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

the war in the West had other

consequences for the German occupation of Poland. From September 1939 to

April 1940 the occupying power in Poland had carried out mass executions of

people who had been held in the context of the so-called ‘intelligentsia campaign’

or the waves of regional arrests; 107 now, after May 1940, such executions were to be continued on a much greater scale as part of the so-called ‘AB campaign’ (where

AB stands for Außerordentliche Befriedungsaktion or ‘extraordinary pacification

campaign’). As Frank explained to representatives of the police at the end of May,

the beginning of the war in the West had presented them with a chance ‘of

finishing off the mass of seditious resistance politicians and other politically

suspect individuals in our area and at the same time of eliminating the inheritance

of earlier Polish criminality’. Frank stated quite explicitly that this campaign

would ‘cost a few thousand Polish lives, above all those from the leading intellec-

tual cadres of Poland’ and in this context he cited Hitler when he said, ‘the

elements of the Polish leadership that we have now identified are to be liquid-

ated’. 108 This is in fact what happened: during the ‘AB campaign’ some 3,500

members of the intelligentsia and political functionaries, as well as about 3,000

people who had been designated criminals were killed. This policy of the system-

atic mass murder of the Polish elites was itself bound to have a radicalizing effect

on the persecution of the Jews.

After the Department for the Internal Administration of the General Governor

had in August 1940 already confirmed the necessity of establishing ghettos that

were, however, not to be hermetically sealed, 109 the construction of new ghettos in the General Government evidently gained further impetus in autumn 1940. In

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The Persecution of the Jews, 1939–1941

Warsaw110 and other cities further closed Jewish quarters were set up111 after the legal basis for such action had been established in September when the Order

concerning Domicile Restrictions was issued. 112 However, the formation of ghettos did not follow a unified plan; local authorities’ need to gain control was the

decisive factor, rather than the failure of the Madagascar Plan. The establishment

of ghettos or the designation of certain quarters or areas of a city as Jewish

represent only one of the measures that the occupying administration used to

deal with the astonishing lack of living accommodation for the Jewish population.

Since the occupying power usually tackled its need for space at the expense of the

Jews—and moreover undertook several ‘deportations’ (Aussiedlungen) to the

‘capital’ of the General Government, Cracow, for example, or to recreational

resorts—it found itself repeatedly forced to intervene in Jewish living arrange-

ments in a regulatory fashion. This trend increased after spring 1941 when more

space was needed to accommodate the eastern army marching into Poland. 113 The original aim for ‘concentrating’ Jews in larger cities was often not achieved,

however; on the contrary, Jews were deported from such places and divided

between the surrounding smaller towns. 114

In the rationing scheme for foodstuffs Jews were in the lowest of ten consumer

groups. These rations, which often only existed on paper, were already set at such

a low level that they did not permit survival. 115 In order to survive the Jewish population was dependent on smuggling and the black market; the danger of the

‘Jewish black market’ was a further reason for the occupation administration to

intensify their control over the Jewish population and step up their persecution of

the Jews.

Until autumn 1941 the authorities generally continued to count on the Jews

soon being removed, which is why most anti-Jewish measures were essentially

provisional. The situation of the Jews did not worsen as the result of a carefully

planned set of policies on the part of the Germans but because of the cumulative

effect of inadequate support measures and a regime fundamentally uninterested in

their fate. Even the establishment of ghettos was carried out so haphazardly and

slowly that it would be wrong to see it as a systematic policy ultimately aimed at

the physical annihilation of the Jews. It is quite clear that there was no uniform

and unified policy towards the inhabitants of the ghettos. Using the examples of

the Lodz and Warsaw ghettos, the historian Christopher Browning has shown

that there were two contrasting positions represented simultaneously within the

German departments responsible: according to one view, the population of the

ghettos should be left to starve, whilst according to the other, opportunities for

employment had to be created in order to give the Jews the possibility of sustain-

ing themselves—although in this case the motive was less humanitarian than

connected with the fear of disease. 116 In both ghettos the ‘productive’ line of argument prevailed over the argument for starving the Jews to death. However,

it is significant that in the course of this discussion the possibility of gradually

Deportations

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annihilating the Jews physically via hunger or disease was openly considered as

a serious option that was eventually rejected overwhelmingly on grounds of

expediency.

In the summer of 1940 responsibility for enforced labour in the General

Government passed from the SS, who had failed in this area, to the civilian

administration, which began to regulate the Jewish workers centrally. The main

focus of Jewish forced labour in the General Government gradually became the

district of Lublin, where Jews (including those from other districts) were assigned

by preference to major projects and given rough and ready accommodation and

wholly inadequate subsistence. 117 The path of Jewish forced labour took a particular turn in eastern Upper Silesia, where Himmler appointed the Breslau Police

Commander Albrecht Schmelt as Director of an office to oversee ‘the registration

and direction of workforces composed of foreign peoples’. Schmelt systematically

set about collecting the Jews ‘concentrated’ in certain towns in the eastern part of

eastern Upper Silesia and deploying them in forced labour groups for road-

building and industrial manufacture. In occupied Poland forced labourers’

wages were usually either wholly withheld or paid only in very small part; across

the camps conditions were appalling, accommodation, food, and medical care

were catastrophically bad, and the camp authorities deployed rigid means of

repression. 118

Life in the Ghettos

The situation in the closed ghettos and those areas of towns specially assigned to

Jews was characterized by extreme congestion (in the Warsaw ghetto, for example,

according to German estimates, using an ‘occupancy’ figure of 6 to 7 persons per

room,