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

general, but also

at the same time it should be distinguished from the overall repression of occupied

Poland. The gradual intensification of Jewish persecution (expropriation, expul-

sion, ghettoization, enforced labour, and finally systematic mass murder) was only

possible because the mass of the remaining population was extensively terrorized

and deprived of its rights. On the other hand, from the perspective of the

occupying powers, the persecution of the Jews in Poland represented the decisive

starting point for the whole-scale restructuring of Poland along racist lines.

Germany’s Polenpolitik aimed at the complete annihilation of every form

of Polish statehood or national identity. This goal was to be achieved via the

systematic mass murder of the Polish elites, by the destruction of Poland’s

national culture and its education system, 36 by plundering its economy and enslaving its workers, 37 by an arbitrary system of terrorization, 38 and finally via a ‘Germanization’ of those Poles who appeared appropriately receptive accompanied by the expulsion, displacement, and long-term decimation of the majority

of the population. 39

148

The Persecution of the Jews, 1939–1941

‘Poland policy’ inaugurated a radicalization of National Socialist ‘race policy’.

The fact that in occupied Poland a regime maintained above all by Party and SS

functionaries could exercise arbitrary power on the basis of racist precepts made

the implementation of further radical measures easier in other areas of National

Socialist ‘race policy’.

Poland as the Object of German Judenpolitik

German ‘Jewish policy’ in Poland went through four phases between September

1939 and summer 1941. Initially ‘Jewish policy’ in Poland in September and

October 1939 was determined by plans and preparations for a ‘Jewish reservation’

(Judenreservat). A second phase, between autumn 1939 and spring 1940 saw the

first deportations of Central European Jews into the ‘reservation’, whilst funda-

mental anti-Jewish regulations were put in place by the occupying powers. In a

third phase, between the onset of war in the West and autumn 1940, the author-

ities in the General Government—in the context of the ‘Madagascar Project’—

made plans for deporting the Jews under German rule to an African colony. From

the end of 1940, ‘Jewish policy’ in the occupied areas was dominated by prepar-

ations for the war against the Soviet Union; deportations of Jews ‘to the East’

seemed therefore to have become a realistic possibility.

Early Plans for a ‘Jewish Reservation’ in Poland

The basis for Germany’s policy regarding the 1.7 million Polish Jews that were now

under its rule was evidently only put in place after the start of the war in

September and October 1939.40 From mid-September initial consideration was being given by the German leadership to a huge ‘resettlement programme’ that

was to encompass the Jews of Poland as well as those in the areas of the German

Reich.

On 14 September Heydrich reported to a meeting of departmental heads of

the Security Police that ‘with regard to the Jewish problem in Poland . . . the

Reichsführer [Himmler] was presenting [Hitler] with suggestions that only the

Führer could decide upon since they had important foreign-policy ramifications’. 41

A week later, on 21 September, Heydrich told them that ‘the deportation of the Jews

(Juden-Deportation) into the foreign-language Reichsgau’ and ‘deportation

(Abschiebung) over the demarcation line’ had been authorized by Hitler. However,

this process was to be spread over a whole year: ‘Jews are to be collected together

into ghettos in the cities in order to permit greater control over them and later

better opportunities for getting rid of them.’ This ‘campaign’ was to be ‘carried out

within the next 3 to 4 weeks’. Heydrich summarized his instructions in the

following key phrases:

Occupation and Persecution of Jews in Poland, 1939–40/41 149

‘Jews into the cities as quickly as possible,

Jews out of the Reich into Poland,

the rest of the 30,000 Gypsies also into Poland,

systematic expulsion of the Jews from German areas in goods trains.’42

On the same day Heydrich sent an express letter to the chiefs of the Security

Police Einsatzgruppen headed ‘Re: Jewish Question in the occupied areas’. 43 In this, one of the key documents of Germany’s Judenpolitik, Heydrich first drew the

attention of the Einsatzgruppen chiefs to the need to distinguish the ‘final goal

(which will take a long time)’ and ‘the stages by which this final goal will be

reached (which can be undertaken in shorter periods of time)’. The ‘overall

measures planned (in other words the final goal)’ was to be kept ‘strictly secret’.

The ‘instructions and guidelines’ that followed in Heydrich’s document contain

no direct references to the substance of the ‘final goal’, but instead merely

suggestions for the short-term measures to be taken in order to ‘encourage the

heads of the Einsatzgruppen to consider the practicalities’.

Heydrich’s ‘first prerequisite for the final goal’ was the instruction to concen-

trate ‘the Jews from the countryside into the larger towns and cities’. The terri-

tories annexed by the Reich would be the first to be ‘cleared of Jews’. A ‘council of

elders’ was to be established in all Jewish communities which was to be ‘made fully

responsible’ for the ‘precise and punctual implementation of all instructions that

have been or will be issued’. The fact that the places in which the Jews were to be

concentrated mostly lay near railway lines, and Heydrich’s further instruction to

the effect that these guidelines should not operate in the district for which

Einsatzgruppe 1 was responsible (the area east of Cracow) are important indica-

tions of the stage that RSHA planning had reached. Thereafter it was intended to

deport the Polish Jews into an area on the eastern border of occupied Poland,

where a ‘Jewish state under German administration’ was planned, as Heydrich

confirmed to Brauchitsch a day later. 44 The ‘final goal’ classed as ‘strictly secret’

will have involved the more extensive plan that Heydrich had explained to his

department heads on 21 September: the deportation of the Jews from the whole of

the area of the Greater German Reich into the ‘Jewish reservation’ and the

possibility of their being deported into the eastern Polish area occupied by the

Soviet Union, a plan that Hitler was to come back to several times in the days that

followed.

After the Soviet Union and Germany had reached agreement on 28 September

on the definitive demarcation line separating their zones of influence, and the area

between the Vistula and the Bug (later the district of Lublin in the General

Government) had been made a German area, the planned ‘reservation’ was to

be situated in this