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

Polish Jews across the line of demarcation into the Soviet-

occupied areas. 15

After the end of the war this wave of terror became more systematized. From

late October on Einsatzgruppen and Selbstschutz carried out the ‘intelligentsia

campaign’ organized by the RSHA, 16 in which groups such as teachers, academics, former officers, and civil servants, the clergy, landowners, and leading members of

Polish national organizations, as well as Jews and the inmates of mental institu-

tions became the victims of large-scale mass arrests and executions. Some of the

victims were transported to camps, where they either died from the conditions

obtaining there or were murdered in mass executions that took place up to the

spring of 1940.17

There were sometimes other groupings involved in extensive campaigns such as

this, just as they were in the murders of civilians during the war. They included the

National Socialist Motor Corps, 18 the Paramilitary Police (Schutzpolizei), 19 the Waffen-SS, 20 but above all units from the army itself. 21 In the first four months of German occupation tens of thousands of people were murdered in this way, with a

notable focus on the new Reichsgau of Danzig-West-Prussia, where at least ten

towns or camps can be identified with certainty, in each of which more than a

thousand civilians were shot between autumn 1939 and spring 1940.22

In the course of these events in Danzig-West-Prussia in autumn 1939, as well as

members of the Polish elites, Jews and the inmates of mental hospitals, in many

towns there were smaller groups of ‘a-social’ individuals killed, including prosti-

tutes, women said to be suffering from sexually transmitted diseases, and Gypsies.

146

The Persecution of the Jews, 1939–1941

These murders will have been committed for the most part on the authority of

lower-ranking policemen, SS, and Selbstschutz functionaries, who had on their

own initiative amplified the orders they had received in the spirit of ‘racially

hygienic cleansing’. 23

In the newly formed Warthegau, too, Germans were shooting people from the

same groups as in Danzig-West-Prussia, beginning in September and continuing

throughout October and November, albeit on a smaller scale. 24 More executions occurred in the Polish areas attached to East Prussia, in Upper Silesia and the

central and eastern Polish districts. 25 A report made by the commanders of Einsatzgruppe 16 to the Central Office of the SD on 20 October makes it clear

just how systematically these murders were being carried out: the planned liquid-

ation of ‘radical Polish elements’, who the report’s author regretted were already

largely in detention, could only be continued for a short time, which meant that

the number of dead in East Prussia could ‘only’ reach about 20,000. 26

The role of the army in these systematic murders was not only restricted to

participating in executions or to attacks by individual soldiers. More significant

is the fact that the leadership of the army had accepted a ‘division of labour’ with

the SS and the police at the beginning of the campaign. When the Head of

Military Intelligence (Abwehr), Canaris, alerted the Head of the OKW, Keitel,

on 12 September to the plans for sweeping, comprehensive executions in Poland,

Keitel replied that ‘this matter has already been decided by the Führer’ and that

Hitler had made it clear that ‘if the army does not want to have anything to do

with this, it will have to accept the SS and the Gestapo working visibly alongside

them’. 27 After a meeting with Hitler, Brauchitsch, the Commander-in-Chief of the Army (ObdH), informed his senior officers that the Einsatzgruppen in

Poland would have ‘certain tasks concerning ethnic politics’ the fulfilment of

which would lie outside the army’s areas of responsibility. The army thereby

created the parameters for a war that was already being waged in part as an

ideological campaign of annihilation, but without itself having to carry out the

mass murder of civilians.

Whilst the army tolerated the murder by Einsatzgruppen and during the war

against Poland carried out considerable numbers of executions, after the end of

the war the resistance of the military (and the civilian administration) to the

uncontrollable activities of the Einsatzgruppen and the Selbstschutz began to

grow. 28 Again and again there were awkward confrontations between the Self-Defence Corps or Einsatzgruppe units and army officers. In the middle of

November the commander of the new military district (Wehrkreis) of Danzig,

Lieutenant General von Bock, complained to Gauleiter and Reichstatthalter For-

ster about the continuation of murders by the Selbstschutz, 29 despite an undertaking to desist given in mid-October. 30 Even though the Self-Defence Corps was supposed to have been dissolved after autumn 1939, in some areas this process

was drawn out until spring 1940.31 In February 1940 Blaskowitz, the Military Occupation and Persecution of Jews in Poland, 1939–40/41 147

Commander (Militärbefehlshaber) for the East, protested to the Commander-in-

Chief of the Army about the murders of Jewish and non-Jewish Poles. 32

The racist policies of the National Socialist regime in Poland were also exp-

ressed in the separation of Jewish prisoners of war (estimated at some 60,000–

65,000) from non-Jewish prisoners, and in the fact that they were treated worse

than their Polish comrades, who themselves lived under much more miserable

conditions than their Western counterparts. The consequence was a much higher

mortality rate amongst Jewish prisoners. 33

Establishing German Rule in the Occupied Territories

After a short-lived intermediate period of military administration, the fundamen-

tal decisions regarding the future governance of Poland were taken in October

1939: extensive areas of Poland were annexed by the Reich; the ‘General Govern-

ment’ was established in central Poland and the extent of the eastern Polish areas

to be ceded to the Soviet Union was definitively agreed. 34

In Poland the National Socialists attempted to put into direct practice their

utopian dream of a form of rule that was founded on the principle of racial

inequality: a relatively narrow section of ethnic Germans and occupying forces

from the area of the Reich subjugated the mass of the Polish population, whose

Jewish minority was further sharply segregated as a lowest-ranking social group

without rights of any kind. 35 After the extension of the General Government to cover eastern Polish areas in the summer of 1941 the Ukrainians and White

Russians living there were generally better off than the Polish population.

Within this differentiated system of racist rule the persecution of the Polish

Jews must always be seen within the context of ‘Poland policy’ in