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

attempt to reconstruct the

decision-making process underlying these events.

For spring and summer 1942 a chain of events and developments may be

reconstructed which, seen in context, represent a crucial escalation of anti-

Semitic policy: the mass murders already under way or definitely planned in

the Soviet Union and in certain other regions (Warthegau, the districts of

Lublin and Galicia, Serbia), and the deportations that had been started or

prepared since autumn 1941 were now linked together and extended into a

Europe-wide programme of the systematic murder of all Jewish people living

in that space.

Since autumn 1941, a general rethink had begun among those involved in

Judenpolitik in a process that can no longer be fathomed in all its details: reacting

to the mass murders in Eastern Europe, the main players reached the conviction

that the ‘Final Solution’, which had originally been envisaged as the European

Jews slowly dying out in an inhospitable territory somewhere in the ‘East’, could

be at least partially carried out during the war, that it could be anticipated by

killing as many Jews as possible through a combination of inhuman living and

working conditions and direct murder actions. During the winter of 1941/2 and

Extermination on a European Scale, 1942

357

the spring of 1942 the comprehensive plan emerged, presumably in stages, to kill

all the Jews in Europe if possible during the war. In parallel with this establish-

ment of the temporal horizon, ideas crystallized about where and how this

genocide was to occur: in occupied Poland, with the aid of poison gas.

We can reconstruct three stages in the process by which the genocidal ideas

assumed concrete form: between December 1941 and January 1942 Hitler gave

clear signals that after the war had expanded into a world war Judenpolitik should

be further radicalized to include the ‘extermination’ of the Jews on a large scale.

During the Wannsee Conference, Heydrich still assumed a gigantic deportation

programme towards the occupied Eastern territitories, which could only be

realized to its full extent after the end of the war. But his address also reveals

that the leadership’s ideas of how the deportees would die had in the meantime

assumed concrete form: from now on the plan included a combination of ‘exter-

mination through work’ and mass murder of those who survived the exertions

and clearly also those who were ‘unfit for work’. Apart from this, there had already

been talk at the Wannsee Conference of taking the Polish Jews out of the planned

deportation programme and murdering them on the spot, and the murder

methods had also been discussed.

The second stage of this radicalization process can be dated to March. Now the

policy of systematic extermination that had also been introduced in Poland in

autumn 1941 was extended to the district of Lublin and to Galicia, while at the

same time the deportations, which had also begun in autumn 1941, were extended

to other territories in Central and Western Europe.

In the middle of March 1942 the murder of the majority of the Jews in the

districts of Lublin and Galicia was set in motion. Here the murder quota of 60 per

cent cited by Goebbels is particularly important. Globocnik had already begun the

corresponding preparatory work—the construction of Belzec extermination

camp—in October 1941. The mass murder of the Jews of the Warthegau had

also been initiated in October 1941, the murders in Chelmno began at the

beginning of December. In both cases the mass murders occurred in connection

with the deportations from the Reich. In the meantime, at the latest by the

beginning of March, the RSHA had established an initial plan for a third wave

of deportations for the Jews of the Reich (including the Protectorate), to occur in

early March; in the course of this a total of 55,000 people were to be deported to

the General Government, particularly the district of Lublin. This programme

began in March.

In parallel with this, in February, Germany developed a programme together

with Slovakia that was initially to cover the deportation of 20,000 Jews, but which

was extended at the end of March, at Himmler’s urging, to all the Jews living in

that country. The destinations of the deportations were the district of Lublin and

Auschwitz concentration camp. The Jewish hostages from France were also

deported to Auschwitz from March onwards.

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Extermination of the European Jew, 1942–1945

Clearly the mass murders in the district of Lublin and the deportations from the

Reich and Slovakia to that area were linked. The old ‘reservation plan’ had been

revived, according to which ‘room was made’ in the ghettos of the district through

mass murders. A decision to link deportations and mass murder in this way must

at any rate have been made before the beginning of March.

From Heydrich’s statements during his visit to Tuka in early April we know

that the deportations from the Reich and Slovakia were already part of an overall

plan, presumably developed in March, for the deportation of around 500,000

people from Central and Western Europe, for which, however, no concrete time

frame can be demonstrated at this point.

Even more serious, however, is the third stage of this process of radicalization,

which was prepared at the end of April and came into full effect in May and June.

Only now were the regional murders linked into a programme of systematic

murder of the European Jews covering the whole of Europe.

In early May the deportations from the district of Lublin were expanded with

the systematic clearance of the counties (Kreise). At the end of May, with the

deportations from the district of Krakau (Gracow), there began the extension of

the murders to the other territories within the General Government, until in July

and August the districts of Warsaw and Radom were also included. The signifi-

cant preparatory measures for this extension of the murders to the whole of the

General Government included the extension of Krüger’s powers in May/early

June and the start of the construction of Treblinka in May or June at the latest. So

the corresponding decisions must have been made before May. At about the same

time the decision must have been made to carry out a mass murder among the

Jews of annexed Upper Silesia, to which tens of thousands of people fell victim

between May and August. However, because of the transport moratorium, the

mass murder of the Jews of the General Government could not begin to its full

extent until July. Finally, the transport moratorium had