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

three months. 137

After systematic preparations in the second half of July, at the instigation of

SSPF Katzmann, in late July the mass murder of the Jewish population of Galicia

was resumed with the deportations from Przemysl to Belzec. In Lemberg (Lvov)

alone, in the big ‘August action’ between 10 and 25 August we may assume that

more than 40,000 Jews, about half of the then Jewish population of the city, were

arrested and deported to Belzec in goods trains, into each of which about 5,000

people were crammed, and murdered there. 138 During this action, in which hundreds of people were murdered on the spot, including the patients in the

hospitals and the children in the Jewish orphanage, Himmler and Globocnik

stayed in the city on 17 August. 139 Initially those spared from deportation involved many fit for work, mostly men and women under the age of 35. They were now

locked up in a ghetto in which there were 36,000 Jews in September. The

‘selections’, however, had been carried out under such chaotic conditions that

we cannot speak of a systematic separation of Jews who were ‘fit for work’ from

those who were not.

The deportations from the counties (Kreise) of the district of Galicia were also

resumed at the end of July and—interrupted by a fourteen-day pause during the

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Extermination of the European Jew, 1942–1945

Lvov campaign—systematically continued. 140 Again, thousands of people were shot on the spot, but the largest part of the Jewish population was deported to

Belzec. In most county towns ghettos were now set up for the surviving Jews,

where they had not existed before. Between the end of July and the beginning of

September 140,000 Jews had been murdered in the district of Lublin. At the

beginning of October 1942, however, the regular deportations to Belzec extermin-

ation camp came to a standstill, as the murder machinery could no longer keep

pace with the large number of deportees. The gas chambers had been extended,

but the area of the camp proved too small and threatened to collapse under the

large number of murder victims.

In October a second wave of murders began in the district of Lublin, in which

the Jewish communities were almost entirely wiped out. 141 It would seem that Krüger and Katzmann made considerable efforts, precisely because of the growing

difficulties—the halt in deportations to Belzec, the constant arguments with army

headquarters and the civil administration over the question of preserving Jewish

workers, the increasing number of Jews escaping as knowledge about the mass

murder spread—to achieve by any means the goal set by Himmler of finishing the

murder campaigns by the end of the year, not least by intensifying the mass

executions. In December Belzec extermination camp had to be closed because of

the difficulties that had been becoming apparent for some time, and between

15 December and 15 January a transport moratorium was imposed. In 1942 a total

of 300,000 Jews must have been murdered in eastern Galicia, since according to

German data 161,000 Jews were still alive. 142

Seen overall, we have the following picture: while after the lifting of the

transport moratorium in July and Himmler’s order of 19 July the deportations

were first channelled from the district of Warsaw to Treblinka and from the

district of Cracow to Belzec, the focus of the mass murders was shifted from late

summer and in autumn 1942 to the districts of Galicia, Radom, and Lublin.

The actions in which the majority of the Jewish population of the General

Government were murdered between the spring and autumn of 1942 followed a

consistent pattern that had first been applied in the clearance of the ghetto of

Lublin and had been constantly refined since then. These operations were run by a

special ‘resettlement staff’ and carried out by the Security Police and the Order

Police, with the Trawniki generally deployed to cordon off the actions. The civil

administration performed indispensable services in the preparation of the actions:

it produced the statistics of the Jewish population, moved the rural population to

certain collecting ghettos, and issued identification papers for those Jewish work-

ers who were still required. Equally indispensable was the close collaboration with

the Reich railways, which had to ensure the regular availability of the deportation

trains.

The effectiveness of the campaigns themselves was based on the element of

surprise and calculated terror, designed to throw the population of the ghetto into

Extermination on a European Scale, 1942

339

a panic and prevent any resistance. The Jewish councils were informed a short time

before the imminent ‘resettlement’, and the Jewish police were forced to help drag

the people from the houses, usually in the early hours of the morning. If the clearing

of a ghetto lasted days or even weeks, an attempt was made to conceal the planned

extent of the overall operation and cover the ghetto with a series of shock oper-

ations. The people driven to collection points were always subjected to a selection: it

decided who was to be sent in packed goods trains to the extermination camps. The

selection process was often quite capricious, and those who had been selected for

work were often designated for transport to the extermination camps. If those

responsible for the mass murder had initially used the slogan that those ‘unfit for

work’ were to be removed, in order to create the impression that the murder was

based on a rational calculation, this claim was now in practice rendered absurd.

Throughout the entire process people who hid or failed to follow instructions

were shot, but also often murdered on an utter whim. After the execution of the

‘actions’ the streets of the ghettos were often scattered with corpses.

A Jewish work troop immediately had to start clearing up; at the same time any

valuable objects or other property that were found were collected and sorted. The

exploitation of the personal belongings of the victims was an integral component

of ‘Aktion Reinhardt’. 143

Treblinka

In the second half of 1942 the Treblinka camp was to assume a central role in the

extermination process in comparison with the two other extermination camps,

Belzec and Sobibor.

The camp complex covered an area of around 20 hectares and, in a densely

forested setting, was screened off from the eyes of the outside world. 144 Having its own spur line made it possible to drive the deportation trains, each crammed with

6,000 or 7,000 people, directly into the camp. At