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

For the Polish ghettos we now have a large number of published diaries and letters as well as contemporary records and transcripts that are based on contemporary records.

For Lodz see Oskar Rosenfeld, Wozu noch Welt. Aufzeichnungen aus dem Ghetto Lodz,

ed. Hanno Loewy (Frankfurt a. M., 1994); Hanno Loewy and Andrzej Bodek, ‘Les Vrais

Riches’. Notizen am Rand: Ein Tagebuch aus dem Ghetto Lodz (Mai bis August 1944)

(Leipzig, 1997); David Sierakowiak, The Diary of David Sierakowiak: Five Notebooks

from the Lodz Ghetto, ed. Alan Adelson (New York and Oxford, 1996); Yosef Zelk-

ovitsh, In those Terrible Days: Writings from the Lodz Ghetto, ed. Michal Unger, trans.

Naftali Greenwood (Jerusalem, 2002). For Warsaw see: To Live with Honor and Die

with Honor! . . . Selected Documents from the Warsaw Ghetto Underground Archives ‘O.

S.’ (‘Oneg Shabbath’), ed. and annotated Joseph Kermish (Jerusalem, 1986); Emmanuel

Ringelblum, Polish-Jewish Relations during the Second World War, ed. Joseph Kermish

and Shmuel Cracowski (New York and Jerusalem, 1976), an essay on the Warsaw

ghetto written in 1943; Emmanuel Ringelblum, Notes from the Warsaw Ghetto: The

Journal of Emmanuel Ringelblum, ed. and trans. Jacob Sloan (New York, Toronto, and

London, 1958); Mary Berg, Warsaw Ghetto: A Diary, ed. S. L. Schneiderman (New

York, 1945); ‘Daily Entries of Hersh Wasser’, intro. and notes Joseph Kermish, YVS 15

(1983), 201–81; Abraham Lewin, A Cup of Tears: A Diary of the Warsaw Ghetto

(Oxford, 1988). See also Janina Baumann, Winter in the Morning: A Young Girl’s

Life in the Warsaw Ghetto and Beyond 1939–1945 (London, 1986); Adam Czerniakow,

The Warsaw Diary of Adam Czerniakow: Prelude to Doom, ed. Raul Hilberg, Stanislaw

Staron, and Josef Kermish (Chicago, 1999); Chaim Kaplan, Scroll of Agony: The

Warsaw Diary of Chaim A. Kaplan, ed. A. I. Katsch (New York, 1973); Janusz Korczak,

Ghetto Diary (New Haven and London, 2003); Konrad Plieninger, ‘Ach, es ist alles

ohne Ufer . . . ’. Briefe aus dem Warschauer Ghetto (Göttingen, 1996), which are letters

by Josef Gelbart; Eugenia Szajn-Lewin, Aufzeichnungen aus dem Warschauer Ghetto.

Juli 1942 bis April 1943 (Leipzig, 1994); Michal Zylberberg, A Warsaw Diary (London,

1969); Stanislaw Adler, In the Warsaw Ghetto. An Account of a Witness: The Memoirs

of Stanislaw Adler (Jerusalem, 1982). For Cracow, see Halina Nelken, Freiheit will ich

noch erleben. Krakauer Tagebuch (Gerlingen, 1996). On the critical assessment of these

contemporary records, see Robert Moses Shapiro, ed., Holocaust Chronicles: Individu-

alizing the Holocaust through Diaries and Other Contemporaneous Personal Accounts

(Hoboken, 1999).

130. On the relationship of councils and ghetto inhabitants see Trunk, Judenrat, 379 ff.

Corni (Ghettos) stresses the respect that these councils also enjoyed alongside

widespread criticism.

131. On the attitude of the Jewish councils to the Germans see Corni, Ghettos, 77 ff. and Trunk, Judenrat, 388 ff.

Notes to pages 169–173

491

132. On methods of keeping order in the Jewish community, see Corni, Ghettos, 106 ff. and Trunk, Judenrat, 475 ff.

133. Aharon Weiss, ‘Jewish Leadership in Occupied Poland: Postures and Attitudes’, YVS

12 (1977), 335–65.

134. This problem has been examined by Dan Diner: ‘Die Perspektive des “Judenrats”. Zur

universellen Bedeutung einer partikularen Erfahrung’, in Kiesel et al., eds, ‘Wer zum

Leben’, 11–36.

