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

extermination of

the Jews occurred in the autumn of 1941. It consisted of two crucial decisions: on

the one hand Hitler’s decision made in mid-September 1941 to deport the Jews

from the whole of the Reich including the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, if

possible that same year, to the incorporated Polish territories, and further east-

wards the following spring. If the first step was originally seen as being the

deportation of 60,000 Jews to the Lodz ghetto, this intention was soon modified

and extended: now 25,000 Jews and Gypsies were to be deported to the ghettos of

Riga and Minsk. We know that at this point a third wave of deportations was

already planned for the start of the following year. Between September and

November, with the marking of the German Jews, the general prohibition on

emigration imposed upon Jews throughout the whole of the area under German

control, and the withdrawal of citizenship and the remaining property of those

deported from Germany, major administrative preparations for the deportation

had also been made.

Thus, in September 1941, Hitler set in motion the plan, made early in 1941, to

deport the European Jews to the territories of the Soviet Union that were soon to

be conquered, although without waiting for the victory over the Red Army. The

fact that, although the war was not going to plan, Hitler insisted on the imple-

mentation of the final variant of the reservation plan that had been pursued since

1939—with its genocidal consequences—seems to be more significant for the

analysis of the decision-making process than any additional factors (the issue of

accommodation, repression because of the deportations of the Volga Germans,

etc.), which, from the point of view of the Nazi leadership, argued in favour of the

instigation of the deportations in autumn 1941. As with the Nisko and Madagascar

plans, the Nazi leadership clearly associated the idea of ‘hostage-taking’ with the

first deportations. The United States were to be dissuaded from entering the war

through the more or less open threat to liquidate the deported Jews, entirely in the

spirit of Hitler’s prophecy of 30 January 1939.

Conclusion

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The decision that Hitler made in autumn 1941 gradually to deport the Jews

under German rule to the East was linked to a second momentous decision (but

one which cannot be reconstructed in detail), namely to carry out the mass

murder of the indigenous Jews in the provisional reception areas. Now areas

‘free of Jews’ were also to be created in the occupied Polish territories, as they

had been in the Soviet Union since the end of the summer. With the

prospect of sending tens of thousands of Central European Jews to the already

completely overcrowded ghettos, more radical solutions were demanded of the

local authorities.

Reichsstathalter Greiser himself had proposed that the indigenous Jewish

population in the Warthegau should be ‘reduced’ by 100,000 ‘in compensation

for’ the reception of Jews from the Reich in Lodz, that is these people were to be

killed with gas vans. Further large-scale massacres were carried out until the end

of 1941 among the local Jewish population in the other sites destined to receive

Jews from the Reich, namely the ghettos of Minsk and Riga. When Einsatzkom-

mando 2 began shooting thousands of Jews deported from the Reich immediately

after their arrival in Riga or Kovno (Kaunas), the murder of the Reich German

Jews was suspended by a direct intervention from Himmler. Thus, a distinction

was still being made between the Eastern European and Central European Jews.

In the General Government too, particularly in the district of Lublin, prepar-

ations for a mass murder of the local Jewish population began in October 1941.

Previously, the government of the General Government had been informed that

they could not expect to deport any more Jews eastwards from that territory for

the foreseeable future. In October preparations began for the construction of the

first extermination camp at Belzec, and at, the same time, with the so-called

‘Schiessbefehl’ (order to shoot on sight) the death penalty was introduced for

leaving the ghetto. The goal of these measures was to murder the Jewish popula-

tion that were ‘unfit to work’, initially in the district of Lublin. These plans may

also have applied to the district of Galicia, which had only been part of the General

Government since 1 August and where, like the Einsatzgruppen in the other

occupied territories, the Security Police had been carrying out similar massacres

among the Jewish civilian population since October. References to the construc-

tion of an extermination camp in Lemberg (Lvov) are significant in this context.

However, the construction of an extermination camp in Belzec (and possible plans

for Lemberg) cannot be seen as specifically intended for the murder of the entire

Jewish population of the General Government. The occupying forces initially

concentrated on making preparations for those Jews who were ‘unfit for work’

in the district of Lublin, where a third wave of deportations was expected the

following spring. Thus, in autumn 1941 the murder of hundreds of thousands of

people had been planned, but not yet of millions. As far as the fate of the

remaining Polish and other European Jews was concerned, the older plan of a

mass deportation to the Soviet Union (with ultimately genocidal consequences)

428

Conclusion

had not yet been abandoned. At any rate a dynamic of mass murder had now been

set in motion, which could only have been halted by a radical change of direction

in the regime’s Judenpolitik.

In the autumn/winter of 1941 facilities for killing with gas were established not

only in Belzec (and possibly in Lemberg) as they had been in Chelmno. Further

possible locations have been identified through plans for the installation of such

facilities in Riga, and corresponding references to Mogilev (not far from Minsk).

There is also the offer that Himmler made to the Slovakian head of state on

20 October, to deport Slovakian Jews to a particularly remote area of the General

Government, possibly the basis for the construction of the second extermination

camp at Sobibor. The use of gas as a means of killing had thus initially begun in

the planned deportation zones. Parallel with this we should consider the events in

Serbia, where the Wehrmacht began systematically shooting Jewish men and

Gypsies in October. In November the military administration in France also

began deliberately to direct their retaliatory measures against Jews, who were to

be transported to the East as hostages. In October, November, and December

threatening statements by National