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

Jews’. 20 The Chief of Police from the Upper Silesian industrial areas, Wilhelm Metz, spoke in his December situation report to the

District President of the ‘battle against the Jews who must be exterminated here

most urgently’. 21 Furthermore, Odilo Globocnic, SS and Police Commander in the Lublin District, suggested at a meeting held on 14 February 1940 that the ‘evacuated Jews and Poles’ in his district ‘should feed themselves and obtain support

from their people because those Jews have plenty. If this should not succeed, they

should be left to starve.’22 Frank made a similar statement on 23 April at a meeting with the State Secretary, Backe, who was responsible for matters of food and diet:

‘I’m not remotely interested in the Jews. Whether they have something to eat or

not is the last thing on earth I care about.’23

The list of pertinent quotations could be extended. Eduard Könekamp, a

speaker at the German Foreign Institute (Auslandsinstitut), sent a report to his

Deportations

155

colleagues from occupied Poland in December 1939 about the situation of the

Jews: ‘the annihilation of this sub-human group would be in the interests of the

whole world. Such a destruction is, however, one of our greatest problems. It can’t

be done by shooting them. You can’t allow people to shoot down women and

children either. You can count on losses in the course of evacuation transports

here and there, and of the transport of 1,000 Jews that marched out from Lublin

450 are said to have died. ’24 Albrecht Haushofer, who was at this point employed in the information office of the Foreign Office, reported in a letter to his mother

on 13 December that he was sitting ‘at table with the man whose systematic task it

will be to leave a substantial number of the Jews who are to be freighted out into

the Lublin ghetto to freeze to death and starve there’. 25

Deportations Phase II: Autumn 1939 to Spring 1940

Further planning for the deportation of Poles and Jews from the area of the Reich,

and in particular from the newly annexed areas, was significantly influenced after

October 1939 by the various waves of ‘returning settlers’, ethnic Germans entering

the Reich from the Baltic. 26

Himmler, who styled himself Reichskommissar for the Strengthening of

the German Nation (Reichskommissar für die Festigung deutschen Volkstums)

after the authorization issued by Hitler on 7 October—but without any official

conferment of this title—announced the first comprehensive programme for the

‘resettlement’ of Poles and Jews from the annexed territories on 30 October 1939. 27

In the days that followed this plan was modified, as we learn from Bruno

Streckenbach, the commander of the Security Police in the General Government

who was charged with the ‘central planning of settlement or evacuation in the

eastern territories’. On 8 November, in Cracow, he informed the Higher SS and

Police Leaders responsible for carrying out the deportations that, by the end of

February 1940, ‘all Jews and Congress Poles from the Reichgaus of Danzig and

Posen as well as from Upper Silesia and South-East Prussia will be evacuated’ and

the remainder of the Polish population there would be categorized either as

‘Poles’, ‘Ethnic Germans’, or ‘Poles still wanted’. In all it was now planned to

‘evacuate approximately 1,000,000 Jews and Poles from the Old Reich’—Germany

in the borders of 1937—‘or the newly occupied Eastern areas . . . in the first instance

by the end of February 1940’. 28 In detail this meant ‘400,000 Poles, including Jews’

from West Prussia and 200,000 Poles and 100,000 Jews from the Warthegau, 29

which meant that deportations of the order of some 300,000 people from the area

of the Old Reich were envisaged, as they were during the Nisko project.

However, the whole ‘resettlement programme’ was put under pressure by the

streams of ethnic Germans entering the Reich. At the end of October the RSHA had

set up a coordination point for the planned resettlement programme jointly

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The Persecution of the Jews, 1939–1941

with Special Department III ES (immigration and settlement), 30 and by November it was attempting to master the increasingly confused situation with the help of a

comprehensive clearance plan. It established a so-called long-range plan (Fernplan),

according to which all the Jews and any politically undesirable Poles would initially

be moved into the General Government, to be followed later, after a ‘racial assess-

ment’, by the mass of the Polish population. There were no longer plans for a special

‘Jewish reservation’. Moreover, the ‘long-range plan’ was not now aimed at the Jews

of the Old Reich area, but for the most part matched considerations of ‘ethnicity

politics’ being worked out simultaneously by the Racial Policy Office of the

NSDAP. 31 At the same time a ‘short-term plan’ was established, according to which 80,000 Jews and Poles were to be removed from the Warthegau in order to

house the Baltic Germans who were then in provisional accommodation in camps. 32

And indeed, according to the Higher SS and Police Commander, Wilhelm Koppe’s

concluding report, between 1 and 17 December there were more than 87,000 people

deported from the Warthegau into the General Government, 33 ‘politically incriminated Poles, Jews, Polish intelligentsia, criminal and asocial elements’. 34

Although the original intention of deporting the Jews from the whole of the

area of the Reich into occupied Poland was not part of the long-range plan, the

RSHA had by no means given up this goal. A note about the ‘final solution to the

Jewish problem’ from the Jewish Affairs Department of the SD dated 19 December

1939 worked on the basis of two possible alternatives:35 either a ‘Jewish reservation’

would be created in Poland or the Jews transported from the area of the Reich

would ‘be accommodated in the future Gouvernement of Poland’. The author of

this note also asks the question of whether the ‘emigration of the Jews should not

still be carried out with a view to creating a reservation’, whereby in foreign-policy

terms the reservation would constitute a ‘good means of bringing pressure to bear

on the Western powers’: ‘perhaps it could be used to raise the question of a

worldwide solution at the end of the war’.

On 21 December Heydrich announced that he had appointed Eichmann his

‘special expert’ for ‘dealing with the centralized security police arrangements as

the clearance of the Eastern territories was carried out’, 36 and made him responsible for all the