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

Socialists also accumulated concerning the

deadly fate that awaited the Jews.

As confusing as the overall picture may seem at first sight, it does become clear

that, within the space of a few weeks in autumn 1941, German organizations in

various occupied territories began to react with remarkable similarity to the new

situation in Judenpolitik created by Hitler’s September decision to deport the

German and Czech Jews, by organizing mass shootings (Galicia, Serbia), deploy-

ing gas vans (Warthegau) or preparing the construction of extermination camps

(district of Lublin, Auschwitz, Riga, possibly Mogilev-Belarus).

If we see these activities in context, it becomes irrefutably clear that the German

power holders on the ‘periphery’ were always acting in the context of an overall

policy guided by the ‘centre’, meaning Hitler and the SS leadership. The centre was

always in a position to prevent an escalation of a policy which it found undesir-

able, as is demonstrated for example by Himmler putting a halt to the murders of

Reich German Jews in the Ostland in late November 1941.

However, the centre was only able to guide this process and set it in motion

because it knew that impulses issuing from the centre were picked up with great

independent initiative by the authorities in the ‘periphery’. Just as the extension of

the shootings to women and children in the Soviet Union from the summer of

1941 onwards was not simply ordered, the extension of the mass murders to

particular regions of occupied Europe in autumn 1941 also required a very

complicated interaction between the centre and the executive organizations,

involving orders and guidelines from the centre, as well as independent initiatives

and intuition on the part of the regional power holders, which were finally

channelled and coordinated by the centre, albeit at a much higher level of

radicalization.

Conclusion

429

The Wannsee Conference of 20 January 1942 provides an important insight into

the RSHA’s policy of consolidating the various approaches for an extension of the

murders and thereby designing a comprehensive programme for the impending

‘Final Solution’. While, on the one hand, the Germans continued to adhere to the

old programme of deporting all Jews to the occupied Eastern territories after the

end of the war, they were already engaging with the new prospect of implementing

ever larger stages of the ‘Final Solution’ even during the war, although the murder

method was not yet entirely clear. The idea of a gigantic forced labour programme

developed by Heydrich, with deadly consequences for those affected, may well in

fact have reflected ideas actually held within the RSHA.

From the autumn of 1941 the SS had also developed the perfidious system of

‘extermination through work’. Within this system, not only were many people

worked to death in a very short time, but it also meant that a hurdle had been

erected that those people who were no longer fit for work, or who were not capable

of being deployed, were unable to surmount. The perfidious nature of the system

of ‘extermination through work’ was also particularly apparent where there were

only a few forced labour projects for Jews, or none at all, as it provided a pretext

for marking out those Jews who were ‘non-deployable’ as ‘superfluous’. Jewish

‘work deployment’ formed an important complementary element in the early

phase of the ‘Final Solution’.

In the first months of 1942, the deportations were extended in accordance with

the declarations of intent made at the Wannsee Conference. In March 1942

Eichmann announced a third wave of deportations involving a total of 55,000

people from the territory of the ‘Greater German Reich’. This third wave actually

began on 20 March 1942 and lasted until the end of June. Its destination was

ghettos in the district of Lublin, the original ‘Jewish reservation’.

Now, at the beginning of March 1942, a decision must again have been made to

practice mass murder in the reception zone, in the district of Lublin. This decision

also applied to the adjacent district of Galicia. In the eyes of the Nazi leadership

Galicia represented something like an advance base for the planned New Order of

Lebensraum in the East and, since the autumn of the previous year, had been

already the scene of large-scale mass shootings.

The statement in Goebbels’s diaries that the intention was to murder 60 per

cent of the Jews living in the two districts is particularly important here. The

decision to implement mass murder in the two districts, made early in March, had

been prepared since October 1941 by SSPF Globocnik, who was responsible for

this mass murder in both districts. The measures taken in the district of Lublin

demonstrate important parallels with the mass murder of the Jews in the Warthe-

gau, which was also introduced in autumn 1941, although unlike Greiser Globoc-

nik used stationary gas chambers. As in the Warthegau, and as in Riga and Minsk,

the mass murder of the indigenous Jews in the district of Lublin was directly

linked to the deportations from the Reich.

430

Conclusion

With the start of the third wave of deportations to the district of Lublin and the

completion of the first extermination camp in the General Government the option

of a later resettlement to the East had been definitively abandoned. Most of the

people deported to the district of Lublin died miserably in the ghettos after a short

time, or were also deported to extermination camps. However the façade of a

programme of resettlement and work deployment was maintained. During this

third wave of deportations, which occurred between March and June, the RSHA

prepared a Europe-wide deportation programme conceived on a much larger

scale.

Between 25 March 1942 and the end of June, 50,000 Jews were deported from

Slovakia to Auschwitz concentration camp on the basis of the agreements with the

Slovakian government. The deportation of hostages from France to Auschwitz

also began in March 1942.

It is clear from a remark by Heydrich to Tuka on 10 April that these first

deportations from territories outside the ‘Greater German Reich’ were already

part of a Europe-wide programme. According to this, it was planned initially to

deport to the East half a million Jews from Slovakia, the Reich, the Protectorate,

The Netherlands, Belgium, and France.

This introduced the fourth stage of escalation in the transition to the ‘Final

Solution’. Now, in spring 1942, the previous scheme for the deportation of Central

European Jews to particular areas in which the indigenous Jews had first been

murdered was abandoned. In late April/early May the decision must evidently

have been made