135. Gutman, Jews, 119 ff. The same conclusion about underground action by the

Socialist League in this period is reached by Daniel Blatman, For our Freedom

and yours: The Jewish Labour Bund in Poland 1939–1949 (London, 2003), 44 ff. In

Corni’s account of resistance in the ghettos (Ghettos, 293 ff.) there are virtually no

data for the period before the onset of the deportations, and the same is true of

Trunk, Judenrat, 451 ff.

136. See Corni, Ghettos, 70–1.

137. Pohl, ‘Lublin’, 88.

138. Willi A. Boelke, ed., Kriegspropaganda 1939–1941. Geheime Ministerkonferenzen im

Reichspropagandaministerium (Stuttgart, 1966), 492 (6 September). By the end of the

war it was envisaged that c.500 Jews per month would be ‘sent to the South-East’.

139. Toury, ‘Austreibungsbefehls’, 436–7.

140. Ibid.

141. BAB, R 43 II/1334a; Toury, ‘Austreibungsbefehls’, 446.

142. Anonymous report from Karlsruhe dated 30 Oct. 1940, published in Sauer, Dokumente

der Verfolgung, no. 441 (¼ NG 4933; see also other relevant documents here), which

may have come from groups associated with the Confessing Church (Bekennende

Kirche); cf. Toury, ‘Austreibungsbefehls’, 453. The report assumes that it was originally the intention to deport to France all the other Jews from the Reich area, including the

Protectorate.

143. Toury (‘Austreibungsbefehls’, 443) notes that in a draft for a letter made on 7

December Rademacher initially used the formulation ‘deportation ordered by the

Führer’ which he corrected to ‘deportation approved by the Führer’: Toury assumes

that the initiative for these deportations (which are often referred to as the ‘Bürckel

campaign’) was Gauleiter Wagner’s.

144. Minute taken by Bormann: IMT, xxxix. 425 ff.

145. Faschismus, ed. Berenstein et al., 59, circular of 23 Nov. 1940 from the government of the GG to the governors of the districts informing them of the ban dated 25 Nov. 1940.

146. Telex from Frank to Greiser, 2 Nov. 1940, reproduced in express telex from the

Inspector of the Sipo and the SD in Poznan to the RSHA, 5 Nov. 1940 (Biuletyn, XII

(1960), doc. 50); Aly, ‘Final Solution’, 126–7.

147. Franz Halder, Kriegstagebuch. Tägliche Aufzeichnungen des Chefs des Generalstabs des Heeres 1939–1942, ed. Hans-Adolf Jacobsen (Stuttgart, 1962), vol. ii, 4 Nov. 1940.

148. Elke Fröhlich, ed., Die Tagebücher von Joseph Goebbels, Teil I: Aufzeichnungen

1923–1941, Band 8, bearbeitet von Jana Richter (Munich, 1998), 5 Nov. 1940, (‘yester-

day’), p. 406.

149. These totals are derived from Polish sources and research in Werner Röhr, ed., Die

faschistische Okkupationspolitik in Polen (1939–1945) (Bonn, 1989), 356–7.

492

Notes to pages 173–175

150. Hitler’s directives no. 18 (Russia) from 12 Nov. 1940 and no. 21 from 18 Dec. 1940

(Operation Barbarossa), Wolfgang Hubatsch, Hitlers Weisungen für die Kriegführung

1939–1945. Dokumente des OKW (Frankfurt a. M., 1962), 71 and 84 ff. are central to this

point.

151. On the deportation plans after the failure of Madagascar, see Browning, Origins, 213 ff.

152. Adler, Verwaltete Mensch, 147 ff.; Gruner, Kollektivausweisung; Alfred Gottwaldt and Diana Schulle, Judendeportationen aus dem Deutschen Reich 1941–1945. Eine kommentierte Chronologie (Wiesbaden, 2005), 46 ff.

153. BAB, NS 19/3979.

154. This figure is certainly not a ‘first reference’ to the later total of the victims of the systematic murder of the European Jews, as Wolfgang Benz suggests in Dimension

des Völkermords, 2; it does not include the Soviet Jews, for example. Cf. Aly, ‘Final

Solution’, 126. On the day before, 3 December 1940, Eichmann had informed