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

workers, and on 9 May HSSPF Krüger had issued a regulation intended to replace

Polish, Ukrainian, and other ‘Aryan non-German workers’ with Jewish specialists.

On 20 May HSSPF Krüger had promised the Wehrmacht Armaments Inspection

to replace Polish workforces deported to the Reich with 100,000 Jews. 157

After HSSPF Krüger had become responsible for all ‘Jewish affairs’ at the

beginning of June, the Labour Administration informed the Labour Offices on

25 June that Jews could only be procured by agreement with the security and

police commanders. On 17 July Krüger informed the Armaments Inspection that

342

Extermination of the European Jew, 1942–1945

the previous agreements about workforce deployment were invalid, because

armaments factories would henceforth be supplied with Jewish forced labourers

who had been brought together in camps controlled by the Higher SS and Police

Commanders. 158 Also in July, at the time when the deportations had been resumed, particularly from Warsaw, Krüger ordered that only Jews between the

ages of 16 and 35 could be used. This crucial restriction, which corresponded to an

instruction from Himmler probably issued in May 1942, amounted to a death

sentence for all people outside that age-group. 159

After the incident in Przemysl (the local Wehrmacht commandant had pre-

vented the removal of the local Jewish workforce by closing a bridge160), Krüger ordered all Jewish forced labour camps to be closed. On 5 September, the head of

OKW, Keitel, gave the order for all Jewish workforces in the General Government

to be replaced by Poles. 161 The director of armaments inspection in the General Government, Curt Ludwig Freiherr von Gienanth, was dismissed for protesting

against this measure. 162

However, during the armaments conferences that took place between 20 and

22 September 1942, in view of the dramatic labour shortage, Hitler declared

himself in agreement with Sauckel’s suggestion that, for the time being, qualified

Jewish specialist workers should continue to be employed in the General Govern-

ment. 163 Himmler, who clearly discussed the consequences of this decision with Hitler on 22 September 1942, 164 now revised the intention he had expressed in July 1942 to murder all the Jews in the General Government by the end of 1942. Instead,

on 9 October 1942, he ordered the ‘so-called armaments workers’ in textile

factories etc. in Warsaw and Lublin to be consigned to concentration camps.

The Jews working in the ‘real armaments factories’ were to be gradually removed

from these factories, so that in the end there would be ‘if possible only a few large

Jewish concentration camp concerns in the East of the General Government’.

‘However, there too, according to the Führer’s wishes the Jews are eventually to

disappear.’165

Police regulations issued in October and November 1942 ordained that

(apart from the forced labour camps), ‘Jewish residential districts’ might

only continue to exist in a total of fifty-four places. 166 The Jews held there and in the camps were declared ‘labour prisoners’ of the Higher SS and Police

Commanders. 167 Apart from these, there still existed the so-called ‘Jewish camps’ in the various armaments factories; the forced labourers imprisoned

there, according to an agreement between HSSPF Krüger and the commander

of the military district, were subject to the Wehrmacht armaments inspec-

tion. 168 With these regulations the SS had created the crucial precondition for henceforth keeping alive only those Jews working in armaments production.

For all others, including the family members of the slave labourers, this

amounted to a death sentence.

Extermination on a European Scale, 1942

343

The Annexed Polish Territories: Upper Silesia and the Warthegau

In the Polish territory directly annexed by the Reich, in Upper Silesia and the

Warthegau, the systematic murder of the Jewish population began in 1942.

It appears important for the overall development of the Holocaust that it was in

May, the point in time when the murders in the district of Lublin were extended,

that the SS set in motion a further ‘regional final solution’ on Polish territory: on

12 May 1942 Heydrich ordered the abolition of the police border which had until

then separated the western strip of Upper Silesia (the territory with a relatively

sizeable German population) from the eastern part (predominantly inhabited by

Poles) and offered a guarantee that the Jews forcibly ‘resettled’ from west to east

would not be able to return. With this decision on Heydrich’s part it was clear that

the ‘deportation territory’ would in future no longer be required. The same day

thousands of Jews unfit for work from Sosnowitz and Bendzin as well as a number

of other places were deported to Auschwitz and murdered there. 169 On 12 August a selection of the Jews living in Sosnowitz and Bendzin began, and lasted several

days; some 11,000 people, the old and the sick and mothers with children, were

finally killed in Auschwitz, around 9,000 people were deported to the labour

camps of the Schmelt Organization . Between May and August 1942 a total of

around 38,000 Jews were deported from the ‘Eastern Strip’, about 20,000 to

Auschwitz, the rest to the Schmelt camps, in which a total of over 50,000 Jewish

slave labourers were deployed in January 1943, including several thousand Jewish

men, most of whom were taken from transports arriving from France in Kosel,

Silesia, in August, September, and October 1942. The deportations to Auschwitz

were organized by the Kattowitz (Katowice) Gestapo. It was not until October

1942 that, on the initiative of the city authorities, the Jewish residential districts in eastern Upper Silesia were turned into closed ghettos. Up until summer 1943,

however, the forced labour programme was maintained to its fullest extent. 170

In the Warthegau, where 10,000 people had been deported from the Lodz

ghetto to Chelmno in January 1942, 171 the mass murders had been continued in the first months of 1942. In February 7,025, in March another 24,687, and in

early April 2,349 people were deported to Chelmno and murdered in gas vans,

and then the deportations were at first suspended. The Security Police spread

the rumour that the resettled people had been lodged in a large camp in Kolo

(Warthbrücken). 172

At the end of April, in response to demands from the German authorities,

Chaim Rumkowski, the head of the Jewish council in Lodz, announced the

‘resettlement’ of those Jews who had been deported to Lodz in the autumn of

the previous year. The recent deportations were to include, in particular, those

who ‘didn’t work’—and that was the great majority of this group of