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

from Berlin. 139

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The Persecution of the Jews, 1939–1941

From July onwards, and in especially large numbers in August and September,

tens of thousands of ‘undesirable persons’ (including almost the entire Jewish

population of some 3,000) had been transported from Alsace and Lorraine into

the unoccupied areas of France. 140 On 28 September Hitler demanded of Gauleiter Josef Bürckel of the Palatinate and Gauleiter Robert Wagner of Baden (who as

heads of the civilian administration were simultaneously responsible for Lorraine

and Alsace) that in ten years they should be able to report these French areas as

‘German, furthermore as purely German’; he said he would not ask ‘what methods

they had applied’. 141

The policy of organized deportations also encompassed the regions within the

area of the Reich over which these two Gauleiters had authority. On 22 and 23

October all the Jews from Baden and the Saar-Palatinate, approximately 7,000

people, were taken in twelve transports to southern France where the French

authorities interned them. 142 It seems that the Gauleiters themselves were responsible for the initiative for these deportations, which were explicitly approved by

Hitler. 143

In parallel to these deportations to southern France preparations were being

made in October 1940 for further transports to the General Government. In this

context statements made by Hitler in early October on the capacity of the General

Government to receive more people are of interest. When Gauleiters Baldur von

Schirach and Erich Koch asked General Governor Frank in the course of an

informal conversation in Hitler’s apartments on 2 October to take 50,000 Jews

from Vienna or a larger number of Poles and Jews from the area of Zichenau (now

part of East Prussia), Frank refused; Hitler’s view, however, was that ‘it is irrele-

vant how large the population in the General Government is’, although he did not

give a firm opinion on further deportations of Jews. 144

Frank could also no longer reckon on ‘relief’ through Jewish emigration: on 25

October 1940 the RSHA placed a ban on Jews leaving the General Government in

order not to impair opportunities for Jews to emigrate from the area of the

Reich. 145 However, in November Frank succeeded in putting a stop to further movements of Jews from the Warthegau by appealing to the preparations that

were already in place for the Eastern military deployment. 146 They were only to be resumed at the beginning of 1941 in the context of the so-called ‘third short-term

plan’.

At the beginning of November, however, Hitler took the concrete decision to

create more space in the annexed Polish territories for more ethnic Germans

coming from Romania and the Soviet Union: before the end of the war he wanted

some ‘150,000 to 160,000 Poles and Jews [amongst others] from the recovered

areas’ to settle in the General Government. 147

On the same day Gauleiters Erich Koch from East Prussia and Albert Forster

from Danzig-West-Prussia began to argue about the quotas for deportations,

with the result that Hitler had to ‘make peace, laughing’ between the two of

Deportations

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them, as Goebbels’s diaries record. On the same occasion the ‘Führer’ confirmed

that ‘we will shove the Jews out of this area, too, when the time is right’. 148

By the end of the year more than 48,000 former Polish citizens, Jews and

non-Jews, were deported into the General Government from the district of

Zichenau, which was under the authority of the East Prussian Gauleiter, from

Gau Danzig-West-Prussia and from Upper Silesia. 149

Deportations Phase IV: A Successor to

the Madagascar Project

Between November 1940 and January 1941 the German leadership finally aban-

doned the Madagascar Plan having had to accept that a separate peace with

Great Britain was not possible. Within the context of the preparations for

‘Barbarossa’, 150 they began to develop a new project, a ‘Post-Madagascar Plan’. 151

When the Madagascar Project proved to be pie in the sky at the end of 1940 the

deportations into the General Government for which individual Gauleiters had

been pressing ever more firmly were resumed. The head of the Reich Chancellery,

Hans-Heinrich Lammers, informed Schirach in early December that his request

of two months earlier to transport the Jews of Vienna had been approved by

Hitler. A first step towards the transportation of a total of 60,000 people that he

had in mind was the deportation of 5,000 Jews from Vienna into the General

Government in February and March. 152

Further information about what the RSHA envisaged as a ‘solution’ for the

‘Jewish question’ is provided by the elaboration of some ideas that Eichmann

prepared for Himmler on 4 December in order to provide him with figures for a

speech to Gauleiters and Reichsleiters. 153 Eichmann drew a distinction between two phases, first the ‘initial solution to the Jewish question by means of emigration’ and then the future ‘final solution to the Jewish question’, by which he

understood ‘the resettlement of the Jews from the German people’s European

economic area into territories yet to be determined’—which was a clear reference

to the recent abandonment of the Madagascar Plan. In his notes for Himmler

Eichmann wrote that this project would encompass ‘a total of some 5.8 million

Jews’, 154 which is considerably more than the four million that the RSHA reckoned with when preparing the Madagascar Project. Planning had evidently been

extended in the meantime to include German allies and satellites in Eastern

Europe and the Jews in the French colonies.

In the speech that Himmler made on 10 December he identified ‘Jewish

emigration’ from the General Government as a key future task that would ‘create

more space for Poles’. The Reichsführer did not identify a destination for this

emigration.

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The Persecution of the Jews, 1939–1941

Various indications from January 1941 show that ‘resettlements’ were planned

on a huge scale even during the preparation of the third short-term plan. Influ-

enced by the waves of ethnic German ‘resettlers’ streaming into the area of the

Reich from Romania and the Soviet Union, comprehensive plans were being

drawn up for expelling more Poles and Jews from the incorporated Eastern

territories into the General Government.

At a meeting in the RSHA on 8 January 1941 Heydrich gave the figure of 831,000

to indicate the number of people to be resettled by the end of the year, which

included the 60,000 Viennese Jews. Another 200,000 people were to be expelled

from the General Government in order to be able to establish huge sites for

military exercises. 155 Initially it was proposed to deport