plans of early March, in which the RSHA had planned the deport-

ation of a total of 6,000 Jews from France for 1942, had thus been considerably

extended. The determining factor here was not only the ‘military grounds’, the

transport moratorium caused by the German summer offensive; it was rather that

in March/early April the RSHA’s plans had consolidated to such an extent that the

outlines of an initial Europe-wide deportation programme became visible, in the

context of which not only the Reich and Slovakia were to be made ‘Jew-free’, but a

considerable proportion of the Jews living in the occupied Western territories were

to be deported and murdered.

One important clue to the existence of such a programme is a minute88

from the office of the Slovakian Prime Minister, Tuka, dated 10 April, con-

cerning a visit from Heydrich on the same day. On this occasion Heydrich

explained to Tuka that the planned deportation of the Slovakian Jews was

‘only part of the programme’. At that point a ‘resettlement’ of a total of ‘half a

million’ Jews was occurring ‘from Europe to the East’. Apart from Slovakia,

the Reich, the Protectorate, the Netherlands, Belgium, and France were

affected.

Now (at the meeting in the RSHA on 11 June) this programme was modified

and accelerated in view of the impending transport stoppage in June: now, within

a few weeks, the deportation of a total of 125,00 Jews from the occupied Western

Extermination on a European Scale, 1942

329

territories was to begin within a few weeks, and at the same time it was made clear

that this first big wave of deportations—like the agreements with Slovakia—was to

encompass the Jews (aged between 16 and 40) meant for the ‘work programme’ in

particular.

But the quota of 100,000 Jews to be deported from France, cited on 11 June, could

not be reached, as Dannecker