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

On 2 April 1943, Himmler issued the order to build a concentration camp in

Riga, dated retrospectively to 13 March. 51 On 21 June, after a meeting with leading SS functionaries, Himmler ordered that ‘all remaining Jews in the territory of

Ostland be brought together in concentration camps’. At the same time, with

effect from 1 August 1943, he prohibited ‘the removal of Jews from concentration

camps for work’ and again issued the order for the construction of a concentration

camp near Riga. Those ‘members of the Jewish ghettos not required’, Himmler

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Extermination of the European Jew, 1942–1945

finally specified, were to be ‘evacuated to the East’, meaning murdered. 52 With this order Himmler gained total control over the Jewish forced labourers in the

Reichskommissariat of Ostland. This decision of Himmler’s was closely connected

with the order to conclude the ‘Final Solution’, which Hitler had given him two

days previously. It is also significant that, on 21 June, Himmler appointed Bach-

Zelewski as head of the anti-partisan units (Bandenkampfverbände), after Hitler

had extended his authority in this sphere. The internment of the surviving Jews in

concentration camps, constant selection of the Jewish forced labourers in the

concentration camps, and the hunting down of Jews in hiding under the cloak of

‘anti-partisan combat’—these, then, were the instruments with which Himmler

planned to bring the ‘Final Solution’ to its conclusion in the General Government

and in the Reichskommissariat Ostland. Moreover, immediately after the issuing

of the order on 21 June, the Security Police in Latvia began to withdraw the

workers who were, in their view, not important to the war effort, from individual

firms.

The Kaiserwald concentration camp, which had been built near Riga on

Himmler’s instructions, was to achieve a capacity of 2,000 inmates at the most;

in fact it was to act as a transit camp. Here labour columns were assembled which

were marched to the individual firms where they were lodged in primitive

accommodation, known as ‘barracks’, near the production facilities. 53 In these camps and in Kaiserwald continual selections of those unfit for work took place;

on 28 April 1944 the children were removed from all the camps and murdered. 54

The Riga ghetto was, by contrast, dissolved. As in the Kaiserwald camp and in

the ‘barracks’ only Jews who were actually in the ‘work programme’ were sup-

posed to live there. On 2 November the Security Police drove together the children

and the sick in the ghetto and deported them to Auschwitz. 55 After that the ghetto was gradually cleared once and for all. The two other large ghettos remaining in

the Baltic, the ghettos of Kaunas and Vilnius (Vilna), were removed in September

1943.

The Kaunas (Kovno) ghetto was turned into a concentration camp (‘KZ

Kauen’) on 15 September. By this point many of the ghetto-dwellers were already

living in work camps outside the ghetto, which were now subordinated to the

concentration camp. A total of 2,800 Jews were deported to Estonia and deployed

as forced labourers; those ‘unfit for work’ were murdered. On 27 March 1944

prisoners who were not used as slave labour, 1,800 children, and elderly people

were murdered. 56

In the spring of 1943 the smaller ghettos in the district of Vilnius were dissolved,

and the bulk of the inhabitants murdered, the smaller part interned in the Vilnius

ghetto, and in June and July the same thing happened to the labour camps in this

area. 57 In August and September the remaining 20,000 or so inhabitants of the ghetto were herded together; most of them were dispatched to Estonian and

Latvian concentration camps, while around 4,000 people were deported to

Murders and Deportations, 1942–3

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Sobibor or murdered in the mass execution centre at Ponary. After the final

liquidation of the ghetto at the end of September 2,500 Jews were left in labour

camps in Vilna. 58 The Vaivara concentration camp in Estonia was set up on 15 September 1943 in direct connection with the action against the ghettos of

Vilnius and Kaunas. It served as a transit camp for the Jews deported from the

ghettos of Vilnius and Kaunas as well as from the Reich, Theresienstadt, Poland,

and Hungary. Some 20,000 people passed through this camp and were distributed

around smaller labour camps. 59

While the examples of Slutsk and Glebokie make it clear that in 1943 the Jewish

population of White Russia continued its resistance against the policy of exter-

mination, conditions in the Baltic were rather different. Here, after the major

ghetto actions in 1941, in which the majority of the Jewish population had already

been murdered, resistance groups formed in various ghettos beginning in early

1942. However, the fact that a long phase of relative calm began, one which was to

last until 1943 during which as a rule no ‘actions’ occurred, in the final analysis

produced a negative effect on resistance activities. The high percentage of Jews

employed ‘productively’ fed the illusion that the Germans were at least leaving

those Jews ‘fit for work’ and their relatives alive.

In Kaunas a Communist and a Zionist underground group combined forces in

the summer of 1943; the underground activities were covered up by the chairman

of the Jewish council, Elkes. The focus of the work of the underground lay in

reinforcing the resistance of the ghetto-dwellers through cultural and educational

activities. Several hundred resistance fighters finally managed to flee the ghetto in

small groups and join the partisans in the forests. No attempt at an uprising in the

ghetto was undertaken. 60

In Vilnius the FPO resistance group founded early in 1942 prepared for an

armed uprising. However, their activities were considerably frustrated by the

chairman of the Jewish council, Jacob Gens, for fear of reprisals against the

ghetto-dwellers. When the ghetto was cleared in several ‘actions’ in August and

September 1943, the FPO did not, as planned, manage to light the initial spark for a

general uprising through armed resistance. The surviving resistance fighters

continued the struggle in the forests. 61 There were also underground movements in the ghettos of the Lithuanian towns of Schaulen and Svencian, but they did not

attempt an uprising. 62

In Lithuania in 1943–4 a total of around 1,150 ghetto-dwellers fled to the forests

as participants in resistance groups and a further 650 did so independently. This

meant that a total of 4.5 per cent of the ghetto population managed to escape

extermination through flight. 63

In the Latvian capital of Riga, an underground organization with